To be honest, what we need are philosophy PhDs publishing peer reviewed books and articles advancing these things (following the Bunge framework I discuss in Is Philosophy Stupid?).

The main barrier to that (besides academic philosophers having no interest in doing that) is that it is expensive. Even I cannot spend time doing that, as peer reviewed work earns no income, and I am income-dependent, all my hours are devoted to income generation, with little left for hitting arbitrary peer-review targets.

So I do the next best thing: blog. One could blog or vlog essays advancing this agenda.

That would not be ideal but it would at least be something; and if enough of it was good, we could build a network that might get the attention of academic philosophers someday (who are essentially “paid” by universities to produce peer reviewed work and thus are deciding what the field “publishes”), or that will fuel a more legitimate philosophy community outside academia that actually makes progress (with perhaps some smart and dedicated philosophers of wealth who do not need to work for a living and thus can devote their time to advancing the field, though I rarely see that happen).

So, I guess, that’s my best advice. It’s not great. But it’s all I can think of.

I’ve been looking for a systematic approach to an Aristotalean philosophy updated with Bayes’. I had in mind a few additional updates that are sorely needed. I look forward to going down all the side routes you link to here, to see if someone already laid them out.

Suffice it to say, I am extremely gratified to see someone with your academic chops to raise the banner of renwed interest in the systemization of philosophy, and one that is neither more platonic claptrap, pop-psychology soup of the day (eg, Robbins; Peterson), nor dogmatic cult masquerading as rationalism.

Aside from minor disputes and arguments over details, I anticipate my main question will be, “what can I do to help promote this framework?” And I don’t mean with mere money. That’s not a question I’m expecting a personal answer from you on, but if you’ve already addressed that question in a general way, I’ll be grateful to be pointed in that direction.

You hit the nail on the head about fallible memory. I held a vivid memory for half a century that in 1968 while my brother and I lived together and attended the University of Michigan we cut from newspapers articles about the Fischer-Spassky chess-championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland, studied the games move-by-move using a chess set, discussed brilliancies and blunders, worried when Fischer fell behind early, and felt elated when he triumphed. I remember where we sat and what chess set we used. And we watched masters’ and grandmasters’ running commentary upon each move on television. I remembered so clearly and would have sworn under oath that’s exactly what happened.

Only weeks ago, wanting to revisit the events, I Googled and was astonished to discover the tournament occurred in 1972! https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+fischer+spassky+championship&oq=when+was+fischer-spassky+champ&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j33i22i29i30.26562j1j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 At that time, I was in military service at Beale AFB, CA, 500 miles from my brother, without access to newspapers or television.

I remembered my father’s stories of eating at a Penny Cafeteria in Detroit during the Great Depression. I treasured those memories, as I treasure memories of all my father’s stories. A year ago, my brother and I discussed it, but he remembered it as a Nickel Cafeteria in Detroit. I Googled a year ago, only to find there were Penny Cafeterias in New York during the Great Depression.

What Einstein reputedly said seems relevant here: “Two things are infinite: human ignorance and the universe. And I’m not sure about the universe.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/942-two-things-are-infinite-the-universe-and-human-stupidity-and (unsourced) Oops! In the few seconds it took me to navigate from the quote to this comment, my memory transformed ‘stupidity’ into ‘ignorance.’ Ironic. You live and learn.

I doubt the explanation for such false memories lies in Satan’s minions’ invading a mind.

Always good to explore.

1) If, as you say, “all mental objects causally reduce to nonmental objects, without remainder,” and we haven’t observed nonmental objects making a choice, having emotions, thoughts, or intentions, etc. (think of a rock, a stream, the wind, an electron, a chemical reaction, etc.), where is the science that provides evidence for the leap that nonmental objects in sufficient combination and quantity can become mental objects capable of choice, emotion, thought, or intention? (In other words, where is the empirical evidence for the emergent consciousness hypothesis? Or is emergent consciousness just a logically consistent theory you favor?)

There are at least six extensive converging lines of empirical evidence to that conclusion. I cover this in detail in Sense and Goodness without God III.6, pp. 135-60. Apart from that the most informative article on this point is currently The Mind Is a Process Not an Object. But it doesn’t cover everything.

2) Consider these two cases: 1) You blink, but are focused on something else and aren’t aware you just blinked, or 2) You catch yourself blinking, completely aware that for a quick instant the world goes dark and then comes back into focus. The experience you sense and feel in the second case is qualitatively different than the first case, though both “blink” actions are identical. Which physical processes record the “qualia,” or experience of blinking in Case 2 versus Case 1? Is there any empirical evidence for how and why these subjective phenomenal experiences occur?

This is a question of the mechanics of information processing. There is abundant neuroscience on it. All of it physicalist.

First, nothing gets recorded the way you think (there is no video tape recorder in the brain). Vast empirical evidence has established all memories are reconstructive, i.e. your brain only stores the information needed to reconstruct the memory (and in result, it can screw that up quite easily, which is why memory is not superlatively reliable). The brain uses literally the same physical architecture to remember something seen, as to see it (there are not two separate structures; the exact same circuit is used for both), and only keys it with a corresponding signal from another circuit in the brain that “tells” you if you are seeing or remembering (and this circuit can malfunction, i.e. not turn on, during hallucination and lucid dreaming).

Second, when the brain notices a thing (this involves activation of the attentional circuits of the brain; which also can malfunction, which is one of the six reasons we know how this works), it records that information; whereas when it doesn’t notice a thing, it does not record anything (and indeed, in result, if you try to “remember” a thing you didn’t notice, your brain might inadvertently completely fabricate a memory to satisfy you, doing its best with the scant information it recorded). Indeed, even most of what you think you are noticing even in the moment, doesn’t actually exist (most background data in a visual field is fabricated by the brain, which “fills scenes in” with what it thinks is supposed to be there, which is how we fail to notice things not directly receiving our focused attention, hence the Invisible Gorilla).

The neuroscience literature on attentional states, subconscious perception, memory construction, and so forth is quite vast. I give a bibliography of some summaries of it in Sense and Goodness, but an enormous amount more has accumulated since 2005.

3) If we are simply beings comprised of nonmental particles, (molecules in motion or just brain fizz as some apologists have snidely protested), then why bother with morality at all? If all the Richard molecules are not qualitatively different from the molecules comprising a computer, why is it immoral to take offline and disassemble the Richard molecules versus those of the supercomputer? They both have hardware, they both run subroutines, they both store and process data. Why, in the grand scheme of things, does it matter which we destroy? Is that fact that one experiences “qualia” or self-awareness and the other does not the basis for secular morality? If so, then should we not extend all ethical laws equally to every being which experiences qualia?

Only cognitively social animals can be moral agents, just as only they can operate governments (other animals are incapable of comprehending or processing what we call morality or politics). This is a physical difference that produces a phenomenological and axiological difference. As to why cognitively capable beings should pursue moral behavior, see the articles on morality I reference in the article above (“In the matter of ethics”). On the moral status of animals lacking cognitive personhood, see my article Meat Not Bad.

I appreciate your opposition to Platonism. A while back I read a modern metaphysics text for the second time. Each chapter seized upon a linguistic oddity and conjured infinite numbers of entities to “solve” the linguistic “problem.” The text admitted to being Platonist. Just before finishing, I gave it away to save my sanity, what little remains. No surprise here: Plantinga’s “thought” heavily influenced the book.

Dogs and cats resemble each other. But in what does this resemblance consist? There must be an infinite number of intermediate entities transmitting that resemblance in all of its multifarious degrees of similarity.

1) If, as you say, “all mental objects causally reduce to nonmental objects, without remainder,” and we haven’t observed nonmental objects making a choice, having emotions, thoughts, or intentions, etc. (think of a rock, a stream, the wind, an electron, a chemical reaction, etc.), where is the science that provides evidence for the leap that nonmental objects in sufficient combination and quantity can become mental objects capable of choice, emotion, thought, or intention? (In other words, where is the empirical evidence for the emergent consciousness hypothesis? Or is emergent consciousness just a logically consistent theory you favor?)

2) Consider these two cases: 1) You blink, but are focused on something else and aren’t aware you just blinked, or 2) You catch yourself blinking, completely aware that for a quick instant the world goes dark and then comes back into focus. The experience you sense and feel in the second case is qualitatively different than the first case, though both “blink” actions are identical. Which physical processes record the “qualia,” or experience of blinking in Case 2 versus Case 1? Is there any empirical evidence for how and why these subjective phenomenal experiences occur?

3) If we are simply beings comprised of nonmental particles, (molecules in motion or just brain fizz as some apologists have snidely protested), then why bother with morality at all? If all the Richard molecules are not qualitatively different from the molecules comprising a computer, why is it immoral to take offline and disassemble the Richard molecules versus those of the supercomputer? They both have hardware, they both run subroutines, they both store and process data. Why, in the grand scheme of things, does it matter which we destroy? Is that fact that one experiences “qualia” or self-awareness and the other does not the basis for secular morality? If so, then should we not extend all ethical laws equally to every being which experiences qualia?

To be clear, my current vague, ill-thought “notion” is that your naturalistic philosophy is generally spot on. However, I don’t have the capacity to drill down as deeply as you do, and thus hope you can answer these questions.

Thanks,
Tom

Thanks for the thought-provoking reply and references. Having the brain of a decrepit old man with one foot in the grave, I forgot having read The Atheist’s Primer and its last chapter on error theory during your class a couple years ago.

I appreciated the SEP link, though on one reading parts were slightly over my head. I read Mackie’s error theory a few times in recent decades but didn’t realize error theories could extend beyond the domain of ethics.

I ordered the two science-of-humor books you recommended in Musical Aesthetics. Everyone regards Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a classic of humor, but in three tries I never got past page 45. Couldn’t “get” the jokes.

This is a good question. Because I find this a common hurdle for folks.

One way to grasp it is to remember it’s hylo-morphism: it’s not just “matter exists,” but what it is shaped into; thus space-time is part of it.

If you have an actual ball of clay in a space (and it would have to be in a space: a ball existing logically entails the existence of extended space), then you potentially have every possible shape that clay can be remolded into. It could be a clay pyramid, a clay dinosaur, even (if there is enough of it) a complete scale model of the entire Earth and all its cities and inhabitants, or likewise of Mordor or Tattooine.

Nothing more need exist for that to be the case. It’s not like you need a new law of physics that “allows” a lump of clay forming a ball to be capable of reshaping into a dinosaur or anything else, as if you could subtract that law, and suddenly every effort to reshape it would fail because it cannot be any other shape. To the contrary, you would need to add a law to prevent the ball being reshaped by any cause that would do so. In the absence of laws, anything can reshape the clay, into anything.

The clay ball thus inherently already contains all logically possible clay things (of the same quantity). As soon as that ball exists, all those potential reshapings of the ball also at the same time exist. They don’t exist “somewhere else,” like Plato said. They are simply an inherent and inalienable potential of the ball. The ball’s existence logically entails these potentials. And the only difference between an actual ball and a potential pyramid is that the ball is actual, the pyramid is not. But the potential to be a pyramid actually exists in the ball. If it can be a ball, it can be a pyramid. Unless something stops it (which requires some causal force; in other words, something added on, not subtracted from).

This can then be extended all the way down. The clay is just quarks and electrons arranged a certain way in space; so the clay is potentially gold: just move some particles around; or even a whole living, sentient person: just move some particles around. And quarks and electrons might just be wiggles, warps, in a multidimensional space; so reshape the space, and they become neutrinos and gluons, or even nothing: just straighten and flatten them out.

If everything is just the shaping of stuff (the only difference between a ball of clay and a person is what arrangement the material is in; there is literally nothing more to it), then every actual thing contains every potential thing. It can’t not. Yes, those potential things don’t actually exist; but that’s what makes them a “potential” and not an “actual” thing. The potentials only actually exist as potentials, in the things that can be reshaped into them; and they exist because the actual things can be reshaped. The possibility of reshaping an actual thing simply is a potential thing.

Notice no “mind” has to exist for a clay ball to potentially be reshaped into a pyramid or a dinosaur. It’s not as if, were we not watching, clay would suddenly become invincibly petrified and incapable of being reshaped by any force. The potential is not dependent on a mind. It is dependent solely on the material and the space it occupies. Minds are irrelevant.

And if matter is just reshaped space, we don’t even need matter. Just twist up the space a certain way, and you have quarks and leptons. (See my article on Superstring Theory that I cited.) And if any space can be stretched into any other, then even a single point of spacetime contains all potentiality, because it can be stretched out into a wider space, and twisted up to form the things of any universe. (See my article on the Problem with Nothing that I cited.)

And so on. (e.g. see my old article on Moral Ontology.)

On where Aristotle says all this (conceptually, that is; obviously in his case he was not yet aware of particulars like subatomic physics, but he’d agree with my extension of his metaphysics of potentiality to it) see the article I linked to, Thomism: The Bogus Science. Important content is found in his writings on the mind, on the generation of animals, and beyond; not just his physics and metaphysics.

But yes, Aristotle can be hard to follow, especially as most translations are not that great (every translation contains the biases and assumptions of the translator, and thus Aristotle’s works are often corrupted by Medieval Christian notions modern translators have inherited through the Western tradition).

I’m familiar with Franklin’s work. It came out after Sense and Goodness, but I would definitely have cited it in its section on the ontology of mathematics. I concur with his overall position. That he basically ended up the same place I did, independently of each other, is an example of converging evidence supporting the conclusion that we’re right about it. I link to several articles in the article above about the ontology of mathematics that you will find sound pretty much like him.

“philosophy of religion is an error theory”: Please explain.

There is a succinct explanation in Malcolm Murray’s Atheist Primer, which is the singularly most useful summary of the case against gods, and has a whole chapter on religion as error theory. In short, an error theory in philosophy is the view that the subject matter in question is actually all false, and thus its mostly just arguing over non-existent things. It would be as if we had an entire field called Philosophy of Winged Unicorns. The entire content of it would either be false statements or arguments to the effect that the rest of its content is false statements.

Take away the supernatural, and philosophy of religion simply becomes philosophy of culture, a.k.a. cultural anthropology and sociology, and inferences drawn from their scientific findings.

Has a science of aesthetics been accomplished?

Yes. Or at least, it has begun and is making progress (it’s a young science). See the first half of my article Musical Aesthetics for examples.