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Consensus omnium, consensus gentium. The idea that everyone has an idea about God (or “the gods”), so He/they must exist.

Nevertheless he then goes on to say how they don’t care about human affairs and that, besides, the soul’s not eternal.

Seems the atheist, then, or at least the “practical atheist” in an Epicurean sense (including those of the “I’ll go to God on my deathbed, after I’ve done what I really want to do” camp), denies the edification of the soul in order to bring it into subjection to the body; whereas the Christian is commanded to bring the body into subjection of the soul, which is valuable to God in the utmost.

Reading Derrida today, flying through an address he gave in 1968 about the end of philosophy, I noted a point he made about the agricultural versus nomadic societies and the way that language has changed so much….

And it occurred to me, part of the reason I love philosophy is that it gives me a real sense of adventure, of wandering, of not-settling. How could this be a good thing, you ask? Read Beowulf and tell me how it couldn’t. That may sound typically Anglo of me, but the heart yearns for adventure: martial artists know this; street acrobats know this; professional hikers know this.

Remember the first Diablo game? (Some of you will; that was the last major game I was really into, and I still refer to it sometimes for metaphor.) There seems a certain charm to shopkeeping, like with Perrin, the shopkeeper, who would stay in the same little place, always greeting you, the Hero, the Conqueror of Hell and of Daemonic Lands, with, “Hello my friend! Stay awhile, and listen!” He was charming. But he was also static. He was written that way; and we are not written that way. We are programmed, if you will, with intelligence and the ability to make decisions: why then would I settle for a sole proprietorship?

There is an adventure there, too, of course, the adventure of business, of forging one’s own way of rendering goods and services. But perhaps to the dichotomies of nomad & farmer, abstract & concrete thinker, thinker & feeler, and so forth—we might add, “shopkeeper & warrior.” I never realized I had it in me till I started “doing” philosophy. The craft of language, of ideas, of logic and of theory—how compelling! How exciting! My adventures with a friend of mine in a new, freshly immersive video game that just came out reminded me of these old parallels, especially in light of Derrida’s writing. Isn’t it rather like “leveling up,” like gaining experience and skills, to begin with an overview of everyone from Plato to Aristotle on up through Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and even Lewis and the rest? You start out with questions that take for granted certain presuppositions, only to learn a more nuanced way of wielding the various daggers and bows in your repertoire, and to defend with the shield of your own argumentation and, should it come to that, to the constitution of your own ideology and core beliefs. Are you mortally wounded? Then it means your argumentation hasn’t been strong enough, and your shield was found to be in want. Are you unable to grapple with the Giants across the way with the longsword of your logic? Wait, study, listen, watch, learn: then go and slay them—or find that they’re not quite so huge after all, since you yourself have grown.

This is part of the joy of philosophy, and indeed of theology: swashbuckling and adventuring has never died, only “transcended” into a more abstract way of adventuring. Disagree with me? You, too, will be doing philosophy, and will have joined the conversation—come along, let us banter, now seriously, now jovially; let us argue, and let us teach one another.

You cannot make a trite, repetitious, self-centered, theologically soggy and weak, single-guitar, single-singer chorus that starts with “I want” and ends with “You” with nothing profound in between more spiritual by making it slower. Discuss.

How We Got Here (1)

The Death of Hymns, Part I

An old farmer went to the city one weekend and attended the big city church. He came home and his wife asked him how it was.

“Well,” said the farmer, “it was good. They did something different, however. They sang praise choruses instead of hymns.”

“Praise choruses?” said his wife. “What are those?”

“Oh, they’re OK. They are sort of like hymns, only different,” said the farmer.

“Well, what’s the difference?” asked his wife.

The farmer said, “Well, it’s like this - If I were to say to you “Martha, the cows are in the corn”‘ - well, that would be a hymn. If on the other hand, I were to say to you:

Martha, Martha, Martha,
Oh Martha, MARTHA, MARTHA,
the cows, the big cows, the brown cows, the black cows
the white cows,
the black and white cows,
the COWS, COWS, COWS
are in the corn,
are in the corn, are in the corn, are in the corn,
the CORN, CORN, CORN.

Then, if I were to repeat the whole thing two or three times, well, that would be a praise chorus.”

The next weekend, his nephew, a young, new Christian from the city came to visit and attended the local church of the small town. He went home and his mother asked him how it was.

“Well,” said the young man, “it was good. They did something different however. They sang hymns instead of regular songs.”

“Hymns?” asked his mother. “What are those?”

“Oh, they’re OK. They are sort of like regular songs, only different,” said the young man.

“Well, what’s the difference?” asked his mother.

The young man said, “Well, it’s like this - If I were to say to you ‘Martha, the cows are in the corn’ - well, that would be a regular song. If on the other hand, I were to say to you:

Oh Martha, dear Martha, hear thou my cry
Inclinest thine ear to the words of my mouth
Turn thou thy whole wondrous ear by and by
To the righteous, inimitable, glorious truth.

For the way of the animals who can explain
There in their heads is no shadow of sense
Hearkenest they in God’s sun or His rain
Unless from the mild, tempting corn they are fenced.

Yea those cows in glad bovine, rebellious delight
Have broke free their shackles, their warm pens eschewed
Then goaded by minions of darkness and night
They all my mild Chilliwack sweet corn have chewed.

So look to the bright shining day by and by
Where all foul corruptions of earth are reborn
Where no vicious animals make my soul cry
And I no longer see those foul cows in the corn.’

Then if I were to do only verses one, three and four and do a key change on the last verse, well that would be a hymn.

A recent article from CBS News details the effects of Ambien (zolpidem tartrate, a sedative hypnotic sold in 5- and 10mg doses) for the curious public.

Having used this for insomnia a few years ago when it was the Next Big Thing, I can testify that it changes the way everything, not just tastes, are perceived; the “hypnotic” part of the sedative hypnotic classification is really some powerful stuff. It also does cause memory loss for the time period in which it was taken; if you take an Ambien and then suddenly remember something you forgot to do, you’re probably better off just leaving it till the morning, lest your friends and loved ones see you break dancing to polka in the den while eating slices of frozen pizza (at least that’s not from personal experience).

I leave you with the short text of a conversation I shared with my friend Walter last October amidst rumors that Ambien was about to go OTC:

(16:13:44) Walter: DUDE is ambien really about to go over the coutner?
(16:13:52) I: is it??
(16:13:52) I: lol
(16:13:54) I: i don’t know
(16:13:59) Walter: that’s what I just heard
(16:14:04) Walter: and I’m trying to find out more
(16:14:08) Walter: cuz that would be suuuuuper sweet
(16:14:12) I: lol
(16:14:19) I: that would be reeeeeeeeeally ridiculous
(16:14:23) Walter: I would never have a sleepless night ever again
(16:14:33) Walter: but yeah, I can’t imagin it in its current state being otc
(16:15:39) I: haha maybe if they removed the weeping, and the LSD
(16:15:50) Walter: the weeping and the LSD!
(16:15:51) Walter: lmao!
(16:16:18) I:
(16:16:25) I: but without those, Ambien is just Benadryl

This article by Tori DeAngelis from the APA’s Monitor on Psychology, February 2003 issue, touches on an issue near and dear to my heart. I’m curious why we’re so apt overestimate ourselves; and wonder at my own way of dealing with it, which is namely to crush it with a constant anxious fear of failure or, worse, utter obsolescence in light of The Greats. This of course I’m talking about with philosophy, theology, and even psychology. But there are other areas of my life where I am often surprised at how greatly I overestimated my competence. Is it mere, common, human pride, or is there something in the way we interact with others in America a contributing factor (DeAngelis evaluates those who certainly think so).

A good bit of lunchtime reading if you have a moment sometime. See also the Harvard University “Project Implicit.”

Stoicism was a school of thought that proceeded from the Hellenistic period of Greco-Roman history, and was characterized by a pantheistic physics, a structurally Greek ethic with its foundations in Aristotelian thought, and a focus on the rationality of the universe. Stoic philosophy was focused on the rationality of the world and of the universe at large. There is a sense in which the arguments that the later, perhaps more argumentatively practiced and subtle, Stoics make for the existence of the gods and of the intelligence (and intelligibility) of the universe seem to be an exposition of the natural wonder of every man at the beauty, elegance, and power visible in the cosmos as a whole. Christianity shares with Stoic doctrine a focus on the power and rationality of the cosmos, and the two systems of thought have a remarkable amount of interplay even in current public discourse.

Arguments abound that Christianity came about at such a time as would have made it popular by default, since Jew, Greek, and Roman alike were seeking for an explanation of the afterlife in a way that would serve as a counter-argument, or an answer, to the Stoic claim that there was no immortality of individual souls. The faithful counter that this was a matter of divine forethought rather than mere historical inevitability, though perhaps both arguments are equal in gravity: in the public discourse, there have always been matters upon which both sides agreed, even in the most extremely dichotomous debates. Cicero, as a first-century B.C. author and orator and an adherent to the Academic Skeptical school, provides a wealth of argumentation and dialogue on theological points that were not only pertinent in his day, but relevant and cogent for apologetics taking place in universities, offices, and courtrooms even today. It is for this reason that it is worthwhile to examine not only Stoicism and Christianity as they attempt to explain the universe in terms of having been crafted purposefully by a sentient intelligence, but also to examine the major points upon which classic, Greco-Roman Stoicism (especially as put forth in the second book of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods [De Natura Deorum]) agree with classical Christianity both in its infancy and today.

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Roderick M. Chisholm, “Intentional Inexistence” (1957)

1.
“It would be an easy matter, of course, to invent a psychological terminology enabling us to describe perceiving, taking, and assuming in sentences which are not intentional. Instead of saying, for example, that a man takes something to be a deer, we could say `His perceptual environment is deer-inclusive.’ But in so doing, we are using technical terms…. And unless we can re-express the deer-sentence once again […] as a nonintentional sentence containing no such technical terms, [the sentence] will conform to our present version of Brentano’s thesis.”

2.
Chisholm is attempting to make a nuanced defense of Franz Brentano’s thesis that the characteristic shared by all mental phenomena, and by no physical phenomena, is intentional inexistence: that when referring to mental acts, we must refer to them as intentional, and not merely in physiological terms. Not only is behavioristic language about reinforcement and physiological processes in the mind too technical for Chisholm, it is also inaccurate because of its deficiency in explaining how perception actually works from a the standpoint of the subject to whom mental phenomena are being presented.

It seems to Chisholm that the only way around using intentional language, especially when describing something about how a person perceives an object in his or her environment, is to use needlessly complex and technical phraseology that does not capture the full meaning of what it is to perceive something. Furthermore, an explanation of perception that does not include intentionality is crippled, according to Chisholm, when explaining how we can take an efficient cause of a presentation to be something that it is not—as in a case, for instance, wherein the man mentioned above could mistake the deer for another animal.

3.
Chisholm begins his article by asking whether Brentano’s intentionality thesis with regard to mental phenomena can also be true of assumptions, and then proceeds to (at least rhetorically) attempt to disprove Brentano’s theory using other peoples’ objections and examples after explaining more fully the terminology Brentano himself was using. For Brentano, as for Chisholm, attitudes and beliefs and other sorts of mental phenomena “intentionally contain an object in themselves,” such that the object presented to consciousness need not exist in real life: I can have a belief about unicorns, or the state of a substance on Twin Earth, or a wish for something that never comes to pass. However, physical (nonpsychological, as Chisholm says) phenomena cannot intentionally contain objects: in order for me to kick a ball, there must necessarily be a ball for me to kick, and so forth.

Chisholm argues that we can talk about states of mind or psychological “directedness” by way of certain types of sentences; in this way he clarifies and re-states Brentano’s original thesis through statements such as, “We may now say that a compound declarative sentence is intentional if and only if one or more of its component sentences is intentional.” Various psychologists and philosophers have tried to re-state the ways of talking about mental phenomena apart from intentionality in various ways, one of which is exemplified by Ayer’s objection that “to think of” something is “to be conscious of the symbols which designate” that thing, but Chisholm says that even this is intentional, since by saying X is designated by Y, we posit nothing about the ontological status or nature of X. Other objections, according to Chisholm, always inevitably refer back to intentional bases, and so assumptions, being mental, must also be intentional.

The overarching point for which Chisholm is attempting to build a case is that in order to describe psychological phenomena, we must use sentences and language that is necessarily intentional, lest we confuse the issues with overly technical language, or by not capturing all there is to a mental act. We can, and according to Chisholm, should, describe physical phenomena from the standpoint of non-intentional sentences; but this is insufficient for psychological language, since intentionality is not reducible to the physical. Therefore, intentional language is the only kind of language adequate for discussing matters of psychology and of the objects of cognition.

Reference: Chisholm, R. M. (1957). “Intentional inexistence.” From Perceiving: A Philosophical Study. New York: Cornell UP.

On Franz Brentano, The Distinction between Mental and Physical Phenomena (1874)

1.
“All the data of our consciousness are divided into two great classes—the class of the physical and the class of mental phenomena. […] But what we have said is not sufficient. […] [S]ensation and imagination are distinguished by the fact that one occurs as the result of a physical phenomenon, while the other is evoked by a mental phenomenon…. But … what appears in sensation does not correspond to its efficient cause. Thus it turns out that the so-called physical phenomenon does not actually appear to us…!”

2.
This passage from Brentano’s book, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is the beginning of his delineation of the problem that had been troubling psychologists and philosophers for years on the nature of how the individual consciousness contains conceptions of and understand relations of things within the world at large. From the first premise, that all conscious data are divided into two classes, Brentano goes on to set out the problems that had theretofore afflicted scientists and philosophers of mind that had attempted to defend such a position. An example of this problem is the contradictory statements that scientists had been forced to make regarding imagination and sensation: though the two were purported to be separate phenomena, one physical and one mental, it had been shown that the efficient causes of sensations—objects in the world—did not always correspond to what was actually perceived, and that indeed things could be mistaken for other things—the sensations admitted to confusion.

Brentano goes on to talk about the different possible answers to this question of the fundamental difference between mental and physical phenomena, until finally settling on the notion that mental phenomena are characterized by “intentional inexistence,” that is to say, by being about something else.

3.
Beginning with a statement of purpose to clarify the difference between mental and physical phenomena by making the definitions and descriptions of each more specific instead of (what he seems to think would be) taking the easy way out and making the descriptions even more generalized, he posits that the idea or “act of presentation” to the consciousness an object of experience in the world is a mental phenomenon. That is, not the object in itself, but that which the mind takes from the efficient cause of a sensation. Furthermore, judgments, beliefs, all emotions, and all recollections are examples of mental phenomena; whereas, physical phenomena are colors, figures, and other such “sensible” objects of experience.

From that point, seeking a more “unified definition” of the difference between the two types of phenomena, Brentano brings up the idea that Descartes, Kant, and others put forth, that the defining feature of mental phenomena is that they do not share with physical phenomena being extended into space and having location. However, he notes, people object that some physical phenomena have no extension, and others that mental phenomena do in fact.

Ultimately he arrives at the Scholastic notion of the intentional inexistence of mental phenomena, their being about something. This aboutness characterizes mental phenomena, argues Brentano, is never shared by physical phenomena: colors and figures, chords and states of heat or cold are not “about” anything in the way that judgments, beliefs, and emotions are. He answers the objection that feelings of pains, like cuts and burns, are not intentional by saying that there are always presentations to our minds, even when we are dealing directly with stimuli within our own bodies. There is always a presentation involved, when the mind is involved; the mind is always directed toward something, and thoughts are always about their objects, even if they do not correspond perfectly with external objects (efficient causes of the presentations).

Brentano goes on to defend other aspects of this theory, such as that mental phenomena can occur simultaneously whereas physical phenomena can only occur serially; and that mental phenomena are only conceived of in the inner consciousness, not externally. Later psychologists would contest various aspects of Brentano’s theory, but it remains highly influential in the field.

On The Extended Mind, Clark & Chalmers (1998)

1.
“The moral is that when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and skin. What makes some information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the relevant role can be played only from inside the body.”

2.
Clark and Chalmers are saying here that, in the ongoing discussion about how cognition originates and where it takes place, there is no reason that scientists and researchers must delimit the mind as only the brain, contained within each person’s physical body. Behaviorists and materialists have attempted to show that there is nothing to the mind outside the body—there is not a soul in the mystical sense, separate from but somehow coinciding with the brain. Clark and Chalmers imply that in the zeal of those (behavioral materialist) writers to show that the mind is contained in the body and, indeed, is merely the name laypeople give to the collection of neurons in the brain, they have gone too far and have put a dogmatic limitation on a person’s cognitive processes being contained solely within each person.

Even outside of strict materialist circles, beliefs are traditionally viewed as being held solely within one’s own mind, unexposed and inaccessible to anyone else except when explicitly given through verbal or written communication. Viewing the body and mind as comprising the functional unit of a person, Clark and Chalmers posit the view that the different roles that different bits of information (and, additionally, some forms of computation) play makes them what they are—in this case, that certain types of information are beliefs because they play the role of beliefs, not that the definition of belief must necessarily include “being contained within the person’s body.”

3.
The claim that the mind can be extended into the world, including beliefs and computations, is a radical one in light of the vast majority of the history of philosophy of the mind. Clark and Chalmers are not content to accept the claim that whatever is outside of the body is outside of the mind; nor are they satisfied with the claim that meaning can be outside of the body and, therefore, the mind must be extended into the world. They claim, instead, that the functional interaction of the body, including the brain, with the outside world, can also constitute mind, or contain it, in a way that allows for the mind to act directly on the objects in the world.

Clark and Chalmers reference investigations in the differences between epistemic and pragmatic actions: while pragmatic actions change something in the world because of physical necessity or desirability, epistemic actions are changes in the world in order to augment cognitive processes (as in the case of physical versus mental rotation of blocks that fit certain sockets, as in, e.g., Tetris). This distinction allows them to distance themselves from the passive externalism of Putnam and Burge, by claiming that epistemic actions engage the world directly in the cognitive loop, and are not merely “dangling at the other end of a long causal chain.” Thus, flipping blocks in Tetris to aid judgment-of-fit of a given block, or rearranging the letters on a tray in a game of Scrabble, are both examples of extended cognition. This, Clark and Chalmers go on to say, is much simpler than the “needlessly complex” explanation of inputs, mental connections, and actions that characterize most cognitive-behavioral speech.

In this way, too, are beliefs and other traditionally “inner” pieces of information given external cognitive existence. Clark and Chalmers point to the case of a man with a peculiar sort of amnesia, who remembers to check his notebook for things he needs to remember; his beliefs about the placement of things and places in the world are contained in that notebook, and are a part of his cognitive processes, even though they are contained physically outside of his head. Their point is that what is important is the role being played by a series of actions or by an external source of information, not by the locations of these sources in space or in relation to the body, whether inside of it or outside.

Exciting news. Between 2X and 3X as fast (read speed) as hard drives, smaller form factor, extreme weight reduction (to 15g), no moving parts (hello laptops!), 95% reduction in power consumption from a normal hard drive: Samsung’s 32GB SDD.

The catch? Not-unlimited writes per cell of the drive, and an expected price tag of between $750 and $1000.

Still, looking good! Hard disk drives are THE bottleneck in computing today.

A dear member of my family, I found out late last evening, has very strangely had a stroke. I know we have some prayer warriors out there; please add this young man to your list. God is sovereign; His glory is that toward which all things are directed. Pray peace and comfort on his family and for clarity in this time; and, failing clarity, peace.

Having installed the xmms-aac RPM-based XMMS plugin for my distro (FC4/x86_64) only to find that XMMS still filled up its buffer and re- and re- and re-filled (”ad nauseum”), I Googled and realized that (1) I was clearly not the only one with this issue. I’d never thought anything of it till I found that the 48kbps Groove Salad stream from SomaFM seriously rivaled its 128kpbs MP3 stream—at less than half the bandwidth! (The irony that this technology comes when I now have the fat phat pipes to handle it is to be set aside for the moment.)

I realized after a while that it wasn’t necessarily AAC that I wanted to play, or MP4, or what-have-you; but aacPlus. I didn’t and, frankly, still don’t, know the difference between the two, but apparently they’re different enough for XMMS to shrug at the latter.

The “Software Audio Players for Linux & BSD” is helpful, but having downloaded numerous of them, I can say that most of them require lengthy compiles and obnoxiously need more fiddling than I have/had time for.

Try Xine, though; it works for me, for a while. It has crashed consistently if I leave it on overnight, or even for more than about eight consecutive hours, but that aside, it’s a good player (especially if you need one NOW).

Google pointed me to BornAgainRadio, where I found an article about how much better aacPlus is than MP3, and I was sold; Xine helps make it happen for me right now, but if you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

In a recent post on Digg.com about Porsche’s new $150,000 (yes, that’s currently € 123 183.05!) “digital” watch, people began immediately betraying their ontological position on the constitution of the universe, and I thought the discussion was so interesting, I’d like to tell you about it:

rm999 said,

Digital means it shows digits, which is a discrete output vs a continuous analog watch. It’s kind of cool - it reminds you that everything in this world is analog at its core - even computers are created with analog voltages and chemical reactions.

To which breakneckridge responded,

I have to disagree, everything is digital at its core. Once you get down to the quantum level, electrons can have only certain energy levels and do not exist in a continuous band of possibilities. But I’m just playing devils advocate because in truth calling something digital or analog is really a synthetic distinction that humans came up with to try to describe the world which never really falls into separate categories the way we’d like.

Then, PhysicsTheory (go figure) responded to that thus:

Not to be a nit-picker, but since you brought it up… at the quantum level things are VERY much NOT digital. That is acutally the point, and was one of the major problems Einstein had with the whole thing. You can really only describe the location of subatomic particles with probability functions until you directly observe them, collapsing the probability function. Probability functions are continuous by definition, not discrete. Hence analog would be a more apt analogy.

Cheers!

Interesting, no? Any other ladies and gentlemen knowledgeable about quantum physics care to comment?

read more | digg story

Actually, though I very much appreciate the fact that the Roman Catholic saint to Ireland brought Christ to the Celtic masses, this post is about two very important, yet subtle, aspects of the holiday as it is celebrated today.

First off, it’s not St. Patty’s day. Come again? “Yes, Michael,” you say, “perhaps you are pedantic about his name being unabbreviated?” No, I mean the abbreviation for Patrick is Paddy, not Patty, which is short for Patricia. Patrick’s Gaelic name is Padraig. This of course applies only in the English language, since he was born Maewyn Succat in Scotland in some time between 387~390, and was baptized Patricius, meaning “noble.”

Also, that whole “green beer” thing? Yeah, they don’t do that in Ireland, or anywhere else than the US for that matter. In order for a beer to be able to be made green, you have to have something ultra-light (like Michelob’s sampling of the same name) in which you can put green food coloring. It’s a novelty, but it doesn’t magically make the beer good.

No, but if you want good beer, check out people who know.

Back to more important, weighty matters.

St. Patrick’s Breast-Plate (his prayer preparing him for his mission to the pagans of Ireland), as literally translated from the old Irish text and found in the Catholic Encyclopedia, follows:
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Optimized the MySQL databases: You should notice the significant decrease in loading time.

Updated the .htaccess rewrites for optimized browsing and refreshed the permalink structure; “Previous Posts” and “Next Posts” at the bottom of any given page should now work flawlessly.

Have gone through all posts up to January of 2005, fixing broken or obsolete links and texts. Working my way up through December 2005, when I converted to WordPress.

Will soon have the following:

1. a page from which you can help support ThinkBlog,
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