tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post2820370306894695570..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Rhetoric and NonviolenceDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-83034462296116481602011-03-22T19:11:41.954-07:002011-03-22T19:11:41.954-07:00"Well actually there is an enormous sociologi...<i>"Well actually there is an enormous sociological literature supporting the various comparative national health and wellness and happiness indices that one finds in various United Nations publications and harm-reduction model policy analyses, for example."</i><br /><br />I linked to a lot of that stuff from my utility page. At least that's an improvement on well-being = GDP, isn't it? <br /><br />All I'm doing is suggesting directions for further improvement.<br /><br />I wonder if utility doesn't stand in the same relation to morality as science did to religion in the middle ages.Poor Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00780183195105651583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-74323463537018861332011-03-21T15:26:47.194-07:002011-03-21T15:26:47.194-07:00Well actually there is an enormous sociological li...Well actually there is an enormous sociological literature supporting the various comparative national health and wellness and happiness indices that one finds in various United Nations publications and harm-reduction model policy analyses, for example. There is something of a cottage industry in pop happiness theory, often taking perfectly sound and useful theory and deranging it into libertopian don't worry be happy theory, so one must be careful in surveying the scene. Also, the recent scholarship vogue debunking rational expectations in economic and sociological discourses contains a wealth of such empiricial gap filling. It isn't my field, so I can't say that I've read more than a few hundred books and articles in this area (mugs for camera).Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-63257452805050354522011-03-21T15:04:51.374-07:002011-03-21T15:04:51.374-07:00Fair enough Dale. That's what I thought you sa...Fair enough Dale. That's what I thought you say, and I'm pretty much on the same page.<br /><br />I just have one question and I'll stop beating this nag:<br /><br />Have you seen this kind of thing around anywhere?<br /><br />Utility 2.0 Framework<br /><br />A CRUDE AND PARTIAL TAXONOMY OF WELL-BEING/FLOURISHING/QUALITY-OF-LIFE<br /><br />I. Identity & demographics<br /><br />II. Mental/emotional status<br /><br />Note: possibility of real-time monitoring of some items<br /><br /> 1. vital signs<br /> 2. galvanic skin resistance<br /> 3. pupil dialation<br /> 4. brain scan(qEEG, fMRI)<br /> 5. hormone levels<br /> 6. subjective reports<br /> etc.<br /><br />III. Health & longevity (many scales)<br /><br />IV. Safety/security (ditto)<br /><br />V. Freedom/constraint/capability <br /><br />VI. Information/communication<br /><br /> A. Education<br /><br /> 1. Formal education<br /> 2. Self-directed education<br /> 3. Educational goals<br /> 4. Quality assurance, confidence<br /><br /> B. Self-knowledge<br /><br /> 1. implicit associations and biases<br /> 2. conscious values/beliefs<br /> 3. strengths and weaknesses<br /> 4. habits<br /> 5. effective/ineffective reinforcement history<br /> 6. etc.<br /><br /> C. Knowledge of consequences of alternative choices, thoughts, or behaviors<br /><br /> 1. short-term consequences <br /> 2. long-term consequences<br /><br /> D. Beliefs and opinions<br /><br /> E. Cognitive and communication metrics and skills<br /><br />VII. Social matrix<br /><br /> 1. Status (gender, age, wealth, power, rank, position, fame, celebrity, etc.)<br /> 2. Family<br /> 3. Friends<br /> 4. Community<br /> 5. Employment (job code, job satisfaction, working conditions, culture, co-worker relations, etc.)<br /> 6. Memberships and affiliations<br /> 7. On-line social networks<br /> 8. Other support networks<br /><br />VIII. Skills & abilities (academic, technical, mechanical, professional, athletic, parenting, housekeeping, etc.)<br /><br />IX. Standard of living factors<br /><br /> 1. market basket<br /> 2. assets & liabilities<br /> 3. disposable income<br /> 4. etc.<br /><br />X. Other quality of life factors<br /><br /> 1. creative activities<br /> 2. recreation<br /> 3. exposure to nature<br /> 4. etc.<br /><br />XI. Contribution to flourishing of others (including ecosystem impacts)<br /><br /><br />"Instruments" exist to measure most of the parameters above.<br /><br />The next stage of the Utility 2.0 model would be correlating data in the profile so that a change in one variable would be reflected in any others where a relationship was known. So the Utility 2.0 framework is a model of both data and relational algorithms.<br /><br />One metaphor for the General Utility framework might be the control board in a recording studio. The individual parameters of the sounds on multiple "tracks" can be adjusted and combined in an infinite number of ways but somehow one particular set of levels gets chosen as the most pleasing combination. Earlier models of utility and social welfare might be analogous to the generic rock/pop/jazz settings on a cheap acoustic equalizer. General Utility is a more granular, eclectic, and empirical approach to altering parameters and measuring results.<br /><br />PRPoor Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00780183195105651583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-18914600971919713112011-03-21T14:12:43.862-07:002011-03-21T14:12:43.862-07:00I guess I don't think utility really needs res...I guess I don't think utility really needs rescuing -- which isn't to say I think the notion needs to be bagged for disposal but that utility is plenty useful enough that it doesn't need the protection of philosophers freighting it with our rather silly idiosyncratic baggage. As a good Jamesian pragmatist I say that "the true is the good in the way of belief... for definite, assignable reasons." I think that common or garden variety truths as beliefs we have reasons for which we are willing to state in public/ation is a perfectly sensible notion but that "truth as correspondence" is a philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks, that common or garden variety certainty as warranted confidence on which one is willing to stake one's life or at any rate the mortgage is a perfectly sensible notion but that "certainty as indefeasability" is a philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks, that common or garden variety utilities, whether of the scientific kind that confer prediction and control, the moral kind that keep us from losing our scruples, the prudential kind that differently navigate legal, commercial, political interactions are all perfectly sensible notions but that the a "general utility function" philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks. True to my training in the belly of the pomo beast, I suppose, I do still think theory is better off reaching first for the tools in the historicization and contextualization drawers rather than the generalization drawer. If I speak derisively of philosophical impulses, do understand that I have had the philosophy bug most of my life and feel I know Socrates and Kant and the Founders and many Marxists and Arendt and Rorty better than most living people, I haven't shaken that bug yet -- and so acerbic comments should be viewed as wry commentaries on weaknesses to which I am prone more than finger-pointing exercises at silly benighted Others. I do think one needs to re-think what intellectual ambition properly looks like from a pluralist-pragmatist-rhetorical perspective (I'm a teacher with a vocation for it, so this is something I think about fairly incessantly) ... metaphysical traditions and their scientistic evolutionary cybernetic progeny in the present day seem to me to offer more cul-de-sacs and symptoms than use.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-66119840244655526502011-03-21T12:33:20.995-07:002011-03-21T12:33:20.995-07:00"I don't think we know enough to call our...<i>"I don't think we know enough to call ourselves consequentialist, and that that is knowing more than enough to know we shouldn't. Utility is always -- to whom? for what? at the expense of what? And answering these questions eliminates most of the benefits that presumably make it alluring to be a utilitarian, it seems to me"</i><br /><br />This was exactly my reservation about utility a year ago. Since then I've been thinking of how to rescue utility and what I've managed to throw together so far is certainly, on the surface and without caveats on every other line, the kind of hyperbolic futurism you despise:<br /><br /><i>"I consider both consequentialist and utilitarian viewpoints altogether too reductionist and too cocksure ."</i><br /><br />What I have done is try to make it slightly less reductionist and far more inclusive and pluralist.<br /><br />For example:<br /><br />"Both the so called “utility function” and utilitarianism have their critics and their historical baggage. In philosophy, economics, and social science they have been formulated in overly vague, reductive, or simplistic ways often rife with primitive, pre-scientific assumptions and externalities. That doesn’t matter to me because I assume a priori that any philosophical school has historical baggage and needs to be reformulated to conform with a modern empirical framework. Henceforth I refer to a more scientific framework as General Utility 2.0. I call it “general” utility to distinguish it from prior species of utility theory which I characterize as narrow or “special” versions of utility.<br /><br />In theory, the General Utility 2.0 framework is a multi-dimensional matrix of all currently known and measurable variables that impact the well-being and flourishing of human life and everything on which it depends (i.e. the biosphere.)"<br /><br />I go on to offer a rough sketch of what a taxonomy of such variables might look like. <br /><br />Reading some of your stuff on amor mundi makes me feel that such an enterprise is pretty foolish and naive.<br /><br />Certainly in its grand scope it is absurd and impracticable. But I guess I am holding on to the hope that somewhere within the bathwater is a more parsimonious and less ambitious baby, perhaps some je ne sais qois, that can be lifted out and salvaged, which would still be an incremental improvement on the intuitively appealing but impractical ethical calculus of utility.<br /><br /><a href="http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/General_utility_2.0" rel="nofollow"><b>General Utility 2.0, Towards a science of happiness and well-being</b></a><br /><br />Is there any at all here that might pass your muster?<br /><br />(Disregarding all the reference material I threw in at the end it isn't long.)Poor Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00780183195105651583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-7252767950348425922011-03-21T04:07:18.612-07:002011-03-21T04:07:18.612-07:00I don't think we know enough to call ourselves...I don't think we know enough to call ourselves consequentialist, and that that is knowing more than enough to know we shouldn't. Utility is always -- to whom? for what? at the expense of what? And answering these questions eliminates most of the benefits that presumably make it alluring to be a utilitarian, it seems to me. I consider both consequentialist and utilitarian viewpoints altogether too reductionist and too cocksure (attitudes which tend catastrophically to go hand in hand). My own tendency is pluralist, and I tend to prefer the pragmatists when they are in their pluralist moods more than in their reductionist moods -- there is plenty of both to be found in the archive. It is only useful to resolve those ambiguities that are troublemaking -- and sometimes what is wanted instead is to embrace and even bring out ambiguities where a hardening of the orthodoxies is making the trouble. I think every modality of reasonable belief ascription contributes its measure to the resolution or ramification of ambiguities, from time to time, not just the aesthetic. You will be unsurprised to hear that I prefer the latter to the early Wittgenstein. Sorry for the tumble of responses there all at once.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-49139237577544138572011-03-20T19:37:11.056-07:002011-03-20T19:37:11.056-07:00Dale, I like your comments about pragmatism. When ...Dale, I like your comments about pragmatism. When I was much younger I called myself a pragmatic idealist but now I'm just a pragmatist.<br /><br />Have you written anything about consequentialism or utility?<br /><br />I would like to equate pragmatism and utilitarianism but there is too much about utilitarianism that seems impractical, especially the difficulty of computing or predicting consequences with any confidence in view of typical ambiguities and complexities. I guess the same applies to pragmatism so perhaps they are equivalent.<br /><br />I think of pragmatism as an art/craft/science with a big set of tools and an emphasis on skills and aesthetics rather than philosophy and ideology.<br /><br />I think there is an art of science and a science of art; a philosophy of science and a science of philosophy; a politics of science and a science of politics, and so on. These pairs are recursive like the images that recede to infinity in a facing pair of mirrors.<br /><br />The processes the brain has evolved to resolve ambiguity and complexity are themselves ambiguous and complex. Science, scholarship, craftsmanship, and even language are very useful forms of reduction, but there is always a residual ambiguity that is left for aesthetics to resolve.<br /><br />I think Wittgenstein said something like that in Tractitus.<br /><br />PRPoor Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00780183195105651583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-50755161497557661802011-03-14T19:01:19.876-07:002011-03-14T19:01:19.876-07:00Thanks very much! Only because you seem such an ap...Thanks very much! Only because you seem such an appreciative audience of writings of mine I'm proudest of do I venture the immodest suggestion -- vis-à-vis "fuzzy materialism" which I presume is not so unlike Rorty's phrase "nonreductive physicalism" with which I sympathize -- that you might also enjoy: <br /><br /><a href="http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2005/07/is-science-democratic.html" rel="nofollow">Is Science Democratic?</a><br /><br /><a href="http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/06/raised-vulcan-eyebrows-and-hopeless.html" rel="nofollow">Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes</a><br /><br /><a href="http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/12/sold-out-truths.html" rel="nofollow">Sold Out Truths</a>Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-11530446548336477342011-03-14T18:18:34.450-07:002011-03-14T18:18:34.450-07:00Some really breath-taking rhetoric and analysis he...Some really breath-taking rhetoric and analysis here, Dale. <br /><br />I like your contrast between rhetoric and philosophy. I am reminded of Gurdjieff's "Philology more important than philosophy."<br /><br />I like your formulation of what, if you don't object, I might call "fuzzy materialism". I am reminded of John Lilly's "Contained mind vs uncontained mind vs leaky mind."<br /><br />I want to read your post again before I say more.<br /><br />PRPoor Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00780183195105651583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-65242162251157901812010-06-13T10:56:22.045-07:002010-06-13T10:56:22.045-07:00Metaphors are of course natural rather than supern...Metaphors are of course natural rather than supernatural phenomena materialized as are all signifiers in events, marks, noises in the world and materialized as are all signifieds as electrochemical dispositions in brains that register the organized attention and responsiveness of organisms to impingements upon their sense receptors of streams of energy articulated by the negotiation of a demanding environment by that organism. I don't see how materiality or reality are imperiled particularly by recognitions of the dynamism of the literal-figural distinction, or any of the series of post-Nietzschean (among which, American pragmatists) recognitions: namely, that science yields confidence but not certainty, truths are good but not final, salient associations can be familiar or not, we are on our own but have each other, and so on.<br /><br /><i>For Lewis, this line of argument is simply a way to keep God in the picture.</i><br /><br />There's a whole lot of that going on, in my experience.<br /><br />My own position is rather idiosyncratic because I am a crusty atheist and champion of consensus science on the one hand, but a pluralist about reasonableness in that I think different criteria warrant as reasonable our judgments about scientific, legal, aesthetic, moral, ethical, political, even more circumscribed professional questions. <br /><br />Sometimes I sympathize more with the arguments of religious folks (of whom I am not one) against atheists (of whom I am one) who want to be too imperializing about reducing all endeavor and value into terms they fancy to be properly scientific -- a project that seems to me to have nothing to do with science (let alone atheism), properly so-called.<br /><br />While I don't believe in God I do follow a path of perverse private perfections exploring and appreciating the delights of the world or the pursuit of my own thoughts in ways that are far from entirely justified by the terms that justify and warrant (and rightly so) our beliefs in respect to consensus science where matters of prediction and control are concerned. A reasonable person is not only capacitated but capacious, and this is all good.<br /><br />When a materialist declares a pragmatist to be relativist you can be sure he is revealing that his is a fundamentalist rather than properly scientific materialism. When a naturalist declares pluralism supernatural you can be sure he is revealing that his science has been commandeered by a reductionist project that has nothing to do with science properly so-called.<br /><br />On the other hand, I do wish that those who complain about materialism or naturalism or science and then always freight these terms with words like "merely," "simply," "random" and so on would be much clearer that it is reductionism and scientism that they really oppose. Opposing these leaves plenty of reasonable conceptions of consensus science, materialism, naturalism cheerfully intact -- and it provides nothing to reassure one's faith in a creator-god or guardian angel or eternal life or superhuman judge punishing the wicked and rewarding the well-meaning in life as too rarely happens, demoralizingly enough, here on earth.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-73513626669359976962010-06-13T10:29:13.208-07:002010-06-13T10:29:13.208-07:00> to be reduced to the terms of the already-leg...> to be reduced to the terms of the already-legible is<br />> to be rendered an object and not a peer. . .<br /><br />http://abstrusegoose.com/275<br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism<br /><br />;-><br /><br />"According to scientific materialism, the parts are more important than the<br />whole -- to the degree that sometimes the whole seems to be a lot less than<br />the sum of its parts. The end result is what the late British neurophysicist<br />Donald MacKay liked to call the “nothing buttery” syndrome, the<br />attempt to explain every fact of human existence as “nothing but” some<br />nonrational material process -- as in, “Our enjoyment of symphonies is<br />nothing but the conversion of mechanical energy into electrical signals by<br />the cells in our inner ear,” or “Morality . . . is merely [i.e., ‘nothing but’] an<br />adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends,” or “your joys<br />and your sorrows . . . your sense of personality and free will, are in fact no<br />more than [i.e., ‘nothing but’] the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells<br />and their associated molecules.” Even the realms of mind and spirit cannot<br />escape from the reductionists’ onslaught, because in their view “matter<br />is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just<br />[i.e., ‘nothing but’] words that express the wondrous results of neuronal<br />complexity.”<br /><br />-- "Nothing Buttery from Atomism to the Enlightenment"<br />http://www.isi.org/books/content/422chap1.pdf<br /><br />See also C. S. Lewis's essay "Meditation in a Toolshed"<br />http://www.calvin.edu/~pribeiro/DCM-Lewis-2009/Lewis/meditation-in-a-toolshed.pdfjimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-50161075895273582532010-06-13T10:15:56.617-07:002010-06-13T10:15:56.617-07:00> [T]hey are either impatiently misunderstandin...> [T]hey are either impatiently misunderstanding or dishonestly<br />> circumventing -- rather than "refuting". . . through a stubborn<br />> clinging to the customary definitions of truth and illusion it is<br />> [one's] whole point to trouble. . .<br /><br />Ain't it the truth! ;->jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-56596260732692529212010-06-13T10:06:44.067-07:002010-06-13T10:06:44.067-07:00When I said that those who dismissed as self-refer...When I said that those who dismissed as self-referential incoherence Nietzsche's "truth and illusion" declaration were indulging in a parlor trick, my point is that they are either impatiently misunderstanding or dishonestly circumventing -- rather than "refuting" -- Nietzsche through a stubborn clinging to the customary definitions of truth and illusion it is Nietzsche's whole point to trouble in the passage. <br /><br />If some illusions under Nietzsche's perspectivism can be good in the way of belief then it will not be a distinction between truth and illusion premised on Platonic essentialism or naive correspondence that facilitates our reasonable or warranted beliefs in the matter. That is to say, when mobile metaphors replace word-world correspondence, when occasion replaces certainty it no longer makes much sense to declare as forceful a truth-illusion distinction in the way those asserting the formulation to be self-refuting are doing. <br /><br />What they are really saying is something like, "Nietzsche is using the words truth and illusion in uncustomary ways." Thus rephrased, their objection not only no longer seems a stunning refutation but seems instead to name the obvious in the clumsiest most clueless manner imaginable. Of course, Nietzsche depends on an awareness of both the customary and noncustomary usages and the play between them for the force of his point.<br /><br />Hence, the "parlor trick distraction for undergraduate theory-head pricks" comment. I am far from saying that self-referential incoherence is always a useless parlor trick. Indeed, scouting for logical, topical, tropological incoherences butters your bread if you are in the business -- as I am -- of textual close reading!Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-68661776712783887362010-06-13T08:29:35.014-07:002010-06-13T08:29:35.014-07:00> what has always seemed to me most promising i...> what has always seemed to me most promising in [Nietzsche's] formulation<br />> is his insistence that this is in army in motion.<br /><br />W. V. O. Quine:<br /><br />"There is no absolutely certain starting point<br />that can be the foundation for our philosophical<br />edifice. Nor is there any point of view from where<br />we can see it all from outside: we are thrown<br />into a kind of existence that we must seek to<br />understand without stepping out of it. 'There is<br />no vantage point, no first philosophy,' Quine said.<br />He therefore picked as his motto for his main work<br />of _Word and Object_ the following quotation from<br />Otto Neurath: 'We are like seafarers, who must<br />rebuild their ship in open sea, without being able<br />to take it apart in a dock and build it up of its<br />best constituents from the bottom up.'"<br />http://www.wvquine.org/wvq-obit.htmljimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-45864978268521252952010-06-13T08:28:13.484-07:002010-06-13T08:28:13.484-07:00(interlocutor)
No urgency, but learning your refut...(interlocutor)<br />No urgency, but learning your refutation to it. . .<br /><br />(me)<br />Well, who am I to "refute" it? ;-><br /><br />My reaction is more or less as follows. For Lewis,<br />this line of argument is simply a way to keep God in the<br />picture. For Haldane (and Darwin himself, it seems),<br />their reservations might simply be accounted for by the fact<br />that taking Naturalism seriously forces one to<br />adapt to a huge intellectual discontinuity,<br />especially for somebody brought up in an older<br />religious tradition.<br /><br />My take is that just being able to seriously<br />entertain the possibility of materialism<br />(Napoleon: "How is it that, although you say so<br />much about the Universe, you say nothing<br />about its Creator?" Laplace: "Sire, I had no need of that<br />hypothesis") is something quite new and strange<br />and disquieting in the human intellectual<br />sphere (God, the gods, angels and devils, spirits and souls, etc.<br />are an old, familiar, comfortable story) and my inclination<br />is to give it a chance and see how far the best minds can run with<br />it. I am no evolutionary epistemologist, but I do not<br />outright reject as nonsense the notion that variation --<br />randomness -- followed by selection, can act as a "probe"<br />to extract and store information about the world.<br />The randomness isn't complete chaos -- it's highly<br />constrained by all the selection that came before.<br />The continuing variation occurs "on top", or<br />"at the edge", or "at the margin" of the structure<br />that's already been created over aeons (or over a<br />lifetime). There are lots of books out there about<br />evolution, and as for how an analogous process might<br />account for intelligence, you can read Gerald Edelman<br />or Jean-Pierre Changeux, or Henry Plotkin (on<br />evolutionary epistemology).jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-91237398432170651332010-06-13T08:28:13.485-07:002010-06-13T08:28:13.485-07:00Also
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pe02phl...Also<br /><br />http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pe02phls.html<br /><br />Problems of materialism include:<br /><br />1. Self-refuting<br />Materialism is self-refuting. As leading Darwinist<br />mathematician-biologist J.B.S. Haldane realised, "If my <br />mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of<br />atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my <br />beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for<br />supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." (Haldane, 1927, <br />p.209; Lewis, 1947, pp.18-19; Moreland, 1987, p.78ff).<br />That is, materialism applied to the mind undermines the validity <br />of all reasoning, including one's own, since if our theories<br />are the products of chemical reactions, how can we <br />know whether they are true? (Johnson, 1997a, p.82). Darwin<br />himself expressed his "horrid doubt" that the <br />reasoning of a mind that was the result of chance could<br />not be trusted upon (Darwin, 1898, p.285). Thus <br />materialistic science destroys its own base, since scientists<br />must be able to trust the conclusions of their <br />reasoning, but if man's mind was evolved wholly by natural<br />selection for survival value, then all scientific <br />theories, including evolution, would be untrustworthy<br />(Lack, 1957, p.104; Plantinga, 2000; Johnson, 1995b, p.65; <br />Sire, 1988, p.94; Wilcox, 1990, pp.2:20-21). Materialists<br />must therefore implicitly exempt themselves from <br />materialism in order to make their arguments for materialism<br />(Pearcey, 2000b)! But as Plato long ago pointed <br />out, a theory is always wrong which, at its very root,<br />invalidates itself (Grene, 1959, p.56).<br /><br />http://www.benbest.com/philo/freewill.html<br /><br />Popper says that "the decisive argument for indeterminism is<br />the existence of rational knowledge itself." This, of course,<br />would be "scientific" indeterminism, proven by the "scientific evidence"<br />of the existence of knowledge. He quotes J.B.S. Haldane,<br />who wrote, "I am not myself a materialist because if materialism<br />is true, it seems to me that we cannot know that it is true.<br />If my opinions are the result of the chemical processes<br />going on in my brain, they are determined by the laws of chemistry,<br />not those of logic." Popper identifies materialism with<br />determinism, but both he and Haldane seem to accept this<br />argument as a self-evident truth, which I would paraphrase<br />"I know I have knowledge, therefore I know I am not determined."<br />Descartes would be proud.<br /><br />Lewis's version of the argument is described at:<br /><br />http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/cslphilos/CSLnat.htm<br />C. S. Lewis's Case Against Naturalism<br /><br />There are various (all biased, one way or another, no<br />doubt) accounts of the famous debate between Lewis<br />and Elizabeth Anscombe (herself a Catholic) on this<br />topic. Some people have suggested that Lewis "lost"<br />the debate and was terribly demoralized thereby;<br />others claim that Anscombe merely suggested modifications<br />to Lewis's argument. Who knows what really happened?jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-36985081918202925582010-06-13T08:27:49.175-07:002010-06-13T08:27:49.175-07:00> Nietzsche famously said of truth that it is
...> Nietzsche famously said of truth that it is <br />><br />> > A mobile army of metaphors. . . which after long use seem firm,<br />> > canonical, and obligatory. . . illusions about which one has forgotten<br />> > that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out. . .<br />><br />> Richard Rorty once chided this statement as apparently self-refuting.<br />> Does Nietzsche mean for his own utterance to be taken as a truth or as<br />> an illusion, after all? . . . the concern was always mostly a<br />> parlor trick distraction for undergraduate theory-head pricks. . .<br /><br />It may be a parlor trick, but something similar (the accusation of "self-refutation"<br />aimed at an argument purporting to explain the nature of truth) comes up<br />over and over again. E.g. (from an exchange in my e-mail archive):<br /><br />(me)<br />One of our unresolved arguments [i.e., between<br />N.L. and me] was the one put forth by<br />[C. S.] Lewis and others against Naturalism --<br />i.e., if my thoughts are simply the end-product<br />of random collisions of inert matter [a caricature<br />of evolution -- the randomness is at the **margin**,<br />but let that pass ;-> ], then why should I believe<br />them to be true? Ergo, Naturalism is self-refuting.<br />I thought that argument was begging the question<br />(i.e., of whether a "dead" universe can give rise<br />to life and intelligence via evolution) by asserting<br />the negative by a simple appeal to prejudice,<br />and I still think so.<br /><br />(interlocutor)<br />Oddly, I take seriously that C.S. Lewis position,<br />though I associate it with JBS Haldane, no foe of<br />naturalism.<br /><br />(me)<br />Well, well. I never realized that Haldane had<br />made this argument, and I'm a little shocked to learn<br />that he did. But it does indeed seem to<br />be attributed to him in several Web articles,<br />and in fact it seems that Lewis actually quoted<br />Haldane approvingly in _Miracles_ (how could<br />I have missed that? ;-> ):<br /><br />http://www.geocities.com/worldview_3/naturalism.html<br />C.S.Lewis quotes Prof. Haldane as saying, "If my mental<br />processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms<br />in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my<br />beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for<br />supposing my brain to be composed of atoms" ("Miracles", p.18).jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.com