The Uncredible Hallq

It's alive!

2008-05-25T15:23:00.003-05:00

My WordPress blog is officially in business. Change your bookmarks, or links, or bloglines subscriptions or whatever (to my surprise, bloglines tells me that 21 people supposedly have subscriptions to this thing--go me!) Actually, wait a second, I don't have an RSS feed going yet, so no changing bloglines subscriptions. Oh well, I'll get that done tomorrow. When I do, I'll announce it there, not here, so try to check it manually until then.

New website!

2008-05-22T09:42:00.003-05:00

Just in case anyone is still reading this blog, I have a new website at uncrediblehallq.net. Now, mind you all that's there right now is a notice that the site is under development, but it's a start. The tools I'm using are less user-friendly than blogger, making me glad I waited until after finals to do this, but now I've got all day and with any luck will have my first post up by tonight.

Update 2:13: uncrediblehallq.net/blog/ Now contains the standard WordPress header, with a sub-header announcing it to be "Just another WordPress blog," and a no-body post titled "Hello world!"

Dumping evangelicals

2008-05-04T17:21:00.004-05:00

PZ Myers suggests politicians simply dump religions leaders, and does so with arguments that make some sense from a purely vote-getting point of view. I've heard that Americans want their leaders to be religious, just not too committed to particular beliefs. I suspect this isn't really true; Americans have no such monolithic position. Rather, the hard-core Evangelicals won't tolerate someone who isn't religious at all, the hard-core secular and hard-core vaguely secular won't tolerate anyone with beliefs perceived as "extreme," so mushy liberal Protestantism is the best way to hedge your bets. Sometimes, though, you end up with someone like Wright on your team purely by accident.

On a related issue, Sully wrote a rather defensive post on Obama where he admitted:

Obama was, I think, brought up and lived for a long time in an atmosphere in which occasional left-wing excess did not grate on his ears or his temperament as they would on people like, er, me. And his desire to connect to a black experience he never fully had himself also played a part in not distancing himself from some aspect of his pastor's rhetoric or friends' associations.

In a way, I think Andrew is very insightful. I live in Madison, a city so liberal it's referred to sixty square miles surrounded by reality. I've socialized with admirers of Lenin and sympathizers of eco terrorists. And I think jumping on candidates for what their associates say is stupid. Still, it's also stupid to insist Obama can't be thought of as another politician, especially with his weasle-word responses to this and implausible surprise.

Mind shattering kaboom

2008-05-03T22:15:00.002-05:00

Okay, so as usual when I want something to do other than the work that currently badly needs to get done, I took a spin through TVTropes.org. I stumble across an entry I hadn't noticed before called Better Than It Sounds, which contains descriptions of things and then the name of the thing behind a spoiler tag. One entry reads "People all around the world are brought together by the things they love best, which appear to be pornography, repetition of various phrases, and arguing." This refers to something that, when left to my own devices, I tend to think of as one of the distinctive technological triumphs of the 21st century. Ooops.

Finnals and getting off blogger

2008-05-02T12:52:00.002-05:00

It's that time of the semester again, finals are coming up and I need the time to study. Thus, I don't plan on doing more that a couple more posts over the next two weeks. After that, however, I'll have a ton of free time and I've decided it's finally time to get off blogger, get my own domain name, and develop my own site design. Stay tuned.

Review: Expelled

2008-05-01T19:30:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I went with my friend Karl to watch the pro-ID documentary Expelled. It was an odd experience, to say the least. Before reading my review, you might want to read this review found via Vic Reppert. I don't link because I consider it a good review in the traditional sense, but because I suspect it's a good example of how people who don't know the issue are likely to respond: they find some things convincing, but can't buy all of it. This sort of movie is way too much to swallow whole.

The movie opened with black and white stock footage, most of it looking WWII (I'm retrospect I'm less sure because the use of stock footage was so indiscriminate, but hold off on that point). It wasn't just Holocaust, it was also war planning (Normandy Invasion, I think, again not quite sure). It threw me off for a moment; I thought perhaps I was watching the trailer for some other film. The relevance of that isn't made immediately clear. Only after seeing the end of the film do I suspect some of it may have been Berlin Wall shots.

Then we get to the movie proper, and for a moment it looks like things are going reasonably well. We get an audience waiting to hear Ben Stein speak, Ben Stein in his dressing room looking Very Serious (actually not terribly overdone) and then he goes out and begins delivering a ringing speech about Freedom. Trying to set up the battle over Intelligent Design as a matter of fundamental American freedoms seems a bit overdone, and there's a feeling of dissonance when you realize Stein is a comedian giving that speech rather than, say, a serious nonfiction writer, and those who did their homework will know the audience at Stein's speech were mostly extras. Still, all in all it's pulled off pretty well. It looks like a slick presentation.

Then we get to the claims that ID supporters are being persecuted, kicked off by an interview with Richard Sternberg. At this point, the presentation collapses with its very first instance of Lord Privy Seal. Lord Privy Seal is that feature of bad documentaries where content is paired with dubiously relevant images. The joke is that a discussion of the Lord Privy Seal would have shots of a lord, an outhouse, and a seal balancing a ball on its nose. In Expelled, this first precious moment comes when Sternberg says people got really, really mad about his publishing a sup-par pro-ID article, and it cuts to stock footage of guys pounding their hands on a table. I found the moment hilarious, though as the saying goes, I wasn't laughing with the movie. This first LPS was quickly followed up by shots of a guy in 19th century dress getting pushed around, I guess as a metaphor for how Sternberg got treated.

One thing I noticed with both Sternberg and the other big example of a supposedly suppressed scientist Guillermo Gonzales is that the claims were a bit vague. With Sternberg, there was a comment about "that's where my office used to be" (he was merely moved from one office to another) and being "pressured" to resign (it's clear he didn't lose any job over the controversy). It's also claimed his life was "almost" ruined, but only almost. Similarly, with Gonzales, they complain about his not getting tenure, but the filmmakers weren't about to go into the minefield issue of the details of his publication and grant record.

Nevertheless, both of those cases looked vaguely sinister if you don't know the full story behind them. However, one case I couldn't wrap my head around was the Michael Egnor one: he wrote a pro-ID article and got criticized harshly online. This was supposed to be shocking. To quote Expelled Exposed: "Michael Egnor had apparently never been on the Internet before." This seemed to be part of a pattern in the movie: it was unable to stop with a few effective bits of deception, and couldn't resist the temptation of completely overblown posturing.

Interestingly, I have at least one bit of evidence that the impact of the movie's "persecuted scientist" sequence wasn't as sharp as was intended. A few weeks ago, the campus atheist group I'm a part of spent some time discussing the movie (before it came out) and it turned out one Christian girl who had been showing up at meetings and was planning to see the film. She came back a little unclear on what exactly we had been discussing the other day. After seeing the film I tried to sort that out with her, and we worked out that she kinda remembered seeing Sternberg and it seemed "a little unfair," but I got the distinct impression it hadn't made much of an impact.

The handling of the arguments for and against ID was even more inept. The initial case against was presented in the form of one-sentence clips of representatives of the "scientific establishment" (which apparently includes Christopher Hitchens) saying variations on "ID is bad." The Stein asks, dramatically, "Do they have any other reasons for rejecting ID?" and plays a clip of a scientist talking about how boring it is. The intended impression seems to be that this is all scientists have by way of criticism of ID. Obviously, this is an instance of dishonest video editing, but it's so obvious that I don't know what Stein thought he would gain by the tactic.

The basic approach to presenting pro-ID academics like Dembski is to give them slightly more screen-time for their largely unexplained assertions, and hope this counts as a good argument. Stein keeps saying "I still have this question, so I'll go talk to so-and-so," but so-and-so is never given enough screen time to say anything of substance. The only real argument against scientific explanations of life comes with the first cell, where they go on about how cells are too complicated to come into existence by chance, yet everyone agrees that life had to start with a single cell. This isn't true though, most scientists assume life started with a simple self-replicating molecule. This was actually mentioned by an interviewee at some point (I think it was Dawkins) though a viewer would have to be really paying attention, and know what to look for, to catch this.

Also on the origin of life issue: Michael Ruse is shown proposing that life formed on crystals. This provided the context for the movie's most memorable Lord Privy Seal: a quick cut to a guy in a turban with a crystal ball. I can only wonder what impact that had on ordinary people who remember just enough of their high school earth science classes to know that crystals actually exist.

The number of points where the film goes clunk in this way are endless: attempts pseudo-dramatism made ridiculous by Stein's monotone; inane, repetitive questions ("was Hitler evil?" "Yes" "Do you believe there's such a thing as evil..."); a random shot of Stein scratching his back with a strange metal implement.

There was one instance, though, that really exemplified everything wrong with the movie: the infamous unauthorized use of John Lennon's "Imagine." Here's the context: shot of PZ Myers talking about religion gradually fading as science literacy improves. Then Stein declares "Myers thinks he's being original, but he's just taking a page out of John Lennon's song book!" Cue song, and random clips of commies. Two things are odd about this: one, the need to melodramatically inflate Myers' supposed claims, making him claim things for himself he never said, and two, there's an odd anti-climax in how random the shots are: Stalin waves, we are shown other things with no clear connection to anything.

I saw that clip on YouTube before seeing the full presentation and thought it exceptionally odd, but it didn't mean much the second time around: the whole movie is like that. Half the time, whoever was in charge of editing apparently had no idea why a piece of footage was included.

The one other part of the movie that needs comment is the section on the conflict between evolution and religion. Dawkins is seen saying some quite sensible things: most of the people who really invest their time in fighting creationism are non-believers, they reach out to believers for political reasons, putting Dawkins on the stand in the Dover trial would have been a bad move. Stein could have stopped with this, but had to go completely over the top and declare that this had completely refuted what Genie Scott said about evolution and religion and proved you couldn't accept them both. Then the film sinks to outright dishonesty in showing clips of theologian Alister McGrath saying Dawkins is all wrong about science and religion. The implication is that McGrath thinks we should allow religious explanations into science, the truth is almost exactly the opposite: McGrath thinks there's no conflict between the secular theory of evolution and religion, a view completely at odds with the view being promoted in the movie. This is not to say it was wrong about these claims, just that it lacked an argument beyond manipulating interview footage to create the impression of an open and shut case.

The final sequence was in some ways the most precious: Stein not only compares the supposed persecution of Intelligent Design with the Berlin wall, but intersperses shots of himself speaking with clips of Reagan calling for the destruction of the Berlin wall. It's a nice symbol of the movie as a whole: at every turn, it can't leave well enough alone but has to heap on loads and loads of melodrama, burying the well done bits of propaganda. Had I not seen any of the publicity for the film, you might have been able to convince me it was a clever parody of Lee Strobel: it's a lot like Strobel's Case for X books, only with Strobel's limited substance dialed down to zero and his annoying dramatism dialed up to eleven, and with everything done more ineptly.

None of this to say the movie is without value. I enjoyed it immensely, and I expect it to be loved by anyone who enjoys watching things done badly in subtle ways. It will be hard to resist the temptation to buy it on DVD. The Lord Privy Seals alone would provide sufficient fodder for a Rocky Horror Picture Show style screening. It would be fun to try to shout out rationales for every nonsensical use of stock footage. I, for one, consider it an prime example of something so bad it's good.

Carnival of the Fraudless #1

2008-04-29T21:56:00.002-05:00

The very first Carnival of the Fraudless has been posted. FYI, some material that Ron was reluctant to link to can be found with the help of leading anti-Scientology site Operation Clambake. Enjoy.

CotG 90

2008-04-28T02:13:00.000-05:00

A new Carnival of the Godless is up.

Quote of the Time Being

2008-04-28T02:09:00.002-05:00

"It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense. I don't have anything additional to say. It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, I don't have anything more to say ... it's nonsense. I reject it categorically,"

-John McCain, on Hagee.

I'm getting this via Andrew Sullivan, and would just like to point out the marked contrast to Obama's inability to use words like "nonsense" in describing Wright.

Quote of the Time Being

2008-04-25T16:10:00.000-05:00

When one analyzes [post-modernist and deconstruction] writings, one often finds radical-sounding assertions whose meaning is ambiguous and that can be given two alternative readings: one as interesting, radical, and grossly false; the other as boring and trivially true.

-Alan Sokal, via Massimo Pigliucci

The silliness of philosophy

2008-04-25T15:49:00.003-05:00

In Peter Unger's Beyond Inanity, he makes a point of saying that the claims he's attacking are guilty of being insubstantial, not silly. However, it strikes me that an awful lot of what gets done in philosophy is silly. I've even suggested that philosophy is so silly, that an obviously silly paper is actually an improvement over one that tries to hide its silliness.

What, exactly, is the problem? I can think of at least two things:

First, there's a tendency to want to be rigorous, sophisticated, and scientific, and this leads philosophers to invent technical concepts and apply them in situations where they serve no purpose. Take, for example, the concept of a possible world. A possible world is basically a possible situation, except that its emphasized that it is a "maximal" situation, including or excluding every detail that the world might possibly have. Sometimes, it's a useful concept. Sometimes you want to imagine a hypothetical world exactly like ours, except for a short list of very specific changes. Or sometimes, you want to imagine a world with a very small number of objects and nothing else. That's all okay. (Or at least not as bad as what I want to complain about here.)

However, philosophers have fallen in love with the concept of possible worlds, and begin invoking the concept in situations where it's useless or counter-productive. Situations where, most importantly, they aren't really concerned to have every detail fixed. For example, last semester in philosophy of mind we encountered a theory of the relationship between mind and matter (I think it was called "global supervenience") that was explained in terms of possible worlds. It turned out that an immediate consequence of the theory was that the position of a hydrogen atom in a distant galaxy might be vitally important in determining our mental states (thanks in part to possible worlds emphasizing the idea of every detail being fixed). And this is a theory which philosophers had seriously put forth. They never meant to say something so absurd, but did so because they got using technical concepts when they didn't need them.

Another example in this problem is adequately summed up in the second quotation in this post. Basically: philosophers wasting a lot of time on the nature of a certain claim, when all that mattered is whether it's true.

The other thing that's silly about philosophy: philosophers taking themselves way to seriously. For example, in the metaphysics class I'm taking right now, we basically spent over a week discussing the transporters from Star Trek. This was done with minimal self-awareness and irony. Now, debates on Star Trek message board about what this or that piece of technology would really be like can get quite heated (or so I've heard). However, Trekkies are at least capable of keeping the MST3K mantra stuck somewhere in the back of their minds, even if it's at the bottom of a chest in the attic of their brains, with the path to said chest blocked by a pile of lamps, coat hangers, and bicycles. The point is, it's there, they know it's just TV. In philosophy, however, there is no equivalent to the realization that it's just TV. It's serious business. And that makes all the discussions feel very off.

SC 85

2008-04-24T20:30:00.001-05:00

The 85th edition of the Skeptic's Circle is up at Andrea's Buzzing About.

What matters: stuff

2008-04-22T18:08:00.003-05:00

The trick is to know which books to read.
-Carl Sagan

When I reviewed Susan Jacoby's American Age of Unreason, I got a somewhat unexpected criticism: not so much that Jacoby was on-target in her worries about the use of the word "folks," but that I had no business agreeing that some thigns are better than others. Rather than reply immediately in the comments, I decided I'd bet better off replying in a series of blog posts.

This first post, I'll keep general. I want to point out that there are a couple things which can seem superficially an appropriate focus of life, yet pretty obviously aren't after a little reflection. A classic argument along these lines is Robert Nozick's "experience machine" thought experiment: would you take up an offer to plug in, for life, to a machine that would give you whatever good experiences you want? Most people say "no." An even worse answer than "good experiences" is "pleasure"--the idea of hooking up to electrodes to give a constant flow of intense pleasure isn't really all that far out, technologically speaking, but it's not something most people really want.

Once you accept that the truly good things in life are somewhat subtle, it becomes easy to see that it's worth putting effort into sorting out the truly good things from trash. Consider books, fiction or non-fiction (this is just an example, I'm hardly meaning to commit to anything on the value of books vs. TV or books vs. real world experience). In Cosmos, there's a great scene (in YouTube form at bottom of this post) where Sagan walks down the length of a few bookshelves, containing approximately as many books as a person could read in a lifetime. It's pretty good number, but it's only a fraction of the number contained in a good library. So assuming moderate variation in the quality of books, we've got good reason to be discerning. And this goes for TV shows and movies and websites and life experiences as much as books. Life's to short to watch "whatever's on."

Carnivalia

2008-04-22T17:52:00.002-05:00

Some carnivals I haven't gotten around to linking yet:

--The 84th Skeptics' Circle at Archaeoporn\
--The 18th Humanist Symposium at Spanish Inquisitor
--Also, the 0th edition (i.e. initial annoucement) for an anti-Scientology carnival

Enjoy

Open Source Philosophy

2008-04-22T01:34:00.003-05:00

The call for ~~posts~~ papers for the next Philosophers Carnival reads as follows:

This is a call for papers for the next Philosopher’s Carnival to be hosted here from April 28 to May 12.

The theme for our carnival will be ‘Open Source Philosophy’. This may relate to the Philosophy of Open Source or to Open sourcing Philosophy (or anything in between).

Entries from other fields of philosophy will still be most appreciated of course.

I'm inclined to take the second option. Honestly, though, I'm not sure what it means. Not that that's going to stop me.

The way I conceive of open-source philosophy (based on a half-baked guess about what the phrase means), it is the effect of rapid communication and digital technology on the way philosophical ideas develop. As early as 1991, Daniel Dennett was commenting on how e-mail was making the canonical, published version of a paper less important, and creating a situation where most of the people concerned would find out about a paper by reading a draft. (Dennett then famously suggested this as an analogy for consciousness, but that's not relevant to my post.) Now, that kind of interaction can happen before a paper is even written, thanks to blog posts. And websites that let you upload word documents and PDFs mean you don't even need e-mail to get a paper, you can just go to the relevant website.

I've actually done a fair amount of philosophical reading that way in the past couple of weeks. I read Richard Chappell's honors thesis, which I probably never would have gotten my hands on without the internet. I read the third chapter of Peter Unger's Beyond Inanity, and when I finish reading the last two available draft-chapters, I'll e-mail him with my thoughts. I also asked for the syllabus for a class on disagreement I didn't have the time to take, was warned some of the papers weren't published yet, and found them online anyway. That's the power of the internet for you.

All of this is very strange, in a way. There's nothing stopping me from citing any of the things I've read in what I write in the future, indeed one of those things, Thomas Kelly's Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence cites an awful lot of papers as "forthcoming." The ideas in Beyond Inanity are compelling enough, and projected publication distant enough, that I doubt I'll be able to resist the temptation to cite (indeed, I just printed off a one-page piece solely for the purpose of getting teacher feedback, which referenced BI).

Another odd element is the idea of instant feedback, from anyone on the planet who wants to give it. The idea of a random undergraduate giving comments on a book draft to an established academic just isn't something that could have happened 30 years ago. I'm not sure what to make of it--I must face the possibility that the comments I send in will ultimately turn out to be drivel.

And aside from what you do with a draft after having read it, the experience of reading a draft is different than the experience of reading a finished product. The available BI drafts are things I would regard as frustratingly underdeveloped, if I encountered them as finished product, but as drafts I can get excited about what they do contain and the finished product that may one day come of them.

Having rambled on like this, I'm not sure what all of this means. That admission reminds me of the tag line of the great new blog Journal of Half-Baked Ideas, and it's almost tempting to submit this there, except it doesn't quite seem to be the sort of fare they're printing. Therefore I will just end this post without a definite conclusion. Except that the world is changing.

Sean Carroll on politicians and critics

2008-04-22T01:29:00.002-05:00

While reading about the fight about how to fight Expelled, I came across a piece by Sean Carroll (prof here in Madison, gave a good introduction to Dawkins) titled Politicans and Critics. Honestly, I've sometimes felt things along those lines, and that they might be just to get the politicians and critics to ignore each other as much as humanly possible. However, the idealistic part of me wants to believe that the politicians can also be critics. Thoughts?

Quote of the Year

2008-04-21T01:48:00.000-05:00

I have not read the news, watched the news, or read a blog for 48 hours, and it is kind of great. Hell, I have not even checked memeorandum to discover the latest ginned-up outrage of the week. The 98% of the world who don’t read blogs may be on to something.

-John Cole

Fuck you, Randy Olson

2008-04-21T01:29:00.002-05:00

Last month, talking about the latest blowup in the Myers/Nisbet fight over framing, I wrote:... Continue reading at God is for Suckers!

Review: The Age of American Unreason

2008-04-18T00:27:00.003-05:00

A review in which I explain what isn't wrong with modern culture and how we can fix it.

I bought Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason as something of an impulse buy--it was prettily displayed in the store--but I had enjoyed Freethinkers, and am concerned about the sorry state of intellectual life in America (won't say "dumbing down," because I'm not sure it's really gotten worse).

Having read it, the nicest thing I can think to say about it is that I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if Jacoby hadn't gotten off to such a bad start. And even there, I suspect the answer is "no," since there are enough things to dislike about the book throughout.

First the bad start: Jacoby spends five pages complaining that some people have begun using the word "folks" where they might have used "people." This is bizarre. Words go in and out of fashion all the time without consequence. What's her position: that there is a transcendental rule that only "people" can be used to convey that particular idea? Is she shocked by the idea of people in the Spanish speaking world conveying that idea with "la gente"? There are many troubling features of our intellectual climate, but a single point of word choice that doesn't create the smallest confusion in thinking isn't one of them.

As I read on, I could kind of convince myself this was a minor lapse. After the first chapter she launches into history reminiscent of Freethinkers. I had a lingering worry about history being used for propaganda purposes, but tried to suppress it. I ultimately failed at that. I gave out during the chapter on the 60's, which was dedicated to arguing that the American Left is not responsible for our current state of affairs. To this end, she trivializes major events from that period:

The problem with that argument is that radical New Left activists never came close to attaining a majority among students, much less faculty, on most campuses--including the elite institutions that were centers of student protest and garnered the most extensive national publicity. At Columbia University, where the administration closed the school in response to a student strike in April 1968, only about 1,000 of the 4,400 undergraduates were actually on strike, and many fewer took part in the occupation of buildings. (p. 141)

Are we seriously expected to believe that students shutting down a university would not have had broader aftershocks, just because the students involved were a "mere" large minority? The anti-war activists on my campus today can only dream of having over 20% of the student population backing their protests. This doesn't mean Leftist students are to blame for our problems: my response to hearing that story is curiosity rather than fury, but Jacoby can't find it in her to be even historically, curious, because that would undermine her rhetorical aims.

Once she leaves the history behind, the book becomes pure trash. The central motif that emerges from the book is snobbery. Reading Jacoby, I've come to see that snobbery is best understood as valuing the outward trappings of intellectual and cultural achievement, and feeling superior about it, while having no sense of what's really valuable in those areas. Such is the attitude required for mistaking a minor point of word choice for a sign of the End.

A major strand of Jacoby's snobbery is ungrounded rants against new media. I was initially puzzled by Jacoby's assertion that the internet would take time away from reading--made as if she is unaware that text comprises as solid majority of the internet's content. Then, on p. 262, she comes back from a section break by noticing this problem and giving signs she will issue a rebuttal. She even has the decency to provide a substantial excerpt from an enthusiastically pro-internet Wired article. Then she declares the excerpt "ghastly," and doesn't really bother to answer it. The final sentence before the next section break reads "I say readers get what they pay for--in time as well as money." Jacoby is too busy being impressed by her use of a cliche to see how stupid she's being. Literally, this statement is trivially true as long as one isn't defrauded or accidentally handed the wrong product. What she means to imply, though, is something along the lines of "new technology will never give us equal- or better-quality products more efficiently and at a lower price." Counter-examples to this claim are embarrassingly abundant, and include near everything that makes civilization possible.

On television, let me say this: yes, it's a tragedy that many people watch trashy TV shows when they could be watching great novels. But it's also a tragedy that Firefly got canceled, and just think: it probably would have survived if every hour spent reading trashy novels that year had been invested watching the show instead.

Not only is Jacoby snobbish, much of the book can only be described as anti-intellectual. Oftentimes, people with more academic qualifications than she disagree with her, and rather than providing serious intellectual engagement, simply acts shocked that an intellectual would disagree with her. This reaches its most absurd point when she mentions academic discussion of popular culture:

Courses in popular culture are extremely popular with students, and the faculty members who teach them argue that such classes enable students to "deconstruct" and think critically about mass entertainment. They are wrong. (pp. 314-315)

Though Jacoby continues to heap scorn on popular culture for a few more sentences, those last five words are the entirety of her response to her academic opponents. Here, as in many other places, it's clear Jacoby hasn't bothered learning enough about her targets to effectively critique them. Learn enough about popular culture, and it becomes pretty clear that it really is possible to deconstruct popular culture in a way that prevents anyone from viewing it the same way ever again.

If we want to improve the state of American culture, we need to be able to make a convincing case that life is too short to spend watching "whatever's on."* We need to be able to show people the world of first rate literature, philosophy, science, and history. But to that, we need to be able to explain what's valuable in it, and to do that, we need to understand ourselves what's valuable, moving beyond a mere snobbish exaltation of the superficially sophisticated.

*Perhaps the closest thing this book has to a redeeming feature is Jacoby's discovery of a statistic that something like 43% of Americans are willing to watch "whatever's on," a finding unfortunately not given the attention it deserves.

Quote of the Time Being

2008-04-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer... At all events, philosophers seem, in general, not to make the attempt; and, whether in consequence of this omission or not, they are constantly endeavouring to prove that 'Yes' or 'No' will answer questions, to which neither answer is correct, owing to the fact that what they have beffore their minds is not one question, but several, to some of which the true answer is 'No,' to others 'Yes.'

-G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica

Expelled continues to get kicked around

2008-04-16T23:48:00.000-05:00

By Ed Babinski, Chris Heard, and Ed Brayton.

The straightforward trash-nonsense strategy continues to work beautifully in this case.

Friday link bomb

2008-04-16T23:24:00.005-05:00

A friend recently alerted me to this excellent essay on why journalism sucks. Said friend is going into radio.

At Vjack's place, we find Shelley the Republican is still fooling people/ S'ok, man, everyone falls for her!

The internet was sent into a flurry this week over a hoax. I'm glad it was a hoax, but I must confess to thinking: I wish I could think of shit that crazy. Also, I have no idea whether this is a hoax.

Greta Christina has an admirable post on lack of evidence backing up (some) pro-gay rhetoric.

Ed Brayton and Michael Shermer recently published very valuable criticisms of the new Expelled movie. The Discovery Institute has responded. There's at least one counter-response out there somewhere, but it's not worth the trouble of linking to, as the DI response seems to be based on the assumption that their readers aren't actually reading the criticisms of Expelled.

Also on the Expelled front, there's some debate about whether the makers of Expelled are going to lose their profits to lawsuits over copyright infringement. Brian Flemming, who knows the movie business pretty well, says yes:

Fair-use exceptions are possible*, but if the Expelled producers simply used "Imagine" and "All These Things That I've Done" to underscore the emotion of the film's images, which appears to be the case, well, that's not fair use. It's just...use. That's how all movies use music. Fair-use exceptions have to be, you know, exceptional.

Russell Blackford takes up the opposite position, in spite of his general dislike of Expelled. Personally, I suspect the argument might sort of work if they had explicitily said "this is how atheists think! They sing this song at their atheist summer camp!" But it sounds like they didn't do that, and their usage definitely falls under "underscore the emotion of the film's images."

Oh, and one last thing: Viva la Google bomb!:
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled
Expelled

Thought of the Time Being

2008-04-16T23:22:00.000-05:00

We are the people the ironists warned us about: pretending to hate our parents by putting their old slogans on t-shirts.

People without vital force

2008-04-16T20:50:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, I criticized the zombie argument for dualism on the grounds that a similar argument could be made for vitalism. In response, Richard directed me to a previous post which touched on the vitalism and zombies issue:

But 'life' can clearly be analysed in functional and structural terms. There is no sense to be given to the notion of something that is functionally and structurally indiscernible from a duck, having all the same kinds of relations to other objects as another duck does, and yet somehow fails to really be a living duck. To be a living duck just is to have the right kinds of functional relations and so forth. There's nothing more to it than that.

Here, Richard almost talks as if the problem with the vitalism analogy is that the argument for vitalism is wrong. But the key thing is why it's wrong. It's wrong because we have good reason to reject our the pre-theoretical intuitions about the nature of life that some people have in a powerful form. Spend enough time around creationists, and soon you realize that many of them have an intuition that life is non-physical, so it would be impossible in principle for unguided matter to give rise to life. Sounds stupid? That's the point. We often mistake stupid ideas for profound philosophical insights.

Richard says life can be analyzed in functional terms (patterns of causal relations and such). I agree. But this isn't obvious, built into our pre-theoretical intuitions, or any such similar thing. If you want to analyze life functionally, you admit our intuitions about these things don't always give us the right answer. Conversely, some people think consciousness should be analyzed in functional terms. If they're correct, then consciousness is once again in the same boat as life.

Perhaps you dislike whatever theory happens to be the currently reigning functional analysis of consciousness. Perhaps you do so with reason. Still, we're in the beginning stages of understanding the brain. It's a false dilemma to say "either we have the right answer to this key issue already, or we have to accept our intuitions and not take seriously the possibility of ever getting another answer."

The burden of proof is on anyone who thinks there could be no physicalist account of consciousness. In my last post, I suggested there might be a good argument for that conclusion. But if there were, the dualist wouldn't need a zombie horde to do his dirty work. Invoking zombies is a weird way around this--it assumes we have reason to think consciousness isn't physical without ever providing the reason.

Richard has also recently written a post challenging the idea that thought experiments are question-begging. On this point, he brings in the analogy with the common sense belief that the Pope doesn't count as a bachelor. There's a disanalogy here, though: we're in a reasonably good position to answer that question based on our experience with how the term is used. In the zombie case, I don't know how we could know such things are possibit's mainly a question of what convinces people, but his interactions with Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested he thought many people who aren't convinced should be.

The most frustrating post on the zombie argument, though, has to be how to imagine zombies. There, Richard suggests that a world microphysically identical to ours would contain things like David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind. This is a claim that should sound a caution in any good dualist's mind: if there is non-physical consciousness, it seems plausible to think that it affects the physical world, and most importantly is the reason philosophers like Chalmers write books like The Conscious Mind. The view that consciousness exists but has no such causal powers is known as epiphenomenalism, and is quite popular today. Chalmers endorses it. But Chalmers admits he isn't entirely confident about it. Now: if even a big-shot dualist like Chalmers isn't entirely confident about the truth of epiphenomenalism, what business do we have simply intuiting claims that presuppose its truth? Richard talks about what a super-genius would calculate, but the conclusions of super-geniuses seem an even poorer candidate for intuiting than most metaphysical issues (why bother with smart people if they can be replaced by intuitions?)* If nothing else shows the doubtful, question-begging nature of the zombie argument, this point should.

For more on this issue, I strongly recommend Siris' "Zombie Invasion" round-up. Especially the links there to the Brood Comb posts on epiphenomenalism. Oh, and be sure to check this out.

*As an aside: it matters a bit whether Richard means to say that the super-genius will know everything about a snap-shot of a world, or about it's causal processes and future as well. But it seems that "all there is to know" includes these things.

Go philosophy, or something!

2008-04-15T17:13:00.000-05:00

Will Wilkinson posts a graph that should depress philosophy majors, and then explains why actually we should be happy. Meanwhile, Lester Hunt has a vaguely similar discussion.