Some Poor Answers at the “Ask Philosophers" Site

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:

You may still wonder: what does it actually take to make someone a bona fide philosopher?...People who have several publications in respectable philosophy journals would count, for example. So would people with PhDs in philosophy who have positions in philosophy departments at accredited universities. Such folk are paradigm cases of philosophers (at least, in the early 21st century in the west.) People recognized as philosophers by paradigm-case philosophers will count. People similar to paradigm-case philosophers are candidates for being counted as philosophers; the stronger the similarity the stronger the case. 

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.