On free will-2: The Ghost in the Machine

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) didn’t think much of Rene Descartes’ idea of a disembodied mind, using its free will, acting as some kind of captain of the body, and coined the derogatory term ‘the Ghost in the Machine’ for it.

There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory… The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function. Human bodies are in space and are subject to mechanical laws which govern all other bodies in space… But minds are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws…

…Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” (quoted by Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 9)

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Federal judge says OK is not ok

On election day, the state of Oklahoma passed by a whopping margin of 70-30 a referendum that amended the state constitution to prohibit courts from the consideration of Sharia or international law in their verdicts.

Stephen Colbert applauds this action.

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But now a federal judge has placed a temporary restraining order preventing the amendment from taking effect pending a hearing on November 22.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that the devious jihadists have infiltrated the federal judiciary in Oklahoma as a first step in their plan to impose Sharia law on the entire US.

On free will-1: Cartesian dualism and the Cartesian Theater

It’s been awhile since I inflicted on this blog’s readers a long multi-part series of posts but I have decided to look at the question of free will, something that I have not addressed before, and this is such a weighty and controversial subject that it requires a somewhat lengthy discussion.

It used to be thought that what distinguished living things from inanimate matter was the presence of some mysterious life force, an élan vital. Modern biology has dispelled that myth of a vital essence, replacing it with the understanding that biological systems are nothing more than the working out of the laws of physics and chemistry on atoms and molecules. But there are some forms of vitalistic thinking that are still extant because people tend to want to cling on to the idea that there is something special about living things, especially human beings.
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Talk about ingratitude

Apparently there is this church in Spain that has been under construction since 1882 and is not due to be finished until at least 2026. It looks to me like they are way overdue to find a new construction firm. Pope Ratzinger consecrated the church on his recent trip so now they can at least hold masses there.

Architect Antoni Gaudi was a devout Catholic and believed that the new church would be an expression of “the divine history of the salvation of man through Christ incarnate, given to the world by the Virgin Mary”. He was so dedicated to this project that he began work on it in 1883 and from 1911 onwards made it his only occupation, spending “the next 15 years living and working on site as a virtual recluse, supervising work”.

In return for all this selfless devotion, god caused a tram to run over and kill Gaudi in 1926.

We should not be surprised. God has a funny way of showing gratitude for the unquestioning faith he says he wants, like when he caused the deaths of all of Job’s ten children just for the hell of it, even though Job was even more faithful to him than Gaudi.

For those not familiar with the Job story, here’s a nice summary.

Pope on the run

One positive sign about the impact of the rise of atheism is that pope Ratzinger feels the need to constantly warn against it on his travels. After doing so in England, he has felt obliged to do so in Spain as well, saying, “The clash between faith and modernity is happening again, and it is very strong today.” I love the fact that uses the word ‘modernity’ to contrast to faith, thus reinforcing the idea that religious faith is a medieval relic.

Spain is a country in which 73% identify themselves as Catholic although only about 14% attend mass regularly, has a socialist government that has pushed through some reforms such as ending obligatory religious education in state schools and legalizing abortion, divorce, and gay marriage.

One positive sign about the impact of the rise of atheism is that pope Ratzinger feels the need to constantly warn against it on his travels. After doing so in England, he has felt obliged to do so in Spain as well, saying, “The clash between faith and modernity is happening again, and it is very strong today.” I love the fact that uses the word ‘modernity’ to contrast to faith, thus reinforcing the idea that religious faith is a medieval relic.

What to expect in the next few months

Now that the mid-term elections are over, what can we expect to see in the next few months? As I said in yesterday’s post, the advantage to the leadership of the two parties of so-called ‘divided’ government, where one party controls one part and the other party another part, is that they can blame lack of action on the issues their core supporters care about to this gridlock while they can be ‘bipartisan’ when it comes to serving the needs of the oligarchy.
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Abortion is causing the US to go bankrupt?

It is very easy to find bizarre stuff on the web. I usually don’t read the comments sections on the more popular political blogs because they quickly veer into incoherent rants. But once in a while my eye catches something that is so quirky that I become curious as to how any rational mind can think like that.

Take this comment in response to a Politico post about raising the debt ceiling:

END ABORTION NATIONALLY OR FACE NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY. The most recent increase in the U.S. debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion by H.J.Res. 45 was signed into law on February 12, 2010. The amount of national debt accumulated from 1791 until Roe V. Wade made abortion legal on January 22, 1973 was about $444 billion. Do the math to find the % of the total national debt prior abortion being made legal nationally. I predict that US Congress will raise the debt ceiling again. We will go bankrupt as a nation because of the national sin of legal abortion. There is a solution. Abortionility, A plague from sea to sea. To Christ our knees must bend, Then Roe V. Wade will end. 2 Chronicles 7:14

In case you are curious what the Chronicles reference is and don’t carry your Bible around with you all the time, here is the verse: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

The person who wrote this is educated enough to write grammatically and is knowledgeable enough to marshall some fairly esoteric facts to buttress his argument. But then the neurons seem to suddenly start firing randomly, leading to a chain of reasoning that is bizarre, to say the least. Basically the author seems to be saying that god started rapidly increasing the US national debt as punishment for legalizing abortion and will erase the debt if we stop the practice. Who knew?

Not only is it a textbook example of confusing correlation with causation, it is also an example of how religion subverts people’s reasoning skills.

A good election night for the Democratic Party

As predicted the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives, have a smaller majority in the Senate, and lost many governorships. The election results are widely viewed as a major setback for that party, with even President Obama calling it a ‘shellacking’, so why do I think it was a good night for them? For reasons that I outline below and elaborated on in a post at the beginning of this year, this post-election situation will be less embarrassing for them than one in which they control both houses of Congress and the White House.

As I have said repeatedly, the US is a one-party system with two factions, labeled Republican and Democratic. This one party serves the interests of an increasingly rapacious elite that seeks to divert more and more wealth from the public good for their private benefit, and the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic factions seeks to accommodate them. This agenda is profoundly anti-democratic and thus must be covert and is never publicly articulated. One has to infer the existence of this agenda from the fact that since 1980, there has been a steady and massive shift in the income and wealth distribution of this country towards a small elite, irrespective of which party controlled the branches of government, and this could only occur because of policies that both parties collude to create.

The two factions differ on some social issues (abortion, gays, religion, guns, immigration, race, etc.) and it tends to be these issues that are publicly discussed, often at great volume. Each faction also talks in vague terms about jobs and taxes and trade and cutting spending, but never in terms specific enough that one can pin them down to any specific policy proposal. Each party leadership feeds their factional base with rhetoric they do not really support just in order to keep them in line and voting for them, but hopes that they will not have to actually implement them. They try to meet their party supporters’ demands as minimally as possible, but for this strategy to work, they need plausible excuses for why they keep failing to follow through on their promises.

For the Democrats, winning the presidency and big majorities in the House and Senate in 2008 was embarrassing because their supporters now expected them to actually carry out their promises for major health care reform such as a single payer system, wind down the two wars, close down Guantanamo, reverse the trend towards a national security state with all its concomitant violations of the constitutional protections of basic liberties, and so on. The Democratic leadership clearly had no intention of doing any of these things and had to try and deflect blame by pointing to the Republican use of the Senate filibuster rules to explain their failure. But their supporters were not impressed, rightly suspecting that appealing to this arcane and self-imposed rule of the Senate was merely an excuse for a lack of will, and that a forceful president and party would have been able to find ways to circumvent it. After all, George W. Bush never had such control of Congress and yet he managed to get his favored policies passed.

Obama and the Democratic Party, rather than being apologetic about their lack of progress, then deliberately and publicly denigrated their core supporters, the very people who put them into power in 2008, as being ungrateful and having unrealistic expectations, thus further dampening their enthusiasm. Is it any wonder that there was a so-called ‘enthusiasm gap’ between supporters of the two parties when it came to voting? Ted Rall calls this Democratic Party strategy ‘political suicide’.

My main regret with the elections was the defeat of Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the sole Senator to vote against the infamous USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, that is responsible for many of the abuses of basic rights and liberties that we now see. That was an act of political courage and history will place him alongside Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who were the only senators who resisted being steamrolled into approving the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 that President Lyndon Johnson then exploited to expand the Vietnam war.

Now that the Democrats have lost control of the House, they can more comfortably repudiate their supporters and capitulate to the oligarchy’s agenda, all the while saying that now they truly lack the power to carry out their supporters’ wishes and thus must compromise with their Republican opponents. This is exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1994, selling out his party’s supporters after losing control of both houses of Congress. Clinton handily won re-election in 1996 and I expect Obama to do the same in 2012, because he can blame the Republican-led house for his inability to achieve anything meaningful.

The Republican Party leadership also faces a similar challenge. They don’t really care about cutting spending or balancing the budget or paring down the debt or increasing jobs, the things they sold to their supporters as key issues. What they want to do, like the Democrats, is cater to the very wealthy even if the country goes broke in the process. They will try and sell their tea party supporters the idea that it was because they do not control the Senate and the presidency that they could not carry out their wishes. How well the tea partiers react to this inevitable betrayal will be interesting to observe.

The main difference between Republican Party rule and Democratic Party rule is that the former will bring the country to fiscal ruin faster and is more openly callous about the harm they inflict on the poor and middle class in their desire to serve the rich. The Democrats do it more slowly and with more hand wringing about how sad it all is. Although the Democrats can stop Republican House initiatives either in the Senate or with a presidential veto, I suspect that they won’t do that with issues that benefit the oligarchy, so the only achievements of the next Congress will be those things that serve the interests of the oligarchy, and these will be done quietly and with little fuss.

Next: So what should we watch for in the coming months?