Yesterday, I offered my summary of two powerful-seeming arguments against mind-body dualism in any form. My plan was today, to give my reasons for concluding after a lot of deliberation on the point, that neither argument is as powerful as it appears -- and as it HAS appeared, historically, to many powerful minds from whom I have learned a great deal. But on further deliberation, that has come to seem too ambitious for a single blog post. I will wrote today about just the first of them ... here we go. About continuity. TL:DR version: The emergence of an intangible mind out of evolving life is not a violation of a principle of continuity to whatever degree we actually need and (upon reflection) want such a principle. It is no more of a violation than a variety of other emergences of which we make no such commotion. One intriguing and I think under-noticed fact is that the argument from continuity against the development of an intangible min...
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I've recently discovered a new phrase, the "Gish gallop." It seems to me to fill a valuable vocabulary gap in discussions of argumentative styles, fallacies, etc. So I'll preserve my discovery here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop The term refers to the debater's tactic of throwing out a lot of (individually weak) arguments in quick succession. It can be a devastating trick because it takes a lot less time to make any one claim than it does to do a careful dissection of its weakness. So, if I were arguing the "pro" side of the proposition, "do pots of gold exist at the end of rainbows," [a deliberately ridiculous example], and I and my opponent each had five minutes for an opening statement, I could say: 1) It is arrogant to claim that such pots of gold don't exist, since it is impossible to imagine that the 'gold deniers' have personally visited both ends of any large percentage of rainbows; 2) something ha...
The day before yesterday, I quoted a review in the New York Review of Books, for June 4th. Today I will do likewise. Again with the caveat that I haven't read the book and likely never will. The book in question this time is READING DARWIN IN ARABIC, 1860-1950 by Marwa Elshakry. What a marvelous title! so resonant (whether by intent or not) of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN. Anyway, the Ekshakry book is reviewed by Christopher de Bellaigue. He tells us, on Elshakry's authority, that the Arabic term for Darwinism is "Darwiniya," and that in many quarters, especially in Egypt, it was a key part of modernizing/westernizing movements for decades. He ends his review this way: "Darwiniya is not only a scientific system, but also a shorthand for intellectual curiosity and a progressive view of the human condition. The reverses it has suffered over the past few years are less bad than they look, not only because modern values are espoused by a great number of Mulsims,...