Metaphysical Thoughts I: Past Notes

I finally finished a second chapter of my dissertation (chapter 3), clocking in at 34 single-spaced pages! That was quite a marathon. Anyways...

This post is yet another entry in my Past Notes series. These are just random thoughts on issues in metaphysics, encompassing times, for instance, when I've flirted with Carnap/Putnam type views and endurantism. Part II will be posted later with post-2002 stuff.

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10/9/01

I am me. Who else could I be? To ask about a counterfactual situation where I was someone else is like entertaining the idea tha the Sun might not have been the Sun. It is meaningless.

10/11/01

The opposite of self-identity? There is none. Try to contradict it and what you say will be meaningless. A=A cannot be thought otherwise.

10/15/01

We cannot escape from metaphysics - every claim we make is saturated with ontology. To say that metaphysics is meaningless is itself a claim of metaphysics. "There is a cat on the mat" is a metaphysical claim. Even if we try to say it all formally, we are still being metaphysical. How can we avoid metaphysics and yet say or think anything? "Metaphysics is meaningless" is self-refuting.

4/18/02

Let us say it is secured through concepts that material objects exist independently of us. That will hold only in case we are right about our conceptual argument. The fact that even we could not imagine it to be any other way than right does not make it so. We must assume certain things in making any argument and so will always rest on assumptions which might be false, though perhaps invulnerable to doubt.

7/9/02

I learn what a material object is through experience. I have a continuous experience of a certain sort. I develop a sense of object permanence. Soon I have a full conception of a material object as a distinct object of experience - it is the kind of thing I can interact with in such and such a way and interacts with others in such and such ways. A famework for thought and experience thus arises. Whether the rudiments or beginnings of such are already in me is another question. Of course, perhaps I experience things from the beginning as discrete objects. But this seems odd. In any case, idealism could not be correct - the mental is, at the very least, those things we know of which are not material objects. To say material objects are mental in nature is to change the meaning of words and disregard their common usage. There might be some properties, known or unknown, in common between material and immaterial things, yet the distinction still remains. If idealism was true, I could not think it. I could only whether idealist "material objects" were idealist "mental" in nature. This is similar to Putnam's brain-in-a-vat. Realism is almost by definition true - it is a commitment of our thought and action, our language and concepts.

7/15/02

I cannot consistently deny realism. It is implied in all our assertions. Realism is not a theory - it is the way in which we must think. It cannot be unmasked.

10/23/02

There are 3-dimensional objects. These are not mere time-slices of the "real" objects, which are the spatiotemporal series. Real change requires this - the same object to have one property at one time and a different one at the next (replacing the other). If the real objects are space-time worms, there can be no change. Each worm has each of its properties in every time. Consider a coffee-worm. At 1:00 it has the properties of being hot-at-1:00 and cold-at-2:00. At 2:00 it has the exact same properties. Objection: The worm does not at 1:00 have the property of being hot, rather it has the property of being-hot-at-1:00. The same with 2:00. And it always has exactly the same properties. Consider a poker, where one end is hot and the other cold. Point to one end and say that at that point the poker is hot and point to the other say that at that point the poker is cold. But the poker cannot be both hot and cold. What is really true to say is that the poker has the property of being hot-at-poker-end and the property of being cold-at-handle-end. Objection: But it is not the same object that changed. The properties changed, but so did the object. One temporal slice is not another. So this is not sufficient for real change. Space-time worms, then, cannot be the "real" objects, but rather the three-dimensional objects we know and love.

Moral Indexicals, Or Why Judgment Internalism Is Not Evidence Against Objectivist Moral Realism

So one argument I've come across more than once is that Judgment Internalism - on the version I am here interested in, the view that, insofar as one is rational, moral judgments will be intrinsically motivating - provides evidence against moral realism or at least against objectivist versions thereof (could a subjectivist view count as moral realist? I'd have to think about that, but it's late so I won't). The reasoning here is that objective facts are not intrinsically motivating, so when one makes a moral judgment one can't be judging that some objective fact is the case. I have two main responses to this argument, either one of which would effectively defang it:

First, I would contend that in fact not all moral judgments do motivate on their own. Consider this one: 'Ian Spencer ought to A'. That's not going to motivate me to do anything unless I know that I am Ian Spencer. Andy Egan thinks that since self-locating beliefs such as 'I' beliefs are motivating and hence that moral judgments must be self-locating beliefs ascribing to oneself the property of being such that one's ideal rational self would prescribe or proscribe such and such. But notice that, as we just saw, the only moral judgments that are in fact motivating are the ones that contain an explicit first-person reference. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is a moral judgment - it only has to do with the fact that it contains a first-person indexical! So Egan is right to find the motivating factor in a motivating moral judgment to come from self-location but he is wrong to think that this has anything to do with the relativity of morality. After all, an moral realist objectivist could perfectly well agree that self-location is doing the work here but disagree with Egan's relativism - the non-motivating third-person judgment and the motivating first-person one express the same facts and these can perfectly well be objective, morally realist facts. Similarly, 'Ian Spencer is being chased by a bear' and 'I am being chased by a bear' express the same objective, realist fact even though the latter will motivate me all on its own whereas the former will not (that requires me to know that I am Ian Spencer). Note that this also shows that there may also be non-moral judgments that are also intrinsically motivating insofar as I'm rational!

Second, suppose I am wrong about the above. Notice that Judgment Internalism says that it is only if one is rational (or insofar as one is so) that one is motivated by moral judgments. But if we view morality as in the business of dealing with reasons for action, we can view moral judgments as embodying or expressing reasons for or against different actions. Now, insofar as one is rational, one will be motivated by one's reasons. So judgment internalism follows nearly-trivially from just these two conceptual points about morality and its connection with rationality. No need for relativism or emotivism or what-have-you. The nature of rationality and morality jointly do all that work for us. So whichever of these two arguments you choose to employ, it looks like the move from Judgment Internalism to relativism or anti-realism done for.

Christ and Proper Functioning: Past Notes

More past notes. You'll be able to see the beginnings of a self-formation view (see some of my other blogs on this) take shape here as well as me toying with various connections with morality and God.

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10/6/01

No one goes to Hell for not being a Christian. Everyone is headed there anyways - because we are human. Christians are merely those who have opted for the way out.

10/27/01

To be a Christian - to follow Christ, to have Christ as Lord, to love, to be conformed to Christ, to glorify God. It is to function properly - how were designed by God to be. How were we designed to be? To glorify Him and live with Him and one another in perfect joy by loving God and one another perfectly. To live according to design is to live as God wants and thus also being as God wants; we are in His kingdom and have Christ as Lord. As Lord, he tells us and shows us how to love - and so we follow him. He is the perfect example and therefore we try to conform to him. Lord -> glorify -> love -> conform -> follow. Following is the first step in making Christ Lord. We follow to conform and in doing so love and thus glorify God, who is in this way Lord over our lives. All the ways of describing the goal of Christian life are linked.

11/2/01

There must be a sense in which ultimate freedom includes not being able to do certain things the one who is less free can do. This connects with the fact that we can have a hand in building our own character.

11/9/01

He is a good thief = he is successful at doing thief-like things - he functions well as a thief. He is a good person = he functions well as a person - performs functions of personhood. This is a good action = conforms to the standards = is the action of a perfectly good person. Bad = fails a standard of goodness. - He is a bad thief. Evil = bad person/bad action + ?

What does it mean to function well as a person? If we try to figure this out on our own, we can try to give an ethical imperative to try to capture this, like the utilitarians or Kantians. But these will always fail in some case or other. Why, after all, is conforming to utility functioning well? Why is this what it means to perform the functions? Kantianism fares better, but it still cannot cope with actual life. Is morality conventional? Is being good a conforming to our own constructed standards? The Christian answer is that being good is being as God designed us. Pleasure, pain, partiality, impartiality, value and valuelessness all find their fit in the Christian view of goodness. What does it mean to say that God is good? Obviously, He is good by definition. All He does is good, for what higher standard must He conform to than His own? This shows that all accusations against God are unfounded - it is to mistake the Creator for part of His creation.

11/19/01

What are signs of improper functioning of humans? Pain, for one. Improper functioning causes unpleasantness. We are averse to improper functioning. No matter how drawn to it, we still function improperly and thereby experience unpleasantness in some area, some lack of perfect peace and joy. This obviously, however, does not make utility a mark of goodness - pleasure and pain, rather, are consequences of moral life rather than its nature. We know things are meant to be different. All of this coincides with the divine command theory of ethics yet diverges in so far as ethical life is in our nature from God rather than imposed on it bey God - real ethics is an ethics of character rather than rule-following. Ethics does need God, but not for the lame reason that moral law requires a law giver. Ethics needs God because humans and their life need a Creator. Law is a formalization of a way of living - it is a formal descriptions of the way things are done by perfect people. Law is to be followed not because it is law but because it is the way one lives if one is perfect. This is perfect law - God's law. Human law, falling short, is obviously not the same kind of thing.

11/21/01

In Adam, therefore -> No proper function - cannot enter into God's reign. Christ's death and resurrection paid for all sins. In Christ, therefore -> cost of improper function paid - free to enter into God's reign, freed from sin. In Adam, are considered as him and are in fact as him. In Christ, are considered as him and are made to be as him - Christ paid our way into the kingdom of God and proper functioning. Christ triumphed over sin, death, all the powers, and Satan. How? The weakness of the world.

1/9/02

That our proper function is a certain way is part of the background of our lives and how we think - especially how we think morally, no matter how confused we may otherwise be or become.

12/13/02

As free I shape my decisions, my character, myself, my future - I build for myself a future destiny of what I will be for all eternity. Adam and Eve were flawless but not perfect or complete. To bring out this original flawlessness we might call it by perfection and simply say they lacked completion or the fulfillment of what they were. To live perfectly would have been to grow into completion. The incomplete may sin or not - they are on the path of building themselves. The complete may not- they have completed the project of becoming what they are. So my free will expresses itself in perfection through the possibility of falling into sin, while my free will expresses itself in completion through the impossibility (in the resurrection). Some, however, will end their time of making with something which is not what they are but a mockery of it - something which cannot of its own free will go into completion because it has wrought itself fully but as a marred, malfunctioning shadow of what it could have been. Such are those who do not find themselves in the kingdom.

2/19/03

Components of Internal Autonomous Freedom: Freedom of the Will, Self-determination of character, Rationality (full?), Autonomy.

Thoughts on Love and Desert: Past Notes

More past notes while I gather my thoughts to comment on some recent articles. This is just me puzzling over love and desert:

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10/4/01

Love dictates morality. Immoral love is imperfect and dictated to by true love. The original "ought" is to love.

10/8/01

What does it mean to deserve punishment? Is this something irreducible or can it be explained in terms of something else? Look at some of the reasons for punishment - it was threatened in order to be a deterrence (Gen 2-3), it provides correction (punishing a child - many times in the Bible), it makes one an example for others (Ananias and Sephira). Is there any sense, though, in which evil by itself simply deserves punishment? Let us look at punishment's opposite - reward. What does it mean to deserve reward? Some reasons for reward - promised in order to be an incentive, it provides positive reinforcement, it makes on an example for others to follow. Is there any sense, though, in which good by itself simply deserves reward? Is there any intrinsic merit or demerit? What does it mean to deserve something at all? Irreducibility seems attractive - look at the urge for revenge (I am offended, this person deserves punishment). Clearly desert is intricately connected with normativity and consequences of actions. Maybe I deserve whatever is a consequence to myself (foreseeable) of what I do. But this is not enough for an adequate analysis. What else is needed?

10/9/01

Isn't love by nature active? Isn't it more than a mere feeling? Consider Frankfurt's analysis and its natural fittingness over Velleman's. Love considers its object as an end - a final end. Is the beloved, though, valuable because it is loved or is it loved because it is valuable? Love will give of itself - it is self-sacrificing. Even self-love is like this - I will forgo other things in order to do things for myself. I do not love myself for any other end than myself. "Love your neighbor as yourself."

10/11/01

When I feel guilty I wish to make atonement - I feel I ought to suffer. What does this say about deserving?

10/30/01

What is the connection between fault and desert? You deserve what you are responsible for - whatever leads to desert is your fault. Anything else?

God and Knowing What It's Like: Past Notes

Wahoo! Just finished a chapter of my dissertation!

Anyway, here's the first in a series of posts where I plan on recording the contents of an old notebook which contains thoughts from a few years in philosophy - beginning with my senior year as an undergrad philosophy major at Cal. This is partly just so I have this stuff somewhere where it won't get lost. Plus some of it's interesting in its own right. Sometimes, I'll probably make some shortish or longish comments about the topic afterwards as well. This first one was written from way back when I thought the Knowledge Argument worked (note that I'm not always currently sure about what I meant in some places - note also that I was taking a Wittgenstein course that semester, which shows!):

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9/28/01

Does God know what it's like to be a bat? Not in the epistemological sense of knowing information, but in the ontological sense? Or is it part of omnipresence that He experiences things also from the bat's point of view? Or is it that He experiences all in such a way that the bat's experience is a qualitatively identical set of experiences as a chosen subset of God's? But this seems to say the same thing. Maybe we can think of God's consciousness as "behind" the bat's - the bat's consciousness is not God's but God is also conscious through the bat - the bat's consciousness being that which rests on and depends on the deeper divine consciousness. Or is this too close to pantheism? This is too speculative.

Return now to the first view. This seems closer to reality. Or is it? We are still wondering of the relation between other consciousnesses and God's. Here it is: Finite consciousness is an activity or characteristic of Creation and Creation is God's thought of something possible made now actual by His will. Thus all our thoughts are thought in God's thought but determined by our own selves. But must not our thoughts be also in total be thought by God if He is to know what it is like to be a bat? But then God would think sinful thoughts. How can God experience doubting that He exists? Where then is His unity - His personhood? There must be some fundamental difference between what He knows of how it is like to be me and God actually being a man in Jesus Christ. I am not God. Christ is. God is holy. I am not. How are to mark the difference, given an absolute God? It is not obvious. No wonder so many thinkers have slid from orthodoxy into pantheistic and hyper-panentheistic heresy. Consider Hegel and others. But perhaps we should think of it this way - God suffers our thoughts, we think them. In Christ, God actually thought the thoughts. Our thoughts exist in God's thought, but not as His thought - Christ's exist in God's thought as His thought. This is hard to understand. God gives our thoughts existence in His thought yet they are ours.

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More Recent Thoughts: Does God know what it's like for me, say, to be sinful? Maybe knowing what it's like requires having (pure) phenomenal concepts. Could God have those? Not if having them requires having the relevant experience. But why think this for God? Why think God would require actually having the experience, even if it's a requirement for us humans? In any case, assume he can't have such concepts. He might still be able to know all the same propositions that get expressed using phenomenal concepts, but does so via other concepts. But assume that propositions are individuated partly by the concepts used to express them (or at least that this is the case with propositions expressed by phenomenal concepts). God might still be able to know the exact same facts just via different propositions. But let's say that facts are individuated by propositions in some way. Then maybe God knows the facts expressible by the metaphysically appropriate truth conditions or truth makers or fact makers for all of those propositions. God will still be fully omniscient in the appropriate way - God must be such that nothing in the world is mysterious to Him or beyond his ken. Omniscience doesn't require having every truth vehicle in the head, so to speak. In fact, maybe God's knowledge doesn't involve propositions at all - maybe God's knowledge of everything is direct in a way superior to and bypassing propositional knowledge. God, perhaps, has no use for representational mediaries and so not knowing what it's like in some sense is no blow to his all-knowingness.

A Sketch of How One Might Acquire a Tenseless View of Time Using Only Tensed Resources

So the mad end-of-quarter rush is finally over. Here's a little bit of something I thought recently (still a bit rough):

Some tensed theorists seem to think that our tensed representations or experiences are the basic ones. I think there's a lot of truth to that. But then many will also say in turn that any ideas of tenseless relations like earlier than or later than and any idea, really, of anything like a B-series are really reducible to tensed determination like past or present and our ordering of things into an A-series. Indeed, they might claim, we can have no idea of B-relations or B-time other than via A-relations or A-time - we have no experience of this tenseless stuff, only the tensed, so there's no way we could acquire tense-independent, objective concepts of mind-independent time.

Now, I think this is all not quite fair, but let's go with it for a moment and accept that our basic experience and primitive representations are all tensed - that we have no direct experience or grasp of tenseless B-relations qua B-relations. So how could we acquire such tense-independent concepts? Are they just reducible conceptually to A-properties as many A-theorists would have it?

Consider how we get our concept of B-space. Our experience is always of A-space, arguably. So how do we get to B-spatial relations? Are they reducible to A-ones? Part of having a conception of objective space (for a spatial agent) - and, by many lights, of even being an agent in space - is knowing how to mentally transform one's point of view into others. That is, knowing what things would be like elsewhere - being able to detach one's point of view from one's current self and place and conceptually 'move it about' to places other than the one one is currently at. This involves seeing other places as possible points for spatial points of views. But the process of objectification in one's ideas of space does not end here. One of the last things to do is now to identify spatial A-facts related to me and my current place to those related to other places. So 'J is here' said by A at place p1, expresses the same fact as 'J is there' said by B at place p2. If one wanted, now, one could form a form of representation free of spatial centeredness to stand in for that very fact which is expressed in both of the two spatially-tensed sentences. And voila, B-relational representations irreducible to A-ones, all on a thin spatially A-representational basis.

A similar story will go for time. Having an objective conception of time involves knowing how to transform one's point of view into others - knowing via memory, imagination, etc. what things would be like elsewhen by detaching one's point of view from the present and freely moving it about. As in the spatial case, this will involve an idea of other times as possible points for a temporal point of view to take up residence. The final steps will be similar - we then identify A-facts relative to the present with those relative to other times. So the fact expressed by 'J is F' said by A at t1 is now identified with the fact expressed by 'J is P' by A at t2. In a way similar to the space story, we can now form a kind of tenseless representation via a sort of abstraction from these two sentences and the fact that they each are said to express the same fact. So now we get concepts of earlier and later and simultaneity, all without these being reducible to A-concepts. Hence, for all that's been shown, the supposed fact that we do not experience time or even at first represent it qua tenseless does not show anything about whether it is in fact fundamentally tenseless or tensed.

Non-superfrickin'-technical posts for the non-superfrickin'-technical reader

For those family and friends who stumble upon this blog and have no idea what I'm saying, here are some posts you may find (slightly more) readable (hopefully updated regularly):

Series Posts

Short Historical Write-Ups
(for a history of Christianity class I took)
Luther
Radical Reformation
Reformation for Women
Schleiermacher
Mormons
Evangelicals
Ehrman on the Bible on Suffering
Warren on the Purpose-Driven Life

Dispensationalism and the Interpretation of Scripture
(cursory remarks on why I don't think dispensationalism is scriptural - some of this may be dated, though and I can't guarantee everything will match my current views to a T)
Part 1: Two Kinds of Hermeneutic
Part 2: Prophetic Literature
Part 3: Modern Israel and Biblical Prophecy
Part 4: The People of God, Israel, and the Church

Naturalness
(on the uses and misuses of nature and the natural in debates over homosexuality, gender and gender roles, etc. and in human lives)
If It's Natural Does That Mean It's Good or Good for You?
Naturalness Part 2: Gender and Biology
Naturalness Part 3: The Sinful Nature and the Image of God

Non-Series Posts
Notes on Philippians 3:7-16
(what it says)
Notes on Acts: Introduction and Chapters 1-2
(what it says, some of this used for teaching a class)
Genesis and Christmas
(some connections between Genesis and Christmas)
Transgender Bill
(why I'm not happy with a particular bill that just got passed in my state of California)
Notes on Galatians 5:1-12
(what it says)
Notes on Galatians 4:12-20
(what it says)
Teaching About the Bible, Not Just Its Content
(about why we should teach about the Bible itself more, not merely the information therein)
Some More In-Depth Notes on Galatians 3:1-18
(a follow-up to the previous Galatians entry below)
Why We Shouldn't Use the Word "Legalism"
(what is says - me complaining again about the harmfulness of poor word choice)
Some Notes on Galatians 3
(what it says)
Short Science and God Presentation Notes
(notes for a short church presentation on science and the existence of God)
Evil as Purposelessness and the Problem of Evil
(some thoughts on the problem of evil from a semi-practical standpoint)
Time Travel, Pre-Natal Ethics, and Other Miscellania
(a potpourri of thoughts)
Annoying Theodicy Objections
(a tiny rant)
Some Notes on Genesis 45:21-50:26
(what it says)
Pneumatological Trends
(just a dry run-down of current trends in thinking about the Holy Spirit)
Hate religion, love Jesus?
(just a fun picture I found)
More on Ephesians 5 and Principles of Interpretation and Application of Scripture
(why it is hard to argue on the basis of Ephesians 5 in favor of patriarchal households and how people's interpretations of this passage often involve certain common mistakes often found among Christians when reading the Bible)
Ephesians 5 Contains No Command for Wives to Submit - Or, Why Things are Often More Interesting in the Original Greek
(why a careful look at the Greek shows this and how most translations get it wrong)
Thoughts from Ephesians 3:1-13
(what the title says)
Ephesians 1:1-14
(some notes on the beginning of Ephesians)
Portraits of a King
(another Cal paper featuring David)
David and Tamar
(an old paper from my Cal days on the near-identity of structure for the Tamar and rise-of-David stories)
Bibliography 2010-2011
(most of the books I read or cited September 2010-June 2011)
Some Random Song of Songs Notes
("deleted scenes" from a much longer paper)
An Abridged Introduction to Christian Ethics
(a version of a paper I wrote - a bit denser than some other things here at points)
Update!!! (Finally...)
(what's been going on...)
First Obama, Now Palin - Smears All Around!
(how the internet and media have smeared Obama and Palin)
Why I Think John Piper's 'Christian Hedonism' View Sucks (And Also What's Good About It Too)
(what the title says)
The REAL Solution to Global Warming
(stupid humor about pirates and global warming)
Quotes: Anscombe on Various Topics
(interesting quotes, most of which I used in a Sunday School class at FBC)
In the Meantime...
(funny political cartoon)
Teleological Personhood
(don't be turned off by the title - this one's all about justice for folks like the unborn and mentally handicapped and many ethicists' and philosophers' prejudices against them)
Weird Cult-Like Folks
(the title says it all - another cult-like website I found through the google ads on my sidebar)
Chavez Finally Goes Too Far!!!
(a tongue-in-cheek tirade against Venezuela's president's "crusade" against hot sauce)
Freedom, Heaven, and Purgatory
(a slightly harder post on why Protestants might want to believe in Purgatory after all)
Quiz Results
(results of a quiz on eschatology that grouped me as amillenial)
Self-Formation, Aristotle, and Kierkegaard
(for the more sophisticated general reader only; all about character formation and virtue)
Bad Responses
(what I don't want students to say in their papers or people to tell me in conversation)
Some Teacher's Proverbs: Thoughts Thought While Grading a Bunch of Papers
(me being cynical)
Some Criteria for an Adequate Moral Theory
(what it says - very simple)
Simon Gathercole in Christianity Today on the New Perspective on Paul
(a critique of a critique of the New Perspective)
Notes for the Simply Christian Sunday School Class on Justice & Spirituality, God, and Israel
(what it says - based on the curriculum and book by N.T. Wright)
Politics Trumps Facts In Editorial Hostile To Administration
(critique of editorial criticising the Bush administration for being 'hostile to science' but where the editorial itself is really just presenting philosophical opinion masquerading as science)
Helm on Wright on the Order of Salvation
(for the more theologically literate, what Reformed thinker Helm gets wrong in his critique of N.T. Wright)
Notes on Self-Formation
(character formation and the forging of one's self for the future)
Notes on Romans 1:1-6
(what it says - an exposition of sorts)
Philippians 2:5-11 (Spencer Paraphrase Version)
(a paraphrase/translation of the passage)
Identity Politics
(the politics of identity, especially sexuality, and what goes wrong)
Hey Wise Guys!
(a test to check your wisdom)
Anglican Pit Fight
(more fights over homosexuality and a very contentious speech)
Random Thoughts on Ethics, Society, Welfare, and Human Functioning
(what it says - cosmetic surgery, amputation, disability, and human flourishing)
Cosmetic Amputation
(yikes! yes, there is such a thing!)
Peeps Alive!
(a link to a great video of our family fielding "peep wars")
A Large Portion of My Class Says They'd Push Someone in Front of a Runaway Train
(a bit heavier but still readable - ethics and society's views on it)
The True Nature of Internet Discussions and Debates
(me being cynical about the internet)
Religion as an Excuse for Violence
(what it says - a quick comment)
Further Notes on Moral Relativism
Moral Relativism and Really Bad Papers
(self-explanatory posts)
Yo-Mama Jokes for Philosophers
(yes!)
Controversy surrounding FBC
(the big media fiasco surrounding our church, one of the members, and some very prickly protesters)
"Blog": Genealogy of a Word
(me being weird)
Philosophical Orthodoxy
(first post)