Philosophers' Carnival XXI

Welcome to the 21st Philosophers' Carnival! For those who have just tuned in, the carnival aims to showcase some of the top philosophy posts of the last three weeks from around the blogosphere. There were a lot of entries this time around, so I've broken them up into categories...

Religion and Naturalism

Mathetes brings a refreshingly practical slant to abstract questions of God and Time:

This paper sets out to prove that the man on the street, who has no other source of hope for a better future but God, should hold on to his hope if God is atemporal, but should put his hope elsewhere if God is not.

He makes some questionable assumptions along the way, but it should make for some interesting discussion in the comments section.

Kenny Pearce, in Leibniz on "Efficient" vs. "Final" Causes in Physics, lucidly explains how this Aristotelian distinction can be used to differentiate between the "mundane" and the "miraculous" without asserting that there are exceptions to the laws of nature.

Meanwhile, Warren Platts speculates about Finalism in a Darwinian World. He argues that if advanced civilizations could trigger their own 'big bang' to create a whole new universe, then this could enable the evolution of, well, evolution itself:

[I]f entire universes are units of selection, and if universes that generate intelligent life produce more offspring universes than lifeless universes, then a progressive and purposeful (in the same sense that eyes are purposeful) evolutionary process that’s almost guaranteed to produce intelligent life and culture is just what a Darwinian would expect.

Tiberius and Gaius Speaking offers An Inductive argument from faith that God does not exist. He argues that the prevalence of "faith-based arguments" inductively supports the claim that it is reasonable to believe God does not exist. I'm not sure how compelling the argument is, but you've got to admire the sheer cheek of it!

Matt at Daily Phil argues in favour of Antecedent Naturalism, according to which we take as our starting point the following three principles:

1. Unity - There is only one world in which everything resides...
2. Realism - Nature goes beyond (our) conceptualization / cognitive activity.
3. Continuity - Experience is an engagement with the real elements of nature.

Truth and Fiction

Clark Goble discusses Heidegger and Truth, explaining that "Heidegger accepts our commonsense notion of correspondence. He just rejects as empty or at best unhelpful the theory of truth that is called correspondence."

Over in Fake Barn Country, Jonathan Ichikawa writes about Embedded Fictions and Iterative Imaginings:

We sometimes, but not always, have blunted affective engagement with iterated fictions -- fictional fictions. What explains the difference? I suggest that it has to do with an interest in imagining what's true in the fiction.

Consciousness

Uriah of Desert Landscapes writes about Dainton on the Phenomenal Self, defending the conception of the phenomenal self as a “bare locus of apprehension” against Dainton's objection that without any content to apprehend, being such a 'bare locus' would be subjectively indistinguishable from not-existence. A commentator suggests the slogan: "Phenomenal contents and a subject of experience — you can’t have one without the other."

Consciousness and Culture suggests that the adaptive function of conscious awareness is

[to introduce] a gap or distance between stimulus and response, which makes the stimulus available but not determinate. And this in turn allows for an exceptionally flexible form of behavioral control... [This view implies that] the mechanism of consciousness must have two main components -- two sides of the gap, so to speak -- one of which "presents" the environmental stimuli in some structured manner, while the other "apprehends" such presentations in some "loosely coupled" manner.

Ethics and Society

Will Wilkinson at The Fly Bottle has a fascinating post suggesting that:

Maybe the way to maintain a sense of freedom when in chains is also a way to manage agoraphobic hyperventilation in the unbounded consumer paradise.

Don't miss Jason Kuznicki On Nurturing as the True Purpose of Marriage:

Here I argue that the reason for marriage is neither solely to produce children, nor to seek romantic fulfillment, nor merely to contract with the government for rights or benefits. I propose another model, arguing that it explains the institution of marriage much better than the common reasons given for it in the same-sex marriage debate.

Jim Sias at common sense philosophy defends our moral intuitions against Singer's charge of inconsistency. Sias shows how the coherence of two apparently conflicting intuitions can be restored by taking care to generalize them under the appropriate principle.

In Blackburn, Anscombe, and Natural Law, Edward Feser critiques Simon Blackburn's recent review of the new collection of G.E.M. Anscombe essays. There's also some fun discussion in the comments questioning the plausibility of natural law theory.

The Sharpener raises the question: Why don't we use torture?

Not because of the low effectiveness rate of torture — but because torture fundamentally breaches human rights, including but not exclusively the presumption of innocence.

On my other blog, a short post quoting Nick Bostrom on the "urgent, screaming moral imperative" of anti-aging research provoked some interesting comments, from a range of perspectives, on such issues as how to assess the value of a life, and whether death is bad for you. Feel free to join the discussion!

Meta-philosophy:

In the delightfully titled Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it? Keith DeRose follows through on the title's promise with a post as interesting as it is long. The thriving comments thread is well worth a skim too.

Brian Weatherson quotes and discusses Soames on History, contrasting philosophically relevant history of philosophy vs. history-for-history's-sake history of philosophy. (The critical discussion in the comments section is also very interesting.)

Fluid Imagination, in Value Added Philosophy, first offers an abstract of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and then a critical response -- suggesting that Rorty's concept of edifying philosophy is ill-served by his hermeneutical program and that a better method might focus on "creation" instead of "translation".

Another critique of the book is found over at Strictly Speaking, specifically targeting Rorty's use of Wittgenstein's views of philosophical discourse.

New Blogs

To quickly introduce a couple of blogs you might not have come across before: The Atheist Ethicist celebrates his 50th post by offering "a sampling of some of the issues that I have written about in my first fifty days."

In the introductory post of "Mapping Out the Moral High Ground", Reuben invites topic suggestions and general discussion of his novel approach to life's problems:

Each week or so I will ask a question concerning some aspect of my lifestyle. After it has been discussed and a conclusion reached I shall alter my life style accordingly.

(I understand Reuben is currently flat out finishing his Honours research project. But be sure to check back in a couple of weeks.)

That's it for this edition of the carnival, I do hope you've enjoyed it. Many thanks to all those who made the effort of submitting a post. If others would like to find out how they can contribute in future, check out the Philosophers' Carnival homepage.

Philosophy for Kids

I've previously posted on my own blog about teaching kids philosophy. But it seems appropriate to raise the issue here too. Here are three relevant articles:

One discusses Harvard's Project Zero, which I think sounds very interesting:

Up to 70 per cent of Project Zero's work involves schools. One of its projects - known as "visible thinking" - gives teachers strategies to encourage deep thinking among students.

"We would like schoolchildren to learn to think and learn in a stronger way," Professor Perkins says. "One simple problem with thinking is that it's invisible. So the basic philosophy of this initiative is to make thinking more visible in classrooms so that children can see their own thinking and teachers can see it at work so they can get a hold of it and improve it."

For the utilitarians among us, another confirmed that a philosophy for children programme "was making a real difference to academic results and had resulted in children behaving in a less aggressive and more mature way."

The third contains much of interest. For those who doubt whether kids are ready for philosophy:

Gareth Matthews was in Japan last year talking to fifth-graders about perfect happiness. He read them a story he had written about a child absorbed in the satisfaction of scratching an insect bite. Could this define perfect happiness?

"Scratching an insect bite and enjoying it so much that at the moment you don't enjoy anything else is only one petal on the flower of happiness," one child said.

Matthews, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was impressed. "Adults are not generally aware of the fact that children are capable of raising interesting philosophical questions and pursuing interesting philosophical issues," he said.

It continues:

Mount Holyoke College philosophy professor Thomas Wartenberg teaches a course called "Philosophy for Children." College students help develop questions based on picture books and then lead discussions for second- and fifth-graders at Jackson Street Elementary School in Northampton, Mass. Out of the adventures of storybook characters come such questions as "What is courage?" Lively discussions develop around the topics of beauty, truth, justice and reality.

Under Wartenberg's supervision, college students help grade-schoolers create a "community of inquiry" in which children learn the crucial elements of a philosophical discussion. He tells children, "You have to listen carefully and think hard and then make up your mind. If you can't defend your answer, you have to think some more."

This sounds like really fun and worthwhile stuff. I wonder if there'd be any chance of a similar programme being developed here at Canterbury?

Recommended Links:

• The Stanford encyclopedia entry on children and philosophy.
• Philosophy for Children (NZ)

Update [Feb 07]: More here:

New research from Dundee University suggests learning philosophy raises children's IQ by up to 6.5 points and improves their emotional intelligence.

Outfoxing Plagiarists

Uriah Kriegel has some clever advice for fighting plagiarism:

Every assignment I give is a two part assignment. The first part is to read your institution’s academic code of honesty plagiarism section. The second part is to write a paper. Failure to fulfil one of the two parts is failure to do the assignment, therefore deserving of a failing grade.

What this does is neutralize the “I didn’t know it was plagiarism” line. A student who didn’t know it was plagiarism did not fulfil the first part of the assignment and therefore fails.

Affirmative Action at TPM

The Philosophers' Magazine has an interesting and well-argued article up on the topic of affirmative action, written by our very own Simon Clarke. Go read it!

After rejecting three common justifications for affirmative action, Simon offers a variant of the 'role-model' argument:

Racial minorities should be given some advantages, even if the beneficiaries of those policies come from the wealthy middle class and even if they are not the ones who can specifically be said to have suffered racial discrimination in the past. They should receive such advantages in order to achieve the conditions for real equality of opportunity. People need to know that they can achieve goals in society. Sending that message helps encourage the belief that opportunities really are open to them, that the rooms that may have once held them captive have been unlocked. It helps bring about real equality of opportunity.

I very much agree with Simon about the importance of people recognizing that opportunities are available to them. When a teacher at Aranui high school asked a student where he thought he'd be in five years time, the student answered, straightforwardly, "Prison." That's where all his older male relatives were, so he didn't see any other options as being genuinely open to him. These social circumstances are tragic, and it would certainly be desirable to change them.

But would Simon's idea really help? It assumes that impoverished Maori will identify with wealthy and successful people of the same race. But is this assumption true? Will seeing the success of upper-class Maori really make the Maori in Aranui think such options are open to them, so long as the real circumstances of the people they know are unchanged? It strikes me as pretty implausible to think that seeing a bunch of rich strangers - even Maori rich strangers - is going to have that sort of impact. We need more widespread, low-level, local reforms to the social structure. Of course, I haven't a clue how to achieve that, or whether it's even possible to achieve through outside intervention. If affirmative action could be shown to have this sort of impact, then that could provide a solid justification for it. But until then, I'm skeptical.

The Truth is finally here

Pastafarianism or Flying Spaghetti Monsterism draws on overwhelming observable evidence in order to back its claim that evolution has had, and continues to have, a guiding hand. Due to the irreducible complexity of elements of the natural world, science must consider the possibility that the universe was designed by a greater intelligence.

This is Bobby Henderson's counter-theory to both Darwinian evolution and Christianity. As the case for intelligent design to be taught in schools is increasingly heard in the USA, FSM has seized the opportunity to be heard. FSM seeks to be taught alonside both evolution and Christian intelligent design theory. The argument goes, all those in favour of free speech should allow FSM to be taught in schools. To do otherwise is to be arbitrary and biased. The message of His Greatness the Noodly Splendor should be heard!

Coercive Moral Paternalism

Things have been awfully quiet around here recently. I hope others get around to contributing something at some point. Anyway, I've long been meaning to write about the interesting seminar on Paternalism & Trust that Simon Clarke gave a couple of months back. It was centred around Raz's anti-paternalist catch-22:

P1. Coercive paternalism is justified only if the paternalist is someone reasonably trusted by the coerced.

P2. A person subjected to coercive moral paternalism cannot reasonably trust the government.

Therefore,
C. Coercive moral paternalism is not justified.

Simon was basically arguing that P2 needs to be modified to recognize that trust comes in degrees, so although paternalism undermines trust, this might be counterbalanced by other "trustworthiness-enhancing conditions of government". An interesting point came out in discussion (from Philip, I think), that the perceived legitimacy of compulsory voting might support this thesis. Voting increases trust in the government by involving one in the democratic process, which may explain why this particular case of coercive paternalism is more acceptable than most.

Anyway, I was wanting to discuss a slightly different issue. It seems to me that the distinction between moral and non-moral paternalism is not entirely clear-cut. Simon defined coercive moral paternalism (CMP) as "use of threats to prevent a person from following their way of life for their own good", e.g. laws against drugs, prostitution, pornography, gambling, etc. Typical examples of non-moral paternalism, by contrast, would be seat-belt and cycle-helmet laws.

I take it the idea is that moral paternalism goes against the person's own values, whereas non-moral paternalism does not. But do the examples really show a difference in kind? Someone might really dislike helmets, or not want to mess up his carefully styled hair whenever he cycles. To force him to wear a helmet anyway would thus seem to be a case of forcing values upon him that he does not share. (You might say that it's to protect his health, which he surely values. But this would extend to banning drugs, which was supposed to be a form of moral paternalism. More generally, everyone values their own well-being, and all paternalism is aimed at promoting that.) Granted, cycle-helmet laws are less intrusive than drug laws, they impose values which are less important to people - less central to their lives - but this seems merely a difference of degree rather than kind.

The alternative is to say that non-moral paternalism is when the person would, upon (perhaps idealized) reflection, come to agree with the paternalist and endorse the coerced action. But that barely seems to be paternalism any more. (It strikes me as quite unobjectionable.) It's more like a self-imposed law to help one overcome weakness of will and such. Perhaps seatbelt laws really do play this role for most people, but there would be exceptions. This definition would mean that the helmet-hating cyclist mentioned above (for example) actually suffered from moral rather than non-moral paternalism. But perhaps that's not so implausible?

Anyway, given this new definition, CMP might be self-defeating -- at least according to a subjectivist conception of well-being. If a person's good is what they would reflectively endorse, and CMP promotes ends that a person would not reflectively endorse, then CMP is (by definition) not to that person's good!

But one thing Simon said suggests he thinks that CMP is not always unjustified:

Coercion can be justified if used by friends or others whose good intentions are not in doubt. This reflects the nature of trust. Government forcing me into art galleries undermines my appreciation of art, but being forced by a close friend who I trust does not.

But does the friend really engage in CMP, or is it actually a case of non-moral paternalism? Perhaps we assume that our friend shares our values, so that his judgment is indicative of what our own values commit us to, or what we would reflectively endorse. That seems a possible alternative explanation, anyway. I'd be curious to hear what others think.

One final (and somewhat hasty) point: P1 strikes me as pretty implausible. The strongest argument against paternalism comes from the value of autonomy, of course. But if we set that aside, surely the only other grounds for opposing it are utilitarian. If we set aside autonomy, then coercive paternalism is justified iff it actually succeeds in making the target better-off. Trust is only relevant insofar as it affects whether the paternalism will be successful. If you can truly (successfully) improve my life, what does it matter whether I trust you?

Bats, Consciousness and Simulation

I've been meaning to write about the interesting talk Doug Campbell gave on our Cass trip. I can only half-remember it now, but I'd better get something down before the other half disappears too...

Anyway, Doug was talking about Nagel's famous Bat argument. He reconstructs it as follows:

A1: Any sufficiently intelligent creature can in principle grasp any physical fact by adopting an objective perspective (e.g. through science).

A2: There are facts about what it is like to be a bat that can be grasped only by a creature that is capable of adopting a bat-like subjective perspective.

A3: It is not the case that any sufficiently intelligent creature can adopt a bat-like subjective perspective; so
–
A4: The physical facts do not exhaust the facts. (From A1, A2, and A3.)

His response was to highlight two distinct methods of learning facts: theory and simulation. If you want to know what each button on a VCR does, you might take it apart, carefully examine the wiring, and develop a technical theory of how it works. Alternatively, if you have another VCR of the same make and model, you might simply try pressing the buttons on this other VCR and see what happens. An assumption of similarity would allow you to carry over the results to your original VCR. In effect, you learnt about it through simulating its processes on another (similar enough) machine.

Next, suppose we want to know how other people are likely to behave. It would be very difficult to devise a fully-fledged theory of human psychology. Fortunately, we don't need a complex theory because - as with the VCR example - we have a similar 'model' at hand that we can experiment with: ourselves! Doug pointed out that consciousness allows us to learn about the behaviour of other people through simulation. We imagine how we would react in a particular situation, and - on the assumption that we are relevantly similar to the target - we conclude that they would likely react in a similar way. Moreover, Doug suggested that simulation is how we learn "what it is like" from some other perspective. I'm a bit unsure on this point, but I think he may even go so far as to suggest that the process of simulation just is "what it is like" -- i.e. facts about qualia may be identified with facts about simulation?

Now we get to the bit I had difficulty following: relating this point to the bat argument. Bats are far too different from us, so we lack the capacity to accurately simulate their behaviour. But what follows from this? If I recall correctly, I think Doug was wanting to use his point about simulation to deny premise A2 (or was it A3?), but I'm not sure how that works.

There's one crucial question in particular that I'm not sure about. We have these facts about "what it is like", that we can learn about through simulation. So far so good. My question is: are those facts only learnable through simulation? Or is it also possible, at least in principle, to devise a theory of consciousness that would yield facts about what it is like to be a bat?

If such a theory is possible, then A2 is false. But it doesn't seem that such a theory is possible -- that's the whole problem with consciousness; it seems inherently subjective. Alternatively, if qualia facts are only learnable through simulation, then it seems we should be denying A1. That is, assuming we hold such facts to still be physical facts. I'm not sure how plausible that is either though!

I've probably misunderstood the argument somewhere along the line, so if anyone can clarify things for me, please do so!

Blogger Problems

A quick warning to my fellow contributors: the Blogger system is notoriously unreliable, and has a nasty habit of eating your posts rather than publishing them. The cost of a free service, I suppose. Anyway, I strongly recommend copying your post to the clipboard (press ctrl-A then ctrl-C in the text editor) before pressing the 'publish' button. That way if something goes wrong, you can just 'paste' your work back in again, rather than having to start from scratch.

Update: Blogger's new recover post feature might also help out here.

Identity

This time a question. Is there anything more fundamental than identity? It seems to me that, at least from our epistemic situation, the most fundamental thing is identity; without identity then all that follows cannot not make any sense.

Immaterial Physicalism

This is an idea I had some time last year and as there are no current posts on the blog I thought I might share it with you. No doubt no one will agree with it but I am looking forward to hearing why.

Basically the view arises from the following two considerations: (1) The materialist claim is that everything is extended. The essence of extension is that it is dividable. There exist some things which are not dividable, such as gravity and other fields. (I should also note that there is a tradition of existence being connected to oneness, if something can be divided then it does not have oneness and thus does not exist, all that exists are the parts that make it up). Thus we have the immaterial half of the thesis. (2) Plain old physicalism; the physical facts exhaust the facts. It just so happens that the physical picture contains some non-extended things. I would like to argue that in fact all physical things are essentially non-extended and that it is the combination of an infinitude of non-extended things that any extended things arise.