Scottish Nous

Past Blogging Hiatus

Here's a belated apology for not blogging recently (supposing you really care).  I just returned from a visit with my sister in St. Maarten in the Netherland Antilles (or the West Indies, since that sounds so much more romantic).  So obviously, I'm not a bit sorry that I haven't been blogging (frolicking on pristine beaches through the Carribean surf with scantily clad - if clad - women takes precedence over blogging in my book), but I am sorry if you checked this site on a daily basis in expectation of reading my witty, insightful postings only to find nothing new.  But never fear, for blogging will soon resume.

Sunday Sermonette

I'll post a slightly unusual Sunday Sermonette this week.  Bertrand Russell is always perfect for this feature, and I suppose one can derive at least one moral lesson from this quoted material.  But really, I just find it hilarious.  If you haven't read Heinlein, you need to.  From Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, where Valentine Michael Smith learns why humans laugh:

But today even the misanthropy of camels could not shake Mike's moodiness.  Nor did monkeys and apes cheer him up.  They stood in front of a cage containing a family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom, and swarm aimlessly around, while Jill tossed them peanuts.

She tossed one to a monk; before he coult eat it a larger male not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating.  The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he pounded his knuckles against the floor and chattered helpless rage.  Mike watched solemnly.

Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed across the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a dubbing worse than the one he had suffered.  The third monk crawled away, whimpering.  The other monks paid no attention.

Mike threw back his head and laughed - and went on laughing, uncontrollably.  He gasped for breath, started to tremble and stink to the floor, still laughing.

Bertrand Russell, twenty-nine years earlier:

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ’The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race. -Education and the Social Order

Heinlein's final thought:

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more effective ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all other ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.  Man was his own grimmest joke on himself.  The very bedrock of humor was --

"Man is the animal who laughs," Jubal answered.

 

When Ghosts Attack

I came home last night to find my roommate watching typical late night local television station fare in the form of "Unexplained Mysteries: When Ghosts Attack".  A certain Midwest bozo who refused to show his face (perhaps to conceal his well-deserved claim to be a big liar) alleged that the ghost/spirit "Sallie" was attacking him at random times, leaving scratch marks (from fingernails, of course) on his flesh.  This prompted the producers of the show to bring in "paranormal researchers" (with thermometers) and a large camera crew (with cameras) to substantiate that claim.  Their uber-sensitive thermometers detected temperature fluctuations in the room of up to one half of one degree Fahrenheit, evidence that was taken to corroborate the reported experiences of cool spots in the portions of the room the ghost was passing through.  I must say it's very depressing to watch people walk through a room waving their hands in the air and claiming to use their epidermis to detect temperature fluctuations of up to one half of one degree Fahrenheit as chills from the spirit realm.  But, as Majikthise reports here, 32% of Americans believe the dead come back to haunt us. 

More amusement (or despair - we often use laughter as a defense mechanism against that which we find painful) was provided by the cameraman filming the "paranormal researcher" who could "see and talk to the dead".  As he stood at the base of some stairs we could not look up, he pointed a crooked finger towards the landing and uttered in a hushed voice, "There's a little girl up there."  Perhaps the man operating the camera was just frightened, but as far as I could tell he didn't think it at all important to give us a shot of the top of the stairs.  I mean, for a show like this, who would want to catch a ghost on film?   More shots of the conman talking to the off-camera ghost of Sallie followed.  Perhaps the cameraman wasn't frightened, but rather just didn't want to scare the ghost away?  Are ghosts scared of cameras?  (I wonder if Ayer and/or other verificationists would take this as a meaningful question?  I think the answer should be yes, but that it happens to exhibit presupposition failure.)

Despite the eleven scratching attacks that occured throughout the night in the camera-rigged haunted house, and despite the some dozen repeated assertions that nobody could doubt the attacks were taking place since they had been caught on film, the producers didn't think it important to provide footage of any of these attacks (unless you count footage of a man with fingernail scratches on his belly as proof of paranormal phenomena).  I really wonder why.  Thinking about all the idiots at their workplaces today who are appealing to the the non-existent video footage of a ghost attack as evidence of the reliability of their malfunctioning cognitive apparati is very disconcerting:  "I told you so, you poor, close-minded skeptic!  The scientists on KGNU last night even showed pictures!"  Yes they did.  Pictures of the flabby belly of a sado-masochistic liar with sharp fingernails.

If You Doubt This Is Possible, How Is It There are PYGMIES + DWARVES?

Pharyngula's blog is a laugh riot, and I've been suitably cheered up since my last post by the title line, leveraged by creationist Jim Pinkoski in defense of the claim that Adam and Noah were giants.  ("There were giants in the Earth in those days." Genesis 6:4)  See Pharyngula's post here for the cartoon and to acquaint yourself with the newly coined use of this line as the defense for any ridiculous claim.  More of Pinkoski's creationist comics can be found here and here and here and here (with commentary by Pharyngula).  The last link features Lucifer leading hordes of ravenous dinosaurs in an attack on Noah's Ark - with scientific proof of this event to boot!  For the creationists who find this post, I provide a special link to a Planned Parenthood cartoon entitled "How Pregnancy Happens".

Scoble Rant

Majikthise is always amusing and thought provoking, though sometimes I find her blog can be a source of massive irritation.  Today, for example, my morning blog browsing habit got off to a bad start when my hackles were raised by this post about Robert Scoble's imbecilic defense of Microsoft's pact with China to ban words like "human rights" and "freedom" from the Chinese variant of their blogging service.  A quick glance at Scoble's post suggests that he barely has an IQ high enough to grunt.  First, Scoble points to his spam non-deletion policy as evidence for his commitment to the First Amendment.  Come again?  What obscene comments I get here I promptly delete, and I don't see how that has any relevance whatsoever to my position on freedom of speech.  This is my blog, and I can delete whatever comments from it I please without trampling upon anyone's right to freedom of speech.  Nobody's constitutional right to freedom of speech includes the provision that they be allowed to post whatever they want on my blog.

Next, Scoble spews more retarded nonsense when he babbles on (almost unintelligbly) about "forcing the Chinese" into a "position they don't believe in."  Does Scoble actually believe that he could force the hand of China?  Or does "they" refer collectively to the members of China who are in unanimous agreement on the desirability of banning words like "freedom"?  And since when does the refusal to provide a censored blogging service at the whim of fascist fucktard regime constitute forcing "people" into "a position 'they' don't believe in"?  If all the Chinese really did want a censored blogging service, I'm quite confident that someone would provide it.  The failure of one particular company to provide such a service is forcing absolutely nothing upon the Chinese.  Unfortunately, moral weaklings Scoble and Bill Gates have happily turned themselves into "Beijing's bitches". 

The post degrades further.  Next, Scoble appeals to his conversations with students and professors as indicative of the perspective of the Chinese majority who have a right to force whatever immoral laws they want upon the rest of the populace at large, violating the human rights of the oppressed which they aren't allowed to speak about, and shockingly states that he "has no right" to use "business power" (by opposing the provision of a government sanctioned censored blogging service) in a coercive fashion.  This suggests that Scoble believes he has a moral duty to provide said censored service at the whim of fascist fucktards.  Will someone tell me how this monkey got a job?  Microsoft should take Google's hiring practices as a model and stop employing people who are dumber than stumps.

Stealing God's Babies

J. Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has published his raving fatuities for all to read here.  In the article, which states amongst other things that "marriage, sex and children are part of one package", Mohler actually expresses incredulity at married couples capable of having children who choose, for whatever reason, to abstain from reproducing.  Can this really be other than faux incredulity, or is Mohler just that blind to reality?  These damned "modern Americans are determined not only to liberate sex for [sic] marriage [and even from gender], but also from procreation."  Yes, Mohler's position is that you have a divine mandate to procreate, and that furthermore, if you shirk your reproductive duty, you are defrauding the Lord Himself of "His joy and pleasure in seeing the saints raising His children."  Wow.  Not only do those who choose childlessness commit an abominable sin, but they cause a decrease in the happiness of the greatest possible being.  Don't you pity the evil deity who, according to a myth Mohler believes, made childbirth so much hell for women (by ensuring that it was a very painful process), His lost joy and pleasure? [Via NoodleFood]

Sunday Sermonette

At Left2Right, David Velleman provides a pointer to some very sensible remarks by Tuft's philosopher Daniel Dennett.  I admit to being pleasantly surprised upon finding Dennett defending the transcendental foundations of morality by analogy with the transcendental foundations of mathematics, a reaction which I suppose betrays a lack of familiarity with most of Dennett's work and an overly critical attitude towards a philosopher who denies, at least in some confused sense, the existence of consciousness.  This is incredibly geeky, but hearing Dennett compare eternal arithemtical and moral truths with the Platonic forms made my day!

Unfortunately, a vast minority of unthinking religious fanatics subscribe to the view that without God there could be no morality.  This is a well-entrenched belief in numerous fundamentalist circles, even though it has, as far as I can tell, absolutely no rational basis whatsoever.  I'm now going to amuse myself with a historically overused counterpossible sentence construction and suggest that even supposing that God exists, and does in fact somehow (per impossible) provide the foundations for morality, this need not have been the case.  In other words, pace the strange theists I have in mind, things could have been otherwise.  (Amuse yourself by considering the modal implications of the suggestion that a necessary being might not have existed. Now reject S5.)  Dworkin, in Objectivity and Truth: You'd Better Believe It, makes explicit the moral position being criticized:

I gave another example: many people believe that the discovery that God is dead (or otherwise engaged) would be catastrophic for morality. Though, once again, atheism is not itself a positive moral judgment, this argument also requires a premise that is-the premise that God is the one source of moral value, that His will, and that alone, can generate obligation and virtue.

In that article, Dworkin identifies the overly "familiar claim that since there is no God morality is bunk".  Theists run a modus tollens, stating that if there were no God, morality would be bunk, but since there are moral truths, God must exist.  Dennett effectively equates this modus tollens with the equally absurd argument for God's existence from necessary mathematical propositions.  Because it's funny, I'll extensively quote Bahnsen quoting and expanding upon Van Til in Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis:

Van Til did not address specific disuptes between philosophers or contemporary debates regarding possibility, but he realized that Christians are committed to hold certain beliefs about possibility that unbelievers will reject.  "It is today more evident than ever before that it is exactly on those most fundamental matters, such as possibility and probability, that there is the greatest difference of opinon between theist and anti-theists."  To put it simply and memorably: "Non-believers have false assumptions about their musts."  Van Til was particularly keen to observe that "abstract possibility" must not be "placed higher than God" - a metaphor for asserting that God is not enveloped (and does not have His source) in a broader kind of "possibility"; rather, there are no "possibilities" that are independent of Him, His knowledge, or His plan.  "The meaning of the word possibility is first determined by the God who has spoken to sinners through the book [the Bible].  That, and only that, is possible which the God of the Bible determines."  So the antithesis with unbelieving thought is felt at this most basic philosophical level.  "For the Christian, God legislates as to what is possible and what is impossible for man.  For the non-Christian, man determines this for himself.  Either positively or negatively the non-Christian will determine the field of possibility and therewith the stream of history by means of the law of contradiction.  This means that for the non-Christian the concepts that he employs while using the law of contradiction are taken to be exhaustive of the 'essence of the thing' they seek to express.  Van Til detected subtle intellectual arrogance even in the way unbelievers treat possibility.  "The law of non-contradiction employed positively or negatively by man assuming his own ultimacy, is made the standard of what is possible or impossible, both for men and for whatever 'gods' may be.  But on this basis the Bible cannot speak to man or any God whose revelation and whose very nature is not essentially penetrable to the natural intellect of man."  Neither man's mind nor "reason" has the prerogative of deciding whether a thing is possible or impossible.

In this confused passage we get an explicit affirmation of the thesis Dennett criticizes with the mere substitution of modality for mathematics or morality.  Van Til, in fact, goes on to explicitly claim that God is (and must be!) the source of all possibility.  The same lack of clarity evidenced in the similar claims of other theist resurfaces here, as for example where Bahnsen uses a metaphor ("enveloped") to explain a metaphor ("possibility... placed higher than God").   It is unfortunate that bizaree and false claims such as these are so effectively propogated amongst the uneducated religious by this sort of psychobabble.

Dennett is especially clear on one point: we discovered - as opposed to invented - mathematics.  The alleged arrogance of the enlightened man is that he believes in the openeness of reality to discovery.  It is a fundamental pressuposition of rationalism and realism that there is a way the world is, and that, moreover, we human persons are in a privileged position that permits us to investigate the way the world is and discover true propositions that describe it.  One of our faculties that makes possible this discovery of the way the world is we call "reason", and using reason (and rational intuition), we can arrive at decisions about what is and is not possible.  Thus I can confidently assert that it is not possible for Berkeley College to be topped with round square cupolas, God be damned.  That's because, like truths of arithematic and morality, truths about modality are features of the world that can be discovered by men using reason.  Are you arrogant or not?  I sure as hell am.

Let's end with a quote from Dennett in response to Robert Wright's question:

RW: I guess the question is: You don't see belief in God, or even belief in any kind of higher power or even a belief in a transcendent foundation for morality...  You don't see any of that as really necessary as far as creating good behavior goes?

DD: Let's talk about "transcendence" and "morality".  One of the things that we have evolved to discover on this planet is arithmetic.  We didn't invent it.  We didn't make it.  We found it.  It is eternal, a priori, true.  It's just great stuff.  And it's true everywhere in the universe.  It's true everywhere in any universe.  There's only one arithemetic. Now is that transcendence? I would say, Yeah... I don't know, for sure, what you mean by transcendence... It's a sort of Platonism...  We've discovered it, and it's true.  Now could there be a sort of similarly Platonic ethics?  Could we find the universal principles of good behavior for intelligent beings?  I'm agnostic about that.  I don't see why we couldn't.  I don't see that the parochialism of our concerns would necessarily stand in the way.  We could ask the same questions about ethics that we ask about arithmetic.

Everything Bad is Good For You

Steve Berlin Johnson, who has a blog here, has posted about his Daily Show interview (BitTorrent) regarding his new book with a logically contradictory title: Everything Bad is Good for You.  It is, of course, simply false to assert that something which is bad for you is also good for you, at least in the same respect or with reference to the same set of contextually relevant interests that badness is ascribed.  This suggests at least two readings of the book's title.  One might think that the word "bad" should be mentioned rather than used, and furthermore, mentioned in such a way that it metaphorically refers to the class of things people commonly, though allegedly mistakenly, consider to be bad.  (For example, Steve Johnson seems to think that most people consider playing video games and watching television to be bad for you.  He claims these activities make one smarter.  I suppose I should leave the logic texts behind and play Pong instead.  These activities are not intrinsically bad, of course, but the average American youth watches 60 days worth of television out of every year.  Clearly, the average American youth is not brilliant.)  For another reading, suggested above, contextualism could be invoked.  Peter Geach famously argued that "good" functions always as a predicative adjective modifier rather than a predicative adjective.  While this is assuredly false, it at least seems to be the case most of the time.  On Geach's view, to say of something that it is "good" is just to say that it satisfies certain contextually relevant interests taken in the class of things to which the particular utterance "good" is connected to a higher degree than most other members of that class.  Being a good sprinter is not the same as being a good person, for example.  (For an excellent discussion, buy the Soame's book linked in my sidebar.)  You should download the file and watch the interview.  Stewart does a good job of mocking Steven's ridiculous thesis that might be summed up in one variant as follows: the complex plot structure of television shows boosts IQ so much that it should be considered not merely entertainment, but also education for the masses.

Sunday Sermonette

From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Fallacies by David Stove:

From an Enlightenment or Positivist point of view, which is Hume's point of view, and mine, there is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

To read more about Stove see Campbell's Wikipedia entry, visit James Franklin's online collection of some of his writings, including "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" delivered to the Russellian Society and subsequently published in its Proceedings.  If you have institutional access, you may find Jenny Teichman's response, "The Intellectual Capacity of David Stove", online in Philosophy 76 (2001): 149-157.