2016-01-07T14:47:38+01:00

Last updated on: January 7, 2016 at 2:47 pm   By

Having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions meant. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.

This is the seventh post after

#1 – a priori

#2 – Abstract objects – Platonism or nominalism?

#3 – Aesthetic value: objective or subjective

#4 – Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

#5 – Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

and having covered idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism in the last post; the next question in the survey is:

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

Accept or lean toward: compatibilism 550 / 931 (59.1%)
Other 139 / 931 (14.9%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism 128 / 931 (13.7%)
Accept or lean toward: no free will 114 / 931 (12.2%)

Woo hoo! Here is my most written-about topic in the world of philosophy, being the topic of my first book Free Will? An investigation into whether we have free will, or whether I was always going to write this book. In fact, the book looks to answer this very philpapers question.

So, first of all, like all philosophers, we need to define out terms. Unfortunately, this is the nub of the problem, to the point where one could quite easily combine no free will and compatibilism in the stats above, depending on what definition is being used, and how we exemplify it.

Libertarian free will

If we step out of the world of academic philosophy and ask your average Joe what free will is, it would sound something like this (which is confirmed through my chats to non-philosophers and people at the talks I give on this subject):

The theoretical ability to do otherwise in a given situation. In other words, if a person did A in a situation C, then if we rewound back to C, she could do B in that same situation C, too.

I would refine this as: The theoretical, consciously controlled ability to do otherwise in a given situation.

I would do this because if these things are happening non-consciously, then notions of an agent and their control are stripped away to some important degree. More on this later.

This, then, is what is known as libertarian free will (LFW) or contra-causal free will.

Now, as mentioned, not everyone adheres to this as being the definition of the term. However, I prefer to go with what people generally understand. In some senses, this renders the stats to the question as problematic because some might answer it doesn’t exist, whilst others will answer it does, if defined in a particular way. Indeed, this is probably what is happening with regard to the results for compatibilism and no free will.

On the definition that I have given, this means that one could do A or B in exactly the same scenario (C). This means that if every prior piece of history, every variable at that moment (down to every individual atom), every piece of reasoning in the mind to that moment etc. was exactly the same, the person could still chose other than they did. This clearly opens up this theory to problems with grounding any given decision and thus action by an agent. For example, if I did A in C (decided to make a cup of tea at 6:15pm on Tuesday evening) and we went on for 10 minutes in this world and then rewound back to that exact moment (C – 6.15), then I could choose not A (eg B, or to not make a cup of tea). But what an earth could ground this “second” decision? Since everything, including my reasoning, would be absolutely identical, what could ground my decision to do otherwise than I did originally? Every available piece of reasoning, and indeed, my reasoning faculties as states in the brain and neurological structures, would be identical. There seems to be a problem for rationally grounding these two actions given identical scenarios.

Determinism

This is why this is called contra-causal free will, because it invalidates the notion of causality that we generally have. And this is why I reject this idea of free will (LFW). Before you even look at evidence, the logic and philosophy fail. This can be summed up like this:

Either something happens for a reason, or it does not.

Now, we can introduce a third factor here: random. The problem is (and this can take the shape of quantum indeterminacy, for example) that this does not help free will as generally understood where the agent has conscious control over their decision. If part of the variables which lead towards this decision are random, like a virtual die roll, then the agent is not consciously controlling and “owning” this decision making. This kind of indeterminacy is often invoked to get a sort of free version of the will, and I do not accept this move.

We seem to have two notions here which are in direct conflict: determinism and the will. Determinism is this idea that the world works to strict natural laws of cause and effect. This is something which science accepts quite generally, and thus we have methodological naturalism, which I have talked about before. With the idea of some kind of random in the world (e.g. quantum) this idea could be invalidated. However, there are two things to consider here. Many interpretations of quantum are deterministic (i.e. the random is illusory we just don’t know enough about the systems etc.) or that the random at microscopic level does not affect causality at macroscopic level. This is called adequate determinism as espoused by people like Stephen Hawking. As wiki states:

  • Adequate determinism is the idea that quantum indeterminacy can be ignored for most macroscopic events. This is because of quantum decoherence. Random quantum events “average out” in the limit of large numbers of particles (where the laws of quantum mechanics asymptotically approach the laws of classical mechanics).[23] Stephen Hawking explains a similar idea: he says that the microscopic world of quantum mechanics is one of determined probabilities. That is, quantum effects rarely alter the predictions of classical mechanics, which are quite accurate (albeit still not perfectly certain) at larger scales.[24] Something as large as an animal cell, then, would be “adequately determined” (even in light of quantum indeterminacy).

Without wanting to derail the discussion too much, I will disregard quantum indeterminacy as either not having the desired macroscopic effect, not existing, or simply not being able to be useful to a consciously willing being.

Which means we are back to things either being caused or not. If something which happens is uncaused, then it is effectively random anyway, and this brings us back to not being helpful to the conscious willing of an agent.

Which then brings us back to one option: things are caused. Whether they be brain states, other physical matter, or the will, things adhere to causality, a relationship between an effect and its causes. Some people talk about humans being influenced but not wholly caused. I call this the 80-20 Problem, which I have written about here where I state:

Which is all good and well, but what about the issue at hand? Well, when people claim we are, say. 80% determined, but that 20% of an action is still freely willed, we have EXACTLY the same problem – we have just moved that argument into a smaller paradigm, into the 20%. Assuming that we forget the 80% fraction which is determined so not being of interest to the LFWer, we are left with the 20%. But this is devoid of determining reasons. So what, then, is the basis of that 20% in making the decision? The agent cannot say, “Well  my genetically determined impulses urged me to A, my previous experience of this urged me towards A, but I was left with a 20% fraction which overcame these factors and made me do B” because he still needs to establish the decision as being reasonable.  OK, so if that 20% is not just random or unknown (but still grounded in something) and had any meaning, then it would be reasoned! The two horns of the Dilemma of Determinism raise their ugly heads again. We are left with reasoned actions or actions without reason, neither of which give the LFWer the moral responsibility that they are looking for.

As mentioned, science very much assumes and evidences determinism. Whether it be genetics, social science, neuroscience, physics, psychology or any other ology, science looks to hypothesise how and why things happen from a point of view of causality. For example, in Are We Free?, by Baer, Kaufman and Baumeister, which looks at free will and determinism from within the discipline of psychology, the introduction includes the sensible claim:

A psychology that doesn’t accept causes of behaviour or the possibility of prediction is no psychology at all.

You couldn’t step into a psychologist’s or psychiatrist’s office and ask “Why am I behaving like this?” and expect the expert to throw up their hands and say “Well, I’ll be blown if I know; you freely chose to…”. Indeed, they look for reasons for behaviour. As Schopenhauer once said:

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

Compatibilism

Which brings me on to the final piece of this jigsaw: compatibilism. This is the belief that determinism and free will both exist and are compatibile with each other. Whether or not we subscribe to fully blown determinism or adequate determinism (including quantum indeterminacy), one of them sits comfortably with this idea of free will. However, as philosophers like Ted Honderich have pointed out, free will (understood as LFW) seems to be a negation of determinism, so in some sense compatibilists are saying that free will and lack of free will coexist!

Compatibilists adhere to determinism so they are sometimes called soft determinists whilst those who adhere to determinism as being incompatible with free will, and thus free will does not exist are called hard determinists (and sometimes incompatibilists or hard incompatibilists). Compatibilists will generally admit that the agent is unable to do otherwise in a given scenario. In other words, they deny LFW for the basic reasons given above, together, perhaps, with empirical evidence. Instead, they see free will as being able to do what you desire to do. Thus if I wanted to make a cup of tea and made it, I did it freely, and therefore have free will, even if I was always going to do so.

Which is why Schopenhauer’s quote above is apt because, to me, internal causality is just as relevant as external causality. So if a person had a gun against their head or shackles around their ankles, they would not be behaving freely. But surely kleptomania and other internally caused dispositions have this same effect. Moreover, as I have pointed out here (“Whitman, tumours, the neurotypical and moral responsibility”), “normal” brain states are just as caused as “unwanted dispositions”. Our will, in other words, is itself victim to causality. Therefore, we may do want we want, but we cannot want what we want. The causal chain goes back and back and back to the beginning of the universe or similar. Causality works through us, and we are riding on its waves. We don’t consciously control that wave.

If you define free will, then, as the ability to do what you want, then I too would believe it existed and would be a compatibilist. The problem with the question is it uses the term libertarian free will as an understanding of free will, and so this invalidates compatibilism as a position (or indeed vice versa). Thus one or other should not be an option. It should either be: free will or no free will; or compaitbilism or incompatibilism, or something similar. If  you define free will in terms of LFW, I believe it does not exist. If you define it in terms of that generally accepted by most compatibilists, then I accept its existence! The question fails on this basis.

Now, I haven’t even looked at genetic, psychological or neuroscientific evidence to support positions in this article. You can check my category for free will and determinism here for some of that. I am perhaps biased because I am writing this from a position of thinking free will is an illusion to the mind (illusionism) and that our decisions are either caused by our non-conscious brain, and we attach intention to them afterwords (epiphenomenalism) or they are simply caused by brain states without us particularly thinking about it.

And religion?

The powerful ramifications of the free will debate with regard to religion couldn’t be more pronounced. The God question supervenes on this one, unless you are a theological determinist like a Calvinist, for example. This is because almost every major concept of God is a personal judgemental god who weighs up your life based on your decisions. If these decisions are invalidated by such philosophy, then that conception of God is wrong and that god does not exist.

If in any meaningful sense I could not have done otherwise, then God punishing me eternally is rendered utterly incoherent. Which is why crime and punishment is such a rich area for debate in this topic.

Each aspect of what I talk about here is a book on its own, so there is obviously a great deal of simplicity necessary for this piece. As ever, buy my book (which is a simple introduction to the topic)!perf6.000x9.000.indd

The concept of moral responsibility is really important to this topic, and I suggest further reading on this elsewhere on my free will and determinism category.

RELATED POSTS:

#1 – a priori

#2 – Abstract objects – Platonism or nominalism?

#3 – Aesthetic value: objective or subjective

#4 – Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

#5 – Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

#6  – External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

#7 – Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

#8 – Belief in God: theism or atheism?

2016-01-07T17:37:47+01:00

Last updated on: January 7, 2016 at 5:37 pm   By

…or at least not wholly right.

For those across the pond who are not familiar with the Hillsborough disaster, it was a a grim day in Sheffield in 1989 when 96 Liverpool Football Club fans died (with 766 injuries), being crushed to death in surging crowds in the old terrace-style ground enclosures.

There have been ongoing inquiries into the event, looking to find blame and culpability. In the last week, the most recent inquiry has culminated in dys of evidence being given and headlines like this:

Hillsborough inquests: David Duckenfield admits causing 96 deaths

Hillsborough Chief: My Failure ‘Caused’ Deaths

Hillsborough: Duckenfield admits not closing tunnel directly caused 96 deaths

The BBC, Sky and Guardian are pretty representative here. But no one seems to be doing their philosophy. Let me give you some basics of what happened on the day, as mapped out by wiki:

A crush resulted in the deaths of 96 people and injuries to 766 others. The incident has since been blamed primarily on the police for letting too many people enter the stadium. It remains the worst stadium-related disaster in British history, and one of the world’s worst football disasters.[1]

The Football Association (FA) selected Hillsborough (home ground of Sheffield Wednesday football club) for the match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Liverpool fans were allocated the Leppings Lane stand,[2] entry to which was possible only via one of seven decrepit turnstiles,[2] a restriction that led to dangerous overcrowding outside the ground before kick-off. In an attempt to ease pressure outside the ground, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, the senior police officer responsible for the match, ordered an exit gate to be opened. The opened exit gate led to a tunnel marked “Standing”, which led directly to the two already overcrowded enclosures. In previous years, the tunnel had been closed off by police when the two central pens were full; however, on this occasion the tunnel was unmanned.

The ensuing influx of supporters caused crushing, and some fans climbed over side fences or were lifted by fellow supporters onto the stand above to escape the crush. Moments after kick-off, a crush barrier broke, and fans began to fall on top of each other. The game was stopped after six minutes. To carry away the injured, supporters tore down advertising hoardings to use as stretchers and emergency services were called to provide assistance. Of the 96 people who died, only 14 had been admitted to a hospital. When the FA Chairman visited the Control Box to find out what had happened, Duckenfield falsely claimed that the supporters had “rushed” the gate.[3]

There have been claims and counter claims from the police and what they maintain happened, form supporters and supporters’ groups opposing them. What has happened this week is that Duckenfield himself, the senior police officer making decisions at the time, has admitted he has directly caused those deaths. I have written about this before in “Have I killed somebody” where I questioned whether I myself had been responsible for the death or someone I knew:

I will embed that whole article here as it is entirely prevalent:

Causality. It is a funny thing. Or not so funny.

A few years back, I took my class, as a teacher, on a class trip to the Historic Dockyard in the naval city of Portsmouth, UK. My school is some 45 minutes walk and a short ferry ride from there. With the cost of coaches, it is important to be able to walk to such places to keep the costs down for parents.

We pasted it there on the way, and we were running a little behind, so the walk back at the end of the day was quicker still. One of our parents, helping with the trip, was a heavy smoker who had to stop off at strategic times throughout the day for a crafty kids-can’t-see-me smoke. Many of the children were moaning on the way back because they simply were not used to walking any such length of time. This certainly applied to some of the parent helpers too.

Anyway, we made it back for the end of the school day, so good effort.

Except, that night, we heard that the aforementioned parent helper had died. He had had a heart attack.

Ever since that moment, I have felt partly responsible for that outcome, of that man’s death. In a naive, folk understanding sort of way, that is.

In writing my book on free will, and in researching the Kalam Cosmological Argument, I have come to understand that causality is much more complex than one might imagine. A does not cause B which causes C in such a simplistic manner. At best, things are only ever contributory causes (see JL Mackie’s INUS notion of causality [1]); but even then, this assumes one can quantise time, and arbitrarily assign discrete units of existence to both events and entities.

Let’s look at the event of the class trip. Did it start when we arrived at the dockyard, when we got off the ferry, when we left, when I started organising it, or, indeed, were elements of the trip in place when I started planning the unit, given the job, got my teacher’s qualifications etc?

Of course, there is no objective answer to that. These abstract labels are subjectively assigned such that we can all disagree on them. That is, simplistically speaking, an element of conceptual nominalism. Likewise, there were necessary conditions in the parent’s life which contributed to his death: anything from his smoking, to his lack of general health, from deciding to come on the school trip, to  deciding to get married and have kids. And so on.

An event happens in time and arbitrarily ascribing a beginning and an end to that event is an abstract pastime, and thus fails to be (IMHO) objectively and (Platonically) real.

This is too simplistic and I don’t buy it!

Causality works through people, and harnessing it so that any one individual can claim themselves (morally) responsible for future effects which themselves are caused by effects preceding the individual makes for tricky philosophy. This is the battleground for the free will debate, for sure. Arbitrarily cutting causality up in such a way is problematic.

As I have set out in my analyses of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA), which I hope to turn into a book (based on a university thesis I did on it), causality is not a linear affair which can be sliced and diced, It is a unitary matrix which derives from either a single beginning (like the Big Bang), something I find problematic, or eternally backward, or reaching some time commencement which could itself be a reboot. Either way, the idea of causality cannot be seen, and should not therefore be seen, in a discrete manner of units which can be attributed to equally problematic notions of events or unities. We are one big family of causality, this here universe.

So, in answer to the question, no. No, I didn’t kill anyone. Perhaps we could say that the universe did. And whatever notion “I” am, and whatever “I” am represented by, sat on or, better still, was part of the threads which cross and recross intricately and almost infinitely over each other in a mazy web of interconnected causality.

And that is what I wrote before. Now we can apply this idea to the Hillsborough disaster, and look at it in terms of Mackie’s conditions above, footnoted below. There is this idea that causality is more complex than A causes B causes C as the Hillsborough case seems to imply. There are any number of variables or conditions which, had they not been met, the event would not have happened, or at least not in the way it did. For example:

  • The Liverpool or Forest manager had not been born, or had been ill for the previous round, and the teams had not qualified
  • The turnstiles had been updated
  • The passageway had been manned by police or stewards
  • The restriction had not been in place which had led to crowding
  • The crush barrier did not break
  • The Liverpool fans had been allocated the other end
  • As wiki also states: “In September 2012, the Hillsborough Independent Panel concluded that up to 41 of the 96 fatalities might have been avoided had they received prompt medical treatment.[9] The report revealed “multiple failures” by other emergency services and public bodies that contributed to the death toll.” – if these services had worked as hoped, deaths could have been avoided.
  • The stadium had had safety measures in place, as all modern stadia, which came about as a result of this
  • The bottleneck of fans had not developed
  • Police had not prevented 43 of the 44 ambulances from entering the ground
  • Again, wiki: “People entering were unaware of the problems at the fence; police or stewards usually stood at the entrance to the tunnel and, when the central pens reached capacity, directed fans to the side pens, but on this occasion, for reasons not fully explained, did not.[2] A BBC TV news report conjectured that if police had positioned two police horses correctly, they would have acted as breakwaters directing many fans into side pens, but on this occasion, it was not done.”

And so on.

The point of this piece IS NOT to say Duckenfield is A OK and should be let off the hook. Of course not! But it is to say that causality is very complex and that having simplistic approaches like the ones expressed by the papers and media outlets and the people themselves is inaccurate. Any one of these components being missing would have led no doubt to very different outcomes, meaning that Duckenfield wouldn’t have been directly responsible for 96 deaths and 766 injuries.

The difficulty is assessing this or quantifying it in any way. It is fair to say that he, in a simplistic way, was a major contributing factor to the disaster. But how much is hard to say, perhaps impossible. If homo sapiens hadn’t evolved…We have this idea of proximal causation where we ascribe responsibility to the nearest thing to the event but this is problematic as shown above.

In some microscopic way we could claim that a brain state or a neuron or three were directly responsible for the deaths. What does it mean to be directly responsible for something? To me, the universe is responsible, if that makes sense, for an event coming about.

But that doesn’t make good headlines, right? And it certainly won’t make families feel better or get a sense of closure.

NOTES

[1] Cause as INUS-condition. The most sophisticated version of the necessary and/or suffi­cient conditions approach is probably John Mackie’s analysis of causes in terms of so-called INUS condit­ions. Mackie suggested that a cause of some particular event is “an insufficient but non-redundant part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result” (Mackie 1974: 62). Mackie called a condition of this kind an INUS condition, after the initial letters of the main words used in the definition. Thus, when experts declare a short-circuit to be the cause of fire, they “are saying in effect that the short-circuit is a condition of this sort, that it occurred, that the other condi­tions which, conjoined with it, form a sufficient condition were also present, and that no other suffi­cient condition of the house’s catching fire was present on this occa­sion” (Mackie [1965] 1993: 34). Thus, Mackie’s view may be expressed roughly in the following definition of ‘cause:’ an event A is the cause of an event B if A is a non-redundant part of a complex condition C, which, though sufficient, is not necessary for the effect (B). Source.

2016-01-07T21:16:05+01:00

Last updated on: January 7, 2016 at 9:16 pm   By

I have made sticky (sent to the top of the blog post list)  the post Andreas Schueler wrote about the biological aspects of personhood, life and thus the ramifications on views on abortion. The post is excellent and reflects issues with nominalism and realism: how we attach abstract, conceptual labels to real, material things. And the problems therein.

A new commenter has resurrected the thread, and Andreas is being his usual robustly erudite self.

Join in the debate!

The post is here:

Life starts at conception but what about personhood?

Here some other relevant posts:

The “I”, personhood and abstract objects

Dawkins, Abortion and Catholic Fervour

Philosophy fundamentals – abstracts and abstract ideas

Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #2 – Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism

2014-06-27T22:23:31+01:00

Last updated on: June 27, 2014 at 10:23 pm   By

I have talked about abstract objects many times before, such as here. It is a fundamental area to almost everything in philosophy and is not debated nearly enough. We had a Tippling Philosophers’ debate in the pub last night about the ‘I’ and personhood, which came down to whether they really existed as concepts or not. I actually deny the continuous ‘I’.

tumblr_lae78hUQxw1qzc587o1_500

We had a really good discussion at TPs, talking about what the ‘I’ is that experiences and whether it persists over time, what it entails etc etc.

Anyway, I talked about how the discussion depended upon abstracts and whether they exist or not. This is what I said on email:

Twas a good night. Some fascinating discussion to be had…

Guy, on nominalism vs realism (whether abstract objects exist outside of our brains), I have written a sort of beginner’s guide here, based on the famous philpapers survey question:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/02/18/philosophy-101-philpapers-induced-2-abstract-objects-realism-nominalism/

It is important in the world of maths. I have just edited a book by a mathematician looking at this exact thing, such that maths is a DESCRIPTION of reality, rather than prescribing it. Numbers don’t ‘exist’ out there, but are our mental abstracta, and we should not confuse the map with the terrain.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/16/dot-dot-dot-infinity-plus-god-equals-folly/

Given that personhood is an abstract label ascribed to x or y properties, is that relationship really real? The fact that we all disagree on what constitutes personhood, or a hero, or anything, evidences the notion that these labels are merely conceptual, and exist nowhere but in our heads.

On personhood, we talked a little about Dennett:

  1. Persons are rational beings
  2. Persons are beings to which states of consciousness are attributed, or to which psychological or mental or intentional predicates are ascribed.
  3. Whether something counts as a person depends in some way on an attitude taken toward it, a stance adopted with respect to it.
  4. The object toward which this personal stance is taken must be capable of reciprocating in some way.
  5. Persons must be capable of verbal communication.
  6. Persons are distinguishable from other entities by being conscious in some special way: there is a way in which we are conscious in which no other species is conscious. Sometimes this is identified as self-consciousness of one sort or another.

I think these are taken from his riginal 1976 chapter found here:

 http://dl.tufts.edu/file_assets/tufts:ddennett-1976.00002

Fascinatingly, there are cross-cultural and temporal differences as to how personhood is perceived. Guy, this runs contrary to your ‘walks like a duck’ thesis, since there are many different ideas of the duck, it seems!

“Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate, and has been questioned during the abolition of slavery and the fight for women’s rights, in debates about abortion,fetal rights and reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, as well as in debates about corporate personhood.[2]

Processes through which personhood is recognized vary cross-culturally, demonstrating that notions of personhood are not universal. Anthropologist Beth Conklin has shown how personhood is tied to social relations among the Wari’ people of Rondônia, Brazil.[3] Bruce Knauft’s studies of the Gebusi people of Papua New Guinea depict a context in which individuals become persons incrementally, again through social relations.[4] Likewise, Jane C. Goodale has also examined the construction of personhood in Papua New Guinea.[5]“

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood

All interesting stuff!

Guy is a fellow TPer who is a recent addition to the group and with whom I have had some big discussions before about free will, naturalism, psychology and science. There has even been some poetry! Here is what Guy responded:

Thank you Rob for chairing the meeting last night. Very stimulating. I’ve read the definitions of realism and nominalism given by Jonno on SIN. Not sure that I can see the relevance of it to the discussion last night. Would appreciate help making the link. I obviously don’t understand its applications nor Jonno’s zeal about its importance. Dennett’s list seems reasonably sensible and chimes with what most in our western tradition would assume about personhood. I remain unmoved from my grammatical argument i.e. that the moment a verb is uttered a person is implied and that grammatical persons derive from the fact of personhood which is something which is irreducible in some way. If it was reducible then utterance could not take place and all our discussions become meaningless or irrelevant. Got the impression this was close to Descartes last night – Cogito ergo sum or Sum ergo cogito. If I is not then thought can’t occur. The existence of I in a real sense is a condition of thought and debate. If you dissolve I you dissolve the validity of debate as debate is predicated on the assumption of a set of I’s. This really is like Heisenberg or even Schroedinger. Try to move a muscle to dissolve I and you dissolve your tongue (or kill the cat). The only response to this is acceptance of a set of conditions in which we live which are a given. Having made this acceptance the game of debate can begin. If you doubt the existence of the centre court no tennis will be played (sorry to labour the point).

Were I pressed I’d begin my list of what personhood is as below. I’d also suggest that society assumes most of this in many forums – the legal, the social etc. I’d go on to say that these “properties” are derived from the general experience of most people (or persons!), most of whom would agree on them. I accept that the Watusi tribe of the Upper Amazon may have a different view. I’d say that the list below is the fullness of personhood or its potential fulfilled. I’d also suggest that this is a sane view, although I’m sure that word will cause a few misgivings!

I has unique identity of which it is aware

I is morally responsible and accountable

I is aware of myself and my condition in a detached self-conscious way which animals don’t do (this allows humour and art)

I is aware of the mortality of myself

So I need to show that the nominalism debate is key to the debate about the I and personhood. That should be pretty straightforward, I hope.

Most everything in philosophy is about abstract ideas. In this case, Guy (and everyone else) were talking about personhood, amongst other things. The claim was that a person is labelled such if they had, say, X and Y properties. This claim, that personhood has such properties, relies on this abstract idea of personhood. Personhood is an abstract label ascribed to certain properties. For example, Guy claims that they are X and Y, someone else A and B. The idea of this is that if anyone is true, this relationship, this abstract idea must truthfully and really exist mind independently. That is the definition of objective.

So what this means is that an abstract idea must have mind independent ontology. It must have existence outside of conceiving brains.

Our  brains conceive of all sorts of things. We have agreed, amongst us, through language, that certain properties constitute a table. But other cultures, animals, aliens, would not ascribe those properties to that idea or label.

Take morality. The properties we ascribe to good have changed over time, and differ from culture to culture. We often agree on a lot because our brains, desires and experiences are very similar. But just because we have developed language to describe these ideas doesn’t mean they poof into mind independent existence. Their ontology still exists entirely in our brains or conceptions.

This idea that abstract ideas are conceptual is called conceptual nominalism. The idea that they are somehow real, or ontic, in a mind independent sense, is called (Platonic) realism.

This can really well be explained by looking at the abstract concept of a species. As I have written elsewhere:

Many apologists attack evolution, and attack the notion that species can evolve into new species, and that there is no transitional fossil evidence for X, Y and Z. However, what they do not realise is that there is no such thing as a species (in a manner of speaking). Objectively, such an idea does not exist. ‘Species’ is a label that we humans have attached to groups of organisms that we see common characteristics between. We also tend to attach arbitrary rules to them too, such as they cannot interbreed with another species, otherwise they are effectively the same species etc. What this labelling does is give a false impression that a) species are static; and b) that these labels define these organisms whether humans exist or not. These labels are human constructs – that is all. Every organism is constantly shifting its genetic blueprint.

We can see this with age. We label something ‘adult’ just like we do ‘personhood’. But what makes someone an adult and not a child? Does something magic happen from one second to the next on the stroke of midnight on the 18th birthday? Of course not. And each individual person is different. The idea of an adult is a conceptual construct which does not exist without human minds to conceive it. Just like personhood. And table. We can take one molecule, leg, two legs off of the table and we might all disagree on whether that thing still qualifies as the abstract idea of the table.

Language serves to describe this process, and to describe these ideas and concepts. It does not prescribe them, and it certainly does not poof ideas into ontic existence.

What is interesting is that Guy was nominalistic about aesthetics when we discussed it (and I very much agreed with him there, for this very reason). Therefore, there might be a double standard by rejecting nominalism in this other context.

In conclusion, personhood is a human, conceptual construction which we attempt to define into existence with language. It is not, however, real or ontic in a mind independent sense. The best we can do is perhaps agree on what those conditions are. Consensus, though, does not make something pop into existence, or make something true. It provides, here, a pragmatic way of seeing the world. If all of us disagreed on every abstract object, there would be chaos. We create dictionaries to attempt to define these ideas, but even these change over time, drop out of fashion, and new ideas and concepts pop into usage (selfies) and some self-appointed arbiters of language define these abstract labels as being used enough to go into a dictionary (they actually use statistics to help there).

 

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2014-04-28T19:22:13+01:00

Last updated on: April 28, 2014 at 7:22 pm   By

Causality. It is a funny thing. Or not so funny.

A few years back, I took my class, as a teacher, on a class trip to the Historic Dockyard in the naval city of Portsmouth, UK. My school is some 45 minutes walk and a short ferry ride from there. With the cost of coaches, it is important to be able to walk to such places to keep the costs down for parents.

We pasted it there on the way, and we were running a little behind, so the walk back at the end of the day was quicker still. One of our parents, helping with the trip, was a heavy smoker who had to stop off at strategic times throughout the day for a crafty kids-can’t-see-me smoke. Many of the children were moaning on the way back because they simply were not used to walking any such length of time. This certainly applied to some of the parent helpers too.

Anyway, we made it back for the end of the school day, so good effort.

Except, that night, we heard that the aforementioned parent helper had died. He had had a heart attack.

Ever since that moment, I have felt partly responsible for that outcome, of that man’s death. In a naive, folk understanding sort of way, that is.

In writing my book on free will, and in researching the Kalam Cosmological Argument, I have come to understand that causality is much more complex than one might imagine. A does not cause B which causes C in such a simplistic manner. At best, things are only ever contributory causes (see JL Mackie’s INUS notion of causality [1]); but even then, this assumes one can quantise time, and arbitrarily assign discrete units of existence to both events and entities.

Let’s look at the event of the class trip. Did it start when we arrived at the dockyard, when we got off the ferry, when we left, when I started organising it, or, indeed, were elements of the trip in place when I started planning the unit, given the job, got my teacher’s qualifications etc?

Of course, there is no objective answer to that. These abstract labels are subjectively assigned such that we can all disagree on them. That is, simplistically speaking, an element of conceptual nominalism. Likewise, there were necessary conditions in the parent’s life which contributed to his death: anything from his smoking, to his lack of general health, from deciding to come on the school trip, to  deciding to get married and have kids. And so on.

An event happens in time and arbitrarily ascribing a beginning and an end to that event is an abstract pastime, and thus fails to be (imho) objectively and (Platonically) real.

This is too simplistic and I don’t buy it!

Causality works through people, and harnessing it so that any one individual can claim themselves (morally) responsible for future effects which themselves are caused by effects preceding the individual makes for tricky philosophy. This is the battleground for the free will debate, for sure. Arbitrarily cutting causality up in such a way is problematic.

As I have set out in my analyses of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA), which I hope to turn into a book (based on a university thesis I did on it), causality is not a linear affair which can be sliced and diced, It is a unitary matrix which derives from either a single beginning (like the Big Bang), something I find problematic, or eternally backward, or reaching some time commencement which could itself be a reboot. Either way, the idea of causality cannot be seen, and should not therefore be seen, in a discrete manner of units which can be attributed to equally problematic notions of events or unities. We are one big family of causality, this here universe.

So, in answer to the question, no. No, I didn’t kill anyone. Perhaps we could say that the universe did. And whatever notion “I” am, and whatever “I” am represented by, sat on or, better still, was part of the threads which cross and recross intricately and almost infinitely over each other in a mazy web of interconnected causality.

NOTES

[1] Cause as INUS-condition. The most sophisticated version of the necessary and/or suffi­cient conditions approach is probably John Mackie’s analysis of causes in terms of so-called INUS condit­ions. Mackie suggested that a cause of some particular event is “an insufficient but non-redundant part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result” (Mackie 1974: 62). Mackie called a condition of this kind an INUS condition, after the initial letters of the main words used in the definition. Thus, when experts declare a short-circuit to be the cause of fire, they “are saying in effect that the short-circuit is a condition of this sort, that it occurred, that the other condi­tions which, conjoined with it, form a sufficient condition were also present, and that no other suffi­cient condition of the house’s catching fire was present on this occa­sion” (Mackie [1965] 1993: 34). Thus, Mackie’s view may be expressed roughly in the following definition of ‘cause:’ an event A is the cause of an event B if A is a non-redundant part of a complex condition C, which, though sufficient, is not necessary for the effect (B). Source.

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2014-04-21T00:24:24+01:00

Last updated on: April 21, 2014 at 12:24 am   By

Some fellow tippling philosophers and myself are having an email exchange about psychology. It started with one of us writing an email lauding Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow, and with another TPer critiquing that (the bold is where he is quoting Andy, the first person).

Kahneman has spoken.

Kahneman’s first commonplace is

do not trust anyone – including yourself – to tell you how much you should trust their judgment.  

That is, except for him as his judgement is somehow free from the lamentable schoolboy errors he tells us we all make on a daily basis. How fine to live on the  Olympian plateau he inhabits while we grovel around down here in a sea of our own grime, heuristics and biases.He then produces a string of homespun bromides and platitudes such as:

The way to block errors that originate in System 1(Intuition or thinking fast) is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2(Computation or thinking slow).

 

Anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

 

Superficial or “lazy” thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a failure of rationality.

 

The common admonition to “act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: You are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.

 

Biological fact: an organism should react cautiously to a novel stimulus, with withdrawal and fear.

 

Death by accidents was judged to be more than 300 times more likely than death by diabetes, but the true ratio is 1:4. The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy.

A friendship that may take years to develop can be ruined by a single action

 

A single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

Tell me something I didn’t know already! But, of course, it’s all dressed up in psychobabble gleaned from the assumption that a human being is the same as a lab rat, and suddenly it wins the Nobel Prize (Economics -sub section – Emperor’s New Clothes – subsection – the Bleeding Obvious)!

He talks about the superiority of ‘Computation over intuition’ which amounts to no more than ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ or ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’, which, I believe, pre-existed the arrival of Daniel Kahneman on the scene.

Did you know the word ‘gullible’ has been removed from the dictionary?

For a very short and more sane Youtube video appraisal of the situation see  below.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114172/leon-wieseltier-scientism-and-humanities

Of course, you don’t have to trust my judgement on anything.

Guy

Guy has actually got  misreading of Kahneman here. More accurately, from Kahneman himself:

Besides, relying on computation instead of intuition would, according to Kahneman, create a slow, laborious, difficult, and costly world. What he did advocate is paying closer attention to the onset of faulty intuition.

“The alternative to thinking intuitively is mental paralysis,” he said. “Most of the time, we just have to go with our intuition, [but] we can recognize situations in which our intuition is likely to lead us astray. It’s an unfinished story.”

And then Guy continued:

‘One’ doesn’t even exist. We are all busily abolishing ourselves and the responsibilities of selfhood by accepting that we amount to no more than a bunch of biases which we can’t escape (unless, of course, our name is Kahnemann, who found the power to become aware enough of his biases to be free of them. I wonder when and how he decided he had reached this point. How did he know he was no longer subject to bias? Perhaps it never ends. At some point he arrogated to himself the right to pronounce himself free and to be capable of pronouncements worthy to be attended to by other mortals. Like Moses handing down the ten commandments).

I responded to this as follows:

Are you doubting cognitive biases? I am not sure what you are getting at. There are shed loads which  are hugely pervasive, and evidenced by shed loads of empirical evidence, not least by people like Kahneman himself.

Good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_biases

I would direct you to my good friend Dr Caleb Lack, Great Plains Skeptic, who teaches  about cognitive biases. Incidentally, I recently edited a chapter of his for an anthology, on cognitive biases!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKhzr0dc2q8

By saying “Tell me something I don’t know” you seem to be claiming that these are obvious, then calling them into question by attacking Kahneman and/or his work…?

Actually, Kahneman, as far as I know, advocates both strategies [intuition and rationality] since one without the other always seems to end in problems (see the work of Antonio Damasio on precisely this).

This email included reference to our very own Great Plains Skeptic here at SIN. I have to say, I was somewhat surprised by Guy’s response which goes to the heart of the matter:

The institution of Psychology with its libraries of authorities, of course, justifies and sustains itself. I am taking issue with the discipline of Psychology so it would be pointless to submit myself to ‘proofs’ from people who are already sold on it. My point is that I am not sold on it. I have taken time to write a considered response to Kahneman’s standpoint. It’s called:

Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow

and is the most recent post on

Roseatetern.blogspot.co.uk

Guy

This crazy epistemological approach inspired me to say:

Of course, that logic works entirely against you and a sound epistemology too:

A Creationist announces:

“I know the truth of the Bible! Why would I want to listen to the words and work of scientists if I reject what scientists have to say! I am taking issue with the discipline of Science so it would be pointless to submit myself to ‘proofs’ from people who are already sold on it.”

(substitute “science” with any discipline).

In other words, you isolate and insulate yourself from changing your mind by refusing to listen to the relevant experts in the field which you are rejecting.

Guy offered his riposte:

 I take issue with only one particular discipline here – Psychology the authority of whose ‘experts’ I don’t accept. I’m very happy to accept  the discipline of medicine for example as it is studying the merely physical aspects of humans. I don’t accept the authority of psychologists because Psychology is founded on casual and fallacious premises that neglect to define the area of study in a satisfactory way. It casually presumes to study human beings without first establishing an incontrovertible model of what a whole human being is and, therefore what the range of the area of study is. It’s not self-evident in the same way as the being of an animal is. It cannot be encapsulated so easily as there is huge range of conflicting models available. Also the fact that a human is studying humans is problematic. How does he detach himself from the interfering inferences and assumptions that humans make? How can he, therefore be truly scientific in a disciplined way? Perhaps I’m saying that he comes with, dare I say it, biases and cannot presume to accuracy in his data. Using the rat template won’t work for all of these reasons and will lead to spectacular mistakes.

Guy

PS How do you deal with the fact that ‘experts in the same field will often disagree and become involved in vitriolic arguments? By your lights the poor layman has to listen to them all and believe them all even though they disagree. Its best to think freely and make your own mind up after giving experts due cognisance.

Let me just say here that disagreement is part of the scientific method and gets sorted, in due course, with more understanding and knowledge, by the scientific method. That is what both philosophy and science seeks to do (science originally being called natural philosophy). What does “thinking freely” mean? That one can just believe what they want irrespective of the evidence? Well, sure. But  it most probably won’t be correct or true in any meaningful sense of the word. Is it a good thing that I might believe that the moon is made of cheese? Is that really what freethinking entails? Yes, let’s be iconoclasts if that furthers our knowledge in some way, but to do so just for the sake of it isn’t so worthy.

Another problem here is that he conflates a human with a human being. Psychology looks at why people do things (in very simple terms), not what a human being is. It doesn’t need to concern itself with what dictates personhood. Understanding confirmation bias or the halo effect has little to do with the philosophical argument of how a human being is defined in terms of personhoood! Essentially, his point here is a non sequitur.

Let me include three more exchanges before summing up. First from me:

The Psychology of the “Psychology Isn’t a Science” Argument

Is worth reading. I would also ask how deep your knowledge of psychology is. Perhaps you are stuck in old-school views of, say, (Skinner’s) Behaviourism as opposed to more modern cognitive psychology, or any other field and subfield. I imagine, since Rob [a friend and founder TPer] is just about to embark on a Masters in Psychology, that he might have something to say on the issue!

Yes, there is pseudoscience in psychology, as there is in many fields. And yes, one must define what is meant by science. But as knowledge goes, psychology is right in there. And as a teacher, I would be amazed if you didn’t use psychology on a day to day basis with your pupils. It is the bread and butter of our pedagogy.

I have to admit, your comment here really surprises me!

To which Fiona, who has guest posted here, chipped in with:

What disturbs me about psychology and books like Kahneman’s is that the business of existing is becoming a science where everything has to be labelled and categorised. Apparently 1 in 4 of us suffer from some form of mental illness. But who decides what it takes it to receive a diagnosis? Surely these apparent mental illnesses are just part and parcel of being human? We seem to have this need to make life perfect, to not suffer or experience negative emotions. And if we do a pill or a psychologist will make us better. Is it any surprise that so many are mentally ill when we live in a culture where the messages we constantly receive are that we should be somehow different or better? And that books such as these are making us feel that there is something wrong with the way that we view our world?

It appears to me that in trying to make sense of what it is to be human we are dehumanising ourselves.  We are all encouraged to modify our behaviour, to feel that if we do something else, or change some part of ourselves we will be somehow improved.

We are not computers but it does seem that we are being “scienced” into being just this.

What all this research seems to do is lead us down the path of feeling that just “being” is not enough.

Fi

This was interesting because it has come up here a number of times recently and it has also been a topic of conversation between myself and another TPer, the Rob mentioned above. I replied:

Funnily enough, Guy, I met with Rob for lunch the other day.

We got to talking about personhood. My ideas of personhood are defined precisely by my philosophy on abstract ideas and existence properties. I have a problem with a lot of philosophers, theologians, thinkers, etc who make claims about, say, personhood, or morality etc but who have not done the more fundamental work.

To claim that personhood has ontic reality, ie that it is a real and existent thing, is problematic. What you need to do first is establish what abstract ideas and concepts are made of. This is why I am always saying to Rob that THE most important debate in philosophy is the abstract one: realism vs nominalism and conceptualism.

As a conceptualist, I find it hard when people make big claims about big ideas (morality, personhood) without realising that these are human concepts, and aren’t objective facts. Or at least, if they are, the claimant needs to show that they are by establishing something akin to Platonic Realism which is really hard.

So although some of the things you and Fiona are saying here might sound nice and sort of ‘ring true’, this far from establishes that they ARE true. I have reassessed many of my beliefs about the world in accordance to what we can assess about abstract and existence properties. The problem, unfortunately, is that it is a very dry and complex area of philosophy (when you get on to trope theory and particulars).

Whether one is prepared to enter into such an fundamental debate is anther question. But I DO suggest that if we want to get to the bottom of such claims, it is hard to do so when arguing many levels up in areas which clearly supervene on  this more fundamental area of philosophy.

This is not only a lot of reading, but some of the entries need lots of re-reads and head scratching and pondering.

nominalism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics/

abstract objects

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/

properties

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/

natural kinds

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/

tropes

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tropes/

Types and tokens

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/

Medieval Problem of Universals

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/

Platonism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/

Propositions

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/

Now, I have not included every response here as that would be tedious, but the final one I want to include is as follows:

Jonathan,

I’m not going to read that long reading list. Firstly I’m going to quote you:

As a conceptualist, I find it hard when people make big claims about big ideas (morality, personhood) without realising that these are human concepts, and aren’t objective facts.

Then I’m going to refer you back to Roger Scruton’s propositions about the impossibility of studying the human person as an object (which agrees with what you say). The fact that we can’t do this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist (or has ontic reality as you say). Indeed, in our interactions with each other, in our very pretension to make utterances that signify and have value, we cannot help but assume that it does exist. The problem is that it pre-exists our discussion of whether it exists. Unless it did we couldn’t begin to discuss anything. There’s the rub! There’s the glory and mystery of the human condition. We have to accept and assume something we can’t prove. Otherwise we can’t even get off the ground and interact as people. Something of a wondrous paradox which won’t submit to the exigencies of explanation. Perhaps this says something about the status of human reason. Irritating isn’t it?

Guy

What do I make of all of this and why do I bother making a post of it? Well, it is partly this notion that psychology is ill-defined and not worthy of being a science, partly because of some of the crazy logic, and partly about this idea of mystery being important to humanity and personhood. Yes, that’s a lot to get through, so let’s get started.

What I find fascinating is that there is a move from a couple of the TPers here to distance themselves from Psychology with a big P as it is cited. The problem is that these people seem to be happy to use and refer to psychology, I’d wager, when it suits them. I am not sure they realise how much psychological knowledge derived from scientific, testable methodology, they use and have accepted in their lives. It seems to me that these people are happy to rubbish psychology because they straw man it; they have erected an edifice built of pseudoscience, poor psychology and woo quacks and called it Academic Psychology. Well, I would not ascribe to that nonsense. Evidence-based, good clinical and research-based psychology, on the other hand, warrants a lot of attention. Making hasty generalisations of psychology and poisoning the well is a rather silly way to go about things.

It would be useful if these other TPers actually defined the psychology with which they take issue. As with all arguments and philosophy, defining your terms is incredibly important.

It is this quote which most annoyed me, I think:

Of course I use psychology with a small p in the classroom. That just means, and, again, I flatter myself here, I have accumulated some wisdom about human relations. In this sense good teachers, long before the invention of the academic discipline of Psychology with a big P was invented, used psychology (I’m sure Socrates and Aristotle did). Psychology and psychology are not the same thing though.

So psychology is fine, if practised and collated individually. But when we make a discipline of it, it thereby becomes impotent, ruined, ridden with fallacy or some such other issue? So is this the case with every academic discipline? Or just psychology? What about academic psychology is so terrible here? It annoys me that the amazing work on, say, priming studies is somehow invalidated by this most sweeping and incoherent generalisation. So work which I have detailed, say, here and here, or maybe here, is by definition of being academic psychology, invalid and unworthy of contemplation? Personally, I find the psychology of religion more rewarding a subject, and more forceful and telling, than theology and to some respect, philosophy. It is a case of normative vs descriptive. What we would like the world to be or how it should be is a far cry from what it actually is. And psychology is interested in that descriptive aspect – why do we act, believe, behave like we do? To give psychology a bad name in this way is nonsensical to me. To see this discipline as, I don’t really know what, but somehow responsible for dehumanising us is mind-boggling. In fact, psychology tells us what it means to actually be human by point of fact it tells us what we do behaviourally, and why. How our minds work.

Looking at some of what Fiona states, it is clear that there are some further issues. Perhaps it is a misunderstanding of what psychology is and what psychologists do and believe.

Apparently 1 in 4 of us suffer from some form of mental illness. But who decides what it takes it to receive a diagnosis?

As Dr Caleb Lack, SIN psychologist, has written on a recent post:

Although some would argue, PTSD does not seem to be a new phenomenon, with accounts dating back fairly far in written history. It also appears to be as well validated a diagnosis as most other mental disorders (which are, in and of themselves ,social constructions, as are medical disorders, but this does not mean they are “made up” or not real. I’ve written a whole series of posts on how we define psychopathology, so I’m not going into detail here). Specifically, persons with a diagnosis of PTSD display three broad groups of symptoms:

These social constructions, though, are pragmatic. That is why, indeed, they have sprung up. We label both physiological illnesses and mental illnesses abstractly, like we label anything. But they represent real things. There really is stuff happening in your body, your brain and your consciousness! Fiona continued:

Surely these apparent mental illnesses are just part and parcel of being human? We seem to have this need to make life perfect, to not suffer or experience negative emotions.

AIDS and cancer are part of being human, by the same token. Does that mean we should not fight these things? Old age? Colds, coughs, sore backs, broken arms? This logic means that we should not also academically research medicine and health care! Separating the mind/consciousness out from its physiological setting (ie the brain and the body) is insane. I suggest reading work on emotions to let you know that these psychological conditions are best understood in their physiological an even evolutionary contexts. Dr Valerie Tarico does a superb job of showing this in her chapter of Loftus’s The End Of Christianity in order to show that God, being non-corporeal, has no need of and makes no sense in having psychological emotions.

Maybe Fi (and this is perhaps to some large degree the case, knowing her) is an extreme naturalist (environmentally so, meaning nature) and wants humanity to ‘get back to nature’. But then you would eschew all remedies and attempts to find cures for things, or sort problems out. Just let nature be. Psychology is pretty organic when one talks about many of the behaviour therapies etc. Fiona needs to be careful not to confuse psychiatry with psychology here, too, as Guy’s wife was at pains to tell me in another email (though I think that she would be better to have aimed that at Fiona’s comments as I am all too aware of such differences).

And if we do a pill or a psychologist will make us better. Is it any surprise that so many are mentally ill when we live in a culture where the messages we constantly receive are that we should be somehow different or better? And that books such as these are making us feel that there is something wrong with the way that we view our world?

So here we are really getting on to a misrepresentation of what psychology is. One must be aware of the differentiation between psychology, clinical psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy; and even the difference between these things between the UK and the US (e.g. UK psychologists cannot prescribe medicine).

It appears to me that in trying to make sense of what it is to be human we are dehumanising ourselves.  We are all encouraged to modify our behaviour, to feel that if we do something else, or change some part of ourselves we will be somehow improved.

We are not computers but it does seem that we are being “scienced” into being just this.

There is lots to take issue with here. I think Fiona is imagining everyone is psychologically perfect or like her. The problem is, the world is replete with psychopaths, sociopaths, depressives and the like. Maybe we should leave psychopaths to their own devices and not interfere with their ‘natural’ inclinations! Maybe we should not try to understand autistics… Or should we be tying to make the world a better place by understanding how things and people work, helping to make them happier?

Now, it seems that Guy, as a teacher and according to his earlier quote, just relies on his small p psychology to do his work well. Perhaps he has not taught severe autistics and people with Asperger’s Syndrome in his teaching career. I have. And to think that academic psychology isn’t of great help in this area is sheer nonsense. I have had training sessions delivered by educational psychologists which have been fascinating and insightful. I meet very often with educational psychologists to help my behaviour management of the statemented children I have who are on the spectrum, who are very difficult to manage. So it kind of pisses me off when “Psychology” is just rubbished in such a trivial and naive way, as if it has nothing to offer. As if the discipline hasn’t opened the autistic world up to be understood better by the neurotypical world. Whether it be ground-breaking experiments like the Milgram of Stanford Prison experiments, or whether it be Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Mischal’s Delayed Gratification work, Piaget’s development models, or the priming work of Pisarro, work of Gervais and Baron Cohen on autistics, understanding of the bystander effect, halo effect, placebo effect, Lucifer effect, yada yada yada, psychology is massively informative, pragmatically applicable and, well, scientific to boot.

The more I think about it, the more I think these TPers have little understanding of the scope and findings of academic psychology and have just built up a bizarre straw man of what it supposedly is.

Science, of which psychology is a part, like philosophy, seeks to understand the world. In fact, science is a branch of philosophy. As we find out more, this does demystify the world. But is that a bad thing? Would you prefer to live now, or in the Dark Ages in ignorance? Perhaps we can wistfully wish we were poets postulating upon unknowns in a romantic era. But, in reality, I would take being able to do the things I can do today, including understanding my own psychological foibles so that I can better understand myself in order to cope and flourish in the world of today. And it doesn’t stop me writing poetry.

And this is precisely what Kahneman’s work seeks to do. Understanding why we make irrational decisions, understanding our intuition, is hugely important and has very pragmatic applications (as the recent BBC documentary, Horizon, on his work quite explicitly showed). Whether it be financial decisions by stockbrokers and bankers that brought down the world’s economy, individual financial decisions going awry due to loss aversion,  or running policemen not being able to witness other policemen beating up a suspect and ending up going to jail as a result (see here), there are real applications to psychology that affect us all. Understanding them is the job of psychologists and is very bloody useful.

Finally, let me remind you of what Guy said with regard to personhood (where “it” is personhood):

The fact that we can’t do this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist (or has ontic reality as you say). Indeed, in our interactions with each other, in our very pretension to make utterances that signify and have value, we cannot help but assume that it does exist. The problem is that it pre-exists our discussion of whether it exists. Unless it did we couldn’t begin to discuss anything. There’s the rub! There’s the glory and mystery of the human condition. We have to accept and assume something we can’t prove. Otherwise we can’t even get off the ground and interact as people. Something of a wondrous paradox which won’t submit to the exigencies of explanation. Perhaps this says something about the status of human reason. Irritating isn’t it?

What Guy does wrong here is conflate personhood with consciousness, which is the fallacy of equivocation. He is sort of thinking of Descartes cogito ergo sum here, by the looks of it. That paragraph is simply wrong, incoherent. We don’t have to presuppose personhood at all. In fact, no one can really agree what it is, let alone accept it as objective fact. Personhood is a group of properties which we may or may not agree define us as being human beings.

Daniel Dennett, originally in “Conditions of Personhood,” Richard Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), claimed personhood is defined by

A is a person only if:

i. A is a rational being.

ii. A is a being to which states of consciousness can be attributed.

iii. Others regard or can regard A as a being to which states of consciousness can be attributed.

iv. A is capable of regarding others as beings to which states of consciousness can be attributed.

v. A is capable of verbal communication.

vi. A is self-conscious; that is, A is capable of regarding him/her/itself as a subject of states of consciousness.

So this is his definition which we may or may not agree with. But this does not mean that personhood as a concept or a thing is ontic or objective. This is a concept bringing together many other concepts which we understand in a conceptualist context. Psychology is connected in some ways to these ideas since it is the understanding of how the human psyche works in a physiological, neural and conscious way. To say psychology is not useful or true or should be ignored (yes, truth needs to be defined here) is problematic. I do deny the continuous “I” as being ontic for many reasons, but the “I” is useful, perhaps pragmatically necessary, to get through life as we know it. Contracts would be invalidated with my ‘correct’ understanding of the world. The continuous “I” is very useful if not entirely real in an objective sense.

Fascinating as this subject is, as realism vs nominalism/conceptualism really is, I don’t think it is a useful diversion for critiquing psychology, or just flatly refusing to deal with it or the people who research it.

Really, what I think this comes down to, and knowing Guy and his previous discussions, is naturalism. I think he is projecting his supernaturalist worldview on to the idea that psychology is supposed to be a science, that science isn’t everything, and thus psychology is somewhat doomed from the off. This seems to be supported by his blogpost:

Faced with the glorious, not to say marvelous fact of a human being, Daniel Kahneman and the psychologists don a lab coat, pick up a clip board and conclude merely that humans are less than the computers they have given existence to. They achieve this by dressing up some subtle and, essentially, mathematical problems which computers can solve (eg the Linda problem, the sunk costs fallacy etc) in simple-seeming clothing and then being delighted when humans fail to solve them correctly. This, they say, is because of their dependence on heuristics and their lack of awareness of their cognitive biases.

This idea that humans are victim to cause and effect is indeed a prerequisite of psychology. In fact, psychology struggles to make sense of free will. You wouldn’t sit down with a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist and explain a problem for them to just retort, “Well, it looks like you just chose to do that, so I can’t really help you!” This is meaningless and not a fair reflection of the state of affairs. Things happen for a reason. Things in our brains and thus in our conciousnesses. But Guy doesn’t like this idea of cause and effect, it demystifies his opinion of what humanity is and should be. Unfortunately, that doesn’t bear up to empirical scrutiny, whether he likes it or not. He continues on his blog:

In fact, the reason why many humans get Kahneman’s problems wrong are manifold:

1) We are not mainframe computers with large computational competence for making simply mathematical calculations. We are much more than that. We invented the mainframes to avoid the tedious.

2) We are duped by the way in which the questions are framed by the psychologists. Some of their colleagues have actually pointed this out.

3) We are endowed, in a way which computers are not, with the amazing capacity for self-awareness. This gives us an understanding of context. When faced by one of Kahneman’s problems we make swift judgements that they can’t be worked out quickly or are too trite and pedestrian to waste our valuable computational resources on during the short time we are on this planet.

Without seeming to realise that point 3 is precisely what Kahneman has spent 45 years deciphering and understanding with a great deal of success. Guy, as a self-professed humanities man, is very concerned that science and ‘scientism’ are trampling on the humanities, to the point that he swears by Leon Weiseltier against Steven Pinker in their debate over science and the humanities.

This idea that science is somehow attempting to destroy the artistic beauty of poetry or something is really not a valid reason to refuse to acknowledge the work of every brilliant research psychologist in the world, now. Building up fences (between science and the humanities) is arbitrary, accepting that there are blurred lines possibly more accurate. The fact that Shakespeare can include so many wonderful pieces of psychoanalysis which are backed by modern empirical understanding is great. The fact that Cambridge University runs a course on Shakespeare and Psychology is nothing short of delicious in its irony.

2014-03-18T22:12:38+01:00

Last updated on: March 18, 2014 at 10:12 pm   By

Spoiler: I might swear.

I have a fairly liberal attitude to commenting here, and I don’t particularly police it that much. Dissenting views are utterly vital to being sure that you are warranted in your own beliefs and views.

Well, I got involved in a comment thread on the Possible Worlds blog of Randy Everist. My goodness. I have never seen such comment nazism. I was warned by the Thinker. It’s intellectually disgusting. I posted a really good-natured couple of posts, he posted something in response (a little snarky but generally fine) and I responded with a really normal post about realism vs nominalism, about William Lane Craig and the problem with circularity in the Kalam Cosmological Argument, undefended premises, causality, induction, Dennett and so on, and he came back with this:

Sorry, Jonathan, I don’t allow non-substantive rhetoric on my blog–that’s why the comment was not approved. :)

Oh the hell dear. I am genuinely so pissed off I am going to rant. Because I can’t even rant to him or complain since he moderates every comment officiously. Yes, people can do what they like on their own blogs. But if you are going to tagline your blog with:

Exploring issues in Christian philosophy, theology, apologetics, and life in general.

and refuse to genuinely explore issues, then you are wasting your time and, in this case, mine. Your whole effort at blogging is to reassure your own beliefs. Well, get the fuck off the net and massage your own beliefs in private. Because refusing to even engage with comments because you disagree with their content or don’t get them or love WLC too much is a waste of my time. That comment took me some 20 minutes to write (not that it was any great shakes, just pointing out a number of issues with the Kalam Cosmological Argument), time I’ll never get back because some dufus is too cognitively biased to understand how such dialectic works. Basically, Randy Everist, you can fuck off, and take your biases with you.

Mainly because you put a stupid fucking smiley on the end of your big brother comment. Dick.

I hereby renounce the Possible Worlds Blog. Do not go there.

[admission: this is me at my most rabid]
2018-04-20T09:58:58+01:00

Last updated on: April 20, 2018 at 9:58 am   By

We had a Tippling Philosophers night the other night on beauty, and these are the quick notes I sent to someone who was unable to be there. Let me know what you think:

My belief is that:
  • Beauty is a word which all too often means “I like that”. In other words, it is shorthand for desirability, attraction etc. Stripping many of those meanings away leaves you with somewhat anaemic definition.
  • Beauty is a personal value statement ascribed to an object by the subject. It might be described as relational.
  • If there were no humans or rational agents in existence, then nothing would be beautiful, though they would still have the properties which were ascribed beauty.
  • In other words, it is dependent on perception.
  • I would think, in the ways that humans understand beauty, only humans presently have that conception, though other animals might have the same emotional reaction to some things which we might describe as beautiful.
  • The argument boils down to nominalism vs realism (see a link above) and I didn’t go into too much depth about it, but it is foundational to the debate.
  • If you think an object actually has the real properties of beauty, then these properties must exist somewhere. Either this means a platonic realm DOES exist, or that an object holds beauty like it does mass and so on. Either claim is victim to an array of problems.

Let’s say that we claim a volcano is beautiful. These questions should evoke the issues with objective beauty:

 

What about looking at the inside of the volcano? The outside?

Is half of the volcano half as beautiful?

What about where the volcano ends? If I included 2, 4, 9 miles outside the volcano?

Would different angles viewing the same object ACTUALLY hold different beauty values?

What about that same volcano but magnified to standing right in front of it? What about magnified under a microscope? What about at electron level? This same object, would it now have different objective beauty?

What about the volcano to an alien, monkey, bird?

What if it was erupting, smoking?

What if it was now causing widespread death and destruction? Global warming?

What if I kept chipping away at it, rock by rock? When would it go from being beautiful to not? Or is it gradual? If you were looking from afar, you wouldn’t see most of that gradual chipping, yet you would still claim that now different object had the same beauty value. At some point, though, there would be a tipping point.

 

etc etc

The point is, it is easy to claim that something is objectively beautiful, far more difficult to give a coherent account of how it works.

However, from a subjective stance, all the above questions pose absolutely no problems at all.

Of course, with different definitions and ideas (a grandmother being beautiful, to grandmothers as a generic concept being beautiful – visual vs abstract ideas of beauty).

In other words, it is difficult enough to establish abstract ideas as real in philosophy (nominalism vs realism) but to then assign a supposedly objective abstract concept (beauty) to an abstract idea (grandmotherness) is even more difficult.

Just my thoughts!

JP

2014-01-25T06:19:06+01:00

Last updated on: January 25, 2014 at 6:19 am   By

So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions were. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.

This is the sixth post after

#1 – a priori

#2 – Abstract objects – Platonism or nominalism?

#3 – Aesthetic value: objective or subjective

#4 – Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

#5 – Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

This post is about a the world which exists, or doesn’t, outside of our heads, so to speak (or more accurately, externally to our minds).

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

Accept or lean toward: non-skeptical realism 760 / 931 (81.6%)
Other 86 / 931 (9.2%)
Accept or lean toward: skepticism 45 / 931 (4.8%)
Accept or lean toward: idealism 40 / 931 (4.3%)

This is quite a fundamental question. Is there a real world which exists beyond our thought? Are we just living in some kind of Matrix style existence?

Idealism

Idealism is the position that everything which exists is just thought, and that there is no external reality. Thought is existence. Well, in actual fact, there are two slightly different ways of looking at idealism. One sense is anti-realist, that there exists only subjective mind, that existence is experiential and incorporeal. The epistemological approach is slightly different in that we should be skeptical of an external world, and that the mind has primacy. We cannot know things in themselves, as Kant claimed, since we are interpreting through our subjective senses and filters. Kant claimed, indeed, that idealism was “the assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining”.[1] On the other hand,  Objective idealists make claims about a transempirical world, but simply deny that this world is essentially divorced from or ontologically prior to the mental.

Bishop George Berkeley was big on reviving this movement from the anti-realist stance. As wiki states in comparing the positions:

As a rule, transcendental idealists like Kant affirm idealism’s epistemic side without committing themselves to whether reality is ultimately mental; objective idealists like Plato affirm reality’s metaphysical basis in the mental or abstract without restricting their epistemology to ordinary experience; and subjective idealists like Berkeley affirm both metaphysical and epistemological idealism.

 

Skepticism

In this context, skepticism states that the world can never really be known in its true form, which is actually sort of what Kant was claiming. We cannot know things-in-themselves (dinge-an-sich). Now, it would be interesting to look in the meta-analysis of the survey to see how people defined this since skepticism as an epistemological approach to the world, is sound in a Cartesian sense. What I mean by this is if we take knowledge to be indubitable, then the only thing we know is cogito ergo sum, that the thinking entity exists. In that way, we are in some way warranted to be skeptical, to at least some degree, of everything else. This approach that we should abstain from dogmatic claims to knowledge was recorded by Sextus Empiricus and called Pyrrohnian skepticism in reference to the philosopher Pyrrho from about 300 BCE. As wiki explains:

Whereas academic skepticism, with Carneades as its most famous adherent, claims that “Nothing can be known, not even this”, Pyrrhonian skeptics withhold any assent with regard to non-evident propositions and remain in a state of perpetual inquiry. They disputed the possibility of attaining truth by sensory apprehension, reason, or the two combined, and thence inferred the need for total suspension of judgment (epoché) on things.[2] A Pyrrhonist tries to make the arguments of both sides as strong as possible. Then he asks himself if there is any reason to prefer one side to the other. And if not, he suspends belief in either side. According to them, even the statement that nothing can be known is dogmatic. They thus attempted to make their skepticism universal, and to escape the reproach of basing it upon a fresh dogmatism.[3] Mental imperturbability (ataraxia) was the result to be attained by cultivating such a frame of mind.[3] As in Stoicism andEpicureanism, the happiness or satisfaction of the individual was the goal of life, and all three philosophies placed it in tranquility or indifference.[3] According to the Pyrrhonists, it is our opinions or unwarranted judgments about things which turn them into desires, painful effort, and disappointment.[3] From all this a person is delivered who abstains from judging one state to be preferable to another.[3] But, as complete inactivity would have been synonymous with death, the skeptic, while retaining his consciousness of the complete uncertainty enveloping every step, might follow custom (or nature) in the ordinary affairs of life.[3]

The point of interest here is that even if we are skeptical of the external world, all of our psychological mechanisms presuppose its existence. Pragmatically, we believve it is there. Try existing only mentally without sleeping or eating…

Non-skeptical realism

This is Greek for “That shit’s real. True dat.” The world exists, and we ain’t skeptical about it. It appears that, by a comfortable margin, most philosophers adhere to this position.

The creators of the survey included this commentary on the above question:

We asked this one partly because of its centrality in the history of philosophy, and partly because we were especially interested in data about how many philosophers accept the “old, dead” positions that supposedly no-one accepts these days. Skepticism and idealism are often treated as gateways to reductio in contemporary discussion, for example, rather than as serious contenders for the truth. We would have liked to have an option for a view on which the external world is somehow mind-dependent without this being idealism (e.g. social constructivism), but we couldn’t find a good accessible generic term here. Of course we expected a big majority for non-skeptical realism, but we were interested to see whether there would be a good number of skeptics and idealists out there

This is overwhelmingly the position of the respondents to the survey, and, it seems, most philosophers around. I suppose there is a difference between what one pragmatically believes and what one can prove (as knowledge). We pragmatically believe there is a real world out there, that the Correspondence Theory of truth is, well, true. But we can’t necessarily prove it, so in some ways, there is an element, however small, of skepticism.

Theists sometimes adopt this approach in what Stephen Law calls “going nuclear” in saying that thought, or rationality, has primacy and empiricism and science supervene on it, but that one cannot use rationality to prove the power of rationality since that is a circular scenario. Yeah, but you use it every day, so get over it.

Anyway, I’m now going to punch myself in the face to test whether the world is just constructed of thought and ideas from my mind.

Ouch! Jesus, mate, that fricking hurt….!

Notes

[1] Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 318

RELATED POSTS:

#1 – a priori

#2 – Abstract objects – Platonism or nominalism?

#3 – Aesthetic value: objective or subjective

#4 – Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

#5 – Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

#6  – External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

#7 – Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

#8 – Belief in God: theism or atheism?

2014-01-19T14:51:09+01:00

Last updated on: January 19, 2014 at 2:51 pm   By

OK, it might take you a while to stop laughing. Now, these days, I don’t really get involved in evolution arguments with people who flatly deny evolution on such blatantly anti-intellectual terms. I see it as self-delusion, and having written before that such people are impervious to reason and evidence, and that showing such actually entrenches their views, I try not to be bothered by such positions. But often fail.

In this case, the commenter was replying to a video I made years ago which was responding to the oft cited claim that evolution is just a theory. Jeez, that one pisses me off. Anyway, these comments from one particular commenter can be found on my You Tube video below:

So, here are a selection of his (or her) comments:

Evolution doesn’t exist and has no facts to support it.  And it is due to absolute 100 percent knowledge that I know it does not exist. It has nothing to do with “not wanting to deal with this or that”  I know this for a fact, no theory involved.  At 1:40 you associated evolution with science.  There is no association. So that is a false argument.  You claim creationists are ignorant of science, yet you never proved nor has anyone that evolution is science.  So to appeal to “science” is simply a ruse.

When I hear evolution is a theory.  I know that I am being lied to.  The notion that “scientific community” is welcome to be debunked by the scientific method is another ruse.  Your whole argument is an appeal to perceived authority fallacy.  No facts are facts.  Falsehoods are falsehoods. That simple

By claiming naivete, you are pretending that evolution is science, and it that it requires high intellect to understand.  That is not true.  There is no reason to bring up what direction trees are facing.  Bacteria reproduce bacteria, so you gave an example of reproduction, that isn;t an example of evolution.  Ok lemurs exist.  That doesn’t prove evolution either.  Evolution makes predictions, affirming the consequent fallacy.   Creation predicts life will reproduce after its own kind.  But creationists don’t make arguments based on affirming the consequent because it is logically fallacious.

To say you need to read, is to pretend that evolution is academic again.  There is no association between evolution, science, academics, or the intellect.  It does not exist.

No its not cognitive dissonce I have absolute knowledge that evolution does not exist.  Not a shred of doubt.  There is no such thing as a phd in evolution because evolution does not exist.  You are merely observing life reproduce after its own kind, then calling reproduction evolution.  There is no such thing as en evolution expert or evolution phd, because it does ot exist.  Evolution is a simple con. Step 1 call evolution science.  Step 2 Logical fallacy proof,Step 3 repeat step 1.

Your trying to associate evolution with real science. You gave examples of one kind of animal reproducing after its own kind.  Animals don’t reproduce exact clones of themselves.  To say that since animals don’t reproduce clones of themselves is evolution is not true.  There are not millions of people who work on it, and it is not true.  Evolution doesn’t exist therefore has nothing to do with academics.  No I did not make that claim.  I simply made the claim that evolution is not science.  The claim that I must make predictions is not true.   A fact is simply true or not true.  Whether or not we can make predictions from the fact is not proper reasoning.  Its affirming the consequent fallacy.

Creation would explain ERV’s by simply stating they exist.  That makes no sense to phrase a question that way.  The term species is used by evolutionists to say that the same kind of animal is a different species.  So then they call speciation evolution.  Just a simple word game trick.  It’s all dependent on who defines the lexicon, the concepts stay the same.

I predict tomorrow that life will reproduce after its own kind, and nature will not create life.  This will be true.

The evolutionist con is to make predictions that have nothing to do with proving life can reproduce other than its own kind, or that nature cause mud to come to life.  This has to be observed.  We actually observe the claims from creation.

That makes no sense your argument of simply listing different things.

What about Boyle’s Law, the quadratic equation, etc simply listing things doesn’t prove anything.

Sexual selection exists because it exists.  All sorts of phenomenon exists.  How does that lend a hand to evolution.  No one is saying that life does not exist.

How does creation explain all those things – they were created, hence creation.

Evolution isn’t science.  People are simply conned in schools to associate evolution with science in their minds.  It doesn’t actually exist. Life reproducing after its own kind is all that has ever happened. It is not possible for some animal, not human to mate with another animals and a human being be reproduced.  This is simple biology.  Its a law of biology.

Poe’s law -logical fallacy appeal to ridicule

With all due respect (I mean that literally, the amount of respect due to such comments is…), it is hard not to ridicule such comments. But then I remember that people are the result of who they are in the situations they find themselves in. Perhaps I need to be more courteous in such situations. Perhaps.

What I usually start off by saying in these scenarios is “Have you read a book on evolution by an evolutionary biologist?” to which the answer is usually not forthcoming, question ignored (as in this case) or is simply “no”. This is the first hurdle. The very people who should know the most about this subject are the ones being ignored by the people who refuse to believe it. And that statement cuts to the heart of the matter. This is not a conclusion (the denial of evolution) arrived at after surveying all the proper information and arguments. This is a conclusion derived from presupposed ideals and does not take into account the vast amounts of data and evidence. It is, indeed, the classic case of post hoc rationalisation, with a heavy dollop of cognitive dissonance in dealing with subsequent argument and data.

Will this post change this person’s mind? No. When someone who has arrived at a position or worldview based on an a-rational or irrational process, and then scrabbles around to post hoc rationalise; and if they have vested personal interest in that position; and if that position threatens them with the worst possible consequence in human conception for not believing and rewards them for the best possible consequence in human conception for believing it, then no, this person is unlikely to change their mind in the face of good, solid, rational evidence. But hey, hope springs eternal and all that.

What next? Well, I will list a few points which I think are deal clenchers, which will all need explaining under creation. I mean explaining. Properly.

    1. Endogenous retroviruses. These viral fossils in the DNA of humans and primates show beyond any statistical doubt that we have common ancestors.
    2. Fossils. Loads of them. If just one fossil was out of place, in the wrong strata, evolution would be in serious doubt. Not one is. All fossils are found where predicted.
    3. Predictiveness. Evolution predicts findings. Biologists have predicted things on evolution and have found them to be true. Creation predicts jack shit. For example, the types of diversity of animals and plants between very old continental islands, continental islands and oceanic islands.
    4. Vestigial organs and atavisms. Parts of the body which no longer have use and that are leftovers of previous evolutionary processes. Humans have appendices, arrector pili, ear wiggling and suchlike. Many are born with coccygeal projections – stumpy tails from our ancestral heritage. These recapitulations of ancestral traits are reexpressions of ancestral functional genes. Whales have vestigial and atavistic pelvises and leg bones. they have leg bones of differing sizes which are unconnected to their skeleton. They have no use at all, no place in any perfect designer’s design book, but are fully explicable when we know whales evolved from land mammals back into the water.
    5. Embryology. Human foetuses start with tails and look like fish embryos. What’s up with that, God? Our blood vessel map and nerve map (as with other animals like the giraffe) show a clear ancestral heritage going all the way back to fish, hence Neil Shubin’s superb book, Your Inner Fish. Darwin saw embryology as the greatest evidence for evolution. If any of you have had babies, that fine downy hair called lanugo is also part of our ancestral heritage and has absolutely no explanation under creation. Evolution explains it just fine.
    6. Bad design. Oh yes, bad design. Evolution gets by. It does all it needs to to get adults to reproductive age, and promotes reproduction itself. A perfect designer? Well… one would imagine they would deign… perfectly? Flatfish, with eyes in stupid places, compared with the better evolved skate. The laryngeal nerve, hinted above, in humans and giraffes is very badly designed. Explicable in terms of evolution from fish. Creation says jack. Male testes (heritage from fish gonads) are explained by evolution. Creation must insist that God really dug whacking our bollocks on the outside. Also, our urethra is a bit troublesome too. Women giving birth through the pelvis – ouch. This had to remain a narrow opening due to human bipedality as evolved from earlier locomotion. The gap between human ovary and fallopian tube is just stoopid.
    7. Biogeography (BG). My favourite. Geographic isolation from the rest of the world or the ecosystem means that natural selection can take hold and mutations can branch out species which have travelled there, or who have been split off from tectonic movement or what have you, to form new species. Creation makes no sense of this – why would God put groups of distinct mammals only on separate islands? Darwin’s finches set off this understanding. Oceanic islands are a perfect example of this. They harbour incredible amounts of unique species. But larger places do this too. Why are marsupials only found in Australasia (also, ancient ancestral marsupial fossils were predicted to be found in Antarctica, and then were, due to tectonic plate movement)? Lemurs in Madagascar, but nowhere else?
    8. BG II. Why are there connected species in particular areas which are thousands of miles apart? Of course, this is predicted by evolution together with tectonic movement. Species of flora and fauna found in Eastern South America are connected to those found in Western Africa. Creation can say nothing about this.Geographic ranges of fossils
    9. BG III. A certain fossilised tree species, Glossopteris, exists in distinct locations, pushed down by glacial ice movement. Such movement always pushes trees forward in the movement of the ices, and this is always towards the sea. But there are some places around the world where this species is seen pushed towards the centre of the continent. Hang on! This makes no sense! Unless, of course, we see the tectonic plate movements from ancient Gondwana which shows directions to the coast now flipped inland. That’s science; it works, bitches.
    10. BG IV. Quote from Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True: “And, starting about forty years ago, we have accumulated information from DNA and protein sequences that tell us not only the evolutionary relationship between species, but also the approximate times when they diverged from common ancestors. Evolutionary theory predicts, and data support, the notion that species diverge from their common ancestors, their DNA sequences change in roughly a straight-line fashion with time. We can use this “molecular clock,” calibrated with fossil ancestors of living species, to estimate the divergence times of species that have poor fossil records. Using the molecular clock, we can match the evolutionary relationship between species with the known movement of the continents, as well as the movements of glaciers and the formation of genuine land bridges such as the Isthmus of Panama. This tells us whether the origin of species are concurrent with the origin of new continents and habitats.” Creation doesn’t even come close to having this explanatory power.
      The direction of the glacial scratches and the falling of the glossopteris trees fits with plate tectonics and biogeography.
      The direction of the glacial scratches and the falling of the glossopteris trees fits with plate tectonics and biogeography.
    11. BG V. Why would convergent evolutionary species only exist in particular habitats when they could simply exist in others, too? This shows three aspects of evolution: common ancestry, speciation and natural selection. If God created all animals, then what the heck would he be doing putting random species which would be adept at living in different places, only in certain habitats? Take Cacti and Euphorbs. These exist in very similar habitats and climates, and yet, they are thousands of miles apart. This is predicted by evolution by natural selection – that species with common ancestors would adapt to similar environments, but not necessarily in exactly the same way. And yet when you transport one to the habitat of the other, it thrives. Convergent evolution is what that is.
    12. BG VI. Oceanic islands again. The types of animals we would find on oceanic islands, as predicted by evolution by natural selection, would be those who could get there by wind, flight or rafts. Not mammals and the like. This is precisely what we find (until man popped along and brought mammals). Think Galapagos etc.
    13. Domestication is evidence of artificial selection, which is just natural selection harnessed by man. All dog varieties come essentially from wolves in only so many thousands of years. We know evolution works coz, like, we done it and all.
    14. Lenski’s experiments. Evolution in the lab creating bacteria with new abilities. Watch the video below.
    15. All of the fossil evidence to support human evolution from a common ancestor with primates.

So on and so forth. On Lenski’s experiments, see this:

http://youtu.be/vUhYGgtwNkE

Anyway, let’s get back to dealing with a few of the points the commenter raised.

“Evolution doesn’t exist and has no facts to support it. “

Mere assertion which is itself empirically false.

“And it is due to absolute 100 percent knowledge that I know it does not exist. It has nothing to do with “not wanting to deal with this or that”  I know this for a fact, no theory involved..”

Interesting epistemological assertion, again. Apparently he has some secret 100% knowledge no one else has access to. Of course, by interesting, I mean ridiculous. Are we talking indubitable, even though from a Cartesian point of view, all we can know 100% is cogito ergo sum? Everything else is probability. So we need to talk about what scientific fact is and how it is defined. On all definitions of scientific fact, evolution is one. It was developed 150 odd years ago, and has been verified every year since then. Even with no idea of a mechanism for heredity, Darwin nailed it. Genetics followed. Nice one, Charlie boy!

” I know that I am being lied to.  The notion that “scientific community” is welcome to be debunked by the scientific method is another ruse.  Your whole argument is an appeal to perceived authority fallacy.  No facts are facts.  Falsehoods are falsehoods. That simple”

This is just utter nonsense. As Andy Schueler would so beautifully say, word salad. Facts appear to be only the things that this commenter claims and adheres to. More later on the absolute stupidity in asserting that the scientific community is somehow in collusion… So one cannot appeal to the scientific fact to show that a scientific theory is valid? Wow! This person is GOOD! (By good, I mean uses unhinged arguments.)

“Creation predicts life will reproduce after its own kind.  But creationists don’t make arguments based on affirming the consequent because it is logically fallacious.”

This just gets better. Do you really want me to list the fallacies creationists use? Better still, watch this:

http://youtu.be/EXMKPvWqgYk

There is a rather circular and invalid aspect to his approach. (S)He asserts that evolution is unacademic and unscientific and when I ask him or her to read something by an evolutionary biologist, the reply is:

“To say you need to read, is to pretend that evolution is academic again. “

Wow, and then the commenter has the sheer audacity to claim:

“Evolution makes predictions, affirming the consequent fallacy.   Creation predicts life will reproduce after its own kind.  But creationists don’t make arguments based on affirming the consequent because it is logically fallacious.”

This is superb. Such amazing hypocrisy. The commenter does not realise that the sheer ad hoc nature of their approach is the best example of affirming the consequent. In fact, they START with the consequent as a presupposition, and then deny any contrary evidence. You literally can’t get any more fallacious than this!

And then, if that nonsense is not enough, check this out:

“Creation would explain ERV’s by simply stating they exist.  That makes no sense to phrase a question that way.  The term species is used by evolutionists to say that the same kind of animal is a different species.  So then they call speciation evolution.  Just a simple word game trick.  It’s all dependent on who defines the lexicon, the concepts stay the same.”

I am actually laughing at this. It is brilliant. To explain something (which is an actual usable piece of knowledge in virology) by claiming that creation merely states it exists is not onlywrong (creationists actually try to deny them in various ways and fail) but also has absolutely no explanatory value. Valid theories, plausible theories, must do (if they are to be preferred) the best job against rival theories to explain the data. As for speciation, we have even seen this taking place (examples can be found here).

The craziness goes on:

“Sexual selection exists because it exists.  All sorts of phenomenon exists.  How does that lend a hand to evolution”

To state something like this shows very clearly two things:

1) this person does not understand the philosophy of science and the creation of hypotheses.

2) this person does not properly understand evolution and what it entails. They really need to read that book… And we are back to “well, these phenomena just exist!” Brilliant, just brilliant. We observe phenomena and they have absolutely no explanation under creation, and yet are perfectly explained, even predicted by, evolution. and they settle for the theory with no explanatory value because an old book implies, under their particular interpretation, that this must be the case.

“Life reproducing after its own kind is all that has ever happened. It is not possible for some animal, not human to mate with another animals and a human being be reproduced. “

Wow. This is priceless. First, I suggest this person reads up on the Problem of Species, nominalism vs realism, and the Sorites Paradox. Of course, there is no delinaeation, truly , between species. We are, in some kind of abstract way, all one species in different transitional forms. However, we can’t all reproduce with each other, and so this allows us to have something more than an arbitrary time-defined method of demarcation. This commenter, however, seems so utterly unaware of such ideas that it is amazing that they can deny evolution, that they can deny something about which they have no grasp whatsoever.

My final point is to show that this person contradicts themselves so tremendously:

“Animals don’t reproduce exact clones of themselves.  To say that since animals don’t reproduce clones of themselves is evolution is not true.”

 Wowsers. This is again brilliant. OK, so this person accepts that animals do not produce exact clones. that’s a start. Of course, if you then factor in millions of years and multitudinous generations, we are starting to get somewhere like evolution. So perhaps this person doesn’t deny evolution (he can’t, we can see it in the lab, for real, in front of our eyes), perhaps it’s just time and tectonics…

The problem for such denialists is that they end up having to deny all sorts of other scientific disciplines and findings just to be able to ad hoc rationalise such denial. Carbon dating, radiometric dating, geology, genetics, biogeography, virology, anthropology, paleontology, archaeology etc; and, if a young earth is claimed, then cosmology and physics. Denialists jump through, no, thrust themselves headlong into massive ad hoc, Ockham’s Razor contesting, hoops of contrivance.

I remember listening to a Reasonable Doubts podcast where they were talking about the onerous idea of bothering to deal with such claims, claims which they saw as so banal and unwarranting of answer since they were so obviously problematic and false as to be a waste of intellectual effort. But then, they all started off believing in similar ways and that so many people are engaged in this battle, and are starting off their journey in a similar way that these efforts are not wasted and are not in vain. Well, I  hope the effort of putting this together is not in vain; that someone, somewhere might have their doubts piqued, and may deign to research further these fascinating scientific findings.

My last point is this. Millions of people, if not more, both work in and rely on these findings. I said this to the commenter and (s)he misread me to say that millions of people work in evolutionary disciplines. I did not mean that. I mean there are people who work in and benefit from our knowledge and understanding of evolution and all of the disciplines associated with it. This may be genetics, virology, immunology, geology or what have you. That the planet has been around this long with its plates slowly moving means that we need to properly understand those movements to properly work towards mitigating their effects. That so many people go to work each day in disciplines which either rely directly or indirectly on evolution being true, and that thousands and thousands people go to work directly in the field of evolution and its research, tirelessly logging data and doing field research, aggregating other research, synthesising conclusions and findings, is staggering in its scope. That someone can flatly deny these findings and hypotheses; that they can accuse these people of concocting a lie; that they can claim that all of those decades of meticulous research amounts to nothing but such a lie… is not only wrong, but is tantamount to a massive insult. It’s bloody rude. It is an insult not only to intelligence itself, but to the good and thorough work of these people and these disciplines. If this person ever needs gene therapy to treat their genetic blindness, upon which such work relies on application of work derived from evolutionary theory and understanding, then perhaps the scientists should deny such therapy to them.

It’s rather like a doctor or surgeon and their team who tirelessly work for days in saving a poor child’s life, using the best known scientific methods, expertise and understanding, only for the parents to turn around to the team and claim, “It’s a miracle! God has answered our prayers and saved our child’s life!”

Ah, bugger off. That’s thousands of hours of scientific learning and practice, built upon hundreds of years of application of the scientific method and building up of the body of knowledge synthesised by countless numbers of the finest human minds for the better of humanity, coming together through hard work and application, to save that life.

Yeah, that’s science. It ain’t no frigging miracle. It’s hard damned work.

Appealing to a two thousand year-old book written by unknown people in unknown places in unknown times for particular agendas to provide explanation for natural phenomena is easy (though intellectually very difficult and contrived). Anyone can bury their head in the sand.

Going out and doing the field studies and data collection which drive scientific work and understanding and theorising; writing the papers; getting peer-review; learning the scientific theories and knowledge; working on designing, carrying out, recording, and relaying results from experiments; and so on – now that’s hard. But it’s worth the effort. Properly understanding this effort and knowledge is the respectful thing to do, particularly if you have decided you don’t want to believe it in the first place. You know, just because some people in your church told you to.

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