Pulpitum Vulpis

A Note on Islam

2012-01-08T22:17:00.000-06:00

To balance out my persnickety-ness in the previous couple posts, I figured I would write on something a bit more positive. There seems to be a widespread gap of information on Islam in our society. Therefore, I am writing a short blurb on its incredible diversity and inability to be captured in any particular stereotype,as well as to give some clue as to why I might hope to join Peace Corps and spend some time in this portion of the world. I'll provide details and sources if anyone wants, but my point here is just to show how many cultures are part of the Islamic world, and how they are Islamic precisely in keeping that culture.

First off, Islam is much more than just the Arabic-speaking world, but I will start there. Even within North Africa and the Middle East, there are a range of cultures. Some North Africans would identify with nomadic Berber tribes (of which Augustine may have been descended). Other North African countries still contain traces of French occupation and participate in the Francophone world. Egypt is, well, Egypt, with a history of ancient pharaohs, Greeks, Persians, Fatimids, and Turks. The Arabian Pennisula itself is the main location of the Arab tribes themselves, whereas the Levant is home to Syrians (remember the Assyrians?) and Philistines (aka Palestinians – Gingrich is dead wrong in saying that they are an artificial grouping). As far as Arabic speakers go, Christians and Jews form and have formed significant communities, so Arabic and Islam are not by any means co-extensive.

Beyond the Arabic-speaking world, there is of course Persia and its territories, centered in present-day Iran but including all of the -stans as well (a suffix meaning roughly the same as the English “-land”). Islam did not merely take over Persia; the crumbling Persian empire was revitalized through Islam and both Zoroastrian and imperial motifs were reworked.

This empire extended into India – but Indian Muslims considered themselves Indians. They added their own legends about how Adam and Eve first stepped foot into India, giving a pride of place to their own homeland on par with that of their religion's own holy land. Some emperors worked on a “Divine Religion” in which Hindus and Muslims could come together and Hindu texts were translated into Persian to show the similarities between the religions. Unfortunately, on the political level, such a rapprochement did not last. However, some segments have continued to share their ideas and lives in pursuit of a common goal.

Up north a little are Chinese Muslims. Among other things, they formed their own school of Confucianism, showing the similarities with Sufi writings. An Islamic school of martial arts also arose as Islam adapted to the culture. And I could point out the spread of Islam into Indonesia or the rest of Africa, though I am unfortunately unaware of much of the specifics at this point.

Turkey is an example of diversity in Islamic opinions. The modern secular state was founded, not against Islam, but because of arguments from an Islamic position. The Caliphate, which had been seated in Turkey, was defunct – it was supposed to be the institution that succeeded Muhammad and carried out his work. There had been nothing of that sort for a thousand years, even if certain individuals were still using the name Caliph. Since a successorship can't just be restarted, the best thing to do with be to transition into a non-caliphal, non-religious government.

Then there is Europe. The Muslims in Spain have left their mark which can still be seen in the country today. The court of Abdul Rahman III of Cordoba was considered one of the high points of religious tolerance and freedom in the world. The Islamic jurist and philosopher Averroes might very well be an integral part in our own Enlightenment. Once the Western Roman Empire fell and knowledge of Greek was lost, it was through Arabic thinkers that Latin Europe reclaimed Greek science and philosophy.

And what of the present day? I remember sitting in a mosque a couple summers ago, watching the sermon. Much of it was indistinguishable from a Protestant church, except with more Arabic and more bowing. The main sermon points were the same. They had summer religious programs (Vacation Qur'an School?). And despite what many want to say, they didn't want to impose Shari'a law in the United States. They rather lauded the freedom that they had here as opposed to many of their home countries.

I could go on, talking about the Silk Road or the way in which Turkish, Persian, Indian, and Chinese painting styles intermixed. Or contemporary events in the Arab Spring with the numerous democratic movements coming from within these countries instead of imposed externally by warhawks. Or any number of other details.

I am not a Muslim. In case anyone could not tell from my other blog posts, I am actually rather antagonistic toward theism and scripture-based religions. And I can certainly recognize horrible flaws in many Islamic governments. But there's a lot of cool stuff in this culture too, and it deserves to be looked at without any mention whatsoever of jihad and terrorists. There is no one single picture of Islam, nor is there any particular restriction on what we could see even within our lifetimes.

Against Optimism

2012-01-08T19:26:00.001-06:00

Around Thanksgiving, I heard many people talking about how they were grateful to have a job, despite the fact that they would have to abandon family gatherings in order to work Black Friday. I found myself thinking that "gratitude" is a horribly misplaced emotion for such a situation.

Now, granted, it is better to have a source of income than not. But gratitude implies that one owes some sort of debt to another, and a company is owed no debt for exploiting workers. One can accept the fact that one must go in and earn some money, and that this is reality. But one should not approve of corporate bullies.

I hear from a lot of people that we should be grateful for what we have, because many people have it worse. And I am admittedly privileged beyond most. Life also sucks sometimes, and this is true completely independently of people are starving halfway across the world. (And to whom would I be grateful? If it is to a god, then this god is responsible for the miserable conditions the world over just as much for my good fortune. Gratitude is not appropriate in such a situation, but rather a trembling fear that I might someday be put on the cosmic asshole's shit list. A god that gets people into Wheaton but then starves entire nations is not worthy of worship, only terror.)

But at this point someone might say, "But it makes me feel better to have hope in something, so what is wrong with that?" Because an unfounded optimism, a fantastic belief that the world is good, is selfish. One has chosen to make placate oneself with an opiate creating false beliefs, which render one unable to respond accurately to real problems. How can one meet others in their need, when one chooses comfort over truth? How can one address problems when the problems are ultimately good?

And if individual optimism is reprehensible, what shall we say of communal optimism? Of views which justify faith, because it is the only way of finding meaning for human existence (ignoring for the moment the direct counter-examples of people who have no problem finding fulfillment in such an existence – such an appeal to faith is an acknowledgement of one's own lack of imagination and inflexibility, not of the human condition)? Of beliefs which encourage a leap beyond the evidence, which by its very nature also is a leap beyond critical examination and which places ones wish fulfillment outside the realms of analysis?

Now, one might think that I would advocate a pessimism, by contrast. But that would not follow. Pessimism is its own set of fantasies which obscure the world. However, pessimism might at least encourage one to go out and change the world when necessary, so I have less of a problem with it. An acceptance of the actualities of the world as it is makes the most sense. Whether one wants to keep the world in stasis or to start a revolution, one must start with where things are presently. If I work a job I hate, I should go in and do it as calmly as possible, then search for new jobs afterwards in like spirit. But let us drop any view that valorizes fantasies.

(Of course, some of this is overblown. But no one responds to carefully drafted and qualified posts, so let's see what this can incite.)

Closing the School of Athens

2012-01-07T10:39:00.004-06:00

Philosophy, as its own department in the university, should be shut down.

Now, let me clarify that. It is not that I think that philosophy is worthless. In fact, quite the contrary. Philosophy is too important to be left as a discipline that only philosophers study. Scientists need some basic study of the philosophy of science. Political leaders need to know something about political philosophy. Quantum physics already is speculative metaphysics half the time. Everyone could use some ethics. If philosophers were forced to join other departments, they would actually contribute to discussions.

At the same time, philosophers need to spend some time in empirical studies. One cannot do philosophy of mind without some knowledge of contemporary cognitive science. One cannot do social and political philosophy without a rigorous scientific background in contemporary sociology. I am not saying that one must agree with the reigning scientific paradigms, but rather that one must understand what they are saying even if only for the purpose of critique. And any philosophers who cannot deal with the rigor of science are doing creative writing, not philosophy.

Finally, history of philosophy could join, logically enough, the history department. This not out of a sense of irrelevance. I have learned more from in-depth study of ancient and medieval thinkers than from almost any other intellectual endeavor. History has a pride of place in the humanities, to my mind, as the best window we have into human existence as it is played out.

Without a separate philosophy department, other people will have to listen to philosophy, philosophers will have to listen to other people, and we can finally get rid of these inane journals where everyone writes merely to have written. We would be closer in spirit to the philosophers of past ages, who considered an empirical understanding of the world around them to be integral to philosophizing. Aristotle was the quintessential biologist. Kant pretty much invented geology. Descartes was influential in physics. Avicenna and Maimonides were pioneering physicians who have provided techniques that are still used today. Many Chinese philosophers were statesmen concerned with proper running of their country. If philosophy is to be more than logic chopping and self-absorbed poetizing, it must no longer consider itself an entity unto itself.

Are Beliefs Practical?

2011-11-11T16:41:00.001-06:00

Beliefs are slippery little buggers. On the one hand, they are tools for navigating life. We believe certain things so that we can get around in the world. We need some way of dealing with the complexities of reality. I believe that western medicine by and large works and that it works far and away better than the alternatives. Therefore, I go to doctors trained in Western medicine rather than homeopathy or Ayurveda.

The belief is a means to an end: namely, my getting better. If I didn't need to get better, why would I worry about different medical practices? We have finite lives. We can't spend all of our time trying to make sure that our believes are correct, so long as our lives are running well. If I pick a shoddy medical practice that works for me, even as a mere placebo, I still feel better. What's the harm?

Sometimes, the belief can even change the result. William James talks about a person who is about to jump across a chasm. If this person believes that they can make it, they will have a higher chance of doing so than the persons that doubts themselves and hesitates. So believing something simply because we want it to be true can sometimes make it true.

But beliefs aren't merely tools. Having a belief means that we take something to be actually true about the world already. I take it to be the case that most of my sicknesses are caused by microscopic bacteria, viruses, and so on. The world is not made up of either 4 or 5 elements. Theories based on balancing these elements are just plain false, despite occasionally producing useful results. I can't believe that balancing the fire and water in my body will heal me without also believing that this is actually how things are; the very idea that I could is just nonsense, though some people have astonishingly high skill at self-delusion which allows them to get around this logical nicety.

So how can we take something to be true about the world and not care about whether it is true? How can we believe something, but then be unwilling to put it to critical analysis and to search out whether it is true? But is this really a problem? Why not just take it all with a grain of salt? Use beliefs as tools only. Believing something becomes like watching a movie – we suspend disbelief rather than take the plot to be actually true. It's a story to guide our actions, but merely a story.

This helps with local events: both local in space (affecting me and those closest to me) and in time (short-term goals). Sure, if I follow the medical tip from some random second cousin and it makes me feel better, then it works for me. I don't have to believe anything more than that it has been personally useful. However, it is not clear that this approach deals effectively with broader issues, such as those affecting other groups or calling for short-term sacrifice for the sake of long-term gain.

Take climate change, for example. There does seem to be some truth to the matter as to what will happen in the future if we continue to live as we do. Either humans beings are actually causing climate change, or we are not. Either this will produce a wildly out-of-whack world, or it will not. Either changing emissions in certain ways will help us deal with the problem, or it will not. (There appears to be little actual evidence against the notion that (a) there has been climate change over the past century of alarming proportions, and (b) that it is in large part caused by human beings. However, there is still a lot of discussion over what that entails for the future.)

There is potentially a disaster coming up within a couple generations, and adjusting ourselves to meet it could result in short-term sacrifices. We cannot merely look at what is practical for ourselves here-and-now in our own country to decide what would be better overall in the longer-term. Even if we were to decide that large-scale changes would not need to be implemented, it would have nothing to do with the fact that such changes would be hard right now – it would have to do with our best scientific research telling us that climate change won't be mitigated by our efforts. People arguing from local practical concerns alone, such as loss of jobs and increase in price of goods, completely miss the point, regardless of what our best plan of action will be.

I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem; I merely point out that there is a problem which must be dealt with based on matters of truth beyond what is recognizably practical to us now. (I thought I would give religion a break for a blog post, so I went with science instead.) So beliefs about what are practical to me and those close to me for the short-term can be decided through purely practical means, with little regard to overall truth. But those beliefs are also only suited for these very particular circumstances. Change the context, and the validity of such practical beliefs also changes. So for more far-reaching goals, concern over truth and the theoretical value of beliefs becomes more important.

Politically, this is problematic. Democracy and a democratic voting system is based on people being able to know where their interests lie, and trusting that people overall are smart enough to figure this out on their own. And this might be well enough for locally practical beliefs, for those that guide people through their own day-to-day experience. But people also vote based on issues impacting their communities, their country, and even the world, and it is not at all clear that their experience is useful here; in fact, it might even cloud their judgment in such matters without proper education showing them the bigger picture (and taking a couple science classes hardly instills scientific literacy).

Vampire Ethics

2011-10-28T09:30:00.000-05:00

After watching the Dracula ballet last night, I got to thinking: if someone got turned into a vampire, is it best for them to be killed or not? On the one hand, we would think of them as a moral abomination now. We think that if we ever reached that point, we would want somebody to off us. So too should we kill the new vampire, for their own sake.

But on the other hand, they are no longer human. The standards for human flourishing (which, although this is controversial, would probably include not killing off friends and family to feed your lusts) are not the standards for vampire flourishing. A human-turned-vampire would be like a rabbit-turned-lion. You may be surprised at what happened, but you should not feed this new being hay if you want it to be happy (and I would prefer happy lions around, if I had to have any at all). This new vampire then should also be judged according to vampire standards. The human would not have liked this new life, but that is irrelevant to whether it is best for the vampire to live.

This then gets at one moral dilemma, similar to if a young person makes a promise that she later regrets when older - "whose" moral standard becomes relevant in deciding whether she should be held to that promise? What about if I say that I would rather be euthanized than be a vegetable in a hospital bed?

Of course, even if it is worse for the vampire, we could still just stake the sucker for our own sakes. We don't want creepy supernatural predators preying off of us, as human beings. So we can fight for the human good, against a world that sometimes just doesn't care about us.

But, at the same time, part of being human is that we can transcend our own local interests for other things in the world. We can identify ourselves with causes that may have no direct human benefit. (The one point on which radical deep ecologists and conservative Calvinists can come together?) So simply doing something because it is a human good is not necessarily the same as doing something just because it is good overall. And we as humans can think about this distinction. So then should we let vampires live out of respect for life (er, un-life) as long as they don't prey on us too much?

This dilemma comes up too in both the Greek and Chinese traditions (and I'm sure many others). We have the debates between the philosophers and rhetoricians in Greece and Rome, where the rhetoricians and sophists favored a purely human-centered life concerned with building human communities. Search for "truth" is secondary to these matters of practice. The philosophers favored finding what is true, even if it goes completely against what people around them took to be good. And part of this could even be for the sake of humans: current values concerning what is "good" can be revised. The Daoists and the Confucians have had similar struggles, with the Daoists focused on the Way of Heaven even when it completely called into question all typical human values while the Confucians focused more on starting with human beings and only dealing with what is relevant to them. Of course, this was not always a pitched battle; sometimes the two sides in both traditions have complemented each other, since human beings are not actually separate from the world in which they live - another tricky ethical point to work through.

Biology and Metaphysics

2011-10-19T16:02:00.000-05:00

Again, thinking about nature & stuff: how do biology & sociology differ? On the one hand, there seem to be conflicts and divergences between them. Let us take standards of beauty. To some extent, these are given to us biologically. We are hard-wired to find certain features attractive. Those who are attracted to females like human female breasts and are not looking for peacock tails instead. But at the same time, society can work with that and present differing ideals of beauty. Sometimes these even conflict. The American obsession with thin women goes against what seems to be a overall global trend, which is about 20 lbs heavier (or so I remember from an undergrad psych class. If anyone has the actual scientific data on hand to back this up, that would be appreciated, but the whole point of my writing a blog instead of a journal article is that I don't feel like looking that up to have a chat :p .) On top of that, it would seem that sociology could in turn affect biology: sociological constraints give new standards of fitness for evolution.

But at the same time, sociology is biology.¹ Even as we can talk about these conflicts in ideals of beauty, these conflicts are differing parts of biology. We are social beings by nature, and the social dimensions of beauty and sexuality are written into our genes.

So there is a sense in which it is all biology which is interacting with itself. Some biological features develop and turn around to influence the features already there; some of which gave rise to the "higher order" features in the first place. This feedback loop creates the domain of sociology, which has its own principles and objects as distinct from bilogoy, even though it is also explained by biology.

This seems to be what is going on with the Neoplatonic principle of emanation. There are higher orders of reality, more "real" levels, that give rise to lower levels of reality.² The lower levels, though, do really exist in their own way. (Some indian philosophy has similar stuff, but there seems to be less value give to these lower levels, to the point that they are all equally "mâyâ" or play/illusion.)

There is a possible study of societies as such. But at the same time, sociology is an "emanation" of biology (as chemistry is of physics and biology of chemistry). Similarly, the search for a Grand Unifying Theoroy of Physics would be a search of a originary principle, motion, force, or whatnot, from which the other features of the physical universe emanate;³ that is, whatever the originary principle is, it is a dynamic one which interacts with itself. Considered as itself alone, it is one. Considered as interacting with itself, as "stumbling as from a drunken slumber" as Plotinus describes the descent of Being from the One, it is regarded as multiple forces, and ultimately as the innermost essence of every existing thing.

¹ Which is not necessarily to say that human nature is reducible to biology - that is a separate question. But it would seem that, insofar as societies can be studied scientifically and as mired in natural causes, it produced by biology. But if you still don't like this, than take physics and chemistry for the illustration instead.

² One might argue that Neoplatonism would go in the opposite direction, however - from the wholes to the parts. One admittedly cannot simply assume Proclus' entire metaphysical scheme and apply it to modern science. However, if we look at physics as describing the fundamental principles of the world, and so that which unifies it the most, instead of as all the quintillions of atoms rushing around forming everything, there is something to be said for a Neo-Neoplatonism.

³ I have been going through easy examples, in which we merely have concentric circles: physics emanates chemistry, which emanates biology, which emanates sociology. Of course, it could be (and probably is) more complicated. For example, at least restricting ourselves to scientific psychology (which is not in itself a slam against other types), biology would then give rise to psychology, which together with biology would give rise to sociology, or something like that (insofar as there are features of society which are not mediated by direct mental processes).⁴

⁴ Now, where would consciousness fit in? We can see how chemical rules follow from physical ones, and can have an inkling of how sociology follows from biology. However, it is hard to see how consciousness would follow from biology or whatnot except insofar as the latter provides a suitable base of neurons (and by "hard to see," I mean that I don't feel like going through the arguments right now, but I have them). In other words, biology provides the material and formal causes for sociology, but only the material causes for consciousness. It might be that the elusiveness of any Grand Unifying Theory is that such theory does not merely provide unify physics, but would also explain other features of the world; in other words, it would always be underdetermined by purely physical data. This is mere speculation, but it does present a possibility, akin to Spinoza's God.

Essential Futility

2011-10-18T16:20:00.000-05:00

I was reading a book on evolution (Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth), and it made the point that an awful lot of nature is futile, if we look at it from the perspective of design.¹ Take trees: they don't actually get any more sunlight by being taller than if all of them were equally short. If every tree were 10 feet tall, they would be just as well off - better even, because they would not have to spend so many resources on what amount to mere stilts. But once one tree grows taller, it blocks the sun for others, and the race is on.

So this seems to be futile - futile because so much energy is expanded simply for the sake of competing with others when everyone would have been better if they hadn't entered into the competition in the first place.² My concern here is in what exactly "futility" is.

My impression is to regard this race as futile because the trees are merely reacting to each other and to their circumstances. Each response is deflected away from what "really" needs to be done and toward those other trees and their contingent actions. If only these trees could get on with living instead of pointless tasks!³

But what would it mean for the tree to get on with the task of being a tree? We might have a picture in mind of trees taking care of real tree stuff, like getting light using as few resources as possible, and not getting distracted by the pine race. But whatever this hypothetical entity is, it is no longer a tree. Trees are what they are because of other trees. This competition they are locked in is just as much a part of them as the need for light in the first place. Conversely, the need to survive by taking in photons and synthesizing them into nutrients is just as much a "futile" race as growing taller than the other trees. The replication of DNA in all of its myriad manners is its own race, in which each set of genes is "competing" against the others.⁴

So there would be no reason to think that the race of the trees against each other is any more or less futile than anything else going on in the trees' lives. There is no core essence to "being a tree." This other race against other trees is not extrinsic to the tree's true nature, a race to be avoided if possible so that it could live a more tree-ish life.⁵

Things are what they are because of their causes, or to put it more mystic-sounding-like, things are what they are not. The tree is what it is entirely because of its relations to other trees, to other plants, to animals, and so on. It is meaningless to dismiss any of this as "futile" as opposed to some other possible existence. If it had a different existence, it would be something else. Taken to the extreme, we have the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" - everything simply is its relations to everything else, with no ultimate underlying substance or essence to anything. There is no core "tree" that can be separated from everything else. There is no firm division between "this" and "not this," between "this kind of thing" and "that kind of thing."

How might this relate to human life? Let us return to the Prisoner's Dilemma again. If there were a well-defined human nature, we can say certain things are good, and it would be better for everyone if we had some agreement that no one should be a jerk. But given the current considerations, there is no well-defined good. Things are what they are, and what they are is defined by their competition and relations to everything else. Also, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, we see that short-term gains lead to long-term losses. But now we also see that there are even longer-term changes which alter the rules of the game.

How do we put these sundry ethical views together? On one level, maybe we can just acknowledge that different considerations lead to different conclusions, and that there has yet to be a single system to unify all of this. But these different views may not be contradictory. Human beings are what they are, both as biological beings striving to copy their DNA (whether or not they are aware of this) and as rational beings able to look at the big picture. The interaction between these aspects is not a theory to be solved.

¹ Dawkins himself does not say that it is futile; his view I think at least dovetails with the one I put down here. He just points out that if we were to take as a hypothesis that there were a designer of the universe, many things that would see would be futile from that perspective.

² I won't go into whether this futility is evidence against design. I don't think that the example of trees settles it, but many other examples seem to me to present a rather sound case.

³ To some extent, of course, this is anthropomorphizing them, but there is no need to equate end-directedness to intent; more in another post.

⁴ Some readers but balk at the physicalism here. It seems to me that there needs to be a whole lot of work down to show that nature in any way, shape, or form demonstrates any sort of final cause beyond itself. Saying that it needs to be that way in order for there to be any hope in the world is an admission that any such view is wish fulfillment, pure and simple (not to mention the fact that many people find such a non-goal-oriented view of nature nevertheless inspiring and beautiful gives the lie to the assertion). Now, whether or not human beings can be reduced to such a physicalistic picture is a separate issue, one that is more complicated – all I am pointing out is that by our natures as human beings we have at least one foot in the same world as all of these physical going-ons.

⁵ Granted, trees that are planted all by their lonesome do not grow like trees in a forest, but a) they do not completely become like they would have had they not been the descendants of the other trees in the competition, & b) we can still talk about individual trees in the forest as being products of their environment.

Essentialism and Math

2011-10-16T14:31:00.003-05:00

Many times, when we abstract pieces of information out of the world, we are trying to hold that little bit steady in order to have a fulcrum for moving everything else. When ask about what gravity is, we like at all of the things that move by gravitation - that is, everything gravity isn't. The apple that falls is not gravity itself, but what gravity acts upon. We ask what it is to be a cat, taking it as given for the moment that there is some roughly well-defined concept "cat" that interacts with the rest of the world.

Views that try to do away with this are considered sometimes to be incoherent. If I say that there are no individuals, that you are I are are really existent but are mere social constructions, that there are no stable selves, I must assume that there are stable selves in order to say this. I think that it is I who am thinking the thought "There are no stable selves," for example. And any view that denies that there is an ultimate truth takes this denial to be an ultimate truth.

It seems like we have to have two different views at the same time to make statements like these. We look at the world and see stable things, and then we look at the world and see flux. Problems like this abound in philosophy, and I will leave it to the audience to turn up more.

I want to look at mathematical functions & equations as an analogy. A mathematical function, as a function, has a dependent variable and at least one independent variable. Take a line, for example: that classic formula y = mx + b. Let us take in particular the line y = x + 5. x is the independent variable. It is what we control, the equivalent of these stable spots we make in the world. y is the dependent variable, which is everything else that we are explaining. If I set x to 1, y must be 6. If x is 200, y is 205. y is thus explained by x.

This is fine in many cases. y = x² + 2x + 1 makes a fine parabola. y = cos(3x/2 + π) makes a nice little wave. But what about a circle? The equation for a circle with a radius of 1 would be x² + y² = 1. But that is not a function. There is no longer an independent variable and a dependent one; we have to take it in all at once. If x is 0, then this does not explain y - there are the two possible values of 1 and -1. y cannot be the independent variable either for the same reason. No set of independent variables explains everything else.

We can describe a circle using two different functions: y = √ (1 - x²) and y = - √ (1 - x²). But there is no one function which does the job. It is not even in principle possible to describe a circle in a single function - we have to keep going back and forth between these two. If you want to set one variable constant, you can't have a unified grasp of the situation.

It were as if we were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle of the world. We have to set down a couple of pieces. However, this puzzle is odd in that, whenever we start with any pieces and then add the others, we can never get the whole puzzle. The only way to solve the puzzle is to set it down all at once.

There may yet be a way out. Take the equation r = 1. This describes the same circle, but in different coordinates. "r" is a variable representing radius, so r=1 is the function which captures all points at a distance of 1 from some central spot. Voila - a simple equation for a circle.

But just as it is hard representing a circle in rectangular coordinates, so too is it difficult to represent straight lines with polar coordinates (coordinates which describe shapes in terms of r, the radius or the distance from the origin, and θ, the angle of the line going out from the origin). So again, we can describe circles and spirals (r = θ) and other stuff like that at the cost of describing straight lines, or we can describe straight lines at the cost of describing circular curves. (I suppose we should talk about parametric functions here too, but I'm giving an analogy, not a full mathematical treatise). By making one thing set and settled, we have limited our options of what we can describe, even though at the same time there is something beyond what can be captured through independent & dependent variables.

This is not an argument for anything, but just a thought experiment to show that it is at least possible to say that we use our views of essences and substances, of fixed individual and set kinds, of steady states of whatever sort, to describe the world, even though they themselves are not in the end real constituents of the world. It is coherent to say that everything is dependent on everything else, without any first cause starting the chain. Or I can talk about myself as an individual being, as some set metaphysical reality with this particular "soul," even while at the same time acknowledging that there is some other "function" which does goes in a completely different direction. There may even be some grasp of the universe which must take things all together and not piecemeal (such as Platonic Forms & Neo-Platonic Nous), like how there is a equation for a circle in rectangular coordinates but no single function. But I'm more interested in leaving this as a playground of thought than any settled metaphysical view for now.

Reverse Prisoner's Dilemma

2011-10-05T15:27:00.002-05:00

Often times in ethics, we are trying to give a reason why people shouldn't do bad things, and why doing the right thing is actually good for them. One way of doing this is using the prisoner's dilemma: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1899#comic. Basically, if only one person were a jerk, they could get off the hook. But if people start being jerks, everyone will be jerkish to compensate, and everyone ends up worse off.

But what about people being too nice? What sorts of ethical dilemmas does this raise? Let me give an example. I was biking up a (rather steep) hill the other day. Toward the top of this hill is a 4-way stop. Now, as I was nearing this hill, there was a car which had been fully stopped long before I reached the stop sign. They tried waving me on instead of going themselves.

If they had just gone as the rules dictated, without paying attention to me, they would have gone all the way through the intersection before I arrived. I would have slowed down, looked for traffic, and continued going through the intersection without having to come to a complete stop and start up again on a hill. Instead, they waited longer, and I had to completely regain all of my momentum. Everyone ended up worse off because of one person's niceness. (Admittedly, the world did not end for this egregious affront, but it does illustrate the point.)

A possible principle here seems to be this: special consideration for anyone throws off everyone. It doesn't really matter whether this is consideration for oneself or for another. It really ends up being the same, completely regardless of intention. Individuals are parts of some bigger whole because they interact with each other and affect each other; we are social animals and have to rely on others. The whole, in turn, is best off when order is preserved. Individuals may benefit short-term from acting disharmoniously (or from others doing such in mistaken niceness), but such behavior leads to long-term loss for everyone (of course, this “long-term” may be beyond the life of the particular individual, which is why asshole CEOs don't necessarily get what is coming to them, but that is yet another issue). (I would like to tie this to Kant's ethics, in particular to his “kingdom of ends” interpretation of the categorical imperative, but that is a different discussion.)

What is this “order”, though? Of course not every order will do – racist and sexist laws do not achieve what is overall best for everyone, so preserving any order simply for order's sake is not necessarily what is what will preserve the good. And there is not necessarily a single order – a 4-way stop sign arrangement seems to be reasonable and probably not oppressive, but there are other ways of managing residential intersections too. So ethics may be to some extent arbitrary, but that is not the same as saying that anything goes. (This actually was in part the view of the medieval thinker Duns Scotus: there is only one moral law which is necessarily true, i.e. that the first principle must be loved, while everything else is merely a fitting way of ordering the universe). So it might not be possible to find “the” one order to rule them all, but we can study particular ways of living to see which promote the good: which societies seem to give the best life for the most people?

Reason in Nature

2011-09-11T17:24:00.000-05:00

I've started working with the Urban Ecology Center. It's actually nice to be out in the sun pulling weeds for a change, especially after sitting indoors in a chair all day. And, geek that I am, I am thoroughly excited to start learning about prairie plants and migratory birds (insert obligatory Monty Python joke here).

I was collecting seeds the other day, and one of the volunteers was explaining to a student about domestication and why domesticated rye has larger seeds than wild rye. I though about that, and how odd human cultivation is as a process of evolution. Normally, plants develop thorns and poisons and stuff to avoid being eaten. Here, though, under human care, they no longer resist us - they grow alongside us precisely to be eaten. We're on the same side instead of constantly opposed, as it were.

Now, I want to take this so far only as a metaphor - in reality, the rye doesn't care about having larger seeds or being domesticated, so we can't actually say that rye is "better" for the arrangement. I think that dogs and cats really do end up in a symbiotic relationship with human beings - they get regular food and shelter, lacking in the wild, and we get rid of mice and burglars, and we have funny internet memes.

But the point is this: human beings, given the sort of beings we are, can adapt to nature from within nature and rework it into an "everybody wins" sort of approach. Not always, granted, or in any way with even a modicum of grace at times. But think of how odd this is. If there are too many deer, they can't learn to cultivate grass or switch food sources. The grass gets eaten and the deer starve to death. The way to avoid this is an external force: add wolves or hunters to take down the number of deer.

That's where human beings differ. We have reason. We have an internal force for change. I don't mean by reason mere logic - that is merely one form that reason takes. Reason is the ability to take up the form of the world around us, to understand it and in so doing identify with it.

Think about this: What, in the end, am "I"? Something in some way tightly connected to this hunk of matter at particular spatio-temporal coordinates, to be sure. Certain patterns of brainwaves, yes. But I don't have to be just that. People identify with their good friends, parents identify with their children, patriots identify with their country, and so on. We all consider our "selves" to be something beyond ourselves (unless we really are concerned just with fulfilling basic needs, and honestly, that sounds like the most boring life possible to me.)

It is reason which lets us take up aspects of the world around us. If I identify with a certain task of domesticating wolves, for example, I have to know what wolves are like. I have to work with their natures as given - I have to accept the world and wolves as they are. To do otherwise will not result in the end I want nor in a dog that can benefit from my involvement. It may be an excellent way of getting mauled, however.

Of course, we also have people working with each other. When working with rye and wolves, human beings are not quite the same as the domesticated. With other humans, one might be concerned that I am giving a recipe for domination. But I am saying that we need to treat whatever we identify with as the sort of thing it is. Human beings aren't plants and can't be treated as such. If I were in a relationship, I would need to attend to my lover's needs as they in fact are. Failed and sickly relationships are the result of this not working, for any number of reasons. Good relationships are when both parties can in fact do this. Identification cannot be merely good intentions - it must involve trying as hard as possible to understand people and situations as they are in themselves. (Just trying to have good intentions usually results in trying to look good. Trying to have good results from within the world as it actually is and acting accordingly, is in itself a good intention.)

To act irrationally, by contrast, is to act counter to the way the world is, to act based on our own subjective whims and fancies, on what we "feel in our hearts" regardless of whether that stands up under scrutiny. It is, in short, to choose our current selves and our presently-limited preoccupations over what we could be, to choose deception and its short-term smothering comfort over truth. It is to become that deer that will starve to death unless it is ripped apart by wolves first. the deer that cannot even take care of itself because it could not take heed of its environment.

This is why I champion unending, thoughtful and careful analysis of our opinions and get tired of emotionalism, tribalism, and relativism of the sort that descends into mere etiquette and shuts off genuine debate. Reason is sometimes held up as the tool that divides and separates, but that is only its short term function. It must divide the true from the false, the real from the fantastic, and as long as society prefers its own whims, reason must break it. But this is for the goal of a better society, one in which the good is accessible to all in self-sustaining fashion, because people can take up themselves, each other, and the world around them as it is and as they are part of the whole. True, this is an ideal and most likely never reachable. But even though most of us will never reach the north pole, the direction North on the compass or GPS is still necessary for navigation.

Reason, ultimately, is justice.

Karma

2011-07-31T11:03:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking through the concept of karma lately. It's a helpful myth for me in thinking about how we live in the world, even if I can't accept there being an actual moral law in the universe that punishes and rewards us. First, though, what are we as persons, as this or that individual human being with this or that personality? There are many, many factors which play a role and I don't mean to be reductionistic in my proposal. I'm not going to argue for or against the notion of a soul, or of individual existence after death, or what not. I'm just looking at how we forge our lives here and now, and the concept of karma makes sense for that.

How so? Think about this: are you a separate person from your genetics? Keep in mind, your genetics have an awful lot to do with every single aspect of your build and your brain. They give you a predisposition to be a bookish introvert or gregarious extrovert, a night person or a morning person, calm or irascible, capable or incapable of being Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein, and so on. So it would seem that you, as the person you consider yourself to be, would not be that person without your genetic printing.

Of course, your environment and upbringing also play a large role here. Would you be that same person if you had grown up in a different city? Country? In some places, how would being born a block west or east have changed your life? With different parents? With a different number of parents? In a multi-generational home, or with just your nuclear family? This would all seem to play at least as much a role in who you are as genetics.

This is the point, then: you are not you. You are these things that make you up. You might wish you had been born to a different family, but if anyone had been born to that different family, that person would not have been you. This is where karma comes in: you have inherited your karma, your situation in life with all of its implications. If you are born into one home, you'll have one set of skills and virtues. Born into another, you would have a different set, which would you helped "you" and the world around you perhaps more or perhaps less.

I have been born an American. When I look around at political debate in this country, I wish that I had been born at least a Canadian. Scandinavian wouldn't have been so bad either. But I wasn't. I was born here. This is where I actually am. The ideological debates between Republicans and Democrats is part of my karma. The myths of freedom and individualism and capitalism are part of my karma.

I have been "reincarnated" here, to pull on another myth, out of the conditions of my forebears. I am their decisions brought into concrete form, so I am them, in a sense.

So what do I do from here? This is where talk of purifying karma comes in, of dealing with it skillfully. What counts as skillful, I'll leave for other discussions. But one way or another, I need to work with my present situation. Whether or not one can transmute lead into gold, it sure isn't going to work if one doesn't use the lead at hand.

This then leads to my legacy, my own "reincarnation." Whether I deal with the world skillfully or unskillfully, I will leave imprints. These imprints will change those I'm friends with, those I teach, maybe even those I brush up against on the street for a moment. This will leave something for the next generation, one way or another, as a continuation of that karma and of my personhood.

Progress & Nature

2011-07-27T14:03:00.002-05:00

In the course of trying to find a new course for myself, I find myself running up against two different intuitions about the world, which more or less were the content of the last post. The first is that nature simply is what it is, and there's not a whole lot one can do to change that. Human beings will be human beings and any attempt to force them into a different mold will rebound. I had wanted to get into education to change minds and so change society. But what I found was that the people who were already open-minded and engaged were the ones who, well, stayed the same. The people who really needed to turn around and look at the world, the people who will go on to vote and run things and who impact all of our lives through their “private” opinions, twisted my lectures into the exact opposite of what I said when necessary to protect their little paradigms. Really, this shouldn't be too surprising – the Enlightenment should have taught us that educated apes just do more damage in their certainty.

But at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that some sort of progress is possible, and that as someone in a privileged position, I have a responsibility to be part of that change. What good is intelligence if it can't actually provide foresight about the world's problems? When I'm planning out what to do and not already involved in something, I should be able to pick some life which would make a difference. The world doesn't seem to be merely a cycle, and I can't just hide somewhere while making my own life comfortable while things crumble around me. Maybe it's just my neurosis, but I can't just go off and till my own garden. It seems like a waste of a life, and honestly, life isn't so great that I want to live it merely for my own enjoyment.

Because of the first problem, I can't rely on naïve notions of progress, and I can't get wrapped up in idealistic projects. How can I commit myself to something that I know will probably fail? And I don't see any reason whatsoever to believe that there's any moral force in the universe, divine or otherwise, which will pick things up despite the appearances we've seen in history for thousands of years, or which will come alongside in my tasks when this force also seems to work with CEOs to build sweatshops. But we have seen that societies can change, at least somewhat, and that the way things have been is not the way they always must be, and I can't close my eyes to that either.

So there's this constraint: nature must be worked with. What are some solutions to the problem then? In martial arts, I think of how we work with natural forces to accomplish ends, so it at least seems possible in the abstract to change the world by working with nature. How does that translate into changing society, though? How do we work with the bigotry, power-grasping, tribalism, and narrow-mindedness that seem endemic to human nature (yes, including my own) to produce a society that rises above these things? At the end of the day, we still have our biology which was not built for modern life or for cosmopolitan living, but yet at the same time we can be aware of this and of the possibilities the future could hold. How do we combine the two?

I also think to the Chinese tradition, where you change the world by becoming virtuous yourself; then other people will naturally look to you. Of course, I'm skeptical about the efficacy of this. Confucius didn't seem to make much of a political difference in his day, and people studying him just made him into a new set of material to understand and a tool to demarcate the elite from the non-elite. But given the constraint that we can't just go and change other people by force, it seems like the only option would be to persuade them and let them arrive at the decision by themselves. The question is, what makes for viable persuasion.

This doesn't mean that we can't go and change material conditions as well – in fact, we need to do that. But that still only does any good if we can also change people around us and the structural forces that perpetuate the problems, and we can only do that by hacking the system, as it were. Shows of force in the end don't seem to change the situation, but merely repeat it – not that force is never justified, but that it doesn't seem to be a useful tool toward pushing the world to a different end. So what would work?

Quietism and Power

2011-07-17T20:58:00.002-05:00

How does one best go about changing the world? On the one hand, it is tempting to take up a quietistic approach - let things be, and let nature take its course. Many times when we try to control events, we make a bigger mess of them. Let us just take care of our own garden, and then at least that portion of the world will be better. Similarly, we can cultivate ourselves, and if we succeed in becoming better people, we can naturally help people around us and inspire them.

But I'm not sure that that approach always works. I was reading an article earlier today about some presidential candidate who wants communities to decide what is best for themselves - by outlawing mosques. I might be able to convince a few people around me that Muslims are not about trying to conquer all of America, but that hardly changes the systemic problem of prejudice in this country. Nor does the quietist approach change the structures that continue poverty and racism, amongst other problems.

So trying to control things from a high-level standpoint, through laws and politics and positions of power, seems necessary to deal with some issues, but it also produces social problems to have this stuff forced on society. Plus, it's not really feasible for all of us, since few have that power.

I had thought about education as being a solution. Teach people to think critically about the world around themselves, and maybe that can help them deal with whatever problems can arise. But I'm cynical about that now. When I was teaching philosophy, the students who were already critically analytical and thoughtful about the world were the ones who benefited from studying more of the same. The ones who really needed to be reached, simply crammed whatever I said into their pre-made categories, sometimes to the point of believing that I was saying the opposite of what I actually said.

We can't actually change human nature, and it seems to be human nature to approach the world according to our pre-set paradigms and to find the opposite painful. No one escapes this, and most don't have the temper, time, talent, or opportunity to even start examining their worldview. So what do we do when these worldviews cause suffering? We can't just let communities decide for themselves, because there are no isolated communities. The communities of Muslims criss-cross the communities of Islamophobes geographically & politically, so which community wins out in making decisions? Simply being a nice person to those around me and making sure a few friends and a few students understand the world a bit better might relieve a little suffering, but does it actually change anything? How does one get people to think about things that they need to think about, for everyone else's sakes, but which they are resistant to examine?

Contingency and Intuitions

2011-07-14T15:26:00.003-05:00

While preparing for comps, I came across a statement along the lines of "It is possible that Susan might not have been born. If you don't believe this, you are a philosopher with a theory."* But the issue seems so much more complicated than a dig at "theory-laden philosophers" would solve. I argue that our intuitions about which facts about the world are possible and which are necessary has relatively little to do with their actual status.

Take the following formula: 1,045,9879 * 230,840. What does it equal? Without stopping to work it out, does it possibly equal 2,414,557,468,360? It might seem like it could, but in fact, it doesn't and cannot possibly equal that amount. Our first intuitions about it don't mean much of anything. We must work through the chain of mathematical analysis, step by step, until we come to the answer.

We possibly get that problem wrong, but we don't ever think that 1+1=5. Why? Because there is only one step in the simple problem - it's almost impossible to misthink it. By contrast, there are many links in the chain of reasoning for the more complicated problem, and we don't immediately see all the links at once or how they are connected to each other.

"But," you might say, "we know that this is a mathematical problem, so we know that the answer must be necessary. But Susan's birth isn't math." Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that our intuitions about her possibly not-being are worth anything. It depends on whether physics is completely deterministic on a macro-level or probabilistic, on whether the initial state of the universal was necessary or whether it was random/intelligently designed/programmed by the great space potato/etc., on whether free human actions can alter the universe apart from deterministic laws, and so on. My intuition on Susan's birth isn't informed by the reality of any of those situations - that is, whatever makes me think of her possibly not being has nothing to do with my thoughts on these other matters. I think that her birth is merely possible, not because I actually understand anything about reality, but because I can't see the big picture to see how the complex web of causation operates. I see this little piece, and imagine it cut off from the whole, as if it actually could be, in the same way that I imagine that 1,045,9879 * 230,840 = 2,414,557,468,360 because I have not seen through all the steps.

In short, there seems to be no reason to leap from "I can conceive of x being possible/possibly not being," to "x must not be necessary." Our intuitions on states of affairs are completely bunk and should not be resorted to in our analysis of the world.

*: I found the quote. It is: "If Sally, an ordinary human being, says, 'I might not have existed,' almost everyone will take her to have stated an obvious truth. (Anyone who does not will almost certainly be a metaphysician with a theory.)" Van Inwagen, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/

Teaching Philosophy and Human Nature

2011-05-19T11:04:00.002-05:00

I'm still digesting course evaluation results. It's always frustrating, and it seems like that's the case no matter how good or how bad the results are, judging by the comments I hear from everyone. If nothing else, it feels like the comments are worthless, much of the time - the students aren't even trying to learn, so who are they to judge our worth as teachers?

But I do think that there is another side to the issue, and sometimes I as a philosopher forget that. I and my field are but one moment in the totality of human life. True, Socrates was a gadfly, and he was executed for that; but let us not merely blame the crowds for doing so. I want to live in a world where everyone is open to new ideas, but new ideas also disrupt society, which creates real problems for real people. People, like our students, are trying to build up a life for themselves, and let's face it, philosophy is often a destructive process. We philosophers tear down the edifices everyone else builds for the sake of a new creation. This is important for the sake of overall progress and I certainly would prefer to have a rational, informed public. But even we need to live in a society that runs more or less stably. The skills that keep order and community are often opposed to those that encourage universal, rational considerations.

I'm not completely apologizing for the ignorance of college freshmen, nor am I proclaiming that I have nothing to work on even on my side of the debate; but I do think that I, personally, need to step back and look at the larger picture of human nature sometimes. There are different forces required in society, often forming said society only through their conflict, and I am but one moment in that flux.

Thoughts on Bin Laden's Death

2011-05-02T17:29:00.003-05:00

It should come as no surprise to those who know me that I find the hubbub about Bin Laden irritating. "But shouldn't we rejoice that there is less evil in the world, however minute?" "Why can't you let your countrymen rejoice?" Because we get too distracted by a mere symbol to actually confront the real problems in our world.

This death is symbolic, nothing more, and possibly even harmful. We aren't going to pull out of Afghanistan or Iraq. Iraq in particular was never about these terrorists, as anyone with any clue about Middle-Eastern politics has known since the beginning, and we still have other problems in Afghanistan (the Taliban, together with the mess we, yes we, America, have made of the place). The terrorists aren't going to stop. If anything, they have a martyr to rally behind now. All we did was get the satisfaction of an all-too-expensive revenge. Are we such animals that we can only live for hormonal, emotional responses, when they come at a cost to real lives and real goods we could put to work elsewhere? Are we mere gorillas that can only pound our chests, or can we actually rationally think about matters?

Most of all, I'm concerned that this is a mere distraction. There is real evil in the world. Yes, Osama was a horrible person - I'm not going to deny that. But there are bankers in Wall Street who would let our country burn if it gained them a profit. There are companies in our very nation who have quite literally stolen money that could have fed the poor and aided the sick. And there is the utterly apathetic lack of concern about educating our public so that they would have the tools to govern themselves wisely - we spend money on bombs and bureaucracy while impoverishing the minds of our youth, all the better to be molded to the persuasions of the powerful.

There is real evil in the world which needs to be fought. Osama's defeat is a cheap victory, his death a gaudy celebration which takes no effort and no time from our lives, which ultimately gives no justice. Justice is not as simple as a shell or as easy as ammunition. It is not only a negation of what we hate, but the building up of our own lives, of putting aside the myth of our perfection and taking up our own toils, of fashioning and forming ourselves.

Dancing Tiresias

2011-04-19T17:29:00.006-05:00

I've been swing dancing for about a year now, and from time to time I'll take classes as a follow - partially to learn the other side of the dance, and partially because we've had too many leads and I don't like standing around (btw, if any women or gender-role-dashing men want to come out and learn an awesome social dance, let me know). Because I've been on both sides of the swing-out, I started to notice something: the dance by and large doesn't come from the dancers.

When you look and see a really cool turn, you might think that the dancers are doing most of the work. But really, a lot of what is going on in dance class is learning to stop doing certain things - stop moving so much in a Lindy circle, stop cranking the follow's arm around, and so on. When I lead and I want my follow to do a certain turn, I simply lift their hand in a certain way. I thought that the follow was still doing most of the work. But then I tried following, and it felt like the lead was doing most of the work - I just followed a relatively simple direction, turned when I had to because of momentum, and kept my arm bent properly so as to keep both of us from getting injured.

So who was doing the work? No one, really. The lead gives a couple signals, the follow interprets a couple signals, both add in a couple things to keep the dance floor safe, but they aren't aware of most of what is going on in the dance. It happens. They are blind to the specific spins and twirls turning around them. A hand goes up, a foot goes forward, and there was a turn. They circle around, the hand supporting the back is removed, and the two are at opposite ends of a rubber band.

Momentum and music and the real dancers.

When we try to see what is going on, we miss it. It's already happening - we just need to know a few key touches to enter into the action. When we dance blindly, we see.

Metaphors and Particulars

2011-04-14T17:29:00.002-05:00

What are particulars? I was thinking that the notion of a metaphor shares some similarities. What makes a metaphor, a metaphor? It is a word being used in a non-literal sense: that is, there is (1) the literal sense (the general rules and semantics of the language), (2) the current situational context, and (3) the interaction between them. A metaphor, qua metaphor, is the interaction and is not either of the interactors.

Similarly, a particular thing seems to be something existing between two different levels. Take a fire burning in front of me. On the one hand, it is a bunch of universal physical laws - it is an instantiation of heat, motion, release of energy, and so on. (Of course, this is tendentious, but I think that there are good reasons for assuming the reality of at least linguistic rules.) On this level, though, where is the particular? Everything is universal. There is also the situation: the fire is part of a context, warming a room, boiling water for tea, and so on. Yet again, however, we don't have a particular, since it all gets subsumed under the situation. The particular is something liminal, something appearing only as the general laws (like the overall language and its typical meaning) interact with the completely concrete situation (like the current paragraph, piece, or poem). Like metaphors, particulars have meaning as a real interaction, but are not some object existing outside of that.

Maybe, in addition, the interaction itself is produced by us - we mix things together. We take sights, sounds, smells, and tastes with a touch of reason and spin them together. So the problem of particulars arises because we exist on different levels and navigate them simultaneously, so we need some way in which they hold together for pragmatics.

The Problem of Potentiality

2011-03-14T10:55:00.005-05:00

How do we explain change? Maybe we remember our basic physics classes in high school: there is an object, held up in the air (by our hand or by part of some hacked-together Rube Goldberg device). It has potential energy. Then it gets dropped, at which point the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy.

This is more or less the Aristotelian notion of change (yes, I know there are problems, but it's an illustration - work with me here). We can apply this to other forms of change as well. For example, an acorn falls to the ground and resists being eaten by a squirrel. It is nourished in the soil and in time becomes a rabbit. Wait - that makes no sense. Acorns become oak trees, not rabbits. Why? We say that the acorn is potentially an oak tree and not potentially a rabbit. It is not the oak tree yet, but this is a different sort of not-being than the way in which it is not a rabbit. In time it will actually be the oak tree, given whatever there is that actualizes its potential (nutriments in the soil, water, etc.). So things potentially are certain other things (or potentially have certain other states) which can be actualized in the right circumstances.

The Aristotelian analysis requires these to be separate principles - actuality and potentiality, and we might also say the form of something (as it actually is) together with its matter (what makes it up). Matter is potential to receive a form. This makes some intuitive sense - when something changes, it both becomes different and stays the same. If I eradicated the acorn and then put an oak tree in its place, we would not say that the acorn changed into the tree. But at the same time, if nothing ever was different, there would be no change either. So the form must in some way become different (accidentally or essentially) while the matter stays the same in order for change to occur.

But here's the problem: we can never refer to matter itself. We also refer to some arrangement of that matter. We can talk about the way the acorn is currently structured to talk about how it will turn into a tree. In fact, it is difficult to see what we would need beyond its current form to explain its later form. Potentiality and matter are just roundabout ways of talking of current form and actuality with reference to latter form and actuality. It is as if we had two different coordinate systems looking at the same reality, but with the twist that actuality seems to be prior. All talk of potentiality is talk of actuality in disguise. Actuality carries monetary value, while potentiality consists of written slips of paper for a set number of greenbacks. So let's get parsimonious.

How do we explain change without potentiality then? The problem might be in thinking of "form" and "actuality" as something static. Things don't stand still, though. Everything is already caught up in some network of force. Even the earth which seems still is in tension with itself, as we discover when a tsunami hits. The actuality at any given instance is directional (or "telic", if you will) - it is what it is *doing* rather than what it statically *is*. When we talk of the potentiality of the acorn to become an oak tree, what we mean is that, given that dynamic nature of the acorn's present form, it would naturally become an oak if it follows that trajectory. But that oak tree is not now real - it is merely a way of describing what is actual through a hopeful prediction of the future. The oak tree is a hypothesis which is not now actual, and perhaps will never be, but which helps to organize our experience in the meantime. It doesn't need any separate principle beyond the fact that the acorn is currently in a state of growing, of responding to the soil around it, etc.

Potentiality has a merely pragmatic status, not a metaphysical one. The real principle, which is singular, is dynamic activity. This is resolvable into the current state and its direction of force (matter and energy?), but only as a conceptual distinction. How is this not just a return to the Aristotelian system, then? Because "actuality" is not the current state abstracted from its potential, but is the dynamic activity itself. Likewise, the direction of force is not the potential, but is just as much the actuality of the thing. In addition, these two moments are not metaphysical principles, but requirements of our minds for understanding the world. It seems perfectly possible that a perfect intellect would not need these crutches. We experience change because of who we are just as much because of how the world is.

What are the implications of this? We can still talk of potential, it serves a perfectly good pragmatic purpose, but it doesn't carry any metaphysical weight. Things don't change because some external actualizer acts on them, but have their own intrinsic power of self-actualizing (at least when I try to talk about it in Aristotelian terms, which are inaccurate; it's the best I have at the moment, though, so I have to ask readers to put aside surface incongruities and look at the meaning of what I say).

Further, it makes it easier to talk about all things as interconnected. When you have substances, they each have their own integrity, and you have to explain how they influence each other. But with an analysis of dynamic activity, everything already is by its very nature (speaking of its own "nature" in a pragmatic sense) affecting everything else. Aristotle's system is leaning in this direction with its analysis of act, but I'm going a step further - everything is completely constituted by how it fits into the overall network of forces. That is primary, and the substantial stability is an epiphenomenon - not vice versa. Substance is an abstraction from Reality (Indra's Web, suchness, shunyata, however you want to put it), not the basis. It is a perfectly good abstraction for getting around the world, which is all most people need, but common sense makes for poor metaphysics.

This also makes more sense of contemporary science in matters such as inertia (things naturally continue a line of force, whether fast, slow, in motion, or in rest, rather than going to some "natural place") and gravity (things naturally tend toward a place set by their environment, not by their own natures). Directionality, force, and environment determine the intrinsic nature of a thing; it is not always something accidental and violent.

What is Democracy?

2011-02-19T13:34:00.002-06:00

The recent problems in Wisconsin are raising the question, What exactly is Democracy? Is it simply going with the majority? That can't be right - we say that slavery was wrong, even when the majority would have chosen it. But what is it, then? What do we do when budget cuts cost people not just luxuries, but their livelihoods? How many people must be crushed underfoot before a regime has become undemocratic, and how does their pain compare with the "majority" opinion of what is to be done? If most public school teachers make too little to be able to afford benefit cuts and still eat, is that too many people hurt? How about if a quarter of them? The handful beginning their careers in Milwaukee? Do they only have rights if the rest of the state is informed enough to vote in their favor, to realize that these people asked to "tighten their belts like the rest of us" already chose a stricter lot simply in taking up their career, their service to a community which more than ever proves the need of education? Do they only have their lives if their "representatives" in Madison pay attention to economic realities? But why stop at these budget cuts - what about those who have had these problems all along, but never had the solidarity, the security, or the space to say anything? How many have gone unheeded all along, whose lives have been so consistently hampered that they have not been able to point to a law which would change it for the worse?

Democracy must be for the people. And when the people cannot give two seconds to think about their neighbor, when they cannot bring themselves to be informed, when they cannot turn and face the world in front of them beyond their fences, it must be against the majority.

Red

2011-01-13T11:04:00.003-06:00

"First with regard to the knowledge of sense perception, whenever an object makes an impression on our normal sense organ by coming into contact with it, we may safely believe without any doubt that it is in reality as we perceived it, provided we are sufficiently expert not to be misled by illusions...." - Saadya Gaon

What does it mean to say that something is as we perceive it? This is a difficult issue, and I want to show just how difficult it is. Let's start off with the simplistic view: I am sitting in my chair and I see a red book in front of me. Therefore, barring hallucinations, colorblindness, and so on, the book is really red, in an objective sense.

However, it turns out that it is me who makes the book red. The different wavelengths in the world are analog and continuous - there is no nice division of colors "out there." Colors get divided up in our brains. The rods and cones in our eyes divvy things up according to, more or less, the three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue; some women have a fourth set as well). Another portion of the brain (the LGN) contrasts certain colors and is responsible for that after-image you get when you stare at something too long. This opposes blue and yellow, and red and green. Linguistic systems add colors in a specific order: languages with only two words for colors talk about white/light and black/dark, languages with three invariably add red as a third, and so on. Our brains make things the colors they are, so the book is subjectively red.

But even if our brains shape the world, there is still the world to be shaped. My seeing of the book as red is as dependent on my brain shaping the world as on the world shaping my brain. There are certain wavelengths which trigger certain neurons, and both wavelengths and neurons are necessary. So the book is red in this subject-object interaction.

Of course, things get even more complicated. On the one hand, I am as much a part of the physical world as the book. The book would probably appear as a different color under the light of a different sun; is it any less red for that? But I am as much a part of this physical environment as anything else. I am here seeing the book in this way because of specific pressures of natural selection, formed in relation to the world. So my own subjective view of the world is not so subjective - it formed because of the world, in tune with the world (or else the lineage leading up to me would not have survived). So maybe the book is objectively red after all, though in a less simplistic sense than we had first considered; perhaps it is better to say that it is "materially red", since there is no longer any separation between me the subject and the book as the object.

On the other hand, everything that I see in the world is a form of consciousness. Everything sensed, thought, inferred, is all a way in which I am conscious of it. The book's being red is a form of consciousness like anything else. Everything that I figure out about natural selection or the physical structure of the world is grounded first and foremost in consciousness, and makes no sense apart from it. However, it is not just me as the subject imposing a view on the world; the world as form of consciousness is just as important. When I see a tree, the tree is just as important to that event as me. In fact, it is after the fact that I separate out the aspect of consciousness which is "I" and which is the "tree", based on the fact that they move in different directions. So the book would be ideally red, or red as a structure of consciousness (just as "I" end up being merely a structure of consciousness), and not just subjectively red.

It would seem that we need at least one more level, however. We can start from the book and then bring ourselves in as an object of natural selection, or we can start from ourselves and bring in the book as a form of consciousness. Somehow, both of these work together. We need to talk about consciousness of the world in order to let science get off the ground in the first place, but science has something to say about our consciousness of the world. There is a circle here, and so the final ground I will talk about is the whatever-it-is that is the basis for this circle which allows it to take place. In order to figure out what this basis is, I give the simple homework assignment of reading Plotinus, Proclus, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dogen, Nishida, Shankara, Schelling, Hoelderlin, Hegel, and Heidegger, for a start.

At this point, since it all works together, subject and object, matter and consciousness, maybe it is best to simply say that the book is red.

Chomsky, Math, and Politics

2011-01-03T11:21:00.003-06:00

I was recently reading through some of Noam Chomsky's writings on politics, and I came across a comparison he made between different disciplines. He pointed out that when he talked about mathematics, all that people cared about was the content of what he had to say. He is not a professional mathematician, but this does not matter as long as the math checks out. By contrast, when he talked about, say, the Vietnam war, everyone was concerned with his credentials rather than what he had to say, at least in the American media. His explanation was that those disciplines with more intellectual substance don't need credentials, whereas those needing credentials tend to be more concerned with preserving certain power structures in society. I think there is another explanation, however.

I don't wish to discount Chomsky's worries about how the intelligentsia does misuse its position to create facades of expertise, negatively impacting critical discussion of issues. But I equally want to recognize that there is a reason why we expect credentials of people in some fields and not others. When I look at a mathematical proof, all I need to examine is there. I may need to bring in my own knowledge to understand the proof in the first place, but if I can understand it, I can assess it. Other mathematical facts are irrelevant in deciding whether the theorem checks out, so understanding of the steps in this specific proof is all that is required.

When it comes to history or politics, by contrast, there can be many views with their own inner logic, which people take to be determinative of their truth (for example, conspiracy theories, religious apologetics, and the political views of your least favorite party). Looking at whether the argument itself checks out is no longer enough, since external facts can change that picture (technical tangent: David Lewis' book on Counterfactuals comes to mind - could this difference between fields be expressed in terms of modal logic?). Is the history being taught now the same history you learned as a child, for example? And I guarantee that if you have not studied the history of Galileo's contribution to the history of science, you will find it to be much less straightforward than it is made out to be - a couple extra facts about the time make the difference between "Galileo, the destroyer of dark age dogma" and "Galileo, the guy with the interesting idea which nevertheless poorly explained various aspects of the world until Newton posited that mystical, occult force known as gravity."

No matter how certain these sorts of arguments seem on their own, they could be false. Therefore, to know that someone has something worthwhile to say, we need to know more than that their speech makes sense. We need to know that they are the sort of person to know a lot of potentially relevant background information and so able to catch external facts pertinent to the topic. If someone talks about the wars in the Middle East, they need to know something about the history of the area, the differences between the regions and peoples, the root causes for the radical movements, and so on. Otherwise, we get such nonsense as "Saddam Hussein is aiding Osama bin Laden".

Of course, two other things seem to be necessary which complicate the picture. In addition to actually having the information, one needs to have an open mind so that one can readily assess new data and change ones position if necessary - again, the already present internal logic of an historical, religious, political, etc. argument is no sign of its ultimate validity. Also, there needs to be sources for the new information, which is where Chomsky's own point seems to have its place. We need people around who can perturb the system, push back against the recognized system of credentials. No system of credentials could be perfect since the object of study can never be closed off - we never will have knowledge of the specific going-ons in society in the way that we have knowledge of mathematical theorems.

Zen and Grammar

2010-12-16T14:17:00.003-06:00

I was walking to get coffee one day (in the not-so-merry month of December), and I realized that there is a similarity between Zen and the relation between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. (Yes, I know, everyone's thinking it these days – I'm a little slow on trends.) So, descriptive grammar would say that whatever people say is what is grammatical. After all, what is understood is what is understood, and language is what actually communicates and not merely what the grammar books say ought to communicate. “They” is a single, gender-neutral pronoun in additional to a plural one, and the phrase “I could care less” is meaningfully its opposites.

On the other hand, prescriptive grammar would hold that there are correct ways of speaking. How prescriptive one wants to get may differ, but there at least are some norms of speaking which are correct and deviances from this norm which are incorrect.

I don't wish to get into debates over which is correct (especially because the answer is obviously descriptive grammar), but I wish to point out that there is a tension between the two. In my daily speaking, I resist the use of the word “irregardless”. It is meaningful, because it means something. Even people who detest the word know what was intended by its use. However, I do not use it, preferring the more aesthetically pleasing “regardless”, and this alone already influences the linguistic world around me. I will also mark it on students' rough drafts, perhaps point it out to other people when I feel snobbish, and so on.

In any case, I can't help but talk in one way rather than another, and this influences the speech patterns of other people. So even while everything that communicates, communicates (and so absolutely everything that is not babbling, and perhaps even that on occasion, is grammatical in a sense), I naturally choose some ways of communication over others (and so make a prescriptive choice).

Similarly, in Zen, everything is already as it is. It is ultimately Parmenidean – what is not, is not in any way, so why talk about it? If everything truly is one, there is nothing to talk about or reject concerning this ultimate truth. However, we still act in some ways instead of others. We have natural dispositions and practical situations,. Until we are dead and so no longer agents we will choose some ways of acting over others, even if this is the decision to not act.

Everything therefore is perfect in being “imperfect”. When I am hungry, I do not exist less; however, my state of being hungry is not something to be held on to, either. It is self-obliterating. When I am hungry, I go and get myself some pizza and so cease to be hungry. So everything is lacking and incomplete, because of the fact that it is what it is. Hunger is not hunger, because it essentially drives us to become full, and therefore it is hunger. So this lack, this drive to eat which makes itself cease, is its own perfection: I am perfectly hungry in ceasing to be hungry.

So too in language. My grammar is perfectly descriptive in being prescriptive. My use of words is not a static dictionary of meanings, but is what it is in influence, change, and force. My prescriptive changing of linguistic norms is the descriptive state of things, despite the fact that there is no single prescriptive reality. No matter what "grammar" actually is on a descriptive level, we are still caught up in the midst of things and working things out in our own conversations.

Similarly, a fire is not a fire, therefore it is a fire. It is entirely outward-focused: it is fire not because of anything in itself, but because of how energy is given off to everything around it. It is what it is only because of how it affects the world around it; that is, insofar as it makes what it is not what they are. The eye does not see itself, therefore it is an eye; it is how the eye responds to what it is not that makes it what it is.

So too is language descriptive in not being descriptive. Precisely because it is the ebb and flow of meanings can we have descriptive grammar. If we tried to be grammatical according to a descriptive grammar, it would become prescriptive. After all, grammar books start off talking about how language is actually spoken; it is after that they become bulwarks against the change of words. Grammar is descriptive because it is prescriptive. But it is also prescriptive because it is descriptive: we have the power to change language, and so prescribe something within our own conversations, precisely because there is a way of speaking which is beyond any of these norms we are trying to enforce. The norms we enforce aren't bootstrapping themselves, but rather rely on the changeable nature of language to change from something to something else.

The Fact of Fiction

2010-11-30T17:50:00.002-06:00

The following can be traced back to a conversation between Nate and myself. I thought that it should be written down at some point, some point being now. I can't remember whose part was whose, and furthermore I don't think it matters in matters of philosophy – chalk it up to the speech of Aletheia, if you must have a source. The question is, what is it that distinguishes fictional entities from real things?

The first answer might be to say, real things exist. But what does it mean to say that things exist? That I can touch and feel them? This might be true for physical things, but it at least makes logical sense to say that non-physical entities exist (does the number 2 exist? How about consciousness?). How about that there is something true about them? But it is true that Santa Claus rides his sleigh around the world, in a fashion of speaking. Social constructions such as Santa Claus have their own specific sort of existence in our shared stories, though I am not saying that I could wake up in the middle of the night and discover him on my roof after the rising of such a clatter. Maybe you don't want to call this “existence”, but then we need to see what existence is, as well as how “non-existent” things can have anything at all true about them.

We proposed the following: real entities are complete and consistent, while fictional entities are not. By complete I mean this: ask whatsoever question you will that is applicable, and there shall be an answer. If I ask about the mating habits of the rarest species of beetle, there is some truth to the matter. If I ask about the mating habits of dragons, however, I may very well be at a permanent loss. We encounter this phenomenon all the time when reading stories – we speculate about what happens, where the characters are coming from, what happens in the middle of plot holes, and we get frustrated when no answer in forthcoming. Think of a murder mystery that never reveals the killer. We feel that there must be an answer, but it may simply be unanswerable – there is a killer, this is true, but there is no truth to the matter about who the killer is.

Consistency may be a bit more tendentious, but I shall proffer it anyhow. I may read one story, and vampires melt when exposed to sunlight. In another story, which I shall now invent and which I have certainly never encountered through any medium, they glitter. Do vampires then melt or glitter in the sunlight? Both, it seems. Now, it might be argued that vampires melt in the first story and glitter in the second, and so there is no contradiction. But that would be saying that there are two sorts of vampires. The oddness of the second story comes about not because we are encountering a second sort of vampire, but because there is one sort of vampire, and they melt. And yet they glitter, too. There would be no possibility of cognitive dissonance without there being one entity between the different stories which has both the essential property of melting and the essential property of glittering without melting. Fictions can therefore be contradictory in a way that real things cannot.

But fictions are beings that are not, beings that are false. The opposite seems to hold as well: all of our falsities and delusions are fictions of a fashion. What is “being” then, by contrast? It is uncreated and imperishable, not one of our unstable fictions; whole and of a single kind and unshaken and perfect. It never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous (Parmenides, Fragment 8, KRS). If it is complete, it is whole and does not exist as something that was and now is not (since answers to our questions about the past are currently answerable – history is a viable study), nor similarly is it something that will be yet now is not (the very power of prediction proves the possibility of encountering the future now). If it is consistent, it is all together, one, and continuous, since nothing contradicts anything else.

If this is correct, then the status of fictional entities is more than a study of books and legends. Fiction is the way we live life when it does not align with the above picture, whereas reality by contrast is something unitary and whole and the fertile ground out of which all of our fictions spring – since they too are part of reality in their own way.

What is "Non-conceptual"?

2010-11-17T09:53:00.003-06:00

In my posts on religious experience, I had been focusing on how there might be dialogue about non-conceptual experiences specifically. As was pointed out to me, however, it is far from clear what "non-conceptual" might be. On the one extreme, it could refer to any experience. I cannot tell anyone what "red" is - they must see it for themselves. So if "conceptual" implies "communicable by means of speech/concepts alone", then most things (or perhaps all) would be non-conceptual.

That doesn't seem to help us too much, though, since there appears to be some content to "non-conceptuality". What about the nature of (fill in goal of particular religion here)? That is something neither experienced in this life, nor is it something we could put together from anything in this life presumably (heaven would always exceed our expectations, for example). Or how about "go to church/synagogue/mosque/temple/etc. and your life will make sense"? This one is more difficult. Presumably we will eventually be able to form concepts of an afterlife, and so it is only accidentally non-conceptual. The directive to do something for life to make sense is, by contrast, a command cloaked in the language of a statement. There might be a concept associated with it, but there is also a dissociation between the concept and the experience which one has by following the directive. This is actually a quite interesting topic, especially since it relates to much more than a rather specific form of experience such as I am discussing here. But it is not yet the type of non-conceptuality I am interested in.

I was talking with someone yesterday about math, and I think that there is something there which can come closer to what I am talking about (for a more detailed discussion, see here and perhaps here). We talk about infinite numbers in mathematics, but there is a sense in which all that they show is that we never really talk about the infinite. There is always a larger "infinite" numeral, in fact an "infinite" number of them (whatever that might mean). Any attempt to capture the infinite fails to truly capture it, but must always delimit it in some fashion. Our actual references to the infinite does not refer to the infinite in itself, but rather to the way in which we find that everything that we encounter in insufficient. We are always referring to finite things in describing the "infinite" (and even to talk about describing it is to allow an infelicity of speech).

In this sense, we never have a concept of the "infinite" in itself. Similarly, Heidegger's discussion of the "nothing" is not of an object (since it makes no sense to make "nothing" an object since it is not a thing), but rather of the "nihilation" of beings - that is, we are talking about a particular manner of what is, of how meanings slip away and things recede from us, and only in talking about beings can we in circumlocutions talk of "nothing". There is no way of having a referential concept of the "nothing" or of the "infinite".

So what would a "non-conceptual experience" look like? Not being a practicing mystic myself, I cannot quite say (although they say that they can't say either). Maybe we could think of it like this: even though we never truly find the mathematical infinite, we have some intuitive grasp of the paucity of concepts - not just of the concepts we do have, but of any possible concept we could have. There is a part of us that jumps out of the particular way of thinking about things and takes hold of the whole, even if only to immediately lose it. Any attempt to describe this whole then fails, and we can only think about it by looking at the parts, in their difference, their strife, and their lack. Even in having the experience, then, one does not have something they can conceptualize and refer to. Two mystics can refer to "the mystical experience", but any conceptual content even for them will still be of what happens to beings, to the finite, etc., and not of the ultimate and infinite. So perhaps "non-conceptual" would mean that, even if there might be a concept of it in a sense, such a concept has for content something other than its purported "referent"?

Cultural Values

2010-11-12T20:21:00.003-06:00

The other day, I was talking with some people about foreign education. In particular, do we as Americans step in and give them our own educational system when we see fit? Or do we let them develop their own culture? I tended toward the latter option, and although it would need numerous caveats in a concrete situation (for example, would it be all right to give funding for them to develop their systems, and other issues), it made me think of broader cultural concerns.

Basically, the position I want to put forward is this: every culture has its own genuine vantage point on reality, and we need to work with that (if anyone is interested in listening to theoretical justifications for this, it is based on Parmenides and Neoplatonism – but that is a different post). When Americans champion values of freedom and independence, there is an actual good in that. We have seen something real about the world. There would be no way of subjectively and relativistically realizing anything unless reality allowed it – freedom could not be seen as a good, even "subjectively" - unless it actually does something for human, social reality. But at the same time (as I have been forced to acknowledge against my American intuitions), other societies that champion communal values and concrete regulations for guiding action have their own insights into reality which we often lack and which generally conflict with ours.

So there is room to say that American education should grow American values – there is something there worthwhile – but at the same time there should be, say, Islamic education growing Islamic values. There's good stuff within their own framework, and Muslims should be looking to their own roots (sometimes in recovering what has been left behind, such as struggling/ijtihad over legal canons, but still in a way genuinely Islamic).

Part one of the thesis, then, is that every culture has its own truth, or perhaps its own finite witness to truth if that is better - a truth neither fully absolute nor merely conventional, but real nonetheless. Part two is that it is better to work within a tradition than to syncretically combine them. Different traditions and cultures have spent hundreds and thousands of years melding material together. Sometimes this is done more effectively than others, but there is still more of an organic unity between elements of an established culture than one put together from whatever novelties excite people. Now, cultures are living and growing, and can incorporate new elements. But this still isn't done randomly. New elements must be grafted in to the old tree, worked in so that they work with the whole. Throwing American models of government into the Middle East causes problems, whether or not they are better models of government – they have consonances in the Euro-American system (including thought about the nature of the person, responsibility, role of government, states of nature, dissemination of knowledge, economics, etc.) which are completely lacking in other areas of the world. It is similarly difficult applying insights learned from other cultures to a contemporary American environment (for example, how hard is it to convince people of the benefits of available health care and public transportation?).

Part three is that, since cultures have their own witness to truth by their relation to reality (and so to Being), cultures that negatively define themselves lack a witness insofar as they negatively define themselves. Terrorist groups have relatively little cohesion outside of fighting against some common enemy. There might be some such cohesion, and to this extent they get something about the world, but a negative and merely relative identity keeps them from having anything to develop. Taking ones own race as the master race in opposition to all others is, again, merely a relation against others.

Sentient Cuttlefish: The Novel?

2010-10-26T09:47:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned on this blog thoughts on intelligent cephalopods a few times. The concept fascinates me: here is a group of animals at a completely different spot in the evolutionary chain from ourselves, lacking our mammalian social instincts, but yet with a high degree of intelligence. What if they were to cross some threshold and become self-aware? What would this look like? I've played with the idea of sentient dolphins also, but that seems more boring: they'd look like cavemen of the sea at first, and then build up something like an underwater, mammalian society, not too different from what humans would do. It would be a good test case in how a different environment can shape intelligence, but cephalopods are cooler. So, I want to start writing about them. Maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe an epic poem, but I want to make this happen, and I'm looking for input.

I'm still working on the setting. These beings lack social instincts, and this will change them at their very core. What does reason look like for them? Language? They don't use language primarily to communicate, so where does it come from? I'm thinking that it will arise from evolutionarily beneficial mnemonic systems, with perhaps some adaptation to rudimentary communication (such as "stay off my territory"). This entails that writing comes before speech for them.

They would also be solipsistic in a sense since they would have no innate feeling for others. But they wouldn't even have a well-defined sense of themselves, since there would be no other over which they could define themselves as separate individuals. Ethically, they would appear amoral, not having basic social feelings, but it's not as though they would actively try to be bad, either - they just wouldn't recognize each other. They would in some ways be more like those with extreme autism than, say, psychopaths, except that their entire evolution would have been guided by this.

Could these beings ever have anything remotely resembling a society? It would still be beneficial to them, but then how would they maintain it? Would they end up like Vulcans of a sort? What would happen if they encountered human beings (or sentient dolphins)? Just some of the ideas with which I am playing.

On Human Nature

2010-10-22T17:27:00.008-05:00

I have been grading many essay questions on the topic of whether human nature is good or bad according to Chinese philosophy, and I thought that I would weigh in on the question since I've been forced to think through it fifty times.

On the side of Mengzi (Mencius): there are roots in human nature which give us the capacity of being good. Further, when left to themselves, they make us actually good. For example, according to Mengzi, if we see a child stuck in a well, we will save the child. This is the case even if the child is not ours and we expect no reward from saving the child.

Roots like this sense of compassion are how we could ever get any virtuous qualities. Because we naturally feel compassion,* we can actually be benevolent. The alternative would be that we would have a set of rules instructing us to act in a benevolent way, but without anything being internalized beyond these rules.**

We cease being good by failing to reflect on these roots in our nature. We naturally feel compassion for those close to us. As we reflect and nourish the feeling, it grows outward, encompassing more and more people. External forces can push us away, however. For an illustration, a starving person will eat whatever is offered to her, though her nature distinguishes between tasty and disgusting food when left to itself. Similarly, conditions such as oppression and poverty can distort our natural judgments.

For Xunzi, on the other hand, human nature is bad. We are born and our nature is only concerned with ourselves. A baby feels its own hunger, not that of another. Each of us starts by seeking our own immediate advantage and this alone. We need to be shown a way out. This requires a virtuous role model (the sage) with her standards and practices for reaching the good life.

This good life is peace and harmony in society for Chinese thought. As long as we seek our own immediate benefit, we cause disorder and disharmony. This is why human nature is bad, not because of some arbitrary command from on high decreeing it to be such. We can recognize the need to be better, since such a disharmonious society is bad for everyone involved at some level, but without the external force of the sage we cannot escape. The Achaeans in the Iliad honoured warriors and those who could accumulate wealth, even while realizing that a life of war is horrible for human beings. We need (a) a model to see to give us possibilities, (b) a set of practices to follow to discipline us against seeking our immediate benefit, and (c) our own deliberate effort to become good.

The problem is, who is right? Contemporary science backs Mengzi to an extent (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/ for a quick view of some of the issues). If there were a race of sentient cuttlefish, they would have an entirely different nature and set of ethics.*** However, human beings are mammals and so have social natures. Living together is something hard-wired into the vast majority of us. We naturally feel empathy, fairness, altruism, etc., and not just our own immediate, purely self-focused benefit.

Still, this only helps part of Mengzi's argument. We do not seem to naturally keep extending these roots out further and further, since whatever is according to nature (or the way of heaven, or however one wishes to put it) happens always or for the most part. We stop at a given point where we feel comfortable, with whatever tribe is relevant in our context. Genocides and general dickishness seem to be a natural trait of human beings as much as anything else. Is there some other basic component of human nature we need in order to account for this?**** Are there always external forces resisting our natural impulses, always shortages of resources that cause societies to go wrong at some point? Does our intrinsically social nature work against us as much as for us, depending on the society into which we are born?

Addendum: perhaps the entire problem is that we are starting off with the evaluative terms "good" and "bad". If we were to stick with simple descriptions, some of the problems disappear. Human nature is intrinsically social, and geared toward benefiting those around us. This is simultaneously good and bad, depending on what we are looking at any given time. Starting with the issue of good/bad is therefore trying to cut against the joints of reality, which of course will lead to contradictory conclusions.

* Note that "feeling" is not opposed to "thinking" in Chinese thought. There is simply the xin, the heart/mind/all inner states together, and feeling correctly is an important part of thinking correctly.

** Which rules out a divine command ethic. Even if God commands it, this does not mean that it is anything that would be good according to our natures.

*** Which is why I find the concept of cephalopod intelligence so fascinating. They are already intelligent creatures, but from an entirely different region of the evolutionary chain and without our social instincts. I really want to write something about a cephalopod (anti-?)civilization at some point.

**** Of course, someone is responding at this point with the theological answer of "sin." But it seems that this is a cheap answer, when there are genuinely explanatory and natural accounts available. Evolutionarily speaking, communities which preserve each other against competitors survive. Aggression helps creatures survive. Even atrocious acts such as rape are found within the natural order (go research ducks - nasty things), and there seems to be no reason to explain them as a result of some fall rather than a brutal way for nature to accomplish its purposes of perpetuation. "Sin" only makes sense if you expect that everything should be perfect in the first place and then find that it isn't. But I have yet to see one iota of evidence for such an expectation unless one has already assumed a set of theological claims, or is expecting a different sort of perfection than one which would mean anything for the daily lives of human beings.

Non-conceptual Religious Experience: Continued

2010-10-20T20:13:00.003-05:00

I had started a discussion of non-conceptual religious experience earlier (http://pulpitumvulpei.blogspot.com/2010/09/non-conceptual-religious-experience.html), and started to think of an alternative way around the issues involved. I'm currently working on the paper supporting that conclusion, so I figured that I would post the sequel here as well.

Traditions of any sort, let alone religious traditions, are not actually closed off from each other. They do engage in dialogue, and they do find similarities amongst themselves and occasionally borrow practices and modes of expression. This is as much a part of the formative influence on experience as anything else. We must also look at ways in which the different religions talk about their experiences amongst each other. This will not always lead to similarities - indeed, a good deal of the time such discussions turn polemical - but sometimes it does, and both these elements (of similarity and of dissimilarity) must be preserved in order to do the traditions justice in their own self-conceptions.

Starting from the external aspects of experience, we are not stuck in externals. We can look at the way in which a given tradition shapes both the experience itself and its interpretation, but the experience is no longer interchangeable as it would be under the theory of extrinsic evidence. Once it can be matched up with elements from a different tradition, the experience gains a certain level of independence from the tradition which shaped it and provides some measure of evidence for something in itself. This, however, does not lead to the theory of intrinsic evidence insofar as the experience is not completely independent from the tradition either.

As an illustration, we can look at the Pythagorean theorem. There still can be seen to be some experience associated with "discovering the Pythagorean theorem". Similar enough experiences were encountered in the Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions, each using different mathematical methods and different standards of rigor. In particular, the Greek tradition focused on strict logical proofs, while the Indian and Chinese traditions resorted to more empirical methods with more of a communal sense of how one goes about doing math. These different practices lead to a different characterization of "discovery of the Pythagorean theorem", to the extent that Indian and Chinese methods may not be appreciated as mathematical by someone steeped with the Euclidean Greek tradition.

One could then quibble with the Indians, and say that their discovery of the Pythagorean theorem could not be the same as that of the Greeks', since an essential element of the former is a strictly rational basis while the former uses empirical methods of proof. The contradictory phenomena would supposedly disprove any similarity of experience. Despite this logical analysis, however, the different traditions have been able to come together and agree that they have something similar in this theorem. Therefore, precisely through the assessments within the traditions and their own practices and not by presupposing some a priori realm of mathematics, we can talk about a shared experience not reducible to any single tradition even though descriptions of it within the different traditions conflict.

The conceptualizable portion of the evidence is still something mediated by the traditions. We still cannot look directly at a non-conceptual experience and have support for concepts. It is only in looking at the ways in which similarities appear across the traditions and as mediated by them that we can have any idea of what evidence the experience itself provides. As a result, the experience itself is never directly rendered conceptual, nor is it ever exhausted - it is always possible that something similar enough would show up in a new tradition with its own sets of practices and beliefs through which it understands the experience.

Proclus and Relativism

2010-09-20T10:08:00.002-05:00

In my last post, I argued that relativism may actually entail objectivity. In trying to think through what sort of objectivity would be entailed and how it comes about, I found myself thinking back to Neoplatonic models. So my purposes here are twofold: (1) to analyze the case of spatio-temporal relativity and show in what since space-time exists, and (2) to attempt to rehabilitate Neoplatonic modes of expression to show that they do in fact have sense and are not merely outdated linguistic games.

In Proclus' system, there are triads consisting of Unparticipated-Participated-Participant, or, perhaps better, Unpossessed-Possessed-Possessor. There is some Form, say of human being. It may be helpful to spell out what this Form is not. It is not a human being itself (and so escapes Aristotle's "third man" argument). It is not the universal "human being", which is a concept derived from our abstracting from individual human beings. The Form of human being is called by the name "human being" because it is their (formal) cause, and not because of what it itself is. It is not some abstract Form that could exist without concrete human beings, floating ethereally up in some Platonic heaven. It always exists along with participants; what is at question is the formal priority.

However, this Form itself is Unparticipated/Unpossessed. This is not the humanity of any particular human being; it is the formal cause of humanity as a particular reality. The humanity of any particular human being is the participated/possessed form. Every human being has their own humanity. The concrete human being is then the participant/possessor of the individual form.

How does this relate to spatio-temporal relativism? Let's start backwards. There are concrete physical entities inhabiting what we call time and space. These are the participants/possessors. Now, we can talk about their particular locations in time and space, which are the possessed/participated spatio-temporal frameworks. All actual spatio-temporal frameworks are (a) relative, and (b) based on concrete beings. (In addition, there are spatio-temporal frameworks which are purely formal and mathematical, which correspond to other features in Proclus' system which I will not explain here). There is no space-time existing apart from these frameworks, but rather, space-time is always a specific space-time for each being.

However, it is not as if we were purely equivocating on space-time for each individual. There is some reality there which allows for them all to join together in a spato-temporal reality, even though they participate in different frameworks. This would be the unparticipated/unpossessed Form. It itself is not space-time, or spatio-temporal; whatever involves space and time must exist in some given perspective. In other words, space and time are realities that we experience as located in given perspectives and make no sense without being perspectival. Space-time is always space-time as experienced by some entity.

However, there is something which allows all of the different perspectives to be. It cannot be space-time in general (which is merely an abstraction, since real space-time is always in a given perspective), nor can it be the space-time of any individual perspective (since this would only exist for that perspective). Instead, it is the formal cause of the space-time for all perspectives, as a particular formal reality which is not itself space-time. It is that ground upon which relative spatio-temporal frameworks can take place.

Why posit this ground, then? Why not just stop at the different relative positions and be done with it? The different relative positions (as determined by concrete, actually existing entities, and not first and foremost as mathematical forms) are still the only fully concrete realities in the Proclean model. However, they do not explain themselves. There is a community amongst them that needs to be explained, and if we stop at mere individuality, it is difficult to see how we do this. By positing an unparticipated Form of space-time, we can explain the spatio-temporal openness of one entity to another even though space and time can only exist and be described according to individual frameworks.

Relativism vs. Subjectivism

2010-09-18T05:22:00.003-05:00

Concerning ethics, I think that there are lot of people who have a knee-jerk reaction to relativism. As far as I can tell, this is because they think that this reduces morality to something subjective, and hence something arbitrary. But this need not be the cause, and perhaps is actually something incompatible with relativism. For an analogy, let us take the case of space-time relativism in physics. This does not mean that there is no space or time; on the contrary, Einstein thought that by showing the relativity of space and time to individual perspectives, he had proven their objectivity. If they truly were subjective, then a single individual perspective should account for them (such as Euclidean mathematics in Kant's system). But the fact that space and time can only be viewed within given perspectives, and yet these perspectives hang together, show that space and time are something real outside of any one given perspective.

Similarly, why is there a problem in saying that moral claims are relative to a given perspective? This is not to say that they are merely individual, but rather that we can only know claims from a given standpoint. Or, to put it another way, we can only be virtuous within our given contexts. For an example, the virtue of generosity requires some sort of wealth to give away. It only makes sense within a certain context of having something to give away. Other contexts demand different virtues. If you don't have any wealth, you can't engage in the same activities as those who are independently wealthy. So in the same way the practices involved in living in a Chinese society may differ from those involved in living in an American society, based on what is available, how things will affect the persons around oneself, etc. It is not clear that there need be general moral rules guiding these practices for them all to be the best ethical practices, other than some basic sense of "the good". (Edit: where "the good" would seem to entail some knowledge of the natures of whatever we are talking about; the good for human beings is what lets human beings be most human, and so on. This may be relative to whatever is talked about, or there may be some general sense of goodness/aesthetic sense applicable to different cases with practice and insight.)

Further, it is not clear that there need to be extrinsic moral principles to say that some systems of ethical behavior are inferior. The Nazi regime doesn't seem to be self-sustaining. What happens when all of the current "others" are sent off to concentration camps? Either a fundamental shift in ethics must take place (which should have existed in the first place), or there will be a need for a new superior race and hence inferior differences. The cycle must continue, and there cannot be a stable society. So the system falls apart internally. Now, psychology and sociology may be able to supply a better story for why this would happen than the naive one I present here, but the point remains the same. A society that exists by setting itself from others cannot exist apart from some sort of others.

If all of this is correct, then relativism is a form of moral realism; in fact, it may be a better form than moral absolutism. Why? Because absolutism (saying that there are these specific moral absolutes) still feels the need to posit the absolutes; there would not be morality unless we take an active stance in making morality exist. Relativism lets things be what they are, and trusts (hopefully rationally and empirically) that morality will really arise from the natures of things. And if it cannot arise from the natures of things, in what sense could it possibly be objective?

Thoughts from Preparing Class Readings

2010-09-13T15:26:00.003-05:00

In preparing readings for my Intro to Philosophy course which I am teaching, I noticed that there seem to be two points running through every single thinker, no matter how diverse their views are on other topics. One is that we ultimately need to understand things on our own, and that explanations and teaching can only point us in the right direction; we must utilize our own power to see the truth for ourselves. The other is that the things we encounter in our daily lives are only means and must be treated as such, without attachment. Plato, Aristotle (albeit to a lesser degree), Augustine, the Confucians, the Daoists, and the Buddhists all hold these things. What points does anyone consider to be important, and pretty universal despite different narratives legitimating them? To what extent do the stories we tell surrounding these basic points matter (asked as a legitimate question and not merely as a dismissal of detailed thinking)?

Are there Atoms?

2010-09-06T12:15:00.004-05:00

Or, alternatively, what does it mean for something to be false, or explanatory, etc.? Parmenides holds that what is, is, and what is not, is in no way at all. Which seems to be pretty straightforward, and I've been thinking that there is something right on and profound here. It has sometimes been applied to the problem of evil: evil is a privation of being (what "is not") and so does not actually exist. It is like the hole in an umbrella: you feel the rain falling on you, but not because of what is there. Put in another way, any reality evil has is relative, and not absolute. Even a dictator is still pursuing some good in oppressing subjects; pursuing evil purely for its own sake would be nonsensical on this view.

But I don't wish to discuss traditional accounts of the problem of evil; the relation between goodness and being is not straightforward. I am bringing this illustration up for the sake of another issue: what is truth? What does it mean for something to correspond to reality? A statement is true if it says of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. But what is not, is in no way at all; so how does it even make sense to talk of what is absolutely false?

In order to try to understand the problem here, let us take scientific theories: specifically, are there atoms? On a simple view, we say that atoms exist and make up the world. There are carbon atoms and oxygen atoms and gold and hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, etc. But then we turn around and see that these are constructs, models we make in our understanding to navigate the world, and so do not actually exist in the world, but are merely tools for us in our thinking, arising out of specific historical circumstances.

I am proposing that we take another step, which I've suggested before on this blog. The problem is that both of these views assume that there must be some sort of correspondence for there to be truth. What is explained and the explaining are two distinct things which must match up. But why not say that the explaining, the unifying of experience, is itself the explanation? Insofar as atoms unify our view of the world, they exist. They do not exist because they unify our worldview; this unification is their existence, where this sort of explanation and unification takes place in our ongoing interaction with the world and not with us on one side and the world on another.

If this is right, then falsity is relative as well as non-being. Statements come from a context and speak to that context; some better than others, to be sure, but there is also some explanatory power of statements and so some way in which they have truth, since a contextless and therefore non-unifying statement is meaningless. Even a con artist or conspiracy theorist needs to make statements that resemble the truth, and so to that extent cannot be purely false; it's just that closer examination would find much better explanations (that is, ones that unify experience more and that unify more experiences; namely, the experience that you will lose your money to the con artist and sanity to the conspiracy theorist).

What about fictional characters? They would exist as well, but only in their own fashion. Santa Claus must exist, as a fictional character; the notion of "Santa Claus" pulls together various social narratives and practices and children's games, and so is real precisely insofar as it does this. It is not real insofar as we would expect to come upon a sleigh with flying reindeer on Christmas Eve. Insofar as the notion would include this, it would create disunity with our experience.

Non-conceptual Religious Experience?

2010-09-05T12:33:00.003-05:00

I was getting into a conversation the other day about religious experience, and in particular about whether anyone could have a non-conceptual, direct experience of the Trinity (or, if you prefer, God in general, Brahman, Thusness, etc.). I held that it is always an experiencing-as, an experience that also has an interpretation (not that the experience and the interpretation are two different realities), and the response I got back was that this was a result of a Western split between reason and faith/theology/the non-rational, and doesn't come up elsewhere.

But this doesn't seem to work. Just because another group believes in square circles doesn't mean that they exist, and I am holding that a non-conceptual experience that nevertheless legitimates a particular view is similarly nonsensical. If the experience itself is non-conceptual, it does not provide intrinsic evidence for anything articulable. If it could, it would have to already have some conceptual structure to it.

So does it provide any evidence at all? It seems that it could provide extrinsic evidence, by which I mean this: I join up with a group, the group tells me that I will attain a certain experience by following certain steps, and lo-and-behold I have that experience. Considering that the group has been right about this, I have some prima facie evidence for accepting their interpretation of the experience. The experience itself may be non-conceptual, and so there would still be nothing within the experience to give evidence in itself, but there could still some reality that actually occurred during the experience which is articulable about which the group is right.

So my experience of God may itself be non-conceptual, the experience itself not giving me grounds for saying that it is of God as opposed to of a tree, but it could still be that I had actually experienced God rather than a tree and I would now have some extrinsic evidence of this because of the methods of practice and interpretation of the group at hand.

However, different groups have their own non-conceptual experiences, and offer different interpretations. An interpretation of the experience as one of the Triniarian life is not the same as a recognition of divine Tawhiid (unity/unification) or of ultimate Shunyata (emptiness). The experience doesn't validate the group; the group simply helps to give an interpretation to the experience (although, this is not something separate from the experience and is part of the prerequisites for experiencing it at all).

So, to what extent could religious experience actually give evidence that a given religious group is right? It appears that the only thing that it can do is to suggest that a group with its traditions, etc. has a sort of efficacy. It says absolutely nothing about whether that group is right compared to other groups. Experience can tell us that a given path is worthwhile, but says nothing about whether there are other paths. In fact, if we take other people's experiences seriously and not be ad hoc about our own, religious experience would seem to entail the positive conclusion that there are multiple worthwhile paths.

How to Stay Excited about Pointless Stuff

2010-09-01T18:02:00.002-05:00

Continuing from the last post, how is it that we hold excitement for any given idea, culture, or whatever? I remember starting off in philosophy, thinking about all the grand ideas and the exoticness of it all. I was enthralled. But I gradually started losing that fervor when I saw it in perspective. Maybe we can't actually get metaphysical knowledge, and maybe it isn't really all that important anyhow. And maybe we need to be concerned with the little things and not always with the big questions.

This perspective is good, I think, but I also became pretty apathetic about what I do. I started churning out work because it was what I do, not because I had any love left for it; after all, what in the material actually made it worth that love? Beauty always seems to be something which exceeds that which we call beautiful; there is no explanation for it in the subject matter (or the pretty face) itself.

But I think that view is wrong as well. We can realize that our favorite subjects aren't really as important as we make them out to be. However, why shouldn't we get excited about what we can? There may be absolutely nothing objective about this excitement, but who cares? Let someone get excited about it, so that someone may devote their time and attention to making that portion of our discourse better.

How is it that we can hold to our own ideas, to make our own philosophical arguments? We hold our positions in order to give them their dues. Think of a sports game: two teams are playing, and what really matters is that there is a good game. But there cannot be a good game unless each team is trying their best to win, even though the goodness of the game is not dependent on any specific team winning. We can attach ourselves to our philosophical theories in a like spirit. We could be wrong; what really matters at the end of the day, though, is that the truth is found, and perhaps the "team" for which we are rooting will lose. Nevertheless, if there are no advocates of a given position, or no advocates who sincerely argue for it, it cannot be be given its due, it cannot put up a fair fight. So we hold to what portion of reality we can see and we articulate it as well as possible so that on the whole the truth may be discovered. We attach ourselves to the position for the sake of the whole and not for the sake of the part.

To some extent, I think this is what the mystics mean who say that love/the good/the beautiful is beyond being and reason. Now, they are considering some absolute beauty/goodness, but an absolute that must of necessity shine through in every individual thing. Reason itself, and pragmatism itself, gives no ultimate basis. We must take a step and simply want something for its own sake before we have anything about which to reason or be practical. Without something pulling us forward, there would be no world in which we could work.

One issue that remains: this is all well and good, but it is still the musings of a priveleged white male with the leisure to write a philosophy blog. Maybe some of us can devote our time to pursuits such as metaphysics, but what about those starving on the streets or fighting for basic rights? And this is a terrible situation, one which we must not make light of. If we are caught up in our ecstatic visions and someone needs a cup of water, give them the water. But there is also the respect in which we feed people and secure rights for them not as ends in themselves, but so that we can shore up the deficiencies of our society and procure for all of its inhabitants the most authentic human life possible, one which can be concerned with the matters I'm talking about here and not with worrying about basic needs. So we must take care of those who need care, but without some final goal in sight for why we are doing such, we will dissolve into aimlessness and bickering.

Contra the Symposium

2010-08-28T11:40:00.005-05:00

I'm back, and hopefully will start posting more often again now that I'm not stuck in Arabic prison. I have been putting together readings for my Philosophy of Human Nature class, and in re-reading Diotima's speech in the Symposium I was struck by something which I would like to discuss. Here's a nice summary paragraph given toward the end of the speech:

He who, ascending from these earthly things under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair bodily forms, and from fair bodily forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair sciences, until from fair sciences he arrives at the science of which I have spoken, the science which has no other object than absolute beauty, and at last knows that which is beautiful by itself alone.

There are two ascents here: one from the physical to the intellectual, and another from what is particular to an individual to what is universal and general. Now, I'm not sure that I need to quibble too much with the first ascent. I can imagine two women, for example, the first of whom I find merely physically beautiful, and the second whose character I admire. Even when I find the latter physically beautiful (and I may even find her strikingly so), this is mediated by my appreciation of who she is, which is primary in value and (for me at least) is part of what makes me consider her physically beautiful. Overall, this makes her an order of magnitude more beautiful than the woman I merely consider to be physically beautiful. And from reading through the Symposium and the Phaedrus, I think that Plato likewise allows for lower orders of beauty being caught up in the higher, even if the higher are valued more. Socrates never does seem to get over his appreciation for pretty young things, after all.

My problem is with the ascent from the individual to the universal, or at any rate with stopping at the universal as Diotima appears to do. I think that this first step makes a lot of sense: it is silly to pretend that one person is the only truly beautiful person in the world, either in looks or in character. That's merely blindness. So we can recognize that there are many beautiful people (and societies, etc.) out there, and this is in itself a healthy step: your own local circumstances and your own loved ones are not the only reality.

But at this point, I'm reminded of the Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, or perhaps a woman he was talking to. In either case, the point was that it is easy to love "humanity", but those who love "humanity" in the abstract can find it all the more difficult to love particular human beings. So I think that we need a descent as well on Diotima's ladder of beauty: we need to rise up out of our particular circumstances, recognize that we and our loved ones are not the center of the world, but then also realize that this is our portion of the world to tend. We take care of particular, concrete human beings, and we serve this and that segment of a real society. Rather than avoiding attachment to anyone in particular, we attach ourselves to individual people in light of the whole, as our specific way of helping out the whole shebang (to use Fr. Jones' technical phrase) and our own specific recognition and contemplation of beauty.

Does Seeking Truth Lead to Understanding?

2010-06-13T16:47:00.004-05:00

The second idea I wanted to jot down while I remember it is this: Does truth-seeking always lead to the truth? I've been thinking through a counter-example recently, in which seeking an accurate assessment of the world in the short-term hinders long-term understanding, and I think it raises interesting questions.

I've been taking up dancing. First, I started with east coast swing about three months ago. Now, I hadn't really danced at all before this, so I was blissfully ignorant of how bad I was when I started. Because I didn't realize this, I was better able to be confident, to keep going through mistakes, and to actually learn and understand the dance better. By contrast, once I started understanding what I was doing, and also when I started taking up blues dancing, I have found it harder to progress because of a more accurate assessment of where I am.

So it seems that, by understanding where I am currently better, I have trouble progressing in the understanding of this particular art form. Seeking the truth prevents me from reaching the truth, as it were. As a friend pointed out to me, William James seems to have a similar example: If I have to jump over a precipice, and I believe that I can make it, this belief changes the world. My confidence that I can make the jump helps me actually make the jump, while a lack of belief may keep me from doing so.

I think that the situation that I raise is different from James' in an important way, though. Once you jump over the precipice, you are done. In dancing, by contrast, I have danced many dances and have had the opportunity to see my ability. It is not merely a matter of having confidence, but of inaccurately assessing my current state which helps me to improve, of at least ignoring bad dances if not telling myself they were good. Now, too much inaccuracy also hurts; we can all think of truly inept people who cannot assess themselves at all in their given fields. But too much accuracy also keeps one from moving forward.

Perhaps one could say that I am equivocating on "truth". An accurate assessment of where I am right now is what is true, whereas it is merely a matter of practical concerns and my desires as to whether or not I reach my goals. So truth may not be practical, and not merely for Machiavellian reasons. This would still be an interesting question, though: is a short-term disregard for truth a prerequisite for attaining certain worthwhile ends? Is it a worthwhile means to such ends?

But there is also the problem that there is a certain sort of understanding involved, which I can only get if I put aside the concern for truth to an extent. Seeking understanding now gets in the way of it later. If we truly want to understand, there are some things it may be better to not understand. Although, how can we know what these are, until we're on the other side of matters?

And with that, I'm off to become a hermit for a couple months. Feel free to leave comments, I'll probably check occasionally, but I'll only be responding at best once a week.

Philosophy and Search Algorithms

2010-06-13T16:23:00.003-05:00

I'm at Madison now, ready to officially start my immersive Arabic program tomorrow. Or rather, not ready, but being pushed off the cliff anyhow. So I have a couple ideas that I want to get out before I am unable to use English or be around large amounts of English-speakers for two months (mercifully I have Friday nights off, at least, but I don't plan on writing philosophy then). First, I've been thinking that philosophy (and truth-seeking in general) is a lot like computer search algorithms, and that the analogy can help us to understand the place of the history of philosophy.

One can use simple search algorithms, called hill-climbing algorithms. The point is simple: you look everywhere around your current position, and you find the direction that takes you higher (where what counts as "higher" depends on what you are searching for; in this case, perhaps it is what is more rational/coherent/explanatory/pragmatic/all of the above). You take this step, and you repeat the procedure until you find a maximum.

It's nice, it's simple, it gets some results, but the problem with the hill-climbing algorithm is the same as with many thinkers: if you only look from within your own position, you are as likely as not only going to find a local maximum. That is, you found your own little hill in the search-space, but it is quite possible that you are surrounded by the Himalayas. Or plains, for that matter. The fact that you found a local maximum has absolutely nothing to do with the surrounding terrain. That's the problem with "faith seeking understanding": if you start with some ground that you refuse to question, you may get interesting results, but that says absolutely nothing whatsoever about what is ultimately true.

One solution to the problem with the basic hill-climbing algorithm is to start searching at multiple points. There's still no guarantee of finding a global maximum, the absolutely highest point present on the search-space, but one increases ones chances greatly. Even if one doesn't find the highest point, one at least has multiple local maxima to compare. One has a better chance of finding oneself to be in the Himalayas, even if one doesn't find Mt Everest.

Similarly, in philosophy, studying multiple styles of philosophy and assorted thinkers is necessary, not to find the global maximum (the absolute truth), but at least to have different local maxima at hand. Such an endeavor must be done sympathetically, though; if one can't actually see the world through the eyes of different thinkers, then one has not actually searched through the world with them.

One type of search algorithm that enables one to search multiple points is the genetic algorithm. One starts a pool of strings encoded with information. They are tested via a fitness function, and the fittest are allowed to pass on to the next generation. Further, the fittest strings are also mixed up to create new strings with information taken from multiple old strings, thereby enabling change to occur so that new areas on the search space can be explored.

This is how I think that the history of philosophy can work. There is (1) progress, which (2) needs what was done in the past and (3) which doesn't necessarily lead to "the truth" (since we can't necessarily know when we've actually hit a global maximum). We take the "memes" given by other philosophers, ancient and contemporary, and we remix them in our own persons. Some combinations will prove fitter than others, and there can be overall progress. Nevertheless, we never get rid of the past, since it is part of our own intellectual makeup and is a constant source of ideas to stimulate our own searches. Also, the diversity of philosophies is what enables the search to continue and possibly hit better and better local maxima. It isn't about getting it right once and for all, but rather it is about participating in the communal effort for truth as it gradually improves over time.

The Status of Religious Experience

2010-06-08T15:51:00.002-05:00

Does religious experience (whatever you may count that to be) indicate anything about the world, or not? I've been thinking that, before we can answer this question in any way, we need to be clear on what is being asked. There are at least three different questions: (1) does r.e. point to anything real? (2) can r.e. be reduced to anything else? and (3) can r.e. be translated into anything else?

The first question is whether r.e. gives evidence for anything real. Does it indicate something about the world as it is? It seems that the answer to this question is clearly yes. Even if religions are merely about wish-fulfillment and social cohesion, then they are still concerned with features of us as psychological and sociological beings. We actually have to deal with our minds and our societies as structures of the world given to us, and so they are real. If r.e. is anything more, then it is all the more real.

The second question is whether r.e. is reducible to any other field of experience. R.e. may indicate something real, but this reality may be merely psychological features of experience. I would argue that r.e. is not merely reducible to these other areas of experience, although this may not be quite as clear as my answer to the first question. What is experienced in r.e. is experienced in a different way than anything in any other area of experience. The religious believer is not experiencing exactly the same thing as the psychologist or the sociologist. At very least, the religious believer is concerned with the phenomena as presently experienced, while psychology and sociology are concerned with the phenomena as caused and related to factors of mind and society. The perspectives are different.

I don't regard that as necessarily saying too much, though; I'm highly resistant to reducing any area of experience to any other. Even if there is a sense in which chemical laws are reducible to physical laws, the way we experience chemistry is not merely the way in which we experience physics, and so as domains of human experience the one is not reducible to the other. So to say that r.e. is not reducible to psychology or sociology does not mean that r.e. gives evidence for what the religious believer wants, but merely that it has its own legitimate field of empirical inquiry.

So there needs to be a third question: is r.e. translatable into another field of experience? While chemistry may not be reducible to physics as a domain of human experience, there is a sense in which it seems that chemical laws are shorthand for physical laws (something I'll assume for the time being for the sake of illustration). Statements about chemistry can be translated into physics, although not all statements about physics can be translated into chemistry; therefore, we consider physics to to more basic. So the real question about r.e. is whether it is translatable into any other area of experience. Can religious statements be translated into psychological and sociological statements? Can the reverse be done? Does r.e. have something of its own, fundamentally distinct from anything presented anywhere else?

I'm not sure how to answer this last question. I'm also unclear on whether analyzing the experience itself could tell us anything one way or another. On the one hand, it seems perfectly coherent to say that, no matter what the believer experiences, her account of her experience could be completely false and self-delusional as well as brought about by perfectly natural causes. This explanation may or may not be true, but there seems to be nothing impossible about this hypothesis (and in many cases, I admit that it seems quite plausible). On the other hand, I do want to preserve the uniqueness of all experience, and there does seem to be something qualitatively different about r.e., some peculiar stance in relation to the mystery of being that sets it apart. This is in part due to phenomenological concerns (from looking at the experience) and in part due to metaphysical concerns (from reasoning about the world). So for the time being, my hunch is to say that r.e. is untranslatable, though this still does not entail that it means what people think it means. Looking at the experience itself may give grounds for establishing its uniqueness, but cannot in itself tell us how that experience relates to other aspects of our experience.

Teaching Phil 1001

2010-06-03T15:09:00.002-05:00

I'm not sure yet what I'll be teaching next semester, but I need to start planning out some course ideas since I won't be able to do much work on it for a couple months coming up. So, here's some preliminary ideas of have for how to structure a course on "Philosophy of Human Nature," and feedback would be appreciated.

There are two threads running through the course. One is the subject matter: the notion of the self. What is the self? Is there any actually existing self? Am I primarily an individual shaped by my circumstances, or primarily a human being with rationality/freedom/whatever else that might entail? How does my identity relate to society? And stuff like that.

The other thread is the overall structure of the course (the formal cause, as it were). One of the problems in teaching an introduction to philosophy is that the students get overwhelmed by the number of views, and lapse into relativism, skepticism, or dogmatism to cope, or simply declare that it is all opinion. So I want to structure the course around the development of different notions of the self in order to show how we work through philosophical problems and the tools we have at hand for dealing with differences.

The current structure of the course would then be the following: I will look at three different traditions. The first will be the Platonic tradition: Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine (and despite differences, Aristotle is sufficiently responding to Plato to be placed within the Platonic tradition as far as I am concerned). This tradition largely sees the individual as an individual, rational substance, with will brought in with Augustine. The second will be the Chinese tradition: Confucius, Daoism, and Neo-Confucianism. This tradition focuses more on social forces, tradition, and ritual, whether the particular thinkers are for them, against them, or synthesizing these different aspects. The third will be Buddhism: Siddhartha Gautama, either Madhyamika or Yogacara, and Zen. This tradition does away with the idea of a subsistent self. (So there is individual-self, social/natural-self, and non-self). A final section will deal with how we can start to interrelate the different traditions from our own standpoint.

Since I am focusing on a specific topic, I think that the number of thinkers should be manageable. My misgivings are twofold: I am not including any early modern thinkers (largely because, while they are historically important, I just don't find them interesting other than as a bridge between the scholastics and the German idealists) or existentialists (who would normally be considered to be somewhat important on issues of selfhood). Also, it will be heavy on "Eastern" thought, including things that students will not necessarily encounter in their other courses, which might make it a poor introduction to philosophy in general. However, I think that the different thinkers and movements which I am presenting do bring up really interesting and relevant issues and so are good from a topical point of view.

Any thoughts?

Random Points for Discussion on Mongolia and Autism

2010-05-13T12:42:00.004-05:00

A less technical post today, just a few points which I was pondering while watching a documentary last night and which I want to write now so as to postpone grading. The gist of the show was this: a couple had a severely autistic kid who was pretty much non-functional. They discovered that their child tended to calm down around horses, on the one hand, and on the other, the father had been a journalist who had covered many stories on traditional shamanistic healing thought that it was worth a try. So, where do horses and shamans intersect? Mongolia, evidently, so they took a trip out there to see what could be done for their child.

The first point concerning which I would like to have discussion is, to what extent do we need to actually understand the world to get around in it? This family went to Mongolia, saw the shamans, and after a trip to a tribe which herds reindeer, the child came away significantly better. Is it because of the shamans? Or because of the adventure taking him out of his normal circumstances? Both, perhaps? The family had a rather pragmatic attitude about it: it worked, and how it worked didn't really matter. To what extent would such pragmatism justify taking a mythical view of the world (which, for purposes of discussion, I am leaving vague)? And where do we draw the line for evidence for a belief? The child who regularly had temper tantrums and incontinence issues eerily got better after seeing the reindeer tribe shaman, but this is still only a single sample however striking and mixed with all sorts of other factors potentially responsible for his improvement.

Second, some of the experts on autism raised the point that there is a reason for genes related to autism: in limited manifestations at least, it is important that the human race have some autistic individuals. These individuals can do things that other people cannot in mastering immense amounts of details about very specialized topics, and having some people like this is an advantage. Now, if we were to have genetic engineering such that we could choose what our children would be like, we probably would not want them to be autistic. Similarly, it may be that most genetic expressions that we consider to be detrimental exist for some evolutionary reason, and while we don't want any given individual to have them, human society as a whole needs such individuals. So if we could choose what our children would be like, would this entail the eventual collapse of society?

Third, the documentary noted that most shamans had undergone a period of sickness, often with neurological symptoms. They were people on the margins of society, but their societies have places for them. By labeling all sorts of mental disorders and then institutionalizing programs and medicating individuals, do we lose out on being able to utilize human diversity? Even when we champion things like autism awareness, do we really create spaces in our society for such people to not only function in spite of their nature but to flourish because of it?

Isomorphisms and Essences

2010-05-10T16:37:00.003-05:00

I do want to follow up on the previous post; I think that there are some interesting ways in which the notion of chance in the third case can be applied to other situations, such as Advaita Vedanta and Neoplatonic emanation to help make sense of them (I know you're all terribly excited by the prospect). But, I was thinking about Avicenna's notion of essence today, especially as worked out by certain Scholastic thinkers, and I think that I made sense of something and I wanted to jot it down while I remembered it.

For Avicenna, essences exist either in reality or in the mind. I can talk about real, individual horses, or I can talk about the concept "horse" in my mind. Now, these can't be the same. If the essence of horse as it exists in the world were what it really is to be a horse, then horse would have to be an individual; but the idea of horse applies to many individuals. Similar considerations prevent us from taking horse as it exists as an idea in the mind to be what horseness really is. So, there is some way in which we can consider "horse" in itself apart from either real individuals or general concepts. But "horse" only exists in one way or the other. So what could we mean by horse in itself?

I thought, as usual, about mathematical systems. Let us take the natural numbers (N), that is, all whole numbers from 1 on up. Let us also take just the even natural numbers (2N). We'll just be adding numbers; other operations would make this more difficult. We can take any natural number x and transform it into a 2N number y using the formula x*2, and we can take a 2N number y and turn it into a regular natural number x using the formula y/2. It doesn't matter whether we add first and then switch systems, or switch systems then add. For an example, take 1 + 2 = 3:
1 + 2 = 3; 3*2 = 6
1*2 + 2*2 = 2 + 4 = 6
And similarly if we wanted to go in the opposite direction. This is a mathematical isomorphism between N and 2N under the operation of addition.

What the isomorphism means is this: there is the same structure between N and 2N under addition. On the one hand, it doesn't make any sense to say that this structure exists independently of some system; the structure simply is the way the different symbols interrelate and it makes no sense without such symbols. But there is still a sense in saying that there is a structure which is in both N and 2N. This seems to me to be the same logical move as Avicenna is making with essences, and as there is nothing wrong with it in the mathematical case (it at least makes perfect sense to me), the are grounds for thinking that it is intelligible in the metaphysical case as well.

On Chance

2010-05-08T15:26:00.003-05:00

Last night, I was watching a show (Flash Forward) in which the premise is that, one day, everyone blacks out and has a vision of their life at some point in the future. Now, of course, people are going to be acting to either meet that future or avoid it, which brings up all sorts of issues with determinism and the like. The point of interest in the episode I saw last night, though, was how some people had avoided things that were supposed to happen. People were supposed to die at some time, avoided it, but then some of them ended up dying anyhow. One of the characters tried to pass it off as an accident, but another replied that there are no accidents. But what does this phrase mean? It comes up in other contexts, such as with those who believe that God (or the universe, or whatnot) doesn't do coincidence. It seems that there are at least four different ways of looking at the reality of chance, though: (1) chance is a necessary explanatory principle, (2) chance is a property of events, (3) chance is a mode of consideration of events, and (4) chance has no place at all.

In the first case, chance is a necessary explanatory principle. What do I mean by this? I mean that, if we have all of the determinate causes for an event, we still don't have a full explanation. Something utterly random could happen, and this randomness is simply a brute fact of the world which comes into play. There would be something profoundly unintelligible about the event, not just from our standpoint as limited human knowers, but even if we were to have perfect knowledge. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics may flirt with this approach, but that would get us involved in too many issues for the present post.

In the second case, chance is a property of an event. Let us say that I throw a stone, and that you throw a stone, and the two stones hit. I didn't mean for the stones to hit, and you didn't mean for the stones to hit, but they did so anyhow. The event was a chance occurrence. However, unlike in the first case, chance is not a cause of the event; we can completely explain the event by talking about how I threw a stone and you did the same. It is the intersection of these causes which is chance, since there is nothing in the causes themselves to lead to the chance event when regarded apart from each other.

In the third case, chance is merely a mode of consideration, but a mode of consideration made possible by the way the world is. So let us go back to the example of throwing stones again, and this time, let us assume that the world is entirely determined by the laws of mathematical physics (or substitute your own form of determinism if you prefer, and make the throwers zombies lacking free will but with wicked cool cybernetic rock-launchers). So I throw the stone, and you throw yours, and they hit again. There is still an element of chance here, since my throwing and your throwing do not in themselves contain the fact that the stones will hit. But, at the same time, we can find some prior state of affairs such that all of this is determined already, perhaps at the big bang if necessary. There is some point in time such that, if we but work out what it means for everything to exist as it did then, we would see that I must throw the rock, you must throw the rock, and they must intersect. Therefore, the event is not a chance event in itself, but only when we consider the relation of causes abstracted from their context. Chance is therefore an illusion, one which arises because we were not looking at reality according to its own structure, but an illusion which yet has some basis in reality. We have this particular illusion because the world is a certain way, and we bring our own set of expectations which cut against the grain of the world, and chance is where our expectations and reality's structure fail to line up.

In the fourth case, there is no chance whatsoever. This is what seems to be entailed by those who claim that there is no coincidence at all. But the way in which it is intended has to be stronger than the third case: when we think of two events having happened together, there is no chance involved. In the third case, there is still a basis in reality for my thinking that the stones hitting is a chance event when I simply think about my act of throwing the stone and yours. In this fourth case, even that event is not accidental. A character in the TV show who is supposed to die from a car accident, who survives past that day and later gets hit by a car anyhow, does not experience any chance event in any consideration.

I'm not sure that the fourth case is actually intelligible when analyzed. Denying that chance is a real feature of the world doesn't mean that there isn't some conceptual and relative reality to chance when I measure up the world compared to human ends, including my own needs and interests. I can affirm the third case, say that the world is entirely determined in one way or another, and still say that the relation of two events pulled from the larger context (which I am incapable of truly understanding) is a chance relation.

Even if I were to believe that there were a benevolent deity running the universe (and I think that http://thomstark.net/?p=834 has some good points to raise about that, h/t Daniel), then I still end up with case three. Let's say that God has some end in mind, such as self-glorification. God needs to accomplish two other ends to meet this end (pick whatever you want), x and y. Now, x requires some means to accomplish it, and y requires some means to accomplish it (not that God would need to work this out step by step or think through it discursively, but there is some logical order in the structure of the realization of the action). The means for x and the means for y, then, considered in themselves and abstracted from the context of God doing something for his ultimate end, are related by chance. They only lose that aspect of chance when regarded as both leading to that ultimate end. What this means is that the means for x and the means for y may have nothing to do with each other in themselves, and so even in the case of God's providence, there still would be coincidences of the third case sort.

In sum: even if there is no real chance in the universe, coincidences generally have absolutely nothing to do with you.

Critique of Plato's View of Art in the Ion

2010-04-16T13:21:00.003-05:00

Since I presented on Plato's view of art earlier in the semester, I've had some thoughts running around in my head. One such thought concern his critique of the rhapsode Ion, concerning how Ion (and also Homer) have no real knowledge but only present appearances. Now, I think that there is a very real problem here, but there is also an extent to which the criticism is misplaced.

To summarize the Ion: The rhapsode Ion, a professional performer of Homer, tries to engage Socrates in a discussion about Homer. Socrates declines, but tries to understand which sort of skill Ion actually practices. Ion doesn't really understand poetry, since then he should be able to talk about Hesiod as well, but Ion just falls asleep when listening to all poets other than Homer. But Ion doesn't really seem to have any knowledge of what is in Homer's poetry either, since it is unclear that Homer himself understands anything about which he speaks. For example, when Homer talks about divination or charioteering, then we still would need to check out the passages with a diviner or a chariot driver to know whether these passages accurately describe those skills. Homer himself cannot be relied upon directly for knowledge of these activities. Ion makes an amusing attempt to say that he has the skill of being a great general because he knows Homer, but Socrates also shoots this down: you don't hire a performer of poetry to lead your army simply because they recite poetry well. In the end, Socrates says that Ion must either be a lying scoundrel, or inspired by the gods, since Ion himself certainly doesn't know anything. Ion prefers the latter option, since it is more beautiful.

My concern is with the Platonic idea that, beyond the appearances which the poet and the rhapsode present, there is some reality that people who actually engage in skills understand. I have no problem with saying that some people understand things better than others, or even that the poets and playwrights (or in our age, perhaps political speakers, news journalists, and pastors) are often not reliable for helping us understand the world better. What I wish to argue against is the suggestion that the poet has the appearances while the skilled worker has the reality. The skilled worker merely has more appearances with which to work, and I think this has an implication for the knowledge provided by art.

Homer presents the appearance of a chariot race in the Iliad. Socrates holds that Homer may have no actual knowledge of what is involved in chariot racing, and that one must go to a real chariot driver to find out the truth. But insofar as Homer gives a coherent account, he has something to say about chariot driving. He may simply have a very good imagination; think of The Red Badge of Courage, which is supposed to accurately depict a wartime situation even though the author Stephen Crane never participated in war.

It is the coherence of the account which gives it validity, and which perhaps simply is its validity. The actual chariot driver merely has more appearances which must be drawn up into the account. This may require some adjustments; perhaps Homer's imagination doesn't cohere well with the chariot driver's actual experiences. Then again, perhaps Homer's imagination presents something upon which the chariot driver's own experiences founder; perhaps the chariot driver has never made the same sort of risky maneuver recounted in the Iliad. But in either case this is not due to anything beyond the appearances, but merely due to the unity and coherence amongst the appearances themselves.

Therefore, insofar as there is any coherence and unity in art, it gets at something in the world. It may not get at it in the best possible way (although again, in might), but there is not a strict dichotomy between the artist and the person who actually understands; there is merely the differing degrees of coherence and the number of appearances which need to be made coherent.

Thoughts on Interpretation of Art

2010-04-14T16:11:00.003-05:00

I've been shadow teaching a philosophy of art class this semester, and today the issue of the interpretation of art came up. Now, it seems that this often in practice gets reduced to the two following options: either the artist's intent determines the meaning of the artwork, or because we can't get into the artist's mind, it's all about the audience. Granted, this is an oversimplification, but what about the artwork itself? Why do we need to go beyond it to either the artist or the audience? Alternatively, what sense could it make to say that interpretation is left largely to either the artist or audience?

Any artwork is already delimited, structured in some way. Even if I only mark a black line on a piece of paper, I still have structured that line and that paper in a given way. Even if I have left the paper blank, the paper is then blank rather than filled. So every artwork, in virtue of being an artwork, is already structured, some (like a Mozart symphony) more so than others (like John Cage's 4'33").

Any artwork is also by its very nature public. The marks, the texture, the rhythm of an artwork is something that's been put out there in some shared space using, to at least some extent, some shared symbolism or set of markings. If I write a poem, I am using language to write it. This language is not my own, but part of a larger context. The act of putting down words creates something that goes outside of myself; it means something regardless of my intention. I can write a poem and discover a meaning which I did not intend, and this seems to be a legitimate meaning of the poem. This does not mean that there is a completely determinate reading of the poem, or that there even in principle exists a definitive interpretation (there can be irreducible ambiguity and underdetermination), but merely that there is this particular form put down, one which is shared in the community, rather than some other form.

Any interpretation of an artwork must be of the artwork. If I am sitting down and watching The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I turn to a friend to talk about it, and she responds with an analysis of Jedis and the Force, then she is not giving me a bad interpretation of a Woody Allen film; she is giving me an interpretation of a different film altogether. If any artwork has a certain structure, then an interpretation must be of that structure, whether it be a line or a portrait or a blank canvas, a chant or a concerto or a folk song, etc., and so on down to the details of the individual artwork.

The biggest problem is finding the proper context of the artwork. Language is public, so if I write a poem, I have written down something with a meaning beyond what I or the audience want. But what happens when the language changes? This becomes a difficult issue, because I can no longer simply say that the author wanted the artwork to be a certain way and so that is how we should take it. The artwork is the starting point of analysis, and it is here and now this public, structured object.

For example, take the line from The Tempest: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in 't!" What is the meaning of "brave"? If I were to take it in a modern context, it would mean something like "courageous", but this word meant "good, splendid" in Shakespeare's time (cf. the Italian "bravo"). One option would be to use the context that gives the artwork the most force (admittedly a notion that needs much more development): I use the standard of Elizabethan English in interpreting Shakespeare because his plays make more sense that way. I know what a splendid world would be, and this suits Miranda's amazement in the scene in which she speaks this sentence, but I have no idea what a courageous world is and the sense I can make of the phrase doesn't fit the play.

A Bach fugue, as a Baroque piece of music, would have used terraced dynamics in its time period; that is, the individual instruments don't get louder or softer, but instrumentation is added and reduced to change the volume. But unlike the Shakespeare example, it seems possible that using later notions of dynamics in which individual instruments change volume may constitute a more powerful (more aesthetic? more coherent? I'm still searching for the right word) rendition of the score. It may not, but the possibility is open, in which case it would seem at least that there is some aspect, some potentiality of the score which Bach himself might not have noticed. The reason why this seems more likely in music than in literature may be that language is a highly complex phenomenon and changing the rules (say, by going from Elizabethan to Modern American English) is most likely going to reduce the coherence of a given piece.

The nature of interpretation will change from artwork to artwork as well. It does not need to be conceptual and linguistic. The interpretation of Stravinsky doesn't have to be a dissertation; it can simply be a certain playing of the score. Any interpretation of a painting will be, at some level, simply an appreciation of the specific way in which the brush strokes have fallen. Interpreting the artwork on these non-cognitive levels doesn't mean that there can't also be cognitive interpretations as well. In fact, on my current proposal, any way in which one interprets the given artwork (which, remember, necessarily entails that one pay attention the publicly given structure which is the artwork) is a legitimate interpretation of that artwork.

Negative Epistemology

2010-02-04T22:18:00.004-06:00

Is epistemology about building up our knowledge? I would like to put forward an alternative: the goal of understanding is to reduce our knowledge; or rather, to reduce our habitual sedimentations and programmed responses to the world. It is not something we hold on to, but a clearing away and a freeing up.

For example, I can come to the world conditioned by a good number of anti-Islamic attitudes, conditioned by society. I can then approach scholarly research which points out a number of ways in which I am just wrong about the Islamicate world. What have I learned? Well, there have been facts involved, and it can be helpful to keep them on hand as tools for various purposes, not least of which is helping other people come to the same point. But what I have really gained is a removal of old habits and a new openness to people and society. Even if I forget everything I read, I keep this new freedom unless old habits find ways of re-asserting themselves.

So when I approach philosophy from an historical angle, I should sometimes remember the arguments; they are essential for publishing and teaching, and therefore securing a job. But the mere memory of ideas is not necessarily what I am after. Of what use is mere accumulation of knowledge, other than as a mere pastime? I want to free my thinking, to see how I have become blind to my own presuppositions, and to how I already hedge in the possibilities of the world.

Now, one might say that there certainly seem to be times at which we want to have knowledge, and we mean by that that we are actually building up facts about the world. Granted. To this end, I distinguish two types of knowledge. One the knowledge of means to a given end, and in this case we want positive knowledge of how to go about achieving our end. But how do we pick an end in the first place? How do we come at the world in general, aside for using it for our own purposes? It is in situations like these where I would suggest that a negative epistemology might be in order, at least as an interesting thought experiment.

Fractal Knowledge

2010-02-04T22:11:00.005-06:00

What would a perfectly ordered world look like? I think that there is a tendency to think that it would be decomposable into nice, neat conceptual parts, amenable to our thought. But perhaps the opposite is true: perhaps the world which is rationally broken up for us is really arbitrary, while one which is perfectly ordered down to the very depths would forever defy our reasoning.

I bring up the analogy of a fractal. See here for an example. A property of the fractal is that it is infinitely self-similar (more precisely, quasi-self-similar): no matter how far you zoom in, no matter where along the boundary you look, you will find something which is in its own way similar to the whole. So the fractal is my paradigm of perfect order, down to an infinite precision and covering the entire figure.

Imagine living on the fractal. You are trying to make sense of the twists and turns which you encounter. You get a sense of order; it is indeed ordered. Parts do look like each other. But every time you think you have it down, you go a little bit further along the boundary, and something throws you off. You didn't get it quite right, so you have to go through your concepts and reanalyze the world. Since every part in its own way contains the whole (that is, it is in a way self-similar to the whole), you do gain some understanding of the entire fractal from each piece. But you also can't really get any part of the fractal unless you were to grasp the entire thing all at once.

So an infinite order would entire that we could understand something, and understand everything in understanding something, but no understanding would be unrevisable. No set of concepts, no affirmative propositions could be held for any length of investigation.

By contrast, what would a world be like which we could break down into nice, neat concepts? At first, such a world appears ordered. But then we turn to the concepts themselves. Why is green what it is? Just because. Why a straight line? Just because. This "just because" is the only answer givable to any such question, no matter what the basic concept or simple nature at hand is. In the end, we have to posit an Intelligent Kludger to put the mess of arbitrariness together, because there's nothing in the parts themselves to suggest order; only in the arrangements.

The Purpose of Inconsistency

2010-02-04T22:06:00.003-06:00

Why would one would consider contradictory speech to be philosophically appropriate? Given that contradictions can be meaningful, why would one use them? First, it may be that one believes that all systems are going to be inconsistent at some point anyhow. If this is true, then there is relatively little value in ironing out all of the wrinkles of discourse instead of simply investigating what one can. Also, if I have doubts about any given chain of reasoning or system, I have much less reason to follow it through consistently. It may be far better to pursue many lines of reasoning, even if they are mutually inconsistent, since then I may hit the truth on a couple points at least.

Second, one may be strongly convinced by both the arguments for x and the arguments for not-x. The contradiction does not mean that there isn't some y which is coherent with x but which is semantically and practically similar to not-x. This is the problem with some ad hominem attacks: showing that a given person is inconsistent shows nothing about whether a better version of their views could succeed, entailing that they really were close to being right in the first place. In the meantime, holding on to the contradiction may be the most intellectually responsible choice, while pursuing a research program of eventually resolving the contradiction while keeping the insights.

Third, it may be that certain mystical views can only be couched in contradictory terms. If there is some reality utterly responsible for absolutely anything, then language which can only look at certain things at any given time will encounter difficulties. Contradiction shows language's (and thought's) breaking points, and it is the fact of breaking which points to what is to be communicated.

Fourth, one may be holding to a dialectical tension. This I think is closest to what I am talking about with skepticism. On the one hand, I think that everything is doubtable (and once this is realized, also already doubted, for those familiar with what I've said before on this blog). But I also think that we should continue investigating the truth. Should I throw one side or the other away because I can't unite them at one time? No; I continue in a constant back-and-forth, which seems to accomplish a number of aims (including understanding) better than any single idea or system.

But if nothing else, saying that someone is being contradictory is a paltry criticism. It contributes nothing to discussion; it merely wins points in debate. It is therefore sophistry and not philosophy, unless it is accompanied by substantial interaction. Show how some premise is wrong, show how my understanding is off, show some alternative, but show something of value.

Common Sense and Explainability

2010-02-02T08:36:00.004-06:00

We should be skeptical of a belief given by common presuppositions in the case that they can be explained by some reason other than their veracity. If we can explain how a habit forms (say, the belief in external objects, that historical events are actual, or within a given religious context that certain dispositions are sinful and that we have an innate conscience) and give an adequate account of how it comes to be, why do we need to assume that it also gives us a direct window on reality? Belief in external objects comes about in early stages of development as we learn to deal with the bloomin' buzz and confusion around us, to organize it so that we can make sense of it. It it a very practical habit to believe that our blankie is still existent when it is put behind the pillow, even though we cannot see it.

Reality is such that the belief is practical. But this does not mean that reality is as the belief holds. I see a green leaf; the leaf itself is not green (at least while I'm taking off my idealist hat for a moment and speaking from the perspective of the realist), but is a physical object that reflects the light of a given wavelength such that it hits my eye, where due to a complex interaction of rods and cones and processing in the LGN followed by assimilation in the visual cortex I experience the qualitative experience of green on a leaf shape. The belief that the leaf is green is not caused by the leaf's actually being green, though the reality is such to produce that belief, produce it regularly, and make it a helpful belief for navigating the world. Similarly, belief in external objects can be caused by some feature of the world that is not the actual existence of external objects.

But if this is the case, why believe that there are actually external objects? I have explained why there is a wide-spread habit pertaining to them (and there is the experimental data to further substantiate my claims), and there does not appear to me at this point to be anything left unexplained. So why do we assume some mystical sense which gives us real knowledge of the way things are? There is no facet of our experience otherwise unexplained which needs such a faculty. Therefore, positing such a faculty is arbitrary, merely a means of allowing us to hold to the same things we have always held instead of actually trying to think through them and explain them. There is as little reason to assume that faculties of this sort exist, as that a misargued mathematical theorem gives us probable mathematical knowledge. But if such a belief only arises from practical engagement in the world, then it is hard to see without further argument how it could even possibly have metaphysical value unless as merely a different dimension of the same world.

There is a positive side to this, though. While it seems utterly arbitrary to multiply entities beyond what is needed for explanation (not that the simplest theory must be true, but that whatever is posited must play some explanatory role not otherwise accounted for in order to have any meaning), if we avoid doing such, then typical skeptical arguments melt away. Take Hume, for instance: Hume doubts causation, as to whether it is anything more than constant conjunction, but then returns to billiards where natural impulses make him believe in causation again. On my view (which likely is a repetition of the work of others who have explored this much more deeply), Hume isn't merely caused by natural impulses to believe in causation and so engage in self-deception. The language of causation is rooted in empirical life as a way of organizing it. Talk of one billiard ball causing another to move is perfectly legitimate; when we are talking about causation in billiards, we are not referring to features such as necessity, or universality, or quantum mechanics. We are explaining that aspect of our experience which involves the balls hitting each other regularly, enabling us to play the game, without thought of what might be causing this; there is continuity in practical discussions of causation even as philosophy and science radically change our understanding of it. To self-reflectively talk about causation is to enter into another context, and in this context causation as a general principle may be doubted, and may even be meaningless, but this self-reflection is not a feature of most everyday accounts of causation. This philosophical context is not illegitimate, but its concerns are not the concerns of the billiard player, and its accounts of causation get at something else. Now, for the philosophical billiard player, these two accounts may be entangled, or one may take priority; it depends on the specific context and the specific person, but there is nothing that says that different language games are hermetically sealed from each other.

Let us take Descartes as well. Descartes postulates an evil genius which could be messing with his mind. On my view, this is irrelevant. Concepts are taken from experience and explain experience. If that experience is of an evil genius messing with us, whether we know it or not, then these concepts explain that experience of human-nature-being-messed-with. They are concepts forged from inconsistent memories or other tricks which are thrown our way, but this does not make them false; they merely describe a rockier terrain than one in which we would have perfect memories and veridical habits. Similarly, if we were in the Matrix, our concepts would describe the world of the Matrix, again whether we would realize we were in it or not. It would be the world of our experience, and thus what concepts would arise from and refer to.

I do not mean by our "experience" merely the world of sense-data, but absolutely anything experienced. Consciousness, imagination, and our conceptual life seem to be legitimate realms of experience as well. If there is some Agent Intellect beaming intelligibles into our minds, then this is a part of our experience. The worlds of the poet are just as much experienced, even in the wildest cases. Skepticism isn't about strictly rationing our intellectual diet; it is about clearing away sedimentations and ossifications which obstruct living.

Against Qualms Concerning Inconsistency

2010-01-25T13:17:00.003-06:00

Continuing from the last post, I think that I've pinpointed a little bit more clearly what is going on when I reject claims of the self-defeating nature of certain views. Now, when one claims that someone is being inconsistent, they can refer to the language as being inconsistent, the concepts as being inconsistent, or a claim that the world is inconsistent. Further, the assumption seems to be that these three claims are more or less equivalent. But I disagree, and the inconsistencies I raise do not seem to be harmful ones.

Inconsistency in language, if by itself, doesn't seem pernicious. Inconsistent statements have some sort of meaning, as evidenced by the fact that people sometimes find them to be the most useful way of conveying a message. We can argue about their efficacy, but that they are meaningful is clear (they are meaningful to someone, at least; chances are, if you don't get them, it's your problem and not the other person's). And it would seem that concepts would work the same way, when considered independently of language.

The problem comes in when inconsistency in language or concepts would imply such an inconsistency in the world, which is nonsense. But why assume that an inconsistency in language implies that one claims a similar inconsistency in the world? There is an assumption of an isomorphism between world, language, and concepts. All three can be broken up into pieces which interrelate, whatever these pieces may be (perhaps form, matter, and esse, for example, where each of these can stand for a word, a concept, and an external reality). The interrelations in the world mirror those in language and concepts, and language and concepts can be made more or less precise enough to accurately mirror the world.

If there is such an isomorphism, then contradictions in language and concepts do seem to be problematic. But why assume the isomorphism in the first place? This is an assumption, and there seems to be no reason why it shouldn't be examined as well, especially when it is advanced as a weapon in some apologist's arsenal. Why can't we say that the world is a seamless whole, which nevertheless lends itself to being talked about and thought about in some way? Language and concepts are discursive, and reality is not (in this thought experiment), but that doesn't mean that language and concepts are worthless or meaningless. The point of them is a certain sort of interaction with reality, of which ultimately they are a part as well (and even here, I must use "part" language, which isn't accurate, but it may be a useful approximation for those with eyes to see). Contradictions in language then do not entail contradictions in reality. Assuming that contradictions in language do not entail anything whatsoever (and I see no reason to assume without argument that language works like a formal logical system), then why not allow contradictions?

Someone might say at this point, that it is only confused language which breaks the law of contradiction; phrases in such language might mean something, but the whole does not. Logic is the judge of language, whether language follows its laws or not. But why should we assume that? Logic is basically set theory, and works for those relationships capable of being modeled on sets. It is not clear to me that all philosophical relationships must be so clear and set-like; why assume that anything philosophical must therefore be able to be made clear, precise, and analytical?

And the next argument: "but the negation of the law of contradiction entails the law of contradiction; therefore it must be true", is pure sophistry. Not only does it not seem to be "true" anymore once one has negated it, but also, I am saying that language goes beyond precise boundaries. To revert to an argument that "the law of contradiction is either true or false" is already to miss the linguistic and ontological move I am making. In another way, the argument for the law of non-contradiction it is to assume the law of the excluded middle, as well as predicates for which both apply. I deny the law of the excluded middle too, or at least its applicability to any and all meaningful phrases.

Finally: "But with what you are saying, you can say anything and get away with it. This is just a ploy to avoid any criticism." No, it is a recognition that simply pointing out formal flaws has never been good philosophy. Look at the substance; to the reality itself! Logic is the handmaiden of true thinking, and not vice versa. We are engaged in far too difficult a program here to simply sort out arguments and thought based on cosmetic issues.

Is Skepticism Self-Defeating?

2010-01-24T08:07:00.007-06:00

I was writing this as a comment on an earlier post, but I keep thinking of more stuff to say, so I think that I'll just make another post of it. The charge is this: skepticism is self-defeating. It asserts something, namely that nothing is to be asserted. I'm not a big fan of these types of "self-defeating" arguments, and I figured that I should lay out my reasoning. Of course, if anyone understands the reasoning, one will realize that all that I am about to say should not be held to, that one should look beyond the reasonings, but a first step must be taken.

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Language is practical. One uses it; it's not setting forward fixed propositional truth. This at least is the standpoint I want to explore here for the moment. It's hardly a critique of a statement to say that it falls apart in saying that language falls apart. Anyone who took the statement to be a set of propositions which I was strictly asserting would have gotten it wrong. Look at the moon, not the finger; or if you prefer, use the ladder then kick it away.

One can look at the meaning of such an argument in two ways. First, one can take the straightforward meaning. One will have missed the point then, since one will think it perfectly consistent, but it is helpful in leading one to a given state. The practical function of leading someone to a non-discursive state is the point, since I can't very well put that state down on paper or computer screen itself.

Alternatively, one can realize the inconsistencies, but then the meaning is in the performance. Treat it as a poem, if you prefer; there seems to be nothing wrong with putting down in performance and poetry what cannot be said in prose.

The criticism (and the related claim that from a contradiction everything follows) only operates on one level of language. But this is a fairly high level, and there is something going on underneath. Language affects us and moves us even before we have it completely rationally synthesized. Take the poem "Jabberwocky", for example. If I have to look at it in terms of referents and such, it is pure nonsense. The terms just have no meaning. But yet, one does have a vague sense of what goes on in the poem, regardless. Likewise, a contradictory statement might be nonsense when analytically interpreted, but that's not the only level on which that statement was functioning.

Why should we say that such statements have meaning? Because some people say they do. If Bob sees only that x is meaningful, but cannot see any meaning in not-x, while Alice claims to grasp the meaning of not-x, it would seem that Alice has the advantage. Bob's lack of imagination or overly-focused view of the world could just as much explain why he cannot get what not-x is getting at as not-x being meaningless. Not being able to conceive something (especially when someone else can conceive of it) doesn't amount to much in argument.

If anyone has been following this post, they will realize that what I am saying is primarily to be used, not judged right or wrong (although one can judge the post efficacious or not, and can judge whether the destination is worth arriving at). Of course it's all nonsense if one looks at it purely analytically; so find other ways of looking at it.

But let's take the worst-case scenario: the above just doesn't work (and I stress its working and not its veracity) and it all is just inconsistent without any directly redeeming value. Well, what is one to do? Pick up just another other system that's lying around to get out of the problem? But this seems to be at least as bad; leaps of faith are such because they are blind leaps, and blind leaps land you in chasms more often than not. If I can't escape from being embedded in some conceptual system, being human and thrown into the world as it is, this doesn't mean that I must therefore give my allegiance to some conceptual system. I can simultaneously recognize that no conceptual system is grounded, perhaps even that no conceptual system is completely coherent, while also recognizing that I must be implicated in one and can never simply jump out and either renounce all views or take a God's eye view. Will this pull me in two directions, and so be "inconsistent"? Sure, but it seems that a continuing movement between imperfect systems is better than giving up and artificially ironing out a problem of human living and dedicating myself to one of them.

The Point of Philosophy?

2010-01-23T17:21:00.007-06:00

What is the point of doing philosophy? I've been reading Descartes' Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and he seems to suggest that one sits down and figures out the basics of how we go about thinking. Once this is done, and it should be more or less simple (easy and simple matters are what knowledge consists of, not difficult, obscure, and uncertain ones), one goes off and starts the real learning.

On the one hand, it does seem that there is something unfruitful about spending ones time only doing philosophy. One keeps thinking about thinking, about the truth, about the good, etc., without really engaging it in any particular fashion. Sure, the philosophizing is important, so that we don't go gallivanting off in any ol' direction. And we need to think about the core issues of the different fields to keep them on track and from becoming ossified. But sometimes, I at least tire of merely talking about talking. I want some more tangible field of study. I am doing that to an extent with History (at least history of thought), and I am thinking more and more about doing further work in Islamic Studies. Sometimes, when I am really tired of the field and the books, I'll start thinking about doing something drastic like getting a Psychology degree and doing clinical work (I have enough mental problems that I'm already engaged first-hand in the field, right?). But the point is, it seems good for one to have some more empirical field in which the real work gets done, the work that actually embeds one in the world and gives one some meaning (whether that's a career change, a different focus in one's academic path, or merely extracurricular activities). Do philosophy, then contribute to medicine, or law, or social work, or (gasp!) business. If nothing else, sitting around talking Marxism isn't going to change the world's business practices; more philosophers becoming business people has no worse a shot of working.

On the other hand, the picture is more complicated than Descartes thought. First, the more we've been thinking about basic issues of knowledge and cognition, the murkier they appear. It no longer is plausible that we can simply sit down and work out the issues at one point and be reasonably right. So we need to continue to rethink the issues, and this seems to require at least some people who are really sitting down and devoting themselves to the task full time. There don't seem to be any clearly intuited simples for us anymore, and the Cartesian method requires these simple and perspicacious, independent absolutes which one takes apart and puts together like legos, such that one can track one's process of knowing.

Second, there is far greater specialization going on now than in Descartes' time. Even within a field as neatly defined as mathematics, there just aren't any mathematicians who can claim expertise in every subfield of math. A fortiori, there isn't too much place for someone wishing to learn deeply across discipline. Descartes thought that one can learn about all different fields by oneself. Due to this, he argues that theoretical sciences are fundamentally unlike practical arts: in art, one must focus on a specialty to be any good, but in science, one thinks better and more clearly the more one learns across sciences, since the subject matters come together. All of them rely on the same basic processes of thinking. And he seems right; being able to think across disciplines does seem to be helpful for understanding the individual ones. But there's too much to learn in any given discipline now to be competent in any given one while chasing others. And one can throw off the previous scholastic shackles only if one (a) is independently wealthy and not needing to find an employer or tenure, and (b) is willing to give up all of the richness of the past as well as its errors.

So, to pursue a career purely in philosophy feels sterile and confining, cutting one off from much purpose and meaning in life. But one can't solve the issues in philosophy once and for all to go work in the other disciplines, and the issues are hardly trivial. There are important ethical and political reasons for why we keep going back to them, to rethink them. There are also concerns intrinsic to the other disciplines: physics needs to have a good account of how to get good physics in order to actually get good physics consistently. So how does one balance these concerns, given that one has to get a job somewhere to give one the time to work on the issues?

Suarez, Damascius, and Ineffability

2010-01-22T11:13:00.004-06:00

Time for philosopher mash-up. I've been thinking about the problem of ineffability: how does it make sense to say that you can't say something about something? After all, you seem to have just said something about it: that you can't say anything. I will first look at 16th-17th century scholastic Suarez, who is dealing with (what seems to me to be) a similar problem with potential essences which are "omnino nihil", nothing whatsoever. Next, I will look at Damascius, the 5th-6th century Neoplatonist, who makes use of Skeptical thought to show how statements concerning the One's ineffability and transcendence are statements about language, not about the One.

For Suarez, we can talk about the essences, the being, of things around us. There are trees and cats and humans. Each individual being has an essence, and is actual: this tree is right here and now existing, and this existence is merely the actuality of its essence. It is not as though there is some being to the tree which then needs to be brought into existence; any being to the tree whatsoever is its existence. Existence is merely actuality, and not an addition to an essence.

We can also talk about a potential essence of trees, not yet made actual. But a problem arises: if there is any reality to the essence at all, it is actual. But if it is actual, it is not merely potential; potentiality by definition means that something is not actual. So a potential essence is nothing in any way. But how then do we talk about it?

Suarez says that we talk about it because of "extrinsic denomination", that is, we reference it purely through other things. A couple examples are in order. When I predicate a universal of things, I am using this same process of extrinsic denomination. I can talk about this human and that human, and I mean the same thing in both cases, and so "human" must have some generality about it. But general things don't really exist; only individual things do. There is Alice and Bob, but I don't encounter "humanness" except as the individuals. Instead, I meet Alice, and she causes a concept in my head. I can work with this concept and pick out some formal feature which have some unity to them. I'll call this her humanity. Next, I meet Bob, and do the same thing. Lo and behold, when I compare these formal features, I realize that the two individuals have caused the same concept in my mind, and so I can predicate it of both of them. So I call them both "human", where "human" is some universal concept. Technically speaking, though, "human" is a universal in my mind while they are individuals in reality, so I only call them this universal because of the similar effect the individual humans caused in me. So I call them "human" by extrinsic denomination: not something which they are simply in themselves in reality, but by something else which has some foundation in them.

Similarly with potential essences, we talk about them by extrinsic denomination by not actually talking about them, but talking about God's power to produce them. In effect (and I may be going beyond Suarez here, but this is how I make sense of what he is saying), I pick something, I have something in mind in my discourse, and I ask, "Is this potential?" But I'm not really talking about the essence of the thing itself: what I am asking about is God's power and what it can do. I think that the case can be generalized to other fields as well; Suarez thought that species are eternal, so God's power is the only thing responsible for them, but we think of species in an historical light. So it doesn't seem to me to be contrary to Suarez' project to say that we speak of, say, the essence of dinosaurs not insofar as they have being (there are no actual dinosaurs), but by extrinsic denomination from what is actual (fossils, shared biological laws with critters today, etc.). Without these sources of actuality, there would be nothing to say about dinosaurs. So talking about potential (or non-existent) essences is really a shorthand way of talking about actual essences.

What I want to take from that is this: there can be a grammatical referent without an ontological one. I talk of potential essences, but the potential essence is nothing at all. But it still may make the most sense the frame the discussion in terms of potential essences, as the lack of ontological significance does not mean that I must rephrase all of my sentences accordingly. There is a proper mechanism by which I can attribute "potential essence" to things which actually are, so my assertion of truths about a potential essence don't entail its existence in any way.

Next, Damascius. I know less about him (though I probably need to go back and brush up on the details of Suarez' account too), but there is one idea of his which I found quite interesting. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are various realms of reality (or perhaps ways of looking at the world; I can never quite tell). There is material reality, which is too multiple to be intelligible. There is ensouled reality, which is outside of space and which provides some unity and movement, as well as discursive thought. There is noetic reality, which is also outside of time and which is quite unified, with everything reflected in everything else. But even that has some division, something which had to come together, and so there must be something else grounding it, something which has absolutely no division to be grounded, and thus is beyond thought.

This is the One, so called not because "One" applies to it so much as it is the cause of unity for everything else. But this creates a problem: if the One is so removed from division, how is it the cause of everything else? It would seem to get mixed up in multiplicity if it were tarnished by the rest of the world. This was one of the most significant problems in Neoplatonism. Damascius takes an extreme view and distances the One from everything else, such that the One isn't even really the cause of everything else.

I'll leave aside the issues of what exactly the One "is" for Damascius. What is important is that, without any causal relation to the world, we seem to have no way of talking about the One. So all we can say is that we can't talk about the One. But even that is too much. So Damascius interprets this as a claim about language itself. Statements about the One's ineffability are statements about the paucity of language. Language wants to reach beyond itself, but cannot. This is a "peritrope" of language, in Skeptical terminology and Damascius' account: language turns around and refutes itself, and this internal problem within language is what we are referring to.

Putting this all together: By Suarez, we can talk about things without necessarily commenting on their ontological status through extrinsic denomination. By Damascius, statements about the ineffability of the One are statements about the peritrope of language. So perhaps we can say that, in the statement such as "the One/God/Reality/Absolute is ineffable" is an extrinsic denomination taken from the problematic character of language itself.

Skepticism and the Will

2010-01-18T11:39:00.004-06:00

I propose that there are two orders of our being which run contrary to each other. The first is the order of knowledge, in which the negative statement has priority and the affirmative must be argued for. Thus, skepticism doesn't need an argument; all other views do. However, this is actually freeing, since in the second order of being, that of willing, the affirmative has priority and prohibitions must be argued for. Relative traditions give determination to the will instead of absolute reason.

Why does skepticism hold sway in matters of reason? It is because if there is no connection between pieces of discourse, there is no connection. If we think that there is a connection and there is not, we are mistaken; we are not half right, or even necessarily on the right track. If I have a proof for a mathematical theorem, and the proof has a single detail wrong, I have proven absolutely nothing; I haven't given a proof that the theorem is 99% likely. If a single case falsifies a scientific theory, the theory is wrong.

Now, I might be able to pick up the pieces of the old proof or the old theoryand get something out of them, but this points to something else that they were telling us all along. The broken scientific theory still told us about the data we were experiencing, even if not about the world in general. Or perhaps we wish to talk about the historically formed concept given by science which has structured our world, and this was actually part of our reality apart from any inferences. But in these cases, I have presented the immediate, non-inferred connection between what I was doing in science and what I was experiencing in the world, and so I have given a proper connection for a qualified affirmative proposition.

Common sense seems to me to be the worst possible means of ascertaining the truth about the world. The reason is this: common sense is simply the habit of a group of people. Habits don't tell us that they represent reality accurately, merely that they are some way of working within reality. The habit of common sense tells us on a pragmatic level that what the community does works, and so the structure of reality must be such that what the community does works. However, where is the connection between the habitual belief that individual and separable things in the external world exist, which is a pragmatic tool for navigating the world, and the metaphysical fact that such individual and separable things exist externally? How does the first, the way we get understanding, connect at all to the common sense belief to provide any grounds? How does common sense provide any ground whatsoever for the belief that we are not in the Matrix or deluded by an evil genius? Of course if we were deluded, we would not instantly recognize that we were deluded, so what does our lack of recognition actually tell us about the world?

Without some sort of connection, without showing some way in which we legitimately get information for any specific idea, and without introducing some "just so" story to beg the question, what is left? Without some connection, there is no reason inclining us one way or the other. Without reason, all views are epistemologically equivalent; common sense belief in metaphysically individual entities, without some proper grounding beyond "we just intuit them", is equivalent to talk of aliens on the Hale-Bopp comet coming to take us away.

So if some connection must be established to give any sort of rational justification to an idea, and any flaws in this connection make it a different sort of connection, the skeptic is automatically justified in pursuing her project. The connection needs to be made, and the skeptic merely points out that it has not been made and so may very well be worthless. It may very well not be, also; we have no way of telling yet.

But what is the positive side of this? The positive side is that the Good is self-diffusive, that goodness is the one thing that needs no reason. There doesn't need to be a reason to follow our desires or what we find good (desirable, aesthetic, holy) in our culture, but rather the reason must be supplied as to what not to do. Reason can prohibit, but the prohibition must be established.

For example, it is not the homosexuals that should have to argue for their unions, as this needs no argument or rational support, but rather those opposed. And if we are confronted by the Matrix scenario, the correct response is not the deny the premise (how would we even possibly do that?) but rather to say, "So what? My acting is just as real in a simulation as in a so-called 'real world'". And while I may have no theoretical justification for believing in the existence of individual middle-sized objects such as chairs and trees, there is nothing stopping me from living as if there were.

But this leads to the problem that our willing would seem undetermined. This would seem to be the argument of some against skepticism: the skeptic can't live daily life, because she needs to determine her actions in some way and can never really give reasons for doing so. Therefore, no one really is a skeptic on an existential level. But the skeptic doesn't need to give rational arguments for everything she does; her actions can be non-rational as long as there is some other method of determining them.

This would seem to be where culture and tradition comes in. Let me compare the situation to that of languages, which are one of the forms of culture: I can speak in English, formulate my thoughts and poetry in it, look to the great masters of the language such as Shakespeare and Chaucer, and enjoy the heritage and what I can do with it. English determines my speech in a way that lets me actually talk. But there is nothing rationally determinate about English (indeed, there isn't much rational about the language at all!). And there is nothing saying that English is overall a superior language to, say, Arabic. I have something given to me to determine my will in matters of communication, even though I have no arguments for how to speak in general.

I can criticize my culture, just as I can point out some particularly annoying inconsistencies in typical English which spoil its communicative abilities. The point is not that nothing is prohibited; it is that there must be a sound argument for the prohibition before anything is legitimately prohibited.

Now, the problem is that traditions don't see themselves as quite so relative as languages. They make demands and see themselves as being ultimate. And taking any tradition to determine one's acting will most likely involve illegitimate prohibitions as well. But these prohibitions can be seen to have some purpose, just as the artist must determine her work in some fashion to get anything of beauty, even if other determinations (and even opposite ones) were equally possible. Concerning the ultimacy which traditions claim, though, I really don't have much sympathy. If it can't be demonstrated, then there is no reason to believe it, other some some fideism on par with chasing after leprechauns.

Cosmological Argument from Completeness

2010-01-02T19:00:00.006-06:00

According to one of the forms of the cosmological argument (given by Aquinas and Avicenna), God exists because there must be some necessary existent. Everything we encounter is contingent, merely possible when considered in and of itself and only necessitated through another. But if it is necessitated through another, then there must be something necessary in itself which grounds everything else. It seems to me that this argument fails: first, because it does not have any force when considered in a concrete case, and second, because the nature of any given existent in question is unclear. I think that a different version of argument can be made out of the latter point, however.

So Jill is a human being, and as such is contingent. She did not have to exist; something else made her exist. This something else in the present case would be her parents. Now, the argument could be taken in two different directions. One would argue that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes in time. So her parents had parents, and her grandparents had parents, and so on, but this had to begin at some point. It is not exactly clear, though, why there absolutely cannot be an infinite regress here, and even many of the defenders of the cosmological argument have had no problem with such an infinite regress in time: Aquinas and Scotus thought such a regress possible though not actually true, and Avicenna thought it actually true. If nothing else, one is faced with the problem of a first moment: any given moment of time has the structure that it has something preceding it, and something following it. But a first moment would have nothing before it. It seems that such a concept of a first moment then would be at least as difficult to understand as an infinite regress of times.

What infinite regress does the argument disallow, then? An infinite regress of necessitation, for Avicenna, and similarly (perhaps identically), an infinite regress of actualization for Aquinas. That is to say, there are multiple causes working at the same time and not merely stretched out with the cause one moment and the effect in the next. This sort of causation would be logical or metaphysical. But what is this in our concrete example? Why say that there is anything to Jill's existence beyond what her parents gave to her? Once we have explained the physical act of generation, we have everything we need. Or perhaps we could allow in other causes at the same level, but nothing on a fundamentally different level. Any talk of possibility and contingency beyond this is over-abstraction which does not explain actual, concrete existents and so does not command any assent as to a first, necessary Existent whose being is simply is existence.

Second, the argument seems to assume that Jill is an existent. But this would seem to assume that she is an individual, such that we can put her together with other individuals and count each up. Jill and Susan together in a room would then make two individuals. But for this to be the case, there must be a clear-cut logical (not merely practical!) distinction for each individual. There must be an exact criterion of life and death, and of spatio-temporal location. But it would seem that one could pull a sorites paradox for any suggested definition. I can't see any reason for saying that their individualities are anything beyond practical constructions on our part for dealing with a confusing world. Since we start off in life making practical distinctions and only afterward make these practical distinctions precise, the onus is on my opponent to argue for why there are metaphysically as opposed to practically distinct individuals: how do we cross the gap from what is merely practical? But without metaphysical individuals, what is there around to be a merely possible existent? If anything, since the existent (and therefore its possibility) is grounded in our construction of it, the "cosmological" argument would prove the necessity of our stipulation (or better: what for practical purposes could be considered our stipulation, since we ourselves are are stipulating are constructions, as is any talk of constructions. Just as talk of mid-sized objects makes sense whether or not we think they exist metaphysically, it would seem that all this is practically meaningful even without a firm metaphysical foundation).

But there seems to be something we can take from the latter point. There is some reason why we construct "Jill" and "Susan", as well as "this tree" and "that stone". These may not be individuals we can consider on their own, such that they are real albeit contingent existents, but there must be some particularity which allows us to construct these forms.

"Particularity" is not the same as "individuality" in the way I am using it (perhaps my usage is arbitrary; all I am concerned with is that some distinction is made). If Jill is an individual and Susan is also an individual, than there are two defined and delimited individuals. If Jill and Susan each have particularity, though, then we cannot say how many individuals there are, or even if the question makes sense. Particularity undergirds any other statement of quantity, quality, construction, or the like. There is not a "this something" involved; there is merely the "this".

"Jill" and "Susan" then refer to particulars, but the construction makes them out to be individuals: something defined, delimited, and countable. We need this delimitation to think about them, we need some completeness. And here is the problem: nothing exists merely as incomplete. Such a thing would be only partially actual, but every actuality is actually actual. We may speak of, say, an incomplete paper. But what is already down is completely actual; it is the mismatch between our expectations and what is there that introduces the incompleteness, not anything in the bits and bytes or ink and paper themselves. (I think this point needs to be qualified, but I'll perhaps do that in a later post after we get some of the basics down here.)

But while our construction has this foisted completeness or incompleteness, the actuality itself is on the one hand incomplete, and on the other hand complete. Insofar as I mark off simply this little section of reality, it is incomplete. Physically, this computer screen is affected by gravitational forces from the farthest quasars and cannot be completely delimited as an individual without reference to them. They are not something external, but part of the very makeup of this screen itself, however minutely. I currently am constituted by the actual contents of my perception and consciousness: sight is nothing without a seen and intellect is nothing without an intellected, so any reference to me as a separate individual which sees without what it sees, points to something incomplete. This incompleteness, though, is an incompleteness precisely because it is impossible. The incomplete being is lacking something which it logically needs: not as something to bring it into existence or that previously brought it into existence (as with the version of the cosmological argument which I reject), but as what constitutes it here and now. It is the internal constitution of the being which needs explanation, not external factors or its existence in general.

So the fact that we can point to particularities means that we can pick out these incomplete beings. But the notion of an incomplete being is incoherent without its completion. So there must be complete being, some unity of being. I am inclined to say that this includes at least everything involved in any given causal system, but that would be another argument. There may even be levels of different completions, or perhaps different degrees of incompleteness and unity, which are again separate issues.

The incomplete beings would be particular expressions of complete being, since all of them are nexuses of complete being in a way; my computer screen (or at least its completion which is demanded by the incomplete being which I am regarding) is being regarded in one way, and distant quasars are this being regarded in another way, perhaps under a complex coordinate change. Perhaps one could take an analogy: the axioms and rules of inference of a mathematical system already have determined the entire rest of the system, such that they logically entail as their completion all of the system's theorems, while each theorem is the complete system regarded in a different way, or at least complete portions of the system regarded differently (though I question whether most of reality can be made precisely definite at all without violence). But the computer simply regarded in itself is not the complete being. The computer in itself is in fact merely an illusion, since we would take what is really incomplete (and so therefore unthinkable as such) and regard it as complete, just as the axioms regarded in themselves without any entailments have not been understood but have merely formed some basic intelligible impression (although again, the computer may be more purely illusion since it would seem to lack the definiteness of the axioms).

The presence of incomplete beings then logically entails complete being, and the incomplete beings are expressions of the complete being, illusory when considered simply in themselves and theophanies when considered in their completion. What this cosmological argument arrives at is perhaps different from "that which we call God", but it avoids hierarchical notions of causation which do not appear to have any concrete correlate.

This is my attempt to formulate an argument from the unity of being, as found in the Neoplatonists, the school of Wahdat al-Wujud in Islam, in Vedanta (expecially Advaita Vedanta), or in some schools of Buddhism; the analogy from mathematical systems in fact comes from Plotinus. It is not, then, an argument "for God" in the sense of some Creator completely distinct from creation.

Is the complete being itself delimited? The false completion of incomplete beings does involve delimitation, because there are other beings separated out from them. A complete being which does not have anything else, complete or incomplete, over and against it would not seem to have this delimitation. So it is not the degree of delimitation itself which makes something complete, but rather delimitation may already be a sign that something is incomplete since what is truly complete does not need to be marked off.

Is Faith Oppressive?

2009-12-30T22:04:00.013-06:00

I will get back to the last installment of my expert knowledge series soon, once I figure out what I'm actually going to write for it - I had planned what is there already, and I want to see where it all leads as much as anyone else (assuming that others are interested). But first, a brief tangent that I was thinking about: is faith in a given revelation oppressive?

Now, of course, such a question cannot be answered for all cases of faith, nor perhaps can a definitive answer be given in any case. I merely want to raise some issues. It seems to me that Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism (and I've seen similar Buddhist statements) make a virtue out of faith and a vice out of doubt. One should believe authority by default; the Bible says it, the church says it, the Qur'an, the Vedas, enlightened beings, etc., and so you ought to believe what you have been told. A skeptical, critical attitude has often been regarded as not simply a misfortune keeping one from the truth (perhaps you merely have a bad luck to not be able to rationally accept an important belief, even though you have virtuous mental habits), but something evil in itself: it is a vice, and it is blameworthy.

Two things have made me think about the oppressive character of this attitude. First, I went to a conference on a text by the medieval Jewish thinker Judah Ha-Levi. The text was about a king who was searching for the right way to lead his country, and who asked a philosopher, a Christian, and Muslim, and a Jew about what he should do. The text went beyond typical religious polemics and actually gave a thoughtful response and some interesting empirical investigations into what should mark a true religion. One can still quibble with the naive trust of scriptures given, but overall Ha-Levi gave a better response than I've seen from anyone else in the Middle Ages, and probably a better response than I've seen in most contemporary apologetics. Is part of this due to the fact that the Jews were marginalized, and had to actually work through their beliefs, while Christians and Muslims have been able to mandate belief from a position of power? How could any believer hold to the obviousness of her faith without at least a history of power backing it up? Even conservative members who feel themselves under attack from the surrounding culture can only feel under attack because they used to hold the more dominant view.

Second, my master's thesis was on concerns about certain interpretations of Zen Buddhism. Some of these concerns were about the social and ethical ramifications of Zen belief: one throws away rational critique (supposedly) and therefore loses the ability to analyze one's society. This lack of critique has led to Zen involvement in WWII, and sexual abuses by roshis in American Zen centers (to put it simply; of course, there are ways in which Zen can save itself, I think). But (to make a claim which I don't have space here to elaborate), it did not seem like the problematic Zen attitudes were any different from expressions of faith in, say, an Abrahamic tradition, in which one puts some authority beyond rational critique in order to have peace (whether internal or communal). But this has led to social problems whenever it has occurred: groups become marginalized and oppressed, because the the group members are considered malformed and cannot accept the revelation that all truly virtuous people accept.

The Jews should obviously accept the New Testament because they already have the prophecies concerning Christ; the Buddhists are obviously wrong because their practices don't have the sattvic characteristics of the Vedantins; the Qur'an is obviously the work of God and anyone who says otherwise is obscuring her original nature as a Muslim; polytheists are obviously wrong because, well, they're just plain stupid, because no one has ever sat down to think through the pagan worldview. And because of this obviousness, we are justified in putting the authority beyond criticism and expecting others to do the same. For anyone who says otherwise, that this is not how the virtue of faith has worked, point me to a single work of apologetics that does not grant a special status to a view which cannot rationally support itself and that deals honestly and faithfully with other positions. Heck, simply get me one that can take simply the general skeptic's position seriously.

Now, of course these aren't the only expressions of these traditions, and not everything is wrong with some sort of faith (although in my more cynical moments I do tend to think that all acts of religious faith whatsoever are problematic in this way). I mean, I do consider it worthwhile to dedicate my life to studying religious thought, after all! But there does seem to be some problem here, and I hear enough assertions by various believers to this effect (that they know best and everyone who disagrees simply doesn't see things appropriately) that something needs to be done. We live in an age of multiple, competing authorities. We can't just wish them away, and each one calls all of the others into question. We now have a better vantage point to see how oppressed groups have been treated in the past, and we have an ethical imperative to act conscientiously.

(To point out a couple of problems with the above broad sweeps, in interest of fairness: early Christianity does seem to have the emphasis on faith even without much power, and one can see a positive role for skepticism in C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength. And some Islamic views concerning our original nature as Muslims are content with any affirmation of the unity of the source of being. But I think that the problems I've raised are real enough, even if the narrative is incomplete.)

Expert Knowledge - Part 4 of 4

2009-12-19T21:11:00.007-06:00

In the previous posts, I have argued that (1) knowledge is built on expert communities, (2) these communities legitimately structure knowledge claims in a hierarchy, and (3) they can by and large avoid issues of oppression insofar as they stick to their own internal goals without adding in extraneous concerns. Whether I have argued these well is a separate issue, and I am sure that they need (and probably have received elsewhere) much more fleshing out. But in any case, I want to see what happens with religious expert communities. I will first start with the relation of communities to each other, in a couple brief senses; it really is going to be two posts in one, but I want to finish this series and I've already labeled it as as 4 post series. I may (highly) edit this and add in some citations to risk sending to a conference at some point, so please, please, PLEASE leave a philosophical criticism or two on these entries to help improve the mess if you have the time. Or let me know if this has all been said before by some continental guy I haven't read (which would be any of them) and who has said it better.

Novices vs. Ousiders

There is a difference between two different sorts of non-knowers. The first group is that of the novices, who belong to a given expert community for the time being and so are responsible to that community. If one starts asking medical questions, one is beholden to the medical experts if one actually wants to understand medicine; if one does not, one is not really asking medical questions. On the other hand, there are outsiders. If someone does not want to learn about dead white men, then those communities who specialize in dead white male culture (should) have no control over them. So one can be in a community without being considered a knower. A problem here is that outsiders may have nowhere else to go, but that is another (albeit important and relevant) issue.

Essence vs. Existence

There is also a difference between knowing about a particular topic, and knowing how it fits with other topics. A physicist may know physics thoroughly, but this does not mean that her opinion concerning the relation of physics to other sciences (or worse, to politics or religion) has any weight, except insofar as it is knowledge of physics. Of course, this is already extremely problematic; even what "physics" is has been determined by different conversations between different and interrelated communities sharing many individuals. One cannot simply delineate "this" community from "that" community in reality. But for practical and general purposes, there seems to be some sort of knowledge in which the physicist participates, being trained and ratified by a given community within which she continues to dialogue, and I can't think of a better shorthand term for this sort of knowledge than "physics".

I will refer to this division as between the essence of a body of knowledge (what it is about) and its existence (that is obtains within the broader context). There can be a community of experts about (put your favorite pseudo-science here), and they can legitimately have some body of knowledge, but there are also the interrelations between this community and other communities to be considered. Every body of knowledge both is something, but also fits within the larger context of humanity in a certain way, and these are separate issues. "Existence" as I am using it here refers only to how a thing exists, since it must already exist in some way as a communal practice if any community discusses it, but it seems for the present to make a handy technical term so I will keep it unless someone objects. Someone can talk about a phoenix, and even state truths about it (a phoenix is a bird, for example), so it must exist in some way, or we would have nothing stable to talk about. We could (in theory) disagree over whether it exists in physical reality (whereupon I could reach out and touch it) or merely in the reality of social construction (or perhaps, a differently constructed social reality than the physical one and less likely to harm me via physical contact).

The essence of the topic is something understood truly only by the given community; math is understood by mathematicians and medicine by medical experts (although again, these are not necessarily clearly delimited and defined essences which can be neatly separated from each other). The existence of the topic, though, is even less clearly delimited. There are wider communities which can discuss such issues: how physics exists is discussed in the wider community of modern science, for example. But poets and philosophers and university boards all have some relation to the different ways in which the physics community interacts within the larger world, and ultimately, so does all of humanity (and beyond, if we were to encounter other beings capable of considering these issues). Essence then is largely decided within communities, while how the essence exists is decided within ever-increasing circumferences. To fully and completely understand how anything exists, we would need all of the approaches available to us.

Members of a community must, then, listen to those outside of the community in this respect in order to understand their own field better. The mathematician does not need to listen to everyone concerning what mathematical theorems are true, but she does need to listen to others in understanding what math is. The poet may be clueless when it comes to physics, but can both heighten our appreciation of the grandeur which physics shows us as well as call into question its unjustified dominance; for this reason, the physicist may need to listen to the poet to understand physics. In the end, knowledge and communities are both internally and externally constituted and any individual (whether a human being or a specific community) is also made up by the other communities.

Religious Expert Communities

So, where does this leave religious communities? First, different religious communities set their own rules on a lot of things according to their own internal life. Muslims get to exegete the Qur'an, not Christians or Hindus. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox each get their own communities of understanding their authoritative sources and of understanding. Different religious groups have their own specific experts, and in order to be considered a knower, one must be trained and accepted by these specific experts, as in any other field.

It is one thing to be the spokesperson for a given group; it is another to say that one's given belief really obtains, and this is why I wanted to refer to an essence/existence distinction (which probably makes more sense here with religions than it did with, say, physics). The Christian can argue that, within the Christian community, God's justice needs to have been satiated by Christ's atoning death. But this pulls in notions of justice which are shared by other communities; it is not Christian justice which demands God's act, but some feature of reality which should be accessible to people in general. (In general, any rational argument is such that it should connect together ideas appropriately; other communities may disagree with one's starting position, but if you have a good argument from your own premises, this should be widely recognized or else suspicious). When no one else gets the necessity of atonement, ostensibly argued from concerns beyond those of the Christian community, the Christian community needs to revise its claims. Otherwise, it is stretching beyond its community's own inner life and being either oppressive or foolish, dictating what, say, "justice" is to others without having formed the proper expertise. The Christian community, in this case, can (a) restrict their claims to some specifically Christian form of justice which of course no one else holds by definition (but then, what about original sin?); (b) reject the argument and work within the larger community to come to a better understanding of justice and how it fits with the Atonement (as many contemporary theologians are doing); or (c) revise their arguments so that they actually explain their arguments appropriately to others so that the others can see the internal logic of the Christian position (but then the Christians must also listen to other voices in response).

So the Christian community in this case is making claims beyond itself, as it seems to me that world-wide religions must all do to preserve their claims to heal the human spirit in general. While Christians are the finally arbiters on what Christians actually teach (and not, say, militant atheists or well-meaning religious pluralists), they are not the arbiters on what they say that falls within the scope of humanity at large or within other groups' expertises'. To say otherwise would be like allowing a peculiar sort of Christian math which can trump everyone else's math, perhaps because of some rounding found in the measurements of the bath in Soloman's temple. But this is ridiculous; the community which actually understands math through constant practice and training and in which one can be recognized for knowing math is the arbiter for interpreting Christian mathematical claims, not vice versa. But at the same time, when Christians are confronted by other communities, it is the Christian community which decides how to respond based on its own internal life. It may be oppressive (or foolish) to continue claiming knowledge outside of the community's marked expertise, but there is no single response to having a problem pointed out, as shown in the example above with justice. Religious communities must change based on their own internal principles, as mathematics did in the 18th and 19th centuries when it split into modern math and physics.

Religious Expertise and Laypeople

So this goes some way toward outlining how communities can relate to each other, though it is at best a beginning. But what about the novices in the community of faith? How do they relate to the experts of their faith? Are professors, pastors, and priests more members of a given faith than the common people? That depends on the faith and what it requires for practice; one can practice correctly without complete understanding. The experts in the community decide what is actually the knowledge-base of that community. But, since that community does not have any say outside of its own legitimate principles without becoming oppressive, novices in religious understanding may be the relevant experts in some areas upon which the religion touches. When the experts of the community say that the Bible denies evolution, the microbiologist within that particular church is dependent on those experts for their understanding of the Bible; evolution, however, is also discussed by the scientific and especially biological community, and so she is the expert there. One could also say that married people are better experts on family and procreation than celibate priests, no matter how well the latter have been trained in their own expertises.

So the common people of the religion do lack the sort of knowledge which the experts of their religion have. Further, insofar as religious dialogues are concerned with intersecting expertises, lay people uninvolved with these expertises will be left out. But some issues have broader human concern, and so while many people will have no legitimate opinion about the essence of any of these bodies of expert knowledge, they do have some say on how these bodies of knowledge exist. The working-class person's opinion of what is true in physics is irrelevant, but her opinion of how physics impacts her own life (perhaps in being replaced by a machine at work?) is part of the larger discussion. So too does the person sitting in the pews (or standing, or sitting on the floor, or kneeling in prayer) have some aspect in which her religion is affecting her, as will even the ardently non-religious.

Expert Knowledge - Part 3 of 4

2009-12-19T21:10:00.005-06:00

In my last post, I argued that it does make sense to include certain people within the category of expert knowers and others outside as non-knowers. However, this raises the specter of unequitable power relations, with which I hope to deal in this post.

Someone may criticize this view as being elitist, and the concern seems to come up often enough that it should be dealt with. Is the attribution merely descriptive, or pejorative? If descriptive, then it probably fits; so what? If pejorative, then what exactly is wrong?

It is the denial of elitism that is problematic. On the one hand, it is harmful to deny one's own superiority in a given area if one clearly knows more. I rely on my doctor having more medical knowledge than myself; if she were to play humble and average Jane on me, claiming that she really doesn't know any more than I do, or any more than I could figure out on my own relatively efficiently, then she would have trouble curing me.

It also seems that a frank admission of elitism, that some people really do know more than others, that some people really are experts and this is something that it takes years of effort to achieve (and so is not open to the general public for scrutiny), is the ground on which we can even talk of oppression. If people are oppressed, they are actually oppressed. They are actually deprived of some good. To act as though we are all equal when we are not in actuality is to say that those deprived of an education have not actually missed out on anything; that is, they have not been oppressed, and we can all breathe more easily.

In addition, to deny elitism in this sense is to place either an undue burden on the individual, who must now shoulder all responsibility herself for everything she needs, or we must cheapen knowledge acquisition, as if understanding the world and the Other were a simple business. We live and learn communally, which entails our dependence on others who know better than us, even if dependence can be painful.

With that said, the problem with expert knowledge is deciding who the experts are. When we fill the concept of "rationality" and "expert" with content determined by the experience of white males, for example, then this perpetuates a cycle. Men do math, because men are good at math; they are the ones rational enough to do math. Which means that in the next generation, mostly men will be drawn to do math, which means that the stereotype sticks. Maybe a couple women are "unfeminine" enough to be mathematicians, but most women (and all the "real" women) stay out. And of course, examples could be adduced; it was the experience of privileged, rational, land-owning Whites who gave content to the Enlightenment notion of a person, for instance, such that it was a simply matter to consider black slaves as non-persons.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that we multiply the final causes (that is, the goals, that which unifies) of a discipline. We implicitly (since we dare not explicitly) hold both that medicine must work empirically, and that the doctors conform to our image of what a doctor should be. But what is it within each disciple that justifies it? We have our expert community pursuing a discipline; what justifies that community?

It seems important here that we can pick out some immanent criterion, something tangible and readily within experience. If we say that the certainty of math is what legitimates it, then the current experts are the ones who tell us what certainty is, and who can have it. This seems to me to be a way in which those experts in power continue their dominance against minority voices, perhaps illegitimately. But this problem is lessened if we look for a clear mark. What has distinguished the mathematical community of experts? Their unanimity. If a sizable body of people claiming to do math, and who have put in the requisite time for study, come to different conclusions, they could not simply be written off. This is because writing them off would both assume unanimity (which is why they must be wrong) and deny it (since not everyone has agreed). Therefore, this community must be admitted and their claims critically analyzed from within the community, perhaps leading to a redefinition of mathematics.

This can come about because communities are not static. Every expert community can have its common goals for the time being which unify that community. These may need to change; there is no reason to assume eternal essences to disciplines. After all, mathematics today is not the same discipline as of a couple centuries ago. Leibniz saw no need to have a mathematical basis for continuity, because everything in nature is continuous. Modern math doesn't care about the natural world, although it can be applied to it, and no principle can be left undefined. But the changes in math came about due to internal specifications of its goals, and internal processes changing those goals. When the goals split in different directions, we got two different bodies of experts: the mathematicians (favoring logical rigor) and the physicists (favoring description of the natural world). But both of these communities naturally grew out of earlier mathematics.

How does this relate to power relations? The goals of a community are what define the community; these in themselves do not seem to set up unjust power relations. If you don't want to empirically test medical techniques, you're simply not doing what the typical modern medical community is doing. Other aspects (to be covered below) may create injustice, but for the present we are simply defining the communities. Therefore, what creates the power imbalance is the community ignores its unifying principle, its form of life, for tangential concerns. If medicine is defined by being empirical, but we don't even bother to look at the empirical investigations of other sources of medicine or of medicine done by certain minority groups, then we have transgressed the inner life of the medical community itself. But racism within medicine is not to claim that medicine is set up such that minorities are bad doctors; it is to claim that the minorities would be good doctors but are prevented from being such by extrinsic concerns (if minorities would truly be bad doctors, they shouldn't be doctors, since they wouldn't be able to cure people well; I simply don't admit the starting hypothesis). Racism and sexism are problems precisely because they are at odds with the internal goals of the community.

So now the question might be: what keeps there from being a community which defines itself in terms of being white and male, and dedicated to preserved the white male culture? Nothing, really, and I'm not sure that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this. Kant and Plato said some good things, after all, and it would be a shame to lose them. But there should also be room for a community dedicated to preserving, say, black culture. There would be two reasons why our white male community could be problematic. First, it could dictate the concerns of other communities, preventing the black cultural community from existing, or at least flourishing. Second, and perhaps simply a variant of the first, such a community could create exocentric values; that is, values for those outside of itself (and poisoning individuals within, for that matter), which state that not only does the community have its own goals and processes and standards, but that these should be normative for others: people in general ought to study white male culture, since it is superior to other cultures.

Both of these points, though, seem to be illegitimate uses of expert knowledge. The specialist in white male philosophy is only an expert in that area, and so unless she is an expert in, say, black culture as well (and all expertise must be ratified by the community itself), she must defer to the experts in that field when making claims about it. Similarly, the mathematical community can say what it wants to about math, but mathematicians cannot in themselves set the value of math for everyone else (although they can extol the praises of why they themselves love math). There is a plurality of expertises, and experts in one field do not thereby have any claims in other fields until they have proven themselves again.

In summary, then, it would seem that a strategy for reducing unjust power relations in expert communities would be for such communities to a) pay attention to their own internal workings and to hold themselves to such internal standards, and b) respect other communities as being other with their own separate expertise.

Of course, this leaves other problematic issues. Do we say that Nazi Germany was free to abide by the inner life of its own community? It seems to me that political entities have their own problems, not least because the criterion of expertise is missing (there seems to be relatively little knowledge required for political behavior, other than how to gain power for oneself). At any rate, I do not claim to be solving all problems of injustice in this essay; I merely want to lay out some ways in which expert communities can keep their claims to expertise and their stratifications of knowledge-bearers, without thereby necessarily introducing concerns about race, gender, etc.

Now that I have something of a working theory, I would like to turn it to the problem of knowledge within religious communities as given through testimony.

Expert Knowledge - Part 2 of 4

2009-12-19T21:07:00.006-06:00

In the last post, I argued that even deductive systems of knowledge such as math are based on socialized systems of expert knowledge. Now, I will analyze ways in which we separate knowers from non-knowers.

If I am a math teacher, and some arrogant high school student claims to know more about math than I do, I am justified in dismissing their claims. It could always be the case that I have a Carl Friedrich Gauss in my classroom, and I am truly in the wrong. Or there are cases when I may be wrong in a given problem on the board and the student correctly points out my mistake, which was a temporary blip on my part and not a product of habitual ignorance. When it comes to substantial mathematical claims, though, assuming typical (and even precocious) students, I don't have any reason to listen to their concerns insofar as I am a mathematician. Insofar as I am a teacher, I should respond to their concerns, but even here, I am the knower communicating to the non-knowers.

So people may agree to this example; no one really likes math, so no one cares if they don't really know math. But what about medicine? People care about their health, and will follow any crazy diet or alternative source of medicine they can find to support themselves. The trained doctor, though, seems to have real knowledge on this score. If the patient disagrees with the doctor, the doctor, again, doesn't have to pay attention to any epistemological concerns that may arise; the doctor only has to pay attention insofar as it means that she has a stubborn patient that needs extra persuasion. This case is more difficult, since there is greater disagreement within the medical profession than within the mathematical. In addition, it is not as though traditional medicines of other cultures have been entirely non-empirical, and they could potentially bring something to the table that modern scientific medicine has ignored. But in most cases, the medical advice offered by average people who have not done the research is bogus. It doesn't matter that it impacts their lives more than math.

This is leading up to the touchy subject: ethics and religion. So it seems justified to have expert communities of knowledge; mathematicians really know math better (as demonstrated by near-unanimous agreement) and doctors really know medicine better (as demonstrated by empirical efficacy). And as seen with medicine, the fact that people care about the subject does not make them knowers. So why should the principles concerning how we live our lives be any different? The person who spends time familiarizing herself with long hours of study concerning how to live well, and who engages in constant dialogue with others doing the same, all the while paying attention to how the great experts in thinking and living in the past have done the same thing, therefore knows better how to live than the person on the street. The person investigating religious truths in whatever manner is appropriate to them, who spends long hours studying the appropriate material and engaging in dialogue, etc., knows the religious life better in a way that entails that the average person does not know the religious life as well.

I want to return to the latter point in discussing some points in the nature of religious faith and testimony. But a problem arises here: while it seems right to say that in some cases, we have the right to ignore opinions of those who do not know, this same attitude has in the past also been used to silence minority voices in order to preserve positions of privilege. So next, I will discuss how relations of power should also introduce a skeptical element into expert communities.

Expert Knowledge - Part 1 of 4

2009-12-19T20:45:00.006-06:00

When one gets right down to it, it seems that, at least from our standpoint, all knowledge comes down to expert knowledge. Practice within a field and a developed intimacy with the object of knowledge precedes any statements about logical certainty and deductive reasoning.

Let's take math, for example. Math is the most straightforwardly deductive and certain of all of our bodies of knowledge, and so if I can show that math is based on expert knowledge, then it would seem that all knowledge would be. As a math student, I had to be taught how to reason mathematically. I had to be inducted into the community of mathematicians and taught their methods of argument. When I started learning, the experienced certainty which I had of some wrong arguments was no different from the experienced certainty of many right arguments. My experience of certainty, then, was not on its own a sign of mathematical truth. I had to practice the field and learn how the mathematical community goes about doing things. Therefore, I had become an expert from the experts; it was not a bunch of reasoning which I could just show to any supposedly rational human being and have them come to the same conclusion.

Does this mean that that knowledge was just a human construction, or that there is nothing more than the agreement? Not at all! In math, the experts almost unanimously agree on the main part of the subject. In other fields, by contrast, there is a greater degree of disagreement, and so therefore the agreement does not appear to be the socialization in itself, since the practice of socialization is shared across the disciplines. It would seem that the greater the agreement is in the community of individuals looking at the object, the better our knowledge of that object is. If a bunch of people look at a visible object and agree in their description of it, it is likely that the object is what they see (more or less, subject to metaphysical and epistemological qualifications). If the people disagree, then they may not be looking at the same object, or they may not be equipped to see the object properly (perhaps it is dark). But their report of the object becomes suspect without agreement.

But if we don't have certain deductive knowledge to fall back on, since that arises out of expert knowledge and not vice versa, then the problem of competing viewpoints becomes difficult. And we cannot fall back onto deductive knowledge itself, until someone can provide a way in which I can have certainty which does not come through my own (fallible and socialized) feeling of certainty; even if they could offer anything other than a purely dogmatic assertion to the point, how would this non-perceived certainty be the certainty of my knowledge? But if we start from any system of knowledge which relies on consensus within the community, then Any time people disagree on a topic, we would seem to have reason to believe that they are not really apprehending the object of knowledge. But expert knowledge relies on stratified communities; that is, some people are included as knowers, others as non-knowers, with a range in between. It is this to which I will turn in my next post.

Negative Platonism

2009-11-23T17:47:00.004-06:00

How is it that we know that something is bad, or imperfect? What makes a bad argument such, or a bad society? It would seem that there can only be a bad if there is a good, and there can only be an imperfect if there is a perfect. But we do not seem to have any real examples of perfection. For something to be more or less beautiful, there must be some formal constitution of Beauty itself as Plato argues. But it does not appear that we need to know these Forms through their presence, as a legitimization of our own self-satisfied certainty. Rather, perhaps we know the Forms through their absence. This could be how they gain their existence from the supreme Form of the Good which is beyond being: the Forms are not present, and so "are" not, but they are what we strive after while making what is to be good. We are Eros, born of Poverty and Craft, pursuing Aphrodite whom we have not yet grasped. We notice that a law is bad through the absence, disorder, and impropriety which is the absence of a good law, and so, without knowing exactly what a good law on the topic is or having an existing good law, we press forward anyhow.

Religious Dialogue and Dissertation Topics

2009-11-23T10:34:00.003-06:00

I've been thinking over a couple of dissertation topics which my advisor has been throwing my way. The first one would give me a solid grounding in history of philosophy and experience in Greek, Latin, and Arabic. If you don't want the details, skip down to the next paragraph. It would be a study of secondary causation of God's knowledge through Proclus (5th century Neoplatonist, held that the One emanates out the world in a dizzying array of steps to account for multiplicity) and Dionysius (likely 5th-6th century Syrian monk heavily influenced by Neoplatonism; made God the direct cause of all the things Proclus split up), al-Kindi (9th century Arabian philosopher, instrumental in having works translated from Greek and Syriac, including a paraphrase of Plotinus which became known as "The Theology of Aristotle", and who held that God is the only literal agent), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (10th-11th century Persian philosopher, held that God only knows universals and that the world emanates from God in a set of stages), Ibn Rushd/Averroes (12th century Andalusian philosopher, held that God knows things as their cause), and finally the 13th century Christian philosopher and theologian Aquinas, who held that God knows everything directly as their act of being, and who seems to develop this view while working through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. A possible conclusion would go on through to the 14th century with Scotus and Ockham, and where this focus on the individual might end up.

But I'm not sure that I'm going in that direction; it'll be a good stuff for papers, but the second idea grabbed my interest more: the epistemology of religious dialogue. It exciting me to think that I might be able to go back to doing some contemporary stuff. I can do the historical stuff well, and I always want to keep one foot in it since I still think that that is where some of the best philosophy has been done, but I want to create, to be active, to do more than sitting over texts. I don't have the attention span to be a full-time scholar, if nothing else.

So, what would be the basic problematic? On the one extreme, we have groups who engage in some sort of dialogue, but who refuse to budge. The lines have been drawn, the communities have been fixed, and now the task is to refine their own views and to figure out how to live with the either group in the political arena. For this reason, I consider this to be merely political dialogue; the religious issues would only be brought up insofar as they are relevant to how we live together without changing too much. There is a place for this too, but I do not think that it is genuine religious dialogue. I think that Plantinga' basic belief arguments would end up here, if there were to work at all.

The other extreme is pluralism. Religious pluralism might try to circumvent the issue, by saying (to put it simplistically) that we're already agreeing on the important aspects. But this is one view among others, not one view encapsulating others, and so must join the dialogue as an alternative religious vision. Pluralism still would make sense: it would still be a rejection of any overly particular claims to special revelation while an acknowledgment of a spiritual reality which has bee explored by thinkers across traditions. But that doesn't solve the problem of dialogue.

So, where does that leave us? Religious dialogue, it seems to me, must leave one open to the dialogue partner. One must be able to come to the partner expecting to hear something one does not yet understand. And this seems to me to mean that, in any genuine religious dialogue, the possibility for self-conversion must be present. This is not the necessity of conversion, or even the probability, but I must always leave it the possibility open that I may hear something new which could convince me. Otherwise, to have closed the possibility, is to have predetermined what I can hear from the partner.

But now we get to what is really tricky. Religious beliefs depend a great deal upon testimony, whether from divine revelations, the primordial sounds of the universe, or from enlightened humans who realized something we are not likely to catch on our own. If any of these form of revelation are true, it is likely that there are true things about the world for which I must really upon testimony. And so, in religious dialogue, there will be a tension: one the one hand, I must leave myself open to the possibility of self-conversion, or else it is not dialogue; one the other hand, both of us hold to a possible truth that transcends us and our ways of knowing, and for which we rely on the testimony and experience of others, which we do not give up simply because we here one thing that contradicts it. Given this tension, how does the epistemology of religious dialogue work?

If I were to go this route, I would like to spend most of my time in concrete studies. One direction I could take it would be an analysis of historical Muslim inter-religious contexts, in line with my interest in Arabic thought. There's Andalusia, with its mix of Christians, Jews, and Muslims; there's the Mughal empire in India and the different ways in which Muslims and Hindus interacted; then there's Muslim appropriations of Confucianism over in China. It's just a thought, right now, but it would be nice to get back into my interest in world religions through my graduate studies.

Sin vs. Imperfection

2009-11-21T11:28:00.002-06:00

I must confess that I just can't make any sense of the notion of (Christian) sin as a general concept applied to humanity any more. I would thus like to lay out in a dialectical format just what the problem is.

I imagine that there is already a chorus of voices saying, "Just look at the world! Look at the wars, at the poverty, at the injustice. How can you not believe in sin?" And if that were all that sin was, then sure; I can accept that. Sin is really messing things up. But then, it is hardly obvious that everyone is sinful. Some people, presumably unregenerate non-Christians in the eyes of some of my readers, seem to live perfectly upright, just, noble, loving lives. How are they sinful, if we pick out sin primarily by looking at the horrible events of the world?

"But even they aren't perfect. I bet they've told lies and cheated people at some point in their lives." But here is where I fundamentally disagree with the standpoint of sin. Sin assumes that people should start off perfect, and then they are penalized for not being such. It is not merely a comment on how people go wrong, but an expectation that it is perfectly reasonable that they should never have gone wrong in the first place. Rubbish. People start off with nothing and have to work their way up. When you learn math, you don't start by knowing math. Errors are a necessary part of the learning process; I bet that Jesus didn't start off by making perfect masterpiece cabinets. So why is it that suddenly in matters of character and social living, in the excruciatingly difficult process of bringing our desires into harmony with the world around us, errors are suddenly unforgivable, when they are taken for granted in calculus? People are imperfect; that is, incomplete, finite, continuing to grow, and given desires (perfectly natural ones) that conflict with the world around them; and this is often (if not always) all that is needed for explanation.

"Some people do what is right, even when it is difficult; therefore, we are all expected to do the same, even if it is hard." But how are we comparing people? If person A was given a good upbringing with a solid foundation of virtues and guidance, and person B had to make do in a horrible family environment where she had to put forward inhuman effort to not become total scum, then they are not comparable. You cannot, say, place both in the same temptation of cheating on their spouses, and then hold up A as a model for what B should have done. The present objection assumes an awful lot about what the power of human free will, which is not empirically borne out (and requires a ton of metaphysical work even for the dissidents). We are tremendously influenced (maybe even constituted) by our circumstances and even by pure moral luck, whether or not we are perfectly determined. It may be that no two cases of action are actually comparable, and so moral role models are merely models and not standards of judgment.

"But we still blame people for doing wrong, and this applies to everybody. That's what systems of justice are all about; everyone agrees that this is what justice is." That is what systems of law do, and how law may need to operate to practically govern society. Why should God be driven by the practical concerns of the polis? As for the assertion that "this is what everyone considers to be justice," I really have nothing to say other than this: get educated.

"But there is still some metaphysical principle of goodness in the world; those who follow it are rewarded, and those who don't are damned, regardless of anything else you want to consider." What is this metaphysical principle? Why is this the way things necessarily are, rather than some just-so story? Why can't God continue working on "sinful" souls until they do pursue the good? Why can't God annihilate those who are incorrigible?

"How about the Holocaust? Is that merely an 'imperfection'? How can you explain that?" At least as well as any Christian who takes the Old Testament literally. God commanded genocide, therefore genocide in itself is not evil. Hitler simply lacked the divine command, but there was nothing intrinsically evil about his actions. And whether or not one interprets the OT literally, God still knew that the Holocaust would happen and let it happen. Even that, then, cannot be an absolute evil (assuming such would make sense), but merely a relative evil for us petty human beings who can't realize our greater place in the universe. As a relative evil, it is an imperfection of some human beings, both the perpetrators and the victims. Any account of "sin" would be secondary to this and subject to the points above.

On Astrology, Ptolemy, and the Four Elements: The Use of Bad Theories

2009-10-23T18:25:00.004-05:00

I was finally getting around to reading the last book of the Hitchhiker's Guide pentology, and I find a quote in there on a topic for which I had already written down some notes order to write a blog post:

"I know that astrology isn't a science," said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or - what's that strange thing you British play?" "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" "Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations."

So, what is the importance of theory, especially in philosophy?

It seems that I can look at theories that seem to be flawed, and still learn from them. I can read the Renaissance Platonist Ficino on astrology, and still make sense of what he is doing. His division of the world into spheres controlled by the different planets, each under the aspect of a god, a muse, and an aspect of Bacchus, can be insightful even when his reasons for the division have been thoroughly discredited. Similarly, personality theories can be helpful for understanding oneself. Myers-Briggs may lack rigorous scientific evidence, especially insofar as it posits specific explanations of how and why people act, and I may never fit completely into the INTP mold, but I still think that it is more useful for my own self-understanding than the scientifically developed Big Five test, which can group personality characteristics accurately but does not give anything underlying explanations.

Similarly, I can look at scientific achievements in the past which were grounded in bad theories. Astronomy was developed by and large within the Ptolemaic framework. And don't think that this was simply because everyone started with the theory: the data was explained rather well at first by the theory (we experience things rotating around the Earth, and most of the stars seem to stay in their places without big changes). People could continue to revise the theory to deal with the data, and even after people like Copernicus and Galileo, it took Newton and Kepler to establish why the Heliocentric model actually did explain the data better. A lot of astronomical data was accumulated in those Ptolemaic times. Would we have been able to understand as much as we did about the sky, without a wrong theory to organize our data and make it manageable?

Also, take medicine. Western medicine was by and large built on a four-element view of the world: things can be hot or cold, and they can be wet and dry, and different pairings give you the different elements. Makes sense, for a rough-and-ready view of the world. And you can read Galen or Avicenna or Maimonides using this theory in understanding medicine. They may not have been completely right, but they weren't completely wrong either; good doctors in any time or place generally leave their patients in better condition for the visit, or they get labeled as quacks. People notice if Doctor A's patients all die. So the empirical observations of these doctors were still a progress in knowledge, even though their theory was wrong: the four elements were not constituents of the world as building blocks for material mixtures. But this theory also let them be able to process complicated accounts of the human body; could there have been medicine without it?

One issue that has been coming up is that we seem able to advance in empirical knowledge in spite of, and even because of, wrong theories. But what about philosophical understanding? I hear it often said that, due to our increased knowledge of neurological processes, there is no place for dualism anymore. Hogwash. People have always known that if you get hit upside the head, your cognitive faculties will be impaired. We just know a bunch more ways to impair them, now. Avicenna had a rather dualistic account of the person, but again, he was a doctor. He knew about material interactions which interrelated with thought, and they were extensive. In general, medieval cognitional theory is pretty sophisticated and saves any sort of non-bodily cognition only for the highest and hardest cases involving pure intelligibles, which even then often still require some sort of material correlate. I fail to see how modern neuroscience changes the basic framework here, even if it can inspire utmost awe at the marvelous workings of our brains. It fills out the description, but leaves the general categories untouched.

So even within wrong theories, good philosophical categories may persist. And in addition, returning the the original quote, self- and humanistic-knowledge seems to arise clearly in some ways independently of theory. Is this part of the reason for Plato's fondness of myths?

Standards of Evidence in Religion

2009-10-23T11:45:00.006-05:00

Sorry to bog down the blog with another anti-apologetic posting. But I have been thinking about an issue which I think is serious, and I would like to hear some critical thought on the matter. Let's put down issues of the extent to which someone should doubt or be critical of what has been given them on any absolute scale. Let's have a relative standard of evidence: the evidence we ask from history should be comparable to the evidence we ask from our daily lives.

Ask yourself this: what would it take to convince you that someone was genuinely God incarnate, here and now? What would make you leave your religion, as people left their families and ways of life, and eventually Judaism or paganism to follow Jesus? Take this standard of evidence, and apply it to the historical record. If you had four texts claiming to be eyewitness accounts, and reports about people having seen someone rising from the dead, would you go and follow that person? If not, why do you accept the Biblical account?

Note that you cannot simply imagine yourself as someone who was an eyewitness, or receiving secondhand reports. This is not the relation we have to the historical data. It has been mediated to us; at very best, we may have some books of the NT written by eyewitnesses to a significant portion of Jesus' life, and that even is not indisputable. You can't go ask eyewitnesses yourself, because you cannot go ask ask the eyewitnesses whom Paul references. You would have the same distance from the evidence for the person here and now, as you currently have from the life of Jesus. Would you then believe the claims of the next religious leader?

Also, you must compare like cases with like. You can't say, "Well, the evidence claims that Jesus rose from the dead, but this other person only did significant miracles/got reincarnated/etc.", unless you can give a very strong reason why being resurrected is categorically different from the others. I'm not sure that it's even the oddest miracle out there; being both God and man seems to be infinitely greater, if it even makes sense, and I'm not sure what counts as good evidence for that in any time period. At any rate, miracles need to be judged insofar as they are miracles, religious claims need to be judged insofar as they are religious, and so on. If you can't accept some miracle-worker who claims to be a Boddhisattva, then would you really accept claims that some guy got resurrected, showed up to a few people, and alone was identical with the single, categorically-different-from-creation God? The former would seem to require much less evidence, even though its truth would at least be a significant problem for Christianity.

At this point some people may say, "But Scripture tells us to watch out for miracle workers and such," or "Scripture tells us that Christ was it. There is no new revelation." Or related things; fill them in as you like. But, you can't assume what you want to prove. We are weighing the evidence for Christianity here, and so we cannot assume that the Christian story/Scripture/our pastors are correct before looking at the evidence.

Finally, I have heard one concern a few times (worded almost eerily the same; maybe it's coming from some common source?), and it absolutely puzzles me. It goes along of the lines of this: "We don't have any more evidence to give, what do you expect? Why should non-Christians have paid attention to what was going on at the time of the Resurrection, in order to provide an alternative perspective?" But I don't see how this is relevant. I'm asking about whether the evidence we have is sufficient to establish truth, and that has nothing to do (or very little) with what evidence I can expect. Let's take the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics. It has not yet been proven. Even if it could not be proven, this does not mean that I then can expect to get anywhere by picking the side that seems to have the most evidence. That evidence does not meet the standards for mathematical argument, and becomes completely null and void (unless, perhaps, I am a practiced mathematician with an excellent grasp on related issues, in which case I may have intuitions which would raise my opinion slightly above random guessing). Although history is more complicated and admits of degrees of evidence (as well as corresponding degrees of assent), even if we can't expect more evidence, this doesn't make the evidence we have any more conducive to a decision. Arguing merely from what we can expect, or from what is available, is simply fideism.

So, if you truly and honestly would go and follow some contemporary religious teacher under the same standards of evidence upon which you base your current faith, then I simply ask that you have that integrity. If not, then stop claiming any evidence for your faith: you are a fideist, or a pragmatist, but you do not have the support of rational argument.

Blake on Infinite Desire

2009-10-04T17:01:00.002-05:00

William Blake's "There is No Natural Religion (b)":

I. Man's perceptions are not bound by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover.
II. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.
III. [This proposition is missing.]
IV. The bounded is loathed by its possessor. the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
V. If the many become the same as the few when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man.
VI. If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
VII. The desire of Man being infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.
Conclusion.
If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.
Application.
He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.

Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.

(For context, in (a), Blake argues that if we can only perceive what we have senses for; if you were to have no sight, you would not be able to even think of visual things. See http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/nonatrel.htm.)

So if our desire is to have any chance at being satisfied, there must be a way of encountering the infinite here and now:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

(- "Auguries of Innocence")

Programming Languages and Ontology

2009-09-23T08:25:00.002-05:00

A rather whimsical idea struck me: are ontological systems reducible in some way to programming languages? In particular, there are four main types of programming languages: procedural, object-oriented, functional, and declarative. Each takes a different paradigm. And they are all Turing-equivalent.

A procedural language is pretty straightforward: just type in your commands in order. If you've programmed in C or Basic (including on your graphing calculator), you know what a procedural language is. Do x, do y, do z. This is like a narrative mode of accounting for the world, running straight through the information in a linear fashion.

An object-oriented language, like C++ or Java, focuses more on objects. One packages the structures which one is using in a particular way: there is a class with certain functions, and one instantiates objects of this class. This is a substance ontology, of an Aristotelian sort at that.

A functional language, like Lisp (the greatest language ever), by contrast focuses entirely on functions. This is a process ontology. Everything is a function (in good style), and functions simply call functions to get things done.

A declarative language, like Prolog, is relational. It is a logical system, concerning with the interrelations between the terms. It basically just is formal logic as a computer program.

But, in the end, all of these are Turing-equivalent. What does that mean? It means that they all do the same stuff, even though they go about it in different ways.

So what could be an implication of this? If ontologies are computable, if they cut up the world in ways similar to a computer program, then all of the wrestling back and forth over these particular options is over practicality and elegance, not over which one actually describes reality, since if one does then any does. This wouldn't mean that either reality or our minds are in themselves computable, but merely that once we introduce individuation and differentiation into the world, once we have started to cut it up, the world-pieces can be put together as narratival, as substantial, as processual, or as relational equally well.

But isn't starting from world-pieces (or bits of zeros and ones) already an ontology? Perhaps, but one imposed to have anything to say; this is our boot-straps by which we pull ourselves up. Communication requires some digitalization, which we hope approximates analogue reality. The pieces, though, do not come with relations already ingrained. We add those. But the pieces are amenable to the relations; the relations aren't merely imposed, but the pieces are potentially related in the various ways. Practical concerns aren't simply a construction of reality, but a revelation of it.

An Imperfect Elitism

2009-09-23T08:16:00.002-05:00

What's wrong with elitism? It seems to me that elitism is simply the statement that some people are better than others. Now, surely we take some people to be better than others on a relative level; person A is stronger than person B, B is more knowledgable with regard to medicine than A, and so on. And some ends we consider to be more important than others: it doesn't matter whether Charles Manson was really a great artist, he is still inferior as a human being to Gandhi. And if I had to choose between these two whose life was more valuable, I would not hesitate in my choice, so it seems odd to me to say that all humans have been created equal in value. For those who may bring God into the picture, saying that God holds everyone equal, I will point to those whom God has completely separated from all means of salvation as well as basic human needs; you may as well convince me of square Euclidean circles than that God loves people equally, perhaps barring some form of universalism. So I do not understand why we reject out of hand the idea that some people are simply better, other than from a misplaced democratic affection which wills that since we want everyone to be equal, they all are already.*

Now, I am not saying that this is the happiest situation, that we should embrace the fact that there is a human elite and rejoice in it. Feel free to wish that all people were equal, and work to make this true. Just do not mistake it for a present reality.

But that brings up a problem. Formerly, we would wish for the elite to have a prodominent voice in society, whether they be philosopher-kings, aristocratic gentlemen, academics, or whatnot. In turn, we have had similar situations in terms of cultures; culture A sees itself as superior to culture B, and proceeds to colonize. That has yet to work out. It seems to me that there are two fundamental problems. First, we don't know exactly who the elite are. In a society run by culture or education, others outside of power structures have been known to poke fun at those in charge, at their emptiness and book-knowledge. And how does one cull the best people for an aristocracy without lapsing into oligarchy? Concerning intercultural relations, we are still trying to get down the basics of understanding each others' cultures; how can we judge between them? What values are truly important, and who instantiates them? How do we avoid simply picking random differences and playing them as trumps, such as skin-color?

Second, even if we were to properly pick out the elite in the given situation, would they be elite enough? We can think of siblings playing, where the older sibling convinces the younger to do something really stupid. The older sibling most likely is truly more experienced, intelligent, etc. than the younger, but just enough so to get them in trouble. So just because one group is better than another, this does not automatically mean that the better group can legitimately lead the worse, let alone force their decisions.

So we appear to be stuck with an imperfect elite. If it were elite enough and recognizable enough, it could run things and this would be best for society. If there were no elite, then everyone could participate in everything equally in a true democracy. As things stand, there are many who really should be silent, but they should not be silenced. Not all voices are equal, but no one is meet to judge among them. To let everyone have a say leads to carnivals on urgent issues like health care, to fully blameworthy behavior on the part of truly ignorant oafs, but is this worse than Mao or Stalin? Is there a solution, other than doing our best to educate people that by default they should shut up on political matters until they have a worthwhile, studied opinion?

What would such a studied opinion be? There is a difference between opining that one is jobless (a claim I'd most likely accept), that one's community is mostly jobless (a claim I'd accept pending a search into how well this one represents her community), and that one knows how to solve the job situation (a claim at which I'd most likely be skeptical for most people having the problem, and at least without some significant insight into general structures of society). Everyone can attain the first, of their own personal experiences. Those of practical wisdom along with community involvement can attain the second. The third is for those with a more theoretical background. Both the second and third need the voices of the first for their data, but that is where the first ends; those who do not learn anything beyond their own situation have no right to politics. The voices of practical and of theoretical reason, in turn, never reduce to each other, since the practical person will does not, as practical, understand the broader relations outside of her context, and the theoretical person, as theoretical, does not know the lived, material conditions.

* What if even saying that all people are of equal value is misleading, since there simply is no relation of measurement between people at all? What if people are to be accepted, not compared? I'm thinking mainly along more Daoist or Zen lines here, in particular, that our judgements of good and bad have created the problem. I'll have to think more on this one, but it does at least go against my basic suspicions (which come with no guarantee of truth); if nothing else, politics seems to me about relative problems of managing groups of people, and relative problems create relative standards of judgement applicable within the sphere of the problem.

The Role of Creation in Art

2009-09-14T08:51:00.003-05:00

About a week ago or so, I had mentioned that apologetics is more like art than like science: it is about applying one's ideas to a given matter, rather than trying to objectively interpret that matter itself. And as was brought up, this is not quite like how artists look at their work; artists can be just as surprised as anyone else by what they come up with. This seems to me to be a legitimate problem; so what is the difference between the scientist and the artist/apologist?

It seems that we cannot really separate out creation and discovery, subjectivity and objectivity. The pure "artist" would be entirely subjective, purely creating without any worry for the object matter. God is the only one who would fit here, and even then we would have to talk about the relation of essences and nature to God's creation. The pure scientist would be entirely objective, purely discovering what is in the world. It seems that this is a legitimate view of the ideal scientist, while the above is not necessarily the ideal artist; many artists want to explore their art and not purely create, it seems to me. Still, I don't have a better word coming to mind right now, so I will talk about the ideal scientist and the ideal artist.

It does seem that artists still fall closer to this ideal than to that of the scientist. Once one decides on a musical motif, or on a particular image or character for a literary work, the rest of the work may very well already be determined. A well-cohering work demands that things fit together in a certain way, after all; the good artist is feeling out the essential structure of such things (or if you don't like talk of essences, then simply "the way something is and its tendencies" or some such equivalent). But despite this determination of a work once certain elements have been chosen, the elements and a general notion of the work would seem to be necessary in the first place. This is applied to the matter in a work closer to that of creation than of discovery, even if everything after is closer to something discovered.

Of course, someone could point out that artists often just come up with their ideas. Some flash of insight arises, and they go to work, but they didn't plan out their insight. True, and perhaps this is moment of genius is what happens in most truly good art even. I at least know that works for which I had a sudden inspiration tend to work out better than ones which more fully plan out, although that is in part my own lack of skill. But even if this is still outside the control of the artist, it comes about in a different way than the application of the idea to the matter. Both may be more or less determined, but they are determined in different ways, and it is this difference between the more ideal/spiritual/mental/etc. arising of the idea, and the working out of its consequences in the matter, in which I am interested.

So, with that said, the artist (along with the apologist) is not merely creating, just as real scientists aren't merely discovering. But it stills seems that placing them at different points of the continuum is reasonable.

Spiritual Exercises and Historical Analysis

2009-09-14T08:29:00.002-05:00

We had a couple of really good talks here at Marquette last weekend. Last Friday, Michael Chase (among other things, translator into English of some works by Pierre Hadot) gave us quite the journey. He started with ancient skepticism, and talked about Hadot's views on how ancient philosophy (by which, I mean ancient Greco-Roman philosophy) was about spiritual exercises as much as anything else; it was about a way of life. Next, he talked about Nassim Taleb's modern-day skepticism, which takes the epistemological pieces but declaims the practices as being too hard for actual people.

The most cogent of Taleb's criticisms was that we are hardwired to make certain judgments about the world, and so the skeptic ideal of suspending judgment is illusory. Chase brought in modern accounts of brain plasticity and studies on how mindfulness meditation seems to make certain sections of the brain larger, which allows for increased ability to sit back and observe a situation without judging. Now, as he mentioned in the question-and-answer session, this can be seen to be simply part of the skeptic practice of arguing both sides of the problem. But it does seem to provide evidence for increased ability to suspend judgment after putting in the hard work, nevertheless. And even if perfect suspension of judgment is only an ideal, progress seems to be possible.

Next, Chase showed that there are some key features of modern mindfulness meditation (which is in turn taken largely from Buddhist sources, and generally without recognition of any Western roots). These same key features show up in ancient skepticism, and in ancient philosophy in general. True, people weren't sitting around counting breaths, but that is only a technique. The goal of apatheia, of objective and detached analysis of the world and of increased insight into one's own inner workings, are there (he went into a bit more detail, showing five core points that have been established in mindfulness meditation and identifying each one with practices in ancient philosophy). So ancient skeptical practices, insofar as they intending to advocate a lifestyle and not merely academic discussions, would seem to have had some effect on actual suspension of judgment.

It was nice to here of philosophy as something beyond academic disputations. But what interested me at least as much was that Dr. Chase had given a talk the day before, looking at a neglected commentary of the Neoplatonist Porphyry and digging up references which clarified Porphyry's views on cognition. The detailed historical analysis wasn't something other than what he was talking about in the more exciting talk; as he told me when I asked him afterward, the work of analysis and translation are also spiritual exercises, making him put away himself with his interests and concerns for the time. Interesting way to think of the work that I am doing.

The Difference Metaphysics Makes

2009-09-05T14:16:00.003-05:00

I was reading through the Nicomachean Ethics recently, and something struck me: Aristotle has a lot in common with Buddhism. Or rather, it seems that a couple highly important doctrines of Buddhism can be found in Aristotle. But Aristotle and the Buddha end up in such different positions. While this could be due to any number of reasons and any one of many dissimilarities between them, I would like to advance the metaphysics of the human person as a key issue.

To sum up what I see as the similarities, both have an ethics based on the doctrine of the mean, and both have accounts of a non-permanent human soul. These, further, are at the very heart of Buddhism, second only to the notion that all life is suffering (duhkha). The doctrine of the mean at least is also key to Aristotle's ethics, though we may quibble over how important the supervenient soul is to Aristotle's anthropology (I would say that it is important, insofar as forms need to be enmattered for Aristotle, and matter is necessary for all change, so a permanent soul which may or may not exist in matter would go against the grain of Aristotle's physics). So the similarities are as such non-trivial.

But where Buddhism suggests that we therefore seek a way out of this life, Aristotle recommends that we seek to live this life to the fullest; the Buddha points to the suffering of life, while Aristotle looks at the excellence possible. And one difference which seems to me to push them in opposite directions is the fate of the human person. The Buddha believes in reincarnation; no matter how good this life is, you have to live again. And again, and again. For Aristotle, this life is what there is; your mind, your nous, may be immortal, but that doesn't have anything to do with what you consider to relate to your particular personhood.

So if you have to keep on living multiple lives, then what seemed to be excellence in this life may or may not have benefit in the next; the things considered to be "excellences" may actually harm you ultimately. At any rate, they may make one life more bearable, but leave the underlying problem unchanged. For Aristotle, there is no point in pushing things off to the next life. This is what there is, and wisdom concerns how to live this life well.

This also shows that the account of the human person does not necessarily determine what one should do about life. Granted, there are significant differences between the Buddha and Aristotle over the status of the person, but they both seem to agree that you are inseparable from your constituent material parts, which will come apart, and so to this extent you lack an enduring self. Buddhism likes to point out that recognition of this will lead to more compassionate, selfless behavior; but Aristotle champions aristocratic virtues concerned with building up what there is of the self.

So metaphysical problems concerning the afterlife do have an effect on our actions here and now, perhaps more so than the precise nature of the human being or general ethical theories.

Hölderlin (and Epictetus) Quotes

2009-09-02T21:41:00.003-05:00

Just some quotes from recent reading that I found interesting.

The first two quotes are from Höderlin's epistolary novel, Hyperion, in a letter that waxes eloquent about the nature of philosophy and the classical Athenian spirit, as the eponymous writer overlooks the ruins of Athens.

"The man," I resumed, "who has not at least once in his life felt full, pure beauty in himself, when the powers of his being merged like the colors in the rainbow, who has never felt the profound harmony that arises among all things only in hours of exaltation - that man will not even be a philosophical skeptic, his mind is not even capable of tearing down, let alone of building up. For, believe me, the sceptic finds contradiction and imperfection in all that is thought, because he knows the harmony of perfect beauty, which is never thought. The dry bread that human reason well-meaningly offers him, he disdains only because he is secretly feasting at the table of the gods." - Hölderlin, Hyperion

(As a side note, it's probably just because of the odd mix of stuff I've been reading as of late, but I certainly seem to hear similarities between this and Henry of Ghent's view of divine illumination, coming from Augustine. It's all rather Platonic, in any case.)

Reason without beauty of spirit and heart is like an overseer whom the master of the house has set over the servants; he knows as little as they do what will come of all their endless toil, he only shouts: 'Get busy,' and is almost sorry to find the work being accomplished, for in the end he would have nothing more to oversee, and his part would be played. Mere intellect produces no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the limited perception of what is. Mere reason produces no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the blind demand for ever greater progress in the combination and differentiation of some particular material. - Hölderlin, Hyperion

And a pithy quote from Epictetus, on how to study philosophy:

... so never look for your work in one place and your progress in another. - Epictetus, Discourses I.IV.17

Against Logical Consistency

2009-09-02T10:02:00.005-05:00

Should I be concerned if someone points out a logical quibble with my statements? Or should I spend inordinate amounts of time establishing the internal coherence of every one of my propositions? It seems to me that if my statements are arising as genuine interpretations of my experience, these issues should not be first and foremost in my mind.

Let's say that I explain to you that I have seen a table which was completely red and completely blue. You, being the logician, simply tell me that I am speaking nonsense and dismiss my claim. Technically, you are correct; but who cares? Assuming that I am not merely making something up, I have expressed reality more meaningfully in my contradictory statement than you in your criticism. Granted, my statement may not be the most felicitous one. I may want to seek a better explanation, both to better understand my own experience (interpretations can always be improved) and to better communicate it to others; perhaps the table is purple, and so a mix of the colors. But it is both a logical contradiction and meaningful.

There may even be instances in which may statement is better than a coherent statement. Perhaps the table is simply covered in so much blue and so much red in such intricate patterns that they seem to completely interpenetrate, though nothing contradictory has happened. My expression that the table is completely blue and completely red better expresses the wonder and amazement at the phenomenon, and better communicates some of its phenomenology, than would the perfectly logical statement which lists the table's attributes.

Mystical experience would seem to be placed in a similar position; if you haven't had the experience, your logical quibbles are almost worthless. Maybe the mystic would be a better communicator bf being more precise and analytical, but she thought that being paradoxical was a perfectly good way of expressing her experience. Start from this point, and try to figure what she is expressing. No one who cares about truth will start from the logical transgression.

It might even be that language has a purely practical function, as a pointer to reality, and that logical consistency is more or less worthless. "But what you are saying is supposed to be true, and so therefore is not false. Otherwise, I couldn't understand what you are saying." What I'm saying isn't meant to be understood; it is meant to be used. Look, and stop analyzing. "But if you contradict the law of non-contradiction, then you affirm it." Only if you have initially presupposed it; I am rising above the dichotomy (which therefore means also using it at times), not taking the other side. I do not agree with the idea that the law must either always hold or never; I must look at the content in any given proclamation, at any given use of a sentence (and not the sentence itself!), and determine what to do from there. Yet again, look at where my words point, and shut up about the words themselves.

Aims and Arguments

2009-08-26T11:48:00.003-05:00

Last year, Professor Garber gave a talk at the Aquinas Lecture at Marquette (the lecture has been printed as What Happens After Pascal's Wager?: Living Faith and Rational Belief, and I would recommend it as a relatively short but thought-provoking read). I think I had talked about it then, but it's relevant to some stuff that's been on my mind as of late.

The point of the lecture was this: Pascal asks us to first engage in Christian practice, and then we will come to see the Christian faith is rational. The problem, though, is that there doesn't seem to be any link between the practice and the rational justification, in part evidenced by the fact that other groups claim the exact same thing (to simplify the argument for my present purposes and memory). But the question came up afterward: don't scientists do the same thing, in having their practice which gives them their aims which then they go on to rationally prove? So my concern is, what is the difference between the (ideal) scientist and the (stereotypical) apologist?

We do have to have aims before we go to work on anything, and we do have to be embedded in a practical context. We're finite creatures; we can't seek everything at once or start from a positionless point, and so we have to start from somewhere going in some direction. This is the condition for all inquiry. So, we criticize the apologist for having her goals already set before she starts seeking the truth. She has already decided where she will end up. But, as someone brought up after the lecture, the scientist already wants some result from an experiment. What is the difference?

The difference (in two abstract cases away from the complexities of actual human behavior) seems to be to be this: the apologist seeks the goal while using the means, and the scientist seeks the means while using the goal. The apologist must reach her goal, and arguments must be shaped accordingly, despite how they appear at first glance. The scientist needs to orient herself, and uses aims and desires to do so, but once oriented, she looks at the evidence (again, ideally). She displays detachment to the goal, while the apologist is very strongly attached.

Of course, science doesn't actually proceed in this way. One piece of evidence can always be reinterpreted, and it takes a lot of difficulties in interpretation before one gives up a scientific cause. So the scientist has her research program, with some pieces that can be changed without throwing away the program as a whole. Doesn't the apologist do the same? Perhaps, but there seems to be much more reticence to give up the program in apologetics. Scientists take a couple generations to give up a deficient program; apologists perhaps several centuries, if at all. The idea of giving up the program is valid in science, even if costly; it is invalid in apologetics, causing a rift between the former apologist and colleagues.

Apologists do not seem to be doing the same thing as scientists, then. But they do seem to be similar to artists: they see their idea, and they plan out how to enfold it in some sort of matter (that of logical arguments, in this case). The apologist is therefore creative (or should be), and this is a good thing for communities. Science tells minimalistic and unstable stories, after all, and fuller, more constant (though flexible) stories need to be written for a community's narratival life. The only problem is when the apologist attempts to claim that such creativity also bears the marks of objective science. One can only claim such if one is willing to completely subject one's aims to the evidence, to argue as if one's position can actually change as a result of research.

Mysticism and Physical Mediation

2009-08-23T14:37:00.003-05:00

It is my understanding that mystical experiences, experiences of oneness with the universe and stuff like that, can be brought on by severe injury, fasting, sensory deprivation, etc. I, admittedly, have not read the articles saying how this comes about; I really should fix that at some point. However, I have been thinking about how this should affect whether one can take mystical experiences seriously, and whether these indicate some evidence that our mental states supervene on the physical.

The first reaction is to say that mystical experiences are simply caused by trauma and such, and are not valid. They are simply the result of neurons firing, so how could they signify anything else? But this is too simple. One standard argument in response seems to be that everything which you sense is mediated by neurons firing as well, with all of that physical stuff thrown in. But we think that our senses tell us something about reality, whatever that may be. So the fact that mystical experiences are mediated by brain activity is not in itself a mark against them.

But that doesn't seem to be a complete answer either. There appears to be something ad hoc about these experiences, unlike sensory experience. Holding an object in front of my eyes should correlate to me seeing it; that's what seeing is. Suffering trauma does not seem to be connected to mystical experience in the same way. The mystical experience appears to be some accidental byproduct from chemical stimulation.

But then I turn around again. Why do I take sensory experience to be valid? Because (1) I have plenty of opportunities to test it, (2) different senses correlate with each other (it's much less likely that all are ad hoc in tightly corresponding ways), and (3) there are general features which the senses pick out that relate to what they sense (sight has light, hearing sound, etc.); ad hoc-ness comes from specific instances matching up without any underlying general principles.

But mystical experiences don't seem to happen regularly enough to test them. Even mystics do not appear to have them all of the time; I think Plotinus for example only ascended to the One four times in his life. And the fact that there is no other type of mystical sense by which to test mystical experiences is no mark against them. And finally, there may be a general principle which causes these experiences: these causes are all activities which push away the material world, which would explain fasting, sensory deprivation, and severe trauma, while cohering with the nature of the world given in mystic's accounts.

But back again: there also seems to be a commensurability between sensing and the physical processes involved. What is sensed is finite and differentiated, and causing similarly finite and differentiated brain signals. There is room for some sort of mathematical isomorphism between the two, copying the information in one process to the other. But a mystical experience suddenly realizes the entire oneness of everything in the universe; how does any single object of "sense" yield this?

And again back: mystics themselves have realized the opinion that their experiences could all be hallucinations. Either Al-Ghazali or Suhrawardi (I can't remember which) brings this up, and notes that anyone who has had these experiences would clearly know that they are not hallucinatory. It's not like it took modern science to figure out that mystical experiences could be misguided. Even though aware of the possibility, mystics have denied it. Without having such experiences myself, what could I say against them? Or for them, for that matter.

So that is my line of thinking, most of which I am working on clarifying. It seems that there are broadly three options (perhaps not mutually exclusive) which one could take. First, the material world in its diversity is primary, and mystical experience are simply the odd result of certain neurons firing. Second, the mystical/mental/ideal/spiritual/psychic/etc. world is primary; either the mystical experience is the result of leaving behind the physical, or there is some deeper structure involved in which the physical event triggering the experience is itself an effect/emanation/manifestation/etc. of some previous mental/etc. cause/etc. which is directly connected to the mystical experience in the mental/etc. plane (ao, physical event A seems to cause mental event B, but mental event C caused physical event A and mental event C; the physical supervenes on the mental). Third, we're simply looking at two different levels of explanation. Mystical experiences may not give us any scientific knowledge of the world, but are real enough and legitimately understood on their own terms regardless of what neuroscience teaches.

The Lives of Flies

2009-08-22T15:07:00.003-05:00

Two flies were sitting on a wall. One said,
"It won't be that much more until we're dead."
The other stared at him a thousandfold,
Responding idly that three days is gold.
"What would any insect do with more?
Four days even would become a bore.
We only sit on walls and land on food,
Which then we take back to our home and brood.
Now shush, the game is on again." With that,
He buzzed on down to where the snacks were at.
The first fly tried to stoically embrace,
Indifferent or resigned, his lowly place.
No matter what, though, still his spirit filled
A larger field than what his lifespan tilled.
Some desperate escape he tried to find,
Such musings filled up all his lack of time.
He brought out his alembic and his athanor;
He didn't know his friend was soon no more.
He meditated in a mass of poses;
Twelve generations looked upon their Moses.
He sank down into knowledge of the ages,
Passing lives as if they were mere pages.
The world outside he scarcely even saw,
Engrossed upon his labors still to draw
Another mark into his line of life.
Uncounted flies went by in love and strife.
It might have been a day for all he knew,
So bothered by how little he could do.
And times again it was within his grasp,
But long life seemed so awfully hard to clasp.
At length he found his secret, and that was that.
But then a truck came by, and with it splat.

By Faith Alone

2009-08-20T20:35:00.006-05:00

A couple musings on faith which I've been pondering as of late; both a criticism and an affirmation. First, I criticize most religious understandings of faith that I've seen which put it contrary to reason and experience. Second, I affirm a more mythological faith.

When I talk about faith normally, I don't oppose to it reason and personal experience. Quite the contrary; faith is built on these. Faith is the willing to trust someone, but it is only virtuous if I know the person, her character, and her abilities; preferably both on a propositional level (certifications and her own past experience in the relevant area as documented facts) and on a level of personal knowledge (track record with me at doing what I trust her to do, and perhaps more indefinable characteristics).

Now, the level of reason I must have before I trust someone will change depending on what I want to trust her for. I don't need much reason before I lend five bucks. Lending my car is a bit more iffy, and letting someone watch my kids (were I to have any) would require significantly more reason. Further, were I not to have such reason before entrusting my kids to a stranger for an extended period of time, this would not be commendable, or better faith; it would be irresponsible.

When would I trust a relative stranger with a matter of extreme, perhaps absolute importance? I can think of only two cases. In the first, I would be in extreme, immediate danger and there is no other choice. Faith in such a circumstance is simply a necessity; this is not virtuous, but would be merely a difficult fact in less than ideal circumstances. In the second, it would be because I am an idiot, and perhaps a vicious one at that. Religions of faith may be able to play the first card, though it would seem that I would have plenty of time in my life for God/a Boddhisattva/whatever to give me the amount of reason appropriate for what I am being asked to trust them for.

In general, then, the concept of a "leap of faith" seems to me to be disgusting, unless I'm in imminent peril. There should be no leap, except into action, and an omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent God (or Dhyani Buddha) would be able to help each of us reach that point in full view of the necessary step to take.

Now, I have also heard some people talk about having faith in faith, and others criticizing the notion; how can one have faith unless in something? By the above, this "something" is often not something worthy of faith, so I don't see how it would play any more of a role than an abstract or mythological faith. But in any case I think that such an argument ignores the fundamentally pragmatic character of religious pluralism and liberalism.

Consider James' thought experiment in The Will to Believe. A rock climber needs to make a jump across a chasm. If the rock climber believes she can make the jump, then her odds of actually doing so dramatically improve; if she does not believe she can, then she will plummet into the pit. What one believes changes what is true; one cannot simply and objectively regard the world because there is always a subjective element.

Now, one wants to believe that one can jump over the pit because of the result: one would rather not fall and die. But in order to believe, it helps to have an explanatory story. Maybe one just pushes everything else aside and wills oneself across; but one could also remind oneself about all of the training one has been doing. Heck, one could convince oneself that one is a reincarnation of the Monkey King Hanuman. As long as one gets across, that's the point.

Similarly with faith. People with faith may benefit, but a good portion of this seems to be from the faith itself and not necessarily the object of faith. Not that the latter is completely irrelevant, but in any case one can attain a certain peace of mind and courage of existence by believing that something is taking care of oneself. And if one walks into a church, it seems to be that people will give the pragmatic reasons for having faith: the peace, the presence and love of Christ, etc., and these are precisely what are comparable between faiths.

So what do we do? We tell ourselves stories. The mountain climber doesn't have to believe that she is Hanuman; she just has to suspend disbelief for the moment and live in the story she is telling. That will be enough. Similarly, the religious pluralist can approach faith with a myth. It offers a mythological faith, the faith of a story; a faith of suspended disbelief instead of belief. But if that does the trick, what's the problem?

Perhaps we could even see how to go from here to beef up the notion of myth. If one pretends to be Hanuman and actually makes the jump, than there was some truth after all in the myth; one did have the power and agility of a monkey for the moment, and suspending disbelief helped cause this to be true. So first, the myth does in a roundabout way suggest something objective: one did make the jump. Second, what the myth represents is not something other than what is causes, and so cannot be treated as a set of propositions. Well-wrought religious stories, philosophies, theologies, etc. would then offer very good and very intricate myths of this sort, with many far-reaching consequences beyond simply accomplishing one action or another.

At this point, some of my more conservative readers may be saying, "Yes, but that doesn't fix the problem of sin. The pluralist is still living in her sin and must be judged unless she has faith in Christ." Well, yes, we could all be wrong. But one must be convinced of the problem before one would have any need of the cure, and I for one would not be convinced of the specific problem of sin as laid out in certain Christian catechisms until convinced first of the Christian story, in which case I could have a legitimate rational faith and not have to worry about all this. Until then, though, I don't have need of heeding every quack diagnosing me with every illness known to man and then some. And again, the actual, observable effect of faith seems to be portable across objects of faith, suggesting that we are looking at psychological facts and not, say, the Holy Spirit.

Logic vs. Math and Newcomb's "Paradox"

2009-08-20T20:01:00.003-05:00

I got into a tiff the other day over Newcomb's "Paradox". My position is simple: there is no paradox, only a simple payoff table with a logical constraint and an easy choice. Paradox only comes in when someone decides not to play by the rules of the thought experiment, which defeats the entire purpose of a thought experiment. But more interestingly than that, it seemed that our debate came down to a mathematical argument on my side, and a logical one on the other. So the interesting point to me is: why do I place so much more trust in math than logic, and what is the difference?

Math and Logic both have perfectly precise, rigorous forms. An argument necessarily follows formally if it is admissible as an argument at all. And any element used in both fields strictly according to their formal structure is rigorously defined. Maybe we could go so far as to say that the form of mathematics is logic; that is, every single argument structure and basic element general to the field as a whole is taken from logic. But that point need not be made now.

The significant difference is the content. Mathematical content is also rigorous and well-defined. A line is defined by its relations and functions; anything at all which satisfies those relations is a line, and anything which fails them on the minutest point is not. A number 3 is a number 3; not 2, not 4, and 5 is right out. It's not even 3.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. So, the form of a mathematical argument has this perfect structure on which it is arguing. If you can count anything in reality, if quantity at all applies, then the math will be perfectly rigorous so long as you don't decide to change what you are counting.

Logic, on the other hand, has a serious flaw at this point: it is only the form of the argument. The argument itself must be populated with outside information, and in the end the argument is only as precise as its content. If I say that my cat is either in the room or not in the room, this would be perfectly fine as far as logical form. But what it neglects is that "cat", "room", and "in" are not well-defined. What if my cat is standing in the threshold? Does "in" cover this? What is the essential part of the cat? How far does the room extend? And so we either introduce limits which are not part of our standard talk about such matters, or we admit that the logic is imprecise and it fails in application. And if we introduce limits, these limits are either arbitrary or well-studied; and too often they seem to be the former.

And this seems to be the case in most situations that we care about: the concepts over which we are arguing are not well-defined. What is a soul, at any rate? A true metaphysics would avoid this problem and resemble mathematics in this respect, but it's debatable about whether such does exist.

So, in Newcomb's problem, my argument was that one should clearly choose box B. Set up your payoff table: you have 4 boxes with their respective values, but 2 boxes are inaccessible by hypothesis. Therefore, one picks both boxes and receives $1,000, or just box B and receives $1,000,000. All other discussion must build off of this basis, or it is no longer talking about the world of the thought experiment (except perhaps to say that a Predictor is incoherent, which is just a debate over the old issues of divine foreknowledge and future contingents).

The rival argument goes as such: when you enter the room, either there is something in box B or not. Either way, you are better off taking both boxes. This argument then tries to introduce issues like backwards causation and the like to discredit the other side. But to force the entire choice into a single dichotomy distorts the problem. True, either there is something in B or not; but in both cases, there are two described payoffs: one for whether the Predictor sees you picking both, and another if the Predictor sees you picking B. A rational decision must always consider the payoffs stipulated; the argument for choosing both boxes implicitly tries to sneak in its own payoff table, which is only disagreeing with the problem as set up.

Claiming that I must be adding in some metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is not a valid response. The situation could be this: assuming determinism, there is a single causal nexus N at time T1 which will express itself in the Predictor making her predictions at T2, filling the boxes at T3, you walking in the room at T4, and you making your choice and receiving your payment at T5. There is no backward causation, because it is the same causal nexus which determines all events; T5 just got expressed later than T4, but both were equally caused and mutually conditioned at T1 along with the prediction itself. Now, this scenario does not seem to me to have any problems relating to backwards causation and the like. But if it works, then we can go back to saying that the Predictor just knows irrespective of the explanation how, and we should have the same solution.

Meaning for a Failed Life?

2009-08-17T21:33:00.001-05:00

One question that has haunted me is this: Is my life going to have turned out worthwhile? I want to see the results of my labors. I want to get the important things right. I want to see that my life was not a waste.

Now, I think that being concerned with one's life and the fact that one is actually living and actually responsible for one's actions is a good thing; I'm completely with Socrates on the whole unexamined life bit. But why do I need to be the one that sees what my life was worth, here and now?

It seems that a life which gets things wrong, even tremendously important things, can still be worthwhile in the long run. Imperfections do not negate the value of a life. Even a bad example can redirect others and affect them positively. If my philosophy can be a stepping stone on the way to truth, goodness, and beauty, even if it has not attained such itself, is this so worthless? If I can be one part of a worthwhile chain, then wouldn't that have made everything worthwhile as well?

So the point isn't then to get things right, or even coherent. Sure, that is a longterm goal; I would hate to think that nothing I do would lead anyone to the truth ever. But a well-developed or insightful wrong view might accomplish the goal better than spending my entire life to found a poorly-developed right view.

The Purpose of Academics

2009-08-17T21:25:00.003-05:00

I used to be able to enjoy learning for its own sake. I would, at a relatively early age, pick up books on dinosaurs (I liked raptors before JP made them cool), astronomy, or biology and read them for fun. I liked categorizing things just because, though I must admit that I was never much of an experimenter; hence why I am in philosophy now and not science.

But in college, I realized something: I am actually living. And I should be doing something with my life. At this point, my accumulation of knowledge seemed worthless. I decided to go into philosophy instead of math, because it offered more of an opportunity to work on important questions; math was fun, but what use was it (keep in mind that I am generally into pure math, abstract algebra and the like)? And what is the point if it has no use in the world, to do something for someone?

As time has gone by, my expectations for philosophy have not exactly been met. So, why have I continued to do philosophy? Mainly because I don't want to be like the idiots I see around me; the attitude is entirely negative (and not a little resentfully bitter). There is nothing to gain, only a hope that I can stem the losses and not deform other people's minds too much in the process.

Where to go from here? First, why does everything have to be "useful"? Useful for what? If everything were simply useful, then what would be the end for which we use things? Somethings have got to be simply enjoyed for their own sakes. People need to be fed and all, but what do they do once basic needs have been met> What makes our existence more than that of complex beasts? In addition, on a practical level, when something is done purely for itself it seems to be done better, and so whatever use it could have would be magnified; if it truly has no use (and even the purest mathematics often finds a use), then at least it has been enjoyed.

Second, there are good scholars out there who do inspire me, whose work validates their career choice (and hence mine). I just finished reading Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, and Eliade seems to me to be one of these scholars. Why? Eliade is quite well-read; one could swear, even in an introductory book such as this, that he had read everything published on pretty much every religion out there through the amount of citations. And these are not empty citations; he genuinely uses the examples to build his case. He is sympathetic to his topic, and he writes well in helping the reader to be sympathetic as well. Finally, he ties it his research on humanity throughout time and space (but especially more "primitive" peoples, seemingly far removed from us) to the contemporary situation in helping us to understand our place today.

Eliade's work is genuinely insightful and applicable, and this seems to me because he is interested in what really matters in the topic. I myself get caught up too much in terms of style and presentation, which I think gives me part of my problem; perhaps good writing, scholarship, and living comes from simply devoting oneself to the object of one's study and being less concerned with what to do with it afterward.

Incorporeal Individuals?

2009-08-10T17:04:00.002-05:00

What would it mean for incorporeal entities to be distinct?

For material entities, I can point to such and such in one place, and to another something in another place. So, they must be somehow distinct, even if we can also point to continuity.

Mathematical objects appear to be the best place to look. We distinguish mathematicals by strict definitions; every single such object has a rigorous logical definition which completely determines it, except for the basic objects and axiomata of a given mathematical system. The non-foundational objects are completely determined by their relations to the foundational objects, however; they are separate in a sense, but each one already contains all of the others as well. As soon as you have 2, you have 3, 4, 5, and so on, and the basic theorems of a system already entail everything we could ever prove from them. And the foundational elements again arise from our practical considerations in the material world.

So, mathematical elements are not terribly individuated; in fact, it seems that the main individuation requires matter, and what is non-material is what lacks proper individuation; 2, 3, and so on, are individuals only insofar as we get the concepts of 1 and addition from experience, but insofar as they are simply logical entities, they are not really distinct (as in, it would be logically impossible to have 2 and not 3; same with any two theorems of any mathematical system).

Next would seem to be philosophical psychology: we experience ourselves as individuals, and for many, as non-reducible to bodies. But would we have this individuation without our specific material circumstances? Do we even form unique individuals insofar as we are incorporeal, or is it precisely insofar as we disconnect ourselves from the material world that we become more similar? Aren't our thoughts, our ideas and ideals, our ways of life, things which unite us with others sharing the same?

Formal distinctions, then; maybe there are simply different kinds of incorporeal entities. But this is an unsatisfying reply; I'm asking for what it would mean for incorporeal entities to be distinct, and I am being told that they simply are. But what does that mean? Again, in all physical circumstances, I can point to different spatio-temporal coordinates. In math, I can point to different definitions. I can't just read off my ideas of individuation from these fields and apply them elsewhere; the individuation in those cases in not something separate from how the individuation occurs. Psychology is a bit fuzzy already, and may not be anything distinct from material conditions, but it may be the only way in which we could understand such entities. But even there, it seems that there is less individuation the farther we go from the material.

So, if there were multiple, purely spiritual entities, would it be possible to consider them as purely separate individuals? And a side question: would the idea of a spiritual entity be anything other than that entity? Consider the Pythagorean Theorem: is the thought of the theorem anything other than the theorem, or the theorem itself? And if the latter, how does this relate to the problem of individuation?

Of Arms and the Squirrel I Sing

2009-08-08T00:26:00.003-05:00

Because little guys can be irresponsible, lazy, saga-worthy megalomaniacs too.

This is a rough draft; I'll be coming back to it later, but I figured that it would look better in legible type than in illegible handwriting.

Softly scampering, swiftly fleeing
He trembles and turns toward a nearby
Branch, a bough under bushy leaves
The fear unfounded, but fretting continues
This haunted hiding, the whole of a squirrel-life.
But even so, all along he eagerly dreams
Looking and longing for larger things
Dreams of the dread from dominion, the power
And might to maniacally make the world
In rodent-image; but roused from reverie, he dodges
A talon tipped to tear away such visions.
"You're late, you lazy lump.  Again,
And I will eat you entire.  Messengers
Are quick to come by, even if care is not.
Now, the news..." the nettles of boredom
Drone on, drilling deeply into Ratatosk
Who slumps silently and stupidly, while the eagle,
Heedless, hefts and hauls the noise-stones
Of officious errands and urgent proclamations
From his quarry of cares, cleared now of messages;
The checked-off cheers to his chum Nidhogg
Would hopefully be heard, if the herald could focus
And not gallop again after the gain of an acorn.
Impressing his displeasure, he pounces on the squirrel
Who, inattentive, now terrified, in talons is held
The raptor reaches down to relay, with a glare,
"Fail me and find yourself food."  That is all;
The lilliputian, loosed, leaves without waiting.

At a distance down, the drone grumbles
Of the respect rightfully required by those
Serving so very sedulously; besides
Those eagerly-sought acorns he had ambled after
Would make the mightiest messenger swoon,
And he trespassed his toils only twice (or thrice).
Following these fantasias, freezing in his steps,
Ratatosk reined his unruly mind
And mucked for marks upon this mire for signs
Pointing to the pressing pronouncements he would
Forget only as fatal follies.  A void;
And blankly, blearily, he began to wake,
A deathly dawn to his day.  He trembled,
And bashed his blundering brains on bark.
He has a headache, but hardly remembers
A single story for the serpent below.
With what wily wit and wisdom could he
Invent to veer his vessel of fate
Toward happier hopes?  He has a glimmer,
But the light lasts no longer than a breath.
A muttered oath, and more mumblings as down
The tree he traveled.  The tour of the sun
Around and round, and round again
Returns to the top of the tree; and finally,
The squirrel starts his steep descent
Into cold caverns with crumbling footholds,
Sounds of screams from centuries past;
An abyss whose black, bare maw
Would inhale hordes of heroes at a breath,
While rattling reptiles, writhing, drip
Their virulent venom on vicious wretches.

But the furred one finds no fear to be worse
Then the one which works his weary soul.
Not enough, three nightfalls, but Nidhogg is here,
With open eyes and evil stares
And typical reptilian tolerance.  Ratatosk
Feels his furry flesh go numb.  But now,
The crafty creature calls his thought
To muster and mass, to measure up for this stand.
Ratatosk the rodent-ruler cannot perish;
Else sung sagas of scintillating victory
Would belong to lesser lives.  He straightens,
Collects himself, coughs and clears his throat,
The serpent staring solidly, icily,
His teeth torturing the tree not far
From where the wily one stands.
"'There was an old serpent in Helsheim,
Whose scales are covered in fell slime,
He's worse than I, Eagle,
That slithering seagull,'
That's all that I have from my climb."

Such puerile, pusillanimous provocations
Would be suspect to studious students like us,
But maybe messengers were more believed
Before this first failure of trust;
Perhaps tearing at tree-roots brings toothaches, giving
The serpent a sharp, saw-toothed temper.
But the damage is done; the dragon hisses back
His own ode of anger.  The squirrel
Relishes his role and retells to the eagle
How ungratefully the gnarled great worm
Had seemed.  The squirrel had shared his message,
But the intemperate terror had taken the words
And spat them aside, to send back
Nothing but nettles to nail the bird's pride.

The messenger now makes up his messages, however
He pleases, playing in palaces of poetry.
The former friends feud, and never
Stop to seek a second opinion.
Ratatosk's ramblings of a rodent-run world
Fill his furry flippant head,
Now patient to pass as a pensive servant
Till the rule after Ragnarok arises....

Moving Day

2009-08-07T22:09:00.002-05:00

My load is irons
My sweat is rain
The summer air, a mass of chains
For all the change that it would make
I shift my burden with a grunt
And envy Sisyphus his ease of life
But hark, what light in yonder floorspace breaks?
The box is almost down; I am reborn in paradise
When suddenly the fateful, fatal call comes:
"We want it over here."
What eternity compares to these five steps?

The Importance of Argument

2009-08-03T18:43:00.003-05:00

A friend remarked to me the other day that philosophers are more concerned about arguments than about the conclusions of those arguments. This, further, must appear nuts to the average person. I remember even talking to a fellow academic, a theology student no less, who could not understand why I insisted on talking about Hume's arguments against causality rather than simply moving on from his position. So, why is argument important?

For one thing, conclusions are always suspect. It's certainly nice to align oneself with a position for a bit; I know that I enjoy the stable self-image that arises from calling myself now a Platonist, now an Idealist. But these conclusions are always changeable; if they were not at least in principle, then we would not be doing philosophy.

Understanding doesn't come from holding certain propositions about the world. It comes from seeing how these propositions are situated, and that is the point of argument. An argument that simply hammers a statement into the opponents head is useless philosophically, though occasionally useful when one just wants the perceived idiots to go away (if nothing else, the obnoxiousness should be effective). Arguments that show in tight, well-understood steps why something would be true show the context under which it exists.

This, in turn, can be more easily adapted to other contexts. A proposition is either true or false, and if false, then it is simply wrong. The web of beliefs supporting it, however, still exist as that web, and they all essentially fit together, and this way of fitting may be similar to other situations. For example, I may have an argument that we have souls, which are simple and so incorruptible. Maybe the conclusion is false. However, as long as the argument is sound, I know what a soul of this sort would be like if it were to exist. This, further, may be applicable to other incorporeal objects, such as numbers or God.

Unsound arguments gain applicability while losing plausibility. Maybe the concept of a conscious, immaterial soul doesn't include simplicity, for example; alternatively, one can look to the sciences, which do not proceed based on deduction. Such arguments do not compel belief in the same way, but allow for greater latitude in analogizing.

If nothing else, a sound argument tells me that the given bunch of properties are a package deal; I have to take them all or leave them all. I therefore learn much more from knowing that a block of ten logically connected propositions are false, than that a single conclusion is so. Similarly, if I accept the conclusion, I now also see a glimpse of a more complete context into which it fits; even if I can't go back and prove the premises from the conclusion, I now have possibilities for further explanation.

Finally, it seems to me that those who want merely the conclusions are really only interested in using the propositions. This seems to me to put them in the position of wanting truth (otherwise why be concerning with firm beliefs in oneself?), but also despising it (since how else would one not care about the true context of a true statement?). As long as one decides to pursue understanding of statements, it seems best to really do so and not fake the process.

The Epistemic Value of Tradition

2009-07-25T11:17:00.004-05:00

As shocking as it may be, I do not consider tradition to be a valid source of knowledge. In addition, I find that apologists are (often) putting their tradition ahead of the truth. If one already has in mind what one wants to find, and one finds it, where is the truth-seeking? I seek truth because I do not have it; I love wisdom because I lack it. If reason cannot challenge the very core of my being, then of what use is it? It would be deceitful, giving the illusion of a bulwark against unbelief while only justifying me in my unjustified opinions.

But, at the same time, we are human. We are actually embedded in contexts, and we actually pursue our pursuits because of our interests. We rejoice when we find what we wanted, and this seems good to us. Moreover, what would we have without traditions? What could we possibly seek? Is it not gratifying to work through the thought of some great thinker, following in their footsteps? How else would we learn?

In order to separate these elements of tradition, I will look at it as (1) the efficient cause of our knowledge, and (2) as the formal and material cause. Keeping with the Aristotelian-esque analysis, I will close on (3) tradition as final cause, on our reformulation of tradition for others. By tradition I mean any sort of knowledge that is handed down between people, purely with respect to its character as testimony.

Tradition as the efficient cause of our knowledge is what I have problems with. By this, I mean the way in which we accept what traditions teach simply with respect to them being traditions, and so in a way the tradition is an external cause of our knowledge. This is not just grand traditions, like Catholicism, but the various things that we pick up from our parents or pastors. But insofar as it is simply tradition, it does not justify our knowledge. People hand down knowledge all the time in many contradictory ways, and they can't all be right. The means of knowledge is therefore unreliable. One could point out the trustworthiness of particular individuals, or particular methods but then one is seeking other justification than the fact that something has been handed down. In addition, if these personal characteristics or methods are widespread and yet lead to contradictory results, then they too are suspect.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that, in any chain of transmission, there have likely been not-so-great transmitters. Even with insightful, honest people, a game of telephone can ensue; add in a couple idiots and scoundrels, and the damage would be irreparable. Aquinas may have been a great thinker, but his transmission of Christianity is only as good as what has been given them by others. As a philosopher, then, Aquinas is worthwhile; as an apologist, however, he is limited by his traditional prejudices (which is to say, almost worthless for truth, though useful in the game of power between ideologies).

However, tradition as the material and formal cause of our knowledge is indispensable. By, I mean the more internal effect tradition has on our knowledge, as providing content and structure without regard to our acceptance of its truth. We cannot have answers without questions, and we must learn from others before we ourselves approach the truly difficult and worthwhile issues. We must learn from others what the worthwhile issues actually are. Even if the judgment of others is less than perfect on these matters, it still gives us a starting point. Modern science may be far superior to that of the Renaissance, let alone thinkers like Grosseteste, Philoponous, and Aristotle, but all of these thinkers found something worthwhile in their own explorations. Without their ruminations on the nature of things like matter and motion, there would be no contemporary science, even if they had to be superseded.

It is for this reason that I can approach Christian thinkers even after leaving the faith, or those from Hindu and Muslim traditions whose faith I never held. These are good thinkers, if considered as thinkers and not as merely bearers of the tradition. One can learn from Aquinas, from Scotus, from Avicenna and Al-Farabi and Shankara, from the way in which they approached life within their own contexts. One need not look to them for their testimony to their own traditions to use what they have provided, and one will be richer for any study of these thinkers.

Finally, there is the matter of what we do with our own understanding. We will pass it on to others, whether we like it or not. We have no choice but to shape children, students, congregations, and friends by our own rumination on life. On the one hand, this is a tremendous good. We can provide the conditions for other people to think about the world, with which to furnish their own narratives if they choose. Surely this is better than not providing for the thought-life of others. At the same time, we are not perfect transmitters either, and will most likely introduce problems and falsehoods to others, perhaps even life-destroying ones.

What is to be done, then? To the extent that others have a critical spirit (perhaps by our own influence), they may leave behind the good in the tradition because of the bad, and be impoverished. They in turn will impoverish others. To the extent that others are naively accepting, they may take in the bad along with the good, and in turn propagate these deforming errors. The "internal" and "external" causes of our understanding are not, in the end, separable, or perhaps even distinct. It seems to me that there is no solution to this problem, but merely a recognition that we must walk on this balance beam, sometimes trembling, sometimes calm, and acknowledge that we can do nothing other than be imperfect.

Scholarly Standards

2009-07-24T19:24:00.003-05:00

Over this last year, I remember reading a collections of essays on Phenomenology and Islamic Philosophy. I leafed through one, and noted how it was only ten pages long and had only one or two footnotes. I thought, What passes for competent scholarship with these countries? At which point, I realized how modern American/European standards of scholarship have ingrained themselves in my brain with a fine-pointed laser.

From this, I started thinking about why we do what we do as scholars, and about the merits of the different positions. Reading this short, almost conversational article introduced me to an area of thought which I had not thought about before - Islamic Confucianism (which I still have not read up on, despite having been a major summer project). I didn't have to wade through swampy prose. My eyes were liberated from their volley between citations and body. I could enjoy reading it, in a similar way to how I could enjoy a relaxed intellectual conversation, and genuinely say that I had learned something new. And it most likely would never have been published in peer-reviewed, Euro-American journal.

There have been times where I have thought, wouldn't it be grand to be an Aristotle scholar? a Plato Scholar? Kant? maybe even Nietzsche, when I want to liven things up? But there is a drawback to studying a thinker: one must learn the secondary literature. And famous thinkers have collected a lot. It has been the rare secondary article, though, from which I have earned my knowledge in congruence with the weight of perspiration applied. I would rather be the bumbling historian who dabbles in Plato. Then I can have the sympathy of real scholars, who may tolerate my hobby and praise my toddling steps in the right direction, while I can still enjoy the thinker himself.

At the same time, I've seen other articles which have confirmed me in my standards of detail-oriented, thoroughly researched scholarship. Some articles in the book were simply awful. Assertions were so baldly stated and poorly formed that I found little to cart off of philosophical interest.

In another book, I read a comparison between Aristotle and Zhuang Zi; it promised to be an exciting paper topic for someone interested in comparative philosophy. The conclusion of the essay was, I believe, that Zhuang Zi is a much better philosopher because he realizes that an ox can be considered both as living being and as meat for a butcher, while Aristotle is locked into only one way of understanding. No discussion of the nature of form; no mention of teleology; no recognition of the difference between artifacts and natural objects (the ox was treated in exactly the same way as an axe). The author also said that an ox corpse is potentially an ox for Aristotle. I think that a person should have to at least read some of the thinker before commenting.

Sometimes, details matter. Sometimes, conversation matters.

Skepticism

2009-07-20T10:12:00.006-05:00

I have heard some people, theologians in particular, criticize Enlightenment standards of knowledge. The argument goes like this: "Descartes et al. told us to doubt everything. But why should we not doubt this injunction in the first place?" Therefore, it seems, we should not have to doubt anything and can sit nice and safe in our communities. I think that this argument is rather sophistic, but it is widespread enough to be worth responding to.

Why do I go so far as to say that it is sophistic? Because, at least on one level, I do not think that it really interacts with what it means to doubt. If I can doubt a fact, that fact is therefore doubtable. Possibility of doubt already entails doubt; it is not an additional step. Certainty requires certainty, and nothing short of it. So, if there is any way in which doubt can enter, it has entered.

But at this point, one will say, "But we don't need certainty; we get by on probabilities most of the time." But, as I have said in an earlier post, we have no idea about what is probable except in a mathematical or pragmatic fashion. Mathematical probability entails certainty about those probabilities, and we are back to certainty. Pragmatic probability I think is closer to what is wanted.

But pragmatic probability doesn't lead to truth. It leads to efficiency. The fact that I can usually act as if sense data were accurate does not, in itself, mean that they are. It means that it may be the case that a deceit helps us to live better. Now, think that there are reasons for assuming that one can go from here to a certain reliability of the senses, but that requires that one argue for one's position and actually accept the skeptic's problem.

So, even on commonly accepted matters, we only have enough to go on to guarantee what works here and now. Hardly enough to establish anyone's metanarrative. In addition, people actually do disagree on quite important matters. Disagreeing testimony automatically brings the original testimony into question; possibility of doubt entails doubt. If one prefers, the amount and the quality of the disagreeing testimony is often high enough to be worth investigating, though it is always possible that the least source will overthrow everything you think you know. And you have absolutely no idea as to the probability of this happening

In summary, if one can doubt, this immediately leads to a rational doubt. If one is seeking for truth, this is always a problem. One can ignore the problem, and perhaps the problem of skepticism should be ignored. One just should not think that one has arrived at any truth by doing so.

Semantics

2009-07-20T10:12:00.004-05:00

As philosophers, we often get into quarrels over the meaning of words. Alternatively, we dismiss issues as being simply matters of "semantics". To what extant is either justified? I will argue that there is some worth in semantic disputes for both theoretical and practical reasons, although they ought to be curtailed in theoretical disputes.

Theoretically, different uses of different words can open up new aspects of reality. Take the term "truth" for example. Now, some want to hold that only propositions can be true; this seems to be a standard analytical approach. Others want to use it for other matters as well; Avicenna uses the term (or at least an Arabic equivalent in "h.aqq") to first designate that which exists absolutely, second for what exists permanently, and third for propositions and beliefs when the correspond to external reality. Other uses abound.

So, which one of these definitions should we accept? But I take this question to be wrong-headed. Which of these definitions does not get at some aspect of reality? If the term works as a tool to help us to understand reality, why not use it as such? Now I can use the term "truth" to explore propositions, now I can use to explore Avicenna's more complex notion, and in both cases there is something of philosophical value.

Then, is there any room for quibbling over the meanings of words? For theoretical matters, there is some, but not as much as one often sees. To differentiate one's use of "truth" from others is beneficial because it helps to sharpen one's one use of the term. Also, these uses of the term are not accidentally related; there is no pure equivocation in the uses of "truth", but they are analogical and they do exist in tension with each other. This will lead into a practical issue in a moment.

What does not seem to be warranted is the triumph of one use over all others. One should argue for one's own use and should clarify it; this is all well and good, and may need to foil to be effective. However, one never has the resources to say that all other uses are wrong, ill-advised, and so on, on a completely theoretical level. In addition, not even our technical terms are completely unambiguous; try to find a single definition of "substance" in Aristotle or in Western thought in general. Let's not pretend that our discourse or our subject matter is clearer than it is.

Now on to practical matters. As I said before, the meanings of a term are in tension with each other. There is enough similarity in uses of the term "truth" that we want to wrestle over the term. Different uses call to mind different narratives, different perspectives, different connotations. There are sometimes reasons for suggesting that we put forward one set of connotations rather than another. This seems to come up especially in political contexts of various sorts; the language we use shapes our views of others. Theoretically, I can accept that "he" is (or was) just the standard pronoun used in gender-ambiguous cases. However, that doesn't completely explain the situation. Given contemporary attention, the exclusive use of "he" sends other messages, while the use of "she" sends different ones.

We are actually trying to communicate here, and communication involves other people who will understand things in certain manners. We have material conditions under which we work, even as analyzers of thought, and we must pay attention to these as well. So, for purposes of communication and for actually trying to create a perspective, attaching meaning to words does matter.

Types of Mysteries

2009-07-15T23:30:00.004-05:00

When we talk about things which are mysterious, or beyond human ken, what do we mean? I would like to point out three different types of mystery, with reference to cause and effect. From this, I will argue that one of these types is essentially mysterious, one is accidentally mysterious, and one is BS.

With regards to cause and effect, the mystery can be either in the cause, in the effect, or in the link between them. I think that when people talk about mysteries simpliciter, or when Aristotle talks about the wonder that drives philosophy, the link between cause and effect is referred to. We see the effect and do not know the cause. There does not have to be anything intrinsic to the situation which makes it thus, and so this is an accidental mystery; we can learn later what the cause is for the effect.

The second type is what I see a lot amongst certain religious circles and artists. I do not indict these groups of people, but those are the circumstances under which I see this "fideistic mystery" as I will call it. This places the mystery in the effect. Either (a) the effect is such that it simply has no explanation, or it would be wrong to try to find one, or (b) there is supposed to be an effect, but I cannot for the life of me see it. Examples of the former are when one tells me that logic doesn't apply to discussions of God, or that it is wrong to investigate matters of faith. Examples of the latter are the supposed wisdom and righteousness of certain communities which are apparently there although inscrutable.

The third kind places mystery in the cause, and this is what I will call "rationalistic mystery". I think this category is ignored oftentimes, but it is important. Rational investigation does not need to dissolve every mystery; there can be mysteries which are supremely rational. I can logically talk about God, talk about God's attributes and creation of the world, and still say that God is essentially beyond knowing and perhaps even beyond speech. This is not something ad hoc as in the case of fideistic mystery. God is not mysterious just because; God is mysterious because an understanding of what God is entails certain restrictions of what can be known and said about God, either due to the (rationally ascertained) limits of our reasoning or the nature of God. I take Plotinus and Kant to be a good examples for this category. One may not agree with them or even like them, but they at least argue for their views and expect rational assessment.

Mysteries simpliciter then can be removed, and there seems to be nothing barring us from doing so if we wish. Rationalistic mysteries cannot be removed and so are the truest mysteries, most worthy of our consideration, but also of our continually probing and testing. Fideistic myteries by their nature cannot establish why we should not test them, and without such testing do not seem to be more than mysteries simpliciter with bouncers.