What about the placebo effect, then? Those are examples of 'top-down causation' which would mitigate against a physicalist explanation, would they not? — Wayfarer

Mental causation is such a widespread phenomenon that one hardly needs to appeal to such things as the placebo effect to exemplify it. I decide to raise my hand and, lo and behold, my hand rises. The decision might have been the result of a deliberative process (and hence of 'mental events') while the outcome is a material process. There would appear to be a complete explanation couched in terms of low-level material/physiological processes that explains in causal terms why it is that my hand rose there and then. Those two explanatory levels pertain to two different domains (i.e. the intentional level of description of behavior, and the physiological level of description of biological processes) that still can be construed to relate to one another by an asymmetrical supervenience relation. You might (counterfactually) have decided to raise your hand earlier, or later, or not at all, but, in such cases, some of the antecedent circumstances of the physical motion of your hand necessarily would (counterfactually) have been different. We can count 'brain states' as part of those antecedent circumstances. Those are (low-level) neurophysiological states which instantiate, or realize, the (high-level) 'reasons' (roughly construed as beliefs and desires) why you would have decided to raise your hand there and then. (I am not actually endorsing this internalist representationalist view of mental content but it is good enough for the sake of simplicity and doesn't prejudge the present argument.)

So, the mere exemplification of mental causation, as an instance of (apparent) downward-causation, in the real world isn't threatening to the supervenience story. Someone who endorses Kim's causal exclusion argument might still acknowledge that the downward-causal story in terms of mental-causation constitutes a useful coarse-grained explanation of the observed event. In spite of its usefulness, Kim would argue that such an explanation is causally redundant because the genuine cause of the 'event' that occurred, as described fine-grainedly in terms of the low-level physiological or physical description, is operative independently of the high-level characterization of the process.

It's true that if we define the outcome (such as someone's arm raising) fine-grainedly in terms of underlying physiological or physico-chemical processes then the outcome is fully determined to occur in a causal sense. From this fact, Kim derives his causal-exclusion conclusion. He argues, on the basis of supervenience, that the outcome could not have been different unless the low-level causal antecedent had been different. And hence, the low-level explanation is deemed to be complete. And hence, the high level explanation, albeit useful for making coarse-grained predictions in the absence of specific knowledge of the underlying low-level properties, is causally redundant. We may thus conclude that 'the mental' (that is, the high-level intentional/psychological functional properties that supervene of the domain of physical states) is epiphenomenal.

The conclusion is unwarranted and very few critics of Kim manage to uproot the fundamental ground of his confusion, and hence the core flaw in his argumentation, although Peter Menzies and Christian List may have come closest in my opinion.

The main flaw in Kim's conception, I think, is that he tends to tacitly and uncritically rely on a metaphysical-realist stance towards low-level material constituents and, on the other hand, on an empiricist or nominalistic stance towards high-level composite entities that are materially constituted by those low-level constituents. While the individuation criteria by means of which we single out (coarse-grainedly) the high-level entities and define their (high-level) powers and properties are somehow defined pragmatically, or theoretically, the low level constituents (such a atoms and molecules, or whatever) are assumed to be causally efficient irrespective of our categorizations of them.

This is a picture that is very strongly indebted to the modern conception of classical mechanics: of objectively real particles and the objectively real forces being exerted between them (or the force fields mediating those forces). 'Objectively real' here is meant to signify that something exists independently of contextual factors or high-level relational characterrizations. The fundamental ground for all genuine causation in the material world consists in the intrinsic properties of corpuscules, and their intrinsic powers to affects the properties of other particles. Everything else that is being defined in terms of aggregates or emergent relational properties is supervenient on this fundamental 'objective' description.

How is Kim's argument affected if we relax those metaphysical assumptions and grant the same ontological status to relational properties that we accord to (putative) intrinsic properties of elementary material constituents? It collapses entirely, on my view. And the reason for that is very simple. If we acknowledge the idea that what makes something what it is isn't exhausted by what it is that this thing is materially constituted of but also is defined by its functional relations to other things, and also by the pragmatic context relative to which this thing is being single out as being representative of a definite category, of instantiating some definite property, then the distinction between the low-level basis of supervenience and the higher-level supervenient domain is abolished. Complete knowledge of the intrinsic properties of the material constituents, and of they elementary mutual interactions, would still constitute an incomplete knowledge of the world since it is fully abstracting away from what it is that those material constituents are constituents of.

Hence, for instance, the low-level explanation for the putative 'event' that was the occurrence of an upward movement of a hand doesn't constitute any kind of a rival causal explanation of the intentionally described event of someone's raising her hand. If what makes this action the action that it is precisely is a context of prior deliberation (for instance) then such actions must be distinguished from upward motions of a hand that might be the result of a stroke, or a strong gust of wind, or whatever. It is thus quite irrelevant that a strict supervenience relation still holds between the domain of intentional behavior and the material-physical domain. The low level explanation can't compete with the high-level one because it abstracts away from the very fact that the low-level outcome (the hand motion) happens to be an instantiation of the phenomenon that we sought to explain, and hence it doesn't even begin to explain why it is that a voluntary action intelligibly occurred.

@Wayfarer By the way, Babatte Babich mentions in her preface to Heelan's book the hard time that she had had bringing to fruition an event with Peter Hacker (and Max Bennett, Dan Dennett, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson who served as a moderator). This event eventually took place and gave rise to a book. It had afforded an opportunity for Searle and Dennett to respond to the excoriating critique of their views that Bennett and Hacker had produced in two appendixes to their book The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which is a broadly Wittgensteinian critique of mainstream cognitive science and (Anglo-American) philosophy of mind. I myself am mostly on Hacker's side, of course, even though I believe his criticism of Dennett isn't always entirely fair.

@Wayfarer

Yes, we might say that eliminativists (and reductionists) about the mental, about consciousness, or about subjective experience, are "deniers" somewhat in the sense Strawson intends. But he clearly lumps them up with Wittgensteinian 'philosophical behaviorists', whose position he contrasts with his own idea that subjective experiences (and what those experiences are 'directly' experiences of) are material processes going on literally in the brain. 'Philosophical behaviorists' such as Wittgenstein, Ryle and (in certain respects) Dennett, criticize the crypto-Cartesian conception of 'qualia' conceived as substance-like objects of direct acquaintance that stand in between a cognitive subject and the world that she perceives or thinks about. It doesn't make much difference to this view whether the 'sense data' are conceived to be realized in material stuff (res extensa) or mental stuff (res cogitans). According to Wittgensteinians, as well as other 'relationalists' such as J.J. Gibson, Alan Costall, Patrick Heelan and Michel Bitbol (to name a few) consciousness is ineliminably relational and can't intelligibly be explained by reference to instrinsic properties of the brain or 'mind'.

Nagel's criticism of Dennett, which you quote, is revealing and on target. But this is a feature of Dennett's thinking where he badly fails to follow though on the consequences of his own Wittgenstainianism, and, in the interest of being a good bona fide physicalist, he aligns himself much too closely with Strawson's internalist views on mental content!

Massimo Pigliucci has discussed both on his blog) — StreetlightX

I had recommended those four emergence-themed blog posts when I had had my extended debate regarding reduction and emergence on this forum last year. Worthy of mention is George Ellis's three enlightening interventions in the comment section where he responds to Sean Carroll's objection to Pigliucci's strong emergentism. Ellis also supplies an extended quote from R. B. Laughlin. This is all very relevant to what we've been discussing here. (Here, here and here)

@Wayfarer

Thanks for linking to this. It was instructive but almost painful to read (as is, elsewhere, Strawson's uninspired defense of hard-determinism in the philosophy of free will and determinism, and his related 'debunking' of the very idea of moral responsibility). While I've come to believe Dennett to be subtly misguided in about half of the things that he says, and insightful about the other half, Strawson seems to be enmired through and though in a bottomless pit of philosophical confusion. (This is all the more regrettable since his father, Sir Peter Strawson, was one of the most profound and influential thinker in the whole history of analytic philosophy).

While I don't agree with some of the allegedly "denialist" stances on consciousness that Strawson deplores, his own characterization of the broadly Wittgensteinian strand of though that he is opposes (i.e. the so called 'philosophical behaviorism', also propounded by Gilbert Ryle, and to some degree by Dennett who was Ryle's student) boils down to an almost farcical misrepresentation of it. The idea that whoever denies the claim that being in pain must amounts to nothing else but being 'directly' acquainted with an essentially private 'pain qualia' thereby also is denying that anyone ever is in pain, of feels pain, is ridiculous.

Strawson's broad brush narration of the history of the evolution of conceptions of subjective experience in the history of psychology also is deeply flawed. As a corrective to it, I would recommend Alan Costall's From Darwin to Watson (and Cognitivism) and Back Again: The Principle of Animal-Environment Mutuality (2004), which is one of the most enlightening pieces that I have read over the last year on any topic.

Costall, just like Dennett and Strawson attempt to do, in their different ways, aims at disclosing the crypto-Cartesian assumptions that underpin much of contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Dennett and Strawson both fail, in my view, with Strawson's attempt being the most unsuccessful. Costall himself goes much further in targeting the unwarranted Cartesian assumptions that condition the thinking of philosophers and psychologists who fancy themselves to be materialist anti-Cartesians but who just repeat the same (or worse) fundamental mistakes in fancier 'materialist' ways. (One of those mistakes is the uncritical reliance on representationalism in the philosophy of perception and of thought content. This is a mistake that Dennett partially overcomes.)

(I wanted to make another specific point but it currently escapes my mind, so I'll edit this space later on)

[Apologies. This is a bit roundabout as an actual response, but I started so I finished...] — apokrisis

No apologies needed. As usual, your posts need being given quite a bit of thought before one can reply to them meaningfully. Have you read the paper by Noah Moss Brender that StreetlightX linked to recently (Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking, Merleau-Ponty, Cognitive Science, and Dynamic System Theory)? I just finished reading it today.

That is a roundabout way of getting at the fundamentality of quantum mechanics. QM is a highly general view that includes "everything" by removing every symmetry-breaking and just talking nakedly about the statistics of fluctuations or individuations. It forms a ground zero at the point where indeterminism itself is constrained to produce determinism. — apokrisis

I must give more thought to that too but it rings similar to Bitbol's thesis in his paper Quantum Mechanics as a Generalized Theory of Probabilities.

I'll comment more substantively at a later time.

Columnar basalt — T Clark

Either that or Cretaceous bees were mighty big buggers.

My favorite color is orange. If I were a dictator everyone would wear Donald Trump colored shirts. — Purple Pond

Not everything that can be counted ______, and not everything that counts can be ______.

Once upon a time people thought Mr Phil O'Sophy was the coolest name.Then they heard of Purple Pond. The end. — Purple Pond

I like your narrative style. It reminds me of this.

Seems like either I misunderstood you or I misunderstand her. Or both. — T Clark

What you quoted Crowther to be saying and what @StreetlightX had said seem to be broadly compatible ideas applied to different contexts.

StreetlightX stressed that many macroscopic objects and phenomena can be understood and explained while abstracting away from the laws of quantum mechanics that govern interactions between the micro-constituents of those objects.

Likewise, Crowther provides an examples of relative independence between pairs of domains that are both being governed by quantum mechanics. In the case of superconductivity the electrons behave collectively in a rigid fashion in a way that is explained by the exchanges of 'sound particles' (phonons) that can only exist in the context of low energy (below some definite threshold). When that occurs, the random interactions that electrons normally have with each other and with the lattice cancel out and hence cease to have any effect on the collective behavior of the electrons. One striking fact, though, is that the high-level emergent laws that govern equally emergent objects (the phonons), although independent of many features of their material 'constituents' (the electrons) still are governed by the general principles of quantum mechanics.

In the same vein, in their paper The Theory of Everything, R. B. Laughlin and David Pines commented that:

"The Josephson quantum is exact because of the principle of continuous symmetry breaking. The quantum Hall effect is exact because of localization (17). Neither of these things can be deduced from microscopics, and both are transcendent, in that they would continue to be true and to lead to exact results even if the Theory of Everything were changed."

The "Theory of Everything" here is conceived as the ultimate high-energy (and hence the ultimate micro-physical) unification theory of matter and gravity, assuming that there might be one.

First of all, I want to make sure the Karen Crowther you're referencing is not the outrigger canoe racer from Maui. Is that correct?

I'm looking on the web for articles. Any specific references would be helpful. — T Clark

She is the one. Her only paper that I read is Decoupling Emergence and Reduction in Physics, but it has been extremely enlightening. I've mentioned her a few times in this older thread where I had been discussing Weinberg's reductionism.

By the way, @StreetlightX also had referenced the excellent paper The Theory of Everything by R. B. Laughlin and David Pines. This paper pursued some of Anderson's earlier insights and developed a view a emergence that struck me as having many commonalities with Crowther's own. So, I searched the content of Crowther's new book -- Effective Spacetime: Understanding Emergence in Effective Field Theory and Quantum Gravity, Springer Publishing (2016) -- and found out that she indeed refers several times to Laughlin and Pines. (This book has a whole chapter devoted to discussing the issue of the emergence of classical spacetime in the context of Quantum Loop Theory, which is a theory of quantum gravity developed by Ashtekar, Smolin and Rovelli as an alternative to sting theory.)

Finished the article. Its conclusion is not anti-reductionist. — frank

I just read it too. Anderson doesn't define very clearly what he takes reductionism to amount to, or what analysis is. His examples illuminate what he seemingly thinks (without making it explicit), and his main goal seems to be to refute the unwarranted inference from reduction (defined as the possibility of successful analysis) to constructionism (defined as the ability to come up with the high-level laws deductively on the basis of the low level ones). He is really setting the stage for what have been more recently advanced as anti-reductionist and strong emergentist arguments by some of his colleagues.

A weird moment occurs when Anderson sets up two columns listing sciences that have increasingly complex objects, with each one having the objects from the previous science as its immediate constituents, and he asserts that the objects of science X obey the law of science Y (where science Y is dealing with the constituents of the objects of science X). This is supposed to cash out the idea of reduction qua analysis, I think. But then, immediately after that, he claims that each new stage of complexity brings up entirely new laws. And he proceeds to argue for this claim over the rest of the paper (quite successfully). So, if there are emergent laws, that are new to X, how do those laws relate to the laws of Y? Anderson doesn't say.

More recent philosophers of emergence, such a Karen Crowther, and physicists like George Ellis, argue that the higher level laws (of science X) can be strongly emergent from the lower level laws (of science Y) because, as a result of symmetry breaking, the very constituents of the objects of X don't exist at all under the conditions (such as higher energy conditions) where the objects of Y are typically (and exclusively) manifested. Furthermore, the emergent laws of X are complete in the sense that they fully govern the objects of X in a manner that is, to a large degree, insensitive to the laws that govern the objects of X and to the properties of those 'constituent' objects.

I don't think it's incumbent upon the critic to delineate "good reasons" people might be captivated by Peterson's message (and not just because I don't think there are really any "good reasons"). I can understand (and I'm sure the author understands), that many young people, particularly men, may feel lost and displaced in modern capitalism, within a highly volatile job market, where, mostly white men, feel they are losing cultural power to minorities and women. Of course that's not a "good reason" to become a Peterson acolyte. — Maw

No, of course not. It's not a good reason all things considered. All things considered, Peterson's calls for action only are worthy of being ignored. But I was rather thinking about something like the good reasons why Trump voters were discontent with a political establishment that had betrayed them. Some people focus on all the reasons why voting for Trump was a bad idea (which it was) and don't pause to reflect about the sources of the vacuum that he opportunistically filled. And so is it with Peterson's brand of populism.

If it's not incumbent on Peterson's critics to point out also how mainstream left-wing ideologies and political institutions generate discontentment, them some of the best critics (such as Slavoj Žižek and Gyrus) are going beyond the call of duty. A side benefit from such "even handed" critiques is that they're more philosophical. They seek to dislodge the flawed assumptions that not only animate Peterson's thinking, but that tend to be ignored because his main critics share those assumptions. Another side benefits of those critiques is that it tends to diminish rather than increase the polarized intellectual and political climate. This is a polarization that Peterson himself promotes and strives on.

How is it a hit-piece? — Maw

Maybe because of its lopsidedness? I think the piece is informative in identifying most of the unsavory strands in Peterson's thinking and many of his unsavory and oft forgotten recent historical progenitors. Unlike the equally harsh criticisms by Žižek and Gyrus, though, it fails to enlighten the reader about some of the good reasons why many people get attracted to Peterson, and hence fails to promote self-critical reflection for liberals and progressives.

Pankaj Mishra wrote a unique article in the New York Review of Book yesterday, — Maw

Bugger... Whenever I'm trying to look away from the Peterson circus and keep to more serious readings, one of those crop up.

It doesn't seem as though this would be controversial, so how can any smart, competent physicist claim that physics can be reduced to particles spinning around in isolation from the rest of the world? — T Clark

You can read the third chapter -- Two Cheers for Reductionism -- in Steven Weinberg's book Dreams of a Final Theory, for an instance of such an argument. Such reductionist authors don't reject the idea that the particles are interacting with the rest of the world, where the rest of the world is being characterized as just more particles (and fields), of course. They are saying that whatever complex phenomena "emerge" from such elementary interactions are "nothing over and above" the elementary particles that they are being constituted of, and the interactions between them. Weinberg attempts to cash out such ideas of ontological and explanatory reducibility in terms of "convergence of arrows of explanation" to a lower level of fundamental physics while relying entirely on a strikingly impoverished notion of what an explanation is.

(Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway) — StreetlightX

I only read half of Meeting the Universe Halfway, a few years ago, not because it's not good -- it's excellent -- but because of time constraints. I'll come back to it eventually.

It's worth noting that although the smallness of Planck's constant entails that, for instances, for mesoscale sized bodies very much larger than electrons, Heisenberg's inequality relation relating the products of the uncertainties (or indeterminations) of the positions and momenta of such bodies to Planck's constant have little practical signifiance, measurements of observables that relate to individual photons or electrons *do* have immediate practical significance for the behaviors of the macroscopic measurement apparatuses that are set up for measuring them. The main reason for that is that the mutuality relations that hold between conjugate variables (complementary observables such as position and momentum) do not just affect how microphysical entities behave but limit what sorts of measurement apparatuses can be jointly implemented to probe the very same phenomena that they are measuring without destroying their very conditions of existence. So, just because microphysical phenomena can be effectively amplified by macroscopic apparatuses that interact with them, the finiteness of Planck's constant (i.e. the fact that it's larger than zero) has direct consequences for the structure of the phenomena that we can observe at the macroscopic scale, such as interference patterns. This constraint also undercuts the idea that the microscopic events that are being probed have their determinations independently from the instrumental contexts in which they are being measured, or so have Bohr and Heisenberg argued.

Serious. As I said, QM is just the way things are. I don't feel any ontological agita. Why would you expect things to behave the same at atomic scale as it does at human scale. I hate it when people, even physicists, get all excited and talk about "quantum weirdness" as if they're Neil DeGrasse Tyson, that son of a bitch. This stuff makes me rethink how the universe works. — T Clark

Until just a few years ago I tended to share this judgement about the (lack of significant) philosophical significance of quantum mechanics. There is rather more to it than just a description of the way microphysical objects happen to behave, though. Maybe Bitbol's preface to Heelan's book would lead you to change your judgement about this topic. It is very short and entirely devoid of weirdness or woo. It's been published separately from the book, in case you would have some trouble locating it. (Search for 'Heelan' on this page).

A while ago, I wrote this, on the topic of 'reductionism': — StreetlightX

Very nice OP, and thanks for the links to the texts by P. W. Anderson; by Noah Moss Brender; and by R. B. Laughlin and David Pines. I now know what I'm going to be reading tomorrow.

Regarding the issue of context, here is a relevant quote from Patrick Aidan Heelan's own preface* to his book The Observable: Heisenberg's Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, which I was reading earlier tonight:

"I had found that phenomenology and hermeneutics were helpful in making sense of the distinction between classical physics and post-classical physics of relativity and quantum mechanics because these new philosophies had the capacity to explore the latent significance and function of context in both scientific traditions; ‘context’ was arguably the central innovative component of these physical theories that had revolutionized 20th century physics.

Specifically, the notion of context can be thought of as having two parts: a part internal to human consciousness, comprising the functions of meaning-making, meaning-using, and meaning-testing; and a part external to human consciousness, comprising the physical processes associated in human life with meaning-making, meaning-using, and meaning-testing. The internal part draws on the hermeneutic resources of intentionality, which is a technical term for the making, using, and testing of meanings. These hermeneutic resources include not only the habitual practices of categorizing what is represented in the sensory flux, but also habits of relating groups of categories to one another by higher-order explanatory laws (or theories). The external part of context acknowledges the physical aspects of the embodied practices of meaning-making, using, and testing, such as the organized conditions of the space and time of the laboratory bench and engagement with the ‘world’ through acts of measurement performed by a qualified embodied observer who, in his/her community of practice, has become skilled in ‘interpreting’ the measured scientific phenomenon as a datum, present as described within the context of the relevant categories and theories." (All italics in the original)

* There also is a preface by Michel Bitbol and another one by Babette Babich who edited to book after Heelan's passing. Bitbol's preface is outstanding.

It's happened already! The long anticipated Peterson-Žižek debate occurred.

@csalisbury Fair enough. For the time being, I am happily agnostic (because ignorant) regarding the notion of grace. So, modulo that, we indeed may be on the same page.

What you need to make it actually constitute a system of its own is a value in which it believes.You need a third level. An ethical way of life is, precisely, not knowing one what will do. That is the linchpin of the whole thing. If you conflate knowing what one ought do with one knowing what one will do, you lose humanity in a blink. — csalisbury

I agree. I am very much a neo-Aristotelian about practical reason. Hence, on my view, ethical motivation is grounded in virtue of character and the "space of reason" merely signifies the forms of justification that belong to an ethically informed form of life. I don't view reason and morality to be separable at all, not even notionally. The severely impoverished forms of practical rationality being studied formally by some economists and rational decision theorists only can be called "rationality" by analogy, on my view.

Also, my characterization of knowing what it is that one will do because it is what one ought to do is mostly indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe and, though her, to Aquinas and Aristotle. I am suggesting that there is a reading of Kant (or of some strands within Kant's practical philosophy) under which he is much closer to Aristotle than he is usually made out to be.

But the ideologies of "pro-science" laypeople do not need to be criticized the same way? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yes, they need to be criticized in the same way. Scientists are just as likely to be ideologically biased as any other kinds of intellectuals.

And all of the ideologues who use science to attack religion, attack social conservative opponents in debates over sex education, transgenderism, homosexuality, etc. do know what they are talking about and do have sufficient training in relevant fields? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

No, the exact opposite, actually. When natural scientists talk about the climate, they have a tendency to be informed about this particular topic (although there are exceptions). When they venture into social and political science, and into philosophy, they tend to speak like ignoramuses.

What are we talking about when we talk about the self as unknowable? Do we mean, simply, that we don't know what we'll do in the future? — csalisbury

I have a somewhat different take on this. I am mostly relying on Kant's discussion of causation in the Third Antinomy.

As an embodied agent, the self is both a phenomenon (more precisely, an empirical substance) and, well, an agent. This duality doesn't correspond to two different concepts that one can subsume oneself under (there is just one relevant concept in the vicinity: that of a human being, or person) but rather two different stances: empirical and agential. So, I would surmise that knowing oneself is, indeed, knowing what one will do. But this can be achieved from two different stances. From the empirical stance, the agent is subsumed under laws of physiology and (empirical) psychology. It's not so much that her behavior is predictable (which it may very well be, given sufficient information about her past and present circumstances and material constitution), but rather that it is determined by the law-governed chains of causation that she is empirically embedded into (necessarily so, according to Kant, because of the a priority of the Categories of substance, causation, etc.)

On the other hand, the agent who deliberates what to do pictures herself to be initiating new chains of causation that don't have necessitating causal antecedents reaching into her past. The reason for that is because the agent who is deciding what to do must reflect on the reasons why she would do it, and this knowledge, grounded in valid principles of practical deliberation, is free from empirical considerations about physiology and psychology. For sure, one can predict that one is likely to behave irrationally, in some circumstances, owing to some merely empirical fact about oneself (e.g. that one is lazy, or a glutton, say). But such empirical considerations can only constitute excuses or grounds for blame, not reasons for doing what one does. When one does know what one will do (as may occasionally happen) because of the reason one can cite as a good (rational) justification for doing it, then one thereby expresses knowledge of what it is that one will do and, also, at the same time, spontaneous knowledge of the intelligible ground of one's decision and action. This is a form of self-knowledge that is irreducible to empirical self-knowledge (such as knowledge on one's psychological tendencies). This intelligible object of self-knowledge (i.e. one's reason for acting) is the ground that was missing when one attempted to predict what one would do on the mere basis of antecedent empirical facts about oneself. (In that case, what was predicted wasn't intelligible behavior at all, but mere bodily motions).

Offering reasons for one's intended actions thus exemplifies what Kant calls the intelligible character of causation, which he contrasts with the empirical character of causation. The former is potentially gained from the agential stance (given an ability to deliberate rationally) while the latter is potentially gained from the empirical stance (given sufficient knowledge of physiology and psychology). Since angential self-knowledge (from spontaneity) is a form of self-knowledge that is free from empirical self-determinations, this might justify the idea that it is knowledge of the 'noumenal self', where the term 'noumenal' may be construed negatively to signal that its ground is free from empirical determinations, and can also be construed positively to point to the intelligible character of causation which is at play in rational agency. (On that view, 'noumenal ground' and 'intelligible ground' are synonymous).

Which is, in turn, one of the main factors underlying scientism as a kind of quasi-religious belief system - amply illustrated in this thread ;-) . — Wayfarer

Maybe you'll enjoy, if you haven't read them already:

Atheism Considered as a Christian Sect

and (recommended by darthbarracuda, recently):

A Short History of Atheism by Gavin Hyman

Conservatives like to blame the victims to distract away from institutions, social organizations, or actions by powerful people. What he's saying is something different. There's a difference between that kind of excuse-making and making important self-reflections that movements are going about their ways insufficiently, which btw, they are in America to my experience in activism. — Saphsin

Yes, I agree. No contest there.

I don't know where the author advocates for a messiah of the Left (he just says Peterson succeeded by filling a gap that the rest of the Left visibly does not fill for American consumers, that's not advocating one figure to fill the gap) and I don't know where the author says there is the absence of an alternative full blown ideology (whatever that means) — Saphsin

Yes, he may not be saying those things explicitly. That had struck me as being implicit, maybe, because he is clearly lamenting the lack of *something*, that the left has itself to blame for, and which enabled Peterson to find his popular niche. The lack of a well developed alternative political ideology, or of an effective alternative leadership, had seems to me what Robinson was pointing to maybe because the other pieces that I mentioned (by Zizek and by Gyrus) themselves complain about those alleged lacunas being red herrings that distract from the necessity of more radical criticisms (some of them actually agreeing with some strands in Peterson's conservative thinking!) of the current liberal and progressive movements and institutions.

I'm a defender of jargon, which can most effectively be used either sparingly or bountifully depending on the case. I think there's a clear difference between that and what the author has a problem with Peterson throwing jargon around to serve as an intellectual cache and not to illuminate actual content. — Saphsin

Yes, I also understood this to be the point of the author. There are good (needed) and bad (obfuscatory) uses of jargon. But good uses of jargon oftentimes are required in order, precisely, to convey the subtle distinctions that must be made in order to justifiably protect a theory (or paradigm, or hypothesis or philosophical idea) from merely apparent falsification. So, what is it that can serve as a criterion of demarcation between unfalsifiable pseudoscience (or pseudo-philosophy) and jargonous falsifiable albeit unfalsified science (or philosophy)? There is no shortcut that bypasses some moderate level of acquaintance with the topic at hand. That was my main point since the complaints put forward by Robinson seemingly mirror the complaints routinely leveled against philosophy (from friends of empirical hard science), and also against specific fields of mainstream science (by 'skeptics'), on the basis of naive falsificationist epistemological principles. (The idea being: if you can't state your thesis in an way that's easily understandable by a five year old such that it can be immediately falsified or corroborated by 'raw' experience, or common sense, then it is BS).

To concur again with Banno, one thing that infuriates me with Peterson is that he often happens onto some genuine insight, philosophical of psychological, because he seems to be rather well read and intelligent. Hence, he offers some analyses of stories or real life anecdotes that seem to hit at what is indeed important about the psychological dynamics and, indeed, the salient ethical feature of the situation. And yet this insight is not so soon expressed that it gets entangled in the crudest possible forms of sociobiological thinking or loosest kinds of Jungian archetype analysis.

Forgot this gem, addressed to Peterson. — fdrake

Yes, Peterson often does 'postmodernism' without being aware of it rather in the way Monsieur Jourdain was unknowingly talking prose. The pragmatist anti-'metaphysical realism' feature of so called postmodern thinking, which permeates Peterson's own conception of pragmatic truth, led to an infamous clash with Sam Harris. Their protracted exchange was an intellectual train wreck. Both Peterson and Harris are regarded by their largely shared fan bases to be experts on the topics of metaphysics and objectivity. Yet, to the dismay of their fans, they took two contradictory stances -- pragmatist and metaphysical realist -- without displaying much understanding of, or acquaintance with, either one of those philosophical traditions.

By the way, I had commented in another thread about one source of Peterson's mongrel assimilation of Marxism and postmodernism.

Furthermore, the most valuable, ever-green insights from these thinkers are often their critiques, not their recommended solutions.

Thanks. I very much like this concluding sentence. It also highlight the never-ending character of genuine philosophical inquiry as well as that of sensibly grounded political thought.

And while Peterson has explicitly distanced himself from Richard Spencer, the latter, in a tweet, stated, "I respect your work. And we share a lot of common ground and philosophical starting points." — Maw

That's true. In another video with Stefan Molyneux, who also is a libertarian alt-right guru, they lament how tragic it is that mainstream academia doesn't acknowledge the (alleged) racial biological basis of IQ variations between ethnic groups, while also insisting on the (alleged) pointlessness of educational efforts that aim at ameliorating individual cognitive competences.

Incidentally, one of the the YouTube comments that Robinson reproduced, but that you didn't yourself quote, had been posted by me! It was intended sarcastically, though. I fear that I didn't word it carefully enough for the sarcasm to be apparent. I was actually shocked by the fact that Peterson couldn't seemingly fathom that there might be good reason to refrain from hitting women other than just because some men can, if they are angry enough, badly injure or kill women that they hit.

New article on Jordan Peterson by Nathan Robinson that's thorough — Saphsin

It's good, not excellent. I broadly agree with Baden's assessment. It succeeds best in exposing Peterson's rhetorical tricks and his methods for concealing both his ideological intentions and the shallowness of his arguments. I have two main reservations, though.

The first one is that some of the criteria by means of which Robinson categorizes Peterson's intellectual system as vacuous (such as excessive use of jargon and lack of strict empirical falsifiability) are a bit naive and overly formal. Peterson's method, for sure, doesn't conform to the stereotypical canons of empirical scientific research. But the main reason why he fails, intellectually, is because of lack of rigor, lack of consistency and, more importantly, shockingly poor scholarship or fidelity to sources. By the stringent criteria offered by Robinson, not only Peterson's own system fails the test of intellectual worthiness, but so do lots of perfectly good scientific and philosophical paradigms that are equally ambiguous (in many respects) and couched in difficult vocabulary. What makes the apparently indecipherable works of Kant, Einstein, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty nevertheless valuable is their being firmly enmeshed in antecedent research traditions, sensitive to broad ranges of problems that arose from them, and sensitive to the criticism that obvious responses to those problems are likely to meet. Peterson's output, by comparison, whenever it strays from common sense advice, is freewheeling and completely unmoored from any critical tradition. It is, in short, sophomoric.

My second reservation is that the author laments the leadership vacuum that has enabled Peterson to construct a niche that appeals to people on the left. Zizek's two pieces in The Atlantic and Gyrus' piece on Dream&Flesh appear to me much more successful in pointing out the specific lacuna in current mainstream left-wing political movements that Peterson is exploiting. They do so without resorting to lamenting the absence of an alternative full blown ideology, or calling for an alternative charismatic Messiah-like rallying figure for the left.

So far, the best review of Peterson's book (and critique of Peterson) I've read yet. — Maw

Thanks for drawing attention to it. It's pretty good, and spot on, if only, maybe, a bit too unrestrained (in respect of style, not content).

As a general critique of Peterson, and finer analysis of the multifaceted ideological fault lines that he exploits, I still find The Black Truth of Jordan Peterson more insightful, though. It's also more charitable even though it is, in the end, similarly unforgiving.

...so they won't explain anything sudden, like. — unenlightened

Indeed, the variable Milankovitch forcing explains the slow and regular Holocene cooling trend that has occurred since the Holocene Climatic Optimum, roughly 7,000 years ago. It doesn't explain why this cooling trend suddenly reversed a little more than a century ago, and why the climate has warmed as much, over the last few decades, as it had previously cooled, over seven millennia. The human caused increase of atmospheric CO2 (and also methane,CFCs, N2O, etc.) concentration explains this unnatural warming.



Source: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoclimate-the-end-of-the-holocene/

I agree with your comments. However it wouldn't matter if the prediction did take into account that I would be informed about its content (assuming it didn't include a reward or threat). I would still be free to either accept or reject that prediction (i.e., to drink either tea or coffee) and there would be no inconsistency in either outcome. — Andrew M

While I agree that the occurrence of the prediction, and the presentation of its putative content to the agent, take away nothing from the agent's freedom of choice, it must be noted that this setup may make it impossible for the prediction to be successful. That's because if the agent has set up her mind to do the opposite from whatever she is told that she had been predicted to do, then, conditionally on her being presented with the prediction that she would drink tea, say, the predictor will predict that she will drink coffee, and vice versa. So, under those conditions, the prediction, as written down and shown to the agent, can't succeed.

I think this is part of what I wanted to get at.

If I don't behave normally, I'm not entitled to be considered normal. But it need not be a pejorative thing. I think the healthy thing for a nonconformist to do is to accept that they aren't normal, rather than campaign to redefine normal. My sense is that this is a big part of what's going on. — Roke

The trouble is that people don't usually go around qualifying other people's behaviors as "normal" or "abnormal" in a totally dispassionate and/or merely descriptive or statistical way. If this were the case, we could say of an American citizen who speaks both Chinese and Russian that she is highly abnormal.

Also, if someone is gay or transgender, say, and demands not be treated as an abnormal person, it would be very disingenuous to interpret her as saying, foolishly, that her specific case represents a statistical norm: that a large majority of women are gay, or that a large majority of people born with XY chromosomes are females, and hence that she is normal in that sense. Rather, what she is saying is: to hell with norms. Merely statistical of biological norms aren't normative in any kind of moral sense.

It implies that even if you have a completely deterministic description of the universe which predicts I will drink tea, I am not bound by that description. Instead the correctness (or incorrectness) of the description depends on my choice to drink tea (or not). — Andrew M

This is tricky. What you mean to say, possibly, is that the description of what it is that you are determined to do (actually, given "the past" and the deterministic laws that govern the evolution of the material universe) would not bind you if it were (counterfactually) supplied to you. That's because, of course, in the counterfactual scenario where you would be told what it is that you actually are predicted to do, the physical system that you are a part of would be (counterfactually) perturbed away from its actual evolution. Hence, in the counterfactual scenario, you may choose to deliberately do the opposite of what it is that was "predicted". That's because the "prediction" was effected under the assumption that you would not be informed about its content.

What is most deeply true about compatibilism, I think, is the intuition that what can be concluded from a passive theoretical (predictive) stance does not conflict with that it is that can be decided on the basis of a practical (deliberative) stance. And that's because no agent can adopt both stances about herself at once. Deciding what one rationally ought to do is an activity that is inconsistent with passively predicting what it is that one is determined to do conditionally on one's own antecedent psychology and character. Mainstream compatibilist theories spoil this insight when they attempt to theorize the question of agency (and its internal conceptual link with practical deliberation) from within the theoretical stance and hence reify desires, wants and dispositions as some sorts of psychological forces that determine action.

Yet, apparently their supposedly highly intelligent, highly rational opponents easily fall for the narrative that says that there is a significant anti-science movement made up of nutcases. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It is true, as some have mentioned already, that the AGW-skeptical movement (that is, people skeptical of the anthropogenic contribution to recent and foreseen global warming) has been fueled by fossil fuel interests, and also by economic libertarian ideology. However, it seems also to be a drawback from the crude scientism that has been for a long time pushed by the scientific community. From my experience debating climate science in internet fora, most AGW-skeptics view themselves as advocates and defenders of sound science. The same is true, by the way, of anti-vaxers, in general. Just like the mainstream advocates of "official" scienfic positions, they tend to have a fetish for an idealized version of the scientific method that is broadly Popperian and falsificationist. The problem that skeptics face in grasping the rationale behind some mainstream scientific conclusions isn't methodological. It is rather, to put it crudely, that they don't have a clue what it is they are talking about. That's simply because they lack a sufficient formal training in the relavant fields.

The main thing that prevents mainstream scientists who advocates the crude "scientific method" to go off the rails and fall into pseudoscience, as the skeptics often do, is their actual expertise and active participation in a well developed scientific research tradition. It isn't reliance on any kind of mythical universal method that accounts for the success of science. Hence, when the skeptics charge the mainstream scientists with failures to actually be practicing science in the only way their own endorsed method advocates that they should do, they are correct. In order to correctly assuage the worries of the skeptics, the mainstream scientists would need to highlight the substantial flaws in their arguments, and also criticize the ideologies that bias the skeptics' evaluations of the practical aims and other social aspects of the research, rather than advocate for them to accept mythical methodological principles that nobody actually obeys.

These days, most seem pretty confused about it. I'm confused about it. There seems to be some demand to change how it works, but I honestly don't understand what's being demanded. — Roke

Yes, I think there is some degree of confusion, left and right. Left because people who are socially progressive aren't always philosophically literate and right because people who are socially conservative sometimes don't want to be.

I think the insistence to distinguish sex and gender doesn't amount to something being demanded as much as an insistence that fewer demands be made on the basis of sex. If you are a biological determinist, or biological essentialist, about sex and gender, for instance, you are likely to judge that someone who doesn't comply with a demand regarding how people of a given sex ought to behave isn't entitled to be considered normal. This socially prevalent demand for normal behavior, construed with reference to the alleged link between biological sex and gender-appropriate behavior, seems grounded into a form of the naturalistic fallacy (or, sometimes, divine command).