When both sides accuse the other of a coup d'état

Just in case it isn't clear, Calvin is the Democrat; Hobbes is the Republican -- except according to Rasmussen 25% of Republicans agree with Calvin that the election wasn't rigged and 30% of Democrats agree with Hobbes that it was.

Here's the original comic.

The Knowledge Argument

Say there's a woman named Mary who has monochromacy, or black/white color blindness, so that everything looks like a black and white film. Despite this disadvantage, Mary becomes a celebrated neurologist, and actually the foremost expert on color perception. She knows exactly what is happening in the brain when someone sees the color blue, for example, even though she can't see it herself.

Anyhoo, one day Mary is sitting underneath a tree reading a book about Isaac Newton when an apple falls on her head and momentarily knocks her out. When she wakes up her monochromacy is gone: she can see the green grass, she can see purple mountain majesties, and she can see the clear blue sky. She had never seen these colors before. She had never known what "blue" looks like. But she knew everything that happened in the brain when someone experienced the color blue. So the question is: does Mary know something now that she didn't know before? This is the Knowledge Argument.

This isn't as easy to answer as you might think. I've been asking my students this for years and it's usually a split vote. One point to make here is that knowing what blue looks like wouldn't be propositional knowledge, but does it count as knowledge then? Some people think it's obvious Mary knows something that she didn't know before (what blue looks like) and others think it's obvious she doesn't.

The issue here is about qualia (singular: qualium), the "what it's like" experiences. Thomas Nagel wrote an essay called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" which really brought this point home. Many philosophers of mind say that qualia are the heart and soul of the mind, and even human life in general. But the problem is that qualia can't be quantified and are effectively invisible to science. Science seeks to explain things from a third person perspective, but qualia are intrinsically first person in nature. Mary could describe color perception from a third person perspective but with no awareness of the qualium "what blue looks like". So the reason this is important is that, if Mary knows something after seeing the color blue that she did not know before, then there are important things -- foundational, fundamental things -- that science cannot address. If you had a complete physical, scientific description of the entire universe, it would be intrinsically incomplete, since it would not include qualia.

Moreover, the third person perspective is derived from the first person: to describe something from the third is to observe it from another standpoint, but ultimately this just means to observe it from what a first person perspective from that other standpoint would be. There can be no (to reference another Nagel work) view from nowhere. So science is utterly dependent on the first person perspective, and thus qualia, but cannot address them.

Naturally, all this is controversial. Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, deny the reality of qualia. The philosopher who came up with the Knowledge Argument, Frank Jackson, eventually changed his mind about it because of the implications it had, viz., that there is more to reality than the physical world. Jaegwon Kim, who gives Nagel a run for his money as the greatest living philosopher in my opinion, fully accepts the reality of qualia and their centrality in human life, but still defends physicalism: see his books Mind in a Physical World and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. And there's a collection of some of the most important essays about the Knowledge Argument which has the unfortunate title There's Something about Mary. So now you know what to read during the quarantine.

Your eyes are the darkest shade of light gray I've ever seen . . .

Quote of the Day

I do not define the essence of religion as belief in God and immortality. Judaism in its earlier stages had no belief in immortality, and for a long time no belief which was religiously relevant. The shadowy existence of the ghost in Sheol was one of which Jehovah took no account and which took no account of Jehovah. In Sheol all things are forgotten. The religion was centered on the ritual and ethical demands of Jehovah in the present life, and also, of course, on benefits expected from Him. These benefits are often merely worldly benefits (grandchildren and peace upon Israel), but a more specifically religious note is repeatedly struck. The Jew is athirst for the living God, he delights in His laws as in honey or treasure, he is conscious of himself in Jehovah's presence as unclean of lips and heart. The glory or splendor of God is worshiped for its own sake. In Buddhism, on the other hand, we find that a doctrine of immortality is central, while there is nothing specifically religious. Salvation from immortality, deliverance from reincarnation, is the very core of its message. The existence of the gods is not necessarily decried, but it is of no religious significance. In Stoicism again both the religious quality and the belief in immortality are variables, but they do not vary in direct ratio. Even within Christianity itself we find a striking expression, not without influence from Stoicism, of the subordinate position of immortality. When Henry More ends a poem on the spiritual life by saying that if, after all, he should turn out to be mortal he would be

"... satisfide
A lonesome mortall God t' have died."

From my own point of view, the example of Judaism and Buddhism is of immense importance. The system, which is meaningless without a doctrine of immortality, regards immortality as a nightmare, not as a prize. The religion which, of all ancient religions, is most specifically religious, that is, at once most ethical and most numinous, is hardly interested in the question. Believing, as I do, that Jehovah is a real being, indeed the ens realissimum, I cannot sufficiently admire the divine tact of thus training the chosen race for centuries in religion before even hinting the shining secret of eternal life. He behaves like the rich lover in a romance who woos the maiden on his own merits, disguised as a poor man, and only when he has won her reveals that he has a throne and palace to offer. For I cannot help thinking that any religion which begins with a thirst for immortality is damned, as a religion, from the outset. Until a certain spiritual level has been reached, the promise of immortality will always operate as a bribe which vitiates the whole religion and infinitely inflames those very self-regards which religion must cutdown and uproot. For the essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends; the finite self's desire for, and acquiescence in, and self-rejection in favor of, an object wholly good and wholly good for it. That the self-rejection will turn out to be also a self-finding, that bread cast upon the waters will be found after many days, that to die is to live -- these are sacred paradoxes of which the human race must not be told too soon.

C.S. Lewis

"Religion without Dogma?"

In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

Recycle

Here's an article about a space company that plans to use the many discarded upper stages of rockets in orbit to make commercial space stations. That's awesome.

My posts on space science here are not consistent. I wrote a bit ago about a spacecraft that was going to momentarily touch down on a freaking asteroid, gather some stuff up, and then return to Earth. Then it actually did so, got more stuff than it was anticipating, everything's going great, and I didn't post about it. Not to mention the claims that they found some chemicals in Venus's atmosphere that, in our experience, are only produced by life, although it's possible for them to be produced by other processes. Didn't post on it. You'll notice I'm not providing links to those stories either. That's because it would have required effort on my part.

Some more recent acquisitions

Nonfiction:

William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth.

---,  The Reliability of Sense Perception.

Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning.

Michael Bergmann, Justification without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism.

Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief.

Roderick M. Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing.

Paul Copan, ed., Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan.

Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.

Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition.

George S. Pappas and Marshall Swain, eds., Essays on Knowledge and Justification.

Ernest Sosa, Epistemology.

Ernest Sosa and Jaegwon Kim, eds., Epistemology: An Anthology (1st edition).

Barry Stroud, Hume.

Peter Unger, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1.

---, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2.

Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus' Essential Teachings on Discipleship.

Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

Fiction:

Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics.

Tony Daniel, The Robot's Twilight Companion.

Jack Dann, ed., Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Philip José Farmer, Night of Light.

Walter M. Miller, Jr., Conditionally Human.

---, The View from the Stars.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians.

---, Galileo's Dream.

---, The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man.

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin.

Oy vey

I don't write much about politics on this blog (for reasons), but I'm concerned about this Presidential election. I think we're heading to an Avignon Papacy situation. This is because I don't see any way for either side to back down.

Situation 1: Say the Trumpfolk are right and the Bidenkin are trying to steal the election. Honestly, I take it for granted that there are a lot of nefarious machinations behind the scenes like this. And while I'm not a Republican, I have noticed that when there's a close race and the Republican is slightly ahead, they often find a secret cache of votes that go disproportionately to the Democrat. I think it's generally accepted that the Democrats stole the 1960 Presidential election. In my own neck of the woods, Chris Dudley was ahead by about 30,000 votes in the 2010 race for Governor in Oregon, and then overnight they found more votes that made him 30,000 votes behind. In the 2008 Senate election in Minnesota, Al Franken was behind in the votes, although it was really close. As they recounted, they kept finding ways to include or exclude votes, and it just happened to skew to Franken until, ultimately, Franken was declared the winner. I'm not saying it never goes the other way, it's just what I've noticed.

So anyway, I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that's what's happening now. If so, then there's no way that Trump, being Trump, is going to let it go. I suspect a lot of the Trumpfolk wouldn't accept it, even it went to the Supreme Court and they found for Biden. Really, if the Bidenkin are trying to steal the election, then the Trumpfolk shouldn't accept the results. But I don't think the Bidenkin would let it go either. For them to let it go would be to tacitly admit that they cheated and tried to steal a Presidential election. They're not going to do that, they would lose authority and power for good. So if the Bidenkin really are cheating, neither side can back down under any circumstances.

Situation 2: OK, now say that they're not cheating, or at least their cheatings aren't consequential enough to change the election results. In this case, the Bidenkin wouldn't let it go for the same reason: it would be a tacit admission that they cheated. It's even worse here though, because it would have the same effects (a permanent loss of authority and power) but it wouldn't even be true. They wouldn't and shouldn't give in if this is the case.

Could Trump let it go? Well, I guess he could, but, y'know, Trump. He won't. I wouldn't trust him to let it go even if he came to genuinely realize that he legitimately lost (although I don't think he's unique in that regard). But there's more to it. If he let it go it would be a loss of prestige and authority for him. He could run again in 2024, but I think it would closer to a Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 scenario than a Grover Cleveland in 1892 one. So Trump wouldn't let it go. What about the movement that he represents? I'm not sure if they would lose power and prestige, but I don't think they would be willing to let it go either. Trump is their avatar.

So that's why I'm concerned. If the Bidenkin cheated, there's no way either side would back down. If they didn't cheat, there's no way either side would back down. I think Civil War 2.0 is starting, folks. But I really, really hope I'm wrong. The good news is that me being wrong is much more likely.

Update (Nov. 30): This article by a pollster sums up the reasons why people are claiming the election looks like it was rigged.

The Lucas-Penrose Argument

Brace yourselves, this one can melt your brain.

In the early 20th century, it was thought that mathematics could be made into a complete formal system. This is a system in which every element has a complete definition, every entailment is deductive (so that conclusions necessarily follow from premises), and which contains no contradictions. But some basic concepts are unformalizable. "Truth," for example, allows us to form the Liar Paradox: "This statement is not true." If it's true, then it's false, and if it's false, it's true. So no formal system can have a truth predicate in it. (This isn't a mark against truth, btw.) One motive for this is a system with a contradiction leads to the principle of explosion, since ex falso quodlibet -- from a contradiction, everything follows.

Anyhoo, Kurt Gödel, inarguably the greatest logician of the 20th century, suggested we use a concept in place of truth that IS formalizable and doesn't lead to a paradox: provability. "This statement is not provable" doesn't lead to a problem like the Liar Paradox. But since such a statement can be made within any formal system, and since any such system must involve deductive provability, it follows that there can be no complete formal system. This is the intuition behind Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. We'd been chasing a mirage.

This was around 1930. About the same time we had huge strides made in artificial intelligence by the likes of Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, etc. Turing came up with the idea of a Turing machine, which is an instantiation of a formal system, the cause-and-effect processes of the machine standing in for the deductive ground-consequent relations of the formal system. But since any formal system will have a statement within it to the effect of "This statement is not provable within this system" (called a Gödel sentence), such would also have to be the case for a Turing machine.

This is a problem because a Turing machine can only affirm provable claims, so any given machine will have a Gödel sentence which it cannot affirm. Human minds, however, have no such limitation: we can see that there is a Gödel sentence within our own systems of thought and affirm it, recognizing that it is correct. It is correct that "This statement is not provable within this system" is not provable within that system. This has two consequences: 1) Human minds cannot be reduced to Turing machines. They cannot be fully explained by the mechanistic cause-and-effect processes that are going on in the brain. There is an element of the mind that goes beyond it, and this element is truth-conducive. 2) Turing machines, and artificial intelligence in general, cannot fully duplicate the processes of human minds. They may be able to duplicate the end-products, but they can't produce them the same way that human minds do: through non-deductive (non-formal) reasoning. They can only do it via mechanistic cause-and-effect processes which don't have to be truth-conducive in order to arrive at those end-products.

This conclusion was reached by Gödel himself in his 1951 Gibbs Lecture, "Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and Their Implications", but it wasn't published until the third volume of his Collected Works came out in 1995. J.R. Lucas -- who in writing this post I have learned passed away earlier this year, which devastates me -- however, wrote an enormously influential essay in 1961, "Minds, Machines, and Gödel" which presented the same idea. It motivated a lot of objections which Lucas responded to in philosophy journals, and then he published his book "The Freedom of the Will" in 1970, the last third of which is on the implication of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems for the mind and AI. You can read most of his essays online at https://web.archive.org/web/20160718073705/http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/. Later, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose defended the argument in his own way in his books The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.

Simple, no?

Quote of the Day

Christopher Columbus was one of those Genoese navigators who, when Genoa's Asiatic lines of trade were broken by the irruption of the Turks (see p. 467), conceived the idea of reaching India by an ocean route. While others were endeavoring to reach that country by sailing around the southern point of Africa, he proposed the bolder plan of reaching this eastern land by sailing directly westward. The sphericity of the earth was a doctrine held by many at that day; but the theory was not in harmony with the religious ideas of the time, and so it was not prudent for one to publish too openly one's belief in this notion.

P.V.N Myers
A General History for Colleges and High Schools (1889)

Jim's comments: This is a clear and widely-read statement of the flat earth myth -- the idea that, prior to Columbus, people (or at least Europeans) thought the earth was flat on religious grounds. It's false: the sphericity of the earth had been the almost universal view in Europe for two millennia by the time we get to Columbus. Perhaps we can give Myers some grace since the flat earth myth was very common at the time. I wrote about it before here. The best book on it is Jeffery Burton Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Another interesting book is Christine Garwood's Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, although only the first chapter is on the flat earth myth, with the rest on the flat earth movement in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Metallic rules

(Metallica rules too, but that's a post for another time.)

There are five basic rules that are the font of all possible moral positions, and they are often associated with particular metals. They are:

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- treat people the way you want to be treated.

The Silver Rule: Don't do unto others as you would not have them do unto you -- don't treat people the way you don't want to be treated.

The Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they would be done by -- treat people the way they want to be treated, not the way you want to be treated.

The Brass Rule: Do unto others as they have done unto you -- treat people the way they treat you.

The Iron Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you -- might makes right.

So the Golden Rule is primarily associated with Christianity, although you can see it in other contexts. The Silver Rule is much more common. It's basically the negative form of the Golden Rule. The difference is that the Golden Rule requires you to actively do something positive while the Silver Rule requires you to refrain from doing something negative. The latter is saying "Don't do something bad" while the former is saying "Do something good." That's a significant difference. Personally, I'd be happier with just the Silver Rule: I don't want to actively involve myself in the good of others and I usually don't want them to involve themselves in mine. Just leave me alone. But that only works until I need help, and then I come crawling back to the Golden Rule. Regardless I see them as two sides of the same coin, although there would be qualifications to that.

When I was in high school I read Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach the same guy who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and this introduced me to the Platinum Rule, although I didn't know it by that name yet. It seemed to me a huge step further than the Golden Rule: Of course you shouldn't treat other people the way you want to be treated, you should treat them how they want to be treated. At the time it really blew me away. It wasn't until I studied ethics many years later that I realized its fatal flaw.

The genius of the Golden and Silver Rules is their universality. Treat others the way you want to be treated, because they are another you. Whatever your differences are, the similarities are enough so that you can put yourself in their place and act accordingly. The other person isn't you, but whatever it is about you that makes you want to be treated well and not badly is also true of them. Use the value you apply to yourself by treating yourself the way you want to be treated and apply it to everyone else.

So now you see the problem: the Platinum Rule erases that universality. All three rules say to treat people well but the Golden and Silver Rules give you a reason to do so. The Platinum Rule takes away that reason, and thus the rationality and justification for itself. Treat other people the way they want to be treated? Why? What's my reason or motive for doing so? What if I don't want to treat them the way they want to be treated? What if I want to treat them badly?

When I teach ethics, I use Nina Rosenstand's The Moral of the Story which is just about the best textbook I've ever read. She comments on this as follows:

Recognizing the wisdom of the Golden Rule is perhaps the most important early stage in civilization because it implies that we see others as similar to ourselves and that we see ourselves as deserving no treatment that is better than what others get (although we would generally prefer it -- we're not saints). However, the Golden Rule may not be the ultimate rule to live by because (as we discuss further in Chapter 11) others may not want to be treated as you'd like to be treated. Then, according to some thinkers, the "Platinum Rule" ought to kick in: Treat others as they want to be treated! Proponents of the Golden Rule say that this takes the universal appeal out of the rule. The spark of moral genius in the rule is precisely that we are similar in our human nature -- not that we would all like to have things our way.

This raises another issue: a lot of people don't view these rules as rules for themselves but as rules for others. When they say "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" what they mean is "do unto me as you would have me do unto you." The Golden and Silver Rules, however, give us a reason to apply them to ourselves, although we can ignore it: why should people treat me well (or at least not treat me badly)? Because they would want me to treat them well (or would not want me to treat them badly). But then this immediately brings up the self-application of these rules, that we should treat other people well, not just expect others to treat us well. They trigger us to apply the rules to ourselves. The Platinum Rule does not. If we apply it to others, by telling people to treat us how we want to be treated, it just means we want to have things our way. There's no motive to apply it to ourselves. And even if we do, we do it blindly, without any reason or justification for it.

Another issue is that the Platinum Rule is already contained in the Golden and Silver Rules. Treating other people the way you want to be treated would include the idea that you don't want others to indiscriminately assume you want the same things they do. Treating others as you want to be treated is a general statement about what we share as human beings -- that's the universality again. And one thing we share as human beings is the desire to be treated as individuals. This means that we should take into consideration the specific things individual people want that we may not want ourselves, because we would want them to consider the specific things that we want regardless of whether they want the same things.

The Brass Rule is probably the human norm: treat people the way they treat you. Return good for good and evil for evil, although we'd always be looking for ways to avoid having to return good. This is often how people treat the Golden and Silver Rules: I'll treat other people well, but if they don't treat me well the system breaks down. But that's a bad approach. Your job is to treat people well. If others don't treat you well, that's on them. You just keep treating them well. "I'm sacrificing all this time and effort for them and they don't appreciate it. They don't even notice it." Yes, they're failing to follow the Golden and Silver Rules. That doesn't provide a reason for you not to follow it. If your adherence to the rule is contingent on their adherence to it, you're following the Brass Rule, not the Golden or Silver Rule.

The Brass Rule is tangentially related to the Prisoner's Dilemma. The idea here (roughly) is you have two people and they can vote one of two ways, say A or B. If they both vote A, then they share a reward (or avoid a punishment). If they both vote B, they don't get the reward. But if they split the vote, the one who votes B gets the reward all to himself. So it's a good idea to vote A as long as you know the other person's voting A too -- but you don't. So how do you proceed? The optimal response is to vote A initially, to split the reward, and to continue doing so until the other person takes advantage of the situation and votes B to win the whole thing. Then you respond by voting B until the other person becomes willing to sacrifice a few wins to get you back on the sharing track.

Well, actually, this is the optimal response:

You see how this is similar to the Brass Rule. Do unto others as they have done unto you. But it's not exactly the same since the Prisoner's Dilemma is about decision theory while the Brass Rule is about ethics. Granted, there's a lot of overlap between the two -- ethics involves deciding how to behave -- but they aren't coterminous.

And then we come to the Iron Rule. Use any advantage you have over others to put yourself in a position where they have no power over you. If someone treats you well but your interests are best served by ill-treating them, then you should return evil for good. But why wait? Start by visiting evil on people before they even know you're there. In the aftermath of Game of Thrones this makes me think of the iron throne, since many of the people vying for it are clearly following the Iron Rule.

Reaction videos

I don't know why they're appealing, but I sometimes enjoy watching reaction videos -- people listening to music outside their usual interests for the first time, that sort of thing. It's not something I could ever do because I never appreciate music the first time I experience it. In the last few days I've discovered Shan Watches Movies where he watches an entire film, but obviously only showing 15 or 20 minutes worth of clips while giving his commentary. But this is different: Shan knows how film works, and his comments are about the directing, the acting, the cinematography, the music and sound, the lighting, etc. These aren't reaction videos, they're analysis videos. Watching them I found myself wishing my dad was still alive so I could tell him about it, since he loved movies on that level too. I actually have a folder filled with his movie reviews, although they weren't always generous. E.g., his review of Pretty Woman was just two words: "Whore movie." But I imagine if he could watch Shan, he would have immediately become a fan -- a Shan fan. Here's his review of John Carpenter's The Thing which I think is the greatest horror film ever made. Shan has his criticisms.

Space news

A probe will touch down for just a few seconds on 101955 Bennu, an Earth-crossing asteroid, in less than a month, collect some samples, and then return to Earth in 2023. That is pretty cool. It'll look something like this (try to ignore the soundtrack):

Searle contra Dennett

In 1992 when John Searle published The Rediscovery of the Mind. Daniel Dennett reviewed the book in The Journal of Philosophy, and you can read his review here. Then Searle published a critique of several then-recent books on philosophy of mind, including Dennett's Consciousness Explained in his column in The New York Review of Books, which you can read here: scroll down to the bottom, or do a page search on "Quotes 11".

Here's where it gets interesting: Dennett then wrote a letter to the NYRB blasting Searle, to which Searle responded, and you can read both here. Prior to this, Searle and Dennett were, I think, friendly rivals. Not after. Dennett writes, "Searle doesn't have a program of research. He has a set of home truths to defend. They land him in paradox after paradox, but so long as he doesn't address the critics who point this out, who’ll ever know? ... There is not room in these pages for Searle to repair fifteen years of disregard, so no one should expect him to make good here, but if he would be so kind as to tell us where and when he intends to respond to his critics with the attention and accuracy they deserve, we will know when to resume paying attention to his claims."

I have to agree with Searle's assessment of Dennett's accusations: "Dennett’s letter has a peculiar rhetorical quality in that he is constantly referring to some devastating argument against me that he never actually states. The crushing argument is always just offstage, in some review he or somebody else wrote or some book he published years ago, but he can’t quite be bothered to state the argument now."

I should also point out that I tend to agree with Searle's argument:

An intuition in [Dennett's] sense is just something one feels inclined to believe, and such intuitions often turn out to be false. For example, people have intuitions about space and time that have been refuted by relativity theory in physics. In my review, I gave an example of an intuition about consciousness that has been refuted by neurobiology: the commonsense intuition that our pain in the arm is actually located in the physical space of the arm. But the very existence of my conscious states is not similarly a matter for my intuitions. The refutable intuitions I mentioned require a distinction between how things seem to me and how they really are, a distinction between appearance and reality. But where the existence of conscious states is concerned, you can’t make the distinction between appearance and reality, because the existence of the appearance is the reality in question. If it consciously seems to me that I am conscious, then I am conscious. It is not a matter of “intuitions,” of something I feel inclined to say. Nor is it a matter of methodology. Rather it is just a plain fact about me—and every other normal human being—that we have sensations and other sorts of conscious states.

However, I am suspicious of making it into an argument because it allows Dennett and others (like the Churchlands) to argue that you can make a distinction between appearance and reality with regards to conscious states, and their philosophies of mind explain how. All they have to do is deny that premise. Certainly that's not a very plausible option, but they could do it. I'm not sure if you could prove Searle's point via an argument to someone who was dead-set against it.

Arguing from Authoritah

I sometimes get frustrated by common logical misunderstandings. Here's one that just boils my butternut squash: when people think that, since there are fallacies of appealing to authority, all appeals to authority are fallacious. This is not the case. In informal logic (inductive and abductive inference) appeals to authority are fallacious when the authority is an authority in an unrelated field. The fallacy does not rest in the appeal to authority per se but it in the irrelevancy of the authority's authority. For example, if you want to find out whether Newton or Leibniz discovered calculus first, I wouldn't ask someone who's an authority in pharmacological science. Of course, this person may have researched the subject such that they are uniquely situated to answer the question, but if we appeal to the fact that she is an authority, by virtue of her standing in pharmacology, we commit a fallacious appeal to authority.

That may seem easy, but people tend to strongly react against it. Here, for example, is a standard example of a fallacious appeal to authority. 

See, Einstein was a physicist. His area where he could speak as an authority is physics and other closely related fields. He was neither an expert nor an authority in political science or international diplomacy. Was he really, really smart? Yes, of course. Shouldn't we accept his claims about political science and international diplomacy by virtue of his extreme smartness? NO. That is a fallacious appeal to authority. His statement might be right (spoiler: it isn't), he might even be in a good position to affirm it, but it is outside his field of expertise. This is precisely why he declined the offer to be one of the first presidents of Israel.

But there are valid appeals to authority. Traditionally in Western civilization arguments from authority have been considered the weakest possible type of argument, at least according to the medieval Christian theologians. The reason it's extremely weak is because it doesn't involve you coming into direct contact with the truth of a matter: you're just accepting it because someone else has supposedly come into contact with it. But it's still a valid argument merely because, well, let's let Asimov say it:

What this counts for is a matter of dispute among philosophers. There are plenty who say that it only has relevance alongside other arguments. Others say it has strength by itself, but not so much to overturn an assertion. And some just reject the whole shebang.

Where people tend to gloss over the distinctions between valid and invalid appeals to authority is in appeals to science. Authority, supposedly, is of the old system, but science and a rejection of authority is the new system. Ignoring the point that the old system explicitly specified valid arguments from authority as the weakest of all arguments, science is completely beholden to authority. The glory and strength of science comes from its ability to challenge authorities -- background assumptions, traditional modes of understanding -- but of course the individual scientist cannot challenge all authorities. In order to get any work done, she has to accept the vast majority of claims on the basis of the authority of those who made them. She has to build up from what others have already accomplished, and this requires her to accept their claims on the basis of their authority. And of course the non-scientist has to accept scientific claims on the basis of the authority of the scientists who make the claims and the strong authority of science in general. I'm not challenging science at all, by the way, I'm just pointing out that a) appealing to authority isn't intrinsically bad and b) appeals to authority cannot realistically be removed, even from science. If your concept of science doesn't allow this, you're probably thinking of it as fundamentally iconoclastic rather than truth seeking. (Having said that, I'm writing these posts because I thoroughly enjoy telling people that they're wrong. So maybe we're even.)

The rabbit hole goes much deeper, of course. Does all this apply to individual authorities, or should it be reserved for the consensus of authorities? Can the collective efforts of the scientific community avoid appealing to authority even if the individual scientist can't? And who gets to decide who qualifies as an authority -- and who gave them that authority?

The Modal Ontological Argument

Arguments for and against the existence of God constitute one of the main topics in philosophy over the last few thousand years. By far, one of the craziest family of arguments is ontological arguments. They claim that the concept of God entails his actual existence. God is, by definition, the supreme being, the greatest conceivable being, the maximally great being, the perfect being, the being greater than which none can be thought. But if our conception of God is that he doesn't exist, he wouldn't be the greatest conceivable being since we could conceive of him existing and hence being even greater. Therefore, God must exist. Right? Anyone? Hello?

Ontological arguments sound like riddles, but some of the greatest intellects throughout history have defended them. Just in the last 100 years we've had Kurt Gödel (inarguably the greatest logician of the 20th century), Norman Malcolm, Alvin Plantinga, and Charles Hartshorne all defending versions of it. The standard objection to ontological arguments, from Kant, is that they treat existence as if it were a property a being could have or fail to have. But a being that failed to have existence wouldn't be a being at all. The recent counterargument is that this would only apply to Descartes's ontological argument, not to those of others, like Anselm's (or, for that matter, Kant's).

The contemporary versions use modal logic. This is basically the logic of possibility and necessity. If it's logically possible for you to do or be something -- say, waking up one morning as a giant cockroach -- then you have the modal property of "possibly existing as a cockroach." The weird thing is that, if it is possible for you to wake up one morning as a cockroach, then this modal property would not itself be a possible property you may or may not have, it would be an actual property. If something is possible, then its possibility is necessary (possible in all possible worlds), and if it's necessary, it's actual. So if it's possible you may wake up as a cockroach, then you actually have the modal property of "possibly existing as a cockroach." This sounds weird but it's a basic premise in modal logic (axiom S5) and as far as I know, it is uncontested in logical and philosophical circles.

So: say God is the maximally great being -- he has all positive properties, has them without limit, and has no negative properties. If this is logically possible, then God exists in at least one possible world. Now say God exists in only one possible world. Then he would lack the modal property of "possibly existing in world 2," and so wouldn't be maximally great. OK, so he has the property of possibly existing in worlds 1 and 2 and that's it. But then he lacks the modal property of "possibly existing in world 3." Now say he has the modal properties of "possibly existing in all possible worlds but one." Then he would lack the modal property of "possibly existing in that one world," and by lacking that modal property, wouldn't be maximally great. So if God exists in one possible world, he exists in all possible worlds. And the real world is a possible world, since if something is actual, it must be possible. Another way to say this is that any maximally great being worth its salt would exist necessarily, not just contingently; and if a necessarily existing being exists in one possible world, it exists in all possible worlds. Here's a rundown.

1. A maximally great being (God) is logically possible.
2. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in at least one possible world.
3. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in all possible worlds (otherwise he wouldn't be maximally great).
4. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.
5. Therefore, a maximally great being (still God) exists.

There are some very interesting things about this, each one leading to the next. First, virtually every step in this argument is uncontroversial among logicians and philosophers, including atheists. But, second, there's a way to avoid the conclusion: deny the first premise. Deny that God, a maximally great being, is logically possible. Then God doesn't exist in any possible world. In fact, Plantinga, one of this argument's advocates, explicitly makes this point. Third, this means that God either exists in no possible worlds or all possible worlds. He either can't exist or can't not exist. He's either logically impossible or logically necessary. Fourth, since in order to say that God does not exist we have to say God cannot exist, the atheist bears the burden of proof. They must show that it is logically impossible for God to exist, that a maximally great being entails a logical contradiction. The theist only has to maintain that it's logically possible. But you don't have to prove something is logically possible unless you have a reason to think it may not be.

Naturally, one of the main objections to God is precisely that a maximally great being entails logical contradictions. For example, such a being would be maximally merciful but also maximally just. But these are, allegedly, incompatible since perfect justice would conflict with perfect mercy. Some individual traits are accused of being incoherent: could a maximally powerful (omnipotent) being create a stone so big that even he couldn't move it? If he can't, then there's something he can't do: make that stone. If he can, then there's something he can't do: move that stone. Either way, there's something he can't do and so omnipotence is a chimera. Naturally again, there are plenty of counterarguments and countercounterarguments and countercountercounter . . . . etc. Regardless, the modal ontological argument is fascinating, not least because it makes denying God's existence much more problematic.

The Burden of Proof

It seems like everyone has a simplistic idea of who bears the burden of proof and it drives me freakin' nuts -- almost as much as people using "begs the question" to mean "forces us to ask."* The simplistic idea is that the person making a claim must bear the burden of proof, while the person who denies the claim does not. This is the standard in formal debates to keep them from going too far afield. Courts of law apply it as well because our justice system is premised on the "innocent until proven guilty" standard. So it's not unreasonable to mistake it as the universal standard, but it's still a mistake.

In philosophy burden of proof issues are notoriously difficult. Sometimes the person making a claim bears the burden of proof, but sometimes the person denying a claim bears it. Sometimes all parties bear it. It depends. And there's no absolute standard agreed upon by philosophers, although there are some clear examples. One traditional philosophical issue is the problem of other minds. How do we know that other people are really sparks of self-consciousness? The simplistic idea of burden of proof would say the person who denies other minds exist (solipsism) does not shoulder any of the burden of proof, but in this case he shoulders all of it. The person who affirms that other minds exist does not need to prove anything.

One objection people raise is that you can't prove a negative. Except you can. Of course you can. I can prove there is no full-sized elephant in this room right now. I can prove that there is not an army of fifty foot tall badgers ransacking downtown Portland as we speak. In fact, Karl Popper's philosophy of science says that all science can do is falsify claims, not prove them, in which case, science only proves negatives. It can't prove the positive claim "All swans are white" but it can prove the negative claim "Not all swans are white" by finding one example of a swan that isn't white. What you cannot do is empirically prove a universal negative. But you can still empirically prove a non-universal negative (like "Not all swans are white") and you can logically prove a universal negative (if it's a logical contradiction).

Another objection people raise is Bertrand Russell's suggestion of a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. The person making this claim shoulders the burden of proof because in the absence of any evidence or reason to think such a teapot exists, the rational response is to disbelieve it, not just to be agnostic about it. We don't need a reason to disbelieve it, since in the absence of evidence we don't shoulder any burden of proof. But we do have a reason to disbelieve it: it's completely ad hoc or contrived. The more ad hoc a suggestion is, the less likely it is true. The teapot apologist must provide evidence to overcome the ad hoc-ness of the claim. Contrast this with the problem of other minds: there the solipsist is making the ad hoc claim and so must bear the burden of proof.

Most claims end up somewhere in between orbiting teapots and other minds (orbiting minds?), meaning that burden of proof is difficult to establish. The more ad hoc a claim is, the larger the share of the burden of proof one has, and sometimes denying a claim is more ad hoc than affirming it, not least because denying some claims can have repercussions that are outrageous. Carl Sagan said, "Incredible claims require incredible evidence," which is also simplistic and false, but if we restate it as "Ad hoc claims require sufficient evidence to counter their ad hoc-ness" then it can be salvaged, although it may not work as well as an aphorism.

* Incidentally, "begs the question" means you're arguing in a circle. You are assuming (begging) what is at question. So if I said "Trump is the most honest President ever," and when you asked why I believe that, I said, "Trump said so, and the most honest President ever wouldn't lie about something like that," I would be begging the question. The question is whether Trump is honest and my reasoning assumes he is in order to conclude he is. It argues in a circle, it begs the question. I actually wrote about this on Quodlibeta back in the day.