John Ivor Jones

The Philosophy of Logic

2011-12-06T15:10:00.001-08:00

It is remarkable that there are no texts of logic that say what logic is but only assert of it what is not said, in phrases such as one offered by Wittgenstein that "logic is trancendent".

Logic is a varying mix of ontologies. Ontology describes the behaviour of objects. "Right reason", inference, fallacies, form, syllogism, etc, describe or mirror a particular ontology, generally a physical one invariably cast in a moral or prescriptive mould. Returning to the idea that logic is "transcendent" there are no transcendent logics or transcendent object behaviours, for any particular object behaviours are absolute and incommensurable. Colours behave like colours, and materials behave like materials. For example, only the logic or object behaviour of physical objects is incorporated in mathematics, while phenomenalistic logic is employed in the use of colour in the arts.

Today's Logic is an ontological montage offering a false unity of favoured varieties of object behaviours arbitrarily selected from favoured ontologies. There are two major classes of logic, 1) transcendentally real, and 2) transcendentally ideal.

1) transcendentally real logic is a description of ontology as the behaviour of objects. The ground of transcendentally real logic is existence, the existence of objects and their particular behaviours. Existence is prior to identification for existing objects identify themselves.
2) transcendentally ideal logic is a description of ontology as the framework for the behaviour of objects. The ground of transcendentally ideal logic is identification, the conditions required for the identification of object behaviours. Identitification is prior to existence for identified objects do not identify themselves.

Taking 1), above, some modern logicians such as Quine treat logic as pragmatic, and not transcendent or absolute. A pragmatic logic is a transcendentally real logic, where all ontologies or logics are determined or identified by their existence, that is, by self-identification. From the transcendentally ideal perspective a pragmatic logic identifies object behaviours according to an anthropomorphic perspective ("pragmatic") such as need - putting food on the table, for example. A pragmatic logic becomes a tool of science, where a particular logic can be ditched or taken up depending on the outcome of experiment or to meet the needs of theory. Different logics have been mooted to meet maverick object behaviours, such as quantum. Nevertheless, there is no modern "pragmatic" logic, as if logic is a logic of one. A pragmatic entity, whether logic or some other stipulate, comes and goes, without redress. Such a logic classes all ontologies under the umbrella of phenomenalism, where objects vanish and appear without any redress (colours, for example, display this ontology or logic, and vanish and appear without material concommitants ).

By adopting 2) a transcendentally ideal view, there is no single pragmatic logic, or any number of non-pragmatic logics that are identified by their object behaviours, whether phenomenal or not.

Finally, logic(s) is not the terminus of rational thought. Rational thought is a false terminus, more a mixed bag of expectations, morals, needs and object ontologies or logics, and subject to yet further conditions. As indicated in 1) and 2), above, logics are subject to the conditions, or lack of conditions, for the identification of objects and behaviours.

Medieval perspective and reality

2011-10-13T14:29:00.001-07:00

Medieval perspective presents us with what we may regard as a quaint "flat" view of objects. Yet this may be a better representation of spatiality than our modern three-dimensional perspective which makes objects appear from an arbitrary, privileged, single point or viewer. Even so, there is a yet more real way of representing objects. That is to privilege NO viewing point over another, and to view objects from all points.

Viewing objects from all points - pan perspective- would be fairer, or at least not position-biased. It's representation of spatiality and objects is a point. This point, in contradistinction to material objects generally, cannot be hidden. Hence, if we suppose that material objects can be defined and distinguished in that way from secondary properties, the material world is viewer dependent, not viewer independent.

The material world is an invention forced on us by the viewing limits we place on objects. This would not trouble Kant, though I don't pursue this here. This restriction on perspective by science and modern artists of realist schools creates a distorted world. The pan-perspective point - the object - is real and unlike material objects, cannot be hidden. And this is no more than what we, and the medievalists, would expect.

Autism and modern Eugenics

2011-10-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

Autism is a recent invention, one of the many symptoms heralding the rise to power of the Clinic and its rebranded eugenics, following the disastrous war-time eugenics programs conducted in the industrial west.

The autist is shadowed by his own eugenic image. One critical difference between modern eugenics and the old, rejected eugenics, is that the modern Clinic asserts that the perfect eugenic image is within reach for those who do not match its parameters for true personhood. And help is offered to make measured steps toward this unreachable target.

Today, our New Clinic considers autistic people not as persons but as more or less ambulatory clinical conditions. Having a clinical condition for an identity puts them beyond the help of their god and beyond the understanding of mum and dad. Their personality becomes foremost a description of their brain. Who, what, they really are, only the doctor is said to know, is allowed to know.

Alone among others who have also had the blight of the perfect eugenic image shadowing their lives (we can think of aspergers, ADHD etc in this regard), the clinic's autist is affected by his brain, he suffers from his brain, whether he is happy or not. The rest of us...the rest of us might be affected by our brain - but with one crucial difference we declare: brain differences between normal and autist are their differences, not ours; behavioural differences are their differences, not ours.

The clinic's autist is encouraged to reach the clean eugenic image that, we shout, is shadowing him. If he is not assertive his holidays can become therapies, his associates helpers, his home-life can become a tick-box activity of tasks achieved. Medicated for achievement, he is the permanent patient, if not in practice then by deed-poll. For the feisty and independent, denying the clinical shadow can meet life-long resistance from a public and Clinic who's help is often conditional upon accepting their labels.

How to invent a myth and get rich

2011-10-13T06:21:00.001-07:00

This is how to make a myth and make money from it:

Step One
Choose any human emotion or experience. Let's choose sadness.

Step two
Make an empty tautology by writing sadness is caused by sadness.

Step three
Re-spell sadness by juggling its letters around, or else pick an impressive sounding alternative word. We'll choose sendas.

Step four
Now instead of writing sadness is caused by sadness write instead - sadness is caused by sendas

Step five
Tell everyone that sendas is a brain condition caused by environment or genes and that it is the cause of sadness. Scientifically "prove" this by comparing the brain scan of someone who is sad with someone who is not sad. Use statistics and genetic studies to show who is likely to be affected.

Step six
Get people to speak about sadness as a social dysfunction or "attack". Popularize a quirky, memorable phrase, like sad-attack. Appear wise by saying that a sad-attack is caused by sendas and is treatable. Frighten the doubters by comparing sendas to physical attacks, like altzheimers or flu, and remind them that it is a proven brain condition. Say that they "have" sendas and that this is why they are sad.

Step seven
Once sendas is socially and politically sanctioned as a proven brain condition that is the cause of a social dysfunction or "sad-attack", construct a diagnostic teaching program for teaching hospitals. Employ pharmaceutical companies to deliver cures or amelioratives based on complex biochemical studies of sendas. Give instructions to doctor's on the recognition and treatment of sendas. Send sendas experts into schools to assess children for treatment. Offer support to parents. Lobby government for money for further research.

And that's how we make a myth and make money out of it. Do you have sadness because of sendas?

Intelligent design and Dawkin's designoid

2011-08-09T17:03:00.001-07:00

An intelligent design is exactly the same object as a Dawkinian designoid.

For example, to notice a fish's eye we must apply a design template so that we can see or construe what we see as an eye. But whether that template comes from God (intelligent design) or Man (design appearance or designoid), matters not, for the fact that a template or design is involved at all is all that both parties ever argued for.

Sadly, this meeting of minds between Dawkins and the creationists is roundly ignored by both parties. Both parties insist that the fish's eye identifies and manifests itself as an eye. On this reading, the creationists regard the fish's eye as a design itself, and the Dawkinians regard it as a random structure.

Here, both are wrong because:

1) The creationists are wrong because they cannot assert that the fish's eye is itself a design - we do not have a faculty of being able to see how something is in itself. I would also make the observation that Dawkins can only "suggest" the creationists are wrong, hinting that the eye is, instead, a random structure.

2) Dawkins is wrong because he needs a design template to identify a fish's eye. This makes a designoid more than mere empty appearance - the designoid's "apparant" design is used to identify a real, particular, random structure.

So, would it not be easier for them both to agree on the reality of design, and for both to be right on the matter, in the way I suggested?

Animism in Mathematics and Logic

2011-07-27T02:40:00.000-07:00

Logic and mathematics provide Science with its higher foundations, but there is nothing esoteric about the animism that backs them up.

By employing Cantor's diagonal slash Godel animated the syntax in his incompleteness theorems. These theorems were an animistic variation on the idea that symbols and propositions can, under their own steam as it were, refer to their own position in the text in which they appear. Elsewhere, old favourites such as an object is identical to itself, A=A, and "this sentence is false (or true)" become strangely animated when we look at them, as if endowed with the power to show us the position on the page they are printed on.

A casually-accepted animism baptises all mathematical objects with a hidden identity, an identity that can, like the genie in the bottle, be summoned for some (mathematical) task. And no greater summons is made than by Goedel's (animistic) incompleteness theorems which, for Goedel, show us how the natural kingdom is independent of mathematical machinations or calculi. This is ironic, as it is really only in the natural kingdom that identity can be found.

Skepticism

2011-07-21T03:22:00.000-07:00

Skeptics are transcendental realists, or animists. They believe that objects have the properties of their appearances, that light of 650nm really is red, that a tree makes a sound when it falls, etc.

This is a totemic anthropomorphism. That is, objects (the totems) belong to the human and scientific community in an intimate and mystical way. Intimate because objects and Man share common experiences and characteristics (e.g. light of 650nm is red in itself, and red as it appears to humans). If the match between how a thing is and how it appears is only approximate, the basic proposals of transcendentally real, animmistic objects remains intact. And, mystical or transcendent, because there is no explanation provided by transcendentally real objects for a bridge between sharing what a thing is in itself and its appearance.

Rationalism or empiricism are also animistic. Empiricism is based on observations mediated through the senses. But "senses" is an insignificant proposal. It is both, and neither, a physical object and an object of experience. The two objects have different properties. The fact that empiricism merges them into one pseudo-object that is in itself what it appears to be, is transcendental realism. The senses are totems of an animistic philosophy and science.

Rationalism is animistic because the objects that it considers, even though stripped down to their bare spatio-temporal essentials (logical objects also are grounded in spatio-temporal behaviours) are thought of as independent entities that are themselves how they appear.

What is strange in all this is that the Church, too, is inevitably grounded in animism. The very fact that God can be considered to be omnipotent or omniscience requires the prior belief in a world of self-identifying physical objects, where some events themselves are good or bad. It supposes a world where objects are as they appear to be, whether such appearance is approximate or not. At least then, in their fundamental beliefs, skepticism and the church are joined - at the hip, or so the phrase goes, in animism.

This statement is false

2011-06-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

"This statement is false"

Which is "this statement"? That question kills it, dead.

But then we can ponder, and ask "what is a statement"?
Really speaking, there is no such entity as a "statement". There are meanings, to be sure, but what the devil is a "statement" - it's just a pile of shapes.

We might say that at least the pile of shapes is identifiable as the physical ground of the statement.

In which case
"this statement is false" or even "this statement is true"
only points to a position on the page.

How can it do that? Is a pile of shapes, the "statement", animated in some way? Is it like a sign-post? it can't point itself out, there is no identity here. And, in any case, isn't a pile of shapes only identified through the emergence of a specific meaning (and meanings are always specific)?

Does it make sense to say that something can point precisely, even to a position on the page? No. The shapes involved in the act of pointing, the signpost itself, only point significantly through an arbitrary set of publicly endorsed rules.

We might object and say that the pile of shapes, the statement, is at least identifiable or we would not be able to focus on the shapes in an attempt to given them a meaning. But the set of rules that make us attend to a particular set of shapes, rules like a capital letter, letter proximity and full-stop, isn't the same thing as giving them a meaning or allowing a meaning to emerge.

I can find no grounds on which "the statement is false" or even "this statement is true" can be significantly entertained.

Tractatus Explained

2011-05-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

Wittgenstein's Tractatus presented the philosophical community with an enigma:

Wittgenstein said of his Tractatus that
"..anyone who understands me eventually recognise [my propositions] as nonsense" (T. 6.54)

He also said of the Tractatus that
"the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive" (T. preface)

No-one can adequately explain this mystery, this contradiction. The two camps of Tractarian opinion suggest that either the whole work was in Witt's eyes mere nonsense, or that he used "elucidatory" "nonsense" to display what would otherwise be a mystery.

Perhaps I can now move us away from this well-known philosophical fidget spot.

"Truths" pertain only to syntactical truths, whatever the system. The elements of the syntax of the Tractatus that are subject to assesments of truth are his logical propositions. These are modelled on a physical syntax or behaviour, like the syntax of mathematics. Truths refer, then, only to the elements of that syntax, their structures, position and behaviours. Thus for Witt, Tractarian truths really are truths. Just like, for example, it is true that this element or object is behind that element or object. These are physical syntactical truths.

"Nonsense", on the other hand, refers to the necessarily failed attempt of any elements (propositions in this case) of any syntax to describe, syntactically, the framework that selects them, their structures, their raison d'etre. Thus the propositions or syntax of the Tractus could not of themselves describe their framework. That framework could only be shown.

So Wittgenstein's "truths" and "nonsense" both pertain to the propositions of the Tractatus, and this without contradiction. This is why Wittgenstein could say in the body of the Tractarian text that his propositions were nonsense or elucidations, and why he could say, outside the body of the text, in the preface, that the Tractarian propositions in the body of the text, were true.

A Philosophy of Common Objects

2011-04-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

Science describes three classes of object: these are what I call simply the hideables, the non-hideables, and superstitious objects. The hideables can be hidden, that is their existence is not observer dependent. They are the material objects and those objects that are necessarily hidden - quantum events, that fall under the limits of observability. The idea that objects can be classed as hideable or not would directly support Popper's* view that science is the domain of the empirically falsifiable, as hidden objects obviously provide a source of doubt or falsification. Empirical is, in effect, the domain of the hideable.

Objects that are not hideable, hence not empirical or subject to falsification or Popperian doubt, are numerous and include colours, sounds, etc, or the Lockian secondary and tertiary properties or, again, phenomenological objects. I do not include these among the objects of science as there is no direct empirical means of establishing their existence even if these are employed in empirical investigation: measurement is always made upon the hideables.

The third class of object of science is the superstitious object of which there are two types, typified by their social role. Both types - superstitious objects generally - are exemplified by "switching", by which I mean their behaviour alternates between the hideables and non-hideables and which, like the latter, are non-Popperian postulates. I conceive two justifications for their creation though neither of the objects associated with them, I can only suppose, have been knowingly engineered by science or public, despite their regular employment. These justifications are made on the basis of
1) discrediting mystical practices and ideas, and
2) imposing causal relationships upon non-physical associations.

Regarding the object associated with 1), it may be perverse to suggest that any object could or ought to be created to serve a social demand and a bad demand at that, but whatever its dubious ontology we can examine the properties associated with it. The superstitious object, as a thoroughly disengenuous creation, is one of the pair in a Derridean privileged binary, in this case the natural/superstitious binary. Elements in a Derridean binary are asymmetrically profiled, where the element that receives the greater positive profiling is "privileged" over the other. Here, the element, "natural", is privileged over the element "superstitious" on the grounds that it is shown by an examination of only the elements (natural and superstitious) themselves. However, and logically, a third source is required for a relative valuation of two independent elements. This source is found in a value system that is independent of, but supervenes on, the two elements in the binary. Such a system can be the set of values or taboos held by a culture, and is necessarily veiled to justify the value judgement. For example, the social application of a dogmatic materialism leads to the formation of a superstitious object configured in the natural/superstitious Derridean binary.

As an example we can use gods cause thunder. A social mileu that supports materialism, such as science, may want to impose physicality or hideable object behaviour on all object causal nexus. Such a construal if applied to gods immediately creates a superstitious object where non-material gods "switch" to material or hideable object behaviours and back. This new superstitious object called gods exhibits reciprocal (A affects B, B affects A) Newtonian object causality while exhibiting non-Newtonian object behaviours in other scenarios, such as gods speaking to men. However, gods need not be a superstitious object exhibiting ontological switching: god-causality can be a metaphor for the inevitability of fate, or be an assertion built on or supporting the premiss of a reality whose material facts must be identified through a non-material identifying framework such as a Kantian transcendental idealism, or Wittgensteinian language game, or gods.

The superstitious object is not a mystical object it must quickly be noted. The mystical object does not "switch" and belongs to the non-hideables which vanish and appear without empirical redress: Lockian secondary, tertiary properties or phenomenological. For example, colours and gods cannot be hidden, they simply vanish and appear, and they cannot be empirically found.

2) The second supernatural object of science also seems to have bad parentage. This object finds a role in justifying certain theoretical posits in evolution theory and psychiatry and the neurosciences. For example, most conclusions of psychiatry and neuroscience regarding "causes" of mental illness are grounded on a reductionist didactic or connotation imposed on the brain/mind naming binary, where mind identifies brain objects. This imposition creates a privileged binary where the same two elements are now involved in a (bogus) epistemological exchange grounded on a Newtonian causality. To assert that an association (naming/identifying schema) between mind and matter is a reciprocal or Newtonian causality the mind must switch from one type of object behaviour to another, from the non-hideables to the hideables - hence becomes a superstitious object.

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(* Popper:
But I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation. In other words: I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience. (1959) )

Is Mathematics a contingent element in the ad infinitum of legitimacy?

2011-04-16T10:17:00.000-07:00

Mathematics and ordinary language cannot show that a set of signs is not mathematical or semantic.
For example x+2=2x-2.
This set of signs is assumed to be a mathematical expression by working with it, mathematically, to assess it for truth or falsity. The conclusion, that the set of signs is false because it leads to a contradiction, misses the target completely: the set of signs x+2=2x-2 is not false, but rather is not a legitimate mathematical expression. There are no false mathematical expressions.

In working out the truth or otherwise of a mathematical or semantic expression we must make the assumption ("A") that what merely looks mathematical or semantic is in fact mathematical or semantic; otherwise, we are unable to work with it and find out if the signs yield up as a valid mathematical or semantic expression. There is no system that can, by its own rules, show that a particular set of signs actually belongs to it. First, we must make the assumption that a set of signs does belong to it, so that we can legitimately apply the rules and find out if the set of signs actually does, or does not, belong to the system. If it does not belong to the system then our assumption was wrong. Yet, without the assumption systems are impotent.

Here is an example of working with assumption A in practice, from a definition of proposition from Wiki:

In logic and philosophy, the term proposition (from the word "proposal") refers to either (a) the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or (b) the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence. The meaning of a proposition includes having the quality or property of being either true or false, and as such propositions are claimed to be truthbearers.

The author of the above quote takes assumption A on board, without knowing it, it seems. In b) a set of marks are offered as bearers (truth-trackers) of truth or falsity. Yet these marks do not show themselves to be legitimate syntax without either assuming that what looks legitimate is legitimate, or else by defaulting to position a).

To reiterate, the legitimacy of a set of marks, signs or syntax - that a set of signs is a possible candidate in a system - arises prior to its truth or falsity (Proof is another matter. Proof is a description of elements, legitimacy refers to the system itself). Truth and falsity, then, are the means by which we assess legitimacy. This is achieved by comparing the behaviour of the elements of our candidate syntax with the rules of behaviour imposed by the system.

And that is why Mathematics is a contingent element in the ad infinitum of legitimacy. By elements, I mean "systems", a of which mathematics is one. As systems are independent of each other then their presence in the framework of legitimacy is contingent, ad infinitum.

"Ad infinitum of legitimacy" is the name we give to any idea. The idea is independent of legitimacy, and indeed is its very foundation. The idea formulates the styles of legitimacy, styles such as mathematics.

The End of Species

2011-02-12T03:33:00.000-08:00

Evolution and the hegemony of species ends with Homo Sapiens. Now, we are about to witness the ascendance and hegemony of individuals.

The phrase "we will evolve into..." was always incoherent, even in evolution theory, for it could be a stand taken by any species. Species do not evolve, they die out and others come. Genetic engineering will, very soon, end the human species and replace it with individuals. Such individuals may exhibit preferred qualities, such as blue eyes, intelligence, elimination of aging, etc.

Individuals are prior to species and manifest as variations on behaviours of the life-forms that comprise a species, variations that are necessary for the continuance of life-forms. But, until the arrival of Homo Sapiens, species have been the dominant vessel for life.

Evolution theory is limited as a description of life-forms because it informs us that life is confined to species. Evolution, then, is not about survival, nor is it about the continuance of life-forms, but is about the continuance of species. In Homo Sapiens species comes to an end, and evolution, in theory and practice, will fall.

Speciesism

2011-02-05T18:34:00.000-08:00

(These are contributions to a running project)

All species manifest the same behaviour. Differences of behaviour are only found among individuals. Individuals are pan-species. Individual variation, manifested as differences of behaviour, arose with the onset of communion, but pan-species individualism is retained.

The behaviours we characterize as being unique to a particular person vary, as we know. Individualism arose before the creation of species, but it is still retained in the individuals that populate the class we call species.

Art is theft

2011-02-02T15:13:00.001-08:00

Art is theft. The aesthetic experience of art is trophyism. Trophyism is the pleasure of surveying stolen goods. Art lives through the sponsorship of another form of legal theft, the state lottery.

Art museums are the butcher's shop of culture. The goods of the heart of community are stolen by art critics, slain and displayed.

Art swims in blood. The blood is the blood of the culture whose artifacts have been torn from its heart, from the traditions and values that gave them meaning.

The art critic is the great urinator. His mark taints western art. Noses are lifted, for the mark is assessment. Assessed goods, or loot, are sold back to acolytes and the unsuspecting whose homes can be found adorned with micturated counterfeits.

This statement is false. Signpost or statement?

2011-01-17T14:58:00.000-08:00

This statement is false.

Which statement?

Should we suppose that statements can reach out from their page and point to their own position on it? in preference to the positions of other statements on the page, or missing statements?
And what is being pointed at? All we see at first is a collection of marks. But then the marks suggest the idea of a signpost - "this.." And "this" appears to be a signpost that points to a physical position on the page -"here"; "this statement.." does not allude to a meaningful statement - it simply flags up "here". But then we were there, looking at the marks before we recognised them as a signpost.

["This statement..." is physical (because positional) reductionism. There is no epistemological exchange across elements in a reduction. There is only one thing that can show or flag up "here", and it is not "this statement...", it is a life-form. That is why I have said that self-reference is animism.]

Rationalism and Naturalism

2010-12-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

(A short piece inspired by Prof. Norris, whose article appears following my own:)

Rationalism and naturalism have developed such firm and complex connections in our single, grand, integrated philosophical text that, like so many other simple philosophical ideas, their treatment to an ordinary language analysis would be academically impossible without years of research spent wandering through the labyrinth of their references.

This gives the amateur some advantage though, of course, no-one need listen to that species.

“Naturalism”, whether or not we like to privilege it with animal thuggery, is another word for immediate, primary, experience. This provides frameworks (such as “language games”) through which objects are manifested or identified. “Rationalism” is the activity of plunging one framework into another or assessing one framework from the viewpoint of another, thus reducing one of them to an object, while the other is its manifesting condition.

Thus the play of naturalism and rationalism is the play of framework and object. It is difficult to see how any animal, no matter how primitive cannot, in that case, be rational.

Naturalistic “events”, or the primacy of experience, brings us the manifesting, identifying, condition of rational objects. There are no rational objects per se because rationalism proposes no objects and requires the frameworks of naturalism to invoke/manifest/identify them.

This reduces rationalism to mere report - report of naturalism, as natural experience necessarily involves the play of frameworks.
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Ideas of the 21st Century
Ideas of the century: Naturalistic rationalism (36/50)
Written by: Christopher Norris | Appears in: Issue 50

Posted by: TPM ⋅ November 19, 2010
Christopher Norris continues our special 50th issue series

Man's evolution
It is my distinct impression (sorry to spoil the party) that this first decade of the second millennium hasn’t been especially rich in brilliant, original, ground-breaking, or even very useful and productive new philosophical ideas. To some extent – my impression again – this has to do with the increasingly specialised character and the consequent narrowing of focus typical of so much work in the homegrown “analytic” tradition. Allied to that has been the impact, in Britain at least, of an academic culture predominantly given over to a short-term, results-based notion of “research” in philosophy and other disciplines. But it is also the upshot of a problem that goes much further back and which now – especially during this past decade – has come to strike a good many philosophers as involving a basic and highly damaging misconception. This is the supposed conflict between rationalism and naturalism, one that has long been apt to break out in various forms and contexts of debate, from philosophy of science and epistemology to philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and (latterly) cognitive psychology.
On the widely-held incompatibilist view, rationalism involves a firm commitment to certain guiding or founding precepts, chief among them the priority of reasons over causes in matters of human understanding, self-knowledge, and moral conscience. This must entail a flat rejection of naturalism, which – at least in its full-strength versions – is taken to involve a more or less overt denial of the human capacity to engage in certain kinds of rationally oriented enquiry whose exercise requires the willed deployment of just such autonomous cognitive and intellectual powers. On the contrary: that we can have full-strength naturalism and full-strength rationalism without excessive conceptual strain is a fact about human beings and their place in the world that follows directly from their nature as thinking animals. More precisely, as the classical adage has it, this follows from their peculiar nature as creatures constitutionally “capable of reason” rather than creatures somehow guaranteed to be “rational” simply in virtue of that very nature.
This possibility could have been lost to view only through the curious effect of bifurcated vision brought about by the grip of Cartesian notions on so much of our everyday commonsense as well as our more specialised philosophical thinking. The very word “thinking” comes with a large burden of associated crypto-Cartesian ideas about the mind as a realm of private or inner goings-on. However it is wrong to suppose that such talk of “thinking”, “reflecting”, “imagining”, or any of their manifold analogues, must involve some residual dualist commitment. After all, it has been among the chief lessons imparted by anti-dualists from Gilbert Ryle to the present that we can carry on using such language just so long as we accept that it denotes nothing like Descartes’ disembodied res cogitans or that notion of the solitary, self-absorbed revolver of private thoughts famously captured in Rodin’s sculpture Le Penseur.
There is no reason why the thoroughgoing naturalist should not be thoroughly committed to a language of thinking, reflecting, meaning, intending, and so forth. Indeed it is the besetting vice of many debates in this area to set the terms or raise the stakes in such a starkly uncompromising way that any talk of that kind must be seen either as a striking vindication of the “old” presumptively discredited dualist paradigm, or else as an unfortunate backsliding into antiquated “folk-psychological” beliefs. Yet of course the latter case cannot be made without the most basic vocabulary of “belief” and all its near-synonyms, unless by going some tortuous (e.g., behaviourist) ways around in order to avoid it while often smuggling it back through the use of proxy or surrogate terms. However there is no need for all these credibility-stretching ploys and stratagems if one accepts the thesis that naturalism and rationalism are perfectly compatible just so long as the naturalism finds room (as surely it must) for an adequate range of cognitive capacities or rational-discursive powers, while the rationalism is duly purged of any lingering appeal to Cartesian, that is, first-person-indexed and presumptively infallible epistemic grounds.
Still one needs to acknowledge the depth of resistance to naturalism of this sort amongst many philosophers. Naturalism represents a sizeable challenge or a downright threat to the widespread consensus regarding the need for philosophy to carve out a certain elective domain within which its own practitioners can enjoy, perhaps to a higher since more self-conscious degree, the kind of intellectual and ethical autonomy that properly distinguishes human beings (or persons) from other sentient creatures and everything else besides. Accepting it at anything like full strength, as opposed to the various scaled-down versions currently on offer, can feel very much like just giving up on philosophy and switching to one or other of those nowadays more naturalistically-oriented disciplines (from sociology to cognitive psychology) that have shown greater willingness to place due emphasis on the second term of their contested designation as social or human sciences. That philosophers nevertheless can and should do so – can without any such affront to their intellectual dignity and should as a matter of retaining that dignity on respectable, scientifically conversant and humanly responsible terms – is a case that has been made with increasing energy and conviction during the past decade.
Further reading
Re-Thinking the Cogito: naturalism, rationalism and the venture of thought, Christopher Norris (Continuum, 2010, forthcoming)
Christopher Norris is distinguished research professor in philosophy at Cardiff University

The Classifications of Object

2010-12-10T13:41:00.000-08:00

In the following remarks I describe objects and appearances in terms of their behaviours and so hope to put aside the competing ontological frameworks in which they are traditionally cast. I call object descriptions that arise in this ontologically-neutral framework "objects".

Wittgenstein also offers a generic formulation that appears to make no distinction between ontologies in his Tractarian declaration that the world is the totality of facts. But the book is a transcendentally ideal way of looking at world syntax - that elements or objects are described, identified, and manifested through manifesting frameworks that are themselves not subject to the laws or behaviours of their elements. Thus we find differences in the manner of the appearance of frameworks and their elements. Against Wittgenstein (and Kant as it happens), transcendental realists suppose that elements or objects are themselves the source of their appearance or actuality. However, this approach ignores the differences that are clearly evident in object behaviours. I suggest that it is the behaviours of objects, rather than the source of their manifestation that marks the difference between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism.

The Tractarian distinction between things that could be said and things that could only be shown was never abandoned by Wittgenstein who sought to enlarge its library through later ideas such as language games. As I have indicated, the saying/showing distinction is pertinent here as it highlights the two types of object behaviour that I argue is a sufficient, and ontologically-neutral, description of object types. I return to Wittgenstein later in this short essay.

Ontologies are invariably represented as privileged or mismatched binaries, such as realism/antirealism, subjective/objective, and less formally, though no less pertinent, rationality/superstition which also offers a unique ontology. I hope, then, to leave behind the traditional forms in which ontologies are cast and so avoid the ad hoc, often hidden values that accompany them.
I propose two types of object behaviour:

i) appearing/vanishing, and
ii) revealing or unveiling/being hidden

- (i), above, maps to Wittgensteinian "showing" in this essay, and ii) maps to "saying".

There are three, possibly four, types of object in the world, two of which are the subject of physics. Of these four types of object, one is a material object; another is an object of experience (such as colours or sounds); and the third type of object is a quantum object. The fourth class of object I refer to as the "superstitious object" (this is a noun phrase) as this is the common term by which we refer to it. Such a description is unwelcome but, for clarity's sake, is the term I will work with, in these notes at least.

These four object classes correspond to four permutations on the appearance/revelation binary ("revelation" is taken in the non-religious sense of being "revealed"). The ontological distinctions of these permutations are found in their respective nexus. By "nexus" I refer to the unit of behaviour that is exemplified by appearance/disappearance in one case, and hidden/revealed in the other case, and also to their mixed permuatations. For example, the nexus of the hidden/revealed binary describes material objects.

So let us analyse the phrase "the properties of objects" in terms of their nexus; in this case the nexus are simply "properties" and "objects". Then the nexus that we call "property" corresponds to the type of object whose behaviour can be described in terms of the nexus of the appearance/disappearance binary. And the nexus that we call "objects" refers in this case to material objects because it corresponds to the type of object whose behaviour can be described in terms of the nexus of the hidden/revealed binary. And this, of course, is how material objects behave. They neither appear nor vanish, but can only be hidden and revealed.

Material objects can be hidden or revealed but cannot vanish or appear without making redress elsewhere. "Redress" is not a property of the object per se but a description of the manner of manifestation of an object in its framework. Thus the annihilation of matter is redressed by the appearance of energy. On the other hand, objects that simply vanish and appear do not make redress. Thus the appearance of colours need not be accommodated for by a change elsewhere in the system in which they appear.

The above considerations are suggestive of a significant idea which bears upon the description of ordinary objects and appearances that I am laying out: without a framework of presentation the nexus of the four classes of object become indistinguishable. That is, without a framework of presentation material objects (to use their common descriptions), the objects of appearances or experience (Lockean "secondary" qualities, colours, sounds, etc.), and quantum and superstitious objects are indistinguishable. That idea leads to another: the monad object neither manifests nor does not manifest. By "manifest" I unspecifically refer to object behaviours. By a "framework of presentation" I describe the existential dependence of an object on others of its type, and the totality of instances of its type I refer to as its presentation. Thus the framework of presentation of the objects that are described by the hidden/revealed nexus (material objects) is simply the physical world of science that we talk as immediately presenting itself to us. Although they provide the foundations for a description of the association of objects, I do not further explore the nature of frameworks here (see concluding paragraph).

It must be noted that without the description of quantum and superstitious objects I could have reduced the descriptions of objects to their "redress" behaviours. For example, objects corresponding to the nexus of "vanishing and appearing" (appearances or "experiential objects" as I have referred to them), simply reference objects that make no redress in their manifestation. Whereas, objects corresponding to the nexus of "hidden/revealed simply refers to objects that make redress in their manifestation. However, the objects described in 3) and 4) (below) describe behaviours of vanishing and appearing yet also make redress elsewhere in the system.

Having briefly considered the foundations of the model I can now proceed with a summary and discussion of the types of object in the world that humankind has identified:

1) Material objects obey the laws of material objects: they do not vanish and appear but they can be hidden and revealed.
2) Perceptual or experiential objects obey the laws of experience: they vanish and appear but cannot be hidden or revealed. Such objects include colours, sounds, and Wittgensteinian frameworks such as language games.
3) Quantum objects seem, or are claimed, to vanish and appear like experiential objects, yet also can be hidden and revealed like material objects. This conjunction of object behaviours brings the quantum object close in description to that fourth class of objects whose members are unfortunately referred to as "superstitions" (but it is important I think to acknowledge that the invention of the superstitious object belongs to science alone):
4) A superstitious object is an object of experience made, or switching to, a material object (mind over matter, animism, etc), or a material object made, or switching to, an experiential object ("vanishing", miracles, etc).

Examining 3) and 4) in more detail, the quantum object doesn't quite fit the bill as a superstitious object - even though the quantum object, taken to be material (where materiality is a necessary if not sufficient description of the quantum object), appears to be affected by "measurement" by an experiencing observer according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum objects.

Why isn't the quantum object taken as a superstitious object if it behaves as one, that is, if it behaves as if it is affected by objects that are not material? The reason is that the quantum object isn't taken to be merely either "material" or "experiential" in behaviour. Unlike superstitious objects, it does not switch from one behaviour or nexus type to the other. We give the quantum object some conceptual leeway in this regard: it is that class of objects that, unlike material objects, can both vanish and appear and also, unlike experiential objects, be hidden and revealed. This makes quantum objects different from a superstitious object which changes its objectual status from material to experiential and vice versa.

The ontology of the superstitious object is interesting for a number of reasons. I have presented two determinants of an objects ontology - appearing and being revealed. The number of permutations of two elements (A and B, here) would normally be three. And, perhaps, this is one reason why the superstitious object is regarded with disdain - it appears to offer a fourth permutation of A and B, that is, where A switches to B or B switches to A. As far as I am aware, such a switching of signs in the sciences of signs or syntax (logic, mathematics, etc.) is not "allowed". If we take the philosopher/logician Willard Quine at his word and make fundamental changes to the sign sciences - logic in this case - to suit the pragmatics of experience, then there is no reason why we should not in principle "allow" a logic of superstitious objects or objects that switch their nexus - subject, of course, to the proviso that we can find an example of such an object that it might be endorsed by a pragmatically-driven logic. Such a task could not be left to a pragmatic science as science only deals with the nexus of material objects. Finding such an example would force the relevant changes to the sciences of signs; then, indeed, we would find a schism developing in pragmatism itself as its sciences and logic support doctrinally incompatible objects.

But even if the existence of the superstitious object as I have here described it is, after all, only a theoretical proposal, then the sciences of syntax, as sciences per se, are still under threat from that other type of object - the experiential object (or, less accurately, Lockean secondary qualities). The logical, syntactical behaviour of the sign that represents the experiential object would not be allowed as it would vanish and appear without the sort of balancing or redress that normally accompanies the behaviours of signs in logic, mathematics, and the sciences; for example, we don't introduce signs half-way through an equation without balancing them appropriately.

To catch up with the Wittgenstein connection: the only "science" of signs that does allow the behaviour of signs to vanish and appear would be Wittgenstein's, whose syntax (as expounded in the Tractatus) arises or is "shown". Tractarian syntax looks the same as any syntax except that the author wishes to acknowledge, as any author of syntax ought to acknowledge (even if through "elucidation", hints and hunches) that syntax itself is an experiential object (or "object of acquaintance" as Russell might have put it) and behaves in the manner I have described (2), above). Thus in the Tractatus we find syntax per se appearing, and not being revealed, as an experiential object, while the elements or the signs of syntax themselves are indicative of the behaviour of the material objects of science - the hide/reveal binary. That is why Tractarian syntax cannot represent Tractarian syntax, indeed why any syntax cannot represent syntax - the signs and the system of signs represent two different types of object. (This description says more than a theory of types) Such a distinction between system and sign is not made in, for example, a Goedellian treatment of mathematics.

Further, if Wittgenstein gave up the idea of the General Form of Proposition it was because he wished to recognise the fact that propositions, as well as the syntactical framework itself, were distinct from the elements of syntax and could not be derived from them. In my model, the nexus of manifestation of the elements and their framework are distinct, and representative of 1) and 2) above, respectively. While Wittgenstein changed his framework of language from a phenomenalistic to a physicalist one to accommodate that insight, the phenomenalistic framework was, nevertheless, retained for that (syntactically) "unsayable" framework or "picture" that was distinct from its (physicalist) elements of syntax.

Finally, the above remarks provide an outline for a potentially much larger project concerning the nature and classification of objects. At this stage I have not, for example, been able to integrate the points made in the above discussion with the observation that material objects cannot appear or identify themselves. This was one of Kant's point, a point that was missed by Kant's transcendentally real interpreters. The relationship or rather congress/association of incommensurate object behaviours/nexus, such as I have described them, could be further examined to throw light on the coincidence of material and experiential object behaviours; notwithstanding the problematic behaviours of those two other types of object - the quantum object and "superstitious" object.

Jingle Philosophy and the Rise of Commercial Animism

2010-11-19T06:28:00.000-08:00

"Philosophy" is a merchandising tool that promotes animism and totemism for the interests of commerce. Except for Wittgenstein and perhaps Kant, philosophy has always addressed the empiricism of commerce.

Animism and totemism are employed at all stages of social and technical developments as tools of camouflage, misdirection, and enticement. Commerce employs philosophers to promote the animistic text to those who are interested in, or by, non-empirical, literary-syntactical forms.

Philosophy has never been a foundation for the sciences, mathematics and logic; these are, independently, animistic and totemic studies.

The commercial jingle that is mainstream philosophy is transcendental realism. Transcendental realism is animistic and totemic because it promotes the idea that objects are, themselves, the source of their reality and are as they appear to be. Thus animistic and totemic objects immediately become commercially significant because they appear to be the sources and representatives of our own values.

Some of the goods and services that are supported or promoted by philosophy's animistic ethos include:
AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics. Here, dolls mimic human actions and appearances, and are ascribed an identity because of it.
Psychology and its pharmaceutics; here, the brain is anthropomorphised as an autonomous agent with functions and processes so that "mental" "disorders" and other social values can be made to appear physically grounded as facts.
Evolution theory, where chemical objects are ascribed identities or souls that can transmigrate across the boundary of death by replication; selling the idea of moral advancement and improvement as physically identifiable facts.
Mathematics and logic; self-referencing entities animistically identify themselves, such as those encountered in Goedellian mathematics and the Cantorian slash, casting a shadow over syntax without actually encountering it.

Free Will

2010-11-16T05:07:00.000-08:00

We cannot be affected by the thing that we are. To say otherwise goes against the grammar of "affect".

That is why physicalism or any reductionist program that attempts to eliminate experience or reduce it to a description of a physical fact cannot deny free will without also denying any sort of will. For a single, undifferentiated physical object, like "the brain" does not, cannot, be affected by itself, and hence cannot inherently be determined.

Dennett's Animism

2010-11-09T05:33:00.001-08:00

Dennetts "intentional stance" describes an animistic strategy that predicts how behavioural systems will behave.

Animism, of course, is practised by those who depart from the scientific world view. Dennett does his bit of departing in his own magical brand of intentionality, which I would like to call animism or “animistic intentionalism” - the idea that systems “behave”. Dennett, of course, claims that the intentional stance is, at the end of the day, a convenient fiction and that if we want to approach a more real description of behaviour we should abandon "folk psychology" and look to a physical description. But it is in the physical description where Dennett's animistic intentionality is to be found.

Dennett needs to identify necessarily arbitrary sets of physical events (such as “brain” events) as being associated with intentionality or behaviour. By abandoning objects of intentionality in favour pf physical objects Dennett must find a means of identifying the relevant physical objects. As this cannot be done by the intentional stance, which he has abandoned, it can only be done by magically animating these conveniently pre-identified physical events with their own intentionality. This is the only way that Dennett can hope to persuade us that these physical systems can be, and are themselves, identified as the true objects that stand behind the intentional object. This animistic intentionality can then bring us, by virtue of the physical placement of its objects, a better degree of certainty about behaviour than the non-physically placed, hence not-so-certain, elements of "folk psychology".

Dennett has done this sort of thing before. By carving up an object in terms of its various properties he contradictorily presents scenario's in which there is, and is not, a relationship between them. For Dennett, there is a relationship between properties in the object itself, but there is no relationship regarding the actuality of the properties, as his argument against "folk psychology" demonstrates. His difficulty lies in front of him. The properties of an object are neither in nor out of relationship, but are associations.

The Philosophy of Evolution Theory

2010-11-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

A philosophical/grammatical analysis of the events described by evolution theory does not lend any support to the evolutionary concepts of survival, advancement, replication, or selfishness:

Evolution is marked by death, not survival. Nothing survives.
Advancement of a species means its dying out and replacement. Extinction of a species means its dying out and nothing taking its place.
Nothing is replicated, for the identity that supposedly marks out the object of replication isn't itself replicated.
Evolutionary-driven selfishness as life's purpose does not refer to life's forms, but refers to imagined forms that populate the invented world described by evolution theory and its other-worldly laws of replication and survival.

In evolution theory we are witnessing the unacknowledged birth of a new religion - endorsed as such by its commitment to a type of supernaturalism. It is a religion for a modern, technical age, a religion founded on ideas taken from a Biblical template. The idea of "advancement of the species", like the golden calf, steals the actualities of personal and social transformation and uses them to drive the idea and promise of material transcendence and advancement of the species. This material transcendence, in turn, is supported by evolution theory's idea of the replication and transmigration of identity of individuals and species across the boundary of death - a supernatural idea, surely. This idea also supports evolution's moral idea of a selfishness that purportedly strives, selfishly, for replication (aka transmigration), for which the antidote is Dawkinian altruism: more Biblical themes.

Philosophy needs to come to evolution theory for it is sorely in need of it. I think that we will be surprised by what we find, and by the way in which we have misled ourselves on the nature of our own project - evolution theory.

Possible worlds

2010-11-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

The idea that all possibilities "actually" happen can realise no greater possibility than the situation that is described by what we imagine might "actually" happen.

It follows that if we can't entertain the actuality of ONE possible world, then we cannot entertain the actuality of ANY possible world.

Frege's Context Principle

2010-11-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

Frege's context principle, picked up by Wittgenstein, goes like this:
"Never ask for a meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition"

Although it has the force of an 11th commandment, the "never" in Frege's idea points to his failure to understand the whole situation that he is speaking about, and so he can only validate the rule that he wants to draw from it by using an injunction.

So let me fill in for Frege by first pointing out what probably goes without saying: words never have a meaning, but we give marks a meaning.

The missing idea in Frege's Context Principle must surely be this:
Words have meanings in a context, and where there is only a word (or rather the sign for one) then a context is mentally seconded to it.
That is, words, even single words, always occur in the context of a proposition. It just behoves us to be more specific as to what proposition the "word in isolation" is alluding to.

Argument 4

2010-10-19T19:57:00.000-07:00

Argument is cherry-picking a fact in service of another.

The survival metaphor

2010-10-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

It is no contrived technical artifact or literary coincidence that the term "survival", in its ordinary usage, has been tagged to the descriptions of the inanimate chemical reactions and geographical physical placements of the anthropomorphised chemicals that we care to call "genes". Such surreptitious tagging transforms chemistry to life-alchemy and geography to "environment".

Why is this? The "survival" metaphor was needed to serve a popular predeliction for using the facts of science to make some moral stand, in this case a stand on life and its forms. Thus, an antidote to the selfish behaviour that evolutionists believe attended any object that "survives" was offered in Dawkinian "altruism".

Such imaginative moral ventures fall at the very point at which they appear to be justified. For example, an evolutionary antidote for selfish behaviour is only necessary if an object adjusts its behaviour to survive its own death. Such behaviour evolutionists call "passing-on", replication, copying or similar. Yet, it is clear that genes, life-forms, or more generally "survival-objects", do not survive their own deaths in the chemicals (genes, etc) that they produce, nor could they, even metaphorically or analagously, be expected to. These are consequences of their being physical, chemical facts.

It was for moral reasons that the "selfish" evolutionary "metaphor" was invented. This invention has been passed off as a technical ellipsis, or as "art-literary" metaphor. And its invention is also illustrative of a need that even scientists have - transcendence; in this case to construct a system where death appears to be transcended, or at least a contortion of it. These needs have tainted the language of the physical study of evolution. It is regrettable that such careless, extravagent, moral ventures for the most part go unnoticed, and even more regrettable that they are promoted even when they are, however dully, noticed.

Framework 1. Skeptical Redundancy

2010-10-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

To say that something "exists" is to place an object in its framework(s). If the frameworks are "independent" and "imagination" and these frameworks are incommensurable, then I have no choices given to me that would meet, or lay waste, my preference for any of my objects.

Animism in the sciences

2010-10-10T17:33:00.000-07:00

Scientists today practice animism: the brain is supposed to have functions, purposes, and processes; robots are supposed to have identity because they mimic our actions and look like us; information is supposed to travel through the air and be resident in physical objects. And of course, and simply, AI.

Logic and mathematics provide Science with its higher foundations, but there is nothing esoteric about the animism that backs them up.

By employing Cantor's diagonal slash Godel animated the syntax in his incompleteness theorems. These were an animistic variation on the idea that symbols and propositions can, under their own steam as it were, refer to their own position in a (mathematical) text. Elsewhere, old favourites such as an object is identical to itself, A=A, and "this sentence is false (true)" become strangely animated, as if endowed with anthropomorphic hands, with the power to point back to theiir own position on the page which they are printed on.

This casual animism baptises all mathematical objects with a hidden identity, an identity that can, like the genie in the bottle, be summoned for some (mathematical) task. And no greater summons is more evident than Goedel's incompleteness theorems which, so the promo goes, passes judgement on the whole mathematical enterprise and on the natural kingdom itself. This is ironic, as it is only in the natural kingdom that identity, as the same pundits have it, can be found.

Philosophy provides Science with its deepest foundations, but even here animism rules the roost. Most philosophers are "transcendental realists" that is, they believe that objects are themselves the source of their own properties and physical limits - animism.

Can a gene copy itself? Problems with identity.

2010-10-10T17:02:00.001-07:00

Can a gene copy itself?

A gene can build another like it, but there is no possibility of it surviving in its copy - a gene can't copy itself simply because identity is not copyable. Two things do not share the same identity simply because they are built the same. For example, if I made a "copy" of myself would I survive if I die and the copy lives?

The idea that "a gene copies itself" is an idea that models identity ("itself") on the model of a strange sort of physical object. It's as if identity itself were a physical object that could be duplicated like physical objects, but unlike physical duplication where two objects the same are still two objects, the duplication of the identity object remains unique as one object.

Now, the fact that X can be duplicated, and the identity of X can be duplicated yet still remain one, seems to break the association of the physical and the mental. It describes a set-up we have no knowledge of. In other words the idea that a "gene can copy itself" isn't a description of either physical reality or mental (identity) reality.

Intelligence 2

2010-10-10T16:29:00.000-07:00

Summary: Intelligence is specific to a particular environment. A particular environment is populated by its own unique objects, and these objects are used to assess intelligence. As environments are particular to a species it follows that there is no pan-species scale of intelligence and that, consequently, intelligence is not manifested by any species but only by individuals within a species that share those objects.

Intelligence is assessed by assessing outcomes. Outcomes are profiled within a particular environment that supports skill sets particular to that environment. Intelligence describes a person's capacity to work or fit in with the environment associated with his/her species. Thus, a human is no more or less intelligent than an amoeba: each has its own unique environment or set of objects and a corresponding unique set of skills.

Intelligence is not manifested by any species or any type of object, whether animate or inanimate. This does not preclude the manifestation or measurement of intelligence between individuals within a species. This proposal configures intelligence as transcendentally ideal; that is, the objects of intelligence (species-specific individuals) are manifested through a framework. In this case the framework is a species. A species supports a unique set of objects that are enjoyed by its individuals. This set is commonly (and, invariably, anthropomorphically) referred to as the species' environment. It follows that without that framework intelligence cannot be manifested or measured.

Intelligence manifests between individuals that share an environment or set of world objects. Environments are not sets of geographical points but are unique to a species. Species share a geography, but species-specific individuals share an environment. For example, bacteria and I share the geographical kitchen, but our kitchen environments are different. Not only are our environments different, but they also contain different objects, objects that cannot be recognised by the other species (hence Wittgenstein's reminder that if a lion could speak we could not understand it).

Intelligence tests present us with objects that are specific to the human environment, simple objects such as signs or letters and numbers, and the cultural habits and mores that configure them as object-outcomes. This capacity that establishes IQ and establishes how we fit into our environment is itself a culturally-contingent, value-laden judgement, and because of that, IQ has no re-identifiable points on its scale - it is not absolute, and there are no objects, either animate, inanimate, species, or particular individuals, that can be reidentified by means of it.

Intelligence may be associated with consciousness but there is no epistemological gain to be made from making, or denying, the link. It is all the same to establishing a human-individual or amoeba-individual scale of intelligence whether or how the human or ameoba is conscious or not. In its business of being for itself the amoeba's "inner" life might be a blaze of light: it would not matter, not least because it could be argued that in the absence of common amoeba-human objects we could not, on principle, know of such light - and it would not be any of our business if, like a god, we could know.

What is Art?

2010-10-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

Artists assemble objects or signs and recasts them in the framework of community and its good intentions.

Art that is assessed is counterfeit. The art critic deals in stolen goods and counterfeits. The originals are fenced in the museums of Art - the butcher's slab of culture - and displayed as trophies that command money and influence.

The aesthetics of contemporary Art is the aesthetics of trophyism. The aesthetics of trophyism is the pleasure of viewing one's own stolen goods or else admiring the spoils of others.

Wittgenstein's Picture Theory

2010-10-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Wittgenstein never gave up the picture "theory" - that statements "picture" the facts, despite much being said that he did. The philosophical gulf between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations is not as great as we might suppose.

Wittgenstein later amplified the Tractarian picture "theory" as "language games" in his Philosophical Investigations. The only distinction between them is that the picture theory pictured syntax while language games pictured syntax and semantics. The conclusion to be drawn is that semantics, that is, the many ways in which language is commonly employed, offers a much greater display of possible picture forms than syntax (logic) alone. This eventually made Wittgenstein give up the idea of a syntactical - logical - world endorsement, and the idea of the hegemony of a logically perfect language.

The reason why Wittgenstein was initially concerned only with the picturing of syntax is a historical artifact of academia. Russellian/Fregean logic, which Wittgenstein was introduced to and which he eagerly, youthfully and quickly, absorbed, and even logic today, is entirely syntactical. Logic did, and still does, looks after itself. Signs and symbols get shuffled about like beads on an abacus. Wittgenstein, through the influence of Sraffa, eventually saw through this historically forced, syntactically austere circumstance and began to realise that logic was not, after all, capable, in its "crystalline" syntactical purity, of picturing the entire world.

The picture "picture" (which is better than saying the picture "theory") cannot itself be made as a proposition of course because the statement that makes it or presents it itself employs a picture in making it. Rather, the picture is "shown", it is implicit in any coherent sentence whatever: Wittgenstein's Tractatus could have been about anything - the same point would have been made. But Wittgenstein is kind: he employs "elucidations" to invoke or suggest what he wants to indicate. But as Wittgenstein was committed to a logical, syntactically presented world he could not acknowledge the elucidatory form itself except as syntactical "nonsense" or as one of the species that "must be passed over in silence" (Tract. 7), which amounts to the same thing; though at the time he made no explicit link between them.

Thus we find Wittgenstein's proposal that his own propositions in the Tractatus were nonsense. Syntactically they were nonsense for the reasons I gave above. Equally, and non-syntactically, they were "that which must be passed over in silence", although the latter also refers to the non-syntactical framework of ethics. Here, even in the Tractatus there was a recognition that there were non-syntactical frameworks, though Wittgenstein placed these outside (passing over in silence) the framing structure of the "picture" because he was still commited to the syntactical, logical, world view.

Regarding Wittgensteinian pictures generally, Wittgensteinian Language Games didn't in the end, merge all pictures together in the nicely logical, syntactical way that typifies the presentation of syntactical elements or physical objects. The distinction between objects or the elements of syntax and the "elements" of pictures is that the former are commensurable and the latter are not. Most importantly, and a necessary condition for that, is that pictures are frameworks or necessary conditions for syntactical representation, and indeed for any object whatever (for example the framework of colour is not a colour but is the manifesting condition for any colour whatever). In this, Wittgenstein follows Kant.

Finally, as a historical addendum, the current inability of logicians and mathematicians to make much sense of Wittgensteinian logic and his distinction between syntax and the manifesting conditions for syntax, assists in piling error on error. Goedel, for example, unlike Wittgenstein and indeed Kant, failed to appreciate the logical distinction between syntactical and system or "picture" elements, a failure that culminated in the incompleteness theorems, theorems so often endorsed by the new transcendental realists (syntax is all) who make up the modern generation of logicians and mathematicians.

Intelligence

2010-10-08T11:06:00.000-07:00

If we examine the idea of intelligence for its philosophical grammar then it seems that the amoeba is as intelligent as the human.

Just as the human brain is not more intelligent than the human spleen, so the human spleen is not more intelligent than the human cell, and the human cell is not more intelligent than the amoeba. We are led to the odd conclusion that the amoeba is as intelligent as the human. But then each employs a unique set of skills. Each are fully embedded and competent within their particular environment. Environments are filled with unique, species-specific objects.

THERE IS NO PAN-SPECIES SCALE OF INTELLIGENCE.
Intelligence is not manifested by a species. There is no pan-species scale of intelligence because there are no pan-species environmental objects. Intelligence is manifested by individuals within a species as a variable. This is because only within the individuals of a species are there similar environmental objects to be found, and it is this similarity that allows a scalar, comparative, "intelligence", scale to be introduced. The anthropomorphic pleasure of assuming that all animals are quasi-humans living in quasi-human environments within which they can be comparatively assessed for intelligence is a persistent, regrettable, hominid brag.

THERE CAN BE NO ADVANCEMENT OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE.
An advancement of our species intelligence doesn't describe an advance in intelligence. It describes a new environment populated with new objects, and hence describes a new species. Advancing the intelligence of our species means its annhilation and replacement by something other; and that is a warning to us all.

Against Altruism

2010-10-07T15:57:00.000-07:00

Altruism is against all life because altruism is against all selves. Thus, I am against altruism.

Altruism is a more corrupt state than selfishness. This is because selfishness is for one self, while altruism is for no selves. Life, on the other hand, is for itself and for all selves.

People and social movements that promote altruism, such as Richard Dawkins, Christianity and science generally, promote altruism because they are against life. For them, life is driven by inherent sin, selfishness, or stuporous mechanics, for which the remedy is altruism by rote.

Hear this. If selfishness drives the penultimate nail in the coffin of Life, then altruism drives the last.

Argument 3

2010-10-07T04:53:00.001-07:00

"Argument" is not concerned with facts. Facts manifest in their presentation. Argument is the art or technique of the concealment of facts. As facts cannot be concealed then "arguing the facts" misrepresents all facts.

Argument 2

2010-10-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

Wittgenstein and other good philosophers often dissolve disagreement by showing that both parties are working to a common model or framework that is incoherent, iconical or grounded on external assumptions (like Derridian priviliged binaries), assumptions that would, if they are revealed, undermine any arguments built on them.

For example, arguments serving the atheist/believer dichotomy could, in most (if not all) cases, be dismissed on the grounds that they are working with incoherent models of proof, or with showy, iconical, images invented from distortions of dead culture or tradition (contemporary Halloween and its horror kitsch), or with competing priviliged binaries that impose a value scalar on (two) mutually exclusive positions or arguments.

Freedom as universal cannabalism

2010-09-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

Insofar as the freedom of the individual is the freedom to regard all else as its environment, and hence consumable, then freedom is universal cannabalism.

And insofar as we are forced to sup on our own souls then both freedom and determinism yield to satiation.

Is Dawkins a Christian?

2010-09-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

Dawkins is our modern promotional agent for Darwinism. This short article is a timely warning against the old practice of miss-selling.

Dawkins is annoyed with the Church because it ignores Darwin. Darwin is Dawkins favourite thinker at the moment. But Dawkins, as I show, needs the essential spiritual teachings of the Church. So what does Dawkins do?

Dawkins rejects the objects and characters of the Bible menagerie and replaces them with Darwin’s and some of his own. But Dawkins wants to keep the Church’s message. He achieves it in this fashion:

“God” is replaced by “nature"; Deific creation is replaced by Copy(ing)”; intelligent design is replaced by Dawkinian animism; “human” is replaced by “gene”; “sin” is replaced by “selfishness”; “resurrection” is replaced by “survival”; the lineage of the prophets is replaced by "selection"; “sins, money-lenders and miracles” are replaced by Dawkin’s new product - “memes”; and “altruism”, - well, altruism - that remains the same, but no-one notices.

For example,
“Copying created genes”
is like
“God created humans”.

Both are supernatural actions. “Copying” is a supernatural act or process because the creation of a similar object (compare “God created man in his own image”) allows survival beyond death of the original. Also, if we can legitimately pose a “selfish gene” then we can equally legitimately pose a “suffering gene” through sinful or selfish actions. And Dawkins use of the most vital Christian message - humbleness through altruism, is given equal air-time by Dawkins, despite the fact that there are other, non-christian, models and interpretations of "selfishness" and "altruism".

Dawkins is a Christian in the Christian doctrinal essentials and leaves the message of the Bible intact; there is no alternative for him, we must suppose. Dawkins shows his denial of his christian beliefs when he popularizes the characters in his new Bible and makes fun of the characters and themes of the old Bible. But the Bible per se is Dawkins' world template.

And these are the intentions of a shifty, old-time, Christian missionary - Richard Dawkins - hamming up the old practice of mis-selling for a twentieth century audience.

What are Words and Language?

2010-09-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

We share a common framework (language) of invocation. When we are presented with meaningless shapes ("words") we do not learn a way of "interpreting" them, for the interpretation is already present - that these shapes are "language", and language is a task that invokes a response made in the common or public way.
Once we have interpreted shapes as presentations in the framework of language then the framework invokes a commonly held task or response (meaning). But the shapes ("words") themselves don't have meaning.

Smart Drugs

2010-09-22T14:31:00.000-07:00

Who sets the task that require us to do more than we are naturally capable of doing and ought we to accommodate them?

Children can be persuaded to take drugs that can help them meet performance targets if we show disappointment with the fact that they cannot complete a task. And parents can be persuaded to give enhancing drugs to their children if we tell the parents that their child is ill becaue it can't complete a task. This is what is happening today.

This is why it is important to undermine a person's autonomy and happiness of self if we want to promote performance enhancing drugs. The "fallen-enhanced" are the soldiers of the drug enhancement brigade. Only if people have a terminal sense of social failure and personal misery can they be expected to want to accomplish tasks that are naturally beyond them. Once they are infected with this angst of spirit then the idea of amelioration in the form of drugs is easily sold.

Yet it is strange that while we subject children to drugs that make them reach performance targets on the grounds that it makes them happy, no such ethical due is given to children who just take drugs to be happy. The only difference is that in the former we claim a cure is being engineered, or, we are offering them mature choices. The choice is Hobson's - rejection or the submission of autonomy to someone else's values.

Argument 1

2010-09-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

There are no logical arguments. Tautologies, contradictions and deductions show nothing or else show facts that are already in full view.

There are no scientific arguments. Science deals in facts.

Then let us be square, for argument's sake. Argument is about raising voices, descending fists, and lighting fuses.

Kant's Things in Themselves and Wittgenstein's Unsayable

2010-07-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

Kant says (to the effect that) we must assume that there is an object that lies behind phenomenal objects/appearances (or however he puts it) to give them their meaning or sensible presence. This object cannot be represented in phenomenal syntax (sensibility).

Likewise, we must assume that the syntax of Tractarian language has an object lying behind it that gives the syntactical elements their meaning. This object cannot be represented in Tractarian syntax.

Now, Kant does not want to provide us with unfamiliar items so he calls "things in themselves" "objects" - because we all know what an object is. Wittgenstein calls his "object" the "unsayable". We all know that there are some things that cannot be put into words.

Kant and Wittgenstein are transcendental idealists because they acknowledge that there are things afoot in the world that are responsible for things, but that these things afoot cannot be represented by the things they are responsible for. They are either "shown" (Wittgenstein), or made apparant to the understanding (Kant).

2010-04-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

Are the Brain Sciences trashing the Human Wardrobe?

I argue that the brain sciences necessarily, and not merely contingently, place limits on our knowledge of the experiential wardrobe of humanity; that is, they restrict our knowledge of the range and possibilities of human experience. I examine this from an empirical and philosophical perspective. Related to that argument is another: the brain sciences limit their own epistemological sources (the "wardrobe" or database of human experience), and that the restriction of these sources is a cause for concern.

Empirical argument
The experiential map of the brain (ultimately, even the brain itself) is constructed in the laboratory from reports of experience. What counts as an experience or an emotion is, in turn, a contingent eventuality, grounded on cultural mores. As such, our relationship with the brain sciences is not instructive but prescriptive.

Nevertheless, the popular sentiment is that the brain sciences are yielding important information that may one day save our lives. And there is no doubt that technical wizardry can contribute to the successful identification and treatment of what we call physical disease; but that, I argue, is the only novel information that these sciences can yield. As such, the technical soundness of the pragmatics of physical amelioration is not my concern here.

We need not enter a dense philosophical debate to be aware of the fact that an examination of physical matter cannot yield the sort of experiential knowledge that the brain sciences are promoting as their own. No matter how advanced our measuring technique or how colourful our brain-scan, no physical read-out will ever tell us whether a brain is conscious or even if it is a brain. No mooted brain algorithm will demonstrate the value of an experience, or whether we are witnessing an illness. Brain tissues (and genes for that matter) simply do not flag up sounds, colours, values, experiences or illnesses - we read these into, and not from, the physical structure that we come to call the brain. That much understanding of the inherent logical and practical limits suffered by the brain sciences can be had, we hope, by everyone.

Philosophical argumentI argued above that experiential sources and reports are epistemologically primary in the brain sciences as it is these that outline the physical extent of brain structures, even the physical brain itself. In this sense, the brain can yield no experiential knowledge, but only knowledge of how to physically interfere with those experiences or emotions that we have already read into it: we cannot get out of this experiential map any more than we put in. Thus, no examination of a brain that is built on reports of experience can yield novel data about experience. The brain, so constructed, isn't a source of experiential knowledge. But there is a philosophical/logical reason for the fact that physical matter can't flag up non-physical, experiential events to a physical observer.

The relationship between a technically described brain and mind or experience isn't physically, causally reciprocal; where there is no reciprocal relationship epistemological exchange isn't possible. Any knowledge that is sourced between systems in a reduction is static, consisting of a conjunction of propositions taken from each independent system. While the syntax or propositions of each system are related and derivable within their own system, between systems there is no syntax, and propositions appear atomic.

For example, if A affects B physically, then B also affects A. We can determine A by inspecting B, and vice-versa. There is an exchange of information between A and B. But no such relationship exists if one takes mind to be supervenient upon matter, that is, where A affects B but B does not affect A . In that case, there is no reciprocal relationship and no informational exchange. Items in a supervenience or reduction are mapped, not related; and no new information can be obtained from a mapping.

Thus the error of reasoning that promotes the idea that brain studies can show us the extent of the experiential appareil of the human wardrobe is this: the elements of a mapping are erroneously, even willfully, taken as a reciprocal relationship, and hence mutually informative. That is, A mapped to B becomes A related to B. We can analyze this yet further. When A is mapped to B, B is identified by A. Likewise, logically, and as it is realized in practice, the brain is an organ that is identified by reports of experience. That which is employed to make an identification is not itself informed by what is identified. Only if there is a relationship between the identifier and the identified is there informational exchange between them. And for a relationship to obtain between a pair (mind and brain in this case), there must be a model that identifies the pair. No such model exists for mind and brain. Any claim that they are in a mutually informative relationship takes the model as given.

Brain scientists may, perhaps, grudgingly admit that they must work on both sides of this unbridgeable epistemological vacuum (between the technical/experiential camps) but there is a disturbing lack of critical intuition among the public who are only too ready to defer to the idea that brain science contributes to knowledge of our experiential selves. The vague ontological status of "the brain" as it is presented in technical manuals promotes this public view. The brain is offered as being not quite either physical or mental but as a metaphysical oxymoron, a hybrid object created from a supposed causal relationship between mind and matter. So created, this brain-object would magically seem capable of supporting mind over matter in an informational exchange between them.

Restricting the Human Wardrobe
As I argued above, the evolution of brain-based psychologies and sciences are necessarily split. While the technical arm may advance beyond our imagination, the experiential arm evolves independently. But what is important here is that it is the experiential arm that informs the very existence or physical limit of the objects that are the business of the physical, technical arm. It is the experiential arm that is, itself, knowledge of ourselves and the source of how we value and assess experience and emotion. It guides the whole construction of the technical map of the brain. The experiential arm is itself limited by cultural values, expectation and taboos, whether these are medically sourced or social. It is the experiential arm which limits our vision of the range of human experience.
It follows, then, that technically advanced brain studies can only mirror contemporary images of the mental, of what counts as an experience, a valid experience, and emotions, etc. Brain sciences must either freeze or shrink the data-base of the human psyche. Such studies can be grounded on and hence promote culturally idiosyncratic, taboo-driven or limited analyses of emotions and the values we place on them. Areas of the brain that are associated with, or mapped to (and not "related to") experience can only be obtained through culturally filtered reports of our experience. Culturally-contingent associations may disappear altogether with changes in the cultural milieu. And we cannot appeal to physical, brain data to ground our cultural experiential knowledge, as this physical data itself is assembled only from culturally biased reports of our experience. There is no physical data that will show us whether "anger" ought to be examined as "assertion", "losing control", pathology, etc.

I also pointed out, above, that the brain sciences can 1) freeze or inhibit and 2) neglect, the expression of the human natural wardrobe. Here are the ways in which that must occur:

1) The strength of the brain sciences lies only in the fact that they can provide tools that can forcibly change our experience; but even then such changes are also cast in the manifesting framework of local cultural values. Thus, any experiential analysis of the physical changes in the brain that are deemed to arise as a consequence of particular emotions or experiences are also subject to the same problem of circuitous logic. However, it also follows that such tools can force long-term changes either in the individual or in the species through physical brain-intervention based on fixed, skewed, culturally-blinded views of what counts as authentic experience and emotion. For example, it may be the case, though brain sciences would not reveal it, that PTSD is a healing mechanism (notably expounded in the works of Stanislav Grof); again, "autism" casts personality and self arbitrarily by social decree, in terms of a physical structure, while depression is a unique western invention that falls foul of epistemologically circuitous brain-based evidence. The latter two are examples of privileged binaries, where an attempt is made to assess relative values of two mutually exclusive elements (autistic/normal, depression/normal) by placing them on one arbitrary scale. No analysis of brain matter will yield these social pictures that build, and guide the significance of, the structural map of the brain.
2) The medical model of the brain sciences models transitional or painful experience on the model of physical pain in that it can be taken away without harmful consequence. This neglects the ramifications and interrelationships of experience that we find in our everyday knowledge of ourselves, and so by example inhibits open inquiry into the dimensions of human experience. Brain sciences neglect the database of human experience by regarding the individual as experientially fragmented, and as operating without the guidance of any deep, integrative conscious principles or drivers. Such drivers could include archetypal themes, death/rebirth experiential templates, etc. Where some of these drivers intrude into the public light of day they are often, arbitrarily, regarded as pathology; which again models (and limits) experience on the model of pain.

To summarise, the model of mind that arises from a failure to acknowledge the cultural values that directly limit our vision of what it is to be human likewise informs any physical brain-based or chemical studies employed in respect of that vision, no matter how advanced such studies may be. The brain sciences engineer and map out the brain according to local cultural values placed on experience and not through any innate, independent brain-based source of information. Such engineering creates a culture of experiential epistemological neglect, promotes cultural and medical bias, and threatens to undermine the integrity of the species by encouraging direct physical intervention in the brain or its associated genetics. The idea that the brain sciences can do more than just mirror our culturally driven perspective on what it is to be human is dangerous, and ought to be a source of great concern to us all.