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Wars, Religious and Not

Nathan Jacobson
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In my recent response to Bill Maher’s Religulous, I made a claim that seems right to me, but of which I’m not sure. In the film, Maher makes the all too common accusation that, “More people have been killed in the name of god than for anything else.” On the face of it, this seems to me obviously incorrect, but my history is far from above reproach. I claimed, alternatively: “Because humans throughout history have been so irredeemably religious, religion has played some role in most human conflict. A small subset of wars have
been waged for distinctly religious motives.” I’m beginning a survey starting in the present and working my way back to test this impression. I’ll classify each war as either a 1) religious war, 2) a nonreligious war, or 3) a mixed war. I’m especially interested to find wars with distinctly Christian motives. I will rely, to start, on conventional wisdom with respect to causes, though conventional wisdom often does not withstand scrutiny. This is a working document and will evolve as I have time. No doubt these classifications will have to be refined.

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I Want To Believe

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8276756/Alien-life-deemed-impossible-by-analysis-of-500-planets.html
Go Recently, The X-Files returned to the big screen, recalling in its title the famous poster that adorned the walls of Fox Mulder's office during the long running series: "I Want To Believe". In the movie and original series, the show's writers draw parallels between Mulder's credulity with respect to extraterrestrial life and religious people's credulity with respect to God. Of course, as the show progressed, considering Mulder's frequent brushes with nasty alien life forms, his desire to believe hardly required a leap of faith. But in the non-fictional world, the hope that extraterrestrial life is real is increasingly widespread, even though evidence for its existence is not yet forthcoming. I think there are several reasons for this, not the least of which is a desire to believe so. But, don't such desires necessarily prejudice the pursuit of truth? Religious people are often accused of wishful thinking in their belief in God and an afterlife, and now we see in atheologians like Richard Dawkins a similar predisposition towards belief in extraterrestrial life, and in some cases, an evident desire not to believe in the supernatural. As a person of faith, I've often wrestled with whether my judgments regarding the rationality of my beliefs can be accurate when, admittedly, "I want to believe". Pascal, Kant, William James, and many others have approached this question, each from a unique angle. Here, I want to argue that a baseline credulity is necessary for any knowledge whatsoever, and that a disposition towards some kinds of beliefs, like belief in God, is appropriate, as long as it is tempered by other epistemic virtues.

Do No Evil!

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It’s not often that a corporate ethic surfaces in the mainstream, but Google’s maxim, “Do No Evil”, is an exception, no doubt in part because, like Google.com itself, it’s short and sweet. Google’s ethic may seem so obviously self-evident as to induce a smirk, but it’s unusual for a moral imperative to be so significant in a corporation’s self-identity. It brings to mind the kernel of the Hippocratic oath, “Do No Harm”, as well as Ghandi’s applying this simple rule to the complexities of being a googleopoly is not easy. Nonetheless, these rules, as good and important as they are, are noteworthy in part because of how different they are than that other moral maxim, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

They Know Not What They Do

Nathan Jacobson
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As an empirical matter, it is difficult to deny that there are many who have earnestly sought to know God but have been unable to believe for rational reasons. And yet, by my count, most Christian apologists insist that the earnest seeker who follows the evidence will ultimately be convinced of the reality of God and of his self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In two of his recent podcasts, William Lane Craig addresses this issue: first, in response to a questioner who, by his own account, had honestly investigated the claims of Christianity but could not believe (“Evolution and Skepticism“, Nov 30, 2009); and second, in dealing with the phenomenon of some well-known deconversions (“Questions about ‘Ex-Christians’ and Molinism“, Dec 10, 2009). Though Craig recognizes atheism as a rational position, in these instances, instead of conceding the reality of sincere unbelief, Craig posited the power of self-deception in the first case and of moral failure in the second. I don’t discount the power of moral considerations, including self-deception, in belief formation. Indeed, virtue epistemology has well articulated an extensive catalog of moral obligations relevant to justified belief. Nonetheless, there seem to be cases in which the seeker’s quest has been bona fide and not impeded by an unwillingness to obey God. Kenneth W. Daniels’ spiritual autobiography, Why I Believed, recounts the story of his painful loss of faith in spite of his desperate desire to continue to believe the story that gave his life meaning and animated his vocation as a Christian missionary. If you read his story carefully, it is exceedingly difficult to attribute his deconversion to anything but the sway of arguments as he appraised them. And my experience suggests that his is but one of countless similar stories that are undocumented. But what, then, are we to make of a God whom is believed to have promised that he who seeks, will find Him. If sincere and virtuous unbelief is a reality, it presents a unique challenge to the Christian conception of God as described in the Bible. If trust, and thereby belief, in God and Christ is the eternally decisive matter it is claimed to be, how could a good God hide himself from those who seek him?

Determined Compatibilists

Nathan Jacobson
Go The most exasperating and disconsolate impasse in the history of philosophy is, for me, the standoff between compatibilists and incompatibilists. As one who takes reason to be the indispensable means of our understanding, this apparent conflict of intuitions undermines the role of reason as a toolset to which we can mutually appeal in discovering truth. The intuition in dispute in this case is not as basic as the principle of sufficient reason or the law of non-contradiction, but it is close. If it were more tangential, this apparent divergence of intuitions would be less alarming. But, the incompatibilist intuition, at least, is felt as an analytic and necessary truth. Describing a proposition he considered not just improbable but "unbelievable", C.S. Lewis once wrote: "the act of believing [that] is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape..." For many an incompatibilist, compatibilism is on that order. It is inconceivable. And yet, for their part, compatibilists seem to regard it as perfectly coherent, determinism being entirely amenable to our sense of ourselves as free and morally responsible beings. I find myself wondering an impolite question. Do compatibilists in fact have such an intuition? Or, is compatibilism an antinomy, a forced conciliation entailed by two non-negotiable theses with little or no inherent coherence? On the basis of compatibilistic argumentation itself, there is reason to suspect that it is. Some compatibilists admit as much, conceding that the conjunction of determinism and moral responsibility is paradoxical, a mystery. Other compatibilists are determined to persuade us that not only is compatibilism intuitionally coherent, but that only determinism preserves moral responsibility, and to boot, it engenders compassion where indeterminism does not. For them, deterministic freedom is the only kind "worth wanting". By attending closely to several articulations of compatibilism, I hope to give reason to think that the incompatibilist intuition is not as unevenly distributed a deliverance of reason as one might have feared.

Will Power and Predictability

Go The most unrelenting and debilitating deficiency of the Libertarian account1 of agency is its inability to explain the inner workings of the very will it insists upon. Robert Kane has called this issue the question of “intelligibility.” He claims priority for this issue, suggesting that often Libertarian arguments for supplementary theses, such as the incompatibility of determinism and freedom, are largely derailed because lurking in the back of the compatibilist’s mind is the conviction that the concept of Libertarian Agency (LA) is incoherent anyway. The compatibilist generally believes that LA is, at the least, “essentially mysterious or terminally obscure.”2 Kane argues, then, that the Libertarian project will falter as long as it fails to provide an intelligible analysis of the will itself. The alleged unintelligibility of LA springs from its insistence that free acts are undetermined. Given an exactly similar set of desires, reasons, impulses, and deliberations, a free agent has the capacity to choose either of several alternatives. But, if none of these factors are determinative, it is difficult to see how the agent’s free choice is anything but a fluke. Can we conceive of an action that is rational, intentional, and voluntary and yet neither determined nor random? Roderick Chisolm asks this very thing. “Our conception of action should be neither deterministic nor indeterministic. Is there any other possibility?”3 One version of this problem points out our apparent ability to assign probabilities to the actions of persons individually and as groups based on factors external to the will. Sociologists, for example, might predict with accuracy that 90 of 100 school children will cry when the animal crackers are depleted. But if a person’s will is undetermined by such factors, the children should just as easily have been able to receive the news with a stiff upper lip. There should be no such predictability.4

Zombies, Androids, Pantomines

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The Basic Argument

  1. Brain states qua physical states exist and mental states exist.
  2. Mental states possess properties that physical states and systems do not.
  3. Brain states are not identical to mental states.

The Indiscernibilty of Identicals

Statements of identity are usually analyzed as follows: for any entities x and y, if x and y are really the same thing, then for any property P, P is true of x if and only if P is true of y. Note that, with respect to mind/brain identity, the principle is indifferent to whether mind is inseparable from the brain and whether the mind is correlated to the brain in a law-like fashion.

Properties of Physical Things

  1. Resistance (traditionally, hardness or solidity)
  2. Mass
  3. Velocity
  4. Charge

Possibly Unique Properties of Mental States

  1. Qualia and Secondary Properties
  2. Self-Presenting Properties. Privacy and Incorrigibility.
  3. The Subjective Nature of Experience
  4. The Existence of Secondary Qualities
  5. Intentionality
  6. Self-Awareness and Personal Identity through time.
  7. Indexicals. Irreducibility of third-person to first-person.

Functionalism and Computers

Ironically, after half a century of creating devices to mimic and extend human operations and purposes, many now think that it is we who are created in the image of computers, not vice-versa. We are basically organic computers, and because noone thinks computers are one part circuits and one part souls, we likewise are neurons without souls. But, does the operation and analogous functionality of computers suggest that we are like computers? Are any of the above properties exhibited by computers? Might they be?

The computer analogy is basically a modern version of functionalism. In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the view that the mind should be defined in terms of causal inputs and outputs. Just as a kidney or carburetor is defined in terms of its function, so also the mind should be defined strictly by a certain kind of causal inputs and outputs. Anything that outputs 4 when fed 2+2 is a mind.

The Chinese Room Argument

The most famous objection, by far, to the human/computer analogy is John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (Scientific American, C2, Searle 1990, 26-27).

Consider a language you don’t understand. In my case, I do not understand Chinese. To me, Chinese writing looks like so many meaningless squiggles. Now suppose I am placed in a room containing baskets full of Chinese symbols. Suppose also that I am given a rule book in English for matching Chinese symbols with other Chinese symbols. The rules identify the symbols entirely by their shapes and do not require that I understand any of them. The rules might say such things as “take a squiggle-squiggle sign from basket number one and put it next to a squoggle-squoggle sign from basket number two.”

Image that people outside the room who understand Chinese hand in small bunches of symbols and that in response I manipulate the symbols according to the rule book and hand back more small bunches of symbols. Now the rule book is the “computer program.” The people who wrote it are the “programmers,” and I am the “computer.” The baskets full of symbols are the “data base,” the small bunches that are handed in to me are “questions” and the bunches I then hand out are “answers.”

Now suppose that the rule book is written in such a way that my “answers” to the “questions” are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. For example, the people outside might hand me some symbols that, unknown to me, mean, “What is your favorite color?” and I might after going through the rules give back symbols that, also unknown to me, mean “My favorite color is blue, but I also like green a lot.” I satisfy the Turing test for understanding Chinese. All the same, I am totally ignorant of Chinese. And there is no way I could come to understand Chinese in the system as described, since there is no way that I can learn the meanings of any of the symbols. Like a computer, I manipulate symbols, but I attach no meaning to the symbols.

The point of the thought experiment is this: if I do not understand Chinese solely on the basis of running a computer program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis. Digital computers merely manipulate form symbols according to rules in the program.

What goes fro Chinese goes for other forms of cognition as well. Just manipulating symbols is not by itself enough to guarantee cognition, perception, understanding, thinking, and so forth. And since computer, qua computers, are symbol manipulating devices, merely running the computer program is not enough to guarantee cognition.

This simple argument is decisive against the claims of strong AI.

The Implications

In your original response to my article, “The Captain of My Soul”, you said: “I can write a program that will discriminate between conflicting
desires on the basis of reason, desire, and beliefs, and then let it do
so. … The same is true for us. We have an internal deterministic faculty
which discriminates between external desires on the basis of beliefs,
reasons, etc.” I think this is a mistake. Just because we can make a computer take inputs and return outputs in the same way humans do, it does not mean that computers are doing what we do, unless functionalism is true. If we manage to create a perfect Turing machine, it would not mean that that machine would be “thinking” or had “desires” and “beliefs”. There is no reason to think that the flips and switches have any semantic or emotional content. But we know in our own cases that our reasoning and feeling do have such content.

Rush Limbaugh just said: “I know these liberals. I know these cockroaches.” Get the paddle.

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Quantum Physics as Rorschach Test

Nathan Jacobson Reaching Beyond my depth.
Go Recently, with reference to the cosmological argument, a friend suggested that quantum physics undercuts the presumption that every event must have a cause, the principle that drives the argument. I cautioned that the significance of the observed phenomena in quantum physics is a matter of such debate that drawing any such implication is tenuous at best, and in any case, quantum indeterminacy doesn't carry beyond the level of elementary particles. This move, he suggested, was typical of Christians and Objectivists, but not of scientists themselves. And ironically, I had just read Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland making this point: "Regarding quantum entities, there are at least eight different empirically equivalent philosophical models of quantuam reality and, at this stage, it is irresponsible to make dogmatic claims about the ontology of the quantum level."1 (20) My sense is that quantum physics, at least on the popular level, operates as a kind of Rorschach Test, amenable to whatever presuppositions one brings to the table. This is why one finds a whole host of viewpoints appropriating "the new physics" to their own ends, from libertarian naturalists to New Age mystics. The quantum level is sometimes described as a wonderland where none of the usual rules apply and anything is impossible. So, what should we infer from quantum physics? And what is its appropriate role in philosophical debate? Relying heavily on those who understand it better than I do, here are a few suggestions.