And, disagreeing with Massimo on Homo ethicus

 Massimo seems to be coming more and more of a moral realist. He posted for free this 2024 piece on that.

I disagree and here's why.

I have long thought that we simply “are,” morally, for several reasons.

One is from Walter Kaufmann’s “Without Guilt and Justice.” I am not sure we can make overarching claims about ourselves en toto as a species without getting into Platonism, or without trying to claim a utilitarian view from nowhere and nowhen about the development of human ethics. In other words, on the second half of this first issue, we simply can't step outside of ourselves to make moral judgments about ourselves as a species in that way. (Although little mentioned in the book, critics have generally understood it to be a critique of John Rawls.)

On the Platonist side, these words and ideas don't come from nowhere, though. That's part of why I would call myself a moral semi-realist. 

Another is from either Gödel’s or Tarski’s broader world of thought. It’s not technically within either of their theorems, but more broadly, I think it’s a self-referential claim within a quasi-sufficient quasi-formal structure and can’t stand. Third gets to the evolution of human psychology etc. (Massimo mentioned there’s a specific phrase for non-ev psych theories of the evolutionary development of human psychology, but that was eons ago.) Under this, our moral judgments evolved with our moral actions, and so they’re intertwined; this is kind of a spin-off of the point above.

Related to that would be the idea that our morals evolved as part of larger psychological evolution for Darwinian reasons.

And, if not self-referential, what outside standard do you use and how do you defend that against charges of the Euthyphro dilemma? 

I’m a moral semi-realist, if you had to label me. I’m not a moral realist, but I’m not a moral non-realist, let alone anti-realist, either, per the above, and I specifically reject subtheories within that like moral anarchism. And I am reminded that I need to get back to reading Walter Sinott-Armstrong.

==

Extensive addendum 

See Stanford's Plato for more on moral realism, including how its opposition to moral anti-realism is paired or twinned, as well as what the standard is for making realism-based moral judgments. Moral naturalism sounds nice, but it is not what it sounds like; Plato notes it's a subset of moral realism, and any version of it that does not say that not all claimed moral facts actually are moral facts because they're not naturalistically grounded is not where I'm at.

The real real problem with moral naturalism, as I see it, and as it appears that SEP doesn't see it, is the issue of what is a "moral fact"? Otherwise, it's a kind of tautological idea for anyone who is a methodological naturalist in general. Both moral realism and moral anti-realism are, for such a person, naturalistic. 

What I'm really looking for is, basically, something like an Academic Skeptic version of morals. That is, no moral statements are factual in a narrow sense; some are closer to being factual in how strong they're based on a naturalistic derivation. And, of course, moral skepticism best fits the bill; indeed, the breadth of views within it describe well the breadth of my speculations. Indeed, Sinnott-Armstrong is cited several times in the essay. See also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry for moral epistemology.

Per his Wiki, Sinnott-Armstrong studied under noted scholar of Pyrrhonism Robert Fogelin. From that, it notes that he's long promoted coherentism, and per the Wiki on that, I take it as the second half of coherentism, the epistemological, not the truth-theory version. See IEP's entry for more.

To put it another way, moral skepticism, per the second half of SEP's article, parallels theories of knowledge. In other words, moral skepticism rejects the idea of moral knowledge as justified true moral belief, or something to that end. That said, per a diagram about two-thirds in, as I reject both halves of the traditional division between Academic and Pyrrhonic Skepticism, so I reject both halves of the similar division on moral skepticism. I say, instead, in both cases, that we can postulate general probabilities and therefore can make some degree of judgment rather than a suspended epoche, but that the probabilities are very general and can not be assigned precise percentages or even very narrow ranges in most cases.

Also, it should be noted that coherentism is NOT Quine's epistemological holism. 

This all said, I found S-A's book on Pyrrhonism sadly wanting. 

Finally, it should be noted that the SEP article on moral skepticism is BY Sinnott-Armstrong. That will make picking back up his "Moral Skepticisms" book even easier. 

WRR First Circle: $125 a month; really?

 I heard that on the radio a week ago, and double checked on its website, and yes.

This is only further acceleration of a trend that started even before COVID, but was massively accelerated by it: Increasing economic disparity within the classical music world.

Twenty years ago, on a six-pack season ticket package for its chorale terrace area, I could go to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for $10 a concert. (The then-21 concert season came in three seven-part groupings, with one of each seven a chorale based concert that excluded chorale terrace seating.) Buy a second six-pack and it was $9 a concert within that. Buy a third and $8 a pop for that.

The $125 per month is $1,500 per year. If some literally tithed to charity and this was it, that would be a $15,000 annual income. More realistic? If they gave 2 percent to charity, and only here, that would be a $75K annual income. Donate 2 percent, and half to WRR, and you're at $150K, and in the DFW Metromess, not Austin, let alone one of the coasts.

 

Back to the current DSO.

Side note, first: Why are they playing full-length, or nearly so, concerts outside the Meyerson, and NOT a pops-type summer concert? 

Now, the prices.

Cheapest promoted for new subscribers is $148 for four concerts. That's $37 a pop. And, you're not shown available seats until AFTER you buy, which was not the case 20 years ago. Actually a bit cheaper is $256 for eight, just $32.

Creating your own package of three or more is no cheaper? It looks cheaper, but the $4 per concert handling fees, waived on preset packages, is charged. 

Still disagreeing with Massimo in some ways on determinism

 He talks about this issue more in this piece, part 1 of 2 on five "-isms."

This part covers determinism, materialism and reductionism. 

First, he notes he rejects contracausal free will. That's kind of a throwaway, though; doesn't any materialist monist?

Second, he does allow for quantum effects, while not overstating them.

The fail comes on reductionism. He rejects greedy reductionism and allows for emergent properties.

He just fails to apply that idea to libertarian free will, my idea of "something like free will" based in part, indirectly, on Dan Dennett, and even more, directly, on Dan Wegner. Indeed, "libertarian free will" or "compatibilism isn't even mentioned.

Massimo could, again, stand to read some Daniel Wegner. EVERYBODY who pushes the false dichotomy of "free will versus determinism" could. 

And that's the rub.

On the other hand, near the end, he notes:

So what’s my position about reductionism? When I was younger I was attracted by the notion of strong emergence, in great part because as an organismal biologist I simply couldn’t see how things like the development of living beings, and even less the complexity of ecosystems, could ever be reduced to physics. Now I’m not so sure, and in fact the more time passes the more I lean toward reductionism and weak emergence.

So, that may be why he's a harder determinist today. 

Another reason? Before you hit the paywall in his part 2, he appears to be more of a positivist than before. 

What if Noah's curse of Canaan is still being misinterpreted?

 Justin Reed notes Christian churches, EVEN the Southern Baptist Convention, have rejected the idea that there is, or was, some "curse of Canaan" that was Blackness or similar.

Progress, right? But, the core of his piece is that the post-Flood story is still being misinterpreted, as though Noah's curse was correct, and the only incorrect thing has been the identification of what that curse was. 

In other words, just maybe, Noah was nothing more than a grumpy old sot with a hangover. This is better than some other alleys Reed wanders down as side warrens. Yes, people like women were marginalized in antiquity; the idea that we should read their point of view into ancient stories is often overblown.

It also ignores a more straightforward reading. This is Yahweh the nationalist god for the descendants of certain children of Shem. The "divine curse" is not slavery, but an invasion and takeover of their land. You know, Yahweh the proto-Zionist. Because Noah has three sons, Japheth is along for the ride. Surprised that Anglo-Israelite types haven't done more with this.

That said, frankly, and via poetry, I've long wondered if this was a Yahwist version of something like a castration myth like that of Cronos against Ouranos. Fitting that into the above, Ham has a failed castration attempt and is punished for it, as is son Canaan.

How can you write a book about time, its subjectivity, and the self without including Hume?

 Somebody should ask Jo Marchant, because she did exactly that.

In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant
My rating: 1 of 5 stars 

 

In a book like this, with a title like this and its subtitle, knowing that ideas of selfhood would also be involved, even though he’s a philosopher, not a scientist, I expected a hat tip to David Hume’s famous comment about trying to perceive the self:

"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."

So I looked at the index.

And Hume, this comment or any other, is not in here!

It’s not like Marchant is philosopher-ignorant. Beyond what I said in the review, her bio on Goodreads would hint at that:

Dr Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist based in London. She has a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology from St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in London, and an MSc in Science Communication (with a dissertation in evidence-based medicine) from Imperial College London. She has worked as an editor at New Scientist and at Nature, and her articles have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Wired UK, The Observer Review, New Scientist and Nature. Her radio and TV appearances include BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week and Today programmes, CNN and National Geographic. She has lectured around the world. Her book Decoding the Heavens was shortlisted for the 2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

There you are.

Besides leaning on Anil Seth for theories of mind and consciousness, she references other living philosophers like Galen Strawson, 20th-century giants like Russell, Husserl and Wittgenstein, goes all the way back to the pre-Socratics, and also references Leibniz from Hume’s own general time.

But no Hume. (And no other British Empiricist, for that matter, even though chapters a little bit over halfway through the book discuss ideas related to empiricist ideas of the mind and the universe.)

Anyway, seeing him not in here, I figured I had to check out the book to figure out how much to review-bomb it because no Hume gets you a ding for sure.

But, “ding”? Hell, no. By the time I was a fair way in, I realized this book was going to get a crushing review bombing, complete with the “mendaciousness” bookshelf tag. (I also gave it the "philosophy" tag, but, per the below, refuse to give it any tag for any natural science.)

Let’s dig in, staying with what all Marchant left out in what I am assuming is intentional philosophy bias against Hume in particular and empiricism in general.

Hume’s comments refer to ideas of a “soul” as well as self or consciousness.

From this, Hume noted elsewhere that without change, we would not have a “now.”

Hume himself writes, “that time or duration consists of different parts: for otherwise we could not conceive of a longer or shorter duration.”

Also, many sites will tell you about Hume’s influence on Einstein. They’ll also tell you, related to that, that Hume questioned Newton’s idea of absolute time.

Aeon has a long essay about this:

‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have been written on the topic.’ Then he went on to express his intellectual debt to ‘Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I had studied avidly and with admiration shortly before discovering the theory of relativity. It is very possible that without these philosophical studies I would not have arrived at the solution.’

See how mendacious it is, from that pull quote alone, for Marchant, in her many mentions of Einstein, to never mention Hume? Read the whole piece, and you'll see in blinding detail the degree of mendaciousness.

Related and coming from the latter part of the book? Her discussion of quantum theory is incomplete on the varieties of interpretations possible, including looking at it in non “romantic” terms of classical statitstical mechanics. More weirdly yet, Schrödinger is never mention in her discussion of the quantum world. At this point, I basically stopped reading and figured we were in one-star territory. My thoughts on Schrödinger, his cat, and his smoking too much Bhagavad Gita.

This all really, really came out about page 200 and shortly thereafter. Before page 100, with the Hume ding, I figured were were at best 3.5 stars rounded down, and by 150 or so, figured we were at 2 stars. Obviously, these things were the final self-burials Marchant committed.

But as noted, she was on the downslope before this.

That’s because I’m not enamored of her choices of modern philosophers of consciousness and ideas and theories of consciousness much more than I am enamored of her writing Hume out of the picture.

First, I’m not enamored of Anil Seth so leaning heavily on him can get you another ding. (Per the link? Active inference with a Bayesian background is itself not bad, but he loves to make overblown claims and is all wet on free will, including repeated strawmanning.)

And while Andy Clark, also leaned on, is somewhat better than Seth, that’s a low bar. Spinning off Clark, she proposes an enactivist version of qualia that sounds like high-octane pure empiricism, but she still can’t reference empiricism. Maybe it’s a matter of fear, of being called out for all the wrongness of empiricism.

The fact that humans’ two primary senses evolved to see electromagnetic radiation of certain wavelengths and hear certain frequencies of material vibrations show that the world of consciousness can’t be entirely “in here.” With light, in fact, all creatures with sensory organs evolved to see in roughly the same wavelengths, with some tilting more left, some more right, a few extending into either the low ultraviolet or the upper infrared, because of the wavelengths of radiation the sun puts out, followed by plant evolution, above all chlorophyll’s color. Things like this continue to put paid to the problems of empiricism or some sort of backdoor neo-empiricism that Marchant may be trying to do, even with dissing The King of Empiricists.

I mean, if you think about it, that's what some of these modern theories of consciousness are — neo-empiricism, in essence. And, that's at core of why they fall short.

I mean, human brains and sensory systems, and animal nervous systems in general, evolved for better survival odds in response to specific environments. In other words, not sensory experiences, but sensory experiences adapted to an "out there."

Although Marchant doesn’t mention directly Karl Friston and his Free Energy Principle as much, it too is considered overstated by many. One critique?

More importantly, we observe that a mathematically central step in the argument, connecting the behaviour of a system to variational inference, relies on an implicit equivalence between the dynamics of the average states of a system with the average of the dynamics of those states. This equivalence does not hold in general even for linear stochastic systems, since it requires an effective decoupling from the system's history of interactions.

This applies to circa page 170. It's kind of like a high-level version of confusing "mean" and "median" as two different types of averaging.

On lesser things, I’m not sure she’s a “determinist,” but she seems to pass forward Seth’s strawmanning of free will. Beyond all of the above, per a low-star reviewer, there’s also not a “throughline” here.

Review bomb complete. And, assuming Marchant has a philosophical bias about even discussing empiricism in general and Hume in particular, I won’t read her again.


View all my reviews

Blogroll updates

Vridar's been removed again, from a combination of not needing to give Neil more airplay and comments of mine there going in the moderation queue and then getting killed.

Added? 

The Gnostic Archive. David Litwa is an up-and-comer in biblical criticism. 

Markus Vinzent's Blog. I disagree with him on running the origin of the Synoptics all through Marcion, but he writes about other NT biblical criticism ideas as well. 

Panthera: Christian creation, not Jewish?

So claims Christopher Zeichmann, in this excerpt from a new book. The basic gist is that this was a Christian anti-Jewish polemic:

Early Christian writers placed the accusation in the mouths of fictional or stylized Jewish opponents to defend the virginal conception, police Christian belief, and portray Jews as hostile outsiders. Rabbinic references to the “son of Panthera” are late, fragmentary, and too ambiguous to support the idea of an organized Jewish anti-Christian polemic.

INNteresting. 

My first counter-thought is, then how did it wind up in the Toledoth Yeshu? Did rabbis forget entirely about its Christian origin? (Zeichmann doesn't claim the whole TY is a Christian creation, or even with largely Christian roots. He knows that's simply not possible.)

Zeichmann notes that its first Jewish reference is in the third century CE, in the Tosefta. He also notes the Tosefta refers to a "heretic" named Yaakov, who invokes the name of Yeshu to try to heal someone from snakebite. Is this a play on "Yohanan the Dyemaker" in Toledoth Yeshu, generally regarded as John the Baptizer? Both it and the Jerusalem Talmud's story play off the idea of Jesus the Magician, which appears to be a strain of thought from early on in the TY.

Second, why did it already arise in the second century? Wasn't Christianity still too small to be issuing bank-shot anti-Jewish counterblasts, at least ones with enough legs to get the attention of Celsus? 

Zeichmann says:

[T]here are two major flaws with the prevailing opinion that the Panthera legend was the product of Jewish slander and largely perpetuated by Jews. First, Christian texts claiming that real, historical Jews were the primary articulators of the Panthera legend are deeply unreliable. Second, it is not clear that the earliest Jewish references to “Yeshu son of Panthera” refer to the Christian figure of Jesus. Let us consider these issues in turn.

Well, let's see now. 

He goes on to claim that since we don't have Celsus' own words, who claims to be quoting a Jew, we can hardly know what Celsus actually said. Well, that's true of ANYTHING where Celsus is being refuted by Origen.

He then claims the Jewish Yeshu has but few points of comparison with Jesus. 

Yes, but isn't that the whole point? The TY, for example, is largely a scurrilous screed. Zeichmann approaches the Jesus Seminar's use of the "criterion of dissimilarity," or perhaps its overuse.

As for unreliability of texts? Are the texts he critiques MORE unreliable than others, and if so, how much more? Not stated in this excerpt. 

Zeichmann then says it's the Babylonian Talmud that conflates ben Stada and ben Panthera, and after the conflation, makes the new person to look more like Jesus. That said, at least in this excerpt, he does no further analysis of the conflation.

Interestingly, Zeichmann only references the TY twice.

I just don't buy the idea that some Christian, pre-170 CE, would have made this story up to kneecap Jews and specifically over a dispute about Mary's virginity or not.

Going beyond that, Zeichmann claims this is Christian projection of doubt about the virginal conception. Also unlikely, if not highly unlikely.

Plus, this is not the only time Zeichmann has had an "out there" interpretation. (Among other things, he posits a gay relationship between the centurion and servant of Jesus' healing in Matthew 8/Luke 7, though his focus is more on the interpretation history of the passage. Where he really goes wrong, on that link, beyond that, is the assumption this is based on a historical event. The idea that Capernaum, largely Jewish, had an actual centurion, per both Matthew and Luke and presumably Q behind it [I take John as derivative from Luke] is simply a non-starter. Yes, Antipas had elements of his army partially, and in places, organized on Roman lines, but that's not a guarantee. Besides, at no more than 1,000 people there, Antipas would have had no more than a small constabulary. Zeichmann has a much more detailed discussion of the discussion, and pros and cons, here.)

Finally, an author who five-star ratings-bombs his own book before it appears in print, as Zeichmann did on Goodreads? (I one-star rating-bombed in response to set the scales back to even.)