Another Quote

“He [Glenn Miller] had what you call a ‘Republican Band,' kind of straight-laced, middle of the road-and Miller was that kind of guy, he was a businessman. He was sort of the Lawrence Welk of jazz and that’s one of the reasons he was so big-people could identify with what he did…. But the biggest problem [was that] his band never made a mistake. And if you never make a mistake, you’re not trying, you’re not playing at the edge of your ability. You’re playing safely within limits…and it sounds, after awhile, extremely boring.”

-- Artie Shaw

- posted by mike @ 8:38 AM (2) comments

 
Nice quote
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.
They know it is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically
dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas
or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
-- Robert Pirzig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- posted by mike @ 9:05 AM (0) comments

 
Can propositions about the future be true?
From a discussion on Yehoodi, Dan2513 writes:

While I agree with you that foreknowledge itself does not change too much whether you are using an A or B theory of time, I hasten to point out that if you do not believe future events have truth values (I disagree with this), you can consistently hold that God is omniscient yet does not know the precise outcome of the event. The reason being that omniscience only requires that God knows all things that are true. If future events do not have truth values, then God knows them at exactly the moment at which they become true. Of course, this belief is not compatible with the B theory of time because that entails that God is present at all moments in time and never has to "wait around" for an event to instantiate along with its truth value.

There's much that's muddled here, but also the kernel of an idea that I find interesting. First the muddled parts:

According to the "Justified True Belief" definition of knowledge that goes back to Plato's Theatetus:

S knows that p iff:

• (i) p is true;
• (ii) S believes that p;
• (iii) S is justified in believing that p.

Since this model already stipulates that p is true, stating that "God can only have knowledge of things that are true" is simply redundant.

Secondly, the suggestion that events have truth values is problematic. What does it mean to say that an event has a truth value? Say you and I witness something striking, like a car wreck, and I point to it and say "that was true" or "that is false!" Pointing to an event (or a situation) and saying it's true or false seems incoherent. I think it's more correct to state that only propositions can have a "truth value," as suggested by clause (i) of the JTB model. Thus I might say "the guy in the red corvette was going way too fast" and that'd be something we could argue over.

Now the not so muddled question: can propositions about the future be true or false?

"It's going to rain tomorrow!" I can certainly believe that. And my belief can be justified (at least partially)-- the weatherman says its going to rain and he's almost always right. But can that proposition be true at the very moment I utter it? How would we verify its truth? We can't exactly look into the future. Or can we?

On the one hand, it seems that all statements about the future are merely conjectures which could turn out false. Who knows? Tomorrow might never happen. The universe might explode at 11:59pm. At best, it seems we can say their truth value remains undecided until the future arrives. But if that's true, then we can't have knowledge of the future, not the JTB sort of knowledge, at any rate.

If I'm here tomorrow, I'll follow up with some more thoughts on a priori vrs a posteriori propositions.
- posted by mike @ 9:38 PM (0) comments

 
Rationality in Action
Rationality in Action, by John R. Searle -- I love this book! The writing is incredibly lucid. (Why can't all philosophical writing be like this? Does Kant have to be so freakin' difficult?)

Searle's thesis is that the classical model of "practical reason," or reasoning that results in action, is dead wrong. What is the "classical model?" According to Searle:

1. Actions, where rational, are caused by beliefs and desires.
2. Rationality is a matter of following rules, the special rules that make the distinction between rational and irrational behavior.
   
3. Rationality is a separate cognitive faculty.
4. Apparent cases of weakness of will, what the ancient Greeks called akrasia, can only arise in cases where there is something wrong with the psychological antecedents of action.
5. Practical reason has to start with an inventory of the agent's primary goals and fundamental desires, objectives, and purposes; and these are not themselves subject to rational constraints.
6. The whole system of rationality only works if the set of primary desires is consistent.

I'll continue with Searle's critiques of each of these points in turn.
- posted by mike @ 8:37 PM (0) comments

 
Must... write...
I enjoy reading philosophy, but I have a bad habit of passive reading, of letting arguments just wash over me uncontested. Philosophy requires active engagement, perhaps even struggle! And so, in that spirit, I'm going to try to write something *every* *day*, no matter how lame or uninspired. (Wouldn't that describe the typical blog? ;)) Even if it's just summarizing something I've read, that'll be enough.
- posted by mike @ 3:39 PM (0) comments

 
On the free will defense...
The "problem of evil" has plagued philosophers and theologians for centuries, and with good reason. The apparent self-contradiction of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient being has spawned the theological branch of theodicy: the attempt to reconcile a good and all powerful god with the existence of evil. The problem of evil also plagues internet discussion forums in debates over religion and philosophy. Typically, free will is suggested as an antidote to the problem, and then the discussion spirals downward:

"But if God is omniscient, he knows the future, so we can't have free will."
"Yes we can. God allows us to choose. If we couldn't choose to do evil, we couldn't be free."
"But how can we be free given God's foreknowledge. If God knows you're going to do evil, how can you be free to do good?"
"It's seems mysterious, but that's how it is. Just because we can't understand it doesn't mean God couldn't."
"It's not possible."
"Yes it is."
"No, it's not!"
"Yes, it is!"

The discussion halts in standoff, with each side simply unable to see what the other side sees. Either free will in the face of divine foreknowledge seems impossible, or it doesn't.
The free will defense suffers from a number of philosophical problems, but I wish to focus on just one: even if it's granted that we have free will, an omnipotent God would nonetheless remain responsible for the existence of evil. (Note, I'm considering only moral evil, not natural evils such as earthquakes and the like.)

A Simplified Moral Universe

First, to set the stage for later discussion, imagine a vastly simplified moral universe consisting of only one being other than God -- let's call him "Luc" -- and in the course of his existence he makes exactly one moral choice, between good and evil. I'll abbreviate those choices "G" and "E," respectively, and assume that E leads to great suffering and G to great happiness.
As a premise of our thought experiment, we assume that Luc has free will, possesses rationality, and is a fully capable moral agent. Now, an omniscient God would know all future outcomes of his actions, and thus an omnipotent God could surely choose to create (in actuality) either one of two possible universes:

1. In universe 1, Luc chooses E.
2. In universe 2, Luc chooses G.

Logically, God is equally capable of creating either universe. Yet one leads to suffering, the other to happiness. Surely, it seems that an omnibenevolent God would choose to create universe #2. Conversely, a God who knowingly created universe #1 would not appear to be omnibenevolent. Ultimately, then, God must be responsible for Luc's suffering. Luc's free will does not let God "off the hook," so to speak.

What's the point of this thought experiment? Simply that if the above logic holds in our simplified case, it holds in our actual universe. To see why, we employ an argument based on mathematical induction. Note first that we can represent our moral universe as a series of moral choices made by free agents. We might simply list these as follows:

1. GGGGGGGGGGGGGG...
2. GGGGEEGEGGEEGGG...
3. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...
   

Given a series of N moral choices, there are 2^N possible universes. (Ie, if N=3: GGG, GGE, GEG, GEE, EGG, EGE, EEG, EEE.) The actual number of possible moral universes is, of course, quite vast.

In universe 1, every moral agent always chooses the good. In universe 2, which we might imagine to be much like ours, some agent makes an initial evil choice (in the traditional Christian mythos, Satan would presumably be that agent.) In universe 3, moral agents always choose the evil. For the sake of brevity, we'll label universe #1 "GGG..." and universe #2 "GGE..."

To see the implications our initial thought experiment, we use mathematical induction:

1. Having established that in the case of a single moral choice (G or E) God is still "on the hook" so to speak, we make the inductive step:
2. Assume God is responsible for the existence of evil in the case of N moral choices, and imagine that these are represtented as: GGG...G. (A finite series of Gs).
   
3. Now, consider the Nth + 1 moral choice. God can choose to make one of two possible universes: GGG...GG, or GGG...GE. The same reasoning as in our original thought experiment quickly leads to the conclusion that an omnibenevolent God would choose to create universe GGG...GG over GGG...GE.

That concludes the induction. Thus, while it may seem strange and unlikely, it's logically possible for God to have created a universe in which every agent, when confronted with a moral choice, chose the good. Clearly, that is not our universe.

Responses to the Argument

The most common response to this argument is to deny that GGG... genuinely allows its inhabitants free will. Mark Piper, in The Perennial Problem of Evil, offers an elegant response:

The free will defense implies that God could not have created humans who both possess genuine free will and yet always choose the good – but it should be asked: why couldn’t an all-powerful God do such a thing? Why couldn’t God create genuinely free humans that invariably freely choose the good? Detractors might respond that such a suggestion is tantamount to making us robots, in effect taking away our free will (and thus depriving us of the capacity for genuine moral goodness), but there appears to be nothing self-contradictory in the notion of a moral agent possessing genuine free will and perfect moral goodness. After all, isn’t God said to be a being who has genuine free will and yet always chooses the good? And if so, why couldn’t God have created humans precisely in that image? Surely an all-powerful and perfectly good God would have done so.

Another approach is to deny that genuine moral choices can be made in universe GGG... That is, some evil must exist and be known of in order for moral agents to actually conceive of the consequences of their actions. Imagine, for example, that you had never learned that fire is hot, can burn, and cause pain. One could argue that your choice not to put your hand in the fire is fundamentally different than my choice, if I knew the actual consequences. Although there is some intuitive appeal here, there are several problems with this argument:

1. It immediately implies that the very first case in which E was chosen over G was not a true moral choice. But then, what was it? If it wasn't a true moral choice, then E wasn't truly chosen over G. But if that's true, then the next choice, by the same logic, can't be considered a moral choice, and we have an infinite regression in which true morality never gets off the ground.
   
2. Furthermore, even if we were to grant that some evil must exist in the universe for moral agents to make true moral choices, it's far from obvious that so much evil must exist. Which is to say, rather than "GGEEGEEEEGEGEEEGEEGEE..." why not "GGEGGGGEGGGGGGE..."? It's easy, even as a less than omniscient being, to imagine how humanity might have been made just a bit less irrational, violent, and prone to self-destruction. Since there seems to be no logical constraint preventing God from creating this "less evil" universe, one must conclude that such a god could not be omnibenevolent.
3. Finally, this argument essentially boils down to the "greater good" argument, in which some evil is neccessary for the greater good. Mark Piper's article also offers a number of critiques of this argument.
   

- posted by mike @ 7:29 PM (0) comments

 
Think
I'm reading "Think," by Simon Blackburn. It's not the liveliest philosophical writing, certainly not compared to the witty "...in 90 Minutes" series by Paul Strathern. (I recommend the latter for the sheer entertainment value of the author's style, if not the substance.)

"Think," isn't bad though, and I like using Descartes as a launching point, since he's relatively easy for a modern reader to grasp, and his thought touches on most of the broad philosophical areas.

On the section on Philosophy of Mind, however, the author makes a couple of basic errors. The author discusses the problem of perception and private languages. Meaning, when I see a picture, I see colors such as blue and red, but how do I know that when you see the same picture you see the same colors? For example, when you see the wavelength that I call "blue," the color you actually perceive in your mind is "red." You still call it "blue," because we share the "public language" of color, but if I could somehow get inside your mind, I'd call it "red."

A simple way to explore this idea is to pretend that we can only see in black and white. Could some people see black as white and vice versa? Imagine that such people, when they look up in the night sky, see the moon and stars as dark spots, and the emptiness in between as whiteness. Let's call these people "Negatives."

Negatives can get along perfectly fine in the world. Yes, when they see the moon, which to them looks black, they still call it "white," just as us Positives do, because they've learned the public language of black & white.

Now, could Negatives actually exist? Is a reversed monochromaticism even possible? Blackburn suggests it's not:

But this does not really work. If I make a piece of grey glass lighter, I see better through it; if I make it darker, I see less well through it. Since he is a physical duplicate, this has to be true of my twin. But for him, when we clear the glass it 'seems' as though we added soot, since it becomes subjectively darker. And when we add soot it 'seems' as though it is becoming clearer. But then we have to imagine that for him, as a plate of glass becomes darker he sees through it better and better, and as it becomes lighter he sees through it worse and worse. And that just doesn't seem to make sense. It doesn't mark a coherent possibility.

But I think the author has made a mistake here, in confusing lightness with transparency. Just because something becomes "lighter", doesn't mean it becomes clearer. Take a piece of glass that's been painted white, for instance. You can't see through it, but it's certainly not "dark." And thus, if you had a piece of glass and you added soot to it, it'd appear darker to a positive and lighter to a negative, but in both cases, it'd become less transparent. Neither the Negatives nor the Positives could see through it, even though subjectively it appears at opposite ends of the light/dark spectrum.
- posted by mike @ 6:08 PM (0) comments