Category: philosophy

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More idiocy

Free will an illusion, says article.

The report in the Independent says that:

Volunteers in the study were asked to sit in front of a screen and focus on its central point while their brains’ electrical activity was recorded. They were then asked to make a decision to look either left or right when a cue symbol appeared on the screen, and then to report their decision.

The cue to look left or right appeared at random intervals, so the volunteers could not consciously or unconsciously prepare for it.

The brain has a normal level of so-called background noise; the researchers found that the pattern of activity in the brain in the seconds before the cue symbol appeared – before the volunteers knew they were going to make a choice – could predict the likely outcome of the decision.

This notion, that rational consciousness is making the decisions, has been shown to be bunk, and for a long time. But this result does not mean we have no free will. What it shows is that “rational consciousness” is the story teller; the part of our brain that rationalizes decisions we have already made. Rationalization is narratization, and narratization is just story telling. Humans tells stories the same way birds make nests, or beavers make dams, or bears turn over stones looking for ant nests.

Nevertheless, the part (or function, or activity) of our brains that tells the story to others and to ourselves what decision we have made is not the part that makes the decisions – but it is the part that thinks it is making the decision because it is the part that commands language.

Language confuses us into thinking that the part that commands language commands the brain, but it is quite the reverse. The human mind existed before language and the function of our mind that decides/acts/chooses existed before (and must have existed before) the capacity to tell a story about our acting/decision-making.

All of this fascinating matter is discussed extensively in Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion.

Not merely does consciousness (understood as the narratizer) not make the decision, it actually fakes the record! Milliseconds after the part of our mind that decides has decided, consciousness interposes its memory of having decided into the record earlier than it actually was aware of the decision. Your “consciousness” – your media department and record bureau as it were – is like the journalist who pretends that it has made the decision, but non-linguistic functions of your brain have actually done so.

This amazing result has been shown by what I call “electrode science”. It has been completely replicated and does not depend on any theory of the mind as a non-material substance.

So, if “consciousness” -the person who remembers and tells stories – does not make the decision, who does? We do. It is just that the press office of our minds is not the executive function.

That our executive function is not “conscious” – able to tell stories – merely tells us that the ability to duck the thrown spear, or catch the teacup before ithits the floor, is prior to being able to talk about it.

The same point is made, at much greater length, in several books:

Iain McGilchrist, the Master and his Emissary

McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and man of letters, discusses the absurd over-emphasis on modern culture of conscious (left-brained) thinking.

Julian Jaynes, the Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind,

This was the first book to take seriously the division of the mind into left and right hemispheres and to ask profound questions about the significance for human cultural evolution of the separate functions of the hemispheres.

While McGilchrist differs from Jaynes in thinking that consciousness (the narratizer function) has not emerged from the breakdown of the bi-cameral (two-chambered) mind, he does agree with Jaynes that we have sppressed too much the non-linguistic aspects of our beings, by disparaging myth, symbols, and and other non-linguistic portions which feel and understand, but cannot speak through the press office.

 

 

Global warming: where is the science?

To the extent something proposition is scientific; it is capable of disproof. So said the philosopher of science, Karl Popper. If it is incapable of disproof, it is not science. Second, if it is not a statement about the natural world, it is not within the domain of science.

To the extent that anthropogenic global warming is both a statement about the natural world, and is falsifiable, it is science. The theory may still be right, and we may well be warming our planet through the emission of CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Yet after nearly fourteen years of climbing CO2 concentrations caused by us humans (fact), and a failure of the earth’s average temperature to increase (fact), then a crisis of confidence must eventually erupt in the computer projections which predicted much more global warming than has occurred.

Below is the data from the UK Met Office.

fe0617_climate_c_mf

As Ross McKittrick observes in today’s NatPost,

The absence of warming over the past 15 to 20 years amidst rapidly rising greenhouse gas levels poses a fundamental challenge to mainstream climate modeling. In an interview last year with the newspaper Der Spiegel, the well-known German climatologist Hans von Storch said “If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models.” Climatologist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech recently observed “If the 20-year threshold is reached for the pause, this will lead inescapably to the conclusion that the climate model sensitivity to CO2 is too large.”

McKitrick points out that the models on which policy makers are basing economic effects from AGW, so called Integrated Assessment Models, are themselves based on these inaccurate models of global warming, so that error is compounded into vast decisions about power sources: coal versus nuclear, versus windmills, for instance.

The science may have been settled; it is unfortunate that it has been proven wrong.

As to reliance on computers for such enormous issues of policy, I am reminded of “garbage in-garbage out”. Butlerian Jihad anyone?

Most computer projections are the confabulation of fudge factors chosen to arrive at predetermined outcomes. Hence, not science, since they cannot be proven wrong.

Consciousness

This is the lecture given by Bruce Greyson to a group of Buddhist monks in Daramsala, India. He says everything that needs saying about the failure of the materialist idea of the mind: that the mind and the brain are identical, and that consciousness is produced by the brain. The evidence presented in this lecture is purely scientific.

Thomas Nagel again

Thomas Nagel shocked the philosophical world in 2012 with a book called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. I was reminded of him because of David Bentley Hart, subject of my last posting below.

Hart is a committed Christian and Nagel is an atheist. They are looking at the same mountain from different sides, one from the side of beginning to see what the mountain might really be, and the other from the side of a clear vision of what it is. For each, it is the mysterious mountain.

To Nagel, the question to be explained is whether the account given by Darwinists to man’s capacity for moral reasoning is true. If we have evolved, as everyone admits, then what is our capacity to grasp the difference between good and bad in any fundamental way? Oh yes we can tell the difference between pleasure and pain all right, but is pain really bad or have we just evolved to feel that way? The answer turns on what you mean by “really”.

Nagel got himself into trouble with some quarters by saying that we know that pleasure and pain are good or bad in themselves and we are so constituted that we know this difference really, not just because we have evolved to avoid one and seek the other. This is what is called a realist view: realist in the sense that we truly apprehend the world, and are not confused by demons who actually hold our brains in vats, while we experience this three-dimensional illusion of the world, à la Matrix movies.

Nagel concludes that the Darwinian picture must be incomplete.

The historical question is about our origins: What must the universe and the evolutionary process be like to have generated such beings? Both these questions seem to require some alternative to materialist naturalism and its Darwinian application to biology, but what are the possibilities? (at p.112)

To which David Bentley Hart would say to Nagel, “well done, you are starting to ask the right questions”. Hart takes a view that I share, namely that consciousness is primary and the material universe is secondary:

Once again: We cannot encounter the world without encountering  at the same time the being of the world, which is a mystery that can never be dispelled by any physical explanation of reality, inasmuch as it is a mystery logically prior to and in excess of the physical order. We cannot encounter the world, furthermore, except in the luminous medium of intentional and unified consciousness, which defies every reduction to purely physiological causes, but which also clearly corresponds to an essential intelligibility in  being itself”. (pp.297-298)

In brief:

  • physical explanations do not explain the mystery of being;
  • we cannot experience the world apart from consciousness, which cannot be reduced to material causes; and
  • the world is intelligible.

To which Hart would add, all religions, at all times, have asserted as much.

Below, on a related matter, Hart discusses his disappointments with the atheists: Dennet, Hitchens, and others. Hart’s style is high, wry and dry, and one could wish for a littel more oomph in the presentation, but he is bombing from a great height: the B-52 airstrike so high the newly dead never heard it.

Political correctness and Islam are the same thing

All the instances of suppression of speech are the same story: the Left has gotten into the habit of suppressing speech and cannot stop at any point; since habits are habit-forming. Says Mark Steyn:

 If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

After recounting all the recent instances of people suppressed or punished for being out of line with the Cathedral, Steyn adds:

 A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.

Once again, Steyn ties it all together in a way I can only envy.

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

It is the concern of every thinking person that the we are rapidly heading to the same dismal state of inquiry as we find in Islam. We arrive at it by the same process as political correctness enforces: the suppression of free “unbalanced” debate.

And just as it was with Islam, it is a lack of confidence that underlies the suppression of free inquiry. In both cases, the lack of confidence is justified.

Compare that insecurity to the robust confidence of Christians trained in the Greek classical tradition, who are ready to take on philosophical attacks from any direction. Why are they so confident? Because they believe that human reason grasps reality and that, while some things are mysteries, we do actually apprehend with our minds what is real.

That is why Christianity gave rise to universities, science, and the modern age, and that is why political correctness and Islam are so weak, while appearing so strong. Their weakness causes them to suppress, and what each suppresses is – for the moment – different. Soon, however, political correctness will be Islam, and Islam will be political correctness. What is essentially alike will recognize its underlying likeness in the other, and will assimilate. Borg will absorb Borg.

If these forces prevail, just put a black flag on top of Parliament, shut it down and refer all political issues to the jurists at human rights commissions whose judges, naturally, will be Islamized political apparatchiks. All inquiry and discussion will become subject to  jurisprudence, since everything important has been decided anyway. No one will question anything, and inquiry will rapidly atrophy. That, at least, is their hope.

Why do Islam and political correctness resemble one another? Because they know they are artificial constructs that cannot withstand the scrutiny of reason, and must rely on the enforcement of conformity in thought, word and deed to hide from themselves their emptiness.

Am I wrong?

 

Near Death

Mario Beauregard, a research scientist at the University of Montreal, writes an interesting article on near death experiences in Salon Magazine.

NDE= near death experience

OBE = out-of-body experience

Although the details differ, NDEs are characterized by a number of core features. Perhaps the most vivid is the OBE: the sense of having left one’s body and of watching events going on around one’s body or, occasionally, at some distant physical location. During OBEs, near-death experiencers (NDErs) are often astonished to discover that they have retained consciousness, perception, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of personal identity. If anything, these processes are heightened: Thinking is vivid; hearing is sharp; and vision can extend to 360 degrees. NDErs claim that without physical bodies, they are able to penetrate through walls and doors and project themselves wherever they want. They frequently report the ability to read people’s thoughts.

The effects of NDEs on the experience are intense, overwhelming, and real. A number of studies conducted in United States, Western European countries, and Australia have shown that most NDErs are profoundly and positively transformed by the experience. One woman says, “I was completely altered after the accident. I was another person, according to those who lived near me. I was happy, laughing, appreciated little things, joked, smiled a lot, became friends with everyone … so completely different than I was before!”

Of course, nothing will persuade the materialist that all mental events  derive from the brain and no mental event happens outside the brain, and all mental events are brain events. It reminds me of Mussolini’s dictum: ” all within the state, nothing outside the sate, nothing against the state”

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benitomuss109829.html#Y5QoFYlOXkLssmjI.99
All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benitomuss109829.html#Y5QoFYlOXkLssmjI.99

Hmmn…materialism as a form of brain fascism.

Materialism – the doctrine that everything in the universe is of one substance: matter and its motions, and nothing else – is the dominant world view of this century and the last. It has precisely zero chance of lasting another fifty years, except as a relic, like fascism or communism. It is so twentieth century.

Anyway, for  the interested, here are a few books worth your attention on the subject of mind, awareness, and consciousness,  and why consciousness is primary:

Out of our Heads, by Alva Noë (2010) The author is a philosopher.

The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, by Tor Nørretranders (1999) The author is a science writer.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes 1976. The author was a classicist [Jaynes was almost certainly wrong in part but absolutely brilliant]

The Purpose-Guided Universe, by Bernard Haisch (2010) The author is a physicist

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, by Stephen M, Barr
(2003) The author is a physicist.

The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGillchrist (2011) The author is a psychiatrist.

Biocentrism, by Robert Lanza (2009) Lanza is a medical doctor, whose book is a more popular rendition of the ideas and arguments found in Bernard Haisch and Stephen Barr.

Brain Wars, by Mario Beauregard (2012). Beauregard is a brain researcher at the UdeM. Also by him:
The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul

Surely, Professor Searle, you appeal to the authority of pure snobbery

The following extract is a classic example of assuming exactly what cannot be demonstrated. So you say: “surely, all intelligent people know this” and expect to get away with it.

John Searle on the nature of consciousness:

Interviewer: You also say that consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire.

John Searle: Consciousness is a biological property like digestion or photosynthesis. Now why isn’t that screamingly obvious to anybody who’s had any education? And I think the answer is these twin traditions. On the one hand there’s God, the soul and immortality that says it’s really not part of the physical world, and then there is the almost as bad tradition of scientific materialism that says it’s not a part of the physical world. They both make the same mistake, they refuse to take consciousness on its own terms as a biological phenomenon like digestion, or photosynthesis, or mitosis, or meiosis, or any other biological phenomenon.

That consciousness is experienced by physical beings like you and me does not make consciousness physical ( that is, consisting of matter and its motions), anymore than numbers are physical. Numbers can be manipulated, mental operations may be performed upon them, but they are, like the Pythagorean theorem, like the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius – π, not ultimately matter and its motions. And we have not even reached mind yet. We have not even reached consciousness, nor the redness of red, nor the mind that understands what “red” is.

Will the materialists never get it?

The purged

They were found guilty of offending “the Cathedral”, that apex of political correctness.

Read this and contemplate whether we are in fact living in a liberal society. My short answer is no.

A  central narrative about the origins of modern anti-democratic thought is here.

A more religious interpretation of its origins is found here.

If you ask, why waste your time in this neo-reactionary bullshit? Why give mental time over to silly ranters in basements? My answer is given in part by looking at my posting on the controversy about Judge Nadon’s appointment to the Supreme Court. I cannot take seriously what passes for controversy and thought in Canada in 2014. I have other concerns. One of them is the systemic undermining of constitutional government and reasonable social order by the political Left, or the rising tide of Bad Ideas. This tide is broader, deeper, older, and more significant than contemporary controversies, which are the tide’s surface manifestation.

Dark Enlightenment

For those who are curious about the places where you really should not go on the Internet, to taste the dubious fruits of seriously reactionary thought – I do not mean conservative, I mean reactionary – you can start with this rather dispassionate survey here from Vocativ, which is an interesting site in its own right.

What is the Dark Enlightenment? As the term suggests, the Dark Enlightenment is an ideological analysis of modern democracy that harshly rejects the vision of the 18th century European Enlightenment—a period punctuated by the development of empirical science, the rise of humanist values and the first outburst of revolutionary democratic reform. In contrast, the Dark Enlightenment advocates an autocratic and neo-monarchical society. Its belief system is unapologetically reactionary, almost feudal.

Having braced yourself for your encounter with stuff so far from electoral politics that it has disappeared through the event horizon, the  definition of which is surprisingly apt:

a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer…

you may now safely observe the blogs I am about to direct you to. Start with Occam’s Razor, which is frankly anti-democratic and reactionary, and in particular to “The Dark Enlightenment/NeoReaction gets Mainstream Notice”.

There are enough links for and against for you to follow that you can waste your time productively in the murkier recesses of reaction, and hysteria about reaction.

The essential contention of the reactionaries is that there exists an established church of opinion, which is called the Cathedral, whose laws are to be obeyed.  The laws of the Cathedral are the summary of the generally anti-white, anti-Christian, and antinomian beliefs that animate contemporary political discourse. Whether you agree with the reactionaries or not, you will probably recognize that the Cathedral represents  the core beliefs of the far political Left.

I exclude from the category “far Left” people who might want more government spending, or higher taxes, or less social inequality. Many people to the left of me are in the zone of reasonable political disagreement. I am talking about the people whom I believe to be morally deranged by anti-white racism, anti-male sexism, and anti-Christianism, among other symptoms.

The Left is hysterical about the existence of political differences. It drives them bonkers that there can be difference of opinion on, say, anthropogenic global warming, and people writing in the obscure corners of the opinion environment who believe that liberal democracy is heading us all straight to hell, or keeping us locked up there, as the case may be.

I remain much more confident about the capacities of public discourse to hold back and eventually reverse the Leftist tide, than either the reactionaries doubt or the far Left fears. In this I may utterly mistaken. I am creature of the Enlightenment in many senses:  I have no use for atheism,  I remain confident that reason will prevail, and these two beliefs are not contradictory. I am also confident that representative democracy is the only one suitable for sustaining self-government. I am a conservative, rather than a leftist,  because I believe we must govern ourselves well or else we shall be governed by others, and that requires serious education of the soul. I am a liberal, rather than a reactionary, because I believe that, more often than not, we are able to govern ourselves.

 

Happy delving into the depths of genuine political debate. Do not forget to come up for air.

Links:

http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/12/the-dark-enlightenment-is-new-right-lite/

http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/08/its-not-racist-to-seek-an-exit/

http://davidbrin.blogspot.ca/2013/11/neo-reactionaries-drop-all-pretense-end.html

http://anarchopapist.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/the-rightist-singularity/