For some, the lecturer's accent may make the lecture...

For others, less aesthetically gifted, the content will have to stand on its own.

The upshot is that, unless ethics suffuse economics, the idol of economic efficiency will effectively censor (and reconstruct) people by giving them over to their own insular, most efficiently satisfied impulses.

A conversation I recently had at work…

There I was, minding my own business, finishing yet another reading of the epistle of James, waiting for the students to arrive, when suddenly my co-worker blurted out, "The Bible?"

"Yes," I said, "that old thing."

"Have you read the whole thing?"

"Yes."

Unlike you, I'd wager.

"Why are you reading it? Just to… re-fresh… your… or…?"

"Yes, I'm one of those. I'm a Catholic."

"Still? Oh."

"I wasn't always Catholic. I was raised Presbyterian, but about five years ago, I entered the Church. I take it you are… interested in the Bible?"

By interested, of course, I mean titillated by your own sophomoric disdain for anything older or bigger than you.

"You mean the official Bible, or the ones that were repressed?"

No, I don't mean the ones that were written later as Gnostic reactions to ancient Christian worship, and which were subsequently rejected by that same body of worshipers for being too old, too weakly linked to the Apostles, and too much at variance with each other, to boot. I don't mean those Bibles, no.

"Ah, yes, I'm familiar with what you mean, but no, I'm reading the orthodox Bible, not the Gospel or Judas or Thomas or anything like that. Do you study religious history?"

As in, do you imbibe as much of the Huffington Post and Youtube clips as your leisure affords?

"Well, I was into history and soash at uni, so… yeah."

Soash!

"So, you like religious history?"

"I like… facts. I mean, not that there are any."

Well, that's a relief. Here I thought you were challenging my faith based on damning facts about the Bible. Good thing there are no facts with which I must contend, aside, I suppose, from the fact of your visceral loathing for Christian tradition and the very idea of truth.

"Ahh. Okay. Right."

"I'm interested in how society… how social ideas can… influence or shape people's actions. Like Scientology, wow! I saw this amazing documentary on BBC last night about Scientology."

Sweet lamb, if only you realized how the "social determinist" argument cuts both ways. If you turn your read, just so, in just the right light, I can only faintly detect the thread of silver running from Dawkins' blog to the ring in your nose.

"Oh, BBC, they're pretty good."

"Yeah, but, well, everybody's got a bias."

Fortunately, everyone but you, right?

"What are you gonna do?"

"I try not to think about it all. I just want to be happy."

Quite.

The division of mind…

"The division of labour has become the division of mind… and means in a new and sinister sense that the right hand does not know what the left hand doeth. In the age of universal education, nobody knows where anything comes from. The process of production has become so indirect, so multitudinous and so anonymous, that to trace anything to its origin is to enter upon a sort of detective story, or the exploration of a concealed crime."

-- G.K. Chesterton, Jun 1932

So, you ask, what's all this about economics and social ethics lately?

A few things:

0. I'm not a communist! I'm a capitalist... with qualms. My tentative thesis: capitalism rests on the free-market mechanism (FMM), but is self-defeating as soon as it is applied in a necessarily limiting social context (i.e., capitalism requires market-external intervention), whereas distributism protects the FMM but in a radically different form (i.e., the ecological analogue of 'distributed cognition/processing'). Since both theories consist in the FMM, there cannot be a clash between them, unless/until the former rejects the structure of the latter in favor of politically abetted concentration, a concentration which denatures the 'neural' tissue of the FMM. Capitalism emphasizes the mechanism of the FMM at the expense of a sustainable structure, while distributism emphasizes the structure of how the FMM can persist.

1. I don't capitalize "distributism". It's too tendentious/pugnacious, otherwise. Marxism, Darwinism, Georgism, etc. Okay. But let's stick to socialism, capitalism, distirbutism, institutionalism, solidarism, etc.

1a. Georgism and distributism, dear cousins!

2. Even mentioning "distribution" scares otherwise receptive conservative/traditionalist minds, so distributism needs a new name. I propose: "[Darwinian] niche capitalism" or "radically parallel-process capitalism" or "ecomodular capitalism".

3. I'm not a bought-and-sold distributist. Not yet, anyway. I really am just reading in all directions, and basically making up for a mediocre economic education along the way. I'm a big fan of the free market and, as an American, I'm hugely biased towards capitalism. I am gravely dissatisfied, however, with the historically regular and increasingly manifest link between "capital concentration" and "political centralization" (and vice versa!) If, however, the Magisterium indicates that neoclassical liberalism (NL) is heresy, let NL burn.

4. As John Médaille argues, economic reform is only possible after political reform, and political structure follows economic dynamics. The rise of federal hegemony over states' rights is a parallel development of the corporatist centralization of capital in the USA. Likewise, the dismantling of federal debt and welfare statism can only come by (re)distributing the political power to the states, cities, and boroughs of the USA. In turn, once these local (!) powers regain their power, they will regain their revenue responsibility in the republic. Away with kicking problems upstairs to Uncle Sam!

4a. There is a crucial link between states' rights and truly free markets, since (classical) federalism is just political distributism. This is why I believe the "Austrian–distributist" debate among Catholics is a new kind of De Auxiliis for the Church. If they are ever going to find each other (as kissing cousins, indeed), Austrianism and distributism will do so in the domain of states' rights, at least in the USA.

Down with physicalism...

‎"Intention is ascribed by language users; it is not inherent in physical systems. Language users are physical systems in which intention (i.e. linguistic reference and representation) is inherent."

Down with physicalism, up with analogy.

Working with your hands...

May 24, 2009

The Case for Working With Your Hands

By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

... Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. ... 

... High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. 

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. ... But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? ... Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy. 

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. ... The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India. 

... One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”  

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. ... Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.  

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. ... I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. ...  

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor..., I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.” ...  

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. ... I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods. 

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. ... As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun. ... 

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes. ... The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational. ...
As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot ... [and] you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. ... My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer. ... 

[M]echanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. ...  

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. ... The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer. 

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. ... Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. ... Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. ...  

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up ... a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But ... it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.  

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. ... Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.  

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions.... In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?  

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer. ...  

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Matthew B. Crawford lives in Richmond, Va. His book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” from which this essay is adapted, will be published this week by Penguin Press.

Thinking about thinking about physics…

The following are some observations derived from some of my recent reading materials, mainly Roger G. Newton's Thinking about Physics (TP), as well as Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen (EE).

The first thing to note is that Huggett's and Newton's approaches to "the philosophy of physics" are very similar, while their methods of exposition are very different. Both authors show a strong bias in favor of letting "normal science" reign over philosophizing about "science per se". For both authors, physical results can be dispositive of metaphysical questions. Newton plainly states in his preface that he will stick as close to physical data and methods as possible, but does defend metaphysics as the arena for honest disputes between intelligent people about those data and methods. At the end of nearly every chapter in EE, Huggett shows how physical discoveries can shed light (even decisive light) on classic philosophical queries.

Huggett's book is much broader than Newton's, and much more accessible to "the intelligent lay reader." Indeed, three or four times while reading EE, I realized Huggett had explained matters so well that it felt like the first time I had really grasped the issue, despite countless previous exposures on my part. Newton is also a very lucid writer, but, as he points out in the first sentence, TP is addressed to "readers with a good undergraduate education in physics", so, if, like me, you lack such an education, TP will be rough sledding. One deficit of EE, is its relative (!) lack of discussion of quantum mechanics, whereas TP discusses quantum theory in great detail. A good book to read in conjunction with TP, is Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma. Another good companion book is Lawrence Sklar's Theory and Truth, not the least because both authors qua "chaste realists" evince the same weaknesses in what I would call Kantian or critical realism.

It is in this vein that we can begin to discuss what I think is a substantive philosophical disparity between EE and TP. As a professional and highly awarded physicist, Newton is much more inclined to "let the physics do the thinking," as it were. In this way, he is very much a realist about scientific truth, since he writes as if we can read reality from the very face of science. His form of realism is, however, burdened by serious complications, which I shall discuss presently. Huggett, by contrast, is a professional philosopher with training in physics, and so he is much better at situating various physical questions in their broader philosophical context. Even so, Huggett strikes me as even more of a realist than Newton, and this, precisely in inverse proportion to their respective rejection of, or kinship with, Kantian idealism. Huggett locks horns with Kant on a few occasions to refute him in EE. As far as I can tell, Newton only refers to Kant once in TP, and dismissively, but certain statements he makes show how he is unwittingly a disciple of Kant, a connection which I shall also have to discuss later.

In any case, to focus on TP, Newton writes in his preface that he wants "to demystify quantum mechanics as much as possible." This is a key admission, since TP is very much a philosophically deflationary book. Time and again in TP, to philosophers of quantum reality, and physicists who would like to imagine they are philosophers of their trade, Newton effectively say, "Simmer down." Quantum theory (QT) tends to make people say and propose wacky theories, a tendency which Newton does not entirely gainsay, nor repudiate, but one that he insists can and should be toned down with a more reasonable interpretation of basic physics. His key tactic for demystifying QT, in express disagreement with Feynman and Heisenberg, is to shift focus from the particle as the most fundamental reality to the field as being most fundamental. It is only because people instinctively treat QT as a particle-based theory that QT seems to bizarre. An extension of this tactic is to undermine the crazy-making focus on indeterminacy in (Copenhagen-interpretation) QT, and treat quantum indeterminacy as just one mode of the larger, rather pedestrian issue of probabilistic physics altogether. Hearing that QT is indeterministic, Newton basically shrugs, and points out that so is, for example, classical thermodynamics. Get over it. Simmer down.

Now I want to begin discussing what I think are crucial defects in Newton's philosophical handling of his own beloved subject. I will have to bracket a discussion of Huggett for now, not only because this post is getting largish, but also because his book requires more codgitating (and a re-reading) on my part. In fact, since I need to go to class soon, I will leave this post as an introduction to the more detailed critiques to come.

The halting halting halting halting halting halting…

…problem.

This an argument I think I devised while teaching this morning. I say I think I devised it, since it is still so tentative that I need to present what the strands to see if it is even an argument, or rather just an observation, sprung, like so much, from my endless ignorance.

So.

I was thinking about the halting problem (HP) (I'll save you the click):

In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: Given a description of a computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever. This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

(Here is a delightful proof of the halting problem, for those of you seeking reading materials for your children.)

Now, here was my wondering:

Assuming that "the mind is the brain and the brain is a computer"––a thesis which I do not accept (cf. e.g. Schulman, Searle, Tallis, Dreyfus, Ross, Bougis, et al.)––, but for argument's sake, say that the thesis of the computational mind (TCM) is true.

If TCM is true, then there is nothing in the brain itself qua algorithmic engine, to halt its own computations. A stop would only come from outside influences, say, if all sensory input were blocked, or if so many portions of the brain were mangled that the brain simply shut down.

Which brings us to a second prong of the inquiry: the modularity of the mind (MoM).

I think that TCM nearly goes hand in hand with MoM these days, since it is a lemma of TCM that the "programmer" of the mind is blind natural selection, and therefore there is no "central programmer" for making a unified mind. This lemma is extended in research programs about the modality of the mind. What biological sub-systems still exist in the human nervous system and comprise the modular mind? Apart from the different lobes of the brain (visual, somatic, motor, etc.), there are also cognitive modules that are all vestiges of earlier cognizant organisms, and just happen to be confined in one space––the human cranium––by natural selection. The mind is a "kludge", as some would put it. The mind is actually just a quilt of neural-cognitive modules which have tended to increase reproductive success in humanoid populations over time.

Fine. We'll take TCM and MoM as true for the purpose of argument. What follows?

If the mind is the brain and the mind is a computer, then the mind:brain is subject to HP.

If the modules of the human brain:mind are themselves kids-of-minds by virtue of being algorithmic engines, differing from "the human brain" on in degree, then human neural-cognitive modules (hNCM) are subject to HP. This is modus ponens.

If, however, the brain, either as an agglomerate of hNCM or as any one hNCM, is subject to HP, it (or they) should never halt in any algorithmic state. hNCM do/does not, however, endlessly "fail to halt", therefore…. This modus tollens, but I must elaborate on some conditional conclusions.

Since human cognition does not endlessly fail-to-halt––otherwise, how do we perform any action?––, but our behavior is governed by hNCM, then something peculiar is happening in our mind:brain. Enter my hypothesis.

Even if we grant humans are governed wholly by hNCM, we can see why humans have free will. If each hNCM is its own little non-halting Turing machine (á la TCM), then none of them should ever halt in a concrete decision. Halting is a function of decidability, but purely algorithmic halting is undecidable. So, how does/do our hNCM ever halt? From MoM, we must treat each hNCM as an external environment to every other hNCM. It is because our hNCM mutually interact that they can halt in ways that produce our unified-modular behavior.

The upshot is that there is a radical indeterminacy in the total hNCM nexus known as our consciousness, yet one that does not generate simple randomness––and this is the basic meaning of free will: non-random indeterminacy. The competing pre-halting computations of our hNCM lead to a dynamic series of non-random but non-deterministic actions aka our selves. Interestingly, even research into the irrational biases of hNCM itself relies on a standard of rationality that surpasses those very biases: we are not determined by our modular biases, although our modular mind is wholly physically deterministic. Even the mind:brains of cognitive scientists defending TCM indicate the non-random, non-deterministic nature of human consciousness.

This is akin to Robert Kane's account of free will, in that at any moment of conscious decision (note that MoM-TCM accounts for unconscious decision processes), we are literally an indeterminate, yet wholly physical, complex of unhalted, unweighted decision variables. Once the mutual interference among hNCM generates a halting state which propagates non-centrally but uniformly through the mind:brain, we act freely. We act because hNCM halt; we act freely because there is nothing deterministic about hNCM qua computational algorithm engines. The understanding of chance qua the overlapping of otherwise disparate causal chains goes back to Aristotle, and it is that sense of indeterminate causality which I invoke here. We are free because––assuming TCM-MoM––there is an intrinsically indeterminate congeries of hNCM which could not function unless they mutually limited each other. A jumble of indeterminate rational engines produces a stream of rational action.

So, I propose that free will is intelligible even on a materialist account of the brain, and certainly intelligible on a non-materialist account of human existence. Regardless which ontology of persons is true, the doctrine of rational, human free will is true.

How the future shapes the past…

1. Retrodictively

2. Counterfactually (Retrodictively*)

3. Spatiotemporally

4. Ethically

In more detail…

1. Cf. Aristotle and Diodorus on the master argument.

What happens tomorrow makes true or false what you say today.

2. Cf. Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen, Hempel's theories, Musser's Scientific American article on free will, etc.

I think Musser's invocation of the block universe to explain retroaction is probably fallacious. I'd have to re-read the article, but the problem basically is this: the whole point of the (Minkowskian) block universe is that time is static, and therefore it's illicit to say action a at time t', after time ti, alters the conditions for action C(A) at time t. In a block universe, nothing changes.

Even so, it is not all that startling a claim that we can alter prior conditions. It is a possible property of our universe at time t-alpha (the putative origin of spacetime as we know it) that from the initial conditions Ci, there will occur X number of sandwich-eatings. It is also a possible property of the universe at time t-alpha that it will contain X' number of sandwich-eating events. If tomorrow I eat a sandwich, and then at some time t-omega the universe ends and the sandwich-eatings are tallied, I'll have brought the number to X. If, however, I don't eat a sandwich, the number will end up as X'. So whatever I do , I will decide a property of the universe at time-alpha, even though I am vastly far removed from it in spacetime.

His point about the impossibility of copying oneself, due to quantum indeterminacy, was, however, extremely apt. Down with Moravec! Down with Kurzweil! The singularity will not be televised!

Further, in any case, there is this worry: if a natural law's "authority" is based on its holding good at all times (i.e. ∃x∀t(Lx(t))), then a law can only said to be lawful if it holds at all times including all future times. Therefore, a law's putative lawfulness depends now on its holding-good at any and all future times. So a law's present status depends on future conditions.

In addition, Huggett discusses how a (hypothetical) future state of affairs (SoA), accessible by a time machine, would render certain SoA in the present impossible. E.g., my going into the time portal now at time t would be rendered impossible by my future self's persuading my past self not to enter the time portal at time t–x. Likewise, my entering the time portal in a red T-shirt at t would be rendered impossible by my future self deciding and succeeding to prevent my past-self-in-a-red-T-shirt from entering the time portal at t–1.

3. Some of what makes STR true is the general theory of relativity (GTR), but what makes GTR true is the total state of the cosmos at any formulation or enunciation of GTR. Thus, the truth of GTR depends on factors in the universe to which STR says no one can have access. In other words, we know GTR is true because it extends to the STR-relative states of the universe anywhere, but knowing GTR is true in that way transcends the limits STR says we cannot transcend. To be more precise, GTR's truth-being-made depends on factors operant in the cosmos even at times beyond which we could possibly observe. On earth we never see the sun immediately (without telescopes, etc.), but are always seeing it as it was about eight minutes earlier. This means the sun's current SoA is in the future relative to us. The same holds for cosmic factors even farther removed than the sun. GTR is true in the present based on the operant actuality of future phenomena.

4. What I do now can easily be modulated or negated by its impact on the future. Being green, for example, has (perhaps) everything to do with being ethically responsible towards our progeny (i.e. towards the future as an ethical condition on the present).

What you read is what you get…

…and other amusing anecdotes of late.

Earlier this week I was playing a grammar game in class, which involves three staircases represented on the board, which each team can ascend (to glory) or descend (to doom), and, further, which teams can push their opponents down. Three staircases is the best format, since two teams invariably gang up on the third team. Well, almost invariably. This week, I was simultaneously appalled and amused to see my seventh-grade students discovered game theory on their own! At some point, team A insisted on pushing team C up one step. I said they couldn't do that, but they were adamant. I was bemused, since vicious competition makes students focus better and try harder, but I let A bump C up. Two questions later, team C insisted on bumping team A up! Fortunately, the class was over soon, so their spirits weren't utterly sedated by their socialism. I caught one student, the original philanthropist, explaining to her teammates that she could tell team C was getting angry, so she wanted to make them feel better, not the least so that C wouldn't lash back at A. Fascinating.

This morning while driving to work, a man ahead of me was wearing a purple T-shirt with the word "STAGE" printed on the back in capital letters. The A, however, was printed without the middle horizontal bar, so all I saw was one form of the logical symbol for "empty set." That's what I get for reading oodles of philosophical logic!

On the same ride, Quine's famous phrase in "On What There Is"––namely, that modal realism "offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes"––came to mind, as I had been reading it at breakfast, and with it came the memory of my work-study manager, Bill, from my first year at university. During a break all of us were chatting and he was asked about God. He explained that he is an atheist "for aesthetic reasons," a claim I took at the time to refer to the problem of evil, but which now seems to be of a piece with Quinean nominalism. God is the ultimate in realism, modal or otherwise, so for someone offended by modal realism, such as Quine and perhaps Bill, the reality of God may be so unseemly as to be unbelievable. Fortunately, however, the Jews found God first in the desert.

Later this morning as I got up to go to class, my plastic folder-box wouldn't close properly. I pushed the lid down again but then noticed the leg of a small cardboard rocking horse was stuck in between the edges. I have seen the rocking horse every day for weeks now, but it was only this morning that I had reason to lift it up, whereupon I noticed two foiled wings were under it. They had been removed, for originally the horse was a rocking Pegasus. This was another strange coincidence, since in the same essay, "On What There Is", Quine discusses the disputed existence of Pegasus and the property of anything like it as "pegasizing."

More about books. A couple weeks ago I left a small bag at a friend's house. There were two library books inside the bag, so when I finally got around to picking the bag up at his place earlier this week, his roommate handed me the bag and explained that he "figured the books might be overdue, so [he] returned them for [me]." I was civil about it, mainly because I was in a rush, but also because I couldn't quite believe my ears. He opened my bag, inspected its contents, removed the unfinished books, and returned them for me without any notice. I felt like I was in an episode of Seinfeld. Alas, my friend tells me the roommate's logic doesn't operate on the same plane as ours. Time to go to the library, I guess.

Nothing about books this time. Last night my wife and I were eating noodles. I think she saw I was about to eat the last clump of them off my plate, for as I lowered my head, verily, to eat the last clump of noodles, the extra clump of noodles she had on her fork craned over into my hair as she tried to lower it onto my plate. I just gaped and stared. She just bawled and patted me on the back. It was a hoot.

Stupid… my secret…

Don't hold your breath.

I've got to hold my horses.

How could I be so stupid?

Then again, how could I not be so stupid?

So it is that the well meaning are damned.

Inordinate.

Meet Ashes.

My avatar without royalties.

Facebook is, Facebook isn't...

Facebook is an engine for false memory. "I was there." "That's my friend." "We did this together."

It's ON like TRON...

1. TRON is alluring because there are no straight lines in our world. It shows us the world we must believe in to know, and must know to understand our own world. Geometry as idealism, mathematics as utopia.

1. Google Translate: TRON是誘人的，因為沒有直線，在我們的世界。它向我們展示了世界，我們必須相信知道，必須知道，了解我們自己的世界。

2. TRON is alluring because in our world there are no straight lines. It shows us the world in which we must believe in order to know, and the world which we must know in order to understand our own world.

2. Google Translate: TRON是誘人的，因為在我們的世界裡，沒有直線。它表明我們的世界中，我們必須相信，以了解，世界，我們必須知道，以了解我們自己的世界。

I borned...

I reach for a jar of marmelade.

On a compatibilist reading, I am unfree but not unnaturally coerced to perform this action. It springs from my every impulse, which springs from my ever-conditioning environment. I would not choose to eat the marmelade without my determined background, but, crucially for compatibilists, my marmelade would not be chosen to be eaten without me being the transeunt agent.

I emerge from my mother's womb and then enter a grave.

On a compatibilist reading, I am unfree but not unnaturally coerced to perform these actions. I would not undergo these changes apart from the determining factors behind them, but, as well, they would not occur except by me (qua transeunt agent).

Yet birth and death are not actions we perform, therefore compatibilism is false.

For,
if the conditions for a "free and rational" action, on compatibilism, are equally satisfied by my birth and death and by any choice (e.g. my choice of condiments),
but birth and death are not properly actions,
then compatibilism's account of actions is fatally flawed,
and compatibilism (qua theory of action) is defeated.

Ease as mark of truth…

"I decided to be a determinist because it's just easier. I can stop analyzing "why" I did this or that and simply accept the fact that my willing at any moment is the confluence of countless prior influences, conscious and unconscious. In a clip of Christopher Hitchens discussing global warming, notice how the phrasing of the question––"missing the boat"––leads to him using the word "boat" in his reply (or should I say leads him to using the word?). If challenged about his lack of rhetorical ingenuity, Hitchens would probably just shrug and say, "Well, there's determinism for you." Determinism, therefore, is true because it allows us to mesh most naturally with our environment."

Class, discuss.

I will suggest the following, though: the above comments make what I think is the deepest ontological error in determinism, namely, the claim that there is some puny, passive subject, which is constantly influenced by its environment, yet which does not add anything to that environment. The "self" in determinism is like the beam of light reflected in a mirror: a reality which allegedly only exists at its entry and exit points in the visible spectrum.

Also, while there is some truth (!) in the pragmatic thesis that "the true is the workable", since goodness is an analogue of being and both are unified in truth (and vice versa in all three directions), the very difficulty of "working out" certain interrelated claims is a sign of their truth (quantum mechanics, trinitarian theology, the "place" of the will [as if it were a spatiotemporal entity to begin with!], etc.). Further, the harmony, the functional resonance, which we experience in grasping the true does not mean the true is the useful; for some things are known to be true by their beauty, a beauty which of itself preempts pragmatic lechery. What is "it" good for? Shut up, philistine, and accept that its pragmatic vacuity is precisely the sign of its alethic dignity. A remaining snag is how to meet the utilitarian claim that even the "purely beautiful" is 'useful' in the utilitarian sense. Then again, that seems to be so much a concession to the classical view of beauty qua truth qua goodness as to be more a surrender than a challenge to metaphysics.

P.S. A clue that pragmatic success does not amount to truth: doping in the 1980 Olmypics.

Belief, character, behavior, perception…

Our behavior is an expression of our character.

Our character is an expression of our beliefs.

Our beliefs are a codification of our perceptions.

If we can modulate our perceptions, and perceptual environment, by systematically altering out behavior, we can alter our beliefs and, in turn, our character, which will also influence our behavior. This is praxis. This is the "technique" of ascesis and sacramental devotion.

The soteriological dispute between Protestants and mainline classical Christians about "works vs. faith" runs much deeper than the exegesis of various biblical passages. The proper teaching on salvation must reflect Jesus' basic account of being(s), definition, and agency. "You shall know a tree by its fruit"––that is a very Aristotelian concept. Powers stem from essence; actions reveal powers. Essence is revealed, or known, in the (actual) application(s) of its given powers.

"You look at the signs of the weather but do not look at the signs of the times"––a semiotic thesis. If a thing's existence integrally includes its semiotic relations to other subjects, then a thing's real nature must include its outward 'performance(s)'. If a subject's faith, faith rooted in an object, does not manifest in certain signs, in certain 'performances', then it is not essentially the faith that the subject is seeking.

Fides formata et informata, I know, I know… but it would be an interesting study to see how Jesus' naturalistic and often philosophically robust parables illuminate the "faith vs. works" dispute. The task of faith is to align itself with the signs presented by its object so that the subject generates the appropriate signs on its own. If you do not 'perform' such signs, objectively you have no faith and thus no salvation.

One of those people…

Some life advice:

If you ever want to test an object (a fence, an appliance, a wire, etc.) for live electrical current, lightly tap it with the back of your hand. If it's live, your arm will contract and curl away from the source, whereas if you use the palm of your hand on a live object, your muscles will contract around it and you'll be much worse off, if not dead. I learned that when I was nine or ten on a science museum field trip.

I realized yesterday that I do something similar to a woman with whom I must deal on a regular basis. I use a conventional greeting––"Hello, how are you?"––like the back of my hand: politeness expended just to assess how hazardous or volatile her mood is for the day. Sigh.

Well, as long as it gets his books sold…

A controversial psychologist's VERY politically incorrect 'truths' about human nature
By NIALL FIRTH, Last updated at 10:45 AM on 1st December 2010

…this is not the first time that evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has stirred up controversy with his outspoken declarations.

Usually perfectly timed to coincide with his latest book, The London School of Economics researcher has come out with a raft of startling claims about what makes us human.

Already this year he has claimed that men who cheat on their girlfriends or wives are less intelligent.
And he claimed that most suicide bombers are Muslim because they do not have enough sex.

He even gave psychological reasons why liberals are more intelligent than those with more conservative viewpoints.

A few yellow flags.

First, this strikes me as our era's version of phrenology. In Victorian times, it was titillating to inspect a friend's head, perhaps surreptitiously, and conjecture what it meant about his character or destiny. Now we like to superimpose a skein of evolutionary impulses onto others and conjecture the same.

Second, to take one example, what does Kanazawa mean by "physically attractive" women? Conceptions of feminine beauty can shift in just a few generations and already varies widely across cultures/regions. Is there a single evolutionary mechanism here that produces such scattered results, or are there really numerous 'occult' mechanisms working diversely in us as subspecies? Either answer is a bit harebrained.

As another example, it's hard to say just how high Kanzawa's analysis of Arab terrorists should extend. What if Arab guys just did a lot of prostitutes, would they still be inclined to terrorism? If the claim is that the motor of Arab terrorism (!) is the fact that most Arab men are competing for a mate, what does it mean to "have a partner"? To have access to a vagina on a regular basis? To have a shoulder to cry on? Or to have someone with whom you can produce offspring so you can transmit your genes? If the latter––and I think that's the only respectable answer a "real Darwinist" would want––, then shouldn't more gay people be terrorists?

Third, these claims are only as good as their statistical corroboration. In other words, as statistical claims, they can't be said directly to cause the behavior b of a particular man m at time t, otherwise the mechanism could be discerned 'straight off' m's actions at t, and then what would be the point of evolutionary psychology versus good old fashioned psychiatry? Laws are generalizations about the dispositions of concrete existents; but those dispositions are not wholly reducible to the laws, since they are merely dispositions dependent for their expression on a convergence of different factors. If the dispositions just were mechanistic laws, then laws could be violated with simple counterfactual adjustments, and that's an insult to the term "law". As always, evolutionary psychology is reifying a collective subconsciousness and ascribing it to "us", as if each of us were a real specimen of the real species Homo sapiens sapiens. Essence pervades the theory or its general claims don't hold for particular speci(e)mens. Since, however, essence is de jure anathema to modern evolutionary reasoning, the theory's general claims don't hold in particular cases.

The Internets is self-affirmed…

According to this peculiar website, the Internet has a 65% positive attitude towards… "the Internet".

Then again, it apparently has an 89.2% positive attitude towards… "death"!

I'm sure he'll be glad to know that the Internet has a 74.9% positive attitude towards "Richard Dawkins" and 66.9% positivity about "the New Atheism", while it scours with a 52.4% negative attitude towards "the pope" and 59.8% negativity towards "the Catholic Church".

Good thing truth ain't a beauty contest.

On a similar front, "natural selection" gets 86.1% positivity while "intelligent design" only gets 63.1% love.

Results may vary from region to region and time to time.

Well, no, you can't get there from *here*, but…

Dennett starts from cognitivism and thereby disproves introspective rationalism (á la the beer taster scenario, or my own recent "how heavy is this dumbbell now versus last time" scenario). This is like a man starting from a store-bought roadmap and 'thereby' disproving that you can reach San Francisco in seven inches.

+ + +
"I have heard when my gay friends first had consciousness of their gay attractions, and it was pretty young, as young as my consciousness of heterosexual attractions, therefore it is morally acceptable."

"I have heard when my audited friends first had consciousness of their attractions to laundering, and it was pretty young, as young as my consciousness of the obligation not to steal, therefore it is morally acceptable."

+ + +
We all know drunk guys fight the best and have the most power on tap, therefore, train drunk and you will be immune to the pains that prevent you from breaking through into the powers of Drunkdom.

+ + +
I am a philosopher by trade. You are a not-philosopher by trade. I make X dollars per year. You invariably make X+ dollars per year. Yet, I surpass you existentially since my occupation is to dwell on what you dwell upon during your drive home and those moments when you wife and children and boss are not commmandeeeeering your cognitive capacities. I lose, yet I I win. That's philosophical alchemy for you.