When I was 16, I found a diary my dad (now dead) kept when he was an undergrad at Berkeley. At the end of every day, he would list all the time he had wasted that day. It would go something like this:
"20 minutes walking around apartment aimlessly
30 minutes wasted while studying because I was distracted
10 minutes slept in
Added up: I wasted an hour. I MUST do better than that! I am a failure!"
Because I never knew my dad past age 8, I never saw this side of him while he was alive. Yet it scared me, because already at 16 I had the same hyper-critical take on my work habits.
Tuesday I finished my last final - all three were easier than I thought they'd be. If anything, what I've learned this semester is not all in the textbooks.
I would say the most valuable thing I did was my honors project on Donne. I have an odd knack for making different projects come together into a singularity. So while I was working on religious poetry, I ended up dabbling in cognitive psychology. The Police had a song about that: synchronicity.
When my proposal on Donne was rejected for the honors conference, my heart sank. All that work and they didn't care! But then I saw a greater opportunity: to work on the idea more over summer and see if I could get it put out somewhere else. Is that presumptuous? Maybe. But my professor advised me that to get anywhere in the world, one needs a little ego.
That may also be why I have never had a dearth of mentors and advisors around. I am not afraid to approach them for advice. This is my blessing as well as one of my 'signs' that I am being called to my scholarly vocation.
Peace.
AMDG
Friday, April 29, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Pragmatic reasons for believing in free will.
A new study is out finding evidence that believing in free will vs. determinism actually changes one's behavior.
"Psychological scientist Davide Rigoni of the University of Padova, Italy, wanted to see if weakening people’s belief in free will might have an effect on volition and intent, as reflected in the brain’s electrical activity. To explore this question, he recruited a group of volunteers and had some of them read a passage from Nobel laureate Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis, which argues that free will is a delusion—and furthermore that there is scientific consensus behind this view. This exercise has been shown in previous research to attenuate belief in free will, and indeed it did so in these volunteers to varying degrees. The other volunteers also read from the text, but nothing about free will."
(http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/a-sobering-message-about-free-will.html)
James in "The Dilemma of Determinism" describes how the debate on determinism vs. free will has no pragmatic value - since the truth or falsity of either position has no influence on human actions, on how we move about in the world. If the hypothesis substantiated by this new research turns out to be true, then James was wrong. However, if believing in determinism reduces our tendency to agency (things like self-discipline, inhibition, etc.) then we have a pragmatic reason to believe in free will.
"Psychological scientist Davide Rigoni of the University of Padova, Italy, wanted to see if weakening people’s belief in free will might have an effect on volition and intent, as reflected in the brain’s electrical activity. To explore this question, he recruited a group of volunteers and had some of them read a passage from Nobel laureate Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis, which argues that free will is a delusion—and furthermore that there is scientific consensus behind this view. This exercise has been shown in previous research to attenuate belief in free will, and indeed it did so in these volunteers to varying degrees. The other volunteers also read from the text, but nothing about free will."
(http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/a-sobering-message-about-free-will.html)
James in "The Dilemma of Determinism" describes how the debate on determinism vs. free will has no pragmatic value - since the truth or falsity of either position has no influence on human actions, on how we move about in the world. If the hypothesis substantiated by this new research turns out to be true, then James was wrong. However, if believing in determinism reduces our tendency to agency (things like self-discipline, inhibition, etc.) then we have a pragmatic reason to believe in free will.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
virtue theory.
Some thoughts on virtue theory, from a talk I heard on Saturday.
1. I liked her discussion of natural law: "human reason pondering human
nature to glean moral insight." The bastardized version of natural law she describes is even in the catechism. Check it out:
"Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved." (CCC 2357)
Given that there are no scriptural reasons to condemn homosexuality per se, we now have a situation where the Church foolishly teaches a hurtful doctrine with no Biblical or theological support. Sigh. In fact, the version of natural law she describes - coupled with modern psychology and the witness of numerous gays and lesbians - directly opposes this doctrine.
2. When I was about divine command theory, it occurred to me that divine command theory doesn't make sense Biblically either. That's a very fundamentalist reading of the Bible: that it gives specific advice on every possible moral situation we could ever encounter. If only life in God's hands was so easy! We face moral situations today that Biblical authors never dreamed of: global warming, bioethical questions such as cloning and designer babies, and questions about artificial intelligence of the kind that sci-fi authors love to explore. We have to use prayerful discernment and reason to come to tentative answers. We have no other choice.
3. I would also argue that virtue ethics gets us out of the Euthyphro dilemma that divine command theory would run into. The question goes, "Is it good because God commanded it or did God command it because it was good?" And virtue ethics says "yes, both": God is good and wants our good.
Peace.
1. I liked her discussion of natural law: "human reason pondering human
nature to glean moral insight." The bastardized version of natural law she describes is even in the catechism. Check it out:
"Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved." (CCC 2357)
Given that there are no scriptural reasons to condemn homosexuality per se, we now have a situation where the Church foolishly teaches a hurtful doctrine with no Biblical or theological support. Sigh. In fact, the version of natural law she describes - coupled with modern psychology and the witness of numerous gays and lesbians - directly opposes this doctrine.
2. When I was about divine command theory, it occurred to me that divine command theory doesn't make sense Biblically either. That's a very fundamentalist reading of the Bible: that it gives specific advice on every possible moral situation we could ever encounter. If only life in God's hands was so easy! We face moral situations today that Biblical authors never dreamed of: global warming, bioethical questions such as cloning and designer babies, and questions about artificial intelligence of the kind that sci-fi authors love to explore. We have to use prayerful discernment and reason to come to tentative answers. We have no other choice.
3. I would also argue that virtue ethics gets us out of the Euthyphro dilemma that divine command theory would run into. The question goes, "Is it good because God commanded it or did God command it because it was good?" And virtue ethics says "yes, both": God is good and wants our good.
Peace.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Mental styles.
Interesting discussion with Viviane on Thursday. I've been so blessed with mentors all along my path who pop into my life left and right. She's one of them, a new one.
She has a doctorate in psychology - in a very qualitative method from CIIS. I've never been comfortable with qualitative, since so much of it seems very fluffy. Though quantitative methods can be very narrow, they give confirmed results. I've always seen qualitative and quantitative methods as complimentary: with in-depth explorations of fewer subjects, we can form hypotheses linking different mental events/phenomena/behavior and study these more specific things in larger quantitative studies.
Viviane's the opposite of me: uncomfortable with quantitative methods. One point she brought up was that quantitative researchers often ignore how they influence the subjects. Granted, they do so less than qualitative researchers, who interact more with subjects, but they still do so. Being in a lab or knowing one is being tested may influence subjects in all experiments.
One problem with qualitative research - or any research - is finding a balance between precision and nebulousness. I saw this in my twentieth-century philosophy class in the difference between much analytic and continental thinkers. Analytic philosophy seems to worship precision at the expense of overspecialization and debates that seem to be largely irrelevant (or even entire subfields!). Continental philosophers can be so nebulous that you don't know what they're saying (Derrida and Heidegger are good examples).
In psychology, this same debate could be played out between 'hard science' types like cognitive scientists and 'not-so-hard science' types like depth psychologists and transpersonal thinkers. If I end up going into psychology, I'd like to make it a career mission to bring together thinkers and methods from different psychology paradigms that may never speak to each other. An easy example is phenomenology and neuroscience, which can work together to describe experiences.
Don't get me wrong. Highly specialized researchers can do good stuff. But that's not really my cast of mind. And I think people can be trained in different disciplines. Folk like C.P. Snow wrote entire books on this. And what about Aquinas?
She has a doctorate in psychology - in a very qualitative method from CIIS. I've never been comfortable with qualitative, since so much of it seems very fluffy. Though quantitative methods can be very narrow, they give confirmed results. I've always seen qualitative and quantitative methods as complimentary: with in-depth explorations of fewer subjects, we can form hypotheses linking different mental events/phenomena/behavior and study these more specific things in larger quantitative studies.
Viviane's the opposite of me: uncomfortable with quantitative methods. One point she brought up was that quantitative researchers often ignore how they influence the subjects. Granted, they do so less than qualitative researchers, who interact more with subjects, but they still do so. Being in a lab or knowing one is being tested may influence subjects in all experiments.
One problem with qualitative research - or any research - is finding a balance between precision and nebulousness. I saw this in my twentieth-century philosophy class in the difference between much analytic and continental thinkers. Analytic philosophy seems to worship precision at the expense of overspecialization and debates that seem to be largely irrelevant (or even entire subfields!). Continental philosophers can be so nebulous that you don't know what they're saying (Derrida and Heidegger are good examples).
In psychology, this same debate could be played out between 'hard science' types like cognitive scientists and 'not-so-hard science' types like depth psychologists and transpersonal thinkers. If I end up going into psychology, I'd like to make it a career mission to bring together thinkers and methods from different psychology paradigms that may never speak to each other. An easy example is phenomenology and neuroscience, which can work together to describe experiences.
Don't get me wrong. Highly specialized researchers can do good stuff. But that's not really my cast of mind. And I think people can be trained in different disciplines. Folk like C.P. Snow wrote entire books on this. And what about Aquinas?
Intro.
"A vocation is something which cannot be had for the asking. It comes from heaven and from our first nature."
I am a student in the honors program at Modesto Junior College and the philosophy online program at University of Illinois at Springfield. I'm also president of our college Philosophical Society. The life of the mind is my vocation.
Ever since my discovery of William James' "Will to Believe" in my first philosophy class, I have been interested in what the philosophy and psychology of religion can say to one another. Since then I have also begun walking down a Christian path and wonder how these ideas seep into theology.
"All who bear a message, all poets, all seekers and also those who are on the alert to pick up truths that lie scattered around us, must plunge deep into the vast emptiness that is plenitude."
(Quotes from A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life.)
I am a student in the honors program at Modesto Junior College and the philosophy online program at University of Illinois at Springfield. I'm also president of our college Philosophical Society. The life of the mind is my vocation.
Ever since my discovery of William James' "Will to Believe" in my first philosophy class, I have been interested in what the philosophy and psychology of religion can say to one another. Since then I have also begun walking down a Christian path and wonder how these ideas seep into theology.
"All who bear a message, all poets, all seekers and also those who are on the alert to pick up truths that lie scattered around us, must plunge deep into the vast emptiness that is plenitude."
(Quotes from A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life.)
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