This final consisted of two parts. In the first, we defined some terms from the course; in the second, we chose and answered a question from a list. Continue reading “Introduction to Knowledge, Mind, & Existence — Final” →

Cyborg’s Unplugged

This article is interesting for the real-life challenges it poses. Many other articles ask the reader to imagine a scenario, and then say “See! This view of the mind must be wrong!” Yet so often they subtly assume the “proven” view of the mind while constructing their argument. This article, for once, presents real-life stories to you and forces you to deal with the implications. It too delves into the unknown future and presents you with scenarios, but they at least are anchored by real people and experiments with known results. Continue reading “Reading Response: Andy Clark” →

The extended mind

This piece initially induces only one thought in me: WRONG! The authors attempt to equate “use of the environment” with “cognition in the environment” and offer a number of reasons they think this is so. Unfortunately, they all fail.

First, the authors argue that when players of Tetris rotate a piece to try and fit it into a slot, the player is using the Tetris game in cognition, and moving part of the player’s cognition into the game. Offered as evidence is third-party research finding that players who rotate a piece are often doing so to determine if the piece will fill a hole. According to the authors, this means that the Tetris game is performing part of the cognition process. Not so. Rather than shifting part of the cognition into the environment, players are actually making the problem easier to solve by means of changing their environment. That is, the player takes a hard problem (“can this shape fit into this hole?”) and makes it into multiple easier problems (“Can this shape fit into this hole in this orientation?”). This basic misunderstanding of how the brain works extends even further, with their example of a notebook as memory. Continue reading “Reading Response: Clark & Chalmers” →

Can Computers Think?

Searle makes a strong argument against computers ever being able to think in this piece. The Chinese room is an excellent metaphor discussed early in many Artificial Intelligence classes, and his analogy to simulating a tornado is fairly persuasive. Unfortunately, his argument suffers from a few serious issues. Continue reading “Reading Response: Searle” →

Descarte’s Myth

I am fond of the argument posed by Ryle in this article, for two reasons. First, it actively illustrates what he calls category mistakes, and I am grateful; second, it explains why philosophers seem so intent on having a non-physical mind: to make humans different from animals. Continue reading “Reading Response: Ryle” →

Question

Explain Vasiliou’s (author of “Reality, What Matters, and The Matrix”) views about whether physical constitution makes a difference to value.

Response

Vasiliou’s position is plain: physical existence does not impact value. That belief is more subtle than it first appears, but that is his belief. He justifies this by distinguishing between an object’s “reality” and its “constitution” and arguing that the reality is what imparts value to us as human beings. The argument has flaws, but they are flaws of polish rather than structure; over all it is a good position, correct in many ways; it is important for illuminating what we really care about.

The difference between an object’s reality and its constitution is the core of Vasiliou’s position, and he argues that reality creates value but constitution does not. Water matters to us because it satisfies our thirst and without it we die; that is its reality. The fact that water is constituted of two hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom matters not at all, and if we were in a Matrix (benevolent or hostile), if there was a substance called water that satisfied a need like thirst then we would continue to value that water, even if it was not constituted of two hydrogens and an oxygen atom.

This distinction is intuitively familiar to us under a great many circumstances. When I talk to my girlfriend over the phone, the reality is that I speak to her even though that conversation is constituted of me speaking and listening to a device converting sound waves in the air into electric currents. Similarly, even though when I was young my phone was constituted of a device that plugged into a wire that ran to a switching center where it was electronically connected to other wires when I wanted to speak to somebody; and my phone is now constituted of an electronic device which converts sound waves into microwaves which are received by a tower, routed to another tower over the internet, and broadcast by that tower to my girlfriend’s phone; the reality of my speaking on the phone is the same now as it was then.

Now, there are flaws in Vasiliou’s argument. He claims, for instance, that if we could get all our nutrition from a pill and then pretend to eat perfect food by entering a computer matrix temporarily, people would prefer that experience to genuinely eating a steak — because after all, the reality of the steak to us is that it is “juicy and delicious.” Here, Vasiliou is wrong — for most people, the reality of a steak is that it is juicy and delicious. But its reality is also that people far away expended a lot of effort to provide the ingredients for your steak, and that a chef very close by (perhaps yourself) then worked hard to cook that steak to perfection and season it properly; in other words, how something came to be is part of its reality. A Matrix steak would be just as good as the real thing (assuming you do not leave the Matrix), but a “food machine” would not.

This argument has some important extensions. First, as implied in the rest of Vasiliou’s piece, anything that is a product of and for the mind (literature, philosophy, and human emotion) is as fully real in the Matrix as outside of it. But something whose application is partly physical is less real, because in a computer-driven Matrix it is not unique; it can be replicated freely by the software and its constitution does not exist everywhere its creator exists. A great painting in the Matrix could be admired for its aesthetic value and the time the artist spent creating it, but it would have less value than a painting from outside the Matrix because the in-Matrix painting, not having a constitution outside the Matrix, could not be hung in a real-world building. Vasiliou misses this subtlety and the paper is weaker for it, but the argument still stands strong.

Question

We read Anselm’s response to Gaunilo’s “Isle of the Blest” argument in defense of the Fool. In essence, Anselm believes he has demonstrated that the concept of God is different enough from the concept of a blessed island, and so his argument doesn’t run afoul of Gaunilo’s reductio ad absurdum objection. Haight & Haight also offer a kind of reductio of Anselm’s argument. Explain Anselm’s response to Gaunilo. Does Anselm’s response also work as a defense against Haight & Haight? If so, how would such a defense work? (That is, spell out what Anselm would say in response to Haight & Haight.) If not, why not? (How is the Devil different from the Blessed Isle? Why does the reductio fail in the case of the blessed isle but succeed in the case of the Devil?)  Alternatively, you can defend one of the other logical possibilities here, e.g, argue that Gaunilo’s argument works, but Haight and Haight’s doesn’t; etc.

Response

Anselm’s response to Gaunilo is quite simple but incredibly dense. It argues that existence is a necessary property of God — and since it is impossible to conceive of the non-existence of something for which existence is a property, God cannot be conceived to not exist! If the Fool says to himself “God does not exist” the fool cannot be thinking of God. Gaunilo’s fault is that existence is not a necessary property of an Isle of the Blest.

While this distinction might seem arbitrary (why is existence a property of God but not of the Isle?), most of Anselm ‘s elucidation of the ontological argument is devoted to proving existence as a property of God. The argument can be broken up into 4 steps:

1. Even the Fool believes “in understanding” that there is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and so this being exists in understanding.
2. That than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot exist in understanding alone, for otherwise a greater being can be conceived — that which actually exists.
3. In a parallel fashion, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived to not exist, and that being is greater than the being in (2), so the greatest being is necessarily so great that it cannot be conceived to not exist.
4. This being is God, and anybody with understanding of God cannot conceive God to not exist, because the mere conception disproves their having conceived of God.

Existence is thus a property of God, but Anselm clearly believes the same argument cannot be applied to an island — indeed, he finds it so obvious that he does not explicitly argue the point.

The difference is first noticed in their descriptions: Anselm speaks of the “greatest” being, which is generally taken to mean “most perfect” in the Greek tradition; Gaunilo speaks of the “most excellent” island. And while it is logical to believe in a perfect being (by Anselm’s proof above), an island, no matter how excellent, is inherently imperfect — it cannot perform rational thought or do a host of other things that bring a being closer to perfection. Because existence makes a being more perfect (and so is part of perfection), it is meaningful to argue that a perfection which does not exist is less perfect than one which exists (so obviously the first object is not really a perfection) and so the most perfect must exist; but when speaking of anything which is not perfect such an argument is absurd because existence is not a necessary property of anything except perfection.

This same line of reasoning is applicable to Haight & Haight’s reductio argument about the Devil — not being a perfection (with the requisite existence), he cannot be logically shown to exist from principles. But a far simpler argument is their reliance on “the worst possible” being. By Anselm’s logic, because existence is a form of perfection, and the worst possible being would be completely imperfect, the worst possible being would necessarily not exist! (Indeed, we could not conceive of the worst possible being, since it is better to exist in understanding than to not exist at all!)

Of course, Anselm’s argument is not correct just because Gaunilo and Haight & Haight’s arguments are not convincing disproofs. Kant has a devastating critique of it which I will not discuss here, yet even if  you accept Anselm’s assignment of existence to perfection, you cannot accept his conclusions. For Anselm rests his argument on the claim that “even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived.” But this is not a safe assumption! For the Fool to understand what the most perfect being is, he must be able to identify the being, not just name it as “that which nothing better can be conceived.” Perhaps he does not need to be able to enumerate its qualities, but given the choice between a more perfect being and a less perfect one he must be able to identify the greater perfection. Humans, being as imperfect as they are, cannot reliably identify this perfection.

To illustrate, let us consider: who was the more perfect, Martin Luther King Jr or Mohandas Gandhi? Clearly this is a futile task, one which we can debate but which we cannot resolve. Now, if we cannot even identify the more perfect among two humans, who are so near to ourselves on the scale of perfection, how could we distinguish between God and a very near-perfect alien being? It would be completely beyond our capabilities. Indeed, if we encountered the alien first we might misidentify him as God, and then be in a state of complete bewilderment or denial when God actually showed up.

For this reason I do not accept Anselm’s ontological argument, but arguments reductio ad absurdum are doomed to failure against the ontological argument because the argument for necessary existence only applies to perfection itself — Anselm’s God.

Plato — Theaetetus & Getter — Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

In these readings, we continue our (entirely appropriate) obsessive quest to define knowledge, via a Socratic dialogue from Plato and a short essay from Gettier in which he attempts to disprove the formulation we’ve seen in several places throughout the course. We face the fundamental problem of human knowledge in Plato, and in following Gettier we demolish the best definition of human knowledge we’ve seen. Continue reading “Reading Response: Plato & Getter” →

Does Origins of Life Research Rest on a Mistake?

White’s ultimate argument throughout this paper is that life on earth is caused either by chance or an intentional bias, rather than a non-intentional bias inherent to natural laws. He considers this argument important as nearly all origin-of-life research is focused on finding a process that is non-intentionally favored by physical laws. It’s an interesting argument, but one that is perhaps misguided — science is the search for (natural) explanations, and those explanations are best found via repeatable phenomenon — if it turns out that life is indeed caused by genuine pure chance, science cannot explain its origin, and you cannot prove pure chance except by disproving all biases, so how could we possibly research pure chance any more directly than we are? Continue reading “Reading Response: Roger White” →

Creationist Theory: Popular Evolutionist Misunderstandings

Throughout this piece, Ratzsch attempts to explain the true beliefs of creationists in the face of “evolutionist misunderstandings.” His writing does little to clear the air, and in fact raises as many serious questions as it answers — partly due to Ratzsch’s particular failings as a writer, philosopher, and scientist; partly due to the flaws inherent in the creationist belief system. Anybody seeking to understand how somebody could be so profoundly confused as Ratzsch evidently is should realize two things: Del Ratzsch is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College (Calvin as in Calvinism), and the book he is writing in is published by InterVarsity Press, part of the well-meaning but doctrinally conservative InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Continue reading “Reading Response: Del Ratzsch” →

For my Introduction to Knowledge, Mind, & Existence course (Philosophy 30) we did a lot of readings, and had to do responses to a bunch of them. The class was a bit of a sad mistake; there was a lot of interesting stuff from before 1200AD and some interesting stuff written by computer scientists on AI, but a lot of the readings were from that middle period by people who didn’t seem capable of anything approaching logic. 🙁 This was the first of 8 reading reactions for the course. Continue reading “Reading Response: Iakovos Vasiliou” →