Bad Science; Bad Policies

  • June 22, 2011 4:47 am

I don’t generally use this blog to vent, but as I am still working on the new site (where I will likely do more posts like this one) and it is not live yet, and I needed to write something, this seemed like the best venue for it. For the small number that follow this tiny corner of the blogosphere, I’m sorry for being so slow. I will likely try to blog more as the summer goes on. My schedule is start to calm down and I am starting to fall in a groove, so hopefully that will leave more time.

There are very few issues that I take personally, in politics. But the one view that I have come to find most offensive during my adult life is the 21-year-old drinking age. As a 20-year-old, I take the assertion that I am incapable of making my own decisions about alcohol very personally, and I am often deeply upset about my inability to spend time with people that I care about, to go out to graduation parties or just to go out to karaoke or to go out dancing, because my age prohibits me from going out to bars.

I don’t think that there is any level at which it is politically defensible to restrict the rights of adults to participate in social society based on age. If I thought I could win, I would love to file an equal protection lawsuit against the state of California to make my point (if there are lawyers who think that case is reasonable, I’d love to hear it, though it would likely litigate until long after my 21st birthday anyway), but instead I’m just here, in the blogosphere, venting about it.

Bad Science; Bad Policies – continue reading

On Relevant Areas of Expertise, and Debate

  • April 5, 2011 6:04 am

I opened up Pharyngula this morning (as I do most mornings) to find two posts, one by PZ and one by Lawrence Krauss himself, on Krauss’ debate with William Lane Craig. Both are venting about the sophistic tendencies of Craig and how it undermines the credibility of his opponents (and atheists, generally) in a debate setting.

Of course, PZ and Krauss both miss the point.

The problem with the Krauss/Craig debate is that they lack similar areas of expertise. Because Krauss is a physicist and mathematician, he is not necessarily equipped to argue against the philosophical arguments presented by Craig and, because Craig is neither a physicist nor mathematician, he has absolutely no understanding of what Krauss is talking about. Both Craig and Krauss failed to realize this issue prior to the event, which is shocking, since it’s happens all the time, but setting aside that general point of frustration with the commentary, it’s worth presenting some notes.

On Relevant Areas of Expertise, and Debate – continue reading

The Devil’s Advocate (or “You Be Trollin’”)

  • April 4, 2011 9:16 am

One of the most wonderful pieces of writing that I’ve done up to this point in my career as an aspiring philosopher is a paper I presented at CSU Bakersfield last spring. It wasn’t the most compelling piece I’ve ever written, nor was it the most eloquent, nor was it the most inspired. The reason that it was wonderful is that it was an opportunity for me to argue in the presence of those who sincerely believed in what I was arguing against. I didn’t have to ‘troll’ in the sense of being ridiculous and off-topic, but rather I had the opportunity to play ‘philosotroll’ (not so coincidentally, the name of the new project I’ve been working on) to a crowd of genuine believers.

The backstory goes something like this: I was working on a series of papers dealing with religious ethics and religious toleration, trying to clarify my own position on the extent to which various forms of religious acts were punishable by the state. One of the areas I found most interesting was the Christian attitude towards witchcraft and demonic possession. I wrote a paper for a conference in Bakersfield attacking the epistemological framework of an article by a professor of religious studies, Stafford Betty, entitled “The Growing Evidence for Demonic Possession.”

The primary claim of my article was that all of the claims Betty made failed to meet any standard of evidence. I stand by that claim. The story continues, though, as it turns out that Dr. Betty is a professor at CSU Bakersfield. I hadn’t been aware of this prior to submitting the paper, however I discovered this in doing a little research prior to presenting, and when I arrived at campus (thanks to Dr. Gamboa and the wonderful people in the philosophy department there) I was told that Dr. Betty would be there for my presentation.

The Devil’s Advocate (or “You Be Trollin’”) – continue reading

On the Akedah and Audacity

  • March 29, 2011 4:35 pm

When I was in high school (not that long ago) I studied with a Rabbi named Steven Chester, and one of the passages that I read with him (and a group of other students) was the Akedah, which he expressed at the time was one of the most interesting passages for him to study. Reading Genesis 19 with Rabbi Chester was not a radically different experience from other readings of Biblical texts that I had done with other religion scholars; there was exegesis, but very little hermeneutics, which is the way I’ve found it done in most religious contexts.

Anyway, it came up in class when a guest lecturer referenced the Binding of Isaac as an example of a situation where an outside agent would be justified in intervening. One of my friends, a very committed Christian, was deeply upset by his use of the referent. As she expounded (after shushing me; not an uncommon reaction from my more literalist friends, who don’t really appreciate the experience of Jewish exegesis or my general attitude of skepticism) on how the distinction should be made between ideologies and poor interpretations of those ideologies, I had to try to quell my anger. But this is a blog, so I will let it flow into the internet, and hope it is lost in the void.

On the Akedah and Audacity – continue reading

Slouching Towards Compassion

  • March 22, 2011 9:59 pm

As I write this blog entry, I realize that there are other things that I should be doing. I have two (hopefully three) presentations coming up in the month of April and a bunch of papers and midterms that I should be dealing with. But for a moment it is worthwhile for me to take a breath and relax. This wasn’t really something that I created as a confessional. I’m not that blogger and, frankly, not that kind of person. But this is a moment that it seems appropriate.

I’m listening to Lupe Fiasco right now say things that have definitely been on his mind for years, and I think that’s an example worth following. So, here it goes.

A friend of mine posted as a facebook status:

‎”Taxing the high income members of society 36% is just a disincentive to be productive.” YES. Thank you, ag law professor!

That’s fine. I’m a fiscal conservative in a lot of ways. I will admit to having read and enjoyed Ayn Rand in high school, and am happy to cite Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard as two of the most interesting and engaging political philosophers I’ve ever set my mind on. But I hear this, and it drives me nuts.

You need an incentive to make +$200,000 a year? How about putting food on the table for your family and sending your kids to college without taking out a second mortgage? How’s that for an incentive?

I recognize that the federal and state governments take considerably more money from the wealthy than from the poor in the United States, and a lot of that money goes to help those poor people who some of my conservative friends thing don’t deserve the government support. The government shouldn’t subsidize poverty. Fine. An enormous amount of government spending is spent subsidizing Viagra and political coups, and that’s disgusting. But how about we recognize that some of that money goes towards fighting infant mortality and educating kids so that maybe, someday, the average American 8th grader will actually be able to read at a 8th grade level, and will have a science teacher who majored in science.

The honors seminar that I take part in met today and discussed Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy.” I don’t like to defend Nietzsche. I find his philosophy totally off base when it comes to logic and epistemology, and I find him thoroughly frustrating in his anti-rationalist tendencies. But when a friend, who is one of the most literate people I have ever met, says that she stopped reading after she got through Nietzsche’s denunciation of Christianity because she thought it was weak, I had to hold my tongue.

I’d like to have said: “Really, I dug my way through C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, one of the most absurd, fallacy-ridden loads of Christian charlatanism at your request, and you’re telling me you couldn’t get through a chapter of Nietzsche because of a half-dozen sentences rebuking Christianity? I sift though bullshit by every pseudo-intellectual Christian apologist my friends recommend to me, but they can’t read through and then challenge one apostate to Christianity?”

I’m used to stomaching hypocrisy, but that was a little much, especially after a long day.

That’s all I have for today, but I think I’m going to make the practice of venting into the blogosphere a little more common until I get the new project up and running.

Consciousness Explained

  • February 12, 2011 12:49 am

I don’t get to publish my reviews in professional journals (yet) but since I’ve been busy, despite the fact that I’ve kept up on my reading. I’m working on coordinating a panel discussion for Fresno State students later in February, so that is consuming a lot of my time, and I’m submitting three presentations (two papers and a short presentation for a research symposium connected to the National Endowment for the Humanities) which all have to be turned in by the end of March, plus a third paper that I will be submitting towards the end of March. None of this particularly stresses me out, but the combination of those things, plus my course load, has left me with little free time.

I figure, though, for those few readers I have out there who are interested in hearing what it is I think about what I’m reading, it might be good to link in with GoodReads, which I strongly recommend. It’s a great site, and feel free to friend me on there to keep up with my progress as I get through stuff. I do try to be pretty diligent about logging my reading, as it’s nice to have an understanding of how fast I read, as well as some log of my reading history. (It also helps that there’s an app for my iPod touch, which I carry with my all the time, that lets me log my progress anywhere there’s wifi.)

Consciousness ExplainedConsciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was trying out a new reading methodology for Consciousness Explained, reading the critiques of articles entered in journals alongside the actual text, which allowed me to see both the illegitimacy of some of the criticisms and the serious problems with some of the text. I strongly recommend that methodology. I’ll be trying it again at some point soon.

Dennett’s text is considered one of the most significant texts in modern philosophy of consciousness, which is odd since there are some major criticisms of it that seem very strong. I strongly recommend the critiques by Ned Block (Journal of Philosophy, 1993) and Colin McGinn (Philosophical Perspectives, 1995), which point out that Dennett actually doesn’t construct a theory of consciousness.

The most powerful part of the text, which has largely been accepted and adopted even by many of Dennett’s dissenters, is the discussion of the Cartesian Theater.

That said, the rest of the text is kind of hard to read, since it seems fairly weak. Dennett himself is constantly hedging his bets, acting as a pragmatist. He does this extensively in his discussions of heterophenomenology and the Multiple Drafts Model. The problem, though, is that the MDS is not a model of consciousness, but a model of content and the way in which content relates to consciousness.

There are a lot of reviews on here that are critical of Dennett but admit to not having read the entire book. I’m not one of those people. I’m also not going to say that “Dennett reads like Derrida” or something silly like that. The fact is, Dennett has a very unique and engaging writing style, but I think it’s worthwhile to remain skeptical of many of his claims, and to try to follow whether the arguments that he paints as in contrast to his own are actually being addressed by the content that follows. It’s a worthwhile read for those who are interested in consciousness, and content, but I definitely don’t recommend this as a first read. Despite its accessible writing style, the actual content may lead to later confusion, as much of the debate has changed since the writing of the book.

View all my reviews

Also, I’m working on a new web project which will focus more on philosophy. I think that when that gets up and running, that will take precedence over this. It will be a communal project, with a few of my good friends who also happen to be diligent students of philosophy and religious studies. So, for those of you out there in cyberspace, I hope you check that stuff out when it becomes available, as I think you’ll enjoy reading what they have to say, provided you enjoy my insight.

Why Apologetics Drives Me Crazy

  • January 24, 2011 7:43 am

There are a few things that I really don’t like about contemporary apologetics. The first is that it’s no longer possible to write it off as the product of medieval thought when it comes up with attempts at analytic proofs that are totally ridiculous. The second is that it often consists of condescension to experts in the fields of philosophy or the sciences. The third is that, for the most part, it’s entirely logically unsound.

The primary problem in the unsound reasoning of contemporary apologetics has to do with the use of a priori arguments to establish the existence of God. That is readily visible in theologians like William Lane Craig, to name perhaps the prominent. This definitely warrants its own post, but it seems to me that anyone even the least bit involved in analytic philosophy should be aware that it is not possible to use an a priori proof to demonstrate the existence of an external body.

But a secondary problem with unsound reasoning is that often it is just plain terrible. P.Z. Myers posted a link to this awful attempt at a refutation of a youtube video dealing with the impotence of prayer. The actual content o the video isn’t that relevant. What got me to dust off the logic stick (which has been taking a break since New Years) was a particular soundbite in the article which, since it was a Christian soundbite reproduced by Christians, I’m going to assume was accurate:

“You look at all of that [and] you sympathize with Susie because you think they (disasters, illnesses, etc.) are evil,” he said. “But if it’s evil, then there must be a standard for good. If there is a crooked line in this world then there must be a straight line. If there is a straight line then there must be God.” (italics mine – JDS)

Now, I’m going to ignore the bit at the beginning about disaster and illness and poverty and famine being evil. He’s welcome to defend those things as good if he wants to. He’d be wrong, but it’s a position I’ve heard before. I don’t think he would, because, as I’ll see in a moment, it’s important to his argument for the existence of God. But, for now, I want to focus on the conditionals.

Why Apologetics Drives Me Crazy – continue reading

The Significance of Cogito and Proof by Function

  • December 27, 2010 12:22 am

Usually, when I sit in on classes that teach enlightenment philosophy, they usually represent Descartes on the basis of his most famous (perhaps because it gets taught in every enlightenment philosophy class) demonstration in his works:

Cogito ergo sum.

I think therefore I am.

The problem is, and I’ve learned this from tutoring the students who get taught this in enlightenment philosophy classes, no one explains why this is a substantial proof of the existence of a mind.

It seems to me that the greatest breakthrough of the cogito is not what it proves (which should be apparent to every being engaged in thought, anyway) but the way in which it proves it, and this seems a really important lesson to teach undergraduates.

The Significance of Cogito and Proof by Function – continue reading

Logical Positivism and Emotivism

  • December 23, 2010 8:20 am

I’m working through a collection of essays edited by A.J. Ayer on logical positivism, and every once in a while I come up against a claim about normative statements that makes me wince. There is a lot of good content (though, as has become a little infamous around my department and among a few groups of philosophers in the valley, I have a strong sympathy for the logical positivist position) in the text, but there is this desire to regard normative claims as lacking content or lacking meaning or even, occasionally, lacking logical consistence.

I find this fundamentally bizarre. It seems clear to me (even without having read what Ayer has to say about emotivism and what we are actually saying in normative and value statements) that there is content in statements of value. The issue is that the value does not reference an experience of the object, but rather references my experience of a fact about the world and the intentional stance derived from my internal understanding of the fact about the world.

There is nothing problematic about this, in terms of content. Statements about internal states still have content and they still have truth value. If the objection to normative claims is that they overstep their bounds by introducing the ought, then that’s fine (though redundant, since Hume already explained that problem) but it seems to me that the objection of a lack of content is somehow larger than that.

Logical Positivism and Emotivism – continue reading

On Time

  • December 23, 2010 12:47 am

One of my peers at CSU Fresno is working on a wonderful paper on McTaggart’s The Unreality of Time, a text I’m not that familiar with. It’s terrifically interesting stuff and I’m happy that she’s asked me to help her (as much as I can) with it.

The work is (in my understanding) on whether a view of time which is observer centered (referred to as the A Series) and locates events in one of three categories (Past, Present and Future) has any claim to be referred to as real. The preferable model, from what I am coming to understand, though clearly this is disputed (the B Series) locates events strictly with respect to other events, a sort of third-person relative.

The more I look at theories of time, though, both A Series and B Series (which you can find definitions of in McTaggart), the more I find myself referencing one of my favorite pieces of Zen wisdom. Now, it has nothing to do with the philosophy of time, but it seems to me worth repeating.

On Time – continue reading