Juan Enriquez comments on the Knowledge Economy and old economy. The Juan Enriquez interview he gave with Christopher Lydon is amazingly insightful. The quote here is insightful here:

I’ve never seen a better time to invest: things are cheap, there’s a lot of smart people around, there’s a lot of technology we’ve been investing in for 15, 20 years in life sciences that is incredibly exciting right now. And Boston is the center of the universe for that stuff. Per capita, there isn’t a smarter place than Boston right now…

Half facetiously, I claim that the center of the universe is the pitcher’s mound at Fenway. And the reason for that is because you’ve got Boston University sitting on one axis, Harvard on another, MIT on another, then Boston College and Harvard Medical School… Within a three to five mile radius of that pitcher’s mound you have an awful lot of what the new economy looks like.

Of the known universe, at this point, the corner of Vassar St. and Main St. may be the single most interesting corner anywhere and the reason why is because you’re sitting in the middle of a zipcode, 02139, that has generated one the largest economies on the planet in terms of the companies that the faculty and students that graduated MIT have done. The second reason is that you have a huge concentration of life-science powerbases that around the Whitehead and the Broad Institutes and the Human Genome Project. You have a new neuro-cognitive center, the Picower Institute where they’re bringing together in one building everybody who’s thinking about the brain. So if you’re a psychologist or a psychiatrist, if you’re a neurosurgeon or a brain imager, if you’re a computer scientist, anybody who’s thinking about brain circuitry or how this thing works, you’re all talking to one another in a building, which is highly unusual for academia.

And then right across the street from that you’ve got a Frank Gehry building that has possibly the next generation of computing, the next generation of artificial intelligence, and the next generation of robotics. And you bring those three things together — and you think of single professors’ labs — a lab the size of your house — generating market caps of five or 10 billion or 20 billion dollars in the students that are graduating and the companies they found…

When I want to show somebody why the US is still a really important power despite the debt, despite a certain sabbatical from governance, I drive them through the area… As you go past the Stop & Shop, you’ll see the old NECCO candy factory, which has now become the global research headquarters for Novartis. In three other huge buildings next to it they’ve taken the three big Swiss Pharma companies – Ciba, Geigy, Sandoz – merged them and offshored almost all of the R and D to Cambridge, MA, which is a big deal! That’s offshoring probably five percent of the future of the Swiss GDP. That’s what the bet is… And then you hit the Charles River, which is lovely, right?
Juan Enriquez in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, June, 2009.

Juan Enriquez also talks about the real possibility of shrinking of America–literally.
However, if you want to get what Enriquez is really getting at listen and/or watch his TED Talk:

The Skeptic Dialogues part 4: Interruptus

Master Pretense: Perhaps we should take a brief diversionary stroll into confusing context?

Grasshopper: Does this get us back to the village atheist?

Master Pretense: According to the Zen text, The Gateless Gate, “Shogen asked: `Why does the enlightened man not stand on his feet and explain himself?’ And he also said: `It is not necessary for speech to come from the tongue.’ “

Grasshopper: What does that have to do with anything?

Master Pretense shrugs.

Grasshopper: Ugh

Master Pretense: We often get frustrated studying people like Pyrrho because they seem to confirm to our stereotypes of French post-existentialist intellectuals talking about the how “otherness of fluid motion proves the sexism of science” or the pot head talking about “how do I know anything is real?”

In Simon Blackburn’s book Truth: A Guide (Oxford, 2005, p xiii), he gets to sort of pulling tensions in philosophy:

There are real standards. We must fight soggy nihilism, scepticism and cynicism. We must not believe that anything goes. We must not believe that all opinion is ideology, that reason is only power, that there is no truth to prevail. Without defenses against postmodern irony and cynicism, multiculturalism and relativism, we will all to go hell in a handbasket.

So thunders the conservative half of us–of each of us. But perhaps the thunder and conviction betray an anxiety. We may fear that there is another side to it, that our confidence is dogma, that our bluff may be called. There are people who are not impressed by our conviction, or by our pride or our stately deportment. They hear only attempts to impose just one opinion. They hear nothing but the machinations of power and attempts at suppression of alternatives. They hear bluster, the usual disguise for insecurity . . . .

The sides in this conflict have various names: absolutists versus relativists, traditionalists versus postmodernists, realists versus idealists, objectivists versus subjectivists, rationalists versus contextualists, Platonists versus pragmatists. These do not all mean the same, and some people who stand on one side or the other would be choosy about allowing them to apply to themselves. So for the moment they simply act as pointers.

Pyrrho and the methodological skeptic would appear to be on different sides of that hypothetical divide set-up by Blackburn. But is this fair? For one thing, methodological skeptics often don’t actually share a common philosophical framework. Some of probablists and pragmatists who love science and believe that gives us the most probable answer.

But the love of science, and the methods of science, were an attempt to bridge the divide between empiricists and rationalists, Platonism and pragmatism. The controls, the experiments, the falsifiable hypotheses, the distrust of social hierarchy. All of this was an answer to the gap here.

We can see that there is something to both of those impulses–the want to say all ideas are ideology, or that if there isn’t that is true in an opinion, then there is no criteria for judgment. Science doesn’t answer all those questions either. The methodology is about how and what, not so much about meaning and why.

Blackburn makes the further point:

For first, the conflict is not only between different people, but grumbles within the breast of each individual, as we find ourselves pulling us to one side or the other. And second, the conflict is about the our conceptions of ourselves and the our world . . . Today, the stakes in this war are enormous. Relativism in the ancient world typically issues in scepticism, whose main result was the suspension in judgment. . . Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as green light to believe what they like with as much force and much conviction as they like.(xiv)

Grasshopper: So the ancient philosophical skeptic and the relativists may make the same arguments, but they doing so for VERY different reasons.

Master Pretense: Yes.

Grasshopper: And the methodological skeptics still see themselves as fighting the dogmatists, who ironically are using arguments that ancient skeptics used against the dogmatists in the past.

Master Pretense: Yes.

Grasshopper: And most people, including most methodological skeptics, are not philosophically consistent. So we have people fighting skepticism with skepticism and dogma with dogma.

Master Pretense: It appears so.

Grasshopper: But the absolutists, the believers in objective truth, are they right?

Master Pretense: Only an absolutist can answer that.

Grasshopper: Cop-out.

Master Pretense: I’ll let Blackburn talk again.

[Willaim] James describes the absolutists as having a religious temperament, whether the object of his religion is some traditional text or deity, or a new one, such as The Market, or Democracy, or Science. This may also seem surprising, since religious lives can be full of doubts and worry and dark nights of the soul, and as we have already seen, in the modern world, it is the relativists as much as the absolutists who belong to cults. But James may be right to see absolutists as suffering from something very like a religious ambition . . . He [the absolutist] wants communion with higher authority, a provider of guarantees that, acting and thinking as he does, he is at the same time acting and thinking rightly. (xvii)

So the absolutist can end up just confirming his own biases. And the problems with modern skepticism is that both methodological skeptics and the people they oppose to flip and flop between relativism and absolutism depending on the context and the question.

Grasshopper: I have a question?

Master Pretense: Yes?

Grasshopper: Why do you spell “skeptic” with a k and Blackburn spell it with a “c”? And why does English have a “c” at all since its sounds are already covered by K and S.

Master Pretense: One the first question, Blackburn is English and they like C. On the second question, I’ll resort to historical reasoning for this: blame the French.

Grasshopper: Really? Are they why that “I” before “e” rule applies less than it does.

Master Pretense: Probably. I don’t really have any idea.

Grasshopper: So back to the Greeks then.

Master Pretense: Back to the Greeks.

To be continued.

File under What?

There are many things I don’t really understand about Europe, particularly countries that I am ethnically tied too. Take Ireland for example. It appears that have a non-religion specific blasphemy law that is sort of like an American hate speech law that fines anyone who says anything that could religiously offend anybody. Here’s the text of the law thanks to Paliban:

36. Publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.
(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000. [Amended to €25,000]
(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.
(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.
37. Seizure of copies of blasphemous statements.
(1) Where a person is convicted of an offence under section 36, the court may issue a warrant (a) authorising any member of the Garda Siochana to enter (if necessary by the use of reasonable force) at all reasonable times any premises (including a dwelling) at which he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that copies of the statement to which the offence related are to be found, and to search those premises and seize and remove all copies of the statement found therein, (b) directing the seizure and removal by any member of the Garda Siochana of all copies of the statement to which the offence related that are in the possession of any person, © specifying the manner in which copies so seized and removed shall be detained and stored by the Garda Siochana.
(2) A member of the Garda Siochana may (a) enter and search any premises, (b) seize, remove and detain any copy of a statement to which an offence under section 36 relates found therein or in the possession of any person, in accordance with a warrant under subsection (1).
(3) Upon final judgment being given in proceedings for an offence under section 36, anything seized and removed under subsection (2) shall be disposed of in accordance with such directions as the court may give upon an application by a member of the Garda Siochana in that behalf.

By my standards, this is a sort of a libel law nightmare. The proof on what is meant by “intending to cause moral outrage” is vague and will have to be decided by case law, but it seems to me that you could very well prosecute standards of religious faith understand this sort of law when two religions conflict.

This is why I opposed the similar language that was moved to be put into the “human rights” language at the UN. (I am somewhat skeptical of human rights as a means of protecting of people’s persons and dignity, but I’ve gone into that before an won’t today.)

The Skeptic Dialogues Part 3: Pyrrhic Victories and Other Matters

Grasshopper: So why engage in philosophy at all and thus how do we know about a “school” of Greek thought called skepticism?

Master Pretense: Well, we have Sextus Empiricus and the Diogenes I mentioned earlier to thank for our knowing about Pyrrho. As Suber mentioned, skepticism has a formal relationship to Stoicism and has a similar vocabulary to Epicurean philosophy. Still let’s go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for the context:

Skeptical doubts are said to characterize times of social upheaval (a connection said to characterize, not only the ancient world, but the fourteenth century and our own era). It is difficult to judge such general claims, but it would be surprising if the foundational doubts that characterize skepticism were not more evident in times when social and intellectual turmoil invite deep questions about what is right and wrong and true and false.

Ancient skepticism’s ties to other trends in ancient philosophy are more easily observed. They are particularly evident in the considerations that motivate the skeptics’ decision to suspend judgment on the truth of any claim. The skeptics’ conclusion that truth is uncertain is at odds with the “dogmatic” philosophies they reject, but this conclusion may still be founded on a similar focus on opposing arguments, antithesis, and conflicting points of view. One might, for example, easily compare the Pyrrhonian conviction that there are equally convincing arguments for and against any claim to the Protagorean view that one can argue equally convincingly on both sides of any question. In both cases, one finds a general commitment to the possibility of convincing arguments for opposing points of view. Despite this mutual commitment, Protagoras defended a perspective which is in some ways diametrically opposed to skepticism (at least if we judge by Plato’s account of Protagoras in his Theaetetus), for it accepts rather than rejects opposing claims to truth.

Ancient skepticism has many affinities to other ancient philosophies. Greek atomism shares, for example, skepticism’s interest in opposing perceptions and points of view, and can be seen as an attempt to explain this opposition by hypothesizing atoms which impact on different kinds of bodies (the bodies of different individuals, and of different species) in different kinds of ways. Opposites which include opposing points of view also played a central role in Heracleitean and Platonic epistemology. Even Aristotelean philosophy has affinities to skepticism, affinities which are in this case manifest in an Aristotelean rhetorical tradition which incorporates the rhetorical works of Theophrastus, Demetrius of Phalerum and others, and which emphasizes the power of persuasive speech rather than argument’s ability to establish what is true.

In a number of cases, philosophers who have no direct ties to the skeptical schools anticipate skepticism by stressing the difficulties inherent in inquiry. Xenophanes was known for his claim that no one knows clear truth; Democritus maintained that “bastard” knowledge gained through the senses exists only by convention; Plato’s dialogues contained arguments pro and contra, and cast doubt on everyday opinions; Diogenes of Sinope and other Cynics dismiss philosophical speculation; Epictetus insists that philosophers spend too much time on theory (En., 51); and so on. The philosophies that such philosophers endorsed do not incorporate a full fledged skepticism, but their influence added impetus to the skeptics’ moves in this direction.

More generally, ancient skepticism flourished in an intellectual milieu which incorporated many general themes and trends conducive to skeptical conclusions. In marked contrast with modern science, ancient science could not boast the practical and theoretical successes of its modern counterpart. In part because of this, mysticism and irrationalism were powerful cultural forces in the ancient world. The possibility of conflicting views of things was reinforced by an interest in foreign cultures which drew attention to opposing customs and traditions. Opposing interests and perspectives were also manifest in debate, war, political rivalries and a religion and mythology which pitted god against god, man against man and even god against man.

Within this broader context, ancient philosophical inquiry is characterized both by a remarkable array of conflicting philosophical perspectives and by famous philosophers known for dazzling arguments for paradoxical conclusions (that motion is impossible, that nothing exists, that time is an illusion, etc.). In the midst of the conflicting views and conclusions that this implies, it is not surprising that some philosophers propound the conclusion that reason cannot establish truth, and gives us no way to choose between opposing arguments and opposing points of view.

Grasshopper: That’s one hell of a quote block.

Master Pretense: Don’t go meta-dialogue on me. We’re breaking the fourth wall.

Grasshopper: There is no wall. The readers are looking at screen.

Master Pretense: Metaphors, young grasshopper, are a dish best served mixed.

Grasshopper: You didn’t answer my question about why engage in philosophy if you believed like Pyrrho

Master Pretense: How would I know? I am just your teacher, not a dead Greek philosopher. Ask Pyrrho.

Grasshopper: You can’t pull another one of those quote thingies to explain?

Master Pretense: Fine. I’ll go to Wikipedia:

The goal of this critique, which Pyrrho’s followers realized would ultimately subvert even their own method, was to cultivate a distrust of all grand talk. They expected philosophy to collapse into itself. How far in this direction the Pyrrhonean commitment extended is a matter of debate. The Pyrrhonists confessed a belief in appearances, e.g. in hot and cold, grief and joy. It is impossible to deny, they admitted, that one seems to be in pain or seems to touch a piece of wood. Their world, thus, was completely phenomenological. An accomplished Pyrrhonist could, ideally, live as well as a dogmatist but with the added benefit of not worrying about truth and falsity, right and wrong, God’s will, and so forth.

So yes, the original Pyrrho knew that this could be caustic to philosophy.

Grasshopper: So what did Pyrrho believe again?

Master Pretense: The only real good evidence we have for Pyrrho’s beliefs can be found in a fragment from the philosophy Aristocles

He [Pyrrho] himself has left nothing in writing, but this pupil Timon says that whoever wants to be happy must consider these three questions: first, how are things by nature? Secondly, what attitude should we adopt towards them? Thirdly, what will be the outcome for those who have such an attitude? According to Timon, Pyrrho declared that things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable and inarbitrable. For this reason neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore for this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but should be unopinionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not. The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude, says Timon, will be first speechlessness [aphasia], and then freedom from disturbance; and Aenesidemus says pleasure. (Eusebius, Prep. Ev. 14.18.2–5, Long & Sedley)

The Stanford Encyclopedia explains,

The interpretation of this passage is the subject of debate (see Bett, Pyrrho). According to the interpretation most in keeping with later skepticism, Pyrrho holds that things appear with equal force to be and not to be (and to both be and not to be; and to neither be nor not to be). According to an alternative (“metaphysical”) interpretation, Pyrrho holds that this is how things actually are — i.e. that things in the world actually are and are not (and both are and are not, and neither are nor are not). If the latter interpretation is correct, it is a historical irony that Pyrrho became the most famous spokesperson for a later skepticism which rejects all claims about the true nature of the world.

If the second view is true, Pyrrho would have agreed with the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna. Suber, however, thinks that even if the first view is true, Pyrrho would have concerned with something other than “doubt” in the strict sense:

The dogmatist asserts that something is true. He makes judgments he is willing to stand by. The skeptic suspends her judgment; she waits until she is sure, which may be never. Suspension of judgment (in Greek, epoche), not doubt and not denial, is the skeptic’s characteristic activity. This is the next important technical term. The Greek word epoche means to check, cease, suspend, stop, or pause in some activity that otherwise or normally occurs. The skeptics applied the word to judgment, while in other contexts Greek speakers applied it to sunlight (in eclipses), menstruation (in pregnancy), payments on a debt (in default), musical vibrations of a string (at the nodes), and the passage of time (at turning points or “epochs”). The English phrase “suspension of judgment” captures the gist of the skeptical usage well, but loses the flavor of a versatile common word doing philosophical work. If we had to coin a word to capture more of its sense, “ajudice” (meaning non-judgment, on the model of “prejudice”, meaning pre-judgment) might work well.

Grasshopper: Wait. You need to back track and explain to me how this relevant to say Carl Sagan or James Randi or Bob the Village Atheist or Eric the Objectivist who doesn’t believe in global warming.

Master Pretense: All in good time, Grasshopper.

To be continued.

The Skeptic Dialogues Part 2: More on Ancient Skepticism

Grasshopper:  So what’s with the classical skeptics rejection of sense data?

Master Pretense: Pyrrho of Elias held that acatalepsia led to ataraxia.   You may recognize ataraxia as the primary goal of the Epicureans as well.  It means freedom from worry.   Pyrrho is said to have thought that is you admitted that you couldn’t really know things, you would be free from worry. At least, that’s was what Diogenes Laertius had him say.

Grasshopper:  So these ancient skeptics thought you should be agnostic about everything?

Master Pretense: Basically.

Grasshopper: Doesn’t that make science as we understand it impossible?

Master Pretense:  It makes drawing any conclusions from science impossible. The Pyrrhian skeptic would still engage in such things like science and religion. Ultimately, Pyrrhian thought that convention should guide one’s life, but we should avoid assigning truth value to those conventions.

Grasshopper: How is that different from nihilism?

Master Pretense:   How should I know. Nihilism is a vague word. Meaning either nothingism or “anything the user of the said word doesn’t really like.” Anyway, Peter Suber may put it in more understandable ways and also get to the ironic relation to methodological skepticism:

Historically, we know it was for a reason like this, with an ironic twist, that made the inquiry for truth a decisive part of skepticism. The Greeks sometimes called skepticism, Pyrrhonism, after Pyrrho, an austere teacher of serene non-commitment. He was not a pure skeptic himself, in the epistemological sense, but his teachings led directly to what we now call skepticism.

Pyrrho was born a little over a century after Socrates. Plato was about 60, and Aristotle about 20, when Pyrrho was born, and Pyrrho lived to see both of them die. Pyrrho lived to see the rise and fall of Alexander the Great, the civil wars in his empire, and the opening of the Eastern world to the West. This meant that Pyrrho witnessed the splintering of Platonism and Aristotelianism into many bickering schools. He travelled to India with Alexander’s army and witnessed the spectacle of novel Eastern customs, at once utterly different from the Greek but equally civilized and supported by a reflective philosophical tradition. He witnessed the social and political chaos, war, and strife that followed the death and succession of Alexander.

(Socrates 470-400 BCE, Plato 428-348 BCE, Aristotle 384-322 BCE, Pyrrho 360-270 BCE, Alexander 356-323 BCE.)

Some scholars find a political origin to Pyrrho’s skepticism in this, on the theory that traumatic periods produce disillusionment and resignation, the souring and obsolescence of traditional beliefs, a tenacious relativism of beliefs, virtues, and habits that will not assign absolute superiority to any, and a need for new methods of coping in a hectic world.[Note 3]

There is probably some truth in this, and it does seem that skepticism recurs through history in the periods of greatest upheaval and dissolution. But it is unfair to skepticism to reduce it to the play of historical forces and forget that it has its immanent ‘reasons’ that have a claim on all of us, regardless of our circumstances. That is, philosophies have grounds, not just causes. Pyrrho’s own biography, scanty as it is, gives a good idea of how these reasons operated in his life.

Pyrrho began his intellectual life as a student and disciple of the Stoics, who taught that peace of mind was the highest end of life and that a knowledge of truth was required to attain and maintain it. Pyrrho accordingly sought truth. But he heard the Stoics say one thing was true, the Pythagoreans say another, the atomists another; he heard many versions of Plato’s truth and of Aristotle’s. He heard disagreements among the disciples of Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Protagoras. For every question of interest to philosophy he heard the Stoic doctrine contradicted by dozens of other doctrines, all of which also differed among themselves. What was worse, each position had reasons and evidence to support itself and to subvert and refute its opponents. To Pyrrho it was a standoff. He gave up in despair and admitted to himself that he could not decide among them and did not know what was true.

Voila! He discovered that his confession of ignorance had given him peace of mind. He had ironically attained the goal of all Stoicism by giving up and reversing its means. He had found a tranquillity in honestly confessing his ignorance. Moreover, his tranquillity seemed as durable and serene as the Stoical peace of mind that presumed to depend on true knowledge —and that embroiled the Stoics in endless disputes and other perturbations.

Grasshopper: What is the sound of one-hand clapping?

Master Pretense smacks him on the forehead and laughs.

To be continued.

The Skeptic Dialogue, Part 1

Skepticism, as a term in common usage, is a huge mess. Sometimes you’ll see people use skeptic, rationalist, empiricist, scientific, and humanistic as if these terms are all interchangeable. Sometimes Skeptic means Michael Shermer will be on television with six other paranormal event proponents. Sometimes skeptic is someone who is denying a specific area of the “knowedge” consensus. Sometimes it is a person who doubts that knowledge can be meaningful in any epistemologically consistent way. Sometimes skeptic is a code word for “asshole.” When asking someone if they are a skeptic, they may reply “yes” and you still don’t know whether they are a philosophical skeptic, a methodological/empirical skeptic, a denialist, or a using the term as code for naturalist or humanist.

Now, I am involved with this, because I am a part, albeit not a very active part, of the “skeptic’s movement” who considers himself a humanist and who loves science. Still the convolution of the term bothers me because the term Skeptic doesn’t really clarify much in and of itself. Most of the time, I know that people who are skeptics are either methodological/empirical skeptics or denialists. Philosophical skepticism is generally the province of humanities grad students and people who read Nietzsche in the mid-teens. Still there is overlap.

Why the hang up on semantics? I don’t think this is a semantic issue, but a semiotic issue. As an issue about language, not having clear ideas about what the word means that most attempts at “branding” the skeptics movement or even clearly communicating its key ideas this very difficult. That, however, means I will be going several sources, tiptoeing into the history of philosophy, and generally bogging myself and my argument down. So here’s an imagery dialogue to my problem here:

Grasshopper: Is philosophical skepticism really related to methodological skepticism?
Master Pretense: Yes, but I’ll get to how in a minute. Or, more accurately, I’ll let skeptic dictionary get to how.

Grasshopper: Why do some people call what you call what you calling methodological skepticism things like empirical skepticism, rational skepticism, affirmation skepticism, or ordinary skepticism?
Master Pretense: There are several reasons for this–mostly because the overlap of terms has to do with both ideas being related in the history of philosophy. Personally I like methodological skepticism, although there is nothing particularly “wrong” with ordinary skepticism as a term. I just find that later vague.

Grasshopper: Is Methodological skepticism the same as rational skepticism as the UK Skeptics say or empirical?
Master Pretense: I would say that this use of rational is a misnomer or at least incomplete. Philosophical skepticism IS rational–we’ll go into why in a minute. Philosophical Skepticism is just not really scientific. Methodological Skepticism is scientific, rational, and empirical. Note the difference. At least, the Brits get to use the American spelling for the methodology and the British spelling for common and philosophical usage.

Grasshopper: Is methodological skepticism the same as empirical skepticism?
Master Pretense: Empiricism trusts what you see and experience as a demarcation for truth. I find this term problematic because while empiricism is definitely part of skeptical inquiry, you can’t trust you experiences as a sole demarcation for truth. Experimental controls must be added empirical observation to control for bias and logical methodology must be added to control for, well, bat-shit crazy interpretations.

In a way empiricism and rationalism as they are historically understood in Western philosophy as types of localized skepticism of another groups knowledge claim. As Skeptic’s Dictionary says, Empiricists tend to emphasize the tentative and probabilistic nature of knowledge, while rationalists tend to be dogmatic and assert they have found a method to discover absolutely certain knowledge.

Grasshopper: So what is philosophical skepticism?
Master Pretense:  So different strains in philosophy that really developed in early Greek philosophy and manifested in different forms throughout the history of Western Thought. Philosophical skepticism has several major strains: ancient skepticism (both Academic and Platonic), early modern skepticism, and post-modernism.

Standford Encyclopedia of philosophy explains the basic forms of philosophical skepticism as such:

Consider some proposition, p. There are just three possible propositional attitudes one can have with regard to p’s truth when considering whether p is true. One can either assent to p, or assent to ~p or withhold assenting both to p and to ~p. Of course, there are other attitudes one could have toward p. One could just be uninterested that p or be excited or depressed that p. But those attitudes are either ones we have when we are not considering whether p is true or they are attitudes that result from our believing, denying or withholding p. For example, I might be happy or sorry that p is true when I come to believe that it is.

I just spoke of “assent” and I mean to be using it to depict the pro-attitude, whatever it is, toward a proposition that is required for knowing that proposition. Philosophers have differed about what that attitude is. Some take it to be something akin to being certain that p or guaranteeing that p (Malcolm 1963, 58-72). Others have taken it not to be a form of belief at all because, for example, one can know that p without believing it as in cases in which I might in fact remember that Queen Victoria died in 1901 but not believe that I remember it and hence might be said not to believe it (Radford 1966). For the purposes of this essay we need not attempt to pin down precisely the nature of the pro-attitude toward p that is necessary for knowing that p. It is sufficient for our purposes to stipulate that assent is the pro-attitude toward p required to know that p.

Let us use “EI-type” propositions to refer to epistemically interesting types of propositions. Such types of propositions contain tokens some of which are generally thought to be known given what we ordinarily take knowledge to be. Thus, it would not be epistemically interesting if we did not know exactly what the rainfall will be on March 3 ten years from now. That kind of thing (a fine grained distant future state) is not generally thought to be known given what we ordinarily take knowledge to be. But it would be epistemically interesting if we cannot know anything about the future, or anything about the contents of someone else’s mind, or anything about the past, or anything at all about the “external world.” We think we know many propositions about those types of things.

Now, consider the (meta) proposition concerning the scope of our knowledge, namely: We can have knowledge of EI-type propositions. Given that there are just three stances we can have toward any proposition when considering whether to assent to it, we can:

1. Assent that we can have knowledge of EI-type propositions.
2. Assent that we cannot have knowledge of EI-type propositions.
3. Withhold assent to both that we can and that we cannot have knowledge of EI-type propositions.

Let us call someone with the attitude depicted in (i) an “Epistemist.”^[4] Such a person assents to the claim that we can have knowledge of EI-type propositions.

The attitude portrayed in (ii) has gone under many names. I will follow the terminology suggested by Sextus Empiricus. He used the term “Academics” to refer to the leaders of the Academy (founded by Plato) during the 3rd to 1st century B.C. According to Sextus, they assented to the claim that we cannot have knowledge of what I have called EI-type propositions — although it is far from clear that this was an accurate description of their views. (See the entry on ancient skepticism.) Perhaps the prime example was Carneades (214-129 B.C.). Other philosophers will refer to this view as “Cartesian skepticism” because of the skeptical arguments investigated by Descartes and his critics in the mid-17th century. And still others will refer to it as “switched world skepticism” or “possible world skepticism” because the arguments for it typically involve imagining oneself to be in some possible world that is both vastly different from the actual world and at the same time absolutely indistinguishable (at least by us) from the actual world. What underlies this form of skepticism is assent to the proposition that we cannot know EI-type propositions because our evidence is inadequate.

Those assenting neither to the proposition that knowledge of EI-type propositions is possible nor to the proposition that such knowledge is not possible can be called “Pyrrhonian Skeptics” after Pyrrho who lived between ca 365 – ca 275 B.C. The primary source of Pyrrhonian Skepticism is the writing of Sextus Empiricus who lived at the end of the second century AD. The Pyrrhonians withheld assent to every non-evident proposition. That is, they withheld assent to all propositions about which genuine dispute was possible, and they took that class of propositions to include the (meta) proposition that we can have knowledge of EI-type propositions. Indeed, they sometimes classified the Epistemists and the Academic Skeptics together as dogmatists because the Epistemists assented to the proposition that we can have knowledge, while the Academic Skeptics assented to the denial of that claim.

Another difference between Academic and Pyrrhonian Skepticism is closely related to the charge by the latter that the former is really a disguised type of dogmatism. The Academic Skeptic thinks that her view can be shown to be the correct one by an argument (or by arguments). The Pyrrhonian would point out that the Academic Skeptic maintains confidence in the ability of reason to settle matters — at least with regard to the extent of our knowledge of propositions in the EI-class. One way of understanding the so-called problem of the “Cartesian circle” illustrates the Pyrrhonian point: Descartes is relying throughout the Meditations on his power of reasoning to remove the skeptical doubts that he raises, but to do so means that he has exempted the faculty of reasoning from the doubts that he raised in the “First Meditation” about the epistemic reliability of our faculties. A Cartesian reply could be as simple as paraphrasing Luther: Here I stand, as a philosopher with confidence in reason, and as such I can do no other.^[6] Regardless of the adequacy of that kind of response, the point here is that the Pyrrhonians did not think that they had a convincing argument whose conclusion was that withholding assent to non-evident propositions was the appropriate epistemic attitude to have.

So confused yet?

Grasshopper:  Does a skeptical cow have buddha nature?
Master Pretense:  Mu.
.
Grasshopper:  You would answer in koans.
Master Pretense:  Correct, Grasshopper.

To be continued. . .

My relationship to various religions and a suggested reading list for critical scholarship on buddhism

File under useless wastes of mental energy and time, what I would like to call myself: for example, I have been somewhat forlorn that I can’t drop large amounts of Buddhist inspired thinking, yet I can’t really adopt traditional Buddhist teachings because at some level I think that a) the so-called “western” rule of non-contradiction does apply to reality (thus refuting some foundations of the otherwise brilliant Nagarjuna) and b) the history of Buddhism is just as steeped in same weirdness, sectarianism, and dogma as any other religion, and c) there are certain Buddhist principles that explain everything in such as way that they explain nothing at all (karma and shunyata).

Pardon the mixing of metaphors, however, I do derive a large portion of my coping mechanisms and ethics from a Buddhist framework in a secular context with large twists of Jewish and Christian influence in that particularly surreal drink. I have also become highly pragmatist in my approach to the way others deal with truth–”an absolute standard is only necessary when you are dealing with scientific facts or killing humans and, probably, most animals with similar cognition levels to a small child.”
Buddhist ethical relations DO seem to be human-centric in a bad way, but any good ethic should still human centric enough that you aren’t trying to make Utilitarian arguments about equlivancy with any organism while not thinking that humans are the center of the universe.

So after years of studying all sorts of religion and then reading so many sutras my eyes bleed. Trying to learn Pali. Taking novice monk vows in the Theravada tradition for a little while. Studying with an ajahn for two years. Then losing my mind and experimenting with every religion that pasted by while never really believing in most “spiritual” things. Taking both a practice approach and an analytic approach–and yes, I have kept prayer vigils and rituals and almost retreat intensity meditation regimes–I formally just don’t care. I am not a Buddhist in that I don’t “believe” as a Buddhist and I don’t keep all or even most the Buddhist practices, but I am cultural tied to Buddhism and I still like meditating and reading sutras and controlling my urges.

I would say I was an “ethnic” Buddhist, but that would be confusing because while I do have a Buddhist background going back into childhood, I am not Asian. My family is ethnically Irish Catholic, Eastern European, and Jewish.

Like Dogen, I don’t think “enlightenment” is something you find or you become. If such a thing exists, it exists in merely knowing your limitations, knowing that attachment to ideas can make those limitations MUCH more painful, and enjoying your life as it is. You can take this far, become fatalistic, be resistent to change or social welfare or innovation. I guard against that and I guard against complete contentment because I think it is akin to death.

But I do think that the process of “Being” is a process, not a state. I don’t think “I” am anything but a narrative of events and feels and reactions of a collection of things that seems to feel that it has consciousness and thus needs to define itself against other things. I do think that non-harm is an ideal and as an ideal, it is impossible to achieve. And given that I don’t know what consciousness and will really are, at least, on an experience level in ways that can be communicated in language–I definitely don’t really know what death means or even what the clearest demarcation of life is.

I still meditate as a means of detangling my mind and centering myself.

This last year has taught me to quit tying myself in knots over things. It only makes me an asshole, so I am giving this question up. I don’t care if people view me as a card-carrying atheist-humanist or as a mystic or as a fool. I care if they respect me enough to listen to the important things I have to say DESPITE those beliefs. I don’t believe in G-d or gods or celestial Buddhas. I doubt that rebirth or reincarnation has any meaning outside of the metaphorical. I think that when your dead–and by that I mean that you do not have anything that can be called consciousness–you’re probably going to stay dead.

I don’t like being called an “atheist” because it defends me by my lack of the belief in something that I don’t even think most people have a coherent enough definition of to reject. I consider myself an ignostic, but people mistake that for agnostic and I get called wishy-washy. The label isn’t important. The values system that it is underneath it is.

Anyway, I have critiqued Buddhism harshly before and I have been an apologist for it. At this point in myself, I don’t feel the urge to do either. I think people tend to take it uncritically or criticize it ahistorically: I don’t think either approaches are wise. Buddhism is a “Western” word–a word largely invented by British colonial scholars about 150 years ago. The Buddha Dharma is much more complex than the watered down Zen, pop Tibetan, or austere Theravada you mostly get here. It’s not historically the evangelical religion that is represented by Sokka Gakkai or Nichiren or the religion of “no religion” as Alan Watts would have you believe.

If you’re going to historically understand what Buddhism is, what is was, and why I am ambivalent about the whole concept. you need to read some real good books on the subject to understand its history.

Here’s my recommended reading, you won’t see the normal pop Buddhists authors on here:

For core of what many may call “Buddhism” that I still basically accept as a ethical guideline and a tool for psychological framing:
Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner
Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor
Money Sex War Karma by David Loy*
The New Social Face of Buddhism by Ken Jones
Ten Zen Questions by Susan Blackmoore
Zen and the Brain by James Austin

*I disagree with Loy on the supposed “failure of secular modernism” but I agree with most his moral arguments.

For an fairly objective history and view of the historical development of Buddhism (and why in most forms IT IS a religion) you need to read the following scholarly work (you will notice that I favor things from academic presses not Buddhist presses like Shambhala or Wisdom):
Buddhist Scriptures by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed by Donald R. Lopez jr
Buddhism in Practice by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
The Story of Buddhism by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
Curators of the Buddha edited by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
Prisoners of Shangrila by Donald R. Lopez Jr.
The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David L. McMahan
The Buddha by John S. Strong
The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations by John S. Strong
Buddhist Religions: A Historical Introduction by John S. Strong
Unmasking Buddhism by Bernard Faure
Chan Insights and Oversights by Bernard Faure
Seeing Through Zen by John R. McRae
Did Dogen Go to China by Steven Heine
Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up by Steven Heine

Also ACTUALLY read the Sutta and Sutras (Thomas Cleary translations are easy to find for the Zen ones and www.accesstoinsight.com provides the Pali cannon in its entirety for free).

When you done read into the above and kept a skeptical outlook, you’ll probably see why I think Buddhism as a whole IS a religion, but it can be secularized and naturalized in ways that many other religions can’t. I suppose if there are Humanistic Jews, then there can be Humanistic and Naturalistic Buddhists.

If you think that’s too complicated, you can think of me as an old-fashioned secular humanist. It doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that if people are going to make decisions on Buddhism or make blanket judgments on Buddhism (which tend to be either totally positive or totally negative), they need to subject Buddhist scripture and Buddhist history to the same scholarship and criticism which they place on Abrahamic religions.

National Standards

IF you’ll pardon me this moment of policy wonkery, but I don’t want readers thinking that just because I don’t like the way the NGA only included ACT and College Board insiders in a largely secret meeting on what looks to be national standards. I think that the NEA largely endorsing national standards is a great move. We need something to make education more unified in this country. I would go so far as to say we need natural standards for science as well.

What I think is necessary, however, is an open dialogue that includes FAR more than just people who make standardized tests. I still think people who do scientific work in the field who DON’T work for testing companies need to be included as do teachers representatives and other “stakeholders.”

File Under Wow

Thanks to Post Human Blues and Sentient Developments for this:

And while I pondering technology and our future, IEET published a piece by Randall Mayes that gets to something about blood substitutes that I didn’t know:

The FDA has placed a number of blood substitutes in clinical trials at selected hospitals for accident victims in the United States which are trauma victims in life threatening situations. Although blood substitutes do not have white blood cells found in whole blood, they have hemoglobin from expired human blood to carry oxygen.

Biopure’s Hemopure failed in the United States, but was approved for use in South Africa. Unfortunately, in the United States the other candidates have either failed or were withdrawn due to side effects including liver and kidney failure, irritated blood vessels, and heart attacks.

The most promising candidate, PolyHeme, was developed by Northfield Laboratories to overcome the drawbacks of working with whole blood. It has a shelf life of over twelve months while stored at room temperature, is purified it to minimize risk of viral disease transmission, and is compatible with all blood types.

In circumstances where a patient at least eighteen years old is in critical condition at the scene of the injury, random patients either received saline solution or PolyHeme for up to twelve hours as needed after transported to selected trauma centers. It was one of the few candidates to complete phase III clinical trials, but it also failed to win approval with an unfavorable risk-benefit assessment.

In 2008, the Journal of American Medical Association released the paper, Cell-Free Hemoglobin Based Blood Substitutes and Risk of Myocardial Infarction and Death, which is a meta-analysis study of 16 clinical trials of blood substitutes, including 5 products, and 3711 patients. The paper was the bearer of bad news as it revealed patients in clinical trials had a 30 percent greater chance of death when compared to a control group.

The Informed Consent Dilemma

Humans are involuntarily used as guinea pigs for blood substitute clinical trials? In 2006, those living in 32 communities in 18 states and anyone traveling through these communities were potential guinea pigs without consent in Polyheme’s Phase III clinical trials. PolyHeme is the fifteenth experiment allowed by the FDA for emergency medical trials exempted from informed consent.

This is disconcerting since one of the distinguishing factors between eugenics and transhumanism is that the H+ movement is based on voluntary use of medical treatments and artificial human enhancements. But, what if someone is incapable of giving informed consent and a blood substitute is the only hope for survival to an accident victim or a soldier?

In order to avoid participating in the clinical trials, citizens had to inform their local testing site and wear a medical bracelet. Although I live several blocks away form the Duke University Medical Center which is one of the trauma centers across the United States which is sanctioned by the FDA, I was not aware of the clinical trials or the exemption procedures.

Even more disturbing, bioethicists Dickert and Sugarman disclosed in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal that Northfield Laboratories was able to withhold proprietary data relating to the trials which remained unpublished because they had no government requirement to report problems . It wasn’t until Public Citizen filed a law suit that FDA released the data.

This blog is not defunct, and the NGA and secret national standards

I have restored my interest in skeptical blogging on education and humanities. I just needed a good little while to get enough stuff done to have something to write about.

“It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.” -Charles Sanders Peirce

Which brings me to today’s post. Living In Dialogue has blogged about how the National Governor’s Association has set-up a council for new national standards that literally only includes one teacher and will be kept completely confidential until it is complete.

Now the other shoe has dropped. On Wednesday, the NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released their plan for developing national standards for Mathematics and English.

They propose a process that will result in new national K-12 standards by next December, and launched a new website where we can watch the magic unfold. They also released the names of those on the Mathematics and English “Work Groups” that will draft the standards, and the “Feedback Groups” who will advise them once drafts have been offered. We are informed that “The Work Group’s deliberations will be confidential throughout the process.” As far as public input, “States and national education organizations will have an opportunity to review and provide evidence-based feedback on the draft documents throughout the process.” There does not appear to be any avenue for the public at large, students, parents or teachers to provide direct input.

So who makes up the two Work Groups? Of the 25 individuals on the two teams, (four people are on both) six are associated with the test-makers from the College Board, five are with fellow test-publishers ACT, and four are with Achieve. Zero teachers are on either Work Group. The Feedback Groups have 35 participants, almost all of whom are university professors. There appears to be exactly one classroom teacher involved in the entire process, on one of the Feedback Groups.

Now if that isn’t bad enough, look who the people are ACT and the College Board who make standardized tests are setting the standards. While I understand wanting to keep interests out of the situation and stop a lobbying fiasco, there is a clear conflict of interest in turning the various private testing boards into such power blocks. Furthermore the push to send everyone into some sort of credentialing has increased. Georgia’s Work Ready program is already using a test designed by the ACT to certify people for work.

We can’t be fairly skeptical or positively evaluate these standards, because they are matters of trade-secret.

I actually think national standards are a necessity, but I do not think literally teaching to the test by having the private test-makers set the standards is a smart way to do this NOR is something the most successful educating nations do like Finland or Canada. I also don’t think everyone who goes through a secondary school needs to be college bound.

And besides teachers, parents, and children, why aren’t more NOT partial cognitive sciences and education researchers who aren’t tied to a test-making body included? In fact, I think the later are more important than the former.

Another thing that bothers me is that this continues to ignore science education and the boarder humanities, BOTH are suffering severely under the current focus. Science literacy is key for many areas of life and its omission is truly tragic.

Why do politicians and testing-organizations get all the power? I think the obvious answer is that they already have it and don’t want to give it up. For those who thought that perhaps most sensible or a more inclusive view of education may come out of the Obama era or the state governors, I think we still have every reason to be skeptical.