Music on My Mind

Jimmie Rodgers, "Kisses Sweeter than Wine." Not quite sure why it's on my mind, but it's the sort of song that sticks if you hear it once.

Causally Unconstrained

Richard Beck has an interesting but ultimately rather confused post on free will. He rejects the notion that free will is a causal capacity:

To repeat my criticism, I don't think "free will" means "causally unconstrained." I don't see how it is possible for the human brain--the apparatus of human volition--to step outside the causal flux. That ability, as Harry Frankfurt points out, is a question of power, not freedom. Humans are not omnipotent. We are finite, causally bounded creatures. Consequently, we are unable to step outside the system.

Pretty much every point of this argument is problematic, from the unanalyzed ambiguities of the phrase 'causally unconstrained' to the notion of the brain as 'the apparatus of human volition' to the extraordinarily vague 'causal flux' to the assumption that causal non-constraint implies omnipotence or stepping outside the system. Obviously something can be causally unconstrained in a number of very different ways; the brain is the 'apparatus of human volition' in pretty much the same way everything else about us is, and we might as well call our toes or our lungs the apparatus of human volition; by 'causal flux' he seems to mean 'things happening according to causal laws', which is useless unless the particular causal laws in question are specified; and obviously something may be causally unconstrained in one way but not others (and therefore not omnipotent); and input into a system is not 'stepping outside the system', even if it were an input of new initial conditions, and talk of such a thing is useless in any case unless you specify the system in question. But what I find more interesting is what he intends to put in its place:

So for me, free will isn't about causality. It is, rather, more akin to what we might call political freedom. Emancipation.

There are two aspects, positive and negative, related to this notion. The first is a negative. If I lock you up in a jail you are not free. If I let you out you become free. Freedom here is liberation, a freedom from....

If being released from jail is an example of negative freedom, freedom from the jail, then education is a good example of positive freedom, freedom to.

For example, one of the reasons we educate ourselves and our children is to increase our opportunities, to increase our choices. We become free to do this or free to do that. Thus, we become more free with education. Our horizons expand. We have greater knowledge and skill. As they say, "Knowledge is power." That power is the expansion of choice. What was once closed to us is now open. Less a freedom from than a freedom to.

The problem, of course, is that this is all just about ability and power, too. When I say that I am free from prison, what do I mean? I mean that prison and the causal factors associated with are not constraining me. I step outside the prison system. When I say that education frees me, what do I mean? I mean that education removes an impediment to my causal capacity. 'Horizons' don't expand in one direction, but in many different directions, any one of which you can go. If you can't actually go in all those different directions, your horizon hasn't expanded at all. If your choice is not choice from set of alternatives to no one of which you are causally constrained, your choices do not increase, they merely become different. And only if you are causally unconstrained with respect to this can you actually do this or do that; if something causally constrains you to do this, there's really no good pretending that you can also do that.

Thus political freedom, both positive and negative, is as much a form of being causally unconstrained as any other freedom we might have notions of; reject causal non-constraint, you empty political freedom of any positive meaning. You can still have negative freedom, which depends on a purely relative notion of causal non-constraint: a leaf that is falling is no longer constrained by the particular forces that held it to its branches. But positive freedom requires that we actually have options, and that requires that we are not actually constrained by any of our causes to only one possibility. Beck is quite right when later he associates skill and freedom and says, "the greater the skill the greater the freedom." That is a very medieval Aristotelian point; but, of course, there is a connection between greater skill and greater freedom due to the fact that you are less constrained to one thing the more skillful you are. Knowledge, technical skills, and virtues like prudence or justice open up options by closing down things that close down options. What Beck is really trying to do is have his cake and eat it, too: having a robust positive notion of freedom (greater horizons, expansion of choices) while denying the precondition for this. A consistent compatibilist would usually avoid this by reworking what is supposed to count as the positive notion of freedom so that it doesn't involve these things, but Beck seems to want to have it both ways.

What is happening, of course, as is made explicit in some of the comments to the post, is that Beck is asking one question: "Are human beings finite, physical, causally bounded creatures?" And the answer to this, obviously, is yes: hence his repeated denunciations of the straw man position that we are omnipotent. But this answer has no intrinsic connection with most of the conclusions Beck draws from it, unless you equivocate on the meaning of 'causally bounded', 'finite', and 'physical'.

Ripheus in Heaven

Now knoweth he how heaven enamoured is
With a just king; and in the outward show
Of his effulgence he reveals it still.
Who would believe, down in the errant world,
That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round
Could be the fifth one of the holy lights?
Now knoweth he enough of what the world
Has not the power to see of grace divine,
Although his sight may not discern the bottom.

Dante places two pagans in Heaven: the Emperor Trajan and the Trojan prince Ripheus. For the former he was following a legend that St. Gregory the Great prayed for Trajan's salvation on seeing a monument to Trajan's compassion; in response to which God resurrected Trajan for long enough to be baptized and then reprimanded St. Gregory for presumption. No such legend attaches to Ripheus, mentioned above (in Longfellow's translation of Paradiso XX) but Dante seems to have been struck by the description of his death in Book II of Virgil's Aeneid. The description is something like, "Ripheus fell as well, uniquely most just of all Trojans, most faithful of preservers of equity; but to the gods it seemed otherwise." But since I quoted Longfellow's Paradiso, I might as well quote Dryden's Aeneid:

Then Ripheus follow'd, in th' unequal fight;
Just of his word, observant of the right:
Heav'n thought not so.

It's an interesting comment: Virgil tells us flat out that Ripheus was most just and most equitable and then says that the gods didn't think so (dis aliter visum). What he means, of course, is that Ripheus's justice availed nothing: no matter how just he was the gods did not save him. Dante seems to have been struck by this; when introducing Ripheus he makes a point of underlining that God loves a just king. The injustice of the pagan gods is overcome by the mercy of the God of Heaven: according to Dante, Faith, Hope, and Love came to Ripheus and baptized him:

The other one, through grace, that from so deep
A fountain wells that never hath the eye
Of any creature reached its primal wave,
Set all his love below on righteousness;
Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose
His eye to our redemption yet to be,
Whence he believed therein, and suffered not
From that day forth the stench of paganism,
And he reproved therefor the folk perverse.
Those Maidens three, whom at the right-hand wheel
Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism
More than a thousand years before baptizing.

But why the special attention for Ripheus? To this question, Beatrice replies that Dante the narrator is not able to understand God's purposes:

O thou predestination, how remote
Thy root is from the aspect of all those
Who the First Cause do not behold entire!

Dante lacks the eyesight to see what grace does; and as Dante, so we. The practical implications are then clear:

And you, O mortals! hold yourselves restrained
In judging; for ourselves, who look on God,
We do not know as yet all the elect;
And sweet to us is such a deprivation,
Because our good in this good is made perfect,
That whatsoe'er God wills, we also will.

Beda!

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Beda, Doctor of the Church, commonly known as the Venerable Bede; I meant to put something up to mark the occasion, but forgot. From the beginning of his Ecclesiastical History of England:

Britain, an island in the ocean, formerly called Albion, is situated between the north and west, facing, though at a considerable distance, the coasts of Germany, France, and Spain, which form the greatest part of Europe. It extends 800 miles in length towards the north, and is 200 miles in breadth, except where several promontories extend further in breadth, by which its compass is made to be 3675 miles. To the south, as you pass along the nearest shore of the Belgic Gaul, the first place in Britain which opens to the eye is the city of Rutubi Portus, by the English corrupted into Reptacestir. The distance from hence across the sea to Gessoriacum, the nearest shore of the Morini, is fifty miles, or as some writers say, 450 furlongs. On the back of the island, where it opens upon the boundless ocean, it has the islands called Orcades. Britain excels for grain and trees, and is well adapted for feeding cattle and beasts of burden. It also produces vines in some places, and has plenty of land and waterfowls of several sorts; it is remarkable also for rivers abounding in fish, and plentiful springs. It has the greatest plenty of salmon and eels; seals are also frequently taken, and dolphins, as also whales; besides many sorts of shellfish, such as muscles, in which are often found excellent pearls of all colours, red, purple, violet, and green, but mostly white. There is also a great abundance of cockles, of which the scarlet dye is made; a most beautiful colour, which never fades with the heat of the sun or the washing of the rain; but the older it is, the more beautiful it becomes. It has both salt and hot springs, and from them flow rivers which furnish hot baths, proper for all ages and sexes, and arranged according. For water, as St. Basil says, receives the heating quality, when it runs along certain metals, and becomes not only hot but scalding. Britain has also many veins of metals, as copper, iron, lead, and silver; it has much and excellent jet, which is black and sparkling, glittering at the fire, and when heated, drives away serpents; being warmed with rubbing, it holds fast whatever is applied to it, like amber. The island was formerly embellished with twenty­eight noble cities, besides innumerable castles, which were all strongly secured with walls, towers, gates, and locks. And, from its lying almost under the North Pole, the nights are light in summer, so that at midnight the beholders are often in doubt whether the evening twilight still continues, or that of the morning is coming on; for the sun, in the night, returns under the earth, through the northern regions at no great distance from them. For this reason the days are of a great length in summer, as, on the contrary, the nights are in winter, for the sun then withdraws into the southern parts, so that the nights are eighteen hours long. Thus the nights are extraordinarily short in summer, and the days in winter, that is, of only six equinoctial hours. Whereas, in Armenia, Macedonia, Italy, and other countries of the same latitude, the longest day or night extends but to fifteen hours, and the shortest to nine.

Pearl, Ivory, Coral, Diamond, Suns, Gold

Vaunt Not, Fair Heavens, of Your Two Glorious Lights
by William Drummond

Vaunt not, fair heavens, of your two glorious lights
Which, though most bright, yet see not when they shine,
And shining, cannot show their beams divine
Both in one place, but part by days and nights;
Earth, vaunt not of those treasures ye enshrine,
Held only dear because hid from our sights,
Your pure and burnish'd gold, your diamonds fine,
Snow-passing ivory that the eye delights;
Nor, seas, of those dear wares are in you found,
Vaunt not, rich pearl, red coral, which do stir
A fond desire in fools to plunge your ground;
Those all, more fair, are to be had in her;
Pearl, ivory, coral, diamond, suns, gold,
Teeth, neck, lips, heart, eyes, hair, are to behold.

The parallelism of the last couplet is quite clever as a way of tying the rest of the poem together and giving it its point.

Tabulating →

Alexander Pruss had a post a while back giving an argument that indicative conditionals (if p then q) are material conditionals (Either q or not-p, as this would be understood in ordinary propositional logic). Longtime readers will know that I think indicative conditionals are almost never material conditionals and that the standard practice of representing them in logic as if they were will usually leave something important out (many indicative conditionals can indeed be represented for many logical purposes as material conditionals but at least most of those will leave something out that would be logically important under different conditions and many indicative conditionals are not material conditionals at all); indeed, claiming that they are is one of the ways you can sometimes really get me riled up. Not that Pruss's post riled me up, but this is all by the way of explaining why I've been intending to say something about this esoteric post for three weeks now.

Pruss's argument is:

(1) For any possible world w: (p at w) → (q at w) if and only if (p→q at w).
(2) For any predicates F and G, from "Every F is a G" (where "x is an F" is more euphonious way of saying that x satisfies F) together with the assumption that c exists, it logically follows that if c is an F, then c is a G.
(3) If (1) is true and → is non-hyperintensional, then indicatives are material.
(4) If (2) is true and → is non-hyperintensional, then indicatives are material.
(5) If (2) is true, then one has to assign the same truth value as the material conditional does to a number of paradoxical-sounding examples of indicative conditional sentences that are relevantly just like the standard alleged counterexamples to the thesis that all indicatives are material.

p → q would mean "If p, then q." Never mind the talk about non-hyperintensionality. Pruss's interest is primarily (5). What caught my eye was (1), which Pruss characterizes as plausible. I don't think it is plausible -- or to be more exact, I think it is plausible only under certain kinds of assumptions, assumptions that often are not true.

Consider the following way of thinking about possible worlds. Let every possible world be represented by a table, on which sentences are printed that represent what's true in that world. So a possible world in which "Dogs exist" is true would be represented as:

Dogs exist.

Now, we want to allow lots of possible worlds, and therefore many tables. But from one possible world one can infer a great many things about any of the possible worlds we are allowing (sometimes including itself). We can represent these as rules governing the tables themselves. There are many kinds of rules you can have; some of them will simply say that there's an allowed table somewhere that has a particular sentence on it, others might say that particular sentences are on every table we allow, others might say that if you have a particular sentence on one table there will be a particular sentence on another table.

So when we look at the left-hand side of Pruss's formula, (p at w) → (q at w), what this tells you is that whenever any allowed table (w) has the sentence "p" written on it the sentence "q" is should also be written on it. So if p is "Dogs exist" and q is "Dogs are friendly" then any table with p looks like this:

Dogs exist.

Dogs are friendly.

The left-hand side of the formula [(p→q at w)], however, would give us a w that looks like this:

If dogs exist, dogs are friendly.

Now, if the full formula [(p at w) → (q at w) if and only if (p→q at w)] were really true, these tables should look the same. In particular, they should both look like this:

Dogs exist.

Dogs are friendly.

If dogs exist, dogs are friendly.

Yet they don't. Why? Because Pruss's formula is only true if you make assumptions we haven't made yet.

In effect what this shows us in miniature is that Pruss's formula is only plausible if we assume that modality (the rules governing what sentences you can write on various tables) doesn't play any significant role in the meaning of indicative conditionals. Since I'm a constructivist about what philosophers call 'possible worlds', I think possible worlds in a sense just are tables modeling possiblity and the like: and since I'm a Humpty-Dumptyist about logical models, I can do whatever I please with tables, and therefore with possible worlds, and I dare both you and the tables to try to stop me. The essence of logic, like that of mathematics, is absolute freedom within the confines of ultimate consistency. So this is why I don't find Pruss's (1) very plausible at all.

Of course, one might not accept such views, but this is not essential to my main point, which is that Pruss's (1) is plausibly true only if certain assumptions are made about the modal landscape, and the assumption that whenever we find indicative conditionals, those assumptions are in fact assumed. I am not at all convinced that this is always true, and even one exception would make (1), which has no qualifications, false. (1) may have a more restricted true version; indeed, I think there surely must be a restricted form that is true of some modal set-ups, and maybe even all the more common ones. In any case, my point is just that any assumptions that might make (1) plausible are stronger assumptions than one might think.

Consider Giving

The Africa Windmill Project is gathering donations to buy a truck; they are a bit more than halfway there. If you have a few dollars to give, consider doing so: the program does some excellent work in helping farmers in Malawi improve sanitation conditions, increase the sustainability of their agricultural projects, and expand their growing season.