Quote of the Day – John Dewey on the Role of Philosophy as a General Theory of Education

If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education…Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic – or verbal – or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct.

~John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 338

Quote of the Day – Wittgenstein on Value (spoiler: there is no value)

“In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.”

~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Sounds about right to me.

Quote of the Day – Dewey on Scientific Progress

When we take means for ends we indeed fall into moral materialism. But when we take ends without regard to means we degenerate into sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation and preaching; or else upon a fanaticism that will force the realization of preconceived ends at any cost.

~John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 73

Quote of the Day – Philosophy’s Barren Monopoly

Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Absolute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening the moral forces which move mankind and in contributing to the aspirations of men to attain to a more ordered and intelligent happiness.

~John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 26-27

Book notice – Hasok Chang’s Inventing Temperature

Hasok Chang’s book Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (OUP, 2004) is a brilliant  example of how to do history and philosophy of science in a rigorous but endlessly fascinating fashion. Chang’s discussion of operationalism, coherentism, and epistemic iteration have had a huge impact on my recent thinking in regards to how to evaluate the prospects for current and future scientific approaches to consciousness.

Quote of the Day – The Geometry of Vision

There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception – that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems; one may see it in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning but a universal of nature itself.

~Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations, p. 132

Quote of the day 2/20/13 – Seneca on philosophy

One must therefore take refuge in philosophy; this pursuit, not only in the eyes of good men, but also in the eyes of those who are even moderately bad, is a sort of protecting emblem.For speechmaking at the bar, or any other pursuit that claims the people’s attention, wins enemies for a man; but philosophy is peaceful and minds her own business. Men cannot scorn her; she is honoured by every profession, even the vilest among them. Evil can never grow so strong, and nobility of character can never be so plotted against, that the name of philosophy shall cease to be worshipful and sacred.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Weisberg and Leiter's review of Thomas Nagel's new book Mind and Cosmos

Read it here. Weisberg and Leiter are pretty harsh, but I see no evidence that they are being unfair to Nagel’s argumentation (or lack thereof).

“We conclude with a comment about truth in advertising. Nagel’s arguments against reductionism are quixotic, and his arguments against naturalism are unconvincing. He aspires to develop “rival alternative conceptions” to what he calls the materialist neo-Darwinian worldview, yet he never clearly articulates this rival conception, nor does he give us any reason to think that “the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Mind and Cosmos is certainly an apt title for Nagel’s philosophical meditations, but his subtitle—”Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”—is highly misleading. Nagel, by his own admission, relies only on popular science writing and brings to bear idiosyncratic and often outdated views about a whole host of issues, from the objectivity of moral truth to the nature of explanation. No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection “is almost certainly false.” The subtitle seems intended to market the book to evolution deniers, intelligent-design acolytes, religious fanatics and others who are not really interested in the substantive scientific and philosophical issues. Even a philosopher sympathetic to Nagel’s worries about the naturalistic worldview would not claim this volume comes close to living up to that subtitle. Its only effect will be to make the book an instrument of mischief.”

Their reaction to Nagel’s book subtitle resonates with my earlier remarks that such a title was ridiculous for a serious philosophical book and only serves as a marketing ploy to excite anti-science and ID believers.

Book notice: William Calvin's The Cerebral Symphony

William Calvin, otherwise known as “That guy who talks about throwing a lot”, is one of my favorite popularizers of neuroscience. The Cerebral Symphony (1989) is an attempt to explain what it is that makes human consciousness so special. One of my favorite things about Calvin’s approach to human consciousness is that, in his view, “The term should capture something of our advanced abilities rather than covering the commonplace” (p. 78). In other words, the primary explanandum of consciousness studies is not the “sensory qualia” we share with nonhuman animals, but rather, our ability for abstract thought, imagination, and “mental time travel”. That is, Calvin is trying to explain the more “narratological” aspects of consciousness (to borrow a term from Julian Jaynes, who Calvin cites approvingly on this issue) as opposed to the more sensorimotor aspects. However, being a Darwinian, Calvin doesn’t want to necessarily say that capacities that make humans able to narrate and imagine sprung out of evolutionary thin air, so perhaps there are some functional overlaps with other primate species.

The central explanatory tool of the book is what Calvin calls a “Darwin Machine”, which is a variant of the “neural darwinism” approach to brain function. Calvin’s idea goes something like this: suppose the evolution of the ability of humans to throw (and thus hunt more efficiently) necessitated the development of a “neural sequencer” that plans linear motor patterns. Now imagine you have a massive array of sequencers operating in parallel but generating different “variations on a theme”. Calvin’s idea is that consciousness is the sequence that best survives based on various selection criteria that change depending on the task at hand. This is in fact very similar to Dennett’s notion of “multiple drafts” or “fame in the brain”, and I think I first heard of Calvin’s book in Dennett’s 1991 book Consciousness Explained. To me it sounds like pretty much the same theory, which limits the originality of Dennett’s theoretical framework (supposing that Calvin came up with the idea first). Overall, The Cerebral Symphony is an interesting and theoretically insightful account of human consciousness that is solidly grounded in Darwinian thinking (perhaps to a fault). The book is also interspersed with sociological commentary on the scientific community at Woods Hole in Cape Cod Massachusetts, which makes for relatively easy reading.

Book notice: Oliver Sacks' Seeing Voices

In Seeing Voices (1989), Sacks delves into the science of Sign language and the Deaf community in general.The Deaf (capital “D”) community is different from the population of hearing impaired persons, and signals the presence of a genuine subculture complete with its own unique language, history, challenges, and triumphs. Sacks explores the powerful and complex ways in which language learning impacts cognitive development. Deprived of the chance to learn a language,a child will grow up “dumb” relative to everyone else in regards to the complexity of their conceptual repertoire. Hence, most deaf persons who were considered “dumb” in previous eras were really victims of not having been taught a language, rather than victims of any “general” cognitive impairment. Furthermore, Sacks relates the struggles of hearing parents to choose between teaching them the arduous process of communicating in the hearing world or choosing the easier route of teaching them Sign. The dilemma is that the hearing and speaking skills take years to develop whereas the teaching of Sign is much more intuitive and happens faster, allowing for an expansion of vocabulary at a young age to provide a cognitive scaffold upon which to build more complicated conceptual schemes. The hearing and talking route takes longer and risks missing “critical periods” of development. Sacks was writing before the development and refinement of cochlear implants, which have only complicated the debate between the relative trade-offs of immersing oneself in the Deaf community with ASL or reaching out to the hearing world.

Sacks also explores the question of whether and to what extent “thinking” is possible independently of language. His conclusions are rather tentative because reports from late language learners is sometimes confounded by their developing “proto-linguistic” systems on their own. Thus, it’s difficult to know how to analyze the famous report of Theophilus d’Estrella that prior to learning a language he was able to formulate thoughts such as “the briny sea is the urine of a great Sea-God’. This report is interesting, but is confounded by the fact that he had devised “home-sign” from earliest childhood. Moreover, given the retrospective nature of the report and the limited sample of one, it’s difficult to verify that his memory of his pre-language days wasn’t contaminated by conceptual structures learned later. However, given the likelihood that “supernatural” thinking is hardwired, it wouldn’t surprise me that some capacity for abstract thinking is possible prior to language learning provided it is restricted to religious domains. In general though, Sacks concludes that learning a language profoundly impacts cognition and makes many of the uniquely human conceptual capacities possible, particularly the step in which a child learns that everything has a name.

Sacks’ book is rich with observations and insights into the Deaf community, as well as the interesting nature of Sign language itself, especially ASL. For a long time it was thought that ASL was not a real language, but merely “idiographic” and parasitic on English grammar. However, research by William Stokoe in the late 1950’s demonstrated that Sign languages have a complex “spatialized” grammar and are complete languages. All in all, Seeing Voices is one of the most interesting of Sacks’ books and well-worth reading if you are at all interested in the interplay between language and thought during child development.