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.

Some recent acquisitions

Nonfiction:

William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. (I should have read this one years ago. Written by one of the most important epistemologists of the last hundred years.)

Nathan Aviezer, In the Beginning: Biblical Creation and Science. (A Jewish perspective.) 

Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. 

Frederick Copleston, Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker. 

Charles Darwin, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books (Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals), edited by Edward O. Wilson. (Unfortunately, it doesn't include The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits, so I'm kinda bummed.)

Cardinal Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics. (I've been wanting this one forever.)

The Interlinear NIV Hebrew-English Old Testament. (Almost 3,000 pages. Got it for about $25.)

Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers. (I had this years ago and it was lost in shipping when we moved back to the States.)

John Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? 

C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. (One of the few Lewis books I didn't have, although I've read it more than once.)

Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. (OK, this one I've really wanted forever)

_______, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology.

_______, The Science of God.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 volumes. (I love Nietzsche, and my impression of Schopenhauer is that he's a forerunner of Nietzsche who was more pessimistic.)

Wilbur Marshall Urban, The History of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (This was published in 1898, so as a history it's a little out of date. I'm just a big fan of Urban.) 

Fiction:

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions. (This is all of his short story collections in one volume.)

Fredric Brown, From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown. (Gold.)

Ted Chiang, Exhalation. (Short stories, and the ones I've already read are amazing. The title story is incredibly relevant to philosophy of mind.)

James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes.

_______, Caliban's War.

_______, Abaddon's Gate. (I've watched The Expanse, the show based on these books, and loved it, but the books were expensive. I got these first three as a boxed set for about $20 which is much cheaper than I've seen any of them.

Cixin Liu, The Wandering Earth. (His short stories. I've loved everything I've read from him.)

Ken Liu, Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. (Chinese short stories that Ken Liu translated and edited. He also writes his own books and stories, so I'm going to give those a look in the near future.)

Fred Saberhagen, Love Conquers All. (Same author as the Berserker series. I wanted this one because Saberhagen was a Catholic and from what I understand, this is his version of Brave New World.)

John Scalzi, Redshirts.

Lucius Shepherd, The Best of Lucius Shepherd.

Michael Swanwick, The Dog Said Bow-Wow.

John Varley, The Persistence of Vision.

Peter Watts, Blindsight. (This supposedly has some philosophical relevance to the Chinese Room argument.)

Andy Weir, Artemis. (Same author as The Martian.)

Robert Charles Wilson, The Harvest.

Contrasts

Today I read two articles critical of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. The first was an exercise in frustration. It took passages in the Bible which say God sent a deceiving spirit or something similar, and use this to argue that the Judeo-Christian God lies. In this case, Judeo-Christian theism gives one a defeater for the belief that their cognitive faculties are reliable just as much as naturalism allegedly does. It was exasperating to read this just because the authors' exegesis was so painfully bad. One of the foundational rules in exegesis -- in exegeting any text, not just the Bible -- is to interpret the unclear in light of the clear. These authors never mention the explicit passages in the Bible that say unequivocally that God does not, will not, and cannot lie. They just superficially accept what they want the text to mean. They go on to suggest that allowing miracles opens the door to chaos, although they condescendingly invite theists to provide some sort of repeatable, predictable evidence of miracles. It was just so incredibly superficial. It reminded me of a fictional conversation between Carl Sagan, Sylvia Plath, and Allen Carpenter in Escape from Hell by Larry Niven and the late great Jerry Pournelle. 

"I'm still getting used to this," Carl said. "Allen, you must have thought about this a lot. How can you justify keeping people in Hell? What gives God the right to demand we worship Him?" 

"Come now," Sylvia protested. "Where does right come from? You're going to judge God? By whose standards? You say yours, but what makes yours any better than anyone else's?" 

"Sylvia--" 

"I mean it, Allen. You two are smarter than almost anyone I ever met, but you sure have awful educations! People have been arguing about this for thousands of years! And you act like you've just thought of the questions." 

"I notice you never answered my question," Carl said. "What gives God the right to demand we worship Him?" 

"I haven't heard any such demand," Sylvia said. Maybe we just need Him, and we're miserable if we don't have Him."

"People have been arguing about this for thousands of years and you act like you've just thought of the questions." That pretty much sums up the article.

The Unconscious Violinist

The pro-choice position is that women have the right to do what they want with their bodies, but the pro-life position claims that the fetus is not the woman's body; it's the fetus's body. Since the right to swing your arms ends where another person's nose begins -- that is, your right to do what you want with you body ends where your use of your body harms someone else's body -- then if the fetus is an actual person, this would bear on whether a woman has the right to abort it. One problem with this is that the the woman and the fetus are organically connected, so the relationship between the mother and the fetus would be a unique one (really, the only example I can think of that's even remote comparable is conjoined twins), and that's a detail that could potentially change the equation.

Judith Jarvis Thomson is a moral philosopher and she came up with an argument that has greatly influenced the abortion debate. She grants these pro-life claims for argument's sake in order to construct a thought experiment. Say you wake up in a hospital bed and discover you're hooked up via tubes and whatnot to another person who is unconscious. Then you're told that this person is a famous violinist, a great artist, and has a kidney disease or something, and the only way to save him was to hook him up with someone else who closely matches his various biological conditions so that this other person's kidneys will filter his blood as well as your own -- and congratulations! your kidneys fit the bill. After nine months, everything can be disconnected and the violinist can be woken up, cured of his disease or condition. So do you have the right to refuse to take part in this procedure?

Thomson says yes. Granted, the unconscious violinist is a person; granted he will not survive without this procedure, this does not entail any responsibility on your part to allow your body be used as an object or tool to keep him alive for the next nine months. As a person, the violinist has the right to live, but he does not have the right to use someone else's body for his own purposes. So even if the fetus is a human being, a person, it does not have the right to the use of the woman's body.

Some people have raised objections to this. For one thing, at best, it would only apply to pregnancy by rape. Thomson argues that the fetus is using the woman's body in a nonconsensual way, but if the woman chose to have sex, the parallel between Thomson's thought experiment and abortion doesn't hold. We could add the detail that the woman attended a party with the understanding that there was a nontrivial chance of her being hooked up to an unconscious violinist for nine months afterwards. But this muddies the waters enough so that it isn't obvious that she has the right to unplug herself from the violinist. She knew that was a possible outcome of going to the party. Honestly, the first time I heard the Unconscious Violinist Argument, I thought it was an argument against abortion because of this point.

Another question we can ask is, how long is too long? What if she only has to be hooked up to the violinist for nine days? Or nine minutes? We can stand on principle here so that no amount of time is acceptable, but would you really think not having your autonomy overruled for nine minutes is more important than the violinist's life? What about nine days? Nine weeks? Or, to add another wrinkle, what if it's only nine hours but you know you only have fifteen hours to live and this will prevent you from accomplishing what you want during this time?

Again, this is all granting the pro-life position that the fetus is a person which is eminently contestable. I would conclude that the abortion issue does not have an obvious solution one way or the other, and if you're really confident of your position, maybe spend some more time thinking on it. I actually grew up with one side being the obvious, unquestioned one and then had some ideas presented to me which had never occurred to me, and after some contemplation, I switched teams.

This is interesting

 Entire cities could fit inside the moon's monstrous lava tubes. The lower gravity means the tubes are significantly larger than on Earth.

"The largest lava tubes on Earth are maximum [about] 40 meters [130 feet] of width and height," said study co-author Riccardo Pozzobon, a geoscientist at the University of Padova, Italy. "So like a very large motorway tunnel."

That's certainly big enough space for some people to fit inside. But on Mars collapsed lava tubes tend to be about 80 times larger than Earth's, with diameters of 130 to 1,300 feet (40 to 400 m). Lunar lava tubes seem to be still larger, the researchers found, with collapse sites 300 to 700 times the size of Earth's. Lunar lava tubes likely range from 1,600 to 3,000 feet (500 to 900 m).

A lava tube on the moon, Pozzobon told Live Science, could easily contain a small city within its walls.

Yes, I know, my love of science is fueled by my love of science-fiction. I just like the idea of giant caves on the Moon and Mars with cities inside them. Sue me.

I'm very happy

 I just got a book I've been wanting ever since I heard about it: From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown. I'm delighted to see how many of these stories I haven't read before. Fredric Brown is one of my favorites, he wrote flash fiction before it was called that. He was science-fiction's O. Henry. I've read two stories so far: "The New One," which has the same general idea as one of his other stories, "Murder in Ten Easy Lessons"; and "The Angelic Angleworm," which was delightfully weird. So, sorry, I'm going to be busy for the rest of the day reading.

The Lottery Paradox

Henry Kyburg was a philosopher who developed a theory of probability called statistical (or epistemological or sometimes just Kyburgian) probability, in contrast with Bayesian probability and logical probability. He's famous for coming up with the Lottery Paradox. Say there's a raffle with one million tickets, so one of the tickets between 1 and 1,000,000 will be picked. Since ticket 1 only has a one in a million chance of being selected, rationality requires us to believe that ticket 1 won't win. What is the probability that ticket 2 will win? Well, the same, one in a million. So rationality requires us to believe that ticket 2 won't win either. In fact, since every individual ticket only has a one in a million chance of winning, we should believe that every individual ticket will lose. But of course, we also know that one of those tickets will win. So rationality requires us to believe that ticket 1 will lose, ticket 2 will lose, etc. all the way up to ticket 1,000,000, but also that one of those tickets will win. This is a contradiction, there is no possible world where all the beliefs are true, yet it is irrational to deny any of them.

Kyburg was pointing out that there are three rational principles that lead to contradiction, and so we must reject one of them. First, if a proposition is probably true, it is rational to accept it. Second, if rationality requires us to accept proposition X and rationality also requires us to accept proposition Y, then rationality requires us to believe X and Y. Third, it is not rational to accept an inconsistent proposition. The Lottery Paradox shows that the second principle would mean we should accept that each ticket will lose and that one of them will win. This contradicts the third principle. To avoid this, we need to reject one of the three principles. Kyburg advocated rejecting the second: just because it is rational to believe ticket 1 will lose, ticket 2 will lose, etc., it doesn't mean it's rational to believe every ticket between 1 and 1,000,000 will lose. Many logicians, however, argue that we should reject the first principle: we shouldn't believe that ticket 1 will lose, we should believe it is very improbable that ticket 1 will win, but it might. Another possibility is to just throw up your hands and accept that an ideal form of rationality would still be imperfect and could entail contradictions. This is a rejection of the third principle. But accepting all three is not an option.

I'm inclined to reject the first premise -- or rephrase it so that instead of saying rationality requires us to believe a low probability entails falsehood, we say rationality requires us to believe a low probability entails ... wait for it ... a low probability. But regardless, the Lottery Paradox shows that logic, rationality, and probability are not as simple as they may appear.

Descartes's Evil Demon

Descartes was a 17th century philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Once, in his early 20s, he went into a small cabin to stay warm. When he came out the next day he had invented analytic geometry. It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished.

He wanted to explore the nature of knowledge, so he came up with several methods allowing him to hypothetically doubt even the most obvious truths, such as that other people exist, that the physical world exists, that he has a body, etc. Again, this was all hypothetical. People often mistake him as actually calling these things into question, but Descartes explicitly says you'd have to be a lunatic to seriously doubt them. He was engaged in an exercise to see if there was some belief he could not doubt in a logical sense.

To this end he came up with the Evil Demon. That's how English speakers refer to it. In French it's mauvais génie which can mean evil genie or genius.

The evil demon has the power to manipulate your thoughts so that falsehoods seems obviously true. Descartes used this to ask whether he could doubt that 2 + 3 = 5. It's logically possible that such a demon exists (that is, it's not a logical contradiction) so it's logically possible for Descartes's belief that 2 + 3 = 5 to be one of those beliefs that seem so blatant and obvious because the evil demon is messing with his mind to make it seem so. Ex hypothesi, 2 + 3 does not equal 5, it's just the evil demon's machinations that make it appear so. With this scenario, Descartes realized he could doubt that 2 + 3 = 5.

At this point, Descartes is (theoretically) denying the existence of other people, his body, the physical world, and even the obvious truths of basic mathematics and logic. There doesn't seem to be anything he can't doubt. But this is where he reaches what is called the cogito: he's doubting, so he can't doubt that he's doubting. But doubting is not an event, it is an action, and so it requires an actor, a subject that is doing the doubting. Since doubting is a form of thinking, Descartes concludes "I think therefore I am" (Latin: cogito ergo sum). I can't doubt my own existence, because in order to do so, I have to surreptitiously affirm my existence. I am the one who doubts my own existence. So it is impossible to doubt one's own existence. On a practical level, he can't really doubt that 2 + 3 = 5 either, but there is a logically possible scenario that allows him to do so. There is no such scenario where he can doubt his own existence: in every possible world where he tries to doubt his existence, he exists.

From this foundation, Descartes tries to reestablish his beliefs about everything else, but on a much surer footing. He goes from his own existence to God to the physical world and other people, etc. It is at this point that many philosophers reject his arguments -- not that they necessarily deny these things are real, but that Descartes can't really prove them. And of course, there have been plenty of philosophers who have argued that one can deny one's own existence, such as David Hume and Peter Unger. Nevertheless, Descartes's evil demon argument has been one of the most influential ideas in philosophical history.