Live
March 6, 2007
We're now live with new posts over at the new blog.
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OK, it's finally up. Admittedly in a somewhat tentative fashion. Tell me what you think. I'm still adding a lot to it. So it'll be changing over the next few weeks as I add functionality. But I figured I ought stop worrying about getting it perfect and just get it to the stage I can start posting a bit.
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OK, I got this one from Nate Oman more than a month ago but just now had time to read it.
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New Blog
December 31, 2007
Yes, I haven't forgotten. I'm hopefully finishing up the blog tonight. In the meantime, if you are interested Park City Cable put up a little segment on my company. No, that's not me. That's my business partner Art Pollard. He's the "face" of our company and so he's usually the one who gets interviewed. (I really hate being in front of the camera)
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I'm (very slowly) getting caught up in some of my reading. If I'm lucky I can finish putting together the new blog one of these days. Anyway, one of the more interesting posts I read was from Chris at Mixing Memory. It's from way back in August - almost a month ago. It's about a scientist named Bailey. Cases like these always catch my interest. It seems that there is a perception that only "unthinking conservatives" politicize science and engage in ad homen or worse. Of course that's not the case. Don't get me wrong I've been very critical of conservative excesses over the past decade. But the way some scientists seem to see only a narrow spectrum of problems really worries me. (Yes, I'll admit some of that is that it bothers me for political reasons - but part is that it bothers me for the safety of science) Anyway, read Chris' post. It's well worth reading as are the comments.
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Once again, lots of comments in that discussion on evil. There for a while it verged into the area of epistemology. Now that's been a big topic of discussion for me and I'd written a fair bit on it way back (such as this post on the failure of religious experiences) My approach, for those who can't remember back that far, is basically a Peircean one. What one believes isn't ultimately volitional. What one has to do is continue to inquire and that entails never taking things for granted and looking at alternatives. If one does ones duty in this regard and still is unable to doubt then one can be said to know. This applies to scientific knowing or religious knowing. The key is inquiry.
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OK, I apologize for not contributing to that amazingly long thread on evil. Lots of good discussion. It always seemed that when I caught up in reading there were a dozen new posts and I didn't want to write too much. So here are a few thoughts (primarily in reverse chronological order)
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Just a note. Most of you noticed that I've only had a handful of posts all summer. Part of this is just me being so tremendously busy that I've not had the time. Part is also that I have a new blog all setup but it's just not quite done. Anyway, posting should resume in September with a slightly new url.
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Someone asked at LDS-Phil about the problem of evil. This is my (swiftly written) answer. My apologies for any grammatical errors or typoes. I don't have a lot of time to write at the moment. But some might find this interesting.
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I occasionally read the discussions of evolution at various sites. It strikes me that one common misunderstanding is the confusion of natural selection. Specifically the distinction between selection for and selection of. This is especially true among critics but also pops up alarmingly often when people discuss evolution and philosophy.
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Just a reminder to my Mormon readers. The 2007 FAIR Conference is in just a few days at the Southtowne Conference Center up in SLC. I had thought I would be going but the amount of work I have this week is so ridiculous that it's just not going to happen. (Pity the small business owner) The conference starts this Thursday (August 2). Check out the above link for speaker information.
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Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been pretty busy although I should have a bunch this weekend. One news story that caught my eye was from the NYT today. For some reason it's not coming up correctly on my home computer. So I'll quote excerpts below. It's basically a little story on Richard Bushman and how he's become the main defender and explainer of Mormonism in the press.
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I was listening to Talk of the Nation's Science Friday today and they had a good show on cognitive dissonance and bias. Basically the idea of why it's hard to know when your wrong. Most of the research has been around a long time although the show put it together nicely. Roughly the brain doesn't like to be wrong on major things so you don't even know when you are wrong. This manifests itself in various ways. One interesting one is the fact that the harder it is to join a group the more you tend to support the group. The other is that the higher "cost" of a bad decision makes you deny that it was bad. All of these are happening very low level in the brain and it's very easy to miss it.
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OK, I'm finally recouped on sleep enough that I dare post. It'll probably still be light for the coming days though. It's been an extremely busy last few months. One thing that's been the talk of the blogs is Paul Davies new book, Cosmic Jackpot. He had an extended editorial in New Scientist last month and was interviewed on NPR's Science Friday last month as well. Now let me say in advance that I've not read Davies book, although it sounds intriguing. He's done a fair bit on the borders of theology and physics over the years but, judging from the NPR interview, he has a somewhat novel theory.
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Back
July 8, 2007
I'm back. Although after a 1000 mile drive I can't say when I'll be posting next.
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Just a note that I'll be taking a vacation from blogging for the next month. I'm heading up to Alberta for my brother's wedding and then to San Francisco for business. I may make a few posts still - but I wouldn't count on it.
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Peter over at On Philosophy has a post up on how to avoid writing nonsense. Even though in general I agree with lot of what he says, as you might expect I disagree with a lot as well. Mainly in the details. Of course Peter adopts a lot of positions pretty much completely at odds with my own. So some disagreement isn't that surprising. (I tend towards externalism; he's an internalist for instance) Of course despite these differences I thoroughly enjoy his blog. His interests are nearly the same as mine own (philosophy of mind and physics) even if perhaps his conclusions aren't. But onward to my quibbling as I rise to some of his statements.
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The other day I put up a few thoughts on externalism and cognitive science. Now I should note that externalism is a pretty broad term and relates to many different (and sometimes incompatible) positions. There's spatial externalism or the idea that the brain isn't all there is to the mind. There's temporal externalism or the idea that some contents depend upon states other than the present. One could go on. Externalism has long been an interest of mine primarily because I tend to recognize in myself a tendency to compartmentalize objects and then treat those objects as self contained and reacting only to various inputs. I think that while this is often useful as a first order approximation it fails as one thinks about it.
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I suspect most with a philosophical bent are pretty familiar with David Chalmer's zombie argument regarding consciousness. If not then this is a nice summary. Basically the argument is that if physicalism is true then an exact duplicate of this world would be the same as this world. Yet we can imagine a world where everything is the same except for consciousness. i.e. all people are zombies. The problem is in assuming this really is a physical duplicate. I thought I'd give my personal experience as to why I think Chalmers is onto something with zombies but why I reject it.
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Richard has up an interesting post about identifying your God. I'd actually blogged on this topic a few years back. The basic question is whether Christians and Muslims (or Evangelicals and Mormons) worship the same God. Roughly what we have is a tension between causal relations (i.e. the source of some spiritual phenomena or the reference of who is listening to our prayers) versus our descriptions. While this is pretty interesting in terms of religion the same issue actually pops up a lot. I think this suggests that we assume description (meaning) and reference (cause) are clearly delineated whereas in practice things get muddled very fast.
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I know quite a few people who read this blog are either experts in cognitive science or at least have more than a passing interest in it. (Chris, of Mixing Memory being the cognitive science uber-blogger) I know Chris picked up Peirce's Reasoning and the Logic of Things, perhaps due to my review of it. It's an excellent book but really not the best introduction to Peirce. It's rather mathematical in places where I suspect people would prefer simplicity. I'm pretty convinced that Peirce is relevant to cognitive science but I know little cognitive science to really be able to argue this claim. (It's mainly a gut reaction, although I discussed Peirce in our Tomasello reading club) Anyway there actually is a very new book that is basically information theory and cognitive science as done through a Peircean prism. The book is Cybersemiotics by Søren Brier. I've not read the book so I can't really comment too much on it. Although the author does post on Peirce-L occasionally. It does look rather interesting and I'm thinking of putting it in my Amazon queue.
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I managed to miss the philosopher's carnival until today. One post in it that caught my eye was from the blog Philosophy and Literature on Heidegger, Speech Acts and language. While perhaps I'm just reading things wrong it seems to me that the the main discussion is wrong. At least in terms of how I understand Derrida and Heidegger.
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The Volokh Conspiracy has a story about a woman who put up a working paper of a law paper. Unfortunately the paper was "so riddled with grammatical errors and mangled writing that some FAMU law students are now using it to help build a case that [the director] is not qualified to teach and was hired primarily on the strength of her personal ties...." It's an interesting question. While, as a bit of an amateur (i.e. I have no quest to ever be a professor), the issues are moot for me, I have to admit it disturbs me a bit.
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I get a few emails asking me various questions. Sometimes I answer them directly by email and sometimes I answer them here. So here's a few questions I've got the past week and my answers.
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Rich has made an interesting interlocutor the past few months. About once a week he makes a comment over in the Heidegger and the Other thread from March. I was going to just put an other comment there but figured I'd break out an other post. The issue is why worry about externalism at all? There are two issues. One is linguistic. That is whether our mental terms can really be done justice by just talking about what ultimately is neural states or types of neural states. While that's interesting and perhaps where there's the most philosophical focus there is an other issue. The more "pragmatic" one. That is what is ultimately helpful for our understanding.
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I mentioned a few days ago that Davidson's division between the mental and the physical ends up being a linguistic one. That is Davidson argues that intrinsically our mental talk is in terms of normed folk terms like belief, intent, etc. which can't be treated as scientific law. Further to develop a scientific language of the mental is to "change the topic" (Davidson's words) and thus cease talking about the mental. To me this is pretty shady. Both because it's unclear why a more scientific language of the mental is changing the topic whereas a shift from folk talk of mechanics to scientific talk of mechanics isn't. (Or maybe it is, who knows?) The point being that Davidson's critique of the mental is ultimately about the words we use and not the nature of the phenomena. This is unfortunate since, as I've often said, I find anomalous monism extremely compelling.
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I think I mentioned that I'd picked up that book that included Quine's anti-pragmatist essay. I'd discussed that a couple of weeks ago. I managed to find it at a used book store for only $6. The book is Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects. It's somewhat interesting in a quite odd way since nearly all the claims about pragmatism in it seem wrong to me. Clearly that's the case with Quine. But while I've not thoroughly read the rest of the essays they seem wrong to me also. I even cringed when one author brought up the idea that pragmatism accepted "truth as useful." I don't claim to be an expert or even have read all the pragmatists. I tend to primarily focus on Peirce and to a far lesser extent James and Dewey. But that just seems wrong. However that's neither her nor there. What I wanted to quote was the opening paragraphs of the essay "Pragmatism and the Importance of Being Ernest" by Ernest Gellner, the essay that follows Quine's.
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Over at Maverick Philosopher they had an interesting discussion about miracles in light of Hume. Of course this is an oft discussed topic. But I thought I'd weigh in a little with my thoughts. The basic problem as I see it is the presumption that a miracle qua miracle must be an exception to a law of nature. It isn't clear to me why we should assume this. Why not say a miracle is a violation of our technological understanding. I'm sure there are many things we could take back to the time of the Romans which, if shown, would be considered miracles. Did it violate their understanding of the universe. Perhaps, although I'm not sure I'd take even that for granted. But it certainly violated their understanding of the capabilities of technology.
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A few years ago I took some comments by David Chalmers as a way of thinking about Davidson and Peirce. Now that I've returned to Davidson and have been reading more of his essays and reading them a tad closer, I think I was way off. I was perhaps too caught up in Davidson's earlier positions - many of which he backed away from. The key issue was the nature of why the mental was irreducible to the physical. In that post I took it as a more thorough problem of translation wrapped up in holism. Roughly the idea that to translate the mental one would need all the physical. Davidson, especially towards the end of his life, saw his appeal to Quine as mistaken. The issue, as Davidson saw it, was that indeterminacy of translation was primarily about the fact that for any fact of the matter was due to the many ways it could be expressed. So, for example, a weight could be expressed in terms of kilograms, pounds, stones, or whatever. Not quite the problem I suggested Peirce seeing.
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I've been rather neglecting religious posts the last while. I hope to do a few more on Blake's book. However I was asked by one of the folks at Dialog to comment on an article that appeared there a few months back. So I'll use that as a starting off point to discuss a few religious issues. The issue is ultimately the big bang and how Mormons deal with it. For any interested non-Mormons reading this a major point of theology for Mormons is the idea of a pre-existence. Roughly the idea that we existed as spirits prior to our birth. Mormons believe that we are co-eternal with God. Although it's not exactly clear how to take that. Most take it to mean that in our essential natures both humans and God always existed. This entails an infinite past. Given that Mormons also tend to take spirits as material rather that as Platonic or Thomist souls this also means that the big bang can pose a problem.
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I'll leave out the author of these comments. But I couldn't help but comment on it. There is in our society an odd valorization of a romantic ideal of the artist as a madman. We want suffering artists who seem somehow cut off from society. I recall as show on NPR about depression that mentioned the false idea that suffering from clinical depression produced greater art. It didn't, the doctors said. It just made for dysfunctional artists. Anyway, here is the original comment and my response.
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I've been meaning for a few days to comment on a paper that Razib mentioned at Gene Expression. The paper is about why some scientific notions are accepted by the public (germs, electricity, a round earth, helio-centric astronomy) whereas others are rejected (evolution, global warming, etc.) Now of course in practice there will be non-cognitive issues. So the conflict between individual's religion and evolution will have an effect. And of course while heliocentric astronomy is accepted, according to some scary poll results I've seen folks are far more ignorant than one might suppose about the orbit of the earth. Still there is a problem when scientific theories are non-intuitive in the sense of not lining up with the common sorts of experience human communities encounter.
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