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Michael’s Picks

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On September - 6 - 2010
By Michael De Dora
* At a hotel ballroom just south of Ground Zero, Pastor Bill Keller launched his plans for a nearby 9/11 Christian Center – a direct response to the proposed Islamic community center – “with a fiery sermon targeting Muslims and Mormons as hell-bound followers of false faiths.” 
* On that note, 57 percent of FOXNews.com readers apparently don’t think much of Constitutional rights. 
* A Florida church’s plans to burn Qurans this Sept. 11 “could endanger [American] troops and it could endanger the overall effort” in Afghanistan, according to the top U.S. commander there, Gen. David Petraeus. 
* Two lawyers discuss why it’s not just wrong, but also dangerous to think our Founders sought a Christian nation. 
* Tim Crane parses several differences between science and religion on The New York Times’ philosophy blog.
* Hal Herzog does an interview with Salon.com on the question “why do we get so angry with animal abusers, but eat more animals than ever before?”
* My essay on secular discourse and humanism was published on the On Faith section of The Washington Post’s Web site.
* Michael Joseph Gross looked into Sarah Palin’s life for a couple months, and the result is an extraordinarily interesting, depressing, and maddening essay in Vanity Fair. 
* Schoolteachers in China are being trained with a sex education curriculum created by U.S.-based Evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family. 
* A town outside of Boston denied a store owner’s request for a license to sell beer and wine seemingly because it might be “detrimental to the spiritual and educational activities” of a church in the vicinity.
* The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond.
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Massimo’s Picks

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On September - 5 - 2010
By Massimo Pigliucci
* The most recent Rationally Speaking podcast, on the idea of expertise.
* You’ve heard the standard evolutionary psychological argument about why males “naturally” cheat. Here is a tongue in cheek response from the female perspective.
* What’s introspection? How reliable is it? How is it possible? Here is the latest about it from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
* Francis Collins, his rather silly conversion from atheism to Christianity, and the equally silly accusations hurled at him by some of the New Atheists.
* Philosophy Talk takes on the thorny issue of self-deception: how is it even possible, and why do we do it?
* How “myths” (read “lies”) about the health care bill originated. My favorite: it provides for a personal army for President Obama.
* Funny yet depressing commentary by Gail Collins on Sarah Palin.
* Michael Shermer responds to Jerry Coyne on capitalism and the Templeton Foundation. I have to think about this one.
* Did Samir Okasha, one of the most brilliant contemporary philosophers of science, finally crack Hume’s problem of induction?
* My interview at “Real People, Real Lives, Real Spirituality.” (Hey, Michael Shermer did it too...)
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Health, Disease, Karma and Past Lives.

Posted by They call him James Ure On September - 3 - 2010
It seems that karma is one of the least understood principles of Buddhism. Yet, at its core it is not too dissimilar to Newtons third law of motion, which says that for every action there is a reaction. Thus, in essence karma is nothing different than cause and effect, which isn't as mystical and confusing as some might think. It stands to reason that if I hit my friend in the head with a hammer that there will be a reaction--and rightly so!!

At times though we can become obsessed with our karma wondering what previous action led to any number of things we're currently obsessed about: A disease we might be living with, a state of poverty or a perceived lack of talents. Believe me I've spent way too many nights wondering what I did "wrong" in a past life to develop a severe psychiatric condition but that's just not a good use of my time.

The problem is that karma is such an all-encompassing, timeless, constant process that it's nearly impossible to isolate what previous action led to a present condition that causes us particular suffering. There is karma at work that happened thousands of years ago. Plus, not everything is caused by karma. We know that the human form is the most suitable form to understand the Dharma in but it's not without its downsides. Some things, like sickness are just apart of the human condition regardless of who we were or are now as Buddha found out early: We get sick, we age and then die. So, it quickly becomes pointless to try and figure out what came from where. It will merely cause additional stress and suffering, which will do nothing to improve our current condition that we were suffering from originally before we started a forensic investigation into our past karma.

Physical disease is particularly hard to pin down because we are all destined for disease from our first breath as an infant. The minute we take our first breath, the countdown to death begins. That might be shockingly morbid to some of you but if you contemplate upon it you might find it frees you up to enjoy the present moment rather than obsessing about death and disease. We always seem to ask "why" when we have a major disease but not when we just have a simple sickness like a cold or the flu. Why, not? Because we simply understand that the human condition is frail and sickness is inevitable.

Yet somehow when we get a severe disease we think the severity means it must be punishment for something we did. The question becomes, "What did I do to deserve this?" The ego-mind wants some serious infraction to cling to because that would make sense to its limited and deluded nature but the real answer to that question of, "What did I do to deserve this?" is simply that you were born a human. That's it. I know, it's not a particularly exciting answer but that's the point. The ego-mind is looking for some exciting, unique reason for it. So, that even though the body is sick, at least it will get to feel important because some guru said the sickness was from some mysterious past life. It's silly isn't it when you think of it that way? It's not that we are trying to sound important--we just want to know why we're sick so we can feel better but the ego is so subtle that it can control us like a puppet and we're often none the wiser. That's why paying attention to our thoughts through meditation is so important. So that we can practice on being aware of our ego more and more.

This is important to remember when it comes to one's health because it can be easy to feel discouraged if we assume a disease we live with now is because of some terrible action we committed in the past. The point of Buddhism is not to figure out what we did wrong in the past but to stay centered in the present moment, so that we add as little additional burden to our karmic backpack as possible. Why worry if something in your past caused you to get sick? That won't help heal your disease but it will cause stress, which makes any illness worse. This reminds me of a famous lesson from Buddha, which goes something like this: A man gets struck with a poisoned arrow and the doctor wants to get it out as soon as possible and reverse the spread of the poison. Instead, the man shot by the arrow says first he wants to know who shot it, what kind of arrow is it? How was it made? Where did the wood for the arrow come from? Where did the poison come from, and what kind is it? But by the time the man finds this out he'll be dead.

Worrying about the past won't change anything--what's done is done. If you feel you did something less than helpful in a past life (or just yesterday) then don't worry about it; just live now the best way you can. Because you can't heal your physical self now without letting go of having to know all those "poisoned arrow" questions. Buddhism is about the present because it is the only time we have. We can waste our entire lives living in the past and I know some old people who have been lost to the ravages of that kind of worry. They are empty shells of people who are so balled up with stress and regret that they hardly know what is going on presently. They spent so much time lost in their past memories that even they have almost become a memory. Live in the now, not the past because we aren't guaranteed a tomorrow.

~Peace to all beings~
Health, Meditation News, death, disease, illness, karma, mental illness, old age, past, past lives, poisoned arrow, present, punishment, sickness
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Proving things isn’t the point of definitions

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On September - 3 - 2010
By Massimo Pigliucci
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. It seems that my colleague and friend Julia Galef has indeed been bewitched by language, so I’ll try some philosophy to rescue her.
Julia seems to be unaware of the fact that there is more than one type of definition out there. Particularly, in philosophy one makes the distinction between a linguistic and a conceptual definition. (For a nice introduction to this topic, see section 1.1 of A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense, by Normand Baillargeon, the text I use in my introductory course on critical reasoning).
Linguistic definitions are the sort of things for which dictionaries are very useful. If you wanted to know, say, what a quadruped is, you would simply look it up and find something along the lines of: “A quadruped is a four-footed animal,” and that would be that. No arguing required.
Now suppose you are interested in the meaning of justice. You can still look the word up in the dictionary, but in this case such a move would only be the beginning of the discussion, not the end. That’s because what you need is a conceptual definition, and that’s the territory of philosophy.
Let’s use one of Julia’s examples to make the difference more clear. Julia is quite right when she says that if one defines God as “the unknown” that such a definition is completely unhelpful. Not only do we already have a word for “unknown” (it’s, as Julia sardonically points out, “unknown”), but we have now created a pseudo-problem, namely how to investigate the properties of God — we can’t, because, by definition, it is unknowable.
But in fact few people actually define God as the unknown. For instance, the common concept of God in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition is of a being who is simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Now that is something a philosopher can sink his teeth into, as John Mackie famously did in his essay on “Evil and Omnipotence,” still today a masterful and devastating criticism of the very concept of the J-C-M god.
The same goes for morality. Julia accuses me of sneaking in (“double-dipping”) a prescriptive stance into a descriptive definition. But the point is that definitions, again, come in two varieties, one of which (the linguistic) is indeed descriptive, the other (the conceptual) is prescriptive. There is no possible confusion as long as we keep this basic distinction in mind.
For instance, contra Julia, morality is not usually defined as the set of actions that augment human flourishing (that was my definition during our previous debate). A typical descriptive-linguistic definition of morality is this: “Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” There is little disagreement possible here, since this is the way in which, according to dictionaries, people tend to use the term morality. Nowhere in there does anything about human flourishing appear.
So, when I said that I define a moral action as one that augments human flourishing, I was using a conceptual definition, which is open to both debate (one can reasonably reject that particular concept of morality) and needs to be unpacked (what exactly does one mean by “human flourishing”?). For instance, an Ayn Randian could argue that moral actions are those that increase one’s own welfare, and indeed for such a person my concept of morality would be im-moral! As for flourishing, that is why I referred readers to Aristotle’s virtue ethics, which is a way to unpack the concept by introducing and elaborating upon the ancient Greeks’ idea of “eudaimonia,” or happiness in the broad sense of a good and just life.
Of course Julia (or anybody else) can still disagree with my concept of morality, but that disagreement simply can’t be swept away by saying that it is all a matter of definitions (or “semantics,” a word that has gotten far too bad a reputation in common discourse, considering that it is defined — descriptively — as “relating to meaning in language and logic,” and is therefore crucial to understanding what we are talking about).
There is another way of looking at the issue of definitions and their multiple meanings. In the course of our debate on morality I brought up a parallel between ethics and mathematics. I hasten to say that this is a parallel, not an exact equivalence. I am not saying that ethics is precisely like mathematics. Indeed, the reason for my analogy was my criticism of Sam Harris’s claim that the only moral facts are scientific (i.e., empirical) facts. Part of my counter-argument was that we can derive non-arbitrary notions (which I still wouldn’t call “facts”) in wholly non-empirical ways, for instance in logic and mathematics, so that one cannot simply assume that if there are non-arbitrary notions in ethics they must be the same sort of facts with which science deals.
The reason that point is pertinent to this exchange with Julia is because of her contention that every claim needs support. Yet, mathematical theorems and logical proofs begin with generally unsupported claims — they are called axioms or assumptions. The theorem or proof is then developed by provisionally accepting that the axioms or assumptions are true and proceeding to examine what follows via deductive logic. Yes, one can always go back and examine the validity of axioms and assumptions, but that’s a different project that needs to be pursued separately. Moreover, 20th century attempts at meta-mathematics and meta-logic (i.e., at establishing self-consistent foundations for math and logic) have failed, and yet we do not reject either math or logic. (For a clear and entertaining take on that intellectual pursuit, check this out.)
Similarly, questions of meta-ethics (i.e., how do we justify ethical systems and reasoning to begin with) are distinct from discussions of the logical consequences of a small set of assumptions about ethics. Regardless of what the ultimate foundations of ethics may be, it makes a difference whether you look at an ethical problem from the point of view of a virtue ethicist, a deontologist, a consequentialist, or even a moral relativist.
Indeed, one could go a step further and turn the tables on Julia’s (and Harris’s) favored sacred cow: science itself. A quick look at an introductory text in philosophy of science will show that meta-science faces serious issues of its own, which cannot be resolved empirically (i.e., within science itself), just like math, logic and ethics (and dare I say, art?) cannot solve their own issues from within their own confines.
For instance, much of science is done by inductive (as opposed to deductive) reasoning. Yet Hume pointed out two and a half centuries ago that induction cannot be reasonably justified! Nobody so far has been able to give an account of induction that resolves Hume’s problem. You would think that scientists are spending many sleepless nights worrying about the fact that everything they have done cannot be rationally justified, but they don’t, and for a good reason: the problem of induction is an interesting philosophical issue (and there are plenty of really smart solutions that have been proposed — by philosophers), but does not really concern the everyday practice of science. As this xkcd cartoon aptly puts it, “Science works, bitches!” and from a pragmatic standpoint, that’s enough.
In the same way, we are not going to throw out math, logic, or ethics just because meta discussions of those topics seem to constantly get us into trouble. Hume would have approved retaining science, math, logic and ethics regardless of their respective foundational problems. But he would have simply smiled if someone rushed to him with a dictionary in hand to tell him that the problem of induction is all just a matter of definitions.
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Definitions Don’t Prove Anything

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On September - 2 - 2010
By Julia Galef

Once upon a time, the little village of Chelm found itself facing a problem: the holiday Shavuot was coming up, and the town was suffering from a critical shortage of sour cream, a customary feature of the Shavuot feasts. The Wise Elders of Chelm convened an emergency meeting to address the problem. They sat around, brows furrowed, pondering, proposing ideas, but to no avail. Finally, the wisest Elder of them all announced: “I’ve got it! From today forward, water shall officially be called 'sour cream,' and sour cream shall officially be called 'water'!” The other Elders agreed that this was a brilliant solution, and were rather chagrined that they had not thought of it themselves. Thence followed much rejoicing from the grateful townsfolk, and although there were some scattered reports of water shortages, the Elders decided they had already solved enough problems for one holiday, and that they would deal with that one another time.
- Adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Stories for Children.

This post was inspired by a discussion on Common Sense Atheism this week, in which Luke Muehlhauser examines a longstanding debate between me and Massimo about morality. There are several aspects of Massimo's position that I disagree with, but as Luke astutely notes, one of the main ones results from what I consider a fundamentally misguided way of using definitions. I've been wanting to highlight this issue for a while, because it keeps coming up in other debates we've had on other topics – so, taking Luke's post as an invitation, I'll do so now.
First, the basics: A definition is simply the act of setting some symbol equal to some concept, so that you have an easy way of referring to that concept. A definition itself can't be correct or incorrect, because the symbol has no inherent meaning of its own.

But you have to be careful when you establish that definition, the SYMBOL = CONCEPT relationship, that you're not implicitly thinking of the symbol as having another, hidden concept inside it already. Because if you are, then what you're doing is actually equating one concept with another, different concept. That's not a definition, that's a claim, and it can be incorrect.

Here's a case study that may ring a bell. Some people are fond of saying that they define “God” to be the unknown, or to be a symbol of perfection, or to be whatever caused our universe to exist. At first glance, this seems puzzlingly pointless. Why assign the word “God” to something like the unknown? We already have a word for the unknown — it’s “the unknown.”
But clearly, this doesn’t feel pointless to them. There is some reason they want to be able to say “God exists” instead of “The unknown exists,” even though those two statements should theoretically mean the exact same thing according to their own definition. And that’s because the symbol “God” still has concepts hidden inside it. They haven’t scrubbed the word entirely clean of its original meaning before redefining it. With both meanings of “God” conflated into one word, they feel like the fact that the word is now pointing to something that exists allows them to believe in the existence of what the word used to be pointing to.

And if you think it’s hard to scrub the word “God” clean of its connotations thoroughly enough to be able to genuinely redefine it, try the word “moral.” It’s a common phenomenon for people to assert that they are defining the word “moral” to refer to some particular kinds of actions, and then to act as if they have thereby shown that people should follow those actions. Indeed, this was Massimo’s approach when he and I debated meta-ethics earlier this year. He argued, “I define as moral an action that increases human welfare and/or flourishing... Julia of course may reject the idea of behaving herself so as to increase human flourishing, but then she is by definition acting immorally (or at least amorally).”

But if you really, truly are just defining the word “moral,” then all you are doing is assigning a symbol (“moral”) to a concept (increasing human flourishing). You have not proven anything about that concept; you’ve just given it a new name. One has to wonder what the point is. After all, just as in the “God” example above, we already have a name for the concept of increasing human flourishing – we call it “increasing human flourishing.”

And if it feels like you’re doing more than just re-naming something, that’s probably because you haven’t sufficiently scrubbed the symbol “moral” clean of its other associations before you defined it. Typically, the word is used to refer to how people ought to behave, and you haven't scrubbed away that implicit definition before adding a new one. So instead of setting a symbol equal to a concept (“moral” = increasing human flourishing), you have the sense that you have equated a concept with another concept (how people ought to behave = increasing human flourishing). That's not a definition, it's a claim, and it needs support.

So, the reason I get frustrated in general when people argue over how to define words, like “art,” is that it suggests that they think the way they define a word can prove some point. It can’t, not if you’re doing it right. Of course, I suspect that the reason people care about how art is defined is because they’re not doing it right. They have another hidden meaning in mind already embedded in the symbol “art” — something along the lines of “worth taking seriously; meriting critical evaluation.” So they have the sense that by defining the word “art” they are not just equating a symbol with a concept ("art" = this particular set of things), but that they are equating a concept with a concept (worth taking seriously = this particular set of things).

That’s what I think Massimo was doing in these two posts in which he argued that the Marina Abramovic performance art piece at the MoMA was “not art.” While I agreed with Massimo in finding the piece silly and uninteresting, it is nevertheless true that there are plenty of common definitions of “art” that would include it – for example, “something designed for the primary purpose of evoking an aesthetic or emotional experience.” And whether or not the piece meets those common definitions is a completely separate question from whether it is worthy of serious consideration and critical evaluation.

To quote Gary Drescher's Good and Real, “Whenever something substantive seems to depend on a choice of definition... we should suspect that a tacit definition is being smuggled in, and a sleight of hand substitution of the tacit definition for the explicit one is occurring.” The fact that Massimo believes something substantive depends on whether we define “art” to include the Abramovic piece or not indicates that he is conflating the explicit and implicit definitions of art (which is what I suspect one commenter meant when he accused Massimo of trying to “double-dip the concept of art in both descriptive and normative territory”).

You can't use definitions to prove a point, only to make clear what you mean by your words. You can’t use them to prove that something doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. You can’t use them to prove that people should behave in a certain way. You can’t use them to conjure a God into existence. And you definitely can’t serve them on top of your blintzes on Shavuot.
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Michael’s Picks

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On August - 31 - 2010
By Michael De Dora
* The Web site Patheos is featuring a collection of essays on the future of humanism. Contributors include Hemant Mehta, Greg Epstein, Ron Lindsay – and me. Click here for my entry. 
* New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart and did a wonderful job distilling down the position in favor of allowing the Islamic cultural center to be built near Ground Zero.  
* A short but great three-minute clip from a 1959 interview with Bertrand Russell, who discusses God and religion. 
* An essay in the New York Times by Tim Egan on uncritical thinking and its impact on society. 
* Glenn Beck says that Charles Darwin is the father of modern-day racism. 
* Firebrands vs. diplomats; accommodationists vs. New Atheists. Lucy Gibbins says there’s room for both in the secular movement. 
* Innocence Project founder Peter Neufeld speaks about injustice in our criminal justice system in an interview with Slate.com. 
* The Economist reports on a group of Moroccans fighting for the freedom to not observe Ramadan in public. 
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Of Robots and Altars.

Posted by They call him James Ure On August - 29 - 2010
We've been in the process of moving over this past month into our first house and the packing has dislodged all our "possessions" from their "right" place and thrown them into a mixed soup of items. As I was dutifully sorting and wrapping up our materialistic karma into the appropriate boxes, I noticed that during the churning maelstrom of the process that my toy, "Robot B-9" from the 1960s, American, science-fiction, t.v. program, titled, "Lost in Space" had found its way to the altar. Anyway, at first glance my conditioned mind saw this clunky, garish, pop-culture refugee, toy as a blight on my otherwise serene, elegant and meticulously designed, altar.

Yet as I questioned this initial reaction from my mind I began to see the cheap, plastic, robot in a different light. I questioned myself, "Why do you see the Buddha differently than the robot?" In a flash my newly focused mind replied, "me." By their nature, the Buddha statue and robot are inanimate objects made unique by their artists yet still of the same nature or essence. It was my mind that was labeling one as "beneficial" and the other as "clutter."

So, just to shake up my habitual mind I've decided to replace the Buddha statue on the altar with the robot for a few days as a kind of koan to contemplate. Religious paraphernalia can be a powerful reminder of what it means to follow the Dharma. However, it can quickly turn to spiritual materialism where we start to think that the items have some sort of power that improves our spirituality; and that without them we're somehow less of a practitioner. Surely the first time I go to bow to Buddha before meditating and instead see that goofy robot I will laugh out loud at my silly mind. Perhaps in a different world in a different part of this universe Buddha takes the form of a robot!! If you find that idea sacrilegious then perhaps you have some of your own spiritual materialism to shed?

---End of Transmission---
Altars, Clutter, Meditation News, Possessions, lost in space, materialism, religious paraphenalia, spiritual materialism, spiritual objects
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Podcast Teaser: Transhumanism

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On August - 27 - 2010
By Julia Galef
What's so great about being human, anyway? Yeah, sure, we've got a lot of neat stuff — art, literature, love, digital watches — but there are some pretty serious downsides to the human condition, too. Being made of flesh is no picnic; we're easily maimed, mutilated, and hijacked by microorganisms who have no qualms about making us miserable. For that matter, we have a seemingly bottomless capacity to make each other miserable, too, through our own short-sightedness, hot-headedness, and other foibles that evolution built into us, or couldn't be bothered to fix. And even if we avoid all those ills, we still have an annoying tendency to shrivel up and die after just a few decades. 
But we don't have to settle for the human condition as it currently is, say the transhumanists. Why not instead strive to make ourselves smarter, better, faster, stronger? And instead of meekly accepting our death sentence, why not try to finagle a stay of execution — either by understanding the causes of death and preventing them, or through more unorthodox means such as replacing parts of our bodies or brains with inorganic parts?
Not so fast, some say. Tampering with human nature could have dire social consequences, such as heightened inequality and an overcrowded Earth. Or maybe death and suffering are an essential part of a meaningful life. What if, in trying to improve the human condition, we end up becoming inhuman? And finally, there's the sizable contingent who think that all these doomsday scenarios are beside the point, because the transhumanist aspirations are wildly unrealistic anyway, simply the product of wishful thinking and a diet of too many science fiction novels.
In episode #17 of the Rationally Speaking podcast, we'll discuss some of the basic ideas of transhumanism, the accusations made against it, and whether — rationally speaking — it's something worth pursuing. Kick off the discussion in comments below!
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Between Spock and McCoy (via Aristotle)

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On August - 25 - 2010
By Massimo Pigliucci
Spock: Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here.
McCoy: You admit that?
Spock: To deny the facts would be illogical, doctor.
This dialogue seems to me like a good summary of my own struggles during the years to reconcile reason and emotion, a problem that without much exaggeration can be said to vex all of humanity by the very nature of what it means to be human.
As many young people attracted to reason, I started out as a self-professed son of the Enlightenment, predictably one of my favorite periods in human history (the other, equally predictably, being Athens in the 5th century BCE or thereabout). Accordingly, when it was time to go to college, I chose a career in science, which I was lucky enough to be able to pursue from 1982 (when I first set foot in a lab as an undergrad in Rome) to 2009 (when I closed my lab at Stony Brook University).
Later in life came the onset of philosophical reflection (which could probably have been anticipated from my very early interest in Bertrand Russell, dating back to high school), which eventually led me to go back to graduate school to actually get a degree in philosophy, and finally culminated in switching careers and becoming a full time philosopher (of science) at the City University of New York last year.
In a sense, I started out under the influence of Spock and with a certain degree of disdain for McCoy, and it took me some time to appreciate both Spock’s own inner struggle with his half-human half-Vulcan nature, and McCoy’s humanity and delightful sense of humor. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you may be reading the wrong blog, or you may want to check here and here.)
Of course, Spock’s continuous attempts to control his emotions and to put reason firmly in charge are reminiscent of Plato’s theory of the soul, where the rational part ought to be in charge, keeping the “spirited” and “appetitive” parts in check. The idea is that we share emotions with other animals, but that what distinguishes us from the rest of the biological world is precisely our ability to reason through things before making up our mind about what to do.
The again, McCoy’s character is also complex: he is a trained physician, a man of science, and yet his emphasis is on the primacy of emotion. His philosophical equivalent was, of course, David Hume — a skeptic, a friend of major figures of the Enlightenment, and yet one who famously said “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Notice that this isn’t just a description of how things are for human beings, “ought” here is prescriptive.
For Hume, we do things — including writing about philosophy — not because they are eminently rational, but because we care about them. Accordingly, he also said that “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” meaning that reason can only be instrumental toward achieving objectives that we already care for, it cannot tell us what to care for.
Modern neurobiology tells us that both the Platonic and the Humean programs are doomed to failure. As Antonio Damasio put it in a series of three highly philosophically informed books on the science of consciousness (check this one, for instance), a healthy human mind is one that constantly negotiates between the excesses of reason and those of passion. Too much leaning on one side, and one becomes incapable of empathy, possibly embarking on the destructive route to psychopathology. Too much on the other side, and we join the long history of destructive irrationality against which the Enlightenment was a valiant, if flawed, reaction.
While it’s nice to have modern science validating with facts the idea that a sensible human being ought to try to steer a middle course between the Scylla of too much reason and the Charybdis of too much emotion, it was yet another philosopher who had arrived at that conclusion 24 centuries ago: Aristotle. His virtue ethics is based on the insight that we improve our happiness (in the holistic sense of the ancient Greek eudaimonia) by a combination of reflecting about what we do and why, and practicing virtue so that it becomes second nature. Not reason against emotion struggling for primacy inside us, then, but rather a continuous flow aiming at a dynamic balance between the two. (Before anybody even thinks of making the analogy, let me assure you that I do not have any eastern mysticism or new agey crap in mind.)
Okay, Massimo, could you please get off the historical-philosophical-Star Trek train of thought and give us a concrete example? I am tempted to talk about serious issues, but this isn’t a therapy session, so let me take my own lifelong struggle with weight management instead. I am now a reasonably healthy male in his mid-forties, I achieved a quasi-ideal body weight about a decade ago, and have kept it since.
This has not been easy, and still isn’t. I started out as a rather chubby kid (by European standards, don’t think of modern McDonald’s babies), who went through the standard yo-yo of various kinds of diets for many years. At some point I realized that a radical change of strategy was needed, and I discovered the basic principle of healthy living: eat everything with moderation (with almost no fried or sweet stuff) and exercise regularly. It worked, and it’s still working. But it also is a constant struggle, because I don’t particularly enjoy going to the gym, and I am constantly tempted by any kind of chocolate I encounter.
But Aristotle was absolutely right: contra Hume, I initially used my rational understanding of the problem to guide and reshape my behavior and my emotions. It worked! The more I practiced healthy living, the more I not only got used to it, but I began to enjoy it, especially the feeling of well being and of power over my own life that it gives me. But contra Plato, I no longer strive to suppress my passion for food, but instead, enjoy the variety and quality of cuisines that I find in this constantly bewildering place where I am lucky enough to be living: New York City.
My newfound situation, however, is not the end of the struggle, but merely the current point of dynamic equilibrium concerning that aspect of my life. As Aristotle thought, life is a project that ends only with one’s death (the later the better — with certain conditions — thank you very much), and eudaimonia is not a final state, but an ongoing quest. It is as if I am trying to roll Spock and McCoy into one person, not so that they can (rather amusingly, it must be said) forever fight with each other, but because the result of that mix is a most fulfilling human existence.
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Julia’s Picks

Posted by Massimo Pigliucci On August - 24 - 2010
By Julia Galef
* This New Yorker article from a few years ago has some very insightful points about why biographies skew our perception of reality.

* In light of some recent debates here, I think a lot of you might appreciate Paul Almond's thorough discussion of all the possible ways “supernatural” could be defined, and whether it's a fundamentally incoherent concept.
* I did an interview for the Skeptical Review, in which I talk about me and Massimo, the podcast, the NYC Skeptics, and some other random tidbits.
* Some thoughts on whether most people actually believe in God, or merely believe that they believe in God: a post from George Rey, and another in a similar vein from Eliezer Yudkowsky.
* If you happen to reside, along with me, in the intersection of the three sets {People who know more about philosophy than they have any excuse to}, {Enthusiasts of nerdy puns}, and {Former Dungeons & Dragons players}, then you will most certainly appreciate this comic by Dresden Codak. (Also, if you do reside there: Hello neighbor! Get in touch, it's lonely in this sliver of the Venn Diagram!)
* A useful breakdown by Richard Wiseman of all the ways parapsychologists nullify null results. The utility of this list goes beyond parapsychology, however; it's really applicable to all the shady corners of bad research.
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