Sussuration Song

.......Will shining shingle sing of God?

.............Dark incarnate hearts
pump hard, as rooks heave at dusk,
.............wing-beats glistening.
.......Clouds that shroud heaven
.......hang over shadowless dusk,
..............starkly reddening.

..............Robin’s orange bust
..............bobs a little rustily
..............in a sudden gust.
Robin Redbreast drops dead, poor thing, for
it’s night, and the slimy shingle stinks of cod.
..............“In your sight all is light
..............for ignitable spite,
for recursive respites see your fighters rehearse,
as your terse universe irreversibly worsens,,

.............Rudely tulips bloom,
petals plumped round jumbling genes,
bumped by bumbling bees. Two twirling butterflies
climb a double helix. I’m a double helix
.......whose whirling wonder dies. Sparks
...............swirling upwards flash
.......into ash-flakes (“Your words dye into
paper,,) as wounding winds use weaving waves
........to bury bones in gruesome graves:
................Robin’s flotsam grotto.
................To deliberate is to delete options.
........................On other shores the sea snores
........................as the waves break, saying
......................................................“je suis... Je suis...,,
Ruddy flesh haloed,
but pebble-strewn puddle owns,
................muddy cherry stones

........and so there will be cherry blossom

Call for Posts: PC74

Posts relating to philosophy are wanted for the 74th Philosophers' Carnival, which will be here. Submit anything by anyone, if it strikes you as interesting and accessible. If you're blogging philosophically, sign up to Host a carnival, and if not then start a philosophy Blog.

Aberdeen

Many thanks to all the people who made the Joint Sessions in Aberdeen very pleasant, especially Jonny:

I saw a mysterious looking man called Martin Cooke from Glasgow present a paper on a physically possible supertask that he thought proved that propensity theories were contradictory, or physical tendencies were, if there is a difference. There were a lot of structural similarities with the 2 envelope paradox, so I went over and started talking to him at lunch. We talked for quite along time before we realised that he had actually commented on Blogginthequestion! Under the pseudonym Enigman! “So you are Enigman!” I declared and shook him firmly by the hand.

My talk went well enough (e.g. I didn't faint), although I was booed when I replied to a question about what I was proving by saying that my proof could be regarded as a proof that the counting numbers are indefinitely extensible, if we assume that physical tendencies are well-described by some propensity theory or other! The talks I sat through were more academic, as were the plenary speakers. The best bits were Kit Fine likening David Lewis to Thales (Lewis said that to question set theory would be silly, but his basic supposition was that there are no Laws of Nature) and a discussion on the nature of time (following an argument against presentism that was illustrated by a drawing, so that in effect, the force of the argument presupposed that time was quasi-spatial, imho; the man making the argument replied that presentism was crazy).

Omniscience and the Odyssey Theodicy

Improvement upon my response to Mawson's "Divine Eternity" is now here.

Where have you been?

Said the straight man, to the late man,
Where have you been?
I've been here, and I've been there,
And I've been in between.

I talk to the wind,
My words are all carried away,
I talk to the wind,
The wind does not hear,
The wind cannot hear.

That's how "I Talk To The Wind" begins, 1968

What is Logic?

It seems to me that what we mean, when we say that some reasoning is logical, is that it is the kind of reasoning that would always, if we started with nothing but some truths, take us to nothing but truths. It is, for example, logical for me to deduce that you are a human from the (presumed) truth that everyone reading this is human, because if all the objects of a certain kind have a certain property, then any particular object of that kind will have that property. Why is that the case? Well, it just seems to be self-evident. I suppose that I could show the self-evidence by drawing a lot of red dots: given those dots, each of them is, of course, red (and each of them is a dot). Such reasoning is self-evident because it gives us just some of what we already had. Now, it seems to me that first-order logic is a mathematical model of such logical reasoning, which is about things (subjects) and their properties (predicates). In short, I take predicate logic to be linguistic, and first-order logic to be mathematical. But I am beginning to wonder if I have got this all wrong, because I found the following description of predicate logic on a paper in a book in the library:

Predicate logic (first-order logic) is a formal system that extends propositional logic by breaking sentences down into subjects, predicates (properties), and quantifiers. It enables precise reasoning about objects by defining properties and relationships, allowing for statements like "all dogs are blue", which propositional logic cannot express.

Travels = Travails

I'm Back in England for the Summer (except for Aberdeen next month) but all I'm doing is rewriting my response to Mawson and having deep thoughts... News Flash: I'll be hosting the best Carnival in the world wide web next month too (it needs doing hint hint and it's fun to play god :)

Is there a question?

Is it the job of analytic metaphysicians, to put back the pictures that the axiomatic mathematicians remove from our scientific descriptions of reality; and if not, why not?

Limerick

There once was a man from Limerick
Who got, in his weakest limb, a wrick;
His eyes filled with glints
As he spied, of splints
Split from a tree's limb, a rick.

Stuff (and this and that)

Kripke (Naming and Necessity) described how "water" means H2O because people once indicated the liquid form of H2O and said something like "that stuff," so that (via a causal chain) we now mean by "water" what they meant by it. But if so, then had some weird spacetime wormhole (or something) substituted that bit of water for XYZ briefly, just before they said "that stuff," then we would have been misusing "water" ever since (and obviously we have not, whereas it's not so obvious that such a substitution could not have been).
......Furthermore their folk metaphysics may not have been much like ours, way back then (instead of our chemistry, something like alchemy maybe), so why would "that stuff" have meant H2O then? Indeed, what stops us referring, with our "water," to H2O in any of its fluid phases (the liquid phase is largely H+ and OH- ions anyway), or to any similar mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (similarly) or of nucleons and electrons, or to just the oxygen or just the nucleons, or (conversely) to impurities in the water as well as the H2O (as we may well do ordinarily), and so on?
......Presumably we all presume some (similar) folky metaphysics, so that our "that"s are intimately (if subconsciously) associated with something like a description (if an indescribable one) in our heads. Furthermore, once we've separated out such descriptivistic content, there might not be anything externalistic left over.
......Even if the reference of "water" is fixed from day to day, by our thinking "that stuff" while thinking of some actual water, the substance underlying H2O might be a different one on different days (e.g. as subatomic strings randomly pointed in different directions, or something), and we would not then mean, by "water," different substances on different days. If the underlying variation made no observable difference, it would be like there was (as presumably there is) no variation; the stuff referred to would be the constant chemical (defined by its chemical description, and hence via the meaning of "chemical"). And if it did make a difference then descriptivistic content would again determine which stuff we were referring to (cf. normal versus heavy water).
......Furthermore, while there may seem to be an externalistic element with the "that" of "that stuff," there would surely be (after all the descriptivisitic stuff) an internalistic "this," because only a reference to this Actuality (containing both that stuff and us) would be able to lack descriptivistic content.
......There is therefore (for a frivolous consequence) surprisingly little incoherence between Biblical literalism and modern science; e.g. when originally creating water (not just below but also above the starry firmament) God would have had some description (some range of relational roles or whatever) in mind, but such details as the underlying substances (e.g. the particles that comprise the H and the O nowadays) might quite naturally have varied as the more crucial (e.g. moral and psychological) matters were settled.

Form is the diagram of forces

                       Dark incarnate hearts
pump hard as rooks heave at dusk,
wing-beats glistening.

Possibly Obvious

The Spiritual Resources of Weekend Fisher have recently been for those dealing with dying; and they're v.g.i. ... b.t.w. though, Jean Kazez ended an article on dealing with dying (People Don't Die, Do they?) on this thoughtful note:

We still haven’t had to cope with a major loss. But, when the time comes, we will cope with our feelings without any waffling. “He had a wonderful life. We’ll always remember him. He’s a part of us.” These platitudes don’t remove the pain of loss, but they’re the truth, as some of us see it. There’s no place but here. We think.

What I don't get is how those so-called platitudes (trite or banal remarks) aren't more like waffle (evasive or vague speech). Was his life really full of wonders (and how could that have been possible); and will they always remember him? But I can't even make sense of his being (present tense) a part of them. Of course, it's important what valued others think of one, and so one's sense of who one is is already bound up with one's sense of what such people think of one; but surely that would not make one part of them, not even if there was nothing else left (and not even if they are their thoughts, and one is present in propositions about oneself, and their thoughts are propositional).
......I also suspect that (re no place but) "here" refers either to all that the speaker's location is part of (which might include parallel universes, or even transcendental realms) or else only to the known part (and the presumption that that is all there is is rather arrogant), so that much of the force of Jean's thought might arise via equivocation (or waffle) ...a bit like saying that only physical things exist, and then defining "physical" so that if there was a transcendental creator of the Big Bang, ex nihilo and deliberately, for example, then that God would be a purely physical thing (which is—tellingly?—as good a defence of Physicalism as many professional philosophers can manage nowadays).
......On a deeper note, to end my facile post (since logic is concerned with truth, which is concerned with what there is), the following, from a letter from Stephen Bilynskyj to Peter van Inwagen (taken from page eleven of the latter's The Problem of Evil), belies nicely the idea that having the hope of Heaven encourages thoughtlessness.

As a pastor, I believe that some sort of view of providence which allows for genuine chance is essential in counseling those facing what I often call the “practical problem of evil”. A grieving person needs to be able to trust in God's direction in her life and the world, without having to make God directly responsible for every event that occurs. The message of the Gospel is not, I believe, that everything that occurs has some purpose. Rather, it is that God's power is able to use and transform any event through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Omniscience and the Odyssey theodicy

Mawson argues in Divine Eternity (forthcoming in Int.J.Phil.Rel.) that Open theism (that God's future is to some extent open) implies that God is not omniscient and hence not omnipotent either, whence God's goodness would be, to some extent, a matter of luck! So in Omniscience and The Odyssey Theodicy I defend Open theism against that charge—hopefully introducing to a wider world (this world is so odd) my yearling theodicy (that we asked to be born because we wanted to be the instruments of a scientific investigation into God’s uniqueness) as part of that defence (since evil is less of a problem for theism if we asked to be born, which we could more plausibly have done if God is everlasting rather than timeless).

Russell was Wrong

Russell thought that we could base a logical view of the world around us on our direct perceptions because we could not be wrong about a patch of colour being a certain colour. However, we cannot even guarantee being right about whether a square on a checkerboard is black or white, as this amazing picture shows: checkerShadow (PS, in 2015, YouTube had this video of the illusion)

Haiku; by who?

......Yellow butterfly
fluttering—fluttering on
......over the ocean.

The best haiku ever (at least in translation)—I read it years ago and cannot now recall who wrote it (and Google was unusually unenlightening); does anyone out here know?

Happy Talk

The final bit of my tryptich, a modern-physical instantiation of Levy's Paradox, will be appearing (in a graduate session) at the Joint Sessions in Aberdeen in July (dream come true :-)

April is cruel

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas, 1933

The Philosophers' Stone

An old, and rather silly paradox: Can almighty God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it? If He did create such a stone (the paradox goes) then there would be something that He could not do (i.e. lifting it), but that cannot be because (since He is almighty) there is nothing that He cannot do. Hence He did not (and will not) create such a stone—but therefore there is something that He cannot do (i.e. creating such a stone). Consequently (the paradox concludes) no such omnipotent being (a being for which nothing is impossible) could exist; but several replies are possible, most obviously that "omnipotence" should be defined in such a way that impossible things do not have to be done by omnipotent beings. The paradoxical reasoning can then be taken to be showing that such a stone is impossible—since an omnipotent being could move any possible weight of stone, so no such stone is a possible object. It is certainly hard to get any sense of what such a stone would be like (e.g. were it filling all of an infinite space, it could not then be lifted, but then it would not be too heavy, so much as too big to lift).
......God might even be contradictory (so powerful His powers transcend our mundane powers of linguistic description) of course, although I personally think of God as almighty in the sense of His being able to do (at least) whatever He wants with His Creation (which is at least this Cosmos) and presumably much more besides (although presumably God could not do what He did not want to do with His Creation, and the idea of God possibly wanting something that He does not actually want is rather obscure, whence the modalities are also obscure); but what strikes me about this paradox is how odd it is, to think of Him lifting stones at all (like He was like Hercules, only bigger)—far more impressive is His creation ex nihilo of a pebble. Now, traditionally God not only creates, but also at each moment keeps all created things in existence, which raises the question: Why bother with all of that (in the case of purely material objects, like stones) just to generate the phenomena sensed by sentient creatures; why not generate the latter directly? One theistic argument for Idealism (the topic of this fortnight's Philosophers' Carnival) is that material objects do seem a bit pointless (e.g. they might be less deceptive than mere appearances, but only if modern physics has got them very wrong).
......Creation itself seems a bit gratuitous though; so, one might ask: Could almighty God create an object that He did not have to keep in existence, from moment to moment, which was instead self-sustaining, to some extent? Maybe (since that does not seem to be contradictory), but God is also traditionally eternal in the sense of existing atemporally (a bit like numbers do), so it is hard to see what difference that would amount to. Still, for all we know God (and all Creation) exists more in the manner of a person—fully (if mutably) in the immense present—whence we might ask: Could almighty God create an object so self-sustaining that even He could not destroy it? He can create souls (as well as stones) it seems, and with such free will that even Satan is a possible object; and the giving of such freedoms, to His creatures, involves the voluntary limiting of (what we naturally regard as) His powers, within Creation (on this view of eternity), so maybe He could—such an object does not seem to be contradictory. Maybe, like the aforementioned stone, it is no more than a Philosopher's plaything, but such a perfectly indestructible object could conceivably be something that God would want to create (maybe our lovely Creator knows better than to be certain that Beings with powers akin to His, but of which He is, as yet, unaware, do not exist).

Atheism and Explanation

New to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy this week, was a thought-provoking article on Mathematical Explanation; and this week also saw the start of this year's Gifford Lectures (previously, e.g., the excellent Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed) here in Glasgow, on Religion and Its Recent Critics. And so, since next week's Carnival (for philosophy bloggers) favours Idealism, I thought I'd compare a popular atheistic claim—that not believing in God is negative (so that the onus is on those who believe)—with the negativity of not believing in material objects, or in natural laws. Is the lack of evidence for material objects (evidence sufficient to justify introducing things of such an ineffably strange kind into our ontology) sufficient to justify Idealism; and is the lack of evidence for natural laws (over and above the observed regularities) sufficient to justify Humean Supervenience? Idealists and Humeans can argue that it should be, if they want to; but do we actually find many atheists either (i) making the effort to be Idealists or Humeans, or (ii) being in possession of evidence sufficient to justify the corresponding positive beliefs? Regarding the latter, it would hardly be good enough to claim that such beliefs are universal (Berkeley and David Lewis being the obvious counter-examples) or self-evident (similarly); but the former option is just silly—Idealism is ideally suited to theistic explanations, while the evolution of minds in a world of Humean Supervenience would be too odd, no?

The Human Paradox

If we saw a lot of black crows (and no other kind) we might well believe that all crows are black, if we wanted to; but we could quite rationally (although we would naturally find it quite absurd to) believe in Humean Supervenience, and hence that there was no evidence for such a belief (and either way the albino crow would come as no great surprise). Facts, in other words, are what we want to believe—we want to believe the facts, because we value truth; and truth is useful, but what about when it isn't? On a Naturalistic view of humans, we value truth because to do so is so useful, in general, that primitive hominids that didn't do so died out; whence we value it even when it would be more convenient for us not to. Facts force themselves upon us as true. Snow is white, it seems, whence we believe that it is.
......That tree is pink with blossom—is its pinkness (as it seems to be) something that is out there, in the world, or is it in our heads? Naturalists believe that only the photons are out there (or rather, somewhere that corresponds to the "out there" that is similarly in our heads). And does the objective reality (for Naturalists) of particles in spacetime contain some thing that is that tree? Logically that seems unlikely; but still, does it really matter? Such is how reality is represented in our brains (evolution has probably led to the world as we perceive it being a good enough map of reality for our natural purposes). Winter seems to be closed in on itself; loved ones seem to shine—such a useful map, and presumably evolution has similarly led to moral axioms being included in our mental maps.
......Having in it some moral axioms (such as the Golden Rule) would have similarly aided our survival, as would a tendency to accept the more local rules; we value loyalty, as well as objectivity (and hominids too lacking in either would have died out). So maybe a propensity to form such beliefs as that God is watching us arose naturally. Does such a God exist, the Naturalist wonders; but still, why worry about that? Such a belief should help the worst of us to behave better (and to be more readily identified, and possibly corrected) and anyway, the best of us regard the evidence for its falsity as inconclusive. But (the Naturalist persists) surely it matters whether or not that belief is true? Well, if it's part of our natural representation then surely (for Naturalists) it's at least as true as that that tree is pink.
......The human paradox is that, even were Naturalism true, the value of our natural beliefs in something like God (assuming that we humans have such beliefs) would hardly be outweighed by the value of such objectivity as we could ever attain. We do of course value truth, but many atheists do value loyalty more (in the confusion out there), while many believers regard the Naturalistic versions of objective truth (e.g. scientific modelling) as mere shadows of objective reality—if the truth is that God is watching us, then there really could be an objective truth, one worthy of our valuing it absolutely (and there could more easily be some logical object that is that tree, only approximately analysable into particles).