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.

Action without agents?

To paraphrase Maritain: "...because all law is a promulgation of reason, ... there must be an eternal reason behind the eternal law; and since the natural law is nothing more than our participation in the eternal law, there must be some principle of reason behind the natural law."

Morality is value-laden action. Action is behavior ordered towards an end or ends.

If moral claims are absolute, they are also eternal. That is, if there are absolute moral principles, there are absolute principles of action.

There are absolute moral truths, and therefore also absolute principles of action.

Action, however, cannot exist without an agent. As such, absolute principles of action exist only because an absolute principle of agency exists. Morality is absolute, therefore there exists an absolutely moral agent, which all men call God.

Tell me everything you know…

Tell me everything you know about unicorns, and you still won't tell me whether, for all that, they exist. Tell me everything you have in mind for your latest invention––yes, the flying bed––and you still won't tell me, for all that, whether it exists. In both cases, the total propositional set of facts about the objects (x|x:F, G, H,…N) does not include the fact of their existence. Once the objects exist, of course, that fact enters their propositional constitution.

This is an old, almost boilerplate issue in metaphysics––the "real distinction" between essence and existence (RDEE)––but there is one facet of the issue I'd like to bring up here based on my reading David Oderberg's Real Essentialism, at least for my own benefit, if not for the greater good of metaphysicians everywhere.

Briefly, RDEE entails that no entity includes its own existence in its essence (with the exception of God, though that is an issue I'll bracket here)*. In other words, to paraphrase Aristotle (Post. An. II, 7, 10), we can know what a thing is without knowing that it is (with the exception of indexicals and conscious experience, discussion of which I shall also bracket for now)**. In addition, we can know that some-thing exists without really knowing what it is (e.g. Bigfoot, UFOs, an approaching figure, the Wii game system, etc). So there is a bidirectional independence between essence and existence, form and substance. As Aristotle says:

"He who knows what human-- or any other-- nature is, must know also that man exists; for no one knows the nature of what does not exist-- one can know the meaning of the phrase or name 'goat-stag' but not what the essential nature of a goat-stag is. But further, if definition can prove what is the essential nature of a thing, can it also prove that it exists? ... [W]hat human nature is and the fact that man exists are not the same thing.... [It] is by demonstration that the being of everything must be proved--unless indeed to be were its essence; and, since being is not a genus, it is not the essence of anything. Hence the being of anything as fact is matter for demonstration…." 

Hence, while Aristotle grants the role of pure, second-order reflection (imagination and notional extrapolation), he sharply divides a thing's supposed nature from its demonstrated existence.

Now, Oderberg addresses the objection that to assert RDEE "is to treat existence as some sort of characteristic of contingent things––a kind of metaphysical 'add-on' to essence" (p. 124). He rebuts, however, that this confusion is due to the paucity of vocabulary in contemporary metaphysics. He grants that "[e]xistence is indeed something that is true of existing things" and that "[a]ll existence ... requires that something be actualized", but denies that this makes existence a property, "since properties flow from the essence of a thing and, given what I have already said, existence does not flow from the essence of anything" (p. 124). Neither is existence an accident, Oderberg continues, "since accidents inhere in and modify already existing substances. Hence, to that extent, we can agree with the broadly Kantian argument against the Ontological Argument, to the effect that 'existence is not a real predicate'" (p. 124).

Even so, Oderberg argues, this should not lead us to the regnant Fregean view that existence is a second-order property of concepts, since "[e]xistence is something true of things that exist, not of our concepts of them" (p. 124). Even construed as properties of the world at large, the existence of things themselves is a fact about those things themselves, "and this is logically prior to its being a fact about the world."

It was at this point that my insight tried to strike me. I wondered where we should draw the line between the fact of x's existence and the fact of the world's actualization of x as a substance. As discussed above, we can't suppose any essence we can define could for that very reason be true in our world. Maybe there are far fewer essences--really possible forms--than we typically believe. Perhaps numerous essences are really impossible, though they are conceivable. Saul Kripke argues as much about unicorns (cf. Naming and Necessity [Harvard, 1980], pp. 23-24, 156-157), to wit, that given what we know about biological taxonomy, genetics, and natural causal history, unicorns are not really imaginable (recall Aristotle's reference to a stag-goat). All we can manage in terms of knowing the essence of unicorns are vague notions of horned horses. Beyond that, there is no coherent, compelling sense in which unicorns could be anything more than mutated horses. In any event, the upshot is that there is a two-way connection between facts about x and facts about the world in which x exists. What is the connection?

Let's go back to your invention above, the flying bed. You may be able to wax about its features, may have dozens of sketches and schematic blueprints, and may even have functional scale models, but, until it's made, you can't include in the blueprints the property "and it exists." Moreover, it may just be the case that, when the dream bed (which we'll call Bedd) is produced (which we'll call Bedder), unforeseen facts about the world impinge on the formal purity of your design (Bedd). This is a common problem in engineering, especially commercial engineering, where customer satisfaction can be as weighty as gravity. The tension here is between form and matter, design and development, shadow and act, Bedd and Bedder.

So let's imagine that features d, k, and s of Bedd have to be modified, or even removed, in order for it qua Bedder to function in the real world. At that point, facts about the world directly impede the fact of Bedd's existence, in which case, by modus tollens, the fact of the non-existence of Bedd is derived from a fact (or facts) about the world. This seems to refute Oderberg's point about existent-facts being logically prior to world-facts. Seems to. Oderberg's point is that the world "elk-izes" because elks exist in the first place. Kripke's point is that unicorns don't exist because the world doesn't unicornize. The juncture of these claims leads to believe that when we think we know a form (or an essence qua the abstracted state of a substantial form), we can only know it as far as it conforms to other substantial realities.

This may seem trivial, but my point is that what we know of a thing's form can actually be illuminated by its actualization in the world. If we find that features d, k, and s don't jibe with Bedder, then we realize what we thought we knew about Bedd (namely, its b-k-s characteristics) is actually no part of Bedd itself, even in its formal purity. What we thought we knew of Bedd as a really possible being in our world, is revealed in actualization not to have been produced by knowledge of the world. We know less about Bedd than we thought, because we know more about the world and Bedder than our grasp of Bedd could ever fathom. As James Ross puts it, "Material things overflow our conceptions", and this because "the de re necessities [for anything] spread out into the inaccessible" (Thought and World [University of Notre Dame Press, 2008], pp. 14-15).

Once we see why Bedder cannot b-k-s, we will just see why that it is so: Bedd's substantial, as opposed to purely abstract, form requires non-b-k-s. The "design constraints" put on Bedd arise from matter, but its actual coming-to-be depends on the potentiality--the ontic hospitality, as it were--of materiality qua the womb of the world. It may be true of the world that the world Beddizes only in virtue of the fact that Bedder exists (i.e. the existent-fact has logical priority over a state of affairs), but knowing what Beddizing really looks like requires that we know how the world actualizes Bedd. Strangely enough, then, while the existence of Bedder is not a part of its essence (viz. Bedd), the existence parameters of Bedder were facts about Bedd all along. Certain impossible facts about Bedd (i.e. its b-k-s features) betray our misconception of facts about the world from which we assumed we had derived it.

* [In a nutshell the distinction hinges on the fact that God's very Godness just is the essential inclusion of existence.]

** [In a nutshell these latter things are either derivative modifications of a prior substance or beings of reason (second intentions) which exist by reflection on prior objects.]

Thinking about thinking about physics, part 2...

In my introductory post of this series, I noted how Roger G. Newton is what I call a "chaste realist" (C.R.) and that, as such, his instinctive realism is at odds with his crypto-Kantian idealism. As I noted in the introductory post, Newton's thinking about physics is largely deflationary, in the sense that, at the end of the day, even the strangest scientific discoveries and theories can and should be reconciled as closely as possible with common sense (i.e. realism about the world and our knowledge of it). The following are informal characterizations, but I think they will make my basic point.

A C.R. is someone that, so to speak, wants realism to be true, but who is also aware of how far from reality scientific theories can be and are. Secretly, a C.R. knows science is on the right path and that normal science tells us important, lasting things about the real, mind-independent world. A C.R. cannot bring himself to subscribe to scientism, since he admits the ontological limitations of scientific claims are tied up with their origin in human cognition. C.R.s recognize that idealization, pragmatic selectivity, aesthetic bias, and so on, effect scientific paradigms, but they insist the general thrust of scientific inquiry tracks reality better than most, if not all other, methods of reasoning. On the other hand, a C.R. rejects constructivism and most of the non-progressive, anti-realist theory of science (as espoused by Duhem, Carnap. Hempel, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Van Fraassen, Giere, et al.). Scientific standards and conceptions may be relative to human "users" of science, but that does not entail the former are relativistic and fictional. In effect, C.R.s say to the regnant anti-realist regime in the philosophy of science, "If we promise not to claim too much for science as a 'truth engine', can we be allowed to accept scientific findings as 'true enough'?"

So, I'm calling Newton a chaste realist. I'll begin by noting his realism. First of all, Newton has i) ambitious aims for scientific explanation (Se). Se must not be mere description. For instance, Newton argues, even if we discovered that physical constants changed, as Paul Dirac and others have suggested based on the expansion of the universe, "we would still have to search for an underlying time-independent law that would account for the specific way in which these constants vary with time. Physics never regards history itself as a sufficient explanation of any fundamental change" (Thinking About Physics [TP], p. 10).

Likewise, ii) Se is about more than the pragmatic success of science. "What justifies our confidence in the basis soundness of the entire [scientific] structure," Newton writes, "is its coherence, an intellectual coherence that includes consistency with all the experiences and expectations founded on it, the fulfillment of precise, far-reaching predictions implied by it, and the functioning of all the technology built on its basis" (p. 19, my italics). Newton's claim contains a number of overly realist quantificational implications, which ultimately are at odds with the chastity of his realism, about which more later.

In any case, Newton continues with a point which strikes, wittingly or unwittingly, against a main pillar of the crude scientism prevalent in much of Western society, namely, the 'argument' that "Science Works, Bitch!" As Newton says, however, "[t]o point out that science works, in the sense that we readily watch television..., is, of course, the most banal of the answers we can give to those who question the truth of science... [though] it is an important component of the coherence of physics" (p. 19). These claims indicate how, for Newton, scientific truth is not merely a matter of technical success or "better living through science," but rather derives from the ambition of making sense of the world by way of science itself. Coherence, as Newton describes it in "the broad sense above... is the basis for claiming truth as the goal of physics-- not as an attainment, but as an aim" (p. 20). Lawrence Sklar, in Theory and Truth, makes almost exactly the same claim, so I hope to discuss both authors in tandem at some point.

Lest the above seem too theoretical, I should note that "the philosophy of science" is not Newton's focus. Rather, his focus is largely on how to reconcile the oddity of quantum theory (QT) with the mainstream of historical scientific claims. For instance, he denies that QT undermines good ole fashioned Newtonian determinism in the popular "spooky" way many people think, since "[q]uantum mechanics is as deterministic as classical mechanics" and that the truly weird things about QT--namely, entanglement--"originates in the wave-particle duality" (pp. 22-23). Indeed, "while part of what is meant by entanglement would obtain for any probabilistic theory... other parts [of QT] go further and are caused by phase correlations" (p. 23). Such entanglement, free of the wave-particle duality, does not strike us as odd for wave dynamics proper, so, as I mentioned in the introductory post, it is Newton's implicit aim to demystify the weirdness of QT by situating it in the larger context of physical statistics as such. A crucial premise in Newton's deflationary QT, is that "reality at the everyday level has to be distinguished from reality at the submicroscopic level" (p. 26).

This is a striking claim, and one with profound philosophical implications. Since, as always, my time is running short before I must head to class, I will close this post without getting any deeper into Newton's own claims in TP. In the next post I will connect Newton's premise about the macro-/microscopic cleft in reality (or the MMC) with its larger philosophical implications from an Aristotelian perspective (mainly by citing Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma and David Oderberg's Real Essentialism).

Stay tuned.

Various and sundry…

Strive to learn at least one new prëmbil every day.

+ + +

Everyone is happy until they are not. Therefore, no one is happy. No one can be made unhappy if they are already truly unhappy. Therefore, everyone is happy.

+ + +

Telling yourself over and over again that "telling yourself something over and over again makes it true" doesn't make it true. Or so I am told.

+ + +

If time increases (or "slows") at higher speeds, and time increases in speed (or "flies"), when you're having fun, then having-fun is a slower activity, and therefore closer to the immobility of the divine.

+ + +

‎"The gravity at the CERN site where the neutrinos left, for example, is actually slightly greater than the gravity at the OPERA detector site. As a consequence, time would appear to move more slowly at CERN from the vantage point of the OPERA detector. Failing to take this into account, Contaldi contends, means that '[t]he resulting measurement that the neutrino velocity differs from c is not only unsurprising but should be expected in their setup.'"

–– cf. Gravity May Have Thrown Off Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Calculations - Forbes

“'From the perspective of the clock [on the GPS satellite], the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter….' Which is to say: it is shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground. [It seems] the OPERA team failed to take this into account––indeed, that they thought of the clocks as on the ground, not in orbit. Van Elburg argues once you take the changing distances between the GPS clocks and the neutrino detectors into account, it cancels out the 60 nanoseconds by which the neutrinos seemed to exceed the speed of light."

–– cf. Netherland Scientist Claims Solution to the FTL Neutrino Problem - Forbes

+ + +

Hilarous cuz it's verdicial. 

+ + +

Class, make sense of this prop. 

+ + + 

"Sean Connery's best line ever." 

+ + +

"Haters gonna hate." 

"Never give up." 

Pick your caption. 

STR notes for future reference...

I've read x about STR but not only still feel like I've read x minus x about it... and I also find it harder to grasp than GTR, which is odd, since the former is but a subset of the latter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/sr/sr.shtml

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/relativity.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/RelativityOfSimultaneity/

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/specrel/lc.cfm

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module4_time_dilation.htm

http://www.relativity.li/en/resources/relativitytheory/

http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9909040

Notes on TSR...

It doesn't seem to matter how much I ingest about STR, it's still a mindbender.

Part 2


~2:30 : Since all observers will see the same laws of physics hold, and since the speed of light (c) is a part of the laws of physics, all observers will see c the same, regardless of their state of motion. c is constant. In order to agree on the speed of light, observers may need to disagree about distance and time.

As I was trying to explain to my wife (my weakness, not hers), the reason classic relativity (CR) says object move with different speeds in different reference frames, is actual because the equations work only by keeping c constant. (That this was not known, but that the equations still worked, raises an interesting point about counterfactuals and scientific theory.) A pitcher P on a moving truck will see his pitched ball B move at 100mph, whereas an observer O of the truck-ball system TB would see the ball B moving at 150mph (cf. part 1 of video series). Since the time of measurement is the same for both P and O, and since c must remain constant, the speeds must rise as the relative distances increase. O is removed from TB to an extent that speed will rise in order to keep the ratio between distance and speed constant relative to c. P is closer to TB, so the speed decreases to preserve the c-ratio. In fact, P is "inside" TB so that he will detect no motion (unless he pitches B), which just means that as distance (between P and TB) shrinks to 0, the speed of B in TB shrinks to zero--all the while c is constant.

~7:00 : Reflected-photon clocks C1 and C2 would be precisely synchronized for an outside observer O. If C1 is stationary while C2 is in motion, O will see the time of C2 pass more slowly. why? Since both reflected-photon beams move at the same speed, and the moving clock C2 covers a farther distance than C1, the time of C2 must increase in order to keep c constant (despite other changes like increased distance).

Part 3


~1:30 : All the rulers aboard the moving ship S2 shrink just enough to keep c constant invariantly with respect to increased speed. Time dilation and length contraction.

I was trying to get length contraction clearer in my mind tonight, and here is what I thought of:

The faster object moves towards me, the faster its "trailing photons" will reach me relative to its "leading photons". In other words, when I observe a normal stationary ruler, with one end pointed at me, light from its front end reaches me at no discernibly different time than light from its rear end. But if it is moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, photons from its front end will reach me at about the same time as photons from its back end, and thus it will appear that both ends are closer together (i.e. that the ruler is shrunken). I "understand" that this compression is not merely a result of my neural-observational limitations, but actually holds in a Lorentzian way (cf. Wiki). But what of non-Lorentzian relativity?

~3:30 : The faster you go through space, the slower you go through time. If you could travel at the speed of light in space, you would make no progress in time. If you could surpass c through space, you could travel back in time. If different observers must always agree on c, they must disagree on time and distance.

~5:15 : There is no single time or space on which everyone can agree. [Thus, unless the universe transcends space and time, there is no universe. There is a universe, however, in which c is constant. Therefore the universe as known by humans transcends space and time.] Velocity depends on distance (viz. from which frame of reference it is observed, i.e. how far from its center it is clocked), and time depends on velocity (viz., as velocity increases, time decreases, and distance increases). What is observed far apart in space, appears near in time. What is observed near in space, appears far apart in time (relative to something farther away).

~6:30 : The faster a particle goes, the heavier it goes. In order to maintain acceleration, as mass increases, energy must increase. E = mc^2. Once again, c must remain constant. In a given time, an object's velocity depends on the energy given to its mass.

Part 4


~0:20 : Einstein's STR says that an observer at a constant velocity Ov will observe the same laws of physics as an observer at rest Or. [I think "at rest" here could only mean "an observer moving at the speed of light (Ol). Cf. Einstein's scenario of sitting on a photon.]

~1:55 : Einstein argued that there's no way to tell a difference between being stationary under the influence of gravity versus being accelerated through space. Hence, given the universality of the laws of physics, the laws of gravity must be equivalent to (i.e. transformable into) the laws of acceleration through space.

======

Basic maths for time dilation


γ = 1/√(1 - (v²/c²))

This helps me make sense of the "substantial fraction of the speed of light" condition (i.e. the focus on "motion at relativistic speeds"). As v increases, the ratio of v²/c² nears 0, and the divisor under 1 therefore nears 0, which would make γ into an increasingly large (and potentially infinite) amount. In turn, as γ increases, Δt' decreases. As observed time (t') decreases, time "flows more slowly". Time dilation at relativistic.

======

Time dilation with Dr Wittman


~0:00 : "Moving clocks run slowly and moving things contract in the direction of their motion. Those are two of the amazing conclusions of special relativity."

~ 2:30 : "We have to measure the same speed of light, even if the clock is moving. ... Let's see if it can get to the top of that clock." The faster the photon clock moves, the less distance it travels inside the apparatus, and therefore the less time it traverses. "Moving clocks go slower."

~ 4:05 : γ = c(1/√(1 - (v²/c²))

So as speed increases, time increases and length decreases. Anything beyond the speed of light would be eternal and sub-spatial (i.e. immaterial). And you're telling me natural theology is dead??

~6:30 : In order for the truck driver to maintain c, he must measure "our" v as vγ.

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).

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

If whatever (B) happens actually only happens at times (t(n-1) + t(n-2) + … t (n-k)), then nothing happens at time t (i.e. ~∃x(Bx(t)). If no-thing happens at time t (i.e. ~∀x(Bx(t))), then nothing ever happens. If it is granted that "what happens at t" is B itself, then perdurantism is false. Otherwise, if there is no B, then there is no sense in speaking of parts of B.

The canonical example for (but really just "in") perdurantism qua entailment of the theory of special relativity (TSR), is a train collision, or mutatis mutandis a train passing a station. The point is supposed to be that there is no unique time in which "the train T passes the station S", rather that there are only time slices which correspond to relative observations. If so, then those observation-slices are themselves divisible into "smaller" slices, and don't exist in their own right. If it is granted that observation is instantaneous, then we're getting all Thomistic.

What is a "unique" time? There is no "singly valid" (unique) observational standpoint on perdurantism, so, by extension, there is no singly valid (unique) event. That is fallacious, however. Chalk it up to my abiding worries about woebegone simultaneity and truth-makers as a metaphysical family secret. Plus my profound dissatisfaction with perdurantist (ethical, logical, etc.) entailments.

∃ is {& exist;}
∀ is {& forall;}
↔ is {& harr;}
≡ is {& equiv;}
∴ is {& there4;}
□ is {& #9633;}
◊ is shift+alt/option v (auf 'ner deutschen Tastatur) or ◊ {& loz;}
∩ {& #x2229;} (Where members of set X are members of A both and B.)
U is… U (Where members of set X are members of either A or B.)

Why I like perdurantism…

Regular readers might be surprised by this post's title, since I've made it no secret how antagonistic I am to perdurantism (i.e., the metaphysical doctrine that object do not exist wholly at any given time, but are in fact comprised of innumerable time slices for each segment of the spacetime manifold). I have ethical, logical, and metaphysical objections to perdurantism, which I have voiced at FCA in a few posts, but tonight I will voice one thing the theory has going for it in my eyes.

The good thing about perdurantism is that it makes some of the hardest doctrines of Christianity quite reasonable. Note: this does not mean that the latter is so wedded to the former that a disproof of the former entails a rejection of the latter, but it does mean that the authority of the latter might give tremendous metaphysical weight to the former by making "more" intelligible some of the latter. 

Here's an example of the perdurantist-Christian alliance (PCA): if perdurantism is true, not only is Adam literally continuant in all of us, but also no one has ever died. In one swoop, PCA has secured both the literal headship of Adam, and thus the transmission of original injustice to all humans, and the immortality of humans. In the first instance, because Adam is just a "compilation" of his spatiotemporal time-slices, which include all the atoms and subatomic "particles" in any slice, then not all of Adam's atoms have disappeared in the cosmos, and are thus still perduranistically interwoven with all other humans. If at time t, Adam had a physical stature of {t,x,y,z}––which object we shall label A({t,x,y,z})––, then at time t* (say, fifty years later), due to natural growth and muscular development, Adam had a stature of {t*,x*,y*,z*}––the Adam we shall label as A({t*,x*,y*,z*}).

On perdurantism, there is a literal continuity between A({t,x,y,z}) and A({t*,x*,y*,z*}). Just because A({t*,x*,y*,z*})'s bicep's muscular tissues was {x,y,z}mm farther from his humerus than the bicep tissue of A({t,x,y,z}), does not mean they are not members of the same meta-Adam A({t_,x_,y_,z_}). By extension (!), therefore, just because the numerous components of A({t_,x_,y_,z_})'s tissue are now––at time t(p)––farther removed from each other than they were at t or t*, does not mean there is no longer A({t_,x_,y_,z_}). Indeed, it is precisely because A({t_,x_,y_,z_})'s components have "gone into" making his numerous progeny that A({t_,x_,y_,z_}) is still literally a member of our causal nexus. Adam is just as fully present in me as he was in any of his other spatiotemporal configurations (A({t:,x:,y:,z:}). 

Now it is time to make space for the matter (!) of human immortality (HI) under the PCA. Fortunately, from the above, HI falls out quite obviously. If Adam persists in "us" (qua variegated pragmatic configurations of A({t_,x_,y_,z_})), then it follows that each of us (P({t_,x_,y_,z_})) persists throughout the span of the cosmos, despite how dispersed, contracted, agglutinated, or reduced we become. 

Logical updates…

Good to know, for HTML, at least: 

∃ is {& exist;}
∀ is {& forall;}
↔ is {& harr;}
≡ is {& equiv;}
∴ is {& there4;}
□ is {& #9633;}
◊ is shift+alt/option v (auf 'ner deutschen Tastatur) or ◊ {& loz;}
∩ {& #x2229;} (Where members of set X are members of A both and B.)
U is… U (Where members of set X are members of either A or B.)

[Remove space between & and the sequalia.]

Here are my poor man's HTML-free stabs at it…

$x : there is an x
A*x : for all x
<--> : iff
=* : means, is semantically entailed by
‹› : it is contingent that
[] : it is necessary that
Ω* : intersection of
∆· : therefore

All of these only work (or work best) on a German keyboard (as I have set on my Mac).

So, let's try this again…

For : "Every dog (Dx) is loved by (Lyx) at least one man (My). herefore, at least one man loves every dog (~∀y∃x(~∃x~Lyx)) loves every dog (Dx)." 

Valid or invalid? Show your work!

~(Dx --> ($y(My ^ Lyx)) ^ --> (A*x$x(Dx ^ My ^ Lyx))) 

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.

Naturalism as philosophy?

Naturalism fundamentally amounts to the claim that there is no "philosophical" or "metaphysical" theory or data which may, or even need, be added onto our knowledge of the world apart from "the scientific picture" of it.

Since, however, science itself can only get off the ground in virtue of antecedent philosophical commitments, there are ineluctable data which metaphysics brings to our picture of the world, no matter how empirically scientific it may be.

Therefore, naturalism is fundamentally false.

Oh, secular humanism, you do get on!

So I am expected to give a rational justification for my faith in God. Meanwhile, secular humanism (SH) is not expected to give a rational justification for its belief in the unique moral autonomy of humans. Paradoxically, SH takes "humanness" to be both a trivial fluke of biophysics and the one standard we can possibly have for morality, truth, goodness, etc. Further, of necessity, SH pulls this standard out of metaphysical thin air. It is a humanistic order imposed upon a mindless, mute, brute Nature, which is why there is SH in the first place. Why does faith in God need an extrinsic justification if faith in Man does not?

A lil' convo…

I want to reproduce a discussion I recently had with a friend at That Other Place. You've read some of our interactions before, perhaps, so this might be a prized cameo for some readers.

Then again, I know how eye-meltingly vapid it can be to read online debates online, like eating reprocessed leftovers. But I think the discussion contains some interesting points and reveals some noteworthy dialectic haps and mishaps. Plus, I just want to keep it for my own reference.

I posted the following on my wall at That Other Place:

If language is utterance, what is Utterance attempting to do/convey? If language is use, what is Language using? Words, presumably. But then, why words and not something else? What do words possess--or access--that Language needs with them? What is language ABOUT?

Comments ensued:

C The question is not what language is using but how language is used. If every human being were dead, (silence)

E So there is no world apart from human language? I think even Wittgenstein knew there was a world outside Vienna.

C Is there? I think not.

E Thanks, Descartes. Amazing how little distance analytic philosophy has come, despite its trappings. Is there being apart from language? Any attempt at a reply assumes the affirmation of being. "Is" there? etc. At bottom, why use language?

C It's a question.

E‎ "'It' 'is' 'a' question." Alterity, existence, unity--these are all contained in your reply... because they preempt all replies.

C Any statement that an attempt at a reply assumes the affirmation of being is an assumption that any attempt at a reply assumes the affirmation of being.

E‎ "is"

C‎ ""'It' 'is' 'a' question." Alterity, existence, unity--these are all contained in your reply... because they preempt all replies." Dude, c'mon, really?

C I have no idea what you are saying? What's your point?

E As I've realized for years, Wittgensteinism (the mode of living, not the tenets of his doctrines) is the cure for people beleaguered and pestered by actual philosophizing. Ha, a fan of Witt complains about inscrutability in prose! ;) My point: the tactic of subsuming all reality to language because all expression of language involves language is as fallacious as the attempt to reduce all time to the present.

C And how is that?

E Repeat the cycle. Read my opening post.

C Ironically, the beleaguering, nonsensical and the ambiguous are actually considered by earlier philosophers as philosophizing. Misleading, that's all i can say of of the post.

E Ah, nothing so sweet as some anachronistic patronizing. Point to the moon and remember your fingertip is not that satellite. Call in some of your allies …, and they can have their way with this issue. Perhaps I'm suffering Anemia Jargonensis! Let's look at "ambiguous". Do you suggest there is possibly a one-to-one formulation of a perfect correlation between words and objects? If not, then ambiguity is ineluctable. Cue Gödel.

C Do you suggest otherwise?

E Of course. Reality is not reducible to language. That's my entire point!

E But if ambiguity is all you want, have fun in the monad with Leibniz.

C Has Wittgenstein ever said that reality is reducible to language?

C Hence the stance that metaphysics makes no sense.

E‎ "Die Grenzen meiner Welt sind auch die Grenzen meiner Sprache." On some readings, this was precisely Witt's goal: to leave a space for the mystical and real world, beyond our own 'mere' worlds.

C You don't just like pick a statement from his notes of a trillion words. One really has to finish the whole thing just to get an idea of what he was actually trying to say.

E Ahhh, yes. One must be a disciple before one can utter any kind of critique. Good to know! Why do you think Witt's Investigations is one of [D.'s] most intellectually significant books?

E Now you're sounding like an inerrantist about Holy Witt, when once you might have been zealous about Holy Writ. By what rule or canon or authority or inspiration can I cull Witt's essential dogmas? After all, 1,000,000,000 notes is a lot of notes to cull.

C Ha, yeah right, maybe the answers to your "challenge" are in these notes he wrote.

E Now you have a worthy goal. Refute my Wittgensteinian maxim with a greater Wittgensteinian maxim. Naskh away!

C Inerrantist? Holy Witt? Dude, you are smoking way too much religions, man. Look at your choice of words for sarcasm. In this case, you are like a creationist who screams at the biologists for their failure to understand biological science. I'm actually hoping that there is something I could learn outa this. But seriously the irony ensues with these attempts to write Wittgenstein off.

E I'm not writing him off. I love Witt, as far as I know him. But if it comes to a standoff between me and him about language and reality, you know where my feet are. And honestly, I think I know where Witt's instincts were, despite everything else.

C I guess, at the end of the day, the goal stills remains that a philosopher must find a way to make sense of all this, yeah?

E I agree, but I still think THAT conclusion itself contains pointers to something beyond what a lot of people make of philosophy, not to mention of Witt.

C Are you that philosopher? Do you have the same goal in mind? Or are you just interested in attacking non-religious, demoralized and metaphysics-rejecting philosophers who jeopardize the path for scholastic philosophy to go on?

E Yeah. That's me all over. Have a look at my blog. I sure hope I make the cut, sir.

C P[hilosophical] I[investigations] is good even without Witt. He himself realized that. That's why he considered philosophy "dead".

E Which is why you are really more a historian than a philosopher.

C I understand why you say such a thing, and again, ironically that historically philosophers who stick to that age-old tradition have always enjoyed emasculating Russell and Witt.

E As if they were one and the same!!?? For shame.

C They have often done a good job at discrediting them as non-philosophers but never really good at solving any problems.

E I mean: AS IF Russell and Wittgenstein were one package to "discredit", and that the facile implication of their unity is for shame.

C You think there are no challenges to the kinda philosophy you cling onto? You ever thought about why back in the US there are more analytic schools than scholastic ones or whatever?

C Do you believe it is possible for non-believers to universally accept that kinda philosophy?

E Tell me more about this /fallacia ad populum/.

C Do you honestly and genuinely believe that people can just all stop questioning things and start to accept eveything once they have entered the realm of scholastic philosophy?

E The Faith is not a philosophy. No one is asked to accept a philosophy. There are oodles of non-Thomist, non-Scotistic, non-Etc., Catholics.

E If you think scholastic philosophy is about dogma, I owe you a hot poker up the bum.

C No, I don't think it's just about dogma. However, you and I both know clearly that it is derived from it.

E Caricature after caricature. But that stands to reason, since Medieval though, and St Thomas, if no one else, is enormous, and can only be painted over by innumerable such caricatures.

C Without it, it cannot survive.

E I'll leave you to your artistry.

C How come in other parts of the world there were no other Aquinas?

C Look into Indian philosophy, perhaps you should be surprised by it.

C I'm not doubting your ability to understand Witt as much as the hidden purpose behind all this challenging. As I've noticed over the years, it has always been driven by an absolutist's attempt to show that nothing else is right except for his own version of philosophical absolutism.

E Thus Spake Wisdom Absolute.

C School me more on this when we meet again, yeah? Let me know if you are free tomorrow.

E I'm a professional educator, so I never intend to "school" people unless I'm being paid. ;)

C Exactly, conveying ideas, namely, communication. And again ironically [you are] the person who has do all the pointing to this "God" and how logic, language, science and ethics can only make sense with the God reasoning while attempting to remind others that it is the fingertip which does the all pointing. Let's see how metaphysics is going to survive after all with all this "you-can't-understand-my-nonsense-because-this-is-genuine-philosophizing". :)

E Make yourself more egregious, please. I thought you were all done.

C I thought you were all done with attacking Witt until last night...

E Thin skin, dude. So now engaging equals attacking? Hmmm... maybe I hould throw in lots of curse words and sexual innuendoes to make it more intellectual in your eyes?

C And that is how you see me? It's a shame. What? 'Cause I don't cling onto tradition like you do?

E I don't "see" you any how.

C And perhaps to you philosophy is all about the tenebrous, the mysterious and problematic linguistic confusion. In this case, I'm not that "philosopher" at whom most scientists laugh at resulting from the stereotype that philosophy is nothing but a bunch of horsecrap.

C Same problems for almost a thousand year. Tell me that Thomas Aquinas has the solution.

E Dude, I don't want this to be about "you" and "me". That's why I joked about the word "schooling" you. That's a completely improper way of loading the discussion. Why does everything have to be adversarial? I posted a thought about what I think is a fundamentally weak argument for linguistic determinism (and Quinean constructivism altogether): Now the Middle Ages is being smeared. Stick to the topic or just drop, please?

C I am not smearing but probing all possibilities to find solutions.

E‎ 'Kay.

Important...

Is important itself an important concept?

I suppose the title of this post triggered a reflex that that to which the word "important" refers, is important, demanding attention.

But this post is not about mere psychology. That would be insufficiently codgitative.

Again: is importance itself important?

It seems not, since every indication or assignment of importance in the world--to money, to blood, to water, to fire--is itself contingent, and therefore not intrinsically important, but merely important.

If, then, important is not an important category of being--if, that is, importance is a fable stitched upon the austerity of natural existence--, then we must suppose the absence, or perhaps opposite, of importance is itself important.

So, then, let us consider if non-important is important. Manifestly, it is not, since every actus indicationis is as anthropomorphic and statutory as the importance we stitch upon nature. Even when the actus indicationis points at "non-importance".

What, then, can we say? Neither importance nor non-importance is fundamental (or, fundamentally significant) to nature.

Yet, even this bifurcation is one which we impose. Moreover, it is one that is inescapably important, since the dialectic between important and non-important keeps the mind in its only viable tension, and thus keeps the mind in an important, and imported, way. Perhaps someone will suggest we deactivate our minds, in a Zen way, but that itself is an injunction based on the importance of mental tranquility, or on the non-importance of dialectic, etc.

Nevertheless, the above conclusion is still too merely psychological. We must seek a point of metaphysical resolution. Or at least a momentary denouement.

We cannot go without assigning either (state of) value to the world. That is the psychological dialectic.

But, more importantly, we cannot even speak of a world of diversity apart from our perspective in it, and the world itself has produced "us" (qua valuators). There is no us (qua generative rational dimension) without the world, yet there is no "world" *qua discrete object) without "us" (qua delimited field of reference).

And so it seems inescapable to assert that the world not only bears within it the generative power of reason, but also bears within it the mark of a bifurcation between important and non-important. There is, by an ineluctable dialectic necessity, a field of being which transcends our linguistic ascriptions (e.g. important/non-important) to it. Thus, the world is both a field of rational order and a field of scaled valuation. If that is what physicalism wants, it may have it. But then were are speaking something so close to theism that the victory against theism is surely Pyrrhic.

CODA:

It may be your reflex to say that, like all my writing, the conclusion was "pre-laoded" or casuistically inevitable, but in point of fact, I began this codgitation with a simple question in mind."Is the word 'important' itself important?" If not, then there is an important reason for denying it an important status, and anything with the ability to confer importance on action, apart from the linguistic marker for importance, is something much more than naturalism affords.

But I must accept that Marcel is out, and Maddox is in. So woe unto me.

The non-linguistic...

"Tell me about the linguistic without using language. Show me something outside language without staying inside language."

Tell me about the past without incurring or implicating any element of the present. Indeed, explain to me the former without the latter. Show me something outside the present without being in the present.

If language is utterance, what is Utterance attempting to do/convey? If language is use, what is Language using? Words, presumably. But then, why words and not something else? What do words possess--or access--that Language needs with them? What is language ABOUT?

Materialist atheism?

Atheism is a condemnation of bad beliefs, which is itself an injunction to epistemic normativity. Therefore, atheism is an injunction to absolute freedom of will. Such freedom of will, however, is a trademark of theism. Therefore, atheism is false.

If, however, there is a stripe of atheism that makes the will free, not merely indeterminate, I wonder if it's a Pyrrhic victory.

A Freudian proto-argument against abortion…

"A fetus lacks sufficient neural abilities to function, and therefore to 'count', as a human person. More to the point, a fetus is basically unconscious, so it doesn't suffer conscious pains if it is aborted. Therefore, fetal abortion is not immoral or cruel."

Reply:

According to Freudian theory, a human functions in three psychic dimensions: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the dominant, fundamental dimension, comprising the most basic somatic drives. The ego is just the "tip of the iceberg" in human behavior. The real engine is below consciousness. Human nature subsists in its unconscious functions. Delving into a person's subconscious is delving into the person's real character. Conscious behavior is by and large a lattice of pseudo-drives and confabulation constructed to protect one's id or even to protect one's own ego from one's own id.

In so far as a fetus is an unconscious humanoid, it is an archetypal Freudian agent. It displays all the somatic drives that an ego will eventually gild: homeostasis, nutrition, expansion, crude stimulus response, etc. Just because the fetus does not (presumably) consciously feel pain during an abortion does not mean the abortion is not being performed against a human subject. Indeed, just because a psychiatric patient is not consciously aware of his innermost drives does not mean those drives are not human drives.

Therefore, a fetus is a true human person and abortion is cruelty against an unwitting subject.

Notes for a response to a reader…

On the goodness of God, truth, etc.

http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles1.htm#60

http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles1.htm#91

http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles1.htm#95

http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer1.htm#8