Our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
The case of pop star Kesha seems to suggest that one can have either liberal capitalism or liberal feminism, but not both.
Einstein vs Einstein on the nature and import of causality.
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga talks about a road trip to the origin of our species.
Do academics have a drinking problem?
An academic Sokal-type hoax that exposes the pretensions of a certain group of sociologists of science…
This one is a cross-over from my other interest: the (British) police officer as a Stoic. Which includes an interesting analysis of the concept of “policing by consent.”
Why we do what we do: a short piece on free will as complexity of choice.
Footnotes to Plato 
Interesting that there are some interwoven themes here, for example the free will piece talks of causality while the Frisch piece talks of the problems with the concept.
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From the free will piece:
I am not sure that there are many people who actually say that free will is “uncaused”, if there are those who say this I would like to read it in their own words.
As C D Broad pointed out, a libertarian is not saying that a free will action is uncaused, but that it is a certain kind of cause (of a kind which Broad concluded was impossible in any case).
But if determinism was the case then it could be as complex as all get out, but it wouldn’t, in any meaningful sense, be free.
I know there are those who think that free will is compatible with determinism, but often they won’t be explicit and say that free will is compatible with every single one of our actions having been already inevitable before we were even born.
If somebody does say that then we will only have to disagree about the usage of the term.
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Hi Robin,
> If somebody does say that then we will only have to disagree about the usage of the term.
I think the important thing to remember here is that even on determinism there are still distinctions to be drawn which are of legal and ethical import. Whether you willingly aided a criminal or were coerced at gunpoint, whether you were fully aware of what you were doing or whether you were suffering from some kind of delusion or mental impairment.
The compatibilist version of free will is concerned with drawing these distinctions and doesn’t care too much about ultimate causality. If you don’t want to use “free” to describe the distinctions compatibilists are interested in, that’s OK, but then we need an alternative.
Since compatibilists deny that libertarian free will exists or is even meaningful, they think that the term “free will” can only be sensibly interpreted as they do. It fits with 99% of everyday usage (“Did you do this of your own free will”) even though it disagrees 1% of usage in discussions about metaphysics (“Does free will exist?”).
So the compatibilist attitude seems quite reasonable to me, even if I do see that you have a point also.
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Liked the free will piece because of its talk about complexity of background, and also its talk about contingency.
Also liked the Gazzaniga, and the description of narratives, which I think links to free will, or at least to our description of what we think free will is.
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Massimo, with the proliferation of ASBOs in the UK, couldn’t one make a far better argument for the bobbie as Kantian?
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Finally, Gazzaniga squares with what I’ve repeatedly said about free will and subselves. True, the piece isn’t explicitly about free will, but it is about choices made at a subconscious level, with later attempts to explain them at a conscious level.
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OK, one more for now on the two volition-related pieces. I, of course, go beyond Gilbert Ryle in postulating that not only is there no Cartesian meaner at the center of our minds, there’s also no Cartesian free willer. That said, Dan Dennett’s multiple drafts idea of consciousness is not the best metaphorical phrase, as drafts imply a conscious, centralized draftsman.
Beyond the metaphor, though, I think it’s wrong for another reason. Dennett’s multiple drafts idea, and related metaphors, such as one subself or another bubbling to the surface of “consciousness,” seem to not allow enough room for a semi-stable semi-core self that we see in individuals over longer-term, rather than momentary, observation.
Maybe we need to think in terms of Venn diagrams, with areas where more than one subself overlap being more “core.” I don’t want to go too, too far down a road of “modularity” with different subselves, but this is kind of where I’m fishing.
Part of this core, part of this semi-stable, semi-core self, would be a semi-Cartesian confabulator. In other words, per Gazzaniga’s experiments, if I’m presented the images, and Massimo, and Thomas, we’re all likely to create the same confabulation when the confabuation seems obvious. Even there, though, we might nuance it differently. But, where a confabulation isn’t obvious, we might give individualized responses, while, at the same time, that particular response would remain relatively stable for each of us.
It’s a narrative identity, but one that doesn’t just fall under Dennett’s heterophenomenolgy.
I hope this isn’t seen as hijacking, but, rather, just some thought having been stimulated.
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The legal complications of working in the music industry are extremely difficult for outsiders to untangle; that’s one of the reasons young artists can end up broke despite having seemingly successful careers. The first advice to any young musician serious about a recording/performing career, is: get a lawyer.
It should be noted that Kesha’s complaint was not only against Gottwald, but against the companies he founded as well as those he himself is contracted to. This indicates that there is a question – which the judge would certainly have in mind – concerning fairness of judgment to the other, corporate defendants. Kesha’s complaint against Gottwald: http://genius.com/Mark-j-geragos-kesha-v-dr-luke-complaint-re-sexual-harassment-assault-allegations-annotated
Slate has an interesting discussion of the case here: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/02/kesha_and_dr_luke_court_battle_explained.html
The preliminary decision rejecting Gottwald’s counter-complaint: http://courts.state.ny.us/Reporter/pdfs/2016/2016_30198.pdf
It should be remembered that the New York Supreme Court happens to be a *lower* court; so we will have to see how this plays out in appeals, if it gets there.
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Wow Socratic, by denying the Cartesian meaner, you seem to be fishing in waters where you think you don’t think. (Wish I had more time!)
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Russell appears to have had the matter right. No matter how we slice it, it seems that the notion of ’cause’ cannot be properly grounded. It is a kind of trope, and one that we probably can’t avoid using; but it is best to keep in mind that it is only a term for a set of phenomena that we can measure, yet not fully understand.
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On Einstein vs. Einstein:
Einstein vs. Einstein?
I don’t pretend to understand the direction of time, but this discussion seems to be wrong headed. It worries about the fact that most equations of physics are time symmetric [a]. That is not the problem.
‘A wave source produces a spherical wave that propagates outward. The inverse process does not exist as elementary process’.
I find it difficult to believe Einstein said the above. The source of the quote seems a bit vague. If he did it may have been his ‘greatest blunder.’
Just because the equations of physics are symmetric doesn’t mean the solutions are! Given conditions at some time these equations allow you to compute what will happen or what happened (at least classically).
It’s like a ferromagnet. The equations are symmetric under rotation, yet the atoms line up so they all point in one direction. The equations don’t care what direction, that is determined by the ‘initial conditions’ basically which direction is ‘accidentally’ a bit ahead or more often the hint given by an external field.
In this case it’s called ‘spontaneous symmetry’ breaking.
There’s no reason why just because the hydrodynamics is time symmetric that the solution to the equations should be. The ‘initial condition’ ‘drop a rock’ in the water is a lot easier to setup up than lining the edge of the pond with kids and having them all push on a paddles at a specified time.
[a] Actually some physics is not strictly time symmetric. We see CP violation which via the CPT (charge-parity-time symmetry) theorem implies T symmetry violation. Still equations for water waves and radio waves are symmetric. T-asymmetry has also been claimed to observed directly though I find it difficult to distinguish T from CP in these experiments. Anyway in weak interactions T is violated. The CP violations seen in B-meson decay are quite large.
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People like Peter Dreier, Sokal, and others complain about obscurantist drivel being written in the Academy – and there is, across all fields, even in the sciences. But the problem isn’t with individuals, writers or editors, particular theoretic or ideological perspectives. It can be summed up in three words: ‘Publish or Perish.’ If a field has literally thousands – world-wide, tens of thousands – more trained researchers than are actually needed; and if all these researches must ‘publish of perish’ – and they must – this is what we will find. Many (nay, most) of these researchers will find some way to use words that satisfy institutional demands to publish, regardless of their ability to communicate anything interesting. It is doubtful that the Academy will tenure on the basis of teaching, and scrap ‘publish or perish’ or at least reduce its draconian force. Thus we can expect more Dreiers, Sokals, and Bogdanovs for many decades to come. (Although I suggest that those who recognize the real problem find such moments less and less amusing as the years go by.)
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Interesting article by Villiers, which I hope to spend more time with. For now, I agree with the article, I thinks cops should be stoics, they should in fact be trained in stoicism.
Unfortunately, most young cops these days seem to be living out a comic book, they’re trying to ‘catch the bad guys,’ which has nothing to do with law enforcement (since ‘bad guy’ is a moral, not legal, determination).
(Of course, according to television cop shows – cop operas, I like to call them, the primary reason for joining the police is to find multiple sex partners. What happened to the good old days of Joe Friday? Now, there was a stoic!)
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On the risk of being put on probation, or worse, for reasoning and recycling some ideas, I may as well take the chance, or quit the discussion anyway.
The reason I take this chance is because these ideas have become more clear to me at least, as I’ve been rehashing them to the general frustration.
The issue of causation, in very simple terms, would be the application of force/energy. The batter hitting the ball causes it to fly away.
The problem is Newtons’ observation that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Consider the wake of the boat, which is not so much directly caused by the boat pushing the water out of the way, but the water pushing back and filling in the vacuum or low pressure space behind the boat, then each side bouncing against the water coming from the opposite side, so back against the outside water, creating a subsequent smaller wake wave and then rapidly diminishing, to the point of flat water, as the original chop of the surface has been erased.
Which might lead to the question of whether there was some absolute initial cause, or force, to set all this in motion, or is it entirely cyclical? To wit;
“Feynman argued that physics follows what he calls the ‘Babylonian tradition’, according to which the principles of physics provide us with an interconnected structure with no unique, context-independent starting point for our derivations. Given such structures, Feynman said: ‘I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end.’”
Now avoiding particular cosmological, or religious models, which propose an initial cause, possibly we could ask the philosophic question of whether one is necessary, or is perpetual motion possible.
Now according to basic physics, the slowing or stopping of motion and energy is friction, which only converts kinetic energy to heat. Even with entropy, it is due to conflicting energies, say gases in a closed space, bouncing into one another, until they reach thermal equilibrium. Which is not loss of energy, just that it can’t go to a lower state.
So there would seem to be a conundrum here, in that energy is still conserved, but it is simply chaotic, not cyclical. So how could perpetual circularity come to be?
Let’s start with the most basic conceptual model, in that we have this energy, but it is not enclosed, just a minor level of energy over an infinite space. Logically it would settle out to a smooth, but slightly chaotic medium. The most reasonable explanation for order to emerge, would be a tendency for it to clump. Possibly positive and negative charge to the energy in this medium. So as it clumps, it builds up stores of energy that exercise more, i.e., vibrate and heat. Which releases some of this energy to radiate back out, but what remains becomes more stable and ordered.
In which case, gravity, considered a property of mass, is possibly more a vacuum created by this lost energy, so that as the remaining energy becomes more stable it also becomes more dense.
Consider the recent observations of gravity waves, which are not really gravity itself, given it is an attractive effect, but the energy being lost as massive structures coalesce even further.
Eventually this internal structure builds to the point it collapses completely, sending opposite charges out the poles and all this energy, both what radiated out in the process of reduction and that eventually shot out the poles, mixes and starts the process over again, so there is no starting point, just endless cycling.
So before I get zapped, remember this is just hypothesizing; ‘I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end.’
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EJ, agreed on the publish or perish. In cosmology, it’s why we have as many different versions of string theory as string theory has alleged hidden dimensions, to the fifth power.
On social sciences, this isn’t exactly new. Arguably, some of the hubbub over multiple personality disorder 30-some years ago was driven by this. That said, sadly, the effects of publish or perish have more serious consequences in the social sciences than in either the hard sciences or the arts and humanities.
I shall now publish:
“On the Absence of Intersectional Absence in the Eco (sic) Chamber”
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“Also, many of those causes are not positive reasons, but lacks of reasons. When we do something freely, we do it because we see good reasons to do it, but also, at least typically, because we don’t see sufficiently strong reasons to refrain from doing it. The lack of reasons to refrain is an important part of the explanation of why we act, and of why we act freely.”
High pressure=energy propelling action, versus low pressure= the vacuum attracting this energy.
Think in terms of social interactions prior to an all powerful financial mechanism, where it is possible to store excessive amounts of value in notational form. Consequently any value beyond one’s immediate needs has carrying costs. So there is no punishment for sharing ones food sources, for instance, as they can’t be saved otherwise. So those with extra would be high pressure and those without would be low pressure and circularity throughout the system would be the norm.
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Does nobody get the incredibly insightful thing said by Gazinga in his article?
“…revealed another special capacity of the dominant left brain. We called this device the “interpreter” and have come to realize it is the storyteller, the system that builds our narrative and gives our many actions that pour out of us, frequently outside of our conscious control, a centrality, a story — our personal story”
“it is so powerful an addition to humankind that it masks the reality: We are, in fact, a confederation of relatively independent agents, each struggling to be part of our narrative that is our story. It turns out the left brain has another capacity potentially more important than language itself. The interpreter is the thing that sticks all of those parts together.”
We are narrative machines. We make sense of the world by creating narratives about it. A narrative is far more than the facts. It relates us to the world through an interpretive strategy where values and time are used to weave the facts into a coherent whole, our narrative. It is through our narrative that we give life its meaning.
A dear friend, a narrative psychologist, has described how she treats trauma patients by assisting them to build new narratives around the traumatic event. An event is only an instant in time that passes in a moment. The only lasting power that event contains is preserved in our memory of the event. That memory only survives in the context of a narrative we weave around the memory. It is the narrative that matters, not the event or even the memory.
Every painful, sorrowful or harrowing event in my life has become a narrative. The original pain, sorrow or suffering is lost. What remains is a narrative of survival against the odds, overcoming, perseverance, triumph or endurance that is an occasion for gladness, pride, or celebration.
Happy people with meaningful lives have learned to create positive, affirming narratives.
But here’s the thing, narratives are personal, subjective things, even when we create the shared narratives that Harari describes. We should never mistake the narrative for the truth, which is always just beyond our reach, since the only access we have to reality is through our narratives.
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Actually, that’s a fair amount of what I picked up on, Labnut, in my one brief early post where I talked about narratives, then in more depth in my long piece where I talked about this as the “confabulator.”
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Brodix,
I think you misinterpret Feynmann, his point was about the ‘web of knowledge’, our understanding of things not things themselves. He was actually very clear as to where to begin very often. A raw and Newtonian acceptance of conservation and symmetry. He might have said different in different places of course.
To use my own metaphor, it is like making a plan of a house, you can start with the windows, you can’t build it that way though.
It is an Epistemological point not an Ontological one to put it more technically. Though maybe Nature imposes patterns on our understanding of it? Do you think that there is an exact symmetry between things and our understanding of them?
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Labnut eloquently elaborates the point made by Gazzinga, and I would agree that it is indeed a very important point.
This aspect however I would disagree with :
“That memory only survives in the context of a narrative we weave around the memory. It is the narrative that matters, not the event or even the memory.”
This discounts all kinds of non-language based sense memories that play a crucial role as well. When I pick up a basketball there is lot more going on behind the joy I start to experience then just the narrative I have weaved based on prior experiences. The right hemisphere is roughly half the brain for reason.
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That Kesha piece is an embarassment. I’m really surprised you posted it.
“Ask a capitalist why contracts are so important and they’ll give you all kinds of rationalizations, but the actual function is simple: capitalism needs to perpetrate all kinds of injustices to survive, and contracts give it legal cover to do so.”
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Lol. Is this some sort of joke? Or a parody of an anti-capitalist?
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“Kesha is a particularly vivid example of how this disproportionately impacts women, but the damage is far more widespread…
“we cannot privilege the sanctity of contract at the expense of women. Judges and juries should be empowered to simply nullify contracts in cases like this, and if capitalists don’t like it, they should stop raping women and giving the courts reasons to nullify contracts.”
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Beyond Kesha’s allegation, I am not aware of any rape conviction having been secured, with respect to the gentleman in question. Or are we now simply taking a mere accusation as equivalent to a conviction? Sort of a Maoist approach to criminal justice…
I also love the abandonment of the whole rule of law thing. I mean, who needs that? Oh, and by the way — if you breach a contract with *me*, I’ll sue you until you’re living in a cardboard box under a bridge. You see, contracts are promises, and I take those rather seriously.
Finally, poor Mr. Beier seems not to have checked the federal crime statistics. Rape has been declining steadily for decades. He must have drank too much “rape culture” Kool Aid.
It was this kind of demented leftism that turned me into a conservative for nearly two decades. It’s rather disturbing to see it still drifting around like fallout or toxic waste. We need a Superfund for this sort of garbage.
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ejwinner: On publish or perish you are exactly right. The entire academy is operating under this perverse incentive structure and the result is just piles and piles of uselss work.
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http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/jan/22/why-do-academics-drink-so-much
I don’t know about philosophy but I’ve never seen anyone plastered at a physics colloquium even when wine is served.
Cookies are, however, more common, even though at SLAC we have to pay for them ourselves due to some stupid DOE rules about not spending money on, ah, cookies.
Where does the Guardian get this BS? Did the author never hear of the three martini lunch?
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HI SocraticGadfly
“EJ, agreed on the publish or perish. In cosmology, it’s why we have as many different versions of string theory as string theory has alleged hidden dimensions, to the fifth power.”
I guess you didn’t mean this literally, but the number of possible ‘string theories’ is vastly greater than the number of possible publications. It somewhat depends on what you mean by ‘theories’.
There is a field called ‘string theory’ or ‘M-branes’. There’s only one such field.
As I understand there are actually no string theories that anybody been able to write down and prove consistent much less calculate anything we might hope to measure. That’s why us experimenters complain about strings; we like something we can shoot at.
The number of possible string theories is estimated to be very large. I haven’t been able to find the number, but it’s way bigger than the number of publications as large as that is. It’s not so easy to write such papers; somebody’s going to check your math.
Some of the calculation tool developed for string theory tare being deployed to tackle more prosaic problems. This I think might be the way forward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory
If I dig through that I might be able to find the number of theories number. I think it does embarrass string theorist and they don’t put it right up front.
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Given that I have had several doctors tell me that drinking more than two drinks a day constitutes alcoholism, apparently, entire countries in Europe are alcoholic.
And people wonder so many people don’t believe the testimony of experts anymore.
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Free will
I have a general rule against discussing freewill w/o pitcher of beer at the Dutch Goose in Menlo Park.
However, I’ll exercise my ‘free will’ to violate my own rule
I really have no good idea what the hell free will could be. Neither caused nor uncaused (quantum randomness?) seems exactly free. Either you can’t do anything different or some random event in you brain causes you to choose.
The best I can come out with is a sort of inside/outside perspective. Viewed externally I’m a kind of machine doing whatever I do. Viewed internally I am this machine and it’s processing is me deciding what to do.
Doesn’t seem very satisfactory. Swig.
I can’t see that moving it up to a ‘spiritual’ level helps; exactly the same issues arise. It’s turtles all the way down….
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As far as free will goes, I’d suggest cadging a construction from Kuhn and saying that although humans do not have free will, they may, I suggest, legitimately be treated as if they do.
(For those interested, the Kuhn quote was a diss at Popper: “Though he is not a naive falsificationist, Sir Karl may, I suggest, legitimately be treated as one.”)
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Daniel, actually, they are. And not just the British soccer hooligans, and not just because of 12-step Puritanism.
France, for example, has as high a liver-disease death rate as the US. Some other Western countries are even higher. And, the No. 1 cause of liver disease in Western nations, without parasitic diseases, is alcohol abuse to the state of addiction:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/liver-disease/by-country/
If you think that alcoholism isn’t a problem in Western Europe, let alone Eastern Europe, you’re quite mistaken.
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It is a false dichotomy to say that the only alternative to determinism is randomness. That may apply at the level of completely indivisible events, but at any other level we can quite clearly describe processes which are neither deterministic nor random.
Whether our mind is such a process, I don’t know.
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More narrowly, for cirrhosis of the liver (more closely correlated with alcoholism than is liver disease in general), per WHO, a number of European countries have death rates as high as or higher than the US:
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A1092?lang=en
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