Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

(But then, contemporary juries are not very good on causation either. In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.)

I almost want to see if I can find the court transcript for this case. But I don't know if my sanity could survive reading it.

‘causal overdetermination’

Since the problem must have a solution in the case of mechanical control, it must have one for people as well.

Why? Is this a given? It seems scary to think that huge arguments like determinism vs freedom and it's related question of accountability are based on such a simplistic notion as a bad simile between machines and people. Or am I taking a simple analogy too far?

Peter Strawson

There is an interesting ‘gestalt switch’ in Strawson’s picture. At first, it might seem that the moral attitudes associated with blame are hard and harsh, and we might think that it is an improvement if we can get past them to more liberal and understanding attitudes to such things as crime or ‘deviant behaviour’. Treating people as patients rather than as criminals looks to be a step in a humane, decent direction. Strawson asks us to confront what is lost in this change. He suggests that a lot of what makes human relationships distinctively human is lost. Suppose, for instance, that I have behaved in a way that I want to explain. But I find other people listening to my story with a look in their eyes that suggests that this talk is just another symptom. It is just another sign that I need to be managed or handled or cured or trained. Then I have been dehumanized. I want my decision to be understood, not patronized. I want other people to ‘hear my voice’, which means appreciating my point of view, seeing how things appear to me, rather than wondering what causes a human organism to behave like this.

?

This kind of objectification concerns us again in Chapter 8, when among other things we confront the therapy industry with it.

I was thinking about this, in terms of the “what happened to you” question. Makes that seem less straightforwardly beneficent.

The right response to the highlighted complaint, taking account of Strawson’s point, is this. The compatibilist is not intending to deny agency, but to give a particular account of it.

Some thinkers like to say that there are two perspectives on all of this. There is the deliberative, first-person stance you adopt when you yourself are making a choice. And there is an ‘objective’ or third-person stance, one that a scientist might take, seeing you as a complex, determined, neurophysiological system. The problem lies in reconciling the two stances. If the problem is put this way, then the right solution is surely this. There would only be a difficulty about reconciliation if what is disclosed in the deliberative stance is incompatible with what is disclosed in the third-person stance. But the deliberative stance discloses nothing about causation.

So, since nothing is seen from within the deliberative stance that conflicts with the scientific world-view, perhaps there is no need to find the problem of reconciliation at all difficult. What we may be left with is just a moral problem: one of making sure that we approach one another not with the objectifying stance, but with full human understanding, enriched, rather than undermined, by knowledge of the conditions that bring about the decisions of other people.

This seems good.

the ‘lazy sophism’.

Is it not better to withdraw, and perhaps sit in an orange shawl saying ‘Om’ all day?

This is kind of insulting, but whatever…

The lazy sophism can be represented as this argument for a course of action: The future will be what it will be. Its events are already in time’s womb. So, do nothing.

Which events unfold from time’s womb depends on what we decide to do—this is what the inside control of a person or a thermostat means. Our choosing modules are implicated in the process, unlike those of mere spectators.

When you don’t know what will happen, and you think events will respond to your doings, you deliberate about what to do. We have seen that fatalism affords no argument for conducting that deliberation one way or another. And it affords no argument that the process itself is unreal, unless the process is construed in the outside way we have considered and rejected.

‘God’s eye view’, or what has been called the ‘view from nowhen’.

is

The key word to catch hold of is ‘flexibility’ (remember those inflexible, programmed, Zombies again). And you cannot tell a priori how flexible human behaviour is.

Theorists and gurus like to make a pattern: people are all selfish; people are only influenced by class interests; people hate their parents; people can be conditioned; men are aggressive; women are gentle; people cannot help themselves, and so on. But this is not so much a matter of following the evidence, as of imposing an interpretation on it. Like all stereotypes, such interpretations can be dangerous, for people can be caused to conform to them, and often become worse as a result than they might have been otherwise. The job of conceptual engineering, here, is to supply a clearer outline of alternative structures of thought, and there are many.

actual things we think about ourselves:

some possible things to think about ourselves.

We have seen that plants and animals survive change of material substance. So why shouldn’t persons (me, you) survive change of soul substance?

But this is a completely different question, shifting from something we know exists (material substance) to something in question (soul substance)—a giant and not at all analogous leap.

Locke’s wonderful move is to point out that even if we are very worried by personal survival through time and change, invoking ‘immaterial soul substances’ wont help. Why not? Because just as we count plants through time regardless of change of material elements, so we count persons over time without any reference to ‘immaterial substances’.

I'm not understanding something...

We can summarize the negative point by saying that nothing in our inner musings about ‘myself’ licenses thinking in terms of a permanent inner substance, capable of surviving even the most remarkable changes and possibilities.

‘failure of transitivity’ of identity.

This is sometimes called a ‘no ownership’ theory of the self, or the ‘bundle’ theory of the self.

Perhaps the way forward has to be to deny that the ‘self’ is the kind of thing of which awareness is possible.

artificial intelligence.

Again. I am leery of using concepts we've attached to computers to illuminate questions we have about humans.

What this suggests is that a minimal self-consciousness is a structural requirement on any kind of interpretation of experience.

So thinking in terms of an ‘I’ now looks like a formal or structural requirement on interpreting experience in the way we do—as experience of a three-dimensional world of continuing objects, amongst which we move. The ‘I’ is the point of view from which interpretation starts. It is not something else given in experience, because nothing given in experience could solve the formal problem for which an ‘I’ is needed. But a point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.

This is part of the "I" that Sam Harris wants us to see as an illusion, like when he asked listeners to imagine that, while walking, we are stationary and objects are moving toward us, or that nothing was moving and everything was simply in its place.

Beliefs are supposed to be true. ‘I believe that p’ and ‘I believe that it is true that p’ come to the same thing. You cannot say, ‘I believe that fairies exist, but I don’t think it is true that fairies exist.’ And religious people apparently believe various things, which other people do not believe. But it is not actually obvious that religion is a matter of truth, or that religious states of mind are to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity.

I start, however, by considering the classical philosophical arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the design argument, and arguments from revelation and miracles. We end by thinking more about the nature of faith, belief, and commitment.

One way of putting this is to say that the terms have a sense, but no reference. You know what you mean, but you don’t know whether there is anything that answers to it. You cannot argue from the sense to the reference, because whether there is a reference is a question of how the world is, not to be settled in the study, or by consulting a dictionary.

Philosophers sometimes express this by saying that ‘existence is not a predicate’, meaning that adding ‘and exists’ is not like adding ‘and likes Guinness’. You are in charge of sense: you can add what you like to the job description. But the world is in charge of reference: it says if anything exists meeting your conditions.

reductio ad absurdum.

In my own view, the crucial problem lies in an ambiguity lurking in the comparison of ‘reality’ and ‘conception’. In the argument, things ‘in reality’ are compared with things ‘in conception’ (i.e. according to a definition, or in imagination or dreams), for such properties as greatness, or perfection.

St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74),

He preferred to argue that God is needed in order to explain the world or cosmos as we apprehend it. This argument, the cosmological argument, has a much stronger appeal to the imagination.

One version of this, and perhaps the easiest to understand, is the first cause argument.

It is important to remember here that as far as everyday experience goes, minds are just as much in need of explanation, just as much dependent beings, as physical objects. Postulating a mind that is somehow immune from dependency on anything else whatsoever is jumping away from experience just as violently as postulating a physical thing that is so.

The same Cleanthes who is given the job of refuting the cosmo-logical argument is the spokesman for a different attempt to prove the existence of a deity: the argument to design—the view that heaven and earth declare the glory of the creator.

he

argument by analogy.

the argument is ‘a posteriori’. That is, it argues from experience, or from what we know of the world as we find it.

he

What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call ‘thought’, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.

Argument by analogy requires certain conditions in order to be reliable. First, the bases for the analogy should be extremely similar. Second, we should have experience covering the likely explanations. That is, we should know as much as pos...

Since Philo’s point here seems unanswerable, it is good to speculate a little about the allure of the argument to design. Why do not people appreciate Philo’s counter? I suspect the root cause is the same as that responsible for some of the problems of free will. We think that it is more satisfactory to halt the regress with ‘intelligence’ rather than ‘generation’, because we think that in our own experience we have an example of an uncaused mental event, say, my deciding to initiate an action, giving rise to a physical event. So we take that as a model for the arbitrary creation of a universe by an intelligent deity.

This interaction between the design argument and the interventionist conception of free will has an interesting moral aspect. Arguably, the two images of God as supernatural, and of our ‘selves’ as equally outside nature, feed off each other. And each leads people to deny the sovereignty of nature. It leads people to see the world as something that ‘we’ have dominion over, just as God does. Whereas the truth is that the world is something of which we are a very, very small part.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

So the traditional attributes of God include moral perfection. God is to be all-powerful, of course, all-knowing, but also all-caring. But then there arises the classic argument against the existence of God: the problem that, in the world that he (or she, or they) created, this care seems sadly lacking.