Specter of Reason

Newcomb's Paradox is a well-known problem, and I won't try to go through all the angles, interpretations and arguments.  The basic problem is this (taken from Wolfram ): Given two boxes, B1 which contains $1000 and B2 which contains either nothing or a million dollars, you may pick either B2 or both. However, at some time before the choice is made, an omniscient Being has predicted what your decision will be and filled B2 with a million dollars if he expects you to take it, or with nothing if he expects you to take both. It's common to suppose that the Predictor is not necessarily omniscient.  It can just be an extremely reliable supercomputer, say.   Grey's Labyrinth  gives a nice introduction to the problem and a very clever go at a solution , too.  The claim is that it is most rational to choose just one box.  I agree.  Here's why. First off, I don't think the paradox should be taken as an argument against free will, or against the com...

I ended my last post by saying that I hope Dennett declines Sam Harris' invitation to publicly discuss free will with him.  That might not seem very fair or friendly.  Why shouldn't I want to see Dennett and Harris discuss free will publicly? The reason is this:  Harris has not shown that he can treat well-tread philosophical subject matter fairly and authoritatively.  He has only begun a career in neuroscience, and has yet to distinguish himself as anything other than a popular writer and speaker on matters related to atheism.  His abilities to write and speak are certainly praiseworthy, but they do not earn him the stature of a great intellect.  Furthermore, his reasoning on philosophical topics is highly suspect, often problematic, occasionally incoherent, and overtly Buddhist (in an irrational and self-contradictory way, which is perhaps the norm for Buddhism in general, but shouldn't make Harris very comfortable).  Harris is not an authority on ...

I want to quickly point out some major problems I have with Sam Harris' recent comment on his disagreement with Dennett on the issue of free will. His main idea is that, while he and Dennett agree on everything about how people actually function, and while they agree on what sorts of free will are worth having, they disagree on what ordinary people mean by the phrase "free will."  He thinks Dennett is just redefining the term and thus changing the subject, rather than engaging with how people actually think about free will.  He suggests this strategy is dangerous, because people are living under an illusion which needs to be dispelled. Maybe he makes a stronger case for this in his book, but in the post there's a severe lack of support for this claim.  Dennett's arguments seem very well in tune with how people talk about free will, and Dennett seems more eager than most to identify how cognitive illusions influence our understanding of consciousness and relat...

In addition to Jason Stanley's Know How, there's another, even more recent book on the same topic:   Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind and Action . It's a collection of 15 new papers presumably commissioned by the editors of the volume, which are John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett. I've only just begun to peruse the bits that are available online.  I don't expect to get to the whole book any time soon.  But it looks like at least some of the contributors are defending Ryle, and in ways not unlike my own.  Still, there are some confused interpretations of Ryle, as well. For example, on page 65, Paul Snowdon admits, in his criticism of Ryle's "Knowing How and Knowing That" (1946), that Ryle "is very hard to follow."  Snowdon claims that the confusion is Ryle's, and not his own.  He thinks Ryle is confused in his presentation of knowing-that, as if Ryle conflated the state or condition of knowing-that with the act or process of contem...