Specter of Reason

For no particular reason, I just returned to this discussion at Butterflies & Wheels, in which Peter Beattie charges Massimo Pigliucci with two counts of deplorable argument. I was surprised to find that one of my comments had been deleted. Nobody had said anything about it. I don't follow B&W. That discussion is the only one in which I've ever participated, so I'm not sure what to think. The deleted comment consisted of me pointing out to another commenter that I thought we had been "wasting our time on a clown with delusions of philosophical grandeur." I was speaking of Peter Beattie. I'm not sure, but I presume this is the Australian politician who was Premier of Queensland from 1998 to 2007. That's not why I called him a delusional clown. I called him a delusional clown because he was acting like one. I don't blame anybody for deleting senseless insults, and if there was no justification for my comment, so be it. But sometimes...

I won't be blogging so much in the coming months, since the school year begins in little more than a fortnight. I'm starting with King Lear, and this marks my first pedagogical venture into Shakespearean territory. To prepare, I'm reading a number of canonical texts from the Early Modern period and which I ashamedly admit I have not before read, including Bacon, Montaigne, and Machiavelli. Today, I looked at Martin Luther's famous De Servo Arbitrio ("The Bondage of the Will"), an impassioned rejoinder to Desiderius Erasmus. (Roughly, Luther's position was that mankind is not free to choose good or evil, but is determined to do so by divine providence. Erasmus believed that the question of freewill was itself unnecessary.) Without analyzing the philosophical or theological issues, I just want to draw attention to Luther's rhetoric (in the first six sections of De Servo ), which is pretty extraordinary. It betrays a desire to not simply counter Era...

Philosopher Alva Noe is discussing gender and neurobiology  on the NPR blog (see  here  and  here ). His primary goal is noble. He wants to counter the cultural forces which stereotype men and women and which, in some cases, lead us to devalue ourselves and sabotage our own potential. He appeals to a work of popular science by Cordelia Fine,  Delusions of Gender , which he says draws the following conclusion: "Whatever cognitive or personality differences there are between men and women cannot be attributed, except in a few isolated cases, to intrinsic biological or psychological differences between men and women, at least not in the current state of knowledge." I haven't read Fine's work, so I cannot say how well Noe has represented her conclusion. In any case, the conclusion he attributes to her is much weaker than the three claims Noe himself puts forward in the name of science.  First, Noe says the science clearly tells us that there are " no cognitivel...

Putting together a few thoughts on free will which I've been toying with lately, I've come to consider two possible views of libertarian free will. One might be possible, I think, but the other doesn't seem to work. (I should mention at the outset that I'm not considering any version of metaphysical libertarianism that postulates supernatural entities.) First, some general observations about free will and what it means to make a decision. To be an alternative is to be represented as an alternative. To have an option is to have a representation of something as an option. Whether or not that representation corresponds to a physical possibility, or whether or not the choosing of that option is physically possible, is irrelevant. Viable options must be logically possible, not physically possible. All that matters for people to have options is for them to have processes of a particular sort which regard options as such. If somebody snaps their finger to my left, and I ...

I recently had a brief discussion about the non-existence of numbers with a friend and student of physics. I'm a skeptic when it comes to the existence of numbers. I think math is something we do, and that numerals and their corresponding words are tools without referent. There is no number 2, but only various roles filled by the numeral "2" and the word "two." I wouldn't even say the numeral "2" denotes a rule (or rules) for its use. My friend agreed there was something obviously correct about my approach, but said that we still have to wonder about the correspondences. I didn't have time to respond, but the remark seemed to betray a common intuition about mathematics: that mathematical equations and theorems in some way correspond to facts. I don't think there's any reason to suppose this is true. Math does not correspond to anything, just like hammers don't correspond to anything. I don't think there's anything c...

A thought just occured to me. If we are capable of utilizing a purely random process, such as quantum mechanics might offer, then we could presumably use it in our formulation of potential plans/intentions prior to conscious deliberation . The randomization need not be in the conscious selection of a course of action--in the making of a decision itself--but in the unconscious production of options. Thus, we might choose to do X (as opposed to Y and Z) according to our beliefs and desires, and yet we come to identify X, Y and Z as options--and, indeed, come to have them as options--by a process which was not completely determined by past events. This only requires neurological processes devoted to randomly generating and selecting possible intentions. So, in choosing X, we are choosing something that was not determined by our causal history, and we are still acting on our beliefs and desires. We still choose what our physiology, psychology, etc., determines is the best option. So,...

I recently wrote about the consequence argument and suggested that it might involve a notion of power which we don't necessarily need in order to have an influence over the future. I just came up with a much better response to the argument, however, which does not require any fussing over the word "power." The consequence argument is as follows: If we have no power over X, and X completely determines Y, then we have no power over Y. Since we have no power over the past or over the laws of nature, and the past and the laws of nature together completely determine the future, then we have no power over the future. Thus, free will and determinism are incompatible. The problem with the argument seems to be that it regards agents as existing outside of the causal nexus comprising the past and the laws of nature. If we think of ourselves as part of the past and the laws of nature, and we accept that the past and the laws of nature determine the future, then we are part of w...