Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

On one of my frequent late night trawls on the internet I dredged up this piece of ignorant, misleading and patronising creationist (or ‘intelligent design’) propaganda. The film is going to be released in the United States in early February, and features contributions from a number of eminent intellectuals, including Dawkins, Dennett, and Phillip Pettit. It seems that the makers duped all of them into appearing in the film by intentionally misrepresenting its content and stance. Another Darwinian contributor, “PZ” Myers, has published the invitation he received to appear in Expelled; you can find it here. Not only does the letter give a different title for the film (Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion), but the original blurb about it on the Rampant Films website includes the claim that “Darwin provided the answer” to the question of how we exist. If this isn’t intentional mispresentation of the film’s stance and content, I don’t know what is.

What’s even more sickening is that a concerted campaign is underway to get Expelled shown to schoolchildren across the States. If schools and colleges arrange trips to see the film they will receive generous ‘donations’ of up to $10 000, the exact amount depending on how many students watch it. This information, taken from the ‘Get Expelled Challenge’ web site, is published on Richard Dawkins’s web site, and you can see it for yourself by following this link. I love the fact that there is actually a specified ‘donation structure’, detailing precisely how much your college will receive if X amount of kids see Expelled.

 The sad fact is that creationists are not the underdogs in the United States. In a 2004 poll, 55% of Americans said that they believed that human beings were created directly by God; just 13% said that human beings evolved with no divine involvement whatsoever. Demonstrating the political aspect of the evolution vs. creationism debate, 67% of those who said that human beings were directly created by God voted for Bush in the last presidential election.

Expelled is made by rich and powerful ideologues prepared to lie and bribe in order to promote their right wing politics and their fundamentalist religious beliefs.

On a lighter note, I found this hilarious (and slightly disturbing) video on Youtube. Enjoy…

Colin McGinn on theism

If you’ve got half an hour to kill, you could do worse than watch Jonathan Miller and Colin McGinn discussing theism. You can link to the next two sections from the first one, which can be found here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=U51JT8dTHTs

I especially like the bit where McGinn trashes the argument which says that God must exist because if he didn’t human life would be meaningless. But he’s rubbish on the the ontological argument: surely the definition of God as ‘the most perfect being that can be conceived’ is inessential to the argument, because we can simply list God’s attributes as including existence, omnipotence, omniscience, and so on. Thus, questioning the meaningfulness of the description ‘the most perfect being that can be conceived’ does nothing to diffuse the argument. (And, by the way, Anselm wrote in the eleventh, not the fifthteenth, century! McGinn needs to do a bit of history of philosophy…) Anyone have any ideas why McGinn doesn’t just repeat the mantra, ‘existence is not a property’?

This should put you off philosophy forever!

The guy holding a glass of white wine is David Chalmers, one of the most eminent contemporary philosophers of mind. He looks disgusting…

 On a happier note, anyone interested in mental state externalism should get this book:

It’s about twenty quid (including p & p) on amazon, and it’s the perfect guide to a great topic.

An introduction to the issue of mental state externalism…

How do our beliefs about the world come to have the contents they do? What makes my belief that water is wet a belief about the wetness of water? These questions are deep and difficult, and I shall certainly not attempt to answer them fully here. However, we can fruitfully treat one aspect of the problem, the issue of mental content externalism. Hopefully, this will be the start of a series of blogs (and responses!) in which we discuss externalism, and reach some substantive philosophical conclusions. But first I need to clearly set out the issues at stake.

In the introduction I raised the issue through the example of belief. But it is not only our beliefs that have contents in the relevant sense; rather, the issue attaches to all of the so-called ‘propositional attitudes’. A propositional attitude is what it says on the tin: an attitude to a proposition. I believe that the Holy Spirit doesn’t exist, hope that I won’t go to Hell, desire that I will go to Heaven, and so on. In each example, the embedded sentence after the ‘that’ clause expresses a proposition, and the verb before the ‘that’ clause expresses an attitude towards that proposition – in my examples, the attitudes are belief, hope and desire. We call the embedded proposition the ‘content’ of the propositional attitude; what is at stake in the present debate is how this content is determined. At the present stage, we do not need to commit to a detailed answer to the question of what contents are. What we do need to acknowledge is the basic thesis that contents are comprised out of elements called notions or concepts, whose nature and arrangement determines the nature of the content as a whole. I trust that this will not be too controversial: after all, it seems, intuitively, that the contents ‘water is wet’, ‘water is potable’, and ‘Coca Cola is potable’ share certain things in common, and that what is shared is the occurrence of the same conceptual elements. Once again, we do not need to make any substantive metaphysical commitments about what concepts are. Finally, we should note the following criterion of individuation for mental states: if two mental states have different contents, then they are different mental states.

We’ve seen the distinction between attitude and content, and that contents are composed out of elements called concepts. To understand mental state externalism, we need to introduce one more philosophical concept: supervenience. This may be defined as follows: a set of properties A supervenes on a set of properties B if and only if any two individuals x and y which share all properties in B must also share all properties in A. The concept of supervenience was introduced into philosophy by G. E. Moore in the context of ethics and aesthetics. One supervenience claim is that the beauty of a painting supervenes on the arrangement of paint on the canvas: crudely, the beauty of the painting remains constant so long as you don’t muck about with the paint. A different supervenience claim is at stake between internalists and externalists. The internalist thinks that the contents of a subject’s propositional attitudes supervene on the subject’s internal states; the externalist denies this claim. What counts as a subject’s ‘internal states’? To keep things simple, assume that materialism is true: that is, that everything that exists is physical or material. My internal states are therefore wholly constituted, or determined by, the physical particles which make up my body. Thus, two subjects made up of the same particles in the same arrangement are in the same internal state. Now we can express the internalist’s thesis as follows: two physically identical subjects necessarily have mental states with the same contents. The externalist thinks that two internally identical subjects could be in different mental states, because their propositional attitudes could have different contents. Note that internalism and externalism are types of position, rather then concrete, particular positions: internalists can disagree about which internal states mental contents supervene on; externalists can disagree about which external factors play a role in determing the contents of a subject’s propositional attitudes.

In my next post, I’ll consider arguments for the the externalist’s thesis that two internally identical subjects could be in different mental states. This man looms large…