Ten Years (and counting)

Ten years ago today I started this blog. I don't remember if I thought I could change anyone's mind, but I don't think I ever did. At least I had some interesting conversations. I have not posted much lately. I did learn a great deal about why so many philosophers are atheists.



I looked into many arguments over the years. A thirteen-part review of Feser's book, a weekly review of Kant's Ethics (never finished, due to disappointment with the contents), responses to various blog posts. So many supposedly serious arguments, all built on straw and bluster.

I don't what the future of this blog is, but one day, I will figure that out and post regularly again.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2015-01-21

It is likewise a contradiction to make the perfection of another my end, and to regard myself as in duty bound to promote it. For it is just in this that the perfection of another man as a person consists, namely, that he is able of himself to set before him his own end according to his own notions of duty; and it is a contradiction to require (to make it a duty for me) that I should do something which no other but himself can do.

IV. What are the Ends which are also Duties?, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, by Immanuel Kant

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

So long as another person can set his goals before himself according to what he believes is his duty, he will be perfected? I can think of a few ways that this is insufficient, and in many of these ways, people can be assisted to their own perfection, and it is quite reasonable to make assisting such people a duty.

First, some notions of duty are harmful. Feeling duty to an evil government is harmful. Feeling duty to social conventions that degrade people are harmful. Feeling duty to purely toxic family members is harmful. There is no contradiction in taking, as one of our own ends, the convincing of another person that they have chosen duties that are harmful, and to assist them in the ability to discriminate between harmful and helpful duties. This would be a duty we had toward the perfection of other people.

Second, people can not rationally choose duties to follow without learning to think rationally. It's not enough to say have a duty that is helpful, we need to understand how to advance such a duty in our lives, and which of our behaviors tends to support that duty. This instruction would also be a valid duty to undertake to support the perfection of another.

Thirdly, parents have a duty to raise their children in a fashion to help their children to their own perfection.

I could go on, but I think these examples suffice to point out that the perfection of others can be, and often is, a duty of ours.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-12-31

An end is an object of the free elective will, the idea of which determines this will to an action by which the object is produced. Accordingly every action has its end, and as no one can have an end without himself making the object of his elective will his end, hence to have some end of actions is an act of the freedom of the agent, not an affect of physical nature. Now, since this act which determines an end is a practical principle which commands not the means (therefore not conditionally) but the end itself (therefore unconditionally), hence it is a categorical imperative of pure practical reason and one, therefore, which combines a concept of duty with that of an end in general.

III. Of the Reason for conceiving an End which is also a Duty, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, by Immanuel Kant

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

This paragraph contains a basic logical fallacy. Given A(x) meaning "x is an action that leads to an end" and B(x) meaning "x is an idea of an object of the elective free will", the first two sentences make the argument (∀x[B(x)⇒A(x)])⇒(∀x[A(x)⇒B(x)]). This is the Fallacy of the Converse.

Moreover, the reality is that actions come not only from acts of will toward an end, but also from habit, and more importantly even from confusion. Sometimes we have an end in mind, but have no idea of how to proceed toward that end, except that we know the current state of affairs is not the end we seek. We then use our will to enact any random change, without any guarantee such action will put us any closer to our end (and indeed with the understanding that we may end up further away). Some might try to explain this as the change itself is the end of the action, a short-term end in support of a larger end, but this explanation is wanting, as change is the description of the movement between the current state and the end, and therefore can not also be an end unto itself.

One analogous example occurs with inexperienced chess players, who understand the goal is checkmate, but see no method by which to secure it. This results in the seemingly random movement of pieces. It would be a mistake to say that the end of the chess player was to move pieces about.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-12-24

To virtue = + a is opposed as its logical contradictory (contradictorie oppositum) the negative lack of virtue (moral weakness) = 0; but vice = - a is its contrary (contrarie s. realiter oppositum); and it is not merely a needless question but an offensive one to ask whether great crimes do not perhaps demand more strength of mind than great virtues. For by strength of mind we understand the strength of purpose of a man, as a being endowed with freedom, and consequently so far as he is master of himself (in his senses) and therefore in a healthy condition of mind. But great crimes are paroxysms, the very sight of which makes the man of healthy mind shudder. The question would therefore be something like this: whether a man in a fit of madness can have more physical strength than if he is in his senses; and we may admit this without on that account ascribing to him more strength of mind, if by mind we understand the vital principle of man in the free use of his powers. For since those crimes have their ground merely in the power of the inclinations that weaken reason, which does not prove strength of mind, this question would be nearly the same as the question whether a man in a fit of illness can show more strength than in a healthy condition; and this may be directly denied, since the want of health, which consists in the proper balance of all the bodily forces of the man, is a weakness in the system of these forces, by which system alone we can estimate absolute health.

Remark following Exposition of the Notion of an End which is also a Duty, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, by Immanuel Kant

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

I have seen three or four philosophers recommend this book as the best place to start a study of ethics. Than I read a passage like the one above and wonder why they speak so highly of it. Perhaps I am missing something. Actually, I'm sure I'm missing quite a bit, but in this case I meant some way of interpreting the passage that is not so contrary to the plain evidence of our knowledge. Even in Kant's time, there had been horrors committed by powerful men, men who clearly had a strong purpose, were as much endowed with the freedom to act as any other contemporary, and were masters of themselves in the pursuit of that purpose, fitting Kant's definition of having strength of mind. Yet, these men never shuddered when organizing, planning, and committing great crimes; they shrugged them off as unfortunate necessities or even delighted in their execution.
Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-12-17

Now that ethics is a doctrine of virtue (doctrina officiorum virtutis) follows from the definition of virtue given above compared with the obligation, the peculiarity of which has just been shown. There is in fact no other determination of the elective will, except that to an end, which in the very notion of it implies that I cannot even physically be forced to it by the elective will of others. Another may indeed force me to do something which is not my end (but only means to the end of another), but he cannot force me to make it my own end, and yet I can have no end except of my own making. The latter supposition would be a contradiction- an act of freedom which yet at the same time would not be free. But there is no contradiction in setting before one's self an end which is also a duty: for in this case I constrain myself, and this is quite consistent with freedom.

Exposition of the Conception of Ethics, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, by Immanuel Kant

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

As so often happens when a person declares that one of two conditions must exist, reality intrudes with situations that fit into neither category. Here, Kant seems to be saying that there are two reasons that we undertake an action, either to accomplish our own end, or by threat of coercion from another to accomplish their end. but he makes no allowance for a person to be able to install an end from the their own mind into the mind of another.

An obvious counterexample to the general statement is child-rearing. One of the primary goals of parenting is to instill the appropriate ends into your children, to teach them to esteem being virtuous. Perhaps Kant will discuss this in a later section of this book. I can certainly see a possible exception being offered, that children are too unformed to have free will, and the contradiction does not exist in the absence of free will.

Nonetheless, This answer does not satisfy, because we can see the same phenomenon in adults. In kidnapping victims we refer to it as Stockholm syndrome. People change their ends to reflect those of their captors, abusers, religious leaders, etc. Any detailed discussion of free will needs to account for such occurrences.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-12-10

The notion of duty is in itself already the notion of a constraint of the free elective will by the law; whether this constraint be an external one or be self-constraint. The moral imperative, by its categorical (the unconditional ought) announces this constraint, which therefore does not apply to all rational beings (for there may also be holy beings), but applies to men as rational physical beings who are unholy enough to be seduced by pleasure to the transgression of the moral law, although they themselves recognize its authority; and when they do obey it, to obey it unwillingly (with resistance of their inclination); and it is in this that the constraint properly consists.* Now, as man is a free (moral) being, the notion of duty can contain only self-constraint (by the idea of the law itself), when we look to the internal determination of the will (the spring), for thus only is it possible to combine that constraint (even if it were external) with the freedom of the elective will. The notion of duty then must be an ethical one.

*Man, however, as at the same time a moral being, when he considers himself objectively, which he is qualified to do by his pure practical reason, (i.e. according to humanity in his own person), finds himself holy enough to transgress the law only unwillingly; for there is no man so depraved who in this transgression would not feel a resistance and an abhorrence of himself, so that he must put a force on himself. It is impossible to explain the phenomenon that at this parting of the ways (where the beautiful fable places Hercules between virtue and sensuality) man shows more propensity to obey inclination than the law. For, we can only explain what happens by tracing it to a cause according to physical laws; but then we should not be able to conceive the elective will as free. Now this mutually opposed self-constraint and the inevitability of it makes us recognize the incomprehensible property of freedom.

Exposition of the Conception of Ethics, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, by Immanuel Kant

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

When you are trying to create a universally applied doctrine, there seems to be no defect that is both more fatal to the task and more overlooked in the pursuit than a lack of understanding regarding the parts of the world that you don't inhabit, and the people in the world. People go on long discourses about the nature of other people, in the process describing what they see in their own nature.

Here, Kant denies the existence of men "so depraved who in this transgression would not feel a resistance and an abhorrence of himself". Such men certainly do exist; they feel no abhorrence for shirking any duties that other men impose at themselves, they laugh at those of us that take on such duties. Further, even for those that do feel the call of these duties, so many people are masters at lying to themselves. They tell themself that they are serving a noble cause, and commit atrocities in its name. People are not naturally rational, they are naturally rationalizers.

Free will seems to be cast here as ability to decide between following a duty, or to put that duty aside. However, much of what is considered sin by an observer is likely the result of changing what the transgressor considers to be sinful.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-12-03

If there exists on any subject a philosophy (that is, a system of rational knowledge based on concepts), then there must also be for this philosophy a system of pure rational concepts, independent of any condition of intuition, in other words, a metaphysic. It may be asked whether metaphysical elements are required also for every practical philosophy, which is the doctrine of duties, and therefore also for Ethics, in order to be able to present it as a true science (systematically), not merely as an aggregate of separate doctrines (fragmentarily). As regards pure jurisprudence, no one will question this requirement; for it concerns only what is formal in the elective will, which has to be limited in its external relations according to laws of freedom; without regarding any end which is the matter of this will. Here, therefore, deontology is a mere scientific doctrine (doctrina scientiae).

Preface, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, by Immanuel Kant

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

This is the first paragraph of the Preface of Kant's book. I would disagree that any system of pure rational concepts can be had independent of intuition, but that may be a bad translation to the word "intuition". Any formal system of purely rational concepts requires a set of beginning points, and to avoid circularity these points can not be chosen via this rational system. The only way to make such choices, in the hopes that they apply to the world, it via our intuition or via experimentation.

Also, the notion that there is scientific doctrine seems faulty. The whole point of science is to dispense with doctrine and find answers empirically. We may teach the results of previous explorations in a fashion similar to doctrine, but it is always done with a mindfulness that our knowledge is tentative and primitive; that reality continually wriggles out of our grasp.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-11-26

In the mental world, the evidence for the universality of causal laws is less complete than in the physical world. Psychology cannot boast of any triumph comparable to gravitational astronomy. Nevertheless, the evidence is not very greatly less than in the physical world. The crude and approximate causal laws from which science starts are just as easy to discover in the mental sphere as in the physical. In the world of sense, there are to begin with the correlations of sight and touch and so on, and the facts which lead us to connect various kinds of sensations with eyes, ears, nose, tongue, etc. Then there are such facts as that our body moves in answer to our volitions. Exceptions exist, but are capable of being explained as easily as the exceptions to the rule that unsupported bodies in air fall. There is, in fact, just such a degree of evidence for causal laws in psychology as will warrant the psychologist in assuming them as a matter of course, though not such a degree as will suffice to remove all doubt from the mind of a sceptical inquirer. It should be observed that causal laws in which the given term is mental and the inferred term physical, or vice versa, are at least as easy to discover as causal laws in which both terms are mental.

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lecture 8

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

In a lecture on cause and its application to free will, Russell takes time to note that causal laws apply to the interactions between different mental phenomena, or between mental and physical phenomena. I find free will to be a very difficult concept, in that among the people who believe it exists, they are almost universally certain it does not exist in computers, and yet are unable to give any sort that qualitative difference that withstands careful scrutiny. I'm working on a post looks at a typical example of this position.

This will be the last Quote of the Week to feature Russell, at least for a while. I've downloaded some Kant and some Nietzsche, so I expect they will be featured over the next few months.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-11-12

Between philosophy and pure mathematics there is a certain affinity, in the fact that both are general and a priori. Neither of them asserts propositions which, like those of history and geography, depend upon the actual concrete facts being just what they are. We may illustrate this characteristic by means of Leibniz's conception of many possible worlds, of which only one is actual. In all the many possible worlds, philosophy and mathematics will be the same; the differences will only be in respect of those particular facts which are chronicled by the descriptive sciences. Any quality, therefore, by which our actual world is distinguished from other abstractly possible worlds, must be ignored by mathematics and philosophy alike. Mathematics and philosophy differ, however, in in their manner of treating the general properties in which all possible worlds agree; for while mathematics starting from comparatively simple propositions, seeks to build up more and more complex results by deductive synthesis, philosophy, starting from data which are common to all knowledge, seeks to purify them into the the simplest statements of abstract form that can be obtained from them by logical analysis.

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lecture 7

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

I have areas of agreement and areas of disagreement with this post. I would put both mathematics and philosophy, as well as fields of study like constitutional law, largely in a class of knowledge referred to as formal knowledge. For me, this is knowledge derived from systems we set up, such as logic, uses propositions we assert to be true. In this sense, it is true mathematics, philosophy, or the law would be the same in any alternate world, as long as you hold the assumptions that they make to be unchangeable.

On the other hand, Russell wrote these lectures in 1914. long before the Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Paul Cohen had proved the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis in set theory. We can certainly talk about one possible world where the Continuum Hypothesis is true, and another where it is not true. In that case, we can't say mathematics will be identical in these two possible worlds. The would hold true for any branch of philosophy (or any other formal system). We will always come across unprovable statements, which may be true or false, and discuss possible worlds for each case. The assumptions of mathematics are not unchangeable, but instead, up to the decision of the mathematician.

Read more!

Quote of the Week, 2014-10-22

I do not see any reason to to suppose that the points and instants which mathematicians introduce in dealing with space and time are actual physically existing entities, but I do see reasons to suppose that the continuity of of actual space and time may be more or less analogous to the mathematical continuity. The theory of mathematical continuity is an abstract logical theory, not dependent for its validity upon any properties of actual space and time.

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lecture 5

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

Can you tell what I have been reading lately?

Russell regularly regales against philosophers who put their metaphysics as being, and here he sets his own standard for himself; the best he does is work with something somewhat analogous. I've been talking about philosophy as constructing models for reality since the very first of this blog. We never can know if we have a perfect model of reality, only if we have one that's working for our needs.
Read more!

Quote of the week, 2014-10-08

But if human conceit was staggered for a moment by its kinship with the ape, it soon found a way to reassert itself, and that way is the "philosophy" of evolution. A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress--though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lecture 1

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

Of course, we know that evolution does not teach there is a process from amoeba to men, but rather, that amoebas and men have a common ancestry of a population of single-celled animals that we might call (for the purposes of this discussion) early eukaryotes. I don't know if Russell was aware of this inaccuracy or not; he makes this sentence in the process of describing philosophical positions, not biology, and so moves on quickly to philosophies that supposedly use evolution as a basis (of which he is not fond).

Still, I agree that the early eukaryotes may not consider either lines of their descendants to have progressed.

Read more!

Quote of the week, 2014-10-01

Everyone knows that to read an author simply in order to refute him is not the way to understand him; and to read the book of Nature with a conviction that it is all an illusion is just as unlikely to lead to understanding.

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lecture 2

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

I am far overdue to respond to some posts by TheOFloinn. I will try to keep this in mind in my responses.

Read more!

Knowledge, but little mastery

I've been doing a lot of reading of others, but haven't had much to say in a blog post lately. One of the things I've realized is that every blogger engages in a lot of repetition, making the same points over and over in response to new circumstances. So far, I haven't been motivated to do that. So, that's why I have not said much lately. However, I'm thinking about starting up again. I do have a point of view that I don't see expressed often, i.e., that formal knowledge (the understanding of the creation of argumentation forms and their use) is a distinct type of knowledge from either empirical knowledge (gained from experimentation and exploration in the natural world) or first principles (basic values and understandings that we hold without evidence).

While I'm still mulling that over, today's comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal hit another dimension of some things I've read.

One of the notions I've read is that science changed from understanding the natural, in an appreciation of Aristotle's four causes and an attempt to encourage them, to an attempt at mastery. In particular, that science has abandoned the notion of form (the proper shape of something, that the something always seeks to emulate) and purpose (the reason for something to exist, with a thing's goodness being tied up in how well exhibits/accomplishes this reason). Supposedly, this freed up science to be about mastery of the world and shaping it into want men wished it to be, as opposed to what it was supposed to be.

The problems with this view are numerous, and I have discussed some of them before. However, one I don't recall mentioning is that it diminishes the sense of wonder, awe, and helplessness we feel at our inability to master nature. We had to give up respecting made-up natures to appreciate actual nature. It was a good trade.
Read more!

On the limits of formal systems

You can do some very interesting things with formal systems, such as chess, philosophy, or mathematics. You can create true beauty that has the advantage of being eminently useful or making a personal profit. You can make predictions from baseline assumptions and expose inconsistencies. However, there are many things you can’t do, and one of the easiest ones to forget is one of the most important: you can’t prove something using formal logic that exceeds your assumptions. I discuss this further below the fold.

I will start with one of the illustrations that we use for implications, a Venn diagram.

The basic idea of any implication is a subset. The conditions that create the hypothesis (what you assume to be true) are a subset of the conditions that create the conclusion (what you are demonstrating to be true). Since the entire calculus of classical log can be expressed using implications and the word “not”, that means that all of classical logic is basically a verbose form of set theory.

One aspect of this notion is that all implications are downhill, or at best level, in the restrictions imposed upon the model by the statements involved. You reason from the more restrictive, harder to match, less flexible model to the less restrictive, easier to match, more flexible model. This is the only way implications can work, therefore the only way classical logic can work.

Of course, sometimes the implication is just not there. You find yourself with a hypothesis that covers too much ground, and has too much flexibility to support the conclusion.

You can make a couple of choices at this point. One of the most common ones is to increase the number of hypotheses. When you require that all the various hypotheses are true, you are restricting your model even more. You wind up with a much smaller model, as you can see by the blue region.

Now, if we combine the previous two diagrams, we can see that adding additional hypotheses has allowed us to restrict our starting model to the point where we can prove the conclusion.

Of course, most philosophy, and for that matter most mathematics, is done with commonly spoken language as opposed to a formal language. This makes it easy for people to sneak in hypotheses, often without even being aware that is what they are doing. This is even truer when the proof is particularly important to them, such as when it is being used to support a religious position. For example, if someone tells you about a proof that the existence of change (an unrestrictive, easily matched, flexible starting point) can be used to prove the existence of God (a moderately restrictive, not as easily matched, less flexible conclusion), you know that something will be incorrect even before you dig into the proof. Using logic and metaphysics, you can’t prove the existence of God unless you assume such strong hypotheses that, by comparison, God’s existence is less restrictive option. Logic just does not work that way.
Read more!

Evolution without teleology

The OFloinn recently posted on the existence of teleological principles in evolutionary theory over on his blog. TheOFloinn is certainly a better writer than I am. He writes with style, but that doesn't really make up for the lack of understanding regarding the material, or the lack of imagination being applied, which I'll discuss below the fold. I won't cover everything I dislike in his post, but hit a few items of interest. Overall, his point is to support the notion of importing formal and final causes back into science, which Artistotelians always seem to find lacking in scientific theories.

One of the early footnotes set an interesting tone.

Oddly, Mendel's work and the support from his Order are seldom mentioned during debates about church-science relationships.

The odd part is why a priest doing science, as ascientist, or a church sponsoring research into an area they do not find objectionable, would be relevant to the church-science debate. I don't think anyone objects to religious people doing science, or even science being funded by religious organizations. The issue with church-science relationships come from churches discarding, adjusting, altering, ignoring, and/or contradicting the results of science in order to preserve their preferred notion of reality. For example, when abstinence-only education classes (or people working in AIDS ministries) teach that condoms don't protect against HIV because viruses are smaller than the natural holes in latex, or when scientific funding is cut from research because a legal procedure is not supposed to be encouraged, or when children go unvaccinated because some people don't believe in puncturing the skin, the actions of the church affect everyone, even non-church members. I could only wish that sponsoring a few experiments was the extent of church-science relationships.

Later, after a recap of the well-known problem of defining a species, a solution is offered:

Darwin's problem with "species" was due to his dislike of and lack of background in philosophy; for "species" is first of all a philosophical term. It is in fact an example of formal causation, which Darwin and other Moderns are taught to deny. The form is that in virtue of which a thing is what it is.

Whatever else a species is, within biology it is not in any way a philosophical term, but one of mating potential. The fuzziness of the boundary for species does not make the idea philosophical; it means you can not quantize the concept in simple steps, but must treat it as a continuum. The putative use of form would not improve our ability to determine a species. My form is different from my third son's form (for example, we have different eye colors resulting from different eye coloration processes), even though due to the commonality within our forms, we are both of the human species. Trying to redefine species as a concept of forms adds no clarity at all to the species problem, and in particular does not alter the continuum to a simple categorization. This is an example of using a "problem" (which is not really a problem, except to people who like simple categories) to promote a position, when the position acutally does nothing to solve the "problem". TheOFloinn presents a type of thinking where the usefulness of forms is presumed, therefore forms are declared useful; that type of thinking offers no genuine insight.

Things get even more amusing when discussing the notion of finality in physical systems. We see a two-part attempt at evidence for them, which I'll address separately.

There is telos in physical systems.
1. Systems move toward attractor basins, toward equilibrium manifolds; chemical reactions run to completion, then stop. The equilibrium state may be an orbit or a resonating reaction, but this is still a "finality" to the physical process. An inanimate system tends to minimize its potential function, even if it does not intend to do so.

There is a confusion here between the achieving of a final state and the entry into stochastically equivalent interactions. Really, the only true final state of matter is complete entropy, the primary form of which is the lack of a structured form, the lack of telos. Chemical reactions run to increased entropy, stopping when the entropy is maximized, the form is least effective, and any interpretation of final cause has little play. You might say the 'final cause' of matter is to shed anything that looks lie final cause.

2. The evolution of species is more teleological than a river "seeking" the lowest attainable gravitational potential. Living beings have an integrated wholeness and possess inner principles that inanimate bodies do not. A petunia is a bag of chemicals; but it is not only a bag of chemicals. For so long as it is alive, it does things that a bag of chemicals cannot do. This is why biology at one and the same time "is not a hard science" like physics and chemistry, and also "a much harder science" than physics and chemistry.

This is an attempt to appeal to our sense that living things are in some sense superior, but it fails upon close examination. A non-living bag of chemicals identical in composition to a petunia will be undergoing processes that no petunia undergoes, just as the reverse is true. Further, I'm not convinced that biology is any less a hard science, or harder, that the more esoteric branches of physics and chemistry. Since the rvery basics reactions of biology are just physics and chemistry, it's really a matter of direction, not difference in hardness.

TheOFloinn also seems to easily confuse metaphor with meaning.

The very terms of evolution are redolent with telos.

Natural selection.
Adaptation.
Struggle for existence.
Striving to reproduce.
Even when we dive down deep into the gene, we find teleological terms like "information" and genetic "code."

Natrual selection is ultimately a probabalistic term, referring to long-term tendencies to survive, not any sort of true selection process. Adaptation is the outcome of the long-term survival tendency within a changing environment. The struggle for existence and the striving to reproduce are also fundamentally stochastic events. Information, when stored in a linear medium such as a gene, is maximized by randomness. The genetic code is really just the chemical process where amino acids are inserted based on a particular sequence. There is no need to telos in interpreting these concepts, and no advantage offered by so doing.

It is often said that these terms are just metaphors; but metaphor is the business of literature, not of science. No one has yet successfully "cashed out" terms like adaptation for non-teleological expressions.

Actually, metaphor is a mental shorcut, whether in literature or in science. Scientists use them to abbreviate, illustrate, and categorize. TheOFloinn is kidding himself about there being no translation of the metaphors into non-teleological language; the translations are easily available on-line. They're also longer and more cumbersome to a mammal brain with an inherent bias to look for purpose.

The essence of the Scientific Revolution was a shift in scientific focus from the contemplation of the beauty of nature to the enslavement of nature to man's dominion over the universe. ... Insight into nature is seldom touted; only its practical spin-off.

He must read other scientists than I. There's no shortage of eloquence on the beauty in the study of stars, zebraish, or rock formations from the same blogger that dismiss final causes as irrelevant and unnecessary.

Edward Blyth, who described natural selection twenty years before Wallace and Darwin (but who did not call it by that name), proposed it as the engine that maintained the species type by de-selecting variants that were not up to snuff. ... Now it is easy to see that Blyth was correct.

Both correct and incorrect. Natural selection does not tend to maintain the species type nor to alter it. To the extent that is metaphorically does anything, it increases the percentage of the population that can take better advantage of the environment. This increase may narrow or broaden the differences in a population over generations.

In an article that I have long lost, these factors were summarized as follows:

The genetic factor: the tendency to variation resulting from constant small random mutations in the genetic code; i. e., a variety of differing individuals within a species capable of transmitting their differences
The epigenetic factor: the tendency of interbreeding population to reproduce itself in a stable manner and increase in numbers; i. e., the maintenance of type
The selective factor: natural selection by the environment which eliminates those variants which are less effective in reproducing their kind; i. e., the agent determining in which direction species-change will take place
The exploitative factor: the flexibility of living things by which they are able to occupy new niches in the changing environment; i. e., a feed-back mechanism which guides the selective process toward a new type which can exploit new environmental possibilities
Which the Aristotelians among you may recognize as

Material cause
Formal cause
Efficient cause
Final cause

Naturally, we see near the end plea to the four causes of Aristotle. As usual, in evolutionary terms, it turns out that the appeals to formal and final causes are not actual causes at all. There is no tendency to reproduce in a stable manner (unstable reproduction occurs regularly), rather the actions of chemicals. I actually have no problem with the idea of form as a description of the processes undergone, but it does not act beyond the inertia supplied by the underlying physics, and the physics is neutral on the maintenance of some "type". There is no guidance of the selective process, merely a stochastic effect that increases certain traits among members of populations, and a primate species that found the shortcut of interpreting events as if they had a purpose to be a handy survival technique, even when the purpose was non-existant.
Read more!

On the intellectual honesty of atheism

Ilion, whose handle is inseparable from the phrase "intellectually dishonest", recently linked to a post he claims present the proof that atheists are indeed intellectually dishonest. The proof itself is somewhat out-of-order. Below the fold, I'll try putting it together in a more traditional fashion as well as looking at the various axioms, to judge the soundness of the proof. Those who wish to see the original form can use the link.

Everything in the indented section, except for the outline numbers, is a direct quote from Ilion's post. I am trying to sort out axioms (A) from logically proven propositions based on those axioms (P). When statements are basically repetitions of other statements, they may be given the same outline number, or deleted.

A1) When an entity reasons, it chooses to move from one thought or concept to another based on (its understanding of) the content of the concepts and of the logical relationship between them.

A2) GIVEN the reality of the natural/physical/material world, IF atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, THEN everything which exists and/or transpires must be wholly reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes.

A3) This "everything" (which exists and must be wholly

P1) IF atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, THEN this movement from (what we call) thought to though (which activity or change-of-mental-state we call 'reasoning') *has* to be caused by, and must be wholly explicable in terms of, state-changes of matter. That is, it is not the content of, and logical relationship between, two thoughts which prompts a reasoning entity to move from the one thought to the other, but rather it is some change-of-state of some matter which determines that an entity "thinks" any particular "thought" when it does.

P2) ... there exist entities and events in the world which are not wholly reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes,

P3) ... the denial that 'God is' is a false proposition.

Well, this is somewhat incomplete, but the completion seems straightforward. Let's put this in a prepositional calculus form. First, I'll lay out the bare argument.

Z = "atheism is true"
C(x) = "x changes based on the content of concepts and logical relationships"
R(x) = "x reasons"
F(x) = "x exists or changes solely on the basis of material causes"
T(x) = "x is a mind"
E(x) = "x exists"

Then, I'll rewrite Ilion's statements above.
A1) R(x) ⇒ C(x)
A2) Z ⇒ ∀x(E(x)⇒F(x))
A3) T(x) ⇒ E(x)
P1) Z ⇒ ∀x(R(x)⇒F(x))
P2) ~∀xF(x)
P3) ~Z

Let's add a couple of axioms needed to fill this out, which I suspect were meant to be implied.
B1) ∃x(T(x) & R(x))
B2) C(x) ⇒ ~F(x)

The (shortened) proof is in the table below. Note that this proof does not work without B1 and B2.

1	Z	Assumed for contradiction
2	∀x(E(x)⇒F(x))	1, A2
3	T(c) & R(c)	B1
4	T(c)	B1
5	E(c)	B1, A3
6	F(c)	1, B1, A2, A3
7	R(c)	B1
8	C(c)	B1, A1
9	~F(c)	B1, A1, B2
10	F(c) & ~F(c)	1, A1, A2, A3, B1, B2
11	~Z	A1, A2, A3, B1, B2

This proof is valid. The soundness of this proof is questionable on more than one front (Elizabeth Liddle questioned a different axiom); I want to look at B2. If a change is based in part on concepts and/or logical relationships (CLR, for short), does that imply it is not based solely on material causes? I disagree. I would say that changes based on CLR are actually based solely on material causes.

My position is that CLR are patterned-yet-material reactions in the brain to material stimuli. We react with the same pattern of brain reactions to similar stimuli, and name these reactions the process of reasoning. Different people will likely store different physical patterns, but they will create the same behavior when reasoning.

So, as opposed to C(x) ⇒ ~F(x), I would say C(x) ⇒ F(x), rendering the proof unworkable. Naturally, should Ilion offer alternative versions of B1/B2, I'll take another look.
Read more!

Response to a post by The OFloinn

The OFloinn's blog doesn't allow me to comment, and he had a post, pointed out to me by another commentator, that I wanted to offer a couple of small comments on, below the fold. As Thomastic writers go, he's got a light-hearted style that makes him an easy read. I give him credit for that. Since this is a Thomasian poster/blog/argument, I'll be trying to frame this in Thomasian terms, to the best of my limited ability.

Now modern genetics does not falsify the Adam and Eve tale for the excellent reason that it does not address the same matter as the Adam and Eve tale. One is about the origin of species; the other is about the origin of sin. One may as well say that a painting of a meal falsifies haute cuisine.

I agree modern genetics doesn’t say much about the Fall, but it has a much harder time filling in with modern anthropology. For the Fall to be true, it requires that Adam and Eve live far enough back that they can be ancestors of all humans, possess sufficient Intellect to understand and communicate concerning the concepts required of them, and possess sufficient Will to deliberately reject those concepts. So, we have people with an operative language. However, the archeological record shows that humans were using writing technology to track numbers abstractly some 24,000 years before they used similar technology to track verbal concepts abstractly. That's a long time to wait to apply an existing technology in a new way.

Evolution points to the answer. Darwin tells us that at some point an ape that was not quite a man gave birth to a man that was no longer quite an ape.

First, note the inherent sexism. It's a man that gets the ability first, according to the narrative.

Second, even more surely than you can count on scientists to make bad philosophical statements, you can count on philosophers to make bad scientific statements. Evolution tells us that humans are apes. There is no sensible evolutionary organization of apes that excludes humans. You can separate humans from a group containing chimpanzees and bonobos, or from gorillas, evolutionarily. If you want to put chimpanzees and gorillas (or chimpanzees and any other species besides the bonobos) into the same evolutionary grouping, humans will belong there.

Further, this is even true in Thomasian terms. My understanding is that one school thinks that living things can participate in many forms, in which case humans participate in the form of Ape. Another school would say each thing has its own form, and that terms like "ape" are categories of forms. Again, by any reasonable definition (that is, one not specifically designed to exclude humans) of this collection, humans will be categorized as apes.

Yet when the Coynes of the world want to tell us 'what Christians believe,' they agitate over the idiosyncratic beliefs of Bill and Ted's Excellent Bible Shack, whose teachings go back to last Tuesday. Go figure.

People respond to the religions of their culture, and the US is dominated by those last Tuesdayers.

There is an argument similar to Zeno's Paradox of Dichotomy that holds that sapient man arose by slow, gradual increments. That is, arguing from the continuum rather than from the quanta.

This completely overlooks the argument from the plane, or n-space. Pregnancy entails separate steps (for example, arrival in the uterus and fertilization of the ovum). Sapience consists of different aspects (generalization, separation of immediate stimulus from remembered stimulus, separation of pattern from individual instances), all of which are possessed by mammals in differing degrees.

Now, "a little bit sapient" is like "a little bit pregnant." It may be only a little, but it is a lot more than not sapient at all. There is, after all, no first number after zero, and however small the sapience, one can always cut it in half and claim that that much less sapience preceded it. But however long and gradual is the screwing-in of the light bulb, the light is either on or off.

There is no good reason to think positive numbers or light bulbs represent good models of sapience.

It is not clear how Dr. Coyne envisions the same sapient mutation arising simultaneously in 10,000 ape-men.

There is no reason to think the physical mutations that allowed sapience where followed by immediate sapience, either. Sapience comes at least in part from a learning the process of being sapient. The physical tools for sapience could have been present for a million years or more before the cultural tools for sapience began to develop. It that happened, even under the on/off model of sapience offered, sapience would have spread inside of a population of 10,000 with a couple of generations, with kids learning it from adults who were not their parents or from the other kids they played with.

Except, The OFloinn allows his metaphysics, founded in religious beliefs, to prevent him from considering this possibility. Original can't be passed from playmate to playmate, it must pass parent-to-child. Therefore sapience must pass the same way.

The anathemas of the Council of Trent mention only Adam.

It's not Eve's fault, she was just a woman.

And so we might imagine Adam sitting around the campfire after an exciting hunt and remembering the bison they had chased and the moment of truth and he suddenly utters the hunting cry that signifies "bison here!" A cry that is in principle no different from those made by other animals, and possibly his fire-mates look about in alarm for the bison the cry signifies.

We might imagine a bee, looking for a new location for a hive, see the location for it, and then returning to the hive and doing a special dance that all the other bees interpret as telling them about the new hive. Except, we have actually observed it, as well.

But in all likelihood, his ability to speak in abstractions -- to speak of 'bison' rather than any particular bison -- is coterminous with his sapience.

So, will the OFloinn venture that bees are sapient? I find it unlikely.

But Adam is different. Having a rational human form in addition to his sensitive animal form, he is capable of knowing the good.

Sure, he just has three words, but he knows what it means to be good.

But for Adam to know the good means that Adam is now capable of turning away from the good.

Notice that "capable of knowing the good" has transformed into "know the good" in the blink of an eye. I wonder if Adam had time to draw a breath in between?

Well, that's enough for one post. The rest is not much different.
Read more!

Biology, forms, and natural law

I've been reading up on Aristotelian forms, and I think I now understand them much better than before. In brief, forms are the processes that a thing undergoes as a part of being what that thing is. This has some interesting consequences for Aristotelian metaphysics, from what I can tell. For one thing, it pretty much ends the notion of natural law, because there is no sort of being to which a natural law could apply, and even if there were, there is no overall good to which natural law can appeal. More details below the fold.

The first point, that there is no being to which natural law could apply, is based in this notion:

No thing can be a mereological sum of other things. A heap of sand, then, is not a thing, for it is nothing but the mereological sum of the grains of sand. Whether the grains of sand are things or not is a more difficult question.

It’s actually not a difficult question. The grains themselves are composed of molecules, and the molecules are composed of physically separated items like electrons and protons, each acting according to its own form. However, there is no question of an electron behaving morally. Under Aristotelianism, every electron behaves according to its own form perfectly. There are no imperfect electrons. Since any larger object is the mereological sum of the various subatomic particles, with the apparent unity being the sum of the behaviors of the individual particles, every larger object will act according to the sum of the respective forms. Thus every action is in concord with the mereological sum of the forms, and there is no non-good action. That means all actions are in accord with natural law, rendering it moot.

As for the second point, let's say for the moment biological organisms actually were things, because we allowed certain sums of subatomic things to be things in their own right, and these included biological organisms. Then, it turns out every biological organism is a thing with its own unique form. For example, my form is certainly different than my mother's, since my natural processes have made me male and she was female. My form is also different from my father's since his natural processes made his hair red, and then (opaque) white, while mine has been brown, and is slowly going translucent. So, when people talk about the form of a dog in the general, it turns out there is no such thing. Every dog has its own form, and every person has their own form. Rather, we can talk about common characteristics of dogs, or humans, but no some or subset of these characteristics is the form of a dog, or a human. Natural law claims depend upon the use of something being consistent with its purpose, which purpose is deduced from its form, but since every form is different, there is no barrier for the proper use of the penis on one man being different from the proper use of the penis in another man. Hence, the use of the penis in a homosexual relationship by homosexuals is in fact moral. Actually, since the form changes from person to person, and every person acts according to the processes that make up that person, even child molesters are following the dictates of their forms. Natural law is reduced to acknowledging every action as moral.
Read more!

Pascal's Wager as a burden of proof argument

Dr. Vallicella has recently put up a series of posts on the notion of the who had the burden of proof in an argument, and I have some disagreements with the first entry and the most recent entry (which, from the last paragraph, looks to be the last entry).

First, I want to commend Dr. Vallicella overall, for an interesting and well-thought-out series. This is especially true in light of his statement that he had no worked-out position before these posts. I’ll discuss a couple of disagreements with the conclusions, below the fold.

In the first entry, Dr. Vallicella discusses a few different methods of assigning the burden of proof to one side of the other of an argument. They are the notions that burden of proof would rest on someone making a positive claim, an existential claim, counter-empirical claim, an improbable claim, a minority-opinion claim, and an unsafe claim. For example, claiming that there is a Saguaro cactus on a desert hillside in Arizona would be positive, existential, empirical, probable, majority-opinion, and safe. Overall, the burden of proof would be on the person who denies the claim. The assignation of the burden of proof can vary from field to field and situation to situation, though. A man carrying a crate of guns from a factory to a distributor has no burden of proof to show every single gun in the crate is unloaded, while a person handling a gun, even directly from such a crate, does bear this burden.

The difficulty comes in applying these different notions to God. In particular, Dr. Vallicella asserts that the theist accepts a majority-opinion claim, and bears no burden on that regard. I certainly don’t disagree there. He asserts that since some positive, existential claims do not need to be proven, there is no burden of proof attached to the positive claim for the existence of God, which certainly strikes me as fallacious reasoning (some things with A also have B, X has A, therefore X has B). Oddly, I didn’t find a name for that fallacy, although it would be some sort of faulty generalization. Just as badly, he assigns the burden of proof to non-theists on the basis that we would not want to lose our beatitude, which is Pascal’s wager dressed up in fancier language. I don’t feel a need to add to the criticism on the linked page.

In the latest post, Dr. Vallicella discusses the notion of the burden of proof in the competing notions that are or are not miracles. Firstly, I find that tense odd. Wouldn’t it make more sense to discuss if there have or have not been miracles? Is the existence of miracles in the present moment actually relevant to his discussion? However, that’s a minor inaccuracy. More serious is the very careful framing of the question as to the whole general class of miracles, avoiding the focus on individual miracles. Saying that there have been miracles offers no assurance at all about the truth of any individual putative miracle. It only offers emotional comfort in the notion you can’t be defeated on general principles.

Also, the notion that in the science game, the burden of proof will be on those who assert miracles exist, but in the religion game, the burden will be on those who assert they do not exist, is flawed. It confuses the procedural methodology of science with the ontological definition of religion. Science has no opinion on the existence of miracles. Religions do. However, any particular religion denies the existence for more miracles that it accepts.

As to whether the burden of proof lies with those who say morality and its presuppositions are illusory, I’m not sure what such a claim would truly entail in actual philosophical terms, unless you are denying the existence of thought at all, such as in eliminative materialism. Even then, the various collections of neural firings that we associate with morality would still be real, so morality as a behavior would still exist. I’m unsure what position is being assigned the burden of proof, here.
Read more!

On Leibniz's Mill

There was a recent post on Dr. Feser's blog reviewing a book on the challenge to materialism presented by Leibniz's Mill, which refers to the illustration Leibniz offers in section 17 on his The Monadology. I haven't read the book, and so offer no opinions there. However, The Monadology and Dr. Feser's post are both items I will to comment upon below the fold.

Starting with The Monadology, the first four parts discuss what these Monads are, and what is means for them to be simple. In particular, Monads are simple, without parts, are not collections of things, can’t be extended, divided, created, nor destroyed through natural means. So, from the start, the grounding of this notion is outdated physics, as monads are created/destroyed by phenomena such as pair production or pair annihilation. Since monads are proposed to have a property that is counter to reality, any discussion of them based on that property will not be descriptive of reality.

The example of Leibniz’s Mill comes in section 17 of The Monadology; the claim is that perception can’t be explained mechanically (if we enlarge the brain to a size where we could walk around in it, we can’t point to any given activity as a perception), and is therefore simple. Leibniz then uses this notion of simplicity to talk about the notion of a soul, how it starts, etc. Since the notion of simplicity itself is not descriptive of reality, there is little point in going into detail about the results from this notion. That’s one of the advantages of arguing in a formal system, a mistake at the beginning invalidates the entire argument.

However, according to Dr. Feser, the book under review uses the other aspect of Leibniz’s Mill (the inability to point to a perception in a physical model) to show that mechanical descriptions of nature can’t account for perceptions, a position Dr. Feser endorses. The basic style is a careful presentation of positions that Dr. Feser feels can be refuted. I don’t find some of the refutations to be particularly convincing.

The first is the notion that since we would not recognize collections of nerve activity as being perceptions on sight, asserting they are is basically doing an end-run around Leibniz’s position. However, this is a play to an argument from our ignorance. The real issue is not a lick of connection between brain activity and mind activity, but the lack of the ability to form sight interpretation. Indeed, given a precise translation table between brain states and thoughts, you would expect even under Dr. Feser’s Scholasticism that observing particular brain states exactly corresponds to particular mind states, and the lack is the ability to make the translation.

I do agree with Dr. Feser that taking the position there are no thoughts (eliminative materialism) concedes that Leibniz is correct you can never see a thought. However, I don’t see where that is a problem for eliminative materialism, any more than conceding you can never see a unicorn would be a problem.

Dr. Feser discusses the idea that this could be compared to a computer, where you could see computation going on but not understand the output of the program (again, unless you had a precise translation table). His response is that there can be no such thing as computation without something that assigns meaning to the processing, just as there is no meaning to a written word except as assigned by the reader. However, there is a fundamental difference between an active collection of objects and a passive collection of markings. The water cycle has many of the properties we assign to algorithms, and we can discuss its effects and consequences without making reference to whether the cycle has been designed. There is far less discussion to be had regarding a small collection of rocks lying on the ground. Saying that mental activity which is not previously programmed does not qualify as computation is a matter of terminology, not effect.

Finally, while I’m agnostic on whether the activity cycles of a computer/brain can be pointed to as a separate level of existence or not, such existence would be a far cry from embracing the entire Scholastic metaphysical system or some sort of mystical existence. Noting that activity patterns have cumulative effects does not require that they point to anything outside themselves (so no final causality) and certainly does not entail an exterior mind to direct them. Thus, there is nothing in the computationalist response that need disturb the materialist in the slightest.
Read more!