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In his latest ‘The Stone’ column at NYTimes.com, Mary and the Zombies: Can Science Explain Consciousness?, Gary Gutting admits that non-Philosophers might conceivably have something useful to say (even though he has to add the usual BS  “Of course, professional philosophers have technical resources that non-philosophers lack“).

Frankly I doubt that anything useful will be said though, because I suspect that no-one has anything useful (and new) to say on this particularly ill-posed question.

But since I am a no-one,  I’ll have a go anyhow.

I “liked”  the comment by ‘Jason’ who said

The other comments (thank goodness!) have already outlined all the reasons that these thought experiments don’t hold any argumentative force. I once spent two weeks reading into this literature convinced I had missed something critical about zombies and Mary and Chinese rooms and bats. How else could all these people take seriously such manifestly flimsy arguments? It turns out there is nothing more here than some philosophers incorrectly assuming that their intuitions mean something interesting. Let’s stop talking about bad question-begging thought experiments.

But despite my frustration with the presumptions of (many) professional Philosophers, I do feel that this is a bit too harsh. If the focus was not on “explaining consciousness” but rather on exploring what we mean when we talk about it, then Philosophers, while not uniquely qualified, might have a useful job to do by way of helping to clarify when people are talking at cross-purposes and perhaps seeming to disagree when they really do not. (At least they should be good at it since I see almost the entire history of philosophical argument as being exactly of that nature.)

Commenter ‘Paul M’ says

Both thought experiments assume their conclusions in their premises. 

In Experiment One, what is the “fact” that Mary learns when she sees red? If the answer is that the “fact” is her subjective experience of the color red, then all this thought experiment has done is define subjective experience as a “fact.” It hasn’t demonstrated that it is, and it certainly does not demonstrate that this “fact” is not physical. By saying, in the premises, that Mary knows all physical facts about red, but has not experienced seeing red, an implicit assumption is made that experiencing red is not a physical phenomena. But that is what the experiment is supposed to demonstrate. So the conclusion is assumed in the premises, and the experiment doesn’t demonstrate anything. 

Experiment Two has the same problem. By postulating a physically identical zombie without any of the same subjective experiences, a separation between physical and subjective is simply assumed. If you don’t’ believe that such a zombie is possible, then this experiment does nothing to establish that there is a separation between subjective experience and the physical world. Again, by assuming the possibility of such a zombie, the conclusion is simply assumed in the premises. 

Most importantly, what is “physical”? As Chomsky points out in his talk “The Machine, the Ghost, and the Limits of Understanding,” we presently have no coherent answer. So the physical/subjective dichotomy is incoherent.

Here I almost decided not to quote the last paragraph because I don’t actually think the dichotomy is “incoherent” although perhaps most expressions of it have been.

The essence of the issue of “qualia” and the experience (as opposed to the phenomenon) of consciousness is that the experience is entirely and essentially subjective. It cannot be communicated by description or even by direct neuronal stimulation since even if I create in zombie you the exact same pattern of neuronal stimulation and hormonal responses that occur in person me there is no way for me to tell whether the resulting experience in you is the same as in me.  We can agree on what red “looks like” because we will agree on what things look red,  and we can understand what it “feels like” on the basis of emotional connections we make with the fact of seeing red (on the basis of either experience or instinct). But we seem unable to imagine that there is not some aspect of the redness we experience which is more than the sum of its associations. The pattern of uncomfortable confusion we feel when we try to imagine a different version of “redness” can probably be dismissed as identifiable with some kind of biochemical response to the “churning” of our neuronic computational circuits, and in that sense  “our” private version of “redness”  may even be explainable, but to explain something is not necessarily to explain it away and even when “explained” that sense may be hard (or even impossible) to eliminate.

Commenter ‘Graham Anderson’ says

When Mary awakens from her operation and sees the red roses, she has then become a red-seeing mind. Previously, she understood everything there is to know about red-seeing minds, but was not one herself. When the phenomenon that Mary *is* changes, it does not give her a new fact. She simply has new experiences, the products of the change in state of her mind. 

. . .

I believe we are talking about two distinct concepts: knowing about something, and being that thing. The two concepts are easily confused when we’re talking about a human mind, for which knowing and being are eerily similar.

Similarly, even if consciousness is explained as the process of laying down recoverable memories this does not undo my feeling of consciousness – or even prove that that feeling is not actually unique to me alone.

Ultimately, the “resolution” to this issue may have to be that there is no way I can ever tell whether or not the rest of you are zombies, but the prospect that you are entails such a terrifying sense of godlike loneliness that I have no choice but to credit you with the same consciousness as I feel myself. (And then it’s a normative question – why should I not also credit zombie Mary with consciousness as well? and to a lesser extent my cat? or even this computer?)

It’s an interesting coincidence that just a few days after my posting on the discussion at ‘Butterflies and Wheels‘, the topic of Philosophy’s relevance was taken up by Paul Horwich in ‘the Stone’  at NYTimes.com (though fortunately with less dismissive rudeness in Michael Lynch’s response).

According to Horwich

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

(If)Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. . . .(then) we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress — by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues. Therefore traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to a painstaking identification of its tempting but misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate. But in that case, he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble)” — and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”

further

We might boil (Wittgenstein’s position) down to four related claims.

— The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic: its primary goals, which are to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover profound explanations, and to correct naïve opinions, are taken from the sciences. And this is undoubtedly the case.

—The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth — is in tension with those goals.  That’s because our concepts exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes.  As a consequence the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate, and differ dramatically from one concept to another. Moreover, it is not possible (as it is within empirical domains) to accommodate superficial complexity by means of simple principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic) level.

— The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy — an immediate consequence of the first two — is that traditional philosophy is necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed.

— Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must avoid theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead.

and

Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts —true, good, object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not only irrational, but unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality is scientism.

As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:

Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.

These radical ideas are not obviously correct, and may on close scrutiny turn out to be wrong. But they deserve to receive that scrutiny — to be taken much more seriously than they are. Yes, most of us have been interested in philosophy only because of its promise to deliver precisely the sort of theoretical insights that Wittgenstein argues are illusory. But such hopes are no defense against his critique. Besides, if he turns out to be right, satisfaction enough may surely be found in what we still can get — clarity, demystification and truth.

Horwich presents (this view of ) Witgenstein’s position as worthy of consideration (but without wholeheartedly endorsing it)

Lynch responds

According to HW (Horwich’s Wittgenstein), we get trapped in our glass cages because we philosophers fetishize science’s success in giving reductive explanations. A reductive explanation of X is one that tells us the underlying essence of X – that says what all and only X’s have in common. As HW points out, the concepts philosophers are interested in seem highly resistant to this sort of analysis. And this is something we could appreciate if we just paid attention to the role such concepts really play in our thought and language. Once we do so, we’ll see that traditional philosophical answers to its traditional questions are “mistakes of perverse overgeneralization.”

But

First, just because we can’t reductively (“scientifically”) define something doesn’t mean we can’t say something illuminating about it. Go back to HW’s account of truth. He assumes that there is either a single nature of truth (and we can reductively define it) or that truth has no nature at all. But why think these are the only two choices?

and

So no uniform reductive explanation perhaps, but illumination just the same.

This brings me to the second way that I think HW’s metaphilosophy overgeneralizes. According to HW, philosophy is purely descriptive; it should “leave the world as it is” — only describe how we think and talk, and stop at that.

I think philosophy can play a more radical role. Return to our fly. Wittgenstein was not the first to compare the philosopher to one, nor the most famous. That award goes to Socrates, who claimed that the role of the philosopher was to act as a gadfly to the state. This is a very different metaphor. Leaving the world as it is isn’t what gadflies do. They bite. As I see it, so can philosophers: they not only describe how we think, they get us to change our way of thinking — and sometimes our ways of acting. Philosophy is not just descriptive: it is normative.

This is most obvious with ethical questions. Locke’s view that there are human rights, for example, didn’t leave the world as it was, nor was it intended to. Or consider the question of what we ought to believe – the central question of epistemology. As I’ve argued here at The Stone before, questions about the proper extent and efficacy of reasons aren’t just about what is, they are about what should be. In getting more people to adopt new evidence-based standards of rationality — as the great enlightenment philosophers arguably did —philosophers aren’t just leaving the world as they found it. And that is a good thing.

Lynch ends with

Philosophy is not science. Knowing how we ordinarily use our concepts of truth, or personhood or causation is important. Wittgenstein was certainly right that philosophers get into muddles by ignoring these facts. Yet even when it comes to the abstract concerns of metaphysics, philosophy can and should aspire to be more than just a description of the ordinary. That is because sometimes the ordinary is mistaken. Sometimes it is the familiar from which we need liberating — in part because our ordinary concepts themselves have a history, a history that is shaped in part by certain metaphysical assumptions.

Consider the idea that the real essence of truth is Authority — that is, what is true is whatever God, or the King or The Party commands or accepts. This is a reductive definition, one that still lurks in the background of many people’s worldviews. It has also been used over the centuries to stifle dissent and change. In order to free us from these sorts of thoughts, the philosopher must not only show the error in such definitions. She must also take conceptual leaps. She must aim at revision as much as description, and sketch new metaphysical theories, replacing old explanations with new. She must risk the fly bottle.

Perhaps it’s an annual event there since it’s almost exactly a year since Gary Gutting addressed the same question in the same place.

If you think that the only possible “use” of philosophy would be to provide a foundation for beliefs that need no foundation, then the conclusion that philosophy is of little importance for everyday life follows immediately.  But there are other ways that philosophy can be of practical significance.

Even though basic beliefs on ethics, politics and religion do not require prior philosophical justification, they do need what we might call “intellectual maintenance,” which itself typically involves philosophical thinking.  Religious believers, for example, are frequently troubled by the existence of horrendous evils in a world they hold was created by an all-good God.  Some of their trouble may be emotional, requiring pastoral guidance.  But religious commitment need not exclude a commitment to coherent thought. For instance, often enough believers want to know if their belief in God makes sense given the reality of evil.  The philosophy of religion is full of discussions relevant to this question.  Similarly, you may be an atheist because you think all arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious. But if you encounter, say, a sophisticated version of the cosmological argument, or the design argument from fine-tuning, you may well need a clever philosopher to see if there’s anything wrong with it.

and

The perennial objection to any appeal to philosophy is that philosophers themselves disagree among themselves about everything, so that there is no body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can rely.  It’s true that philosophers do not agree on answers to the “big questions” like God’s existence, free will, the nature of moral obligation and so on.  But they do agree about many logical interconnections and conceptual distinctions that are essential for thinking clearly about the big questions.   Some examples: thinking about God and evil requires the key distinction between evil that is gratuitous (not necessary for some greater good) and evil that is not gratuitous; thinking about free will requires the distinction between a choice’s being caused and its being compelled; and thinking about morality requires the distinction between an action that is intrinsically wrong (regardless of its consequences) and one that is wrong simply because of its consequences.  Such distinctions arise from philosophical thinking, and philosophers know a great deal about how to understand and employ them.  In this important sense, there is body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can and should rely.

In an interview a month earlier (for 3am magazine), Gutting had said something similar.

Over its history, philosophy has accumulated an immense store of conceptual distinctions, theoretical formulations, and logical arguments that are essential for this intellectual maintenance of our defining convictions. This constitutes a body of knowledge achieved by philosophers that they can present with confidence to meet the intellectual needs of non-philosophers. Consider, for example, discussions of free will. Even neuroscientists studying freedom in their labs are likely to offer confused interpretations of their results if they aren’t aware of the distinction between caused and compelled, the various meanings of “could have done otherwise”, or the issues about causality raised by van Inwagen’s consequence argument. Parallel points apply for religious people thinking about the problem of evil or atheists challenged to explain why they aren’t just agnostics. Philosophers can’t show what our fundamental convictions should be, but their knowledge is essential to our ongoing intellectual engagement with these convictions.

Now it’s my turn.

From what I can gather,  the experiment referred to in this discussion may have just involved transmitting the excitation pattern of motor neurons associated with pressing the (say) left button rather than transmitting any “conceptual” association of that button with the subsequent reward. The receiving rat would then reflexively press the left button and after getting the reward might then be reinforced and so have “learned” the association on the basis of its own experience. What would be needed to demonstrate the transmission of anything close to learning would be for stimulation of the receiving rat prior to exposure to the apparatus to have the effect of increasing its likelihood of making  a subsequent correct choice while NOT stimulated.

I wish the name of Gordon Brown didn’t always take the lead in these promotions but I don’t know of any more effective way of promoting the cause of women’s education around the world – and I do think that cause is perhaps the most important one in the air right now.

My previous post refers to some aspects of Godel’s famous theorems about incompleteness in mathematics. But since the context which brought them to mind was a posting on an atheist blog it’s ironic that Godel believed he had a proof of the existence of God.

The irony is compounded by the fact that he was allegedly reluctant to publish the proof because he was worried that people might think that he actually did believe in God – but in fact he apparently did! Of course he also went essentially mad, but his wife claimed that he read the bible regularly and he once described himself as “baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza.”

And among his papers at death was a page entitled ‘My Philosophical Viewpoint’ which lists fourteen points including:
1. The world is rational
10. Materialism is false
and
14. Religions are, for the most part, bad – but religion is not.

In the light of the way he expressed the undecidability results in his 1951 Gibbs lecture (“Either . . . the human mind . . . infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine, or else there exist absolutely unsolvable diophantine problems”), perhaps the result of his God proof should be expressed as “Either God exists or Modal Logic is fundamentally flawed”. As for me, not having either the will or the capacity to get into modal logic, it could go either way – or perhaps I could say that, within the powers of *my* human mind, both questions are undecidable.

In the discussions following Landon’s Guest Post @» Butterflies and Wheels (on the value in philosophical training) there is an exchange between Landon and Harald Hanche-Olsen on the question of whether Logic is a branch of Philosophy or Mathematics. I make no claim on logic per se, but the Boolean Algebra which models its basics is a branch of mathematics and that relatively trivial bit is all that has relevance to computers – which is what Landon was on about, but that is not what I want to look at here.

Further down in that exchange the question of Godel’s proofs came up (though that definitely has nothing to do with real computers!) and Landon made some claims that I had to dispute. (In particular he denied the relevance of the well known restriction to systems which include a model for the natural numbers). This led me to revisit the little book by Nagel and Newman – and actually there is still a gap in my understanding. On page 78 N&N show how the statement that formula x is a leading part of formula y corresponds to the Godel number for x being a factor in that for y. So far so good, but on page 79 they assert that there is a similar but more complicated arithmetic characterization of the statement that number z is the Godel number for a proof of the statement with Godel number x. This seems quite plausible but I have never checked it. It could be considered an ‘exercise’ but it might be a hard one to actually carry out in detail. But that’s not the issue I want to address here either.

In order to point out the silliness of claiming that the restriction to systems which include the natural numbers is irrelevant it is of course necessary to identify a mathematical system which does not include them. Simple Boolean Algebra is one – whose consistency is in fact provable. But given Landon’s position, that might not be an effective example. Other algebraic structures naturally come to mind – except for the awkwardness that they are often (though probably not essentially so) set up in terms of a “set” of objects and so it might look at least superficially as if the axioms therefore presuppose those of ZF set theory which does include a model of the natural numbers (and on to just about everything else). Then I thought “aha the existence of Finite Geometries must show that the Euclidean axioms don’t imply the ability to construct a full model of the Natural numbers”. But fortunately I checked before posting and noted that only the incidence axioms were listed – which is fine for my purposes but raises the question of whether the standard Euclidean geometry could have been used as an example. If I had thrown out my first thought there, it would not have taken an expert to see that I was wrong (or at least hadn’t thought carefully enough about which of the often not clearly itemized axioms I was referring to). Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with high school Euclidean Geometry could have said “But Euclidean geometry allows you to construct the mid-point between any two points, and if you then construct the mid-point between that and one of the first two, and so on then don’t you get an infinite sequence of distinct points which could be identified with the ordinal numbers?” and I would have had to stop and think about what goes into that mid-point construction which has been left out of the axioms in terms of which finite models do exist.

In mathematics, and actually I suspect in other disciplines as well, it is often newcomers who make the major advances because those new to the field are less encumbered by either repeatedly reinforced preconceptions or masses of irrelevant detail. If I can be excused a bit of a play on words: they may be expert but they are not yet experts.

Ophelia Benson’s post on Patricia Churchland’s 2011 book ‘braintrust’ points out that, in contrast to the efforts of Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, Churchland makes a much more modest claim for what she is doing. Indeed Churchland’s claim “is not that science will wade in and tell us for every dilemma what is right or wrong. Rather, the point is that a deeper understanding of what it is that makes humans and other animals social, and what it is that disposes us to care about others, may lead to greater understanding of how to cope with social problems.” Harris on the other hand, and to a lesser extent Shermer, does seem to be claiming the goal of determining what is right or wrong rather than just how people in a certain context might judge it. I was happy to see this point made in a relatively high profile setting as it seems very much in line with my own earlier criticisms of Harris

But a parenthetical comment in Ophelia’s first paragraph has prompted a discussion orthogonal to that of whether science answers moral questions – namely (but putting it a bit crudely) does philosophy do so either?

And I think an exploration and continuation of that discussion may be relevant to concerns some Philosophers seem to have about public perception of their discipline – perhaps including the recent “Physics vs Philosophy” wars. Continue reading →

I do NOT want my cable fees used to pay for biased propaganda that undermines the caring culture that I have chosen to live in (and which, with bad luck, I may one day have to depend on).

Those who want this garbage are not prevented from buying it but please do NOT force me to join them!Sign the AVAAZ petition.

I heard about this Complexity Explorer course via Stephen Downes and have decided to enrol.

Our experience always involves a lot of complexity which we typically manage by isolating just a few quantities of interest which are related by compactly expressible relationships. I am curious to see whether “complexity theory” really proposes general methods for dealing with cases where this is not possible – or whether it just consists of introducing some particular new ways of extracting simplified models from more complex ones.

Alain de Botton Proposes a Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success.

And at the Atlantic Alexis Madrigal responds to Jack Dorsey on the role of luck (in addition to hard work and genius) in the making of a great success story.

Something similar came to mind when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates (also at the Atlantic) discussing the challenges faced by daily newspaper columnists, and frankly wondering whether he could meet them himself. But my response is that actually no-one can, and the annointing by newspaper editors of a precious few with the gift of that platform is an insult to those who pay for the papers. (Though I have to admit that if people continue to pay for it then it’s not surprising that that’s what the papers will continue to dish out.)

Whether it’s access to audience via a media pulpit, to political power, or to money, the fact is that there’s an instability in the sense that once you have a certain amount it becomes easier to get more – or as the Bible says “Unto him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away – even that which he hath”.

According to G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón, “Conscious Capitalism” Will Be The Framework For Your Next Decade Of Innovation, but I’m more inclined to Mr Garth’s skeptical position on this,

This idea of “doing well by doing good” is fine up to a point, but ultimately it amounts to a denial rather than an affirmation of any non-monetary values.

If doing the right thing leads to increased profits that’s all well and good and deserves pointing out, but since seekers of profit will always find it, such pointing out is not really necessary. The challenging situations are those where the claim that doing the right thing will lead to increased profit are either false or hard to prove. In such cases, the only way to get the profit motive to drive business in the right direction is to ensure that it does so by adding costs to doing the wrong thing. This means regulations with enforced penalties of a serious magnitude.

End of story.

ThinkProgress reports that Lomborg Urges Climate Inaction With Misleading Stats In Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

This is the same guy who first threw up a wall of phoney statistical arguments against the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming and then when they had all been refuted said effectively “Well ok it is happening but we don’t need to do anything about it”. This would have been ok (in a moral sense) if he had really believed the first position, but he is too smart for that and I am sure that he presented his anti-AGW argument in the full knowledge that it was bogus.

The most important point to note about this guy is that he is prepared to adopt any argument in support of his goal of inaction but will drop it as soon as its capacity for creating further delay becomes weakened. The fact that he adopts positions that he probably knows are untenable just to create delay is what is most offensive, but may also eventually come to be recognized if the point is made often enough.

Sadly he is not unique. There are people on both sides who adopt positions with regard to climate change (and the choice of optimal response to it) who do so with less regard to the validity of their arguments than to whether or not they support some ulterior motive.

William M. Briggs claims that Women In Combat Results In A Suboptimal Military but his argument belies his supposed expertise in statistics.

I am taller and stronger than the average woman, but only around the 80th percentile. So 20% of women are physically stronger than me. I could probably dominate half of those by virtue of a more highly testosterone-fuelled aggressive nature, but that leaves about one woman in ten who could probably have whupped my ass in my prime if properly trained to. If I had been in the right age cohort and location I could easily have passed muster to enter combat-ready military service, but one of those “nasty” women would have been a better protector for my country. It only makes sense to pre-select on the basis of population averages when the variable(s) of interest are hard to assess directly.
Perhaps Mr Briggs needs to (re?)learn some statistics.

Of course this is not to say that there is a case for demanding “equity” in the form of equal representation of genders or for any lesser reduction in the qualities required of a female as opposed to a male soldier, but the fact is that when much of modern combat is enacted from what is essentially the console of a video game it is less physical strength than various mental capacities which should control the selection.

Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School studies placebos | Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2013.

One of the most intriguing points was that even a placebo identified as such to the patient can have a beneficial effect. So perhaps whatever benefit people derive from religious rituals does not require insistence on actual belief from the participants.

On the other hand, the subjective relief from the placebo (even when not identified as such) is apparently usually not matched by any objective improvement in the actual pathological condition. (The mental effects may have objective manifestations in brain chemistry or whatever of course, but the underlying illness and physical damage continues to progress.)

Masking pain, or feeling good about life, can be a valuable goal but should not be allowed to divert attention from effective treatment of a curable illness – or from giving effective attention to the ills of the world around us.

Using the click2play option, a page needing JAVA (or any other plugin) requests permission to run it (which I can ignore if I don’t both trust the source and need the service).

This is the only sensible option anyhow when other plugins also have occasional security issues and always take up resources which are best left available to other applications until the plugin is actually needed.

So why has James Fallows joined the latest anti-JAVA panic which has the effect of having people shut themselves off completely from useful tools on trusted sites?

…because I have freely decided to do it!

Those who claim to have evidence that “you probably don’t have free will” or who assert that complex chaotic systems’ unpredictability “is what gives you free will” are both either unprincipled or naive in accepting that the idea of “free will” has any absolute meaning.

I have yet to see a coherent definition of what it would mean to have, as opposed to not have, free will. But I cannot follow along with the game of debunking the concept by refuting a definition that was proposed in order to debunk the concept.
On the other hand, if Dennett is right in his claim that “Philosophers have done some real work that the scientists jolly well should know” then I’d like to see a brief sample of what he considers the best (just in case there’s a chance that looking further wouldn’t be wasting my time).

One has to wonder why anyone would rework a song like R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” from Minor to Major Scale, though I suppose at least it serves someone’s political purpose. But to do the same with the Doors ‘Riders of the Storm’ really does just convert a great song to Muzak

Actually I prefer to go the other way, especially with national anthems (for which the American one becomes quite beautiful and particularly appropriate for anyone disappointed at the apparent failure of an enterprise of great promise)

Spanish Runner, Ivan Fernandez Anaya, gave up the opportunity to take advantage of a misunderstanding by his opponent and then was sincerely frank about why he did so.

This doesn’t change my opinion as to the silliness of high-stakes athletic competition but it can’t help but raise the spirit with regard to how decent people can be when the stakes may be high but are not cranked up to ridiculous levels.

It is clear from the video that Abel Mutai was confused by a change of track colour rather than experiencing a failure of strength or will, so I suppose Anaya had good reason to think that it would be unfair to win (if one thinks of the race as a purely physical contest). But what I particularly like is his frankness about his own motives.

At the end of the El Pais report he is quoted as saying “Of course it would be another thing if there was a world or European medal at stake. Then, I think that, yes, I would have exploited it to win… But I also think that I have earned more of a name having done what I did than if I had won. And that is very important, because today, with the way things are in all circles, in soccer, in society, in politics, where it seems anything goes, a gesture of honesty goes down well”

William M. Briggslaments the abuse of statistics in many of its applications. But I really think that he undermines his case when he attacks “classical statistics” itself rather than its abuse. Such abuse is definitely all too common in many fields but it is just not true that “*Every* analysis begins by assuming more than is warranted”(emphasis added). And on the other side of the argument the “superior” alternate (Bayesian/predictive) methods he advocates are just as susceptible to abuse as the old – perhaps more so as they are arguably harder to explain than the classical theory and so people are more inclined to take the word of an “expert” on faith rather than really understand the assumptions that it comes from.

I have always thought that if anyone had a brain the financial world should have collapsed when the US “debt ceiling” was first enacted, since it amounts to a declaration of total financial irresponsibility by the largest participant in that world[1].

I wish that I could have got away with the same thing myself – but who would have given me a mortgage or credit card if I had loudly announced that once my debts exceeded a certain amount I would stop paying them off?[2].

Continue reading →