Just to whet your appetites, here's an extract from near the end of my article/essay, "Atheists for Freedom of Speech":
Atheists and religious sceptics have good and urgent reasons to challenge the authority of religious organisations and leaders to pronounce on matters of ultimate truth and correct morality. None of these organisations can speak for a superior being, such as a god, with a claim to our obedience or deference. The emperor has no clothes, and we ought to say so. In particular, religious leaders are not moral leaders, much as they might pretend to be. Their non-existent credentials ought to be exposed. This will require persistent, cool argument, but also moments of outright denunciation or unashamed mockery of religion's most absurd actions and truth-claims. In particular, we should not flinch from expressing the view that no religion has any rational warrant, and that many churches and sects promote cruelty, misery, ignorance, and human-rights abuses.
About Me
- Russell Blackford
- Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).
Thursday, November 04, 2010
I have my author's copy of The Australian Book of Atheism (ed. Warren Bonett)
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Shock of Gray
Shock of Gray - a new book by Ted C. Fishman about the increasing age of modern populations - looks interesting. Here's an interview with Fishman.
Sample:
What do we mean when we use the word "old"?
That depends on who we are and the age we are. When I spoke to people late in their career, they were talking about people who were retired as old. Then the early retirees would talk about the less-active retirees as old. There's ageism at every age. And it works in reverse, too. I was at a senior center where they were telling me about a dance where the 70-year-olds were dancing and a 90-year-old was on the balcony looking down. The senior center director said, "Why don't you go join in." And he goes, "Oh, those aren't my people."
As baby boomers start to approach the age of 65 in large numbers, do you foresee a civil rights movement for older adults, given that generation's history of activism?
There might be a civil rights movement, but people won't recognize it as a civil rights movement. They'll see it as an economic turf war. When you get the resources of a society, you get the respect. You can see this in Europe right now, where the population is somewhat older than it is here. The debt crisis has really caused a huge and quick reckoning with the crisis in pension funding and hundreds of thousands of people are coming into the street. They made promises to themselves and now they find that they can't keep those promises. In some ways, they're battling their past selves.
But they feel like they are fighting a younger generation.
Yeah, I think that's right. But in the long run the battle will not be for who gets what share of the public financing. It will be a more traditional civil rights issue, which is: Evaluate me on my abilities and my skills, not on my weaknesses. The older population is a hugely diverse one. If the image of an older person is going to be exclusively that of an enabled, sharp, cognitively with-it, older person who can work into their 70s and 80s, then we're ignoring a huge part of the population that will need our help.
Sample:
What do we mean when we use the word "old"?
That depends on who we are and the age we are. When I spoke to people late in their career, they were talking about people who were retired as old. Then the early retirees would talk about the less-active retirees as old. There's ageism at every age. And it works in reverse, too. I was at a senior center where they were telling me about a dance where the 70-year-olds were dancing and a 90-year-old was on the balcony looking down. The senior center director said, "Why don't you go join in." And he goes, "Oh, those aren't my people."
As baby boomers start to approach the age of 65 in large numbers, do you foresee a civil rights movement for older adults, given that generation's history of activism?
There might be a civil rights movement, but people won't recognize it as a civil rights movement. They'll see it as an economic turf war. When you get the resources of a society, you get the respect. You can see this in Europe right now, where the population is somewhat older than it is here. The debt crisis has really caused a huge and quick reckoning with the crisis in pension funding and hundreds of thousands of people are coming into the street. They made promises to themselves and now they find that they can't keep those promises. In some ways, they're battling their past selves.
But they feel like they are fighting a younger generation.
Yeah, I think that's right. But in the long run the battle will not be for who gets what share of the public financing. It will be a more traditional civil rights issue, which is: Evaluate me on my abilities and my skills, not on my weaknesses. The older population is a hugely diverse one. If the image of an older person is going to be exclusively that of an enabled, sharp, cognitively with-it, older person who can work into their 70s and 80s, then we're ignoring a huge part of the population that will need our help.
Science and the supernatural
Here are few more posts, including a sort of round-up by George Dvorsky, and a new post by Jerry Coyne, who comments on words of wisdom from Sean Carroll. I really like Sean's take on this.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
More on free will and Harris
Harris has a bit more to say on this issue in a long note, where he says something that he seems to think is obvious (although he does also cite Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen in support).
The first point he makes, in replying to Daniel-Dennett-style compatibilism, is that "people's moral intuitions are driven by deeper metaphysical notions of free will." He adds:
"That is, the free will that people presume for themselves and readily attribute to others (whether or not this freedom is, in Dennett's sense, 'worth wanting') is a freedom that slips the influence of impersonal background causes. The moment you show that such causes are effective - as any detailed account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would - proponents of free will can no longer locate a plausible hook on which to hang their notions of moral responsibility."
Again, Harris is concerned to claim that the folk believe we are somehow able to act in a way that is not controlled by "background causes" such as our own dispositions (and whatever physical make-up we might have on which these are supervenient) and various events at the neuronal level (or even at a quantum level) that we can't consciously control.
This is a very strong concept of free will that he is attributing to "people".
Once again, I agree with him that we don't possess free will in this sense. Again, though, I really wonder how many "people" Out There really believe that we possess free will in a form anything like this sense and how many would, if taken through the idea, report a view that this sort of free will is needed for such things as moral responsibility.
That is not to suggest that the folk have a concept of free will similar to mine or, say, that of Daniel Dennett. It's more that I suspect most people have an idea that is rather vague, inchoate, and possibly not coherent (which is not to concede that the view that Harris is attributing to the folk is truly coherent, either).
Still, to whatever extent ideas such as Harris is describing are indeed widely held, my own view is that this entails that there's a lot of error around. That is, it looks to me most unlikely that we possess free will in any such sense, and pretty much for the same reasons as Harris puts forward. I'm with him on the metaphysical question as to whether such a form of free will exists, but I question whether as many people are committed to it as he thinks.
The first point he makes, in replying to Daniel-Dennett-style compatibilism, is that "people's moral intuitions are driven by deeper metaphysical notions of free will." He adds:
"That is, the free will that people presume for themselves and readily attribute to others (whether or not this freedom is, in Dennett's sense, 'worth wanting') is a freedom that slips the influence of impersonal background causes. The moment you show that such causes are effective - as any detailed account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would - proponents of free will can no longer locate a plausible hook on which to hang their notions of moral responsibility."
Again, Harris is concerned to claim that the folk believe we are somehow able to act in a way that is not controlled by "background causes" such as our own dispositions (and whatever physical make-up we might have on which these are supervenient) and various events at the neuronal level (or even at a quantum level) that we can't consciously control.
This is a very strong concept of free will that he is attributing to "people".
Once again, I agree with him that we don't possess free will in this sense. Again, though, I really wonder how many "people" Out There really believe that we possess free will in a form anything like this sense and how many would, if taken through the idea, report a view that this sort of free will is needed for such things as moral responsibility.
That is not to suggest that the folk have a concept of free will similar to mine or, say, that of Daniel Dennett. It's more that I suspect most people have an idea that is rather vague, inchoate, and possibly not coherent (which is not to concede that the view that Harris is attributing to the folk is truly coherent, either).
Still, to whatever extent ideas such as Harris is describing are indeed widely held, my own view is that this entails that there's a lot of error around. That is, it looks to me most unlikely that we possess free will in any such sense, and pretty much for the same reasons as Harris puts forward. I'm with him on the metaphysical question as to whether such a form of free will exists, but I question whether as many people are committed to it as he thinks.
Sam Harris on the illusion of free will
One small part of The Moral Landscape (about 10 pages) consists of a discussion of free will, which is, according to Sam Harris, an illusion. A problem that he faces immediately is how to define this thing that he considers illusory. Unfortunately, even if the folk Out There think that they have free will - which I suppose most of them do - it may turn out that their concept of free will is actually rather inchoate or confused or even incoherent. When the concept is pressed hard, it may be very difficult to explain in a way that makes sense. Even if the concept can be made coherent, it may be at the price of being remote from what the folk originally had in mind.
Still, the folk may believe various specific things that fall within the ballpark of the free will debate and which are actually coherent and true. It may be worthwhile disentangling what they actually do believe - along with how much of it makes sense, and how much of that is actually likely to be true. Oh, and what the implications of that really are.
When you go around claiming, as Harris does, that free will is an illusion, you are going to upset a lot of people, but you may be able to forestall at least some of the upset if you define just what you have in mind by "free will". You probably won't forestall all the upset, or even most of it, because many people seem to be attached emotionally to the idea of having free will, so you run the risk of being misinterpreted and/or misrepresented however careful you are. That's a problem that Harris faces, and I don't want to add to it. Let's see if we can work out what he's getting at.
Harris does not deny that we make choices or decisions, such as his decision to write The Moral Landscape. Nor does he deny that these have consequences; thus, his decision to write the book was "the primary cause of its coming into being." Decisions, choices, intentions, and so on, produce behaviours, and these lead to outcomes, some of them of great importance.
Elsewhere in his discussion of free will, he seems to assume that we have an ability to engage in consciousness deliberation, even though he doesn't think all our decisions are like this, and that it is particularly apppropriate to hold people accountable for decisions that they have acted upon after conscious deliberation.
Harris does not deny the reality of moral responsibility. He says, and I agree: "It seems to me that we need not have any illusions about a causal agent living within the human mind to condemn such a mind as unethical, negligent, or even evil, and therefore liable to occasion further harm." Nor does he deny the importance of social and political freedom - apparently, though he doesn't spell it out, because he thinks it important that we be able to make decisions that are reflective of much about ourselves (our own values, etc.) rather than being the products of coercion and made despite of much about ourselves.
There's much in the above that I'm sympathetic to, but it does raise the question of what Harris is actually denying or calling an illusion. He thinks that there can be circumstances where we deliberate and make conscious choices, that these are important and consequential, that it is at least sometimes appropriate to hold people accountable for their actions (and especially for those that followed conscious deliberation), and that it is both possible and important to have a degree of social and political freedom. I'm tempted to ask: "What more could you want?" As Daniel Dennett might say, what else in this ballpark is worth having?
A clue as to what Harris is getting at may come from his denial that there is "a causal agent living within the human mind", as opposed to different human minds being good, evil, and so on. Harris also refers to "the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems." Later, he writes, "... it seems quite clear that a retributive impulse, based upon the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion - and perpetuates a moral one."
So I'm getting the impression here that the idea of free will that Harris attributes to the folk is that there is a causal agent that somehow lives within the human mind and is the "real person" in some sense, somehow transcending the individual's brain processes, etc., and that this real person is somehow the author of its own thoughts and actions all the way down - deeper than any material phenomena such as genetic potential, uterine environment, socialisation, and whatever deterministic and indeterministic events happen within the brain. Unfortunately, Harris never offers a definition of "free will", although the meaning of the expression is not at all obvious, at least to me, so I'm trying to glean from clues here and there what it is he thinks the folk think.
I'll say this, though: if Harris' idea of free will is something like what I've patched together above, then I agree with him that we don't possess free will (as defined). Whether free will (as defined) is an illusion, however, will depend on whether we actually do seem to possess it. Harris thinks that even the illusion of having free will is an illusion, and he may be correct about this. The idea is that when we don't attend very carefully to our own experience, we seem to possess free will as he describes it; however, so he suggests, even this "seeming" is an illusion, because it fades when we attend carefully and simply observe thoughts and intentions arising the mind.
Maybe so, but there's still this niggling issue as to whether the folk really do, in the first place, believe that we possess free will in the sense described. From where I sit, it seems like a bizarre thing to believe.
But perhaps some do believe it, especially if they've been taught that free will takes such a form. Speaking for myself, I find it very confusing working out just what the popular, pre-theoretical understanding of free will really amounts to beyond a readiness to use the words "free will" in certain contexts. Judging from my experience and from teaching philosophy to bright young students, I think our pre-theoretical idea of free will is something inchoate and possibly incoherent. But it's worth trying to get a handle on what important capacities we might actually have that are related to the pre-theoretical notion of free will. And I think it's clear enough (and Harris doesn't deny this) that we do have some such capacities.
But anyway, some people possibly do have the belief - backed up by an illusory sense of their own experience - that they possess something like free will as Harris portrays it. I agree that those people, at least, are labouring under an illusion. To that extent, I'm with Harris. Whether it's most perspicuous to convey this by saying that free will is an illusion may be doubtful, but Harris is correct, I believe, to deny the existence of free will in this sense.
Still, the folk may believe various specific things that fall within the ballpark of the free will debate and which are actually coherent and true. It may be worthwhile disentangling what they actually do believe - along with how much of it makes sense, and how much of that is actually likely to be true. Oh, and what the implications of that really are.
When you go around claiming, as Harris does, that free will is an illusion, you are going to upset a lot of people, but you may be able to forestall at least some of the upset if you define just what you have in mind by "free will". You probably won't forestall all the upset, or even most of it, because many people seem to be attached emotionally to the idea of having free will, so you run the risk of being misinterpreted and/or misrepresented however careful you are. That's a problem that Harris faces, and I don't want to add to it. Let's see if we can work out what he's getting at.
Harris does not deny that we make choices or decisions, such as his decision to write The Moral Landscape. Nor does he deny that these have consequences; thus, his decision to write the book was "the primary cause of its coming into being." Decisions, choices, intentions, and so on, produce behaviours, and these lead to outcomes, some of them of great importance.
Elsewhere in his discussion of free will, he seems to assume that we have an ability to engage in consciousness deliberation, even though he doesn't think all our decisions are like this, and that it is particularly apppropriate to hold people accountable for decisions that they have acted upon after conscious deliberation.
Harris does not deny the reality of moral responsibility. He says, and I agree: "It seems to me that we need not have any illusions about a causal agent living within the human mind to condemn such a mind as unethical, negligent, or even evil, and therefore liable to occasion further harm." Nor does he deny the importance of social and political freedom - apparently, though he doesn't spell it out, because he thinks it important that we be able to make decisions that are reflective of much about ourselves (our own values, etc.) rather than being the products of coercion and made despite of much about ourselves.
There's much in the above that I'm sympathetic to, but it does raise the question of what Harris is actually denying or calling an illusion. He thinks that there can be circumstances where we deliberate and make conscious choices, that these are important and consequential, that it is at least sometimes appropriate to hold people accountable for their actions (and especially for those that followed conscious deliberation), and that it is both possible and important to have a degree of social and political freedom. I'm tempted to ask: "What more could you want?" As Daniel Dennett might say, what else in this ballpark is worth having?
A clue as to what Harris is getting at may come from his denial that there is "a causal agent living within the human mind", as opposed to different human minds being good, evil, and so on. Harris also refers to "the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems." Later, he writes, "... it seems quite clear that a retributive impulse, based upon the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion - and perpetuates a moral one."
So I'm getting the impression here that the idea of free will that Harris attributes to the folk is that there is a causal agent that somehow lives within the human mind and is the "real person" in some sense, somehow transcending the individual's brain processes, etc., and that this real person is somehow the author of its own thoughts and actions all the way down - deeper than any material phenomena such as genetic potential, uterine environment, socialisation, and whatever deterministic and indeterministic events happen within the brain. Unfortunately, Harris never offers a definition of "free will", although the meaning of the expression is not at all obvious, at least to me, so I'm trying to glean from clues here and there what it is he thinks the folk think.
I'll say this, though: if Harris' idea of free will is something like what I've patched together above, then I agree with him that we don't possess free will (as defined). Whether free will (as defined) is an illusion, however, will depend on whether we actually do seem to possess it. Harris thinks that even the illusion of having free will is an illusion, and he may be correct about this. The idea is that when we don't attend very carefully to our own experience, we seem to possess free will as he describes it; however, so he suggests, even this "seeming" is an illusion, because it fades when we attend carefully and simply observe thoughts and intentions arising the mind.
Maybe so, but there's still this niggling issue as to whether the folk really do, in the first place, believe that we possess free will in the sense described. From where I sit, it seems like a bizarre thing to believe.
But perhaps some do believe it, especially if they've been taught that free will takes such a form. Speaking for myself, I find it very confusing working out just what the popular, pre-theoretical understanding of free will really amounts to beyond a readiness to use the words "free will" in certain contexts. Judging from my experience and from teaching philosophy to bright young students, I think our pre-theoretical idea of free will is something inchoate and possibly incoherent. But it's worth trying to get a handle on what important capacities we might actually have that are related to the pre-theoretical notion of free will. And I think it's clear enough (and Harris doesn't deny this) that we do have some such capacities.
But anyway, some people possibly do have the belief - backed up by an illusory sense of their own experience - that they possess something like free will as Harris portrays it. I agree that those people, at least, are labouring under an illusion. To that extent, I'm with Harris. Whether it's most perspicuous to convey this by saying that free will is an illusion may be doubtful, but Harris is correct, I believe, to deny the existence of free will in this sense.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Embiggen Books
If you buy books, you might want to think about creating an account with Embiggen Books - as I just did - and start sending some of your book-buying dollar in that direction. It strikes me that we're lucky, here in Australia, to have such an outstanding bookshop heavily committed to rationalist and skeptical thought, and with what I hear is an efficient mail-order service ... and that it would be good, where we can, to support it with actual cash transactions.
So that's what I'm going to do, starting now, and I commend the idea to others.
Something to consider.
So that's what I'm going to do, starting now, and I commend the idea to others.
Something to consider.
Lonely Planet wants you to come to Newcastle ...
... according to this news story.
Quote:
No longer in Sydney's shadow, the second largest city of New South Wales has been picked by the prestigious global travel publishing giant Lonely Planet as one of the top 10 cities to visit in 2011.
Newcastle came in at number nine on the list of Top 10 Cities 2011, published in Lonely Planet's annual Best in Travel 2011 book released today. According to Lonely Planet, Newcastle has "a unique blend of imagination, sophistication and laidback surf culture."
Okay, y'all, who's visiting first?
Quote:
No longer in Sydney's shadow, the second largest city of New South Wales has been picked by the prestigious global travel publishing giant Lonely Planet as one of the top 10 cities to visit in 2011.
Newcastle came in at number nine on the list of Top 10 Cities 2011, published in Lonely Planet's annual Best in Travel 2011 book released today. According to Lonely Planet, Newcastle has "a unique blend of imagination, sophistication and laidback surf culture."
Okay, y'all, who's visiting first?
US government's amicus brief opposes gene patents
The US government's amicus brief in the inevitable appeal proceedings relating to the gene patents case is something of a surprise.
The government emphasises its view (which I tend to agree with) that patents should not be available merely for DNA sequences already found in nature (even if they have been rendered "pure"), though they should be available for such things as gene-replacement therapies, engineered biological drugs, methods for modifying the properties of organisms, etc. This will also include novel organisms as in the key Chakrabarty case from 1980.
Proceedings continue.
The government emphasises its view (which I tend to agree with) that patents should not be available merely for DNA sequences already found in nature (even if they have been rendered "pure"), though they should be available for such things as gene-replacement therapies, engineered biological drugs, methods for modifying the properties of organisms, etc. This will also include novel organisms as in the key Chakrabarty case from 1980.
Proceedings continue.
Sam Harris on a science of morality - throat clearing
I'm currently reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I'm only halfway through, and I'll probably need to read it twice before I can comment with the sort of confidence that I'd like. A bit down the track, I'll be publishing a full review in The Journal of Evolution and Technology; however, I'll be wanting to comment on some specific things, even over the next few days.
I'm generally on side with what Harris is trying to do, and though I am finding things throughout where Harris is not handling issues the way I would, I keep trying to remind myself that (a) it's best not to criticise an author merely for not writing the book you would have written, no matter how dear the subject matter is to your heart, and (b) all of this stuff is difficult.
It's not just that the subject matter is hard, as if that could be used as an excuse for writing a bad book. The point is more that there are many, many things that I want to quibble about, but of course if I'd written a book on the same topic (which I may do some time) there'd be many, many difficult choices about what to deal with, what tack to take on such-and-such an issue, what to set aside, and so on. There could be lots of quibbling from others that might not be all that salient to the overall point. It's best when reading a book like this to try to avoid mere quibbles and to try to get the big picture.
The good news is that the book has a lot more detail than anything we've seen to date on this subject from Harris, and he does deal with points that he's skipped over in earlier presentations, short articles, etc. I'm not so sure that he's dealt with them convincingly in all cases, but, hey, it's too early to have a considered opinion about that - as I said, I'm only halfway through.
Before I go much further, here are a few of my earlier posts on Harris, which give an indication of where I'm going to be coming from. They show me saying that Harris is, as I see the world, approximately right on what really matters - but at the same time I have reservations about the way he tries to ground the theory down at the meta-ethical level. Part of the problem is that he could get almost the same substantive results while leaving open that one of the more sophisticated relativist approaches (that of Gilbert Harman, say, or that of Neil Levy) might be correct. The substantive points about morality that he wants to make, by which I mean the ones with political bite, are, insofar as they seem correct, probably overdetermined - you could reach them via various meta-ethical positions.
But enough for now; I'll get back to reading the book later today.
I'm generally on side with what Harris is trying to do, and though I am finding things throughout where Harris is not handling issues the way I would, I keep trying to remind myself that (a) it's best not to criticise an author merely for not writing the book you would have written, no matter how dear the subject matter is to your heart, and (b) all of this stuff is difficult.
It's not just that the subject matter is hard, as if that could be used as an excuse for writing a bad book. The point is more that there are many, many things that I want to quibble about, but of course if I'd written a book on the same topic (which I may do some time) there'd be many, many difficult choices about what to deal with, what tack to take on such-and-such an issue, what to set aside, and so on. There could be lots of quibbling from others that might not be all that salient to the overall point. It's best when reading a book like this to try to avoid mere quibbles and to try to get the big picture.
The good news is that the book has a lot more detail than anything we've seen to date on this subject from Harris, and he does deal with points that he's skipped over in earlier presentations, short articles, etc. I'm not so sure that he's dealt with them convincingly in all cases, but, hey, it's too early to have a considered opinion about that - as I said, I'm only halfway through.
Before I go much further, here are a few of my earlier posts on Harris, which give an indication of where I'm going to be coming from. They show me saying that Harris is, as I see the world, approximately right on what really matters - but at the same time I have reservations about the way he tries to ground the theory down at the meta-ethical level. Part of the problem is that he could get almost the same substantive results while leaving open that one of the more sophisticated relativist approaches (that of Gilbert Harman, say, or that of Neil Levy) might be correct. The substantive points about morality that he wants to make, by which I mean the ones with political bite, are, insofar as they seem correct, probably overdetermined - you could reach them via various meta-ethical positions.
But enough for now; I'll get back to reading the book later today.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)