Philosophy Hurt Your Head

The Blog has Moved

2006-11-16T15:51:00.000+11:00

Philosophy Hurts YourHead has moved, for the forseeable future to its new home at Wordpress. To get to the new site click on this link : http://samueldouglas.wordpress.com/

All the old content has been imported, so you can still take exception to old posts etc.

Wordpress?

2006-10-31T13:18:00.000+11:00

Hey all, I'm currently testing Wordpress to see if it is better than Blogger. Click the link to have a look. http://samueldouglas.wordpress.com/

If it at alsucessful I'll transfer permanently to that provider, as well as seeing if the Philosophy Club site would benefit from a similar move.

Postgraduate Symposium

2006-10-31T09:56:00.000+11:00

On Thursday I'll be delivering a paper entitled "Meaning Scepticism and its Implications for the Interpretation of Policy" at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences Postgraduate Symposium.
This is organised each year to give post grad students an opportunity to ramble at a captive audience of their peers, whether we want to or not. This means that we actually are seen in public at least once a year.

I'll post the transcript after Thursday.

Till then...

Life and other stuff

2006-10-31T09:39:00.000+11:00

Which is a stupid title, really. I mean, did anything happen to me that was not a part of my life? Never mind.
In a nutshell, since I last posted:

I got married - which was great, we have a really good time and there were only a few minor mishaps along the way. No 'Funniest Home Videos' or "Four Weddings and a Funeral' moments thank goodness! The honeymoon was good, even though we it rained for almost the entire time (but fined up when we left the beach!)

I went to a funeral - for my grandfather, who passed after a long illness. As well as think alot about his life, and what it means for that generation of my family to be gone, I thought a great deal about the consolations philosophy can't give.

I had my candidature confirmed. After what I think was the weakest verbal defence of a thesis ever heard, my supervisor, the Head of School, and the CT&L Convenor all thought what I was doing was great and generally made a fuss. Weird, but a great relief.

Sketicism, Contextualism and Kripke?

2006-06-30T11:16:00.000+10:00

Aaron Cotnoir of What is it like to be a blog? , Voices his concerns regrding contextualism in :
"Skepticism about the Contextualist response to Skepticism"

"Recently, philosophers have suggested that garden-vareity epistemic skepticism can be answered with contextualism. Contextualists argue that standards for correctly asserting that S knows that P can vary. In some contexts, the criteria for knowledge attribution are loose. In other contexts, standards are more rigorous."

What I'm wondering is if Kripke's Skeptical Paradox can be correctly characterised as ontological rather than epistemic skepticism, does this solution still work? In some ways I think it might, as contextualism does bear some resemblance to Kripk'e Sceptical Solution. But there seem to be some important differences as well. I'll talk more about these later when I have a better grasp of 'contextualism' as such. The problem (for Aaron at least) is that applying this solution to rule-following commits the position to being contextualist about the truth of what the 'right' way of using words is, which he may not want to commit to.

Mind and Meaning- the Sequel.

2006-06-06T16:16:00.000+10:00

This is a selection of some of the things that have crossed my mind during the past few months of my research. None of this really makes much sense so far, so if it seems disjointed and poorly developed, that is because it is. The setting for these thoughts is a particular problem that has dominated my thinking of late. It is this: Kripke's Sceptical Solution seems to imply that all there is to our use of the word 'meaning' is that if a speaker passes the tests (and keeps passing them) for a word, then we can assert that they are using the word in the 'right' way. But this is at odds with the intuitively appealing idea that only certain kinds of things, namely things with Minds, can 'mean' anything at all. This was my paradox.

But first some definitions: The main one to keep an eye on is the 'Functional Isomorph'. I picked this up when reading David Chalmers The Concious Mind. Basically it is a Philosophical Zombie, functioning exactly as we would, with every particle in their being exactly the same as on us, except, they have no phenomenal or subjective experience. There is nothing it is like to be a functional isomorph. For this reason it is not to much of a stretch to say that if such a thing did exist(and I'm not sure that they are even logically possible), that it would not have what we call a Mind.

Consider these examples:

1. Monkeys: Suppose we had an infinite monkey simulator. Now if I talk to it it would usually respond with nonsense. But suppose by freak chance it responds properly, do I consider it a speaker? No. Therefore I don't consider its words to have meaning.

2. Zombies: Suppose I am talking with my functional isomorph. Being what they are, they respond properly. Do I consider its words meaningful? From a purely functionalist viewpoint, I would have to. But from the viewpoint that only if something is a 'speaker' do I even get to the question: “In virtue of what does this speaker mean X by X?”. Speakers must have minds, which are dependant on certain physical structures. Once again Mind arises as a necessary but insufficient factor in meaning X by X. Therefore, I thought, for Kripke's account of meaning to be correct, it must be compatible with a non-functionalist account of Mind.

I thought about Zombies some more, and found myself pondering the following:

A puzzle: The Meaning Zombie.

Q:Is the following entity logically possible?

A functional isomorph, but more than that, a copy that does have the same phenomenal qualities as myself, but is a Meaning Zombie. That is to say, he passes the usage tests, he has phenomenal experience, he has a mind etc, but, his words, even when they are the same as mine, have no meaning.

A:I would say not. If he satisfies these requirements, and his speech is 'correct', then there is no way that we can say he does not mean X by X.

Questions like the two above got me to thinking that there was something wrong with how I had initially approached this whole issue. I suspect I had been a little too impressed by JR Searle's assertion that it was ludicrous to allow thing with-out minds to 'mean' what they said. It did take me a while to get this though, and I spent a fairly sleepless week toying with the idea of some grand metaphysical schema describing meaning as being emergent from the interaction of non-physical phenomenal properties. I thought very naughty things about quantum mechanics and wave collapse, and was generally very weird. But I have given this away for the moment for two reasons. One is that however seductive one might find Chalmers' property dualism, it does have its problems, or at least a few circularities to sort out. The other is that I began to suspect that there are two issues at hand here, and that the downfall of many defenders of so called 'straight' solutions as well as pseudo-sceptical but claiming to be straight ones (I suspect JR Searle's Background based solution is one of these), has been to confuse, or at least to lump these two issues in together as if they were indivisible.
So I went back to the an earlier question: Under what circumstances would we say that something that has no mind 'means' what it says?

To answer this question, we need to break down 'meaning'. There are two basic things to consider.

One is “Utterance X means X not Y”.

The other is “I mean X not Y by X”.

The first is about the determinacy of rules. The second is about the definition of meaning, it is the idea that 'meaning' is connected to there being a subject to 'mean' something

Mind is necessary for meaning in the subject-action sense. Therefore in that sense the attribution of Mind is necessary ( but not sufficient) for the attribution of 'meaning'. 'Correctness', for want of a better term is the other necessary but insufficient condition.

This has led me to the position where I'm inclined to say that 'Meaning', we have been using the word, is two distinct things.

Clearly under Kripke's sceptical solution, 'correctness' is defined by the language game as the rules a negotiated and re-negotiated. But if this is true then the attribution of Mind (perhaps attribution of 'Subjectivity' is probably more applicable, in any case I intend to extend upon this in the future) is a process determined by the language games via either consciously or unconsciously held beliefs, (as Searle of all people seems to imply).

If the rule that governs what we consider/assert to be a 'Subject' (or a thing with a mind) is not a rule that is determinate, then there is nothing determinate about meaning, not even about what can 'mean' anything by it words, there is just what it is appropriate to assert can 'mean' things by it words.

Two questions emerge:

1.Is there any foundation for how we ascribe 'Mind' other than the fact that it is just what we do?

And more importantly:

2.Is there any foundation for the assertion that only things with 'Mind' can 'Mean' what they say other than a similar sort of convention?

The first question is one that I'll write at length about at a later date. But the second one, on that I'll just say this: If the rule that governs the use of the word 'Mean' is not determinate, then we cannot sustain the logically necessary connection between Subjectivity and Meaning, even if there are very good reasons that it is very unlikely that they could ever become divorced in practice.

That pretty well describes where I'm at at this stage.

Mind and Meaning - Arg!

2006-05-12T14:26:00.000+10:00

Here's a problem I've hit in my doctoral research:
I have been looking for a way to resolve certain issues in AI, philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language. I thought that I could do this by using a combination of Saul Kripke's sceptical solution and David Chalmers' account of conciousness, particularly the idea of organisational invariance.

However, it's become obvious that Kripke's solution to the rule-following paradox is essentially functionalist, and is therefore prone to the issues of functional isopmorphs with no conscious or phenominal experience going on 'inside'. This is a problem because one of the sticking points in showing how a manufactured intelligence can 'mean' something by a certain word is that the entity might have no concious expereince. According to JR Searle (and I'm inclined to agree) this is a problem, because 'meaning' something by a word requires conciousness as nessecary but insufficient factor.

It seems a problem if even a sceptical account of meaning is prone to the same arguments that are employed against materialism and functionalism.

Where is responsibility?

2006-04-26T16:45:00.000+10:00

Responsibility: Liberal society is predicated on the existence of responsibility. A few weeks ago on Today Tonight, I saw a youth in trouble because he had racked up massive debt. His mother complained that there should be restrictions on how much people can spend if they don’t earn much (he was on about $18,000 AUD per year). If we really thought he was responsible, we would not have this conversation. This is why metaphysics and the philosophies surrounding Mind, Free Will and the like are so important, much more so than some ethicists would have us believe. Because the metaphysics that allowed us to believe in personal responsibility has evaporated, our ethical systems have foundered. We have only a few choices.

1. Craft a new system of ethics that does not rely on responsibility. This has turned out to be a little harder than we thought. It might resemble physics, or it might not. However some might argue that an Ethics that resembles what we understand Physics to be is no Ethics at all.

2. Find a way to get responsibility back into the picture. (This seems very, very hard.)

Overall it is option 2. that I would like to see acted upon. I am very suspicious of treating ethics like physics, as this could lead to people being viewed as particles, devoid of personal responsibility. This might not be a bad thing in some ways but I worry that it might lead to a situation that is untenable. Treating people as if they are not responsible seems to make them unhappy. It involves choices that are enjoyable, legitimate or both being taken away from people. More specifically this involves only certain kinds of changes being made. For example: too much, or even any X is damaging. Do we change the situation so that X can be used without as many negative effects, or provide alternatives that are less damaging? No, we restrict the availability of X and produce a new disciplinary discourse in the process. This general pattern is my concern. This “responsibility doesn’t exist/determinist” strategy is not deployed in a way that actually helps either the meta-ethical problem at hand, or the quality of life of the people involved. It is deployed in order to achieve and consolidate certain socio-political agendas, almost always conservative in flavour. In the current political environment in Australia (small ‘l’) liberalism is used to justify free market economics, but not freedom to marry a person of the same sex. Similarly, the denial of responsibility will be used to justify the restriction of liberties, but not the fact that we can’t help but strive for these same ends.

ID not so Intelligent

2006-04-20T11:22:00.000+10:00

Intelligent Design is the logic of ignorance - complex life, such as the machinery of blood clotting, can be explained by Darwinism, says Steve Jones

As I sat down to write this piece, I put on my glasses. They were designed by an intelligent optician to correct my eyesight, which, acute as it once was, is now - like that of most elderly academics - blurred at best. The lens has become less elastic with time and no longer focuses properly. My specs help, but soon I will need a stronger pair.

Read the Whole Article Here

(From www.telegraph.co.uk/ via Arts & Letters Daily)

Philosophical Humor

2006-04-03T12:21:00.000+10:00

Non-Universal Ethics Notice:

Due to the possibility that a common notion of ethics are not
universally shared by all sentient beings, and that therefore the
manufacturer may have entirely different concept of "fairness",
"equity", "honesty", and "integrity" than the consumer, the consumer
should not expect the product purchased to conform in any way to the
advertised properties of the product.

-From Bert Christensen's Truth & Humour Collection

The Trouble with the Turing Test

2006-02-22T08:25:00.000+11:00

"One AI champion, Yorick Wilks, goes even further: he has questioned how we can even be sure that other humans think, and suggests that something like the Test is what we actually, if unconsciously, employ to reassure ourselves that they do. Wilks (not to be confused with Maurice Wilkes, quoted earlier) offers us here a reductio ad absurdum: the Turing Test asks us to evaluate an unknown entity by comparing its performance, at least implicitly, with that of a known quantity, a human being. But if Wilks is to be believed, we have unknowns on both sides of the comparison; with what do we compare a human being to learn if he thinks?"

Mark Halpern, "The Trouble with the Turing Test," The New Atlantis, Number 11, Winter 2006, pp. 42-63.

Read the whole article Here.

Voltaire on Prayer

2006-02-20T14:23:00.000+11:00

The Eternal has his designs from all eternity. If prayer is in accord with his immutable wishes, it is quite useless to ask of him what he has resolved to do. If one prays to him to do the contrary of what he has resolved, it is praying that he be weak, frivolous, inconstant; it is believing that he is thus, it is to mock him. Either you ask him a just thing, in which case he must do it, the thing being done without your praying to him for it, and so to entreat him is then to distrust him; or the thing is unjust, and then you insult him. You are worthy or unworthy of the grace you implore: if worthy, he knows it better than you; if unworthy, you commit another crime by requesting what is undeserved.
In a word, we only pray to God because we have made him in our image. We treat him like a pasha, like a sultan whom one may provoke or appease.

Voltaire- "Prayers," Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1770-1774)

The Foresight Exchange Prediction Market

2006-02-01T10:46:00.000+11:00

I had been going over interesting stuff on the web and rediscovered this site.
FX, as it is know, is a game, (in the style of a futures market,) where participants can bet (with fake money) on the probability of future events, and/or make claims of their own about the future. Wikipedia on FX.

Now this might seem a bit geeky and possibly so grossly inaccurate that it gives no useful information. But I was watching a claim related to the price of crude oil last year, a claim that it would hit some huge high or other. The FX market for this claim went through the roof several days in advance of the 'real' market. Did it predict this riseor cause it? I don't know. But it might be worth watching.

I was thinking that it I, and some of the people from Dialectic should put together some claims (possibly of a philosophical nature) and see how the FX community reacts to them.

Do secular societies breed enough to survive?

2006-01-16T12:38:00.000+11:00

I read this on the New Criterion a while back. It is interesting, if somewhat casutic and overexited in places, but does raise a valid question: Will the demographics and more specifcally the reprodcutive habits, of western secular culture be its downfall?

Update on Assorted Stuff in my Life.

2006-01-16T12:00:00.000+11:00

Yeah I know I've been quiet lately. Well there was Christmas and all, and I don't apologise for staying away from the computer over the holidays. The last two weeks have been very trying, with two deaths in my extended and not so extended family.

I will be posting a bit more lightly for the next few weeks, as I am actually working full time as the (temporary and semi-official) Program Officer for the Bachelor of Arts at the Uni. I even have a desk!

Excerpt from the Intelligent Design Ruling

2005-12-22T12:33:00.000+11:00

From Kitzmiller et al versus Dover Area School District et al

"To briefly reiterate, we first note that since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the ID Policy is the advancement of religion. See McLean, 529 F. Supp. at 1272. Second, the disclaimer read to students “has the effect of implicitly bolstering alternative religious theories of origin by suggesting that evolution is a problematic theory even in the field of science.” Selman, 390 F. Supp. 2d at 1308-09. Third, reading the disclaimer not only disavows endorsement of educational materials but also “juxtaposes that disavowal with an urging to contemplate alternative religious concepts implies School Board approval of religious principles.” Freiler, 185 F.3d at 348." (133 – 134)

Read the Whole Judgment Here

(Thanks to MH @ Epideixis for this link)

A setback for Intelligent Design

2005-12-21T09:26:00.000+11:00

A loss in the courts (in the U.S.) for the drive to teach Intelligent Design as science in public schools. Maybe it is still metaphyics after all.

"Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said."

Read the full story Here

(Thanks to Xavier for sending me this one).

Results are In!

2005-12-14T10:56:00.000+11:00

Program: B Arts (Hons)
Awarded Bachelor of Arts (Honours) with Honours Class II Division 1 on 12 December 2005

It isn't perfect, but it is almost definitely enough to get into a PhD next year.
I'm pretty surprised. I thought I had done quite badly.

Once again I'd like to thank some people for their help this year:

All the active members of the Philosophy Club for listening to my incredibly boring and complex rants on Anselm and universal sets.

Martin Hill for listening to more of these rants, and suffering through my need to talk out the Kripke coursework in semester 1.

Rowan for reminding me that it is actually all about him.

Ming for being more or less completely wrong about set theory.

Dr John Wright for his time, feedback, encouragement and basically showing confidence in my ability.

My parents and family for their ongoing moral and financial support.

And most importantly my fiance Alexandra, for the emotional, financial, physiological and nutritional support that she gave me this year. I don't think I could have done it without her.

Epideixis

2005-12-05T18:31:00.000+11:00

I'm now contributing to a new collaborative blog, Epideixis, along with Martin Hill and Rowan Blyth. It is exciting and topical (perhaps) and a tiny bit more serious than here. Visit it, or else!

PhD. Maybe.

2005-12-05T08:40:00.000+11:00

Received a letter from the University of Newcastle saying I have 'provisional' acceptance into a PhD (Philosophy) in 2006! The 'provisional' bit takes a bit of the fun out of it, it means that I will have to have finished honours to a 'satisfactory' extent and have a citizenship check to enrol. Hopefully I can pass muster on both. It can't be a bad sign though. Someone must have liked my research proposal.

On Denoting

2005-11-29T13:31:00.000+11:00

A conference on Russell's work, On Denoting is being held in Padua, Italy from the 15-17 December 2005. Pity none of us here can get there for it.

Sedition Update

2005-11-29T10:04:00.000+11:00

Will the new Sedition laws go through parliament unchanged or not? We will know in the next few days.

Maybe.

So remember, criticise the government if you have to, but be careful who you support. (In public anyway). On that note, also remember that most modes of electronic communication are not secure.

Sedition and Philosophy on Radio.

2005-11-24T08:43:00.001+11:00

I'm going to be on TiN Radio on Friday from 10 till 11 am (Australian Eastern Standard Time) discussing Australia's new Sedition laws.

Hear Sam Speak!

2005-11-24T08:43:00.000+11:00

I'm going to be on TiN Radio on every second Friday from 10 till 11 am (Australian Eastern Standard Time) discussing what ever philosophical thing seems appropriate ( or not).
If you are outside of Australia and can't work out what time this is where you are, go to here

Dates: (Australian)
9 of December
23 of december

etc

Fashion Bitterness

2005-11-15T08:05:00.000+11:00

Fashion? Why the fuck would I bother? I can get my identity eroded for free. Hell, I can go to work and get paid for it! I don't need to throw my money away on some argyle print piece of shit to prove how much of an individual I'm not.