“At home things were calm; magistrates had the same titles; the young had been born after the victory at Actium, and even most of the elderly during the civil wars. How many remained, who had seen the republic?” [‡]
From Tacitus, Annals 1.3.
[‡] Latin: Domi res tranquillae, eadem magistratuum vocabula; iuniores post Actiacam victoriam, etiam senes plerique inter bella civium nati: quotus quisque reliquus qui rem publicam vidisset?
Gene Callahan, in a comments thread at La Bocca della Verità, insists that science can tell us nothing even about the existence of libertarian free will. Responding to me, he writes:
No, libertarian free will has no connection to scientific determinism: science is an abstraction FROM the real world.
But suppose we discover (or think we discover) that the brain and body behave in a perfectly deterministic manner. [1] What would it mean for libertarian free will to exist in such a world? Libertarian free will, remember, posits that the self is (at least in certain circumstances) an “unmoved mover.” [2]
We all agree that, in ordinary cases, the motions of the body are correlated with decisions of the will. Someone who wants to reconcile physical determinism with libertarian free will thus has to bite the bullet and say that (a) we make free decisions, in the libertarian sense; (b) these decisions have no impact on the body, which is a clump of particles obeying macroscopically deterministic mathematical laws; and (c) by a remarkable coincidence, these decisions happen to be correlated almost perfectly with the motions of the body.
[1] Deterministic, that is, at the macroscopic level. This is in no way dependent on a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
[2] Libertarian free will obviously requires more than physical indeterminism. But the latter seems to be a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for the former.
Kindle books have this advantage over their paper rivals: endnotes, when properly hyperlinked, are easy to consult. (In a bound volume, on the other hand, flipping back and forth between the main text and the notes quickly becomes a chore.)
But why, after all this time, has Amazon not added support for footnotes? It is more pleasant, and less distracting, to look at the bottom of the page than it is to have to click on a link. Moreover, give me endnotes, and I have to guess how significant “note 491″ might be. With footnotes, I have, at a glance, certain visual clues: How long is it? Does it contain commentary, or mere citations? Etc.
Tastes differ, of course; but with the rise of ebooks, it should be possible to give the reader a choice of whether to display notes as footnotes or endnotes.
The bland practice of reckoning all dates from the inception of the Christian Era should be curbed, though never abandoned. In some contexts it is far more lively and evocative—more meaningful and imaginative—to count the years from some momentous event that touched the minds of the people whose history is being recounted. We do not reckon all locations in GPS coordinates: why view all dates through the foggy lens of the Dionysian Era?
This week’s new election map gives the results of the 1856 presidential election in Delaware:
James Buchanan won over 55 percent of the vote and carried every county in the state. Millard Fillmore, of the Know-Nothing Party, came in second, grabbing about 43 percent.
A curiosity of this election is that all of John Frémont’s support came from New Castle. His 306 votes constitute 4.7 percent of the New Castle, and 2.11 percent of the Delaware, electorate.
The best thing that can be said for modernity is that it has yet to destroy music. It has ruined all of the other arts (save the art of lying, which politicians continue to practice and perfect), but music has survived every dart and arrow thrown its way.
Would that architecture were so fortunate. The heirs of Vitruvius seem to be locked in a kind of epic arms race of hideousness, with bystanders wondering breathlessly who can cobble together the ugliest building of them all. Among the many triumphs of modernity are these two buildings:
Selfridges Building, Birmingham
Scottish Parliament Building, Edinburgh
Surely, you say, I am photoshopping. Nay; click on the links.
The only thing that can save us now is a barbarian invasion, and I am not optimistic that that is going to happen. Till then, music.
The Body
Of
Benjamin Franklin,
Printer,
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its lettering and gilding,)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
In a new and more elegant edition,
Revised and corrected
By
The Author.
Printed in Jared Sparks, The Life of Benjamin Franklin; Containing the Autobiography, with Notes and a Continuation (1848 ed.), 597.
Benjamin Franklin composed this epitaph for himself as a young man; though brilliant, it was not actually used.
This week’s new election map illustrates the results of the 1806 gubernatorial election in New Hampshire:
Republican John Langdon trounced his Federalist opponents, winning almost 76 percent of the vote. His weakest county was Grafton, where he still commanded 62 percent. His strongest county was Rockingham, where he won just shy of 85 percent.
How should we defend literature and the arts? By refusing to defend them. Beauty does not need a defense; it is an ultimate end, like friendship; not a means to something greater.
It is commonly said that some things have practical uses, while others do not; and it is often implied that the latter are more suspect than the former. Yet what does it mean for something to have a practical use? Simply this: that it helps you pursue some other end. This in turn may be desirable as a means to yet another end; and so on, down the line. But ultimately, this whole chain of justification must terminate in one or more ultimate ends which are desired for their own sake. If those ends are rejected, what is to be said for the means?
The doctrine that “only practical things have value” thus turns out to be not only false but incoherent. If nothing has intrinsic value, nothing is useful; and if nothing is useful, nothing is practical.
Just over a week ago, I posted a brief modal argument for mind-body dualism. The argument, as Alvin Plantinga presented it in the YouTube clip I posted, stands or falls with the crucial premise that “what is imaginable is logically possible.”
This prompted reader Jeremy to post a long, and thoughtful, comment on the subject of conceivability and logical possibility. He points to three potential counterexamples:
1. I can conceive that 2+2 might equal 4, not 5 [sic]. How? I imagine pushing two sets of 2 pennies together, and when counting them up, counting 5. I make sure not to imagine an extra penny appearing out of nowhere.
I think a distinction needs to be drawn here between phenomenology and counting. In the thought experiment, I will continually see four pennies, though I may count five. There is no doubt that the counting is dependent on what I have imagined, but it is not a part of it. (Consider: When presented with a large number of objects, we are often at a loss to estimate their number, even when all of them are easily within our sight.)
I cannot, then, conceive of there being two and two pennies brought together, which are five; though I can certainly imagine bringing the two and two pennies together, and counting (as I move between them) “1, 2, 3, 4, 5.”
But might we, in a similar spirit, say that what I am able to imagine is not the non-existence of my body as such, but its absence from my phenomenal experience? I can imagine floating from room to room, without ever witnessing my hands, feet, legs, or any other part of my body. I can imagine “appearing” before other people, who nonetheless seem not to notice me. But even if, in my phenomenal experience, I have no body, might I not still have one in the hypothetical physical world this thought experiment is situated in? I could, for example, be hallucinating in my hospital bed; or I might be a brain in a vat. The real trouble is that when we reflect deeply on what it means for the body to exist and what it means for subjective experience to exist, there still seems to be no contradiction in the one existing without the other.
2. . . . . I can conceive of having been born as Napoleon. Not that my consciousness dwells in Napoleon’s head, but that I were the experiencer of Napoleon’s experiences. How? I imagine thinking Napoleon’s thoughts, looking out of his eyes, having his temperament, etc.
I don’t see the problem. It seems logically coherent that any of us might have been born Napoleon, if by that one means “I experienced…” (insert a complete description of Napoleon’s mental life).
3. I can conceive that the Riemann hypothesis is false (or true, if you believe that it’s false). It’s easy to imagine how: I imagine a professor announcing a proof, it being validated.
Here, we do not really imagine “it being validated” per se. What we imagine is the mathematician’s fellow professors announcing excitedly that his proof is sound. That certainly is logically possible, even if the existence of an authentic proof is logically impossible.
Jeremy closes with the following note:
At best, I think conceivability can be used in the absence of other lines of reasoning to keep us from ruling out logical impossibility, but as soon as we have other lines of evidence, that should be weighted much more heavily.
This is actually not far from my position. As I wrote in my original post, “[t]he question of when we are justified in inferring logical possibility from conceivability is a difficult one; though we certainly do infer the one from the other on a regular basis.”
That is why I preferred to rephrase the premise in terms of a presumption. Perfect conceivability does, I think, guarantee logical possibility; but we humans rarely grasp concepts in their fullness. (To choose a feeble example, what does it mean to “think of” infinite space? There is a sense in which we have the concept of infinity, and a sense in which we do not.) The trouble, for the materialist, is that the “other lines of evidence” he is fond of citing are not really evidence of logical impossibility, but of nomic impossibility. And that is another matter entirely. It is logically possible that the gravitational constant might have been greater than it is, even if it is nomically impossible. Etc., etc.
This week’s new election map gives the results of the 1852 presidential election in Delaware:
Franklin Pierce narrowly edged out Winfield Scott, winning 49.87 percent of the vote to the latter’s 49.63 percent. John P. Hale of the Free Soil Party received a measly 0.5 percent.
