Laws of Nature

I'm not as comfortable as are some with the phrase "laws of nature."

One way of framing the issue of "physicalism" versus various non-physicalist or dualist views of the world is to ask whether humans or something about human nature constitutes an exception to the laws of nature. If the ansawer is "no" then (runs this line of thought) you are a physicalist.

Not so fast! I have to say. The phrase "laws of nature" implies something ironclad, and this biases whatever constitutes the "physicalism" thus defined. For all we know, though, every 'law of nature' may be probabilistic. That almost certainly is the case with the second law of thermodynamics, for example. The reason heat disperses is that there are lots and lots of molecules moving about and the law of "large numbers" applies. If there is a small group of fast-moving molecules that start off as a tight knot (a hot spot, in macro terms) and a surrounding group of slower-moving molecules, (cooler surroundings) then the fast ones will disperse into the slower ones, even though some specific fast-moving molecules will be moving toward one another some of the time. At a macro level, that won't matter.

I'm out of my debt there and shouldn't go any further, but the bottom line is that the famous 2d law is a statement of probability, which at the macro level looks like an inevitability.

Suppose every law of nature, even gravity, turns out to be probabilistic. This means that we will be in a position to accept something like ideas of free will as applied to human nature without making of the human mind an "empire inside the empire." This line of thought, as you can see, points us toward Penrose, quantum computing, etc.

Question

What would have been Immanuel Kant's view on the ethics of cloning?

We can be confident he would not have said, "Ah, so long as it turns out to have medical uses. It is good to help people after all. Necessary means to that end."

Kant is the Arch-deontologist. Begin there.

Can we go any further?

Bodily resurrection

I encountered recently in my internet surfing an expression of the idea that "substance dualism" is dead among neuroscientists and philosophers alike. Nobody with any relevant training and intellectual focus any longer believes that the soul is a thing that could survive and remain conscious separate from the body.

This author continued: "This is indeed a CRUSHING blow to religion in general, specifically Christianity, because the idea of an immortal soul is central to most religions."

Allow me just to respond to that. The disappearance of substance dualism might not be as crushing a blow as he would think, even if it were complete. After all, Christianity incorporates the idea of bodily immortality. The new testament insists that Jesus was no ghost after his death, that he returned in body, and in time ascended to heaven to the right hand of the father still in his earthly clay.

Millions of Christians believe that there will be a general resurrection of the saved. So to say that the soul will be immortal doesn't imply that it is something essentially separate from the body.

Augustine said that no dogma of the church is "more opposed" to the ways of the world than this. In his environment, filled with strict mind/body dualisms, the idea that the soul, having escaped the body, would willingly and gladly put it back on at the end of days was the most shocking aspect of Christianity to the pagans.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12792a.htm

If we 'awake' onjudgment day to find ourselves in a reconstituted body, will we feel continuous with our present selves? Will it matter how much time will have lapsed? Will it feel like waking from a good night's sleep?

Lightning around Venus

Every once in awhile beautiful theories are destroyed by stubborn facts.

Planetary astronomers are marking such a tragedy this week, it seems, at a conference in Paris.

It has long been understood that Venus is surrounded by clouds. But for a long time, the dominant view has been that there wasn't much activity in this atmosphere regardless - the clouds are a haze, like what we call smog -- not really earth-like clouds, capable of generating lightning and thunder. That's the theory.

A new probe has detected lightning, though. That's the fact.

To be a bit more precise, the probe detected bursts of radio waves, called "whistlers," which are only associated with lightning. On earth, anyway.

This leaves scientists with three choices. Either smog can in some unexplained way generate lightning on Venus. Or the clouds aren't smog -- they're real clouds. Or something else besides lightning can generate these radio waves.

However that debate comes out, things will be a little more complicated than they would have been had the data confirmed the pre-existing theories.

Party on, European Space Agency dudes.

Determinisms: Hard and Soft?

William James once drew a distinction between hard and soft determinism, in an essay often cited these days in discussions of what is nowadays called compatibilism. But I'll get to that.

Let's first understand James on his own terms. Early in an essay on the human will, on whether and to what extent its expressions are all fated, determined since forever ... early on he addresses the question of terminology. The word "freedom" is such a nice word, used so ringingly in anthems and in the course of orations on patriotic holidays, that everybody on every side of an argument will want to be standing up for "freedom rightly understood."

Old-fashioned determinism is the sort that disdains such nice words. Hard determinists don't shrink "from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, neccessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism, which abhors harsh words...." The word both sorts of determinists abhor is "chance," which stands for the simple notion that the parts of the universe "have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be."

James is writing in order to defend indeterminism, not to take sides between the two sorts of determinists, so he accepts the word "chance" as a statement of what he believes in, and abandons the word "freedom" to the grubbers after nice words.

The issue of things (as distinct from the issue of words) is between determinists and indeterminists, between believers in chance and believers in fate.

Now, the debate as James understood it has gone the way of all flesh. On the one hand, quantum mechanics, Godel's theorem, chaos theory and such developments have acclimated everybody to the reality of chance in the world. On the other hand, the fact that everybody now believes in chance makes chance seem less important.

Debate does continue over compatibilism. This is the view that moral responsibility and human autonomy in some valuable sense is consistent with a mechanical/materialistic theory of the universe and of our place in it.

The contrary of compatibilism of course is incompatibilism, which comes in two varieties. Incompatibilists can either say, "No, such a view is incompatible with moral responsibility, which is a good reasons for looking for flaws in such a view, because we ought to work to keep the idea of moral responsibility." We can call this the II position (incompatible, thus immaterialism)!

Another set of incompatibilists can say, "No, such a view is incompatible with moral responsibility. So much the worse for our notions of moral responsibility though -- we're going to have to learn to live without them." Call that the IA position (incompatible, thus amorality)!

James' words on the different sorts of determinists with whom he was contending have been shanghied into this debate, so that "soft determinism" is sometimes used to describe compatibilism (we can have materialism and morality too). "Hard determinist" is used to describe the IA position. This implicitly equates James' sort of indeterminism with the II position.

I don't think that's fair to him, though. Were he alive today, and up to date on contemporary science and philosophic debates, my own suspicion is that he'd still believe in immaterial aspects of the cosmos, as he did, but he wouldn't link that notion tightly to the foundations of morality. Just as he didn't want to chase after exclusive title to the word "freedom" and was happy to grant it to the determinists if they wanted it.

He would likely be a compatibilist, but he probably wouldn't regard compatibilism as all that important a point to make, because the reasons/motives that would impel him to keep looking for the immaterial would be quite different from those to which the II position appeals.

"Gotcha!" says NYTBR

Brian Doherty, a senior editor at Reason magazine, has written what he calls a "freewheeling history" of the modern libertarian movement, centered on five figures of enormous importance: von Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.

The New York Times has run a rather mean-spirited review of the book, in which critic Leonhardt plays trivia games of "gotcha."

Here's a sample from the review, "In a single chapter, Milton Friedman is described both as an active writer at Stanford University and, accurately, as deceased."

Well, yes. That kind of thing can happen when one of the crucial figures upon whom a book is based happens to die while the book is in page proofs. Leonhardt doesn't seem very lion-hearted here, more like a jackal.

Another example of this critic's oh-so-substantive contribution to the conversation about serious ideas, about liberty and sovereignty and such, is this gem: "And almost everything about 'Radicals for Capitalism' is too long: the terms ('Popperian falsificationist'), the sentences that sometimes run more than 100 words, and the book itself, at more than 700 pages."

That seems a remarkable expression of anti-intellectual bias. "Why shucks, I can't handle dem big words, Brian. That's why I write book reviews for this down-home cornpone type publicashun." If you aren't interested in the intellectual history of recent political and economic ideas, you won't read the Doherty book at all. If you are interested enough to read the book, you'll probably already know that there's been a lot of debate over whether such ideas can be considered "scientific," what is the demarcation of science, and so forth. You'll be ready for the term "falsificationism," modified by the name of its best known advocate.

The whole Leonhardt review reads like a sad failed effort at a fisking.