Mark Johnston's Surviving Death

I read Mark Johnston’s book, Surviving Death, which was based on his 2006 Carl G. Hempel lectures at Princeton. I had liked his previous book, Saving God (which I mentioned here); in comparison, Surviving Death is more densely argued and challenging, relative to the “payoff”. But I’m glad I read it: Johnston is an interesting and unique thinker.

In the book, Johnston looks for and finds a naturalistic sense in which a person could be said to survive death: a good person can truly identify with all of humanity by directing his or her actions in concert with this concern. He or she will then live on in the “onward rush of humanity.” A highly condensed summary follows below.

Where Rationalism Meets Empiricism

To review one aspect of the model being explored here:

The concrete world is a causal network of events; each event is an actualized outcome, selected from a set of possibilities*. Some form of modal realism is true: while the unactualized possibilities aren’t themselves concrete, they are real in some sense. Their reality is implicated in everything that happens.

I speculate that since we’ve evolved in this kind of world, we are naturally acquainted with possibilities. In fact, the consideration of possibilities is central to life (of animals, too) and to our reasoning. Somehow, humans leverage this acquaintance with possibilities to spin whole scenarios of how a world could be.

Contemporary rationalism takes the form of modal metaphysics – where one claims that our faculty for conceiving possible worlds is reliable. Like older forms of rationalism, it is vulnerable to critics who claim we can’t know about anything which is not experienced concretely.

But on this account, the space of possibilities is involved in every concrete event. These “abstract” entities are real and are implicated in causality. Therefore our modal reasoning (and by extension, our contemplation of all sorts of abstract concepts) is not disconnected from the empirical realm. Our rational faculties are grounded in our direct acquaintance with something real.

* An alternative account would characterize each event as a manifestation, resulting from an intersection of probabilistic dispositions, or propensities. In quantum physics, the analogues are the measurement event and the wavefunction.

Morality: Not Natural or Supernatural?

Sean M. Carroll, the Caltech cosmologist who blogs at Cosmic Variance, has had a couple of posts responding to Sam Harris’ recent arguments that we should be able to develop a science of morality (he doesn't think this is possible in principle, although his reasoning reads to me as a list of challenges about the practical difficulty).

His discussion offers a clear example of exactly why a materialistic worldview inspired by science leaves one out to sea when it comes to issues crucially important to us.  (I say all this as a big fan of Carroll; he is a great representative of a new generation of scientist-popularizers.)

Powers vs. Humean Supervenience

I’ve been interested in ontological accounts which feature dispositional properties (also known as dispositions or powers) in the starring role.  This intriguing draft paper, “Goodbye, Humean Supervenience”, by Oxford's Troy Cross, sets out to show that David Lewis’ Humean supervenience program (which seeks to reduce everything to a mosaic of categorical properties) fails, since it can be reinterpreted as a system where Lewis’ fundamental properties are in fact identical to dispositions.  This implication can’t be rejected without abandoning the account of properties as sets of possibilia.   The possibility unattractive feature of the dispositional doppelganger of Lewis’ story is its appeal to nonlocal circumstances as the trigger for the manifestation of the powers.  My notes on the paper follow.

Balaguer on Free Will, Part Three

The last post discussed Mark Balaguer’s argument that that the question of libertarian freedom reduces to the question of indeterminism at the point of decision.  In this post, I’ll summarize his argument that the presence or absence of the indeterminism in question is an open scientific problem.

Balaguer on Free Will, Part Two

There are two steps in Mark Balaguer’s argument (contained in chapters 3 and 4 of his book, respectively).  In the first step, the subject of this post, he argues that the question of freedom reduces to a question of indeterminism in decision-making.  In the second step (to be discussed in the next post) he argues that the presence or absence of the relevant indeterminism is an open scientific problem.

Balaguer on Free Will, Part One

After reading and enjoying one of Mark Balaguer’s papers on free will I also ordered and read his book Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem.   Not only did I like his approach to the topic, but his opening arguments, discussed below, clarified for me the reasons for my own vague dissatisfaction with much of the contemporary literature on free will.

(Note:  In these posts I’ll present much of the discussion in my own words; Balaguer himself is very precise in defining his terms and setting forth the arguments.  So, I recommend the book for those interested, but also in the online domain take a look at this paper, "The Metaphysical Irrelevance of the Compatibilism Debate", which overlaps with the first two chapters of the book, as well as a discussion of the paper and then the book itself in several posts and comment sections at the “The Garden of Forking Paths” blog – here, here, here, and here.)

I Agree With Sam Harris on Science and Morality

Sam Harris has a short talk here on why he thinks "science can answer moral questions."  A follow-up to some initial criticism is here, and a brief discussion of "getting an ought from an is" is here.  He evidently has a book forthcoming related to all this.

While the philosophically more talented will have issues with his arguments (and with my brief discussion of this complex topic below), I agree with his main thrust.  There are two key steps here:  first, we include first-person experiences in our view of nature, and second, we locate the target for our (natural) moral instincts in the qualities of the experiences of sentient creatures.

Spinoza on the Composite Self

It can seem surprising the degree to which our conscious experience is opaque as to what causes and/or composes it.  The revelations of neuroscience come only from third person investigation.  Even on its own first-person "turf", introspection has been shown to be a poor guide to analyzing our mental states, perceptions and memories.  The mind-body problem in philosophy is of course the story of the inability of the mind to perceive how nature constitutes it.

The fact that the brain/body is very much a composite system seems to be the reason for some of the difficulty.  Reading Spinoza's Ethics recently, it was interesting for me to see that he grasped this point in the 17th century.

Philosophers Discussing Food! Upcoming Event

Mark your calendars -
The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium presents its annual Public Issues Forum:

 “The Future of Food”

Saturday, March 27, 2010, 1:00 to 5:30 P.M.