Specter of Reason

The following is a post I put together for my TOK class this year:  We're often told to listen to reason and not our emotions.  Emotions might help us in the moment, but they won't help us in the long run.  Emotions are about immediate gratification (getting what you want right away, living for the moment), not long-term planning.  Emotions are wild and unpredictable.  Reason is domesticated, calm and respectable. But is that really so? Or is the truth more like this:  People who try to change your mind about something by telling you not to follow your emotions are actually being hypocrites.  When they tell you not to follow your emotions, they are actually appealing to your emotions.  They are appealing to your sense of responsibility, and where does responsibility come from, if not emotions? Emotions give us love, empathy, compassion, joy and excitement.  Emotions may just be the glue that holds society together. Consider this scenario:  You don't want to do you

The following is a post I put together for my Theory of Knowledge class this year: How important is your language for your sense of identity--your identity as an individual, but also as a member of a nation?  It's common nowadays to associate a nation with a language, even though many nations have more than one national language.  Should a nation be defined by a single language? Consider what political factors have shaped the language that you speak.  Why do you speak Polish, Flemish, Danish, Czech, German, Russian or English?  Why did you grow up learning your native tongue, and why are you learning new languages today?  Are you learning new languages so that you can join new knowledge communities?  Bigger knowledge communities?  Better knowledge communities? Communities rely on communication.  Community, communicate:  Both words come from the latin root,  communia , meaning a large gathering of people sharing a way of life. Communication is not simply about sharing informat

What follows is a collection of illusions I put together for my Theory of Knowledge class this year:  Everybody's familiar with optical illusions, but there are other kinds as well.  We experimented with tactile illusions in class and I mentioned that there are also aural illusions.  Have you experienced any other kinds of illusions?  Illusions of taste or smell? Here are some optical and auditory illusions to enjoy.  What do they reveal about the limits of sense perception? First, an image.  When you look at it for the first time, you might not see a pattern at all.  It just looks like random black spots on a white background.  But eventually, all of a sudden, you can see a picture. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Here's another one with the same effect:             These examples raise the question:  How much of what we see depends on what we have learned to see? The same phenomenon can occur with sounds. Here's an audio track with a stunning de

Deepak Chopra, a well-known spiritualist, does not like physicalism. Physicalism says that everything is physical and can be entirely explained in non-mental terms.  So, according to physicalism, consciousness can ultimately be explained in physical, non-mental terms.  Chopra says this view is an unreasonable dogma, and that it makes much more sense to believe that thoughts are non-physical.  When we think, he says, non-physical phenomena affect the workings of the brain.  To add muscle to his position, he has issued a challenge:  According to the New Statesman , he will award  a prize of $1 million  to anyone who can demonstrate, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, that human consciousness is created by the brain.   This is not a challenge to demonstrate that Chopra has misunderstood physics, nor is it an invitation to critique his own arguments about consciousness.  The challenge is to scientifically demonstrate that brains create consciousness.  That's it.  If we cannot meet

I've been discussing things to do with Sam Harris' Moral Landscape Challenge lately, but I forgot to congratulate the winner, Ryan Born .  Though it was Harris' challenge, it was Russell Blackford who chose the winning essay.  I've only read a handful of the entries, but I don't recall reading any that were better than Ryan's.  It's a well-written and interesting essay, and I trust Russell to have found the best of the lot. That said, I'm not thrilled with Ryan's essay.  I like the general strategy of taking up the Value Problem.  However, Ryan's primary tactic is problematic.  He takes up the idea of self-justification in a confused, or at least confusing, way.  Sam Harris has said that he would change his mind if he could be convinced that "other branches of science are self-justifying in a way that a science of morality could never be."  Ryan mistakenly takes Harris to be saying that science is self-justifying.  This allows Harris

This is a logic puzzle I came up with over twenty years ago, when I was in high school.  I will post the solution in a separate post in a week or so, if nobody solves it before then. Once upon a time, a bored and whimsical millionaire invited five of the world's most prominent logicians to his house for a game.  The winners were promised a prize of five million dollars.  (The losers, needless to say, were promised nothing.)  "But you must use logic," said the millionaire.  "This is no game of chance!" The millionaire placed a hat on each of their heads such that nobody could see the color of their own hat.  They could only see the colors of the hats on the other logicians' heads.  They were told that the hats were randomly selected from a batch consisting of five white, three red and one black hat.  The logicians were then numbered one through five and told that they would be asked, in order, if they knew the color of their own hat.  They would have to p

I've just turned my attention to Plato's Cratylus for the first time.  Nothing of significance brought it to my attention, but when I learned it is considered his only sustained treatment of language, and that it deals with the question of whether meaning is natural or conventional, I thought I should become familiar with it.  I have only looked at the very beginning, but already I wish I had more time to explore it and its relation to 20th-century philosophy of language. At the beginning of the dialogue, Hermogenes affirms a view of names which is relativistic:  the designation of a name is entirely dependent on conventional usage.  The rightness or wrongness of word meaning is relative to a linguistic community.  If I use the word "horse" to refer to humans, and "human" to refer to horses, then I am right as far as my own usage goes, though I am not in line with the majority. Socrates leads Hermogenes to find a problem with this view with a curious arg

It is perhaps well known that there is more than one way of interpreting the phrase "free will" and that many scientists are very stubborn about how they are willing to interpret it.  Dan Dennett has recently (in the last several months) acknowledged that there are benefits to giving up the term, though also that there are serious costs and risks.  This has led to some speculation  by Gregg Caruso at Flickers of Freedom  about whether or not Dennett has shifted his position wrt compatibilism.  One commenter, Randall Harp, draws attention to this lecture from November 2013, in which Dennett makes and expands upon the same point (Dennett starts speaking around to 21-minute mark): This is entirely in line with Dennett's well-known views.  In fact, it's worth watching as a concise introduction to Dennett's thoughts on free will and moral responsibility.  He has not shifted his position and he still uses the phrase "free will" as he always has.  As I pos

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."  "Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd

One of Dennett's most well-known contributions to philosophy is the idea of the intentional stance .  This is supposed to be a template for understanding minds and rational agency.  However, Dennett's view of the intentional stance has shifted since he first began its formulation in the mid-1970s.  His earliest work on the topic indicates the following thesis:  An object is an intentional system just in case it is advantageous to regard it as such.  Here he is, in 1976 : An Intentional system is a system whose behavior can be (at least sometimes) explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires (and other Intentionally characterized features--what I will call Intentions here, meaning to include hopes, fears, intentions, perceptions, expectations, etc.). There may in every case be other ways of predicting and explaining the behavior of an Intentional system--for instance, mechanistic or physical ways--but the Intentional stance may be t

Compatibilism is the idea that there is no conflict between determinism and free will.  Incompatibilism is the idea that free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe.  There's been a lot of discussion over which view is correct.  What's remarkable about the debate isn't so much the stubbornness or passion which has been exhibited by this or that party, but the fact that the very terms of the debate are controversial.  There is a great deal of confusion about what the key issues in the debate are and how we should be talking about them.  As a result, there is a meta-debate within the debate itself.  You cannot engage in the debate without also engaging in a debate about the debate--about what issues are at stake and about how the issues should be framed.  So here's what I want to do:  I want to explain why I think incompatibilists are doing a very bad job of framing the debate, and also why compatibilism is the most reasonable option on the table.  It's an ambi

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Sam Harris' first book, the award-winning best seller, The End Of Faith . Over the past decade, he has earned a good deal of public acclaim and devotion, and for respectable reasons. Sam Harris is a gifted writer and speaker. His eloquence and clarity of expression are enviable. In addition, he has been an outspoken advocate of reason, critical thought and secular values when this has been sorely needed. For these reasons, I would like to see Harris as an ally and potential friend who, like me, wants to make the world more hospitable to atheism and reason. However, his attitude towards the decorum of professional philosophy is hurting the cause, and his own arguments are suffering, too. In his review of Harris' most recent book, Free Will , Daniel C. Dennett admonishes Harris for not doing his homework and not engaging with "the best thought on the topic." This sort of reaction to Harris is not uncommon from profession