As for Strangroom’s article, its points are well-taken. Those humanists who believe that important aspects of the human mind transcend nature need to ask themselves how rational or naturalistic their version of humanism really is.
As for consciousness, I agree that eliminative materialism and epiphenominalism ignore, rather than address, the mystery.
As for free will, I am satisfied that human beings have yet to formulate a coherent explication of this concept.
If free will means that our choices are not determined by prior causes, how can we make sense of the idea that choices can be prompted by certain factors, like my choice to get out of the rain, or move out of a dangerous neighborhood?
If free will means that our choices are indeterminate, how do we explain our intuition that other indeterminate natural phenomena do not possess free will?
(Consider the likelihood that a single atom will undergo radioactive decay. Consider the exact trajectory of a single gas molecule. Sorry, folks, you can’t predict ’em.)
If free will means merely that we could have made a different choice in a given situation, why not impute free will to everything in our universe, which current physics tells us may be one of many universes in which all alternative events are realized?
Perhaps free will is a conceptual mirage that arises out of the old axiom, “ought implies can.”
(Remember that this axiom is not only moral but prudential as well.)
When hindsight tells us that X *should* have behaved differently, said axiom suggests that X *could* have behaved differently.
In reality, the idea that X should have done something else does not strictly imply that X could have done something else. Were this not the case, we would never critique, in hindsight, actions whose consequences the agents failed to foresee. e.g….
“She should have never dated Dr. Jekyll.” “He shouldn’t have stepped on the snake.” “You shouldn’t have panicked.” “First a riot and now an earthquake: I should never have come to L.A.!”
If we qualify the old maxim, and admit that there are problems with applying “ought implies can” to past events, the free will mirage dissipates, in my opinion.
In fact, a more general hypothesis is possible. The fact that our minds generate (deterministically or not) alternative scenarios, and can project (deterministically or not) these scenarios into the past may give rise to the illusion of free will.
Even so, better minds than mine still think that free will is a real issue. However, even if we grant this, I don’t see why determinism is relevant to morality. (Don’t laugh yet.)
If determinism is true, and we are helpless to prevent our own misdeeds, aren’t other human beings equally helpless to stop themselves from calling us responsible?
Consider the plight of the deterministic police officer. Maybe deep down, a tender facet of the officer’s psyche wants to hug the sex-murderer he has just arrested. Maybe the officer wants to shout “All is forgiven! Sin no more, and let us run together naked and innocent through sunny fields of flowers!”
But does the officer do these things? No, for he cannot! His upbringing in a family with good parents, his constant exposure law-abiding peers, and his indoctrination at the hands of a crime-weary society, have forced him to a different course of action that he cannot even consciously question! Deterministically driven, he handcuffs the sex-murderer, and puts that villain in jail!
The idea that determinism is relevant to morals or law is essentially fraudulent; it cannot escape the implicit assumption that even though wrong-doers and criminals can’t be held responsible for their actions, moralists, society-in-general, and the criminal justice system can. For are we not called upon to consider the alternative choices to traditional punishments when confronted with the idea that wrong-doers can’t help themselves?
Holding people responsible for their behavior is a universal human tendency. A person acts one way, we praise.
A person acts another way, we blame.
As a practical matter, the advantages of this pattern of behavior generally outweigh the disadvantages.
Who knows when or if this behavioral pattern will become outmoded? If it does, the change won’t be due to the collapse of the airy-fairy nebulous notion of free-will.
Re: Is astrology relevant to consciousness and psi?
Does anyone know who/what/where/how the original astrological data was charted eons ago? I’ve always wondered about that because it’s the entire basis of astrology. What is the source?
As I reread the article, a few questions occurred to me re the “test involving 2101 persons born in London during 3-9 March 1958 averaging 4.8 minutes apart. For each person 110 variables were available, including ability test scores, interests, and ratings of behaviour, all of which are supposed to be shown in the birth chart. The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success but the results were uniformly negative. The effect size due to astrology, expressed as a correlation on a scale of 0 to 1, was 0.00 ± 0.03.”
Just a few notes… Based on my limited knowledge of astrology/natal charts/etc., the information provided by the precise position of the planets at the time/place of birth is that of the basic personality traits and behaviour of the person. This is the raw material when the person is born.
So much can happen to a person that can affect this “raw material,”, to a certain degree. For instance, the study included ability test scores, but as we are finding out more and more, there are numerous environmental and physical factors that can contribute to either an increase or decrease in ability (nutrition, chemicals, pollution, etc.).
Also, social and environmental factors can affect one’s emotional and psychological makeup. For instance, our family life greatly affects our future personality/interactions.
In other words, if there is any truth to the information in astrological predictions, it would be very difficult to prove scientifically because of all the variables involved. I am not trying to defend astrology, but merely to understand the challenges it presents.
Ken Malik seems to make a distinction between materialism and naturalism, but it isn’t clear to me what it is. Both rejects supernaturalism but he seems to think that materialism also rejects things like democracy and free-will. It doesn’t – it just regards them as high-level descriptors of material phenomena that are too hard to grasp in terms of quantum fields or whatever the most fundamental material stuff is. This category also includes almost all of chemistry and biology too. Materialism is a theory about the world. It has a lot of evidence for it and no conclusive evidence against it. A material explanation of consciousness and the feeling agency will no more make them vanish than biochemistry has made life vanish. It will be a theory that in principle every conscious thought has a description in terms of neural activity and configuration. Just as biochemistry is a theory that every manifestation of life has a description in terms of molecular reactions. That doesn’t mean that anyone, or any device, will be able to predict what you’re going to do next anymore than biochemistry can predict what my avocado tree is going to do next. So, as Dennett puts it, you will still have all the free will worth having. We will still analyze and predict people’s actions in terms of their experience, needs, capability, and aspirations; just like I predict my avocado trees actions in terms of wind, weather, season, soil ph, and watering – not in terms of molecular reactions. No doubt some people, like James Grossman, will say this ignores the mystery of consciousness. So be it – we’ve gotten along fine while ignoring the mystery of life. One never know what the solution to a problem looks like until it has been solved.
If three goons in trench coats pushed me into an elevator and demanded to know my metaphysical orientation, I would have to call myself a rationalist. I could call myself a materialist, but I have never been comfortable with this term. My discomfort has nothing to do with any belief in disembodied spirits or non-physical beings. No, the reason the term “materialist” irks me is that “material” doesn’t really mean very much.
If “materialism” is defined as the belief that the real constituents fall into only one ontological category, namely “matter,” then it may be too monistic to be compatible with the physical sciences. After all, there are many fundamental particles, and four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces). But, the quest for a Unified Field Theory notwithstanding, the sciences have yet to reveal a single
ur-substance called “matter.” To say that the various particles and forces are all the same type of thing, namely “material,” begs the question of what all these particles and forces have in common that justifies lumping them into one category.
What they have in common, I believe, has nothing to do with their intrinsic properties, but rather, how much we know about them. “Material” and “immaterial” do not *mean* “known” and “unknown,” but historically, they have *applied,* respectively, to things that we understand empirically and things we hardly understand.
In ancient times, everything was supernatural: a plethora of gods explained everything from weather to disease to sunshine. As we came to understand more about our surroundings, lo and behold, the land became “material.” The stars in the heavens and the animation of living bodies remained supernatural for a while.
But thanks to people like Galileo and Newton, lo and behold the planets and stars became “material.”
Even up to the nineteenth century, the processes that kept organisms alive was “supernatural” or at least imbued with a “vital spark.” Now that we understand proteins and DNA, life is presumed to be “material.” “Material” vs. “immaterial,” “physical” vs. “non-physical,” and “natural” vs. “supernatural” are unwittingly epistemic terms.
Admittedly, supernaturalist doctrine complicates the picture. Though the term “supernatural” has historically been applied to poorly understood phenomena, the believer in the supernatural is not an agnostic, but one who pretends to know all sorts of interesting things about the unknown. The creativity that this pretense requires has given us a baroque world-literature of superstitions from heavens to hells to gods-on-Earth. A frequent theme among all of these beliefs is action caused by unmediated will. In both magic and theistic religion, things happen because certain beings will them to.
No known natural phenomenon is caused by an unmediated act of will; even biofeedback is theoretically mediated by nerves or hormones. So for the time being, we have a convenient way of distinguishing alleged supernatural phenomena from natural ones. But what positive property makes a phenomenon “natural,” “material,” or “physical”? In my opinion, none.
It’s how we come to claim knowledge that distinguishes brights from believers. Therefore, I prefer to describe myself as a rationalist rather than a materialist. In this context, either term is more appropriate than “naturalist.” After all, not all people with a naturalistic world view don’t spend their days taking pictures of animals in the woods.
As for consciousness, its nature is currently a mystery. Current descriptions of the brain do not explain it, since both thought and perception are known to occur both in its presence and its absence. However, this would not prevent future descriptions of the brain from explaining consciousness. As things stand, it is reasonable to believe that consciousness has its basis in the brain, since it co-varies with the condition of the brain. The idea that consciousness is physically unmediated makes a needless puzzle out of how anesthesiologists make their living.
Having published two highly tendentious criticisms of the “Academic Bill of Rights” why not publish the document ? It is rather shorter than either of the aricles you published, and self explanatory.
It does not even remotely suggest that “more conservatives” should be hired, instead it expilicitly says that political leaning should NOT be a hiring criterion.
The reasoning behind the leftist anger at the idea is this (a) Currently left-leaning people are given hiring preference, to an unusual degree, (b) if hiring was politically ‘blind’, then more conservatives would be hired, ergo (c) this measure effectively discriminates against leftists !
Publish the document, and criticise it on its merits – don’t be a shallow mouthpiece for biased leftists.
FYI – the 8 principles of the “Academic Bill of Rights”.
Note in Principle 1 it says “No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs”.
I challenge any logical person to square this document with the two articles attacking it.
1. All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.
2. All tenure, search and hiring committee deliberations will be recorded and made available to appropriately constituted collegiate and university authorities empowered to inquire into the integrity of the process. (The names of committee members may be redacted). No faculty member will be excluded from tenure, search and hiring committees on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
3. Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
4. Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate. While teachers are and should be free to pursue their own findings and perspectives in presenting their views, they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints. Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.
5. Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.
6. Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism.
7. An environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas being an essential component of a free university, the obstruction of invited campus speakers, destruction of campus literature or other effort to obstruct this exchange will not be tolerated.
8. Knowledge advances when individual scholars are left free to reach their own conclusions about which methods, facts, and theories have been validated by research. Academic institutions and professional societies formed to advance knowledge within an area of research, maintain the integrity of the research process, and organize the professional lives of related researchers serve as indispensable venues within which scholars circulate research findings and debate their interpretation. To perform these functions adequately, academic institutions and professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.
Check yourself, dude! Your opinion of the need for self-expression for certain young people of today and their teachers who are valiantly striving to educate them in the various ways tey can is overbrimming with racism. It seems you just don’t like what they are writing and what they have to say. While I don’t personally share their world, I can respect what it’s about. When I was a youngster there was rock and roll, psychadelic music, civil rights struggle, Viet Nam, and transitions between Baby Boom generation to peace and love to disco to the complacent, money making 80’s )almost the period in which I began). We were reading Thomas, Ferlinghetti, Baraka, Ginsburg, among others and they spoke to us and were well written and I’m sure they were students in some teacher’s classroom who were encouraged to express themselves as well as study traditional forms.
Your preference of 18th century Irish poets and writers is cool but you presume a young person would have no interest in them. You use one contemporary female writer and believe all of them follow the same line. Shame on you. I’m sure Yeats would think you’re full of shit.
We live in a world that is defined by European terms (I realize you don’t respect this point of view). Throughout history there has been a need for Europeans (particular the Anglo-Saxons) to conquer and dominate other people and their cultures and redefine their thoughts, religions, etc.
“Why do you people dress that way? Why do you like that music? Blah, blah, blah”
Besides the manifest destiny and need for white man’s burden, Europeans made slaves out of everyone they could and raped and pillaged all the natural resources and stole religions.
All right, all right, I’m on my soapbox.
But people like you need to stop defining the world in terms of what they believe and stop trying to impress your rules on everybody else in order to legitimize an oppressive culture.
Your way of thinking was the basis of what brought 6 million Jewish people to extermination by a group who didn’t agree with the way they expressed themselves either.
Hang on, Mr. Blair. We didn’t publish the two articles about the Academic Bill of Rights and the proposed Colorado legislation to enforce it. We only linked to them – that’s quite another matter. We don’t entirely agree with every article we link to. (Actually we don’t necessarily agree absolutely entirely with every article we publish, either, but still publication is much more of an endorsement than linking is.) Though the teasers I wrote did to some extent agree with the point of view of the articles.
But thank you for publishing the AB of R. I’ll link to it in News if I can find a good link.
It has generally been my policy not to defend my writings in response to individual criticism. My reasons for this are that the work itself either succeeds or fails on its own merits. I don’t believe a writer should comment on his or her work once it has been published. It seems a bit disingenuous to my mind to defend, explain, or apologize after the fact. In short, take your lumps or laurels as they come.
However, your comment has made me rethink this position. Not because it was well written or insightful, but rather just the opposite. It may very well have been one of the loopiest comments I have ever received – and this is no mean feat!
Perhaps it is your sense of proportion (or lack thereof) that I find most disturbing. You open your comments open with the line, “Your opinion of the need for self-expression is overbrimming (sic) with racism.” Notwithstanding the ugly awkward neologism, I defy you to point out the racism you find in my work. Or, has this become the standard for argument – I disagree what you say therefore you must be a racist! Yes, the old bugaboo. Throw the “R” word in and that settles that – end of discussion!
Well, Ben, I’m not biting.
I find it a bit rich coming from someone who seems to have such a problem with Europeans (and by extension white Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.) and in particular, those nasty Anglo-Saxons! Of course even a cursory read of world history would be in agreement with the idea that “Europeans” have caused a good deal of mischief in the world, but due to my Swiftian view of our species, I think there is more than enough nastiness to go around.
Perhaps you believe the Japanese were merely holidaying in Manchuria and things just got out of hand, or the Hutus felt they had to defend themselves against the Tutsi in Rwanda? Maybe, just maybe, the two million human beings who perished in Pol Pot’s Cambodia was just a problem of logistics or that the 20,000 sacrifices a year to the Aztec’s gods just hopped up those stairs of their own accord? And, of course, slavery never, ever existed in the Muslim world and those pesky Armenians and Kurds probably had it coming to them!
You might want to familiarize yourself with an excellent article written by Ian Buruma entitled “Wielding The Moral Club”, which recently appeared in The Financial Times. In it he cites the philosopher Avishai Margalit;
[Margalit] calls it moral racism. When Indians kill Muslims, or Africans kill Africans, or Arabs kill Arabs, western pundits pretend not to notice, or find historical explanations, or blame the scars of colonialism. But if white men, whether they are Americans, Europeans, South Africans or Israelis harm people of colour, hell is raised. If one compares western reporting of events in Palestine or Iraq with far more disturbing news in Liberia or Central Africa, there is a disproportion, which suggests that non-western people cannot be held to the same moral standards as us.”
When people lecture me constantly on racism or can’t seem to get through a conversation without bringing up the subject, I often think to myself; “The lady (or gentleman) doth protest too much, methinks.”
As for my “preference” of 18th Century Irish poets, you thoroughly misread my sentence. What I wrote was “…I would have demanded that (fully expecting that my rights would be honored!) my instructors should be well versed in the intricate meters of the 18th century Gaelic poets which best represented my particular cultural context.” This, my irony-challenged friend, was a slap at the ridiculous multi-culti notion that children should read only authors of their own ethnicity or race. Yes, I have read a number of the Gaelic poets in translation (as my Irish is very poor) but I don’t feel as though I have any particular “claim” on them. Literature, like language is not genetically transmitted. I’ll leave that sort of nonsense to the advocates of “Ebonics”. However, you might want to read Daibhidh O Bruadair, he had a number of less than flattering things to say about those awful Anglo-Saxons!
I find it interesting that you number among the poets you admire, Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones). Mr. Baraka has gained certain notoriety with his racialist and anti-Semitic views in recent years, although what I find most offensive about him is that he is an extraordinarily bad poet. Perhaps your energies should be spent writing letters to him addressing some of his issues.
But, it is this final statement that shot you to the top of the pops and into the winner’s circle that resulted in bringing about this response:
“Your way of thinking was the basis of what brought 6 million Jewish people to extermination by a group who didn’t agree with the way they expressed themselves either.”
You cannot seriously mean to imply that my disliking poorly crafted poetry qualifies me as some sort of wannabe death camp commandant? Or do you? I’m not sure quite how to respond to that one. “It beggars the imagination” was only a cliché until I read that! One could only conclude that while you were a “youngster” listening to “rock and roll,[and] psychadelic (sic) music” you might have ingested a little too much of whatever controlled substance that was available to you.
So in conclusion, I deliver this in the same bonhomie with which it was delivered to me: “Check yourself, dude. Put down the pipe!”
Just to note – Barney mentions the article by Ian Buruma –
“You might want to familiarize yourself with an excellent article written by Ian Buruma entitled “Wielding The Moral Club”, which recently appeared in The Financial Times. In it he cites the philosopher Avishai Margalit”
It’s easy to find: we linked to it in News on Monday, under ‘Moral Racism’.
As laudable as the purpose of this web site is, and as interesting and valuable as many of its linked articles are, when you look at it carefully, the general tenor is all flash and sound bites, redolent of yet another ideology, ultimately almost as naive as what it criticizes. I am also reminded of Critical Thinking on the Web, with an accompanying mail list, critical@yahoogroups.com, which is quite uncritical of much of the material it promotes.
Case in point:
Jeremy Stangroom’s article:
“There is Something Wrong With Humanism”
I think the reasoning behind it is shallow and idiotic. The author’s specious reasoning is based on the ways the fact-value relation can go wrong in assessing scientific claims, i.e. that humanist values may pre-empt science, for example, when science shows us to be biologically more limited than our pretensions are willing to accept. In following such a line of argument, Stangroom unwittingly shows us what is _really_ wrong with the humanist movement, i.e that it is dominated, apparently in the UK, as in the USA, by managerial-technocratic types who can’t see past their limited role in the social division of labor, and hence cannot perceive how limited bourgeois rationalism and irrationalism form a social totality.
Luckily, this web site offers a rebuttal to Stangroom’s piffle:
“There is Nothing Wrong With Humanism”
By Kenan Malik
There is even more to be said about the social basis of these ideological conflicts. There are also implications for understanding the artificial boundaries enforced within the knowledge industry, for example between analytical and Continental philosophy, i.e. between scientism and the philosophy of the subject. But there are alternatives to both shallow
Anglo-American empiricism and anti-scientific subjectivism.
How would your conceptions change if you addressed this question: what changes when matter thinks?
DeGregori\’s article, \”The Plant Protection Racket\” is, as usual, great. The only minor disagreement I have concerns his initial remarks about the aesthetic preference for imperfection.
There\’s more to art than the aesthetic service–consider the problem of perfect fakes. We appreciate the design but we also appreciate the execution, the artist\’s ability to overcome technical difficulties. We appreciate virtuosity for its own sake. We appreciate Michaelangelo\’s David not only because it was hard to think up but because it was hard to make–a perfect fake, cast from a mold, out of some synthetic substance indistinguishible from marble doesn\’t have the same aesthetic value simply because it wasn\’t as hard to make.
Mass produced products aren\’t simply less valuable because they\’re abundant–they\’re less valuable because they don\’t embody that difficulty of execution. It isn\’t the imprefections as such that contribute to the aesthetic value of hand made items. The imperfection is a sign that they were hard to make, required real virtuosity.
\”An extreme Zionist will reach different conclusions about the covenant between God and man than a follower of Reform Judaism or a Christian liberal.\”
Many Reform Jews are ardent Zionists, as are many Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, and secular Jews. Some in each of those denominations are not. However, Israel has always been central to Jewish liturgy, theology, philosophy, mythology, history, calendar, etc. You can\’t be a Jew and escape the connection, although Jews can take different positions on how to manifest that connection.
\”many Christians I am acquainted with assume first, that the historical claims of the Bible have adequate consistancy with and are substantiated by the results of impartial, careful historical enquiry\”
There is archeological evidence for some of the Hebrew Scriptures – I don\’t know about the Christian Gospels. For example, the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem and captivity of the Jews, and their subsequent return, are all corroborated by chronicles from Babylonia and Persia. There are various inscriptions and coins from reigns of different kings, remains of palaces, dwellings, stuff like that. None of this goes back as far as Solomon, so past about the 8th c. BCE you\’re on your own.
As for Strangroom’s article, its points are well-taken. Those humanists who believe that important aspects of the human mind transcend nature need to ask themselves how rational or naturalistic their version of humanism really is.
As for consciousness, I agree that eliminative materialism and epiphenominalism ignore, rather than address, the mystery.
As for free will, I am satisfied that human beings have yet to formulate a coherent explication of this concept.
If free will means that our choices are not determined by prior causes, how can we make sense of the idea that choices can be prompted by certain factors, like my choice to get out of the rain, or move out of a dangerous neighborhood?
If free will means that our choices are indeterminate, how do we explain our intuition that other indeterminate natural phenomena do not possess free will?
(Consider the likelihood that a single atom will undergo radioactive decay. Consider the exact trajectory of a single gas molecule. Sorry, folks, you can’t predict ’em.)
If free will means merely that we could have made a different choice in a given situation, why not impute free will to everything in our universe, which current physics tells us may be one of many universes in which all alternative events are realized?
Perhaps free will is a conceptual mirage that arises out of the old axiom, “ought implies can.”
(Remember that this axiom is not only moral but prudential as well.)
When hindsight tells us that X *should* have behaved differently, said axiom suggests that X *could* have behaved differently.
In reality, the idea that X should have done something else does not strictly imply that X could have done something else. Were this not the case, we would never critique, in hindsight, actions whose consequences the agents failed to foresee. e.g….
“She should have never dated Dr. Jekyll.” “He shouldn’t have stepped on the snake.” “You shouldn’t have panicked.” “First a riot and now an earthquake: I should never have come to L.A.!”
If we qualify the old maxim, and admit that there are problems with applying “ought implies can” to past events, the free will mirage dissipates, in my opinion.
In fact, a more general hypothesis is possible. The fact that our minds generate (deterministically or not) alternative scenarios, and can project (deterministically or not) these scenarios into the past may give rise to the illusion of free will.
Even so, better minds than mine still think that free will is a real issue. However, even if we grant this, I don’t see why determinism is relevant to morality. (Don’t laugh yet.)
If determinism is true, and we are helpless to prevent our own misdeeds, aren’t other human beings equally helpless to stop themselves from calling us responsible?
Consider the plight of the deterministic police officer. Maybe deep down, a tender facet of the officer’s psyche wants to hug the sex-murderer he has just arrested. Maybe the officer wants to shout “All is forgiven! Sin no more, and let us run together naked and innocent through sunny fields of flowers!”
But does the officer do these things? No, for he cannot! His upbringing in a family with good parents, his constant exposure law-abiding peers, and his indoctrination at the hands of a crime-weary society, have forced him to a different course of action that he cannot even consciously question! Deterministically driven, he handcuffs the sex-murderer, and puts that villain in jail!
The idea that determinism is relevant to morals or law is essentially fraudulent; it cannot escape the implicit assumption that even though wrong-doers and criminals can’t be held responsible for their actions, moralists, society-in-general, and the criminal justice system can. For are we not called upon to consider the alternative choices to traditional punishments when confronted with the idea that wrong-doers can’t help themselves?
Holding people responsible for their behavior is a universal human tendency. A person acts one way, we praise.
A person acts another way, we blame.
As a practical matter, the advantages of this pattern of behavior generally outweigh the disadvantages.
Who knows when or if this behavioral pattern will become outmoded? If it does, the change won’t be due to the collapse of the airy-fairy nebulous notion of free-will.
Thanks for letting me vent,
Jim Grossmann
Re: Is astrology relevant to consciousness and psi?
Does anyone know who/what/where/how the original astrological data was charted eons ago? I’ve always wondered about that because it’s the entire basis of astrology. What is the source?
Re: Astrology
As I reread the article, a few questions occurred to me re the “test involving 2101 persons born in London during 3-9 March 1958 averaging 4.8 minutes apart. For each person 110 variables were available, including ability test scores, interests, and ratings of behaviour, all of which are supposed to be shown in the birth chart. The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success but the results were uniformly negative. The effect size due to astrology, expressed as a correlation on a scale of 0 to 1, was 0.00 ± 0.03.”
Just a few notes… Based on my limited knowledge of astrology/natal charts/etc., the information provided by the precise position of the planets at the time/place of birth is that of the basic personality traits and behaviour of the person. This is the raw material when the person is born.
So much can happen to a person that can affect this “raw material,”, to a certain degree. For instance, the study included ability test scores, but as we are finding out more and more, there are numerous environmental and physical factors that can contribute to either an increase or decrease in ability (nutrition, chemicals, pollution, etc.).
Also, social and environmental factors can affect one’s emotional and psychological makeup. For instance, our family life greatly affects our future personality/interactions.
In other words, if there is any truth to the information in astrological predictions, it would be very difficult to prove scientifically because of all the variables involved. I am not trying to defend astrology, but merely to understand the challenges it presents.
Ken Malik seems to make a distinction between materialism and naturalism, but it isn’t clear to me what it is. Both rejects supernaturalism but he seems to think that materialism also rejects things like democracy and free-will. It doesn’t – it just regards them as high-level descriptors of material phenomena that are too hard to grasp in terms of quantum fields or whatever the most fundamental material stuff is. This category also includes almost all of chemistry and biology too. Materialism is a theory about the world. It has a lot of evidence for it and no conclusive evidence against it. A material explanation of consciousness and the feeling agency will no more make them vanish than biochemistry has made life vanish. It will be a theory that in principle every conscious thought has a description in terms of neural activity and configuration. Just as biochemistry is a theory that every manifestation of life has a description in terms of molecular reactions. That doesn’t mean that anyone, or any device, will be able to predict what you’re going to do next anymore than biochemistry can predict what my avocado tree is going to do next. So, as Dennett puts it, you will still have all the free will worth having. We will still analyze and predict people’s actions in terms of their experience, needs, capability, and aspirations; just like I predict my avocado trees actions in terms of wind, weather, season, soil ph, and watering – not in terms of molecular reactions. No doubt some people, like James Grossman, will say this ignores the mystery of consciousness. So be it – we’ve gotten along fine while ignoring the mystery of life. One never know what the solution to a problem looks like until it has been solved.
If three goons in trench coats pushed me into an elevator and demanded to know my metaphysical orientation, I would have to call myself a rationalist. I could call myself a materialist, but I have never been comfortable with this term. My discomfort has nothing to do with any belief in disembodied spirits or non-physical beings. No, the reason the term “materialist” irks me is that “material” doesn’t really mean very much.
If “materialism” is defined as the belief that the real constituents fall into only one ontological category, namely “matter,” then it may be too monistic to be compatible with the physical sciences. After all, there are many fundamental particles, and four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces). But, the quest for a Unified Field Theory notwithstanding, the sciences have yet to reveal a single
ur-substance called “matter.” To say that the various particles and forces are all the same type of thing, namely “material,” begs the question of what all these particles and forces have in common that justifies lumping them into one category.
What they have in common, I believe, has nothing to do with their intrinsic properties, but rather, how much we know about them. “Material” and “immaterial” do not *mean* “known” and “unknown,” but historically, they have *applied,* respectively, to things that we understand empirically and things we hardly understand.
In ancient times, everything was supernatural: a plethora of gods explained everything from weather to disease to sunshine. As we came to understand more about our surroundings, lo and behold, the land became “material.” The stars in the heavens and the animation of living bodies remained supernatural for a while.
But thanks to people like Galileo and Newton, lo and behold the planets and stars became “material.”
Even up to the nineteenth century, the processes that kept organisms alive was “supernatural” or at least imbued with a “vital spark.” Now that we understand proteins and DNA, life is presumed to be “material.” “Material” vs. “immaterial,” “physical” vs. “non-physical,” and “natural” vs. “supernatural” are unwittingly epistemic terms.
Admittedly, supernaturalist doctrine complicates the picture. Though the term “supernatural” has historically been applied to poorly understood phenomena, the believer in the supernatural is not an agnostic, but one who pretends to know all sorts of interesting things about the unknown. The creativity that this pretense requires has given us a baroque world-literature of superstitions from heavens to hells to gods-on-Earth. A frequent theme among all of these beliefs is action caused by unmediated will. In both magic and theistic religion, things happen because certain beings will them to.
No known natural phenomenon is caused by an unmediated act of will; even biofeedback is theoretically mediated by nerves or hormones. So for the time being, we have a convenient way of distinguishing alleged supernatural phenomena from natural ones. But what positive property makes a phenomenon “natural,” “material,” or “physical”? In my opinion, none.
It’s how we come to claim knowledge that distinguishes brights from believers. Therefore, I prefer to describe myself as a rationalist rather than a materialist. In this context, either term is more appropriate than “naturalist.” After all, not all people with a naturalistic world view don’t spend their days taking pictures of animals in the woods.
As for consciousness, its nature is currently a mystery. Current descriptions of the brain do not explain it, since both thought and perception are known to occur both in its presence and its absence. However, this would not prevent future descriptions of the brain from explaining consciousness. As things stand, it is reasonable to believe that consciousness has its basis in the brain, since it co-varies with the condition of the brain. The idea that consciousness is physically unmediated makes a needless puzzle out of how anesthesiologists make their living.
Having published two highly tendentious criticisms of the “Academic Bill of Rights” why not publish the document ? It is rather shorter than either of the aricles you published, and self explanatory.
It does not even remotely suggest that “more conservatives” should be hired, instead it expilicitly says that political leaning should NOT be a hiring criterion.
The reasoning behind the leftist anger at the idea is this (a) Currently left-leaning people are given hiring preference, to an unusual degree, (b) if hiring was politically ‘blind’, then more conservatives would be hired, ergo (c) this measure effectively discriminates against leftists !
Publish the document, and criticise it on its merits – don’t be a shallow mouthpiece for biased leftists.
FYI – the 8 principles of the “Academic Bill of Rights”.
Note in Principle 1 it says “No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs”.
I challenge any logical person to square this document with the two articles attacking it.
1. All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.
2. All tenure, search and hiring committee deliberations will be recorded and made available to appropriately constituted collegiate and university authorities empowered to inquire into the integrity of the process. (The names of committee members may be redacted). No faculty member will be excluded from tenure, search and hiring committees on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
3. Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
4. Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate. While teachers are and should be free to pursue their own findings and perspectives in presenting their views, they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints. Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.
5. Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.
6. Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism.
7. An environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas being an essential component of a free university, the obstruction of invited campus speakers, destruction of campus literature or other effort to obstruct this exchange will not be tolerated.
8. Knowledge advances when individual scholars are left free to reach their own conclusions about which methods, facts, and theories have been validated by research. Academic institutions and professional societies formed to advance knowledge within an area of research, maintain the integrity of the research process, and organize the professional lives of related researchers serve as indispensable venues within which scholars circulate research findings and debate their interpretation. To perform these functions adequately, academic institutions and professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.
Check yourself, dude! Your opinion of the need for self-expression for certain young people of today and their teachers who are valiantly striving to educate them in the various ways tey can is overbrimming with racism. It seems you just don’t like what they are writing and what they have to say. While I don’t personally share their world, I can respect what it’s about. When I was a youngster there was rock and roll, psychadelic music, civil rights struggle, Viet Nam, and transitions between Baby Boom generation to peace and love to disco to the complacent, money making 80’s )almost the period in which I began). We were reading Thomas, Ferlinghetti, Baraka, Ginsburg, among others and they spoke to us and were well written and I’m sure they were students in some teacher’s classroom who were encouraged to express themselves as well as study traditional forms.
Your preference of 18th century Irish poets and writers is cool but you presume a young person would have no interest in them. You use one contemporary female writer and believe all of them follow the same line. Shame on you. I’m sure Yeats would think you’re full of shit.
We live in a world that is defined by European terms (I realize you don’t respect this point of view). Throughout history there has been a need for Europeans (particular the Anglo-Saxons) to conquer and dominate other people and their cultures and redefine their thoughts, religions, etc.
“Why do you people dress that way? Why do you like that music? Blah, blah, blah”
Besides the manifest destiny and need for white man’s burden, Europeans made slaves out of everyone they could and raped and pillaged all the natural resources and stole religions.
All right, all right, I’m on my soapbox.
But people like you need to stop defining the world in terms of what they believe and stop trying to impress your rules on everybody else in order to legitimize an oppressive culture.
Your way of thinking was the basis of what brought 6 million Jewish people to extermination by a group who didn’t agree with the way they expressed themselves either.
Hang on, Mr. Blair. We didn’t publish the two articles about the Academic Bill of Rights and the proposed Colorado legislation to enforce it. We only linked to them – that’s quite another matter. We don’t entirely agree with every article we link to. (Actually we don’t necessarily agree absolutely entirely with every article we publish, either, but still publication is much more of an endorsement than linking is.) Though the teasers I wrote did to some extent agree with the point of view of the articles.
But thank you for publishing the AB of R. I’ll link to it in News if I can find a good link.
Dear Mr. Jacobs,
It has generally been my policy not to defend my writings in response to individual criticism. My reasons for this are that the work itself either succeeds or fails on its own merits. I don’t believe a writer should comment on his or her work once it has been published. It seems a bit disingenuous to my mind to defend, explain, or apologize after the fact. In short, take your lumps or laurels as they come.
However, your comment has made me rethink this position. Not because it was well written or insightful, but rather just the opposite. It may very well have been one of the loopiest comments I have ever received – and this is no mean feat!
Perhaps it is your sense of proportion (or lack thereof) that I find most disturbing. You open your comments open with the line, “Your opinion of the need for self-expression is overbrimming (sic) with racism.” Notwithstanding the ugly awkward neologism, I defy you to point out the racism you find in my work. Or, has this become the standard for argument – I disagree what you say therefore you must be a racist! Yes, the old bugaboo. Throw the “R” word in and that settles that – end of discussion!
Well, Ben, I’m not biting.
I find it a bit rich coming from someone who seems to have such a problem with Europeans (and by extension white Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.) and in particular, those nasty Anglo-Saxons! Of course even a cursory read of world history would be in agreement with the idea that “Europeans” have caused a good deal of mischief in the world, but due to my Swiftian view of our species, I think there is more than enough nastiness to go around.
Perhaps you believe the Japanese were merely holidaying in Manchuria and things just got out of hand, or the Hutus felt they had to defend themselves against the Tutsi in Rwanda? Maybe, just maybe, the two million human beings who perished in Pol Pot’s Cambodia was just a problem of logistics or that the 20,000 sacrifices a year to the Aztec’s gods just hopped up those stairs of their own accord? And, of course, slavery never, ever existed in the Muslim world and those pesky Armenians and Kurds probably had it coming to them!
You might want to familiarize yourself with an excellent article written by Ian Buruma entitled “Wielding The Moral Club”, which recently appeared in The Financial Times. In it he cites the philosopher Avishai Margalit;
[Margalit] calls it moral racism. When Indians kill Muslims, or Africans kill Africans, or Arabs kill Arabs, western pundits pretend not to notice, or find historical explanations, or blame the scars of colonialism. But if white men, whether they are Americans, Europeans, South Africans or Israelis harm people of colour, hell is raised. If one compares western reporting of events in Palestine or Iraq with far more disturbing news in Liberia or Central Africa, there is a disproportion, which suggests that non-western people cannot be held to the same moral standards as us.”
When people lecture me constantly on racism or can’t seem to get through a conversation without bringing up the subject, I often think to myself; “The lady (or gentleman) doth protest too much, methinks.”
As for my “preference” of 18th Century Irish poets, you thoroughly misread my sentence. What I wrote was “…I would have demanded that (fully expecting that my rights would be honored!) my instructors should be well versed in the intricate meters of the 18th century Gaelic poets which best represented my particular cultural context.” This, my irony-challenged friend, was a slap at the ridiculous multi-culti notion that children should read only authors of their own ethnicity or race. Yes, I have read a number of the Gaelic poets in translation (as my Irish is very poor) but I don’t feel as though I have any particular “claim” on them. Literature, like language is not genetically transmitted. I’ll leave that sort of nonsense to the advocates of “Ebonics”. However, you might want to read Daibhidh O Bruadair, he had a number of less than flattering things to say about those awful Anglo-Saxons!
I find it interesting that you number among the poets you admire, Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones). Mr. Baraka has gained certain notoriety with his racialist and anti-Semitic views in recent years, although what I find most offensive about him is that he is an extraordinarily bad poet. Perhaps your energies should be spent writing letters to him addressing some of his issues.
But, it is this final statement that shot you to the top of the pops and into the winner’s circle that resulted in bringing about this response:
“Your way of thinking was the basis of what brought 6 million Jewish people to extermination by a group who didn’t agree with the way they expressed themselves either.”
You cannot seriously mean to imply that my disliking poorly crafted poetry qualifies me as some sort of wannabe death camp commandant? Or do you? I’m not sure quite how to respond to that one. “It beggars the imagination” was only a cliché until I read that! One could only conclude that while you were a “youngster” listening to “rock and roll,[and] psychadelic (sic) music” you might have ingested a little too much of whatever controlled substance that was available to you.
So in conclusion, I deliver this in the same bonhomie with which it was delivered to me: “Check yourself, dude. Put down the pipe!”
Just to note – Barney mentions the article by Ian Buruma –
“You might want to familiarize yourself with an excellent article written by Ian Buruma entitled “Wielding The Moral Club”, which recently appeared in The Financial Times. In it he cites the philosopher Avishai Margalit”
It’s easy to find: we linked to it in News on Monday, under ‘Moral Racism’.
As laudable as the purpose of this web site is, and as interesting and valuable as many of its linked articles are, when you look at it carefully, the general tenor is all flash and sound bites, redolent of yet another ideology, ultimately almost as naive as what it criticizes. I am also reminded of Critical Thinking on the Web, with an accompanying mail list, critical@yahoogroups.com, which is quite uncritical of much of the material it promotes.
Case in point:
Jeremy Stangroom’s article:
“There is Something Wrong With Humanism”
I think the reasoning behind it is shallow and idiotic. The author’s specious reasoning is based on the ways the fact-value relation can go wrong in assessing scientific claims, i.e. that humanist values may pre-empt science, for example, when science shows us to be biologically more limited than our pretensions are willing to accept. In following such a line of argument, Stangroom unwittingly shows us what is _really_ wrong with the humanist movement, i.e that it is dominated, apparently in the UK, as in the USA, by managerial-technocratic types who can’t see past their limited role in the social division of labor, and hence cannot perceive how limited bourgeois rationalism and irrationalism form a social totality.
Luckily, this web site offers a rebuttal to Stangroom’s piffle:
“There is Nothing Wrong With Humanism”
By Kenan Malik
There is even more to be said about the social basis of these ideological conflicts. There are also implications for understanding the artificial boundaries enforced within the knowledge industry, for example between analytical and Continental philosophy, i.e. between scientism and the philosophy of the subject. But there are alternatives to both shallow
Anglo-American empiricism and anti-scientific subjectivism.
How would your conceptions change if you addressed this question: what changes when matter thinks?
DeGregori\’s article, \”The Plant Protection Racket\” is, as usual, great. The only minor disagreement I have concerns his initial remarks about the aesthetic preference for imperfection.
There\’s more to art than the aesthetic service–consider the problem of perfect fakes. We appreciate the design but we also appreciate the execution, the artist\’s ability to overcome technical difficulties. We appreciate virtuosity for its own sake. We appreciate Michaelangelo\’s David not only because it was hard to think up but because it was hard to make–a perfect fake, cast from a mold, out of some synthetic substance indistinguishible from marble doesn\’t have the same aesthetic value simply because it wasn\’t as hard to make.
Mass produced products aren\’t simply less valuable because they\’re abundant–they\’re less valuable because they don\’t embody that difficulty of execution. It isn\’t the imprefections as such that contribute to the aesthetic value of hand made items. The imperfection is a sign that they were hard to make, required real virtuosity.
\”An extreme Zionist will reach different conclusions about the covenant between God and man than a follower of Reform Judaism or a Christian liberal.\”
Many Reform Jews are ardent Zionists, as are many Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, and secular Jews. Some in each of those denominations are not. However, Israel has always been central to Jewish liturgy, theology, philosophy, mythology, history, calendar, etc. You can\’t be a Jew and escape the connection, although Jews can take different positions on how to manifest that connection.
\”many Christians I am acquainted with assume first, that the historical claims of the Bible have adequate consistancy with and are substantiated by the results of impartial, careful historical enquiry\”
There is archeological evidence for some of the Hebrew Scriptures – I don\’t know about the Christian Gospels. For example, the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem and captivity of the Jews, and their subsequent return, are all corroborated by chronicles from Babylonia and Persia. There are various inscriptions and coins from reigns of different kings, remains of palaces, dwellings, stuff like that. None of this goes back as far as Solomon, so past about the 8th c. BCE you\’re on your own.
Some sites on Biblical archeology:
http://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/
http://www.bib-arch.org/bswb_BAR/bswbba2905f2.html
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/davidjer.html
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Synagogue.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57193-2003Sep10?language=printer