Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls "intrinsic biological essentialism".
I will have…
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009David Chalmers and his student David Bourget at the Australian National University have developed a new resource: PhilPapers. This is a hot list to online versions of (so far) over 188,000 items in current philosophy. I checked my own papers and they were all there (something Thompson International seems unable to achieve). So on the Wilkins Narcissism Scale it rates very highly indeed.
Check it out. It will make a big difference to students and teachers, let alone researchers.
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009Ron Amundson is a philosopher and historian of biology at the University of Hawai'i - Hilo who has done some great work in my field. So I was greatly amused and more than a little sympathetic to see this disclaimer linked to from Leiter's blog:
Metaphysics DISCLAIMER
Phil 310, Metaphysics, is a course in some core topics in Western Philosophy, including the Free Will Problem, the Mind-Body Problem, related problems in Philosophy of Mind, and the Problem of Personal Identity. If you’re interested in what these involve, you can find long discussions online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of…
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2009It came as an email. Then it was on the Seed Bloggers Forum. Now it's on my frigging Facebook - they really want me to answer this:
In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and imagination." And on Tuesday, in his inaugural address, President Obama cemented his commitment to a new ethos and culture by vowing to "restore science to its rightful place."
At Seed, we are firmly committed to President Obama's vision and want to help make it a reality. We begin today by asking you, our friends and…
evolvingthoughts | January 23, 2009this makes you laugh out loud:
It's even relevant to this blog...
evolvingthoughts | January 18, 2009Truism 5: One is only required (by our language games) to justify moral claims one or two levels
Scholium*: Justifying moral claims is a language game in Wittgenstein's sense, but only in a philosophical language game do we justify the justifications. That is why many people prefer to make God the source of morality.
Scholium: All moral claims are founded on duties, not utilities
Scholium: Moral duties and rules encode past utilities
* I'm going to use this term now instead of "corollary" (see comments to Truisms 4)
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2009One of the enduring mistakes made in science and philosophy is to confuse how things seem with how they are. In biology, the conjunction "pattern and process" has been around for decades, at least since 1947 in ecology, when Alex Watt used it as a title for an essay on plant communities. In 1967, Terrell Hamilton published his Process and pattern in evolution, and the phrase sort of took off from there. But patterns are relationships that are salient to the observer, while processes account for the patterns, and many other kinds as well. In the ontology of biology, it is common for theorists…
evolvingthoughts | January 14, 2009Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris describes.
The philosopher responsible for initiating the "deep ecology" movement, Arne Naess, has died at the age of 96. Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.
John Whitfield, at Blogging the Origin, is, well, blogging his way through the Origin. Chapter 1 is here. Comments by various folk…
evolvingthoughts | January 12, 2009Truism 4: There is most likely no God - if all gods but one are rejected with good reason, then by induction so should the final god.
Corollary: There are no independent reasons to think there is a god
Corollary: If there is a god, no-one can know that for a fact
Discuss
evolvingthoughts | January 4, 2009Truism 3: Humans are moral because that is the nature of the species - moral is what humans do
Corollary: Morality is not based on commands from on high
Subcorollary: If God is dead, how could everything be permitted? We are still social apes.
Corollary: The 95:95 Rule - 95% of people are decent 95% of the time
Subcorollary: "Perverse" is 3 2 sigmas of a normal distribution of propensities
Discuss
evolvingthoughts | January 2, 2009I's an ego thing, sure, but it's also a handy way of seeing what one did this past year. Here are what I think of as the substantial posts of Evolving Thoughts from 2008. Sorry for the lateness - it's a longish list. I (and my guest blogger) have been real busy this year...
Religion and Creationism
Desecration, blasphemy in public, and manners
Why are there still monkeys?
Can a Christian accept natural selection as true?
Does religion evolve?
The heat of religion
The religious we have always with us
Agriculture and the rise of religion
The origins of agriculture now extended
Darwin, God and…
evolvingthoughts | December 30, 2008Truism 2: Nobody does anything they don't want to, on balance
Corollary: Everything we want to do has a neurological foundation
Discuss
evolvingthoughts | December 29, 2008As an academic philosopher, one often finds it more interesting to discuss or debate the ideas of others than to assert what one believes to be true. This is because everybody has ideas they believe to be true, but few have managed to argue for them in any way, and philosophy is all about the arguments. But I keep finding that nobody really holds all the views I do but me, and I can't be bothered arguing for most of them, because individually they have already been argued for by others. Then it hit me - why bother? I have intelligent readers - make them do the work. So I resolved to set out…
evolvingthoughts | December 26, 2008It is often said that one of the most significant discoveries in mathematics was the concept of zero, in the Indus valley sometime in the pre-Christian era. An equally important concept in logic is the operator NOT. While Aristotle, the founder of western logic, had discussed groupings of things in terms of what they are not in the Categories, chapter 10, the importance of NOT seems to have been realised first by George Boole in the nineteenth century. In this post I want to discuss it in the context of classification.
Aristotle wrote of four kinds of "contrarieties":
We must next explain the…
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2008So what is it with Christians who are so able to debunk and demythologise the myths of everyone else, and fail to see that exactly the same logic applies to their own mythology?
A priest in northern Italy told kids there was no Father Christmas at a children's mass. Great. We shouldn't believe in magical beings that can break all physical laws just to get across a moral story. I concur.
What about Jesus? A magical being who can break the laws of physics, whose sole justification (and a not very good one at that) is that there is some moral foundation for treating folks nicely. Without a trace…
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2008The Bradley Report [Here] is proposing, among other things, that [Australian] students have vouchers to attend the university they want to, rather than making the university the funding recipient directly. Two things stand out to me. One is that this makes higher learning a marketable commodity, in which the desires of the consumers determines what is most important intellectually. So if everyone wants to be a business manager, accountant or surfing doctor, that is what we should fund? There's no important cultural legacy to be supported? If not, why does the government support art? Surely…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2008... shh, not so loud or everyone will want one.
Here's a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying
"It's not a clean-cut division [between evolution and creation]. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes."
It seems to me that theistic evolution is not exactly about God controlling evolution, although there may be plenty of biblical warrant for God…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2008
The General Ecosystems Thinking (GET) Group centred at Queensland University of Technology (or as we at UQ like to call it, the "city university") invited me to come give a talk on the ontology of evolution. I gave it yesterday. As it will be part of this series of posts that will end up as some form of publication, I thought you might like to hear my dulcet and husky tones, and read the incredible slide. If so, go here, or get the PDF slides here and the WMA sound here. Check out some of the other speakers too. Thanks to Marco Fahmi for the invite and shepherding.
The actual title was: "…
evolvingthoughts | December 1, 2008
The chair of a course on religion, philosophy and ethics at the University of Gloucestershire (being English, they'll pronounce that "glostersheer"), David Webster, is calling for people to give the worst argument in Britain. Go leave yours. Caveat: They already have the full complement of creationist nuttery, and anyway most of it's American, which is too easy.
Personally, I think that, as there are an infinite number of ways to mess up an inference, there is no single "worst" argument, so this is really about aesthetics.