The
“Ask Philosophers” website (www.askphilosophers.org) is a site that consists of questions submitted by the public, with answers given by
philosophers. No doubt there is much wisdom to be found at this site,
although I found some answers that were poor or illogical. Below are
some examples.
In Question 27225 someone asks the excellent question “if Order and
Reason are a part of Nature” or if “this is simply how humans
view things and try to make sense of things.”
Philosopher
Peter S. Fosl answers this question by saying this:
For
myself, I think the traditions of philosophical skepticism have
raised serious doubts about whether or not this question can be
finally answered. It seems, given the apparent lessons of those
traditions, that it wisest to suspend judgment on the question but
nevertheless to keep inquiring and to remain open to the chance that
we might figure it out.
Given
what we know about the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants
and the laws of nature, this answer is a poor one. We live in a universe
with astonishing order and fine-tuning. To give one example of many,
each proton in the universe has the same mass, a particular mass 1836
times greater than the mass of each electron. Despite this mass
difference, the absolute value of the electrical charge of each
proton is precisely the same (to more than fifteen decimal places) as the
absolute value of the electrical charge of each electron. Were it not
for this “coincidence,” which we would not expect in even 1 in a
trillion random universes, life could not exist in our universe, for (as discussed by the astronomer Greenstein) the electromagnetic repulsion between particles would be so great
that planets would not be able to hold together. As we live in a
universe that has many such “coincidences” necessary for our
existence, the wise way to answer question 27225 is to say that order
and reason seem to be abundantly manifest in our universe.
Galaxy NGC 1398 (Credit: NASA)
In
question 3435 someone asks the following:
I
really don't understand what the big deal is with the apparent 'fine
tuning' of the constants of the universe, or even if 'fine tuning' is
even apparent! The conditions have to be just right for life to
emerge, sure, but so what? Conditions have to be just right for many
things in the universe to occur, but we don't always suspect an
outside agent as responsible.
This
answer is given by philosopher Jonathan Westphal:
Suppose
human life is extremely improbable. What does that show? Alas, again
the answer is, absolutely nothing at all. The improbable sometimes
happens, although, of course, not very often! We should thank heaven
that it did!
This
answer is a poor one. We use probability all the time to reach
conclusions about what happened and who was responsible for it. The
more improbable something is, the more justified we may be in judging
that something more than mere chance was involved. You do not justify
ignoring an appearance of intention or design by evoking a principle
that “the improbable sometimes happens.” Such a point is easily
dismissed by pointing out that something that serves a favorable
functional purpose virtually never happens by chance.
If
human life appeared despite enormous odds against it (such as the
odds of throwing a pack of cards into the air and it forming by
chance into a house of cards), that would seem to be an extremely
important clue to the nature of reality, and not at all something
that should be dismissed as something that means “absolutely
nothing at all.” If you were walking in the woods, and saw a
garden with 40 long neat rows of flowers, with an equal space between
each row, you would be absolutely justified in assuming that some
design and purpose led to this arrangement; and you would chuckle at
the very bad judgment of anyone who claimed the arrangement had
occurred by chance, on the grounds that “the improbable sometimes
happens.”
In
Question 221, a person asks the following:
I
heard about the analogy of a computer and the mind, but I'm fuzzy
about the connection. Please help!
We
then get an answer from Peter Lipton that includes the following:
What
makes the analogy attractive is the thought that mental states might
also be functional states. Thus the same kind of thought might be
'run' on or 'realized' in different physical states on different
occasions, just as the same program might be run on different types
of computer hardware. One attraction of this idea is that it seems to
capture the intuition that mental states are not simply identifiable
with lumps of matter, while avoiding any suggestion that they are
spooky non-physical stuff.
This
answer is a poor one. It seems to encourage the very erroneous idea
that the mind is like a computer by arguing that software (a computer
program) is somehow like thought. A thought is vastly different from
software. Rather than trying to argue for the mind being like a
computer, the answer should have stressed that the two are
drastically different. A computer is a physical thing, but a mind is
a non-physical thing. A mind has life experiences, thoughts,
feelings, and ideas, none of which a computer has. So it makes no
sense to say the mind is like a computer. It is not like any computer
that we know of. Also, Lipton erroneously suggests we should avoid
thinking of mental states as non-physical, which makes no sense,
because mental states are non-physical.
Question 317 is this question:
How
do thoughts exist in our brains? How are they stored? Is this a
chemical or electrical process?
The
answer provided by Louise Antony is a poor one. She states, “The
most plausible proposal about what kinds of states these might be is,
in my view, the view that says that thoughts are actually sentences
in a 'language of thought', expressed by means of some kind of
neurological code, on analogy with the 'machine language' employed by
computers at the most basic level.” This
idea is not plausible at all, and there is no evidence for it. Antony
gives no neuroscience facts to support it.
The
idea that our thoughts could be stored using some neurological code
involves a host of problems. One problem (discussed at length here) is that there is no place in
the brain that could serve as a plausible site where memories could
be stored for decades. The leading theory of memory storage in the
brain is that memories are stored in synapses. But that theory is
completely implausible, for we know that the proteins that make up
synapses have average lifetimes of less than two weeks. Another
problem (discussed here) is that we can imagine no plausible scheme by which our
thoughts could ever be translated into information that could be
stored in the brain using some neurological code. A study of how
computers store information will show that such a thing involves all
kinds of sophisticated translation systems such as the scheme by
which letters are converted into numbers (the ASCII system), and
another scheme by which such numbers are converted from decimal to
binary. Such translation is easy for a computer, but it is all but
inconceivable that such translations could be going on in our brains,
which never got anything like the ASCII system contrived by human
designers. Then there is the huge "instantly finding the needle in the haystack" problem (discussed here) that we know of no way in which
a brain could ever instantly retrieve memories if they were stored in
brains, the brain lacking any of the things we have in computers that
allow for fast information retrieval (things such as indexing,
sorting, and hashing). If there was a “neurological code” by
which the brain stored information, we would have discovered it
already; but no such thing has been discovered.
Far
from being “the most plausible proposal,” the possibility
mentioned by Antony is a very implausible proposal, and an idea that
no one has ever been able to sketch out in any detailed and credible
way. Difficulties such as I have mentioned should have been been mentioned
in Antony's answer, and she should have said that because of such
reasons, we do not know that our memories or thoughts are stored in our brains,
and do not know that our thoughts exist in our brains. Our thoughts may exist as part of our souls rather than our brains, or our thoughts may have a non-local existence apart from our body, just as the number pi exists independently of any circle.
In
Question 2354, someone asks, “Is telepathy possible or is this just
a magician's trick? We get a poor answer from Allen Stairs. Very
inconsistently, he says, “I suspect that it is not possible,” but
then mentions ESP experiments using the Ganzfeld protocol in which
“receivers are able to pick the correct target at a rate
significantly above chance.” He doesn't mention the numbers, but in
the Ganzfeld experiments the average success rate is about 32% (as discussed here), compared to a rate of only 25% that someone would get by chance.
Given such overwhelming evidence for ESP, why would anyone say that
telepathy “is not possible”? Later Stairs says “while there is some
evidence on behalf of telepathy, it's very far from making a strong
case.” But why would anyone claim something “is not possible”
on one hand, and that “there is some evidence” for it? That makes
no sense. The evidence for telepathy and other forms of psi is extremely strong. The
Ganzfeld experiments would by themselves be adequate evidence for ESP, and
there are many other experiments (such as these done by Joseph Rhine with
Hubert Pearce) in which the success rate was so high that it
constitutes overwhelming evidence for telepathy, very much making
exactly the strong case that Stairs denies.
In Question 5176 someone asks, “Is it a common view among philosophers
that human beings are simply biological computers?” Eddy Nahmias
answers us by telling us, “There are few substance dualists (who
think the mind is a non-physical entity).” This is not accurate.
There are many philosophers who think the mind is a non-physical
entity.
Question 24702 asks the following:
Assuming
that the multiverse account of the universe is true -- and every
possible reality is being simultaneously played out in an infinite
number of parallel universes -- am I logically forced into accepting
a nihilistic outlook on life? Or is it still possible to accept the
truth of the multiverse account and still rationally believe that the
pursuit of life goals is both meaningful and valuable, despite the
fact that every possible outcome -- or potential reality -- is
unfolding somewhere in another parallel universe?
In
response to this question, philosopher Stephen Maitzen gives a poor
answer. He states the following:
The
beings very similar to you who inhabit other universes are at best
"counterparts" of you, which leaves open the question "What
will you do with your life?" It may be well and good if one
of your counterparts works hard to achieve wisdom, promote justice,
or whatever, in some other universe. But his/her hard work isn't
yours and doesn't occur in your universe.
Instead
of this lame answer, Maitzen should have pointed out the lack of
any empirical basis for believing in any universe other than our own.
He should have asked the user: why are you assuming the
truth of an infinitely extravagant claim for which there is no evidence?
In my next post I will discuss some additional examples of poor answers given at the "Ask Philosophers" web site.
Postscript: Today's "Question of the Day" on the "Ask Philosophers" site is a question that ends by asking, "What
then, prevents any layman from calling himself a philosopher a priori
and considering himself equal to you?" The answer by philosopher Allen Stairs is an answer ringing with a sound of superiority and elitism. He says this:
This is a poor answer. A good answer to the question, "What then, prevents any layman from calling himself a philosopher a priori and considering himself equal to you?" is: nothing at all. To philosophize is the birthright of every human, and anyone who thinks deeply on any complex topic has every right to call himself a philosopher. Philosophers should strive for humility, rather than mounting some high horse and calling themselves "paradigm-case philosophers." There is no reason why we should be more inclined to accept or reject a philosophical argument of a PhD than to accept or reject the philosophical argument of a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. All are equal on the battlefield of philosophical argumentation.
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