Monthly Archives: April 2010

Henry Sidgwick

[T]he history of thought […] reveal[s] discrepancy between the intuitions of one age and those of a subsequent generation. But where the conflicting beliefs are not contemporaneous, it is usually not clear that the earlier thinker would have maintained his conviction if confronted by the arguments of the later. The history of thought, however, I need hardly say, affords abundant instances of similar conflict among contemporaries; and as conversions are extremely rare in philosophical controversy, I suppose the conflict in most cases affects intuitions—what is self-evident to one mind is not so to another. It is obvious that in any such conflict there must be error on one side or the other, or on both. The natural man will often decide unhesitatingly that the error is on the other side. But it is manifest that a philosophic mind cannot do this, unless it can prove independently that the conflicting intuitor has an inferior faculty of envisaging truth in general or this kind of truth; one who cannot do this must reasonably submit to a loss of confidence in any intuition of his own that thus is found to conflict with another’s.

Henry Sidgwick, ‘Further on the Criteria of Truth and Error’, in Marcus Singer (ed.), Essays on Ethics and Method, Oxford, 2000, p. 168

Thomas Nagel

A crucial determinant of the character of analytic philosophy—and a piece of luck as far as I am concerned—is the unimportance, in the English-speaking world, of the intellectual as a public figure. Fame doesn’t matter, and offering an opinion about practically everything is not part of the job. It is unnecessary for writers of philosophy to be more “of their time” than they want to be; they don’t have to write for the world but can pursue questions inside the subject, at whatever level of difficulty the questions demand. If the work is of high quality, they will receive the support of a large and dedicated academy that is generally independent of popular opinion. This is an enviably luxurious position to be in, by comparison to writers who depend for their status and income on the reaction of a broader public. Of course, there are plenty of silly fashions and blind spots inside the academic community, but in philosophy, at least, their effect has not been as bad as the need to compete for wider literary fame would be. I think arid technicalities are preferable to the blend of oversimplification and fake profundity that is too often the form taken by popular philosophy. A strong academy provides priceless shelter for the difficult and often very specialized work that must be done to advance the subject.

Thomas Nagel, Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969-1994, New York, 1995, pp. 8-9

Ted Chiang

By now you’ve probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you’re reading this. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Ted Chiang, ‘What’s Expected of Us’, Nature, vol. 436 (July 7, 2005), p. 150

Martin Rees

Our universe sprouted from an initial event, the ‘big bang’ or ‘fireball’. It expanded and cooled; the intricate pattern of stars and galaxies we see around us emerged thousands of millions of years later; on at least one planet around at least one star, atoms have assembled into creatures complex enough to ponder how they evolved.

Martin Rees, Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others, London, 1997, p. 1

David Copp

[M]oral nonnaturalism faces the challenge of explaining the normativity of morality just as much as does moral naturalism. If normativity needs to be explained, it is not explained by giving up on naturalistic ways of explaining it. Antireductionist forms of nonnaturalism that view moral properties as sui generis face an especially difficult problem, for they appear simply to postulate normativity. It is unclear how they could explain it.

David Copp, Morality in a Natural World: Selected Essays in Metaethics, Cambridge, 2007, p. 282

David Chalmers

[T]he Everett interpretation is almost impossible to believe. It postulates that there is vastly more in the world than we are ever aware of. On this interpretation, the world is really in a giant superposition of states that have been evolving in different ways since the beginning of time, and we are experiencing only the smallest substate of the world. It also postulates that my future is not determinate: in a minute’s time, there will be a large number of minds that have an equal claim to count as me. A minute has passed since I wrote the last sentence; who is to know what all those other minds are doing now?

David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search for a Fundamental Theory, Oxford, 1996, p. 356

Arthur Eddington

Whenever we state the properties of a body in terms of physical quantities we are imparting knowledge as to the response of various metrical indicators to its presence, and nothing more. After all, knowledge of this kind is fairly comprehensive. A knowledge of the response of all kinds of objects—weighing-machines and other indicators—would determine completely its relation to its environment, leaving only its inner un-get-atable nature un¬determined. In the relativity theory we accept this as full knowledge, the nature of an object in so far as it is ascertainable by scientific inquiry being the abstraction of its relations to all surrounding objects. […]

The recognition that our knowledge of the objects treated in physics consists solely of readings of pointers and other indicators transforms our view of the status of physical knowledge in a fundamental way. Until recently it was taken for granted that we had knowledge of a much more intimate kind of the entities of the external world. Let me give an illustration which takes us to the root of the great problem of the relations of matter and spirit. Take the living human brain endowed with mind and thought. Thought is one of the indisputable facts of the world. I know that I think, with a certainty which I cannot attribute to any of my physical knowledge of the world. More hypothetically, but on fairly plausible evidence, I am convinced that you have minds which think. Here then is a world fact to be investigated. The physicist brings his tools and commences systematic exploration. All that he discovers is a collection of atoms and electrons and fields of force arranged in space and time, apparently similar to those found in inorganic objects. He may trace other physical characteristics, energy, temperature, entropy. None of these is identical with thought. He might set down thought as an illusion-some perverse interpretation of the interplay of the physical entities that he has found. Or if he sees the folly of calling the most undoubted element of our experience an illusion, he will have to face the tremendous question, How can this collection of ordinary atoms be a thinking machine? But what knowledge have we of the nature of atoms which renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking object? The Victorian physicist felt that he knew just what he was talking about when he used such terms as matter and atoms. Atoms were tiny billiard balls, a crisp statement that was supposed to tell you all about their nature in a way which could never be achieved for transcendental things like consciousness, beauty or humour. But now we realise that science has nothing to say as to the intrinsic nature of the atom. The physical atom is, like everything else in physics, a schedule of pointer readings. The schedule is, we agree, attached to some unknown background. Why not then attach it to something of spiritual nature of which a prominent characteristic is thought. It seems rather silly to prefer to attach it to something of a so-called “concrete” nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where the thought comes from. We have dismissed all preconception as to the background of our pointer readings, and for the most part we can discover nothing as to its nature. But in one case—namely, for the pointer readings of my own brain—I have an insight which is not limited to the evidence of the pointer readings. That insight shows that they are attached to a background of consciousness. Although I may expect that the background of other pointer readings in physics is of a nature continuous with that revealed to me in this particular case, I do not suppose that it always has the more specialised attributes of consciousness. But in regard to my one piece of insight into the background no problem of irreconcilability arises; I have no other knowledge of the background with which to reconcile it.
In science we study the linkage of pointer readings with pointer readings. The terms link together in endless cycle with the same inscrutable nature running through the whole. There is nothing to prevent the assemblage of atoms constituting a brain from being of itself a thinking object in virtue of that nature which physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable. If we must embed our schedule of indicator readings in some kind of background, at least let us accept the only hint we have received as to the significance of the background—namely that it has a nature capable of manifesting itself as mental activity.

Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, New York, 1929, pp. 257-260

J. J. C. Smart

The reason why there are hardly ever completely knock-down arguments, except between very like minded philosophers, is that philosophers, unlike chemists or geologists, are licensed to question everything, including methodology.

J. J. C. Smart, ‘Ockhamist Comments on Strawson’, in Anthony Freeman (ed.), Consciousness and its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?, Exteter, 2006, pp. 158-159

William James

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even determinism, says that its real Dame is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr. Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a “free-will determinist.”

Now, this is all a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has got entirely smothered up. Freedom in all these senses presents simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by it, whether he, mean the acting without external constraint, whether he mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law of the whole, who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and sometimes we are not? But there is, a problem, an issue of fact and not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often decided without discussion in one sentence, nay, in one clause of a sentence, by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their efforts to show what “true” freedom is[.]

William James, ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 8. (September, 1884), pp. 197-198

Mark Balaguer

Whenever you’re trying to discover something about the nature of the world, you can always proceed straight to the point at hand, without having to determine the meaning of some folk expression, by simply introducing some theoretical terms and defining them by stipulation. Thus, for example, if you just want to know what the solar system is like, you can forget about folk terms like ‘planet’ and introduce some new terms with clearly defined meanings. And if you just want to know what human decision-making processes are like, you can simply use terms of art like ‘Humean freedom’ and ‘L-freedom’ and so on and proceed straight to the point at hand, trying to determine which of the various kinds of freedom (or “freedom”) human beings actually possess without first determining the ordinary-language meaning of the folk term ‘free will’. And if you’re in a situation where you already know all the relevant metaphysical facts but don’t know what some folk term means, then you can describe the metaphysical facts using technical terms with stipulated definitions, and so your lack of knowledge of the meaning of the folk term shouldn’t be treated as a genuine ignorance of (nonsemantic) metaphysical facts.

Mark Balaguer, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2010, pp. 34-35

Jon Kabat-Zinn

When it comes right down to it, the challenge of mindfulness is to realize that “this is it.” Right now is my life.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, New York, 1991, p. 128

David Chalmers

When we observe external objects, we observe their structure and function; that’s all. Such observations give no reason to postulate any new class of properties, except insofar as they explain structure and function; so there can be no analogue of a ‘hard problem’ here. Even if further properties of these objects existed, we could have no access to them, as our external access is physically mediated: such properties would lie on the other side of an unbridgeable epistemic divide. Consciousness uniquely escapes these arguments by lying at the centre of our epistemic universe, rather than at a distance. In this case alone, we can have access to something other than structure and function.

David Chalmers, ‘Moving forward on the Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (1997), p. 6