Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

William James delivered his now-notorious essay on "The Will to Believe" first as a guest lecturer, a guest of the combined "Philosophical Clubs" of Yale and Brown University in 1896. That's important to remember because it gives one a sense of who is the "we" is when James talks about what "we" believe. Ivy League students almost all (possibly all) white men from well-off families. I will contend in what follows that there was an esoteric message in this essay, a message that was likely very clear to many if not most of those in the hall, but the salience of which faded with the passage of time. The pertinence of a key contemporary reference came to seem quaint. So the esoteric meaning has become utterly inaccessible until recovered by -- well, by me. Just now. In the passage below, James is making the point that we take a wide range of our beliefs on authority - we believe a lot on no evidence or personal consideration of our own. T...

Continuing yesterday's thoughts. Back in 1989, two chemists claimed to have created a simple table top apparatus that would work at room temperatures and that would create excess energy in amounts that, the chemists contended, had no explanation other than the incredible one: atoms were fusing. The scientists were: Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. They were both sufficiently distinguished that the claim could not be dismissed lightly. Pons had a Ph.D. from the University of Southampton; Fleischmann from the Imperial College, London. That's Fleischmann in the photo that goes with this text, holding part of the apparatus, which was a little more complicated than Dogbert's. Their claims set off a frenzy of speculation about what this would mean. Some thought it would be bad news -- that the human race could not be trusted with the prospect of unlimited energy this implied. The more usual view was that this was great good news -- an apparently insatiable hunger ...

Koksvik is especially concerned with the argument that interactionist dualism can't work because for it to do so would violation the law of the conservation of energy (supplemented perhaps by the law of the conservation of angular momentum). The idea behind this argument is that IF my thoughts cause me to do something I wouldn't otherwise do, then they must do so by exerting energy. Energy after all  is that which does work, that which which moves matter around. Thus, if interactionism is true, energy is leaking into the phenomenal world from some trans-phenomenal source. Surely this would violate that law. If we're going to say, "so much the worse for the law then!" we can do so. Laws sometimes have to be modified and sometimes abandoned. Still, these leaks of energy into the phenomenal world should be in principle detectable, and anyone arguing for interaction should be able to make a case that they exist, that the law is violated, before arguing for ...