§7.1 the long sleepwalk through politics

2012-01-26T15:33:00.001-05:00

Newt Gingrich was caught in a lie. Kevin Drum steps back and observes:

There's an odd de facto standard for political lying: you can mislead people to almost any degree and it doesn't really count against you. It's he-said-she-said. But if there's a clear, smoking gun fact that you plainly misrepresent, no matter how trivial, then it's a scandal. By that standard, Newt ought to be in trouble. His dealings with ABC News may not be all that important in the cosmic scheme of things, but by DC standards this is a flat-out, premeditated fabrication and therefore a scandal. Gingrich told a bald-faced lied and he knew he was lying when he did it.

This all fits Newt's personality. He's always been more brazen than even your usual hardened politico because he knows that nobody really cares about fact checking. But he went over the line this time. I wonder if he'll pay a price?

There's something almost pleading between the lines here. Kevin Drum knows, I know, you know, your dad knows that no scandal is coming. Why? After all, scandals still happen, right? Newt did lie, didn't he? The lie came in the context of marital infidelity, and that subject that reliably causes scandal, right? Right? Is this thing on? Is anybody listening?

You could carefully check off all the reasons why this ought to concern people, but as you do it you'll imagine some lethargic person shrugging. There are people supporting Newt. There are people on the fence Newt is trying to persuade. There are people reporting on Newt Gingrich for the benefit all these other people. But none of these groups appear to have capacity for outrage in response to the act of lying itself or at least the motivation to draw attention to it.

only real on the first draft

2011-10-18T02:24:00.001-04:00

Music tells a story, the very synesthetic, wading-through-forests story I'm looking for, on the very first listen. After that it's hard to listen again as if for the first time. The more familiar you are with a song, the more you are listening to your own anticipation of it, with which you are overly familiar. Not a song but a duller memory synchronized to, and plastered over, the song.

Not x but y

2011-10-18T02:00:00.001-04:00

Thankfully, by now the criticism of "he said/she said" journalism is widespread, at least on the blogs. That is admittedly very different from it being acknowledged by reporters as a problem. It comes packaged with an argument on its behalf, namely that it's a way to strike balance between biased sides. A person can be persuaded to believe anything, even the worth of he said she/said reporting, if they think their belief transcends some other still more simplistic belief.

But I think another framing device needs to be criticized: the "It's not X that matters, but Y" said in a context where no criteria has been put forward for what should matter, and where ultimately both X and Y matter to some degree. Alternately phrased as "but the real problem is...."

While I'm here, I'll give one more. I guess I'll call it the transcending device. It's similar to he said/she said in that it pits opposing perspectives against each other and suggests they have equal validity. But it adds a third idea, which transcends the framing of the previous two ideas.

It is common now to want to "revolutionize" or "rethink" something, whether with digital devices or perspectives on politics or whatever. But sometimes pertinent thoughts are not original thoughts, and they suffer for being framed as if they are more original than they actually are. For an example, take a look at Brad Plumer's summary of the peak oil debate. On one side, he says, are the peak oilers, on the other are the skeptics. Then Plumer unveils "a clearer way of looking at matters," which defines peak oil as “the cost of incremental supply exceeds the price economies can pay without destroying growth.” But this is not a new idea. At best, it's compatible with what peak oilers already believe. At worst, it's a restatement of what peak-oilers already believe. So what was the framing for?

Knowing a little more about the mystery

2011-10-15T14:17:00.003-04:00

Below is a comment I left, in a comment thread to a characteristically wonderful blog post by Eric Macdonald. It's pretty long so I'm reproducing it here.

Eric, I feel that Daniel Dennet won the argument on sui generis characteristics of subjectivity (or lack thereof) back when he wrote Consciousness Explained. For me, the main takeaway was that philosophers mistake failures of imagination for insights into necessity, and pre-emptively draw up limits to explanatory power of science.

It may be hard to imagine that brain scans can tell me anything important about my own subjectivity. But when I learn that my brain hears, in the violin, the same expressiveness it hears in a human voice, I've learned something about myself and my relationship to the music. Of course Bach did not do brain scans on anyone before writing Air on A G String. But did he know a listener might hear the sorrowful voice of a friend, or a mother? I do not doubt this. His genius, as well as that of Michelangelo, consisted in seeing connections now reflected by our best understanding of biology.

Similarly, when I'm banging my head to the endlessly repetitive rhythms of my favorite metal band Isis, it widens my relationship with the music to know my cerebellum (which regulates motor function) is at that moment furiously active in rhythm processing, and that it has massive connections to the amygdala which is tasked with remembering emotional events. And that the cerebellum is the most primal reptilian part of our brain.

It may be hard to imagine how we might separate out legitimate experiences of religious euphoria (if any) from erotic fantasies. But, presumably we'd do science on this the same way we do science on other things: with attention to detail, with control subjects, with creativity. Attending to the specifics of subjective reports, and the details of brain activity, we can compare what the nuns feel to actual sexual fantasy, explicitly tested for in other subjects, or actual experiences of euphoria from atheists. Do you think we would not tease out differences? Or do you think that, having failed to spot differences, this in itself wouldn't be positively interesting as opposed to neutral? We could find that experiences explode into a dozen or a thousand different categories, or that they are the same.

On correlations: it appears to me the history of science with respect to any phenomenon, is a history of encroaching correlations that eventually infiltrate the phenomenon itself. When this happens, they are no longer correlations but simply a description of what the phenomenon is. Why should it be the case that we can map out the physiological basis for chills in response to music, as Zatorre and Blood have, but not the higher-order circuitry that preferentially responds to qualitative aspects of music to induce those chills? Where exactly is it, in the interpretation of art, that science isn't supposed to be able to get to?

We suffer from an impoverished language that rarely ever does justice to our euphorias, or religious experiences. This I think, together with the fact of our being drenched in 2000 years of human culture where the only attempts at language-making with respect to aesthetics and euphorias have come from people wholly ignorant of brains, has constrained our intuition and our ability to form hypotheses that might relate these experiences to the objective world (i.e. to brains). Even since the scientific revolution brain science has only just come of age, or maybe hasn't even.

The history of religious (and philosophical!) retreat in the face of scientific explanation has not finished, and atheists are wrong to concede the point with respect to aesthetics. It's not that we would wipe out art (a misguided fear that I think is not unlike religious fear of losing their humanity if they become atheists) but that we would come to greater understanding of ourselves. Feynman said it like this: "It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it."

Neuroscience denialism

2011-10-13T12:24:00.002-04:00

If you polled people on what anti-scientific belief they thought was most widespread, I think most would reply creationism, followed by global warming skepticism and vaccine skepticism. I hesitate to include astrology because I don't know to what extent horoscope readers believe what they're reading.

I think, however, that the most widespread anti-scientific belief is not any of the above. Instead, I think it might be what I can best describe as neuroscience denialism. It consists in denying that there is, or ever can be, a neuroscience that accounts for various subjective human experiences, such as pains, pleasures, musical experiences, loves, lusts. It denies that there can be a common neurological organization shared across people, across humanity that accounts for these things, in virtue of which we can come to objective knowledge about them.

It's motivated, I think, by people's fear that they lose power over their individuality if they concede such things to science. In my experience atheists are no less likely to make such claims than theists.

2011-10-03T13:06:00.001-04:00

I want people to be able to describe music the same way they might describe walking through the woods. Mist in their face, the light glinting off rocks, that rock!, the moving shadows.

Confidence Men starring Anita Dunn

2011-09-26T23:31:00.001-04:00

Democracy Now is a fine program. Some of its recent guests recent guests include Daniel Ellsburg, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ron Suskind, Troy Davis' sister, Larry Cox executive director of Amnesty International, Benjamin Jealous president of NAACP, and Noam Chomsky. That roster of guests compares favorably against any morning news program.

But sometimes I'm embarassed for Amy Goodman. Like here, when she interviews the aforementioned Ron Suskind about his book Confidence Men.

AMY GOODMAN: And former White House communications director, Anita Dunn, has flat-out denied Ron Suskind’s claim that she said the White House is a "hostile workplace to women." Speaking to the Washington Post Friday, Dunn said she had point-blank told Suskind that the White House was not a hostile environment.

Ron Suskind, your response? And talk about why you’re saying that.

RON SUSKIND: Yeah, well, Anita Dunn, of course, talked to me extensively about especially the gender issues in both the campaign and in the White House. Her quotes are in the book. Again, the women’s issue is not central, I don’t think, to the flow of the book. It’s important.

AMY GOODMAN: It may not be central to you, but to many it is.

RON SUSKIND: To many people, it is white-hot stuff...

With this interjection, Amy Goodman imagines herself to be standing up for the importance of gender equality. But that has nothing to do with what Suskind is saying, who was about to put the quote in context. If taken literally, Goodman is advising him that the "central" flow of his own book is, at least in part, the Anit Dunn comment.

That's a pretty basic divergence from the simple issue of what Suskind's book is about, and it didn't need to turn into a gender-equality non-sequitur.

2011-09-13T23:05:00.001-04:00

heavily armed troops stormed aboard, handcuffed the three of them, and took them off for extensive questioning. After which they were eventually released with "no charges filed."

And the troops surely just shrugged it off. But there's some untallied psychological abuse here that no one cares about. It is weak to plead practicality. Recognize it as a problem in need of solving.

He-Who-Easily-Can-Curve-Himself-Against-The-Harp

2011-09-13T13:47:00.001-04:00

Lots of enlightening interpretations of Joanna Newsom's Colleen at SongMeanings. And also, this:

Its simply a fairy tale.

Yes, it has many layers of meanings that will honestly never be agreed upon. But that is what songs and fairy tales thrive on, each person's interpretation.

So my solution is to not overanalyze and try to pick apart this masterpiece, instead let it wash over you as a lullaby of some sorts.

This is the kind of passiveness I think destroys the soul of the song.

2011-05-19T13:28:00.001-04:00

Ezra Klein had a contest to come up with alternatives to "strong" and "weak" as adjectives to describe high and low value dollars. He likes "import" and "export" dollars. I like "fat" dollar and "thin" dollar.

But observe the medium amount of human attention that had to swirl about the issue; that numerous people had to have to even think explicitly about it and think that there should be different adjectives in use and think up particular adjectives. So where did the original "strong" and "weak" adjectives come from? Was there any less a conscious effort to bring them into use?

2011-05-19T10:57:00.001-04:00

Prison privatization ended up costing more, not less. What historical examples exist of an operation moves from privatized to government run or vice-verse, and what are their track records?

questions

2011-05-09T08:59:00.001-04:00

Inspired by reading this post from Climate Progress.

Q: What disagreements would exist between Ronald Reagan and the current Republican party?

Today's questions

2011-05-07T10:42:00.001-04:00

Q: Which Republicans currently in office, or high-profile Republicans formerly in office, have quotations of them supporting Cap & Trade?

Q: Which Republicans currently in office, or high-profile Republicans formerly in office, have quotations of them supporting an individual mandate?

Questions 5-6-11

2011-05-06T15:21:00.001-04:00

Currently reading Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, and one curious thing is the well-reputed scientists sewing misinformation about the science of global warming, and earlier about tobacco, was that at least a pair of them had backgrounds researching the atom bomb:

[...] Frederick Seitz and S. (Siegfried) Fred Singer. Seitz was a solid-state physicist who had risen to prominence during World War II, when he helped to build the atomic bomb; later he became president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Singer was a physicist-in fact, the proverbial rocket scientist-who became a leading figure in the development of Earth observation satellites, serving as the first director of the National Weather Satellite Service and later as chief scientist at the Department of Transportation in the Reagan administration. Both were extremely hawkish, having believed passionately in the gravity of the Soviet threat and the need to defend the United States from it with high-tech weaponry.

Was the whole culture of atom bomb research as ideological as Seitz was? And was the whole of Cold War era weapons research done by scientists of a similar ideological nature to Fred Singer?

And what about present-day physicists doing weapons research?

Civil Rights for sex offenders, pt 2

2011-02-04T09:54:00.006-05:00

From reddit, this is a case where the person wasn't even a sex offender at all. But this didn't stop them from having their life destroyed by the accusation.

I am 32.

When I was 25 I was accused by the daughter of a family friend, who was 14 at the time, of sexual assault. She was profoundly disturbed (had been in and out of mental health facilities for years) and made up a story in which I came over to her house while her parents were out, got her drunk and high and raped her repeatedly. She told her parents this story and her mother believed her, her father had his doubts.

I was arrested and the trial came down to her word versus mine. My "alibi" was viewed as suspect (I was at home and lived alone at the time). The DA was running for mayor at the time and wanted to appear "tough on crime." I was offered a deal where I would serve no time but I refused, so they went for jail time.

I served 3 years in protective custody. For 2 years I was on the sex offender registry. Last year the girl, now in her 20's, confessed to making up the whole story.

I sued her and her family and received a six-figure settlement. I cannot sue the cops or DA under state law (unless I can prove collusion).

My life was destroyed. I lost my job, my career (I'm a teacher) my fiance, my family abandoned me. I live in another state, changed my name and literally speak to no one I knew in the first 30 years of my life.

The confidence that the mother, the DA must have mustered as they went about their work- filing documents and making arguments to the court, all with the tragically mistaken certainty that someone needs to be thrown in jail. This life-destroying falsehood was just casually wandering about in a DA's mind, in the mothers mind. And I highly doubt that they didn't have the opportunity to doubt themselves, or that the (ultimately correct) possibility of their being wrong was never presented.

And I bet, knowing better, they simply move on, and no apology is ever offered that begins to equal the injustice. So much shrugging, so much "hey man that's life." It would be funny if, with this hindsight, the DA could go back to the jury and argue to convict him on the grounds of "hey man that's life." And also give him a six figure compensation.

A pathetic blog post

2011-01-16T17:28:00.005-05:00

From the wikipedia article on Synecdoche, New York:

In his review of the movie in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert said, "I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film."[24] In 2009 Ebert wrote that the movie was the best of the decade.[25] Manohla Dargis of the New York Times said, "To say that [it] is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now ...

It's disturbing to me that the critic can so easily give away the issue, as if it should be taken as obvious that calling a film "closest to her heart" is offering something pathetic. And its said as if to be obvious and widely understood. And perhaps it is. But then somehow there are others, such as those capable of creating the movie.

Somehow I doubt that Dargis thinks her own reaction involves something pathetic, even if only in contrast to the film. I think self-deprecating concessions like these are made only to be passed over as a set-up for praising other things. So it may be merely a way of talking. But it is insidiously self-withering.

Civil Rights for Sex Offenders

2011-01-16T13:18:00.003-05:00

From a thread on reddit, comes the story of a sex offender. It's possible that this description of the mans own events omits important information, in which case there may be less of an injustice here.

Before I get into it, I'll start off by saying I am NOT:

1. A rapist
2. A child molester
3. Pedophile
4. child porn viewer
5. general scumbag

I am however a dipshit who drank waaaaaay too much in his early 20's. I'm probably the only one who ever has by my guess. Anywho, I met a a 19yo girl through an ex-girlfriend, and after the ex and I broke up the other girl admitted she had a thing for me, and I was like fuck yeah. So we hung out, and we made out, and we did some frisky hands on each other.

Turned out she lied to me about being 19. She was 15. So I was like GTFO. After that she began telling my ex that we had made out. My ex convinced her to go to the police and tell them I had raped her. I was arrested, jailed, etc.

Luckily, I had instant messenger logs from this era proving it was complete bullshit. So my lawyer convinced the judge to force the girl to hand over her PC, where they found the logs of my ex telling her what to say. Which got all that stuff dropped in a sneeze length.

Problem was there were messages where this girl had told my ex about us making out, and how i lifted her skirt to squeeze her butt. The district attorney used this to create a new charge and hung me out to dry.

In the end, that butt squeeze cost me everything. I lost my home, my job, my car, everything I owned, all my family photos from 4 generations, my pets, and 2 years of my life in prison. Because it was an "under the clothing touch on a private area."

So now, just like Uncle Tickle & his magic ice cream van down the street I am forced to register as a sex offender FOR LIFE. (My state doesnt have a level system, nor any time limits to gain relief from registration for smaller sex crimes) I live in a crappy apartment. I can only find shitty jobs because of my criminal record, (Most times I get fired for making "other employees uncomfortable") I appear on the pervert website. Neighbors call their kids inside when I walk to the store. One neighbor called the police on me, claiming I was staring out the window at his wife. I cant live within 2000ft of a school or a park. And I kid you not there's a park in my town that's literally nothing more then the center divide of a road with a bench and a tree. I've been attacked. Harassed. Threatened.

All of this and more. And my only conviction is for squeezing the butt of a girl who lied about her age. If this was a rage comic "forever alone" would be perfect

I think what we fight for and call by the name "civil rights" applies to a greater variety of people than we even now imagine, including categories we have not yet imagined for people who really do suffer unjust types of ostracization. To be non-cryptic about it, people's lives are destroyed by such simple things as having speech impediments, being disabled in some way, or even just having certain illnesses. And yes, it's quite possible that sex offenders are among those who suffer from the forces of unjust social ostracism. There is much in the way of cultural tolerance that needs to be done that we haven't even begun to think about.

I still think we suffer far too many blind spots when it comes to, say, women's rights, so I do not advocate any change in priorities, whatever they currently are. But these things don't have to be mutually exclusive.

eff why eye

2011-01-06T21:38:00.000-05:00

I substantially reworked my Notes on The Moral Landscape post.

Keynesian Tax Cuts

2011-01-05T22:39:00.009-05:00

Here's a neat chart from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

Even if a Republican doesn't want to argue that tax cuts pay for themselves, they still have the option of arguing that tax cuts nevertheless stimulate economic activity. That's true, and it is, I think, something Republican politicians believe and explicitly argued in the debate over extending the Bush-era middle class tax cuts.

But if you are willing to incur deficits to stimulate the economy via tax cuts, that means you are willing to incur deficits to stimulate the economy. And you might as well incur deficits to stimulate the economy in the most effective way possible, right?

If not, we are talking tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts.

2011-01-03T00:49:00.001-05:00

remember that I felt normal and bored even then, and it was outside of me, to me that it was addressed. this is how to remember it.

some cryptic words

2011-01-01T23:17:00.003-05:00

I'm reading a popular book that writes in a style I don't like. But I don't think what it says is untrue even if frivolously presented. So I want to respond to pieces of it in a way that, I hope, disentangles it from its new age bent. What I write may seem trivial but often things seem that way when you are simplifying or clarifying. Even if a point sounds trivial, it is not insignificant, or without need of emphasis.

On coincidence. To "notice" coincidence can mean to have cues back into an internal dialog. to inflect items with emotional significance and keep checking in. and more than that, to have particular items that fit into a story you tell yourself to make sense of things.

Really, what is left?

2010-12-31T00:23:00.003-05:00

I hope Brian doesn't mind my quoting his outstanding comment here, originally left over at Russell Blackford's blog.

Once we realize a few things, I wonder how much else discussed here will be important. Those things include:

a) that we can describe our desires as properties of physical brain states and others' desires as properties of physical brain states,

b) that any of a set of activities would fulfill those desires,

c) that any of another set of activities would change those desires to those corresponding to other brain states, i.e. there are fact about how people will respond to stimuli. There are facts about which arguments people will and will not find persuasive at different times and under different pressures.

d) people actually mean things when they talk and this generates meaningless fake problems when their meaning does not correspond to their words (broccoli questions go here),

e) people think they think things that they do not think,

f) the moral systems people believe in and think they believe in form an incredibly complex conglomerate into which all beings' actions fit morally,

g) people may believe in square circles or a certain definition of "free will", "maximizing utility", or "morality" but that does not mean they can exist without internal contradiciton,

If someone asks me "Why should I be moral?" I can (in theory) tell them many true things. I can tell them if they are using the word "moral" to represent a coherent concept. I can tell them what they care about and why, as well as what it would take for them to care about different things. I can tell them which of those arguments that would convince them are invalid and/or untrue and which arguments they reject that are valid and true. I can tell them the relationship between their biology, what they care about, what they think they care about, and what it would take to change their desires.

In the midst of all this I don't feel poor for not being able to tell someone "why" they should do something. If I know how to make Biff my slavish handyman, and that certain people can't be convinced to be harmless due to their religious upbringing, and how to change the minds of others, and what mix of desires in the population results in honor killings and that all but the tribal and addled abhor that practice for good reasons, etc. please tell me what, if anything, I am missing out on by not being able to convert an "is" to an "ought".

I don't know what is left for "ought" to be about that is actually meaningful. And perhaps an error theorist like Russell Blackford would say "that's just the point!" And maybe so. But he also says this unanswerable, unfillable "ought" is the very thing laypeople address themselves to in their everyday moral discourse. I'm not convinced this is true.

2010-12-30T23:33:00.003-05:00

If you want to uncover absolute insanity, ask a group of people whether they would want to live forever in perfect health. At least one of them will say they do not want to do it. The rationalizations will be inexplicable, completely out of left field, and always confidently given as if the forces of the universe conspired to make their ridiculous explanation inevitable. It will have to be a project of this little blog of mine to aggregate all the different responses I have heard.

Another angle, taken by many internet atheists, is to say "how can I be afraid of death? Death isn't anything so it doesn't make sense that I should be afraid of it." It has the seductive elegance of shifting to a newer, high minded premise that happily dissolves the problem by trading in the whole framing for a different one.

If your best friend could be vanished from existence Marty Mcfly style, and your memory wiped of any recollection of the friend so would never experience any emotional suffering at the loss, would you say you lost nothing?

No one ever wants to admit that it is them, personally, then and there, that is succumbing to an emotional need to rationalize away grief. Society at large, a person in the abstract, or me so long as I'm merely equally guilty with others. For most of us death really is tragic. It's a problem to be solved.

2010-12-18T14:31:00.002-05:00

Nice second wave of political victories for Obama.

First wave: S-CHIP, Health Care, Student Loans, Stimulus bill with thousands of things in it such as high-speed rail and his tax cuts, Financial Regulation, Iraq withdrawal, saving GM. Ezra Klein and others would add TARP but I'm not sure TARP necessarily "worked."

Second wave: DADT Repeal, DREAM Act (hopefully, please!!), START treaty (hopefully), tax cut compromise (a mixed bag yes, but said to have a stimulative effect)

And imagine if there wasn't a mother fucking filibuster. We could have had an energy & climate bill and a comprehensive immigration bill rather than the less ambitious one we have. I think energy & climate was nearly as important as health care.

And the DREAM act would not have "failed" 55-41 today. The mother fucking filibuster.

And that if we passed an energy & climate bill instead that would have been a tremendous achievement on the level of health care.

If he wasn't absolute shit on civil liberties...

The most infuriating thing is there is so much good Obama could do on civil liberties without having to be held up by the Senate.

My notes The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

2010-12-17T20:31:00.048-05:00

Critics of Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape wrongly expect that Harris will give a knock-down argument to convert everyone into moral realists, and then express disappointment when he fails to give one. But Harris openly concedes he is not going to give one:

Let me simply concede that if you don't see a distinction between these two lives that is worth valuing (premise 1 above), there may be nothing I can say that will attract you to my view of the moral landscape. Likewise, if you admit that these lives are different, and that one is surely better than the other, but you believe these differences have no lawful relationship to human behavior, societal conditions, or states of the brain (premise 2), then you will also fail to see the point of my argument.

Of course the problems of why we care and why we ought to, and what it is we are caring about are very real. But much more consensus exists than we would like to admit. We are, after all, going to put down Harris' book, and go on getting oil changes and cancer screenings and looking both ways before crossing the street -- behaving in a way that communicates a belief in the value of human life (and perhaps other lives as well). Most of us end up ultimately unconvinced by the very philosophical points we bring against Harris. It is, I think, this inner conviction Harris is appealing to. Once we take our moral behavior seriously, as if it pertained to real things in the world, it has all sort of implications: implications for how and whether we should adjudicate over competing claims of cultures, for one. So he asks:

Must we really argue that beneficence, trust, creativity, etc., enjoyed in the context of a prosperous civil society are better than the horrors of civil war endured in a steaming jungle filled with aggressive insects carrying dangerous pathogens?

And must we? In this I see echoes of Frederick Douglass' Fourth of July speech, which is, I think one of the greatest assertions of human value ever made by an American. Douglas reacts to those who expect him to debate the wrongness of slavery:

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

And what would they imply? Whose sense of human dignity could be so hedged and contingent that they could speak of it relatively, and positively, and negatively without suffering trivialization? It is embedded in facts of the lived life. We climb over these facts and through them before any discussion starts.

You already know what it is to you!

2010-12-07T12:27:00.018-05:00

Russell Blackford frequently defends his belief in error theory with something like a Moorean open question argument. You can always cast doubt on any moral theory by saying "so what's it to me?"

Whenever this comes up, I've been saying that a True Moral Theory would not prevent the asker from repeating their question. Instead it would show the repetition of the question to be absurd after a certain depth of explanation.

If the Mafia is trying to assassinate Louis Griffin, she can explain to Peter why he should care. But, Peter can always say "so what's it to me?" Or as Russell says,

if he ultimately doesn't [care], then there's ultimately nothing more we can say.

And here we are supposed to believe that moral theory X loses its claim to objectivity.

But the "force" of morality comes not from its compelling people to see the light, or (as some of Ophelia Benson's commenters seem to believe) intervening as if it were a force of nature and preventing an immoral activity. The "force" comes from its universal and consistent application. People who choose not to act morally according to the theory cannot escape being labeled "morally wrong" by that theory. In that sense it is inescapable.

The meaning of "flashlight" doesn't break down because you choose not to build one. An instruction manual on how to build flashlights doesn't need to include a section persuading people that they should build flashlights. Perhaps it would if they want to sell their manual, but the section would have no bearing on whether the methods were correct.

Similarly I don't think an instruction book on morality needs to include section on why you "should" behave morally in order for it to be morality.

I do think, most of the time, people who might consider themselves amoral, or ambivalent or otherwise hard to pin down, are actually moral in a conventionally acceptable way after all and don't realize it because of fuzzy thinking. For them you actually can build a bridge into morality, because, with eloquence, you can reveal the pre-existing concern for moral issues they already have.

I don't mean to sidestep the problem. Just, I think most people who would count themselves as instances of the problem aren't, and most things people would point to as instances of the problem aren't either. And most of these, I think, contribute to our belief in the significance of the problem. If this point could be well made I think it would alleviate most concerns we have with what morality is.

For the true believers, the case is tougher. I don't see that any "should" can lead in to morality from without.

If any kind of bridge could be built, it would have to be from within the preexisting interests of the person who is still on the fence about whether they should be moral. But then, you are appealing to them on the basis of something other than morality. If someone truly doesn't share any of the interests embedded in the moral theory, you cannot persuade them without changing their interests. But it is wrongly expected of morality that it should concern itself with appealing to the self-interests of particular individuals.

The Flesh of Description

2010-05-18T17:35:00.007-04:00

From Consciousness Explained, Dennet gave this reply to the Mary's Room thought experiment. It is a response that I think answers the problem but doesn't say much about what gave rise to the problem. I'll try to do this, but first Dennet:

Indeed, we can all vividly imagine her, seeing a red rose for the first time and exclaiming, "So that's what red looks like!" And it may also occur to us that if the first colored things she is shown are, say, unlabeled wooden blocks, and she is told only that one of them is red and the other blue, she won't have the faintest idea which is which until she somehow learns which color words go with her newfound experiences.

That is how almost everyone imagines this thought experiment- not just the uninitiated, but the shrewdest, most battle-hardened philosophers (Tye, 1986; Lewis, 1988; Loar, 1990; Lycan, 1990; Nemirov, 1990; Harman, 1990; Block, 1990, van Gulick, 1990). Only Paul Churchland (1985, 1990) has offered any serious resistance to the image, so vividly conjured up by the thought experiment, of Mary's dramatic discovery. The image is wrong; if that is the way you imagine the case, you are simply not following directions! The reason no one follows directions is because what they ask you to imagine is so preposterously immense, you can't even try. The crucial premise is that "She has all the physical information." That is not readily imaginable, so no one bothers. They just imagine that she knows lots and lots- perhaps they imagine she knows everything that anyone knows today about the neurophysiology of color vision. But that's just a drop in the bucket, and it's not surprising that Mary would learn something if that were all she knew.

To bring out the illusion of imagination here, let me continue the story in a surprising- but legitimate - way:

And so, one day, Mary's captors decided it was time for her to see colors. As a trick, they prepared a bright blue banana to present as her first color experience ever. Mary took one look at it and said "Hey! You tried to trick me! Bananas are yellow, but this one is blue!" Her captors were dumfounded. How did she do it? "Simple," she replied. "You have to remember that I know everything -absolutely everything- that could ever be known about the physical causes and effects of color vision. So of course before you brought the banana in, I had already written down, in exquisite detail, exactly what physical impression a yellow object or a blue object (or a green object, etc.) would make on my nervous system. So I already know exactly what thoughts I would have (because, after all, the "mere disposition" to think about this or that is not one of your famous qualia, is it?). I was not in the slightest surprised by my experience of blue (what surprised me was that you would try such a second-rate trick on me). I realize it is hard for you to imagine that I could know so much about my reactive dispositions that the way blue affected me came as no surprise. Of course it's hard for you to imagine. It's hard for anyone to imagine the consequences of someone knowing absolutely everything physical about anything!"

Surely I've cheated, you think. I must be hiding some impossibility behind the veil of Mary's remarks. Can you prove it? My point is not that my way of telling the rest of the story proves that Mary doesn't learn anything, but that the usual way of imagining the story doesn't prove that she does. It doesn't prove anything; it simply pumps the intuition that she does ("it seems just obvious") by lulling you into imagining something other than what the premises require.

It is of course true that in any realistic, readily imaginable version of the story, Mary would come to learn something, but in any realistic, readily imaginable version she might know a lot, but she would not know everything physical. Simply imagining that Mary knows a lot, and leaving it at that, is not a good way to figure out the implications of her having "all the physical information"-any more than imagining she is filthy rich would be a good way to figure out the implications of the hypothesis that she owned everything. It may help us imagine the extent of the powers her knowledge gives her if we begin by enumerating a few of the things she obviously knows in advance. She knows black and white and shades of gray, and she knows the difference between the color of any object and such surface properties as glossiness versus matte, and she knows all about the difference between luminance boundaries and color boundaries (luminance boundaries are those that show up on black-and-white television, to put it roughly). And she knows precisely which effects -described in neurophysiological terms- each particular color will have on her nervous system. So the only task that remains is for her to figure out a way of identifying those neurophysiological effects "from the inside." You may find you can readily imagine her making a little progress on this- for instance, figuring out tricky ways in which she would be able to tell that some color, whatever it is, is not yellow, or not red. How? By noting some salient and specific reaction that her brain would have only for yellow or only for red. But if you allow her even a little entry into her color space in this way, you should conclude that she can leverage her way to complete advance knowledge, because she doesn't just know the salient reactions, she knows them all.

It's what Dennet calls 'Philosopher's Syndrome': mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity, a term that I love because I think it describes something that happens all the time. The real driver of the thought experiment is exactly that: "it seems just obvious" she would learn something new.

I suppose the real problem is why the third person isn't the first person. We want more than an equivalence, we want an identity. And so even if you tell me that this brain state, when instantiated in my brain (but not until then!), will indeed give me red, it doesn't solve the problem of why it wasn't already, as a third person description already red, prior to any requirement that it be instantiated. Why should there even be descriptions at all? If our senses stretched down into the world to match the depth of our knowledge and realized every true statement about physics as a corresponding qualitative "raw feel," we wouldn't need representations and there wouldn't be such a thing as a description that wasn't identical to the first person experience.

Representation involves the "overhead" cost of getting to something that isn't qualitative content by means of qualitative content. Black and white give themselves immediately but also, when we have enough power over them, give lines, a cube, or a map. I could instead have a cube-feeling or a map-feeling, in which case it might not be necessary to "represent" either.

If physicalism is true (as think it is) the real problem posed by red is that we call it intrinsic and thereby postulate an irreducible character and then take up the definitionally impossible task of trying to reduce it. What we mean by "intrinsic" here has to be mistaken. Red can be broken apart to some prior components, physical components which really are combined to make it, and this can be done without transgression of an ontological divide. Physicalist stuff really can combine in such a way as make green, and tone, and the snake's directional olfaction and any of innumerable senses we could yet evolve. To use a dangerous word that I generally don't use, the being of physical ingredients is imparted onto red.

That red and blue combine to 'make' purple is a metaphor to be extended in the other direction to describe the ingredients coming together to make red. Red can not be 'intrinsically' so in the philosophically significant sense, but rather produced by the coming together of prior ingredients, of which there is nothing but.

On Oughts and Is (Ises?)

2010-03-29T20:19:00.006-04:00

Via u n d e r v e r s e (I'm sure Chris gets a sadistic joy from making me type that out), I see Sean Carroll has criticized Sam Harris' recent Ted Talk about science's ability to answer moral questions. Only Carroll criticized it without really criticizing it at all. I think his commenters do a good job at pointing out what is essentially his non-responsiveness to Harris' point, but I want to address it here as well.

I'll preface by saying that we are letting Hume become to morality what Aristotle (and subsequently Newton) became to science- they contributed so much to scientific thinking that they stood in the way of prospective advancements beyond them, because before we allowed ourselves to stand on their shoulders and look with them at the natural world, we had to spend several centuries groveling below them, elevating them to the status of (quite unmovable) monoliths.

Sam Harris notes that one is making a factual claim when one notes that capacities for conscious experience, and therefore suffering, varies amongst rocks, ants, and apes. Sean Carroll replies:

Let’s grant the factual nature of the claim that primates are exposed to a greater range of happiness and suffering than insects or rocks. So what? That doesn’t mean we should care about their suffering or happiness; it doesn’t imply anything at all about morality, how we ought to feel, or how to draw the line between right and wrong.

Let's note, right from the start, what Carroll's complaint isn't.

Carroll is not disputing Harris's point that humans and other living creatures have experiences of suffering and pleasure. Carroll not disputing Harris's point that the existence of sufferings and pleasures are biological in basis. Carroll is not disputing Harris's point that there are facts of the matter about whether and how these pleasures can be promoted and pains suppressed. He's not disputing Harris's point that science can inform us as to which facts are relevant in these matters, he's not disputing that cultural dispositions may encourage acts that truly cause suffering. Carroll is not even objecting to Harris's observation that almost every instance in every culture where the concept "moral" is invoked its with reference to entities that can have conscious experience.

No, he disputes none of this. So Carroll's rebuttal, such as it is, fails to even interact with 95% of Harris's talk.

Carroll thinks Harris has failed to get around the is/ought problem:

Harris is doing exactly what Hume warned against, in a move that is at least as old as Plato: he’s noticing that most people are, as a matter of empirical fact, more concerned about the fate of primates than the fate of insects, and taking that as evidence that we ought to be more concerned about them; that it is morally correct to have those feelings. But that’s a non sequitur. After all, not everyone is all that concerned about the happiness and suffering of primates, or even of other human beings; some people take pleasure in torturing them. And even if they didn’t, again, so what? We are simply stating facts about how human beings feel, from which we have no warrant whatsoever to conclude things about how they should feel.

One ought to recognize where oughts come from. If you want to make caramelized onion quiche, you "ought" to have 3 large eggs, 6 ounces grated Gruyère cheese, 1/2 cup heavy cream, 2 onions etc. You "ought" to french the onions and you "ought" to pre-bake a pie crust.

These oughts vanish if you don't intend to do anything particular with the ingredients. A moral "ought" is only an "ought" if there is morality. There exists a distinction between moral "ought" and a factual "is" only if you believe the stuff of morality isn't the kind of stuff to be met with in experience.

To say is/ought is a "problem" is only true to the extent that you subscribe to this division in the first place. Carroll hasn't denied that any of the things Harris refers to (suffering, differences in cognitive capacities) exist, and no one does in these arguments. The objection is whether you can call those things morality.

Carroll asks:

But what if I believe that the highest moral good is to be found in the autonomy of the individual, while you believe that the highest good is to maximize the utility of some societal group? What are the data we can point to in order to adjudicate this disagreement? We might use empirical means to measure whether one preference or the other leads to systems that give people more successful lives on some particular scale — but that’s presuming the answer, not deriving it. Who decides what is a successful life? It’s ultimately a personal choice, not an objective truth to be found simply by looking closely at the world. How are we to balance individual rights against the collective good? You can do all the experiments you like and never find an answer to that question.

Who decides what a chemical is? It depends on the person. Alonzo Fyfe proved this:

... no scientist can give any type of objective argument showing that six proton atoms have to be called 'carbon' and cannot have any other name. The decision to call six proton atoms 'carbon' is arbitrary and subjective. So, chemistry itself is subjective. [...]

Not only is it the case that the scientist cannot objectively prove that six proton atoms must be called 'carbon' - that this choice is not arbitrary - but can give no objective answer to the question of why he has decided to write about 6-proton atoms.

There are over a hundred different atoms that the chemist could be talking about - hydrogen, oxygen, iron, uranium. The decision to talk about carbon atoms, as opposed to one of these other types of atoms - is entirely arbitrary. It is up to the whim of the chemist what atoms he is going to write about. That is to say, the choice is totally subjective. Therefore, chemistry is totally subjective.

I am going to make a noise with my mouth. If I try to spell this noise out using latin alphabet, I guess I would spell it "m-o-r-a-l". I am going to decide that this noise is a word. I am going to decide that this word is about pleasure and suffering of creatures. Now that you know what I mean by it, we can use it to more easily discuss the pleasure and suffering of creatures.

But even Carroll's feeble objection about the definition of 'morality' isn't problematic. No one holds a copyright on the word morality. If I decide it is a useful concept to explain certain facts, it doesn't make the term "incorrect" because other people use it differently than I do in contexts independently from me. Carroll has made the mistake of making the term "moral" so sacred that he would refrain from staining it with any meaning at all. So long as you are aware of the real things in the world I am pointing toward whenever I use the word, we can get to work.

Far from a penetrating insight, Carroll is offering nothing but a flat-footed reassertion of the very concept Harris spent his presentation criticizing, and telling Harris he doesn't subscribe to a conception of morality when Harris is arguing that he doesn't subscribe to that conception of morality does not represent forward progress in a conversation of any kind, much less a rebuttal.

YouGov/PushPollingPoint

2010-03-10T00:44:00.011-05:00

YouGov is a web-based polling organization. While "online poll" might call to mind the polls "crashed" by P.Z. Meyers, or the FOX/MSNBC insta-polls that almost always show 97% agreement with the partisan bent of the question, YouGov tries to escape the overwhelming forces of internet self-selection by filtering for partisan identification, and then adjusting for demographics.

Whether they succeed I don't know, but a better question is whether they are even trying to. I recently got a notice via email from YouGov about a new poll they are conducting (more specifically, that PollingPoint, a branch of YouGov is conducting), and I find it hard to believe a professional non-partisan polling organization would ask such transparently slanted questions as the two I'm about to present. Here is the first one:

In the Senate, it takes the votes of 60 out of 100 Senators to stop debate and force a vote on a bill. But Democrats in the Senate may use a parliamentary procedure known as budget reconciliation to pass the health care bill with only 51 votes. How do you feel about using budget reconciliation to pass the existing health care bill with a simple majority?

The 60-vote supermajority, which has only just emerged as an omnipresent procedural hurdle in the past 2 of our nation's 233 years, or 0.86% of our country's history, is presented by YouGov as an unsurprising, garden variety fact. And then they subtly other-ize the reconciliation process, a strange parliamentary procedure. They present Democrats as if they were circumventing a standard, respected (unprecedented) supermajority vote, in order to pass legislation with only 51 votes. Of course, this conforms completely to the Republican frame, alternately worded as "ram-it-through" or "jam it down America's throat".

And besides this inversion of context, which tells us that Democrats are circumventing a standard Senate procedure, which tells us that a heretofore unprecedented tactic of scorched earth filibustering is to be taken for granted, we have the fact that this runs counter to the intent of our Framers.

William Blake's article on the filibuster, which I just noticed because it was revised yesterday, goes into this:

The Constitution contains six procedural references: the tie breaking vote of the vice president, a two-thirds vote for conviction on impeachment charges, a simple majority for a quorum, a two-thirds majority for expulsion of a member of Congress, the “Yeas and Nays” clause, and a two-thirds requirement to override a presidential veto. The fact that half of these provisions deal with supermajorities shows that the Framers wanted to limit the number of cases in which majority rule should not prevail. Under this philosophy, if the Framers had considered the filibuster to be such an important right for minorities, it would be logical that a supermajority provision for cloture would exist in the Constitution as a fourth exception to majority rule.

No such provision exists. I think Blake's point is most strongly made when he cites Federalist 10 by Alexander Hamilton:

To give a minority a negative upon the majority is in its tendency to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser number…The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been formed upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.

YouGov/PollingPoint asks that you take the opposite sentiment for granted. From the same poll was this mischievous question:

As you may know, charter schools are independent public schools that are freed from some of the rules and regulations that apply to other public schools. Do you think the number of charter schools should be increased or decreased?

Regulations and rules are something that you should be "freed from," a characterization that, again, conforms perfectly with the Republican frame.

2010-01-20T14:36:00.002-05:00

I just want to note the irony of saying it's anti-democratic to delay seating Scott Brown, because America needs him to block legislation that 59 senators are willing to vote for.

The current status of 'beyond science'

2010-01-19T13:20:00.018-05:00

I love that simple images can illustrate profound points and wish it was done more often. On that latest hump you could find bloggers like Santi Tafarella, Chris Schoen and current generation philosophers on consciousness like Thomas Nagel and pretty much all philosophers of morality. I wonder what they think is going to be different this time.

Edit: I may as well elaborate while I'm here. I wouldn't pay so much attention to Schoen were it not for the fact that he's essentially me multiplied by -1. Given the extent to which we've rolled back these anti-(or at least non-)naturalistic assumptions in the past century, especially as they pertain to mind, it is flabbergasting for me to read something like:

To the extent we have a "lust to be good" as Richard Dawkins likes to say, there is no problem. But we have other "lusts" as well, often in direct conflict with one another. The multiplicity of desire is the "is," and the fact that we can only act on a limited number is the "ought." Biology and "social conditioning" are not sufficient to resolve the difference.

.. to read this here, to read it now, in 2010, without an attendant iota of suspicion of the implied inference. Just like that, we flick about a colossal ontological bifurcation like it's a nickel in a high-school poker match.

Once we've gone so far as to grant that the lusts themselves are an is, it is necessary to recognize how, just by doing this much, we've effectively retired a generation of moral thought to the dustbin that similarly claimed Descartes and Malebranche after it was proved that animals could experience pain.

Does anyone think we are anywhere near finished filling the dustbin? Does Schoen appreciate, as Marion King Hubbert did, that you could use the rate of discovery to anticipate future discovery, and what the implications are for the current question?

We can't measure the force of desire in units, but we can circumscribe their correlates, and we can know we have better ground to stand on than is offered by the naturalistic fallacy fallacy (not a typo). Requiring that we postulate, all over again, an "ought" entity that we might ground some schema of lust-prioritization on it, rather than simply defining the schema in terms of the strength and harmony of those lusts, is an unmotivated requirement.

I suggest to at least the atheists among us, that this isn't the problem so many have held it up to be. At least here, there is no opportunity for chiding us unbelievers into deeper introspection. The is is the ought; we can only manufacture Moore's open question by begging it.

This conversation is really a proxy for the larger battle of whether a mechanistic, empirical outlook can found itself on the same third person perspective it strives to apply everywhere. On this question empiricism returns the most beautiful answer: not an absolute proof but ever-incrementing hints in the affirmative direction.

The Will to Kill the Bill

2009-12-24T18:03:00.002-05:00

Nate Silver has the kill-the-billers exactly right, I think; perhaps more right than even he thinks:

I do want to make clear, though, that I should probably have made some finer points of distinction among those who I have lumped under the broad heading of "kill-billers". There is a healthy debate to be had over the merits of the health care policy, and there's much to be said from an Overton window perspective about a world in which you're having two liberals (me and Darcy Burner) square off against one another for nearly 15 minutes on Hardball, or David Sirota writing the opposing viewpoint to USA Today's editorial position that the health care bill should be passed. Moreover, pressure from the left has been more successful than the pressure-ers might allow. The concessions that liberals won in exchange for giving up the public option are not trivial, and some further improvements will probably be made to the bill in conference.

There have also, however, been people who have been arguing the bill in what I believe to be bad faith -- recycling or inventing a grab-bag of misleading and often self-contradictory talking points against the bill's passage. The progress of the debate over the past week has perhaps been revealing; whereas some advocates, like Markos Moulitsas and Howard Dean, have tended to ratchet down their rhetoric, in some cases even explicitly calling for the bill's passage, others have tended to become more entrenched. By "others", I mean in particular two or three of the writers at the blog FireDogLake.

The arguments you are hearing at FireDogLake - they seriously suggested the Senate bill could be obliterated and successfully replaced with a better one, with the same Joe Liebermans and Ben Nelsons signing on - are just embarrassingly bad. In fact, I think a better explanation for their behavior is with referece to an overton window. The "moderates" get to appear moderate if they are opposed by "the fringe" left, and if only there was this kind of furious outrage at the death of the public option, we might still have the medicare buy-in. If they argue the bill is not good enough, that may have been just the thing to get the moderates to come together on this compromise. It was only after they demanded we "kill the bill" that the final compromises fell into place.

Would you put it past Jane Hamsher & co. to pull a tactic like this?

Dennett on Postmodernism and Truth

2009-12-13T22:58:00.000-05:00

via reddit:

What would be wrong would be that since this man didn't acknowledge the gulf, didn't even recognize that it existed, my acquiescence in his shopping spree would have contributed to the debasement of a precious commodity, the erosion of a valuable distinction. Many people, including both onlookers and participants, don't see this gulf, or actively deny its existence, and therein lies the problem. The sad fact is that in some intellectual circles, inhabited by some of our more advanced thinkers in the arts and humanities, this attitude passes as a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims. In fact this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naiveté, made possible only by flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power. Like many another naif, these thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their methods of truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently generalize from their own cases and conclude that nobody else knows how to discover the truth either.

Abraham Maslow on the fusion of fact and value

2009-12-11T23:33:00.000-05:00

From The Farther Reaches of Human Nature:

Too many people of limited vision define the essence of science as cautious checking, validating of hypotheses, finding out if other people's ideas are correct or not. But, insofar as science is also a technique of discovery, it will have to learn how to foster peak-experience insights and visions and then how to handle them as data. [...]

I quote a letter from Dr. A. Hoffer, dated February 8, 1963:

We have deliberately used P.E. (peak experience) as a therapeutic weapon. Our alcoholics who receive LSD or mescaline are given P.E. using music, visual stimuli, words, suggestion, anything which will give them what they say is a P.E. We have treated over five hundred alcoholics and certain general rules can be enunciated. One is that in general the majority of alcoholics who respond by sobriety after treatment have had P.E. Conversely, hardly any who have not had P.E. respond.

We also have strong data which suggest that affect is the chief component of P.E. When LSD subjects are first given penicillamine for two days they have an experience which is identical with the one normally gained from LSD, but where there is a marked dampening of affect. They observe all the visual changes, have all the changes in thinking, but they are emotionally flat and are more non-participant observers than participants. These subjects do not have P.E. In addition, only 10 per cent do well after treatment compared to our expected 60 per cent recovery on several large follow-up studies.

Now we make our big jump: This same list of described characteristics of reality, of the world, seen at certain times, is just about the same as what have been called the eternal values, the eternal verities. We see here the old familiar trinity of truth, beauty, and goodness. That is to say, this list of described characteristics is also simultaneously a list of values. These characteristics are what the great religionists and philosophers have valued, and this is practically the same list that most serious thinkers of mankind have agreed upon as the ultimate or highest value of life.

To repeat, my first statement is in the realm of science, defined as public. Anyone can do the same thing; anyone can check for himself; anyone can use the same procedure that I have used and can, objectively if he wishes, record on tape the things that are said in answer to the questions I posed and then make them public. That is, what I am reporting is public, repeatable, confirmable or not; it is even quantifiable if you wish. It is stable and reliable in the sense that when I repeat the operation I get approximately the same results. Even by the most orthodox, positivistic definitions of ninteenth-century science, this is a scientific statement. It is a cognitive statement, a description of the characteristics of reality, of the cosmos, of the world out there, outside the person who is reporting and describing, of the world as perceived. These data can be worked with in the traditional fashion of science, and their degree of truth or untruth can be determined.

Wrigley Field is a perfect copy of Wrigley Field

2009-12-11T05:22:00.021-05:00

I'm supposed to bury this insight at the bottom of the second to last paragraph, put the magic phrase in italics, to spin a narrative that progressively unravels a mystery, but fuck it. To persuade someone, you convince them that what you are saying is an even stronger affirmation of their values than their own position (you'll see this sentence both as self-description and material to my point). This highlights, I think, the hypocrisy under which our most closely held beliefs are formed. We start with a belief, or rather a very specific prejudice, which is something like self insistence, something like what causes you to laugh which is so irreducibly personal, a truth you would kick over the Taipei 101 clear space for, if it came to that. (That's metaphorically speaking, to those FBI, CIA, and homeland security web-bots crawling the internet which probably outnumber my readers 5 to 1.) That is, a belief about what is good, about where good things come from is necessarily built from the inside out and after the fact its outward coherence is the ostensive basis for its superiority over competing explanations.

So I stopped believing in capitalism when I started believing in the internet, which is to say that what I want isn't capitalism, but that which I thought was synonymous with it: the low barriers to entry, the fact that truly anonymous people can put themselves or their kids through college with initiative and a good idea (or even stupid idea). How empowering that is! But this desirable confluence of opportunists and opportunity came along with a bureaucracy or two, and a measure of centralization, which I had previously believed antithetical to the freedom needed to "put ideas into action" (if you'll forgive my stagnantly Hillary Clintonesque phrasing). I couldn't move away from capitalism until I realized I wasn't losing anything at all.

=

This brings us to blogger Santi Tafarella, who may or may not be a dualist. Santi has responded favorably to Intelligent Design (but may or may not subscribe to it), and has been receptive to global warming skepticism (but may or may not think the skepticism warranted), and, though this last one is different, is critical of new atheism (but is himself an agnostic). In a similar spirit you'll find the title of nearly half his blog posts end in a question mark.

Santi made an admirably candid admission in justifying his own ambivalence, which, in one of its forms is essentially an ambivalence with respect to the truth of naturalism.

Josef:

I absorb your critique of me taking to hand anybody who puts forth a plausible anti-naturalist argument that keeps me in my agnostic abivalence. I like agnosticism. It gives me a space for irony and emotional range that I can’t find in theism or atheism. I like the Whitmanesque freedom of swinging all sorts of ways, and dropping into the shoes of others. It’s a personality thing. I think people who are atheists and theists also have personal motivations for their beliefs, and contingent (not just rational) reasons for arriving at their beliefs.

Santi, you use this ambivalence as an opportunity to pose questions, to occupy that space of contemplative wonder, analogous to what many of us might claim we are doing when we make music.

So, where most of us would wash our hands of (for instance) Intelligent Design and walk away, you perceive a spiritual space closing up, and come to the defense of the indefensible Michael Behe. For fear of so-called new atheists closing the debate on the truth of religion entirely (which seems to have nearly happened in analytic philosophy circles), you defend discredited ideas and regard their gangrenous creep into the philosophical establishment with sympathy.

Let me make clear that my quarrel is not with ambivalence itself, but ambivalence about truth claims, as though each next question and attempted answer is just another excercize in a normal life of spiritual creativity. There is a difference between the creative activity of imagining something to be true, and literally suggesting something is true. Naturally this same imaginative capacity must be at play in understanding new things about the world, and bringing ourselves before an open question seems always to inspire what is called a religious feeling. But many (I would say most) activities of spiritual exertion have nothing whatsoever to do with this, nor should they.

When George Will says that "God, supposedly, and Wrigley Field, actually, are perfect" what should we take to be his meaning that Wrigley Field is "perfect"? Surely the field came first and perfection grew into it. If I didn't know what baseball was, if I couldn't think that the team in some sense represented me and that their victories were mine, I would see no perfection there. But if I'm a Cubs fan it gives me a history, it gives me numerous openings for investing empathy and hope.

Not unlike a slug, we glide along a surface of our own flesh and the payoffs are reflective of that investment (though one might object that the Cubs don't offer much in the way of emotional payoff). What this should make clear is that Wrigley Field isn't actually perfect, but by spending time there and accumulating experiences, the joy spills over into every accidental association until there is no friction, and Wrigley Field appears to be the platonic form of perfection. In truth it was only a vessel.

There is nothing wrong with vessels, and it's true that they really can be fountains of spiritual wonder even when the vessels are completely artificial constructions (as I think religion is). The problem is that these must be physicalised, actualized, the word must be made flesh, as it were. If you've ever really loved dancing, for instance, you'll know that it brings out the feeling that you really have a role in creating the music, just as important, just as participatory as if you were plucking the strings yourself.

And I recall once, bringing groceries out to my car to find a church flier on my dashboard. It had started raining while I was inside, and someone had rolled up my windows for me. If no flier was left, perhaps I wouldn't have even noticed the act of compassion. But, more than an act of compassion, leaving the flier made clear that it was a religious act of compassion. I think the kind person, whoever she was, was "doing God's work" in more ways than she realized.

Unfortunately, one way of acting creatively is to insist on a truth claim, to stand for it, to in some sense defend it and live for it. "I know there are angels out there, making sure my breaks won't fail!" I wouldn't suggest that there is no exertion of passion in the preceding claim. But the kernel of inspiration motivating the truth claim is misattributed to something that really isn't there. And this entails a tornado of confusions, as you mistakenly defend angels in your car, mistaking your flaring heartstrings, and your right to them, for evidence of something else.

This class of creative acts, apart from others, must be attended with responsibility, precisely because it mingles evidence claims with the freedom and fruits of introspection, the latter of which everyone is right to defend furiously. And when an evidence claim becomes so personalized admitting you are wrong is like killing yourself. Most of us just won't do it, and couldn't.

Lukeprog of Common Sense Atheism summed up well when talking about Christian apoligist William Lane Craig's approach to evidence:

Basically, Craig defends his faith against the evidence the same way my mom does – “I know because I know that I know that I know.” And that’s it. “I know in my heart that Christianity is true, and I know my heart is right because my heart tells me it is right.”

And thus, I think, Santi misperceives his heart as being between the jaws of an atheism-theism divide. And in valiant defense of it, you get such spectacles as an embarrassingly bad defense of Michael Behe, wherein Santi implies that it is reasonable to doubt random mutation can produce macroevolutionary changes, which any casual stroll through wikipedia might easily disabuse one of. To that I say, Santi, no! Your heart is over here!

(In the four wiki links referenced above, the third one directly addresses Behe's skepticism about how random mutation works, the others deal with general arguments made by William Lane Craig.)

The Despicable Richard Cohen

2009-12-09T05:05:00.013-05:00

Richard Cohen is the author of Coming out Straight, whose book has been used in speeches to justify a proposed law in Uganda to execute homosexuals. This is an absolutely repugnant person. Observe his first statement, that "since the 1950's, the Ugandan government has punished people for engaging in homosexual behavior". Then observe that, minutes later, Cohen says it's "inconceivable" that they would pass a law to execute gays. Inconceivable? If he wants to represent this Ugandan history of oppression against gays as though it were common knowledge, how on earth could he not know that his book and his message would serve as justification for continuation of what he knows to be longstanding practice of oppression of homosexuals?

Then he denies that his book portrays gays as predators against children, which Maddow promptly follows up by reading an offending passage from his book with all of the outrageous claims you might expect. He disavows knowledge of the bill and disapproves it, but defends the sponsor of the bill, who was holding up a copy of his book. He can't even use his appearance as an opportunity to just drop everything and unequivocally state that the bill is abhorrent, no, he uses his airtime to spread his message of "opportunity," seconds after conceding his book is being used to justify execution. What a terrible, terrible man.

The impolite spite of Robby Wright

2009-12-07T02:58:00.002-05:00

Robert Wright has again attempted to other-ise new atheists. I think the best reaction by far has been Russell Blackford's:

I take no delight in the impolite spite of Robby Wright. His screed is in need of some serious mothereffin’ rigour. It’s got vigour, but I figure that it’s not worth a widow’s mite – no! It’s kind of a slow bleed of real thought. It’s caught in error. It’s trite .. a kind of thinking-lite, yeah – an unpedigreed stampede of special pleading for creeds and unholy deeds and religious terror. It’s like Wright has smoked too much weed or got too much greed, and now he’s a satellite. An acolyte. A parasite on superstition. He’s turned off the light of reason, looking for a coming season when it gets him a treasonous prize, a kind of commission. His ambition has made him unwise: so now he’s a temporiser, when he ought to be a despiser and a pulveriser. It’s a hideous sight, a benighted blight that we must fight without remission. Thank Jerry [and Ophelia] for his[her] demolition!

Responses to Ophelia Benson, Russell Blackford, and B.E.

2009-12-06T23:25:00.024-05:00

This post is the first in a two part "series" of responses to Ophelia Benson, B.E., and Russell Blackford in a now-ancient (in internet terms) thread from Ophelia's Notes and Comments blog. This first post responds first to Ophelia, mainly to set the context, and then to B.E., who posted there in the comment section. The second post will respond to Russell Blackford, in which I will assert that you can be wrong about your own subjective likes or dislikes, and wrong in an important sense. The reason I'm responding to an old thread is that I commented in it, and then had irregular access to the internet for a while and never had a real opportunity to respond to a subject that deeply interested me.

Response to Ophelia Benson

In the post, Ophelia Benson talks about whether there is objective morality, and without exactly seeming to answer whether she believes in it (but I think coming against it), she says:

We do strongly feel that murder is wrong, but that's because we're the kind of beings we are; a different kind of being wouldn't. Imagine for instance a being with thoughts but no feelings - literally no feelings. [...] A being like that wouldn't, by definition, strongly feel that murder is wrong, because it wouldn't feel anything, but it also wouldn't because it is feeling that makes it wrong. The putative objective moral sense actually cashes out as the feeling-capacity. It depends on things mattering. Without that, murder is no more immoral than unplugging a lamp.

The above could go two ways. First, if we grounded this in a form of moral solipsism, the above would, I think obviously be false. A sociopath might not think much of killing a human, but it's still morally wrong. But I don't think she meant that. If this feeling-wrongness Ophelia is referring to is more wide ranging than that (and it seems quite possible to me that this is the case), then this makes sense. On this view a sociopath committing murder is still guilty of a moral evil, precisely because of its in some sense "feeling" wrong to the person murdered, to that person's friends and family, and all those other people who similarly feel it to be wrong (the word "feeling" is admittedly doing a lot of work here, and I wouldn't choose that word myself, but I'm operating on the principle of charity).

Benson says this "cashes out" as the feeling capacity. But this is misleading- the fact of our having what she calls a feeling-capacity is an objective fact about humans. These "putatively" objective moral wrongs are literally objective moral wrongs, because we too, are objectively out there in the world.

Response to B.E.

Anyway, a commenter criticized the notion of objective morality, saying:

It's interesting that those who claim there is an objective morality like to talk in terms of laws. They'd have you believe that morality has law-like status such as the law of Gravity. But the law of Gravity is a description of empirical nature. It's inter-subjective but could in principle be different i.e. it's contingent. Morality is not this type of law. If the law of morality says murder is wrong I can still go and murder whereas if I jump off a cliff with intent to fly, I fall all the same on Earth. So morality has no universality in nature even if we hold that it's universal amongst ourselves.

Laws, of course, are also prescriptions or regulations of behavior. Perhaps moral law means this. But then law must have been prescribed. If it is prescribed by people or societies then it is not objective and subject to changes of mores in those societies. Perhaps the law was given unto us by a god. Of course then you get into Divine command view of morality and it's nemesis the Euthryphro dilemma. If morality is just doing the bidding of a tyrant then how is that moral? (How is that doing what's right instead of doing something arbitrary?) Also, how is that objective? It's subject to the whim of the god. If as Swinburne has it, it's part of the fabric of that god, with said god unable to be bad, then it falls onto the other horn of the dilemma and that god is no more the prescriber of morality than anything else. Is morality prescribed then by the universe, a contingent thing? According to theists the fine-tuning argument suggests that it could have all been very different, what then of morality? Seems like the idea of objective morality or law of morality is pretty lame.

To which I responded:

The law like character of morality wouldn't prohibit your being able to murder. It would prohibit your murder from having a moral justification, and this it would do with law like inflexibility. [...]

To which B.E. said:

Yet there are many a moral justification for murdering or what appears to some to be murder depending on the situation. Just War, self-defense, etc. They may not float your boat, but they do others. It seems to me that saying it has law like inflexibility is a bit weird. If "Murder is never morally justified" mixed with "This is murder" then completing the syllogism we get "This is never morally justified". Sure, but what's murder? If it has law like universality, why does it have this cultural subjectivity in some cases?

First, I want to deal very briefly, too breifly, with the last question: why [murder has] this cultural subjectivity in some cases? I'm simply going to assert that it doesn't. That might be unfair, but if you are criticizing a moral objectivist, they simply won't be convinced by the conventional references to variance in opinion on murder across cultures. It just isn't the type of objection a moral objectivist would recognize as problematic. Instead I'm going to focus on whether it is internally incoherent for a moral objectivist to assert that there can be moral laws.

Going back to "Yet there are many a moral justification for murdering or what appears to some to be murder depending on the situation". In a trivial sense, a moral condemnation is built into the meaning of the world "murder." So an action is either murder or it is not, and it is morally condemned accordingly. (Now, there are species of utilitarianism which say murder can be "right" if it saves more lives than are lost. In this case murder goes from being objectively wrong, to objectively having a net negative impact on the utilitarian calculus it is a part of. This doesn't seem to me to change anything fundamentally, because it still expresses the moral condemnation of murder.)

But suppose we replace murder with kill. If killing is wrong in a given state of affairs it is always wrong in precisely that state of affairs. If it is right in some other given state of affairs it is always right in precisely that state of affairs. The only way to weedle out of this is to try and sneak in some new fact (or remove some old fact, or rearrange the existing facts) to negate the original moral prescription, while insisting it was still in some sense the same "state of affairs".

This is where one might want to plead subjectivity. Killing a stranger who walks past me on the street might be wrong, but it might not be wrong if I recognize that that person is Osama bin Laden. But in every such case, you will find that the rightness or wrongness of the act obtains because of an objective state of affairs. If you replace random stranger with Osama bin Laden, clearly the switch from wrongness to rightness coincided with this substituation, and it turns out you've replaced a subject with certain attributes for a subject with certain other attributes. Insofar as someone is similar to Osama bin Laden in the right ways the act of killing that person tends toward being morally right. Clearly, this smuggles in a fact of the matter that completely changes the nature of the example.

One might try to subjectivize it from the other direction. Killing is not wrong for me if I'm Osama bin Laden and I see Josef Johann walking down the street. But this reduces the question to one of subjectivism vs. objectivism and does not reveal any internal incoherence in objectivism with respect to moral laws unless we assume (or successfully argue), that moral objectivism is just outrightly wrong anyway.

So, on the question of killing, yes, circumstances do vary from case to case. But this doesn't mean that "the moral law" pertaining to killing, whatever it is, is wavering under our feet. It would simply mean there is no such moral law pertaining to killing in and of itself. It would be a confusion about the nature of moral law, just as it would be a confusion about the law of gravity for someone to say that things don't always really accelerate toward the earth at 9.8 m/s^2 since since objects have terminal velocity.

It might be objected that moral law is only moral law in the sense I was previously defending, if it can prescribe conduct over a wide variety of situations. If the set of circumstances is too narrow, then it should not perhaps be a law. All this is fine. (I happen think "moral law" is, in truth, just a conceptual fiction that helps us explain the rightness and wrongness of our behavior.)

So we have two basic facts- that unwavering moral rights and wrongs seem as though they only be on solid footing when the state of affairs is fairly elaborate, and that moral laws are only moral laws when they can be true of a wide range of states of affairs. These facts threaten to eat each other. And I think this is where the challenge against moral law has full force.

This may mean that there are few, or even no, moral laws in objective morality, that even if there are objective moral facts, they are only truly captured by an impossibly elaborate catalogue of specificities. So, moral laws may present a problem for moral objectivists in that a moral objectivist is bewitched by language into mistaken use of the term "law" when they really mean something more mushy, like a regularity or norm that hovers about the truth but which has exceptions.

But there is a simple solution to this- to delegate out the judgment of moral law to parts of the statement that express the moral law. So "It's never right to murder" really is a moral law, because "murder" is defined such that it is always morally wrong. Then we don't need the moral law itself to be equivalent to some description of reality- that responsibility is passed on to the term murder, and by rigging the term with moral judgment, it stays water-tight, whereas a word like "killing" might admit of exceptions because killing is not inherently wrong.

Then we can expand "murder" to mean something like the "gratuitously depriving another human being of life" (or something else). We have partially completed the description of reality, and we distribute out the rest of the job to the term "gratuitous". And finally at the bottom of the hierarchy you have statements that are nothing but descriptions of states of affairs, without any terms laden in moral value in need of elaboration. Then, moral laws truly are moral laws with no exceptions, and yet are responsive to the near-infinite complexity of detail that would threaten to present exceptions to the moral laws.

This is not circular: a law formed this way is just as vulnerable to counterexample as any other law, and it is no more circular than a statement with self evident meaning like "killing is always wrong". It is just a way a moral objectivist can make simple, wide-ranging statements that are up to the task of making true statements that grapple with the infinite complexity of the world.

The award for most insidious qualifier of the day goes to

2009-12-06T15:39:00.002-05:00

Geoffrey Miller at The Economist:

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races. [...]

GWAS researchers will, in public, continue trumpeting their successes to science journalists and Science magazine. [...]

In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled. They hold small, discreet conferences on the “missing heritability” problem: if all these human traits are heritable, why are GWAS studies failing so often? The DNA chips should already have identified some important genes behind physical and mental health. They simply have not been delivering the goods.

It would be a shame if anyone revealed themselves as a less thoughtful GWAS researcher by disagreeing with Geoffrey Miller.

the impulse toward helplessness

2009-12-01T16:56:00.021-05:00

It's just stunning to me how often people treat a hypothetical question as an invitation to think like an absolute lunatic.

A good response to a hypothetical question finds a way to faithfully continue that relationship with the unkown that makes the hypothetical question difficult to answer. I think that's the hardest part, as we tend to take the opening premise of a hypothetical as a cue that we too, should be playing a creative role in answering the question, just as the questioner did in asking the question. We should try to reinvent the question in any direction we wish for the purpose of making our own cute little counter-points.

Unfortunately, this assumption that one should be equal partners with the questioner causes many people to play calvinball with the question and completely dislodge their answer from any reality that the hypothetical could ever have hoped to shed light on. As there is little difference, at least in the form taken both by science fiction questions and abstract moral questions, it is not difficult to see why even serious questions posed in the abstract are treated with a lack of seriousness that corresponds to an overarching failure to appreciate what abstract questions can tell us.

Perhaps the single biggest source of cognitive error that exists consists in the mistaking a contingent fact about the world for an immutable truth. Understanding what it would take to change a belief tells you much about what that belief is. And your ability to specify how and in what context that belief would change, tells you what curiousity, what self awareness, what integrity lives in that belief now. I think frequently this is what happens when a great speech is given- it causes us to stand our world aside many possible worlds, to shake us out of indifference, to go over what distinguishes us and why this course of action is necessary at this moment in history.

But such exercises can be intellectually demanding, and so you find people writhing and twisting with all their might to find some way to collapse the question, with an impulse toward helplessness that disguises itself as a legitimate answer. So I'd like you to observe these statements, psychotically confident in the obviousness of their answer, taken from reddit, that serve utterly nothing except to deflate the question, and arrive at an emotionally satisfying cop-out.

On teleportation:

You don't want [teleportation] - allow me to explain.

Suppose I wanted to transport you from, say, Earth to Mars. Theoretically, I supposed you could technically break you down and send your individual particles zooming through space. Earth engineers, however, would quickly realize that it's much easier and faster to have a cache of particles at the destination, since we all share the same basic building blocks, and then send a signal representing you to Mars, and rebuilding you from scratch. Essentially it would be a long range cloning device.

However, this would leave a problem for the engineers, I mean after all we can't have two of the same person running around. The obvious solution to this is brutally murdering the original. There also might be a line for the teleporter, so they can't leave a corpse, leaving them no choice but to vaporize you.

Of course people, if they knew they were to die, and have a bastardized clone version of themselves running around they would opt out. So the engineers would tell nobody, and commit genocide of millions while stuffing their pockets with money. Supposing it became widespread, people would be committing suicide anywhere from one to 100 times a day.

Now I recognize that this represents a subset of a subset.... of a subset of possible representations of the problem of teleportation. But it doesn't seem plausible that the human race would unthinkingly frolic forward, over and through nuance, multiplying catastrophe upon catastrophe.

And yet without a blink the commenter takes it as obvious that (1) cloning is trivially similar to teleportation, which may be true but isn't necessarily so, (2) that you are for some reason supposed to "get rid of" the original person, which may be true but isn't necessarily so, (3) that the only way to get rid of them is to "brutally murder them," which may be true but isn't necessarily so. At this point the gap between this survey of the problem and what a real, settled answer would look like is wide enough to fit several solar systems through. But that doesn't stop the commenter from concluding that there cannot be teleportation.

Here is a rejection of immortality:

Sorry, but this would be the last scientific discovery I'd want to see.

First of all, overpopulation would probably reach unsustainable levels in our lifetime.

The only way to avoid our self-destruction by overpopulation would be pay or merit based immortality; we'd revert to a caste system even worse than ancient India's.

Rapid destruction of the environment, overcrowding, or a completely unequal and un-egalitarian society? No thanks.

If we harbored similar aversions to improvements in the human condition which were good in themselves, but which had the effect of contributing to overpopulation, we could with equal justification take principled stands against washing our hands, or sanitizing broken limbs in order to prevent gangrene. To suggest that immortality is impossibly and absolutely conjoined with prohibitive population growth, is at best, lacking in imagination.

This is follwed by the gentle but implausible prodding from a commenter:

Overpopulation would make colonizing the moon and Mars not just novelty projects, but goals with real immediacy. To me, that's a win-win.

And as others have said, immortality (which is probably humanity's fate anyway) can be dealt with in other ways, i.e., accepting sterilization.

Then a response:

The people who would get to be immortal would not be the people you would want to be immortal. (The rich and powerful, no matter how evil)

Of course this is treated like an inevitability, and it's supposed to be a coincidence that by answering thus she has taken the path of least intellectual resistance.

Here is another cowardly cop-out, couched in good natured love for parents:

What about adults really close to their parents? I would honestly not chose immortality if it meant I had to watch my parents die from old age and keep that memory with me for an eternity.

About finding aliens:

Either they would exterminate us, or we'd exterminate them.

We can't even get along with other people, how the hell would we get along with aliens?

This merits no response other than to note that here too, the direction is toward non-engagement with the details that would be demanded of a fuller answer.

And an absolutely nonsensical discussion of time travel, about traveling foward in time to get a cure for your mother's cancer:

You don't think outside of the box very well do you? I said "time travel". Go forward. Get cure. Go backward.

The response:

Go forward. Find burned ashes of former civilization, no survivors. Return home. Become crazy street person with sandwich boards warning of impending apocalypse. No one will listen!

Response to the response:

Just go farther forward. Evolution will create a new civilization. I'd be surprised if not one single species evolves far enough in the amount of time our sun is going to give us here on earth to cure cancer in humans

Here's a dismissal of a world with star trek like replicators, where everyone has what they want:

I actually have doubts about this utopian vision. Real society demonstrates that in a large proportion of cases, people who get more free time than they can handle do not embark and grandeous personal endeavours but rather try to satiate the senses with extravagance.

I expect this effect would become worse for people born with this comfort than those who had to learn to appreciate the good things in life the hard way.

If a technology like this became available then one would hope social development could keep up to provide an environment where the individual is still driven to achievement.

Maybe, maybe not. The only thing that is obvious in all these cases is commenters being dominated by an intellectual sleepiness that is begging them to come back to bed. This is the same impulse that causes people to say that any wish granted by a genie will be granted in the most ironical and unanticipated way possible. And any utopian vision is doomed to fail. What jars me is not that these claims are necessarily false, but the ludcrious confidence with which these scenarios, with their splinteringly miniscule plausibility are put forward.

I think this is important because this same failure of imagination (or worse: unwillingness to imagine) colors many moral positions people take on controversial issues, to the extent that we have a deeper fear of the unknown than we do of coming on the wrong side of an issue. Abortion is just wrong. We don't have to worry about the degree of suffering that may or may not be caused, we don't have to try and enter into a utilitarian calculus of whose life is worth more or under what conditions suffering should be endured. A tiredness and general lack of courage closes all of those issues up under a single refusal to engage in them whatsoever.

We should never clone anyone, ever. There should not be weapons in space. I'm going to hypothesize that the more open ended a moral question is, the more likely you are to find a faction that treats of it with an all-or-nothing prescription.

What Desire Consists in

2009-08-26T17:13:00.004-04:00

I've been developing my point on what desire must consist in. This comment of mine was posted at Common Sense Atheism, coming in the context of a discussion on death, where I said it is right to fear death. One commenter responded to me, saying:

However, it’s unhealthy to have a paralyzing fear of death, which is, if the atheists are correct, quite peaceful.

I replied:

Fortunately I haven’t said anything about a paralyzing fear of death. Luke [the owner of the Common Sense Atheism blog] said “I do not fear my death” and I’ve heard many people say this, often with reference to the famous Mark Twain quote about being dead billions of years before having been born. It’s that position that I think is incorrect. I think pain and regret, etc. are perfectly appropriate, healthy feelings, even if you are powerless to stop it.

Furthermore (perhaps this position of mine is closer to what you, lorkas, mean to criticize [that's the commenter who responded to me]), I think so long as it is true that death is bad we ought not attempt to believe it is anything other than bad, even if believing so were harmful to us (though I don’t think it is ultimately harmful even if the feeling itself is).

And, though Luke has not said so here and I am not claiming he holds this position, one corollary I frequently hear is that people would rather die than live forever, or for some very long amount of time. This is absurd.

It would be better for people to live than to die. The fact that people die when it would be better to live makes death a moral problem (one that it would be best to solve, if we can), and we have moral reasons for wanting to live as long as possible if we can find some feasible way of bringing it about. Finding ways to not fear death, I think, represents a withering of an important moral capacity that instructs us to appreciate life, fight to preserve it and enables us to combat superstitions (such as the one that 80 years is the “right” amount of time for people to be alive) that would lead to morally poor choices.

I was challenged on whether people's desires about how long they should live can actually be correct or incorrect. After all, they are desires. Can it really be "correct" to want to live longer? Similarly, can it be "correct" that someone desires ice cream? Are they lying about their desire?

Here was my reply:

I don’t think anyone is lying about what they desire, but I do think the desire to live a [shorter] rather than longer life, all else being equal, is in some sense incorrect. A person can be ignorant of a state of affairs that, if they knew better, they would desire very strongly. I won’t desire ice cream until I discover ice cream. Then, after discovering its enjoyable taste I might say “I desire ice cream.” Then, after discovering I am lactose intolerant I might revise that and say “I don’t desire ice cream.”

But before and after each revision, my desire or aversion was directed toward an identical state of affairs (in each case my physiology was the same: I enjoy the taste of ice cream no more or less than before, in each case I am no more or less lactose intolerant than I was before). What changed was the light under which they were considered (in that successively more light is cast each time.) These different desires can’t all be the best evaluation of the identical state of affairs.

Which is to say, a desire appears to be preceded by an evaluative process, a running of the state of affairs over your palate and coming to a determination as to whether you do in fact judge it to be desirable. A desire must consist in something that moved us from indifference to desire, something besides relations to other desires (the fact that we can have contradictory desires and must choose between them on the basis of whether they promote other desires, suggests to me that desires somehow pop up prior to a consideration of their relations to other desires, otherwise they would not be contradictory).

That “something” typically taken to be an intrinsic value (I have such things as pleasurable tastes, the feeling of happiness, etc. in mind). I can already see your response comment with the objection to intrinsic values [I say this because desirism does not accept that there are intrinsic values]. Believe me, I make this point in full consciousness of the intrinsic values objection, which may yet win me over. My answer to this is that things like “sweetness of taste” are no more or less intrinsic than is green or middle C, which certainly exist in some sense even if they aren’t intrinsic. If you want to say an experience of pleasure can be too complicated to make analogy to a single color or sound, but that it is something over and above those things, I can concede that this is true, but that it is nonetheless consists in a combination of such things than then open us up to an enjoyable experience. (I’m prepared to elaborate on this if necessary.)

I’ve said too much for one comment, so to summarize, (1) desires are preceded by an evaluative process, (2) if that process is to be possible at all, desires must consist in something to be evaluated besides their relations to other desires (3) the components of the experience which are judged to be desirable are no more or less intrinsic than the color green or the sound of middle C. (4) Just as there is a correct answer to whether an image has green in it, there is a correct answer to whether an experience consists in those things that make experiences desirable.

I recognize that point (4) may seem absurd, because it entails things like “the desire to have chocolate cake” can be wrong, or that prioritizing the desire to listen to Joanna Newsom over the desire to listen to Third Eye Blind can be correct. I think this is true, and again, I’m prepared to elaborate on it if necessary.

Desire Utilitarianism

2009-08-24T11:48:00.005-04:00

I might as well post a second comment I've put up at Alonzo Fyfe's Atheist Ethicist blog. He's the man behind Desire Utilitarianism (or "Desirism," the dust hasn't settled on it yet). Today, he has a post discussing the thwarting of desires and what kind of actions should be taken when certain desires are in conflict.

I anticipate that if I get a response, it will be to the fact that I am (1) implying the existence of intrinsic values of which Fyfe is skeptical, (2) that what I call "abhorrence" which is so wanting of condemnation is in fact condemned exactly as much as is necessary, (3) that it is in fact impossible to form a coherent system of "abhorrent" desires without them conflicting with one another (4) my complaint is not so much an argument as a demand for emotional satisfaction, or even (5) that just as desires can be stronger than other desires, some desires can be suppressive of other desires in a manner as to merit special condemnation.

In any case, I look forward to learning more about desirism- it is alive to many complaints I have with contemporary moral systems and answers them in a satisfying way. My last suspicion is whether I should actually favor it over preference utilitarianism.

If, by some act of magic, we could create a child who enjoys pain, this will not allow us to fulfill the desires of those who seek to torture children. If the child likes pain, than inflicting pain on the child would not be torture. By the very definition of the word, a person is not being tortured unless he or she has a particularly strong desire (e.g., an aversion to pain, an aversion to the sensation of drowning) that is being thwarted.

What about a child who likes pain, but not torture?

This would appear to restore the desire to cause pain to children as holding a valid place in society's network of desires. There admittedly remains something absurd about this, and there is probably an easy case to be made that there are indeed still desires being thwarted (such as that of the parents that their child lead a normal life and not run the risk of being ostracized).

The game I'm playing is to see if there is a way to set this up such that a desire is apparently horrifying and yet doesn't thwart other desires.

As I've observed both here and at Luke's Common Sense Atheism blog, it appears that when cases like rape or violence or robbery come up, it is by fortunate turn of circumstance that we recognize their thwarting of other desires and condemn them on that basis.

But, at least in my observation, there is nothing in principle preventing certain like-minded people from setting up their own settlement where they practice any number of behaviors an "average person" would find abhorrent, but are able to fit them together so as to not thwart one another's desires (for example, raising children to desire, or at least tolerate violent things being done to them).

I don't think, for example, that it can be resolved by identifying abhorrence with "desires that tend to thwart other desires," because I can think of desires that thwart other desires without having the character of abhorrence. For example, a law requiring everyone to play checkers once a day would certainly thwart desires, but not be abhorrent.

My intuition is that seemingly abhorrent acts are abhorrent for a reason other than the fact that they thwart other desires. And with what I understand of desire utilitarianism so far, I don't feel that it empowers me to condemn suffering for the sheer fact that suffering is wrong.

On Intrinsic Values

2009-08-07T04:44:00.003-04:00

Haven't posted in a bit, but I might as well share my participation at other blogs. I just posted this as a comment over at Atheist Ethicist, home of the philosophy of desire utilitarianism.

Alonzo,

I have only just encountered your philosophy this week, so I apologize in advance if I don't characterize it accurately. You say:

If those beliefs are false then there is a chance that you are not fulfilling the most and strongest of your desires as you could be.

Supposing all desires were equally desirable (and bad desires correspondingly undesirable), one would prefer those which encouraged, numerically, the greatest number of good desires and suppressed the greatest number of bad desires.

However, there is such a thing as a stronger or weaker desire. Which appears to mean a single strong desire could thwart desires numerically larger and still have reason for being promoted, provided it is sufficiently strong.

Doesn't that mean there is a coin of the realm that desire must consist in such that it can be weaker or stronger than other desires? And that, whatever this coin is, it cannot be (exclusively) a quantity of other desires, but something that those desires terminate in which is itself desirable?

I think the pleasurable experience is an obvious candidate (or perhaps a combination of things, of which the pleasurable experience is one).

This would be an opening for the insertion of intrinsic values where pleasure counts as an intrinsic value, and is real because it is or corresponds to a brain state in the same way a desire, which is real, does.

It might be the case that pleasure is intrinsically pleasurable, but not intrinsically valuable if its realization is bound up in a subsequent chain of pleasurable and non-pleasurable experiences, and what is "valuable" is any state of affairs that returns a positive balance of pleasure after subjection to the utilitarian calculus.

It may be too much an abuse of the word "intrinsic" to say that a state of affairs with a whole mixture of consequences yielding a positive amount of pleasure could be "intrinsically valuable." But there remains an intrinsic quality that the objects of desires ought to consist in, that they might be stronger or weaker than one another.

If Max Baucus fails

2009-07-30T14:45:00.005-04:00

The Missoula Independent profiles Max Baucus. They open with two competing portraits of Baucus, this being the positive one:

One view suggests Baucus is fulfilling his political destiny. The Montana senator, a Democrat and chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has prepared his entire 34-year career in Congress for this role. He's a savvy centrist. His political independence and the relationships he's fostered with senators on both sides of the aisle make him uniquely suited to broker intensely complicated negotiations among the most powerful people and special interests in Washington, D.C. Colleagues claim no one works harder than Baucus. He's spent more than a year—beginning well before President Obama took office and made health care reform his top domestic priority—holding hearings and educating committee members on the nuances of the issue. Baucus himself calls the process fun.

That being the case, if Baucus can savage the health care bill so much, and still not get significant Republican support, I think it would be fair to say his career is a failure. Is 34 years as a savvy, cooperative centrist finally culminating in a committee chairmanship and more than a year of hearings and devastating compromises not enough to win a couple Republican votes?

Harris and The Synthesis

2009-07-27T00:59:00.006-04:00

There is an ongoing caricature of critical atheists, according to which they are identified more with an objectionable tenor than a body of criticisms. I think this characterization reflects a form of misoneism more than engagement, but it is probably also in part because the criticisms, such as they are, have only begun to cross over from philosophy departments into the sphere of "public dialogue."

In any case, if I could will that the character of atmospheric disagreeableness be replaced with a specific statement, it would be this:

Even the thoroughly liberalized thinking-mans theology, which has amended itself to the requirements of modernity by carving out its place as an explanation for the subtleties of human empathy and nature, is based on an unwarranted and premature assumption about the limits of science.

That it hasn't done so, I think, is typically held up as the point of differentiation between this moderated form of theology and its more fundamentalist counterparts. And it's one of the reasons why it's ok to aggressively refute any of the various iterations of fundamentalism, but not to treat moderates in a similar manner.

I think it would be pointless or even destructive to kick up a culture clash for the sake of it, as these moderates have also distinguished themselves from fundamentalists in that they continue to be relevant participants in the conversation on "human nature," so far as we are capable of having one.

However, there will probably come a point when the state of our scientific knowledge advances to the point that certain religiously inspired conceptions of the limits of science will prove to be a hindrance to scientific understanding in the same way that fundamentalism is now.

Hopefully Sam Harris's op-ed in today's New York Times regarding the appointment of Francis Collins as the director of the National Institute of Health will represent a step forward, and out of the discussion about tenor. Collins, a brilliant geneticist, has attempted to perform The Synthesis, but as Harris points out, it's a way of thinking that could tangle otherwise clear thinking on scientific issues.

Most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components — including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc.

As someone who believes that our understanding of human nature can be derived from neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science and behavioral economics, among others, I am troubled by Dr. Collins’s line of thinking. I also believe it would seriously undercut fields like neuroscience and our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like frontal lobe syndrome and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?

Dr. Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.”

One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the institutes of health. After all, understanding human well-being at the level of the brain might very well offer some “answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” — questions like, Why do we suffer? Or, indeed, is it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself? And wouldn’t any effort to explain human nature without reference to a soul, and to explain morality without reference to God, necessarily constitute “atheistic materialism”?

2009-07-23T14:52:00.004-04:00

Matthew Yglesias on Prof. Gates' getting arrested:

Meanwhile, note that racial motivations or [their] absence have really nothing to do with the nature of Officer Crowley’s misconduct. What happened basically is that Crowley accused Gates, whether for good reason or not, of breaking into his own home. Gates, pissed off, offended Crowley. At which point Crowley, even though he was now perfectly aware that Gates was not guilty of anything, decided to exact revenge by manipulating the situation to create a trumped-up disorderly conduct charge. That’s not professional policing, and it’s not a good use of the City of Cambridge’s law enforcement resources. That’s why the charges were dropped, and that’s why it’s fair to say that Crowley was acting stupidly racial issues aside.*

And the asterisk:

* To consider a race-free instance, I was actually treated extremely rudely by an MPDC officer yesterday. I, wisely, just decided to not worry about it and move on. But suppose I’d decided to respond to him being rude by overreacting and blowing up at him. And then he decided to respond to me being rude by finding some pretext on which to arrest me. Neither the fact that the cop’s not a racist nor the fact that I had overreacted would make retaliating with a trumped-up charge the right way for the cop to respond.

Of course, the fact that the charge was dropped seems to be getting glazed over as though it were an inconsequential background piece (though not necessarily by Yglesias).

But, the charge was dropped. Unless one is committed to the a priori assumption that the officer was incompetent, he probably knew quite well that the charges were going to be dropped but arrested him anyway. There was no arrest for burglary, because the officer knew there was no burglar. There was only a misunderstanding that escalated into a baseless arrest.

Limits of Science Revisited

2009-07-17T12:40:00.025-04:00

I hope Mr. Schoen of the u n d e r v e r s e doesn't mind my picking on him once more, as I will be doing exactly that.

First, Sean Carroll has a great post up on the "limits of science," that is almost exactly the subject I have been mulling over in the last few posts.

...what does science actually have the power to do?

I can think of one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question: first, attempt to distill the essence of “science” down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been “the Baconian scientific method” or “logical positivism” or “Popperian falsificationism” or “methodological naturalism.” But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures.

He's pointing out that impasses on "the limits of science" debates almost always hinge on the fact that the meaning of science gets slighted the more clear people try to be about it. That's not a rejection of clarity, it's rather a comment on an unfortunate state of affairs- it's hard to be precise about a dynamic process without also lopping off crucial parts of its dynamism.

Sean is exactly right- though "punchy motto" should be taken to mean a clear description of particular process. There is more than a motto: there is always, for any particular attempt to describe what science is, a large intellectual effort concerned with clearing the ground for a certain method: you identify a problem and criticize conventional approaches to it; you set up an internally consistent vocabulary; you make a set of arguments about why that vocabulary is the correct one to use. Eventually enough precision is reached to describe a process or set of processes that count as "science." But there always seem to be exceptions to each new account of what "science" is, which always seem to generate people newly convinced of the limits of science.

Sean continues:

Science doesn’t do a bunch of experiments concerning colliding objects, and say “momentum was conserved in that collision, and in that one, and in that one,” and stop there. It does those experiments, and then it also proposes frameworks for understanding how the world works, and then it compares those theoretical frameworks to that experimental data, and — if the data and theories seem good enough — passes judgment. The judgments are necessarily tentative — one should always be open to the possibility of better theories or surprising new data — but are no less useful for that.

We tend to reduce science down to a method or a certain body of knowledge, and then leave it frozen up to those limits and suggest that whatever else is "beyond" science, which has doomed in their respective turns, verificationists, logical positivists, and falsificationists. Defenders of religious insight generally don't have a difficult time punching holes in "science" as outlined by these theories because you can (seemingly) always use language in a way that wasn't anticipated by people defining science, which always "proves" that there is some kind of truth that science isn't.

And if I read Chris correctly, he is using that strategy when he says:

Though these and other scientific models would later become refined and legitimated through measurement and observation, there is nothing evidentiary within hypothesizing itself. The creation of models in science [is] itself a poetic function.

and, a little downward:

Reason does not--cannot--produce the initial visionary flash that generates scientific ideas. It can only take these ideas as given and evaluate them methodologically. The ideas themselves come from elsewhere; from the imagination.

I'm curious what he thinks of the notion of an unanswered scientific question, which seems like an idea that straddles both sides of the "divide." For even to formulate a question is to make enough sense of your experience that you can recognize it as a problem, and fix its answer within certain limits. The P = NP problem for example, is obviously a scientific question, a question that is unanswered, and a question whose hypothesizing must occur within fixed limits. The "visionary flash" then, becomes quite corralled.

But more can be said. There are all kinds of things that count as visionary flashes (note the bit of conflation that crops up here- there are processes of thought other than the scientific method that nonetheless belong to a world describable by science- when we call something "not scientific" it should be taken to mean having less or a different kind of precision than our task requires, not that it involves a crossover into some other category of reality) but even in that initial casting about, it seems unfair to suggest that we get something different in kind from what we would obtain under the guidance of an explicitly rational process.

What exactly is going on, anyway? Well, one pulls apart concepts and recombines their pieces, shift contexts, adds or takes away assumptions, ratchets up or down the need for adherence to some principle, and every now and again looks back at the question, and at any available evidence to see how well such thoughts hold up. Where a "vision" fits in, I'm not sure.

If we didn't do this, whether via "vision" or rational process I'm not sure it would be possible to realize such a thing as a new model at all, and so to speak of it as though outside the limits of the scientific method deprives the method of a large part of its meaning, exactly the problem Sean Carrol was being careful to avoid.

A visionary flash seems to mean the sudden appearance of a new idea, together with an instant and firm grasp of its application. The closest analogy I can think of would be an explorer tasked with making a new map. She would already know beforehand the limits of existing maps, she would probably have already walked beyond those limits and perhaps have a vague idea of what the map is going to look like, and most importantly, she would already know how she was going to make the map of the new territory she encounters. What she can't control is what she sees. But this isn't quite right- what also needs to be said is, there is a chance of seeing landmasses wholly unlike anything that has been mapped before, so its not simply an issue of drawing up old images in new places.

But that's not a difficult problem- one can still draw. And a new discovery about reality can still be articulated in the same old mathematical language- its no problem that it describes wholly new rules.

So is it the fact that we can't anticipate what shape, or in what order, our new concepts might appear before us as we hypothesize (in that, an inability to anticipate tips us off to a process obviously outside our immediate control)? Or is it that we are constrained to speaking of them as though they were newly appearing in a "flash," when in truth there was an ongoing and finer struggle to "make sense" of something that precedes what we can deal with in empiricism or even language at all? If that's the case, it's not that things pop out of nowhere, rather there suddenly comes a moment when these ruminations produce something clear enough that we can "catch" it, deal with it in language, which makes the concept "new" in the sense of being for the first time as manageable as all the other ones we can comfortably deal with in language.

Even granting that the process was in some sense non-scientific, how could there be a point of crossover that consistently saw non-scientific concepts translating into ones with relevance and meaning essential to a scientific insight? What kind of mechanism could do that? We can refine and increase levels of precision- but that would mean there was something properly scientific about a concept from beginning to end. If we deny that there was, within a concept, something properly scientific from the beginning, we'd also have to deny that this was the case once it became clearly understood, and be left with the absurdity that one could manufacture "science" just by increasing the amount of clarity in the absence of content.

What is left, I think, is a body of experiences (in the most all-encompassing sense possible) that undergo a progressive escalation of confidence. If that is the case- this progressive escalation of confidence means that every bit of knowledge, however vague, is situated on the same track, even if only at the very beginning of it. If one wants to say not all segments on this track of escalation are equal and that only after a certain point do they become scientific, that's fair, but it totally leaves behind the question of why or how the "visionary" process was doing something fundamentally different from what science does.

It also affirms something that almost no one believes: that scientists and poets alike draw from a common reservoir of experience and that insights uncovered by poetry are always already promised to a corresponding scientific description.

Bigotry at Redstate

2009-07-15T19:23:00.020-04:00

So I have, in fact, been banned from Redstate for this post (a link I can no longer access from home) about the Pew poll showing a minuscule 6% of scientists identifying as Republicans (12% with leaners). Moe Lane, an administrator, replaced most of my post with a youtube video and replaced my headline, "What's up with the Pew Poll? 12% of Scientists identify as Republican" with a generic "What's up with Democrat Spending?" This is what I originally wrote- just some numbers pulled from the Pew poll and a few very reasonable questions asking what they think about it.

Since I was banned, I'd like to respond here to some of the commenters I got over at Redstate who tried to question the legitimacy of the poll, (and also, I'd like to respond to Moe and his banning "rationale").

Aesthete says:

...I don't see your point
Are you trying to prove that the Bush administration suppressed scientific research? If so, you’re going to need to provide a substantially greater amount of proof than polls.

Are you trying to spread the idea of conservatives as being anti-academic, or anti-science? In which case, wouldn’t the results on voter beliefs on science contradict that claim?

As to the “conservatives in the mist” segment of your diary, I don’t overly concern myself with group polling. I don’t think that the fact that blacks vote Democrat, that the military votes Republican, or that (not Native American) Indians vote Republican automatically lead to the conclusion that Dems are anti-military or anti-Indian, or that Republicans are anti-scientist or racist. In reality, there are several plausible explanations for the results indicated in the polls (assuming that the methodology is sound). As such, such data is only useful as an interesting anecdote, and not in my preferences for policy. Neoclassical monetarist economic policies encourage the development of a strong economy with high potential for growth, and that includes science and technology-related investment.

Also, aggregating all scientific fields to prove your “point” is an amateur move, as the “soft sciences” are much more partisan than harder sciences, esp. Engineering, Physics, and the like.

This last point is absolutely false. The scientists are broken into four groups: Biological and Medical (1,255), Chemistry (348), Geosciences (154), Physics and Astronomy (229). So much for the "amateur move." As for the questions- no, I don't think polling constitutes proof that the Bush Admin. suppressed evidence, I think the fact that the Bush Admin suppressed evidence constitutes proof that they suppressed evidence. And yes, I am trying to "spread" the idea of a disjunction between conservative thought and mainstream scientific thought, since it's supported by polling and ought to be discussed by people who don't seem to want to believe it's true.

Uma Ritcie says:

In most science-related articles
the author concludes with calls for “more government funding” to continue exploration of the topic. I assume that if you spend hours and hours on grant proposals when you’d much rather be in the lab doing research, you’re not going to identify with us tightwad Republicans.

I originally mistook this comment for a claim that this study ends by calling for more funding, and struggled in vain to find the part of the report where this occurs. It was, however an attempt to dismiss the report based on a lazy generalization, that's not even appropriate in this case because Pew doesn't take money from the government.

civil_truth says:

It's been quite a while since I've seen a true-blue "conservatives in the mist" diary
So let’s get down to nuts and bolts - when the Obama adminstration suppresses dissenting views on global ~~warming~~ climate change, is that a bad thing (as when the Bush administration allegedly did that) or is that just a necessary silencing and suppression of heretics who dare to challenge a new scientific orthodoxy?

Your answer to that question will establish whether you believe in the old fashioned scientific method as a path to determining objective truth, or whether you agree with the predominant doctine today that science is simply a tool to leverage a post-modern political agenda that rejects objective scientific truth.

I hadn't heard of "conservatives in the mist" before. It apparently comes from a Jonah Goldberg article about the condescending practice of treating conservatives as poor, clueless creatures who don't know better; the quiet background premise being that this is not a legitimate observation. Goldberg's article is now meme-ified, which provides a handy defense mechanism should anyone suggest a divergence between conservative thought and mainstream thought in any context.

As for the question- I would agree provided the report in question were actually "suppressed" rather than unsolicited. So, I'm glad (I guess?) to have proven my commitment to objective scientific truth.

JadedByPolitics says:

Your question on the military and overwhelming support for R's...
is indeed PROOF that the Dem’s are out of touch with the military and have been since Vietnam. The Military likes to get the job done without interference from the Congress and yet while they were no longer militarily engaged in Vietnam they watched as the Democrat Congress pulled the funding ensuring that people that helped them in anyway were slaughtered by the millions. The military in more recent times watched as those who were at war with us were treated by Dem’s as a police action instead of the war it was ie: 92 Twin Towers, Somalia, and well you know the rest.

So in conclusion I am saying that yes the military MISTRUSTS D’s as they should and with regards to Science the fact that Scientist’s consistantly want Government Spending which I believe makes their conclusions biased would not make a GREAT fit for Republicans.

JadedByPolitics appears to agree with the premise that polling a community for their approval of the political parties is a legitimate measure, or "PROOF," of whether those parties are "out of touch" with said community. Which apparently means they think Republicans are in some meaningful way "out of touch" with mainstream science.

Vegas_Rick says:

You've obviously already made up your mind
So why do you waste our time and bandwidth?

You’ve never spent a day in the military yet you talk of the indoctination of military recruits. Where’s your evidence?

Get lost moby.

("Moby" is a term they use at Redstate for liberals who come to Redstate and pretend they are conservative.) I base it on my experiences with one close friend and three or four casual friends who have each joined different branches, as well as my own personal thought that soldiers need to believe the war they are risking their lives for is a war worth fighting and Republicans tend to always have reasons why wars are worth fighting.

Finrod says:

I'd wonder about the internals of that poll
12 percent of scientists identified as Republican? What was the total number of Democrats and Republicans polled? I’m guessing that this poll way oversampled Democrats and way undersampled Republicans; whether intentionally or due to bad polling techniques it’s impossible to tell.

The total number of scientists polled was 2,533. I understand the notion of separating out Republicans, Democrats and independents in a poll, asking them questions, and then weight-adjusting their answers to compensate for over/under sampling and show the public's perspective on a given question. But I'm not sure where the idea comes from that you can weight-adjust the party affiliation numbers when the purpose of the question was to determine party affiliation.

Finally, site administrator Moe Lane says:

He's not returning anyway.
This is a partisan political site, not a therapy session for Democrats and liberals desperate to convince themselves that they aren’t bad people, really.

He certainly has me figured out. I ask them to account for the reported gulf between mainstream science and their Republican party because I feel guilty about Republicans who support policies injurious to the country because of their scientific illiteracy. Well, Moe, as long as you agree that every accusation you ever make of "bias" and "partisanship" is by your own admission hypocritical partisan garbage, that's fair enough. But even a partisan site secure in its message stands to benefit from a little introspection and self criticism.

Venturing into RedState

2009-07-12T00:36:00.007-04:00

I'm about to find out how well RedState likes opposing opinions. I recently authored a post there that is now "submitted for review". I don't remember the review process from the last time I was a member of RedState, but I do remember the hostile climate toward non-conservatives who would stop by, and a very aggressive policy of banning people who weren't conservative. We'll see.

It's below. It's actually quite bland, which is by design.

Hey guys. First post here, and I'll get something out of the way quickly: I probably don't agree with most of the political opinions on this site. That said, I think mingling of opposing views is healthy and helps make people on the other political side more human, and helps restore good faith. For all its celebration as a new way to engage with Democracy, the blogosphere is, in my experience, a very self-segregated place. So this is my little foray to the other side.

Anyway, I don't want to bury the lede on the Pew poll:

22% of Republicans polled say U.S. scientific achievements are best in the world, vs. 16% of Democrats

52% of Republicans polled say religion and science are in conflict vs. 62% of Democrats

45% of R's say science conflicts with their religious beliefs vs. 45% overall

77% of scientists say it is true that government scientists could not report findings that conflicted with Bush Administration positions

71% of scientists say that the above happened more often under the Bush Administration

56% of scientists view scientists as a group to be politically liberal, 2% view them as conservative, 42% as neither

6% of scientists are affiliated with the Republican Party, vs. 55% Democrat and 2% other

Including leaners, it's 12% Republican and 81% Democrat

9% of scientists call themselves "ideologically" conservative

64% of the public view scientists are neither politically conservative or politically liberal

84% of scientists view global warming as due to human activity, vs 21% for Republicans

So, in a variety of cases, on a variety of issues, there is a gulf between the opinions of Republicans and the opinions of the scientific community. The most staggering to me was the most talked about one, where 6% of scientists self-identify as Republican (12% with leaners). Most of the public (64%) don't think this would be the case. Were you a part of that 64%? For me, I honestly expected there to not be as many Republican scientists, but I didn't expect it to be this low.

So, is this a surprise to you? Do you take this as evidence that there is indeed a gulf between Republicans and mainstream science? (If not, I'd like to know what evidence you would need in order to believe that).

I think the obvious counter what I'm saying is to cite any similar polling that's been done on the any of the branches of the armed forces- my guess is you would find overwhelming support for the Republican party in each of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Is that supposed to prove that Democrats are "out of step" with the military? I would say no- there is rather a cultural identification with the military, with war heroes and with war in general that is entrenched in the military, and young apolotical recruits tend to get indoctrinated into that culture and keep the tradition alive.

Then, by parity of reasoning, can't some cultural reasons explain lack of Republican scientists? I don't think so. Issues of peace and war are more intrinsically ideological, and I don't think there is anything inherently "liberal" about being scientific, I hope not! I also don't see the logical connection between appreciating the importance of and using the scientific method, and thinking the Bush Administration was trying to suppress politically controversial science. At some point it's not right to call it bias any longer, and I think this is one of those cases. Thoughts?

Edit: From their "posting rules":

The purpose of this site is promote conservative and Republican ideals. This is our home, and we ask you kindly not to track mud into it. Revocation of posting privileges (banning) will take place after a warning of behavior which violates the intent and spirit of these rules.

'Intent and spirit' - that discussions should converge toward agreement with conservative mainstream thought?

Edit II: That didn't take long. I'm now seeing the dreaded "601 Database redigestation error", which apparently is Redstate speak for "you've been banned." I thought some commenters might give me hell, or that I would at least get a few diaries off before they decided I wasn't welcome.

The Myth of "Science to a Fault"

2009-07-08T13:47:00.044-04:00

At underverse, Chris Schoen tackles Jerry Coyne's question of why certain religions are agreed to be stupid and ridiculous while other religions with lots of followers are respected. Scientology is a laughingstock, precisely because its account of the world is impossible. Is this any less true of Catholicism or Judaism? Why, then, should they be respected?

For Chris, the difference appears to consist in the profound thinking can be occasionally generated by religious thinkers, and that this insight should open us up to the fact that the larger part of our humanity comes from truths not suggested to us by science. I have to pour some cold water on this. I also will have to quote Richard Feynman.

I'll start with the cold water: Chris says more by way of gesture and suggestion than by positive claims, so it's a little difficult to refute, but I think the essence comes in this paragraph:

It would be easy to conjure in our minds a hypothetical example of an unschooled rube, possibly bigoted, possibly lacking in self knowledge, and shielded from empathizing with his fellow humans by the comforting certainty of his dogma. To Coyne, or Dawkins, or Sam Harris, all literal religious belief is of this stripe. But we also have the benefit of calling to mind the writings of Kierkegaard, who brilliantly anticipated the quandary we find ourselves in now, by reversing the question: what's so respectable, so free-thinking, of believing something simply because it's patently true?

I will (try to) answer this question shortly. But this second portion is worth excerpting as it brings everything together:

But I nonetheless hope I have begun what may be a necessary challenge to the idea that belief in empirical truth is any more inherently respectable than subscribing to the truth of great art and literature. On what grounds would it be so, that are not self-establishing? Perhaps this question will help to reinforce Murdoch's insistence that "we are moral agents before we are scientists," and that "how to picture and understand human situations" must always precede descriptions from a more putatively objective perspective.

I think this involves a certain failure of imagination for the brilliance open to us in genuine scientific understanding. Science is "merely true" and advocacy of the kind done by biologists like Coyne, Dawkins, etc. supposedly involves a deafness to one's ability to empathize and understand the better part of our creative capacities. They chase after absolute science the way Ebeneezer Scrooge chased after money: to the detriment of their inner sense of humanity. If only they returned to art, to family (to religion?), they would gain back that perspective and become good again. This caricature has been the staple source of science fiction villains for decades, likely because it is widely perceived to still have a grain of truth.

But what a curiously stagnant, stale perspective "science" becomes under this rendering! This is "science" of middle school vocabulary quizzes, of a droning Ben Stein giving a high-school lecture. This is the "science" you get after it filters down through successive peer-reviews and text-book edits and conversational paraphrasings, chopping off ever more of the flailing spirit of curiosity and vision that originally bound it to its manifold participations in the universe.

It's not the science that communicates the profound massiveness of Arcturus. It's not the science that's sensitive to the onslaught of sensory information you experience in a kiss. It's not even the science that elegantly traces the simple net of balancing forces and frictions that somehow hold my stack of books together in my under-shelved room.

At this moment, I can't help but let the utterly irresistible Richard Feyman complete my thought for me (which I will be doing a few times more):

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.

Here is another outstanding one, where Feynman looks at the stars... and then back at the poet:

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

There are so many like this that I can barely hold myself to quoting just these two. This is the popular myth that Schoen is invoking- that there is a mutual exclusivity between our sense of humanity and the perspective we obtain by being scientific, and that therefore we must perform a balancing act that involves appreciating religious, poetic, artistic contributions to understanding, as though they presided over ontologically distinct realms.

I this false distinction comes from the fact that our cognitive sciences still obviously have much to discover, and in the meanwhile we experience all kinds of things like hope, love, fear... that are immediate consequences of the very cognitive processes we have yet to understand. And so, civilization has had century upon century to stand in front of these problems, and generate a flourishing history of literature and poetry, which have inspired premature "answers" to these problems and languished and crystallized over time.

And this is the point where people are wont to throw incredulous questions at one another from across separate language games: one can ask disbelievingly: "So you're saying that there is no such thing as poetry?" (No.) "So we can use science to analyze poetry and aesthetics for us?" (A question that sounds more like a threat than a question, and speaks to the larger conversation about underlying premises that I think is entailed.)

As for his re-asking of Kierkegaard's question: The "mere facts" being advanced by Richard Dawkins, or Jerry Coyne, carry in toe a whole understanding of the scientific perspective that people are still deeply uncomfortable with and unprepared to embrace, because of the mistaken belief that one can be scientific "to an extreme" (e.g. the "moral agent" as something juxtaposed against a person inhabiting a scientific perspective). Poetry is indeed about a world that is physical, and material, a fact that does not diminish poetic truths but rather situates them in a framework that coheres with the scientific understanding. It's this larger stride toward a fullness of perspective without religious explanations that, I think, Dawkins & co. are after. Here again, Feyman states it better than I ever could:

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.

I'm glad that a challenge to comparative respectability of empiricism has been initiated. This conversation was inevitable, and there are a lot of well-entrenched assumptions about the "limits" of science that will have to be confronted sooner or later. I think a discussion along these lines will eventually make clear poetic and religious insights (as distinguished from science) is a concept that will go the way of the Cartesian "mind" (as distinguished from body). As Richard Rorty observed, "the mind" was also a belligerent holdover from an old vocabulary when the problem looked differently than it does today, and it is not so much an irony as a haunting fact that today, creationists have begun co-opting the old philosophical arguments in favor of a non-spatial, non-scientific mind to pry open a gap and inject their dogma.

I leave you with a final thought on the value of science by Richard Feynman:

There are the rushing waves...
mountains of molecules,
each stupidly minding its own business...
trillions apart
...yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages...
before any eyes could see...
year after year...
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
...on a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest...
tortured by energy...
wasted prodigiously by the sun...
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea,
all molecules repeat
the patterns of another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves...
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity...
living things,
masses of atoms,
DNA, protein...
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land...
here it is standing...
atoms with consciousness
...matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea...
wonders at wondering... I...
a universe of atoms...
an atom in the universe.

Accommodation responses

2009-06-30T09:40:00.001-04:00

I wrote this as a comment to a post over at the Sensuous Curmudgeon. It seems to me fairly representative of the dispute as a whole, so, with small edits, I'm reproducing it here:

@LC, @Curmudgeon

If not turning these people away from supporting quality science education by refusing to adopt an aggressive atheist position is “condescending” and “patronizing” then that is just too bad. To do so would play right into the hands of the creationists, who love to paint the science establishment as a barrel full of atheist monkeys.

(First, I don’t agree with the premise that the effect is to “turn people away”, but its not the point I’m interested in.)

Regardless of whether a certain behavior “plays into the hands” of creationists, it is only propping up an argument that is going to be false anyway. At a certain point merely stating the truth takes priority over being sensitive to whether you are providing “ammunition” for false arguments.

I think we need to untether “aggressive behavior” from mere “factuality.” I think a cornerstone of the criticism of accommodationism is that it involves a measure of wishful thinking. You end up with problematic statements, like incompatibilities between faith and science being merely “alleged”, which happily prescribes non-engagement with our religious friends.

The principle, that we need to curtail our argumentative behavior bleeds over into the making of statements that are, if not literally false, obscuring legitimate issues. I suggest that, to whatever extent we are going to engage on these issues in the first place, it is necessarily going to involve truthfully laying out incompatibilities.

It may be the case that bringing these incompatibilities to the doorstep of our religious friends, when they haven’t asked for it and weren’t asking for a debate, is counter productive. That issue should, however, be seen as separate from the discussion as to whether these incompatibilities actually exist.

As examples, here are some points from Curmudgeon that, I think, have these problems:

Creationism is, and should remain, a denominational squabble, utterly inappropriate in science discussions.

The above point is great, but it’s represented as though it’s consistent with a hands-off approach. But we all know very well, that anyone who participates in creationist talk views their own issue as anything but a mere denominational squabble.

As to the existence of actual science-religion incompatibilities, we can never say that evolution is consistent with everyone’s understanding of his own religion…

Except that individual believers are often happy to help us on this point. And what happens when they insist in all earnestness that their religious view require a vigorous rejection of science? What should we say then? And what should we say about an accommodationist insisting that there is no incompatibility?

The way Curmudgeon represents this, it seems to me, is that he would indeed engage in such debate if only it were necessary. But, by a happy accident of fortune, it happens that we can’t discover anything about the reconcilability of a particular persons faith with the facts of (say) evolution. I respectfully submit that this is wishful thinking, embraced because of its preferable recommendation that we don’t kick up dust.

Some churches actually enjoy the fantasy that they’re under assault by an evil scientific opponent. If that’s their pleasure, we should leave them to play that game without our participation. Some day they may tire of imaginary martyrdom.

Except that such perceived victimization is often the vaulting-off point for religious ventures into science. It will often unfortunately be the case that their worldview is structured such that well-intended statements about science increase their sense of victimization, even when they are perfectly true. In such cases we are helpless but to continue inspiring them and it would be bizarre to respond to this by prioritizing co-operation over honesty.

I should add to this comment, that I understand I am saying something a bit different from PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, who were concerned with National Academy of Sciences and similar institutions maintaining neutrality over the subject of compatibility.

My comment comes in the context of the actual discussion the rest of us have been having on the actual issue of incompatibility. To the extent that we need to have a conversation, the above is (part of) what we should be saying.

Accommodating

2009-06-28T16:11:00.002-04:00

Lots of talk about accommodationism lately. On one hand, there is Lawrence Kauss's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. On the other, there is Chris Mooney's response to Jerry Coyne's book review and the weaving winding coattails of discussion have been with us since.

This is my first post on the subject, so I want to highlight what I think are some problems of accommodationism as well as a few points on anti-accommodationism being a test of "ideological purity," which has been flying around. John Wilkins characterized it as "making science the enemy of religion," and nothing I've read from Mooney, or in the respective comment sections, has been much more charitable. As the back and forth proceeds, the clarity of premises upon which that dialogue was initiated tends to erode. And hence anti-accomodation is represented as "ideological purity."

The extent of our willingness to accommodate is itself the very measure of the reach and influence of ideas we find anti-scientific. This is to say, ideas that cannot be reconciled with science find their grip in that space of tolerance we lend to them, becoming exponentially more empowered than if they were merely advocated by their supporters. Indeed, the Discovery Institute's entire strategy for advancement of ID could be summed up in the fact that they take advantage of this tolerance and essentially stand upon it as though it were a platform built expressly for the purpose of propping them up.

The negative strain on reasonable discourse consists just as much in the constricting effect of accommodationists who see themselves as mediators trying to maintain a happily cooperative equilibrium by talking down those who would take issue with anti-science. And so we end up with the new problem of lectures on civility taking up the space that could, with less-muddied waters, be used to say more about what science is than what it isn't.

I think, contrary to Mooney's claim, you do win hearts and minds when you show an idea doesn't resonate with credible people. Committed advocates like William Dembski and Michael Egnor, are never, ever going to be converted. Nor do I think any concessions will be won from Karl Giberson or Kenneth Miller.

It's people on the sidelines who aren't committed advocates, who are tasked with the problem of parsing the muddied waters of public discourse for ideas that appear to be credible. They aren't helped when ridiculous ideas are put on their plate with the same tolerance and appearance of credibility that is supposed to be reserved for legitimate concepts like evolution.

And so, "tolerance" morphs into an idea that no one in particular should be setting down with clarity what the proper limits of science actually are, and communities not so concerned as the rest of us with such limits can see this open space as a platform for some emotionally satisfying spiritual exercise for "synthesizing" religion and science.

If we are to co-operate, so says the accommodationist, a measure of diplomacy is necessary. That seems to be the takeaway from Wilkinson's post, and that's fine. But in the actual moment of encountering a falsehood, diplomatic gymnastics compromise clarity, and they shouldn't be prioritized over the truth in the actual moments where false things are asserted.

Moreover, it's not clear to me that a forthright approach necessarily precludes the possibility of amicably working with people who don't share the same understandings about science. If the point is to be practical and agreeable with, say, religious groups, why must I assume this is only possible by minimizing or obscuring the existence of points of contention? I find it hard to believe a common sense of humanity and respect couldn't shine through before it got to that point. If it couldn't, there probably was not much possibility for co-operation in the first place.

The whole complaint seems to me to reduce to an atmospheric complaint over style which errs excessively toward caution and indifference.

Erickson

2009-06-25T16:37:00.009-04:00

Erick Erickson has been deservedly knocked around for his early defense of Sanford. What he wrote:

First, we need to be clear on the facts — not the media speculation:

    * Sanford did tell his staff and family where he was going.
    * Because he was traveling without a security detail, it was in his best interests that no one knew he was gone.
    * His political enemies — Republicans at that — ginned up the media story.
    * When confronted by a pestering media, things went downhill.
    * Again though, at all times there was no doubt that Sanford’s staff and family knew where he was.

Now, here is all you need to know about this whole entire story — the reaction from the erstwhile Republicans angry at Sanford for not being a fiscal squish and from the media all go back to their core belief that without Sanford manning the barricades of government at all times, the government will collapse and people will starve, die, and forget how to read and write.

That’s it.

But that did not happen. Life in South Carolina went on. The world did not end. Government did not go off the rails. That the media and politicians would react as they did says more about their world view than anything else.

It is refreshing that Mark Sanford is secure enough in himself and the people of South Carolina that he does not view himself as an indispensable man.

"The world did not end," a defense not unlike nine year old who, upon vaulting themselves off the swing set and over a chain link fence, triumphantly reports that they didn't in fact get hurt. Such a narrow objection says more about the absent perspective.

But Erick Erickson was not (merely) wrong on the narrow facts, which would be unremarkable enough. He was, beyond this, putting the whole cognitive dissonance schematic on display. It's literally a case where circumstance (fortune?) has skimmed off the pretense of factuality but left the coping mechanism.

I glean from this model that the "real" controversy is always the politically motivated rivals who can't get over how great a conservative (insert Republican) is. The controversy additionally reveals some compromising "core belief" belonging to their opponents and its Erick Erickson's job as a blogger set things straight by plumbing the depths of the liberal psyche for these kernels of compromising wisdom.

Critics of Republicans are never merely in need of correction, their context is never in need of adjustment: to make things level, the appetite demands a counter-claim equaling the stature of the original controversy. And so, the very presence of suspicion against a Republican must be symptomatic of a base philosophical defect "proving" the critic out of his depth, or worse.

links

2009-06-25T06:50:00.015-04:00

Last updated 8-12-09, 3:33 a.m.

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