Destroyer and Builder: Peter Gordon reviews Stephen Nadler's book: A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/book-forged-hell-spinoza-treatise-steven-nadler

God’s decrees and commandments, and consequently God’s providence, are in truth nothing but Nature’s order

Spinoza laid the foundations not only for the modern self, but also for the modern conception of the

universe as well.

The philosophical identification of God and nature—the thesis of pure immanence—laid down a pattern of naturalistic explanation that would inspire many of the greatest thinkers of modernity

the universe, he claims, is a single substance, unique, infinite, and absolutely necessary. It is an order without alternative, without contingency or division, and its existence is nothing less than eternal

the birth of the secular age.

The highest ideal of the Treatise is libertas philosophandi, the freedom to philosophize.

Although civil religion is designed to fashion better citizens, a government “that attempts to control men’s minds is regarded as tyrannical,

A perfect divinity does not perform miracles but is identical with the perfection of its creation. To insist on miracles merely betrays one’s failure to grasp the structure of reality: “miracles and ignorance are the same.”

In his cosmos, there is no personal redeemer to whom we might appeal in our distress, and there is no room for a higher creator who dwells outside of nature. Indeed, such a monistic vision allows little room for the traditional conception of God at all. For nature is all that there is; thought and extension are merely its attributes.

Nature is infinite and acts with thoroughgoing necessity, but it is utterly indifferent to our individual cares and aspirations. Spinozism, in other words, does not divinize nature, it naturalizes the divine.

Kant recoiled from naturalistic monism, and cleaved instead to the idea of freedom as a “miracle in the phenomenal world.”

this metaphysical principle amounts to a kind of “secular theology.” The assumption that the natural order is perfect and its laws necessarily inviolable across all possible variations of space and time does not actually surrender but instead secularizes the idea of divine perfection

The Bible, Spinoza argued, is “faulty, mutilated, adulterated, and inconsistent.” Much of the Treatise consists of a deliberate and merciless dismantling of its miraculous reports and, most of all, its moral codes

For the entirety of this “mutilated” text, in Spinoza’s view, contains little more than one lesson that is truly of value: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus, 19:18) and “He who loves his neighbor has satisfied every claim of the law.” (Romans 13:8). But the final blow to the authority of the text is that even this lesson can be learned in other ways.

the best form of government, according to Spinoza, is one that permits the individual to exercise his own rational will. Obedience to laws simply because they are imposed is analogous to the irrational condition that Spinoza described in the Ethics as enslavement to the passions. In both cases one is merely responsive to external commands

The Four Million Dollar Philosopher

• The Four Million Dollar Philosopher

  • According to some people, free will is housed only in non-physical souls; it’s a supernatural power
  • According to others, whether or not souls exist, free will doesn’t depend on them. People in this second group divide into two subgroups. Some will tell you that the ability to make rational, informed, conscious decisions in the absence of undue force – no one holding a gun to your head – is enough for free will. Others say that something important must be added: If you have free will, then alternative decisions are open to you in a deep way
  • What is needed is that more than one option was open to you, given everything as it actually was at the time
  • I assessed some much-discussed scientific arguments for the thesis that free will does not exist. The general structure of these arguments is simple. In stage 1, data are offered in support of some featured empirical proposition or other – for example, the proposition that conscious intentions are never among the causes of corresponding actions. In stage 2, the featured empirical proposition is combined with a proposition that expresses some aspect of the author’s view about what “free will” means to yield the conclusion that free will does not exist.
  • The real threat, I am sometimes told, is bound up with what philosophers call substance dualism – a doctrine that includes a commitment to the idea that every human person is or has a non-physical soul or mind. (So we’re back to the analogue of premium gas.) This alleged threat is based on two claims: first, given what “free will” means, having free will requires being or having a non-physical soul or mind; and, second, the experiments at issue provide powerful evidence that such souls or minds don’t exist.
  • Anthony Cashmore, in a 2010 article (’The Lucretian Swerve: The Biological Basis of Human Behavior and the Criminal Justice System’), asserts that “if we no longer entertain the luxury of a belief in the ‘magic of the soul,’ then there is little else to offer in support of the concept of free will.”
  • Michael Gazzaniga says that free will involves a ghostly or nonphysical element and “some secret stuff that is YOU.” Obviously, this isn’t a report of a scientific discovery about what “free will” means; he is telling us how he understands that expression – that is, what “free will” means to him. Given what Gazzaniga means by “free will,” it’s no surprise that, in his view, “free will is a miscast concept, based on social and psychological beliefs . . . that have not been borne out and/or are at odds with modern scientific knowledge about the nature of our universe.”
  • Because there is no place in the experiment for conscious reflection about which button to press, there is no place for an explanation of the button pressing in terms of conscious reasons for pressing it.
  • Self-deception, as I think of it, is (roughly) motivationally or emotionally biased false belief.
  • Part of the answer would seem to lie in what they want to be true: that they are very good at their job or extremely easy to get along with. It is likely that their wanting something to be true of them biases their self-estimations.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A Universe from Nothing?

• A Universe from Nothing?

  • One question is, within some framework of physical laws that is flexible enough to allow for the possible existence of either “stuff” or “no stuff” (where “stuff” might include space and time itself), why does the actual manifestation of reality seem to feature all this stuff?
  • The other is, why do we have this particular framework of physical law, or even something called “physical law” at all?
  • Ever since Newton, the paradigm for fundamental physics has been the same, and includes three pieces. First, there is the “space of states”: basically, a list of all the possible configurations the universe could conceivably be in. Second, there is some particular state representing the universe at some time, typically taken to be the present. Third, there is some rule for saying how the universe evolves with time.
  • Quantum mechanics, in particular, is a specific yet very versatile implementation of this scheme. (And quantum field theory is just a particular example of quantum mechanics, not an entirely new way of thinking.) The states are “wave functions,” and the collection of every possible wave function for some given system is “Hilbert space.”
  • And then there is a little machine — “the Hamiltonian” — that tells you how to evolve from one state to another as time passes.
  • Within this framework, specifying “the laws of physics” is just a matter of picking a Hilbert space (which is just a matter of specifying how big it is) and picking a Hamiltonian.
  • The first possibility is that the quantum state of the universe really does evolve in time — i.e. that the Hamiltonian is not zero, it truly does push the state forward in time.
  • as the quantum state of the universe evolves, it can pass through phases where it looks an awful lot like “nothing,” conventionally understood — i.e. it could look like completely empty space, or like some peculiar non-geometric phase where we wouldn’t recognize it as “space” at all. And later, through the relentless influence of the Hamiltonian, it could evolve into something that looks very much like “something,” even very much like the universe we see around us today. So if your definition of “nothing” is “emptiness” or “lack of space itself,” the laws of quantum mechanics provide a nice way to understand how that nothing can evolve into the marvelous something we find ourselves inside.
  • The other possibility is that the universe doesn’t evolve at all — the Hamiltonian is zero, and there is some space of possible states, but we just sit there, without a fundamental “passage of time.”
  • We certainly think that we perceive time passing, but maybe time is just emergent rather than fundamental.
  • That is, perhaps there is an alternative description of that single, unmoving point in Hilbert space — a description that looks approximately like “a universe evolving through time,” at least for some period of duration.
  • In this case, unlike the previous one, time could end (or begin), because time was only a useful approximation to begin with, valid in a certain regime.
  • In this kind of picture, there is literally a moment in the history of the universe prior to which there weren’t any other moments. There is a boundary of time (presumably at the Big Bang), prior to which there was … nothing. No stuff, not even a quantum wave function; there was no prior thing, because there is no sensible notion of “prior.”
  • a bit of contemplation should reveal that this kind of reasoning might, if we grant you a certain definition of “nothing,” explain how the universe could arise from nothing. But it doesn’t, and doesn’t even really try to, explain why there is something rather than nothing — why this particular evolution of the wave function, or why even the apparatus of “wave functions” and “Hamiltonians” is the right way to think about the universe at all.
  • Do advances in modern physics and cosmology help us address these underlying questions, of why there is something called the universe at all, and why there are things called “the laws of physics,” and why those laws seem to take the form of quantum mechanics, and why some particular wave function and Hamiltonian? In a word: no.
  • But the universe, and the laws of physics, aren’t embedded in some bigger context. They are the biggest context that there is, as far as we know. It’s okay to admit that a chain of explanations might end somewhere, and that somewhere might be with the universe and the laws it obeys, and the only further explanation might be “that’s just the way it is.”
  • As long as you admit that there is more than one conceivable way for the universe to be (and I don’t see how one could not), there will always be some end of the line for explanations. I could be wrong about that, but an insistence that “the universe must explain itself” or some such thing seems like a completely unsupportable a priori assumption
  • If your real goal is to refute claims that a Creator is a necessary (or even useful) part of a complete cosmological scheme, then the above points about “creation from nothing” are really quite on point. And that point is that the physical universe can perfectly well be self-contained; it doesn’t need anything or anyone from outside to get it started, even if it had a “beginning.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

• Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

  • Leibniz’s original claim was that nothingness was “spontaneous,” whereas an existing universe required a bit of work to achieve. Swinburne has sharpened this a bit, claiming that nothingness is uniquely “natural,” because it is necessarily simpler than any particular universe. Both of them use this sort of logic to undergird an argument for the existence of God: if nothingness is somehow more natural or likely than existence, and yet here we are, it must be because God willed it to be so.
  • When we talk about things being “natural” or “spontaneous,” we do so on the basis of our experience in this world. This experience equips us with a certain notion of natural
  • But our experience with the world in which we actually live tells us nothing whatsoever about whether certain possible universes are “natural” or not. In particular, nothing in science, logic, or philosophy provides any evidence for the claim that simple universes are “preferred” (whatever that could possibly mean). We only have experience with one universe; there is no ensemble from which it is chosen, on which we could define a measure to quantify degrees of probability.
  • It’s easy to get tricked into thinking that simplicity is somehow preferable. After all, Occam’s Razor exhorts us to stick to simple explanations. But that’s a way to compare different explanations that equivalently account for the same sets of facts; comparing different sets of possible underlying rules for the universe is a different kettle of fish entirely.
  • Ultimately, the problem is that the question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole.
  • So the universe exists, and we know of no good reason to be surprised by that fact.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Blackboard Rumble: Why Are Physicists Hating On Philosophy (and Philosophers)?

• Blackboard Rumble: Why Are Physicists Hating On
  • At stake is a critical question living deep inside the heart of modern foundational physics: What are the limits of science?
  • Krauss invokes quantum field theory (QFT) and relies on its definition of nothing as the one that matters. Quantum fields are nature's most basic entity within the framework of modern physics. One of the coolest things about QFT's perspective is that all matter particles (quarks, electrons, etc.) are simply a manifestation or "configuration" of these background fields. Thus "nothing" from a quantum-field-theory perspective is nothing more a state of the field without particles.
  • Krauss was arguing that these "no particle" field states are (1) possible as a pre-condition for our universe and (2) inherently unstable. If you start with a universe with fields in a no-particle state — i.e., nothingness — then the laws of quantum mechanics allow them to spontaneously jump to configurations with lots of particles — i.e., something-ness.
  • David Albert was having none of it. As he correctly points out: Where do the fields come from? Better yet: Where do the laws of quantum mechanics come from?
  • over the last few decades, cosmology and foundational physics have become dominated by ideas that that appear to take a page from science fiction and, more importantly, remain firmly untethered to data.
  • Concepts like hidden dimensions of reality (string theory) or hidden infinite possible parallel universes (the multiverse) are radical revisions of the very concept of reality. Since detailed contact with experimental data might be decades away, theorists have relied mainly on mathematical consistency and "aesthetics" to guide their explorations. In light of these developments, it seems absurd to dismiss philosophy as having nothing to do with their endeavors.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Physics Vs. Philosophy: Really? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

• Physics Vs. Philosophy: Really? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

  • Albert claims that physics presumes the existence of fundamental fields in order to define nothing. Hence, it's not really nothing, but something.
  • he decried (as he did in his book, and Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg before him) philosophy and theology as useless wastes of time.
  • The central dogma of science is that nature is intelligible: with the diligent application of reason we can construct explanations of natural phenomena that can be tested and falsified. Within this framework, no explanation can be deemed final: as concepts and measuring tools evolve, so do our explanations of the world.
  • This strange notion comes from applying the rules of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole: close to the beginning, the entire universe can be thought as being a tiny particle, and thus must obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
  • In quantum mechanics, however, there is no such thing as complete nothingness: there is always a residual energy, which is called zero-point energy.
  • if we apply our current understanding of quantum mechanics to the universe, it should be filled with zero-point energy. So filled, in fact, that it wouldn't exist, having been forced to implode on itself right after the "beginning." To make sure this doesn't happen, we arbitrarily set it to zero or to a small value in our models. This conceptual challenge is sometimes called the "cosmological constant problem,"

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Brain drain

• Brain drain

  • It seems to me that aesthetics, criticism, musicology and law are real disciplines, but not sciences. They are not concerned with explaining some aspect of the human condition but with understanding it, according to its own internal procedures. Rebrand them as branches of neuroscience and you don’t necessarily increase knowledge: in fact you might lose it.
  • Brain imaging won’t help you to analyse Bach’s Art of Fugue or to interpret King Lear any more than it will unravel the concept of legal responsibility or deliver a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture; it won’t help you to understand the concept of God or to evaluate the proofs for His existence, nor will it show you why justice is a virtue and cowardice a vice. And it cannot fail to encourage the superstition which says that I am not a whole human being with mental and physical powers, but merely a brain in a box.
  • neuroenvy, which consist of a vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions.
  • Traditional attempts to understand consciousness were bedevilled by the ‘homunculus fallacy’, according to which consciousness is the work of the soul, the mind, the self, the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside. We cast no light on the consciousness of a human being simply by redescribing it as the consciousness of some inner homunculus. On the contrary, by placing that homunculus in some private, inaccessible and possibly immaterial realm, we merely compound the mystery
  • The homunculus is no longer a soul, but a brain, which ‘processes information’, ‘maps the world’, ‘constructs a picture’ of reality, and so on — all expressions that we understand, only because they describe conscious processes with which we are familiar. To describe the resulting ‘science’ as an explanation of consciousness, when it merely reads back into the explanation the feature that needs to be explained, is not just unjustified — it is profoundly misleading, in creating the impression that consciousness is a feature of the brain, and not of the person.
  • the conclusion depends on forgetting what the question might have been. It looks significant only if we assume that an event in a brain is identical with a decision of a person, that an action is voluntary if and only if preceded by a mental episode of the right kind, that intentions and volitions are ‘felt’ episodes of a subject which can be precisely dated
  • We can be conceptualised in two ways: as organisms and as objects of personal interaction. The first way employs the concept ‘human being’, and derives our behaviour from a biological science of man. The second way employs the concept ‘person’, which is not the concept of a natural kind, but of an entity that relates to others in a familiar but complex way that we know intuitively but find hard to describe. Through the concept of the person, and the associated notions of freedom, responsibility, reason for action, right, duty, justice and guilt, we gain the description under which human beings are seen, by those who respond to them as they truly are.
  • we understand people by facing them, by arguing with them, by understanding their reasons, aspirations and plans.
  • Most of our questions about persons and their doings are about interpretation: what did he mean by that? What did her words imply? What is signified by the hand of Michelangelo’s David? Those are real questions, which invite disciplined answers
  • But how do we move from the one concept of information to the other? How do we explain the emergence of thoughts about something from processes that reside in the transformation of visually encoded data? Cognitive science doesn’t tell us. And computer models of the brain won’t tell us either.
  • When it comes to the subtle features of the human condition, to the byways of culpability and the secrets of happiness and grief, we need guidance and study if we are to interpret things correctly. That is what the humanities provide,

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.