SelfishWizard

Mistakes Were Made

Revisado: 06-27-24

Make no mistake. This is a remarkable book. Glenn Loury is an Ivy League educated black economist who was also a crack addict, womanizer, pool and chess hustler as well as a high school car thief (he needed the car for a date). Loury fathered his first three children out of wedlock and refused to acknowledge one of his sons until the son reached adulthood. He admits cheating on all of his wives and girlfriends except for his last wife whom he married at age 70 and is still married to. Confined to a drug rehab facility he was eventually thrown out of, Glenn first puts towels under the door so he can smoke crack undetected. This and most other things he gets away with.

Glenn admits to leading double and sometimes triple lives as an accomplished academic who was considered for a job in the Reagan administration until the FBI investigation uncovered the young Mistress he had put up in an apartment. Glenn has slept with students, colleagues, prostitutes, random women he approached on the street or in bars and when he manages to seduce them feels he deserves these pleasures as a Tom Wolfeian "Master of the Universe." When his wife Linda who is desperate for a child has a miscarriage, Glenn is relieved, as he won't have to shoulder the responsibility of yet another child. Glen admits all this and much much more.

Loury grew up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago. His mother repeatedly cuckolded his father with slick charming hustlers, bearing Glenn a sister by one of these adulterers. Perhaps Glenn unconsciously sought to become one of the hustlers his alcoholic mother was attracted to but he does not seem to be aware of that possibility. As a youthful math prodigy and an economist, Loury does not fulfill his early promise and bounces from one Ivy League school and elite institution to another embarrassing his Harvard sponsors with an arrest for crack possession and also with a charge of assault by his kept mistress.

You can't make all this stuff up. And who would want to? What some may consider worse is Glenn's lack of sympathy for affirmative action and black victims of police brutality. But Glenn is untroubled by these positions or his attraction to Donald Trump, until Trump tries to overthrow the government on January 6. He does admit his wrongs and transgressions, confesses to narcissism and bad behavior and often expresses regret at how badly he hurt his wives, lovers and children. He never spares himself with these remarkably honest admissions. But he repeatedly states that he is living a game under different cover stories and ultimately it seems that underneath it all Glenn still believes that he was just having fun. And maybe that and this book is his final cover story.

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Robert Sapolsky's Obtuse Determinism

Revisado: 12-02-23

Robert Sapolsky is a hard determinist who believes that the god of cause and effect created everything from every action you take to every thought you have. We humans, says Sapolsky, don't have free will but are instead determined to do every thing we do without having any choice in the matter. And the universe was determined to evolve as it has since the Big Bang, although he admits he doesn’t know what caused that. Yet Sapolsky never tries to argue or explain why the universe must be deterministic, he merely baldly asserts that it is deterministic, listing countless examples of how our behavior might be influence by our environment and genes. Influenced however, is not determined. And Sapolsky’s is nothing more than a straw man argument. No one would dispute that behavior is influenced by genes, the environment and our interactions with the world. But influences are not deterministic. Our universe, as quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle so clearly tells us ,is probabilistic and not deterministic. We have ranges of possible behavior and on average we choose within those ranges.

Biological organisms make decisions in response to their environment based on their own personal self-interest. As separate beings, humans must live for their own sake and make decisions in every moment to survive and get what they want in life. Behavior comes from human goals, needs and desires. We do things because we want to do them not because we are determined to do them. It is hopeless sophistry to assert that whether we go to Burger King or McDonalds, we never had any choice in the matter.

Sapolsky denies humans all responsibility for their own actions. Whether you are a murderer, rapist, torturer or serial killer, Sapolsky thinks it’s not your fault. He also believes that society should quarantine and not punish criminals and that our criminal justice system should be changed to recognize our lack of responsibility for whatever it is we do. Sapolsky fails to see the glaring contradiction in this idea, which undermines his entire deterministic argument. If criminal behavior is deterministic then so is society’s response to it. You can no more change the criminal justice system than you can change human behavior. This is a grotesque flaw in the reasoning of activist determinists like Sapolsky and retributive justice advocate Gregg Caruso. You can’t claim that criminals aren’t responsible for their crimes yet then assert that the criminal justice system is responsible for its own unjust punishments. Meanwhile Sapolsky’s book treats us to lists of murderers serial killers and mass murderers from Ted Bundy to Anders Breivik. The point of this litany is hard to understand but he seems to wants us to forgive these murderers because they had no choice but to commit the horrific crimes they were convicted of.

What Sapolsky doesn’t even seem to dimly grasp is that if there is no free will, there is also no morality, no responsibility and no possibility for human choice in anything we do. There can be no other outcomes than what is determined by the mechanism of cause and effect. We are just puppets and Sapolsky thinks we should learn to love our strings. But in a determinist universe the word “should” has no meaning. We just are what we are, and will be what we will be, and it’s hard to see why anyone in such a world would even trouble themselves to write a book about it. But I guess he was determined to have done it. Hopefully, you will not feel the need to read it.

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esto le resultó útil a 9 personas

An incomplete history of comic books

Revisado: 09-05-22

I came to this book because of how much I liked Philip Ball's" Beyond Weird" but was disappointed in this book's thin premise and its failure to come to grips with the purpose, function and effects of the myths themselves. Unimaginably, the book does not even mention Joseph Cambell's thought or work which thoroughly analyzed the meaning and function of societal myths and their underpinnings. Ball simply describe comic book characters and their evolution. And even then he really only covers DC Comics in depth. The much richer and deeper myth universe of the Marvel comics universe is barely touched upon. I kept waiting for the book to discuss the meaning of myths and their place in society with some effort to address Campbell's ideas. There was none. George Lucas the creator of Star Wars has often acknowledged his debt to Campbell as do many Holiwood screenwriters. Campbell pointed out the archetypal nature of myths and how they reflect the reality of basic human concerns, reinforce social cohesion and cooperation and create or reflect ideals. Religious myths of course have the same function, with the god myth serving to enforce behavioral and moral standards of behavior. Ball addresses none of these issues and doesn't seem to even know whoJoseph Campbell is. Consequently, Ball's book lacks intellectual substance and is reduced to a mere history of DC comic book characters. combined with interminable discussions of Frankenstein, Dracula, Robinson Crusoe stories which are not brought together with any unifying thread or idea but become mere recitations of the story and the authors' personal history and problems. The book is better at giving the details of Mary Shelley, Daniel Defoe and Bram Stoker's biographies than it is at explicating the significance of the myths they created. In short there is little thoughtful discussion and too much trivial comic book history in this book.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Nagel sets teleology & mysticism over materialism

Revisado: 09-03-22

In this short yet remarkably unconvincing book Thomas Nagel would like to convince us of the existence of objective universal values and morality. In short he believes in moral realism and thinks that evolutionary biology and physicalism/materialism cannot explain the development of moral values. He also rejects moral subjectivism, arguing that objective moral values must exist and that the universe has a teleological structure. Nagel implies that its purpose involves giving rise to conscious creatures who have values. Nagel’s reasoning here is as circular as it is tortured.

Nagel never says was what these objective values are or where they came from or how we are supposed to identify them. This last would not be an easy task when each culture, religion and ideology has different (sometimes wildly different) moral beliefs. To illustrate, Nagel says pleasure is good and pain is bad. Presumably he means for the person experiencing it rather than some unaffected observer. Yet even this simple statement is obviously wrong. Pain is essential to human survival as it allows us to avoid injury and harm to ourselves. Pain is like radar indicating danger is near. That is an exceedingly good warning system to have. And pleasure can be very dangerous indeed. Cocaine, speed, alcohol and multiple sex orgies can all bring great pleasure but they may also do us serious harm. So Nagel’s dichotomy is far too simplistic.

As another example, Nagel says infanticide is an objective moral evil. But does he include abortion as infanticide? Is he not aware that Sparta one of the ancient world’s most successful societies left defective children to die of exposure on a rock and refused to care for them? Can he not imagine that parents about to be taken prisoner in a concentration or death camp might not want to spare their child suffering through that experience? It is obvious that moral questions are not only contextual and fact and culture specific but subjective in every case.

A much more obvious source of moral values is the need for cooperation in specific groups based on the interests of the group and its members. That explains why morality differs from group to group, religion to religion and culture to culture. Morality is necessary as a matter of group and individual self-interest but there is nothing objective or universal about it.
That’s why Islamic fundamentalist morality is so wildly different from liberal democratic morality. In this book, Nagel misses many of those complexities and uses eliminative materialism as a straw man that can’t deal with issues of consciousness and values. While materialism certainly doesn't address these issues very well, it is not the only alternative explanation for human values to Nagel’s teleological mysticism.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Essential Reading for Understanding China and Xi

Revisado: 08-22-22

Expert sinologist and former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has written a stunning tour de force on developing Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping and the existential challenges it presents for Asia, Europe and the US. Rudd narrates the book and is fluent in Mandarin so there are none of the amateurish mistakes one sometimes encounters in audiobooks on China.

Rudd starts out by outlining the key ten concentric circles of current Chinese policy which include, fundamentally for Xi, staying in power personally and keeping China under tightened control of the Chinese Communist Party and an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state which has deemphasized and even prohibited talk of human rights and democracy. Rudd makes crystal clear Xi’s goals in a way that is hardly subject to dispute and lays out a remarkably thoughtful and well considered analysis of Xi’s future plans which include building a Chinese military that can defeat the US in combat in Asia, can retake Taiwan even if defended by the US, Australia and Japan and extending China’s maritime presence in the South and East China Sea to the exclusion of all other countries which might challenge its power.

Rudd points out that after Xi is confirmed as effective dictator for life at the November 2022 Party Congress, Xi expects to move advance his military goals toward reclaiming Taiwan in the late 2020s or early 2030s when he is still in power. At the same time, China has through its Belt and Road projects and numerous Asian diplomatic and economic and UN initiatives filled the power vacuum left by the US’s abandonment of its traditional international commitments and role to form new alliances from which the US is effectively excluded.

Rudd also outlines in detail the tremendous damage done to the US international position and diplomatic alliances by the US government’s chaotic withdrawal or disruption of its international alliances under the Trump Administration’s grotesque diplomatic incompetence which left in tatters so many important prior US alliances. The damage has been irreparable but the US still has some opportunities to strengthen new alliances like the Quad to restrain Chinese expansion. But we are far behind both in planning and execution of the necessary steps to prevent China from pushing out the US and becoming the world’s greatest power. It is not too late to respond, but the US appears to lack the determination and focus to do what is necessary while Xi is laser focused on getting what he wants and on pushing US power out of Asia.

At the end of the book Rudd outlines in detail what he sees as the necessary steps to protect Taiwan and contain Chinese power within reasonable limits but acknowledges this could easily be a losing battle. The defense and foreign ministers of every North American, European and Asian government should read this book. It is important and it is alarming.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Separating the Science from the Nonsense

Revisado: 08-16-22

Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics is a highly informative big thought book on the important big ideas in physics and philosophy. Dr. Hossenfelder is at her usual best, highly intelligent, clear-headed logical and uncompromising in addressing the many attempts to pass off speculative metaphysics and quasi-religious ideologies as science.

Sabine is an expert at puncturing myths and pseudo-scientific nonsense that some attempt to pass off as science. No we do not live in a simulation and religious theories that postulate a god or creator based on fine tuning are not scientific. Dr. Hossenfelder does a great job dissecting specious arguments that the Multiverse idea is compelled by science. Multiverse theories are speculative metaphysics, not science. The simulation theory gets similar well deserved treatment as speculation, not science. And no, the universe is not just a mathematical structure. And it does not think either. So much for Panpsychism.

The author is very good at applying her rigorous Germanic logic to the big questions of science and philosophy. Her explanations are clear, insightful and phrased in a way that helps a lay reader understand them in a way they may not have before.

The one area that Hossenfelder gives a rather superficial short-hand answer to is the metaphysical question of Free Will. For Hossenfelder the answer is simple. “The future is fixed except for random quantum fluctuations that we do not control.” The Author views this sentence as dispositive of the question and repeats it numerous times. It isn’t dispositive. The fact that the laws of particle physics are deterministic (but not predictable because of randomness) or difficult to predict because of chaos theory, has nothing to do with the question of the freedom of biological organisms to do as they like. Physics is the study of the inanimate not the animate. Humans can generally act only in ways that they perceive to be in their own interest. In effect, they do what they want. That’s the essence of free will. The fact that the movements of particles under the Standard Model are largely deterministic doesn’t bear on the question of whether biological organisms can do what they like. The book’s approach to Free will is thus its weakest point.

But there is much to like here, and Hossenfelder gives great clarity to many difficult problems. Existential Physics is well worth reading and it is also very much worth watching the informative videos on her YouTube channel.

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esto le resultó útil a 20 personas

Morality based on Deeply Pragmatic Utilitarianism

Revisado: 12-16-21

This is a very thoughtful and scrupulously fair-minded book that does an excellent job of laying out in a clear and logical manner the origins of morality. It is weakest where the author is advocating his own brand of pragmatic utilitarianism and at its best in describing how moral theories work and why it has been difficult for philosophers and scientists to reach any kind of consensus regarding a believable moral system. Greene, who appeared in a December 6, 2021 Sean Carroll Mindscape podcast, is a well known Harvard professor of psychology specializing in researching moral problems. He begins by showing that morality evolved within groups to facilitate cooperation among group or tribal members. The origins of morality are therefore inherently tribal in nature. A group’s morality is usually somewhat effective within a uniform homogenous culture in resolving conflicts, because people in such cultures understand the need to cooperate, collaborate and avoid conflicts within their group.
In other words people instinctively follow the rules of the culture they grew up in. This group or tribal morality can be sorely tested when conflicts arise among different tribes with different moral cultures. We did not evolve to be terribly concerned about killing, enslaving or making war on enemy tribes and in war we tolerate behavior that would obviously not be tolerated within our tribal cultural.

Greene’s proposal for a universal morality is his own brand of pragmatic utilitarianism which he conceives of as designed to maximize the experience or happiness of each human while valuing each human equally. Of course, we don’t actually value each human equally and never will. We instinctively value our mates, children, friends and colleagues far more than we do unrelated strangers. That’s because we have nothing but an abstract interest in how far away strangers live.

And this attempt to reconcile our self interested tribal behaviour with a broader version of the greater good is where Greene goes wrong. People are motivated by self-interest not by a desire to help strangers. But Greene is asking us to value the lives of strangers in the same way we do our own and he asks the we give resources to help far-away peoples in need with whom we have no relationship or interest because he wants us to value the happiness of all people equally even if they are our enemies.

His goal in doing this is to maximize global happiness, a longtime utilitarian pipe dream. To do that you have to posit an objective greater good which he says is “happiness.” This is defining a greater moral good as the sum of a huge number of individual subjective experiences that are inaccessible and cannot be measured. So that’s not the way human beings work or can be made to work. We can no more measure happiness than we can any other subjective experience. Because happiness is not something that has the same meaning to different people. It is personal individual, value laden and subjective. Greene argues that happiness can be measured, but that is obviously not the case as we don’t have any access to the subjective experience of others.

Nor is there any reason to care for far away strangers as much as we do our families and that does not even seem to be a remotely desirable outcome. Animals are born to take care of themselves. If they want to help others that is great. If they don’t wish to be “altruistic” that is their own business and a path they are free to choose.

Greene ends up in the curious position of arguing for an ideal moral philosophy when the first half of his book is entirely devoted to demonstrating that there is no such thing as an ideal moral philosophy,. He concedes that there is no moral truth and no human rights since there is no ultimate basis for establishing those things.

As noted above, with nothing else to fall back on Greene argues for maximizing happiness. But what makes some people happy makes others miserable, so happiness can never be a measure for a moral system as everyone is made happy by different things.

Adding pragmatism to utilitarianism does nothing to solve the problem that there is no such thing as a measurable or objective greater good. And that’s because there is no understandable method to derive the best pragmatic solution. Ultimately we all just do what we like and you don’t need moral philosophy for that. Greene’s only solution to this is to suggest that we think about moral problems instead of reacting to them instinctively with an automatic response. This is a reference to Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”. But no matter how slowly you think and how many ridiculous trolley problems you explore, it won’t be slow enough to come up with a clear or workable moral philosophy.

In summary, Greene is great at tearing down every other moral system but he is terrible at establishing his own. He should have taken to heart the lessons of the first half of his book and recognized that there is no ideal moral system. They are all just products of social groups and that is not going to change no matter how hard or pragmatically utopian utilitarian happiness maximizers try to implement their ideas.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Chalmers' search for Consciousness

Revisado: 11-16-21

David Chalmers' extravagant philosophy of consciousness begins with philosophical zombies who do everything we do but are not conscious. This is a fatal flaw. Such philosophical zombies are not only impossible but inconceivable. They are a contradiction in terms. If you could have zombies that can do what humans do without consciousness, then you don't need consciousness because it doesn't do anything. So Chalmers' search for consciousness begins with the fundamental premise that consciousness is epiphenomenal and cannot act on the physical world. This clearly makes no sense. Everything we do is driven by our conscious awareness and our unconscious motivations. That's why we have consciousness. Having dismissed consciousness, Chalmers asserts that consciousness is a great mystery. But the mystery exists only in Chalmers' head. Consciousness is ubiquitous among living beings,. They could not survive without it, because they would not know what to do without it. Consciousness evolved in living things to enable them to navigate the world. Without being aware of the world we could not survive in it.

Chalmers is a mind-body duelist based on his view of the separation between consciousness and the physical world. At the same time he believes that consciousness emerges from the organization of the physical world. He therefore does not limit consciousness to living things that have need of it to survive. He instead believes that mechanical systems such as thermostats may be conscious. It appears to be lost on him that this is self contradictory. If consciousness emerges from the physical world then why should it not be able to interact with the physical world to cause action and behavior in it? Chalmers cannot explain this and does not try to. But he is interested in extending his zombie argument to say that consciousness can be a property of machines. But if consciousness doesn't do anything in humans it would be hard to imagine what purpose it would possibly have in a machine such as a thermostat or computer.

Chalmers can have faith in conscious artificial intelligence because he believes consciousness is ubiquitous not just in living things but in the Universe at large. He therefore is sympathetic to panpsychism (the belief that consciousness is an integral property of the universe) although he seems finally reluctant to fully commit to it,. Chalmers then goes on to say he believes in Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics that is the basis of the "Many Worlds" interpretation of QM. Yet Chalmers then confusingly says he disagrees with Many Worlds and subscribes to a "one world" interpretation of Everett's hypothesis. Yet every physicist who is an "Everettian (e.g., Sean Carroll) believes in Many Worlds.

And all of this is based on Chalmers' not only flawed but frankly inconceivable philosophical zombie thought experiment. In short, Chalmers is a property duelist, a panpsychist, an Everettian (but one who believes in one world) and a believer in machine consciousness. You can't make this stuff up, Yet Chalmers obviously managed to. Unfortunately, his theory is incoherent, self-contradictory, and based on mere assertions rather than logical argument.

Chalmers is charismatic and a dynamic speaker on the podcast and lecture circuit. People like listening to him even when what he is saying makes very little sense.

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esto le resultó útil a 7 personas

Broad Multi-Disciplinary Overview of Consciousness

Revisado: 10-26-21

Anil Seth's comprehensive review of consciousness science and theory is an excellent overview of the tumultuous and widely divergent approaches to understanding consciousness. Seth touches all the bases and reviews most of the well known experiments in the field (Libbett, etc.) and adds a few ideas of his own. The author gets a good deal right and some things wrong but on balance I highly recommend his thoughtful discussion. Seth narrates the book himself and does it well

As for his ideas, Seth is a physicalist and believes in an objective reality that can never be apprehended but can be approached by scientific investigation. He believes consciousness itself is a "controlled hallucination" (Seth's own pet term which he promotes as a signature catch phrase in all his talks as well as throughout the book). I don't find this a useful explanatory term. A better one might be that our perceptions are subjective constructions. We each create our own self-interested experience of reality.

Seth writes that the purpose of consciousness is survival. This falls back on the old shibboleth of evolutionary biology (survival). In his view consciousness is a controlled hallucination used by the self for the purpose of survival. This isn't precise enough. We use consciousness for everything we do, not just survival. Mostly it we use it to navigate the world and to determine what we want and how to get it. Only a tiny part of conscious effort involves survival. All of it involves self-interest which is a much better descriptor.

Seth correctly argues that intelligence and consciousness are not synonymous in order to demonstrate that machine intelligence is not and probably cannot be made to be conscious. And he is right in being skeptical of general artificial intelligence which may never be possible despite all the hype. However, he misses the point that any intelligent living being must be conscious even though an intelligent machine need not be.

Seth also correctly dismisses the nonsensical concept of "philosophical zombies" as inconceivable, thus disposing of a silly and irrelevant idea that has longed confused philosophical discussions of consciousness. However, he adopts a somewhat confused idea of the self as an ever-changing internal perception of each person's identity which is itself part of the "controlled hallucination" of consciousness. A more useful concept would be to treat the self as the whole organism. That is after all what consciousness is interested in preserving.

Seth also is obviously right in saying that all mammals are conscious but is hesitant to say that all living organisms are conscious. He is too cautious here. We know that insects and bacteria clearly act and react to stimuli in their own self-interested ways. Just try catching a fly in the palm of your hand. It will outwit you 95% of the time. Living beings must either be conscious or they are just mechanisms (in other words philosophical zombies) an idea that seems absurd and anachronistic on its face.

In summary, Seth gets a lot of things right that many other writers get wrong. But he still holds onto some rather unclear ideas regarding the self as an internal changeable identity that is itself a perception of the conscious mind. There is no reason to look for an internal self when consciousness is embodied and includes the whole organism. The concept of an internal self that excludes the body (e.g., similar to the ancient discredited concept of a soul) simply makes no sense.

The book's biggest self-contradiction is perhaps unavoidable and comes from Seth's assertion that all our perceptions are constructed and controlled hallucinations but that we can nevertheless get closer to the objective reality we can never apprehend through science. If everything we see is a hallucination, that can't be the case because we can never know whether we are getting closer or farther away from objective reality which something that will always be inaccessible to us. The most we can do is achieve a scientific consensus about how we think things work. And that should more than enough.

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esto le resultó útil a 18 personas

Slapdash Slapstick and Juvenile Incongruity

Revisado: 07-26-20

Adolescent humor and slapdash slapstick mixed into an incongruous and distasteful brew of cringeworthy bad writing, celebrity
sex and drug orgies and Hollywood craziness. The adolescent intensity of the stream of semiconsciousness writing is difficult to listen to. Incredulity at how bad it is keeps one listening. Occasional bits of humor that are actually funny and insights into moviemaking insanity provide worthwhile sparks of interest. Co- author Dana Vachon who went from Greenwich Conn. to Brooklyn while befriending and dating NY's glitterati (including weird NY journalist Phoebe Eaton) has received logrolling blurbs from Candace Bushnell and Jay McInerney while producing too clever by half sentences at breakneck speed in this insane jumble of fact, celebrity and fantastic fiction.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas