Souls are real but are not things?

I've just read the following piece by Vance Morgan a philosophy professor.

The Soul is Not a Thing, but it Most Certainly is Real

Not sure what it means to say the soul is not a thing but that it nevertheless exists.  And he doesn't explain what he means.  It's not a material thing, no.  But if a soul is our essence, if it is that which makes us the very same person throughout our lives, then why is it not an immaterial thing?

But anyway, the author says: 

[S]cience tells us that everything about us, including our consciousness and all that it entails, is at least in principle reducible to the operations of our physical bodies.

And he also says:

[S]cience has told us for a long time that everything that human beings have traditionally thought that we needed an immaterial “something else” to explain—our thoughts, consciousness, emotions, and so on—is rooted in brain activity.

This is complete nonsense, science tells us no such thing.  Or, if he thinks otherwise, he is required to specify what this research is that suggests this.  

He also says:

[A]s a philosophy professor who, at least in my own understanding of my job description, am there to ask difficult questions, challenge embedded assumptions, and generally blow my students’ minds. For instance, does the notion “non-physical thing” even make sense, since all of our experience of “things that exist” are rooted in stuff made of matter?

So this seems to be suggesting that only things that can be cashed out in terms of our sensory experiences -- i.e only what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste -- can be said to exist.

The first point to make is, why think that? Why do minds, or consciousness, have to be directly perceived in order to exist? No-one ever sees my mind, nor my experiences. Others can only infer what I experience from what I say or from my behaviour, but they do not perceive it. Should we follow the author on this and conclude that the existence of my mind or experiences do not exist?  That would result in each and every person concluding no-one else exists in the world apart from themselves!  And maybe not even themselves since we do not perceive through our senses our own consciousness or minds.  We are just simply directly acquainted with our own consciousness.

Second point, does this mean that what we perceive -- namely colours, smells, sounds etc -- actually exist? That they are part of the furniture of reality? Because this is denied by mainstream scientific thinking.

A review of the Fire HD 10 Tablet

This is so incredibly frustrating. I bought this tablet in order to read books on it. After having possession of it for a few hours I've arranged to send it back to Amazon.

The main problem is that no matter what I do, I simply cannot transfer any non-Amazon purchased books to the tablet. These books do not have drm, they are in mobi format, they have no problem in being transferred to my kindle paperwhite. I've also tried to transfer my own docx and txt files, but they can't be viewed either.

I've tried connecting the tablet to my PC and copying the books over to the books folder (and other folders on the off chance). No luck there. I've tried the calibre software -- it claims the books have transferred and lists them as being on the device. But the kindle app on the tablet doesn't detect them. I've tried sending using the kindle email. That doesn't work. I downloaded this software called "Amazon send to kindle". That doesn't work either. 

I've spent so many hours trying to get this thing to work. I've been chatting with a fair few people on Amazon's customer support. I'm not used to mobiles or tablets and have never read an ebook on one, so perhaps I'm simply missing something very simple. But sometimes you just have to give in. I'm sick of my life being sucked away trying to get modern technology to work. I've had enough . .nay . .more than enough.

Also, on first switching on, it was asking me for my name and address and other details, and then I couldn't get the home page. Swiping up from the padlock simply got a message saying 'wait a min', which lasted interminably, and eventually presented itself with the same locked screen! I eventually sorted it by a hard reset, or factory reset or whatever (can't remember now). This time I wasn't asked for my name and address (why not??) and it simply asked for my email and other stuff instead. This time it all went more smoothly.

Until, that is, I tried to use Alexa and tried to view kindle books actually purchased from Amazon. It threw up errors. Eventually I discovered the wifi had an exclamation mark over it (even though it had already detected my wifi). Simply pressing the wifi icon solved that. But the tablet keeps losing the wifi connection where I simply need to press the wifi icon to reconnect. So what the heck is all that about?? 

And every time I connect to my PC I have to go to the settings and alter some setting to file transfer. Every single time! Unless I do that no folders on the fire are visible. 

OK I've spent many many hours on this thing trying to sort it out. Hours I'll never get back. It's going back. What a complete waste of money.

Yet more on Covid

Just read the following article:

Boris Johnson’s latest Covid strategy: no hope and no end in sight

Article says:

However, shortly afterwards documents were released showing that Sage had advised the government three weeks ago to bring in five measures including a short “circuit breaker” lockdown, or else face a “very large epidemic”.

The official documents dated 21 September also called for a ban on household mixing in homes; the closure of all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms and services such as hairdressers; and all university and college teaching to be online “unless absolutely essential”.

So all this was significantly watered down. 

Inevitable the growth R will increase when relaxing lockdown measures. Hence, if R is only marginally below 1, it is inadvisable to relax all the lockdown measures since this will likely increase the R rate to above 1.  It was especially foolish allowing students to go to University as people from all over the country are mixing together there.  

R needs to be substantially below 1 before reverting back to normal life and this needs to be applied to all the different regions of the country.  Alternatively, we can let the virus rip through most of the population, but try to keep the vulnerable isolated.

But the choice has to be made.  The Government appears to have opted for the former.  But why on earth wasn't the advice from Sage followed?  Allowing R to get above 1 can be calamitous since this is exponential growth we're talking about here. Sorry, but I regard the Government -- and especially Boris Johnson -- as utterly incompetent, at least at handling a pandemic.

I wrote about the virus way back in March on my other blog here.  And on this blog both here and here.  

Sabine Hossenfelder and her denial of Free Will

I watched the following video of the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and her arguments against the existence of free will.

I find it exasperating that scientists continually pontificate on philosophical issues such as whether there's free will, whether there's an afterlife etc, when they simply do not have the appropriate expertise.

This video is a case in point. There's 2 claims she makes:

a) Free will is incompatible with the laws of nature.

b) Free will is entirely meaningless.

She addresses "a" first, but "b" is clearly more important. If free will is meaningless, then to refute free will one doesn't have to appeal to the laws of nature or anything else. So I shall address "b" first.

b) She says:

"[Free will] never made sense in the first place. You see that thing you call "free will" should in some sense allow you to choose what you want. But then it's either determined by what you want, in which case it's not free, or it's not determined, in which case it's not a will."

Determined by what we want... In other words, we have the innate capacity within us to act on our wants, to choose in other words. But this is precisely what is meant by free will! If we have the power to choose as we please, if we are not constrained to act in a specific manner by physical laws or by physical chains of causes and effects, then this is what is meant by free will.

a) The problem here is she assumes reductive materialism. Unfortunately, reductive materialism is incompatible with the very existence of consciousness, hence it is scarcely surprising that it leaves no room for a causally efficacious consciousness! Indeed, science leaves out consciousness in its description of reality, hence the "hard problem" (the "hard problem" is the apparent intractable difficulty in reconciling the existence of consciousness within some type of materialist metaphysic.)

One last point. She says:

 "If you want to define free will in such a way that it is still consistent with the laws of nature, that is fine by me, though I will continue to complain that's just verbal acrobatics."

But no verbal acrobatics are required. We do what we want, what we choose, and the laws of nature, as applied to us, are a simple description of that freely chosen behaviour. Of course, she might complain that only the 4 fundamental forces have any genuine causal agency, but this is both to assume reductive materialism and that these forces do indeed have genuine causal agency. But physics merely describes the world. Assigning innate powers to electrons etc is a metaphysical position. Free will is a metaphysical position too (as is its denial), but at least in our own case we are immediately and directly acquainted with our own causal agency.

I have written an essay on the issue of free will in the below link

http://ian-wardell.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-causal-consciousness-free-will-and.html

Academic Bullshitters

I'm just reading this book Calling Bullshit.  It says:

Another philosopher to take up the issue of bullshit, G. A. Cohen, notes that a lot of bullshit—particularly of the academic variety—is meaningless and so cloaked in rhetoric and convoluted language that no one can even critique it. Thus for Cohen, bullshit is “unclarifiable unclarity.” Not only is the bullshitter’s prose unclear, but the ideas underlying it are so ill-formed that it cannot possibly be clarified. Cohen suggests a test for unclarity: If you can negate a sentence and its meaning doesn’t change, it’s bullshit. “Shakespeare’s Prospero is ultimately the fulcrum of an epistemic tragedy, precisely because of his failure to embrace the hermeneutics of the transfinite.”

What these notions of bullshit have in common is that the speaker aims to persuade or impress, rather than to lead the listener toward the truth. The speaker may do this with active obfuscation, or simply by talking nonsense to conceal the fact that he or she doesn’t actually know anything about the subject at hand.

Yes, much of academic writing -- at least in philosophy -- appears to me to be a word salad.  It's even worse on the net with many men (and it's always men) trying to pose by stringing together words that, as a collective whole, simply don't appear to have any meaning.  I find it infuriating and I don't tend to be polite to these people.  

Big Tits

I remember when I was around 14 years old walking around in Stockton-on-Tees with a friend -- Gary Dix -- on a Saturday afternoon. We were in Uptons looking at the toys and games (must have been near Christmas). My friend suddenly said to me "Ian look at her tits" (or something like that, pointing to this woman). I ignored him at first (as I prefer bums to tits) but he insisted I looked. And I looked, and couldn't believe how huge they were (I now realise they must have been artificially enlarged). Anyway, I collapsed in giggles (I used to giggle like a girl), and we managed to stagger out of the door. Took one look back at the woman. She had such an utterly furious look on her face.

Hungry Horace

I remember back in the 70's reading a comic featuring a character called "Hungry Horace" (think might have been in "The Sparky", but not sure). Anyway, in this particular issue he went forward in time, maybe to the year 2000. He hated it because nobody ate food in the future, they just ate these pills instead!

I remember thinking, oh God, hope the future won't be like that! Of course the prediction never came to fruition, just like all other predictions for the 21st century made back in the 70's.

Minds are affected by brain damage, but souls aren't

 Sam Harris has said:

"we know [there are very good reasons for doubting an afterlife] from 150 years of neurology where you damage areas of the brain and faculties are lost and they're clearly lost, it's not that everyone with brain damage has their soul perfectly intact and they just can't get the words out, everything about your mind can be damaged by damaging the brain".

Sam mentions, for example, that brain damage can result in not being able to recognise faces. So it's not the case that we really do recognise faces, but find we cannot communicate to other people our knowledge. Our minds are actually adversely affected.

The problem with his argument, and the mistake that skeptics always make, is that he conflates the soul with the mind. In fact, even with brain damage, our souls can still be perfectly intact. Suppose someone has perfect unaided vision and puts on a random pair of eyeglasses. Wearing them she cannot read the registration plate of a car 25 metres away. It's not as if she can really see the plate but is unable to communicate this information. She really can't see the registration plate.

But it nevertheless remains the case that her unaided vision is still perfectly intact. Her bespectacled vision is poor, but not her unaided vision. And she merely needs to take the eyeglasses off to restore her vision. Likewise, with brain damage, our minds might be affected, but not our souls. Our souls merely need to detach from our bodies to restore full cognitive abilities (or indeed enhanced cognitive abilities).

Spiny flower mantis native to southern and eastern Africa

 Wow!  Look at that alien like thingy.

Review of Resident Evil 3 Remake

I've played very few computer games in the past 15 years. I played some of Far Cry 3. Played both Left4Dead games (but they were just multiplayer games). And I also played some of the Resident Evil 2 remake. And that's about it, I think. I also over 20 years ago played the original Resident Evil and the remake of it, and the original Resident Evil 2 in its entirety. But I never played the original Resident Evil 3.

First thing to note is that this Resident Evil 3 Remake is extremely short. I think the median playthrough time on first attempt is slightly less than 6 hours. It took me over 12 hours though. Why did it take me over twice as long? Well, I didn't attempt to do it quickly at all and just had my characters walking unless running away from enemies. Also, as I said, I scarcely play any computer games. I remember when I played the first resident evil game (not the longer remake), that it took me 12 hours 45 mins. But that was in 1998 and was the first computer game I'd played since the early 1980's when I used to play space invaders and the like. But I digress...

So, it's very short, and it has no additional missions either. Infuriatingly, control is sometimes wrestled away from you where it simply plays a pre-recorded sequence where you have no control over your character (I think people refer to them as "cut scenes"). Indeed, for the first 20 mins, it was more like watching a film than playing a computer game! Are most computer games like that now? If I wanted to watch a film I'd do precisely that! Moreover, sometimes, in the midst of these pre-recorded sequences it tells you to hold the stick in a certain direction, or press button A on the controller. I have no idea of the purpose of making people do this, it's just a pain and also means you can't go off to make yourself a coffee when the pre-recorded sequence starts.

Also, sometimes the character pulls out her (and his) radio, and then you can't run or interact with anything. This happens constantly and is a complete pain.

And the boss battles (I think that's what they're referred to). There's 4 of them! I think when I used to play computer games there was only the one boss battle right at the end of the game. Is it a problem that there's 4 boss battles? Yes, for one thing the boss -- Nemesis in this case -- is vastly disproportionately more difficult to defeat than any of the other enemies. So I was doing fine on the normal difficulty, until the 2nd Boss battle. I kept having to play that same damn boss battle over and over and over again. It was tedious! Although now I feel I've finally got the hang of it. 

I'd much prefer a game where there are no pre-recorded sequences and no boss battles. Then I might get into playing computer games again. 

And the controller. I'm using an xbox controller. It uses 2 sticks, which I think is now standard in game consoles? But I'm not used to it and I find it extraordinarily difficult to aim at zombies heads since they constantly sway side to side as they approach you. Also, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to look behind me when my character is walking or running without changing the direction in which my character is moving. I presume other people just know how to do it as this won't be the first time they've used this type of controller. I've spent some considerable time trying to work this out and also by Googling and asking beneath youtube videos, but all to no avail. But I know it's possible since I've seen other people do it on youtube playing this game. So I'm at a considerable disadvantage when being chased by Nemesis. I need to be able to see behind me when running away so I know when he is about to unleash an attack!

OK, now for some more positive comments. It has a staggering 5 levels of difficulty, and more importantly, each of these levels is significantly different from each other. The first difficulty, the so-called "assisted" level, is extremely easy. Then there's the normal level, then hard, then nightmare, then inferno. The latter 2 levels of difficulty are different in that the zombies have a much greater reach, and the items are placed in different areas compared to the other 3 levels. I've played some of the nightmare level and it's absurdly difficult. You can, though, apply what are effectively cheats i.e you accumulate points for killing a certain number of enemies and can buy guns with infinite ammo etc. I've never previously used a cheat before in a computer game but I see no alternative if I want to get through the nightmare level (the video shows me playing a small part of the nightmare level, and also testing out my microphone).

Oh yes, and the graphics are gorgeous. And despite the fact I bought my computer 8 years ago back in 2012 (for £1400 minus monitor, so very expensive) the game runs fine. In conclusion, despite all the detractions I've listed, I quite like this game. I just wish it were longer and had some mini-games at the end!

Edited to add:  I tried to submit this review to Amazon UK under the xbox1 version.  It was rejected.  I asked why.  The response states:

Hello, 

We encourage reviews, video and images on Amazon, both positive and negative. However, the video on your review titled "Many detractions, but worth playing" for "Resident Evil 3 (Xbox One)" doesn’t comply with our guidelines. 

Your video includes Guns and Firearms. We restrict videos with inappropriate content because audiences within our Community may be sensitive to that content.

Hmm . .this is surreal.   I fired 1 shot at a electricity box to momentarily electrocute the zombies.  I never shot at the zombies, and they didn't bite me. But, even if it had contained any violence, it's a resident evil game for heavens sake!