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.