Have you ever noticed how denialists end up looking a lot like conspiracy theorists? In fact, exactly like them, since it takes a conspiracy of the vast majority of climate scientists -- a vast global conspiracy. Apparently their conferences are conspiracy-planning sessions, all because they're dirty hippies who vote for Democrats or whatever the equivalent is in their country.
You know, there’s a growing body of evidence that, at some level, our moral “principles,” or at least the moral “intuitions” that form the basis of moral principles are innate. It’s long been thought that, for example, reciprocity is an innate social principle in humans, but more recently, other moral intuitions have been posited to be part of an innate moral vocabulary, or perhaps grammar (a bunch of researchers have recently become moral Chomskyans). But since whatever it is that is innate has to be filled in with real world content, culture will do most of the work in determining the actual content of moral judgments. And since culture evolves, it’s not surprising that moral judgments evolve (I think this has really been the dominant view in empirical psychology since at least Piaget, though often only tacitly).
The market analogy is probably only so useful, as are other analogies in this domain, but if it gets people thinking about it, that’s a good thing. As an analogy (and it’s just that), it reminds me a lot of the analogy behind the concept of memes: it’s a nice place to start, but you have to leave it behind pretty quickly to understand the nuances of cultural, and by extension moral, evolution.
Mike, it's a strange mindset that coopts a pre-Christian world view (that of the Greeks, particularly Plato), one that largely shaped Christianity, not the other way around, and decides that it shows that Christianity is not only true, but the only non-pathological conclusion at which one could possibly arrive from philosophy. It's sort of like saying that the Shakespearean style proves that the only true, uncorrupted literature is the Victorian novel.
Bob, I’m going to just start calling religion, and your religion in particular, an infantile neurosis, and use a few other Freudian terms not so much in argument for that position, because it’s not like you ever argue for your position that we’re suffering from some sort of psychopathology, but to make it sound serious. It’s a good way to avoid having to deal with ideas you, or I, don’t like: call it a pathology, and a fundamental one at that. You take your Voegelin, I’ll take my Freud, and we’ll just lob psychoanalysis at each other. Other than that, I don’t see how it’s possible to engage you on this subject.
Civilization is always collapsing to the generation that's no longer in control of it. When we reach Bob's age (assuming we haven't already), there's a good chance we'll be convinced that civilization is collapsing too. It almost seems like it's hard wired into us.
OK, that was dismissive, for which I apologize. I recommend reading the full text of the wager passages <a href="http://www.reformed.org/master/index.html?mainframe=/apologetics/classical/pascals_wager.html"here. What you'll find is a discussion that is, from the outset, taking place "according to natural light," which is to say, Reason, or Natural Reason, or the Natural point of view. The wager takes you, the nonbeliever (and I don't mean you specifically, Blaise -- and this is getting strange now, calling you Blaise), through a few versions, ultimately to get you (the nonbeliever) to the realization that it is not reason that keeps you from believing, but “the passions” (“But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks”). The whole point is that it is reasonable to have faith, even if that faith is in the existence of something the nature of which one cannot know. For Pascal, faith is precisely the means of knowing the existence of that the nature of which is unknowable. That’s where the passage you quote comes in.
Anyway, despite the fact that I am a nonbeliever, I find Pascal’s version of the wager to be a powerful outline of an argument: it says, in essence, that if all that is blocking your way to faith is the misguided belief that faith is irrational – a misguided belief that has dominated popular atheism for the last few years, it must be noted – then this perspective, the one in the wager, gives a fairly strong counter. Granted, it doesn’t stand alone, but there’s no reason to believe Pascal meant for it to, since a.) it’s not an argument for the existence of God, b.) it is part of a larger apologetics of faith in his fragments, and c.) it’s only aimed at someone who is, in essence, an agnostic. It has no real force for an atheist. If you take it for what it is, it is anything but stupid, which is why it’s not surprising that it was carried on by people like Arnauld or Locke, who weren’t exactly idiots (even if Arnauld and Locke’s versions are a bit more facile, and much less weighty).
Blaise, as I'm sure you're aware, there's little evidence that Pascal's wager is as a proof of God's existence, or as a conversion tool even (at least not from atheism to theism), and it has naught of hell in it. It's not really even an argument, since it's a fragment of a note of what, we can assume, was to be an argument (in dialogue form, probably). It's not even the fragment of one argument; it's the fragment of three.
What it points to, at least, is an argument for the reasonableness, from the perspective of Natural Reason, of faith in God, and for the notion that rejection of faith as irrational is not, thereby, a product of Reason but of feelings, emotion, whatever (we'd probably call it bias, these days).
I fail to see how it's a dumb thing, much less the dumbest thing that he wrote. Even in its fragmentary form, it's really quite powerful.
With the exception of my transition, and it was a years long transition, from Catholicism to atheism, I can't think of any time when I've awakened, or even transitioned slowly, from one belief to a blatantly conflicting one. For the most part, my belief change has been the filling of holes where beliefs were missing.
I suppose there have been cases in which I've learned new facts that have caused me to reevaluate something I believed. Hell, much of grad school was that, and much to my chagrin, doing research has been as well (argh, embodied cognition). But similar to what Jaybird said about calculus, this feels different from waking up with beliefs that have less to do with obvious empirical facts than with values or more amorphous foundations.
Hah, I wasn't speculating, I was wondering. There's a difference.
My guest post would look exactly like this (feel free to move this to the front page):
Dude, Stalin was really bad, and he killed millions of people, targetings several groups, including Ukrainians, Jews, and the officer corps. It really sucked to live in the Soviet Union under Stalin; even worse than it sucked to live in the Soviet Union under other leaders, which is saying a lot. And that's assuming you lived. Did I mention that Stalin murdered or encouraged the murder of millions of people? Also, read Life and Fate.
I wonder if he’d mention that Stalin targeted Jews on more than one occasion.
You know, it was official Soviet Policy not to talk about the extermination of Jews, specifically, by the Nazis, because it was thought that it would minimize the suffering of the other Soviet citizens. This is one of the reasons why Grossman’s Life and Fate was banned.
An amazing book by the way, if you haven’t read it – the letter from Shtrum’s mother is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever read. It looks like you can read all of it here: here, starting at page 80.
I honestly can’t figure out what you’re going on about here. It takes a perverse “reasoning,” if it can be called that, to get anything from Wall’s post that suggests he’s excluding or denying any other genocide or crime against humanity, and as James said, you just seem to be saying that no one should talk about one genocide without talking about the ones that you’re interested in. I notice, though, that you haven’t once mentioned the Armenian genocide. Do you, sir, not think human rights are universal?! (See how silly that sounds coming from someone else?)
The mind is not rational, despite our every attempt to pretend it is.
That statement is even more opaque than the first. What does it mean for the mind to be rational? It certainly obeys an order, even if that order alludes us, and may forever do so. And it's a mistake to conclude, as many philosophers have done (at least in the modern era), that "emotion" or "feeling" is not rational, or that our heavy reliance on it, mentally, makes the mind irrational, because emotions are quite rational, as you'd expect from an evolved creature.
The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits, as some French dude once said. The question is, how do you react to the absurd? For most, the answer seems to be, adding even more unknowable stuff, that is, more absurdity, on top of it in order to make this stuff feel a little less absurd. I find it somewhat amusing that Bob, channeling Voegelin, thinks that is the less disordered approach.
If it's a bias, it's a bias towards the present, towards things that affect us clearly, directly, and frequently. If we were in a Buddhist country, people like me, or Jason, or Sam Harris, would focus on Buddhism, and your equivalent there would suggest we had an anti-Buddhism bias, as evidenced by the fact that we don't spend even close to as much time talking about Christianity.
I just meant I'm not sure where you think the bias comes from. I know quite well where it comes from.
I'm not sure what Blaise meant by that particular proposition, but I agree with what you're saying. Too often today "rational" becomes identified with "science," which is to say, with measurement, causal explanations, probabilistic predictions, etc., and while the life, and the world in general, is certainly not encapsulated in that, this does not imply that there is not some other sort of order to it, some reason to it, where order and reason are more than just causal order and reason.
On “Changing Minds”
Have you ever noticed how denialists end up looking a lot like conspiracy theorists? In fact, exactly like them, since it takes a conspiracy of the vast majority of climate scientists -- a vast global conspiracy. Apparently their conferences are conspiracy-planning sessions, all because they're dirty hippies who vote for Democrats or whatever the equivalent is in their country.
On “Moral Evolution”
You know, there’s a growing body of evidence that, at some level, our moral “principles,” or at least the moral “intuitions” that form the basis of moral principles are innate. It’s long been thought that, for example, reciprocity is an innate social principle in humans, but more recently, other moral intuitions have been posited to be part of an innate moral vocabulary, or perhaps grammar (a bunch of researchers have recently become moral Chomskyans). But since whatever it is that is innate has to be filled in with real world content, culture will do most of the work in determining the actual content of moral judgments. And since culture evolves, it’s not surprising that moral judgments evolve (I think this has really been the dominant view in empirical psychology since at least Piaget, though often only tacitly).
The market analogy is probably only so useful, as are other analogies in this domain, but if it gets people thinking about it, that’s a good thing. As an analogy (and it’s just that), it reminds me a lot of the analogy behind the concept of memes: it’s a nice place to start, but you have to leave it behind pretty quickly to understand the nuances of cultural, and by extension moral, evolution.
On “Changing Minds”
By the way, I wonder what sort of algorithm you use(d) for the wager. Some sort of expected utility calculation?
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Which questions, in your opinion, does the wager beg?
On “Moral Evolution”
In case it's not obvious, "infantile neurosis" was one of Freud's descriptions of religion.
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Eh, that's just Bob's infantile neurosis speaking.
See, Bob?
On “Changing Minds”
Mike, it's a strange mindset that coopts a pre-Christian world view (that of the Greeks, particularly Plato), one that largely shaped Christianity, not the other way around, and decides that it shows that Christianity is not only true, but the only non-pathological conclusion at which one could possibly arrive from philosophy. It's sort of like saying that the Shakespearean style proves that the only true, uncorrupted literature is the Victorian novel.
"
Well said.
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Bob, I’m going to just start calling religion, and your religion in particular, an infantile neurosis, and use a few other Freudian terms not so much in argument for that position, because it’s not like you ever argue for your position that we’re suffering from some sort of psychopathology, but to make it sound serious. It’s a good way to avoid having to deal with ideas you, or I, don’t like: call it a pathology, and a fundamental one at that. You take your Voegelin, I’ll take my Freud, and we’ll just lob psychoanalysis at each other. Other than that, I don’t see how it’s possible to engage you on this subject.
"
Civilization is always collapsing to the generation that's no longer in control of it. When we reach Bob's age (assuming we haven't already), there's a good chance we'll be convinced that civilization is collapsing too. It almost seems like it's hard wired into us.
"
OK, that was dismissive, for which I apologize. I recommend reading the full text of the wager passages <a href="http://www.reformed.org/master/index.html?mainframe=/apologetics/classical/pascals_wager.html"here. What you'll find is a discussion that is, from the outset, taking place "according to natural light," which is to say, Reason, or Natural Reason, or the Natural point of view. The wager takes you, the nonbeliever (and I don't mean you specifically, Blaise -- and this is getting strange now, calling you Blaise), through a few versions, ultimately to get you (the nonbeliever) to the realization that it is not reason that keeps you from believing, but “the passions” (“But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks”). The whole point is that it is reasonable to have faith, even if that faith is in the existence of something the nature of which one cannot know. For Pascal, faith is precisely the means of knowing the existence of that the nature of which is unknowable. That’s where the passage you quote comes in.
Anyway, despite the fact that I am a nonbeliever, I find Pascal’s version of the wager to be a powerful outline of an argument: it says, in essence, that if all that is blocking your way to faith is the misguided belief that faith is irrational – a misguided belief that has dominated popular atheism for the last few years, it must be noted – then this perspective, the one in the wager, gives a fairly strong counter. Granted, it doesn’t stand alone, but there’s no reason to believe Pascal meant for it to, since a.) it’s not an argument for the existence of God, b.) it is part of a larger apologetics of faith in his fragments, and c.) it’s only aimed at someone who is, in essence, an agnostic. It has no real force for an atheist. If you take it for what it is, it is anything but stupid, which is why it’s not surprising that it was carried on by people like Arnauld or Locke, who weren’t exactly idiots (even if Arnauld and Locke’s versions are a bit more facile, and much less weighty).
"
Yeah, I said hell's not in the wager. It ain't. And you missed so much in the wager that I honestly think yoy read it for the first time today.
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Blaise, as I'm sure you're aware, there's little evidence that Pascal's wager is as a proof of God's existence, or as a conversion tool even (at least not from atheism to theism), and it has naught of hell in it. It's not really even an argument, since it's a fragment of a note of what, we can assume, was to be an argument (in dialogue form, probably). It's not even the fragment of one argument; it's the fragment of three.
What it points to, at least, is an argument for the reasonableness, from the perspective of Natural Reason, of faith in God, and for the notion that rejection of faith as irrational is not, thereby, a product of Reason but of feelings, emotion, whatever (we'd probably call it bias, these days).
I fail to see how it's a dumb thing, much less the dumbest thing that he wrote. Even in its fragmentary form, it's really quite powerful.
"
With the exception of my transition, and it was a years long transition, from Catholicism to atheism, I can't think of any time when I've awakened, or even transitioned slowly, from one belief to a blatantly conflicting one. For the most part, my belief change has been the filling of holes where beliefs were missing.
I suppose there have been cases in which I've learned new facts that have caused me to reevaluate something I believed. Hell, much of grad school was that, and much to my chagrin, doing research has been as well (argh, embodied cognition). But similar to what Jaybird said about calculus, this feels different from waking up with beliefs that have less to do with obvious empirical facts than with values or more amorphous foundations.
On “How to Think About John Demjanjuk”
Ugh, sorry about the link. I've always had trouble with Google Books links. Just Google "Life and Fate," look in Google Books, and go to page 80.
That review is wonderful as well. Thank you for posting it.
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Hah, I wasn't speculating, I was wondering. There's a difference.
My guest post would look exactly like this (feel free to move this to the front page):
Dude, Stalin was really bad, and he killed millions of people, targetings several groups, including Ukrainians, Jews, and the officer corps. It really sucked to live in the Soviet Union under Stalin; even worse than it sucked to live in the Soviet Union under other leaders, which is saying a lot. And that's assuming you lived. Did I mention that Stalin murdered or encouraged the murder of millions of people? Also, read Life and Fate.
"
I wonder if he’d mention that Stalin targeted Jews on more than one occasion.
You know, it was official Soviet Policy not to talk about the extermination of Jews, specifically, by the Nazis, because it was thought that it would minimize the suffering of the other Soviet citizens. This is one of the reasons why Grossman’s Life and Fate was banned.
An amazing book by the way, if you haven’t read it – the letter from Shtrum’s mother is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever read. It looks like you can read all of it here: here, starting at page 80.
"
I honestly can’t figure out what you’re going on about here. It takes a perverse “reasoning,” if it can be called that, to get anything from Wall’s post that suggests he’s excluding or denying any other genocide or crime against humanity, and as James said, you just seem to be saying that no one should talk about one genocide without talking about the ones that you’re interested in. I notice, though, that you haven’t once mentioned the Armenian genocide. Do you, sir, not think human rights are universal?! (See how silly that sounds coming from someone else?)
On “Liveblog at the End of the Universe”
it's not a dismissal. Particularly when it's in agreement with what you said.
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I can't, of course, though I find neuroaesthetics interesting as a line of inquiry.
I don't see how the question is relevant, unless you equate unknown with not rational, which would be naive.
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The mind is not rational, despite our every attempt to pretend it is.
That statement is even more opaque than the first. What does it mean for the mind to be rational? It certainly obeys an order, even if that order alludes us, and may forever do so. And it's a mistake to conclude, as many philosophers have done (at least in the modern era), that "emotion" or "feeling" is not rational, or that our heavy reliance on it, mentally, makes the mind irrational, because emotions are quite rational, as you'd expect from an evolved creature.
"
The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits, as some French dude once said. The question is, how do you react to the absurd? For most, the answer seems to be, adding even more unknowable stuff, that is, more absurdity, on top of it in order to make this stuff feel a little less absurd. I find it somewhat amusing that Bob, channeling Voegelin, thinks that is the less disordered approach.
"
If it's a bias, it's a bias towards the present, towards things that affect us clearly, directly, and frequently. If we were in a Buddhist country, people like me, or Jason, or Sam Harris, would focus on Buddhism, and your equivalent there would suggest we had an anti-Buddhism bias, as evidenced by the fact that we don't spend even close to as much time talking about Christianity.
I just meant I'm not sure where you think the bias comes from. I know quite well where it comes from.
"
I'm not sure what Blaise meant by that particular proposition, but I agree with what you're saying. Too often today "rational" becomes identified with "science," which is to say, with measurement, causal explanations, probabilistic predictions, etc., and while the life, and the world in general, is certainly not encapsulated in that, this does not imply that there is not some other sort of order to it, some reason to it, where order and reason are more than just causal order and reason.
"
Bob, you spend a lot of time attacking "secularists." I wonder why you're not spending an equal amount of time attacking Buddhists.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.