9/11: Plus ça change….

I don’t have a lot to add to what I wrote last year about the anniversary of 9/11. And I still miss Phil, dammit! [Warning: 25MB MPEG4.] And I’m not alone – see this heartfelt piece by Rich.
Last year, I talked about my feelings, and concluded:

But having said that, I am deeply angry that Cheney and his gang have used and abused these emotions for their own bloodthirsty and inexcusably thoughtless warmongering. … I’m not naive – I understand how politics works – but the visceral reaction to those scumbags won’t go away. Nor should it.

And the latest example of that cynical exploitation continues today:

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said during a Senate hearing on the future of Iraq with Army Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, that… “I think we should not have had this discussion on 9/11 or 9/10 or 9/12… It perpetuates this notion that the original attacks had something to do with going into Iraq.”

I agree with the Senator. The unmistakable odour of Rove hangs over the whole thing.

Heads-up: this coming Friday

I’m flying back to Boston on the Thursday night red-eye for a long weekend, and I’m planning to spend Friday afternoon visiting friends at the Sun Burlington campus. This will probably wind up in the bar of the Naked Fish just up the Middlesex Turnpike. If you’re in the area, drop me an email or add a comment, and let’s try to connect.

Two takes on Dawkins

Over at the Flying Crossbeam, Julian considers Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Normally I enjoy his quirky pieces (even though I still haven’t got the faintest idea what his “Sica” stuff is all about), but I found this really irritating. When Julian writes:

As a Christian who doesn’t hold to Dawkins’ formula, I had to remind myself routinely throughout the book that we were talking about a goofy literal Greek-style anthropomorphized god and not the sort of general principle that I (and I think many Christians) understand as God.

I found myself wondering whether he had actually read Dawkins, and if so how he could have missed this passage:

This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, one that would inevitably – as sure as night follows day – turn up in a review: ‘The God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a God that I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.’ That old man is an irrelevant distraction, and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don’t believe in an old bearded man sitting on a cloud, so let’s not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever or whenever they have been or will be invented.

Is Julian’s position “not a whole lot less silly”? I don’t know. I have no idea what he means by “a general principle”. Does it involve the supernatural? Does it imply belief in life after death, or non-material souls? (As Haugeland put it, once you take away all the atoms, is there anything left?) Julian describes himself as a Christian, which in ordinary usage implies a belief in a supernatural God and the unique divinity of Jesus. If this is what Julian believes in, Dawkins is talking about him. (The alternative is just Humpty Dumpty semantics.)
Towards the end, Julian considers the root cause of belief in God; while tribalism is undoubtedly a reinforcing factor, I think we need to dig a little deeper. He also tries to explain his dissatisfaction with Dawkins by considering the difference between science and engineering, but I don’t think his distinction works. Personally, I think that scientists want to know why (in terms of causation, not teleology!), while engineers are fundamentally motivated by how. Julian takes a different tack:

Engineering is not easily performed by the pragmatist. There is certainly a discipline to engineering but at the heart of it, the engineer cares about making things better. Once the scientific rigor has identified to the engineer the nature of the problem, getting to its root and resolving it innocently is a joyous sort of hero’s journey. It requires a romantic.

But there have been many joyfully romantic scientists – Richard Feynman leaps to mind – and we all know talented engineers who are obsessed with solving particular technical problems without regard to whether they are “making things better”.
For a completely different approach to Dawkins, Adam Roberts has posted a wonderfully outrageous parody review over at The Valve.

Curse you, David Chalmers!

David Chalmers just posted a round-up of recent books on consciousness. To my great annoyance, it looks like a wonderful list of must-read books. ((Fortunately I already have a couple of them, including the Galen Strawson article and rebuttals. See, I’m already saving money!)) Time to check my book-buying budget. One volume in particular stands out:

Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen.  This consists of ten pairs of articles, taking each side of central topics in the philosophy of mind: e.g. Tye vs Shoemaker on representationalism, Jackson vs McLaughlin on a priori physicalism, Kim vs Loewer on mental causation, Fodor vs Heck on nonconceptual content, Segal vs Sawyer on narrow content, Prinz vs Peacocke on nonperceptual consciousness, and so on.

I’m a sucker for this kind of quasi-debate format. Think of There’s Something About Mary, or Views Into The Chinese Room. Of course I’ve already pre-ordered Chalmers’ The Character of Consciousness ((h/t to oz)) – a little something to look forward to next March…

John Cornwell: the angelic liar

A few days ago I mentioned John Cornwell’s snide article in the Guardian about Richard Dawkins. Of course Cornwell wasn’t just contributing an article at random: he was flogging his new book, “Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to the God Delusion”. Now there’s nothing wrong with doing a little marketing per se, but it was a pretty awful article, replete with the kind of references to Hitler (a good Catholic) and Stalin that Christopher Hitchens skewers so effectlvely in “God Is Not Great”. But from all the reports I’ve seen, Cornwell’s book, with its preposterous title, is much worse.
Taking some time that I’m sure could have been better spent, Dawkins himself has penned a review of the book under the heading ‘Honest Mistakes or Willful Mendacity’. He points out how Cornwell persistently misquotes passages from “The God Delusion”, and frequently attributes to Dawkins a position that is the exact opposite of what Dawkins had actually advanced. Dawkins initially wondered if this was simply a result of Cornwell responding to what he expected to read, which is a mistake that many reviewers make. It’s sloppy, but it might be an honest mistake. But after a while, prejudice came to seem less likely than outright mendacity:

But if that is irritating, the following is gratuitously offensive. Cornwell is talking about Dostoevsky’s reading of nineteenth century thinkers. He mentions Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Utopian Marxism, and “a set of ideas that you would have applauded – Social Darwinism.” Does Cornwell seriously imagine that I would applaud Social Darwinism? Nobody nowadays applauds Social Darwinism, and I have been especially outspoken in my condemnation of it (see, for example, the title essay that begins A Devil’s Chaplain).

I’ve read “A Devil’s Chaplain” several times, and I have always been struck by the passion with which Dawkins takes on H. G. Wells’ “Social Dawinist” racism.

I prefer to stand up with Julian’s refreshingly belligerent grandfather T.H.Huxley, agree that natural selection is the dominant force in biological evolution unlike Shaw, admit its unpleasantness unlike Julian, and, unlike Wells, fight against it as a human being.

It is hard to imagine that a serious author would have attempted to rebut Dawkins without reading all of his relevant writings. The inescapable conclusion is that Cornwell knew full well that he was completely misrepresenting Dawkins. And the way he repeats the pattern strongly suggests that this is a deliberate strategy.
A lesser man ((A Pivar, for example.)) might view such a sustained barrage of falsehoods as libellous. Personally, I think that Cornwell’s rants simply come across as ridiculous: he’s not worth a millisecond of legal attention. But I suspect that angels aren’t meant to be liars in his mythology: an apology would certainly seem to be in order.

Dawkins on Hitchens

Richard Dawkins has finally written a review of Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”. It’s a delightful piece, complementing Hitchens’ points with anecdotes of his own.
There were a couple of things that struck me. First:

The subtitle has suffered from its Atlantic crossing. The American original, “How religion poisons everything”, is an excellent slogan, which recurs through the book and defines its central theme. The British edition substitutes the bland and pedestrian subtitle “The case against religion”.

I hate it when publishers do this. I hope Hitchens gives them hell. And then Dawkins captures Hitchens’ style precisely:

His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and “theologians” ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’s barnstorming book tour around the United States.

Richard Burton – of course! I’ve been trying to remember who Hitchens reminded me of!!

iPhone prognostication

I’m sure that my reaction to yesterday’s Apple announcement was not uncommon: “OK, I was going to wait to get an iPhone, but the new features and pricing are compelling. It’s time to take the plunge.” And then this morning I read Adrian’s detailed analysis, “What happened to the iPhone, and what comes next…”. ((Warning: Turn down volume before clicking through; the page includes some great iJigg music.)) His predictions have been spot on so far, and I think he nails the key points.
As for my impulse to buy now, Adrian makes the case for waiting a few weeks:

Another prediction I made was that a 3G iPhone would follow for the European market. The cut in price of the original iPhone creates an empty price-point at $599, which could be filled by a 3G capable iPhone with 16GB of flash and possibly GPS. Some commentators have suggested that this could be announced at Apple Expo in Paris on Sept 25th, and I think that makes sense.

And that will give me time to investigate interim solutions to the problem of business email access.

Monist or dualist?

One of the more amusing applications on Facebook is “My Questions”, in which you can post a simple question on your profile and invite friends to answer it. The app comes with some pretty dumb suggested questions, but I’ve had fun with several of my own, particularly “How far do you live today from where you were born?” and “What’s the most adventurous CD/download you’ve bought recently?”
Today I decided to ask the big one. No, not “Do you believe in god?”, or “UFOs?”, or life after death. (And not “Boxers or briefs?”, either!) I’ve decided that the fundamental question is this:

Dualist or monist? (“Dualist” – mind/spirit/soul and body/brain are separate entities; “Monist“: it’s all physical, “Minds are what brains do”.)

In part, I’m drawn to this question because I’ve been reading Nicholas Humphrey’s excellent book “Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation“. It came out in 1996, but I’ve only just got round to it. Humphreys is unusual in being a philosopher who is also a professor of psychology (or should that be the other way round?). Rather than taking on the questions of religious faith directly, he concentrates on the question of belief in the paranormal.
One of the great surprises in the book is that he refutes the view of the primacy of personal experience. It is widely held that the main reason why people hold counter-intuitive, unpopular, or counter-evidentiary beliefs is because they have had some personal experience which trumps the rules of reason and evidence. (“I never believed in ghosts until I saw one.”) Humphreys presents compelling data to show that this is at best a secondary factor. People are actually very skeptical about their own unusual experiences; they place far more weight on the reported experiences of others, particularly if they’re in a group of “true believers”
One of the things I’ve been puzzling over for a number of years is what (if any one thing) is the root cause of religious belief. Is it deference to authority (from parent via induction to a super-parent)? Is it anthropomorphism and intentional ascription (to thunder, the sun, etc.)? Is it rationalizing death by imagining continued life? Or it is purely cultural, with imagined (but knowingly fictional) stories taking on the authority of tribal rituals? I’ve recently come to the conclusion (which I think is Humpheys’ position, too) that the root cause is a personal dualism: that the most economical way in which we can model and make sense of our own existence is through dualism. And of course culture reinforces this. The fact that every single scientific and medical discovery of the last three hundred years endorses the monist viewpoint is unlikely to shift the cultural needle around the dial very much.
The fact is that even the most hard-core monist is likely to relax in the company of fictional dualism and supernaturalism. From H.P.Lovecraft to “Harry Potter” to “The Matrix” to Stephen King, to “Star Wars”: we accept these ideas as an integral part of our culture and social psychology. But there is a price to pay. It seems likely that every time someone accuses science of draining the magic out of life, it’s because they cannot distinguish between the cultural and the scientific. It seems obviously silly to me: do we, as a society, appreciate art, poetry, and beauty any less than our 17th century forebears? It seems unlikely, in spite of three centuries of relentless scientific discovery.
In any case, Humphreys’ book is well worth reading for many other reasons. His critique of the paranormal is devastating – if ESP is real, why doesn’t it affect the results of routine eye examinations?! If these are natural processes, why do they only show up in tawdry huckster settings? Good fun, and lots to think about.