introducing the ussr

 three patron heroes of the ussr

The following planned to be my debut video posting, but I've had a crisis of confidence and probably won't post it as a video. I actually think I would be best if I just got someone to interview me for videos.

 

Hello, welcome to the USSR, with me, Luigi Funesti Sordido - perhaps. I'm here to provide you with some pabulum I hope, and some diverting and delightfully edifying discourse on a variety of topics. This first discourse is introductory, in which I'll explain the USSR and its great significance. The USSR stands for the Urbane Society for Sceptical Romantics, of which I, Luigi Funesti Sordido am the founding secretary and sole member, and clearly this society is founded on Urbanity, Scepticism and Romanticism, or at least the founder's conception of those concepts.

So let me take these terms in reverse order. Romanticism, to me, is a simple idea or state, in which the thing focused on becomes, at least temporarily more than the sum of its parts, being invested with emotion, imagination, ideality, even transcendence, dare I say. This is often called the 'swoon' effect, and it can be brought on by a woman's smile, a memory, a mathematical equation, a landscape, a piece of music, a journey, a joke, a reading, a conversation, almost anything. It's a moment or a feeling charged with wonder and delight, and is often associated, however vaguely, with sex, in that I strongly suspect that the parts of the brain that light up or are revved up by this state are also involved in feelings of sexual passion and lust.

So romanticism isn't much associated with rationalism, though I wouldn't want to call it irrational which has all sorts of negative connotations. Perhaps non-rational is the term to use, but I think that romanticism provides a strong emotional current that can partly power our lives, and I think there's a lot to be said for it, and I think it should be encouraged.

Now scepticism is another matter. A popular notion of scepticism has arisen in recent years, associating it with sceptical groups, podcasts, magazines and  celebrity sceptics. This is quite a different version of scepticism from the old philosophical notion, which was a position of radical doubt, including doubt of the status of all knowledge and even existence. The modern notion, which I don't reject, as I find it quite useful, is based largely on science and the nature of evidence – that it must be verifiable, testable, repeatable and so forth. In some respects it's odd that this focus on evidence has come to be identified with the term 'scepticism', but be that as it may, this is the way I'm using the term, along with a residual sense of the philosophical usage, which involves a kind of state of eternal uncertainty, that all knowledge is conditional, even ephemeral, and just a bit untrustworthy. My sense of scepticism has been shaped by a number of intellectual heroes from the past. First, Socrates. Whether Socrates is generally regarded as a sceptic I'm not sure, but my Socrates is a sceptic.

We know of Socrates' reputation but little about his actual ideas. The Socrates of Xenophon seems little more than an idealised version of Xenophon, and the Socrates of Plato can't really be differentiated from Plato's ideas. For some time it was generally thought that the Socrates of Plato's early, less conclusive dialogues might be the most accurate depiction we have, a depiction of someone concerned with the most basic concepts – basic in the sense of fundamental but also in the sense of 'everyday'. The concepts of ordinary, not necessarily well-educated or philosphically-minded citizens, concepts they used to get by in their daily interactions. Socrates questioned the assumptions behind these everyday concepts and exposed their contradictions. Perhaps the two key sayings associated with this version of Socrates are 'I know nothing, but my advantage over others is that I know that I know nothing', and 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. Clearly, this is good sceptical stuff – not so good on the positive theory-building, but excellent for the negative ground-clearing.

Another sceptical hero is Michel de Montaigne, one of the greatest of all practitioners of the essay, whose motto was 'What do I know?'. Montaigne often used himself as the subject of his essays, not so much out of egotism but because the self and its mind were, to him, subjects of the most immediate knowledge, via direct perception [think of Descartes a couple of generations later]. Everything else was that much more uncertain. He was also far from being an abstruse 'academic' philosopher, always choosing to write in an accessible but highly discursive style, letting his thoughts take him where they might.

I'll mention one last sceptical thinker, though there are many to choose from. David Hume represents in some ways a bridge between the old established philosophical concept of scepticism, with its largely negative, undermining overtones, and a more positive and modern concept, emphasising evidence and scientific methodologies in the establishment of sure knowledge. Hume was a major figure of the eighteenth century enlightenment, and an inheritor of the seventeenth century scientific revolution in Britain, spearheaded by the likes of Boyle, Hooke, Newton and Halley. He was also as outspoken a critic of religion as it was safe to be in an age where even the leading scientific figures swore by their faith.

Hume's opening remarks in his essay, 'The Sceptic', beautifully capture, to me, the essence of an initially negative, but healthy scepticism:

I HAVE long entertained a suspicion, with regard to the decisions of philosophers upon all subjects, and found in myself a greater inclination to dispute, than assent to their conclusions. There is one mistake, to which they seem liable, almost without exception; they confine too much their principles, and make no account of that vast variety, which nature has so much affected in all her operations. When a philosopher has once laid hold of a favourite principle, which perhaps accounts for many natural effects, he extends the same principle over the whole creation, and reduces to it every phænomenon, though by the most violent and absurd reasoning. Our own mind being narrow and contracted, we cannot extend our conception to the variety and extent of nature; but imagine, that she is as much bounded in her operations, as we are in our speculation.

These remarks are as relevant today as they were when first written: happy 300^th birthday, David Hume.

So, that's scepticism, a major focus of the USSR. Urbanity I've left to last. Urbanity is of the city, it's what we like to imagine our cities are about, sophistication, diversity, eclecticism, imagination, pragmatism. One of the features of the great urban centres is that they're in some sense the same, in their mix of cultures and periods and styles, in their boldness and their staleness, in their recognisability and their anonymity, in their inspirational yet frightening and overwhelming nature. To be on top of that, or to seem to be, to be riding the wave of it all with a more or less affected nonchalance, is to be urbane. So urbanity, in the context of the USSR, is the tremulous overarching force that connects scepticism and romanticism and combines them into some sort of coherent and workable form. Perhaps.

So that introduces and pretends to explain the new ussr, as opposed to the old one, that bunch of Ultra Silly Soviet Ratbags. Next time, perhaps, our first edifying discourse...

presentism and the conflict thesis

Even the most well-founded, well-argued, and well-intentioned ideas about science and religion are liable to later change or eventual rejection. The same is true for historiographical positions, including, of course, the complexity thesis itself.
David Wilson, 'The historiography of science and religion'

Wilson's essay in the Science and Religion collection is certainly more thought-provoking than the previous one, though the view is much the same - that a conflict thesis has operated largely among non-historians, and particularly among scientists, but that historians of science have largely come round to a 'complexity thesis'. Again, though, its many examples point to a complexity of understandings of both science and religion between individuals, and often within particular individuals, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fundamental philosophical issues are not discussed.
Having said that, Wilson does highlight some important themes. Particularly pertinent is the issue of 'presentism'. Wilson explains it in contrast to contextualism. I'll provide a lengthy explanatory quote from early in the essay:

Although historians have espoused various approaches to the past, it will make our subject more manageable if we concentrate on the polar opposites around which views have tended to cluster. One approach has been to examine past ideas as much as possible in their own context, without either judging their long-term validity or making the discussion directly relevant to present issues. Another approach has been to study past ideas from the perspective of the present, taking full advantage of the hindsight provided by later knowledge to judge which ideas have proven to be valid. The second approach has apparent advantages. It does not exclude current knowledge that can assist us in the historical task. It also keeps present issues to the fore by insisting that historians draw lessons from the past that are relevant to current issues. However, historians have tended to regard the second approach as precariously likely to lead to distortion of the past in the service of present concerns. Dismissing this as 'presentism', therefore, historians of science have come to favor the first, or contextualist, approach.

 Presentism isn't a term I've heard before, but the problem is familiar enough. we find it in fiction too, of course, when we find modern writers of historical romances getting not just the tone but the whole seventeenth century context wrong - sometimes deliberately. Or we have new dramatic interpretations of such perennial faves as Jane Austen which 'tease out' feminist undertones claimed to be found in the original. It raises the obvious question of whether we can ever really recapture the context of the times [I think of Borges' character writing an exact replica of Don Quixote which critics find disturbingly other than the previous version]. Here, though, the distortions of presentism are said to feed into a progressivist view of science and knowledge, what historian Herbert Butterfield called 'the whig interpretation of history' [he published a book with this title in 1931]. 

Were I a historian, I would heed the warnings, while also recognising, for example, that the rigorous exclusion of non-natural explanations in the sciences [meaning, essentially, a tightening of the definition of scientific praxis] has been a great boon in the advancement of knowledge over the past few hundred years, an advancement that has been truly sensational. We should indeed guard against what Maurice Mandelbaum called 'the retrospective fallacy', in which we lose sight of the groping, uncertain nature of the past as it was lived for those who felt it as present and future. For that would be to destroy empathy and to judge harshly. Many great past scientists 'transcended' their times, but only to a limited extent, and to see them as our contemporaries would be to do them a great disservice. Sometimes, in reading them or reading about them, we wish we could free them from the context of their times and show them how times have changed, partly as a result of their own achievements. That's only human, but it's fantasy, after all. 

So, it's true that the earliest practitioners of what we 'retrospectively' call modern science were not atheists, secret or otherwise, and that they were seeking to comprehend the glory of their god's creation, but I'm not so sure that it's a 'presentist' distortion to point out that they were, in fact, contributing to a loosening of the grip of theology and religion upon our modern understanding of how the world works, to a degree that, a few hundred years later, that grip is but a memory trace in the collective scientific consciousness. Or is that going a bit too far? 

Again the point I'm making is that there's plenty of complexity in the relations between and among scientists and believers, but science and religion have ceased to mix sociably since science has refused to, or forgotten to, keep to its circumscribed territory, and has shrugged off its dress-up as some deity's hand-maiden.

Aristotle, his god and the primum mobile

absurd but influential, apparently

Despite his conviction that the world was uncreated, Aristotle did believe in a divine spirit, or God. But the attributes he assigned to his God, whom he called an 'Unmoved mover', would have been strange, and perhaps repugnant, to anyone raised in one of the three traditional monotheistic religions. Obviously, Aristotle's God was not the creator of our world, since it is uncreated. Indeed, he is not even aware of the world's existence and, therefore, does not, and could not, concern himself with anything in our world. Such a deity could not, therefore, be an object of worship. The only activity fit for such a God is pure thought. but the only thoughts worthy of his exalted status are thoughts about himself. Totally remote from the universe, Aristotle's God thinks only of himself.

Edward Grant, 'Aristotle and Aristotelianism', in Science and Religion: a historical introduction, edited by Gary Ferngren


I've long had a thing for Aristotle, especially his ethical and political philosophy, but it's all been from quite meagre gleanings. He seemed to have a common-sense empirical approach, and I like to think of him as a this-wordly philosopher through and through, making big assumptions such as that his primum mobile was just a way of kick-starting the universe, after which it could be abandoned, with all the focus being on a kind of physicalist approach thenceforward. If the above quotation is to be trusted, though, Aristotle's metaphysics are a lot weirder than I'd assumed. I was under the impression that Grant's term 'unmoved mover' was a direct translation of primum mobile, which I always took to mean 'first mover', but I'm beginning to realize my error. In fact the term primum mobile [first moved] is a medieval construction used in astronomy and having nothing to do with Aristotle's metaphysics [though it may have been indirectly drawn from him]. So enough of that concept and let's look at Aristotle's god, at least as revealed in the quotation.
How this god could even be described as a 'mover' is a mystery. He didn't create the world, he's unaware of the world, so of what theological use is he? Why even posit his existence? Clearly we would have to investigate Aristotle's metaphysics much more thoroughly to answer these questions. One possible answer is that it was impossible, in those times, for a thinker worth his salt not to have a theology or a metaphysics of some kind. So Aristotle invented a metaphysics that was beside the point. Not consciously perhaps, but just to get it out of the way, to focus on this world, a world entirely untouched by his god. Whether this answer is plausible would depend on a greater familiarity with his metaphysics, which I may or may not achieve. I actually spent some time in Borders bookshop the other day perusing a book called Aristotle's Metaphysics, a contemporary commentary [something like this one, but costing more than $50] on the works under the title of The Metaphysics [not a term Aristotle used himself]. That's essentially why I'm writing this post today.
I do find that Aristotle's strange god, as presented in the quotation, provides a salutary lesson, and an amusing one. You can create in your mind all sorts of supernatural beings, even ones that are completely irrelevant to the generally agreed purpose of supernatural beings - to give purpose and meaning to the world, or to reality. In fact, Aristotle's god is irrelevant to everything except himself. There seems something important here about theological pointlessness, but maybe not. In any case, I might just return to Aristotle's metaphysics in a later post, when I've learned more about it.

on the end of philosophy, mainly

As for the school of Gothic novelists, they didn't have anything to do with anything except their own gloomy and morbid imaginings: they were probably all opium fiends who got hopped up from daylight until moonlight and kept ravens and indulged in unhealthy thoughts. Life these days, I thought, was Real and filled with Purpose and Endeavour and Downtrodden Masses, and all that Gothic stuff was just made up.
Charmian Clift, 'On Gothic Tales'

Well, it seems that the people of Southern Sudan have voted overwhelmingly to secede from the north and to form their own nation. Obviously it's going to be a hard road to hoe, but hopefully the struggle will be relatively peaceful in the foreseeable future. This site has some useful maps giving an at-a-glance view of the ethnic, religious and language mix of the region. Australia has it so much easier in terms of governance.

Common sense atheism has a stimulating post, with comments, which touches on issues of scientism I've also been touching on in the last few posts. Of course, I'm not a philosopher, and I really don't understand the Bayesian rule [which in any case is a development of mathematics, and specifically probability, rather than philosophy], but I do know that this way of thinking of philosophy - that it's aim should be to kill itself with a thousand cuts, gradually cutting off its various issues and handing them over to science one by one - has been around for quite a while. I myself seem to remember reading something from Max Black around thirty years ago, something to the effect that problems kind of pass through the digestive system of philosophy to come out as science. But no, that probably wasn't it at all.

he says no to atheistic scientism - amen to that 

Anyway, I tend to side with the blogger, Luke Muelhauser, here. When have philosophers ever solved a philosophical problem? At best they've helped to make it more clear and distinct. And of course at worst they've done the opposite. Many issues once held in the sights of philosophers have passed over into the sciences, which have often made rapid progress towards solving them. They're no longer philosophical issues, but issues within a scientific framework - cosmology, neurophysiology, genetics and so forth. I expect that the best developments in the future, in ethics, in philosophy of mind, in philosophy of science, will come, as they have been coming, from practical developments in cognitive psychology, in AI research, in astrophysics, etc. And I agree also with Luke that those developments won't involve a dualistic approach. But what would I know?

on supervenience

Pour qu'une chose soit interessante, il suffit de la regarder longtemps.
Gustave Flaubert

Amongst a number of other no doubt fascinating potted insights at this site, Joshua Greene gives us a condensed version of supervenience. The issue of human mind and consciousness was harped on by Marilynne Robinson in her RSA talk, and at one point she ridiculed what she would describe as the reduction of the mind to that glob of grey matter inside the skull. As everyone knows, this has long been a contentious point between materialists, or to use Greene's term, physicalists, and their opponents, be they dualists or some other ists. Greene's supervenience concept - which doubtless has been around for ages - is that mind is supervenient on the brain. We can't have minds without brains, but that doesn't mean they're identical. You can have a brain without a mind, but more importantly, they operate at different levels. Greene gives the example of a computer image made up of pixels. The image was generated using pixels, but the image also exists on another, human, psychological level, imparting emotion or ideas. Altering the number of pixels might change the resolution but it won't generally alter what the image intends to convey - that 'information', if you like, operates on another level. It is supervenient on the process by which the image was generated.
Greene provides this general definition of supervenience:

Supervenience is a relationship between two sets of properties. Call them Set A and Set B. The Set A properties supervene on the Set B properties if and only if no two things can differ in their A properties without also differing in their B properties.

He then 'concretises' this piece of abstraction rather well - though you can see just by the definition how it works for the mind/brain conundrum, including the asymmetry of the relationship. Essentially the world can be seen as operating on different levels, but there's a basic level upon which everything else supervenes. This is the 'hard' level that physicists work on, and explains why physics is the most fundamental science. When physicists talk about developing a 'Theory of  Everything' [TOE] they don't of course mean this quite literally, though in a sense they do - what they mean is the possibility of developing a theory of that upon which everything supervenes.
As this isn't a new approach, no doubt philosophers have been pulling it apart for some time, though on the face of it, it seems very helpful. My strong sense from people like Robinson is that their emphasis on human brilliance and the specialness of human consciousness is really not so much to urge scientists to get their finger out and start studying this stuff, but to put a god-shaped spanner in the works, to almost sneakily claim that there's something that can't be explained, something that's god's doing. Most religious beliefs are self-aggrandising, or 'human-aggrandising' if you will. Certainly this is true of the Judeo-Christian religion, in which only humans are in the image of the creator-deity, and therefore get to lord it over other creatures and to revel in their own specialness and brilliance. Perhaps if Robinson were to focus a bit more on other species and their minds [bearing in mind my quote at the top of this post], she might start to get a clearer view of consciousness as an evolving property, and she might be more impressed with the differently evolving cognitive qualities of pigs and elephants and cetaceans and other beasties. I'm not sure though that she really wants to do that.