April 30, 2020

April 30, 2020 By

I am a big fan of Sean Carroll for a whole host of reasons, but recently because of his book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (UK), which, if you know my philosophical positions on big ideas and my endless deference to conceptual nominalism, is a whole thesis defending this philosophy. Conceptual nominalism is a position whereby there are no objectively existing abstract ideas (morality, redness, justice, a chair [the idea thereof], definitions of words, etc.); all these ideas exist as constructions in (human) conception. A chair is a chair to a human, but not even necessarily all humans, and certainly not to a cat, an earwig or perhaps an alien. And an Amazon tribesperson might not see a regular chair as a chair, and someone else might argue a tree stump is a chair, where yet another person might not.

And so on.

You’ve read enough of my stuff to get this.

This position is, as far as I am concerned, not only philosophically defensible, but also evident in the world around us in all the arguments we all have, interpersonal, within groups, across societies and between cultures.

Sean Carroll gives his own nomenclature to this position, calling it Poetic Naturalism, and gives it a solid foundation in the science that he also knows so much about. Here, he describes it on his website (I’ll share with you some videos tomorrow). As a short synopsis, this is spot on:

Poetic Naturalism

Summary

Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world — the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world — no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings.

I like to talk about a particular approach to naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world. “Ways of talking” shouldn’t be underestimated; they can otherwise be labeled “theories” or “models” or “vocabularies” or “stories,” and if a particular way of talking turns out to be sufficiently accurate and useful, the elements in its corresponding vocabulary deserve to be called real.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” That is absolutely correct. There is more to the world than what happens; there are the ways we make sense of it by telling its story. The vocabulary we use is not handed to us from outside; it’s ultimately a matter of our choice.

A poetic naturalist will deny that notions like “right and wrong,” “purpose and duty,” or “beauty and ugliness” are part of the fundamental architecture of the world. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. But these moral and ethical and aesthetic vocabularies can be perfectly useful ways of talking about the world. The criteria for choosing the best such ways of talking will necessarily be different that the criteria we use for purely descriptive, scientific vocabularies. There won’t be a single rational way to delineate good from bad, sublime from repulsive. But we can still speak in such terms, and put in the hard work to make our actions live up to our own internal aspirations. We just have to admit that judgments come from within ourselves.

Here I collect some writings I’ve done, and talks I’ve given, elaborating on this basic idea. I claim no special originality here, of course; the relevant concepts are associated with a line of illustrious folks like Epicurus, Lucretius, Ibn Sina, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Pierre-Simon Laplace, David Hume, Charles Darwin, Daniel Dennett, and many others (not all of whom were themselves poetic naturalists). For more, see my book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.

Facebook will allow you to declare Poetic Naturalism as your religion.

Writings

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

You can also buy me a cuppa. Please… It justifies me continuing to do this!

March 18, 2020

March 18, 2020 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 eleventh 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?

#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?

#9 – Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

#10 – Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #10: Knowledge: Empiricism or Rationalism

The question for this post is: Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? Here are the results:

Accept or lean toward: non-Humean 532 / 931 (57.1%)
Accept or lean toward: Humean 230 / 931 (24.7%)
Other 169 / 931 (18.2%)

We might start this piece by discussing what a law is. But let me warn you that this has a very close relationship to universals, abstracts, natural kinds, essentialism, nominalism and realism, as far as I am concerned – covered in previous pieces above and variously on this blog. This really is a whistlestop tour because this subject gets very dry and not very interesting very quickly…

David Hume

Hume, as an empiricist (see above), couldn’t see physical necessity in terms of human experience. Experience tells us how the world is, not how it must be as set out by prescriptive laws. You can see a connection here with ideas of induction. Any experiment we do, at best, finds out about regularities in the universe – how things regularly act.

Accidents

There are several different ideas to be brought up here: necessities, regularities and accidents. It might be that everyone in this room has brown hair; this is an accident and not a universal law or even a regularity as commonly understood.

We might have two statements:

  1. All gold spheres are less than a mile in diameter.
  2. All uranium spheres are less than a mile in diameter.

The first is an accident whilst the second is arguably a law because it is physically impossible, as far as we know. Certain laws are actually merely local generalisations: on Earth (i.e., in a particular context), such and such happens, to the point that we might think they are universal laws.

Regularity

The discussion on the ontological position of the laws of nature has been divided into three main parts in the general history of science: Regularity Theory, Nomic Necessitation, and Dispositional Essentialism. Regularity Theory dates back to David Hume, but its modern development is due to David Lewis (1973). The fundamental view in this account is that laws of nature do not possess any physical necessity. Every time I drop my pencil, it accelerates towards the centre of the Earth at a constant acceleration rate. The law here is Newton’s law of free fall (which is a special instance of Newton’s second law and the law of gravitation), and the free fall of the pencil every time I drop it is the instance of these laws. Rather than attributing any physical necessity to the relation between the law and its instance, Regularity Theorists claim that the law is the collection of all these instances, and nothing more than that. Since we do not attribute any kind of ontology to the law itself, rather than being the totality of instances, (in other words, we make the minimal claim about the ontological status of the law), Bird calls this view “Minimalism about Laws” (Bird, 1998, p. 27). [Source]

So the Humean approach is to call laws descriptive: they don’t prescribe how matter should act but describe how it acts by looking at regular behaviour and summing these up with a “law”. Personally, for what it’s worth, I favour this approach because it coheres better with my approach to ontology. This is more accurately called Regularity or a Regularist Theory. There is no assertion of necessity relation between the instances and the laws of nature.

One can say of Regularists (and think in terms of conceptual nominalism that I often espouse, where abstract ideas exist only in our minds) that there can be a limitless amount of laws, and differentiating between a generalisation and a law can be difficult as they are both descriptive.

As Jon Garvey states:

I had not previously realised, though, that this issue is represented by a deep divide amongst philosophers of science, the “Necessitarians” being opposed by a large body of “Regularists”, who more modestly restrict themselves to “laws of nature” as mere descriptions of the way the world is, without attempting to explain why it is thus by invoking necessity.

Necessitarian Theory

The Necessitarian Theory (Nomic Necessitation) is this prescriptive approach whereby matter “obeys” laws (this is also different, in some sense, to logically necessary) – see 1. below. Some even now argue that this non-Humean view was actually favoured by David Hume, that it is semi-Humean (based on a contingent view of the relation between things) but there you go. Somehow, the very substance of the universe inheres physical necessity, and the relationship between the laws and instances is an issue of universals. There is a subtle difference in two necessitarian views: that the laws are separate ontological entities that somehow enforce matter to obey them, or the physical necessity exists, say, in the electrons of the fundamental units of matter – see 2. below. As the IEP exemplifies:

  1. [E]lectrons will bear the electrical charge -1.6 x 10–19 Coulombs because there is a Law of Nature to that effect, and the universe conforms to, or is ‘governed’ by, this physically necessary (i.e. nomological) principle (along with a number of others, of course).
  2. [T]he statement “All electrons bear a charge of -1.6 x 10–19 Coulombs” is a Law of Nature because it correctly (veridically) describes a physical necessity in the world.[ 1 ]

The necessity, if you will, appears to reside in the matter – see below. It might be that there are only a few fundamental laws and that all other laws are consequences of these (this might lead to questioning the pragmatic meaning of “necessary”, which I do in “This World Is Philosophically Necessary“.

An example of a law that is not prescriptive might be Gresham’s Law, an economic generalisation:

[Gresham’s Law is] the theory holding that if two kinds of money in circulation have the same denominational value but different intrinsic values, the money with higher intrinsic value will be hoarded and eventually driven out of circulation by the money with lesser intrinsic value.

Dispositional Essentialism

Some people see this second version above as a further account – Dispositional Essentialism, a definite realist approach. This is where it gets a bit technical and relies on dispositions. (Many terms have been used to describe what we mean by dispositions: ‘power’ (Locke’s term), ‘dunamis’ (Aristotle’s term), ‘ability’, ‘potency’, ‘capability’, ‘tendency’, ‘potentiality’, ‘proclivity’, ‘capacity’, and so forth. In a very general sense, they mean disposition, or otherwise something close by. [Source]). A definition would be:

Dispositional essentialism is a form of scientific realism that has much to offer. The ‘sparse, fundamental’ properties are precisely those properties that participate in the (fundamental) laws of nature; but on the dispositional essentialist view, they do not only participate in laws. They ground those laws. Negative charge, for instance – if it is a fundamental property – is the disposition to repel other negative charges and attract positive ones; hence it is a law that negative charges attract other negative charges and attract positive ones. The same will hold, on the dispositional essentialist view, for other laws – at least the causal laws. Thus the laws discovered by such sciences as physics will not only be real, existing features of the world; they will be deeply rooted in the very fabric of the world.

Laws supervene on the dispositional essences of properties. Laws become metaphysically necessary because these essences of disposition are necessary in all possible worlds, and since laws depend on these, then laws are themselves necessary.

This has implications on ideas of free will (interestingly, I deny free will but prefer Regularity Theories).

Here, we start talking about essentialism with regard to natural kinds, causation, and with ramifications for abstracta and a number of other areas. Plenty to go and read about concerning these areas.

Truth and Necessitarianism

This, from the IEP, is worth thinking about:

Although there are problems aplenty in Tarski’s theory of truth (i.e. the semantic theory of truth, also called the “correspondence theory of truth”), it is the best theory we have. Its core concept is that statements (or propositions) are true if they describe the world the way it is, and they are false otherwise. Put metaphorically, we can say that truth flows to propositions from the way the world is. Propositions ‘take their truth’ from the world; they do not impose their truth on the world. If two days before an election, Tom says “Sylvia will win”, and two days after the election, Marcus says, “Sylvia won”, then whether these statements are true or false depends on whether or not Sylvia is elected. If she is, both statements are true; if she is not, then both statements are false. But the truth or falsity of those statements does not bring about her winning (or losing), or cause her to win (or lose), the election. Whether she wins or loses is up to the voters, not to certain statements.

Necessitarians – unwittingly perhaps – turn the semantic theory of truth on its head. Instead of having propositions taking their truth from the way the world is, they argue that certain propositions – namely the laws of nature – impose truth on the world.

The Tarskian truth-making relation is between events or state-of-affairs on the one hand and properties of abstract entities (propositions) on the other. As difficult as it may be to absorb such a concept, it is far more difficult to view a truth-making relationship the ‘other way round’. Necessitarianism requires that one imagine that a certain privileged class of propositions impose their truth on events and states of affairs. Not only is this monumental oddity of Necessitarianism hardly ever noticed, no one – so far as I know – has ever tried to offer a theory as to its nature.

Why is this important? More to think about.

Let me run through this as fast and parsimoniously as I can, including asking questions:

  • Have necessitarians just replaced God as prescriber with the Laws of Nature?
  • In this way, is there still a mysterian element to Necessitarian accounts? How does matter adhere to prescriptive rules? This, science cannot answer.
  • “Physically impossible” is an idea that works with both accounts, though it may have subtle definitional differences; this is something that does not and will not happen and has not happened anywhere.
  • A Regularist will differ in this way that saying something is physically impossible, like a perpetual motion machine, is not to say it is nomically impossible – there is a modal distinction here. The machine, a Nercessitarian would say, simply could not exist.
  • People have been pragmatically explaining things in terms of regularity without recourse to nomic necessity for thousands of years, thank you very much.
  • With a Necessitarian view, free will is a problem as fundamental laws prescribe how everything works in the universe. There is no room, it appears, for contra-causal free will. Regularity, on the other hand, dissolves the problem. You can’t “violate” a law of nature, in a sense; you do what you do and describe this accordingly. In an extreme sense, there could be a “law” qua contextual description of what you do at any given time: brushing your teeth at point t15493, or not brushing your teeth. You could argue that an agent can “choose” their laws of nature – I wouldn’t and would take issue with the language used here.
  • To wit, as the IEP states: “To make the claim even more pointedly: it is only because Necessitarianism tacitly adopts an anti-semantic theory of truth that the supposed problem of free will vs. determinism even arises. Adopt a thoroughgoing Regularist theory and the problem evaporates.”
  • A Regularist might say that all laws of physics and chemistry are no different than the laws of economics, say, Gresham’s Law above. It might depend on what level you are focusing the microscope.
  • Many Regularist “laws” are generalisations, or statistical in nature. Can more fundamental, “real” laws be statistical as well, such as the half-life of certain elements?
  • Necessitarians tend to struggle with such statistical approaches: how can something decay at this rate 50% of the time under strict laws? Enter stage right fun discussions of “stochastic nomicity”. This idea actually underwrites an important area of philosophy of science.
  • For Regularists, the way the universe is is ultimately inexplicable.
  • For Necessitarians, the fact that trillions upon trillions of electrons act in a particular and regular manner must be accounted for by some law of nature, not some “coincidence”, so to speak.
  • Regularists will reply with a kind of “so what?” as this is unempirical and not very useful. The way-the-world-is is good enough for them; for Necessitarians, explanations must include ideas of the way-the-world-must-be.

As deeply philosophical as this divide is, there won’t be any solution going forward, most notably because accessing the unempirical and abstract world of Necessitarian laws and their causal relations with matter is arguably entirely metaphysical.

And there you go, long, but hopefully not too long that it is unwieldy.

 

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

You can also buy me a cuppa. Please… It justifies me continuing to do this!

March 6, 2020

March 6, 2020 By

Every abortion kills an innocent human being…. Biology shows that a “ZEF” (Zygote, Embryo, Fetus – the three distinct prenatal developmental stages) is, in fact, a distinct, unique and individual human being…. The issue at hand is when we are considered human beings. That question can be answered by biology…

-Mark Bradshaw

The question remains, though, whether this degree of cellular interaction is sufficient to render the early human embryo a human being. Just how much intercellular coordination must exist for a group of cells to constitute a human organism cannot be resolved by scientific facts about the embryo, but is instead an open metaphysical question. [my emphasis]

–Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP)

[O]ur concept of a person is an outgrowth or aspect of our concept of a human being; and that concept is not merely biological but rather a crystallisation of everything we have made of our distinctive species nature. To see another as a human being is to see her as a fellow-creature—another being whose embodiment embeds her in a distinctive form of common life with language and culture, and whose existence constitutes a particular kind of claim on us. [my emphasis]

– Stephen Mulhall, Fearful Thoughts

Over on another thread, which has exploded, a sub-thread has developed concerning abortion, and a pro-lifer is having his ass handed to him repeatedly, though it is water off a duck’s back. He, Mark Bradshaw (MB), is making a whole host of claims that fail to hold up to any scientific and philosophical scrutiny, including the first one above. Many people have set him straight, such as (((J_Enigma32))) here (Bradshaw’s writing in italics):

Once again, I’ve NEVER made the claim that human = human being

You have several times. Every time you’ve used “human being” you’ve used it both to mean “genetically human” and “person,” whether you realize it or not. “The discourse” does not draw a difference between these words, but they absolutely do exist, and that they get used interchangeably in casual speech is part of the problem when it comes to expressing technical concepts with precise language.

A human being is BOTH “genetically human” AND a unique, distinct and individual human organism.

Is it? What if an alien walked off a spaceship in downtown New York today? You do realize that under the law, human rights are extended to them despite them not being remotely genetically related to us, right? And presumably the same thing will be true of AGIs when/if we decided to produce them. And if we ever resurrect Neanderthals, you folks will have a field day, won’t you?

And you can dismiss my hypotheticals as fanciful dreaming, but they are no less salient to my greater point: what you qualify as “human” is not nearly as black and white as you seem to think it is. Especially since human in this context is being used to mean “person,” not “genetically human.”

and is thus meaningless when discussing application of fundamental human rights

And as I noted below, personhood is the only metric we have in determining who gets those rights, otherwise you wind up giving rights to cancer cells and cloned tissue. “Human” is used as a synonym for “person” in the term “human rights.”

Bradshaw’s response was:

“You have several times.” —- No, I have NOT – EVER.

“Every time you’ve used “human being” you’ve used it both to mean “genetically human” and “person,”” —– FALSE. A human being is genetically human (DUH) AND an individual human organism. YOU are equating that to meaning “person”, NOT me. A human being is an individual member of the species Homo sapiens. We are individual members of that species at fertilization. This is a biological fact and you are attempting to place meaning in my words that just isn’t there.

“”The discourse” does not draw a difference between these words” —- Except it DOES. I’ve made a CLEAR DISTINCTION.

“and that they get used interchangeably in casual speech is part of the problem when it comes to expressing technical concepts with precise language” —– I agree that the word “human” when prefaced by the letter “A” means “a human being”. However, using the term “genetically human” to mean “a human being” is semantically and factually inaccurate. They mean DIFFERENT things. Skin cells are “genetically human”, but are NOT “a human being”. “A human being” is ALSO “genetically human”. See the distinction?

“Is it?” —– Yes. Biology 101.

“What if an alien walked off a spaceship in downtown New York today? You do realize that under the law, human rights are extended to them despite them not being remotely genetically related to us, right?” —– Because society CHOOSES to extend such rights. Those rights are NOT inherent in those aliens. Just because we CHOOSE to extend rights to something, it doesn’t mean that something is a human being (or even human at all). We extend some human rights to animals – like our pets, or Bald Eagles, or Condors. We, as a civil and humane society, CHOOSE to extend some rights to non-human animals/things. Fundamental human rights are inherent in EVERY human being.

“And if we ever resurrect Neanderthals, you folks will have a field day, won’t you?” —– Really? You CAN’T be serious.

“And you can dismiss my hypotheticals as fanciful dreaming” —– Because they are.

“what you qualify as “human” is not nearly as black and white as you seem to think it is.” —– Except that it IS. Biology understands what is, and isn’t, human and a human being.

“Especially since human in this context is being used to mean “person,” not “genetically human.”” —– NO. The term “human” in this context is referencing “A human being” – an individual member of the species Homo sapiens. YOU are attempting to make “human” to mean “person”.

“And as I noted below, personhood is the only metric we have in determining who gets those rights” —– NO it isn’t. the term person is a subjective and arbitrary designator. The ONLY subjective metric is “human being”, which is known in biology to occur at fertilization – when a new, distinct, unique and individual human being is formed.

“otherwise you wind up giving rights to cancer cells and cloned tissue.” —– FALSE. Cancer cells and “cloned tissue” are NOT individual human organisms. A fertilized human ovum (technically not an ovum any more – it is a) is.

“”Human” is used as a synonym for “person” in the term “human rights.”” —– FALSE. Human rights (fundamental human rights) applies to ALL human beings. That is why they are called “fundamental HUMAN rights”, not “fundamental PERSON rights”.

Wow. What a lot of confusion. There are so many comments from this guy that I could have chosen, but we’ll settle for this.

Let me first start by saying that there is a difference between everyday casual language and language that is more technical and required in conversations that are nuanced, conversations of a philosophical nature, such as this one. MB is using the former whilst attempting to join in on the latter and is, therefore, committing the fallacy of equivocation: Using an ambiguous term in more than one sense, thus making an argument misleading. It is not that people don’t use the terms he uses in the way he uses them, it’s just that in forums like these, and in contexts like these, it is vitally important to be as accurate and as technical as possible, and his reeks of serious mission creep.

Indeed, there are even some philosophical writers who use “human being” quite loosely to cover a multitude of sins. But when discussing ideas of, particularly, abortion and human embryonic development, I think it is hugely important to to be as picky as possible with the terminology used. For a good discussion of the nuances of the term “human being”, see “Cognitive Disability and Moral Status” in the SEP. MB seems to think this debate is answered by biology. Alas, no, as seen in the initial SEP quote.

That said, MB is doing what many pro-lifers do, which is to use terms in a way that confer characteristics onto, say, a blastocyst that we would normally consider for, say, an adult human being. This difference is discussed in the sections 1.1 When does a human being begin to exist? and 1.2 The moral status of human embryos in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry, “The Ethics of Stem Cell Research”.

Although he claims he isn’t, MB is using human and human being interchangeably and then claiming that the argument is not one of personhood. But in essence, it really is, as we shall see.

In reality, he is bastardising language (though you will find plenty similar around the internet, as mentioned):

A human being is genetically human (DUH) AND an individual human organism. YOU are equating that to meaning “person”, NOT me. A human being is an individual member of the species Homo sapiens

So, it appears a human being is an individual member of the species homo sapiens, and this is genetically and organismally defined.

Wow. Okay. Where to start. Let’s try to do this as concisely as possible:

  1. “Innocent” can no more coherently be applied to a blastocyst as to a rock. A group of cells, irrespective of what it is, with no consciousness or volition or intention can in no meaningful way be described as innocent. He claims that it not being guilty means it is innocent. The same applies to a rock, or a chicken egg, or any other such entity.
  2. For him, “human” means something different to “human being” in that a human being is an individual of the human species. So human = homo sapiens, and human being = a human individual. Human being is an instantiation of human. Human is genetically human. He is differentiating “human” from “a human”: I agree that the word “human” when prefaced by the letter “A” means “a human being”. The issue here is that the use of the indefinite article (a) before “human” means “human” is now a noun, rather than an adjective, and implies a singular instantiation. So, really, “a human” should utterly suffice for doing what he needs it to do – being an instantiation of homo sapiens. His use of a “human being” is thus superfluous language, with the “being” bit being redundant. For people interested in accuracy of language (for philosophical and debate purposes), we have human (adjective) denoting of the homo sapiens species, a human denoting an instantiation of that species, and human being as something subtly different, implying personhood or specific human characteristics. Moreover, a blastocyst would be none of these still. A blastocyst is a developmental stage of a human, or of a homo sapiens, organism. It is a nested subset of the reference set “human” but I would contest it can be given the label “a human”. You could say “a human blastocyst” but you can’t say a blastocyst is “a human”.
  3. If he is differentiating “human” from “a human”: A blastocyst is no more a human than an egg is a chicken or an acorn is an oak tree. We need to get technical: an acorn is the seed developmental stage of the species quercus robur, for example. If I said, “Cut down this oak tree and make a bench” and handed you an acorn, you would be confused. Language is important. Chickens and a chicken, as terms, are still markedly and obviously different from a (chicken) egg. If I said, “go cuddle a human”, you would never understand this to mean you should cuddle a Petrie dish.
  4. “Human being” surely has the “being” part as the operative differentiator. In philosophy, this denotes what it means to be human, and this is where personhood usually comes in. By leaving little meaningful difference between terms, MD is ignoring the reams of philosophy devoted to this (even if you deny personhood as having ontic existence) and using his own definition; hence, the equivocation. See “What Is Personhood? Setting the Scene.” See point 6.
  5. A simple dictionary definition of human being is: a man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance. Of course, a blastocyst has none of these qualities.
  6. This assumes an identifiable set of genes that equate to human qua homo sapiens. But there is no such thing as a species – known as the “species problem” that even Darwin recognised. As I have countlessly explained, this is an instantiation of the Sorites Paradox where demarcating categories along a developmental continuum is subjective and arbitrary at best, incoherent at worst. See “Species Do Not “Exist”: Evolution, Sand Dunes and the Sorites Paradox”. You cannot objectively state where “human” starts or ends; it is incremental and transitional. Therefore, there is no surefire scientific definition of human qua homo sapiens, only consensus definition used for pragmatic reasons of categorisation. Welcome to fuzzy logic.
  7. What does “genetically human” mean? This can hide a whole range of problems. For starters, a clump of cheek cells of skin cells are genetically of the species homo sapiens, arguably. Are these humans?
  8. He states: However, using the term “genetically human” to mean “a human being” is semantically and factually inaccurate. They mean DIFFERENT things. Skin cells are “genetically human”, but are NOT “a human being”. “A human being” is ALSO “genetically human”. See the distinction? What this then means is that MD believes a human being = human genes + human organismal form. However, this form is very difficult to pin down: it takes on a range from a clump of cells right through to fully formed adult, and every form in between, plus, no doubt, all other forms such as dramatically mentally, cognitively or physically disabled or altered forms. Really, he is co-opting “human being” to mean “a single organism anywhere along the developmental line with the genetic blueprint of the species homo sapiens” even though there is no clear genetic blueprint of homo sapiens. He seems to think all scientists agree with this. They don’t. At all.
  9. Referring back to the previous transitional form problem, if human genes + form refers to a particular organismal form, and since this refers to the entire genetic range of 7 billion people, what are the necessary or essential genes? What could one human and another differ in, in terms of genes, and what genes must they have to qualify as human? What about a neanderthal? What about the transitional hominids that sit before, at and after the arbitrary demarcation line between homo sapiens and the hominid species preceding it? This debate becomes one of essentialism vs nominalism. He would need to establish some kind of Platonic realism where “human being” objectively correlates to a set of essential genes.  Tough gig. See “Natural Law, Essentialism and Nominalism”.
  10. What does this then say about transhumanism – the futuristic, though presently doable, conjoining of humanity and technology?
  11. What if you replaced an animal embryo’s brain mass with human brain cells – would this chimera be seen as a human being?
  12. A blastocyst is no more a human than an egg is a chicken or an acorn is an oak tree. We need to get technical: an acorn is the seed developmental stage of the species quercus robur, for example. If I said, “Cut down this oak tree and make a bench” and handed you an acorn, you would be confused. Language is important.
  13. On the developmental stage from ovum or sperm to adult human being, fertilisation or totipotency is just one arbitrarily chosen stage along the natural mechanism continuum. Why does this get special treatment? See “Life starts at conception, but what about personhood? Revisited.”
  14. In the same way a chicken egg is not afforded the same animal rights as a chicken in most modern societies, and I can throw an acorn in the bin but am not allowed to chop down an oak tree, a human blastocyst does not have and should not have the same rights as an adult human.
  15. As he struggles to deal with in the thread, if other species, including alien species, are ostensibly (in terms of ideas of personhood) similar to humans, do they have the same rights? If so (and considering certain animals already have rights – not depending on their genetic blueprint per se, but their “personhood” characteristics, which themselves will supervene on genetics, admittedly), then this is not a question of human beingness being dependent on human genetic and organismal exceptionalism, but a case of personhood. And, indeed, this is really what is going on. He desperately denies this is about personhood, but every way you slice and dice it, it is about personhood. He simply cannot rationally deny it. I mean, he will deny it, but this denial is invalid.
  16. Because society CHOOSES to extend such rights. Those rights are NOT inherent in those aliens. So humans have inherent rights but every other entity has rights bestowed upon them by humans? Holy special pleading cow. a) Where is the evidence for this? b) How are they inherent for us but rights then become human constructions for others? There are then two different kinds of rights. c) What do rights being inherent actually mean?
  17. Oh righty then. We have an issue because rights have no ontic existence. He needs to read and then refute the following: a) Human Rights Don’t Exist until We Construct and Codify Them b) KNOWING Your Rights, Locke and Other Rights Problems c) Second Amendment: Gun Rights. But What Is a Right, and Do We Have Them? Until then, he really is in a lot of philosophical trouble.
  18. The death of a foetus is qualitatively different to the death of a grown human as seen in the burning clinic thought experiment. He would need to properly deal with this. So even if he could establish some kind of similarity or equivalence between blastocysts and a fully grown human in some sense, they still fail to intuitively and tangibly be qualitatively equivalent.
  19. As 3lemenope stated, “biology doesn’t write law and doesn’t determine morality. At best it can help define terms and describe physical facts that can be put into evidence.”
  20. MD later says: “Potential child. Not an actual child.” —– Nope. An ACTUAL child. So there is no difference between something at the beginning of the continuum and something later on or at the end… But this means a sperm cell is also, being alive, a potential child and thus an actual child (see NOTE 1). A sperm is just a living component on the continuum of natural development separated by some natural mechanism from one stage to the next. So every ejaculation is, therefore, murder of millions, right? And this means breaking a random rock in the wild is identical to breaking a statue in a museum because a potential statue (rock) is qualitatively identical to an actual one. Right. See Note 2.

So on and so forth – you get the picture. It is summed up by this further comment: A fetus (not merely fetal tissue) is as much of a human being as you or I are. Again, this is a biological fact. This is like saying an acorn is as much of an oak tree as this oak tree here. That’s a biological fact. No, it’s not; only if you totally smash up the English language. It is only an oak tree if you change the definition of some or all of the words, and then you lose meaningful distinction. An oak tree suddenly becomes synonymous with an acorn, and we lose an awful lot of distinction and conversation become as confusing and inane as the thread here mentioned.

A limited analogy (stripping away ideas of sentience and so on) would be that an oak tree crushing an acorn is meaningfully the same as it uprooting a whole grown oak tree. There is a false equivalence here.

The problem is that this man thinks that us calling him out on his equivocation of terms and language is denying biology. No, we are denying his use of language as being sound.

NOTES:

1) Is a sperm cell alive? 

Yes, it’s certainly as alive as any other cells in a male body. Since it can have a life of its own outside the body, each sperm is really an independent single-celled organism – like a living amoeba, but differing in locomotion and lifestyle.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, it’s the other cells in a male animal that are pretty much dead: only the sperm can reproduce.

2) The moral status of human embryos: potential vs actual.

Given that a human embryo cannot reason at all, the claim that it has a rational nature has struck some as tantamount to asserting that it has the potential to become an individual that can engage in reasoning (Sagan & Singer 2007). But an entity’s having this potential does not logically entail that it has the same status as beings that have realized some or all of their potential (Feinberg 1986). Moreover, with the advent of cloning technologies, the range of entities that we can now identify as potential persons arguably creates problems for those who place great moral weight on the embryo’s potential. A single somatic cell or HESC can in principle (though not yet in practice) develop into a mature human being under the right conditions—that is, where the cell’s nucleus is transferred into an enucleated egg, the new egg is electrically stimulated to create an embryo, and the embryo is transferred to a woman’s uterus and brought to term. If the basis for protecting embryos is that they have the potential to become reasoning beings, then, some argue, we have reason to ascribe a high moral status to the trillions of cells that share this potential and to assist as many of these cells as we reasonably can to realize their potential (Sagan & Singer 2007, Savulescu 1999). Because this is a stance that we can expect nearly everyone to reject, it’s not clear that opponents of HESC research can effectively ground their position in the human embryo’s potential. [SEP]

 

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

You can also buy me a cuppa. Please… It justifies me continuing to do this!

February 6, 2020

February 6, 2020 By

I have a very lax approach to banning and censorship here, as well you know. And you may or may not like this as threads do, indeed, get filled up with comments from those we disagree with. Sometimes, I get asked to ban so-and-so, and there can be merit in banning the more trollish ones, but it also comes down to what the definition of a troll is and who gets to arbitrate the definition and qualification.

Sometimes the reaction to certain comments is, “Well, your opinion is sooo antithetical to mine that I find it (morally) reprehensible, and therefore you should be banned.” Quite often, it comes down to axioms: whatever you put into the function machine will determine the outcome. But we shouldn’t just ban people, I believe, because their views are merely antithetical to our own. We should be able to point the issues out, correct them, or at least allow them to hoist by their own petard.

However, the issue is that people generally don’t change their minds but instead tend to entrench in their original positions by employing large dollops of cognitive dissonance. This can mean huge frustration as we seemingly provide ample good reason and counter-arguments, but to no avail. Because positions are so often arrived at psychologically and not rationally.

I can confidently say the following (but please do not confuse it with arrogance): I have never knowingly run away from a difficult conversation, thread or comment that I cannot resolve in my head. I may run out of time, forget about them, or get sidetracked. But there really is no area of philosophy (everything) that presents problems of coherence for any of my beliefs. I am completely honest with myself, and hopefully with my readers. I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that some cornerstone of my entire matrix of beliefs and philosophy was incredibly weak or fraught with issue.

I believe that ost divergence in beliefs actually boils down to ontology. You will find that most people who disagree with me on morality, politics (i.e., morality), God, religion and so on can actually have their disagreement mapped back to ontology. I have written before how conceptual nominalism vs (Platonic) realism is essentially the primary debate, and everything else follows. These are the axiomatic building blocks we feed into our function machines that produce wildly different outcomes. Just refer back to those massive threads here about the Second Amendment and the gun nuts who came here to defend their right to carry and use guns. They, to a man, failed to understand that the thrust of the articles was about ontology – what rights are made of. They happily asserted the conclusion – that natural rights exist – but utterly failed to show that/how such rights exist.

I am really comfortable with my beliefs; they are on solid ground because I build from the bottom up. So many religious people build from the top down.

I have found that, when it comes to commenting, atheists and freethinkers really are more freethinking. As bloggers, we are far more likely to have open threads, less moderation and a willingness to deal with naysayers. We kinda live for it.

On the other hand, and I have been personally on the end of many examples of this, Christian/religious bloggers hardly ever allow open and frank comments and conversations that challenge their cherished views.

I simple terms: the higher your religiosity is, the more blinkered you seem to be. And, basically, religious bloggers are far less open to challenge and freethinking than nonreligious ones. I can tell you this from a Patheos viewpoint: the whole  Disqus filter issue was one that was broadly not an issue for the countless religious bloggers here at Patheos because so many either didn’t allow comments at all, or heavily moderated them anyway. It was all the nonreligious bloggers who kicked up a right stink. It was boards like mine that were most affected. Because boards like mine really do allow free speech. Right-wing, often religious types complain so often about centralised authoritarian behaviour from the left, but they are so often the most guilty. Yes, there are exceptions on both sides, but the averages are clear to see.

I would be interested to hear people’s experiences of religious vs nonreligious comment forums and blogs. Do you agree?

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

You can also buy me a cuppa. Please… It justifies me continuing to do this!

 

February 3, 2020

February 3, 2020 By

Short answer, probably not.

Long answer, read my book Did God Create the Universe from Nothing?: Countering William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument and whilst you’re at it, please post a nice review or two on Amazon to counter those typical Christian reviews that give 1 star whilst not offering any substantive critique… Grrr.

Happy to have recieved this Tweet the other day, not least to confirm that people out there actually read my books, but that they are appreciated and have some use:

Posts relating to this are:

 

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

You can also buy me a cuppa. Please… It justifies me continuing to do this!

December 15, 2019

December 15, 2019 By

In editing a book called The Unnecessary Science, I have been looking into natural law theory and Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. Here, natural law’s big modern proponent, Ed Feser (at whom the book is aimed as a critique) locks horns with Graham Oppy. My issue for such debates like this, that are very narrow and metaphysical in nature, is that they are (to me, granted) eliminatable with something like conceptual nominalism. I, personally, would have just taken issue with opening premises that include arguable ideas such as “potential”, as I did here and here. Indeed, it took 54 minutes to bring nominalism up.

 

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

You can also buy me a cuppa. Please… It justifies me continuing to do this!

November 15, 2019

November 15, 2019 By

Some weeks back, I posted a short piece on act and potency, “Criticising the Idea of Potential and Actuality in Natural Law Philosophy” in which I quoted extensively from a book I am presently editing by Gunther Laird.

Recently, I have received a response on this (“Response To A Tippling Philosopher On Act and Potency”) from Harrison Jennings at Quaestiones Disputatae.

Whilst Jennings admits that conceptual nominalism is incompatible with Thomistic philosophy, which I assert in my post, it is not the thrust of his criticism:

Pearce is certainly correct that conceptual nominalism, as he understands it, is incompatible with Thomistic philosophy generally and the act/potency distinction specifically. However, since Pearce does not argue for conceptual nominalism here (although he does direct us to a different post where he does provide some such arguments), we will leave this objection alone for the time being. Suffice it to say that the Thomist (or those generally sympathetic with Thomism) will of course already reject conceptual nominalism, and so will not be too impressed with an argument from conceptual nominalism against the act/potency distinction.

I did not argue for it there because I have done that in so many other posts here that it would have been simple repetition and was actually unnecessary for the point of the piece, unnecessarily adding to its length.

My main point in the piece was to undercut the differentiation that Thomists have between actuality and potentiality, such that something (X) could be potentially A or B; I say, under causal determinism (adequate or otherwise), X will only ever be A, and so there is no potential (in reality) to be B. The only thing that allows for that potentiality is from human theorising given an incomplete knowledge of all of the variables.

I talk about this in terms of a simple coin toss (there is a potential to be heads or tails, but knowing every single variable, it will predictably always be, say, heads in causal circumstance Y), and in terms of Laird’s example of a butterfly:

This butterfly could be of this particular colouration or that particular colouration, it could be of this size, or that size. We line up all the theoretical futures that this butterfly could have given that we don’t know the initial conditions with our limited human minds. However, if we knew every single condition down to every single wave function of the world, then we could predict with surety what the outcome would be.

Jennings replies:

Pearce’s argument confuses epistemological possibility (or bare “logical possibility”) with ontologicalpotential. Pearce’s argument makes use of the former, while it is the latter which is the understanding of potentia appealed to in the Thomistic act/potency thesis.

Let’s take his example of tossing a coin. Pearce argues that there is not really a “potential” for the coin to turn up either heads or tells, since the outcome is already causally determined. Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that this is correct. It still does not follow that the coin does not really have an intrinsic, ontological potentia for its determined outcome. Indeed, it must have this potentia, if the outcome is to happen at all. Suppose the coin is causally determined to turn up heads. We still must say that the coin has the intrinsic potentia to turn up heads; otherwise it wouldn’t be able to turn up heads at all. Even if we were to suppose that the coin lacks any other potential (i.e. cannot possibly have any other outcome), it still must have at least that onepotentia, the potentia for its determined outcome. This is so merely by virtue of the fact that, at the present moment (before we toss the coin), the coin has not actually landed heads up yet.

Here, to me, we have the ungrounded assertion, in my opinion, of any kind of meaningful account, ontologically, of “intrinsic potentia”. It sounds lovely, but it is, to me, a mere assertion that this object, a coin, has some real, ontic property attached to it of turning up heads in causal circumstance (CC) Y. Somewhere, in some realm, this particular coin has the property of H in Y. And if it is subsequently flipped again, it has T(ails) in Z. And it also has the same potential to be at a 1-degree slant on the horizontal plane. Indeed, I can name any potential (possibly infinite) property it will have in the future and this will be its intrinsic potential. All that this means, however, is that “intrinsic potential” just means “future property”. “I have the power to do this” becomes “I will inexorably do this”.

Meh. With all due respect.

I’m not sure this contains any real usefulness, certainly in terms of the Thomistic framework. It’s potential is its future, which is necessarily so.

He continues:

Or take the example of the caterpillar. Even if the caterpillar’s future butterfly coloration is causally determined, it still must have the potentia for that coloration; otherwise that coloration would be impossible. Even given a deterministic account, we must appeal to a real distinction between actus and potentia. If the caterpillar is a caterpillar at t1 and a butterfly at t2, then at t1 it is actually a caterpillar and potentially a butterfly. At t1 it has the potentia for its future coloration, but it does not yet have this coloration actually. Its potentia for its future coloration must be actualized before it becomes actual. And even if this actualization is predetermined such that it must happen and no other outcome can happen, all that this means is that the caterpillar only has onepotentia, and no others. But it still must have at least that potentia. Its potentia is still a real feature of its being, and is still really distinct from actus.

Necessity entails possibility. If something must be the case, then necessarily it also can be the case. And potentia is that whereby a thing can be or become something. If causal determinism entails that a particular caterpillar must become a butterfly, it also entails that that caterpillar can become a butterfly, and hence that that caterpillar has the potentia to become a butterfly.

Here, it looks like we will have to get into definitional talk as he seems to want to make a hash of modal language. The Oxford Dictionary says of potential (n):

1. Latent qualities or abilities that may be developed and lead to future success or usefulness.

1.1 (often potential for/to do something) The possibility of something happening or of someone doing something in the future.

Words requiring emphasis: may, possibility.

Jennings would be synonymising “possible” with “necessary”, such that to say something has a potential to be something (heads or tails) means the same as to say it is necessarily heads, because its potential is necessarily heads. You are stripping modal language of its modality. Jennings states, “If something must be the case, then necessarily it also can be the case” but I don’t buy this. You would never say of anything “X can be Y” and strip X of all other possibilities. Bob can be funny means that very often, or at least some of the time, he is not funny. It doesn’t mean that he is funny literally every moment of his life bar none. And reversing this, as Jennings looks to do, is merely meaningless. If Bob is literally funny every single moment of his life, then to say he can be funny is to equivocate on, or more accurately misuse, the word “can” in its modal form.

To say 2+2=4 is not to say 2+2 can equal 4 (given regular maths understanding). It means it does equal 4. Always. And forever. It doesn’t have “an ability” to, but “an ability” not to; it means it necessarily is or does.

It becomes even more interesting when you look at the universe in terms of how most modern physicists do: as a 4-dimensional block universe. Jennings’ use of potential requires, it seems, an A-Theory understanding of time, in a linear past (gone), present (fact), future (yet to be [potential?]). These days, however, most philosophers and scientists do not adhere to the A-Theory of time – indeed, only 15.5% of philosophers do, correlating unsurprisingly with the proportion who are theistic, give or take. On the other hand, when harmonising special and general relativity, in a block universe, the whole thing is factual. There is no potential. There just is:

So if the future and past are already encoded into the block universe we inhabit – how does that account for our human experience of life, of our inexorable movement through time?

From this block time perspective, time, as we experience in the block universe, is an illusion. “It’s not a real, fundamental property of nature,” says Cortês. The ticking of time, our experience of time passing, is only because we are stuck inside the block universe, moving forward along the dimension of time. “The fact that we experience moving forward in the block but not outside it comes from the fact that the block picture treats time just as another spatial dimension, and we can step outside of it. Time is not pervasive.”

This leads to fundamental questions that cosmologists today are addressing in their theories describing the nature of our Universe. If our Universe is like this block universe, then everything – past and future – has happened and our experience of time is just a mathematical artefact arising from the equations describing the Universe. [source]

In other words, to uphold Thomism, the Thomist has to disprove or counter the block universe (theory), and of course there are detractors, it’s just that I never see Thomists getting involved here. I could be wrong.

But to get back to the potential/actual discussion, it remains to be seen as to what use this is to the Thomist. If all things (given causal determinism, of course, that they would anyway reject) – including brain states and thus resulting behaviours – have “intrinsic potentiae”, then where does this get the Thomist? If we are denying alternative potentiae in saying that all things have actuality and the future actuality is necessarily dependent on previous actualities, then surely the whole Thomistic framework, as an endeavour of moral philosophy, is rendered impotent?

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

October 18, 2019

October 18, 2019 By

As some of you may know, I am presently editing a book by Gunther Laird calls The Unnecessary Science. Natural Law philosophy, about which I have talked a great deal recently, owes an awful lot to Aristotle, Aquinas and other thinkers from a bygone era. One of the cornerstones of this essentialist worldview is the pair of ideas of potentiality and actuality:

The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to any “possibility” that a thing can be said to have. Aristotle did not consider all possibilities the same, and emphasized the importance of those that become real of their own accord when conditions are right and nothing stops them.[3] Actuality, in contrast to potentiality, is the motion, change or activity that represents an exercise or fulfillment of a possibility, when a possibility becomes real in the fullest sense.[4]

These concepts, in modified forms, remained very important into the Middle Ages, influencing the development of medieval theology in several ways. Going further into modern times, while the understanding of nature, and according to some interpretations deity, implied by the dichotomy lost importance, the terminology has found new uses, developing indirectly from the old….

In contrast, the position of Western Medieval (or Catholic) Christianity, can be found for example in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who relied on Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, when he defined God as actus purus, pure act, actuality unmixed with potentiality. The existence of a truly distinct essence of God which is not actuality, is not generally accepted in Catholic Theology.

Laird expands on this idea:

What did Aristotle provide in response? The theory of actuality and potentiality. He believed that Parmenides was simply wrong to hold that the only alternative to “being” was “non-being.” Potentiality was another alternative, and one that could ground a much more workable metaphysical framework. Return again to our caterpillar: He exists as a hungry little worm-like creature, or, in other words, he is actually a caterpillar. Parmenides could see no way he could possibly be a butterfly, but Aristotle held that there was something that could influence our little friend despite not existing in the same sense at the same moment. Namely, the fact that the caterpillar was potentially a butterfly. For Aristotle, the ways anything potentially could be—caterpillars, coffee, rubber balls, whatever—occupy sort of a middle ground between existence and non-existence, which is how he could claim that existing things could change without asserting that change could come from non-existence or non-being.[1]

Now, for Aristotle, there was no such thing as an “infinite” number of potentialities. Any actual thing—that is to say, anything that exists in some way or another—is potentially a certain number of ways and not others. So Mr. Caterpillar is potentially a butterfly, or, if he’s unlucky, potentially a meal for a hungry bird. But he is not potentially a dog or a rock or a philosopher. No matter what you do to him or how many leaves you feed him, when he makes his little chrysalis, a dog or a rock will never pop out, and he will never do any sort of philosophy, unless maybe if you ask Franz Kafka. The same applies to any other object in our experience. A cup of coffee might be actually hot and bitter, but it is potentially cool (if you leave it out for a while) and potentially sweet (if you put a lot of sugar into it). It is not potentially blood or radioactive fuel, because nothing you do to it will ever make it capable of conveying nutrients or powering a reactor. A red rubber ball (to use Feser’s favorite example) might be potentially blue (if you paint it) or squishy (if you hold it over a flame), but it has no potential to bounce to the moon or follow someone around by itself.[2]

[1] FP, 18-19, SM, 32-33, TLS, 53-54.

[2] Ibid.

He goes on to discuss this in more depth before saying:

Thomists claim we can’t have an “explanatory regress”—that is to say, we can’t just explain the laws of physics by referring to an even deeper law, which would require a deeper law, and so on, ad infinitum. For the purposes of argument and the interests of saving time, let’s say they’re right. So, given what we have discussed about the laws of physics potentially being different, thinkers like Aristotle, or more specifically, his successors (since everything we know about the laws of physics would only be discovered centuries later) would say they involve certain potentialities being actualized. What could possibly actualize those? It would have to be something that was “purely actual,” something with no potentialities at all. This “purely actual” thing would have to be eternal. It would never have come into existence, but would simply exist eternally and necessarily, since coming into being involves a potentiality being actualized (for instance, a butterfly comes into being because the nutrients in leaves actualize that potentiality in a caterpillar). It also couldn’t be changed at all, and would be entirely unchangeable, because change involves actualizing potentials, and anything with potentials wouldn’t be purely actual. It would also be omnipotent, because if it actualizes the laws of physics it must be able to exert control over them—like a flame or an electric coil exerts control over the temperature of a pot of coffee (or, more literally, the person who starts the fire or turns on the stove, since that actor would be actualizing the potential of the flammable materials or the electric coil). If such a being could control the laws of physics, it must be able to do just about anything—send a meteor to destroy a city by changing the laws of gravity for a bit, raining fire from the sky by momentarily changing the chemical circumstances under which flame is produced, and so on.[1]

[1]TLS, 96-97, FP, 30-33. Again, this isn’t exactly the argument Feser uses, but a very simplified one to illustrate his general line of reasoning. We’ll come back to this in much more depth when we discuss miracles in chapter 2.

There is much more I could quote and go on to quote, pertaining to these ideas. The differentiation between potentiality and actuality here appears to be a subtle ploy in order to shoehorn God into the equation. I did, however, want to bring up this point that perhaps invalidates the whole differentiation and categorisation of these two ideas.

First of all, I am a conceptual nominalist, as I have set out umpteen times, and this arguably eliminates such metaphysical contortions anyway by saying such mental categorisations are products entirely of the mind and have no ontic existence independent of the conceiving minds in question. Indeed, such nominalism, in my opinion, destroys the foundation upon which natural law, essentialism and Thomistic philosophy and theology is built.

But let’s ignore that minor digression.

I want to look at potentiality and relate it to a deterministic or adequately deterministic framework. I would argue that such frameworks equally eliminate the idea of potentiality; or, at least, make potential synonymous with “the future”.

Let’s talk about this caterpillar. The caterpillar, it is of a particular species and genus. It has a genetic blueprint. In other words, it will only turn into a certain type of butterfly. Given the environment it is actually born into and given the conditions of the food it eats and the chrysalis it makes, it will invariably turn out in a particular way, with a particular colouration and of a particular science. When we talk about potential, I think we are smuggling in a very human conception about what could be in a very general sense.

This butterfly could be of this particular colouration or that particular colouration, it could be of this size, or that size. We line up all the theoretical futures that this butterfly could have given that we don’t know the initial conditions with our limited human minds. However, if we knew every single condition down to every single wave function of the world, then we could predict with surety what the outcome would be.

If I was to say I’m going to toss a coin, we might both agree that it could potentially flip as a head or as a tail. However, if I was to understand every single initial condition and every single variable at play, on the flip of that coin in that particular instantiation of a coin flip, then actually (pun intended), I would know what the outcome of the coin flip would be. There would literally be no potential head or potential tail but there would be an actual future coin flip of head (for example). I keep coming back to this idea that any contextualized thing really doesn’t have the potentiality to be anything other than the exact thing it will be deterministically caused to become, taking into account the causal circumstance it finds itself in.

Thus to talk about “Pure Act” and other notions that depend upon this differentiation of potentiality and actuality is somewhat meaningless.

Of course, we could get onto a debate about causal determinism and the influence of quantum indeterminacy, if indeed it exists. But given this, my criticism would obtain.

 

 

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

August 29, 2019

August 29, 2019 By

The Perverted Faculty Argument (PFA) is a strand of Thomistic (Thomas Aquinas) thinking that is intertwined with Natural Law Theory (NLT)  of which I have been blogging lately. I was challenged by Vincent Torley recently to, if I was going to attack the PFA (as I have done here and here), attack the best form of the argument. The claim was that Timothy Hsiao’s defence was the best. It can be found here.

I also recently posted a piece concerning Hsiao’s formulation of the Perverted Faculty Argument (PFA). I initially posted Ficino’s notes on this and he did a great job at showing some pretty terminal weaknesses with it. My first post on this formulation was only be concerned with Premise (1) and found it to be wanting. This post looks at Premise (2).

Here is his version of the PFA:

(1) For any x that is a K, if x is good, then x is a good K.

(2) If x is a good K, then x is good by being as Ks ought to be.

(3) Therefore, if x is a good human action, then x is good by being as human actions ought to be. (From 1–2)

(4) Human actions ought to be aimed at human goods that are proper to them.

(5) Human goods are that which fulfills human faculties.

(6) Therefore, human actions ought to be aimed at that which fulfills the human faculties that are proper to them. (From 4, 5)

(7) Therefore, if x is a good human action, then x is good by aiming at that which fulfills the human faculties that are proper to it. (From 3–6)

Let’s quickly concentrate on the opening brace of premises:

(1) For any x that is a K, if x is good, then x is a good K.

(2) If x is a good K, then x is good by being as Ks ought to be.

Hsiao’s Defence

Hsiao spends some short time defending premises (1) and (2), including:

All examples of goodness follow this basic model. We cannot say that something is good or bad unless we first know what its function is. To borrow an example from Geach, I cannot know what a good hygrometer is if I do not know what hygrometers are for. Ascriptions of goodness and badness only make sense when considered in relation to how something ought to be by nature. As Geach puts it, there is “no such thing as being just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so.”7 When we say that something is good, what we are really saying is that it is a good member of some kind K with function F.

This looks to be a case of seeing humans in this truly functional and arguably instrumental manner. Things are only good for that which they are used for. He continues:

Some have objected to this by pointing out that something that is a good member of its essential kind can nevertheless still be bad. For example, a bomb that kills thousands of people may be good as far as bombs are concerned, but surely it is still bad, even if properly fulfills its function as a bomb. Hence, goodness cannot be defined in terms of proper functioning. But this objection, far from undermining the Aristotelian conception of goodness, actually affirms it. Since goodness is relative to a particular kind or function, something that is good for one kind of thing may be bad for another kind of thing. Indeed, the very reason why we say that a bomb is bad is because it is bad for the kind “human being.” But something that is bad for us—say, a lack of oxygen—may be good for something else (for example, certain kinds of bacteria). So long as we keep this crucial point in mind, there is no difficulty in saying that one and the same thing can be both good and bad when considered under different descriptions. In this way, the Aristotelian conception of goodness aligns nicely with our intuitions.

This is really interesting because it opens up a whole can of worms in terms of natural law. Indeed, it looks to show it meaningful goodness has some kind of evaluative hierarchy. If you can say a bomb is a good bomb is bad for human being, then this hides an awful lot of moral philosophising. Was the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima definitely bad, end of? Could you not employ some kind of moral consequentialism, as was, in order to argue that a greater good came from it (or any other bomb ever used, ironically using Just War Theory – justified by Aquinas himself). Things get complex here. And you could employ this multiplicity of goods in terms of humans – a homosexual male may be frustrating reproductive ends, but he could be “good for one kind of thing” even if he “may be bad for another kind of thing”! How do these pluralistic goods get evaluated comparatively?

This “crucial point” to which he refers is woefully under-explained and -justified.

Conditionals and Hypotheticals

Here we have a moral ought. But, and I have argued this for years, oughts are thoroughly problematic. Oughts depend on complete conditional sentences – those with a protasis and an apodosis. These are if…then clauses. A statement like “I ought to put oil in my car engine” appears to make sense because it hides an unspoken protasis: “If I want my engine to run well [, then…]”. However, we can change this up by stating, “If I am testing to see how engines fail without oil…” then I might have an antithetical apodosis of “…then I ought not put oil in my car engine.”

In other words, oughts are entirely contextual and depend on the conceived function in the mind of the agent making the claim (in the shape of the protasis (if clause). This links back to issues with the first premise in the sense of being mind-dependent.

I can use a pencil or chair to do whatever I want it to. I might also want my chair to do certain things: have a drinks holder, be uncomfortable to my enemy, allow me to sit with my arm around my partner, and so on. These functions are subjective, agent-dependent. Yes, we might agree on certain basic functions as a group of people for pragmatic, communicative reasons. But these might also change over time, geography and culture or people. A chair could be:

Image result for chairImage result for chairImage result for chairImage result for definition chairImage result for drinks holder chairImage result for kneeling back chairImage result for what is a chairImage result for what is a chair

Image result for backless chair#

…and so on.

Naturalistic Fallacy

A squirrel ought not be a certain way, and its only “functional” aspects (if you really want to argue about function) should really be seen in terms of evolution – for survival to reproductive age, and for reproduction. But this ends up looking like the naturalistic fallacy – things are good because nature has made them this way. Ducks “rape”, and this makes evolutionary sense in their context. Does it make it good?

In the same way, a high-status male human, such as a king, with a huge harem of concubines, makes sense in evolutionary terms (the selfish gene etc.) but is difficult to argue for under ordinary morality and, one would assume, natural law.

But even were a squirrel or human to have intrinsic prescribed oughts, then how do we know what these oughts were? And would they not actually be extrinsically defined and derived anyway? Do we look at evolution and guess as to what the functional aspects of humans and squirrels are and then define the oughts from these natural phenomena (thus guessing God’s intentions in designing it so)? Or do we look at the Bible or some other revelation and then interpret that in terms of some kind of natural paradigm? In which case, the Bible appears to be where the morality is defined or derived and the natural law aspect is somewhat post hoc rationalised.

There is also the idea, as seen often within moral philosophy, as to the meta-ethical question as from whence morality comes – is it found in an agent in terms of their chracteristics, or in an action, such as with consequentialism? Deontology has morality arguably housed in the mora rule, but this can also be seen in the action to adhere to the moral rule. Or intention. O so on and so forth. The point is that “If x is a good K, then x is good by being as Ks ought to be.” hides an awful lot of meta-ethical assumptions.

Where we saw Premise (1) as thoroughly problematic, we can see that Premise (2) fares no better at all.

RELATED POSTS

 

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

August 27, 2019

August 27, 2019 By

The Perverted Faculty Argument (PFA) is a strand of Thomistic (Thomas Aquinas) thinking that is intertwined with Natural Law Theory (NLT)  of which I have been blogging lately. I was challenged by Vincent Torley recently to, if I was going to attack the PFA (as I have done here and here), attack the best form of the argument. The claim was that Timothy Hsiao’s defence was the best. It can be found here.

I also recently posted a piece concerning Hsiao’s formulation of the Perverted Faculty Argument (PFA). I initially posted Ficino’s notes on this and he did a great job at showing some pretty terminal weaknesses with it. I will continue by giving some of my own thoughts, all of which have no doubt previously been discussed in one context or another over many posts. This post will only be concerned with Premise (1)!

Here is his version of the PFA:

(1) For any x that is a K, if x is good, then x is a good K.

(2) If x is a good K, then x is good by being as Ks ought to be.

(3) Therefore, if x is a good human action, then x is good by being as human actions ought to be. (From 1–2)

(4) Human actions ought to be aimed at human goods that are proper to them.

(5) Human goods are that which fulfills human faculties.

(6) Therefore, human actions ought to be aimed at that which fulfills the human faculties that are proper to them. (From 4, 5)

(7) Therefore, if x is a good human action, then x is good by aiming at that which fulfills the human faculties that are proper to it. (From 3–6)

I think the opening premise is fundamentally problematic. Unsurpisingly, if you know me, this will entail ideas of nominalism against ideas of realism. Thomism falls apart under a nominalist or conceptual nominalist account of the world. In simple terms, abstract ideas only exist in the mind of the conceiver. This makes any objective claims about reality really troublesome.

The initial example given by Hsiao is of a pencil – if a pencil is a good pencil it is good at being a pencil. This is far more obvious with something of a simple function. Several things can be said here: first of all, what of something that is not a pencil fulfilling the function of a pencil? Secondly, what of multiple functions of a given thing?

Let’s shift this to a “chair” thing. We would need to agree on what the function of a chair is. Under Thomism, such a function is entailed in the essence of thing. Properties and functions appear to have ontic, objective existence. I would argue this is not true. I will quote at length from my book on the Kalam Cosmological Argument, Did God Create the Universe from Nothing? (UK):

To illustrate this, let’s now look at the “label” of “chair” (in a very cogent way, all words are abstractions that refer to something or another, but nominalists will say that these abstractions, or the relationship between them and the reference points, do not exist, out there, in the ether). This is an abstract concept, I posit, that exists, at most, only in the mind of the conceiver. We, as humans, label the chair abstractly and it only means a chair to those who see it as a chair—i.e. it is subjective. The concept is not itself fixed. My idea of a chair is different to yours, is different to a cat’s and to an alien’s, as well as different to the idea of this object to a human who has never seen or heard of a chair (early humans who had never seen a chair, for example, would not know it to be a chair. It would not exist as a chair, though the matter would exist in that arrangement). I may call a tree stump a chair, but you may not. If I was the last person (or sentient creature) on earth and died and left this chair, it would not be a chair, but an assembly of matter that meant nothing to anything or anyone.[i] The chair, as a label, is a subjective concept existing in each human’s mind who sees it as a chair. A chair only has properties that make it a chair within the intellectual confines of humanity. These consensus-agreed properties are human-derived properties, even if there may be common properties between concrete items—i.e. chairness. The ascription of these properties to another idea is arguable and not objectively true in itself. Now let’s take an animal—a cat. What is this “chair” to it? I imagine a visual sensation of “sleep thing”. To an alien? It looks rather like a “shmagflan” because it has a “planthoingj” on its “fdanygshan”. Labels are conceptual and depend on the conceiving mind, subjectively.

What I mean by this is that I may see that a “hero”, for example, has properties X, Y and Z. You may think a hero has properties X, Y and B. Someone else may think a hero has properties A, B and X. Who is right? No one is right. Those properties exist, in someone, but ascribing that to “heroness” is a subjective pastime with no ontic reality, no objective reality.

This is how dictionaries work. I could make up a word: “bashignogta”. I could even give it a meaning: “the feeling you get when going through a dark tunnel with the tunnel lights flashing past your eyes”. Does this abstract idea not objectively exist, now that I have made it up? Does it float into the ether? Or does it depend on my mind for its existence? I can pass it on from my mind to someone else’s using words, and then it would be conceptually existent in two minds, but it still depends on our minds. What dictionaries do is to codify an agreement in what abstract ideas (words) mean, as agreed merely by consensus (the same applies to spelling conventions—indeed, convention is the perfect word to illustrate the point). But without all the minds existing in that consensus, the words and meanings would not exist. They do not have Platonic or ontic reality.

 Thus the label of “chair” is a result of human evolution and conceptual subjectivity (even if more than one mind agrees).

If you argue that objective ideas do exist, then it is also the case that the range of all possible entities must also exist objectively, even if they don’t exist materially. Without wanting to labour my previous point, a “forqwibllex” is a fork with a bent handle and a button on the end (that has never been created and I have “made-up”). This did not exist before now, either objectively or subjectively. Now it does—have I created it objectively? This is what happens whenever humans make up a label for anything to which they assign function etc. Also, things that other animals use that don’t even have names, but to which they have assigned “mental labels”, for want of better words, must also exist objectively under this logic. For example, the backrubby bit of bark on which a family of sloths scratch their backs on a particular tree exists materially. They have no language, so it has no label as such (it can be argued that abstracts are a function of language). Yet even though it only has properties to a sloth, and not to any other animal, objectivists should claim it must exist objectively. Furthermore, there are items that have multiple abstract properties which create more headaches for the objectivist. A chair, to me, might well be a territory marker to the school cat. Surely the same object cannot embody both objective existences: the table and the marker! Perhaps it can, but it just seems to get into more and more needless complexity.

When did this chair “begin to exist”? Was it when it had three legs being built, when 1/2, 2/3, 4/5, 9/10 of the last leg was constructed? You see, the energy and matter of the chair already existed. So the chair is merely a conceptual construct. More precisely a human one. More precisely still, one that different humans will variously disagree with.

Let’s take the completed chair. When will it become not-a-chair? When I take 7 molecules away? 20? A million? This is sometimes called the paradox of the beard / dune / heap or similar. However, to be more correct, this is an example of the Sorites Paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus. It goes as follows. Imagine a sand dune (heap) of a million grains of sand. Agreeing that a sand dune minus just one grain of sand is still a sand dune (hey, it looks the same, and with no discernible difference, I cannot call it a different category), then we can repeatedly apply this second premise until we have no grains, or even a negative number of grains and we would still have a sand dune. Such labels are arbitrarily and generally assigned so there is no precision with regards to exactly how many grains of sand a dune should have.

This problem is also exemplified in the species problem which, like many other problems involving time continua (defining legal adulthood etc.), accepts the idea that human categorisation and labelling is arbitrary and subjective. The species problem states that in a constant state of evolving change, there is, in objective reality, no such thing as a species since to derive a species one must arbitrarily cut off the chain of time at the beginning and the end of a “species’” evolution in a totally subjective manner. For example, a late Australopithecus fossilised skull could just as easily be labelled an early Homo skull. An Australopithecus couple don’t suddenly give birth to a Homo species one day. These changes take millions of years and there isn’t one single point of time where the change is exacted. There is a marvellous piece of text that you can see, a large paragraph[ii] which starts off in the colour red and gradually turns blue down the paragraph leaving the reader with the question, “at which point does the writing turn blue?” Of course, there is arguably no definite and objectively definable answer—or at least any answer is by its nature arbitrary and subjective (depending, indeed, on how you define “blue”).

So, after all that, what has begun to exist? A causally inert abstract concept.

What this means is that there is no objective agreement as to what a thing actually is or its function. We might agree, by consensus, amongst humans, as to what a chair is. But even in doing so, this does not assume we will agree on whether a particular one is a good one in fulfilling its function.

This problem is also twofold. Firstly, some might agree a thing is a chair because it looks like a chair but people might disagree on its function. Imagine a tiny chair, the size of a marble. We may or may not agree on it being a chair largely on account of agreeing or not over its function. It might look like a perfectly formed chair, and so some will argue it as a chair, but not have the function of any other chair for a human. This would, again, take consensus.

Okay, let’s assume we agree on a tree stump being a chair. Let’s assume a given group of people come to a consensus that it qualifies in every way (aesthetics, form, function) as to being a chair. Now we have a second problem. What happens when a cat or small boy decides to sleep well on it, laying down? It is now arguably a good bed, under Thomism, and not a good chair. It has various functions depending on who is using it and who is evaluating that use.

This causes terminal problems for such essentialism (what is its true essence?), but is perfectly explicable under conceptual nominalism – it is whatever it is to the conceiver, and to anyone else whom the conceiver can convince by good, convincing (rational?) argument.

I may use a blunt, broken pencil to somehow save my life. That is now a good pencil, to me! But it’s crap at writing.

As soon as you start drawing absolutist lines in the sand, things fall apart like a house of cards. It’s why context makes mockery of moral (think biblical) absolutism.

(1) For any x that is a K, if x is good, then x is a good K.

In conclusion, premise (1) is fundamentally flawed, primarily in terms of its attempt to be objective (in even claiming that there are, objectively, Ks!).

[The second part to this can be found here.]

[i] Wittgenstein, in his later thought, would have claimed meaning in a word from its use. This of course hints at no objective overarching meaning for groups of things, but meaning derived from each individual usage of language in each context. If anything, this plays into the point I am making. Things only have meaning to the conceiver, thus don’t ‘exist’ objectively outside the mind of the conceiver, as abstract ideas.

[ii] This text is variously available online. I picked it up from:
http://www.christianforums.com/t7536666/#post56778897  (Accessed 09/12/2015)

RELATED POSTS

 

Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:

A Tippling Philosopher

Follow Us!
OTHER RELATED CONTENT
1
Quantum Physics Better Explains Spirituality Than...
Love Minus Religion
2
Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions
Cross Examined
3
Quoting Quiverfull: Michael and Debi Pearl's...
No Longer Quivering
4
How To Say Goodbye
Godless Mom
Browse Our Archives
TRENDING AT PATHEOS Nonreligious
Quantum Physics Better Explains Spirituality Than Religion
The Interplay of Faith and Facts
To Make Remote Work Effective, Think About Others
Flexibility Is Key to Solving Problems of Tomorrow
view all Nonreligious blogs