Comments on Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape

In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris argues for moral realism, and a version of consequentialism in which the proper target for moral concern is the maximization of human well-being. Furthermore, he says the substance of well-being consists in the qualities of conscious experience, and modern neuroscience is giving us the tools to assess conscious states: hence answering moral questions is properly within the domain of science.

Abilities vs. Dispositions

John Maier (of ANU) does research on the philosophy of abilities. I read his SEP article on abilities, and a draft paper entitled “An Agential Theory of Dispositions.” In the latter, he argues that dispositional properties (also known as dispositions, and sometimes powers) can be analyzed in terms of agents' abilities. The idea is that claims about dispositions in the world are a “projection of agent-centric facts about manipulability onto a world whose nature, considered in itself, is exhausted by the categorical.” Since I have been interested in ontological accounts which place dispositions in a central, fundamental role (see list of posts below), I was interested to see Maier’s argument for this alternative proposal.

Philosophers Gently Debating

Philosophy TV is a welcome addition to the web, and I look forward to watching more installments.

I watched Craig Callender and Jonathan Schaffer debate whether metaphysical debates have substance/merit, given recent criticism from other quarters, particularly from philosphers of science. Callender took the skeptical position while Schaffer took the defense. (I posted on a Callender paper on this topic here; a post which touches on some of Schaffer's metaphysical interests is here).

It was a thoughtful discussion, but both gentlemen were so exceedingly polite and deferential, that the points of disagreement took a long time to bring out. Schaffer had a bit easier time being the defender of metaphysics (merelogical examples were the focus): partly this was because Callender doesn't himself consider all metaphysics to be irrelevent, and also because it is very hard to have a detailed account of what's good and what's bad. For instance, asserting that a debate is too unconnected to science isn't sufficient, since we don't know that the debates couldn't have relevance in the future.

Despite an hour and a half, they didn't get to discuss the key issue of whether our modal intuitions should be considered reliable. Anyway, I'll be checking in on other episodes.

Necessary Being(s)

I think there’s a good case to be made for a necessary being (NB), driven by an argument from contingency. But what else can we say about the NB?

I think a lot about the nature of this NB, and have been oscillating between different conceptions. At one pole is a conception of a chaotic and indifferent mega-cosmos which contains every non-contradictory thing as an actual or latent part. Then, I consider incrementally “tamer” NB’s which are shaped by additional necessary features.

To start, it certainly seems plausible that a broad range of logical and mathematical truths are necessary. Perhaps all reality must contain some minimum degree of order, so it can be grasped by reason (although I don’t see why our local physical laws should be thought specifically necessary). Much more controversially, my study of the mind/body problem leads me to suspect all concrete existence is necessarily experiential or proto-experiential in character. And, going further on a limb, where there is experience, there is value: perhaps value and morals are somehow grounded in the nature of the necessary being.

But this project of “taming Chaos” gets increasingly problematic.

Coming at this from the other direction, most people who posit an NB are theists who believe in a personal God with various attributes who sometimes acts as an agent within the world. I don’t see right now how I’d ever get to this conception.

What seems most clear is that the NB must be the maximum instance of existence. Any more specific or idiosyncratic depiction of God runs the risk of being inconsistent with this. (I thought Mark Johnston, in his book Saving God, is good on this point, when he argues that if God is the “highest one”, any devotion to a more specific and hence lesser deity can be seen as idolatry.) This is where “divine simplicity” breaks down, too: the only arguably “simple” NB is the metaphysically maximal one.

Once you layer God with attributes which are derived from human properties, and most obviously if you make God an actor in an earthly drama (rather than him “in whom we live and move and have our being”), it seems clear you’re no longer talking about the NB.

Comments welcome -- this is difficult stuff!

GPPC: New Links

The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium, a non-profit organization formed by area colleges and universities, has a new web address, and also now can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.

The purpose of the GPPC is to promote philosophical inquiry, foster cooperation among philosophers in the region, and also share the insights and methods of philosophy with the larger public.

The site has information on several conferences and programs scheduled for the 2010-2011 academic year, as well as discussion groups, and will include information about other events at member schools. Please check it out. I'm involved in providing support to the GPPC; you can contact me if you're interested in learning more about this.

Is the Universe 2-Dimensional at Short Distances?

We don't have a theory of quantum gravity, but we have a number of research programs on the case. Steve Carlip has a paper (The Small Scale Structure of Spacetime) which discusses an intriguing fact: many of these otherwise disparate programs display or imply the idea that our familiar four dimensional (3 spacelike + 1 timelike) spacetime may be two dimensional (1+1) at high energies/short distances.

If 4 dimensional spacetime is an emergent phase, and the more fundamental physics is comprised of elementary, causally linked, quantum bits of some sort, you might expect this kind of dimensionality.

Here is the physics arxiv blog article on the paper.

Comments on Meillassoux

I enjoyed Quentin Meillassoux’s book (please see my prior post): it is creative and thought-provoking philosophy at its best. I can’t endorse Q.M.’s quest for a “speculative materialism”, but I found his views on the central topics of contingency and necessity (hyper-chaos!) very interesting and challenging to my own opinions.

1. Why Materialism?

I came to Q.M.’s discussion of “ancestrality” and its challenge to “correlationism” from a different perspective: I don’t agree that the right goal involves purging mind from nature, thereby elevating the scientific account as such to truth. (I’m actually not even sure why he wants to be a materialist, as I’ll explain below). I don’t think “correlationism” is completely wrong in that I think subjective points of view are indeed ineliminable aspects of our world. I note ancestrality poses no prima facie problem for Russellian monism and panexperientialism. But I thought Q.M. made excellent points in his critique of most philosophers’ failure to provide an account of the compelling nature of scientific facts, and the trap of centering reality on human consciousness and/or language. He draws a persuasive connection between these problems and philosophy’s slide into deflationism/anti-realism (and sometimes postmodernism) which has hurt its relevance.

Now, I really liked his exploration of contingency and proposal of a hyper-chaos model. Q.M. views facticity (the absence of a reason for something) as a kind of universal solvent that ultimately undermines any view of what’s necessary other than contingency itself. Interestingly he shares with his “correlationist” opponents the rejection of arguments for any necessarily existing entity or entities. And it is certainly true that many or most modern philosophers reject not only classic arguments for the existence for God – but also broadly reject the possibility of engaging in metaphysics to reach conclusions regarding the necessity of logical truths, mathematics, physical laws, morals, etc.

With regard to the “correlationist” philosophers, Q.M. uses the fact that they themselves might agree that subjectivity itself can't be demonstrated to be necessary as ammunition against them. If even this can be doubted --and note a correlationist would tend to argue this in refuting an absolute idealist, for example-- then the correlationist subject-object “circle” is not necessary either. It turns out then, that, in rejecting absolute idealism, the correlationist has endorsed the ubiquitous scope of facticity. And, ironically, this is evidence to Q.M. that facticity itself can be elevated into something absolute and necessary (“factiality”). (Note he sees this as a necessary principle, not an entity).

Now, here is where I pause to wonder why Q.M. is a self-described materialist. He believes he has derived that things-in-themselves do exist (as contingent facts), but even if he has shown they exist independent of human minds, he hasn’t ruled out that they might have aspects of both mind and matter, or that perhaps facts might be somehow neutral with respect to those categories.

2. My “well-behaved” chaos vs. Hyper-chaos

But let me get back to the issue of necessarily existing entities.

A. Has he really shown necessarily existing entities are impossible?
B. Couldn’t hyperchaos be a necessary entity?

Now, in the absence of a knock-down argument for the necessary existence of something, why would someone believe in its truth? Well, some assume rationality can reach beyond our world and conceive of what is possible, and that this can lead us to map what is metaphysically possible and what is necessary. There are two problems: first, some disagree with this rationalist premise; second, people disagree regarding what’s conceivably possible. In fact, the widespread disagreement can be taken as evidence for the faultiness of the premise.

Now, Q.M. doesn’t offer new arguments against rationalism, he just assumes that the forces of modern anti-rationalism are on firm ground, and then he turns to his project of finding (ironically) a new absolute in the fact that everything can be questioned and found lacking a reason for its being.

But I’m not ready to concede that rationalism is dead just because there exist a preponderance of modern philosophers who think so (they could be wrong). I’ve argued there is a viable modern foundation for rationalism, inspired by the discovery that indeterminism is true of our world (see recent posts here and here).

In fact, I have been entertaining a model for a necessarily existing entity which is a chaotic ground of all metaphysical possibilities (including variation in physical law) – with the creation of the actual an intrinsically chancy process. (see for instance my posts on Timothy O'Connor's book). But my chaos has been “shaped” via rationalism: I thought certain conclusions, such as the fact that logical and mathematical truths were necessary, and that actual events are always experiential events, were justified by reason. And I have been willing to entertain the possibility that other truths might be necessary, too (morals/values?).

But Meillassoux has done a good job making me question my capacity to reach such conclusions. For every necessity I propose he might assert there is no way to be sure, and thus the only sure thing is (“super-”) contingency.

And yet I note that he immediately follows his conclusion of supercontingency and hyper-chaos with a derivation of the principle of non-contradiction, which, as it is based on conceptual analysis, seems pretty rationalist. And he hopes to derive other such conclusions, involving mathematics for instance. At this point I start to wonder if his project is very different from mine (albeit more sophisticated). And by the way can’t I define hyper-chaos as the set* of all non-contradictory possibilities and refer to this as a necessarily existing entity?

I’ll stop there. There’s lots to think about, and “hyper-chaos” is definitely haunting my thoughts, thanks to Q.M.

* I assume he'd say that we can't sum the possibilities because they are "transfinite", hence untotalizable, given his arguments in Ch.4.

Meillassoux: A Foundation of Absolute Contingency

I thank Allen for recommending that I read Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Meillassoux is an innovative thinker on a philosophical mission. His goal is to re-establish a secure foundation for our scientific knowledge, lacking in modern philosophy, without returning to an outmoded metaphysics of the past. The key for him will be taking the notion of contingency to the limit. If there is truly no reason for anything (including physical laws), then, rather than seeing this as a limitation, we should embrace this as the one positive absolute truth on which we can build our foundation.

Meillassoux (hereafter Q.M.) is a French philosopher; the English translation is provided by Ray Brassier. (A talk given in England by Q.M. which offers an overview of his work is here -- however, in my case I needed to read the book for things to sink in.) In some ways, Q.M.’s writing betrays a bit of what I think of as “continental style” – including some tendency toward the grandiose, and an unfortunate penchant for creating new terms. However, the content transcends any intra-academic boundaries – he is dealing with big philosophical questions of perennial interest, and indeed he doesn’t invoke the work of any postwar philosopher with the exception of a shout-out to Alain Badiou (who also wrote the preface).

Below are my notes on the book; I’ll add some further thoughts of my own in a follow-up post.

Quantum Measurement in an Infinite Universe

Anthony Aguirre, Max Tegmark, and David Layzer have an intellectually stimulating paper on Arxiv called “Born in an Infinite Universe: a Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”. They seek to show that if eternal inflation has led to an infinite, statistically uniform universe which therefore contains innumerable exact copies of our local region, then this leads to a new interpretation of quantum mechanics. Specifically they say we can associate the Born rule probabilities of QM with the actual frequency of measurement outcomes realized across the identical spatially distributed experiments. In other words, when we do an experiment, the uncertainty in the outcome is a result of our ignorance of which copy we are. (Layzer has a related paper posted here).

Della Rocca on the PSR

Yale’s Michael Della Rocca has a paper out in support of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). Della Rocca, whose expertise is on the Rationalists, begins the paper with a humorous shtick about how he is writing the paper against his better instincts, since he knows how little credibility the PSR has in contemporary mainstream philosophy.  [UPDATE 4 August 2010: I neglected to tip hat to Sympoze.]

His strategy in the paper is to push the burden of proof back onto those who dismiss the PSR.