Thought for the Christmas day

How do you love Jesus? Would your love survive if you realised that Jesus can do nothing for you? Would you still love him if you learned that Jesus was no God, but an ordinary man like you and me? Mine would. Because his life shows that you can never tell, if your life ultimately proves to be a success or a failure. Jesus was a failed prophet, died a terrible and shameful death, condemned by both the Romans and the Jews. His pupils fled and he had only criminals for company. He sighed: "God, why have you forsaken me?".

Yet he was a founder of a world religion (the spadework was done by his pupils, but he was the inspiration), though he never lived to know it. His example shows that, however successful or however unfortunate we are, we will never be able to know enough to judge our lives. So let's keep our heads up and never cease to smile. And let us be merry as in

Merry Christmas

Marco

Why Tarski cannot handle propositions? Because there are infinitely many primitive of them

Intensional sentences such as:

(1) Georgio believes that Rome is a beautiful city

are sentences whose truth or falsity (i.e. logical) value depends not only the denotation their constituent parts, but on something else, like in the example above: the content of the sentence “Rome is a beautiful city” and (probably) on how Georgio understands this sentence (or its translation or synonym).

From a certain angle there seems to be no intensionality paradox. Sentence (1) is true if Georgio believes that Rome is a beautiful city. Why should the truth of (1) depend on whether the sentence

(2) Rome is a beautiful city
true or false

[Here we can immediately see the relationship between the intensional sentences and intentional objects, the contents of thoughts. The inexistence of the unicorn does not make my thinking of it any less true. The existence of a turbojet does not make my thinking of it true, if I do not realise its existence]

But of course there is a problem. You simply cannot write a Tarski-style definition for each belief sentence like the one

(3) The sentence “Georgio believes that Rome is a beautiful city is true” if and only if Georgio believes that Rome is a beautiful city is true

The reason is that one would have to write infinitely many of such definitions. This is due to the fact that there are recursively infinitely many sentences like:

(1) „Rome is a beautiful city”
(2) „the city in which there lives his only uncle is a beautiful city”
(3) „the city in which there lives the only uncle of his uncle is a beautiful city”
(4) „the city in which there lives the only uncle of his uncle’s uncle is a beautiful city”
(5) „the city in which there lives the only uncle of his uncle’s uncle’s uncle is a beautiful city”


The subjects of these sentences are coreferential with Rome

And now comes the important part. These sentences may be generated recursively. We may even understand them recursively from bottom up. For instance:

(6) the city in which there lives his only uncle

can be understood in such a way

But as far as truth conditional semantics goes, phrases like (6) are absolutely non-compositional, vocabulary items. We must take them as whole. And you cannot formally write a grammar or truth conditional semantics which has an infinite vocabulary, an infinite number of building blocks.

That the vocabulary (in terms of referential semantics) is indeed can easily be seen if we replace the relevant descriptions with coreferential proper names

(7) Rome is a beautiful city”
(8) „the city in which there lives Silvio Berlusconi is a beautiful city”
(9) „the city in which there lives Luca Barbone is a beautiful city”
(10) „the city in which there lives Giordano Bruno is a beautiful city”
(11) „the city in which there lives Giorgio Pier Georgi is a beautiful city”, etc.

We could quickly run out of telephone directory names

These proper names are primitive (non-decomposable) both in syntactic and semantic terms. But from the point of view of intensional semantics the phrases:

(12) “that Rome is a beautiful city”
(13) „that the city in which there lives Silvio Berlusconi is a beautiful city”
(14) „that the city in which there lives Luca Barbone is a beautiful city”
(15) „that the city in which there lives Giordano Bruno is a beautiful city”
(16) „that the city in which there lives Giorgio Pier Georgi is a beautiful city”

are also primitive. Why? Because nothing inside them will help us establish the truth of sentences like:

(17) “Georgio thinks that Rome is a beautiful city”
(18) „Georgio thinks that the city in which there lives Silvio Berlusconi is a beautiful city”
(19) „Georgio thinks that the city in which there lives Luca Barbone is a beautiful city”
(20) „Georgio thinks that the city in which there lives Giordano Bruno is a beautiful city”
(21) „Georgio thinks that the city in which there lives Giorgio Pier Georgi is a beautiful city”, etc.


So this is the real problem of intensional sentences. The truth-conditional semantics of intensional sentences is not formalisable. Why? Because the formalisation would need to use an infinite number of definitions, an infinite list of them. This again is because what counts as a recursive phrase inside a complement sentence, would need be reanalised as primitive, non-analysable element in intensional semantics.

Suicidal mission

However you solve the details of the intensionality problem, it is quite clear that you will not find a general substitution principle which would be truth preserving in the context of „I believe, etc. Whether the Morning Star and the Evening Star are substitutable depends on nothing else, but whether they are “the same thing” for the subject of the sentence. It does not depend on any “fact” facts, but on whether man-in-the-street, educated or not, treats them as the same thing. This is not a very comforting conclusion, if you want to build a general truth-conditional semantics.

A similar conclusion seems to stem from the discussion (which I am trying to study now) on the slingshot argument. In his review of Steven Neal’s Facing the Facts John McFarlane writes: “The slingshot is not a single argument, but a family of arguments designed to show that the intentional entities (facts, state of affairs, propositions) must be individuated either so finely or so crudely that they can do no useful work”. Hopefully, one day I will fully comprehend the slingshot argument and give it a clear presentation on this blog. Just give me some time. At the moment I can just say that parts of McFarlane’s sentence could be taken as part of my the conclusion of my own discussion in previous notes.

Given these difficulties, I wonder what people are even thinking of doing, when they try to build semantics upon the concept facts, situations, rather than things and relations. When are two situations identical? Are the two situations

“The astronomer sees the Morning Star”
“The astronomer sees the Evening Star”

identical?

There are so many problems with extensional phenomena that basing your philosophy of language on intensional entities seems a suicidal mission. But I know that some practitioners of situational semantics are not suicidal. I will need to talk to them.

Marco

Ryle Revisited

I had a cursory glance at the previous note after two weeks of absence from this blog during which I pursued other projects (like earning money for my family).

I still think that the basic idea presented there is quite plausible. “Rome” and “the capital of twentieth century Italy” are phrases which are replacable in:

(3) Marek believes that Rome is a beautiful city
(4) Marek believes that the capital of twentieth century Italy is a beautiful city

but not in

(5) Cicero believes that Rome is a beautiful city (true perhaps)
(6) Cicero believes that the capital of twentieth century Italy is a beautiful city (false or nonsensical)

just because Marek but not Cicero believes that “Rome” and “the capital of twentieth century Italy” are the same thing.

But this is where things start to go wrong. “Believes” reappears in the explanation and we have again intensional sentences which need explanation. So we have an infinite regress We can only be saved by converting to behaviorism and not using any psychological language. But to become a behaviorist at my age?

When I cogitated at my predicament, I just remembered that this is not the first infinite regress connected with the behaviorism/mentalism dispute. Remember Gilbert Ryle and his campaign against a “Ghost in the Machine”.

According to the legend, whenever an agent does anything intelligently, his act is preceded and steered by another internal act of considering a regulative proposition appropriate to his practical problem. [...] Must we then say that for the hero's reflections how to act to be intelligent he must first reflect how best to reflect how to act? The endlessness of this implied regress shows that the application of the criterion of appropriateness does not entail the occurrence of a process of considering this criterion.(The Concept of Mind (1949), p. 31.)
The crucial objection to the intellectualist legend is this. The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle.(The Concept of Mind (1949), p. 30.)

There seem to be similarities between the two regresses. But I am not sure whether they have so much in common. I will need to think about this.

Farewell to Semantics (part two)

So when are words replaceable in sentences starting with "I believe"?

Not when they denote the same thing, as shown by many examples of the "Morning Star/Evening Star" type. Not even when they have the same meaning, because the speaker (believer) many not know that they have the same meaning.

I suggest that replaceablity of words in intensional contexts must always taken relative to the subject of the sentence (= believer). The relevant relation would look more less like this"

(1) aD(B)a = a has for B the same denotation as b

where a and b are names such "Morning Star" and "Evening Star" respectively, "Rome" and "capital of Italy" respectively, "Cicero" and "Tully" respectively or "Superman" and "Clark Kent respectively. Let me suggest the following definition

(2) a is replaceable by b in sentences about B believing something iff aD(B)a

(this should be properly formalised, but I am now only testing my intuitions)



This definitely explains why the sentences

(3) Marek believes that Rome is a beautiful city
(4) Marek believes that the capital of twentieth century Italy is a beautiful city

are both true

but not sentences

(5) Cicero believes that Rome is a beautiful city (true perhaps)
(6) Cicero believes that the capital of twentieth century Italy is a beautiful city (false or nonsensical)

Simply, the two relevant descriptions have the same denotations for Marek but not for Cicero

There are four things to be said about this account of belief sentences. Two not so good and two quite good.

Not so good

(A) This solution is a capitulation. D(B) is not a general relation of meaning. It is not about meaning in a language. It is relativised to a particular believer. So it is not very general. So it may not be very interesting.

(B) You must be very careful how you formulate even informal paraphrases of D(B). For instance, you cannot say that aD(B)b means that B believes that "a" has the same denotation is "b". This would smack of a vicious circle, but this may not be the biggest problem. The problem is that the using of "believe" in the definition of aD(B)b could invite the same paradoxes as those which we tried to explain in the first place. Wherever we have belief we have intensionality

The solution is that "a has for B the same denotation as b" would be explained in behavioristic terms which would not include "believe". This is the philosophy of mind bit. I am very unwilling to recourse to behaviorism, because I like mental concepts and do not want to explain them away, but what can I do? I am just forced to accept it in this case, to explain the semantic puzzle.

Good

(C) This is a very simple solution at first glance (but complications lurk)

(D) It seems to save compositional semantics, although a reference is made to metalanguage, on both side of truth conditions. The intuitive sketch would look as follows.

The sentence "John believes Rome is a beautiful city" iff John believes Rome is a beautiful city and "Rome" denotes Rome for John

If it looks again like a vicious circle, but let me remind that the explication of "Rome" denotes for John Rome would be behaviouristic and "Rome" could be treated as a physical sound and denotation of Rome by "Rome" for John perhaps some physical disposition or co-occurance.

Am I satisfied with this solution? I will need to look at it again later

Farewell to Semantics (part one)

Some entries earlier I described the old and famous intensionality paradox my philosophy teachers were fascinated about. (do not forget to click)

Here is another example:


(1) Cicero believed that Rome was a great town

But Rome is also the capital of Italy, so Rome and the capital of Italy are the same thing.

(2) Rome = capital of Italy,

so by way of substitution, the following should be true

(3) Cicero believed that the capital of Italy was a great town.

But this is false. Cicero did not have the faintest idea about Italy, not in the modern sense, and what its capital was.


Why is this paradox disquieting? This is connected with three names

1’) Frege and compositional semantics
2’) Tarski and definition of truth
3’) Davidson and truth-conditional theory of meaning


Re 1') The compositionality principle says that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. In particular, it depends on what entities are assigned to constituent words. The town of Rome is assigned to the word “Rome”. But the meaning of (1') and (3') does not depend only on the reference of words, but also what words are actually used (“Rome” or “capital of Italy”). And this seems to be unpredicable.

Re 2') This is similar. Once you assign meaning to basic proper names, variables and predicates (or put more simply to basic constituents of language), you can determine by automatic rules the truth of complex sentences which involve logical connectives (and quantifiers). But this apparently cannot be done if we admit verbs expressing propositional attitudes like "believe" or "know". "Rome" and "capital of Italy" refer to the same town. So whether we use the word "Rome" or "capital of Italy" should have no bearing on the truth of the sentences.

(1) Cicero believed that Rome was a great town.
(3) Cicero believed that the capital of Italy was a great town.

But the first is true and the second untrue.

Re 3') Donad Davidson and some other philosophers suggested that the meaning of natural language sentences should be their truth conditions. But for this this you need a Tarski-style semantics, which with belief sentences you apparently are not going to get.

In the next entry I will try to give a solution to the intensionality paradox. I am still a little sketchy about the details and I am sure that it cannot be faultless, because in my experience no one has yet succeeded to solve this problem. But for now my solution seems quite intuitive and, moreover, is rooted in philosophy of mind.

See you soon,

Marco

Hellodicy

Yesterday’s post proved that hell does not exist. The reasoning was actually very similar to the problem of theodicy. The problem of theodicy is to explain the contradiction between the existence of the Evil of with the goodness of God. My problem is that I cannot understand how the existence of hell after the end of the world is compatible with God’s goodness as well as God's love and rationality.
But there is an important difference. Once you have solved the problem of theodicy (can you?) you still have to solve the problem of hell. OK, God exists. OK, the evil exists. But why do you have punish people for their evildoings after the end of the world, when such punishment serves not apparent purpose, because the Last Judgment has taken place and nobody can improve (The threat of Hell is a different matter).
The purpose of theodicy is to explain the relationship between two categories: God and the Evil. Hellodicy is to explain interrelations between three: God, the Evil and Hell.

No more Inferno

Of course there is no hell. The threat of hell may play an important part in God’s moral education plan. But the actual implementation of it is a completely different story.
God threatens us with hellfire, because he does not want us to sin: to kill one another, to steal or blaspheme. This works for some people, but not for others. Nevertheles, hell is an important deterrent. So were the nuclear arms during the Cold War.
But now comes the end of the world and Last Judgment. People can no longer improve. Sending some people to hell will deter no one from committing sin because the world has come to an end and there is no more opportunity to sin. Eternal condemnation makes simply no sense, it is like nuclear bombing of Gorbatschev’s people after perestroyka, after Fukuyama’s end of history.
Theologically it is even worse. Eternal condemnation to hell serves no purpose, it is merely an act of vengeance. And God is absolute love and absolute goodness. Logically, goodness and vengefulness do not mix.
So the good news on this All Souls’ Day is: none of your relatives has gone to hell.
Which does not mean that you can sin. Try and I will be after you!

Banking and semantics

I have a job at a bank. On a bad day it seems to make little sense (other than in pounds and pence). On a good day there is enough sophisticated semantics to pass round, straightforward as it might look at first sight.

Why straightforward? Because banking is about balance sheets. Balance sheets are about numbers. Numbers are mathematics. Mathematics is extensional and does not allow intensional paradoxes.
So banking does not allow intensional paradoxes.

But this reasoning is certainly untrue.

(if you do not know what intensional contexts are click here to see previous entry)


Banking’s basic equation, sort of E = mc2 , is

(1)TOTAL ASSETS = TOTAL LIABILITIES

Hence,

(2) ASSETS = LIABILITIES

Now let us take the assumption which all the bankers recognise as true

(3) DEPOSITS ARE LIABILITIES

Next, from (2) and (3) you can derive by substitution

(4) DEPOSITS ARE ASSETS

which is false, absurd even (because deposits are on the liabilities side of the balance sheet).

The bottom line is that when we talk about the balance sheet the Fregean, compositional semantics does not work, because the talking of assets and liabilities involves intensional contexts. Now, this is puzzling, because it would seem that the balance sheet is pure mathematics, which is extensional.

Logic and Superman

Lois Lane is journalist. She believes that a Clark Kent will investigate a news story with her.
So the sentence

(1) Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent will investigate a news story with her.

is true

But

(2) Clark Kent = Superman

So the sentence

(3) Lois Lane believes that Superman will investigate a news story with her.

should also be true (because very little is changed, only Clark Kent who is also a Superman is referred to by a different sound)

But (3) is false, because Louis Lane does not know that Superman is Clark Kent

Why do I mention this thrilling, old logical puzzle. See next entry.



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Empty Witness Box. Test Your Dualistic Intuitions

There was a time when the earth was not a goldilocks, blue-eyed planet, despite having no people or for that matter animals to suffer. If there had been any people, they would have suffocated, because there was no free oxygen to breathe. It was an ugly place. Once meteorites have given way, hot brown soup brewed on its surface..

This original (primordial) environment provides the context for Stanley Miller’s experiment.

It is described by Richard Dawkins on Melvyn Bragg’s „In Our Time” (BBC)


Stanley Miller performed an extraordinary experiment. He got together the ingredients which were thought to be present in the early Earth atmosphere. (around 3.9 billion years ago) and set up an apparatus, in which he had the flask which represented the sea and a flask which represented the atmosphere above it and put into the atmosphere non-oxygenated ingredients of the early earth. There was electric spark, which simulated lightening strikes. And he just left it for a couple of weeks. And at the end of this time they had accumulated in the sea (the lower of the two flasks, the one with water, a thin brown liquid, which when he analysed it, it turned out to be pretty much what J.B.S Haldane had speculated as the hot brown soup. It contained numerous organic compounds, many of which were vital to the origin of life, aminoacids of various kinds, including several aminoacids from the twenty that life actually uses.

Melvyn Bragg

We are not talking yet about the origin of life..

Richard:

There was nothing living there.

Melvyn Bragg

So what did it prove?

It proved that the conditions of the early earth were ripe for a synthethis under the ordinary laws of chemistry of many of the basic building blocks of life. It was a precondition of life, it was not life itself.

[unquote]


But suppose we walked an extra mile and attempted to actually create life. If evolution is a natural experiment, it can in principle be replicated. So let us perform a thought experiment. I already have a name for it: “Empty Witness Box”, because it is not quite certain if our experiment in life-creation will have any witnesses.

The rules of the game are not complicated. Take a sterilised strong box of any size whatsoever with a covered opening to put solid and liquid substances inside. You are allowed to put anything into the box, but you are not allowed to take anything out of it. I fact, you are not even allowed to look into it, to peep through the hole. To make sure, let us also make the box soundproof. You have as much time as you need and because people are mortal, let us assume that the experiment is conducted not by one scientist, but generations of them (like those who interacted for millions of years with the “Deep Thought” computer in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). They are even allowed to evolve. jettison their awarenesses in the evolution and even turn into machines, because nothing in the experiment depends on the nature of the experimenter. Because he is not even allowed to look, he will certainly not witness the reactions inside the box, so he is basically irrelevant, a mere technician potentially replaceable by a robot.

Let me repeat: potentially any ingredients can be poured or deposited into the box. Once inside it, any chemical or otherwise reactions can take place. You can cook brown soup, red soup, blue soup, this is not important, as long as you do not look. Apart from this there are no conditions on the substances and processes of the experiment.

Why is this not important? The reason is that we are interested in possibilities and not the actual outcome. And we are not so much interested in creating life, but in making consciousness emerge.

Whatever happens inside the box is without witnesses. The main question is: „Is it nevertheless possible that the process will be witnessed?”.

Let us take three philosophers:

MATERIALST: Of course it is possible, if not very likely. Once evolution kicks off and sensual beings start to evolve, we will have witnesses. Your experiment is an evident nonsense. You should rather look into the box and study the interesting science of it.

NON-RELIGIOUS DUALIST: I am not sure. Perhaps what will evolve as creatures with eyes and ears will be zombies. I have no intuitions as to how mind combines with matter. In the historical evolution mind clicked with matter, but I am not sure about EVERY evolution. I do not know where consciousness comes from. It seems to jump out like a jack in the box (pardon my metaphor). It did not get there from outside. Usually when I want to know about other minds I ask people questions and make my inferences. But here I cannot even make an inference. Anyway, you should ask Chalmers.

RELIGIOUS DUALIST: You are all nuts. Only God can create life. What is in the box can be complex automata, which do not see, let alone hear anything, so they cannot be witnesses. But I can grant you one thing: they can be alive and conscious (and not just kicking). God can make anything alive. In any case there is always a witness – his name is God. Instead of playing God, go to church and pray for your soul, which is obviously on its way under.

Which category are you in? And do you sit there comfortably or would you rather like to switch your label from time to time?


(pls give me some time to correct the syntax and introduce links

God without soulmates or kindred spirits

Like Dennet I do not believe in God but, unlike him, I am a firm believer in the mind-body distinction. As part of my therapy to get me rid of my strange philosophical views I wanted to find a contrasting stance. And I found one, a materialist who believes in God. Here she comes.

There is a podcast Philosophy Talk from California hosted by Ken Taylor and John Perry. In the instalment Faith, Reason and Science August 2, 2009 they invited a modern-day theologian Nancy Murphy, the author of Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will argued that religion and science sometimes conflicted — but this conflict did not necessarily work to the detriment of either. For example, modern science put a question mark over the traditional Christian dualist notion that the body and soul are two distinct entities. In this case, Murphy contended that what had been interpreted as a religious and scientific conflict need not be one, because some modern Christians are backing away from dualist readings of the New Testament as better translations became available.

Here is a rough transcript of the relevant fragments of the conversation.

John Perry

Does not Christianity tell us that we are rational because we have an immortal soul that is immaterial and has nothing to do with neurons, except maybe some correlation? How does one reconcile those [science and Christian dualism]? (...)

Ken Taylor

The science is right and the dualism of Christianity is wrong?

Nancy Murphy

I agree. Beginning at least a hundred years ago biblical scholars and critical church historians starting asking the question whether the body-soul dualism was part of the original Jewish and Christian teaching. And there’s almost a hundred percent consensus right now that the Hebrew scriptures are not dualistic. It’s based on bad translations. There are still some conflicts among conservative Christians as to whether the New Testament requires Christians to be dualists, but my own view is that it does not, those authors were simply not interested in that question. So this is a vast oversimplification, but as Christianity was spreading in the Mediterranean region with all those philosophical systems, most of which were dualistic, Christianity picked up dualism as it went along. It has been unnecessary baggage ever since.

John Perry

Unnecessary baggage, it sounds very good, but you are talking about St. Augustine, about the whole Middle Ages, about the understanding what Christ was all about, that has shaped millennia of Christianity, you are going to reject all of that.

Nancy Murphy

Yeah, they are wrong.

Ken Taylor

Maybe its not in the Bible, but the Catholic Church says that the revelation is given in the Bible plus tradition. The Bible needs lots and lots interpreting.

Nancy Murphy

I used to be Catholic myself, but I’ve since switched to more primitive Baptist sort of religion, which puts much more stock in trying to get clear on what the New Testament was teaching. and if we find a discrepancy between the New Testament Teaching and later Church pronouncement, the New Testament will win out.

[There is a] promise of a future life, but not promise of an immortal soul - promise of resurrected bodies, which is quite a different idea.

John Perry

How do you see resurrected bodies philosophically, what happens at resurrection.

Nancey Murphy

Remember that it was biblical critics a hundred years before all those developments in neuroscience who said that the original Christian Hebrew texts did not teach body-soul dualism. Its not that Christians are backing away from dualism, because of science, we backed away from dualism because of the better reading of our own faith. Now, when you get to resurrection, this an area when science will not be able to tell us anything, because what we are talking about is a transformed creation that is so radically transformed that the science which describes it is no longer going to apply and all we know about resurrection comes from various and conflicting pictures what Jesus was like after his resurrection. (..) There is no literal way to describe what a resurrected person is going to be like.

(end of transcript).

What can a non-Christian dualist say to this, without considering all the metaphysical ramifications.

1) Apparently dualism is such a compromised notion that even religion is backing away from it. Dualism is so stupid that originally it was not part of the revealed truth. It was implanted there due to bad philosophy of Greek rather than Hebrew origin. Dualism is lousy.

but there is a another interpretation

2) Dualism has nothing to do with religion, contrary to what people think. Right or wrong, it must defended and argued for in its own terms. So non-religious dualism is a justified stance, which can be legitimately espoused by an independent mind.

Guess which of the two positions I like more.

Good apple partly rotten

Incidentally, there is a problem with saying (like positivists do) that religious statements are nonsensical. If the sentence:
“God exists”
is meaningless, then how about
“The Pope believes that God exists”,
which may be even true. It would be a good sentence with some rotten parts.

Good Question Bad Answer

Religious people think that their beliefs are not only true, but also provide answers to important questions. Not so disbelievers. Positivists thought that religious propositions were not just false or unknowable, they were meaningless. Marxists were less radical. They thought that religious beliefs answered to certain human needs, but not very salutary ones. They were opium for the masses. Douglas Adams (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) kept looking for an answer to the question about the meaning of life. He finally found one and it said “Forty two”. He still thought it was a good answer to an obscure question.
I beg to disagree. I think that religion provides answers to important questions, perhaps even philosophical questions. Questions like:
1) “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
2) “Why is there so much suffering, if everyone would be happier without it?”
3) “What is going to happen to all of us, sophisticated people with so much imagination and mines of information?”
4) “How should one live?”
5) “Why is there so much subjectivity in the world?
6) “How did the world arise?

Not all these questions are very clear, that’s right (1 and 5 are not). But there are all very good questions, prephilosophical, prescientific even.

On the other hand religious answers are almost disappointing in their clarity. How did the world arise. It was created by a powerful being. We must obey him, or else, because he is so strong. But if we are obedient, we will not die and continue to live forever.

Religion is a disappointment. I would like to know what I am doing here and why I was thrown in with all those human animals. Instead I am told a fairy tale about a God who was virgin born, can transform water into wine and part the Red Sea. There is nothing hard to understand here, these are childish stories.

Still, religious people deserve respect, because their quest is legitimate. Some of the questions 1-6 will be answered by science, some not. But it is better to have no answer, than a shallow one, potentially untrue.

Marek W.

Why is being a godless dualist so difficult?

Why is being an atheist dualist so difficult?
The problem is as always (from the times of Descartes onwards) how to combine the material and spiritual (moral) aspect in one person. Or simply put, how to connect the body and the soul.
TRADITIONAL DUALIST in my opinion has no problem. God can do anything, so a mere juxtaposition of body and mind comes to him as natural as creating the world, or man for that matter. For a dualist the only thing is to believe in God, but 95% of the human kind do.
MATERIALIST believes only in one substance, so he does not have such problems. Nevertheless, he faces the issue of recognising other humans (and perhaps dogs) as moral agents (as opposed to stones, grasses and cockroaches). But again, the problem does not seem that big. Like God, man can decide anything (but not necessarily do everything). So he may simply decide that other people will be moral beings and protected by our ethical principles, whereas any pest, worms and cockroaches would be eliminated. The basis for our decision will be sympathy (Hume) and similitude. Simply, those being like us will be promoted and those unlike us will be eliminated. I am very subtle today.
TROUBLED DUALIST like me, who does not believe in God, but thinks that the mind cannot be reduced to the physical. He has lots of questions to answer. What is mind for, if neuroscience can (apparently) explain everything? (if not now, then in future). How is the soul connected with the body? If the soul is a special attribute of man, when did it appear on the tree of evolution (and of course I am a Darwinist). Are bats mere machines or spiritual beings? What is it like being a bat? The list of questions may not be so long (see David Armstrong’s book “A Materialist Theory of Mind”), but they all beat me.
Any I have no powerful ally like God to look to, who can do everything for me. And unlike the materialist I cannot make arbitrary decisions (almost play God). I have real questions to answer. I have been looking one way and the other. But so far, I have remained a disfunctional dualist with all my problems. Am I in a minority of one?

Marek

Dazed and Confused

Hello everybody,

Like Socrates I do not philosophise for money. Unlike him I have a steady, nine to five job, bank job in fact. And of course I am doing all right. But my heart is in philosophy. Hopefully, my mind will follow my heart. Because at present my philosophical views are somewhat of a mess.

For one thing, I am attracted to mind-body dualism or rather double-aspect theory (the mental and the brainy are two aspects of the same thing, two features of it). This does not make me a churchgoer, rather a bland, lay humanist, unlike real dualists, who tend to believe in God, which I do not think I do. And I do not believe in immortality. Although I would like to be in heaven (even on earth), I think that hell is a logical inconsistency and I can prove it. Or perhaps some Christian bloggers can convert me.

Although I believe in rich spritual life, I strongly deny the existence of free will, which spiritual people often advocate. No freedom ex nihilo, no Chisholm, no Sartre. Freedom is possible only in the weakest sense, roughly „you can do as you please, but can you please as you please?” (G.E. Moore, B. Spinoza?) This brings me close to scientism. But if I say that the question of determinism or indeterminism has little to do with the question of our liberty, you will see how muddled and confused my ideas are.

I am old-fashioned. I like good old analytic philosophy, but I would rather have it more romantic, so that it could be discussed in Left Bank cafes, possibly in French, like existentialism, and with attractive girls around. And tell me: why is analytic philosophy so boring, dry-as-dust and unsentimental? After all, it has its origins in Hume, who put so much emphasis (especially in ethics) on empathy, sentiment, fought absolutes of his day no less adamantly than any existentialist. On top of which, he was the darling of the salons and Rousseau’s friend. Later he fell out with him, but who would not?

So read me, because I have fairly bizarre views. But what can I do? This is how I think – honest. Treat me as a member of a bizarre denomination, who nevertheless is trying to convert no one. Twentieth century philosophy was so much party-line oriented! And I would not be admitted to any philosophical party (and boy I tried!).

I started to write this diary in order to rework my philosophical Weltanschauung. Kind of philosophical therapy. You may help me with my treatment. We will see which way this goes. Maybe I graduate to become an austere positivist. Or inward-looking phenomenologist. Or perhaps my soul is really immortal. Or I will remain the philosophical correlate of the political animal invented by Kołakowski: conservative-liberal socialist.

My philosophical views! I will put you to a real test! Beware, if you do not pass it, I will have no qualms about changing you. Although my philosophical persona can also be changed in the process. Once my blobbing starts gathering pace, I may even stop being the same monad.

NB: This blog is a companion to Blog Filozoficzny Marka Witkowskiego by the same blobber. I wish I could recommend it to you. Unfortunately, it is written in Polish, which is my native tongue, so if you do not have the language, do not even bother to click! Every philosopher should have his secret language (lingua mentalis) and I am no exception.

But do come back to this one

Marek Witkowski