Neurath's Boat

I'd heard about this before

But this is the first link I encountered which prominently mentioned that Neda Soltani, recently murdered in Iran, was a philosophy student.  I suppose it's shallow that this makes me so much more interested in the story, just as perhaps I tend to go for the Khmer Rouge as my favorite example of 20th century monstrosity because of their "kill anyone with glasses" policy.  Anyway, here's hoping the situation improves in Iran, and that we don't get too many more stories like this.

Good things

Usually slither is more philosophically sophisticated, but here we see boy on a stick thinking like one of us.

Sample sizes

Whenever it's relevant (when feminism comes up, or materialism) I talk to my students about the studies of sex differences in the brain.  The press always reports any difference discovered by researchers as proof of innate differences in cognition.  Of course, the biggest problem with that interpretation is that environmental factors affect the brain, so finding something in the brain is not useful for determining where it came from, but I also mention the small sample sizes the studies usually have (a couple of dozen participants at most).

A friend is getting his Ph.D. in neuroscience (incidentally, according to him MRI studies, which are the kind that usually get such press, are all crap) decided to practice his thesis defense presentation on his friends before doing the real thing, so I heard about his research.  It had nothing to do with sex differences (it was about some details of how motor control works in the brain), but I learned something about sample sizes.  I was somewhat shocked to discover that it involved two experiments with a grand total of three monkeys (two per experiment; one monkey was involved in both).  I guess these were hideously expensive cyber-monkeys (they had electronic implants to measure brain activity very precisely during the experiments), so it wasn't practical to use more, but it seems like one could get very deceptive results this way if one were unlucky and got even one atypical monkey.

My skepticism of overly confident neuroscience claims has been further increased.

Strangeness

Hubert Schwyzer, who taught me a great deal about Kant, also occasionally talked about his days as a graduate student at Berkeley in the 60s.  Among his other stories, he reported that a great change in fashion happened at that time.  When he started, all the professors wore ties.  By about halfway through his time there, he said you could tell a professor's political views by whether he wore a tie or not.  By the time he left Berkeley, no professors were wearing ties.

Schwyzer is, sadly, no longer with us, and the story he told was of a time before I was born.  I am thus rather mystified by this piece.  Admittedly, it's about jeans rather than ties, but it's still the same fashion war that his side lost almost half a century ago.  Isn't it time to concede defeat?

(I should perhaps add that I have no objection to people dressing up.  I just object to it being mandatory, as well as its use to reinforce gender roles, which seems to be something Will considers a feature rather than a bug).

The reason this blog has been so quiet

I'm afraid I've just been too awesome to post.  (Kaufman 2009)

Greatest Philosopher of the 20th Century

Leiter's been running a poll, and Brian Weatherson has some commentary.  He voted for Lewis, and I voted for Carnap, but his post is about why Russell has been doing so well.  I'm actually a little surprised that Lewis is doing so well, though I think he's a perfectly defensible choice.

It seems that part of the reason Weatherson is surprised at Russell's showing is that the project of Principia Mathematica ended in failure.  I find that very difficult to evaluate.  It made contributions to the state of modern logic, and I guess I tend to think that modern logic is a truly enormous philosophical achievement.  However, it's difficult to know how to assign credit for it.  It's amazing how much was already set out by Frege; most of what comes afterward could be seen as just clarifying and patching a few mistakes.  But clarifying and patching mistakes is perhaps not trivial in this area.  How much did Principia move beyond Frege?  It did, I suppose, have some mistakes of its own.  I'm not sure exactly how to evaluate it, but I am skeptical that the failure of its official stated project is a particularly important criterion.

I suppose there are similar issues with Carnap.  I rank him highly both because of his contributions to the unfolding story of modern logic, and because I think his philosophical attitude toward logic was entirely correct.  But how much did he really add, as opposed to clarifying?  And how much did he clarify, if, as I tend to think, so many of his contemporaries and near successors misunderstood him?

Maybe that's an argument for Weatherson's choice.  There is no question that Lewis clarified many things.  But I guess I still think the same is true of Carnap, and of Russell, and that perhaps it is only less obvious for them because what they worked on was so unclear before they got to it that even quite substantial progress still left plenty of murk.

Qualia and Intrinsicality

Jaegwon Kim once told me that he thought secondary qualities were intrinsic if anything is.  Since that time, he seems to have shifted from being a reluctant defender of reductionist functionalism to a reluctant adherent of something like Chalmers' view (a relatively small shift, since in each case the reluctance consisted of his strong pull toward the other of the two options).  As I've alluded to in the past here, and here, I think the view that qualia are intrinsic is important to the debate about qualia.

I shall approach this topic from a distance; at the most abstract level of fundamental metaphysics, it seems to me that staying away from intrinsicness has produced some spectacular results.  Buddhism teaches that there is no self with any intrinsic nature; the self is just a placeholder in a network of relations.  To put it somewhat tendentiously (as the Buddhists themselves sometimes did), the self is an illusion.  This view did not, of course, maintain that the self was an illusion in the midst of a world of non-illusionary things; the world experienced by the self is also an illusion on this view.  There's just a network of relations, with things being only placeholders for positions in the network.

I suspect that this is why it was Indian mathematicians who invented the concept of zero; to the ancient European mathematicians, numbers were things, and so an absence couldn't be a number.  This is also why the Pythagoreans got so stressed out by irrational numbers; they could make sense of a ratio between countable collections of things, but how could something that wasn't either a count of things or even a ratio between such counts exist?  To the Indians, on the other hand, numbers as placeholders in a network of relations no doubt seemed natural (since they were used to thinking in that way anyway), and it's obvious that idenfying the zero spot in the network of relations is useful.  This view of mathematics as being about such relations is of course orthodoxy in modern times, and has been very good for mathematics.

I think it's not just good for mathematics.  Intrinsic properties just cause trouble; structures and relations are where all of the answers are to be found.  I think we shouldn't believe in intrinsic properties anywhere.  This is somewhat of a paradoxical position, admittedly, and of course there are some, such as Rae Langton, and if her plausible account is right, Kant, who think that while we can't know anything intrinsic, there must nonetheless be intrinsic properties.  I find such views even more puzzling than a complete rejection of intrinsic properties; we can know there are these specific things we can't know about?  But Kant scholars have been debating that sort of thing endlessly since his own time.  I shall leave it aside for now, as the topic I'm most interested in involves qualia, and qualia are not supposed to be uknowable.  So take just the place where extremists like myself agree with Langton and Kant and other moderates; we can't know anything intrinsic.

This is enormously relevant to the issue of qualia.  Phenomenal character appears to be an intrinsic property of experiences.  This, it seems to me, is the main intuitive obstacle to a functionalist account of phenomenal qualities:  functional properties are quite obviously non-intrinsic.  But if the intrinsic can't be known, then apparent intrinsicality is always an illusion.  And if such appearances are always misleading, then they're misleading in this case, so the intuitive obstacle can be swiftly dismissed.

This also strikes me as being the real heart of a lot of the arguments surrounding anti-materialist theories of qualia.  Lewis, for example, in "What Experience Teaches," goes through a very lengthy discussion of what knowledge of phenomenal qualities can't be like.  It seems to me that a good short summary of the argument is that if phenomenal qualities are to serve the role they are supposed to serve in Jackson's knowledge argument, they must be intrinsic, but looking at all of the things we know about our experience, it turns out that we can't find any role for anything intrinsic; looking for knowledge always turns up extrinsic things.

To take another example, it seems to me that Chalmers' zombie argument works by asking us to separate out the intrinsic properties of experience, and imagine that they're absent in the zombie world.  Obviously, if experience has no intrinsic properties, this procedure is impossible; either all worlds are zombie worlds, or (more reasonably) there's some account of phenomenal experience in terms of relational properties, and any world with the right relational properties has phenomal experiences.

It's just one book, but...

Given the continuing poor state of philosophy when it comes to feminist issues, it seems necessary to watch out for this sort of thing.  I just picked up The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, and happened to glance through the bibliography.  There turned out to be a surprising gap.  By most accounts, Susan Haack's 1977 paper on Kantian elements in Carnap's Aufbau was one of the more important early studies contributing to the current Carnap revival, and the current Carnap revival is the topic of the book.  But Haack is absent from the lengthy bibliography.  It may be an innocent accident, it may mean nothing, but with philosophy's depressing history of ignoring the contributions of women, one can't help but worry when it seems like there might be yet another instance of the problem.  Haack is even around, and I thought pretty well respected; usually the historical pattern has been that women in philosophy have sometimes been able to get recognition among their contemporaries but have almost always been been ignored by later generations.

Empiricism and A Priori Ethics

One way of characterizing the difference between traditional empiricism and traditional rationalism is that traditional rationalists have been dazzled by the impressive certainty of our a priori knowledge.  Logic and mathematics are so remarkable that many rationalists have literally accorded them the status of magic, attributing them to some mystical contact with the divine.  It is likely not a mere rhetorical device when Parmenides presents his logical arguments as having been given to him by a goddess.  Plato accords his forms a kind of divine status, and says we know them from previous exposure to them when our souls were in a higher realm of existence; Descartes says what may amount to the same thing, that mathematical knowledge and a few other items were implanted in our souls by God.

Those in the rationalist tradition have also almost always classified ethics as a priori.  Of course, lots of specific reasons for that could be given, but there are also very general motivations from the rationalist tradition which push that way.  First, of course, rationalists have generally been imperialists when it comes to the application of reason; since a priori knowledge is the really good knowledge, the rationalists have sought to reduce everything, or at least as much as possible, to the a priori, to have the best possible knowledge of everything.  Further, ethics specifically is about what's valuable, important, and good, and when it comes to knowledge the a priori is, according to the rationalist, the most valuable, important, and good, so while this does not itself amount to a rational argument, there seems to be some affinity between ethics and the a priori.  This further connection is no doubt enhanced by the tradition of connecting moral good to the divine; since the rationalists also connected the a priori to the divine, this would further encourage bundling the two together.

Of course, the mainstream  of the empiricist tradition has long maintained that the reason logic and mathematics have their apparent infallibility is that they are not actually giving us information about the world; since they don't tell us how things stand with the world, the world cannot refute them.  But the empiricists insist that real truth is about the world, so these a priori matters the rationalists regard with such enthusiasm are at best some kind of honorary truth.  A priori claims embody useful tools, ways of thinking about the world, but don't report facts.  The rationalist project of relying only on the a priori is, from the empiricist perspective, a project of ignoring the real world, of casting aside the only truth worth looking for.

Empiricists have thus traditionally sought to reduce the scope of the a priori, rejecting for example the a priori approaches to science championed by some of the rationalists.  It is perhaps for this reason that some empiricists have tried to argue against a priori ethics as well, saying that we need to be more naturalistic in our approach to ethical matters.

However, there seems to be another possible reaction, which I'm surprised hasn't been more common.  Many empiricists have also been meta-ethical subjectivists (Hume being probably the most famous example).  Such empiricists should find it quite congenial to categorize ethical claims as honorary truths, useful tools which don't reports facts about the world.  So why is it so rare for empiricists to treat ethics as a priori, just like logic and mathematics?  A good reason does not occur to me.  I can think of some bad reasons; perhaps even empiricists are partly under the spell of the apparent certainty of logic and mathematics.  Thus, perhaps they ignore the historical controversies in logic and mathematics, and think that the controversies in ethics show that ethics must be something entirely different from our stable logic and mathematics.

Actually, on one interpretation Kant might be an example of the sort of philosophy I think should be more common.  Of course, Kant claims to chart a third way, neither empiricist nor rationalist, but it has been very common to be skeptical of this.  Many interpreters take him to have simply been either a sneaky rationalist or, less commonly, a sneaky empiricist.  If he was a sneaky empiricist, he was an empiricist of the rare kind I've been puzzling about.  I wonder if the fact that people generally don't connect a priori ethics to empiricism has contributed to the empiricist interpretation of Kant being the less common reading.

An unexpected result

So, a large majority of my ethics students at Rhode Island College said they thought there was nothing wrong with prostitution if it's voluntary.  Admittedly, I elicited this result in a potentially suspect way; when nobody said anything about why prostitution would be different from any other job, I told them to raise their hands if they thought it wasn't different, saying I'd call on someone who didn't have their hand raised.  It is thus possible that some falsified their responses to avoid being called on (though I'd have thought some might also have lied to avoid admitting to endorsing prostitution).

Evaluating scientific evidence

Thanks to overcoming bias, I was led to this amusing study.  A friend of mine went skydiving just a week ago; I wonder how she'll react to my informing her of the state of research into the health benefits of parachutes.

I am also trained in mereology

If you can't afford a celebrity mereologist like L. A. Paul.  Thanks to Leiter Reports for finding this instance of a political blogger recognizing the need for philosophical expertise.

Epistemology and ethics

I went to a friend's dissertation defense today.  Jerry Steinhofer, the friend in question, seeks to account for the value of knowledge by proposing that the distinctive feature of knowledge is that it involves true belief which is deserved, and this fitness between the true belief being deserved and its being possessed is what distinguishes knowledge.  This enables him to employ analogies with other forms of desert in filling in his details.  There has, of course, recently been a great deal of interest in general in the analogies between epistemology and ethics, particularly with the popularity these days of virtue theories in both areas.

While listening to the defense, I thought about this analogy.  Suppose one wished to construct a consequentialist epistemology, with true belief playing the role of pleasure in utilitarian ethical theories.  Utilitarians do have things to say about desert, especially if they're rule utilitarians, so it's possible that such a theory could endorse Steinhofer's suggestion that desert is the criterion of knowledge.  However, there doesn't seem to be an obvious candidate for an analog in ethics to the role that knowledge plays in epistemology.  Various possibilities suggest themselves:  1) the absence of such an analog suggests a defect in the utilitarian picture of ethics, 2) knowledge is given too much special attention in epistemology,  3) there is some difference between ethics and epistemology which explains the lack of an ethics analog to knowledge, or 4) I'm not looking hard enough and there is some analog after all.

Plenty of philosophers would enthusiastically take option 1, and option 2 has had some advocates, but I want to look at 3.  In the case of utilitarian ethics, it seems that there can be cases where someone deserves something bad (cases where punishment is appropriate).  In such cases, if the person gets what they deserve, the fitting between what they deserve and what they get is still good, but what they get itself is bad.  On the other hand, it seems that nobody ever deserves to have a false belief, or at least if they do it seems that the kind of desert involved can't be epistemic.  In epistemology, it seems you can only deserve true belief or not deserve it, there's no further negative state of deserving something actively bad.

Thus, in epistemology, if someone gets what they deserve, that's always an unmixed good, while in ethics, if someone gets what they deserve, that can involve a component of badness, if what they deserve is something bad.  This may explain why epistemology has a highly positive evaluative term for people getting what they deserve (knowledge), while there is no such highly positive evaluative term in ethics.  Perhaps on this account the closest ethical analog to knowledge would be justice, an altogether more problematic notion.

Phenomena, Properties, and Documents

I've decided to give this google docs thing a try, and so I put up one of my current works in progress, related to what I was posting about a few weeks ago.  It can be found here, for anyone interested in reading a somewhat lengthier version of the argument I mentioned in this recent post.

Instead of getting much further work done on that paper, I've been reading other things.  I re-read Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World, as well as his Meaning and Necessity, and also read van Fraassen's Laws and Symmetry.  There seems to be a common viewpoint held by Carnap and van Fraassen, and also related to the views of Langton I mentioned earlier.  All concerned seem to hold that if you know the structure of a situation, the various relationships between the parts involved, you know quite a lot.  Further, they all maintain that it's fortunate that structure tells you so much, because it tells you everything you're ever going to get; there's nothing else that can be known.

This is, I think, actually relevant to the philosophy of mind topics I've been thinking about.  Functionalist accounts are, of course, all about structure and relationships, and the argument that a functionalist cannot account for the phenomenal often seems to be based on a view of phenomenal properties on which they just aren't structural/relational.  I also glanced at Chalmers recently, and was thus once again struck at how implausible his argument seemed to me.  The claims he presents as obviously true which strike me as obviously false often involve the word "property;" I'm almost certain he doesn't use the word the way I do (as surely he'd recognize the obvious falsity of his claims if he did).  I'm less sure what he does mean, but it seems likely that he intends the kind of metaphysical meaning Carnap and the rest say is incoherent.  As usual, I'm with Carnap.

Real Experimental Philosophy

Most people don't know about the lab work we have to do in our profession. Fortunately, I've never been zapped by a malfunctioning enknowledgetron; sadly, despite what you read in the comics, in real life such a thing is usually lethal and never grants super-powers.

What is it like to be a bat?

So Scribefire seems to be misbehaving; perhaps some incompatibility with Firefox 3 or something.  As a result, this initially appeared as a blank post.  Still, it was a short one; easy to reconstruct.  I just linked to this post from cocktail party physics, and noted that reading things like that tended to make me think I'd learned a little bit more about what it is like to be a bat.  Which, of course, also leads me to be ever more skeptical of those arguments that I can't know anything about that.

Experimental philosophy

Apparently there's some monstrous new survey up. I am suspicious of web surveys as a methodology, because of the obvious dangers of bias in the sample, but of course methodological perfection is generally unobtainable, and research which falls short can be very valuable in suggesting new theories to test; it just shouldn't be taken too seriously as proving anything. So I'm going to take it, and recommend it to others.

A circle

I've recently been re-reading Langton's Kantian Humility, and pondering a problem connected with her discussion. It seems to me that properties must be identified by what they do. After all, we can come to know about them, and how could we do that except via their effects? Langton argues for a thesis along similar lines, and attributes this view to Kant as well, though she confines the thesis to phenomenal (in the Kantian sense) properties.

However, two Humean theses also strike me as plausible. First, I agree with Hume's rejection of substance. Things are just bundles of properties. Second, I accept a Humean account of causation; causes just are regularities in the occurrence of events.

Combining these views produces a tight circle. Properties are determined by their causal powers, and causes are determined by the pattern of occurrence of properties. Intuitively, this is not a happy situation. This is perhaps part of the reason for Langton's endorsement of Kantian things-in-themselves, with unknowable intrinsic properties; the intrinsic properties of the things in themselves determine their behavior, so they enable an escape from the circle. The perfectly natural properties of Lewis may also be a way out of the circle.[1]

I do not find any of the escape routes plausible. I'm more inclined to think that, contrary to appearances, no escape is necessary. Causal determination is perhaps necessarily asymmetric, but it is clear that whatever form of determination is going on here is not causal. Logical determination is often symmetric. That may not be what the situation involves either; surely what's going on is some sort of metaphysical determination, which many at least would distinguish from logical determination. But whether it's distinct from logical determination or not, it isn't clear to me that it couldn't share logical determination's capacity to be symmetric.

There are, admittedly, other issues raised by simply embracing the circularity rather than trying to find an escape, but I will postpone them for future posts on this topic.

[1] It would also be possible to escape from the circle by supposing that we do know intrinsic properties in the case of conscious experience, in the form of Humean simple impressions, or in what the moderns call qualia. But of course such a thesis would be absurd.

A strange controversy

I follow some of the discussion of the DDT ban myth, often carried out on Deltoid.[1] The controversy is interesting for the lack of apparent motive for those who spread the myth. Nobody makes or stands to make huge profits manufacturing or using DDT; those who spread the DDT ban myth are not shills for some DDT industry in the way the global warming denial crowd are shills for the energy industry. The best theory I've encountered is that this is an effort to discredit the environmental movement in general, encouraged by factions threatened by environmentalism in other ways (like the energy industry, of course).

I mention this now because Lambert's recent attack on a spreader of the DDT ban myth mentions one example of stupidity so breathtaking I can't help but share it with others. Apparently, this J F Beck fellow that Lambert is criticizing believes that it isn't abusive to call someone a "toady." He even defends this claim when challenged on it, saying on one occasion that "toady" means "sycophant" (which isn't abusive?) and later just sticking to his guns and insisting it isn't abusive without explanation. Even some of his supporters seem confused by his determination on this point.

[1] For those who are unfamiliar, here's the short version. The myth is that some sort of global DDT ban has been responsible for millions of deaths due to malaria caused by mosquitoes which could have been killed by DDT. In fact, there has never been a global ban on DDT use. Anti-malaria policy is a complicated area in which mistakes have certainly been made, but it is well established that mosquitoes can develop DDT resistance. Such anti-DDT efforts as there have been have primarily sought to ban its use in agriculture, and efforts to prevent such use probably helped make use of DDT against malaria more successful by slowing the development of DDT resistance in the mosquitoes. Even if the efforts to cut down on DDT use did reduce its use for anti-malarial purposes as well (a point which is hotly debated; read Lambert's blog for lots of discussion and links), the resistance issue makes it quite unclear whether using DDT more aggressively would have saved any more people at all, or whether instead any benefits would have been offset by hastening the development of DDT resistance in the mosquitoes.

Barnes on continental philosophy

Leiter bashes Jonathan Barnes for his dismissive attitude toward continental philosophy, alluding to "two hundred years of philosophy since Kant on the European continent." Barnes almost certainly goes too far, but Leiter's response seems to me to be equally ill-informed. "Continental philosophy" does not refer to philosophy done on the European continent any more than a "continental breakfast" is a breakfast eaten on the European continent. It's a much more specific term than that, and much less geographical than its name suggests. The analytic/continental divide did not exist prior to the 1930s, so there has not been two hundred years of continental philosophy for Barnes to dismiss.

Barnes may confuse the issue by mentioning philosophers from before the 1930s in discussing this question, but he identifies the philosophers he mentions as heroes of the analytic and continental tradition, and does not claim that they were all members of the respective traditions (his lists also don't put all philosophers from the European continent on the continental list, since, again, it's not a matter of geography).

Why zombies are inconceivable (short version)

Consciousness does work.  My being consciously aware of various things motivates me to react in various ways, to do things in response.  The zombie scenario claims that consciousness has been removed, and everything else left the same, with "everything else" including the work that consciousness does getting done.  But that's impossible; if consciousness is removed, what it does won't get done unless something else does it instead (and the zombie scenario is certainly not supposed to be adding any substitutes).

To put it another way, if in a physical duplicate world the work consciousness does is still getting done, something physical must be doing the work in that world.  But if it's a physical duplicate world, whatever it is that is doing the work in that world is also present in this world.  But in this world consciousness is doing the work.  So whatever that physical thing that's doing the work is must, after all, just be consciousness.

This didn't end up being as short as I expected.  Still shorter than the last two posts on the topic, I suppose.

Trying to do better

Feminist Philosophers provide a link to an essay on "how to mentor someone who doesn't look like you." I did find it slightly surprising that Professor Wong reported encountering so few philosophers of East Asian heritage, since my dissertation supervisor at Brown was of Korean descent, and before I jumped ship from Santa Barbara, I'd been working with a professor whose ancestry was Japanese. Admittedly, they were also each the only East Asians in their respective departments. Kind of an odd coincidence that I ended up connecting with both of them (even more oddly, they were both undergrads at Dartmouth together, though I don't think they knew one another at the time).

Anyway, check out Wong's tips.

More phenomenal content!

My previous post generated no counter-examples, just a claim that I had changed the subject. It is possible that I was insufficiently clear, so I'll start by stressing something I may not have stressed sufficiently.

The point of the depth perception case was to show that within a single subject, phenomenal characteristics seem to track force and vivacity; something's seeming to be at arm's length depends on how strongly my various ways of perceiving depth are pushing me to believe it's at arm's length, and doesn't depend on which of the various ways is active.

Conversely, absences of phenomenal content track absences of force. For example, blindsight is sometimes mentioned when the topic of phenomenal consciousness comes up; this involves the absence of qualia, but seemingly the acquisition of information via the visual system. It could thus support arguments that qualia are inessential to the functions of perception. But those with blindsight are merely better than chance at identifying features of the visual field they claim not to perceive; they come nowhere near being as good at this as those with normal sight, and in general the information they receive through blindsight has far less influence on them than the information a normally sighted person receives through ordinary visual perception (trivially, nothing they perceive leads them to make comments on what they're seeing, but there are lots of other ways in which the influence is weaker or absent as well). Thus, it is quite easy to account for this phenomenon on my theory; these people get very little force and vivacity from stimulation coming through their eyes, so they don't get anything like our usual perceptual qualia.

To take another case where the role of awareness, its associations and effects, track its phenomenal feel, consider learned abilities to perceive. Words we recognize sound different from words in a foreign language; listening to them feels different. Similarly, a trained musician's experience of a symphony or a wine expert's experience tasting a wine is different from that of a novice (or so such people report, comparing their experiences to before they acquired their expertise). Again, the training changes what the awareness does, and it ends up feeling different.

It is, of course, open to someone to steadfastly insist that no matter how closely differences in phenomenal feel track differences in the functional activity of the mind, there's still a distinction between the feel and the functional activity. But it seems to me that at some point it becomes unreasonable to keep insisting that there just have to be two different things here.

Still, I suppose I'm biased. It just seems obvious to me that consciousness does something, so for me the question is what does it do, and any defects in any functional account merely indicate that we haven't quite gotten the function right yet. I have difficulty wrapping my mind around views which take seriously the possibility that consciousness could be functionally inert. But one must be able to take that seriously in order to take zombies seriously, and lots of people seem to be able to do that. I confess I don't know what it would be like to be able to do that.

A phenomenal theory!

So, I've been thinking a lot about qualia, and trying to get a paper together on why they shouldn't be seen as such a problem for materialism.  It seems to be generally accepted that features of mental life which can be analyzed functionally are not problematic for materialism, so my line is that, contrary to superficial appearances, qualia can actually be adequately characterized by their functional role in our minds.  I propose that what is characteristic of qualia is something like what Hume called "force and vivacity"; their tendency to bring associated ideas to mind, and enliven ideas in the sense of making them more believed or plausible.

Hope for Clinton's campaign

If there turns out to be a set of all sets after all, she may win the nomination, or so says Fafnir. Admittedly, not in so many words (I'm referring to his third scenario, of course).

I probably read too many blogs

And don't post about nearly enough of the things that I find. I follow slacktivist, and enjoy reading his discussion of the Left Behind books, which he's blogging so nobody else ever has to read them (a noble sacrifice on his part). This project has produced a lot of amusing material; here's a little comedy which he was apparently inspired to assemble based on the latest chunk of text:

PASSENGER 2: Say what's that you're reading? Is that the Bible?

PASSENGER 1: What? Oh. Oh, yes. It's the Bible. ... I'm sorry, I've got a lot of reading to finish here and I just wanted to ...

PASSENGER 2: Oh sure, sure. No problem. Sorry.

P1: ...

P2: Sorry, I know you're trying to read, but I couldn't help but notice your lapel pin. That little fish, that's like a Christian thing, right? Like a "born-again" thing?

P1: Yes. The fish is a Christian symbol. Yes. Now, I'm sorry, but do you mind? (gestures back at the book)

P2: Oh right, sure. Sorry.

P1: ...

P2: So how's that work, anyway? Getting "born again"?

P1: Look, really, I don't mean to be rude, but I'd really just like to sit here quietly and read until we get to ...

P2: Hey, that's cool! I didn't notice that before.

P1: Excuse me?

P2: Your T-shirt! It looks just like a Budweiser T-shirt, but I just realized it actually says, "Be Wiser" -- oh, and instead of "King of Beers" it says "King of Kings!" Cool. I guess that means Jesus, right? And that I'd be wiser if I ... Hey, wow! Are those gospel tracts in your bag? Can I have one of those?

P1: Oh for God's sake! Why do I always end up next to you people?

All you zombies

Richard Chappell has been recently engaged in a defense of Chalmer's zombie argument; it has been ongoing, but an early summary of his position is here. One issue has come to worry me. Chappell keeps emphasizing that he's talking about special non-third-personal facts, which is why he's not impressed by Brown's argument against non-physical third-personal phenomenal facts. Now, there are first-personal facts which are known to be irreducible to anything third-personal, as discussed for example in Lewis' "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se." But no zombie scenario is needed to show this. No duplicate of me is me, no matter how close the physical match (and as a counterpart theorist, I'd say that this holds across possible worlds; no physical duplicate of me in another possible world really is me in any strict sense).

Of course, that nobody except me has my perspective does not show that nobody except me has any perspective at all. At least, so one hopes, though the zombie argument does seem to invite us to take solipsism more seriously. It seems that via some sort of empathy, I can imagine being someone else. And I am inclined to think that, within the limitations of the accuracy of my empathic imaginings, the others I empathize with are actually having something like the consciousness of themselves that I'm imagining having.

A zombie scenario is one on which I would be making some mistake in thus projecting my imagined consciousness onto the zombie. Of course, many such mistakes are always to be expected, since there's so much I don't know about what's really going on with the others, but in the zombie case the error is supposed to be total, and not based on any of the usual ways of going wrong. If I think I'm imagining what it's like to be a zombie, I'm automatically entirely wrong.

This leads me to wonder what is supposed to make me wrong. I suppose Chappell wouldn't be very impressed with the question, as he thinks it's a brute fact whether consciousness is present or not, so he doesn't think any explanation should be expected. But I have to say that my sincere inability to figure out what could make me wrong makes me rather inclined to think I can't really conceive of zombies after all.

I suppose this could be turned against me, and I could be asked how I know that nobody else is me. Of course, perhaps I just don't. But perhaps it is just a simple matter of logic that I am who I am, and nobody else is; if it is thus a priori, then this would be a clear difference from the zombie case, where no a priori rescue seems available. I confess that this does strike me as plausible (interesting though the Buddhist alternative response is).

Meta-reasons and subjectivism

J. L. Mackie's classic work on ethics begins by saying "there are no objective values... The statement of this thesis is likely to provoke one of three very different reactions. Some will think it not merely false but pernicious; they will see it as a threat to morality and to everything else that is worthwhile, and they will find the presenting of such a thesis in what purports to be a book on ethics paradoxical or even outrageous. Others will regard it as a trivial truth, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, and certainly too plain to be worth much argument. Others again will say that it is meaningless or empty, that no real issue is raised by the question whether values are or are not part of the fabric of the world."

I am in Mackie's third class; I do not believe that there is a real issue here. But I do agree with Mackie when he goes on to say "precisely because there can be these three different reactions, much more needs to be said." Those who think that there are real differences do, after all, give arguments. If I am right, there must be some problem with the arguments. So I shall try to explain what's wrong with Richard's argument.

I confess that I can't see how meta-reasons are supposed to become "mere" for the subjectivist in Richard's argument. Why treat meta-reasons any differently than any other reasons? They do, after all, have consequences, just like other reasons. For example, if things are as Richard describes, and I phi, there seems to be a very good chance that I will come to regret my actions later. This is not to say that potential regret is the sole reason not to phi, only to point out that meta-reasons seem to be connected to my interests and values, just like normal reasons; defying them seems to carry the risk of my interests and values not being served, just like normal reasons.

Of course, in Richard's example, exactly how doing phi conflicts with my values is opaque to me. This is unfortunate, no doubt, but hardly unusual. Probably unconscious reasons have more influence on our behavior than conscious reasons, after all, and unconscious reasons are ipso facto also opaque to us. It is clear to me that the subjectivist is committed to thinking it would be better if one could see more clearly, and so that one should, when possible, figure out what one's unconscious motivations are, or in Richard's case figure out what it is that the meta-reasons are pointing to, but I don't see any way in which the subjectivist is committed to saying that if one can't pierce the opacity, one is required to simply ignore those reasons.

Nozick's experience machine

I have long wondered just how much Nozick's case shows, and really whether it's very convincing at all (sure, most people say they wouldn't plug in, but look at how many hours they spend playing World of Warcraft, and that's not even as good as the Experience Machine). But for some reason it had not occurred to me to ask the question Felipe De Brigard decided to ask, which he briefly describes here. It didn't occur to me even though I always mention "The Matrix" when I discuss the experience machine, and always mention how strange I find it that anyone would want to leave the matrix given the setup in the movie. The results are what I think I would have expected, though that's what we always think when we see experimental results.
Technorati Tags: ethics, hedonism, utilitarianism, Nozick, Matrix

Did Nietzsche know he was a genius?

Clearly he believed he was a genius.  And while this is perhaps slightly more controversial, it also seems to me to have been obviously true.  But of course we all know from Plato that true belief is not enough for knowledge; though it is controversial what exactly are to count as good reasons in general, it is almost universally held that one cannot know on the basis of believing for bad reasons.  So were Nietzsche's reasons good?  Was it even possible for his reasons to have been good?  What could be good reasons for that sort of thing?

It's almost a stereotype that geniuses are misunderstood and neglected in their own times.  But the stereotype seems to have only a shaky basis in reality; quite a lot of revolutionary thinkers were wildly controversial in their own time, but they were of course centers of storms of controversy because they were also targets of enormous amounts of attention, because they were widely considered extremely important.  Those who totally escaped notice among their contemporaries to be appreciated only later seem to be pretty unusual.  On the other hand,  those who escape notice by anyone ever because they're just totally mediocre are, of course, extremely common.  So Nietzsche shouldn't have concluded he was a genius just because he was misunderstood and under-appreciated, and I don't think it's reasonable to attribute that theory to him, either.

Admittedly, being widely acclaimed in your own time is certainly not proof of genius, as there have been plenty of widely acclaimed cranks, and there have certainly been some under-appreciated geniuses, so perhaps Nietzsche should not have worried too much about not having widespread acclaim; perhaps one shouldn't appeal to that either way.  But what other evidence could their be?

Those close to someone are likely to be biased in their favor.  If they care about the person for other reasons, they're unlikely to be too critical of things that are important to the person they care about; indeed, they may genuinely value those things more than they otherwise would just because they associate the things with their author.  Also, people who share similar views are more likely to become close, so anybody who becomes close to you is likely to think you're right about more things than you are, because they're likely to be wrong about some of the same things that you are (and so think you're right about those things).  So while Nietzsche had some friends who thought fairly highly of him, it is unclear how much he could get from that.

As a student, he was hailed as a brilliant classical philologist.  However, he never did very much work in the field, so it is unclear whether he had sufficient grounds for even believing he was a genius in that area; some are far better at impressing teachers than doing independent work, so it is risky to draw conclusions from the evaluations of teachers.  And in any event, Nietzsche clearly thought he was a brilliant philosopher, not just a brilliant philologist.

So what's left?  He came up with results that seemed right to him?  But who isn't able to manage that?