Monday, August 30, 2010

Voltaire

Here's a great little passage from Voltaire's Candide:

"Master Pangloss taught the metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology. He could prove to admiration that there is no effect without a cause; and, that in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of all castles, and My Lady the best of all possible baronesses.

'It is demonstrable,' said he, 'that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten, therefore we eat pork all the year round: and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.' "

Probabilistic Arguments in Philosophy

So here's a sort of trivial, but I think interesting, observation about probabilistic arguments in philosophy:

There are two criterion for the soundness of a deductive argument: That its conclusion follow from its premises, and that its premises be true. The former is self-explanatory, but the latter is interesting. Typically, what a philosopher means by the truth of the premises of an argument is really just that the premise(s) be more likely than their negation. In essence, then, the soundness of a deductive argument is partially judged by a sort of loose probability, e.g. the probability of the given premises being true relative to their negations. But then, is there really a significant difference between, say, the following two arguments:

A1.

(1) If the sun has risen every day until now, it will rise tomorrow.
(2) The sun has risen every day until now.
(3) Therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow.

A2.

(1) If the sun has risen ever day until now, it will probably rise tomorrow.
(2) The sun has risen every day until now.
(3) Therefore, the sun will probably rise tomorrow.

The only difference between (A1) and (A2), it seems to me, is the following: In (A1) the question of the probability of the given premises being true is a meta-argumentative issue (you judge whether or not the premises are true apart from the argument itself). In (A2), the question of the probability of the premises is built into the argument itself. When you ask of premise 1 of (A1), "does the consequent in the conditional follow from its antecedent?" you're asking for a judgment that can only be assessed a posteriori, probabilistically. Premise 1 of (A2) just assumes the a posteriori work has already been done. So really, the difference between the two is more in form than in kind.

Of course, this isn't true of all deductive/inductive arguments. In some arguments with conditionals and/or biconditionals, the consequent of the conditional necessarily follows from its antecedent in an analytic way, as in "If one is a bachelor, then one is unmarried". But the point is this: Philosophers tend to use arguments they would think of as deductive just because of their structure, but which would need a posteriori evidence to confirm or disconfirm the truth of their premises. But the fact is that many of these arguments are easily transformed into inductive arguments.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Away

The years have faded since then,
like clouds engulfing the moon.
Over beach-side neighborhoods
adorned with luminous youth,
we held each other in a simple way;
In a way lacking the complexities of age,
reason, and familiarity.

Since then, we've been apart.
I've been here, you've been there,
and we're now distanced by light-years.
Though an electronic signal
would suffice to reconnect,
neither of us make a move.
Like the opening play in a game of chess,
this needs to be well-calculated,
well thought-out,
and worthy of the opponent.
But, nothing short of the infinite
would be worthy of such a reunion.

I still carry you with me.
Like a bag full of bones,
I've tried to distribute you,
hide you away, hide us away,
but the incision remains there,
bleeding out slowly at every turn.

But maybe it's not you,
maybe it's what you embodied,
what you idealized.
How could it be you?
How could what I see now
be at all continuous with who you were?
How could "who you were" have ever been real?
But it was you.
It was you in all your glory, beauty,
contempt, change, betrayal,
loyalty, joy, and silence.
It's you that I lost.
The you of my dreams, the you
lodged deep within by subconscious.
And it's time to realize a simple fact
always known, but painfully ignored.

It was me.
I killed us.
I made you who you became,
I made you leave me,
I made you cut yourself off
like I've cut myself off.
I took out your eyes,
the eyes that saw what we once did,
looking together out of your window,
seeing stars as symbols of something.
Something bigger, something eternal.
Something more than what passes.
Something more than what fades.
That will never again be reflected in your eyes,
and it will never again be reflected in mine.

But it was me.
And it's over.
And this thought,
these words,
are a message in a bottle
lost at sea.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Free Form #2

Definitions are indefinite.
We are what we are when we cease paying attention
To who we could become.
Being is a process,
Ever dynamic, never static;
The moment you look within
You defeat the purpose of it all.
The purpose of finding yourself,
Of coming into your own,
Of being the picture in your head.
I'll never be that portrait.
I'll never have such finely demarcated borders.
I'll be as we all are;
An infinite abyss;
Only actualized in self-forgetfullness.
We are not made.
We are discovered.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

An Issue with Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument

William Lane Craig's kalam version of the cosmological argument runs as follows:

(1) Everything which begins to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Using Big Bang cosmology, Craig proceeds to unpack why the cause referred to in (3) must be a Being similar to the God of classical theism. Also, because of the paradox of the cosmological singularity representing the beginning of time itself, Craig defends the following idea: That although time begins to exist at t-1, it nonetheless remains true that the universe is past-finite, and so requires a cause to begin. To retain the idea that God is timeless, Craig claims that the moment God chooses to create is simultaneous with the moment of time's creation. This is an ingenius explanation, and it sufficiently deals with the cause-and-effect issues surrounding such an argument. But I can't help but feel there's a deeper problem with the argument, and it's this: How could a timeless Being become temporal? The notion seems extremely counterintuitive, if not down-right contradictory.

If a Being is timeless, it seems to me it would have to be essentially so. Yet Craig's argument implies that God is only contingently timeless. How can this be? It seems obvious that timelessness entails changelessness, because change always entails change at a time. It won't do to merely appeal to the fact that t-1 also represents the moment of God's choice to create, because the issue still remains: How can a timeless Being become temporal without entering time at a time, regardless of whether he created that time. The process of becoming, what the scholastics called being in fieri, logically depends on time already existing. Yet God's process of becoming is somewhere between time and not-time, which seems absurd. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Free Form #1

The morning's relentless shine
creates a nuanced, rough and ready picture of the world
Of a planet truly at peace, where peace wanes
And war, my inner war, reigns.
Trying to find recollection in all this revision
is a permeating, but disheartening theme.
Like it was all a dream.
Like it's all a dream.

"But anyway,"
Yeah, that's what we say
When push comes to shove
And we have to open up our painful places.
Those places no one wants to hear about
But wants everybody to hear.
Trading sight for sound, touch for taste
The coldest of stares, for that warm embrace.
A ubiquitous distribution of pain
Built into Nature itself.

Sound.
The most piercing sound is when no one's around
And that high pitched dog-whistle tells
Of your aloneness.
Of our aloneness.
Of the world's aloneness.
But it's the morning
And I have enough distraction to make it through the day.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Some Thoughts on Free-Will

In my opinion, the problem of free-will is the single most difficult problem in philosophy. No matter what "theory" of human volition you turn to, whether determinism, compatibalism, or libertarianism, there seem to be insurmountable issues. Determinism seems to directly contradict our day to day experience of freely acting, and our language about moral culpability. Compatibalism seems to lead straight back to determinism, because acting based on reasons is to be determined by those reasons, and if not, those reasons themselves are at least determined by our experiences and etc. Libertarianism doesn't seem any better for, as several philosophers (most notably van Inwagen) have pointed out, it appears to make human action entirely random, like a game of luck.

So how is progress ever going to be made? Why are there no viable theories of free-will? I think part of the issue, if not the primary issue, is one that has to do with language. It seems to me that before the metaphysical debate has even gotten of the ground, we have failed to understand the nature of volition-talk. What do humans mean when they use terms like "choice", "free-will", "personal decision" and the like? I think that, while we take ourselves to be using such terms in a normative, coextensive way, we in fact use them in contexts that differ significantly (although they do bear a sort of Wittgensteinian family resemblance to one another, hence our feeling at liberty to use the same terms across the board).

So, for example, one of the situations in which we use volition-talk are situations that pertain to moral responsibility, or culpability. We say "It was his choice to fire the gun, no one made him do it!". In these sorts of contexts, our main point seems to be that a given person acted based on his or her own reasons, as opposed to being coerced or forced by another person. In other contexts, however, we use the same talk in a similar, but significantly different way. Say, for instance, you're driving through a fast food restaurant. You have several options on the menu before you. In the act of choosing what you want, you assume you have various, equally viable possible choices before you. Hence, you deliberate, knowing you could choose any one of the items on the menu. In this context, we find it natural to ascribe to the orderer a process of free-will. Why? Because the orderer really could've chosen among several alternate possibilities. Note, however, that upon philosophical analyses these two uses are inconsistent. For, if you act based on reasons, then you are determined by those reasons, and hence have no alternate possibilities to choose from. And if you did have alternate possibilities, then it would seem a choice between them would have to be random, since reason-determination is determination nonetheless (whether directly or, as I said, because you forming the reasons you have is out of your control).

The situation, then, seems to be the following: We use talk of free-will in situations that are similar, but upon philosophical analyses, the usages give rise to inconsistent ideas about what we mean by freedom of the will. But if free-will cannot be given a coherent, holistic definition, how can we ever make philosophical progress? I think the lesson here is that we have one of two options: (1) We could view the inconsistencies as paradoxes, not contradictions, and be content to say that free-will is ultimately a mystery; that is, that it can somehow be true both that our actions are determined by reasons, and that our actions could have been different after a given choice is made. Or, (2) we could take the inconsistencies to be a decisive blow against the idea of free-will so-construed. And we could then choose to move forward by providing a satisfactory account of what we mean by free-will, reducing the debate to one of metalinguistics. How this all would play out, I'm not sure. But I, for one, find the latter option the most attractive.

How then will we explain the fact that we use such talk in contexts and ways that are implicitly inconsistent? I think that we use the same terms because such contexts all resemble one another in the following way: They all have to do with personal, human action. And because such terms and ways of thinking have played the same functional role, and have served us equally well, throughout the evolution of human society, we have assumed we mean one holistic thing by them. But, as we have seen, there is no way to make consistent all the uses and concepts grouped under the one heading of "free-will".