The Gap of Creation

Swinburne's explanatory argument is basically that while Naturalism cannot explain the origin of minds (e.g. he asks, "how far could the science of the future explain the evolution of souls," in his 1997, p. 174), Monotheism can explain the world's evils (e.g. via my theodicy), whence the latter is the best explanation... but of course, that is so only if Monotheism can explain the origin of souls (otherwise it would be rather like postulating a pork chop to explain crop circles).
......In particular, Swinburne postulates a perfect person as a simple hypothesis (with a correspondingly high prior probability) to explain the world, but that is only explanatory if creating worlds is conceivably something that a person could do. Now, we know that people can rearrange things, but so can evolution. We know that people dream (can even deliberately daydream), so maybe people can create lower sorts of being (if dreams have a sort of being-in-themselves; if we do indeed create them, rather than just experience them), whence a transcendent person might create a physical world; but if God makes people like us (as souls, with free will) as a lower sort of being (not just an imperfect or finite sort), then we seem to lose our sense of God as a perfect person, and the high prior probability without which the God hypothesis isn't even contending...

We seem to, but the criterion of simplicity itself stands in need of justification (or explanation). Maybe what we really want are, to begin with, a few hypotheses that promise to be worth looking into and which seem fairly exhaustive (the alternatives being clearly too odd); hypotheses that we can hope to work with easily enough (simplicity), which promise enough of a pay-off (if they win) and which are naturally unweighted to begin with (prior to the evidence). I'm not suggesting that a big reward for belief can make us believe (Pascal's Wager is off) but after all, the reason why we value truth that highly is, under Naturalism, that genes for such valuations were rewarded, with reproductive success (while under Monotheism truth relates us to God; and incidentally were we made in God's image, simpler concepts would be more likely to resemble those behind creation).
......So Monotheism remains a contender... And while creation remains mysterious, so do mind and matter given Naturalism; and if it's conceivable that matter could spontaneously appear in a Big Bang, and that minds like ours could (somehow) arise from such material, then surely it's similarly conceivable that a sufficiently unlimited person could cause such things deliberately (and incidentally the substance dualism that is our common sense experience is more explicable given Monotheism).

On knowing that One is Irrational

Can one know that one is irrational? It seems contradictory; but suppose I believe that I'm the product of billennia of natural selections—that my most basic concepts, and ways of reasoning (and of judging, and so forth), were probably just the normal ways in which human brains happen to make sense of sensory information, having been selected (from random variants) for not being ways that led more primitive brains (of apes, rats, fish and so forth) into inviability; and also that knowledge was one such concept, one fuzzily orientated towards experts (social authorities) and what they tell us, rather than infallibility. I might then believe that I knew that I was irrational.

Mr. E. and Miss Tree

A couple of mysteries, concerning our selves. The first mystery relates to how we come in two sexes (as a rule), male and female. Considering how profound this sexual division is biologically (even plants have two sexes), the difference between men and women is surprisingly shallow. (The sexism of most religions is therefore ironic, for the asexuality of people qua people argues rather strongly for our being essentially souls.) So my first mystery is, how should we handle a third person of unknown or no sex? I've been using s/he and he/r, for want of anything better, for I've been regarding a perfect person as asexual.
......We naturally think of people-as-people as (potentially) sapient beings, so that anyone who could (e.g. when awake, and well) access such higher mental faculties as language-use (e.g. silicon-based aliens, or intelligent robots) might count as a person. Maybe whales, or birds are sapient; but what if fish have souls that might reincarnate as birds? Or, what if a human has a damaged brain and so can't use language? To look at it another way, plants are alive, but a machine that did pretty much what some plant did would not normally be thought of as alive. Machines do not seem to be any one (in the apposite way, as above), whence a computer could not, after all, be sapient. Our sapience is intimately connected with our being sentient, aware, subjects, something we associate with apes, rats, fish, maybe worms, but hardly plants, bacteria, viruses (are they even alive?). Computers, however powerful, are not alive, do not even have a sex (though we could give them a gender) let alone sentience, so how could they be sapient?
......I even wonder if sentience can exist without the capacity (perhaps in some other life) for sapience; would an animal without its own will not be (as Descartes thought) a mere machine? Anyway, my second mystery is, what should we call ourselves? How about "males" and "girls"? They are syntactically similar, and whilst "girl" has connotations of youth, "male" applies to animals and plants too (and one problem with "man" is that it can mean any human, while a problem with "woman" or "female" is that they are derivative). Any better suggestions, for either mystery? (Anyone reading this far who missed Newborn babies have a preference for the way living things move, about two weeks ago, is rewarded with that link :)

The Collateral Paradox

Trying to think about the crucial difference between the Train and the Hospital scenarios (as described in this post at Show-Me) got me thinking about the following pair of scenarios:
......In the first scenario you are a busy person who sometimes gives to charity (whenever you feel guilty), so you have set up an account so that some money is automatically donated to a good charity every month (without you having to think about it)—in effect, you are improving the lives of ten poor people (e.g. educating their children, and providing health cover). One day you see an advert by a much more efficient (but no less reliable) charity, who can help five times as many poor people with the same amount of money; fifty people could be saved, instead of only ten, you think. So you call your bank and alter your details accordingly.
......The second scenario is similar, except that the original charity paid their workers slightly less and instead spent the money on sending you information about the ten people you were helping (e.g. photos of them, and some letters from some of them). You were usually too busy to bother reading all that (more advertising, you thought), but as you picked up the phone to call your bank (as above) you happened to glance at one of the photos (some family looking hopeful). Before your money could help anyone else, it would have to be taken away from them, you think; so you leave things as they are (and get on with your busy life).
......But why should a mere photo make such a difference?

Is God a Bit of a Deceiver?

God, it is said, is no deceiver; Descartes famously based his worldview on that certainty, and the idea still seems popular, e.g. Swinburne (The Existence of God, 2nd edn. 2004: 241): "God, if he is not to deceive us and yet give us a real free choice between helping and not helping others, must make a world where others really do suffer." But it strikes me that, even if I grant that opportunities for displays of compassion, charity and self-sacrifice are desirable, nonetheless if any creator of such an opportunity had a choice between deceiving all the participants or else torturing one of them, then the choice of the latter (to avoid being deceitful) would display a marked lack of those very virtues (compassion, charity and self-sacrifice).
......What does the Bible have to say? Well all four Gospels tell how Peter denied Jesus; that is, that Peter lied about God. Did the disciples murder anyone, steal much or have naughty sex (et cetera)? No, so how bad a sin could it be, if Peter did it? The Old Testament contains several stories in which God's people (e.g. Moses) used deceit to outwit their enemies, apparently with God's approval (or even complicity). Matthew 13 contains a nice account of Jesus explaining why he spoke in parables; and if Noah's Ark (or any other bit of Genesis) was fictional then God was a bit of a deceiver because until recently people would have had no reason not to take such stories literally (and if not then it's deceptively fictional-looking nowadays). And was there not something like deceit in God's tempting of Abraham?
......But my grasp of the Bible is very weak, so those examples may not prove anything; but my point is really just a question: Why is divine deceit regarded as unthinkable? We would find it acceptable to tell our children white lies if that would keep them from harm, and surely (as Swinburne says of the alternative, in the first of these quotes) "God who is, ex hypothesi, so much more the author of our being than are our parents, has rights so much greater in this respect." Is it that, were the object of our compassion (et cetera) shown to be a hollow puppet we would feel that our goodness had been wasted? But suppose we were shown that after the purpose of the opportunity in question had been revealed to us; would we not then feel gratitude?
......It may depend upon what that purpose was; but suppose it was our opportunity to define ourselves as good—then our good acts, far from being wasted, would have become our good being; and being good we would not want the cost of that to be the suffering of another. And the purpose could hardly lie entirely in it being a genuine (or objective) rather than merely apparent (or subjective) helping of another, when even such a real act would add so infinitesimally little to the infinitely greater goodness of the transcendentally Real creator of the opportunity in question.
......Now, I'm not suggesting that the holocaust (for example) was hollow because (i) we should not, even were that the case, think that it was (although surely we should hope it was), and (ii) I don't think that the point of life (on Earth) is likely to be soul-building—I do think it's likely to involve some deception (if that is plausible), although nothing worse than what would follow from having chosen to be hypnotised in order to behave better (since we would have volunteered for it); whence the question, could it involve divine deception?

8 posts this month

It being 2008 now, not 2007, I shall post 8 posts this month, not 7...

Are Bad Thoughts Good?

A list of the top ten new organisms of 2007 got me wondering whether our intuitions about our responsibilities for our creations might help us to think about the ethics of Creation. My intuition is that just because we create lifeforms, rather than being responsible for them in other ways (maybe just by coexisting with them), our moral obligations towards them (rather than our social or legal obligations) aare not at all reduced—whence I wonder whether Swinburne (The Existence of God, 2nd ed. 2004: 257-8) made too much of creators’ rights:

I may let the younger son suffer somewhat for the good of his and his brother’s soul. I have this right because in small part I am responsible for the younger son’s existence, its beginning, and continuance; I feed him and educate him. I have the right to demand something in return, that he is open to the possibility of his elder brother inflicting (limited) harm on him. If this is correct, then, a fortiori, a God who is, ex hypothesi, so much more the author of our being than are our parents, has rights so much greater in this respect.

Surely our need to inflict suffering upon our children derives from our lack of control over our environment, our right being the right to choose the lesser of two evils; whereas God would be perfectly (purely and infinitely) good to begin with, whence I doubt that S/he would allow an innocent creature to suffer involuntarily for the greater good of another. Furthermore, for Swinburne such a greater good is our being able to refrain from doing evils that we’re tempted to do; but were that really so much better than not even being tempted to sin (cf. Luke.15.vii?) so that it could justify the immense sufferings of this world, then surely this world would’ve been a much better place had we all wanted to do more disgusting things!
......How seriously an agnostic should take the hypothesis that this world was deliberately created for a good reason (which, stripped of such baggage as such talk inevitably collects, is an intrinsically hopeful hypothesis) depends upon how well the prima facie problem of evil is addressed; and I’m not sure that much progress has been made on this since Socrates.
......Bravery, for example (or compassion), presupposes hardships to be brave in the face of (respectively the suffering of others), but need they be actual hardships (others suffering)? Surely we are brave, if we are, before we display it. And while thick skins can be grown, can we learn to be brave—or do we learn to love, from which bravery (rather than rage, foolhardiness or blind obedience), amongst other virtues, flows? (And how great a virtue is bravery anyway? Prima facie it’s on a par with intelligence—it’s not a matter of how valuable such virtues are for us here, as we grow from our selfish infancies towards God, but of whether they’re valuable enough in themselves—with God—to justify the evils here.)
......Do we love lovely things because they are lovely, or are they lovely because they are loved? Prima facie it’s the former on the Monotheistic (as opposed to the Naturalistic) account, but then a perfectly good God (who would be intrinsically lovely) would not need others to love He/r; and whilst being perfectly able to self-sacrifice, S/he would not (as we might) be any better for doing so—but there are a lot more questions, of course; so first, to see why we need realistic answers, consider Swinburne’s (Is there a God? 1996: 112) defence of his theodicy:

Suppose that you exist in another world before your birth in this one, and are given a choice as to the sort of life you are to have in this one. You are told that you are to have only a short life, maybe of only a few minutes, although it will be an adult life in the sense that you will have the richness of sensation and belief characteristic of adults. You have a choice as to the sort of life you will have. You can have either a few minutes of very considerable pleasure, of the kind produced by some drug such as heroin, which you will experience by yourself and which will have no effects at all in the world (for example, no one else will know about it); or you can have a few minutes of considerable pain, such as the pain of childbirth, which will have (unknown to you at the time of the pain) considerable good effects on others over a few years. You are told that, if you do not make the second choice, those others will never exist—and so you are under no moral obligation to make the second choice. But you seek to make the choice which will make your own life the best life for you to have led. How will you choose? The choice is, I hope, obvious. You should choose the second alternative.

Maybe—but were the making of such a choice such a great good, in itself, those “considerable good effects” could simply be repeats of this very scenario; whereas no good God would allow such an endless succession of agonies, just because each should have been chosen (by people ignorant of that bigger picture). And although we should choose the second alternative (as it would be the more heroic), why do we admire such heroism?
......Partly, I think, because it’s voluntary (and not hopeless), so this thought-experiment sits uneasily with the previous quote, with God having the moral right to choose for us to be born (into this world), whence I find Swinburne’s initial supposition (that you exist somewhere else before your birth here) plausible—why would a good God not first make our souls (somewhere safer), tell them the truth there, and then ask us if we wanted to volunteer? That presupposes some meaningful enterprise for us to volunteer for, of course, and traditionally God has nothing to do; but also, God’s goodness is not traditionally of a lesser kind than that of a depraved person (who would surely, even when choosing good, be more likely to choose it for worse reasons)...

Why I don't like Possible World Semantics

I've previously expressed unease with possible worlds (roughly, sets of propositions), as a way of understanding what "possibility" means, partly because of the sets (which like numbers may well be explicable only in terms of possibilities) and partly because of the propositions (which seem too artificial to cover all possibilities) but mostly because far from helping us to understand possibilities, they just seem to make it easier for us to get them mixed up.
......The first time I met PWS, it was in a reply (I forget whose) to Cartesian scepticism: The idea was that, since we know that we're not BIVs, hence BIV-worlds are remote, whence they can be ignored by whatever truth-tracking (across close possible worlds) criteria is required by our concept of knowledge, which seemed circular and to entirely miss the point.
......More recently the following—Gale and Pruss (2003, eds. "The Existence of God": xl-xli) describing their New Cosmological Argument (1999, Religious Studies 35: 461-76)—seemed to confuse subjective or epistemic possibilities (e.g. Goldbach's conjecture might be false, or true, for all I know) with logical or metaphysical ones (for us platonists, if it is true then it is necessarily true, and not possibly false):

Using the semantics of possible world for modal propositions, according to which a proposition that is possible is true in some possible world, and the weak version of [the Principle of Sufficient Reason], they show that there is some possible world in which there is an explanation for [the conjunction of all contingent propositions that are true in the world, say P] about the actual world. But since a possible world is individuated by its [P], it follows that this possible world is identical with the actual world.

Reasonably inconsistent

(Merry Christmas :-) Religious pluralism is complicated (cf. dogmatism or nihilism) but God is, after all, naturally odd; and even the relatively mundane paradoxes (such as the St. Petersburg) take us beyond belief and into a complicated realm of thinking (about things). And although we regard it as irrational to hold inconsistent beliefs (which usually lead us to precisify our language) we could hardly reason (about the world) if we did not. E.g. when perceiving ordinary objects (such as trees) we naturally picture them within Euclidean space, even if we believe that space is non-Euclidean.
......More commonly, when getting about we naturally picture places as arranged in a flat plane, even though we know the world is round. We are probably born with the belief that the world is flat, and I guess that by the time we learn that the world is not flat that belief has become such an integral part of how we think about the world around us that it would be a huge waste of effort to try to eliminate it; it is more rational to have inconsistent beliefs. When asked we may say that we know that the world is not flat, but the fact that we also have the opposite belief is shown by our other beliefs.

Light upon the Earth

A recent post at The Prosblogion has got me rethinking six-day literalism. Prima facie there's a problem with, for example, the creation of Daylight (in Gen.1.iii; called "Day" in Gen.1.v) before the creation of the Sun (in Gen.1.xvi) "to give light upon the earth" (Gen.1.xvii); but then, there are similar problems with omniscience and omnipotence, and they just remind us to be more careful with our accounts of God (than we need to be with tales of, for example, Santa). Dinosaur bones, for example, need not be the work of Satan, even given six-day literalism; because Creation is not that unlike Envatment, and to run Actuality (according to natural laws chosen by God) from the Big Bang (for a few billion years of our time) would surely, for God, be no easier (or harder, although it might be worse morally, in view of the suffering animals) than running it from the first incarnated people (possibly six thousand years ago).
......Anyway, "day" obviously gets its meaning (for us, now) from the revolution of the Earth (or by extension, of any planet) around the Sun (or any star), much as "water" now means H2O; but the Bible is supposed (ex hypothesis) to be the word of God (a transcendent Creator) via the medium of ancient Hebrew (not even Latin), so why should even its literal (non-analogical) meanings be so obvious? And divine creation (of a world like this) could, for example, be like God selecting propositions (in his divine language) so as to restrict a range of possible worlds until only the one is left (for the incarnation of people like us), in which case Genesis could record (quite literally) that process. For example, wanting people to have something like water, various worlds (with various physics) containing water (in some divinely descriptivistic sense) may have been considered; and similarly God may have begun with the idea of a phenomenal daylight, and only later finalised the physics so that a star was its source.
......Now, there is the further complication that the divine acts of creation themselves took evenings and mornings (or days); but such acts may well involve two basic components (creation is a great mystery, but we must have some thoughts about it), for example (i) the actualization or making (maybe testing them with avatars or angels) of the currently desirable possible worlds (maybe as phenomenologically definite but physically indefinite), naturally following (ii) the selection or design of the next restriction. And we are (ex hypothesis) made in God's image (as people), and we do have two corresponding states of being, i.e. waking (for doing) following sleeping (for dreaming). So (were this, or something like this, the correct interpretation), would such a use of "morning" and "evening" (to refer to such a division of labour) in Genesis be literal or metaphorical? Surely it would be no more metaphorical than, for example, our saying that we enlighten a living room by switching on its light as we enter it; rather less, I would guess, given the necessarily transcendental (and primary) nature of nature's creation.

The Theodolite Theodicy

Naturalism and Monotheism compete, but both remain reasonable (explanations of our observations) because a satisfying account of why a good God would allow the evils of this world seems about as likely as a satisfying reduction of our minds to matter (given how much we now know of the evils of this world, and its physics). Nonetheless a perfect person is quite likely, a priori (it being good that good exists), and such a perfectly sapient being would know perfectly well that s/he could not know so infallibly that people similar to he/r, of which s/he was unaware, did not exist.
......Consequently s/he would probably exist everlastingly (rather than timelessly) because not only is s/he a person, being able to increase he/r knowledge (and to try to be sociable) would be good. And since deities obscure to a deity would probably be hard to find, hence as part of he/r investigations into the possibility of other deities s/he would probably create people like us—sapient and imaginative (and innately ignorant) creatures with an innate desire for contact with their creator (or at least for a better world) but who live socially (and of course dream) within a world apart from its creator (operating as a rule via the most elegant natural laws that could support such people, rather than via supernatural interventions)—because to do so would be to deploy a certain sensitivity to the existence of any deity.
......My theodicy (already blogged about in May and September) is based upon the fact that, were that the motivation for our creation, our souls would probably (God being good) have been created in a better place and invited to volunteer for this. A nice consequence is that it is similarly likely that our souls will return there automatically upon our deaths; and my hypothesis also has nice scientific consequences (e.g. it indicates where evidence about the mind-brain interaction is likely to be found) and nice social consequences (e.g. religious plurality is probably the divine will).

The Mind's "I"

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

Emily Dickinson 1862/3

Are Numbers Numerals?

Issue 8 of The Reasoner is out; and with it Hartley Slater’s suggestion that numbers be taken to be such things as that ‘8’ (where, since that numeral is not to be regarded as a name for something else, I’m not sure that I need the quotes around it); to be precise, he ‘solves’ Frege’s Caesar Problem via the following definitions (where ‘n’ is a schematic variable):
......The number of the F’s = 0 iff there are no F’s,
......The number of the F’s = n iff the F’s are equinumerous (can be put into one-to-one correspondence) with the successive nonzero numerals up to ‘n’. There are probably lots of problems with that suggestion; e.g. I wonder what we would then say of mathematics on a distant planet?

Is the Free-will Defence Defensible?

Swinburne’s free-will defence (of God’s allowing of evil) assumes that it is a great good that we can make free and responsible choices; and that the possibility of making such choices requires the possibility of evil. Regarding “free,” Swinburne (1996: 101) thinks that “in order to have a choice between good and evil, agents need already a certain depravity,” but what sort of choice is better made in depravity? Surely not one with important consequences! Regarding “responsible,” our ability to choose is supposed to be a great good only because we are thereby able to cause great suffering to others, but surely whatever value is added to a choice by its being freely made is independent of whether or not its consequences actually occur. Although making free and responsible choices when we have to can be a good thing, is that a reason to allow evil? Surely evil is the opposite of good, not an intrinsic part of it, as this defence seems to require it to be.
......Consider a saint (whose possible existence is supposed to justify the possibility of evil) who devotes her life to loving God, saving the depraved souls around her from sin (for which they later martyr her) and assuaging the suffering of the innocents. She is made this offer: All those sinners and sufferers (and also herself) could have died painlessly as babies and gone straight to Heaven instead, where they would all have chosen (in a well-informed way) to enjoy loving God forever. Wouldn’t a saint put their collective well-being ahead of her own glorious sainthood, and so choose (with all her saintly wisdom) to take up that offer? Or consider the heroic rescue of some people from some horrible situation—that is surely a good thing; but would we judge as good someone who arranged (or even just allowed) for the careless making of consequential choices just so that (in such a situation) she could display her own (or some friends’) heroism?

Bracket This

Time to blog about something, but what? (I could brag that my doubts last month, about the dangers of being fat, were justified last week; or I could nit-pick pedantically, or both:) What our curly brackets (e.g. “}”) are for, in this (meta-)language, is a question that cropped up elsewhere recently. I doubt that the reason why they are on our keyboards is to help us to denote sets because many other, more convenient scientific symbols are not there; so:
......Why do we philosophers use them almost exclusively to denote sets? In our pre-keyboard days, we might have used a big “}” to the right of a vertical list (of 2 or more lines) in order to comment upon all of its elements with whatever was written to the left of the central nipple. So their basic use may well be to group things together; but that could give us a set of things (singularly referred to), an atomic fusion (in the mereological sense), a number of things (plurally referred to), and so forth.
......There are lots of examples of collections, and they aren’t all obviously sets. A brace of pheasants is just those 2 pheasants; e.g. if I said “that brace is ready to eat,” there would not be anything over and above the 2 pheasants there, not something edible anyway. Similarly, for a stamp collection that at first contained only one stamp, that stamp would be the collection (there might not even be an album yet), and if I lost it I would not have an empty stamp collection (although I might have an empty album), I would have no stamp collection.
......Conversely, mathematicians use standard sets to be collections and numbers and everything else (as much as possible), a use that is formalistically rather than philosophically motivated. Collections are pretty fundamental things, but they don't seem to be sets (what is the empty set? and what of all the sets?), so why do we seem to use the curly brackets only for sets? Mathematicians use them that way, but don’t philosophers need a better reason than that? What notation are we supposed to use for collections in general, if not our curly brackets?

Ockham's Razor's Self-Excising

Ockham's Razor is the principle that, when devising theories to explain stuff, theoretical entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. It is used by some to justify atheism, and theism by others; but in fact it's useless. Consider how we would actually explain some observations: You see a cat walking behind a sofa, then just the sofa, and then a very similar cat emerges from behind the other side of the sofa. A natural way to proceed is to perceive one cat walking behind a sofa. You could imagine there were two cattish things in succession, but it's obviously more realistic to postulate the one cat.
......Was that an application of Ockham's Razor, or a trivial application of common sense? If it was Ockham's Razor, then why not postulate, instead of all such cats (and dogs and sofas and so forth) in the world, just the one demon, who has hypnotised us... oh yes, because that's obviously unrealistic! Similarly we could regard all the electrons and positrons in the world as a single electron going forwards and backwards in time, at least mathematically, but should we think of that as what actually happens, and believe in just the one electron? Ockham's Razor says we should (if it says anything); but what do you think?
......Where Ockham's Razor does seem clearly applicable (e.g. I don't explain the appearance of the cat from behind the sofa by postulating a cat and an invisible and intangible splodge of stuff quite unlike anything else) there's no need to apply anything other than a more general principle, such as that one's beliefs should be reasonable (a belief in such a splodge would clearly have no reason for being; it's only philosophers who would think of such a thing). So insofar as it's true it's unnecessary, and so it ought not (by it's own application) to be one of our principles.

How smart are the experts?

Really Philosophical

The past is what has been present [and so no longer exists], the future what will be present [and so does not yet exist]: but the present is a mere durationless boundary between the past and the future, and a boundary can exist only in virtue of the existence of that which it bounds. That was Augustine’s puzzle. If you are indifferent to philosophy, you will happily ignore it; if not, you will want to know the solution to it. (Dummett, in Philosophy 2003: 392, my italics)

Maybe the present moment, of our awareness of what is now (which presumably continues to be present even when we're asleep; or nonexistent, if that's what we become), isn't a mere boundary (but is rather the whole world, a vital rather than static world)? It doesn't seem to be, but maybe that's because it doesn't seem to be an unextended instant; so, why does it seem to be extended?
......Well, light could hardly be perceived within an unextended instant (since all light has nonzero wavelengths) for example, whereas the world is clearly, at this moment, illuminated. But still, that hardly means that the present must be extended, for this time has now become part of the past, as future times continually move through the present; that is, we perceive such things as light as times move continuously (so it seems) through the present, and so we've no reason to think that it must itself be extended. Now, while the past seems to us to be gone forever, maybe it still exists, in some lifeless part of existence. It might even remain known, e.g. by the Creator of this Universe (if there is one, as seems likely). And while the future is only accessible, for us, via the present collapse of the future possibilities into this actuality, maybe it and they are more directly known (similarly). So maybe it is not too odd, to think of the present instant as a boundary.
......I don't know much about time, but I do find our intuitions about it interesting. I don't know about yours (and ought to), but to me it seems that the past is like pictures or propositions; rather than, like the present, full of enduring objects. It seems to me that were the past to exist, somehow, it would be like a CD that we would have to move our attention through (like a beam of light) in order to perceive it; not so much because I think of time classically, as like a line through the space-time jelly of this world, but because when we ask "Where is this thing... now?" the answer is often "Still here," rarely "In the past."
......The past (of this world) could hardly be known, then, except as it was when it was present; but the future is clearly more unknown, in some sense (there's a sense in which it is more knowable), whence it seems unreal. And yet we do know a lot about it, e.g. that the sun will (probably) rise again tomorrow. It certainly seems that the future is less determinate than the past (and presumably the indirectly perceived present is actually the past, the directly experienced present being more of a becoming determinate), whence I almost think of it in terms of fuzzy pictures or propositions; although it also seems more real than the past. And less certain, since it isn't just the fuzziness of some enduring objects' properties, but rather that they might not (for all I know) even be there then.
......The future seems more real than the past, as it rushes to meet us, and maybe that's because it's approaching the present, with my desires directed towards it and my actions being about determining it; but furthermore, it seems that how things turn out affects our conception of what they really were, what they amounted to, were really all about (their meaning, so to speak). Anyway, in short time is to me a big mystery (whether under the assumption that we evolved naturally, or that we were created deliberately), whence I'm fascinated by what others think about it...

I urge that we must not assume that the 'existence' of time (which of course I do not deny) brings with it a well-formed philosophical question. The love of wisdom demands we be ready to question the questions that philosophy has bequeathed to us. I think that Dummett's refusal to consider questioning those questions has unfortunate consequences. It leads him to unwittingly enunciate some nonsenses. (Read, in Philosophy 2003: 402)

Vaguely Logical

Kit Fine was, rather appropriately, rather vague about his extraordinary logic of vagueness (not its name, probably) last night (in St Andrews), which got me wondering what we could possibly want a logic of vagueness for... Our predicates are naturally usually as definite as our ordinary uses of them require them to be, and even in situations in which they're insufficiently definite, the usual logic (of definite predicates) will inform of us that fact, by throwing up a simple contradiction, the resolution of which is also quite ordinary: We need only precisify some predicate(s) somewhat, and we can continue as before. That's all very rough and ready, but at least it works well enough. When devising our more logical theories of things, our theoretical languages must at present contain only definite predicates, but is that a bad thing? (Do we want vague terms in our scientific theories?) The selection of the more precise predicate(s) is a free act of human creativity, but there is no more logical science than mathematics, and our choices of its axioms are similarly free.

Scientifically Paralogical

Suppose that you’re trying to decide if some bloke is guilty of something “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and you think that he is, but your fellows think that he isn’t. If you thought that they had arrived at their conclusion in a reasonable way, would you defer to them and change your mind? Or do you think that it makes sense for reasonable people to disagree when they’re responding to the same evidence, the same arguments about that evidence, and when they have the same interest in simply getting at the truth? We are in a similar situation in philosophy, and we tend to continue disagreeing. But then, there is no sense of urgency in philosophy (despite its claims to meaningfulness)

[This post originally contained a lot of links to Halloween posts, one of which had the following comment by PJ, but I have removed them because now they are all bad links]

People in science disagree all the time about where the balance of evidence points, but happily regard their opponents in any given scientific debate as being quite rational, often because these are fairly open questions where it is difficult to articulate why one piece of evidence should or shouldn’t outweigh another - so you might say that while you recognise that X is suggested by experiment Y, you’re more inclined to believe that Y resulted from mistake Z, because you think X is so unlikely given A, even though Z is quite unlikely too.