At the same time, John Carlos Baez has posted on Probability Theory and the Undefinability of Truth
A much more limited goal than that of assigning objective probabilities to all propositions is that of doing so just for the subset of propositions that make arithmetic statements.

The possibility of making a self-consistent assignment of probabilities to arithmetic propositions has apparently been recently established (by Christiano, Yudkowsky, Herreshoff and Mihaly in a preprint at http://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Christiano-et-al-Naturalistic-reflection-early-draft.pdf).But it also appears that there may in fact be many such assignments.

How would such non-uniqueness get reconciled with the idea of objective Bayesian probability?

I don’t know that everyone “should” do it, but I do think that formulating and expressing opinions regularly (on topics that may not be part of one’s working life) is a useful exercise for most of us. Not having an audience, I don’t really have the option to persuade anyone, so for me it’s more about clarification and reinforcement of my own thoughts and ideas – and protection against the fear that I will forget them.

It was nice to see some acknowledgement of the origin of the ‘MOOC’ term with Downes and Siemens, but not so much to see that brief acknowledgement followed by a claim that a concept only attains respectability when adopted by the likes of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.

I will be interested in seeing how the peer evaluation system works out and in the effectiveness of the discussion forum software. Unfortunately I joined the course too late to really check out the latter although it does seem to have facilitated a number of effective collaborative learning groups.

I do have some comments with regard to the actual course content:

In the section on Number Theory in Lecture 9B a definition of b|a is given which does not require either the uniqueness of the quotient or the condition that b is nonzero. This definition is then reinforced by requiring students to endorse it in the first Quiz (at around 2:13), but in a subsequent Quiz (at around 4:45) the student is expected to deny the truth of 0|0. This actually led to some discussion in the fora which does not as yet seem to have generated any instructor response.

In the same lecture the Unique Factorization Theorem (Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic) is proved by using Euclid’s Lemma to establish uniqueness but the proof of that Lemma is omitted as “outside the scope of this course”(around 17:20). I think this is unfortunate because it is against the spirit of the subject to unnecessarily accept things without proof – especially when the proof is not that hard[1], but more importantly because early emphasis on unique factorization makes the student think of it as fundamental (not surprising given the popular name of the theorem) and so to end up using it to prove the Lemma. Several students did try this in the discussion groups but so far without any correction from the instructors (and although there is some value in letting them work things out themselves there is a danger in this type of course that some will “escape” with the wrong idea without ever having had the chance to be corrected).

And in the Analysis section Lecture 10 the fact that the rationals are densely ordered is given (at about 4:00 in Lecture 10A) and reinforced (in a Quiz at about 7:15 and again at about 1:30 in Lecture 10B) without distinguishing it from the more commonly referenced property of topological density in the reals – (which is usually just called density without the modifier). This may lead students into error in subsequent courses since they may be tempted to use the proof of densely ordered as a proof of topological density – which it is not since eg (-1,-1/2)U(1/2,1) is densely ordered but not dense in R.

[1] Here’s a fairly compact proof of Euclid’s Lemma (with a more compact but still essentially complete version in bold):

We’ll first show how to find the greatest common factor of two whole numbers as a difference of multiples and then use the fact that the gcf is 1 if either of the numbers is a prime which does not divide the other to show that if prime p divides ab then it must also divide at least one of a or b.

Any common factor of two whole numbers is also a factor in any sum or difference of multiples of them.
[In symbols, if a=rd and b=sd then na+mb=nrd+msd=(nr+ms)d and it works similarly for differences. (For convenience we'll work with integer arithmetic from now on so that we don't have to list all the different sign combinations.)]

Any division of such sums or differences of multiples gives a remainder which is also a sum or difference of multiples.
[If na+mb=q(ja+kb)+r, then r=na+mb-q(ja+kb)=(n-qj)a+(m-qk)b ]

A sum or difference of whole number multiples of two numbers is sometimes called an integer linear combination but I’ll just call it a “combination” for the rest of this proof (and so will refrain from using that word “combination” for other types of algebraic combinations).

The smallest such combination is zero [Take each as the multiplier for the other and subtract], so when dividing any of them by the next to smallest, the remainder must be zero (since it must be smaller than the one we were dividing by). Thus the smallest non-zero combination divides exactly into all of them (including a and b as special cases). So the smallest non-zero combination of a and b is a common factor of a and b.

And since it is a multiple of any other common factor it must be greater than or equal to all of them.
So it is the greatest common factor.

If p is prime and does not divide x then gcf(p,x)=1
So if p does not divide either a or b, then we must have integers j,k,m,n such that ja+kp=1 and mb+np=1.
So 1=(ja+kp)(mb+np)=jmab+janp+mbkp++knpp=rab+sp
with r=jm and s=jan+mbk+knp
So 1 is a combination of ab and p which means that gcf(p,ab)=1 and so p cannot divide ab (since if it did the gcf would be p).

We have shown that if prime p does not divide at least one of a or b then it cannot divide the product ab, which is the same as saying that if prime p divides ab then it must divide at least one of a or b.

Note: A slightly less symmetric version of the last bit uses less algebra but doesn’t feel quite so compelling for me:
If prime p does not divide a
then there are integers m and n with 1=np+ma
This gives b=(np+ma)b=npb+mab
so if p|ab ie ab=qp for some q, then b=nbp+mab=nbp+mqp=(nb+mq)p
So if prime p does not divide a but does divide ab then it must divide b.

No one seriously claims that the fetus is part of the mother’s body but it is undeniable that use of her body is comandeered for its support and also that her future life is impacted by the expectation of support through to adulthood (or by the need to make a more wrenching separation decision after its birth).  So yes indeed, “abortion isn’t a black-and-white issue; it’s a complex moral debate, involving rights and responsibilities, life and death, on which well-meaning, moral people come to different ethical conclusions.”

But although the “pro-lifers” speak about the right to life of the fetus and the “pro-choicers” speak about a woman’s right to choose, it’s not so much that these values are “incommensurable” in the sense of there being no consistent assignment of relative value as that there may be too many and we don’t agree on which one to use.  Anyone who comes down on one side or the other has succeeded in making the comparison but their priorities have been different from those on the other side.

And contrary to Hassan’s lesson(#4) we can’t “forget” about the fetus because that is one of the main issues. The fact that  I do not attribute the rights of personhood to a fetus does not amount to ignoring the possibility that it may have them. But after considering the matter to the best of my ability I conclude that it does not.  This involves consideration of what my reasons are for assigning such rights to anyone, and since I don’t accept the convenient but unsatisfying option of a religious fiat, the process of explaining it to someone else might not be easy.

But for me when it comes to restricting the right of action of a conscious mind the onus is on the restrictor to justify the restriction and not on the actor to justify the action.  This is not a libertarian position; I am quite ready to make a case for various restrictions of personal freedom. But restricting the freedom of a woman to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy is not one I have seen any convincing argument for. In fact the most commonly provided argument amounts to just asserting that the fetus has the same rights as a person – either without any justification other than “it feels that way to me”, or by reference to some religious authority. (And of course even if that assertion is accepted some might still raise the question of how much enforcable obligation a person has to support the life of another – ie not just whether they should but whether we have a right to force them to. It is commonly agreed that a parent has an enforceable obligation to provide the necessities of life for a child, but for a born child the possibility of giving it up for adoption means that the obligation is actually implicitly agreed to by the parent)

Hassan claims that his reasons for assigning full personhood rights (or at least right-to-life) to the fetus and for using that to deny the right of abortion to the mother are not based on his religion so I will certainly admit the possibility that he has some, but until he gives them we have no starting point.

[1] Some of the “lessons” Hassan claims to have learned demonstrate real enlightenment others are mere rhetorical tricks

1) Language matters. A lot.

First and foremost, I do deeply regret saying that supporters of abortion rights (not women, per se, by the way!) “fetishise… selfishness”. Both words are, of course, deeply provocative and negative and I wish, with the benefit of hindsight, that I’d never used them.

Good, but followed by a disappointing (but not extreme) bit of weaseling about the technical definition of “selfish”. Fortunately though, he ends this one with a re-acknowledgement of not having been sufficiently “careful and restrained in my use of language”

2) Labels matter. On both “sides”

Many commenters on Twitter took offence at my self-identification as “pro-life”. …[but they] have no right to criticise me for using the term “pro-life” if they, at the same time, uncritically embrace the equally propagandistic and useless term “pro-choice”.

It’s true that engaging in label wars is unproductive, but those who do refrain from label use DO have the right to criticize. The correct response to either kind of “pro” label is to claim both of them for oneself. We are all pro-life AND pro-choice, but we may draw different boundaries when the two are in conflict.

3) Two sides to every argument? Nope

What became apparent quite quickly yesterday is that, for some “pro choicers”, there aren’t two sides to every argument. …

This one is offensive because it’s always true in any argument that “for some” on EITHER side the other side is dismissed, and despite the weasel word “some” he only refers to blinkeredness on the OTHER side. And the only value of this lesson is if one applies it to ONESELF.

4) Forget the foetus

This starts with irrelevant whining about abusive responses (on Twitter no less! – duh) and goes on with

.. I can count on two hands the number of commenters who engaged with my claim that “a baby isn’t part of [a woman's] body” and has rights of its own. If I am guilty of not giving due weight and attention to women’s rights in my piece – and my critics do have a point here – then the ‘pro choicers’ online were equally guilty of ignoring the foetus, being unwilling to engage in the debate over ‘personhood’ and, in some shocking cases, dehumanising the foetus in order to score a point. ..

Not “score” but rather “emphasize”. Yes, some who deny the personhood of a foetus do so in a way that seems just intended to offend the opposite point of view, but again what do you expect? There’s plenty of screaming nastiness on both sides of any argument – especially in an unmoderated context like Twitter.

The lesson about recognizing that others do have concerns that need to be attended to does seem to have been heard by Hassan here, but to do so properly with the intent of really taking it to heart requires stopping to absorb it before jumping back with something like “but the other side is nasty too”.

5) It’s all Islam’s fault!

Muslims, it seems, aren’t allowed to have independent political or moral views. Within minutes of my piece being published online yesterday morning, the precocious (pompous?)Economist reporter Daniel Knowles accused me of being “dishonest” about the real reason for my ‘pro-life’ position which was driven by…wait for it…yes, Islam! Despite the fact that Islamic law has no fixed, single position on abortion and despite me making clear in the piece that I would be anti-abortion “even if I were to lose my faith”. To be fair, Knowles later apologised and deleted the tweet. Still, would a Jewish or Hindu journalist be accused of hiding the ‘real reasons’ for their views, in a similar fashion, I wonder?

Oh come on! A Christian one certainly might be, and whether you would be anti-abortion “even if I were to lose my faith” depends on whether that loss of faith also includes loss of belief in the personhood of a fetus. That particular bit of faith may not be fundamental to Islam so in your case the accusation that your position is forced a priori by being a Muslim may be false. I suspect that there is a lot of misunderstanding around (including in my own mind) about what Islam does imply (as with all the other religions it’s really much like nailing jelly to the wall), but surely this is not a new “lesson” for you.

It is however a useful lesson for ME that I may be at risk of dismissing anti-abortion arguments from the religious of any kind as based on the religion when perhaps they could stand on their own.

6) My opponent’s opponent is… not my friend

This one is a good lesson for all of us – as is also “my opponent’s friend is not necessarily my opponent” or even “my opponent on this issue is not necessarily my opponent on that one”

7) Unhitch from the Hitch

I am not opposed to speaking ill of the dead but repeating gratuitous nastiness is uncalled for.

Not-so-free speech

The reaction from left-liberal, ‘pro-choice’ commenters on Twitter . . .

Oh don’t be silly. Anything said on Twitter about a controversial issue will generate a hail of abuse from a subset of the people who don’t like it and to interpret that as representative of a generally censorious attitude on the other side is unreasonable.

9) We are not alone

“Pro-life” leftiesdoexist . . .

Well duh! There is after all a significant Roman Catholic leftist tradition.

10) I give up

The truth is that abortion is too heated, emotive and complex an issue to debate in 140 characters. Or, for that matter, in 950 words.

In conclusion, I wrote this column, not because I wanted to have a row about abortion or “climb on a bandwagon” (as bandwagon-climber-in-chief Diane Abbott claimed in atweet), but because I desperately wanted “my fellow lefties and liberals to try to understand and respect the views of those of us who are pro-life, rather than demonise us as right-wing reactionaries or medieval misogynists”.

Yesterday’s Twitter responses show that I failed to persuade them to do so. Partly, through a loose use of language (i.e. “selfishness”, “fetishize”, etc); partly, however, because sections of the ‘pro-choice’ liberal-left aren’t willing to acknowledge that abortion isn’t a black-and-white issue; it’s a complex moral debate, involving rights and responsibilities, life and death, on which well-meaning, moral people come to different ethical conclusions.

A good finish – except for the “I give up” heading. The lesson is not to “give up” (unless persuaded you are wrong), but to show (and encourage) the same respect for your opponents that you want for yourself and not to be surprised that there will always be some on both sides who don’t give it.

Mr Dick tweeted (perhaps in response to a recent re-tweet reminding him of his frustration at a three month old exchange) that “Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist.” And in response to the predictable (but in my opinion unreasonable) blowback, Dr Dawkins claims that Mr Dick’s “ill judged words” were just “a rather confused mixture of the following three – admittedly not wholly compatible – spellings-out:”

• Isn’t it an odd paradox that a journalist good enough to be employed by no less a journal than New Statesman is capable of simultaneously holding a belief at least as absurd as Conan Doyle’s belief in fairies?
• Given that he believes something at least as absurd as Conan Doyle’s belief in fairies, is it possible that I’ve over-estimated Mehdi Hasan? Could it be that he’s not such a good journalist as I had thought?
• Conversely, it seems so odd that a good and intelligent journalist should believe obvious nonsense, that I can’t help wondering whether he really does believe it, or whether he only pretends to out of loyalty to a loved tradition.

But let’s see now. It’s no denial of free speech to argue that anyone with experience of the modern world who claims to believe the literal truth of a story about flying around on a winged “horse” (or for that matter about the virgin birth of a male child) is either lying or nuts, and that allowing such a person to express their views does not extend to giving them a platform in a magazine that people rely on for accurate information and analysis. Yes, such a person may have well-founded views on many issues and may be capable of opening my eyes to issues I had overlooked, but I cannot avoid the fact that he is also capable of believing complete nonsense and so his judgement is not to be fully “trusted” (not that anyone ever should be fully trusted of course, but there are different levels of trustability required in different contexts and being published regularly in a major magazine is one of the more demanding I think). Perhaps Hasan has merits which override his evident credulity and it would have been fine for the nice Dr Dawkins to identify such. But the fawning over-compensation with which he does so turns my stomach a bit.

On the other hand he ends well with:

There is a distinction between the Doyle/Dowding belief in fairies and Hasan’s belief in a winged horse. Hasan’s absurdity stems from a major religious creed and is for this reason treated with an over-generous portion of respect. Doyle’s belief in fairies was an individual eccentricity, fit only for mirth. People would blithely write off Doyle among the fairies as a comic nutter while agreeing that he was a very good storyteller; or laugh behind Dowding’s back while agreeing that he was handy with an Air Force. But if you describe a religious believer as a nutter because he believes in a winged horse (or a follower of another tradition because he believes water miraculously turned into wine) you will be in for trouble.

It was an additional intention of my tweet (spelled out in subsequent ones) to emphasise, yet again, this remarkably widespread double standard. It is a double standard that is applied, with peculiar vitriol, by some who call themselves atheists but bend over backwards to “accommodate” religious faith. If you were to suggest that Conan Doyle was a gullible fool among the Cottingley Fairies, I doubt that anyone would call you a “vile racist bigot”; or say to you, as a British Member of Parliament tweeted to me,  “You really are a gratuitously unpleasant man.” The difference, of course, is that Doyle’s ridiculous belief was not protected by the shield of religious privilege. And perhaps that is the most important take-home message of this whole affair.

Two thoughts

1. The NDP’s Shane Simpson (called in at the last minute to replace Matt Toner) was sitting between Andrew Wilkinson representing the Liberal party which implemented BC’s carbon tax and the Conservative Duane Nickull who denied that it has been effective in reducing emissions and also echoed much of what the NDP said when campaigning it in 2005. But Simpson never took the opportunity to use Nickull’s arguments to support and explain the NDP’s 2005 position as not against the principle but just the specific implementation of the tax – eg by saying something like “Yes it is unfair and ineffective as the Liberals have implemented it, but once we are in office we can fix it and here’s how…”

2. Wilkinson’s argument that extending the tax to cover big industrial process emitters would just drive those industries out of the province without reducing emissions as we’d still have to get our cement from somewhere could be answered by taxing all products on the basis of emissions resulting from their production. This may be the only real way to make such a tax effective but would require more accounting to record the emissions from each stage of production. That’s something which looks a bit like the incremental accounting of a value added tax such as the federal GST and so argues for doing something similar with the PST to create what might be called a ‘Harmonized Sales and Carbon Tax’.  But perhaps we should call it something else…

The headline “Environmentalism Behind Unabomber Rampage” may also be misleading, but both are within the bounds of current journalistic practice (which arguably do go well outside the bounds of common decency).

There is indeed a sense in which both are quite accurate.  Namely that (presumably invalid) arguments based on (possibly invalid) concerns about the environment (or Islam) lay behind the actions of Kaczynski (or the Tsarnaevs).

Both of course unfairly encourage the alternate more sensational interpretations that an entire movement (be it Environmentalism or Islam) stands behind the nefarious actions of the deluded. But, hey, that’s how we sell papers (and build blog readership)!

With regard to Islam right now I think there are at least two points worth making.

First I have to admit that, despite the appeal some aspects of it have for me including the existence of many peaceful teachings and of adherents who live by those, there is no doubt in my mind that the pro-violence teachings of Islam do exceed those of Christianity and Buddhism (which are still quite plenty enough to provide extremists of even the most peace-loving faiths with excuses for lots of horrific violence).

And secondly, as alluded to in my previous post, it is the excuse of the moment for those who want something to kill and die for. It is not just the religious who find it difficult to properly condemn those who use violence in support of a cause we support, but right now it is indeed Muslims who are most called upon to meet that challenge. And we should be thankful for those who are doing so.

One is by overlooking the fact that the use of mass violence and terrorism by relatively isolated people and groups long predates the internet.

And although they may not have been “an integral part” of the congregation of a mainstream mosque, it is not true that the members and imams of mainstream who want to help prevent such things “can’t comply because they guys are not part of these communities (so) they have no access to these guys.” They may not have direct access to the perps themselves, but they certainly have the capacity to more effectively denounce the preachers whose ravings sustain and drive them on.

And we should not forget the cases where mainstream Muslims can and do detect and deflect those who may be on the path to violence.

I’m sorry, but even though it’s tasteless, disgusting and anti-science I actually find it funny. (And I don’t even feel too guilty about laughing because it doesn’t really belittle the tragedy.)

But the lovable flaneur should not be confused with the charlatan that he becomes when he asks you to invest your intellectual capital.

Raymond Tallis’s Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur  may turn out to be charming, but I’m afraid that his recent foray into physics smells more of the charlatan.

Draining the River and Quivering the Arrow | Issue 95 | Philosophy Now.

I quivered with anticipation of being drawn into the issue of time, but when the bow was released I found that Tallis’s talk of “Missing the Point” is itself quite off the mark. The argument that time-symmetric physical laws cannot in principle produce time-asymmetric consequences is countered by the existence of broken symmetry in many familiar physical contexts (such as the formation of magnetic crystals for example), so even if the arguments provided so far for broken symmetry in time “fail to deliver” (in Tallis’ attribution to Huw Price) that does not mean that no such argument is possible. And when Tallis says “finding directionality in time requires us to establish in advance that states of the universe are ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ before we could notice that, say, the universe has a temporal trend” then he is subject to a more valid accusation of point-missing than the one he presents. The point is that finding directionality does not actually require finding direction. Although asymmetry does not specify a specific sense of direction it does provide an axis of directionality with the identification of which is “forward” and which is back being just a matter of convention. 

Tallis’s ponderings on the flow analogy are less offensive because they remain in the realm of flaneury and make no real demand for acceptance. That the various versions and uses of that analogy are certainly mutually and often internally inconsistent does not preclude the existence of  consistent versions – but he is right that talk of our moving *with* time is one of the weaker versions. Whether we are dragged forward towards the future through a sea of time or cling to a present past which it flows (from future to past as in the sense of “tomorrow is coming”) is just a matter of choosing one of two relativistically equivalent points of view.  Similarly with the river of time flowing by us on the ever present shore of now, or alternatively our being carried forward floating on the river of now past the shores of time, are both ok.  He’s right though when it comes to describing us as ourselves floating on the moving river of time – which does seem to be a less felicitous version from the physical correctness point of view (but whether or not that makes it bad poetry may be another matter).

A case in point: Moral enhancement, freedom, and what we (should) value in moral behaviour — DeGrazia — Journal of Medical Ethics argues that parents already engage in various methods of moral enhancement of offspring (eg via both explicit education and implicit learning from manipulated experience and examples) and so, since they also use various biomedical interventions for physical enhancement, then if there is a possibility for comparable interventions of “moral bioenhancement” perhaps “we should open-mindedly consider this non-traditional means of moral enhancement.”

This arguably happens already with certain kinds of mental health treatment which could be considered as moral bioenhancement, but it could perhaps also include the use of empathy enhancing drugs on those who are perceived to “need” them and extends also to the use of genetic selection (for those who are prepared to use it for physical features) if  any of the suggestive correlations that have been observed ever actually turn out to be reliable predictors of aberrant behaviour.

Biomedical enhancement of any feature is disapproved of by some if the need for improvement is not sufficiently pressing, but it is generally accepted for life threatening conditions and widely accepted even for purely cosmetic purposes.  Perhaps tinkering with the “personality” itself might be more widely rejected, but there will inevitably be disagreements and I am pretty sure that the academic philosophers will not actually resolve them (though if they avoid over-claiming their own expertise they might well be able to help people see where one another are “coming from”).

A completely separate issue is whether or not the specific method of genetic selection is acceptable for *any* purpose.  Of course, those who consider every stage of embryo to be a “person” cannot accept the selection process at all,  but others such as Julian Savulescu insist that “It’s Our Duty to Have Designer Babies”.

Any such discussion inevitably gets labelled as “Eugenics”,  but regardless of whether or not it’s acceptable, allowing or even encouraging the selection of “designer babies”  is *not* the same as forcibly restricting the right to breed, and recommending the consideration of  ”moral bioenhancement” per se does *not* necessarily entail the use of genetic selection.

But those who have no respect for the truth and no interest in understanding the positions of others will happily use those two papers to just claim that it’s all some kind of left-liberal-academic-facist conspiracy to “kill babies”.

NCBI ROFL: Left-handed people avoid using exact numbers. : Discoblog.

The extension of the effect to “the familial sinistral group” with the hypothesis that “their language and number systems tend to be more distributed over both hemispheres of the brain” is interesting.

But I would attribute my own rounding behaviour less to the greater “cognitive effort of using exact numbers” than to understanding the stupidity of wasting any effort beyond what is actually useful.

Indeed the hypothesis of cross hemispheric distribution of the linguistic-computational system may be considered to imply a possibly better integration of the digital and analog systems and so a better overall level of numeracy. Which may explain the ‘left handed nerds’ aspect of this other article (although a simpler explanation may be just that many sports are based on interacting with dexterity and only the particularly talented subset of the non-dextrous are capable of employing that deficit with sufficient success to be dangerously sinister).

It signifies (1) irrational condemnations of all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group; (2) a disproportionate fixation on that group for sins committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially one’s own; and/or (3) sweeping claims about the members of that group unjustified by their actual individual acts and beliefs.

Well that may look “like a definition” to Raza, but in fact it is not one.

(Or at least it is not a plausible definition of Islamophobia)

Because the definition following “it signifies” makes no reference to Islam or Muslims. It is plausibly a definition of a general class of predjudicial attitudes but is not a definition of Islamophobia per se.

Perhaps Greenwald (and Raza) mean to say that “Islamophobia” means one of these predjudicial attitudes applied willy-nilly to all Muslims. But then it would be a poorly chosen word because irrational fear and hatred of Muslims should be called Muslimophobia and one can (in my opinion quite rationally[1]) fear and hate Islam (or any other religion) without attaching the same fear and hatred to all of its nominal adherents. (And even an irrational fear of the religion is not the same as prejudice against its adherents)

Certainly the anti-Muslim prejudice that  Greenwald, Raza and others identify as “Islamophobia” does exist and is a problem, and it is also true that criticism of Islam is sometimes a cover for such antimuslim prejudice just as anti-zionism is sometimes a cover for antisemitism. But it is no more true that every criticism of Islam is antimuslim prejudice than that every criticism of Israel is antisemitic, and seeing the Islamophobia card played against every criticism of Islam is just as tiresome as seeing the antisemitism card played against every criticism of Israel.

[1] The sacred texts of most religions include passages whose naive interpretation is offensive and even if that interpretation is rarely put into practice it is quite rational to fear institutions whose lack of offense depends on sophisticated re-interpretations of what they actually say. (It may also be rational to overcome that fear in the light of other putative values of these religions, but I have never been of the opinion that one cannot rationally support opposite positions.)

The issue of consent by family proxy is not unique but the question of its retroactivity and the impossibility of respecting its denial (due to the already widespread distribution of cells from the culture by the time they found out) made it especially problematic, and now there is a new wrinkle.

Some family members who agreed to the use of the cells for research purposes are now concerned that when such research includes publication of the full genome it impinges unacceptably on the privacy of those who share large known fractions of that genome.

It is quite reasonable to argue that the previous consent did not cover the genome publication, since at the time that was not a known possibility so the consent cannot be said to have been fully informed; but again the horse is already out of the barn as the data have already been circulated, and although the number of known copies is small there is no way of tracing them all and guaranteeing that no further copies will ever be made.

But aside from the issues of retroactivity, proxy, and informedness of consent, we now have also that of third party privacy – which actually applies to the publication of any genome, and indeed the question of whether one has the right to publish one’s own genome in the face of privacy concerns from (present and future?) relatives is itself an ongoing topic of discussion.

Do I, or you, have the right to publish our own genomes without the consent of the unborn descendants about whom those genomes might provide partial information on matters that they might wish not to have revealed?

Rebecca Skloot raises the HeLa issue in an essay in the NYTimes Sunday Review but a response by Michael Eisen points out that she appears to confound “how to retroactively get Henrietta’s permission to experiment with and publish about her cells” and “the seemingly related  issue of whether publication of the HeLa cell genome is an invasion of the privacy of Lacks’ living relatives”. The first involves  consent (retroactively by proxy) on behalf of Ms Lacks for the removal and study of tissue, and the second the second is on behalf of her relatives for publication of information which might invade their privacy (and would arise even if Ms Lacks had in fact given fully informed consent back in 1951). The latter question of third party privacy is also the clear focus of  a subsequent article in ThinkProgress.

The issue is not just a sub-case of the basic proxy consent issue, with the donor (or in this case her proxy) giving consent by proxy for release of information about the relatives, because in this case the relatives in question may be available (or about to become available) to give their own consent, whereas for a deceased person the most affected people going forward are the immediate present family members, so in matters of what happens to the body obtaining their consent might well be seen as sufficient.

Nor is it trivially resolved by arguing that the individual herself, or if she is deceased her closest living relatives, have the right to give consent because of being the one(s) most directly affected by release of genomic information.

There might be some argument that the closest relatives (siblings and children) are most likely to suffer privacy invasion because they share the most genes, but it may be that combined with other information the smaller shared genome fraction of a further descendant might be particularly revealing  (eg if HeLa had the red headed axe murderer gene then a grandchild with red hair might have greater privacy concerns than the brown haired child who was his parent – or even than HeLa herself had she been the one giving consent).

If red headed axe murderer correlations are rare though, then perhaps we can apply the probable information idea slightly differently – not just to the chance of having a particular gene, but (in advance of the sequencing) to the chance of having any potentially embarrassing information revealed. If we take that view then the closest surviving relatives can give consent for a deceased person and the individual’s consent can override the privacy concerns of his or her relatives.

But it is not obvious that this is really fair. Just because I am most at risk, does that entitle me to cause a lesser risk for others? It may seem not, but we commonly allow the individual to elect a risky surgery without giving a veto to dependents who may be at financial risk if it goes wrong.

Some people think that professional Philosophers have  special skills for actually answering such questions.  I don’t.

Frankly I doubt that anything useful will be said though, because I suspect that no-one has anything useful (and new) to say on this particularly ill-posed question.

But since I am a no-one,  I’ll have a go anyhow.

I “liked”  the comment by ‘Jason’ who said

The other comments (thank goodness!) have already outlined all the reasons that these thought experiments don’t hold any argumentative force. I once spent two weeks reading into this literature convinced I had missed something critical about zombies and Mary and Chinese rooms and bats. How else could all these people take seriously such manifestly flimsy arguments? It turns out there is nothing more here than some philosophers incorrectly assuming that their intuitions mean something interesting. Let’s stop talking about bad question-begging thought experiments.

But despite my frustration with the presumptions of (many) professional Philosophers, I do feel that this is a bit too harsh. If the focus was not on “explaining consciousness” but rather on exploring what we mean when we talk about it, then Philosophers, while not uniquely qualified, might have a useful job to do by way of helping to clarify when people are talking at cross-purposes and perhaps seeming to disagree when they really do not. (At least they should be good at it since I see almost the entire history of philosophical argument as being exactly of that nature.)

Commenter ‘Paul M’ says

Both thought experiments assume their conclusions in their premises. 

In Experiment One, what is the “fact” that Mary learns when she sees red? If the answer is that the “fact” is her subjective experience of the color red, then all this thought experiment has done is define subjective experience as a “fact.” It hasn’t demonstrated that it is, and it certainly does not demonstrate that this “fact” is not physical. By saying, in the premises, that Mary knows all physical facts about red, but has not experienced seeing red, an implicit assumption is made that experiencing red is not a physical phenomena. But that is what the experiment is supposed to demonstrate. So the conclusion is assumed in the premises, and the experiment doesn’t demonstrate anything. 

Experiment Two has the same problem. By postulating a physically identical zombie without any of the same subjective experiences, a separation between physical and subjective is simply assumed. If you don’t’ believe that such a zombie is possible, then this experiment does nothing to establish that there is a separation between subjective experience and the physical world. Again, by assuming the possibility of such a zombie, the conclusion is simply assumed in the premises. 

Most importantly, what is “physical”? As Chomsky points out in his talk “The Machine, the Ghost, and the Limits of Understanding,” we presently have no coherent answer. So the physical/subjective dichotomy is incoherent.

Here I almost decided not to quote the last paragraph because I don’t actually think the dichotomy is “incoherent” although perhaps most expressions of it have been.

The essence of the issue of “qualia” and the experience (as opposed to the phenomenon) of consciousness is that the experience is entirely and essentially subjective. It cannot be communicated by description or even by direct neuronal stimulation since even if I create in zombie you the exact same pattern of neuronal stimulation and hormonal responses that occur in person me there is no way for me to tell whether the resulting experience in you is the same as in me.  We can agree on what red “looks like” because we will agree on what things look red,  and we can understand what it “feels like” on the basis of emotional connections we make with the fact of seeing red (on the basis of either experience or instinct). But we seem unable to imagine that there is not some aspect of the redness we experience which is more than the sum of its associations. The pattern of uncomfortable confusion we feel when we try to imagine a different version of “redness” can probably be dismissed as identifiable with some kind of biochemical response to the “churning” of our neuronic computational circuits, and in that sense  ”our” private version of “redness”  may even be explainable, but to explain something is not necessarily to explain it away and even when “explained” that sense may be hard (or even impossible) to eliminate.

Commenter ‘Graham Anderson’ says

When Mary awakens from her operation and sees the red roses, she has then become a red-seeing mind. Previously, she understood everything there is to know about red-seeing minds, but was not one herself. When the phenomenon that Mary *is* changes, it does not give her a new fact. She simply has new experiences, the products of the change in state of her mind. 

. . .

I believe we are talking about two distinct concepts: knowing about something, and being that thing. The two concepts are easily confused when we’re talking about a human mind, for which knowing and being are eerily similar.

Similarly, even if consciousness is explained as the process of laying down recoverable memories this does not undo my feeling of consciousness – or even prove that that feeling is not actually unique to me alone.

Ultimately, the “resolution” to this issue may have to be that there is no way I can ever tell whether or not the rest of you are zombies, but the prospect that you are entails such a terrifying sense of godlike loneliness that I have no choice but to credit you with the same consciousness as I feel myself. (And then it’s a normative question – why should I not also credit zombie Mary with consciousness as well? and to a lesser extent my cat? or even this computer?)

According to Horwich

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

(If)Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. . . .(then) we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress — by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues. Therefore traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to a painstaking identification of its tempting but misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate. But in that case, he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble)” — and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”

further

We might boil (Wittgenstein’s position) down to four related claims.

— The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic: its primary goals, which are to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover profound explanations, and to correct naïve opinions, are taken from the sciences. And this is undoubtedly the case.

—The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth — is in tension with those goals.  That’s because our concepts exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes.  As a consequence the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate, and differ dramatically from one concept to another. Moreover, it is not possible (as it is within empirical domains) to accommodate superficial complexity by means of simple principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic) level.

— The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy — an immediate consequence of the first two — is that traditional philosophy is necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed.

— Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must avoid theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead.

and

Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts —true, good, object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not only irrational, but unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality is scientism.

As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:

Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.

These radical ideas are not obviously correct, and may on close scrutiny turn out to be wrong. But they deserve to receive that scrutiny — to be taken much more seriously than they are. Yes, most of us have been interested in philosophy only because of its promise to deliver precisely the sort of theoretical insights that Wittgenstein argues are illusory. But such hopes are no defense against his critique. Besides, if he turns out to be right, satisfaction enough may surely be found in what we still can get — clarity, demystification and truth.

Horwich presents (this view of ) Witgenstein’s position as worthy of consideration (but without wholeheartedly endorsing it)

Lynch responds

According to HW (Horwich’s Wittgenstein), we get trapped in our glass cages because we philosophers fetishize science’s success in giving reductive explanations. A reductive explanation of X is one that tells us the underlying essence of X – that says what all and only X’s have in common. As HW points out, the concepts philosophers are interested in seem highly resistant to this sort of analysis. And this is something we could appreciate if we just paid attention to the role such concepts really play in our thought and language. Once we do so, we’ll see that traditional philosophical answers to its traditional questions are “mistakes of perverse overgeneralization.”

But

First, just because we can’t reductively (“scientifically”) define something doesn’t mean we can’t say something illuminating about it. Go back to HW’s account of truth. He assumes that there is either a single nature of truth (and we can reductively define it) or that truth has no nature at all. But why think these are the only two choices?

and

So no uniform reductive explanation perhaps, but illumination just the same.

This brings me to the second way that I think HW’s metaphilosophy overgeneralizes. According to HW, philosophy is purely descriptive; it should “leave the world as it is” — only describe how we think and talk, and stop at that.

I think philosophy can play a more radical role. Return to our fly. Wittgenstein was not the first to compare the philosopher to one, nor the most famous. That award goes to Socrates, who claimed that the role of the philosopher was to act as a gadfly to the state. This is a very different metaphor. Leaving the world as it is isn’t what gadflies do. They bite. As I see it, so can philosophers: they not only describe how we think, they get us to change our way of thinking — and sometimes our ways of acting. Philosophy is not just descriptive: it is normative.

This is most obvious with ethical questions. Locke’s view that there are human rights, for example, didn’t leave the world as it was, nor was it intended to. Or consider the question of what we ought to believe – the central question of epistemology. As I’ve argued here at The Stone before, questions about the proper extent and efficacy of reasons aren’t just about what is, they are about what should be. In getting more people to adopt new evidence-based standards of rationality — as the great enlightenment philosophers arguably did —philosophers aren’t just leaving the world as they found it. And that is a good thing.

Lynch ends with

Philosophy is not science. Knowing how we ordinarily use our concepts of truth, or personhood or causation is important. Wittgenstein was certainly right that philosophers get into muddles by ignoring these facts. Yet even when it comes to the abstract concerns of metaphysics, philosophy can and should aspire to be more than just a description of the ordinary. That is because sometimes the ordinary is mistaken. Sometimes it is the familiar from which we need liberating — in part because our ordinary concepts themselves have a history, a history that is shaped in part by certain metaphysical assumptions.

Consider the idea that the real essence of truth is Authority — that is, what is true is whatever God, or the King or The Party commands or accepts. This is a reductive definition, one that still lurks in the background of many people’s worldviews. It has also been used over the centuries to stifle dissent and change. In order to free us from these sorts of thoughts, the philosopher must not only show the error in such definitions. She must also take conceptual leaps. She must aim at revision as much as description, and sketch new metaphysical theories, replacing old explanations with new. She must risk the fly bottle.

Perhaps it’s an annual event there since it’s almost exactly a year since Gary Gutting addressed the same question in the same place.

If you think that the only possible “use” of philosophy would be to provide a foundation for beliefs that need no foundation, then the conclusion that philosophy is of little importance for everyday life follows immediately.  But there are other ways that philosophy can be of practical significance.

Even though basic beliefs on ethics, politics and religion do not require prior philosophical justification, they do need what we might call “intellectual maintenance,” which itself typically involves philosophical thinking.  Religious believers, for example, are frequently troubled by the existence of horrendous evils in a world they hold was created by an all-good God.  Some of their trouble may be emotional, requiring pastoral guidance.  But religious commitment need not exclude a commitment to coherent thought. For instance, often enough believers want to know if their belief in God makes sense given the reality of evil.  The philosophy of religion is full of discussions relevant to this question.  Similarly, you may be an atheist because you think all arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious. But if you encounter, say, a sophisticated version of the cosmological argument, or the design argument from fine-tuning, you may well need a clever philosopher to see if there’s anything wrong with it.

and

The perennial objection to any appeal to philosophy is that philosophers themselves disagree among themselves about everything, so that there is no body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can rely.  It’s true that philosophers do not agree on answers to the “big questions” like God’s existence, free will, the nature of moral obligation and so on.  But they do agree about many logical interconnections and conceptual distinctions that are essential for thinking clearly about the big questions.   Some examples: thinking about God and evil requires the key distinction between evil that is gratuitous (not necessary for some greater good) and evil that is not gratuitous; thinking about free will requires the distinction between a choice’s being caused and its being compelled; and thinking about morality requires the distinction between an action that is intrinsically wrong (regardless of its consequences) and one that is wrong simply because of its consequences.  Such distinctions arise from philosophical thinking, and philosophers know a great deal about how to understand and employ them.  In this important sense, there is body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can and should rely.

In an interview a month earlier (for 3am magazine), Gutting had said something similar.

Over its history, philosophy has accumulated an immense store of conceptual distinctions, theoretical formulations, and logical arguments that are essential for this intellectual maintenance of our defining convictions. This constitutes a body of knowledge achieved by philosophers that they can present with confidence to meet the intellectual needs of non-philosophers. Consider, for example, discussions of free will. Even neuroscientists studying freedom in their labs are likely to offer confused interpretations of their results if they aren’t aware of the distinction between caused and compelled, the various meanings of “could have done otherwise”, or the issues about causality raised by van Inwagen’s consequence argument. Parallel points apply for religious people thinking about the problem of evil or atheists challenged to explain why they aren’t just agnostics. Philosophers can’t show what our fundamental convictions should be, but their knowledge is essential to our ongoing intellectual engagement with these convictions.

Now it’s my turn.