The regularity theory

I was talking to my stepfather a few years back and asked him why he was eating a turkey sandwich for lunch. His answer was of the deductive/nomological sort: "I always eat a turkey sandwich for lunch."

What if God was one of us?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4CRkpBGQzU

One can find good theology in the strangest of places

"what if God was one of us
just a slob like one of us"

This is beautiful.

The essence of Christianity is the incarnation. Yet there is and has been pressure to make the incarnation less radical that it is. God becoming one of us.

The temptation present already in the early church to treat Jesus as perfect being with a mortal mask trivializes the doctrine. If there is a God, God can pretend to be one of us.

But that is not the incarnation. God became one of us.

Took on mortal form, became like you, like me. Jesus got hungry, got horny, got angry.

The taking on human form is the highest expression of love. It is an attempt at communion, at understanding.

It is a bridge of an ontological divide.

To feel what it is like to be a human being, to be a finite creature from the inside, to take on the burden of finitude and embodiment. These are great things for a God to do, beautiful things, daring, bold things.

Those of us who believe this might have actually happened should meditate on this. It, as I write now on a late Saturday night, just blows me away.

Polytheism

I was recently asked to write a review for a book defending Polytheism. When I first saw the book, I could not take it seriously. Paganism today has always struck me as innocuous but intellectually empty. I love the image of hippies dancing naked in the woods, chanting around a big fire. Its a pleasing, if romanticized image, like Socrates's first version of the ideal city. The one dismissed by Glaucon because of the lack of meat and prostitutes.

When Bertrand Russell was asked whether he was an atheist or agnostic he answered "agnostic," and immediately drew an analogy with Hera and Zeus. "These too may exist", Russell said, but we have no reason to think that they do. The intent of the remark was to emphasize how dismissive Russell was of theism, not to pave the way for serious consideration of the existence of a multitude of gods.

And yet, when I stop and ask myself what reasons I have for thinking there is not a plurality of gods, I find very little to substantiate my prejudice. Its true I also have no reasons, as of yet, for thinking there are many gods, but this may be simply because I have not investigated the matter. I am, after all, just a beginning my research into polytheistic apologetics!). I t would certainly not do to imitate some of my students, who often assume that the old theistic arguments are unsuccessful before they even understand what the arguments are.

What this brings to mind is two quite different ways in which people use the word "absurd."

In one way, "absurd" means logically contradictory or in contradiction to some other known or strongly justified belief. Used in this way, absurdity can be an effective an rational means of critiquing someone's belief.

But another way "absurd" just means contrary to prevailing opinion, or contrary to comon belief. Absurd just means "too weird."

But this second sense is just another way of expressing a prejudice. Its like my old professor who, when he did not have an argument would say, "Surely you don't want to hold that view."

When reason fails, just contort your face the right way and put the right emphasis on your words.

Anything can be thought "too weird." Weirdness, unlike truth, is a culturally or psychologically relative notion. Christianity was too weird to pagan Rome. Evolution is too weird to fundamentalist Christians. Paganism is too weird for most of us hard nosed analytic philosophers.


Are there many gods? Right now I doubt it. I have stirring in my mind some reasons that may lead me to reject it. But I could be wrong.

Materialism lies coiled in the heart of dualism

Fichte draws a distinction between idealism and "dogmatism." The dogmatist holds that we should begin with assumption of mind independent matter and try to account for everything else in terms of that. The idealist starts with consciousness. According to Fichte, these are the two possible starting points. you start with yourself, or you start with material objects. But what of dualism?

Dualism is an unstable position. It constitutes an attempt to fit the real mind in an assumed world of objective material things. Some dualists are content to simply allow the existence of nonphysical mental properties. More robust dualists consider the mind to be a thing, a substance that exists alongside material objects. Whichever variety of dualism you choose, the underlying assumption is that one can think of the mind using the same sort of ontological categories that y ou use when considering material things. To be sure, mental properties are not physical properties. Minds are not physical things. But they are still properties and things and in these innocent sounding words there lies loads of assumptions.

In Being and Time Heidegger recognized these assumptions in his critique of Descartes. Descartes was mislead, Heidegger argues, because he took as his paradigm for existence material things and, realizing that the mind is among these, categorized the mind as another kind of thing, a thing exists alongside run of the mill material objects. But to do this is to miss out on the fact that the mind is not just another kind of thing that is externally related to the physical universe. In Heidegger's terminology the mind is essentially characterized by "Being-in-the-world." We might drop the indiosyncratic language and say instead, the mind is necessarily intentional.

But to say just this and then go on our way is not enough. When we think deeply about intentionality, we come to see that its not just a special mental property. Intentionality is an internal relationship between mind and world, consciousness and its objects. To understand what i am doing now, typing this blog post, I need to bring in things in the world. my fingers, the keyboard, the computer screen. Even if my current typing is in a dream, it is still the case that my dream world is part of my mental state, part of my consciousness. To try to seperate these, to try to replace the esential intentional connection with something causal to pass over the phenmena at hand. To think of intentionality as a property my mind has is to already distort it, since intentionality is an internal relationship to the world. It is Heideggers "Being-In." If we call it a property at all its a property had not by mind alone but by mind and world. It is a way of expressing a primordial essential linkage. If one comes to think of intentionality in this way, as a property not of mind alone but of mind/world, one has already taken the leap and become an idealist!

So a dualist has a choice. She can come to grips with the essential intentionality of consciousness and move away from dualist towards idealism. Or she can view the mind as things like material things with weird properties. The second alternative is what grounds the mind body problem and explains the strong temptation some people feel towards materialism. One needs to find a way of fiting this weird mind thing into an already assumed universe of externally related physical objects. One comes to think of the mind as a sort of appendage to the body, like those thought baloons that cartoon characters sometimes have. So conceived the dialectical preasure to minimize or remove the mind, to make it epiphenomenal or identical to material processes, is enormous.

Even a subtle thinker like Thomas Nagle has this difficulty. Nagle shows an unusual sensitivity to the reality of subjectivity. And yet one feels that for Nagle subjectivity is still just one thing, one added element that has to be somehow meshed in with mind independent objective reality.

What is required is a radical shift of perspective. Instead of asking how the mind fits into the physical world, we should ask how it is that the physical world comes to have any existence for a mind.

Back to Kant!

creativity

What is involved when we think up an idea or engage in the free play of imagination? Take a simple example. I imagine a golden horse. Where does this horse come from? There seem to be five possibilities.

(1) The golden horse is the result of psychological laws having to do with mental events. Earlier mental events are lawfully connected in such a way (via "association") to produce this new imagine in the mind (Hume0

(2) The golden horse is produced by consciousness. Its not an idea "inside" the mind, but rather an object that is produced and sustained by the activity of consciousness (Sartre)

(3) The image is produced by a substantial self, an immaterial ego that has the power to will, and one of the things it wills, is the golden horse object. (Descartes, various agent causation people)

(4) The image is produced by physiological processes in the brain. Its not produced by anything mental, but by physical brain processes of one sort or another (epiphenomenalists, some non-redutive materialists)

(5) The image itself, along with its cause are themselves physical processes. (standard materialists views)

I hope I did not leave anything out. Assuming I did not, then it follows that on any of these views creativity is a radical thing. It is, literally, the creation of a new object (or image), out of nothing. Unlike familiar examples of physical world causation, does not re-arange, there is no energy or matter that is "conserved." It is really, not just nominally, creative.

If my image is the result of psychological laws relating to images, then certain previous mental states are necessary and sufficient for the creation of a new one. Its not that the prior states are re-aranged or transformed. they simple combine together to produce something utterly new, the golden horse image. I don't find this view plausible because it rejects the spontaneity of the will, but even if it was true, it would still be the case that creativity creates something new. The existence of prior causal conditions does not change the fact that the new image is itself not made of anything that existed it prior. it is, literally created ex nihilo.

On the more plausible Sartrean view, the situation is even more obvious. Consciousness spontaneously produces the image. The image is an object before consciousness not inside it. Through a kind of spontaneous activity that each of us is reflectively aware of we make the golden horse appear before us. Its not an existent thing, not a physical object, but it is phenomenological datum that is present and obtains only because of the creative conscious activity. Again, this is a case of creation ex nihilo.

On the agent causation view, the situation is simliar, though on this view the self is more robust, the phenomenology of creation is the same. Whatever a self or ego might be, it certainly does not contain the material out of which our imagined objects are produced.

Let us consider the epiphenomenalist view. On this sort of view, the mental image is created by the brain. But the mental image is still mental, still ontologicaly distinct from the physical processes in the brain. So on this view too, the mental object is created ex nihilo. It is a new addition to the world

Finally we have the standard materialist understanding of the mind. Only if this view is correct is creativity not genuinely creative. If my image is simply a process going on in my brain, however this is understood, the process is itself made up of physical matter, matter that existed prior to the existence of the image. the causal process of mental creativity is thus no different from material object causation, matter and energy are conserved, and the newness is, fundamentally, simply a matter of re-arangement

Therefore, if we think standard materialism is false, we should also believe that creation ex nihilo is a reality whenever we imagine or think up anything.

church visit #2

So after the big ole' mega church, wewent to the local UCC church in our neighborhood, The congregation is "open and affirming" and had a nice supportive GLBT bumper sticker next to the entrance. It was a pretty small church, with maybe 40 people in attendance on this day. The people looked pretty diverse for this university town, with older and younger people, some african amercans, a few gay couples, a nice assortment of children, and the obligatory middle aged guy with a pony tail.

Instead of Christian Rock, there was a violinist playing the pre-service music. the service was also more traditional with an actual liturgy with readings from the bible, responsive readings, and a sermon that was for some reason called a "message." Like the mega church, this church seemed to want to seem "modern" and the first two hymn were taking from a hymn book that consisted mostly of songs written after 1970. The first song was pretty dorky, the second better, and I was pleased the last one was an old favorite of mine from the more traditional hymn book.

I was impressed at how well the congregation sang! I was a member of a much larger UCC congregation before and , appart from the choir, it seemed everyone just stood and mouthed the words. This place was too small for a choir, but made up for it with singing which, while not baptist like enthusiasm, filled the room nicely.

The day we chose to visit was the fiftieth aniversery of the church, we we were in for a bunch of inside church baseball. People came up and talked about how this church affected them, how it started out with only 5 people. I was impressed that apparently the group went door to door to find members (most mainline protestants are just too uptight for that). The service was not overly formal, with people joking around with each other. The Rev. seemed to know everyone personally called people out by name several times. He did not dance around like the mega church guy but he spoke clearly and with definite commitment and enthusiasm. The "message" used the parable of the mustard seed to illuminate both the growth of this little church and the role of the church in influencing the surrounding community.

After church, there was cake and coffee, and we hung around a bit. My dug in with gusto, and I had three cups of coffee. The people were nice, the food was good, and the coffee was caffienated. Everything the spiritual pilgrim needs.

Going to a mega church

Since I have moved back to Iowa City, I have been a wastrel with respect to church going. But last Sunday after going out to breakfast I saw this "mega church" and was curious. So I cajoled my kids into going inside and checking it out.

I knew I was in for something different when I saw some guy in bright clothes directing traffic in the parking lot. Lots and lots of cars and I wondered if mine was the only one with an Obama bumper sticker. As we walked in, there were these people standing behind some sort of booth. It reminded me of a movie theartre and I wondered if we would need to buy tickets. (Really it was "family check in" for sunday school). The first part of the service was all music. There was a band on stage that played some rockified hymns. I liked some of it but wished they did not modify the lyrics of an old hymn--it just did not sound right. My youngest son thought it was way too loud. This music part lasted for a long time.

Finally the minister comes out and does his spiel. The guy was good. He moved. He shaked. He made some jokes. He made some good points as he discussed the dangers of idolizing wealth. (Personally I think we can read more into the "consider the lilies...." stuff than he did, but you can't expect everyone to be a hippy). But he did some weird things too. At one point he refered to the crowd Jesus was talking to as "christians" and even said these 'christians' were being persecuted by "the jews." He seemed not to care about about chronology, making it sound as if the pre-conversion Paul was hanging around at the Sermon on the Mount, ready to strike. As we walked back to my car I talked to my kids about this and decided to back and talk to the minister. I just chatted briefly and he was nice but it was apparent that he did not think it was a big deal. In the sermon he also tended to pick bible verses out of the air without context. So he is talking about Luke, and more or less sticks to the text there and then BAM its some random quote for Daniel just thrown in to spice it up.

Another thing which my kids noticed was that, while there was coffee and ice water.. none of the other typical post-chuch yummies were there (that we saw anyway, it was a big place)

Epistemological and Ontological Idealism

Arguments for idealism generally come in to forms. There are epistemological arguments that attempt to show that the world as it is known to us is essentially mind dependent. Kantian arguments are the most famous example of this sort of a approach. So too are some of Berkeley's arguments for idealism, such as the arguments presented with such force in the _Dialogues_ showing that the only empirically defensible concept of a material thing is one that identifies matter with a system of ideas. Ontological arguments for idealism, on the other hand, attempt to show that there is something about the nature of reality that requires that it be of a spiritual or mind dependent character. Thus McTaggart argues that the world must consist of substances and that the only candidate for substance that we have available is that which we find when we reflect on our own minds. Berkeley too presented an ontological argument for idealism when he argued that the very conception of a mind independent entity was incoherent. The famous master argument was not intended as a claim about merely knowable reality, it was intended, it seems to be a claim about reality as such whether known by us our not. This last claim of Berkeley's has always struck me as tendentious because it appears to attempt to prove a negative: How can we know that the only thing that is real is minds, unless we presuppose that our knowledge exhausts all that is real? And how can any non-omniscient being make that claim?
An answer to this last question can be made by those who endorse a non-realist theory of truth. To take a cheap and easy example, if verificationism is true, then the claim that there is a reality utterly independent of our mode of cognition is not false but meaningless. On these sorts of views the sentence, "There is a reality that is impossible for us to experience" has no cognitive content at all. And this brings out another feature of the distinction between ontological and epistemological idealism. Ontological idealism is perfectly compatible with a realist theory of truth. Thus Berkeley is perfectly happy claiming that, at least when we are "thinking with the learn'd," the literal truth of statements depends on the existence of some reality "out there" that corresponds to it. The difference between Berkeley and metaphysical realists is not with respect to what makes a statement true, but rather with respect to the sorts of things are truthmakers for propositions, to wit, minds and ideas.
Personally I have never really understood the various sorts of non-realist theories of truth. Coherentist and pragmatic theories of truth seem to me to be either obviously false, or really just disquised theories of justification or knowlege. Yet it does seem to me that any variety of idealism is going to be in one limited sense epistemic. Whatever claims about reality we may make, we can only really justify them with respect to the reality that we have some conception of. Kantian things in themselves can never be disproven. The best one can hope to do with respect to such hypothetical entities is to show that such an hypothesis is superfluous, not that necessarily, such things do not exist.
So my own argument for idealism, grounded as it is in the claim that existence is an essential property of consciousness, is an ontological idealism. My claim is that the epistemic claim of the cogito requires an ontological ground. I can only know I exist if there is a necessary connection between existence itself and consciousness or the self. Otherwise I may know I am thinking, and yet not recognize that this thinking must be existent thinking. So the essential premise, the pivotal claim is (1) Consciousness essentially exists. But this claim only gets us to idealism if we can also claim (2) Nothing else exhibits this characteristic of existence. And it is here that the epistemological caveat appears--I can only speak of what I can think of. I can confirm as a phenomenological datum that no perceived object exhibits the characteristic of consciousness. I can even go further and in Berkleian manner argue that no conceivable material thing has the property of existence. Its not just that in fact I am not perceiving material things. but I cannot even in imagination combine the property of existence (which I am aware of in the cogito) with the material things. This shows that at least of those concrete particulars I am aware of (minds and material objects) it is only the mind that exists. Not only do I affirm with Meinong that there are non-existent objects. I affirm the stronger claim that all material things are non-existent objects. But the epistemological limitation remains. The objects that I claim cannot exist are perceivable objects. I cannot by this method show that there is nothing else that also has this property. In fact I may have to admit that there are some things, universals for example, which actually do exhibit existence even though they are not of the character of consciousness or the mind. The idealist claim,though ontological, is thus limited. It is not reality as such, but only reality insofar as I can conceive of it (that is, the concrete particular reality, ignoring universals for the moment), which necessarily does not exist. This may be an "apparently outrageous view" as one reviewer called it, but it is also limited to reality as conceived. Kantian things in themselves may exist even if they are not conscious, but if there are any such "things" they also must not have the character of the material world that is actually conceived and thought of.

dualism vs. idealism

Those of us who agree that both the qualitative and intentional character of consciousness is irreducible to so-called matter have a choice, we can be either dualists or idealists. Dualism is more popular than idealism (though their numbers are smaller than the hordes of materialists), but is this really the best approach to take if we want to affirm the reality of the mental? Dualists have a problem of reconciling the mind with the assumed pre-existence of dead matter. Dualists therefore feel dialectical pressure to make the mind into some sort of appendage to the body. For dualists, the problem of how mind and matter interact is a real problem--if we take materialist causation as our paradigm, then it *is* hard to see how the non-material mind fits in. This is why so many contemporary dualists feel driven to weird ass epiphenomenalism.but if mind is really essential to reality, then there is no mind/matter gap. We get all the advantages of materialist monism without its obvious drawbacks

negative facts

Assume that every true proposition needs a truthmaker. A truthmaker is something that renders a statemetn true. So "deer exist" is true in virtue of some deer existing somewhere. "Barack Obama exists' in virtue of the fact that that there is this one person, Barack Obama.

But what about "Bilbo does not exist" or "Hobbits do not exist"

Well, if Bilbo exists were true, we would say it was made true in virtue of Bilbo actually existing.

what is wrong with saying that "Bilbo does not exist" is just made true by the fact or state of affairs that Bilbo does not exist, that is, Bilbo does not have the property of existence.

Almost all defenders of the view that true propositions require truthmakers reject this move. Instead they make arcane suggestions, e.g. "the universe has the property of lacking hobbits"

Once again,, the prejudice in favor of the actual wrecks havoc on metaphysics.