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Alienation and the Private Dick

From Ken Worpole's "Dockers & Detectives":

Go Fly A Kite

David Papineau reviews John Searle for the TLS. I mention this only as an excuse to point to a "common sense"  ('cause Searle is big on common sense) refutation of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment (well, actually, a refutation of Searle's reply to the systems reply to Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment; still, by extension...). You might call it the "Chinese Kite" thought experiment.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Jerry Fodor Caused This Post

"Weird" is right. In an exchange with Simon Blackburn et al., Jerry Fodor casts a routine feature of causal explanation as a knockdown objection to the theory of natural selection:

The Phenomenology of Belief Change

Odd that Colin McGinn's invitation to opine on the origin of values should (d)evolve into an amateur's inquiry into the phenomenology of belief change. (Well, not really all that odd -- one of the charms, and perhaps even virtues, of blogs is that their readers are so rarely able to stick to the point.)

In sum, my argument is that belief change about matters of fact is in some ways akin to shifts in aesthetic taste, in that a large part of the story takes place "under the hood of conscious rationality": 

Overlapping Magisteria

"Saying that the mental lives of a Francis Collins or a Freeman Dyson prove that religion and science are compatible is like saying that the sex lives of Bill Clinton or Ted Haggard prove that marriage and adultery are compatible."
--Clay Shirky, on the (in)compatability of science and religion, from The Edge World Question for 2008 ("What have you changed your mind about?").

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

A Dormitive Property

Anthony Gottlieb, on Antony Flew"'"s (scare quotes around the genitive clitic) new book, There Is No God:

The pattern of the reasoning is always the same: a phenomenon — be it life, consciousness or the order of nature — is said to be mysterious, and then it is boldly asserted that the only possible explanation for it is “an infinitely intelligent Mind.” It is never said how or why the existence of such a mind constitutes an explanation.

Cf. my parable of the would-be detective for a send-up of this kind of "explanatory" reasoning.

(Via William Edmundson at Leiter Reports.)

That's Cold

Eliezer Yudkowsky remarks upon Ayn Rand and the "Objectivist" cult:

You might think that a belief system which praised "reason" and "rationality" and "individualism" would have gained some kind of special immunity [to incipient cultism], somehow...?

Well, it didn't.

It worked around as well as putting a sign saying "Cold" on a refrigerator that wasn't plugged in.

Read the whole thing. Then read everything Eliezer's written over at Overcoming Bias. (Then repeat after me: "We are all individuals...")

Just In Time

Onegoodmove hipped me to this debate between Dan Dennett and Dinesh D'Souza: "Is God a human invention?"

Notwithstanding D'Souza's routinely shrill, frequently mocking tone, he does manage to score rhetorical points for his team here and there, but only mostly because Dennett's rebuttal isn't as sharp as it should been.

For example, in this segment (starting at 8:08), D'Souza's argues that modern "Big Bang" theory lends support to the idea that God exists:

Everything that has a beginning has a cause. The universe has a beginning. [Therefore, the] universe has a cause. That cause I call "God."

Now, this argument is really hackneyed. But it is intuitively appealing to "swing voters," and any philosopher with Dennett's skill should have a refutation handy -- something along the lines of:

But talk about "causes" doesn't make any sense outside the framework of time. And on the very theory Dinesh appeals to, time did not exist until the universe began. Therefore, the universe could not have been "caused" in any relevant sense. A fortiori, God could not have caused the universe.

More could be said, of course -- but Dennett didn't even say that much (his rebuttal starts here at 3:30), allowing D'Souza's intuitively appealing argument to go entirely unchallenged. This sort of thing happened way too often.

Don't get me wrong. D'Souza's arguments were generally embarrassingly weak on substance. But you'd need to know something about the substance to know just how weak, and he seemed substantially more focussed than Dennett when it came to rebuttal.

To Reason Like Stalin

Declares Theodore Dalrymple: "[T]he attempt [to find a way of life based entirely on reason] leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin."

And there I was all along thinking Stalin's approach actually sort of ran counter to reason. I guess I stand corrected.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

The Utility of Not Coming Into Being

The Economist's Free Exchange limns an amusing colloquy among economists about the utility of existence. Worth reading in full, but I just want to rebut this one part of FE's analysis:

Mr Mankiw avoids talk of souls and simply speaks of what may be observed. [But if admit such talk,] it is then vivid that the decision not to have the next child will leave some unlucky soul dejected and unrealised. If having a kid benefits the kid, then not having a kid harms the kid-that-might-have-been.

Of course this conclusion is not ineluctable. For instance, when Sam Kinison's parents announced to him that he was “old enough to be on [his] own," Kinison noted:

You know, before I was your little son. Before I was your baby — before I was your loan — I was a free spirit in the next stage of life. I walked in the cosmos, not imprisoned by a body of flesh, but free, in a pure body of light. There were no questions, only answers. No weaknesses, only strengths. I was light, I was truth, I was a spiritual being, I was a God!!!

But you had to F*** and bring my ass down HERE!

I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t call and say: ‘Hey, please have me so I could work in a f***in’ Winchell’s someday!’ Now you want me to pay my own way? F*** YOU! PICK UP THE F***IN’ CHECK, MOM! PICK IT UP!

I can't be sure, of course, but I read Kinison as pretty much disagreeing with the FE's analysis.