What Does 'Randomly Lucky' Mean?

Your Luck Quotient: 71%

You have a high luck quotient. More often than not, you've felt very lucky in your life. You may be randomly lucky, but it's probably more than that. Optimistic and open minded, you take advantage of all the luck that comes your way.

How Lucky Are You?

Three Pods of Pepper

On November 24, Sikhs around the world will be celebrating the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bhadur Sahib, the Ninth Guru, also called more poetically Dharam di chadaar, the Shield for Faith. There is an interesting story associated with the event. The Guru went to Delhi, having been approached by some Hindus, asking him to help intercede with the Emperor Aurangzeb, a Muslim, who was attempting to convert them by force. In the course of his journey, he was arrested and brought before the Emperor Aurangzeb, who was Muslim. The Emperor told the Guru of a vision he had had, in which God had said to him that he should convert all the world to Islam; and he laid out his policy for doing so, whereby those who converted would receive land, money, and preferment.

"So you see," the Emperor said, "you would do well to convert. Your reputation for goodness is already known far and wide; with my backing you could gather many disciples and become a great teacher of Islam. Become Muslim, and receive your heart's desire."

The Guru reflected on this, and then asked the Emperor for a hundred pounds of black pepper. When it was brought he set it on fire, and let it burn for a whole day until it seemed to be nothing but ash. Then he had people sift the ashes. Out of all the pepper that had been burned, three little pods of pepper remained.

Then the Guru said to the Emperor, "O Emperor, you who are mighty among men, you wish to make one religion out of two religions." He spoke, of course, of Islam and Hinduism. "But God, O Emperor, wishes to make three religions out of two. For just as three pepper pods were saved out of that fire, so shall three great religions exist in India, Muslim and Hindu and Sikh."

At this, the Guru was imprisoned and given three choices: to embrace Islam, to perform a miracle to show his worthiness as a Guru, or to prepare for death. And he replied, "A miracle is not within the will of God. For me there is only one religion, that of God; and whoever belongs to it, be he Muslim or Hindu or Sikh, has his place not with the temporal and changing but with the eternal and undying. As for those who attempt to convert others by force, they are charlatans. I do not fear physical death. The Emperor may do as he pleases. "

And so the Emperor did; the Guru was tortured and beheaded. He was succeeded as Guru by his son, Gobind Singh.

Disgust as a Moral Emotion

For someone who is on record as saying that disgust is worthless as a moral compass, Ophelia Benson seems to be a bit addicted to appealing to it in morally tinged arguments. In recent posts at the Butterflies and Wheels Notes and Comments blog she has managed to call some of Swinburne's arguments 'disgusting', 'truly revolting', asking, "Why doesn't everybody for miles around just tell him 'That's disgusting' until he's so embarrassed he stops saying it?" In an earlier earlier post she talks about disgust at a mixture of abuse and sycophancy, in a yet earlier post she talks about how preaching against condom-abuse is disgusting, in an even earlier post she calls a comment by Karen Armstrong disgusting, and so it goes on back through the archives; and in every single case these comments can easily be shown to be doing moral work.

I don't bring it up in order to pick on Ophelia Benson. The moves she is making are certainly not out of the ordinary, and she would certainly be a less interesting to read if she took more trouble to be consistent. Rather, I think the quandary into which Benson has backed herself -- being officially against treating disgust as morally informative while being practically unable to stop treating it as such -- is just what the official position gets you. The official position arises from thinking that the real question with regard to disgust is "Does disgust have any role to play in moral reasoning?" when it actually is "What role does it play?" The inconsistency is not so much a flaw as the reassertion of good sense against the absurdity of the official view.

I would suggest that there are several false assumptions that tend to get in the way of clear thought about this subject.

(1) There is only one kind of disgust. This assumption, that all disgust can be treated as if there were simply one kind, seems to be very common; but it also seems to be very dubious. I grab an apple and am about to bite into it, when I suddenly notice it is crawling with worms; a nausea-laced revulsion results. I pick up a book and read a graphic scene in which a pedophile rapes a child, which also creates an intense, visceral revulsion. And note that there's nothing about the latter that's necessarily more 'abstract' or less visceral. But it's not at all clear that the two should be treated as simply one kind of disgust. In other words, how we should think about disgust appears to vary depending on what we are disgusted at. There's a sort of object-dependence to its significance. If it's a disgust due to revulsion at something put in our mouths, or almost put in our mouths, that's very different from disgust at the thought of a person being violated.

(2) Disgust is a reaction to animality. This has become popular among people who follow Paul Rozin's research on disgust; it plays a major role, for instance, in Nussbaum's attack on disgust as a moral emotion. Now, I happen to like a lot of what Rozin does in this regard, and would never say that the research itself is problematic. But Rozin seems sometimes to be rather sloppy when expressing some of his results, and saying things like, "Anything that reminds us we are animals elicits disgust" is as sloppy as you can get. Taken strictly it is obviously false; I just reminded you that we are animals by mentioning the subject, and I doubt you had a disgust reaction simply in virtue of that. And Rozin himself is quite aware that a lot of our disgust reaction is culturally conditioned. Sexual play, foreplay, and the like, for instance, reminds people of their animality over a far greater range of behavior than it elicits disgust And when we try to cash out what features of animality elicits disgust, we really don't have a much more precise view than that they are the features of animality that are gross -- hardly a profound insight. The traits related to disgust are not traits that we most conspicuously share with other animals, if we set aside disgust itself as an indicator. There is, of course, the fact that physical objects of disgust tend to be contaminating in some way. But, again, watching someone eat a beating heart can't be contaminating in quite the same sense that eating one myself would be; and watching someone eat a beating heart isn't contaminating in the sense that the disgust that comes from association with a moral monster is; and in neither case is it clear (without simply begging the question) why we would feel disgust rather than, say, shame or humor at the association. To stretch that far, contamination has to take on figurative senses; what we have is a word useful for discussing all these different kinds of disgust, but very little more. We're missing some key factor here. [As a side issue, with regard to physical disgust why don't people do more research on fun disgust? Perhaps it's just due to being part of the Nickolodeon generation; but having fun with our sense of disgust is a big part of many cultures, although the precise details of it vary from place to place. A lot of the comments about disgust made by researchers make disgust sound so solemn and serious -- which it obviously can be -- but it's like treating fear as a purely negative flight response without considering the fact that people can enjoy being scared. People can enjoy dabbling in the disgusting on occasion. It's not all revulsion. And this is itself an interesting thing.]

Now, I do think that Rozin and others like him are on the right track, and are genuinely uncovering features of disgust; I just think we must guard against premature conclusions about what they've actually shown, such as we find in Nussbaum and elsewhere. It seems to be less that disgust is a reaction against the inhuman than that it itself creates a line between humanity and inhumanity that otherwise might not exist. We can feel sick and revolted at lots of things that aren't animal or contaminating in any strict sense of the term; and many things that are animal or contaminating in a strict sense of the term don't always elicit disgust. Rozin is certainly aware of this himself, since he thinks of disgust in terms of a sort of evolution -- there's a level of disgust devoted to keeping contaminated food out of the body; there's a level of disgust devoted to avoiding animal grossness and mortality, however that's to be understood; and there's a level of disgust devoted to putting out of one's mind things that are found culturally offensive. While Rozin isn't always as careful as he should be in discussing them, the levels simply cannot be conflated. One level is purely sanitary in nature; another Rozin goes so far as to say is the sign of civilization. And that seems along the right lines. Even this stage view of disgust may be attributing more unity to disgust than actually exists; the distinction between physical disgust and socio-moral disgust seems much sharper than this suggests, even though they clearly share some important commonalities (and thus are both kinds of disgust).

(3) If some kinds of disgust are morally wrong, disgust can't be relevant to (good) moral reasoning. This also seems to be a common assumption, at least judging from how people argue. How this is to be squared with the fact that almost everything else related to moral reasoning can take morally wrong form is always left unclear. For instance, some kinds of thought are morally wrong; but it doesn't follow from this that thoughts are not relevant to moral reasoning. It would take a rather elaborate argument to eliminate disgust as a potential source for good moral reasoning; one that is never made.

In any case, how would disgust play a role in good moral reasoning? My own rough view in this regard tends Humean. That is, we start with the inchoate reactions that are developed simply from growing up human, and this inchoate state is fine for a certain level of moral maturity; however, a great part of our moral education involves cultivating these reactions so that they tend to hit the moral mark in cases farther and farther removed from the original ones. In other words, we adapt the response to general rules. The general rules, note, are not doing all the work here; for one thing, if they were, there would be nothing to adapt. Rather, what they are doing is setting up dams that guide the course of the stream; even given the dams, it's the stream itself that does the work of going where it needs to be. And so it is with disgust. Reactions of moral disgust, at least, should be treated with respect as a reason to worry, even if nothing else. It may well be -- and it has turned out before -- that the reaction was unjustifiable, due to a failure to cultivate the sense of disgust properly. But failures to react with moral disgust are in some cases equally unjustifiable, and equally due to a failure to cultivate the sense of disgust properly. It's a bit much to ask that our emotions be infallible guides, particularly since we don't demand the same of the reasoning by which we shape them. But that's precisely what people demand in their attacks on the role of disgust in moral reasoning. To put it in terms that Benson uses in the essay linked to above, it is certainly true that "Ew, ick, gross" and "That's wrong" don't mean the same thing; but that's no good reason for saying that the the sense behind "Ew, ick, gross" has no role to play in the judgment behind saying, "That's wrong."

Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Milton Friedman recently died at age 94, and the reminiscences and memorials are beginning to circulate. Thomas Sowell has a good one. Brad DeLong's is also worth reading. Others can be found at "PrestoPundit."

Jottings on Fitch's Paradox III

In my last set of sketchy thoughts, I proceeded in the indexing of the premises of the argument, as presented in the SEP, as far as premise (4):

(4') K{∃x|∃c}(p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p) It is known by someone or other that both the particular claim is true and that it is not known, by someone or other, who may or may not be the same someone, to be true.

Now, the way the argument moves from here requires that a reductio be made, and a contradiction be derived from (4). Here's the original set of premises:

(4) K(p ∧ ¬Kp) It is known that both the particular claim is true and that it is not known to be true.
(5) Kp ∧ K¬Kp The particular claim is known to be true and it is known that it is not known to be true.
(6) Kp ∧ ¬Kp The particular claim is known to be true and it is not known to be true.

(5) comes from (4) by the standard rule that a conjunction is known only if its conjuncts are known. So (5) has to be indexed as:

(5') K{∃x|∃c}p ∧ K{∃x|∃c}¬K{∃y|∃c}p It is known by someone or other that the particular claim is true and it is known by that same someone or other that it is not known, by someone or other, who may or may not be the same someone, to be true.

And here, of course, we are stymied a bit. For the only thing that can be derived from this is:

(6') K{∃x|∃c}p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p It is known by someone or other that the particular claim is true, and it is not known by someone or other (who may or may not be the same someone or other) that it is true.

And that's obviously not a contradiction.

However, let's assume that x=y here. That is, let's assume that the same someone or other is involved all the way through. Even this, as it turns out, is not quite enough to give us a contradiction. The astute reader will have noticed that I have been ignoring the |c side of the index, and pretending that we can assume that all the relevant circumstances or conditions of knowing are the same throughout. This, of course, is not quite legitimate, and a more accurate indexing will take this into account. I would suggest the following so far:

(1') p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p A particular claim is true, and it is not known to be true by someone or other (given some set of circumstnaces).
(2') (p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p) → ◊K{∃x|∃d}(p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p) If a particular claim is true and is not known to be true by someone or other (given the original set of circumstances), it follows that it is possible that "a particular claim is true and is not known to be true by someone or other" is known by someone or other (who may or may not be the same person and who may or may not be in the same circumstances).
(3') ◊K{∃x|∃d}(p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p) It is possible that it is known by someone or other that both the particular claim is true and that it is not known, by someone or other who may or may not be the same someone and may or may not be in the same circumstances, to be true.

(4') K{∃x|∃d}(p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p) It is known by someone or other in some circumstances that both the particular claim is true and that it is not known, by someone or other, who may or may not be the same someone and may or may not be in the same circumstances, to be true.
(5') K{∃x|∃d}p ∧ K{∃x|∃c}¬K{∃y|∃c}p It is known by someone or other in some circumstances that the particular claim is true and it is known by that same someone or other that it is not known, by someone or other, who may or may not be the same someone and may or may not be in the same circumstances, to be true.
(6') K{∃x|∃d}p ∧ ¬K{∃y|∃c}p It is known by someone or other that the particular claim is true, and it is not known by someone or other (who may or may not be the same someone or other and may or may not be in the same circumstances) that it is true.

It can easily be seen that, taking this into account, the assumption that x and y are the same person(s) is not enough to yield a contradiction and make the reductio viable. Suppose that x and y are both Tom, and suppose that p is the claim that the sky is blue. And suppose the set of conditions c is describable as 'being a baby who has never seen the sky and cannot understand any testimony about it' and the set of conditions d is describable as 'being a young man who has seen the sky'. The result then is:

It is known by Tom, when he was a young man who had seen the sky, that the sky is blue; and it is not known by Tom, when he was a baby who had never seen the sky and could not understand any testimony about it, that the sky is blue.

Which is not a contradiction in the slightest; it's exactly what you'd expect if Tom originally (as a baby) didn't know that the sky was blue, and came to know at some point (by the time he was a young man) that the sky was blue. In other words, it's exactly what you'd expect if we can come to know things through learning about them.

So to have a genuine contradiction here, not only must we assume that x is y; we must assume that d is c, as well. So what has been shown to be contradictory is the following:

(4'*) K{∃x|∃c}(p ∧ ¬K{∃c|∃c}p) It is known by someone or other in some circumstances that both the particular claim is true and that it is not known by the same someone or other in those same circumstances to be true.

(4'*) is necessarily false. This leads us into the rest of the argument.

(7') ¬K{∃x|∃c}(p ∧ ¬K{∃x|∃c}p) It is not known by the same person under a given set of conditions both that the particular claim is true and that it is not known by the same person under the same set of conditions to be true.
(8') ¬K{∃x|∃c}(p ∧ ¬K{∃x|∃c}p) (7) is necessary.
(9') ¬◊K{∃x|∃c}(p ∧ ¬K{∃x|∃c}p) It is not possible that this is known by the same person under a given set of conditions: both that p is true and that it is not known by that same person under that same set of conditions to be true.
(10') ¬∃p(p ∧ ¬K{∃x|∃c}p) There is no particular claim for which it is true both that the claim is true and that it is not known by someone under some set of conditions to be true.
(11') ∀p(p → Kp) For any particular claim, if it is true, it is known to be true by someone under some set of conditions.

(7') we get from the reductio of (4'*); (8') we know because (4'*) was not just false but impossible. (8') tells us that it is impossible for anyone to know both a given claim and that they don't know it (setting aside all differences of conditions, e.g., different times of life). So (9') follows from (8'). It still contradicts (3') only if we assume that x is y and that c is d. But it does do that, given that assumption.

Can we get (10') from (9'), though? We can get the unindexed (10) from (9) by using the negation of (3) to deny the consequent of (2), which by modus tollens gives us the negation of (1). We've been assuming as well that x is y and that c is d, that is, that there is only one knower involved, and only one set of conditions for knowing. But anyone who has gone this far, of course, can, instead of following the trail back to the negation of (1), simply hold that the argument up to (9') shows that it is impossible for us to make this assumption, at least legitimately, for non-omniscient knowers. Nothing precludes such a response; and it is certainly more plausible than the argument itself.

Thus KP doesn't seem to result in the paradox. What creates the paradox is the assumption that KP requires that a given claim is true only if it can possibly be known by any particular knower under any set of conditions. But, of course, this assumption is manifestly false. Not only is the alleged requirement absurd, it's not what people mean when they say that every truth is such that it is possible for it to be known.

Which raises the question of what people really do mean, or, at least, what they can consistently mean, when they use principles like KP. Another post, although I can't promise that it will necessarily be the next one.

And keep in mind that these are all sketchy thoughts, and that none of them should be taken as any sign that I know what I'm talking about.

'Half Monk, Half Hit Man'

I just finished watching the newest Bond film, Casino Royale. I highly recommend it, and I do mean highly. This is easily one of the best, and perhaps the best, Bond film of the past few decades. Daniel Craig plays a Bond just beginning to get his bearings, but this allows him to show both more brutality and more humanity. 007, after all, is not a superhero; he is not an action hero; he is a killer who is in Her Majesty's secret service, the loyal but ruthless attack dog sent after the worst and most elusive of Britain's enemies, who is so good at eliminating them that he can do it with style.

My primary two criticisms are: (1) The exposition during the poker game was heavy-handed and purposeless -- most people are not that ignorant of poker, and those who are wouldn't be interested enough to care. But this is a minor irritation in an otherwise great series of scenes. (2) Whoever decided the music volume should be hit over the head -- while it's OK for much of the film, it occasionally becomes intrusive and loud where it should become soft and subtle, letting the images speak for themselves.

Other than that, it was quite good. It's a bit violent and brutal in parts, but an excellent reinvention of the franchise.

Philosophia Naturalis

To celebrate St. Albert's Day, I thought I'd provide a few links to recent science-oriented posts in the blogosphere that I've found interesting.

* Coturnix at "A Blog Around the Clock" discusses circadian rhythms.

* Michelle at "The Culture of Chemistry" introduces us to the meaning of the term 'eutectic'.

* Jennifer Ouellette discusses wireless energy transfer at the "Industrial Physics Forum" weblog.

* Andrew Jaffe at "Leaves on the Line" reviews Paul Davies's The Goldilocks Dilemma.

* Jacques Distler at "Musings" discusses the role of rigor in physics.

* Mark at "Chemistry World blog" points to the link between Damascus swords and carbon nanotubes.

* Derek Lowe at "In the Pipeline" discusses chemical disposal in scientific contexts.

* Carl Zimmer at "The Loom" talks about the sequencing of the bee genome.