Monty Python's philosopher's drinking song

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [some versions have 'Schopenhauer and Hegel']

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.

Elegant Snaarsiverse

I bought Brian Greene's best-selling popular science novel, "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory" today.

Hopefully, I'll have something both philosophical and irrelevant to say about string theory after reading the book. But first off, let me say that string theory is really a fool's quest, and here's why:

String theory is touted as the explain-everything model that will reconcile general relativity with quantum theory. For those who are unfamiliar, quantum mechanics is about the smallest things we know about in physics, and general relativity is about medium- and large-sized objects (like bugs, apples, cars, planets, and stars) on up to the ungeblievagly engormous things (like black holes and galaxies.) The theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, taken together, explain just about everything observable about the physical universe, but they are mutually exclusive - they can't both be right.

String theory posits the existence of zero-point, one-dimensional structures called "strings," which vibrate through precisely eleven dimensions, and from which emerge matter and the forces familiar to modern physics: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

String theory, so far (to my admittedly meager knowledge), doesn't predict anything that is observable - but it does seem to be able to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity.

If I were a professional philosopher of science, I might characterize string theory as a reductionist theory, meaning that it attempts to explain all phenomena by appealing to one, or a very few, fundamental phenomena, forces, particles, or kinds of things (the last phrase being deliberately vague.)

Anyway, let's cut to the chase, shall we? The truth is, string theory is bullshit when - huh, obviously - the universe is composed not of strings, but - DUH - little bitty snaarsisms, quivering their way through the universal ovoid, imbuing space itself with hyper-optional potentiality.

I can teach you all the Way of the snaars, by which you too can know the truth of these things.

Creation/Evolution controversy explained

It's SO simple, really. Ken Ham, the protuberant creationist apologist, has a neatly packaged Answer-In-Genesis to the question of why Evolutionists "refuse" to believe.

Be you creationist or evolutionist, you may be surprised to find out that the controversy is not about the actual evidence for or against your position. No, we can never look to the evidence to decide the matter. The key, you see, is in the interpretation of the evidence, which is naturally based on our presuppositions (or axioms, which, Mr. Ham explains, are the same thing.)

One interpretation might seem to fit the evidence better, warns Ken, if we have not grasped the notion that what are at issue are the presuppositions which underlie.

You see, it's like this: no one really "knows" if we were created or evolved. Because no one was there to witness how we came to be. Because "We all exist in the present—and the facts all exist in the present."

If there was a witness, then someone was already living. So, being alive, they can't have witnessed the creation of life. Therefore, no one witnessed the creation of life.

No one, that is, except God (good thing HE's not alive, right?)!

Until we have a time machine, we'll never know how it really happened.

Luckily, our Christian brethren actually do have a time machine, in the form of the Bible. Hooray!

If we will only presuppose (and what right-thinker wouldn't?) that the Bible is the revealed Word of our Lord, then all the evidence will fall naturally into place. What a relief!

Ken Ham says he's glad he learned this distinction between facts and presuppositions, because then he was able to inoculate his students against the factual interpretations of other (evolutionist) teachers. Then the shoe was on the other foot for a change!

Despite God's every effort to be fair and give us all an even shake, however, some folks just won't believe, for their own indiscoverable, spiritually corrupt and immoral reasons. As long as they remain obstinate, nothing can prevent them from forming their own radicallly dangerous scientific interpretations of the evidence.

More ethical nonsense.

I found another interesting ethical philosophy survey.

My Results:
1. Jean-Paul Sartre (100%)
2. John Stuart Mill (92%)
3. Ayn Rand (85%)
4. Nietzsche (83%)
5. Epicureans (80%)
6. Kant (80%)
7. Thomas Hobbes (80%)
8. Jeremy Bentham (79%)
9. David Hume (76%)
10. Cynics (67%)
11. Prescriptivism (67%)
12. Stoics (67%)
13. Nel Noddings (55%)
14. Aquinas (47%)
15. Spinoza (43%)
16. Ockham (41%)
17. Aristotle (40%)
18. Plato (32%)
19. St. Augustine (25%)

Totally wrong, but interesting ...

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Man is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. Existentialist 63% Modernist 44% Postmodernist 44% Materialist 44% Cultural Creative 38% Romanticist 31% Fundamentalist 25% Idealist 25% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

determinism and ethics - a family portrait

A previous post has the title 'Moral Relativism?' and the subsequent discussion had very little to do with moral relativism. It had everything to do with the philosophical quandary surrounding the concepts of determinism and free will.

This post will also have nothing to do with moral relativism.

I have been working on the problem lately and I think I might see the outline of a kind of solution.

here are some notes on the fly ...

(A) Suppose that determinism is true, and that our actions are governed by factors that are, in principle, completely predictable. Free will is an illusion brought about by the fact that it is beyond our abilities to account for all the factors at once.

(B) Suppose that it is also true that we make choices and that we can be rightly held morally responsible for our actions.

How is (A) reconcilable with (B)?

evolution
survival
predicting the future/induction increases survival chances
imagination increases survival chances

faculties of imagination and prediction applied to human behavior causes the illusion that we could have chosen otherwise than we did

moral responsibility comes from the notion we could have done otherwise

the knowledge that there is a chance we can be held morally responsible affects our actions and increases our survival rate, as a species

evolution, survival, faculty of imagination & prediction, all are caused by deterministic(? - for lack of a better term at the moment) processes

the feeling of freedom is reducible to the ability to imagine and predict - we imagine that we could have done otherwise, and we predict what would happen in a similar situation if we behave differently. Predictions become causes of future behavior. Our ability to imagine many different outcomes is one reason our behavior is so difficult to predict - each imagined course of action and its probable outcome are weighed

Conclusion: the ability to make choices is the result of deterministic processes

Imagination and prediction, presumably the output of deterministic processes --> this output in turn is a causal factor in future behavior. This leads to the FAULTY impression that we could have chosen to do other than we did. Nevertheless it is important not to lose the motivational impetus that holding each other morally responsible provides ... because we would be removing one of the causes of future good actions ... we can imagine and predict that evil would result.

PROBLEM: Assumes that all the processes involved are deterministic ones.

PROBLEM 2: Just because the processes leading to the ability to make choices are all deterministic, doesn't necessarily mean that choice-making itself is deterministic

This is so sloppy I know. I have never been so careless before. But I have one more final paper to write and then finals to study for and I decided just to get this out there to see what you think.

I'll most likely delete this in the morning.

Ha ha. Ever seen the Princess Bride? "All right Westley, good job, good night, I'll most likely kill you in the morning ..."

Moral relativism?

So yesterday afternoon I found myself very nearly defending a form of moral relativism, which discomfited me, since I do not believe in moral relativism. This bothered me so much that I checked out The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on moral relativism*, just to brush up on it. Let me explain how I ended up in this predicament, at least as far as I can recall while still keeping this entry brief.

It began as a discussion of free will. The problem of free will is that it seems that we make choices, and that it is possible that we could have chosen to do other than what we did (this last is debatable) - but it also seems that minds are physical, and that physical things obey uniform natural laws which are determined and predictable. So, do our minds obey predictable laws or not?

Morality comes in because it seems that if we do not have free will, then we are not free to choose to do otherwise than we did. But our conception of moral responsibility hinges on the fact that we could have chosen to do other than we did.

Most philosophers want to preserve our concept of moral responsibility, because there doesn't seem to be any way to build up a workable ethics without it.

I have a problem in that the determinist position makes the most sense to me, but I believe in moral responsibility. So, I was trying to figure out a way of understanding the two concepts such that they are compatible.

What I came up with - and this is only the barest sketch of a theory - is that the utility of moral responsibility arises out of the fact that even though our behavior is determined in principle, we do not have an understanding of everything that determines our behavior. In order to develop this thought properly, I would have to write a lot more than I want to do here.

There is a whole can of worms here, so many that now that I have got to this point I don't know where to go. How did I get to the point of defending moral relativism? I forget. The conversation went in many directions and my thoughts right now are going in many directions.

Here's the thing: there is abundant evidence that our actions are determined. When we make choices, we usually have reasons. When we humans communicate with each other, we often try to convince each other to choose something or another, by offering reasons. Aren't our choices determined by reasons? If reasons do not determine our choices, then why would we try to convince each other of things?

Some choices may not be governed by reasons (at least conscious ones). Suppose I sometimes prefer cereal for breakfast, sometimes fruit. I may not have any good (rational) reason for choosing one over the other; the choice is purely based on my preference at the time. In this case, isn't the choice a result of my state of mind - which is a brain state - which is just chemistry and electricity and other physically determined events going on?

Wilbur pointed out that when we speak, each word we utter narrows the possiblities for what the next word will be. (Even gibberish follows a pattern.) When we listen to someone else speak, we often mentally fill in the ends of sentences before we hear them. If we can predict what someone is about to say with good accuracy, and we can sometimes know how others will react in a situation, then why would we think that this could not be refined and better understood to the point that we could completely predict what someone will do under any circumstances at all?

If we could do that, then we could say that the person's actions are determined. But the person would still make choices - it's just that we would know what the person would choose, before the person chose. Even though the choices were determined, it seems like the person is still morally reponsible for the actions he or she performs.

I have played fast and loose here and I don't know if I have expressed the issues very clearly, but I think free will and determinism are actually compatible, and that ethics need not be sacrificed.

Maybe Arglor will remind me how it came about that I said, "There's nothing self-contradictory about the term 'moral relativism'."

* For those of you who actually attempt a full read of the article, my hat's off to you. I think DMR is plausible for ordinary conversation but I don't really believe it. MMR is right out as far as I am concerned.

the cosmic wheel

A bit of wisdom I read today:

Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

This quote is telling me that there is not always time to analyze everything in the minutest detail. We must make decisions, whether we are ready or not.

Somewhere along the line I became a cautious person. I didn't trust many people. I didn't trust what I had previously understood.

I have tried many different ways of knowing things. I grew up in a church and even though I had reservations about the existence of God I was influenced by a group of people who had convictions and desires to better the world for themselves and others. My interests in high school were physics, mathematics, and music, and I understood the world through these things, especially physics. Ever since high school I was interested in "Eastern" religions. I started practicing meditation when I was sixteen or seventeen. At some point I decided there was a god, because the world didn't seem to make sense otherwise. I tried looking at the world as a grand contest between good and evil. I think it was my interest in religious understanding that drew me to philosophy.

Through my study of philosophy I have learned that the universe is a weird and wild place. It is strange and wonderful and nothing like what it seems on the face of it. Most things are not what we think they are. Now I think that - god or no god - the universe is not an easy thing of which to make sense. On the whole I think the evidence points to there not being a god, but it doesn't seem to make that much difference to me anymore, really.

This is not a world in which good decisions are easy. But since time marches on, we have to do the best we can with what we've got, knowing that along the way we are getting things wrong.

okaaaaaaay ...

Every day I take breaks from the work on my desk and I check out the latest news through my Yahoo! home page. Not often, but once in a while I check out the usually frivolous/inane/pointless/annoying comments that users post to the articles. The following post is no exception:

Although nothing prevents you from dreaming at least on papar with the hopes that as the result of your contemplation of something potentially different than what is commonly accepted you may arrive at an equally innovative solution... Mind you that depite all the physical limitations which have been theoretically summarised, nothing prevents nature from acting differently in consideration of the fact that our physical laws are descriptive of phenomena which occur with startling causality with a level of prediction which is first and foremost based on accumulated observation which gave purpose for the edification of specific pĥysical laws which only exist because of the relation to observe between theory and observation such observations being deemed as being faithfully representative of reality...

If this guy wanted to say that science is inductive, why didn't he just say so? Geeez! I SO want to reply to this, but I know it would be pointless. He seems to be saying that anything at all can happen, because science is "only" based on what we have observed to happen. He does have a point of sorts. With the very great wealth of carefully gathered scientific evidence we have gathered over the past few hundred years however, there are physical principles that in all probability will never be overturned. (That's not to say we have everything figured out, but that it is far more likely that physical laws will be refined rather than falsified.)

I'm so glad I studied philosophy of science. The popular conception of science is so far removed from the actual practice of it. I shudder to remember that I too once suffered from a similar kind of ignorance.

What do you think, am I being arrogant?