downshifting in a very creative way

Alan Hill lives inside of an abandoned auto plant in Detroit (he does so legally):

the passions

Wow, it’s been ages since anyone has posted here.

I flip flop between which two different perspectives on the passions I find more interesting: generally Stoic and generally Cartesian.

(Point of clarification: I think they’re both false when measured against human experience, but that’s consistent with being fascinated with them. I’m fascinated by false things all the time.)

For the Stoics, passion was assimilated to a type of false belief. The goal of a good life is to eliminate them from the cognitive architecture, because it’s always better to have fewer false beliefs. (My psychologist friends would here press me to define “better.”)

For Descartes, the passions are classes of divinely engineered response functions that, when operating at peak efficiency, move us to act appropriately given the appropriate conditions. They are like the trigger mechanisms for what V.S. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee call the “vigilant self.” The goal is not to get rid of them. Rather, the goal is to bring them under the authority of reason. What does it mean for them to be under the authority of reason? For Descartes it means that they are under the control of the will. Perhaps someone can dispute this, but I don’t know how else to interpret what it means for reason to be sovereign in each and every token of a joint action between reason and passion. I say this because of the connection Descartes draws to disinterest or disengagement. In every particular decision tree we encounter, reason tells us what we ought to prefer (pace Hume), yet we should be, strictly speaking in terms of our passions, detached from the actual outcome. Reason then informs the will to prefer noble decision branch X and tells the passions, “Sic ‘em!” Thus is born a fully rational, intentional action. (Okay, these last two sentences are clearly rhetorical overkill.)

At the end of the day, I find both of these proposals both fascinating and hopelessly naïve. The former turns humans into cyborgs. The latter retains the passions but at the (huge) cost of a homuncular view of the self.

But I also think they’re two of the coolest views on the block. Why are all the cool views false?

interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah

Quite interesting, lengthy interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher whose writing is engaging and lively:

Some Reflections on Contemporary Church Music

In a recent philosophy class of mine, discussion somehow turned to contemporary church music. Opinions on the subject were varied, with one student bemoaning the “me”-focused and mindlessly repetitive nature of the songs, and another student defending them as (at least sometimes) promoting heartfelt worship and devotion to God. Everyone seemed agreed on the danger that such music can cross the line from being of genuine religious value to being a matter of mere emotional self-gratification.

I understand the concern. I was raised on the great church hymns, and while some contemporary praise songs seem to me powerful, few carry the meaning of those hymns. (And some seem to have no meaning at all!) I regret that my children probably won’t learn the hymns as well as I did.

The problem, for me, is captured nicely in a song we sing at my church periodically, a spruced-up and modernized version of the hymn, “Take my Life and Let it be.” The original is beautiful, a humble prayer of one longing to be used and filled by God. Here’s the first verse:

Take my life and let it be
consecrated Lord, to thee.
Take my moments and my days;
let them flow in endless praise,
let them flow in endless praise.

After a few verses, the contemporized version adds the following interlude:

I am yours, set apart for you
I am yours, hungry for your truth
Take my life, you are all I live for
I am yours.

The shift in mood seems to me subtle and profound, and it works completely against the spirit of the original hymn. Suddenly I’m “set apart” for God, and God is all I’m actually living for. While the original states much in the future tense—as the last verse says, “Take myself and I will be ever, only, all for thee” (emphasis added)—the person singing this interlude seems to have already got it made. To my mind the humility of the original has completely disappeared, and perhaps the honesty has, too.

Contemporary church music can be wonderful and spiritually uplifting; but I’d say that the danger my students highlighted is real.

More Fuel for the Teleological Argument

The teleological argument for God's existence points to various features of the natural world and tries to make the case that God (or at any rate a cosmic designer) must be responsible for them and hence must exist. There are of course many versions of the teleological argument, but speaking generally, that's how they work.

The features that these arguments point to range from the intricate detail found in the fundamental constituents of physical reality, to the incomprehensible vastness of a universe which is somehow hospitable to us.

I recently came across a splendid website which gives an interactive "Scale of the Universe." It gives you a glimpse of the relative size of the constituents of the universe (from atoms to viruses to planets to stars), and of the universe itself. The site is both extremely informative and mind-blowing. What you see there raises the question: how can a universe that is at once so vast and yet composed of almost infinitesimally small building blocks have come to be purely as the result of chance?