Monthly Archives: November 2007

Derek Parfit

Venetian Memories. Jane has agreed to have copied in her brain some of Paul’s memory-traces. After she recovers consciousness in the post-surgery room, she has a new set of vivid apparent memories. She seems to remember walking on the marble paving of a square, hearing the flapping of flying pigeons and the cries of gulls, and seeing light sparkling on green water. One apparent memory is very clear. She seems to remember looking across the water to an island, where a white Palladian church stood out brilliantly against a dark thundercloud.

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, 1984, p. 220

Arthur Cecil Pigou

[T]here is wide agreement that the State should protect the interests of the future in some degree against the effects of our irrational discounting and of our preference for ourselves over our descendants. The whole movement for ‘conservation’ in the United States is based on this conviction. It is the clear duty of Government, which is the trustee for unborn generations as well as for its present citizens, to watch over, and, if need be, by legislative enactment, to defend, the exhaustible natural resources of the country from rash and reckless spoliation.

Arthur Cecil Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed., London, 1932, pp. 29-30

Martin Rees

The first aquatic creatures crawled onto dry land in the Silurian era, more than three hundred million years ago. They may have been unprepossessing brutes, but had they been clobbered, the evolution of land-based fauna would have been jeopardised. Likewise, the post-human potential is so immense that not even the most misanthropic amongst us would countenance its being foreclosed by human actions.

Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century—On Earth and Beyond, New York, 2003, p. 183

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

[T]he general term [‘pleasure’] does not appear to call up with equal facility all the particulars which are meant to be included under it, but rather the grosser feelings than for instance the ‘joy and felicity’ of devotion.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, London, 1881, pp. 56-57

John Barrow

Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe’s properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings.

John Barrow, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation, Oxford, 1991, p. 11

Peter van Inwagen

Let us suppose, unrealistically, that IQ tests really measure intellectual ability. Let us in fact assume, even more unrealistically, that they measure the intellectual abilities that are relevant to success in metaphysics. Why should we suppose that a species with a mean IQ of 100—our own species—is able to solve the problems of metaphysics? Pretty clearly a species with a mean IQ of 60 wouldn’t be in a position to achieve this. Pretty clearly, a species with a mean IQ of 160 would be in a better position than we to achieve this. Why should we suppose that the “cut-off-point” is something like 90 or 95? Why shouldn’t it be 130 or 170 or 250? The conclusion of this meditation on mystery is that if metaphysics does indeed present us with mysteries that we are incapable of penetrating, this fact is not itself mysterious. It is just what we should expect, given that we are convinced that beings only slightly less intellectually capable than ourselves would certainly be incapable of penetrating these mysteries. If we cannot know why there is anything at all, or why there should be rational beings, or how thought and feeling are possible, or how our conviction that we have free will could possibly be true, why should that astonish us? What reason have we, what reason could we possibly have, for thinking that our intellectual abilities are equal to the task of answering these questions?

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, Boulder, Colorado, 1993, p. 201

John Barrow

The constants of Nature give our Universe its feel and its existence. Without them, the forces of Nature would have no strengths; the elementary particles of matter no masses; the Universe no size. The constants of Nature are the ultimate bulwark against unbridled relativism. They define the fabric of the Universe in a way that can side-step the prejudices of a human-centred view of things. If we were to make contact with an intelligence elsewhere in the Universe we would look first to the constants of Nature for common ground. We would talk first about those things that the constants of Nature define. The probes that we have dispatched into outer space carrying information about ourselves and our location in the Universe pick on the wavelengths of light that defined the hydrogen atom to tell where we are and what we know. The constants of Nature are potentially the greatest shared physical experience of intelligent beings everywhere in the Universe. Yet, as we have followed the highways and by-ways of the quest to unravel their meaning and significance, we have come full circle. Their architects saw them as a means of lifting our understanding of the Universe clear from the anthropomorphisms of human construction to reveal the otherness of a Universe not designed for our convenience. But these universal constants, created by the coming together of relativistic and quantum realities, have turned out to underwrite our very existence in ways that are at once mysterious and marvellous. For it is their values, measured with ever greater precision in our laboratories, but still unexplained by our theories, that make the Universe a habitable place for minds of any sort. And it is through their values that the uniqueness of our Universe is impressed upon us by the ease with which we can think of less satisfactory alternatives.

John Barrow, The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega, London, 2002, pp. 290-291

Willard Van Orman Quine

Life is agid, life is fulgid.
Life is a burgeoning, a
quickening of the dim primordial
urge in the murky wastes
of time. Life is what the
least of us make most of
us feel the least of us
make the most of.

Willard Van Orman Quine, in Hugh S. Moorhead (ed.) The Meaning of Life: According to Our Century’s Greatest Writers and Thinkers, Chicago, 1988, pp. 154-155

Peter van Inwagen

Suppose that we were to divide a square into a million smaller squares by dividing each of its sides into a thousand equal parts. And suppose that we took the first million digits in the decimal part of pi and interpreted each as corresponding to one of the million squares by some simple correspondence rule (something like this: the top left square is assigned the first digit, the next square to the right is assigned the second digit, and so on). And suppose that we assigned a color to each of the numbers 0 through 0 and painted each of the small squares with the color corresponding to the number assigned to it.

What would we say if the result turned out to be a meaningful picture—a landscape or a still life or something equally representational—of surpassing beauty?

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, Boulder, Colorado, 1993, p. 137

George Schlesinger

The purpose of philosophy is to find out by rigorous methods what the truth is. Often its results clash with the common sense view. In such cases it is reasonable to maintain that our relatively unexamined common sense views should be abandoned and give way to the conclusions of rigorous philosophical analysis.

George Schlesinger, ‘Possible Worlds and the Mystery of Existence’, Ratio, vol. 26, no. 1 (1984), p. 10

John Leslie

We do not want our theories to tell us that what we see is surprising in the last analysis, i.e., surprising even when every explanation has been found; for that would just show that our theories are probably wrong. Our project must be one of showing instead that all this smoke, so to speak, could in the end be very much to be expected, were there a fire.

John Leslie, Universes, London, 1989, p. 108

Steven Weinberg

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with the tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origins of the Universe, London, 1977, p. 147

Bede Rundle

A person finds the arrangement of cards remarkable because it is one that is already familiar, which has special significance for him. We find it remarkable that the conditions for life are satisfied in our universe, because we are already intimately familiar with life. We think there is a contrary-to-chance match, but what we are familiar with is a consequence of these fundamental conditions. No one has given an advance characterization of a universe and then found that, contrary to chance, this universe conforms to the characterization, the characterization invoked being one derived from the given universe. But if no order has been initially specified to which things are found inexplicably to correspond, there is no call to postulate an intelligence to account for this otherwise inexplicable match.

Bede Rundle, Why there is Something rather than Nothing, Oxford, 2004, p. 36

Carl Sagan

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of sceptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because the, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

Carl Sagan, ‘The Burden of Skepticism’, 1987

Jan Narveson

Some people should not have been born; and as there are other people whose existence is a good thing, we may say of the that they, in the same sense, “should have been born”; though of course they were, and it is not a point of much practical importance so far as it concerns the individual the desirability of whose birth is in question. Hitler should not have been born, Churchill should have been born, and there are other cases where it is debatable—though I admit that all such questions, are, as we say, “merely theoretical”. What I am claiming is that, if we regard ‘Hitler’ and ‘Churchill’ as proper names, Hitler’s mother and Churchill’s mother could not have presented themselves, prior to their conception, with sensible questions of the form, “ought we to give birth to Hitler?”, “Ought we to give birth to Churchill?” The latter appear to be parallel to, “ought I to spank Adolph?”, “Ought I to spank Winston?”; but they plainly are not.

Jan Narveson, ‘Utilitarianism and Future Generations’, Mind, vol. 76, no. 301 (January, 1967), p. 64

John Barrow and Frank Tipler

Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas which requires them to believe them, most scientists tend to regard their ideas differently. They are interested in formulating many logically consistent possibilities, leaving any judgment regarding their truth to observation. Scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.

John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford, 1986, p. 15

Jon Elster

Are the conclusions true? Before I address this issue, I want to observe that it is not clear that they are always intended to be true, that is, to correspond to the actual world. Rather, they sometimes represent a form of science fiction—an analysis of the action and interaction of ideally rational agents, who have never existed and never will. The analysis of ever-more-refined forms of strategic equilibria, for instance, is hardly motivated by a desire to explain or predict the behaviour of actual individuals. Rather, the motivation seems to be an aesthetic one. Two of the most accomplished equilibria theorists, Reinhart Selten and Ariel Rubinstein, have made it quite clear that they do not believe their models have anything to say about the real world. When addressing the workings of the latter, they use some variety of behavioural economics or bounded rationality. To cite another example, social choice theory—the axiomatic study of voting mechanisms—became at one point so mathematically convoluted and so obviously irrelevant to the study of actual politics that one of the most prominent journals in economics, Econometrica, imposed a moratorium on articles in this area.

An interesting question in the psychology and sociology of science is how many secret practitioners there are of economic science fiction—hiding either from themselves or from others the fact that this is indeed what they are practicing. Inventing ingenious mathematical models is a well-paid activity, but except for the likes of Selten and Rubinstein payment will be forthcoming only if the activity can also be claimed to be relevant; hence the incentive for either self-deception or deception. To raise this question might seem out of bounds for academic discourse, but I do not see why it should be. Beyond a certain point, academic norms of politeness ought to be discarded.

Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 2007, p. 461

Robin Hanson

Apparently, beliefs are like clothes. In a harsh environment, we choose our clothes mainly to be functional, i.e., to keep us safe and comfortable. But when the weather is mild, we choose our clothes mainly for their appearance, i.e., to show our figure, our creativity, and our allegiances. Similarly, when the stakes are high we may mainly want accurate beliefs to help us make good decisions. But when a belief has few direct personal consequences, we in effect mainly care about the image it helps us to project.

Robin Hanson, ‘Enhancing Out Truth Orientation’, in Nick Bostrom & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford, 2009, p. 358

J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig

Because philosophy operates at a presuppositional level by clarifying and justifying the presuppositions of a discipline, philosophy is the only field of study that has no unquestioned assumptions within its own domain. In other words, philosophy is a self-referential discipline, for questions about the definition, justification and methodology of philosophy are themselves philosophical in nature. Philosophers keep the books on everyone, including themselves.

J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, Illinois, 2003, p. 13

Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow

[T]here is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. The ideas about scientific theories outlined above assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress ever closer towards the laws that govern our universe. Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions—so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And shy should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusions? Or no conclusion at all?

The only answer that we can give to this problem is based on Darwin’s principle of natural selection. The idea is that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and to act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce, so their pattern of behaviour and thought will come to dominate. It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would also be valid in our search for a complete unified theory and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.

Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, A Briefer History of Time, London, 2005, p. 17