Geoff Arnold

On standing up against those who oppose reason

More and more ordinary people - not pundits, columnists or politicians - are speaking up in defence of the values of the Enlightenment. This time it's Adam Bosworth: "It is time to say that facts are what matter, not faith, that human progress is accomplished through unfettered use of reason and inquiry and tolerance and discussion and debate, not through intolerant and irrational acts of terror or edicts."

(Via Loosely Coupled.)

Morally bankrupt, my good man?

Occasionally someone will post a comment on a blog entry that deserves a more prominent response than simply adding a further comment. A few hours ago, Alec commented on my criticism of Thomas Friedman:

"Morally bankrupt" - that's one of the phrases that even scientifically hip biology-teaching evangelical Christians use on me when I deny the existence of God and generally toast their tootsies with atheist rejection of their belief.

Does it actually mean anything to you, or have you too succumbed to subjective mudslinging as a means of argument, however odious the target, my good man?

The belief that morality is impossible without a belief in God, and that to be an atheist "shows a recklessness of moral character and utter want of moral sensibility" [1] is widespread; indeed it used to be the law of the land. One would expect those theists for whom the existence of [some kind of] God is an "objective fact" to argue from this that morality has an objective basis. What is curious is that some atheist philosophers have historically conceded the consequent of the argument, and have argued that, in the absence of a God, morality is necessarily "subjective" or "invented". (See, for instance, Mackie [2].)

Yet the notion that morality and ethics are God-given is hard to sustain these days. Indeed it is under attack from both science and theistic philosophy! For philosophers and theologians such as Swinburne, the notion of "goodness" must be independent of God, otherwise the assertion that "God is good" is simply a tautology. On the scientific front, we are developing better and better models of how creatures develop social behaviours, including cooperation and altruism: Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue [4] provides an excellent high-level account of this work, though geeks should also dive into Axelrod's fundamental work. [5] The key insight of researchers such as Kagen, Wilson, and Frank is that morality derives not from reason, but from instinct:

Wilson chides philosophers for not taking seriously the notion that morality resides in the senses as a purposive set of instincts. They mostly view morality as merely a set of utilitarian or arbitrary preferences and conventions laid upon people by society. Wilson argues that morality is no more a convention than other sentiments such as lust or greed. When a person is disgusted by injustice or cruelty he is drawing upon an instinct, not rationally considering the utility of the sentiment, let alone simply regurgitating a fashionable convention.
[4, p.143]

So to return to Alec's charge: when I refer to Thomas Friedman as being "morally bankrupt", I am inviting the reader to join me in an instinctually-based reaction, which derives from our shared heritage as social animals. These instincts are perfectly objective: the behaviours to which they give rise can, and have, been measured and modelled in a variety of ways. And the source of these instincts is, quite simply, our old friend natural selection. No theistic hypothesis is required.

[1] Odell v. Koppee, 5 Heisk. (Tenn) 91. Quoted in [3].
[2] John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1979)
[3] Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002)
[4] Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (London: Penguin Books, 1997)
[5] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984)

'You haven't explained everything yet' is not a competing hypothesis

Nice op-ed piece on ID in the NYT by Dan Dennett entitled Show Me the Science. Key paragraph:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, 'You haven't explained everything yet,' is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

In defense of uncommon sense

A couple of days ago I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times by John Horgan, entitled In Defense of Common Sense. Horgan is (in)famous for his announcement of "The End of Science"; now he rails against the fact that modern science is counterintuitive and violates common-sense.

"Scientists' contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity..." [Can Horgan really cite an example of this? I've never seen one outside the field of semiotics, which isn't a science.] "The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists. Needless to say, I reject that position, and not only because I'm a science journalist (who majored in English). I have also found common sense — ordinary, nonspecialized knowledge and judgment — to be indispensable for judging scientists' pronouncements, even, or especially, in the most esoteric fields."

I found this kind of stuff offensive on several grounds. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's nonsense - why should the set of cognitive skills that evolved in support of a hunter-gatherer existence be well adapted to the study of subatomic particles, DNA, or pulsars? From a sociological (and ultimately political) perspective, it suggests that scientific rigor and willingness to follow where the data leads should be trumped by a populist appeal to lay opinion; Lysenkoism and Kansas School Boards lie in that direction. Note his use of the word "contempt": he clearly wants to suggest that scientists feel contempt for those who live by common-sense, i.e. non-scientists. That's the kind of thing I'd expect from, say, Pat Buchanan.

In the latest issue of The Edge, Leonard Susskind from Stanford effectively exposes the flaws in Horgan's piece. However rather than quoting from Susskind's elegant essay, let me cite the whole of Daniel Gilbert's blunt refutation:

"Horgan's Op-Ed piece is such a silly trifle that it doesn't dignify serious response. The beauty of science is that it allows us to transcend our intuitions about the world, and it provides us with methods by which we can determine which of our intuitions are right and which are not. Common sense tells us that the earth is flat, that the sun moves around it, and that the people who know the least often speak the loudest. Horgan's essay demonstrates that at least one of our common sense notions is true."

That's wonderful. The second sentence ought to be printed on the front page of every science textbook.

Small ideas are safe

A serendipitous blog thread took me to Thoughts Arguments and Rants, where I stumbled over a lengthy critique of Paul Berman’s NY Times piece about the so-called "philosopher of Al Qaeda", Sayyid Qutb. Now I'm not particularly concerned about the Berman piece, nor about Sayyid Qutb; moreover all of this was published in the winter of 2003. No, what seized my attention was this insight (my emphases):

"Some, and I suspect Berman is among them, suggest that life is not meaningful without some deep idea to guide it. And this is meant to be a bad thing. But lives are, in the most important sense, not meaningful, and this is a good thing. Things that are meaningful, street signs, sentences in blogs, etc are not intrinsically valuable - their value consists in their utility. If lives are to be justified in terms of their meaning, that is to say that they have instrumental value only. And that is the first step on the road to ruin, or at least calamitous war.

I thought the primary lesson of the 20th century was that deep ideas are dangerous. Small ideas are the lifeblood of the world, and they are safe to boot. Someone who has a new idea for representing the relationship between thought and world, or for curing a particular kind of cancer, or for describing the history of the Jews through the Dublin traipsings of an ad salesman, is not likely to start a war over their idea. Someone who has a new idea for the overall arrangement of society is somewhat more war-prone. Deep thoughts are literally dangerous. Paraphrasing Keynes somewhat, the armies of the world are moved by little else."

The rest of the piece is packed full of lovely small ideas: from the risks of "Captain Ahab" philosophy, to the importance of small ideas in science*, and why Bloom is a better role model than Stephen in Ulysses. Highly recommended.

--
* which suggested a twist on John Lennon: "science is what happens when you're waiting for other paradigms"

Conformance

In response to my posting about the BBC's "greatest philosopher" vote, Mark suggested that I should take a look at a fascinating piece by Paul Graham entitled What You Can't Say. After a short preamble comes the challenge:

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Now this is fascinating, because in a conversation with a friend last week I mentioned that I was thinking of posting a piece challenging people to say whether or not they subscribed to any unorthodox or "fringe" beliefs. Graham's formulation is much better: it avoids the awkward judgment as to what would count as "unorthodox" by framing it in terms of behaviour.

Graham's essay is about how we see ourselves, and how we might want to reconsider our confidence in our contemporary beliefs by comparing them with others times and other cultures. It's really well-written, and I strongly recommend it. I, on the other hand, would like to pause a while with his challenge, and invite people to "come clean" about opinions that they might be reluctant to express in front of their peers. The nice thing about blog comments is that they can be anonymous, so your peers will never know that it's you....

I'll kick this off with my own personal "reluctant admission". I am a firm believer in the Aquatic Ape Theory proposed by Alister Hardy and documented by Elaine Morgan. Today it is often treated as an example of weird fringe science, but I am convinced that, in time, it will become part of the orthodox account of the evolution of homo sapiens.

Your turn.

The "greatest philosopher" vote, part 2

As I mentioned a few days ago, the BBC is running a poll to find out who we think the greatest philosopher is. The first phase is over, and we can now choose from the final list of 20 nominees. It's a fairly predictable list (it would be interesting to find out which of the members was "most unexpected"):

Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Epicurus, Heidegger, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Popper, Russell, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein.

And my vote? Well, I'm not quite ready to make up my mind....

Book notes: "Radiant Cool"

Last year a friend recommended a "curious book" to me: Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. I started it back in December, but I couldn't get into it and set it aside. Last week I came across it and finished it in a couple of sessions. C'est la vie.

It's an odd book. The first two-thirds are a novel: a thriller/mystery involving a philosophy grad student, theories of consciousness, experimental stimulation of various cortical areas, overdoses of SSRIs, and a hyperfictional element which eventually engulfs the characters and the story. Some bits worked, some bits didn't, and overall I was a bit frustrated.

Then there's the last third of the book: the appendix. In this, Lloyd (professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT) expounds a theory (or at least a programme) of consciousness which has two primary strands: a recursive retention (and hence representation) model derived from Husserl, and a view of the distinctive role played by the representation of time. Now this fascinated me. Early in my Phil.of Mind course with Dennett, I asked several people about exactly this issue - what is the state of thinking on the philosophy of time, and its relationship to the mind. I was pointed at the work of Bas Van Frassen as representing perhaps the best view of the philosophy of time as it applies to science, but I found no satisfactory account of time in mind. Maybe Jerry Fodor can explain how temporal notions are handled in a LOT, but I'm still waiting.

Does Lloyd nail it? No, but that's just fine: he's asking the same questions that I'm interested in. I note that David Chalmers has published a piece on Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap; it will be interesting to compare his attempted rebuttal of a phenomenal account of consciousness with Lloyd's ideas. Anyway, the book is RECOMMENDED, mostly for the appendix.

The greatest philosopher?

The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time is conducting a vote "to find out who you think is the Greatest Philosopher of all time". You actually get to vote twice: the first time to nominate a candidate, and the second time to pick from the twenty most nominated philosophers. After seeing the large number who are choosing Wittgenstein (some for the strangest of reasons), I felt compelled to submit a nomination for David Hume.

Phil. of mind books

Herewith an almost complete list of the books in the philosophy of mind section of my collection:

Annas: Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind

Aune: Knowledge of the External World

Brook (ed.): Daniel Dennett

Cairns-Smith: Evolving the Mind

Chalmers: The Conscious Mind

Chalmers (ed.): Philosophy of Mind

Chomsky: Language and Mind

Chomsky: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind

Churchland: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul

Churchland/Sejnowski: The Computational Brain

Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis

Cummins/Cummins (eds.): Minds, Brains and Computers

Dennett: Brainchildren

Dennett: Brainstorms

Dennett: Consciousness Explained

Dennett: Content and Consciousness

Dennett: Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Dennett: Elbow Room

Dennett: Freedom Evolves

Dennett: Kinds of Minds

Dennett: Sweet Dreams

Dennett: The Intentional Stance

Dretske: Naturalizing the Mind

Dretske: Perception, Knowledge and Belief

Elton: Daniel Dennett

Flanagan: Consciousness Reconsidered

Flanagan: The Problem of the Soul

Flanagan: The Science of the Mind

Fodor: The Mind Doesn't Work That Way

Heil/Mele: Mental Causation

Honderich: On Consciousness

Hornsby: Simple Mindedness

Humphrey: A History of the Mind

Kim: Mind in a Physical World

Ludlow (ed.): There's Something About Mary

McCauley (ed.): The Churchlands and Their Critics

Millikan: Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories

Nagel: The View From Nowhere

Noë: Action in Perception

Noë (ed.): Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?

Parfit: Reasons and Persons

Perry: Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness

Ramachandran: A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness

Ramachandran/Blakeslee: Phantoms in the Brain

Ross (ed.): Dennett's Philosophy

Ryle: Concept of Mind

Searle: The Rediscovery of the Mind

Symons: On Dennett

Book recommendation: "Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness" by John Perry

During my recent Philosophy of Mind course I acquired a number of fascinating books in the field. In a couple of cases I read the book immediately from cover to cover; for most, I merely dipped into the book when I bought it, promising myself that I'd return to read it properly when time permitted. Well, time now permits, and I've had a wonderful time over the last week reading John Perry's Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness.

Obviously the most important thing about the book is the argument: a careful and detailed account of a stance, which Perry dubs antecedent physicalism, that addresses the recent neo-dualist arguments such as Chalmers' zombies, Kripke's modal C-fibers, and Jackson's Mary. Now these are targets that many philosophers have been taking aim at over recent years; what makes this book so delightful is the elegance and economy with which Perry mounts his particular attack. I found his treatment of knowledge as including both subject matter content and reflexive content more satisfactory than, for example, the idea of distinguishing between "know that" and "know how". The way that he adapted the "centered worlds" argument (which I think originated with Chalmers) has caused me to re-evaluate my attitude towards issues of possibility and conceivability: I think that centering worlds (by agent and time... but what else?) makes some kinds of modal argument much more plausible. (But conceivability still feels like a very slippery notion.)

The thing that really sets this book apart, however, is the quality of the writing: simple, clear, and direct. Perry avoids both over-cautious pedantry and hyperbole. So far I have encountered relatively few philosophers that can achieve this clarity: Christopher Hill and Fred Dretske come to mind.

Highly recommended.

That's that, then

So that's the end of the Philosophy of Mind course that I've been taking. Lectures, check. Term paper, check. Final exam, check. Now I wait to hear how I did.

I came out of the final exam feeling pretty good about it. Yes, I'd blanked on two of the short disambiguation questions (on Block's psychofunctionalism and Rosenthal's HOT), but I felt that the essays were OK, if slightly unbalanced (9 pages for one, 6 for the other). Now, of course (a couple of hours later) all I can think of is the defects: what I forgot to include, why I wasted time on McGinn instead of talking more about Churchland, why I didn't say more about how varieties of functionalism might be compatible with dualism, etcetera. However I guess that's only to be expected.

And now I've got this philosophy-shaped hole in my life! I'm not taking any courses this summer (too many potential distractions), so until the Fall Semester I guess I'm going to be reduced to reading some of the (many) books I acquired during the course. Summer reading, sitting on the deck, with a long cold drink... it could be worse.

Too busy revising to blog

I've been so busy revising for my Philosophy of Mind final on Wednesday that blogging has had to take a back seat. Yet while I wrestle with questions like Brentano's view of the intentionality of mental phenomena, I'm concerned that one of the biggest challenges is going to be mechanical: handwriting. The two hour exam will include a short multiple choice section and two essays. I don't think I've handwritten more than half a page at a sitting since the mid-1970s. There's a real danger that I'll hand in a bunch of stuff that's completely illegible....

Updated blogroll

Just updated my blogroll to include four philosophy-related blogs: Majikthise, David Chalmers (the "philosophical zombies" guy), The Web of Belief (a group blog authored by fellow students from Tufts), and Ignacio's individual blog. In addition, I came across Chalmers' useful list of philosophy-related blogs (which needs pruning, but never mind).

More Hofstadter

One thing that Doug Hofstadter mentioned in his lecture yesterday was that many conventional ideas about physicalism - strict supervenience, law-like causality between the "levels" - are likely to be plain wrong: it seems likely that higher-level systems can be remarkably insensitive to changes in their physical underpinnings. So even though it is true that minds are implemented in brains, and brains are biological structures composed of cells and molecules and atoms which obey the laws of physics, that doesn't mean that one can (or should) look for law-like relations between mental properties and microphysical properties.¹ Of course functionalists don't have any problem with this. The objections seem to come, on the one hand, from philosophers like David Chalmers who see this gap as a reason to toss physicalism overboard, and on the other hand from neuroscientists like Christof Koch who expect to be able to build their house of neurobiological cards all the way up to the top.

While on this subject, Hofstadter recommended a new book by the Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe - reinventing physics from the bottom down. I picked up a copy this lunchtime. From the fly-leaf:

The edges of science, we're told, lie in the first nanofraction of a second of the Universe's existence, or else in realms so small that they can't be glimpsed even by the most sophisticated experimental techniques. But we haven't reached the end of science, Laughlin argues-only the end of reductionist thinking. If we consider the world of emergent properties instead, suddenly the deepest mysteries are as close as the nearest ice cube or grain of salt. And he goes farther: the most fundamental laws of physics - such as Newton's laws of motion and quantum mechanics - are in fact emergent. They are properties of large assemblages of matter, and when their exactness is examined too closely, it vanishes into nothing.

I suspect that this book may turn out to be more provocative than rigorous, but that's OK.

[UPDATE: I've now read the first 6 chapters of the book. It's WONDERFUL!!! Thought-provoking, mind-bending, funny, profound.... I'll post a full review in a few days.]

¹ If this sounds poorly worded, blame me - this is my interpretation, not Douglas's exact words.

Douglas Hofstadter in town [UPDATED]

Douglas Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach and many other books) is in town this week. He gave a lecture to our Phil.of Mind class at Tufts entitled "What is it like to be a strange loop?", and he's talking at the Media Lab in MIT tomorrow.

As to the subject of the talk:
(1) Hofstadter remains fascinated (as he was in GEB) with the interaction of two ideas: feedback loops, and systemic (explanatory) levels. In GEB, you may remember, the strange - and unexpectedly stable - patterns generated by pointing a video camera at the screen displaying its output were a powerful example (and metaphor) for the way these ideas come together. Doug's about to repeat a number of those experiments: how will the fact that the low-level technology has changed from analog to digital affect them?
(2) My interpretation of "strange loops" is that Doug is talking about feedback loops that cross various kinds of boundaries: between the physical and the cognitive, between the outside world and the I-in-the-world (in terms of action and perception), and across minds (from one person to another).

After the lecture, a bunch of us went out for dinner with Dennett and Hofstadter. Among the faculty and students, was an old friend, the novelist and tech writerJohn Sundman. He and I worked together at Sun from 1986 until about 1989; John did most of the writing on the first release of PC-NFS, and managed the writing for the 386i workstation program.

[Apologies for the quality of the pictures - taken on my Treo 650 in very poor light.]

Catching up (philosophy department)

A good week. First, a thoroughly satisafactory result on my mid-term, made even more so by the fact that it was my first bit of classwork in 30+ years. Dennett's class on Wednesday was about Kripke ("C-fibers and pain", modal logic, essentialism reborn), and it was one of those lovely "ah-ha!" experiences. The account of the historic 1971 Irvine summer school was priceless. Great fun.

Then my classmate Richard Dub pointed me at the very useful Online Papers in Philosophy site, and from there I found my way to Megan Wallace's' delightful website and her provocative ideas about fictionalism and "slingshots" (not to mention the very useful Wussy/BadAss criterion and the priceless Acutetarianism).

And finally this afternoon I took some vacation time (I've accumulated a bit too much - use it or lose it) and went to hear Dennett deliver the 2005 Harvard Review of Philosophy Lecture at Emerson Hall. Excellent turn-out - probably around 200. The subject was familar (to those in his class): "Philosophers, Zombies, and Feelings: The Illusions of 'First-Person' Approaches to Consciousness.". The Q&A afterwards showed how uncomfortable some people were with computational models of mind; how strong the need for human exceptionalism - or perhaps essentialism - is.

Playing it safe

I just submitted my first written coursework since - oh, I don't know, 1974? - for my PhilOfMind course at Tufts. The format was a dialogue between three philosophers on a particular topic. The choices were limited: I couldn't simply pick any philosophers and any topic. I chose Fodor, Millikan and Paul Churchland on mental representations.

I started off routinely - read the lit, capture what each participant had to say on the topic, figure out a sub-topical flow that I could use to organize their ideas. And then I read some exchanges (Fodor & Pylyshyn vs. Smolensky on systematicity in connectionist models) that I thought would be a great way of contrasting Fodor and Churchland. A priori language of thought, symbolic, and pristine on the one hand; distributed representations, activation vectors, fuzzy combinations on the other. There were only two problems: I couldn't see a role for Millikan in the debate, and at least 80% of the dialogue would be fictitious: there wasn't a lot of material I could directly quote.

Which to do? Safe but pedestrian, or edgy but speculative and incomplete? In the end, I played it safe - but I think I'll write up the other one anyway, just for my own satisfaction.

Getting a sense of perspective

In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: "Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: 'It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.'"

Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we've known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There's no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

But then Walden brings in religion. "A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense - a belief in the value of human life. [Don't use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what's permissible and what isn't. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don't mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn't survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency."

I'm all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I'm not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We've just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody - bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians - seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It's going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.

If Walden wants to talk about "religion in its widest sense", I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion's historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology "chills him to the bone."

Thought for the day: "When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

How to make sense of the world....

As I do most weekends, I phoned my mother in Oxford today. After exchanging family news, the subject turned to my philosophy course. "I just caught a story on BBC Oxford about a new philosophy group here," she said. "Of course wasn't able to read about it in the paper," [because of her blindness] "but I think it was about the study of consciousness." As we spoke, I quickly searched and came up with the obvious hit. "Are you talking about the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind," I asked. "The project that Susan Greenfield... sorry, Baroness Susan Greenfield is heading up? This led to a short digression about Tony Blair's habit of handing out life peerages like school prizes, and then discussing our disappointment at the lack of rigour in many of Greenfield's publications. After that, I told my mother about OXCSOM's approach:

Initially there will be eight academics on the payroll of the Centre from six different departments: Anatomy, Pharmacology, Philosophy, Physiology, the Ian Ramsey Centre (Theology), and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. The researchers will employ a wide range of techniques, including functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

"I wonder how the theologians will get on with fMRI," I mused, and my mother assured me that that as Oxford theologians they would embrace it enthusiastically. "By the way," I said, "do you know where OXCSOM is getting its money? It's hosted by the IAN RAMSEY CENTRE [studying the relationship of religious belief and science], and funded by the John Templeton Foundation." Both of us vaguely recognized the name - something about underwriting a scientific study of prayer. [Turns out he's a Tennessee-born investment manager.]

As we talked, I clicked on a few links... and then I couldn't contain myself any more. "So, let me tell you about another Templeton project I've just come across. It's called The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love." "What on earth do they mean by 'unlimited love', and how do you do research in it?" said my mother. "It all sounds very flakey." I clicked the About us link. "No problem," I said. "They've got all that covered. By 'unlimited love', they mean 'love for all humanity without exception'. And as for research, 'Just as we investigate the force of gravity or the energy of the atom, we can scientifically examine the power of unlimited love in human moral and spiritual experience.' Easy."

My mother sighed. "You know, a friend of mine, a newspaper columnist, told me that he was giving up on satire," she said. "He feels that nothing he can write matches up to the reality of today's world." And we agreed that satire is dead, and set a time for our next conversation.

On break

Not from real work... but at Tufts I'm on break for the next week; our mid-term papers are due on Monday March 28. Mine is a dialogue between Fodor, Millikan and Churchland (plus Simplicus). Fortunately it will be in direct speech, so I won't have to worry that said is dead.

(Is that weird or what? I picked it up on Neil Gaiman's blog, where he has a much more interesting perspective.)

Snow and zombies

Yet another snowstorm this weekend, bringing us to over 90 inches for the season. It snowed most of Saturday: big, wet flakes that stuck to all the trees and left inches of slushy stuff on the driveway. Very pretty... now go away!

Rather than venture out, I spent most of the weekend curled up with philosophy. Not only do I have a mid-term paper due in a couple of weeks, and my regular reading to do for class; I also received the new Dennett book, Sweet Dreams, on Saturday. (Amazon.com is hopelessly confused about this book: in some places it says that it's coming on April 1, in others that it's available now, shipping in 24 hours.)

Back in November, I blogged about David Chalmers and his obsession with zombies (philosophical and otherwise). In Sweet Dreams, Dennett discusses what he calls the Zombic Hunch: the intuitive idea that there might conceivably be zombie-like creatures that are EXACTLY LIKE ORDINARY PEOPLE except that they don't have consciousness. Personally I find the notion of zombies incoherent - even in principle - but apparently a lot of people take them seriously. Like Dennett, I find the idea of philosophers arguing about the number of zombies that can fit on the head of a pin to be slightly unedifying. Oh well. If you want to get a feel for the issue without buying Dennett's or Chalmers' books, you can read this account of their debate.

And now I have to finish my notes on Searle's infuriating Chinese Room. There are some interesting issues in this famous thought experiment, but ever since I first read it in The Mind's I (over 20 years ago) I've been frustrated by the blatant equivocation and contradiction in the way Searle presents it. Perhaps it's a useful discipline for me: learning to concentrate on [the important bits of] the message without being distracted by the lousy medium.

One more thought on Koch

I know that I shouldn't get hung up on terminology: these things are just arbitrary labels, aren't they? Well, no - we can't simply ignore the everyday meanings of words. So when Koch (and Block too) went on about the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness during the symposium, it felt wrong. It was as if a biologist had been talking about the CCO, the chemical correlate of organisms, instead of cells. Yes, cells are made of chemicals, but no biologist would indulge in such a crude reductionism.

Talking about the neural correlates of consciousness sounds respectfully non-committal: after all, it just talks about correlation, nothing causal. But to my ears, there is certainly a strong implication of stable correlation, rather than (e.g.) a pattern that is stable at some higher level but is not bound to any specific neural elements. If such patterns exist, the minimal NCC would presumably encompass the entire collection of neurons which could potentially support them; this doesn't sound like what Koch is getting at.

In general, I would prefer to adopt a more flexible systems-oriented language for the working of the mind, and explore the constraints and preferences that flow from the properties of the neural substratum. It is easier to capture the relationships between concepts at several levels of [evolutionary] design than it is to tease apart a single idea into multiple elements at different levels.

(In computing we call this refactoring: it's hard enough at a single level, extraordinarily difficult when multiple levels are involved.)

Consciousness 2005

Excellent symposium at Harvard Medical School this afternoon. A few observations follow. (Interesting how it's easier to write about the positions with which you disagree, isn't it?) And a nice bonus was finally getting to meet Bryan Bentz, a long-time fellow member of the Al Stewart mailing list.

• Dan Dennett (Tufts): Qualia, Unsplittable Atoms? If we want to go on using the term qualia, we have to give up the idea that they are ineffable and intrinsic. I drank that Kool-Aid a long time ago: no argument from me. A surprisingly direct rap at Block (citing his infamous jazz metaphor), and a nifty ju-jitsu move in response to Block's attempt at a reductio in the Q&A. Thoroughly enjoyable.
• Patrick Haggard (UC London): Voluntary Action: Conscious Intention and Neural Activity: Updating Libet's classic experiments on the Readiness Potential, which measured the curious fact that your brain starts preparing to act physically up to a second before you are conscious of deciding to act. Elegant experimental design has a distinctive aesthetics; this was a delightful talk. (I was reminded of one of my favourite books: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Florman.)
• Ned Block (BYU): Two Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Block proposes a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness - roughly, the stuff that we're aware of, and the subset that we can actually work with at the moment. This is a subtle distinction that some feel is either irrelevant (because in practice the categories coincide) or just plain wrong. My feeling is that Block overstretches when he tries to cite particular brain activation patterns as evidence of the distinction. (He also relies on Koch and Crick's NCC concept - see below.) In addition, it seems to me (after insufficient thought, I'm sure) that accessibility crops up in other ways than this particular dichotomy: it feels more like a property of a mental event which captures one way in which it stands in relation to other events and functional systems of the mind. I'm not convinced by Block's coupling of the idea to one aspect of consciousness, with a particular neurological implementation.
• Christof Koch (Caltech): Studying visual consciousness in humans using microelectrodes, magnets, and TV's: I guess that Koch is the kind of hyperthyroidal character that you either love or loathe. He's not my cup of tea at all. At the centre of his talk was a series of experiments in which the brain of an epileptic patient was wired up to explore the use of fine-grained electrical stimulation to control his seizures; a side benefit of this was that the same system could be used to detect the state of a few individual neurons. Koch showed the patient (and hence us) large numbers of faces, particularly those of celebrities; he found that certain pictures provoked neuronal activity. (In one case he found that the printed name of he person produced the same activity....) Rather than interpreting this data cautiously and skeptically, Koch started going on about "the Bill Clinton neuron" and the "Jennifer Aniston neuron". I wish I'd been able to ask him to admit that his catchy phrase "the XXX neuron" really stands for "a random neuron which plays an unknown role in a larger neural structure [the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness] which is activated in some way by XXX". Even if it was a detector of some kind, it might play a functional role ("big nose", "green eyes", "sexy") or indicate some correlation ("like Aunty Flo", "seen on TV"). But Koch seems to be a true believer. In response to one question, he railed against "holistic" and "emergent" positions, or theories based on "patterns". He espoused "specificity", which for him seems to go down to the level of the single neuron. Unconvincing.

Consciousness 2005

This afternoon I'm heading over to the Harvard Medical School in Longwood to attend a symposium exploring the neuroscientific and philosphical aspects of Consciousness. The speakers are Dan Dennett from Tufts (my PhilOfMind prof), Patrick Haggard from UCL, Ned Block of NYU, and Chris Koch from CalTech. I've read enough of Dennett, Block and Koch to know that they're pretty far apart on many issues, so it should be "stimulating"!

100% Hume

Thought for the day:

"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."

David Hume, 1739

Busy, busy, busy

Five days without a blog entry... unthinkable! But I've actually been very busy, catching up with my reading for the Philosophy of Mind course I'm taking this semester at Tufts.

Now you have to understand that the last time I was in school was back in 1977, when I was at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne in England. 28 years on and 3,500 miles away, things are a little different! This class meets twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. Before each session, we go through a selection of readings on the topic for the day and submit our comments (which are assessed as part of the grading). We post the comments by 9pm the day before the class to an on-line Blackboard discussion board, where we can (and do!) all read and comment on each others' submissions. And finally a streaming video of each class is posted to the Blackboard about a week after the class.

One thing that I've been worried about is how occasional business travel might disrupt class work. It looks as if the web-based tools will definitely help. I can see it now: reading the next selections at FL350 BOS-SFO, comments and dialogue via Blackboard from the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto.... Not ideal, but feasible. We'll see.

Antony or Anthony? Confusion reigns.....

If you look at my two recent blog entries on "l'affaire Flew", you will see that the first spells the philosopher's name Anthony Flew and the second Antony Flew. Which is correct? I'm pretty sure that the answer is Antony Flew, but it's by no means as clear as it should be. First, that unreliable but influential yardstick - the Google hit count - gives Anthony 36,300 and Antony 32,800. (Curiously there are 618 pages that include both forms!) How about publications? Amazon lists his books under both names, but I assumed that this was simply data entry error. But then I consulted my bookshelf, and found both forms!

Perhaps we should simply use the construction which appears in much of his professional vita: A. G. N. Flew (or even AGN Flew).

Why anything instead of nothing? We load the dice....

In his latest contribution to this discussion, Masood asks why I feel that the question "Why is there anything rather than nothing?" is incoherent. It's because I find it breaks down under either of the common senses of "why" - the causal or the teleological. In each case, the question self-destructs in two ways. Causality presumes a cause - something that made the "anything" happen. Teleology presumes an agent: one cannot have agent-less purpose. In each case, we presume "something". Now, either we are faced with an "infinite regress" - "why does the cause/agent exist rather than nothing?" - or [my favourite] by invoking some antecedent "thing", the "nothing" alternative is rendered moot! (Simultaneous annihilation of the antecedent and creation of the consequent feels like a stretch!)

The traditional way to make headway with the question is to constrain the universals ("anything" and "nothing") to some category, assigning the causal or teleological agents to a different category. (This is the supernatural or religious turn.) Thus, "Why is there a universe rather than nothing? God made the universe, but God is not of the universe: She transcends it". But this simply pushes the question back - why is there an agent/cause rather than nothing? At this point, most people adopt the device of decreeing that the two categories are causally or teleologically different; that it's OK for a Prime Mover to be self-caused and eternal but not for everyday stuff. Of course this proposition is arbitrary and entirely unverifiable.

Those who believe that the orginal question must have an answer are pretty much forced into this dualism, of course. For myself, I have no need of that hypothesis; the question is not meaningful to me. I imagine that a psychologist would say that we actually start with the Weltanschauung of our choice/heritage (theist/dualist or atheist/materialist); we then interpret the meaningfulness of the question based upon our stance. Thus a theist believes that there is a Prime Cause, and therefore the anything or nothing question must be coherent. Etcetera.

The Anthony Flew brouhaha

While I was visiting my mother, she mentioned that she'd heard that "Anthony Flew has got religion". This means that the rumours of Flew's possible recantation must have spread from the phil. of religion blogosphere to BBC Radio 4, so I thought I'd check out the state of play.

In October, Richard Carrier documented the history of Flew's supposed conversions in a piece in SecWeb, and reported that Flew was questioning whether an "impersonal spirit" of some kind might be the best explanation for "why a universe exists that can produce complex life". Carrier's recently updated the piece with some quotes from Flew himself, explaining this Deist-like position:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

Is this simply an argument from incredulity? In his 1993 Atheistic Humanism, Flew points out that "Absent excellent evidencing reasons [...] it becomes preposterous to postulate a" CEB [Cosmos-Explaining Being]; in the same chapter he also argues against the uncritical use of various forms of the anthropic principle. Recently Flew has admitted to being impressed by Gerald Schroeder's The Hidden Face Of God, but Schroeder's (widely criticised) arguments seem to fall short of the "excellent evidencing reasons" that Flew demanded 12 years ago. (See Perakh and Carrier.)

Various religious types have been running around claiming Flew's supposed "conversion" as evidence for the supernatural. J. P. Moreland made this argument on PAX TV, and Carrier quotes Flew as emphatically rejecting it: "my God is not his. His is Swinburne's. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct".

However Flew seems to have gone beyond the position that he described to Carrier, although it should be noted that the source is a story in Fox News. Last May Flew took part in a debate organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas; a video of the debate has been released under the title Has Science Discovered God?. Typically, the press release from Varghese's "Institute" is triumphal in tone, and does nothing to distinguish Flew's "impersonal spirit" from popular religious notions of god. And to increase the confusion (according to Fox),

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

All of this is frustratingly incomplete, of course, and I hope the arguments will be fleshed out in the new edition of Flew's God and Philosophy, coming next year. Presumably if Flew is postulating an intelligent designer, he has an answer for the question of "who designed the designer", as well as all of the other arguments that he himself has articulated over the years in books such as the account of his debate with Terry Miethe. Nonetheless it's hard to know how to reconcile alignment with "intelligent design" with his assertion that he "has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal 'prime mover.' It might not even be conscious, but a mere force." Perhaps we expect too much: as Carrier wrote:

Flew's tentative, mechanistic Deism is not based on any logical proofs, but solely on physical, scientific evidence, or the lack thereof, and is therefore subject to change with more information -- and he confesses he has not been able to keep up with the relevant literature in science and theology, which means we should no longer treat him as an expert on this subject.

Of course such a disclaimer is unlikely to prevent people like Moreland and Varghese from using Flew as a poster child for their causes.

POSTSCRIPT, 12-Aug-05: To my amazement, this entry continues to attact comments 8 months after I wrote it. The sad thing is that so many of the comments raise points that I addressed in later postings. So please: if you stumble over this entry, and feel compelled to comment, please read the other entries on Flew before you do so. See here, here, and here. And thanks.

Doxastic voluntarism

Thought for the day: Do humans have direct voluntary control over their beliefs? Per Michael Sudduth: "This is the so-called doxastic voluntarism thesis. According to this view, a cognitive attitude (belief, disbelief, or withholding of belief) is justified only if the cognitive attitude is within our direct voluntary control. However, there is good reason to suppose that this thesis is false..." This is intriguing: I had always assumed that we do not have voluntary control over our beliefs, and I was surprised to find the idea that we do was sufficiently respectable that it had acquired an impressively polysyllabic name....

I came across the term while reading a review by Jeff Wisdom of Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. I bought the book this morning, anticipating a well-reasoned approach to reconciling humanistic expectations with scientific realities. Like Jeff, I have been disappointed that Flanagan has (so far) failed to address the deeper objections to his, fairly orthodox, views. Now I happen to share most of Flanagan's ideas (though not his Buddhism), but this doesn't mean that there are no arguments to be made. Oh well; even if it isn't a rigorous treatment of the subject, it should be an enjoyable read on my flight back to Boston on Monday.

Philosophical zombies

This page on David Chalmers' web site is way too much fun. Not content with giving us a taxonomy of zombies (including Hollywood zombies and Unix processes), he delves into cocktails, cartoons, and 1960s pop music. Of course the core of the page is the collection of links to papers on philosophical zombies: devices which seem to have become part of the standard toolkit of certain philosophers of mind. Nigel Thomas's elegant Zombie Killer ought to have sent them all packing, but unfortunately these impossible (but arguably conceivable) undead critters just won't stay down....

Book game, again

Terry announced: "Book game (cause it isn't really a meme): Nearest Book, Page 23, Fifth sentence, Posted, with explanation." OK, here goes:

When we talk of a green sensation, this talk is not equivalent simply to talk of “a state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”.

This is from the Chalmer's Conscious Mind book that I've talked about before; he's recapitulating the standard philosophical idea of the phenomenal ("Known or derived through the senses rather than through the mind"). The paragraph continues:

We are talking about the phenomenal quality that generally occurs when a state is caused by grass and trees. If there is a causal analysis in the vicinity, it is something like “the kind of phenomenal state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”. The phenomenal element in the concept prevents an analysis in purely functional terms.

By the way, it looks as if the entire text of the book is online, although the diagrams are missing and (inevitably) the pagination doesn't match the printed version.

(We played this game before - a few months back, IIRC - but unlike some of these blog games it's pretty much guaranteed to be different each time around.)

On reading philosophy and "Three Card Monte"

As I noted earlier, I'm reading David Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind". Early on, Chalmers lays his cards on the table: "In this book I reach conclusions that some people may think of as 'antiscientific': I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible, and I even argue for a form of dualism." He acknowledges that "Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation [...] I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up on this hope, it was quite reluctantly."

Like Chalmers, I too am temperamentally inclined towards a materialist account of consciousness. As I read the book (and I'm still finishing chapter 2 on Supervenience and Explanation), I find myself watching closely to see whether or not he smuggles in some dichotomous assumptions which might affect his eventual conclusions. It feels a bit like watching a game of Three-Card Monte to see if and when a card gets creased or a misdirection occurs. There is plenty of exceptionalism flying around. For instance he concedes that "Almost everything is logically supervenient on the physical.[...] Conscious experience is almost unique in its failure to supervene logically." It'll be interesting to see how he justifies this.

So far, the only troubling section (p.75) has been the way in which he asserts that "...the facts about the external world do not supervene logically on the facts about our experience." One would expect him to treat this as a big deal: after all, as he continues, "Idealists, positivists, and others have argued controversially that they do. Note that if these views are accepted the skeptical problem [due to Hume] falls away." And so, I think, does Chalmers' case that there is a "deep problem" here. But then with one bound our hero is free, Indiana Jones style: "In any case, I am bypassing this sort of skeptical problem by giving myself the physical world for free." Well, maybe - but note that he explicitly means "the external world", and the internal/external dichotomy remains. I have a suspicion that this may be at the root of the eventual dualism, but I'll have to read on and find out.