Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
‘Brand consultant’? ‘PR researcher’? Why the ‘bullshit jobs’ era needs to end.
Hypocrisy is a limited measure of moral failing, we need better ones.
Critical thinking instruction in humanities reduces belief in pseudoscience.
How Aristotle created the computer (well, okay, indirectly of course).
A very bizarre article about how science will chemically “improve” love and relationships.
The Academy’s (alleged) assault on intellectual diversity.
Footnotes to Plato 
Morning all,
Lots of people huffing and puffing, but less in the way of sensible counter-argument. Plenty of people pay grudging lip service to the underlying truth that we humans are machines made of physical material, but freak out if the implications of that are made explicit.
Among the main fallacies on display: “If an author has not discussed Aspect D then the author is necessarily a simpleton who is oblivious to Aspect D.”
That combines with what we can call the Gadfly fallacy: If an author says something like: “if X changes, and if all else is the same, then Y changes”, then the author is simpleton who must think that “X is the sole and near-total cause of Y”.
Of course we recognise such issues with “this stuff”! My stance, though, is that there is a debate to be had rather than an automatic dismissal. I note that no-one has attempted my question about routine doses of oxytocin to birthing mothers. (Which, by the way, is a real-life serious proposition.)
This discussion reminds me of that over GM foods. Plenty here are making the Greenpeace response and freaking out: It’s not natural! (gasp, horror) as though the mere distinction between how things are naturally “meant to be”, versus artificial alterations to that, should settle the matter.
Just about whenever new technology and capability has come along people have reacted like that. And yes, there are issues and dangers with GM foods — and there would be with the sort of chemical manipulation suggested in the article — but there is also great potential for good. There’s a debate to be had.
Maybe another comparison is with the opposition to vaccination. It’s not natural! (gasp, horror), as though artificial manipulation of our bodies is automatically bad. It’s a Brave New World where Big Pharma and Big Government conspire to control our precious bodily fluids.
Whereas, back in reality, vaccination is a huge boon. Yes it’s artificial, big deal, so what? In the coming decades we’re going to learn more about the chemicals that underlie our feelings and moods. Hopefully that will be a boon to those suffering from depression and similar. But the knowledge will have wider applicability, and we’ll need to discuss how we want to apply it.
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Hi Coel,
This is the huffingest puffingest paragraph yet.
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Sorry, I spoke too soon, this is huffinger, puffinger:
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In fact the whole post would have blown the third pigs house down.
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Hi Massimo.
“If you are severely depressed you have a disease, so yes, you should get treatment. And yes, in a sense your “normal” mood would be artificial. But you really can’t tell the difference between that and the case of a love potion that makes you fall for whatever person, regardless of your will and intentions?”
I think the difference between the two examples is mainly in terms of the ethics, not the actual nature of the experience. I think you appreciate that if we did have such a love potion, then in fact usage would have to be strongly regulated. There is a strand of transhumanism, I believe, that imagines such manipulation of our emotional states will become straightforward and useful. The questions are then regarding a) consent; b) reversal of any treatments that been carried out without our consent, even if we are now content with our current state; and c) immunisation against such treatments.
All these issues are already with us in the case of indoctrination by, for example, religious cults. We know the techniques these groups are in fact quite effective, and lead in some people to profound changes in outlook and with this their emotional attachments to other cult members or leaders. It is not a bad analogy in my opinion.
As regards gratuitous references to free will, I think this is pretty relevant to “ownership” of emotions. If oxytocin is effective and I choose to use it, are the resulting changes in my attachment to my newborn child (to take Coel’s example) mine or imposed upon me?
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I’d need to take a convincing pill that convinces you that emotion pills are a good idea before I could think that emotion pills are a good idea.
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Socratic:
‘this is also why addiction experts talk about psychological addiction as well as physical addiction’
If by experts you mean drugs counsellors then yes. If on the other hand you mean scientists researching the neurological basis of addiction then its not that straight forward.
I’m also confused by your statement to screw people and go into virtual reality. Surely the same thing can be said of meditation or taking a walk by yourself in the countryside.?
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I still think the larger problem isn’t that we might chemically alter our moods(science is amoral), but that we have a poor to mediocre understanding of the relational nature of them in the first place and that is more the fault of philosophy, than science.
Consider the Aristotle-computer article. It pretty much lays out how philosophy is mostly concerned with logical constructions, than emotions. For emotions, we get poorly considered ethical discussions of free will versus determinism, trolley debates, etc, along with ‘huffing and puffing’ over ‘moral relativism,’ with no realization that what is postulated, i.e., if morals are not foundational/absolute, but contextual, than anything goes. Which is just negative absolutism, not relational.
Emotions are elemental, not some platonic ideal. The essence of motivation, desire, perception,feeling etc. and we spend our lives manipulating them, for better or worse. If philosophers ignore this debate, then they are just leaving it to the scientists and marketers to advance the discussion and implications.
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Consider the whole ‘Russia is the boogieman” political theater, as an example of manipulating emotions.
Given other countries are far more overt in their efforts to influence our politics, where are the philosophers in pointing out this as a classic case of scapegoating? Ha.
Philosophy needs to grow a spine.
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The discussion about chemical mood enhancers/ behaviour modifiers etc. has raised some familiar questions for me that I would sincerely like answers to. While I’m very firmly on the Massimo et al side of the question, I also feel that Coel has, not for the first time, raised legitimate questions that have been answered only with indignation, scorn and personal incredulity.
Because I currently subscribe to an idea of wholism (with a dash of Idealism) that regards all-that-is or the whole-shebang as an ontological primitive, I have no difficulty in seeing how personal and social realities are not solely determined by biochemical or physical facts. But if you are a physicalist, and personal feelings and social behaviours do not reduce to biochemistry, where do they come from? I am unable to see emergentism as anything but hand-waving or the philosphically acceptable face of woo. Roger Penrose was driven to posit a Platonic realm of possibilities to account for so-call emergent phenomena (and seems to be regarded as a bit flaky for doing so).
So, if not from biochemistry and not from Platonic Forms and not from an inexplicable emergentism, where does ‘Love’ come from?
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Hi Socratic
Your snark on the piece about mathematical logic and computers is entirely misplaced.
The title is clearly a rhetorical flourish, but you seem to have allowed it to colour the entire article for you.
The piece is about how mathematical logic was highly influential in the development of computers. It is well written and accurate.
I only wish more articles today were of this quality.
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I second the quality of the article on computers. I was quite surprised by its depth which surpasses what is found in many more technical magazines
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Massimo,
I was half-way through reading a comment by Bunsen Burner when it suddenly disappeared. Was this a glitch or have you started to move in mysterious ways?
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Yes?
(I don’t think basic WordPress lets us do strike-throughs, but most people should get the idea.)
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Robin: I know computers have to do with mathematical logic, and there, yes, actually the piece is not bad.
I know Aristotle had plenty to do with classical informal logic, as discussed in detail in comments on the previous post.
Waiting, though, for somebody to try to unite this disjunction and tell me how much Aristotle had to do with mathematical logic.
The piece itself didn’t really do that …
Because, snarking by me aside, Aristotle really didn’t, and aside from Boole, I’m unaware of other mathematical logicians citing Aristotle as an indirect influence.
I think that, to square the Massimo circle, the authors engaged, to some degree, in one of those so-called fallacies: an appeal to authority.
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Sherlock,
I always reserve the right to delete insulting or pointless comments. A couple of recent entries by Bunsen fit the latter category. And yes, yes, I know plenty of others have done the same. I may become a little stricter about repeating offenders. Several of Bunsen’s comments are still out, though.
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Sherlock: This isn’t a street corner. It’s Massimo’s virtual living room. There are no free speech rights there.
Street corners are where you have the right to go yell horrible things at people.
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But if you are a physicalist, and personal feelings and social behaviours do not reduce to biochemistry, where do they come from? I am unable to see emergentism as anything but hand-waving or the philosphically acceptable face of woo
= = =
Boy, you’re going to have trouble with works of art (not reducible to materials as Danto showed), constitutions (not reducible to pieces of paper and ink), currencies (ditto), not to mention relations (‘between’, ‘above’, ‘behind’), types, pretty much all representations, etc, etc, etc.
Psst: There is a vast philosophical literature on this, if you actually want to learn about how to think about these sorts of things without Platonism or “woo,” Massimo and I could point to some of it.
Oh, and regards he-who-I-shall-not name, I gave a rather lengthy account of what’s wrong with the article’s reductive treatment of love, which not one of the glands-and-juices crowd has replied to in any sort of substantive way.
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Hi Socratic,
Still can’t get past the rhetorical flourish in the title huh?
It is not a big part of the article. He is not trying to establish the proposition that Aristotle can take credit for the invention of computers.
But since you ask, mathematical logic is a formalisation of the kind of semi formal system of logic which has its roots in the semi formal logic described by Aristotle. Any logician I have discussed this with talks of Aristotle’s logic as being highly influential. Chrysippus was in many ways closer to modern logics, but his treatment is less complete.
Mathematical logic and informal logic are not separate things. Most mathematicians work mainly with informal logic even today, only keeping in mind that their inferences could be formalised if the need arose.
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Dan,
I understand that this is Massimo’s blog and he can therefore do what he likes with it, but the analogy with a living room is, I think, spurious and a little precious. In this particular case, Massimo has indicated that the comment from Bunsen Burner failed the ‘pointless’ rather than ‘insulting’ test so I’m not sure of the relevance of your ‘yell horrible things’ comment.
If Massimo were to reinstate Bunsen’s comment we could all judge the matter for ourselves, but again, I don’t wish to challenge Massimo’s prerogative. And really, on the subject of living rooms, street corners and yelling horrible things, some of your past comments to Coel have contained the most vituperative invective I’ve read on this site.
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Dan,
“Boy, you’re going to have trouble with works of art….”
“Psst: There is a vast philosophical literature on this….”
I stated quite clearly that I agreed with your position on the matter of chemical alterations of mood etc.. I also stated I had no trouble justifying (to my own satisfaction) my belief that our ‘higher’ emotions (and by extension, works of art etc.) are not reducible to biochemistry. I then asked a question:
“So, if not from biochemistry and not from Platonic Forms and not from an inexplicable emergentism, where does ‘Love’ come from?”
Implicitly, that question was addressed to you, Massimo and any other physicalist. Where do you think so-called emergent phenomena come from? If I want to know what Quine or Plato or anyone else thinks of this, I’ll look them up. But here, I’m addressing people on this blog. If you don’t want to answer, that’s fine, but pointing to a vast philosophical literature is equivalent to hand-waving.
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Hi Sherlock
Can you cite that? I know that Hawking called him a Platonist and Penrose denied it:
Did Penrose change his mind about this?
I am aware that sometimes the first sentence of this is quoted out of context which makes it sound as though Penrose is calling himself a a Platonist.
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Robin,
In Shadows of The Mind (pp 412-413 of hardback edition) Penrose talks of three different worlds. One is the world of our conscious perceptions. The second is “…the world we call the physical world.“. Of the third world he writes:
“There is also one other world, though many find difficulty in accepting its actual existence: it is the Platonic world of mathematical forms.”
Among the things that exist in this world are:
Numbers and geometrical theorems.
Maxwell’s and Einstein’s equations.
Mathematical simulations of chairs and tables.
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Incidentally, how desparately short of arguments do you have to be to resort to anti-vaxxer comparisons?
Does that ever work?
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Sherlock,
Unfortunately, snickering and posturing is something we all do to some extent, including yours truly. It’s just that sometimes some comment or other comes across as particularly irksome to me and I delete it. Coel and Dan both have occasionally experienced this, and so has Socratic.
I really wish we could simply engage the arguments (or ignore them, when they become too repetitive, as it is often the case) and avoid the asides. But apparently that’s asking too much, including, again, of myself.
As for emergence, the literature there is both large and confusing. There are different meanings of the term and different accounts of it, as in this good article from SEP: http://tinyurl.com/lewnuxn
My own take is that weak emergence is well documented, widespread in the biological and social sciences, and makes them epistemically irreducible to physics and chemistry. I am open to, but skeptical of, the possibility of strong emergence.
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Massimo: I don’t think one even has to talk about emergence in many of these cases. It is a very common idea that often times, “wholes” have properties that their parts do not and which cannot be reduced to the properties of their parts or even in any specific way “attributed” to the properties of their parts.
Danto’s account of how “mere things” become artworks is a good example of this. But it really is true of much of social and cultural reality.
As for the other point about which people are getting upset, I am happy to accede to Massimo’s standards, when I am in his proverbial house. That doesn’t mean I would impose the same standards in my own house — in fact, I don’t. But on the occasions on which he tells me to stop doing something, when I am in his house, I stop doing it. That people have different standards of decorum and civility and what they want to accept in their online forums seems pretty natural and normal, as not only do people differ in their temperaments and values, but people have different aims in mind for their ventures. I may grumble here and there, but being moderated now and again is a tiny, tiny price to pay in return for having the relationship I do with Massimo and being able to participate with him in his world, which I enjoy very much.
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Sherlock: I don’t see anything precious about it. On my own magazine, only moderated comments are permitted through. And I heavily enforce not only a relevance criterion, but a “respect for experts” one as well. The conversations over there are excellent. There are virtually no flame wars. And there is plenty of disagreement, often quite vigorous.
Those of us who run these sorts of ventures have very different temperaments, values, and aims. It is unsurprising then, that the rules vary widely too. And yes, they are our proverbial houses. We are the ones paying for them and offering them up for free. We owe nothing to shareholders, advertisers, or customers. It is entirely up to the public whether they want to participate or not.
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Robin,
Re. your Penrose quote. I think the point that he is making is that if a Platonic world actually exists then it would be simple realism to accept it!
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It looks like Bunsen got pissed and moved elsewhere. Too bad, but it is what it is. I find it interesting that he thinks this is my “echo chamber.” Apparently he hasn’t noticed any comment from one Coel…
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Little informal opinion poll: would people prefer to have a longer period open for comments, but at the price of contributions being moderated ahead of time, rather than deleted it later?
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