Commenter Archive

By the way, the reason I’ve gone to all this trouble of pointing out that everything you’ve said here is false –aside from the fact that the readers of this blog may not know as well as the readers of the now defunct Positive Liberty and The One Best Way, that arguing from a combination of debunked myths, ideological slant, and outright falsehoods, is pretty much your m.o—is that I find the constant attempts to pin Hitler’s massacre of 6 million Jews (to go along with 3 million non-Jewish Poles, a bunch of gypsies, gays, etc., to say nothing of the Russian P.O.W.s and 13 or so million Russian civilians) on a Jewish individual or a few Jewish individuals in Hitler’s past, to be infuriating. Sure, it was Wittgenstein’s brilliance, not anything malicious on his part, that caused Hitler to hate Jews so much that he’d try to wipe them off the face of the Earth, but it was still the fault of a Jew, ultimately. It couldn’t possibly be the fact that Hitler was raised in a culture—not just Austrian and German, but continental European generally—in which fervent anti-Semitism was not just rampant, but pretty nearly universal, or that just a few decades before Hitler’s anti-Semitism really reached new heights after German’s defeat in World War I, German nationalism and German anti-Semitism had become deeply intertwined in German intellectual, artistic, and even political culture, or that these facts made Jews a convenient scapegoat for someone looking to gain political power through German nationalism. No, it was the fault of some kid who was so brilliant that when confronted with him, Hitler, couldn’t stand the humiliation of his own intellectual inferiority, particularly not when combined with the emasculation that comes from having an apocryphal lonely testicle. Blame the victim. If only he’d been less Jewish along with whatever else it was that pissed pre-adolescent Hitler off, Hitler would have married a Jew, developed a scheme for eternal world peace, and everyone in the world would have gotten a digital watch and a cookie.

What's half right in what you've said here? That Hitler hated Jews? That's right, for sure. Everything else you've said has been either myth, British propaganda, or outright nonnsense.

Oh, and Houston wasn't related to Neville. Seriously, where do you get this stuff?

Heidegger, I don't mean to be an ass, but you are talking out of yours. Wittgenstein is a county name, from which the surname was taken, in part at least, to hide the family's Jewish heritage. Just because a name ends in Stein doesn't make it Jewish name ("Stein" is actually fairly common in Germanic place names, and therefore in Germanic surnames).

And even if he were overtly Jewish (and not, himself, an antisemite), that still doesn't change the fact that he and Hitler didn't know each other. Or that Hitler had two balls, and that his antisemitism and evil temperment had nothing to do with Hitler, testicles, or any such simple explanation.

They don’t have numerous class pictures together. You made that up. There’s a picture, a single picture, with a young Hitler in it, and a kid some have suggested is Wittgenstein, but which almost certainly isn’t. But more than that, they weren’t in the same class! Wittgenstein was a couple years behind Hitler. It’s an apocryphal story, one of many about Hitler’s youth, told in an effort to explain his hatred of Jews, and like many of them, it ultimately blames it on a Jew. Never mind that Wittgenstein was Jewish in name only (and that very few people would have known that he had Jewish ancestry in his youth, as his family hid it well), that he himself was openly anti-Semitic, and that there’s no evidence that he and Hitler ever interacted, certainly not for any extended or meaningful period of time, and certainly not to the point that Hitler would have realized Wittgenstein was either brilliant or of Jewish descent.

The Hitler had one testicle thing is also a myth, serving the same purpose, though in this case blaming it on emasculation rather than a Jew. So at least it’s merely stupid, instead of maliciously so. In this case, we know exactly where the myth came from, and it wasn’t Hitler’s doctor.

Also, I don’t know what you’re talking about with AI and Penrose, and I rather suspect that you don’t either. I don’t despise you, and while I think his work on consciousness is interesting but ultimately useless, I certainly don’t despise Penrose.

Heidegger, that Wittgenstein stuff is myth, and really really stupid myth at that.

Yeah, Tom popped in on this thread to provide an excellent example.

All of these explanations are probably at play: motivated cognition (not just “motivated skepticism” or the overused “cognitive dissonance,” but a whole range of other heuristics and biases that are largely affect-driven), the team mentality, the short-sighted view that my side is not as scary as the other side when it wields certain powers, etc. But, I think one of the important factors, at least in the rationalizing of our behavior, is the fundamental attribution error. When Bush was president, liberals attributed his abuses of civil liberties to authoritarian impulses, while conservatives swore that the abuses were necessary because of the very real and very serious threats to our way of life. Now that Obama is president, the situation is reversed: liberals are much more likely to explain, if not excuse, Obama’s behavior by reference to the situation: terrorism is a grave threat that justifies certain extreme measures, or at least, the political reality is such that Obama has to behave as though it were, while conservatives chalk it up to the liberal inclination to expand the power of government, or socialism, or something to that effect. When you add all of these things up, what you get is the American political system.

Hmm... I think you'd be surprised at how much the mind, or at least the brain, can change as an adult. It's true that much of the major wiring, barring dramatic events (e.g., loss of a major sense or brain damage), much of the systematic wiring is done, but new connections are being created all the time, and the brain is remarkable in its ability to adapt even at a fairly advanced age.

Also, if you look at the research, you'll find that psychotropic drugs are less effective, and in many cases (e.g., anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, etc.) largely ineffective long term without talk and/or behavioral therapy (depending on the disorder). CBT, in particular, can be quite effective for a wide range of affective and behavioral disorders, particularly when coupled with medication.

Partly because, if all ultimate beliefs are absurd, then in the end, none of them are, eh? I mean, what does it mean for something to be absurd if everything is? Even worse if all we have to judge the absurdity of other people’s absurdities is our own absurdities. It’s sort of like the voice of Odin inside a schizophrenic’s head telling him that his neighbor’s life goal’s are crazy.

It seems more accurate to me to just say that the sense that other people’s beliefs are absurd (but not ours) is what is actually absurd, as it has no basis in reason, but is simply a form of world-view hubris. This is not to say that I don’t think there are absurd beliefs out there. In fact, I think many of the formal theological beliefs of major religions are absurd, but for the most part, no one, not even theologians, use these beliefs in everyday reasoning about the world or even about god(s) and other religious topics (this has been one of the more interesting findings in recent research on religion). Instead, they revert to the simpler, “minimally counterintuitive” concepts.

First, I just saw that I said minimally counterfactual. What I meant was minimally counterintuitive, though the point is the same. The concept is simple: the religious concepts and narratives that survive are minimally counterintuitive in the sense that they violate our naïve or folk physics, psychology, biology, etc., but do so “minimally,” i.e., on one or two dimensions and then only to a small degree. So, Jesus (or Lazarus, or Zarquon, or any number of religious figures) rises from the dead, but he is in pretty much every other way like a human (he has a body, he walks on two legs, he talks with his mouth, and so on). It’s true that in theology or religious philosophy you sometimes get wildly counterintuitive concepts or agents or whatever, but the fact of the matter is, no one but the theologians (and perhaps them only in certain contexts) actually believes that shit. It’s certainly not what the religious “masses” believe.

The ideas of other religions may seem absurd to you, because you have a set of minimally counterintuitive beliefs that are either counterintuitive on some other dimension, or on the same dimension but in a different qualitative fashion, but that doesn’t make them absurd. It just makes them different. Different is not absurd, no matter how often we like to feel that our beliefs are the sole standard for measuring reality.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by absurdity (maybe the one you’ll find here?), or by what standard we’re measuring it, but this seems like a piss poor explanation of religion. Even if we established what this absurdity stuff was all about, whether we really do inevitably have them, and whether it really is better to share them, the best explanations for religion will probably start with what religions are really about, that is, the social/community aspects, and relatedly, the practical aspects. The “absurdities” are really just there to serve the social/practical purposes that make religion important and perhaps inevitable. Now, in that regard, it’s good to share the stories, so that people tend to behave in consistent or complementary ways, but the behaviors don’t serve the absurdities; it’s the other way around. If this is what you mean by “It’s better, on the whole, for one’s absurdities to be shared,” then sure, but it’s not about the absurdities, no matter how much we’ve convinced ourselves it is (because the real absurdity may be our persistent belief that the specifics of the “absurdities” are really important).

By the way, one of the consistent findings in the psychology of religion over the last decade or so has been that religious beliefs, at least those that tend to spread enough to be widely held and held over generations, tend to be “minimally counterfactual.” That is, they’re “designed” to diverge from real things only a little bit, to make them easier to understand, remember, and perhaps believe. So, to the extent that reality isn’t absurd, these “absurdities” of religion are set up to be minimally so.

I'm pretty sure Scott's were demonstrably false, and Barrett did a good job of demonstrating them false. Except, of course, to the extent that Scott's were just vague anti-Obama paranoia, in which case, they're not demonstrably false, or true, or falsifiable/verifiable. They're just the result of a vague sense that Obama is anti-American.

It's clear that Obama, and the U.S. government generally, have gone after Assange in ways that, should the charges prove to be suprious (and they appear to be), no conservative or liberal should support, but for Scott, and it appears for you as well, this is only unacceptable because it's not enough.

Charli's not a guy.

And she's got a history of anti-Wikileaks posts, including being furious, furious I tell you, that Wikileaks had endangered the lives of informants, because the U.S. government said that it did. Then, when it came to light that Wikileaks probably hadn't endangered the lives of any informants, Charli's response to facts rather than conjecture was to criticize Wikileaks for not taking precautions to prevent endangering informants in case informants had, counterfactually, been endangered. To put it mildly, she's not a big whistleblower fan, which is strange coming from someone who's scholarly work is (largely) on human rights.

I'd be lying if I said I had any idea what that had to do with virtue ethics. Richardson’s work, as well as the others who’ve been studying monks over the last decade or so, has shown that monks are, after years of meditation training, able to do some interesting things with visual imagery and positive emotions, but I’ll be damned if I can put that work together and come up with neuroscientific support, or even a neuroscientific basis, for virtue ethics.

I wonder what you see in modern brain science that will lead to a renaissance in virtue ethics. Are you thinking of Casebeer or some other naturalized ethics?

I notice that Oklahoma and Utah, bastions of lefty liberalism, have banned the stuff.

You really should read Either/Or first, as Fear and Trembling is about what comes after Either/Or, and makes the most sense in that context. Sickness Unto Death is very good, but it doesn't have the same scope. The Concept of Anxiety is right out, though a must read down the line.

If you're dead set against starting with E/O, then I will break from the consensus a bit and recommend Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. It's short, it can stand alone, ad it's a good intro to K.'s style of writing (which can be sublime) and thinking.

@Pat Cahalan, that agnosticism canard is almost as common as "atheists don't exist." The idea is that you can't prove or disprove God's existence, either logically or empirically, so agnosticism is the only valid position. Even if the impossibility of proof and disproof were true, it's not clear why absolute proof is necessary for belief or disbelief. If it is, then just about all knowledge outside of math is in trouble.

Just to be clear, that wasn't meant as an attack on anyone's intelligence. It's just that atheists vs. evangelicals always seems to bring out the stupid in otherwise smart people. Witness P.Z. Myers.

I didn't bring up Kant to endorse his resolutions to the antimonies or his counters to the ontological and cosmological arguments, but to point out that, when Kant picked the four most persistent and unsolvable problems in philosophy, one of them, perhaps the main one, was the very problem that Joe not only treats as solved once and for all, but as so clearly solved that it renders atheism impossible without the need for any argument. It's symptomatic of this sort of debate, in which everyone is so convinced of their position that the other side's arguments can't have even the slightest merit, and their own is self-evident and incapable of even the smallest flaws. It's inevitably a train wreck.

By the way, has anyone ever proposed a Bob Cheeks drinking game?

Jason, the passage from Aquinas that you reference is neither an ontological nor a cosmological argument, nor is it an argument to a (or from a) first cause. It's something altogether different: an argument that we can know God from his effects. It's only the beginning of a different argument.

@Joe Carter, Jason, that's not his cosmological argument. That is, it's not his argument to a first cause. That's him saying that we can know God from his effects, which is something quite different. The point he's making is simply that if effects follow from causes, and we can know causes from their effects, then we can know God from his effects.

@Joe Carter, Jason, if you admit that the existence of the world is not necessary, then no induction is needed. But just for the sake of argument, can you present an example (from the history of philosophy) of someone arguing that because observable things have causes, then there must be a first cause, or some approximation of such? It's not present in Aquinas' third way, or in Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason. So I'm wondering where you find the induction.

@Joe Carter, Even if we agree that it is not based on materialism (and most, if not all contemporary compatibilism is based on physicalism at least), then the fact that there are coherent philosophical versions of compatibilism by physicalists/materialists is still undeniable. You may disagree, and may even have arguments against them (and there are several versions, so you'll need several arguments), but it's not a given that materialism or physicalism are incompatible with free will. This is a conclusion, not an argument.

@Joe Carter, Joe, compatibilism is the position that materialism (or physicalism) and freedom are not incompatible. If it's a coherent position, then compatibilism is compatible with materialism by definition. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's not obviously false. Compatibilism.