Philosophy and Literature Blog

James takes on traditional philosophical problems such as the meaning of matter. Matter as a substance underlying experience.  What does it mean to say that the world is constituted by such?  Philosophers later in the century would say that such metaphysical questions are meaningless.  James has a different approach.  He says first: "What do we MEAN by matter? What practical difference can it make NOW that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I think we find that the problem takes with this a rather different character...It makes not a single jot of difference so far as the PAST of the world goes, whether we deem it to have been  the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its author..."(pg. 41) It sounds like he might agree with those later thinkers when he says: "The pragmatist must conclude consequently say that the two theories, in spite of their different-sounding names, mean exact same thing, and that the dispute is purely v...

     James begins the second lecture by describing "The Pragmatic Method": "Is the world one or many? -- fated or free? -- material or spiritual? -- here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. ...What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?  If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives men practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle."(pg. 21) This is typical of the early 20th century obsession with eliminating metaphysics from discourse.  This will turn into a full-scale neurosis by the middle of the century.  This is James' response.  It has the benefit of not ending up in yet another round of disputes over underdetermination, falsification, verification, etc.. -- at least not so far.  "The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it wi...

     James opens the book by describing the state of philosophy as he sees it -- in 1906.  He contrasts the scientific, atheist, materialist type of thinker with the rationalist, religious type.  He identifies empiricist philosophy with thinkers like Herbert Spencer, who was widely read at the end of the 19th century but is not so now.  On the other hand we get idealists like the "Anglo-Hegelians" whose philosophies have nothing to the world in which we live.        About the empiricists he says: "Never were as many men of decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day.  Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific.  But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness.  It is itself almost religious.  Our scientific temper is devout"(pg. 9) He goes on: "The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depress...

     William James produces a very strident response to William Clifford, and one that sounds much more modern to my ears.  The argument may be over religion, but it applies to much more than that.  James' essay is a rejection of the straight enlightenment program; it sounds more Nietzschean, more relativistic, and, frankly, more correct to me.  Consider the following remark in his introduction to this collection of essays: "Something -- 'call it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will" -- is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be the greatest of philosophers.  Something is always mere fact and givenness; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of view extant from which this would not be found to be the case."(pg. 2) This could have been written in the last 50 years. Regarding The Will to Believe, he is offering a "defence of our right to adopt a bel...

     So I've read "The Ethics of Belief" and "The Ethics of Religion" by the fine mathematician William Clifford; I've also read "The Will to Believe" by the great William James.  William Clifford is a typical science-worshipper who says we have an obligation to believe only those things that stand the test of evidence.  While he has some excellent turns of phrase in "The Ethics of Belief", it is not that interesting on the whole.  "The Ethics of Religion" is more interesting since he is taking on religion directly and letting it rip.  I have to say I found Clifford's approach to knowledge naive and a tad boring.  I found William James to be much more interesting; this is not to say I think James is necessarily right, but he is more interesting(I will deal with William James in the next post).      The most interesting ideas Clifford has in "The Ethics of Belief" is how our web of ideas can be infected by ideas...

     In Chapter 1, Blackburn sets up the oppositon in views between William Clifford and William James; specifically starting with Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" and William James' famous response, "The Will to Believe".  Blackburn comes down pretty hard on the side of William Clifford.  Blackburn, I think, will use this to establish his core positions against relativism:      "And, of course, Clifford is right.  Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb.  The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church tht one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguisem which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them.  Clifford also emphasizes our social duty,  Our beliefs help to create the world in which our descendants will ...

"If truth is thought of as a goal that can never be attained, those who rather conspicuously do not care much about it will seem that much less villainous than they are." (pg. xvi) In his Introduction, sets up the opposition between absolutists on the one side, and relativists on the other.  He masterfully lays out what he means by each.  Along the way there are some real gems, for example: "[William] James describes the absolutist as having a religious temperament, whether the object of his religion is some traditional text or diety, or a new one, such as the Market, or Democracy, or Science.  This may also seem surprising, since religious lives can be full of doubt and worry and dark nights of the soul, and... in the modern world it is the relativists as much as the absolutists who belong to the cults."(xvii) Lest you think that absolutism only reigns in the domain of religion, recall we may make many other commitments with the same fervor; in fact, we mi...

       Let me say this: both Simon Blackburn and Neal Stephenson are awesome!  From looking at Truth: A Guide, by Blackburn, the title being a reference to Maimonides(again, see the wonderful wikipedia page), and Snow Crash, by Stephenson, these are the two best books I've looked at so far.  Blackburn is obviously a world-class scholar who has thought very deeply about philosophical issues for his entire career; I can tell I"m going to enjoy reading the book with a sense that he could run philosophical circles around me if he were so inclined.  In contrast to Neuromancer, Snow Crash is light, breezy, but no less profound for that; the world Stephenson paints is anarcho-capitalist and absurd.  The main character, named Hiro Protagonist, is a combination hacker and pizza delivery driver -- well, he loses that job.  Stephenson is having fun at the expense of the dark writing one finds in Neuromancer; this should make this book, though ...

     The real meat of this book is toward the beginning: the tone he sets, the dark world he describes, the Raymond Chandler language, cyberspace, superintelligent AIs.  As for the rest, it is, I suppose, original for its time(? Bladerunner came out just before this novel, one also thinks of movies like Tron), but not that interesting these days; and the characters are flat, very flat, but the beginning is so good that it makes up for the rest .  Eventually Wintermute wins and merges with Neuromancer, creating a more complete intelligence.  We know that Wintermute affects that outside world and Neuromancer is the personality.  The new AI is also apparently in contact with another AI from Alpha Centauri -- maybe they'll get a room. Next time I will take on Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I will alternate these posts with a chapter-by-chapter look at Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide.

"I AM THAT I AM" -- Exodus Case finally starts getting mad that Wintermute appears to him in the guise of people from his past in Chiba City, to which Wintermute replies: "You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush?"(N, pg. 152)  Wintermute is able to control the reality both inside and outside of cyberspace with what appears to be impunity.   Humans experience Wintermute as a disembodied entity, able to take on many forms, able to speak as though from nowhere, for whom the world is often a plastic plaything.  Now,  this isn't to say that Wintermute and Neuromancer are all-powerful and all-knowing; they aren't, but they have a lot of godlike powers.  It is precisely the fear that they will become too powerful that gives rise to "Turing Police": these are the forces that try to keep artificial intelligences from gaining too much intelligence, which would precipitate, or accelerate the effects of, the technological singularity....

  More is revealed about the nature of the constructs, that is, the electronic copies, of personalities as Case continues to interact with the ROM construct, Dixie McCoy, aka Flatline.  Note Hosaka is a device that can be queried for information, sort of like wikipedia; the Dixie construct looked itself up and discovered he's dead: "How you doing, Dixie?" "I'm dead, Case.  Got enough time on this Hosaka to figure that one." "How's it feel?" "It doesn't." "Bother you?" "What bothers me is, nothin' does." "How's that?" "Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit.  Medics came by and cut it off.  Month leater he's tossin' all night/ Elroy, I said, what's eating you?  G**mn thumb's itchin', he says.  So I told him, scratch it.  McCoy, he says, it the other G**mn thumb ... Do me a favor, boy." "What's that, Dix?" ...