Crazy metaphysics?

Eric Schwitzgebel thinks that metaphysical theories are doomed for weirdness (he calls this "crazyism." Also see here). He gives lots of examples. Much of his examples really are of famous weird metaphysics. Some of the most famous arguments in metaphysics are for really odd conclusions (modal realism, panpsychism, ontological nihilism, unrestricted mereology, etc).

But why pick on metaphysics? It's not clear to me that metaphysics is any weirder (at least when it comes to a comparison with "common sense" assumptions than many claims in ethics and epistemology. Many utilitarians such as Singer and Unger argued that we are just as obligated to donate every last penny of expendable ready cash in our possession to the needy as we are in saving a drowning child. They even go further and argue that we may be obligated to steal for those that don't donate as much we we do to give to the needy. Kant famously argued that the moral obligation against lying is so strong that we ought not lie even to save an innocent life. That's crazy.

Many skeptics have argued that we don't know many of the things we think we know. Ratnakirti argued for solipsism based on epistemological arguments, for example. There may be many other equally famous examples from these two branches of philosophy or other non metaphysics branches that are equally or more weird. All these examples show that weirdness is common to these other areas of philosophy as well. It may be that metaphysics is a little more likely to be weird than other branches of philosophy but I don't think there's a large difference in this regard.

Pragmatic worries for metametaphysics

This is an interesting video blog on metametaphysics. Here's something the two philosophers did not explicitly mention: one way to cash out grounding or the fundamentality relation may be the cutting-nature-at-its-joints talk.

Perhaps an analogy would serve an explanatory purpose here. Some paintings are abstract, like say, cubism. Cubism still represents reality but perhaps not as accurately as say, a photo or a more fine grained painting. The cubist representations don't cut nature at its joints but does manage to pick out the same structures as the photo.

But I tend to have pragmatically inspired worries. Perhaps what we determine to be fundamental may largely depend on what we have uses for. So say numbers are often posited to exist because they serve useful purposes but if we can jettison them for something else that can do the job better (or maybe we manage to abandon whatever the job they serve to describe completely) we may not view them as fundamental or even real anymore. They don't cut nature at its joints at all; nature has no number joints.

Maybe tables, chairs and even people do not cut nature at its joints or at least cut it less fundamentally than more natural objects (perhaps subatomic particles or the cosmos as a whole?).

More specifically, say, tables are posited to exist because they serve an important role in society but table-chair composites do not and thus we may not see it as fundamental or as real as the table and chair individually. The table is physically separated from the chair, of course, but we posit the existence of many things that have parts vastly spatially separate from other parts (the solar system, e.g.). That may be because the solar system plays such an important roles in our society, our sciences and so forth. Likewise, the left-half of the table is seen as less fundamental or real as the whole table perhaps because it serves a smaller function for us. But say someday we stop using whole tables for whatever reason but find major indispensable uses of half-tables and forget all about whole tables. Will we then see whole tables as we do like table-chairs?

It may be more difficult to jettison the usage of some things than others because they are so culturally and socially and personally ingrained.

But pragmatic considerations come in degrees (which may explain the fundamentality or grounding relation) and are relative to societies and times (which may undermine essentialism or neo-aristotelianism).

Perhaps the sciences offer the best analogy here. At one time, Newtonian mechanics was a model that was thought to describe reality. But when Einstein came along, his model was then seen by scientists and common folk as a more accurate model which is more fundamental in a sense than Newton's. Scientists don't want to say that Newton was wrong maybe because his model still has practical applications in society. But say, one day, a model of physics will render both Newton and Einstein's theory useless (as an explanatory or any other kinds of tool such as a handmaiden for developing new technologies, say) and posit laws and objects that are so different from anything these two physicists posited that people may forget those other theories and call them false.

Here, you can say that it is because the new theory more accurately represents reality than the former two or you can say that it has more usages that the previous theories it has supplanted does not. What reasons do we have for the former explanation than the later?

The extended mind and the self

Some philosophers of mind such as David Chalmers and Andy Clark have defended what is called an extended mind theory (actually there are many kinds of extended mind theories) which claim that our minds are not just physically located in our heads. Some theorists posit that it is a system that is a combination of subsystems such as the brain combined with the rest of the central nervous system and perhaps also combined with the rest of the body (The neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, if I remember correctly, also defended such a view in one of his books). Some others have posited that even the surrounding environment can be included in the whole system which is either identified with the mind or has properties which the mind supervenes. Chalmers and Clark defend a process view which says that the mind extends to the interactive process (not the system per se) between the central nervous system and the immediate environment mediated by the sense organs, etc.

This is troublesome for the brain view of personal identity. I like that view and I believe Jeff McMahon has defended such a view very admirably. I think it is the best view and it justifies many of the medical practices we have today in the US such as our laws regarding brain death and abortion, very important ethical issues.

I wonder if there is a way to keep the ethical benefits of a brain view taking into account the criticisms of such a view from the extended mind theory.

Useful fictions

Does the evolution of our mind and our sensory faculties make it probable that our most basic intuitions about the world are true? Our basic intuitions that there are regular sized objects such as basketballs, cars, people, etc seem out of the question common sense and obviously true.

You can made an argument that evolution makes it probable that truth has survival and fitness value; that is, those creatures whose faculties track truth are able to better adapt to their environment and thus fitter than creatures whose faculties do not and thus our common intuitions about very basic metaphysical claims are true (metaphysical skepticists and nihilists notwithstanding).

However, it may be the case that evolution has not endowed us with truth tracking faculties but with faculties that give us equally useful intuitions about the world that posit useful fictions. Surely there are many useful fictions and for any truth, there are likely just as many fictions that are pragmatically equally useful but strictly speaking false. So long as there is a kind of functional isomorphism (leave that term loose and undefined for now but the basic meaning I am using should be conveyed). So from a purely probablistic standpoint, since a useful fiction is just as good as truth and useful fictions are more numerous than truth for any one intentional stance, it is far more probable that our basic metaphysical intuitions are false. So long as useful fictions "does the job" of insuring survival, even if they are inaccurate at representing reality, they may be good enough for the evolutionary filter.

Perhaps that is the basic moral we should take from quantum mechanics; that the structure of reality may be so odd that we lack the basic perceptual, conceptual faculties to even think about them in a completely truthful way. Maybe that is the reason physicists and laymen alike have such a hard time making sense of quantum mechanics, the most basic description of physical reality we have. Perhaps due to these innate limitations, we, as humans will never completely accurately have a truth conception of reality. reality is just simply too bizarre for us to grasp.

Will fundamental and common sense metaphysical intuitions go the way of moral intuitions and mathematical intuitions as some philosophical skepticists have claimed for these other domains?

Perhaps we are just digital minds in an analog world (just how metaphorical is this metaphor?).

Rosenberg on naturalism

Alex Rosenberg has a piece in The Stone and this talk with Owen Flanagan about naturalism. His The Stone piece was pretty bad. It was a response to Timothy Williamson's piece but the only strategy Rosenberg employs to defend naturalism in response to the rather straightforward arguments of Williamson seems to either bite the bullet big time and to use an ostrich approach viz, pretend the argument doesn't exist (Williamson's rejoinder seems to echo my sentiments on it as well).

Here's my comment to the Flanagan/Rosenberg debate:

I’ve read Rosenberg’s piece in the NYTs and seen this episode but I am still not clear on what kind of naturalism he is advancing.

Anyway, here’s another thought I had while watching. Regarding Rosenberg’s responses to the moral issues Flanagan raised, it doesn’t seem to me that Rosenberg’s explanation will do the kind of work needed for any kind of theory required for a normative outlook in the world. Rosenberg says something like it may be natural to behave morally and that provides all the normativity we need. (I hope I’m accurate in capturing his expressed views and apologize if I got them wrong).

But then the problem is why ought we follow our natural moral instincts? I can imagine someone saying in response, “because we want to” but I don’t think this will do because of this. It is reasonable to me that we also have many natural instincts that may be detrimental to morality (such as instincts to rape or murder in some circumstances). It becomes difficult to see why we ought to follow or cultivate some of our instincts (namely the moral ones) rather than others (the ones detrimental to morality). A response here is that since most of our instincts are moral in nature, we ought to follow that and ignore any instincts that may go contrary and cause discord with the majority of our instincts.

But what if the classical Chinese philosopher Hsun Tzu, e.g. is correct and that the majority of human natural instincts are not moral but selfish and immoral? In fact, the thesis that humans are by nature essentially wicked is supported by at least some empirical evidence. Then ought we follow our evil instincts, ignoring our moral ones and murder, rape, etc?

However, may rebuttal can actually be stated more convincingly when one accepts the seemingly obvious assumption that people, even if they happen to be mostly innately good, can cultivate their wicked side so as to become mostly bad people. The question is why shouldn't we cultivate our evil instincts so that they overwhelm the good aspects if the kind of naturalism Rosenberg is advocating is true? There seems to be no normative force behind it and that is a reductio counting against it. The extra assumption is plausible especially when you consider cases like Robert Alton Harris, who had been a seemingly normal boy, once very sensitive to the suffering of others (even cartoon characters such as Bambi according to his sister), but under severe child abuse, became one of the most notorious psychopaths ever on California's death row.

[Update]

I've included another comment on the talk:

I also found Rosenberg’s answer to the political stuff intriguing but very much lacking in argumentation relying on major assumptions.

For example, he says that punishment and distributive justice itself is a leftist notion and says that his form of naturalism justifies a less punitive and more egalitarian society in terms of distributive justice. His reasoning is that [deterministic] causation makes free will and hence moral responsibility impossible. But he then goes on to say that we cannot abandon our (in P.F. Strawson’s words) reactive attitudes due to their naturalness. But presumably some of our natural reactive attitudes are retributive and its unclear that they would be assuaged by the realization that we are unfree beings without punishing (or rewarding people in the case of our inclinations to praise).Moreover, Rosenberg relies on these assumptions

1. that naturalism implies that determinism is true

2. that determinism makes free will and moral responsibility impossible

The first is an open question. Philosophers of science and physicists are not convinced that all our actions are determined. As to 2. most philosophers are compatibilists. Also even if the world were not deterministic, most philosophers would probably believe in free will since there are also libertarians and most compatibilists theories of free will does not depend on the truth determinism/indeterminism, either would do. It seems that Rosenberg would need to offer a serious rebuttal and defend the small minority of philosophers (12%!)who do not believe in free will.

Abstract concrete distinction: a matter of degree?

In previous posts, I talked about how some abstract objects may have concrete components. Many philosophers seem to think that this abstract/concrete divide is black and white, that all things are either abstract objects or concrete and nothing in between. Either objects are like numbers/pure sets or they are like rocks, planets, chairs, etc.

But many things in reality are not so clear cut and what do we even mean by abstract anyway? It's kind of like a definition of god, negative definitions abound. But there seems to be many criteria for abstracthood. Satisfying some but not all may at least intuitively deem some objects partially abstract or partially concrete. I've identified several criteria and given examples of objects that satisfy them but not others.

Observability: I take this to mean something like cannot be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, heard, etc. Some objects cannot be observed in these ways. Electrons are not observable even in principle as the laws of optics prevent us from seeing them; they are just too small. But electrons also has some mass and thus many people, common folk as well as philosopher would not think to attribute abstracthood to electrons and this leads me to the next criteria.

Mass: Some objects contain no mass such as photons. But photons have other properties like linear momentum and occupy space and has causal properties and thus many people may not attribute abstracthood here either.

Spatial extension: Some things lack spatial extension such as the geometrical center of mass of the planet earth. They are merely points in space(time). But in some sense, this is also not an abstract object because it is not causally inert. It exerts physical effects on the world. Our equations for properties like centripetal force rely on this object's existence (if only as an abstraction!) to work.

Non-gerrymandered: Consider a chair. No one doubts that this is a concrete object (except maybe ontological nihilists or those like Van Inwagen). But what about the mereological object composed of the chair and the table (chair-table)? This object, if it exists, seems somehow unnatural. It is a gerrymandered object. It does not "carve nature at its joints." It is not a natural kind.

Causally inert: Only the most abstract of objects has this last property and this property may be the most weighted property of abstracthood. Numbers and pure sets have it. Maybe some other things have them as well (the Good, etc). Causally inert objects do not cause things to do this or that. They just are, they exist in some abstract realm. If it has this property it has the others as well.

What if an object as some of these properties but not others? Some are probably weighted more than others but i will not advance any kind of quantitative or qualitative weighting myself. But it seems to be reasonable that satisfaction of some of these properties may be at least somewhat indicative of abstracthood especially if it satisfies several.

A secular argument against abortion

In previous posts, I talked about my views on morality of abortion (here and here). If I understand Jeff McMahon correctly, I take my views as very similar to his view.

I focused on the personhood aspect of fetuses, embryos and zygotes and not on the tricky issues regarding the permissibility of abortion for pregnancies involving rape or pregnancies endangering the life of the woman. My personal view is that a person (with all the rights that comes with that status) comes into existence during the 20-22 week of gestation. Abortion is permissible prior to that time on my view. However, there are those philosophers that have advanced arguments that suggests otherwise.

Don Marquis for example, takes the organismic view which suggests that people are organisms. That is, they come into existence just after conception when a new organism comes into existence (as soon as a zygote does or just after conception). Eric Olson takes the view that people are animals, a view that implies that a person comes into existence at about 2 weeks into gestation (when multicellularity, cellular differentiation and other criteria for animal-hood are satisfied). Michael Tooley says that a person must have certain psychological states such as certain kinds of psychological continuity (see here for a debate between Tooley and Marquis). On Tooley's view, people come into existence only shortly after they attain the ability for language (at about age 1). My view roughly is an temporal intermediary of the extremes of these views and it also corresponds to the time frame of most states' laws on abortion.

I think my view is the best view, the most reasonable and defensible. But is it possible that I am wrong and one of the others right? Sure. It's a tricky issue like all issues still in contention in philosophy. Let's say that I'm 70% sure of my position, 10% sure that either Marquis' or Olson's view is correct (that is, person comes into existence within the first two or three weeks after conception) and 10% sure that Tooley's is and 10% sure that some other time is the correct period for personhood. If I'm 70% sure of my view, that means there is a chance that I am wrong and abortion may be immoral (personhood may come into existence before the 20th week). In that case, terminating a fetus or embryo before that time would be immoral. Let's say that there's a 15% chance of that (10% chance that Olson and Marquis are right and 5% for some time in between my view and theirs). Is it worth making policy decisions based on my view knowing that there's a small but significant chance of legalizing certain forms of murder? Even if the social benefits of protecting a woman's right to choose is significant, we have to bear in mind the possibilities that a person's right to life may be seriously jeopardized. In my view, it's a small chance but a significant chance. It is a possibility of a matter of life and death for people we are talking about.

For all but Marquis's view (since he takes the earliest defensible view), the subjective probability that one's view is wrong and that persons come into existence prior to that point must come into the equation in policy decisions. Such a calculus weighing the possibility of life and death based on the social benefits may be distasteful to many but is they support a woman's right to choose, they must answer why that risk is worth it or explain why we should ignore making the risk calculations. For individual people they must live with the fact that even if they hold some later views such as similar to mine or even Tooley's, they may be wrong and they need to take into consideration in their decision that they could be wrong about the moral status of the fetus or embryo. Even a small probability that personhood has come into existence may be enough to deter some from terminating the fetus.

Alternatively, there may be no fact about the matter between all these views (assuming that epistemicism about personhood is false) and drawing a line in the ground somewhere may be the best thing we can wish for. In that case, the calculus may be avoided if we knew for sure that there is no fact of the matter in such closely contested and roughly equally well supported issues of personhood. In that case, we just have to draw a line somewhere much like the law draws an arbitrary line between adulthood and adolescence at age 18 (claiming that there is no fact of the matter about adulthood also implies that epistemicism about adulthood is false).

Death and morality

There is some literature from what I know on the badness of death. See this paper by Sider and the book The Ethics of Killing by Jeff McMahan for example. There are other problems with the ethics of death due to some metaphysical considerations. Consider when someone is murdered. Murder is considered very serious morally and legally because of its badness to victims. But if we can someday (somehow) resurrect the dead, will our punishments toward murderers be fitting? Perhaps we ought to have to compensate them for punishment that exceeded the seriousness of the crime! How would death be different than say, a long coma? So instead of murder, a more appropriate crime for the perpetrator would have to be revised to "serious bodily harm" or perhaps something even less serious.

But this conveniently avoids the metaphysical problems for you may define death as irreversible cessation of life. In that case no one that is resurrected really died. But that seems wrong because death seems to be an event that is not dependent on future contingent events. If someone is not resurrected for whatever reason but resurrection is a possibility, his death seems not to depend on this future possibility not being actualized but on some event prior (his brain being destroyed by a bullet, e.g.).

The mind, brain and the world

Assume that mind-brain reductionism is true. Assume, as many cognitive scientists, philosophers and neuroscientists and laymen that thoughts are merely structures of actively firing neuronal networks and memories are inactive networks of neuronal networks.

I claim tentatively that this seems to be a limitation on realism. If scientific theories are formal representations of a belief of set of beliefs about the world and beliefs are thoughts, there seems to be inbuilt limitations on how accurate our all theories can represent the world. Our brains are finite. It is composed of 100 billion interconnected neurons. Even if each neuron can be a single thought, our theories might ultimately be deficient or fine grained enough to represent the world if the world is at its most fundamental level, too fine grained, nuanced, sophisticated to be represented by such a neuronal networks. There should be a large but finite number of structures built up from basic thoughts or single neuron firings (2^100 billion(?)).

So if reality is much more nuanced in its structure than the brain is capable of forming structural isomorphisms with, there seems also to be limitations to our understanding of the world. Our theories may approach a perfectly accurate description of the world but never get there even in theory. It will have inherent limitations. If the universe is infinitely fine grained (detailed) and all that detail is interconnected in a way that it matters for an accurate description of it to represent the interconnection and more fundamental levels are required for explaining less the fundamental, then the brain will never represent reality in its essence. Even if the universe is not infinitely fine-grained (considered as gunky) or there are possible representational simplifications that retain complete accuracy but that these are sufficiently so beyond the capacities of the brain's flexibility to represent it, it will still be the case that our theories will always be strictly speaking false and that there is upper limit to how further accurate our understanding of the world can get.

My idea is predicated on a kind of representational theory of mind. The analogy (and it's a rough analogy) is with cameras. The picture resolution of a digital camera is dependent on the number of pixels it fits on a picture. The picture's resolution is limited by that number. Reality is presumably continuous but if there is enough pixels, a picture can approach a representation of some parts of the world (the scene represented in the photo). But there may be things in the world the camera cannot accurately represent due to limitations in the resolution power (for example, very fine print at some distance) and lack of pixels it can fit in a picture. The brain has analogous limitations assuming the assumptions mentioned above is true.

Dumb luck (pt. 2)

In the previous post, I posted arguments from Jennifer Lackey critical of the current views on luck. Now I will offer a positive sketch of my own view which is inspired by a contrastive account of causation by Jonathan Schaffer.

In Jonathan Schaffer's work on causation, Schaffer uses a contrastive approach which he claims to solve many of the paradoxes involved with causation. Causal relations are fundamentally quartenary composed of a quadrouple where c is a cause and C* is a non empty set of possible alternative causes, e is an effect and E* is a non empty set of alternative possible effects. Both causes and effects are "within a field" the contents of that field is determined by the causal inquiry.

There's many causes to any effect. Likewise, for any cause, there will be many effects "down the line." It's not informative to point out some of them. Saying that the plane crashed because of gravity is not normally informative though surely gravity played a crucial causal role. Context, (whether as a function of the semantics or pragmatics Schaffer is agnostic) determines what the relata are in any causal scheme. Thus, when we say that the short-circuit caused the house to burn down, we actually say something like: The short circuit (as opposed to the match, or the lightening, or the flamethrower, etc) caused the house to burn down (as opposed to remain intact). As you can see, this has the quartenary causal relation structure.

Many problematic issues common to the work on causation are solved or dissolved by this contrastive causal framework. Schaffer's solution seem convincing to me. Consider the problem of absences:

Are absences causal? To ascend semantically, can negative nominals such as ‘the gardener’s not watering my flowers’ denote causes and/or effects?

(1) (pro) Absence causation is intuitive: intuition accepts some

absences as causal.

(2) (pro) Absences play the predictive and explanatory roles of

causes and effects.CONTRASTIVE CAUSATION

301

(3) (pro) Absences play the moral and legal roles of causes and

effects.

(4) (con) Absences mediate causation by disconnection.

(5) (con) Absence causation is counterintuitive: intuition rejects

some absences as causal.

(6) (con) Absence causation is theoretically problematic.

(7) (con) Absence causation is metaphysically abhorrent.

....

Contrastivity resolves the paradox of absences, by reconciling (1)–(7). The reconciliation strategy is as follows: (i) treat negative nominals as denoting actual events, and (ii) treat absence-talk as tending to setthe associated contrast to the possible event said to be absent. Forinstance, given that the gardener napped and my flowers wilted, ‘The gardener’s not watering my flowers caused my flowers not to blossom’, is to be interpreted as: the gardener’s napping rather than watering my flowers caused my flowers to wilt rather than blossom.

Many other causal paradoxes once plagued the literature are shown resolved or solved.

Now consider luck. I claim that there is something similar going on and that luck is actually a contrastive ordered pair where s is either a fact about someone or an event that happens to her and S* is a non empty set of non actual possible alternative facts or events (what I'll call "scenarios") that may have happened to her or S* may be actual scenarios occurring to other people. s is more beneficial in some way than the scenarios in S*.

What determines the kinds of scenarios in s and S* is also a function of context and inquiry. It's a context relative matter what that criteria will be; she might be richer in s than all the scenarios in S*, she may have found a treasure in s and not have done so in S*, she may have been better looking than the possible scenarios she is in S*, etc. In the first case, the criteria of evaluation is wealth (more versus less), in the second, it is some fortunate event happening to her (as contrastied with it not happening), and the last case it is her appearance (more attractive versus less so). She might be happier, have more stuff, friends, a better spouse, etc etc, it doesn't matter so long as s is evaluated at some criteria that is the same as those in S*. What we choose to be evaluated is dependent on what the context suggest is appropriate for an evaluation of luckiness (or unluckiness as the case may be).

However, the choices for the different alternative scenarios in S* are not completely arbitrary. They should be "live options," likely or contingent alternative scenarios based on the kind of criteria we are evaluating her luck on; they are possibilities that may have occurred to her or she may be reasonably compared based on some relevant reference class in which she belongs. It should be a live option that some person might have been happy or sad within a range or rich or poor to a various range or have so many number of good friends, etc. Her relevant reference class may be her set of friends, some possible scenario other than the one she finds herself, all actual people, all possible people, etc.

But unlike what is determined to be evaluated in s and S*, it's an objective matter how she actually fares relative to the other scenarios in S*. For example, say she has more of x (money, good friends, happiness, etc) than she does in S*, she is correctly said to be lucky. I think this will solve all the problem limned in Lackey's paper.

Take a look at her example of the DEMOLITION WORKER. The context of evaluation is types of events. In the actual event, the explosion occurred because her coworker hanged his coat in the right place, at the right time, etc. Now S* may be some possible event nominal such as his hanging his coat in a slightly different place not resulting in the causal chain culminating in the explosion, or at some different time also not resulting in the causal chain culminating in the explosion, etc. All the events in S* are live options; they may easily have occurred were it not for chance. We can even specify that the scenarios in S* be more counterfactually robust than s, that is, that s is less likely than those scenarios in S*.

In the case of BURIED TREASURE, there is likewise, several ways to evaluate Vincent's luck. We may construe s as Sophie burying her treasure in the spot she did with some alternative scenario in S* in which she chose some other area of the island. We may also construe s as Sophie's choice of flowers. She in fact chose roses which resulted in her choice of area to bury her treasure. But if she had wanted to plant some other plant which resulted in another area more suitable for that plant, another area would have been chosen. In that case, we would have her choice of roses be an event s and S* maybe alternative possible choices such as s_1=her choice to plant tulips, s_2=her choice to plant daisies, s_3=her choice to plant orchids, s_4=her choice not to plant anything at all, and so on. Had she chosen to act on any of those alternative choices, Vincent would not have found her buried treasure and thus not have been so lucky. Alternatively, we may evaluate Vincent's luck by construing s as his mother favoring roses. If she had favored some other plant he would not have gone to the spot and found the treasure. Thus S* would be his mother favoring, say, daisies. The point in this schema is we hold all the other facts fixed in s while choosing alternative scenarios in S* (the field of possible alternative outcomes not as lucky) that would not have been as favorable on some chosen criteria as in s.

Dumb luck (pt. 1)

There are two main competing views on luck. The Lack of Control account and the Modal account. As this paper by Jennifer Lackey shows, they are both inadequate; neither are necessary nor sufficient for an analysis of our concept of luck. The concept of luck has recently been held to high import for discussions in epistemology and ethics. Thus a coherent and well-fitting definition is highly desirable.

The Lack of Control Account of Luck (henceforth LCAL) is defined as:

LCAL: An event is lucky for a given agent, S, if and only [if] the occurrence of such an event is beyond—or at least significantly beyond—S’s control.

However, it is susceptible to these kinds of counterexamples showing first that the sufficiency criteria is not met:

[s]uppose that I walk into my kitchen, toast a bagel, and eat it with cream cheese. When my husband comes home ten minutes later, my eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese ten minutes earlier is an event that he neither had control over (he wasn’t home) nor was sufficiently responsible for (he had nothing to do with my eating the bagel in question). But is it lucky for him that I ate a toasted bagel with cream cheese? If so, it is clearly not in any interesting sense of luck. Countless cases of this sort abound: my neighbor’s playing a computer game right now, my cat’s sleeping this afternoon, a chef’s making eggplant parmesan in Florence today, and numerous other ordinary or mundane events are out of my control at this moment. Yet to regard all of these events as lucky, as proponents of the LCAL must do, is surely to miss something important to the concept of luck.

As Lackey shows, by adding a 'significance' criteria stipulating that the events be not only out of one's control but somehow beneficial or significant will not rescue such a definition. Additionally, such scenarios as described above are general. They are not odd or "iffy" non decisive examples. They show quite clearly the deficiency of such a definition.

To show that LCAL is not necessary, consider:

DEMOLITION WORKER: Ramona is a demolition worker, about to press a button that will blow up an old abandoned warehouse, thereby completing a project that she and her coworkers have been working on for several weeks. Unbeknownst to her, however, a mouse had chewed through the relevant wires in the construction office an hour earlier, severing the connection between the button and the explosives. But as Ramona is about to press the button, her co-worker hangs his jacket on a nail in the precise location of the severed wires, which radically deviates from his usual routine of hanging his clothes in the office closet. As it happens, the hanger on which the jacket is hanging is made of metal, and it enables the electrical current to pass through the damaged wires just as Ramona presses the button and demolishes the warehouse.

The demolition worker had control in setting off the explosion and yet was very lucky that all the conditions resulting in the explosion were just right to produce the condition giving her the means to set off the explosion. Again, as Lackey points out, scenarios such as this can be generalized and seem quite decisive in refuting the necessity condition.

The other view of luck is the Modal Account of Luck (henceforth, MAL). Lackey uses Duncan Pritchard's version of the MAL:

(L1) If an event is lucky, then it is an event that occurs in the actual world but which

does not occur in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant

initial conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world [Pritchard 2005:

128].

(L2) If an event is lucky, then it is an event that is significant to the agent concerned

(or would be significant, were the agent to be availed of the relevant facts) [Pritchard

2005: 132].

But Lackey gives decisive counter examples to this view as well showing that it is both insufficient and unnecessary for luck. She argues convincingly that no such version of MAL can be sufficient and necessary for an analysis of luck. This example shows that it is not necessary for luck.

BURIED TREASURE: Sophie, knowing that she had very little time left to live, wanted to bury a chest filled with all of her earthly treasures on the island she inhabited. As she walked around trying to determine the best site for proper burial, her central criteria were, first, that a suitable location must be on the northwest corner of the island—where she had spent many of her fondest moments in life—and, second, that it had to be a spot where rose bushes could flourish—since these were her favorite flowers. As it happens, there was only one particular patch of land on the northwest corner of the island where the soil was rich enough for roses to thrive. Sophie, being excellent at detecting such soil, immediately located this patch of land and buried her treasure, along with seeds for future roses to bloom, in the one and only spot that fulfilled her two criteria.

One month later, Vincent, a distant neighbor of Sophie’s, was driving in the

northwest corner of the island—which was also his most beloved place to visit—and was looking for a place to plant a rose bush in memory of his mother who had died ten years earlier—since these were her favorite flowers. Being excellent at detecting the proper soil for rose bushes to thrive, he immediately located the same patch of land that Sophie had found one month earlier. As he began digging a hole for the bush, he was astonished to discover a buried treasure in the ground.

Certainly, Vincent was lucky and yet it is an instance of counter factually robust instance of luck for Vincent would have searched the same spot in a "wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant initial conditions for such an event are the same as in the actual world." In fact, we can make the class of the counterfactual possible worlds as arbitrarily robust as we like by making it ever so delicate and complex the initial conditions are for both Vincent and Sophie to insure that they will choose the same spot.

Lackey also shows that MAL is not sufficient for luck by giving "whimsical" scenarios showing that spontaneous or whimsical actions which are significant for agents thus satisfying MAL yet are not instances of luck.

In my next blog, I hope to give a definition of luck not susceptible to any of the counter examples offered using developments from an account of contrastive causation.

Varieties of time travel

There are two ways in which backwards time travel may be possible without the usual paradoxes popping (grandfather, auto-infanticide etc) up. One is involving a causal loop and the other involves a branching or forking universe. These two scenarios have been elaborated by David Lewis's famous paper Paradoxes of Time Travel.

But there seems to be other possibilities. Consider the following possibility which I have never heard anyone mention:

Consider a world where the growing-block world is true and God in that world had wanted to "rewind" the course of the world, its entire history to some point before the furthest point the block's edge has advanced. The universe is "reversed" and I'd imagine that things would go like a rewound dvd video to some previous time. Then if determinism is true in that world, it would "replay" like it has the last time to that furthest point again. Now this kind of backward time "travel" is only backward in the "internal" time relative to those in the block universe but it occurs in the regular temporal direction in some external time or their "god's time." So it's "internal backwards" but not external backwards.

I think that this time travel scenario avoids the paradoxes as well but it may remain to be questioned whether this is a "real" case of backward time travel. It seems to fit my understanding for a possibility of time travel.

Induction and the Axiom of Choice

In this short but strange paper, Alexander George gives a mathematical "proof" justifying induction. The problem of (Humean) induction basically is:

Now as concerns the argument, its conclusion is that in induction (causal inference) experience does not produce the idea of an effect from an impression of its cause by means of the understanding or reason, but by the imagination, by “a certain association and relation of perceptions.” The center of the argument is a dilemma: If inductive conclusions were produced by the understanding, inductive reasoning would be based upon the premise that nature is uniform; “that instances of which we have had no experience, must resemble those of which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same.” (Hume THN, 89) And were this premise to be established by reasoning, that reasoning would be either deductive or probabilistic (i.e. causal). The principle can't be proved deductively, for whatever can be proved deductively is a necessary truth, and the principle is not necessary; its antecedent is consistent with the denial of its consequent. Nor can the principle be proved by causal reasoning, for it is presupposed by all such reasoning and any such proof would be a petitio principii.

George's proof uses the axiom of choice and a recent result called the Hardin-Taylor theorem. George's proof requires the axiom of choice. However, it seems to me that this would not make induction any less problematic because the grounds for skepticism on which the problem of induction is formed is analogous, indeed, very similar, to the grounds for doubting the truth of the axiom of choice. Consider the axiom of choice which basically states:

For it amounts to nothing more than the claim that, given any collection of mutually disjoint nonempty sets, it is possible to assemble a new set — a transversal or choice set — containing exactly one element from each member of the given collection.

This axiom presupposes the existence of a choice function for any collection of non empty sets, even infinite collections and even if we cannot specify the details of that function (for example by specifying a selection rule or the distinguishing property of the elements to be picked out). The function is assumed to exist under that axiom. Likewise the reason the problem of induction does not bother scientists, common folks and philosophers alike (who actually doubts the sun will rise tomorrow?) is because we assume that nature has principles of uniformity such as laws, etc even if we cannot directly observe such laws or discover them by deductive reasoning reason as Hume insisted. Hume suggest that we arrive at the principle of uniformity for any series of past events to continue to hold into the future by acts of "imagination" and inference through that imagining. To claim that we can discover the principles through observation is to beg the question, or worse, to get into a vicious circle (what would justify the principle?). To claim that we can discover them through deductive reasoning is to commit a category error.

Similarly, assuming the existence of choice functions is assuming that there is some regularity in any collection of items from a collection of non empty sets even when we cannot specify what that regularity is. We cannot prove it from the axioms (it is an axiom after all). In the case of induction we are not bothered by the "problem" of induction because we assume that our imagination in conjoining repeated contiguous events have some basis in a natural uniformity that is existing independently outside of our imagination (such as some natural law). We assume the existence of some law e.g., which we cannot directly observe but must infer the existence.

So "proving" induction from the axiom of choice seems to do no anti-skeptical work at all. It throws the problem in the lap of mathematics when the foundations of such reasoning can be put under a very similar skeptical lens as the foundations of our everyday inductive reasoning. This is made especially salient when we consider the reasons why mathematicians have accepted the axiom of choice. First, let's consider what George says about his proof:

But might there be some feature of the proof that compromises its ability to offer the kind of justification we are after? One aspect of the proof that suggests itself is its reliance on the Axiom of Choice....

But then he goes on:

Where a condition on conceptual coherence is consistency with ZFC, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory plus the Axiom of Choice, a theory most mathematicians believe to be true and indispensable for the formal development of mathematics.

If this is the justification then it would render the whole proof implausible because as Penelope Maddy has correctly pointed out, mathematicians have "accepted" the axiom of choice largely because of pragmatic reasons (for ease of proving some theorems like Zorn's lemma). They haven't accepted it because of its philosophically sound obviousness (in fact, many of them and logicians and philosophers have skeptically questioned its truth much as the later have inductive reasoning). Given these pragmatic historical considerations, they seem to mirror the pragmatic considerations of why people accept inductive reasoning as generally true (how will we live without assuming natural regularity and uniformity?).

Many mathematicians are equally adept and comfortable working with axioms that are inconsistent with choice (such as the axiom of determinacy). Maddy's experience with mathematicians on the philosophical aspects of their discipline is similar to my own experience in asking them about foundational issues. They are, almost unanimously in my experience, far more pragmatic and anti-platonist than philosophers would believe and are in general less likely to have platonist intuitions than philosophers of math in my experience. When asked if they think the axiom of choice (or the Continuum Hypothesis) is true they will usually say something like "well, it's true under some models but not others." This is not them being flippant but stems from their general pragmatic outlook. So George's appeal to the authority of the mathematician in his reliance on that axiom for his proof of induction seems odd and rather unconvincing.

Animalism

Eric Olson argues that a person is just an animal. This implies that anyone is identical to some biological being with certain properties such as being multicellular, having cellular differentiation, capacity for sexual reproduction, motility and so forth. So an individual begins to exist at about the 2nd week after conception when cells begin to take on different characteristics (bone cells, nerve cells, muscle etc) and work together in unison to maintain homeostasis of the whole organism.

He argues against the view I think plausible that persons are just their brain (or actually some temporal stage of their brain). His argument is that views like mine must explain how it is that we can have properties that are not instantiated in the animal or physical brain that is co located with our selves when both things share the same constitution (made of the same stuff). There must be both an animal and a person sharing the same body, he argues, that we must explain how it is that there is much similarity between us without being the same thing and why we posit different properties despite the similarities. When I think a thought, does the animal that occupies the same spacetime region as me (or incorporates me if I am my brain) think the same thought or a different but qualitatively identical thought or no thought at all? If the animal no longer exists and was replaced by me, the person, we must explain where that animal went.

This is just a version of the grounding problem. Here, I can only respond that Karen Bennett has argued that the grounding problem is not really a serious problem because those who believe in coincident objects can simply posit the existence of (de se) modal properties as brute facts about things' having properties not grounded in their physical constitution. I find Bennett's argument very persuasive.

But I think I can also offer a tu quoque against Olson's view (i.e., that the same weakness he claims is a feature of the view I favor is a feature of his view as well). Oslon's view is the animalistic view. An animal comes into existence at the 2 week or so of gestation. However, there was an organism there before the animal; namely, that organism was a single celled organism (zygote) then became a multicellular embryo (without all the other criteria officially qualifying it as an animal). Is the animal which Olson think we all are the same being as the organism that came before it? If so then we would come into existence at the same time as it (not two weeks into gestation but about 48 hours after conception). If the organism came into being 48 hours after conception and the animal is identical with that organism then the animal must have also came into existence at that same time (by Leibniz's law of identity). If not, what happened to that organism? Was it replaced or does it exist coincidentally with the animal? So similar problems plague Oslon's view I believe. But it doesn't stop there. What of the oocytic view? This view is just that we are the original egg in which was fertilized by some sperm. Since the egg is about 1000 times larger than the sperm, the joining of both cells may be seen as the egg simply incorporating the sperm and changing a bit in terms of mass etc instead of going out of existence along with the sperm and both being replaced by a new being (the zygote). But the oocytic view is clearly preposterous.

The modal argument for dualism

Here's what I understand about this argument. Versions of it has been used by Kripke and Chalmers and here by Plantinga to argue that we are not our bodies or brains. The argument goes like this: Imagine yourself without a body. That seems easy enough. Can you imagine your body without its body? It seems not. That would be patently contradictory. Thus, your mind must have at least one property that your body doesn't: namely the modal property of possibly existing without a body. By Leibniz's law, they cannot be identical. That law simply says that everything has the property it has. If A has a property B does not have, they are not identical by that law. Your mind would have the modal property of possibly existing without a body while your body cannot exist without itself.

There are at least two ways to attack this. One may wish to deny Leibniz's law for modal properties; that is, one may wish to assert that it is possible for some things to have some modal properties they don't have. But I don't see this as a plausible avenue. It seems to me that Leibniz's law is true unrestricted, true for all properties, genuine, relational and modal.

So I will concentrate on the other possible objection which I will term the epistemic constraint to modality (ECM). It may seem plausible at first that anything one can imagine being true may be true in some possible world. Your car may be green when it is actually red. We know that your car has the modal property of possibly being green. How do we know that? We just imagine it so and if we can imagine it so, it is possible it is so. That's how we seem to know what is and isn't possible in the broadest sense. I can imagine your car being green when it's red and thus it must have the modal property of possibly green. I cannot imagine your car being green all over and red all over at the same time and thus your car must not have the modal property of being possibly green and red all over at the same time.

But does this kind of epistemic access always cut modality at its joints? Cut it precisely such that the space of epistemic possibility covers the same space as the modal space? Let's imagine we live 500 years ago. We would know what water was. It's that clear, potable, odorless liquid. Can we imagine it not being H2O? Yep, I believe we can. We could imagine it being XYZ for example. But we now know that water = H2O. It could not have been possible that water did not turn out to be H2O because water = H2O is a necessary identity statement. This is a case where our epistemic space over steps the boundaries of possibility. Thus zombies may not be possible though we can (now) imagine them.

Defenders of the claim that epistemic space and modal space are perfectly overlapping can deny that people 500 years ago really can imagine that water = H2O because they are not thinking about water when they imagine it not being H2O. But this doesn't seem like a way to defend that claim because then how would we know we are talking about or believing anything about some putative object when we imagine it being so (having some property) when science may tell us one day that it does not have that property? It doesn't seem that my ability to refer and to think about things are so dependent on contingencies in future scientific discovery.

Intention

The post on copy and original got me thinking about intention. What is intention and does it involve mental states and if so does it involve specific kinds of mental states? Can zombies and machines have intention? Let's say that you think intentions must involve a kind of "what it feels like to intend to do A" or any kind of phenomenal mental state. What if mind-body reductionism or eliminativism is true? That would either mean that the what it feels like or phenomenal quality is just some physical process in the brain or whatever or in case of eliminativism, there is nothing that it is like, just an illusion of what it's like perhaps.

Let's look at mind-body reductionism. If it is true, then there must be some specific physical process necessary if those who think that the "what it feels" is necessary for intention. But that seems implausible. What makes that process any different and special (deserving of being called intention) from a functionally similar process and externally identical one that does the same thing? Indeed, philosophers have definitions of intention that do not include a mental state criterion.

If our brains are just computational devices and our thoughts, emotions, and other mental states are just computations or the results thereof and the Church-Turing thesis is correct then it would seem that "intention" can be captured by a fully functional analysis. Indeed, think of even computers now. An example is a chess playing program. We may term a particular move made by the program as an intention to do something (capture a queen, set a trap, checkmate, etc). It has some of the features of intention such as a goal and decision(s) made among possible options towards that goal, etc, though presumably, no phenomenal mental features

Vague objects

Few philosophers believe in vague objects. Vagueness, many say, stem from our language, our conceptual scheme, or our epistemic limitations. Attribution of vagueness to objects, they maintain, is committing the fallacy of verbalism or the fallacy of mistaking that the property of things have the property of the words that describe them. There are exceptions (David Lewis, Gareth Evans, and Roy Sorensen I believe) who believe in vague objects. But if quantum mechanics says particles can be vague why not all else that are often thought vague like mountains (or just about everything, both particulars and categories and natural kinds)?

4d/3d controversy in objects

There is a familiar controversy in the philosophy of time. It has to do with whether objects are 3 dimensional (3d) and "persists" through time or 4 dimensional (4d) spacetime "worms" (or as Ted Sider claims in his Four Dimensionalism, 4d stages). 3ders think that objects do not have temporal parts analogous to the object's spatial parts while 4ders think that the object at any time is just a part of the object at all times (its a segment or slice of the whole worm).

I realized that modern physics might say a thing or two about this. More specifically, quantum mechanics and especially quantum field theory. It could be that both the 3ders and the 4ders are right.

Consider particles in space. In classical physics such as relativity and Newtonian mechanics, objects have a definite position (the classic billiard ball analogy). In quantum mechanics, they do not; rather they have a "quantum superposition" or are "field quanta." They are neither specifically here nor there but their position is kind of spreading out in space. Quantum field theory has it that objects, even large objects, are mere properties of spacetime itself; just ripples or disturbances smeared in that spacetime manifold. Everything can be described by force differentials at any set of localized points in spacetime.

Objects are not only neither here nor there but neither now nor then. But particles do have definite positions once they are being measured or observed in some way. When the wave function collapses under observation and the scope of the scientists' equipment, they will have a definite positions.

I wonder if this can be used as an argument that in some sense, both the 3ders and the 4ders are right much as the corpuscular theory of light and the wave theory of light are both partially right even though they seemed contradictory when they were first proposed but quantum theory eventually resolved the issue in its familiar unforeseen way. Because objects are located in spacetime in quantum field theory, they are more like worms (or fuzzy worms, perhaps caterpillars, as they are smeared in that spacetime) as the 4der claims but may have specific spacetime locations once they are under the purview of observation and common discourse as the 3der claims.

Copy and original revisited

I realized one possible objection to my definition of copy as

Object A is a copy iff its creation was intended as a copy of some object B (or maybe even an idea of such an object) and A does not (numerically) equal B.

Imagine that an entrepreneur makes a supercomputer that is designed to make him lots of money. All he needs to do is supply it with lots of information about the world and the computer will do what it takes to best insure he gets money. The computer decides the best way is to make counterfeit paintings and sell them. The entrepreneur does not know what his computer is up to and just collects the cash it makes him. Since only a machine was involved with the manufacturing of the counterfeits, does that mean that copies of the painting were made without any intention?

I thought of this objection while reading Michael Rea's paper on pornography. He seems to think that the objection is a good one against certain definitions of porn.

However, I have my doubts because it seems that once machines as complex as the computer in the thought experiment is brought about, we can ascribe intentions to it. We already ascribe intentions to certain (complex) animals like dogs, apes, dolphins, etc. A dog e.g., brings you his frisbee. His intention seems to be that he wants to play. No problems there. I have no problems with intentions in many animals.

The issue is whether computers can do the things in the thought experiment without what can properly be called an intention on its part. It seems to be able to choose among available options and compute the best option and implement a plan of action and perform it despite the fact that it may not have the mental phenomenal content that people and animals who perform similar tasks have. Would that be enough to constitute intention? Can "intention" be defined loosely (so that it lacks for example a phenomenal content) but still maintain its close association with the phenomenon we attribute to our understanding of our own intentions? I'm not sure but it seems plausible to me that if the computer can do that it would have what can properly be called an intention.

Ubiquitous fictionalism

In a previous post, I talked about the possibility of moral fictionalism and the skepticism this possibility may justify. But fictionalism is not restricted to the moral realm. All kinds of metaphysical fictionalism is possible and the live possibility that there is much truth to them is the history of philosophy itself which has always butted heads against our most common notions of what exists, even the most commonly acknowledged objects are not safe from the existence of good reasons against their existence. Many metaphysicians are monists, many are atomists, and some are even nihilists. All these positions often deny the existence of chairs, basketballs, cars, and even people and claim that they are mere fictions we conjure to make sense of our world. They often claim that normal objects we encounter daily are begotten through abstraction and are not really there, objectively, mind independently, in the sense we may think or assume they are.

Take monists. They believe that there is just one thing that really exist and usually that one thing they believe is just the whole cosmos or "blobject" (some priority monists believe that only one thing exists concretely while everything else is abstract while existence monists believe that nothing else exists exist for that one thing, whatever it is). Now monists give very good reasons for why they believe what they believe. They can show contradictions and inconsistencies in positing normal everyday objects such as chairs, basketballs, cars, persons, molecules, etc. Monists have summoned arguments from mereology and modern physics (Jonathan Schaffer's argument from quantum field theory e.g.) among other resources to argue their case.

Now take atomists. Many of these folks only believe in the existence of atoms, whatever they may be (quarks or maybe strings or something even more fundamental). All other objects are collections of atoms with some relationship holding among them and obtained through arbitrary abstractions and thus there existence is mind-dependent in a sense. Atomists also have good reason to argue their case.

(Pure) Nihilists don't believe in the existence of any object. Many of them believe that there is gunk all the way down and all the way up. Again, nihilists have good reasons for their beliefs and their beliefs are conflicting much like the other positions with pluralism, the common sense view that all everyday objects like chairs, cars, basketballs, persons, etc exist. They often point to contradictions and inconsistencies in the belief in common objects or in the belief in any object qua object in the way philosophers think of them as existing with their internal properties mind independently, etc.

So it might be the case that our belief that everyday objects like chairs, cars, basketballs, and people are mere fictions. And furthermore, our belief in atoms and the cosmos might be fictions. Furthermore, any belief that assumes, posits, and is built on such beliefs may be in turn fictions. Fictions multiply on other fictions and we would need to invent more and more fictions in ever more ingenious ways familiar to philosophical construction to make sense of our world in ad hoc ways just to keep things coherent. That ad hoc constructionism only to run into further problems down the road sounds like the history of philosophy! This would entail, if true, that we live in a world of our own creation in a profound sense, a world of our fictions with reality far different and weirder than we can imagine. This induces a very Taoist sensibility in me. Something exists, that it is The One, but we cannot know its exact nature except in very general, abstract and ineffable terms, and all conceptualizations on this The One goes wrong from the start seems like a Taoist's skepticist view.