If Richard Dawkins Died and Met His Maker...

Religious apologists have a long history of using the idea of death-bed conversions by skeptics as proof that God is real. Apparently, if you're afraid of one thing, that proves the existence of some other thing. One of the most often cited such conversions was Darwin's. That such conversion never actually took place matters little to charlatans who will lie and deceive in honor of their god, not realizing what an insult that is to the very god they worship... but that's how it goes, I guess.

When it comes to philosophers, it was David Hume's intellectual integrity and courage that shocked the world, and especially the renowned biographer James Boswell, who could not understand for the life of him why his literary mentor didn't think it was at all rational or prudential to bet on Pascal's wager as he was nearing death...

When Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took it one step further, pre-emptively arguing (starting at 7:52 in the video below) that any such possible conversion on his part, were it to happen, would most likely be an indication of his illness, medicine administered by doctors, or some sort of dementia.

Finally, and although he has not kicked the bucket yet, it seems that if Richard Dawkins were to die and find out he was wrong after all, and that there is a god, god who would be the one to end up getting bitch-slapped :)

Read More

Christopher Hitchens - Philosophy and Booze

If you're familiar with the late Christopher Hitchens, you probably know that besides being a prolific writer, social commentator, public intellectual, fierce debater and a master rhetorician, the man loved his booze and his smokes.

In the following clip, and true to form, Hitch decides to give an impromptu performance of Monty Python's famous philosophers' song, which he sings/recites by heart.

Since my own memory sucks big time, that's really impressive :)

Read More

William Lane Craig vs Peter Millican - Does God Exist?

While there is a venerable history of philosophical inquiry into the question of God's existence, debates geared for lay audiences out there tend to display a painful and embarrassing lack of philosophical sophistication. To begin with, the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology, between truth and justification, is so often overlooked that the opponents usually don't realize they are each talking about something completely different from each other. But even when they are not ships missing each other in the dark, the performances leave much to be desired.

Believers tend to assert that God exists because they don't know how else to explain certain phenomena, or because life would meaningless otherwise, or because it's part of their cultural tradition and upbringing. Whatever their merits, such arguments have nothing to do with the question of whether God actually exists or not. Skeptics, on the other hand, tend to turn scientistic, and argue that the only way to know something is through science, and since the claim that God exists is either unfalsifiable or has actually been falsified (and let's ignore the logical inconsistency in those claims), the God hypothesis cannot even get off the ground. Needless to say, both camps tend to embarrass themselves, and each other.

But what if we have two professional philosophers, such as Peter Millican and William Lane Craig, argue the question? I have to admit that I find Craig fascinating... and disturbing. He's an interesting case study of a very intelligent and learned man who will use the most state-of-the-art scientific and philosophical scholarship to support the mutually contradictory beliefs that are the legacy of the virtually illiterate goat-herders who gave us Christianity (the ultimate cult of child sacrifice), but he's really good at this, and he knows how to stand his ground against very smart people. His rhetorical skills and his careful word choice usually takes his unsuspecting opponents by surprise (probably because they're used to debating ignoramuses), and whatever merit their views may have, they usually fumble and stumble in his presence. But Peter Millican is no ordinary thinker, and that can only mean that we are in for a fascinating exploration of philosophical issues that must be addressed even before touching on the question of God's existence.

For instance, who carries the burden of proof? The believer or the skeptic? It makes more sense to me that the person making the affirmative case (the believer in this case) should satisfy the skeptic's standards of evidence, and that the skeptic has every right not to believe until those standards have been met, but as you'll see, Craig is a master at challenging this position in really ingenuous ways...

And another thing we can learn from such a debate is that disagreements even about such a fundamental question as this, can be carried out with complete civility, and with each party taking the other seriously enough to provide a robust and productive dialogue from which everyone can benefit.

Are you feeling smarter now? Or does your brain hurt?

Read More

Lecture 8 - Personal Identity

Science is great when it comes to discoveries and studies about the physical world. It requires lots of work and dedication, analytic skills to test various hypotheses, and a wealth of creativity to figure out how to conduct experiments to tell the merits of one explanation from those of another. For all of that, however, and without implying any denigration, it's also somewhat easy because you have the physical world itself to check your results against. If you think dropping heavy objects will float, the universe itself will let you know you're wrong...

Philosophical research, on the other hand, is more difficult because the object of our studies is concepts, and concepts will not smack you upside the head when you're wrong. Take one simple example for comparison: in science, you might study how something changes, and you can easily imagine the set of tools you might need to do the job. In philosophy, you'd study the nature of change itself. How on earth do you do that???

And the investigation of change is one of the philosophical questions par excellence, tracing its history all the way back to Heraclitus and Parmenides. In this final lecture, Professor Millican explores the question of personal identity: assuming that you do exist, what does it mean to say that your past self and your present self are the same person? How can it be the case that something that changes is still the same thing? That sounds like a logical contradiction, and yet pre-reflectively at least, this is what we all assume to be true.

Click here to see the course slides

And more awesome stuff on this and related questions, check out the Brainspotting tag.

Read More

David Sloan Wilson - Religion and Other Meaning Systems

Even though I'm not as vociferous about my antagonism toward religious belief as people like Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne or Bill Maher, my feelings on the subject are probably not all that different from theirs. Arguing about supernatural nonsense on ethical terms is easy, and it's only in cases of forced special pleading and unjustifiable double standards that we are willing to let religiosity get away with things that we would not grant to any other kind of ideology or belief system.

But here is a possible risk that we secularists ought to be careful about: if we want to be able to explain why religions exist and thrive, we can't let our opposition to religion be the guide. It's easy to want to argue, a la Richard Dawkins, that religion is probably just a by-product of a natural instinct to want to trust parental figures because overall that tends to work out better than the alternative. It's also easy to argue, a la Daniel Dennett, that maybe religion is the cultural and memetic equivalent of a virus that seeks to further its own interests without regard for those of its host.

Such maybes are interesting, but without more than anecdotal evidence, they are fun speculation but not very scientific. Enter David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist from Binghamton University, who has been working on the scientific study of the evolution of religion (among a plethora of other cultural phenomena) for at least a decade.

In the following fascinating and thought-provoking lecture, he clarifies a lot of important evolutionary concepts, such as the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations, neatly organizes the different kinds of hypotheses offered to explain the evolution of religion (and other meaning systems), explains how they can be framed scientifically so as to be testable, and continues to discuss some of the evidence supporting a few of these hypotheses. The man doesn't know how not to be interesting :)

And just in case the youtube version disappears at some point, here's the original:

In the interests of full disclosure, I studied evolutionary theory under Dr. Wilson, who is objectively awesome, so no bias here :)

Read More

Lecture 7 - Free Will, Determinism, Choice and Moral Responsibility

Ordinarily, we tend to think of our actions as freely chosen: we believe in free will. But if we get philosophical for a second, we have to start asking obvious questions, like what does that mean? What does it mean for something to be a choice? What does it mean for an action to be free? If all of nature is determined by physical law, and we are a part of nature, doesn't it follow that maybe our actions are just as determined, even though we may not always be aware of the causes antecedent to our actions? Hey, if we are indeed determined, how can the concept of moral responsibility make sense? Why praise or condemn someone for actions over which he has no real control? Can we make the choice to believe in free will?

In today's lecture, Professor Millican delves into these and other related questions, starting with the classic demarcation between libertarianism (not the political kind), determinism and compatibilism. As you'll see, the debate is just as alive, interesting and perplexing as ever...

Click here to see the course slides

My own leaning is toward the deterministic side of things (at least compatibilism and libertarianism make no sense to me at all), and even though that seems to rob us of our ability to make free choices, I think the upshot is that it also stops us from jumping to the all-quick conclusion that someone is to blame whenever things don't work out in the fashion we might have anticipated.

I find that as a determinist, I am more forgiving and empathetic than I would be if I just assumed that bad actions are always the result of someone's fault. Before pointing fingers, I think it's usually a good and healthy idea (to wonder at least) to what extent circumstances, and not a person, are to blame...

Read More

Lecture 6 - Primary and Secondary Qualities

No introductory philosophy course is complete without at least touching on the famous distinction between primary and secondary qualities originally proposed by Descartes, but explored in more detail by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the 3-minute animated intro.

In today's lecture, Professor Millican provides a thought-provoking historical and conceptual analysis of this famous distinction, especially as it relates to the question of whether our perceptions can actually resemble objects out in the world. For Berkeley, the problem is that ideas and perceptions can resemble nothing but ideas and perceptions, and since these are not physical, then whatever perceptions are about cannot be physical either: good-bye material world. For Hume, what we have is more of a skeptical problem: if all we ever directly perceive are ideas in our minds (caused by perceptions), how can we know (and by what methods can we possibly demonstrate) that there's a world beyond those perceptions? As you can imagine, the answers to such questions will have a lot to say about the nature and limits of science itself...

Click here to see the course slides.

And check out Woody Allen's hilarious version of the homunculus problem.

Read More

Julian Baggini - What Does It Mean to Be "You"?

The metaphysical question of personal identity is, to my mind, one of the most interesting and important there are in the philosophical literature. An obvious part of its importance has to do with the fact that many other philosophical, psychological, social and ethical issues depend on the answer to the question of whether the self exists and what it is.

Consider a thought experiment formulated by Leibniz: suppose you have the option to choose to have all the riches, talents, fame, good looks and lovers you desire, but on one condition: that you forget absolutely everything about yourself up to that point. Would you do it? If you answer is no, that implies that you think that whatever you are, your conscious experience and memories seem to be a necessary part of being you. So, no memories = no you. The new rich, talented, beautiful person would effectively be someone else. Imagine then a case of assault in which the victim loses all memory. Should this now count as murder?

In the following presentation, Julian Baggini explores the question of the self, whether it exists, whether it's an illusion, and whether we should understand an illusion as something that's not there, or as something that's simply not quite what we normally take it to be, but which is there nevertheless.

And if you want to listen to the whole thing, including an interesting Q&A, you can listen to it here:

For more on this issue, check out the Brainspotting series.

Read More

Lecture 3 - David Hume and the Problem of Induction

Look at Newton's cradle on the right and ask yourself this question: what justification do you have for thinking that it will continue to behave in the future the way it has behaved in the past?

This is not something you know a priori, through pure reason alone, since it implies no contradiction to imagine this behavior might change. It's also not something you know a posteriori, through experience, because your experience is of the past, and the question confronting you right now concerns the future. If you think that you can appeal to past experience to support the idea that nature is regular, you'd be begging the question, since past experience is a good indicator of the future only if you assume the orderliness of nature, which is the very point in question. Yes, your head is probably spinning right now from that massively circular argument...

And yet, this assumption that nature behaves according to regular and predictable principles is the very basis of virtually all our knowledge about the world, ordinary and scientific, so it's kind of a really big deal. In this week's lecture, Professor Millican gives us a brief introduction to the empiricism of David Hume, as well as one of the questions for which he is most famous: the problem of induction...

Click here to see the course slides

And check out how John Stuart Mill's attempt to solve this problem through his methods of induction.
.

Read More

Lecture 2 - Introduction to Modern Philosophy

After a brief introduction to ancient philosophy and the intellectual revolution started by Galileo and Descartes in the 17th century, Professor Millican begins to provide a concise and fascinating summary of the intellectual developments and questions that the new science and philosophy would produce.

To begin with, we start with an account of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is mostly famous for his political philosophy, but in the context of this course, his importance is due to his thorough commitment to a naturalistic and scientific account of everything, including minds. His materialism, as you might imagine, was immediately understood to imply atheism, which is why he received the dubious distinctions of being considered the monster of Malmesbury, as well as the cause of certain natural disasters. Pretty powerful for a guy who didn't believe in hocus-pocus :)

Being dissatisfied with the Cartesian account of matter as extended space, Robert Boyle would produce a theory of matter as being composed of tiny corpuscles. He also introduced the idea of empty space, thereby clearing the conceptual landscape for Sir Isaac Newton to come up with his universal laws of motion. Newton's predictive success was unimpeachable, but his instrumentalist introduction of the notion of a 'force' of gravity got many wondering whether we were back to postulating obscure and occult explanations a-la Aristotle or a-la Christianity. Wisely, Newton claimed not to understand the nature of such a force ("I feign no hypothesis"), only that its postulation (right or wrong) helped him describe the phenomena experienced with more accuracy than any previous thinker. David Hume would jump on this idea soon.

Finally, we move on to John Locke's empiricism, as well as to Malebranche's occasionalist attempt to explain the necessary connection behing causal inferences, and to Bishop Berkeley's idealism as a response to the skepticism that kept coming from all directions.

Click here to see the course slides.
.

Read More

Happy Birthday, David Hume!

Today marks the 300th birthday of David Hume, almost universally agreed to have been the most important philosopher ever to write in English, and certainly one of my favorites.

It's rather strange (and disheartening, really) that his name hasn't achieved the level of popular recognition that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant have received, but maybe that has something to do with the fact that his ideas challenged many notions that most of us consider sacred (and I'm talking about concepts like causality, induction, substance, and the self... I won't even get started with religious notions, which are really child's play).

Here is just one example of his incredibly sharp thinking (from his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding): in this quote (known as Hume's fork), he summarizes the insight that any alleged piece of knowledge must be able to satisfy one of two basic conditions in order to deserve to be listened to:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Good-bye religion!

And in this one (from his Treatise of Human Nature), he argues that reason cannot work as a cause of action:

A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification. When I am angry, I am actually possest with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high. It is impossible, therefore, that this passion can be opposed by, or be contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists in the disagreement of ideas, considered as copies, with those objects, which they represent.

Good-bye morality as a rational enterprise :)

Cheers to you, bon David!
.

Read More

Philosophy Jam

I'm too busy to post any thoughtful entries at the time, so I'll just leave each of you to ponder what the hell the following philosophy jam is all about...

Warning: before you know it, this is going to be stuck in your head for days :)

And don't ask me what the footage had to do with the audio... I have no clue.
.

Read More

David Brooks - The Social Animal

Our mastery over the physical world over the past few centuries has been based on our newly acquired ability to understand the structural intricacies of that world. Understanding that world has required that we make certain reductive assumptions about how it works, and although they have been incredibly fertile, many of these assumptions, especially when applied to our understanding of human nature itself, have turned out to be rather simplistic, mechanistic and individualistic.

As David Brooks explains in the following thought-provoking and funny TEDTalk presentation, because of our intellectual drive toward quantification, we've focused a lot of attention on those aspects of our humanity that can be measured while ignoring many of the more subtle, rich and complex intricacies of what it means not only to be human but to be a social animal.

Drawing on insights from philosophers like Aristotle and David Hume, and from the cognitive and neurosciences, Brooks attempts to lay the foundation for certain concepts that could provide the basis for a more enriched and nuanced understanding of who we are, as well as set the stage to solve many of our economic and political challenges.

And for similarly relevant entries, check out Daniel Pink on our carrots-and-sticks incentives mentality, or Matthew Taylor on 21st century enlightenment.
.

Read More

Peter Singer - Evolution vs. Ethics

From its very inception, the theory of evolution by natural selection has been misinterpreted by social reformers of all kinds. Opponents argue that it endorses a psychopathic 'nature red in tooth and claw' approach to social problems. Proponents argue the same (they just prefer to use Herbert Spencer's dictum of 'survival of the fittest').

The problem with these interpretations, of course, is that they are both instances of the naturalistic fallacy: taking a description of the world (an is) as if it were a prescription (an ought). David Hume showed, way before Darwin was even on the scene, that this is a logical problem: in an argument, a valid conclusion is supposed to be entailed by its premises, and you just can't reach an evaluative conclusion (one with an ought) based on purely empirical premises (ones with is's). Sorry, not going to happen.

So, taking a scientific view of the world cannot, without the aid of auxiliary hypotheses not themselves empirical, provide the basis upon which our moral judgments ought to rest (no matter what Sam Harris tells you). Evolution explains how things have worked, not whether that's how they should work (from a moral point of view).

Nevertheless, as the following lecture by philosopher Peter Singer shows, there are important and fascinating lessons that evolution can teach us about ourselves and our likelihood of reaching good or bad moral judgments, given our evolutionary makeup. And although these findings don't tell us what choices to make, they should make us aware of the biases we are likely to fall prey to without realizing it.

And if you want to learn more about the trolley problem, you could listen to the RadioLab guys talk with Joshua Greene on the subject.
.

Read More

The Rubber Hand Illusion

You may feel that you are master of your body, telling it what do do and when to do it. Of course, this mastery presupposes an intimate knowledge of your body, but are you as familiar with it as you think you are? The eighteenth century philosopher David Hume argued that our knowledge of our bodies is acquired, like everything else, from experience; it is not something known innately or purely through reason.

One of Hume's most interesting insights rests on the idea that when it comes to the relationship between mind and body, our experience is merely of their constant conjunction, but never of any necessary connection between them. In other words, you experience that your body does what you tell it to, but you don't actually experience why. You assume that one causes the other to act, but that's ultimately just an inference you make, not something you actually experience.

And as with most things Hume, it's taken a few centuries to scientifically test these observations, but once again it looks like the man was on the right track. Some of the latest research has reached similar conclusions, and has provided valuable lessons about how our brain integrates and constructs its experience of its own body, and the findings are absolutely fascinating: for instance, you can be fooled into experiencing that a rubber hand that you 'know' isn't yours is yours :)

Here is a more concise explanation of what's going on:

And because scientists are not doing this just for shits and giggles, here is an important example of a possible application of this research:

This could provide more confirmation of the natural basis for out-of-body experiences, wouldn't it?
.

Read More

John Stuart Mill's Methods of Induction

If you're familiar with the name, then you probably know that the 19th century British philosopher John Stuart Mill is primarily famous for his work on the ethical theory of utilitarianism. What you may not know, however, is that this young and prolific genius also did some important and sophisticated work in logic and the philosophy of science trying to solve Hume's famous problem of induction.

You may have heard scientists sometimes refer to 'the laws of nature.' The problem of induction is that we never directly experience these 'laws': all we seem to experience is the constant conjunction of certain circumstances with certain events. To talk about a cause-effect relationship between two events, however, seems to require more than just a mere conjunction (which, for all we know, might be entirely coincidental and fortuitous). In short, part of the conceptual problem is that science is supposed to be an empirical enterprise, grounded in experience. But experience is always of particular events. So if our experience is only of particular events, and never of the laws of nature themselves, how can we rationally engage in any meaningful discourse about general laws and principles? This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why scientists sometimes don't like philosophers :)

But here's where John Stuart Mill comes in: he developed, classified and formalized a set of methods for testing causal hypotheses (thereby going beyond mere generalizations from few to many or from past to future). As in all cases of induction, though we may never be able to develop a proof based on logical necessity (the way mathematicians and logicians are used to), science can nevertheless make progress by testing hypotheses: any hypothesis that survives the day gets to make it to the next round. Those that are eliminated are discarded and no more neural energy is wasted on them (ideally).

Anyway, the following is a slideshow presentation I've been working on, summarizing these methods. It's a bit heavy on text to help anyone who may want to use it without having to sit in one of my classes and hear me yap about these ideas :)

The show is best viewed in full-screen mode. Once you start it, just click the right arrow on your keyboard to move through the animations and the slides (don't use your mouse to click on the 'next slide' button or you'll miss important sections of the presentation).

And if you want a short and thought-provoking introduction to Utilitarianism, check out Harvard Professor Michael Sandel's fascinating lectures on Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Disclaimer: The slideshow is based on the eleventh edition of Copi and Cohen's "Introduction to Logic," so the credit should really go to them.

You may also be interested in my slideshow presentation on logical fallacies.

.

Read More

Three Minute Philosophy - David Hume

There are many many reasons to like philosophy, but if I had to settle on just one, I would probably have to say that what I love about it is its inherent playful ability to turn the conventional wisdom of our time and what seems intuitively obvious into something downright bizarre and highly questionable. Needless to say, it does require a peculiar kind of personality to be comfortable with ambiguity and open questions, but isn't that exactly what it takes to gain any wisdom?

One of my favorite examples of a philosopher running wild with a simple idea (like that all our knowledge derives from experience) is David Hume's thoughts on the idea of the self.

Descartes once argued that if there is only one thing you can know with certainty it's your own existence. Taking Descartes' own idea of ideas, Hume demonstrated that you can't even be sure about that, as the following incredibly short and funny summary of Hume's view demonstrates:

Check out more of Hume's ridiculously awesome awesomeness.
.

Read More