The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is 3.14…
The rationalist proposes that the “…” is there because there is something wrong with the world. The empiricist proposes that the “…” is there because there is something wrong with mathematics. If there is something wrong with the world, we are in trouble. If there is something wrong with mathematics, we are in trouble. Either way we are in trouble. Kneel and pray; your trouble will not change. Sit and drink; your trouble will not change. Go and do; your trouble will not change, but that is the only truth you’ve got. And, at least you’ll be doing something.
Dedicated to the Game
Climbing and other disturbing things.
Category Archives: philosophy
Looks Like Warhol Was Wrong
So was Nietzsche. We achieved the egalitarian culture envisioned in Warhol’s prediction of 15 minutes of fame for all, but the result was not a new richness of expression or exploration. Nor did we go under, though we have realized the veneration of the Last Man which Zarathustra foretold. Instead, we leapt right over our potential into an unanticipated and more horrible age – the age of the Spectacular Idiot.
The original idiots, to whom the Greek root-word referred, were ordinary rabble, lacking in the judgment which comes with mastering a skill. The English derivation means incapable of rational conduct. Our current iteration has boosted the concept to a new level by replacing the ‘incapable’ with ‘self-consciously dismissive’. Representation is everything. Our idiots are nothing if not democratic, exalted by, of and for the rabble and its discomforts.
The Idiots of this age are driven and sustained by discomfort born of psychic vacuum. Ideas are not ideas for our Idiots; ideas are badges to adorn the clothing which cloaks scarecrow personalities. If one has no sense of efficacy, criticism or modification of one’s adornments is then a disconcerting, existential threat. Alertness, capability in the face of changing circumstance, and the ability to appreciate the immediate cannot be a source of self-worth for stuffed clothing on a stick. None of Warhol’s bubbling, creative ferment for these folks.
When he contemplated the consequences of mass communication and global culture, Warhol missed the possibility of Idiot ascendency because he was an artist. Though not noted for a consistent ability to overcome their own insecurities, artists must at least accept the inevitability of insecurity to do what they do.
Nietzsche recognized the weakness which led to the Age of the Spectacular Idiot, but missed its positive symptoms. He saw the timidity but not the fear.
…Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he who is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man…Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.
Little did he know, the last men would not simply sip their poison in silent relief if it were placed at the bedside. They would drain the cup and screech for more, even pushing some of their number forward to fetch it. The last men of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Eurasia and North America have stood up such cup-bearers for themselves and for everyone.
Sadly, the political right has bred these fellows. It is no accident, for circulating in the conservative vital essence is an element of comforting authoritarianism, the extract of which makes the best soporific toxin. The process is sad because the necessary juices must be boiled off the base solution of sobriety and caution which makes the conservative indispensable, destroying all healthy self-despite in the distillation.
What remains is the Spectacular Idiot, who not only bears the cup, but also supplies the juice for the last men. The words of the bearers do not matter, nor does the content of their ideas. What matters is the rhythm of the sounds, the smell of the thought, the fit of the jacket and the sparkle of its badges. Spectacle, upstanding and forthright, dulls the pangs which come of the last men’s impoverished experiential diet. Idiocy eases the last men’s insecurity, displacing it with denser righteousness. There is only one cure. Somehow, the last men must have their capacity for self-despite restored, so they can clear their stuffing. They need a purgative to make room for some personal integrity. The question is: How to accomplish a rehabilitation at this late hour without being poisoned as well?
Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary…
This post is in response to Kevin Moore’s posts about physicalism, evolution and consciousness at “The Placebic View”. I want to start by saying that I admire Kevin’s interest in philosophical positions to which he does not subscribe. Earnest examination of positions other than one’s own helps a person improve their own ideas and appreciate other people a little more. Here is some more grist for the mill.
This is my take on physicalism. I think it is not controversial to say that physicalist philosophy is a work in progress. There are a number of competing branches and sub-theories. For good or ill, I’ll only speak for myself and my non-professional understanding of the issues at hand.
1) It seems as if some things are up to me. For example, when I am deliberating over whether to, say, raise my hand or not, it seems as if I am in control over whether I actually endeavor to raise my hand. It does not seem to me as if such endeavorings are determined. Admittedly, such seemings do not entail the falsity of determinism, like seemings of pain entail the occurrence of pain. And, this means that if one were to infer the falsity of determinism solely on the basis of such seemings they would be going beyond their evidence and could very well be wrong. But, that doesn’t matter, here. All that matters for the success of this argument are the presence of such seemings; their veracity can be presently be ignored.
I’m not sure exactly what Kevin is getting at here. He is either talking about intentionality or the subjective quality of movement. I think it is the latter, and that is what I’ll address below.
Intentionality poses little difficulty for physicalism. What ever else intention is, it requires subjects and objects which are, or can be reduced to, entities having relative location and causal relations. Intention does not exist without such subjects and objects. Even when we think about love or a five-dimensional cube, we derive our ideas of these things from experience writ large, including the way in which we are predisposed at birth to feel about our parents and, with the proper exposure, perceive depth. No, intentionality is not the hard part, subjectivity is, and I think that is what Kevin is after here.
2) The naturalist worldview rests on the foundation of two seemingly indispensable pillars: Darwinian evolution (or something near enough) and physicalism. In brief, the theory of Darwinian evolution is suppose to be able to tell us why biological life is the way that it is and the physicalist theory is suppose to be able to tell us why everything is the way that it is. Without the support of both of these pillars, the naturalist worldview is hardly a worldview at all.
If physicalist theory is supposed to tell us why everything is the way it is and Darwinian evolution is supposed to be able to tell us why biological life is the way it is, then physicalist theory does not depend on Darwinian evolution and if physicalism undergirds a naturalist worldview, then neither does a naturalist worldview. Moving on.
3) Now, according to physicalism, everything must be explainable from the bottom-up. In other words, theoretically, once you’ve explained all of the physics for some event, there will be no remainder. Therefore, since our seemings are not identical to any physical states, whatever our seemings are, they must result from some underlying physical states and be epiphenomenal or causally inert. So, according to physicalism, there is no top-down causation where agents really choose anything. And, any seemings to the contrary isn’t to be trusted.
Now we get to the good parts. First, let us be clear on what constitutes an epiphenomenon. An epiphenomenon is one which occurs secondary to a primary phenomenon, a phenomenon which is caused, but causes not.
But this definition is unsatisfying. It simply instructs us in spotting epiphenomena and says nothing about their hows and whys. So how do epiphenomena arise and what are the relations which they have to regular, causal phenomena? Here are a couple of examples which demonstrate what I think those mechanisms and relations are.
First, consider that quintessential epiphenomenon: fever. Before medical science knew the details of the inflammatory response, fever was thought to cause illness. It was thought to be part of the pathological process. It turns out that fever is no such thing. Fever is a byproduct, the elevation of body temperature secondary to a particular biochemical process. So, fever is causally inert. Or is it? On an analytic basis, it is causally inert. Any ‘rules of fever’, for example ‘fever follows from infection’, are inaccurate and properly devolve to the rules of the primary process, which is the biochemistry of inflammation. But sometimes, the elevation of body temperature associated with inflammation inhibits bacterial and viral replication. Fever does something. What is going on here?
These are not the same fever. The fever which inhibits bacterial and viral replication does not give rise to rules nor does it itself participate in law-like relationships; the biochemistry of inflammation takes care of those things. But the biochemistry of inflammation does not, by its rules and law-like relationships, specify the causal relationship between elevation of body temperature and inhibition of bacterial and viral replication. If we started from the primary, biochemical phenomena we might never know about that causal relationship in particular. That’s fever’s job.
To clarify further, consider Hepatitis C. I don’t want to imply that the Hepatitis C virus is an epiphenomenon, ’cause it’s a virus. But the relationship that it might have held relative to the disease Hepatitis C by a certain theory of the disease, is an instructive analogy for the relationship which epipenomena have to their primary phenomena. Once upon a time, many scientists suspected that the Hepatitis C virus did not actually damage the cells in which it replicated. This turns out not quite to be the case, but it was a serious possibility, and let’s pretend for a moment that the theory was accurate. On an analytic basis, the Hep. C virus would be a non-entity. We could substitute “X provocative factor for inflammation” with no theoretical consequences. But Hep. C virus is precisely that provocative factor for those individuals infected with it, and in those cases the replicative habits and specific structure of the virus determine, in part, the natural history of the disease though the virus does not cause any of the pathology.
So, do fever and the non-cytopathic version of the Hep. C virus have causal efficacy? Are fever and Hepatitis C real things? Yes and no. Yes in the individual cases and no as generalities. Or rather, they pick out some real category of historical relations even though the theoretical causal analysis associated with fever and non-cytopathic Hep. C virus may ignore them. Inverting our perspective, cytokines, helper T-cells, etc. may tell us why John may have an elevation of his temperature – such explanations account for fever and even eliminate the need for the term in analysis – but the biochemical explanation of temperature elevation due to inflammation in response to viral infections cannot tell us all about why John has this temperature elevation due to inflammation. “John has a fever.” fills in the gap between the theory and the case, as the statement stands for the specific history of the virus, John’s genetics, his previous illnesses, his nutritional status; in short, all the messy data without which an account of John’s fever on November 10, 1999 at 10 AM via the theory of the primary phenomenon is impossible.
With this understanding of epiphenomena in hand, is physicalism committed to epiphenomenal consciousness? Yes and no, I think. Your patience please, for one more example.
There is a well known thought experiment proposed by the philosopher Frank Jackson called “Mary the Color Scientist”. In the thought experiment, Mary has been confined to a room without any color at all for her entire life. During her time in the colorless room, she has become obsessed with the neurophysiology of color perception and has managed to learn everything there is to know about the perception of the color red. One day, she is released from the room and thus confronted with all the colors of the outside world, including her first actual red perception. Does she say, “Wow!” or does she say, “Meh”? Does she gain any new knowledge via that perception?
Before we get to the final question, there is another question within the scenario. It has as a premise that physicalism requires, in principle, that Mary could know everything about red perception. For her knowledge to be complete, however, she must know much more than the neurophysical rules of red color perception. She must know all there is to know about the history leading up to her particular red perception. If physicalism’s view of events is assumed to be the case, all this knowing must happen in time and there is simply not enough, in principle.
“Sophistry!”, one may object, “She doesn’t have to know all that, just what makes for red perception right now, as she is first seeing red.”
Remember that little issue that Kevin mentioned in passing at the start: determinism? On physical determinism, all that is what constitutes red perception right now. An analytic theory of red, ‘averaged over’ red, however detailed, will not do. We want to know if there is a difference between knowing the reductive explanation of red and the perceptual experience of the same thing. To meet that requirement Mary must know the theory and the associated history which gives the theory its application. In such a case, Mary’s impression of red, as a thing in itself, stands for this otherwise inaccessible detail and so is a real thing just like fever – as a necessary part of the explanation of each case, and so as historical category as well. If the understanding of epiphenomena regarding fever and Hepatitis C extends to subjective experience, then even an epiphenomenal status for our seemings may be explicable in a physicalist framework, and avoid concerns of irrelevancy in the same ways.
However, I don’t think that our consciousness and its subjectivity are epiphenomenal because I don’t think our impressions are primary phenomena. Since we are playing pretend, let’s ignore physical determination and its implications, however improper that may be, and say Mary just does have the reductive explanation of exactly that red experience which is her first. I think she still says, “Wow!”. I think she gains the efficacious knowledge of red + Mary’s recourse to red references, or if we were to ask her, how red works. Red becomes an object of direct reference, where it was previously an object of reflection only. In fact, I think this is the basis of intention and awareness. Red’s ‘seeming’ on Mary’s first perception of it is Mary’s pre-red identity plus the actual, red sense-data compared to Mary’s pre-red identity including, most importantly, pre-red Mary’s expectation of post-red identity. Before her red perception, when Mary perceived an apple, she would first have to see the apple shape, depth to the shape, a stem, all of which brings “apple” to mind, and then reflect that the apple is also red. Her complete knowledge could not change that operational arrangement for her. After her red perception, red becomes available for Mary’s apple anticipations, and so her apple identifications directly, and subsequent apple viewings will give her an idea of ‘red like that apple’, and so on for the rest of her conscious life. I think this is a good description of what her basic conscious life is, if we want to distinguish it from unconscious processes like pupillary reactions to light. Without the momentary, non-reflective, anticipation-based integration of these alterations of identity, we have the zombies which are feared to plague physicalist explanations of mind – creatures with unmediated, locally contingent stimulus-response as their sole operational process. What the evolutionary consequences of such a distinction may be, I won’t guess, but the possibility of consequences addresses the concerns regarding potential invisibility to selection (misplaced though they are).
Dear Texas A.G.,
I listened to your statement regarding the voter I.D. lawsuit today with a great sense of nostalgia. You see, I grew up in the South. I know the code. I was a soft-spoken, clean-cut kid and so people let me in on it without thinking twice. You might say racists educated me.
I was learning when they said things about what you should reasonably expect of someone, about what was only fair, and how certain people just were.
I was learning when the guy on our work crew vetoed a job applicant because, “I don’t want to ride around in the truck with one of them, the way they smell.”
When our church’s choir director turned to my father and said, “Isn’t that just like a nigger?”, after my friend in the heavyweight division got pinned and lost the tournament: another lesson.
I learned that some people just weren’t like us white folks. Some people didn’t deserve the same consideration. My instructors taught me to look down on people based on affiliations, manners of speech and origins. I got it, but not like they thought I would. You see, my teachers succeeded; I just came to feel that way about them.
The thing is, I wasn’t raised to bite my tongue like the black kids with whom I went to school and worked. By the time I had to do it to get by, the thing had already grown nerves. It galled me, and I guess I took it personally.
So, don’t blame me when I say this, blame my teachers – your ideological predecessors. When I hear some pig-fucking, redneck, piece of shit start talking Reasonable Racism – the code – I just get blind mad. I hate. So piss off. And if you decide not to piss off, as my teachers would say, “Don’t come ’round here, boy.”
Determinism and the Demon Experience -or- If You Say Free Will One More Time, I Won’t Be Held Responsible for What Happens Next
Well, after long deliberation, I finally did it. I sold my soul. It turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated, the thing put up – a struggle? I can’t call it a fight; it was more like an argument. It claimed it was a special substance and the only example of that substance which I’d ever hope to possess. When I told it that the fact just strengthened my position with the buyer, it began to claim it was an indispensable consequence of my existence and would carry on representing my self for all eternity if only I didn’t cut it loose. I’m not sure how that was supposed to motivate me in one direction or another, but it reminded me that my soul was putting up an argument because it couldn’t put up a fight. It couldn’t do anything, unless you call standing around acting as a rationalization for teleology doing something. It had me for a while, but it was just stalling. In the end, it needed me much more than I needed it. I could have kept it around for old times’ sake, but I guess I’m not that sentimental. Besides, even though what I could get for my soul couldn’t do anything more than the soul could, it turns out the demon whose consultation I purchased helps me keep me in perspective much better than the soul could. In retrospect, my soul was all about me, a bit of a selfish bastard, and I’m kind of glad to be rid of it, period.
Anyone who knows me, knows the demon to whom I refer: Laplace’s Demon. He is the perfect calculator, brought to life by an Ontological argument just like God:
P1) Numbers necessarily represent identity; the law-based relationships between numbers represent causation.
P2) It is possible for the relationships between numbers to be calculated (causation exists).
1) A complete representation and calculation of all causes over all time is conceivable.
2) There is some possible world in which a complete calculation has occurred.
3) If a complete calculation has occurred in one possible world, it encompassed conditions in all possible worlds.
4) A complete calculation has occurred for this world.
5) A calculation demands a calculator.
6) A universal calculator exists.
Some would say the demon is an aspect of God; it is certainly just as inscrutable. Anyway, the demon itself says there isn’t any difference. Why the demon might trade something for my soul remains a mystery, though I have my pet theory about its motive. I’m not even sure that what it has given me in exchange actually is anything. It can’t cause anything to happen anymore than my soul could.
What I got was a little voice in my head. I’m pretty sure it is different from the other voices which generate my internal dialog. The demon says it is. The demon says a lot of things, but as I’ve noted most of them are of little significance and none are of any consequence.
One of its favorites is, “If you could only look at this from an atemporal viewpoint…”. Whatever follows is moot. A viewpoint removed from time is, of course, its viewpoint. If its calculations occurred in context, it would still be calculating and would have gotten to just exactly this point by now. It could hardly be said to exist as an identifiable thing were that the case, even a proto-consciousness (a proto-proto-consciousness maybe?). No, it doesn’t mind time. That’s the problem, because since it doesn’t mind time it can’t convey any real information.
For example, here’s a conversation we had repeatedly early in our relationship: “What’s going to happen to me tomorrow?” I’d ask.
“It’s complicated,” it would reply.
“How complicated?” I’d persist.
“You don’t have the time.” it would answer.
I’ve found that I cannot ask it any questions about the future; they are just too confusing. If I ask it, for example, “Will I like this carnival ride?” it can give me a theoretical answer, based on the me of the current moment’s appreciation of what it knows will occur on the ride. But it can also give an instantaneous answer, to the me which experiences the ride and at once experiences the resolution of his expectations of the experience. Finally, it can answer the question for the me who will have completed the ride and has integrated the experience into the narrative of all his other experiences. We went round and round about these sorts of questions, but in the end I had to acknowledge that it was right; when I ask it, “Will I..?” it can’t know to whom the hell it should address the answer, and neither can I. Retrospective questions have proven more satisfying.
Questions about what happened didn’t excite me at first. We expect to be able to sort that out ourselves. Asking an all-knowing demon about the past is just indulging one’s own laziness, I thought. I’ve found that it is much more, though, because the demon’s view of history is incredibly complex – much more complex than we could ever hope to know. To a perfect calculator, all the little details matter. For example, when we look at a hydrogen atom, we see something pretty generic. We can’t tell one from another and why should we? To the demon, each one of those hydrogen atoms is there, now in a way that makes it (and its constituents) distinguishable from every other identifiable thing. That’s about as close as anything can get to being a universal truth, and it lends a certain weight to the demon’s pronouncements regarding past events.
Even the answer to the question, “Why did I do that?”, expressed as it is in the stock phrase, “It’s complicated.”, means something more. I always thought I had my reasons for the choices I made. I now have confirmation, not just for the choices which I can readily explain, but for the choices I make just because I feel like it. “Because I feel like it” is as much a gross approximation as the demon’s, “it’s complicated”, but just as true. My whim may not be a reason I pick the dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate in the same way that the dark chocolate’s higher phenol content is a reason for my choice. However, my whim contains such a reason, and in a unique, specific sense. My whim isn’t whimsical as much as it is complicated. My having it as a whim rather than as the demon’s analysis is why I can do something with it while the demon can’t.
I’ve found the demon’s gift of confirmation quite comforting. Everybody has this intuition that something causes decisions, for others as well as for themselves. It is at the core of our Theory of Mind – the notion that other people have their own whims and are not just zombies acting out a complex algorithm.
I’ll admit to having had doubts about my theory of mind. It should have been enough for me, as it is for most people, that I can communicate with others using natural language instead of something like binary code. The implication being that “whim”, for example, has content – all the demon’s complicated stuff – and isn’t just a representation of “emotional impulse”. Despite such logic, I always suspected that I was just projecting my ineffectual feelings onto an algorithm or acting out a psychotic delusion, with my theory of mind serving as a rationalization for discontinuous interactions. Having the demon confirm that the psychotic also had his reasons – that the basics of content remained intact even when the representations were disconnected – was a relief. My theory of mind would not crumble some day to reveal an uglier truth which it had been covering up all along.
The demon’s gift seems relatively cheap, but I don’t want to leave the impression that the gift was without complications of its own. I’ve had to accept some vulnerabilities and abandon some values which I’d prefer to deny and retain respectively. The psychotic does have his reasons, so the demon says. So does the heroin addict. In either case, the demonic complications mean that the person’s reasons may not be accessible or amenable to their consciousness in a way which we would like them to be. Worse, their intransigence may be the only essential difference between those reasons and the reasons which determine our volitions. I’d like to think that Thorazine and Methadone were not necessary. I’d like to think that volition is self-motivated, but the people who really think that are just the people who get the Thorazine prescriptions – in those cases to treat delusions of thought insertion. My motives and their volitions all have a basis, as do everyone’s, and they don’t so much determine my choices as resolve them. Sometimes, the will even requires some tangible adjuncts, like medications, to give it traction in its resolving. There is nothing about me which is truly self-contained and invulnerable.
I can accept being an open system, because I can do things. The demon can have its analysis. It’s frozen out by its status as a universal calculator. It can account for whims and hunger, but it will never have a whim or feel hungry because it cannot ever be there, now. Those identity-resolving phenomena are unnecessary for a thing outside the causal realm and inherently unavailable to it. I initially thought that the demon might have valued my soul because it was jealous of human experience and wished to possess a record of such or at least deprive another of some of that precious history. I no longer think that; the demon couldn’t know the difference. I think it saw the essential identity as a missing piece of its account, though per its method, the account was indeed complete. Judgments like the one I laid on the demon are a human by-product, and they are the last casualties of my association with the demon.
To have a qualitative experience is to be defined by it. Since it contains all the complicated stuff which the demon can’t explain to me (within my constraints), subjectivity is a powerful token in my resolutions. I can tell that my current hunger is like the hunger I have when I’m peckish, rather than the hunger I have when I’m starving. So, as an example of the efficacy of subjective qualities, I won’t try to chase the hyenas away from the food this time. But I can know what it’s like to have my hunger satisfied – to be ‘full’ – as well. That too is a powerful token. I find being full from eating a bowl of donuts to have a quality distinguishable from the quality of being full from eating a bowl of oatmeal. The distinction affects my resolutions as powerfully as the distinction between peckishness and starving hunger. Don’t get me wrong. What I’ve learned from the demon is not that we are automatons moving to the tick of our impressions, just that as creatures occurring in time, we have our limits and live and die by our history – it’s the cost of participation. However, I have therefore had to admit that the romantic and horrific world of tradition is a mistake. We are not heroes or villains, playing out our self-contained natures in some epic, teleological struggle. The demon is not jealous of my soul. Sure, such a model is shiny, well-defined, and action-packed, but it is mistaken. The simplistic evaluations of the traditional model ( the purpose-built, unitary self) don’t represent us well. We are – complicated.
To recap: I needn’t fear zombies or determinism; analysis may be accurate without being completely adequate; qualia have relevant content; identity accrues and so fixed evaluations are invalid. These are the things I have gained and lost by selling my soul to the perfect calculator. I still feel it was a decent bargain.
Jesus Christ: Error Theorist
A moral error theory is one form of moral anti-realism; it combines cognitivism with a failure theory, the belief that moral claims, despite their being truth-valued, are none of them true – Richard Garner
Two questions have always puzzled me: How and why was Jesus born? I don’t mean birthed by Mary, I think I understand how that happened (at least the last bit). I mean divided from the father. Something must have prompted this ultimate schizoid break; Jesus is clearly depicted as the son of god, and physically or metaphorically, the single defining characteristic of a child relative to a parent is coming after. The impetus had to come from outside of the father, as events, such as procreation, must occur in time and not strictly within the timeless deity. It is impossible to be sure, but I believe I may finally have the solution to this mystery. I believe Jesus was born of god in response to a human error concerning morality. Jesus was then born to woman to correct that error – man’s moral realism.
Morality was subjective from the start in the Christian narrative. I don’t see how god could coexist with objective moral entities. When we speak of objective moral terms, we do so in terms of obligations, whether those are obligations to carry out certain moral acts or to bring about certain morally right conditions. In other words, “good” and “evil” are real entities and morality is the set of conformist obligations which the existence of good and evil entails. I don’t see how god could be beholden to something external, if he is eternal and universal. Even if we say he created these principles, I don’t see how he could be obligated to them. As humans, our creations may demand things of us, but they do so on the basis of our identifying limitations and the relations which those limits entail. For instance, I’m obligated to be a good parent by, at minimum, the history I share with my children, my parents, my culture and my species. Good parenting is something I can learn about, and something for which I am responsible only after I have children, even if I have some nascent moral sense demanding that I be a good parent. The obligation is circumstantial. An eternal, universal entity can have no such obligatory relationships. There is no venue in which to have them. There can be no history of an eternal, universal god; he is it.
If we want to preserve objective moral terms then, we must place them within the deity. But now the situation is indistinguishable from moral subjectivity, with god being the singular subject of moral terms. By moral subjectivity, I mean the situation in which moral terms operate only in reference to a subject. To use J. L. Mackie’s language, moral terms operate “within the institution” of a subject’s identity, “such as to satisfy the requirements (etc.) of the kind in question”. In the light of moral subjectivity (with god as the singular subject), the biblical narrative begins to come together in a more coherent fashion, beginning with the Fall.
The tree had to be, if it represented the differentiation between what is, for the created, and what may be “within the institution” of god. When Adam and Eve ate the tree’s fruit, they did not learn the details of good and evil things which had surrounded them in the garden all along. They learned of the possibility of distinction, deficiency and failure. They were exposed to their own inadequacies, and were thereby exiled. The remainder of the old testament can be seen as a divine project of re-education, and a human project of reconciliation, aimed at herding the descendants of the first couple into the institution of man which apple-eating had created.
The initial formula had two elements: external focus (obedience) and right action (rules). The institution was defined. Even in the remedial program, god was pushing his followers toward an understanding of moral subjectivity. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, for instance, Isaac was spared from sacrifice. The lesson was obedience in principle, not simply reconciliation with good through right acts. If it were the latter, Isaac should have died. Instead, god delivers the message that sacrifices and the right actions which they represent will not avail Abraham, only devotion will. In taking his son off the alter, Abraham relinquished any hope of goodness through right actions, of conformity to an objective set of obligations to goodness. He began to act according to the requirements of personhood, fulfilling the requirements of personhood rather than those of the singular subject, albeit under direct supervision.
Despite all the talk of rules and obedience, the primary lesson of the rules-and-obedience program was that of devotion. Devotion focused the mind on one’s own business – the propriety of one’s own relationships and actions relative to those relationships. That was the point, and one which needed making before people could make the next step toward reconciliation. However, a project based on rules and obedience is easily corrupted. Rules invite arbiters and before you know it, a food chain of authority develops, as it did in the biblical narrative.
In the Christian story, the food chain was a preparatory element as much as was the devotional lesson, in the rules-and-obedience regime. Jesus would have had a much harder time making his point without the Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, and all the other arbiters of duty-binding rules. The arbiters were used to represent a “do as I say, not as I do” vision of morality. This is in contrast to Jesus, who sought to lead by example. His entire project was aimed at demonstrating the principles of goodness within the institution of personhood. Here was the reason for the man/god chimera. The chimera was a means whose rationale lay in an understanding of morality as subjective, pertaining to individual subjects and their circumstances. To explain such a system, as opposed to one grounded in some objective moral terms, god couldn’t simply hand down edicts by way of instruction; he had to provide an example. But beyond bringing god’s followers around to a subjective system of morality, Jesus presented a moral error theory.
There is no “good”, there is only god. How else are we to interpret Jesus’ message of salvation through him and him alone (assuming his divine half is the one doing the saving)? When we speak of good within personhood as a ‘kind’, we actually refer to all those individual activities within their circumstances which satisfy the requirements (etc.) of, not divinity or creation, but personhood, which Jesus was supposed to exemplify. So when we make claims about ‘good’ simpliciter, none of those claims are true, as they refer to nothing in particular.
In the old days, disruption of the food chain by proposing this sort of error theory could get you killed. It still can get you killed (or at least marginalized) by the same lot who would have done the killing in the old days. For that reason alone, the story merits attention, from those who consider it allegory and from those who consider it fact, but especially from those who consider it fact. They are natural parts of the food chain and so are most at risk of being persuaded by the arbiters of morality that objective good exists. If they don’t get the message, they may be the soldiers in future pogroms, crusades and inquisitions carried out as obligations to good ends.
Is Intelligent Design Distinguishable from Creation Science?
Yes, as horse shit is distinguishable from bull shit. ID is a deductive argument from analogy and teleology. As such, it is neither valid nor scientific. Both Creation Science and ID are based in the politics of religion, a genre which degrades both politics and religion, but ID is an attempt at subterfuge whereas Creation Science is at least an honest effort to advance an agenda.
Both are like unwanted attention from a belligerent drunk, but where Creation Science is like a shove, ID is like the question, ” What are you looking at?”. As with the shove or the question, one response is in order.
Blip! Intelligent Design Is Done Before It Gets Going…
I’m republishing this because I think it bears repeating in light of the ongoing activities of intelligent design advocates, and because I realized that I was wrong about something right at the beginning. The core errors in ID do power the evolution-bashing arm of creationism. I’ve noticed that the error of de-contextualization which characterizes the positive argument for ID forms the core of many people’s arguments against evolution. Obviously, I think that this is no accident. To many creationists, evolution is one rationalizing story among many. This would be true, provided one considered the theory of evolution out of historical context. But remember, the hypothesis was derived from observations of biological variation across environments. Then came the archeological evidence predicted, and later the genetic evidence predicted. That historical evolution is the difference between all proper scientific theories and mere rationalizing stories. So, one more time – I swore I wouldn’t get into this anymore. The intelligent design crowd keeps pushing this crap, though, and I have kids who are at risk. Beyond that, I suppose intelligent design’s sort of dishonesty just galls me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I am about to give an argument by analogy. I do so with trepidation, because analogies are always in danger of going off in the wrong direction and have no deductive validity in the first place. However, I think this form is the only fair tool for the subject since I’m going to use this argument by analogy to critique another argument by analogy: intelligent design (ID). Rather, I’m going to critique the positive arm of the intelligent design argument. This is the withered limb compared to the evolution-bashing arm, but it is necessary to the whole and the negative argument is a morass. Since scientific knowledge is never complete, critics have available to them an endless list of objections. The positive side of the ID case is more a philosophical than a scientific argument, so it can be settled on that level.
The positive ID argument is as follows: when humans start with a purpose (a problem to solve) and devise a tool to serve that purpose, the end product looks a certain way. Biological structures have a similar appearance, so biological systems must result from the same sort of process. An immediate problem arises at this point. Since proponents wish the analogy between man-made objects and biological structures to be precise the argument commits the fallacy of the undistributed middle (Designed structures look like X, Biological structures look like X, therefore Biological structures are Designed structures).
The proponents of ID subsequently introduce a number of modifiers to try to alleviate this situation. Complex specified information is not only used to portray designed and biological structures as essentially similar, it is also used to try to pare down the middle by saying it is statistically negligible. Appeals to abductive reasoning serve the same purpose, suggesting that design is so far and away the “best guess” that there’s no need to worry about the logic. There are deeper problems than the modifiers and the middle but those are the simplest things to consider, so let’s go there first. Let me tell you how I built my son a mountain bike.
The bike came in a big box in a bunch of pieces with a couple dozen pages of instructions. The instructions were complex and very specific. In fact, if you read the instructions through, you would know that a mountain bike and nothing but a mountain bike would result from following those instructions, even without actually building a bike to find out. But, I didn’t read the instructions. I know how bike parts work, so I just eyeballed the problem and figured it out. So, even though the Complex Specified Information (CSI) in the instructions has all the qualities that the advocates of biological CSI wish it to have, it doesn’t have the necessary relationship to the endpoint that those advocates want from it. There are multiple paths through the middle to the mountain bike. There is still a way out for ID, though. I must have picked up on the CSI contained in the parts themselves. It’s true. When I looked at the parts, they fit together in certain configurations and orders of assembly best, as I expected. My expectations were key, too. Over the years, bike designers had shaped those expectations, in effect teaching me to read the information they put in the parts so I could use my abductive reasoning to make a really good guess about how the parts should go together.
I use this “best guess” faculty all the time, because it is a great shortcut and pretty reliable in familiar circumstance. Notice I said ‘pretty reliable’. Also note that I said I didn’t use the instructions, but I didn’t say I threw them away. Sometimes the bike makers come up with an innovation and then my abductive reasoning is worthless and I have to rely on the instructions again to tell me what to do about the new part. I get in trouble if I try to rely on that ‘best guess’ shortcut in clinical medicine, too. The causal history of a manufactured bike is well-defined because people decided to make it that way. If the causal history of a patient’s symptoms is well-defined for me, it’s because I have decided so. Used outside of a situation with known prior constraints on the variables, the ‘good guess’ becomes confirmation bias. So, the problem is with the complex specified information. In biological structures, to achieve ‘specification’ and thus make the ‘best guess’ inference to design, the causal history has to be constrained after the fact. Anything less leaves open those pesky intermediate paths through the middle. ID imposes that constraint by assigning purpose to all biological structures it considers. Assigning purpose is easy for us humans and we like to do it because it lets us use shortcuts like guessing. Attributions of purpose (intent) are so appealing that we have trouble keeping them in the realm of human behavior where they belong (and not even there without some confirmatory process to check the attributions). Who hasn’t said their car “worked hard” to get up a steep hill? It’s just as easy to say that E. coli intends to swim to new food sources with its flagellum. In fact, it takes just that sort of presumption of intent to wrangle an object’s causal history into CSI, resulting in a bit of a Cartesian circle (if the flagellum is made for swimming, then it has a complex history treading a narrow path to that endpoint, which shows that the flagellum was made for swimming). Still, we should be able to safely use this attribution of intent after the fact in limited circumstances, as long as we’re careful, right? For instance, it is surely accurate to say that the guys who designed my son’s bike did so from an original purpose. However, even that presumption of intent from the endpoint is not accurate, and the problem with the retrospective attribution of purpose/intent in such a case leads us back to the problem with intelligent design that predates any attempt to distribute or minimize the middle.
What do we know about design? We really just know what we do and what we do requires an agent (us), a purpose, and means. The problem is that the relationship between those three factors is not linear, nor is it even hierarchical. When considering bike design, for instance, we could go back to the origin of the means via the agent and examine the influence the means then had on the agent’s intent and subsequent development of further means. We could track back to the origin of the wheel in geometry, which is in turn based on observed properties of materials, which are in turn based on some basic laws of physics, all of which humans bothered to investigate and remember in the first place because, if you are a tool-maker, it’s easier to investigate and remember than to, um, ‘reinvent the wheel’. We could trace bicycle history back to the wheel and beyond, but let’s keep it brief and just consider the design of mountain bikes.
Mountain biking started when some California bike racers moved to the country. Their new environment confronted them with the problem of riding, and of course racing, on gravel roads. Their road bikes’ narrow tires were too unstable for that purpose, so they found some preexisting cruiser bikes with wide tires that would at least be ridable on the fire roads near their homes. The cruiser bikes were not perfect. They were heavy and hard to pedal, so the riders raced them downhill. Even that compromise lead to problems though. The brakes and bearings on the cruisers couldn’t survive that kind of abuse. The riders replaced the brakes and bearings with motorcycle and road bike components. The riders soon found that the revised cruisers, now possessing cassettes of gears with the road bike bearings, were capable of riding on rough trails as well as fire roads. Trail riding prompted further modifications to the bikes. These guys in rural California invented the mountain bike, but not all at once and not out of the blue. They worked through a progressive series of problems, each leading to the next, until they arrived at a relatively stable final design that did something very different from the structure they started with. The mountain bike evolved. Of course, this is microevolution; the mountain bike is just a tweaked cruiser bike. Neither the mountain bike nor the cruiser looks anything like an old penny-farthing with the giant wheel in front. The lineage is clear though, and bike development has proceeded by the same basic process from the wheel to the velocipede to the mountain bike. Moreover, the agents in this process acted as selective forces and were acted upon by selective forces – and not just physically. As designers altered the bikes, the bikes’ new capabilities altered their conception of where and why they might ride a bike and thus their purpose in the next set of modifications.
To fingerprint design as the ID scheme misrepresents it, we really must close that Cartesian Circle by presuming intent for any and all endpoints we wish to examine. Then the history of that point is seen separated from any branches or external contingencies. If the mountain bike comes from a mountain bike factory, surely the mountain bike factory holds the entire explanation for its structure. When defined after the fact like this, the history of a structure looks irreducibly complex; if you take away one part it is rendered meaningless because it is its own context. ID’s analogy between designed structures and biological structures not only fails to distribute the middle, it doesn’t even accurately depict design processes as we undertake them. People, the source of everything we know about design, don’t start cold from an undetermined purpose and design toward that purpose in an implacable, irreducibly complex chain of events. Replication may work a bit like that, but not design.
What this method really does is provide for a hierarchical relationship between presumed intent and biological structures, where the intent causes the structure. Such a relationship seems to allow for a supernatural cause. This is why ID’s advocates have gone through such contortions to make it work (or at least look like it might) – see the Wedge Document. Yet the intelligent Design model fails even as a portal for the supernatural. It offers no solution to the interaction problem in dualism. This is a real problem because, as far as I can tell, one tenant of ID is that the design process in nature is ongoing. To drag a spiritual being into the material world and have it start doing things, one has to explain how it does so without being in some way beholden to the same laws, and thus part of the same causal history, as the rest of matter. If there is no good explanation, then the spiritual being from another realm is just a bizarre, unexpected new part of nature. Though this may seem an obscure technicality at first glance, here is an example of just how sticky the problem really is.
Descartes tried to defend the independence of the mind from brain processes. He offered the analogy of a virtuoso violinist asked to play on a broken instrument. The listener would have no clue as to his true skill. Likewise the damaged, diseased, or intoxicated brain may just be a broken instrument unable to give voice to the intact mind which plays upon it. Unfortunately, this analogy raises the question: May the virtuoso be a virtuoso without a violin? Study of music theory or any other purely mental operation is insufficient. He must play a physical violin. Yet the skill he gains is a mental faculty which is subject to his creativity, religious concepts, and emotion. The brain and its adjuncts affect the mind. There is no escape from this problem in a world of two supposedly separate substances in active contact. Deism or a strict idealism offer the only outs (and Deism may just push the problem back in time). Either of these scenarios keeps the supernatural supernatural, but thereby makes it irrelevant to any practical understanding of nature/matter. This is why it is best for religion that science adhere to methodological naturalism. This is why intelligent design is insidious as well as invalid, for all concerned. It robs religion of any hope of philosophical integrity, just as it misrepresents biology. Reason enough for everyone to drop this bullshit for good.
Just Off Highway 212..
..in Southwest Montana, hard by the Crow agency, stands a prominent hill with a monument marking a mass grave which holds the remains of members of the 7th Cavalry. On a sunny day in Spring, I stood on that hill and saw what happened to Custer and his command in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
They lost it. They lost it long before the last of them died on the hill, though. The evidence, especially the fact that the last of the command did die on the hill, is manifest on the surrounding landscape. Markers dot the ridge and valley leading to the site of the ‘last stand’ indicating the spots where men died along the way, died while standing separate from the command, or fell trying to flee the hill. Nobody could really know what transpired that day, but anyone could know, just by standing there, that the hill was a terrible place to be.
The view from the hill was panoramic. All the features of the terrain, including the perpendicular ridges which form the sides of surrounding gullies, were exposed. The commander of a military unit would naturally seek such a vantage point, due to both his training and a natural instinct to be able to see an oncoming threat. But even at the beginning of his maneuver to the hill, Custer had ceased to be the commander of a military unit trying to win a battle.
As his trained instinct to retreat and regroup was misplaced, so was his natural instinct to keep his enemy in view, for from an opponent’s perspective, anyone standing on the hill became a perfect target outlined against the sky. Any move to escape the hill could not be concealed. From the vantage point of those defending the command, targets seen from the hill had to be picked out from the background of grass and dirt on the slopes, if those targets were not completely hidden behind the perpendicular ridges. Custer’s maneuver to the hill was a mistake, but it was not the first such mistake in human history, nor the last. It was one of a surprisingly broad and common category of mistakes, which afflict the capable as easily as the bumblers among us.
Decades later, the pilots of Air France flight 447 experienced something very similar to Custer’s retreat up the hill. Just as the pilots were maneuvering through a series of thunderstorms, the airspeed sensors on the outside of the airliner froze over. The plane’s computer then shut off the auto pilot to avoid the automated system’s reacting to invalid data from the malfunctioning sensors. Now in control of the plane and unable to make sense of the numbers anymore than the computer could, the acting pilot reverted to instinct and training. His instinct was to get out of the situation. The first bit of training which came to mind for escaping a bad situation was one which told him to add power and pull the nose of the plane up. He even tried to confirm his instinct with his fellow pilot, at one point saying, “I’m in TOGA, eh?” – an acronym for ‘Take Off, Go Around’, a maneuver used to recover from an aborted landing, for example, by adding power and climbing. All the while, the stall warning was screaming, indicating a problem which demanded everything but elevating the nose of the plane and climbing.
I have great sympathy for the pilot of flight 447, because I have done what he did, but I was luckier. I was on one of my first long rock climbs with an equally inexperienced partner. We set out on a warm, clear day amid the long days of Northwest Summer on a route well within our capabilities. We knew we could climb it easily in a day, so we left without jackets, headlamps and extra food. However, the route was longer and more convoluted than we had anticipated. By the time we peeped over the summit for a view across the range to the sea, we had to shade our eyes from the lowering sun. We knew it was late, but had no idea how late, since we had left our watches with the headlamps. As we descended, which we had planned to do mostly by climbing down, it got dark and we were forced to use the rope more and more often.
For those who are unfamiliar with climbing techniques, descending by use of the rope involves doubling the line through a loop of nylon webbing anchored to the rock, with or without a metal ring to hold the rope off of the nylon, then using a friction device attached to one’s seat-harness to slide down the two sides of the doubled rope at once. Typically, the descending climber holds one hand above the friction device for balance while the other hand is on the rope below the device, controlling the rate descent by increasing or decreasing tension on the free end of the rope. Before coming to the end of the rope, the descending climber must find a new spot to anchor another loop of nylon. The second climber then comes down the rope to the new anchor, the team pulls the rope through the original anchor, doubles the line through the new anchor and repeats the process.
In the growing dark, new anchor opportunities became harder and harder to find. We had to get down, because we planned to get down, because we felt an instinctive aversion to the prospect of being stuck on the face, and because my partner had to be at work the following morning. As I approached a wide ledge, I could not find an anchor. I swung back and forth across the face, letting a little more rope through my friction device on each pass to allow a wider and wider arc. Now past the ledge and increasingly desperate for an anchor point, I pushed back to the left one more time and felt the ends of the rope slip past my lower hand. My upper hand reflexively locked onto the rope above the friction device as the ends pulled free of the device. Luckily, my grip on the rope with the upper hand held and kept me from falling several hundred feet down the face.
Instantly, I forgot about the prospect of not finding an anchor, my partner’s missed work day, and the dreariness of being stuck out for the night. Climbing hand over hand back up the rope to the ledge, I was re-oriented to the situation. We were not racing to finish a successful climb or out of options because I couldn’t find an anchor by starlight. We were trying to descend a complex route in the dark, and had hit an endpoint. We would not die of cold or thirst or starvation that night. My partner joined me on the ledge. We secured the rope ends to a bush and then curled around the stem of the small plant as if it could provide some warmth and shelter. We shivered the night away and by morning’s light, found a large flake of rock ten feet right of our little bush to tie off as an anchor. My partner lost a vacation day, but kept his job.
As I climbed more, I spent fewer unprepared nights out, partially because I learned the hard way, but partially because I learned the checklists that all climbers employ. There is a packing checklist, a checklist for use prior to climbing onward from an anchor, a checklist for use prior to descending the rope, a checklist to run before pulling the rope through a top anchor, etc. Checklists have saved me on many occaisions.
A checklist almost saved flight 447, though they did not know they were using one. When the senior officer arrived in the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot were racking their brains trying to sort out what had happened, even as they acted to achieve what they knew that they must achieve – making the plane climb instead of descend. When they asked the senior officer what they should do, he replied, “I don’t know.” In effect, he performed the most vital step in any checklist – he stopped himself and began to pay attention to what was going on right then, in his own head as well as in the airplane. Unfortunately, by the time he’d helped his fellow officers clarify their mental states and reconcile their actions with the events at hand, the airplane was one and a half seconds from the ocean. Even Custer might have been saved if he’d had a checklist, despite the more complicated nature of his situation.Custer faced a special challenge because his opponents had a keen understanding of the psychological elements which make a checklist so useful.
One element in particular is the key benefit of checklists and the one which we are in constant danger of forgetting. Even in the definitive popular treatment of checklists, Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, the key element gets only superficial treatment. He touches on it in his description of the engine failure checklist for single engine planes.
It is slimmed down to six key steps not to miss for restarting the engine, steps like making sure the fuel shutoff valve is in the OPEN position and putting the backup feul pump switch ON. But step one on the list is the most fascinating. It is simply: FLY THE AIRPLANE. Because pilots sometimes become so desperate trying to restart their engine, so crushed by the cognitive overload of thinking through what could have gone wrong, they forget this most basic task. FLY THE AIRPLANE.
The admonition in step one of his example could be generalized to the statement: Remain oriented to your situation. Gawande can’t be blamed for focusing on the other utility of checklists – their ability to help us prioritize the necessary steps in a complex task and thus break the task into manageable bites. After all, he is primarily concerned with the application of checklists to prevent errors in the relatively controlled, but complex, environment of the operating room. However, his focus risks neglecting the source of our potential disorientation, a mental flaw which Custer’s antagonists at the Little Bighorn understood as vital, and which the course of the battle illustrated so well.
As opposed to Custer and his command, the warriors camped along the river were not soldiers. They had experience with war, but operated as a group of individuals rather than a formal unit. They had leaders, but no commanders. Their only training in the cooperative use of force came from hunting buffalo. Yet they understood their position. Management of the warriors’ psychological state was the leaders’ primary task. The leaders had to direct their warriors by example and exhortation. And from the buffalo hunts, they knew that if they could control their targets’ psychological state as well as their own, success was guaranteed. The assembled tribes had a method, but not a plan and part of their method was aimed at breaking all plans set against them.
When Custer moved against the encampment on the Little Bighorn, he had a plan. He planned to trap the band of wayward natives between the two elements of his command, preventing the Indians’ escape or forcing them to surrender and return to the reservation. His plan was one for a pursuing force, an aggressive force. It was a plan for a military unit, utilizing a military unit’s capacity for coordinated attack and maneuver. For a moment, it looked like the plan might work. The Indians were surprised by the force which crossed the river to attack from the South under the command of Reno. But the Indians had a larger contingent of warriors than expected. In the face of determined resistance, the Southern attack failed and the troopers fell back in disarray.
When the initial thrust of Reno’s force stalled, a number of the warriors still mobilizing in the camp stopped to perform ceremonial rites. Crazy Horse in particular took so long in ritual preparations for battle that the younger men following him became impatient. Perhaps the drama was part of his plan too, orchestrated to focus and rouse his entourage. At any rate, Crazy Horse’s rituals were vital for his own role in the fight. The preparations served as Crazy Horse’s checklist, to protect him from the very thing he would soon attempt to do to his enemies – turn them from men into buffalo. When he emerged from his lodge, he was ready to fight his way. During the subsequent action, he would ride back and forth in front of the enemy lines blowing an eagle bone whistle, drawing fire. He would cut through a line of moving soldiers and lead his band of warriors in among the enemy forces. His actions would serve to prevent concerted action by his foes and force them to fall back on the familiar and the comfortable – predictable instinct and the rote lessons of training.
Custer’s attack never really got started. Confronted by a large force rallied to face him, he seems to have had difficulty orienting himself to the new situation. He doesn’t even seem to have had that critical moment which flight 447’s senior officer provided when he said, “I don’t know.” Instead, he retreated toward the hill. In a subsequent interview, Hollow Horn Bear, a warrior who witnessed the battle gave this description:
Interviewer: After the soldiers got to the ridge, did they keep together in one body, or did some of them make a stand to give the others a chance to select a position?
Hollow Horn Bear: Soldiers kept together all during the fight. The soldiers would shift positions, but no stand was being made to do so.
Another witness, a warrior named Two Moons, gave a more incisive analysis:
…Custer was a brave man. I give him credit for attacking a people that vastly out numbered his – but something was the matter with his men. They did not run nor seek shelter, but stayed right out in the open where it was easy to shoot them down. Any ordinary bunch of men would have dropped into a watercourse, or a draw, where they could have fought for a long time. They acted and shot their guns like something was wrong with them. They surely had too much of that whiskey. That bunch of men should have fought for a long time, but it did not take long to kill them all.
Most telling was the view from the perspective of the encampment, as witnessed by Julia Face:
Interviewer: Did the Indians reach the high ridge ahead of Custer, and did he at any time charge them and drive them off?
Julia Face: None of the warriors reached the high ridge ahead of Custer. The Indians acted just like they were driving buffalo to a good place where they could be easily slaughtered. Custer never charged.
Maybe Custer had no choices that day. But maybe the one critical step in any checklist, the pause to reorient, would have helped his command acquit itself better even if it could not have saved him and his men. Because that one step is the only thing that can save the human part of the mind from itself. Without the jolting stop at the start of a checklist, the part of us that thinks will dwell on its plans and motivations rather than wading into the delays and discomforts immediately before it. A pilot’s mind, focused on the goal of gaining altitude, will tune out the stall warning since it is not helping him achieve his desire. A climber’s mind will forget about the end of the rope since it is not helping him find the next anchor. Then, with the human part of the mind occupied with its own concerns, the buffalo mind is left to act in its place. According to its nature, the buffalo mind just does something. It reacts to the anxiety assailing it from within and the simple cues coming from the outside with a series of programmed behaviors which ignore the future and the immediate past. It functions as a behavioral “Hail Mary” when the thinking part of the mind has checked out. It may freeze in the face of an immanent threat and not fly the plane. It may run over the edge of a cliff to escape. Even without encouragement, the buffalo mind, with its unselected, rote behaviors, will often lead us to a good place where we can easily be slaughtered.
Notes: Interviews are obtained from the books, Indian Views of the Custer Fight by Richard G. Hardorff, Lakota Noon by Gregory F. Michno, and Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight by Richard G. Hardorff. Further information is available at the Custer Battlefield in South Central Montana via our wonderful, woefully underfunded National Park Service
The All in One
Discussing the existence of a deity is fraught. Everyone on either side of the issue has profound emotional commitments to their position – profound enough, for some people, to merit a violent defense. Setting aside fanaticism, even the reasonable disputant’s motivation to understand the basic issues is weak. But I don’t think that shaky motivation is the primary source of acrimony. Some basic conceptual differences drive the dispute, and the emotional consequences of everyone’s intellectual positions make the dispute nasty. The classical arguments for the existence, or at least the possibility, of a god in the traditional, Western conception illustrate the schisms best. These arguments – the Cosmological, Contingency, and Ontological Arguments – share a basic set of notions, though I think that the Contingency Argument is by far the most important and interesting. Here is a mash-up of the three, courtesy of Jon Duns (and subsequent admirers) :
(1′) Whatever is possible is contingent or necessary.
(2′) A first cause is possible.
(3′) Therefore, a first cause is contingent or necessary
(4′) Any contingent substance is possibly actualized by another substance.
(5′) A first cause is not possibly actualized by another substance.
(6′) Therefore a first cause is not contingent.
(7′) Therefore a first cause is necessary.
I like this. It at once demonstrates the interesting part of the three arguments, especially the Contingency Argument, and the difficulties with their claims and with opposing claims. Stated in this form, the combo-argument gets right to the chewy bits.
Whatever is possible is either contingent or necessary. This statement says so much. What does it mean to speak of a possible contingent thing? It means one of two things. First, it may be a thing to be considered in logical statements. This means it is a defined entity, a term of art. Our range of defined entities is extremely broad. It ranges from the non-controversial (the color black) to the fantastic (ghosts). However, logic doesn’t mind. As long as there are rules to tell us where an object of our intention stands among its fellows, logic will apply, and our definitions provide us with those rules in each specific case. Give us the definition and we may say what is logically possible. Second, a contingent thing may be something which we may describe as well as define, in other words, rather than just sketching the rules of its identity we may speak of it in terms of its composition and its relationship to other things.
When considered in light of the latter, contingent things form a set of entities defined by their dependence. They are dependent on and inseparable from, the conditions which preceded them. They are describable in a positive sense. They have a composition. But do they also have a nature? Consider that most contingent of objects: the dog. The concept of “dog” would seem to be a solid citizen of our conceptual society. But if called upon to produce the archetypical dog, can we? Mustn’t we instead depend on a pedigree, physically and metaphysically?
The dog-concept is instead entirely dependent on all the dogs, extant and historical, and in a very particular way. It is, in fact, an epiphenomenon, something which stands in for causally related entities, their appearance rather than their structure. The dog-concept is still real as much as the appearance of someone’s face is real. The dog-concept just doesn’t do anything in and of itself, any more than the appearance of someone’s face itself “does” anything other than act as an intermediary between the mind of its possessor and the minds of those who perceive it.
At least that is one way to look at things. Another would be to say that there is some magnetic kernel of efficacy at the heart of the dog-concept – that dogness is a foregone conclusion, not just an implication of the circumstances of the universe, and if dogness wasn’t realized by wolf and man, it would have been realized by fox and man, or Tasmanian tiger and man.
These two ways of looking at things hold on a deeper level too, in regards to contingency itself. On the first view, the fact that the things we see derived from other things through time are interdependent must be taken as basic. The adherent to this perspective must say, “I cannot see into that interdependency itself to say whether it is itself the ‘really real’, efficacious thing about the world, whether it is a useful, “close enough” representation of what is ‘really real’ or whether it is an appearance with nothing more certain about its reality than self-consistency. I’m stuck with it. I can’t look at it without referring to it. I believe I’ll live with the uncertainty and move on.”
On the second viewpoint, the appearance of interdependency is due to something – a foregone conclusion which is not possibly an end-product dependent on our seeing it for its identity. This kernel of kernels remains a property; it is inert without associated objects to manifest it. However, the objects do manifest it rather than participating in its active creation. From this perspective, for example, each Chihuahua could be said to manifest “dogness” (sad though their efforts may be) rather than adding to the concept of “dogness”. Here, by further analogy, the genetics are set and are the real cause of the dog, with metabolic processes and environmental inputs acting as accessories only.
The Contingency Argument could be seen as an explanation of the second viewpoint, but it goes beyond what is necessary for that viewpoint as the argument is used in apologetics. The plain, white rice version argues for a knowable thing. The identity of the non-contingent base relies, at least in part, on its relationship with the contingent things which exemplify it, just as genes are genes only in a biological context. But when the argument is used in support of theism, a hierarchy of dependency is claimed, with the non-contingent thing having the real causal efficacy, and so existential necessity, in the end. The contingent things don’t dance to a tune or express genetic information, they move to the pull of their strings. Interdependency is no longer possibly the epistemic basement, a thing-in-itself lurks below. This is a bold claim; bolder, I think, than stopping with a shrug at the top basement. It is even bolder than something like asserting the causal efficacy of dogness. It is bold because a thing with existential necessity must be opaque.
How, in principle might we come to know a necessary thing? How could we induce changes in it to divine its nature? How could it have discernible “parts”? How could we hope to describe it? Any knowledge of it, even knowledge of its existence, must be as complete and undetermined as it is – given knowledge. This is not to say that such an assertion is necessarily irrational. Given the claim, we can use it in logical statements. In fact, given the claim, we can establish the definition of contingency as the sort of dependency relationship which the second viewpoint above requires, since the first cause, as a thing-in-itself, may not be a billiard ball, or cipher or any other causal entity as we know causal entities. All things we may know as such can be analyzed in some way.
So, if the necessary thing must remain something we propose based on our intuition, are we to believe that whatever is possible is either contingent or necessary? If the necessary thing in question is a logical necessity of a sort after all, rather than an existential necessity alone, would that allow it to be more than a postulate? On the view of contingency which takes the interdependency of things as basic, logic is descriptive and so doesn’t have anything in particular to say about existential necessity. The situation in which logical necessity and existential necessity are equivalent is the situation in which the description of how we perceive cause and effect relationships is also a precise representation of those relationships. Only in that case can we be reassured that none of the definitions guiding our logical expositions are squirrelly. This leaves us with a particular kind of contingency – a condition of dependence rather than interdependence, an open system rather than a closed one. But even granting such a viewpoint does not save us from the implications of the thing-in-itself.
Our perception of cause and effect is one of discrete objects interacting at objectively definable points in time. If our perception is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then we are left with the caricature of determinism laid on naturalist philosophy. History is a network of falling dominoes, each with a discrete, fixed identity and falling across a fixed temporal landscape. “Where did it all start?”, becomes a vital question and the path to a first cause and a thing-in-itself opens up. But by the Cosmological path or the Contingent path the seeker ends up back at the monolith. Examination of the dominoes or the course of their falling can tell us nothing about what started their toppling cascade, whether it was an earthquake, a child’s finger, a gust of wind or a wayward beetle. By empirical inquiry and logical examination, the necessary entity must remain an enigma.
We are left with a mandatory agnosticism regarding the thing-in itself. However, the uncertainty leaves room for one more bold assertion, one about mind. The assertion involved should not be mistaken for the concept of mind in pan-psychism. Mind in the pan-psychist formulation is seen as a basic property, a sort of receptivity which explains the interdependency among objects which we observe, but it remains a property. Mind and consciousness are still “about” something, rather than standing alone as things-in-themselves.
A mind which has an independent identity is something else entirely. It is the object of its own intention independent of any comparators – a condition representing intention itself, which is a condition which can be defined, but cannot be described, except in terms of other indescribable (maximal qualities, self-causation, unmoved movement, etc.) Such a mind isn’t necessarily about anything, which, despite our occasional suspicions about some of our fellow travellers, is not a quality we observe in any mind around us, even our own. One could maintain that we suffer from known limitations on our perspective. Fair enough, but it still leaves us standing back at the monolith, facing an object which defies meaningful examination, though we arrive with an additional postulate.
So, the only reasonable claim to be made about the thing-in-itself is, “I feel it must be thus.” This is the proper jumping-off point for atheism, for an assertion has no more inherent validity than its opposite. A claim to intuitive knowledge is not unreasonable (we can make a logical argument based upon it), but it is an audacious claim. Sound explanations can be made without it, if one is prepared to accept a degree of necessary ignorance. The latter would seem the more cautious view, though it might have the appearance of denial to those convinced of the theist claim.
Either way, the advocate is left with an uncertainty beneath them, which is not a tolerable situation for most. So, people work at feeling justified in their beliefs. The easiest way of achieving a feeling of justification is by expounding on the obvious lunacy of opposing positions. But that tactic is merely a distraction, and one that isn’t good for anyone’s better understanding; it is just good for relieving psychological discomfort. I’m not saying there isn’t anything worth fighting about in the realm of basic religious and philosophical inquiry, just that the things worth fighting about – dogmatism, self-indulgence, tribalism, coercion – are the things most people end up fighting for when they think or talk about basic beliefs.
Dedicated to the Game 