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Eau Courant
- Occasional
sips of news related to naturalism and its implications, updated erratically -
Lessons from the Joker - by Jason Lee Steorts, managing editor of the
National Review, August 6, 2008
The question what one should do springs from the
presupposition that choices are free — even of the reason that seeks to
determine them. From this point of view, ethical propositions are only
conditional imperatives. “If you choose to pursue this good, perform (or
not) that action.” “If you choose to act rationally, do (or not) thus and
such.” A yawning gulf sunders reason from action, and reason alone is
powerless to cross it. It merely stands on one side, a collection of lonely
little shoulds evoking pictures of possible realities and conjoining them
with the implicit statement: “Here’s a way we might make the world. Take a
look and see what you think. But it’s up to you. I told you at the start
that you didn’t have to heed me.”
Comment: A very
thoughtful piece. But of course choices aren't free from their determinants,
which means that one's choice of the good isn't ultimately "up to you," but up
to how you're caused to choose - a matter of biology and culture. We can
therefore take steps to minimize the incidence of Joker-like nihilistic choices.
In fact, the author ends by suggesting some steps to take.
Moreover,
once the Joker sees
that his contrarian anarchism is something he is fully caused to
endorse, for instance out of a desire to exact
displaced revenge against his childhood abusers, then
he can’t any longer set himself above conditions; he
is no longer playing god (or the devil). He’s not
contra-causally special, only sick. Being contrarian and nihilistic is
absolutely predictable, given the desire to defy prediction
or to imagine one is not determined.
Unequal
America - by Elizabeth Gudrais in Harvard Magazine, July-August 2008
It makes intuitive sense that those who view
poverty as a personal failing don’t feel compelled to redistribute money
from the rich to the poor. Indeed, Ropes professor of political economy
Alberto Alesina and Glimp professor of economics Edward L. Glaeser find a
strong link between beliefs and tax policy: they find that a 10-percent
increase in the share of the population that believes luck determines income
is associated with a 3.5-percent increase in the share of GDP a given
nation’s government spends on redistribution...
Comment:
Supposing the poor just choose to be poor relates directly one's
metaphysics of human agency, see also
The Natural
Disaster of Poverty and directly below.
Conservatives happier than liberals - Jeanna Bryner with Live Science,
5/7/08
Individuals with conservative ideologies are
happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason:
Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities....To
justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of
meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic
status in society based on hard work and good
performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper,
middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.
Comment:
The idea of merit, and thus the fairness of inequality, is sometimes
justified by the notion of the ultimately
self-made self.
Do conservatives buy into this more than liberals? Research needed.
Criminal Justice Makes No Sense Without the Concept of Free Will - by Julian
Baggini in the Herald, 5/19/08
...we
now have more, not fewer, reasons to suppose that our behaviour is ultimately
caused by factors other than free will. The old view that we are just blank
slates - to be composed of only our upbringing and culture - has not so much
been abandoned as complicated by genetics. The new orthodoxy is that we are
shaped by two forces: nature and nurture, working together. No one factor
explains everything but between the two, free will has little room left.
Comment:
But he goes on to suggest that we must treat each other
as if we have
free will. Too bad, since that encourages a punitive element in criminal
justice, whether or not it does any good.
The Neural Buddhists - by David Brooks in the New York Times,
5/13/08
First,
the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of
relationships. Second, underneath the patina of
different religions, people around the world have common
moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to
experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated
experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow
with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the
nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable
total of all there is.
Comment:
Brooks is
heading straight for
religious
naturalism - way cool.
The Free Will Delusion? - Mail & Guardian Online,
5/1/08, by
Ndumiso Ngcobo, who has spent most of his adult life drinking beer…
A few years ago I read a book entitled
God’s Debris, written by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. (Out of
interest, the book is
freely available on the web). In the book, Adams dedicates an entire chapter
to debunking the myth he calls “the illusion of free will”. That’s correct,
Adams does not believe that human beings are capable of exercising free will …
Note
to Science: Philosophy is Your Friend - Scienceline, 4/23/08
The inability of scientists to
entertain other explanations, including non-natural
ones, can impede scientific progress, says Delfino. To
maintain this neutral approach, he believes science must
abandon methodological naturalism.
Delfino is challenging how
science interprets the gathered data, not the general
process of obtaining this information. Instead of being
constricted by methodological naturalism, he says
scientists should classify their data differently given
sufficient evidence. Like Socrates who believed in
following the fact track wherever it leads, Delfino
says, “We must also be open to changing the way we
conceive of things based on new evidence.” He says the
transition from Newton’s physics to Einstein’s
relativity demonstrates that scientific theories are
always tentative and subject to future revision.
Comment:
Delfino has a good point, see
here.
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Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them
- Wired 4/13/08
"It's not like you're a
machine. Your brain activity is the physiological
substance in which your personality and wishes and
desires operate," researcher
John Dylan-Haynes said. The unease people
feel at the potential unreality of free will, said
National Institutes of Health neuroscientist
Mark Hallett, originates in a misconception of self
as separate from the brain. "That's the same notion as
the mind being separate from the body -- and I don't
think anyone really believes that," said Hallett. "A
different way of thinking about it is that your
consciousness is only aware of some of the things your
brain is doing." Hallett doubts that free will exists as
a separate, independent force.
Comment:
Dillon-Haynes's study got a great deal of news coverage
worrying that free will has been exposed as illusory,
one several
free will panics recently.
No Soul? I Can Live with That. No Free Will? AHHHHH!!! -
philosopher Tamler Sommers, Psychology Today, 4/2/08
Imagine a world where no one believed in free will.
Life would no longer have meaning, right? We’d be robots, puppets on a string,
living a mockery of a real human existence. And why be moral? After all, if we
do something bad, we didn’t freely choose to do it, and so we cannot be
morally responsible for that choice. So why bother?...
Accountable but Not Responsible - Dr. Cynthia Geppert,
Psychiatric Times, 4/1/08
"Jack"
has been in our emergency department at least 100 times in the 4 years I have
worked at the Veterans Affairs Hospital. I first encountered him in the medical
ICU, where he was hospitalized multiple times with chest pain and ECG changes
after cocaine binges. He was often admitted to the inpatient psychiatric unit
when we could not sort out his accidental overdoses from suicidal behavior or
when he feigned self-harm to escape legal consequences or to have a warm, safe
place to stay. Once in the psychiatry ward, Jack was sexually inappropriate and
would exploit other, more vulnerable patients and was quickly discharged...
No offense, but you don't deserve your salary - Chris Colin, San
Francisco Chronicle, 3/17/08
Any talents, work ethic, intelligence or ambition
strike me as qualities we inherited or learned along the way — or else
cultivated thanks to other qualities we inherited or learned. A person who pulls
herself up by her bootstraps, in other words, is a person lucky enough to have
that determination, grit, inclination, whatever...
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