update

This account is linked to my undergraduate email address, so I'll be switching to a new location soon.

Since beginning this blog a few years ago, I've read a lot and become a better thinker. I don't agree with everything I've previously written on this blog. More significantly though, my style of thought has changed: the informal, existentialist, and polemical styles with which I wrote most of my previous entries no longer resonates with with the analytic way of thinking that I've gradually come to adopt.

By "analytic thinking" I simply mean that I now wish to reason through things with high level of rigor. The rigor to which I now aspire demands a good deal of formalization, meaning that intuitions, judgments, reasons, and principles are to be stated in the form of premises, which are connected via rules of inference which lead to conclusions that are necessarily true if the premises are true. Reasoning in such a manner requires stage setting through the development of concepts and making of distinctions.

When I take the time to think about something, I care about getting it right. I'm inclined to think that this analytic procedure tracks the truth much better than informal reasoning. Unfortunately, it's also very slow. Logic chopping and attention to detail are required and these take time. The end product can generally be stated concisely, so I anticipate that future posts will be brief. Some posts may simply consist in the elucidation of a distinction that I find significant.

My primary interests are currently in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. My specific interests in these areas have become rather technical and I would rather work on longer papers in these areas than blog posts. So, I will likely write on topics in which I have secondary interests: rationality, ethics, philosophical methodology, and political theory.

worldview update (Facebook religious views extension)

Endorsing particular religious propositions is easy. Giving propositions meaning -- that is turning them into something other than thought ending cliches-- is more difficult, but this is a precondition of propositions being either true or false. Propositions that do not meet this condition are nonsensical.

There are different ways of meeting this condition. One is through the association with other propositions and attitudes. In practice, this condition can be met by a group's treatment of a given set of propositions. When propositions are merely meaningful in this sense, and are treated as merely meaningful in this sense, then they are better understood in terms of their assertability conditions than their truth conditions. I think most religious propositions meet this condition, but are not treated as if they merely meet this condition.

Another condition under which propositions can be given meaning is establishing what the world would have to be like for the proposition to be true. If a proposition has no such conditions, then it does not make a meaningful claim about the world. (I'm here concerned with descriptive propositions, not normative ones.) I believe that many religious claims fall into this category. Assertability conditions often accompany truth conditions. Thus, persons can mistakenly use and endorse a religious proposition as being meaningful in both senses when it is in fact meaningful in only the former sense. When this happens, I am ignostic toward, i.e. I reject as meaningless, what the proposition says about the world and reject as false the belief that the proposition says anything --true or false-- about the world at all.

When religious propositions do say something meaningful about the world further questions can be asked: Are they true? What would count as evidence in their favor or against them? What evidence do we have? How can we get more? Would their truth or falsity be an ethically commendable way for the world to be?

These questions are difficult to answer objectively, and pretending otherwise makes them more so. For my part, I find many things in the world that I cannot explain, but I have found no effective religious explanation that does not introduce further phenomena that requires more explanation than the purportedly explained phenomena. I see no difficulty in regarding, as most religious believers do for religions other than their own, all religions as historical contingencies. Unsurprisingly, system of thought that are built for self-replication, but not self-correction, do not have a good truth-tracking track record. Among other reasons, since religious doctrines generally conceive of themselves as something other than historically contingent, suppose that they offer a method for acquiring truth, and suppose that that their metaphysics are both meaningful and true, I reject religion. (For the record, I do not see all forms of Buddhism as religious, and am sympathetic with the ones that are not.)

Am I certain that all religions are false or nonsensical? No, but since "knowing" is typically understood as meeting a standard of evidence that falls short of certainty, I am comfortable saying that I know all religions are false in the same sense that religious believers often claim to know the falsity of religions other than their own.

I used to see religion as a matter of central importance, but this is no longer the case. I care far less about religion than (serious) religious believers. My interests have shifted to philosophical questions, which I care about a great deal. They include: What are time and space? What aspects of experience correspond to aspects of the mind-independent world? What is the nature of the mind, consciousness, and the self?

If you've read this far, you might be interested in my philosophical orientation. Politically, I have Rawlsian and social anarchist sympathies, although I'm not convinced that politics is worth spending time on; we might be better off devoting time to the ethics of our everyday lives than endlessly discussing the national political scene over which we have little control. I do not think punishment is ever justified as an end in itself. I am a recently turned vegetarian. I believe killing (most) animals is permissible, but causing suffering is not; and I think anyone who thinks about the matter seriously and objectively will reach the same conclusion. I see my not currently being a vegan as a moral flaw. Barring a catastrophic turn of events, I think I will have lived a life worth living and that I will be lucky in this regard. I think that most (human and non-human) lives in the history have not been worth living, and am thus skeptical that the existence of the world is a good thing.

I am agnostic about free will, the persistence of the self, and physicalism. If I had to guess, I lean towards the existence of free will and its incompatibility with determinism, the non-persistence of the self, the falsity (to the extent that it is well defined) of physicalism. I am a mysterian about the abstract realm. I think our ordinary conceptions of time and space are probably significantly flawed in ways we cannot conceive. I view various forms of reductionism as tempting, intellectually corrosive, and probably false. At my core, I am a rationalist: humans have innate, amazing, and generally underutilized capacities to consider things objectively independently of the subjective contingencies of their particular point of view and to offer reasons for belief and action that are acceptable to anyone who takes such a perspective. Theories that do not acknowledge this and the causal efficacy of reasons are probably false, not compelling (if one follows them to their conclusions), and radically skeptical. Such relativistic, reductionist, and subjectivist theories are tempting because rationality compels us to believe everything is explainable, including rationality; and because we cannot conceive of a theory of rationality from the outside, these theories offer a superficial escape from this difficulty by denying the existence of rationality or asserting that (without explaining how) it can be reduced to something we can explain.