Category Archives: Philosophy

The Great Knee Defender Controversy

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There are some issues on which everyone thinks they’re an expert. This explains why today’s New York Times article in defense of the Knee Defender has a couple hundred comments so far.

The Knee Defender was invented by a guy who was tired of people in front of him reclining their airline seats so far back that they made uncomfortable contact with his knees. You attach the thing to the tray table and it stops the seat in front of you from reclining. This made the news recently when a one passenger (a man, presumably tall) used the Knee Defender and another passenger (a woman, presumably not so tall) retaliated with a cup of water. The flight was diverted and both passengers were kicked off the plane.

Speaking as someone who is taller than average and has avoided coach only two or three times in his life, I can understand the motivation behind the Knee Defender. It’s bad enough with the limited legroom in coach without the person in front of you reducing your space even more. I’d never use the Knee Defender, however, because a more civilized approach is to communicate one’s discomfort to the reclining passenger in front of you, hoping thereby to evoke a sympathetic response. Also, life is too short.

Speaking as someone who doesn’t run an airline, I can also understand the motivation behind cramming as many passengers as possible into an airplane. There is efficiency (mostly $$$) at stake.

Nevertheless, if airlines are going to limit legroom, they need to limit how far back seats can recline. Otherwise they’re inviting conflict between their customers. Seats that can recline way back are an obsolete technology from a time when flying was one of those enjoyable experiences relatively few people ever had.

Of course, the airlines could simply rely on the common sense and common decency of their passengers. There are people who ask the person behind them if their reclined seat is causing a problem. There are other people who tell the person in front of them in a nice way that their reclined seat is too far back. People do these things.

But then there are other people who shouldn’t be allowed out in public. Many who responded to the Times article argued that they have a right to recline their seats as far back as they will go. If they’ve paid good money for a seat that can recline 30 degrees, they are damn well entitled to recline their seats 30 degrees, no matter what effect it has on the person sitting behind them. In effect, people (some of whom used their real names) made this claim: If an airline has given me the ability to do X, I have the right to do X.

Of course, most of us understand that “can” does not imply “should”. Airlines make it possible for passengers to throw water on other passengers, but passengers shouldn’t do that. Airlines also make it possible for their customers to lock restroom doors and occupy those rooms for hours at a time, but their customers shouldn’t do that either.

To be fair, the Times article these readers were responding to was a defense of the Knee Defender. So maybe they got carried away and went overboard when they wrote their unthinking responses. It’s clear, however, that although everyone may think they’re an expert on a topic like this, that isn’t really true.

A Guide to Reality, Part 15 (the End, or Maybe Not Quite)

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The final chapter of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions is “Living With Scientism”. Rosenberg defined “scientism” in his first chapter as a worldview that isn’t merely consistent with atheism, but is:

the worldview that all us atheists (and even some agnostics) share…[It’s] the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that, when “complete”, what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today…Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about [6-7].

Anyone who accepts scientism as Rosenberg explains it may well be an atheist, since there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God or gods. But the idea that all atheists accept Rosenberg’s version of scientism is clearly false. Rosenberg’s scientism is an extreme example of what might be called “nothing-but-ism”. The universe is nothing but subatomic particles. Everything can ultimately be explained in terms of those particles and their interactions. In Rosenberg’s words, physics fixes all the facts.

Yet one can deny the existence of God or gods but believe without contradiction that there are ethical truths and that some higher-level phenomena cannot be reduced to physics. Rosenberg himself calls attention to so-called “secular humanists” who may be atheists but who also “treat the core morality we share as true, right, correct and really morally binding on us” [277]. Rosenberg, of course, thinks that morality, as well as meaning and purpose, are all illusions.

He has an answer, however, for anyone who wonders why someone with his beliefs would bother getting out of bed in the morning:

Luckily for us, Mother Nature has seen to it that most of us, including the secular humanists, will get up most mornings and go on living even without anything to make our lives meaningful. The proof is obvious. There is nothing that makes our lives meaningful, and yet here we are, out of our pajamas [280].

Natural selection (aka Mother Nature) has made human beings generally capable of surviving and reproducing. Some of us do better at the components of being alive and some do worse, as should be expected. Anyone who worries too much about the meaning of life can look to religion, philosophy or science for answers, although there aren’t any answers to be found, since life has no meaning. Fortunately, we who need special assistance getting out of bed can seek medicine from psychiatrists or conversation with therapists, either of which may rewire our brains and relieve our suffering. As science progresses, it will become easier for psychological problems to be addressed. But we should remember that:

Your neural circuits, and so your behavior, may get modified as a result of the therapy, but it is an illusion that the change results from thinking about what the therapist said and consciously buying into his or her diagnosis. In therapy, as in everything else in life, the illusory content of introspective thoughts is just along for the ride [286].

With respect to morality, Rosenberg endorses what he calls “nice nihilism”, the view that moral distinctions have no basis in reality (that’s the nihilist part), but most people behave morally anyway as the result of natural selection (that’s the nice part). He points out that moral disagreements usually concern facts, not values. For example, some argue that capital punishment is morally acceptable because it’s a significant deterrent. But that’s a question that can be answered by looking at statistics. Some moral disagreements result from conflicting ethical ideals. In those cases, there are no “right” answers. 

Rosenberg argues that scientism is most consistent with tolerance toward other people’s ethical views and willingness to question our own. We shouldn’t assume that people who disagree with us are evil; they’re simply misinformed. And since scientific conclusions are almost always subject to revision, we should admit that our own scientifically-informed ethical views may be mistaken.

As Rosenberg points out, most scientists (not all of whom accept Rosenberg’s brand of scientism, of course) are on the political left. As evidence, he could have cited a 2009 poll showing that 81% of American scientists are Democrats or lean that way, while only 12% are Republicans or lean right. (These numbers shouldn’t be a surprise, since scientists tend to know about science, and therefore about reality, which has a well-known liberal bias).

Furthermore, Rosenberg thinks that anyone who accepts scientism should oppose retributive punishment and favor political egalitarianism. In his view, there is no free will, so nobody is really responsible for the painful things they do or the pleasant things they accomplish. He concludes that prisons should resemble hospitals: sick people (criminals) should be treated and seriously infectious people (those can’t be rehabilitated) should be quarantined. Meanwhile, society’s goods should be distributed rather evenly. None of this should be done for ethical reasons, since ethics is an illusion, but for practical or prudential reasons. For example, people with lots of money can interfere with the operation of free markets, which tend to benefit society as a whole (of which we are a part), so it makes sense to redistribute some of their wealth.

Rosenberg concludes with the suggestion that we consider emulating the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. He was ahead of his time in believing that everything in the universe, including our minds, is made of atoms. He also thought that pleasure and pain are the best guides to what’s good and bad or right and wrong. He didn’t favor riotous living, however. As Rosenberg explains:

A tranquil self-sufficient life along with your friends was the key to securing the good and avoiding evil…The tranquility he commended requires that we not take ourselves or much of anything else too seriously…. Epicureanism encourages a good time [313].

Epicurus also argued that death is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as immortality, so death is the end of our existence. Since we no longer exist when we are dead, we have no reason to fear death (although the process of dying may be very uncomfortable, as Epicurus realized)..

When I started writing about Rosenberg’s book almost two years ago, I thought it would be an interesting experience, but didn’t anticipate taking so long to get through it. (You never know if you’ll enjoy reading a book a second time, even if you really enjoyed it the first time.) This was going to be my last entry on this topic, but a few final thoughts may be appropriate. Not tonight, however, unless they’re yours.

Philosophy Professors Say the Darndest Things

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Colin McGinn is a well-known former professor of philosophy. He was asked to resign from his tenured position at the University of Miami last year after a female graduate student filed a formal complaint.

From the New York Times of August 2, 2013:

“the student’s boyfriend and a fifth-year graduate student in philosophy at Miami, said she had been subject to months of unwanted innuendo and propositions from Mr. McGinn, documented in numerous e-mails and text messages of an explicit and escalating sexual nature she had shown him…

Amie Thomasson, a professor of philosophy at Miami, said the student, shortly after filing her complaint in September 2012, had shown her a stack of e-mails from Mr. McGinn. They included the message mentioning sex over the summer, along with a number of other sexually explicit messages, Ms. Thomasson said. “This was not an academic discussion of human sexuality,” Ms. Thomasson said. “It was not just jokes. It was personal.”

McGinn is in the news again because he was recommended for a one-year teaching position by the Philosophy Department at East Carolina University. However, university administrators decided against giving him the job.

From an article at the Chronicle for Higher Education:

Michael Veber, an associate professor of philosophy who led the search committee at East Carolina that chose Mr. McGinn, says he didn’t put much stock into what went on at Miami. “After reviewing the evidence, Miami never even accused him of harassment,” says Mr. Veber. “So I don’t see how anyone could justify denying him a position because of any of that.”

Given that one student made a formal complaint, another student (albeit her boyfriend) spoke out publicly, Professor Thomasson offered the negative appraisal described above, the U. of Miami encouraged McGinn to resign (for not reporting the relationship with his student), and McGinn did resign, while responding in an unbelievably cringe-worthy fashion in interviews and on his blog, it’s fair to say that anyone, even the average associate professor of philosophy, could easily justify denying him another academic position.

By the way, McGinn is now 64 years old, an age at which many people suddenly find themselves out of a job, only because they can be replaced by someone cheaper.

Logic and the World

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SelfAwarePatterns is an excellent blog if you’re interested in science, philosophy and similar topics (which covers pretty much everything). Earlier this week, its author, a self-aware pattern named Michael Smith, wrote about the nature of logic. He quoted several brief definitions of logic, including one by Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), one of history’s greatest logicians. According to Frege, logic is “the science of the most general laws of truth”, to which Mike Smith responded:

Gottlob Frege’s definition seems closest to my own current personal intuition about it, namely that logic represents the most fundamental relationships in our universe. These relationships are so fundamental, that we can take them and extrapolate truths using them, and often we’ll be right.

After reading this, I began writing a comment but quickly saw that my comment was turning into a post of my own. And since I need to keep this blog going in order to continue raking in the big money, here it is: 

Whenever I try to understand what logic is and how it relates to the world, I end up thinking about the status of Aristotle’s three fundamental axioms of logic: the Law of Identity (A = A); the Law of Non-Contradiction (it is not the case that A and not A), and the Law of the Excluded Middle (either A or not A), where “A” represents a statement like “Snow is white” or “I’ve never made a single penny writing this blog”.

The Law of Identity seems to reflect how the world is without question, partly because it’s supremely uninformative. As Bishop Butler said: “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. I’m not sure the Law of Identity states a fundamental relationship, since self-identity isn’t much of a relationship. There is only one party involved. But it seems undeniable that A equals A, whatever A happens to be.

The Law of Non-Contradiction seems to reflect how the world is too. It’s exceedingly hard to imagine how things could be otherwise in our universe or any other universe (e.g., “Vitamin C is ascorbic acid and yet it isn’t.”). Despite this difficulty, some enterprising logicians have accepted dialetheism: the view that the very same proposition can be both true and false. That seems plainly wrong. Can we step into the same river twice? Well, yes, we can (“It’s the mighty Mississippi”) and no, we can’t (“The Mississippi had different water in it yesterday”). But which answer is correct depends on what you mean by “same river”. It’s the same river it was yesterday in one sense, although it’s not the same in another sense.

How about a self-referential statement like “This statement is false”? To be fair, that’s the kind of sentence dialetheist logicians are interested in. If “this statement is false” is true, it’s false. But if it’s false, it’s true. That is certainly weird, but is the sentence in question really both true and false? I don’t think so. It seems to me that it’s a badly-formed sentence. Its apparent meaning contradicts our natural presumption as speakers of a language that speakers don’t undermine their own claims (i.e., give with one hand and take back with the other). In this case, it seems best to follow the doctor’s advice when the patient said “It hurts when I do this”. The doctor, of course, answered: “Don’t do that”. Or in this case, don’t say stuff like “This statement is false”. Just because we can put certain words together doesn’t make it a proper sentence.

Then there’s subatomic physics. Light is a field of waves and also a stream of particles! The evidence indicates that light acts as if it’s a wave in some cases and as if it’s a particle in others, but saying that it acts the same way at the same time makes no sense. To me anyway. It’s better in this case to infer that our everyday concepts of “wave” and “particle” aren’t adequate to describe the nature of light. But that doesn’t mean light is a counterexample to the Law of Non-Contradiction.

So far, so good for classical logic accurately representing the universe. Things get more complicated, however, when we consider the Law of the Excluded Middle. Personally, I don’t buy it at all. The idea is that every proposition is either true or false. Unless we define “proposition” as “a bearer of truth or falsity”, there are lots of propositions that aren’t clearly true or false. There are vague propositions, for example. Has George lost enough hair to be considered bald? What if he lost one more hair, or 500 more, or 50,000 more? Where is the line between being bald and being hairy? And there is the matter of probability. For example, according to the principle of quantum superposition, “a physical system – such as an electron – exists partly in all its particular theoretically possible states simultaneously”. Is an electron here or there? Most physicists think it’s a matter of probability. An electron could be here and it could be there, but it’s not definitely anywhere until it’s measured or otherwise interfered with.

Concerns about vagueness and probability have led to the creation of alternative logics. So-called “many-valued” logics reject the Law of the Excluded Middle. “Fuzzy” logic replaces it with a continuum of values, ranging from true to false and allowing points in between. We might instead reject the Law of Contradiction and accept that some well-formed declarative sentences, like “George is bald”, are both true and false. “Paraconsistent” logics do that. As Mike Smith pointed out in his post, there is even “quantum” logic, which tries to deal with the peculiar laws of quantum physics.

There is good reason, therefore, to believe that Aristotle’s three axioms are somewhat misleading if they’re taken as an attempt to state fundamental features of the world or even relationships between the world and language (or thought). We should agree that the Law of Identity applies to the world (in fact, it applies to every possible world). After that, we’re in a gray area. There is no denying that the world is what it is (as that annoying phrase “it is what it is” seems to call into question – after all, what isn’t what it is?). Furthermore, we learn logic by paying attention to the world and use logic to navigate the world, but logic, I think, is better understood as “the science of the laws of discursive thought” (James McCosh, 1811-1888) than as a general description of how things are.

A Guide to Reality, Part 14

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It’s been more than three months since I wrote about Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. I left off part of the way through chapter 8, “The Brain Does Everything Without Thinking About Anything At All”. Having read the book once before, it’s been difficult going through it again, but I’m now going to finish chapter 8.

The principal thesis of Rosenberg’s book is that since the universe is nothing more than subatomic particles, much of what we take for granted about the world is illusory. In the case of the human brain, this means that the brain does its work without anything happening in the brain being “about” anything at all.

Rosenberg asks us to consider a computer:

Neither the … electrical charges in the computer’s motherboard nor the distribution of magnetic charges in the hard drive can be about anything, right? They are just like red octagons. They get interpreted by us [as stop signs or whatever] [187].

Electrical engineers and computer programmers assign meanings to a computer’s low-level states (“on” or “off”, or 32767, or the letter “w”), but those states have no meaning in themselves. It’s only because people are able to assign meanings to the states of a computer and then interpret those them that those states can be about anything, just the way a red octagonal sign with “STOP” on it only has meaning for those of us who know how to read a traffic sign.

But doesn’t that mean that the physical states of a computer can be about something? Doesn’t our interpretation of those states imply that those states are meaningful?

Rosenberg doesn’t think so. Earlier, he discussed how brain cells function as input/output devices. Now he compares the brain itself to a computer:

The brain is at least in part a computer. It’s composed of an unimaginably large number of electronic input/output circuits…The circuits transmit electrical outputs in different ways, depending on their electrical inputs and on how their parts… But that it is at least a computer is obvious from its anatomy and physiology right down to the individual neurons and their electrochemical on/off connections [188-189].

But if what’s inside a computer isn’t about anything, and your brain works like a computer, what’s inside your brain isn’t about anything either. It’s merely an enormous bunch of interconnected cells that have no intrinsic meaning. That’s Rosenberg’s conclusion.

To clarify his point, he then offers an analogy. The image in a still photograph doesn’t move. But string many photographs together, project them on a screen and you’ve got a motion picture. The motion we perceive in a movie, however, is an illusion. Creatures whose physiology worked faster than ours would simply see a succession of still pictures, not actors or objects in continuous motion. In similar fashion:

The illusion of aboutness projected by the neurons in our brain does not match any aboutness in the world. There isn’t any….There is no aboutness in reality [191].

So, despite what introspection tells us (or “screams” at us, using his term), our thoughts aren’t about anything either:

Consciousness is just another physical process. So, it has as much trouble producing aboutness as any other physical process. Introspection certainly produces the illusion of aboutness. But it’s got to be an illusion, since nothing physical can be about anything [193]. 

But doesn’t that mean The Atheist’s Guide to Reality isn’t about anything? Why bother reading it then?

Rosenberg’s answer is that his book isn’t “conveying statements”. It’s “rearranging neural circuits, removing inaccurate disinformation and replacing it with accurate information” [193]. But, we might ask, isn’t information “about” something? And isn’t the distinction between accurate and inaccurate information dependent on the idea that information can be about something in a more or less satisfactory manner?

At this point, I can’t remember why Rosenberg is so interested in convincing us that there is no real “aboutness” or what philosophers call “intentionality” in the world.

It’s certainly puzzling how our minds are able to assign meaning to and find meaning in the world. Being appreciative of science, I can accept that there is nothing in the universe but quarks, leptons and bosons when you get right down to it (or their component parts if there are any), but there are also arrangements of those things. Some of those arrangements are meaningful to us and some aren’t. The fact that scientists might and probably will explain our experience of aboutness in biological terms, and then in terms of chemistry, and then in terms of physics, doesn’t change the fact that Rosenberg’s book and the words I’m typing are about something.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t know if I’d work through any more chapters in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (although if the universe is as deterministic as Rosenberg thinks – and I tend to think – that was decided some time ago). But now what I think I’m going to do is skip the next three chapters. They’re concerned with purpose (an illusion), the self (also an illusion), history (it’s blind) and the other social sciences, especially economics (they’re all myopic). Chapter 12, the final chapter, is called “Living With Scientism: Ethics, Politics, the Humanities, and Prozac as Needed”. That seems like a good place to stop.