Thanks for this Razib.

It has been a few decades since I read the Chinese masters. I remember being impressed by some of what they wrote though. Nowadays I find myself frequently wondering how or what I would be thinking were I have been born in some other era and culture.

Many of those marginally alive Chinese peasants of Xun Zi's day would be quite successful in my society though...

You ought to check out Mozi (Mo Tzu) next. I don't know of a new quality translation, but Mo is the least literary and most literalistic of the Chinese philosophers so the old translations are mostly OK.

Mo Tzu was:

1. The most theistic of the Chinese philosophers.

2. The one who used systematic rational argument the most. Some of his followers approached science in their investigations (See Graham: "Later Mohist Logic").

3. Ultimately a consequentialist or utilitarian. He rejected the culturalism and ritualism of Chinese society in favor of economic development, etc., and is thought to have had connections with the technical classes.

4. Somewhat populist, though he remained authoritarian and assumed hierarchy.

5. Not at all anti-war, but an opponent of aggressive war, denying that there was glory or honor in vctory. IE, for him war was on;y utilitarian, and the less war the better. Some Mohists were organized into military units specializing in defensive warfare and military engineering.

Even the late Confucians were thought of as atheists by the Jesuit missionaries (some of whom may have been skeptics of a sort: these missionaries were learned men who had mastered the science of their time). Leibniz wrote a book based on the missionary repoorts of Confucianism (Google Mungello + Leibniz).

Nisbet looks like a can of worms. I used to be much more interested in this kind of thing. A question to ask: how do ethnic Chinese in Singapore (and Chinese-Americans) compare to educated provincial mainland Chinese? A second issue: Chinese and Japanese were successfully participating in Western science quite early on, and this required mastering the western methods. But some East Asians successful in science have claimed that aspects of their Asian culture were helpful to them.

Are there any translation footnotes about the use of "supernatural" in that passage?

Razib,

It seems to me that your less reflective category of atheists includes a great many people throughout the ages. Where I grew up, you'd say such a person "wasn't a churchgoer." They're the guys (like my dad) who darken the door of a church only for weddings and funerals, and who simply find the whole set of theological and religious questions boring and irrelevant.

Irrelevant to what, Albatross?

My own dad was a nonbeliever, and he told me that one of my Sunday School teachers was a doubter.

Belonging to some churches isn't much more than politeness. However, it makes overt atheism difficult.

Are there any translation footnotes about the use of "supernatural" in that passage?

no. though you didn't need to ask, you can 'search inside' the book on amazon. i've seen similar translations of xun zi elsewhere, so the translation seems one of consensus, not this translator's particular inclination.

Some quibbles I guess.

I'm not conversant with my ancient Chinese or Hindu thinkers, but I do consider my knowledge of Western ones, including Greeks, to be above average, in that I've read more than the average person and understood more than the average reader, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb saying so.

Per the Greeks, as far as Greek thinkers not believing in Hesiod, for a intellectually inclined Greek of Epicurus's time, arguing against Hesiod would be like refuting geocentrism today, one could but noone does since geocentism is dead and attacking it would be like knifing a corpse. The god Epicurus didn't believe in was the god of the philosophers.

For 'natural' no ancient Greek put it that way, they would have said the 'natural' was the 'sensible', what could be seen/heard/smelt/tasted/touched. Here's Plutarch from his Life of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, expounding on Pythagoras' thoughts on God, this being the god that Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plutarch believed in.




In like manner Numa spoke of a certain goddess or mountain nymph that was in love with him, and met him in secret, as before related; and professed that he entertained familiar conversation with the Muses, to whose teaching he ascribed the greatest part of his revelations; and amongst them, above all, he recommended to the veneration of the Romans one in particular, whom he named Tacita, the silent; which he did perhaps in imitation and honour of the Pythagorean silence. His opinion, also, of images is very agreeable to the doctrine of Pythagoras; who conceived of the first principle of being as transcending sense and passion, invisible and incorrupt, and only to be apprehended by abstract intelligence. So Numa forbade the Romans to represent God in the form of man or beast, nor was there any painted or graven image of a deity admitted amongst them for the space of the first hundred and seventy years, all of which time their temples and chapels were kept free and pure from images; to such baser objects they deemed it impious to liken the highest, and all access to God impossible, except by the pure act of the intellect



Who knows if Plutarch got his history correct, but that's the God an educated ancient pagan believed in or not. The educated Greek rejected Zeus not because he was supernatural, one could say to Zeus, "Hey Zeus, take a bath, you smell bad", but because Zeus was NOT supernatural, one could see/hear/smell/touch/taste him. To an educated Greek, God was necessity from the Illiad, from Homer's line, "Necessity, which even the gods must obey'. What does 'Necessity' look like? Smell like? Taste like? Sound like? What's it's rest mass? Is it different from what it was five minutes ago? None of the above, it's beyond the realm of sense. I think if modern English language discourse on the subject rejected the word 'natural' and used the more precise 'sensible' a lot of confusion would be cleared up.

Epicurus didn't believe in Zeus, but he was more into his 'senses' than just pleasing them being the point of life, he got there by assuming that what could be 'sensed' was all that there was and could be, thereby rejecting Pythagoras's god, philosophy be damned as it were.

In finishing, the God that comes out of Philosophy is in Greek, pure 'nous' or Mind, who has no body, and since he can't run, or jump or anything like that can only think, and he did the stuff he did by pure thought, 'God thought, Let there be light' and there was light', as it were. There is nothing practical about knowing about such a god though, and the Platonist's foe, a Sophist, who were teachers of practical skills, like how to argue a case in the law courts and such and who thought knowing how to handle a boat was far more important than knowing as to whether or not water was an 'element' or not, didn't have much use for such stuff. Given that philosphers were/are impractical dreamer types, and the God they come up with only thinks, he's pure Mind, and given what a teacher of practical knowledge generally thinks of philosophers so described above, the sophist who said 'If jackasses had gods their gods would be jackasses', probably was talking about the philosophers and their god. Which doesn't mean he was right.

Some quibbles I guess.

the post has been updated to include your clarification. you're right. the cosmogony reference was pretty much a low blow ;-) but i couldn't help it!

I think you hit a useful point with your observation of two sorts of atheists. Perhaps it's of use to change the perspective a bit and put one sort of theist in the midst of a realist continuum. My dog is a realist, and it's beyond dispute that this is more or less where we start. I'm a realist too.

I think theism arises out of an anthropomorphic default model to explain things. We create god in our own image. Back it up, we imagine spirits with human characteristics inhabiting rocks and trees and clouds as well as other humans. This tendency, which arose out of how we evolved recursive thought, was then seized upon by memes that have helped domesticate us--a later development related to agriculture. Monotheism is a development particularly related to the interaction of pastoralists domesticating agriculturalists.

Realism is the ground state. One can escape the grip of the religion memes by either going under or going over. Default anthropomorphism isn't a bad place to start...provided you don't let the religion memes cut your mental balls off and put a ring through your nose.

Thank you, Razib. For a long time I've been wanting to post on the monotheist*-atheist-pagan triangle, but haven't had time (maybe I still will, someday). Monotheists and pagans are usually classed together as "religious", but in many ways monotheists and atheists have more in common with each other than they do with pagans. And, as you have pointed out, in other ways it is atheists and pagans that have the most in common, with monotheists being the outlier.

Also, I think if you separate the religious into "monotheists" and "pagans" you will find that it paints a very different picture of the SES differences.

*Here, I do not mean nominal monotheism.

Monotheism is a development particularly related to the interaction of pastoralists domesticating agriculturalists.

i think this conception is actually false. christianity and islam developed in an urban milieu. muhammad was not a bedouin, but a city dweller. he fled mecca not for the deep desert but to another city. as for judaism, i know that it has mythological pastoralist origins, with nomadic jews conquering canaanites, but

1) there is a line of scholarship with argues that the jews were actually canaanites who retrospectively manufactured an exogenous origin

2) i think the priests of the kingdom of judah were city-dwellers, and it seems that they developed the seeds for genuine hebrew monotheism. and the judaism of the exile was not pastoralist in the least, they were farmers or townsmen.

(off topic, but those are just my thoughts ;-)

david, i would appreciate some clarification on your comment before i respond/follow up. can you outline specifically how your typology maps to the one i presented in my post? (i think i know, but i don't want to make an error which would result in an off target response)

Pagans: +need-for-gnosis -reflective
Atheists: -need-for-gnosis +reflective
Monotheists: +need-for-gnosis +reflective

I'm not sure where to put Dawkins-style atheism. I don't see how Darwinism explains anything - it just raises the questions up one level, like paganism.

The Genesis-Exodus story is very, very peculiar. There are so many features that seem pastoralist, but (at Razib says) it's hard to find anything in the archaeological record or in Babylonian or Egyptian record that can be identified with any of the Biblical events before the return from Babylonian exile. Even the existence of David and Solomon has been hard to attest.

If you think in terms of myths of origins and state-formation or nation-formation, Genesis-Exodus does somewhat resemble actual historical events (foundation of the Zulus, Genghis Khan's unification of the Mongols).

You can't even rule out the possibility that Christian myth influenced the Mongols, for their were Christians among them. And the Alexander legend was known to them too (Alexander himself reached Uzbekistan and his legend was circulated through the Muslim world.)

Mark: Monotheism is a development particularly related to the interaction of pastoralists domesticating agriculturalists.

Razib: i think this conception is actually false. christianity and islam developed in an urban milieu. muhammad was not a bedouin, but a city dweller. he fled mecca not for the deep desert but to another city. as for judaism, i know that it has mythological pastoralist origins, with nomadic jews conquering canaanites, but


You're of course right Razib, but I'm right too.

It is certainly the case that (nomadic) pastoralists were in competitive conflict with (settled) agriculturalists since the more or less simultaneous appearance of both in the Middle East. This conflict wasn't settled until cities finally beat out nomads hardly more than 500 years ago. Sometimes pastoralists have simply destroyed cities, but the more enduring outcome has been a military elite caste with pastoralist roots on top of lower castes with agriculturalist roots in an urban setting.

The key point from my POV is that monotheism arose as a solution to the problem of domesticating people, whereas religiousity in the broader sense arose out of anthropomorphism as a default pattern priming our pattern recognition system.

Philosophical atheism then emerges out of the perceived failure of the default to actually explain and predict. Who has this perception? Anybody who pays enough attention, but it's most consequential in educated elites when the model is failing in a consequential way.

The key point from my POV is that monotheism arose as a solution to the problem of domesticating people

i don't think this is related to simply monotheism. although it depends on whether you include its henotheistic varieties.... my own preference would be substitute 'monotheism' with 'institutional religion.'

Pagans: +need-for-gnosis -reflective
Atheists: -need-for-gnosis +reflective
Monotheists: +need-for-gnosis +reflective


i don't want to get tripped up over terminology, my own tendency is not to fixate on monotheism for the last category. many religious groups that are not monotheism (e.g., buddhists) might fall into the same catchall. but i can accept your typology as capturing a lot of the truth IMO.

i don't want to get tripped up over terminology

I'm not committed to the terminology either, I just made it up on the spot to try to capture "not paganism" (the post I had wanted to write someday is quite unformed in my mind). While Buddhists might not be monotheists in many people's terminology, they do propose an essential unity to being which gives life meaning. I don't think it's possible for a religion to satisfy the need for ultimate meaning without proposing an essential unity to all things.

I don't think it's possible for a religion to satisfy the need for ultimate meaning without proposing an essential unity to all things.

sure. rodney stark makes his explicit in one truth god; he contends that buddhism and chinese religions offer up one true "essences."

Ernest Gellner states Mark's position, citing Ibn Khaldun as the originator. It's worth a look: I'd recommend "Anthropology and Politics".

i don't want to get tripped up over terminology, my own tendency is not to fixate on monotheism for the last category.

I appreciate that you strive to look past the words to the underlying meaning. You are certainly much better educated than I am, and I'll defer to your terminology when I understand it. Feel free to school me up.

I'm going off to reflect on how well your gnosis/reflection model meshes with my own framing in this area.

As for ibn Khaidun, John, I guess it's like Hume and Xun Zi, in that he is certainly not a direct intellectual ancestor; but different minds exploring the same terrain are likely to arrive at similar perspectives from time to time.

I think that monotheism has been on the rise - or, at least, monotheism seems to drive out polytheism. So we should ask what evolutionary advantage monotheism provides for a religion.

It's probably easier to motivate fanaticism with monotheism than with polytheism. You can't get too worked up about what one god says, if a dozen other gods say something different. It's probably easier to maintain discipline under monotheism; polytheists can't have any ultimate, central authority, since the temples of one god aren't under the jurisdiction of the temples of other gods.

While the great lift off in natural sciences has occurred only in the past few hundred years, perhaps the vast majority of the genuine original value from the humanities and philosophy was generated within the first few hundred years of the Iron Age?


This is a curious statement. Philosophy seems to be constantly developing novel ways to see the world and there are many things still not clearly understood which are philosophical in nature.

Within the last 1,000 years, phil has:

1. codified the scientific method (Francis Bacon and others)

2. created the sciences of psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, inter alia. (However, the creation of psychology as a modern science is partially due to two philosophers: Brentano and James and two biologists: Wundt and Pavlov.) The other sciences were first practiced by philosophers.

3. Created Marxism, modern democracy, modern fascism, and modern capitalism.

4. To a large degree responsible for the electronic and computer revolution through developments in logic. (There's a reason why circuit boards are called "logic gates"). A Model Theory for the sentential logic was first developed by Wittgenstein. For the First Order Logic it was first developed by Alfred Tarski (who's PhD was actually in philosophy)and a Model Theory for the modal logic first developed by Saul Kripke.

Razib wrote:

While the great lift off in natural sciences has occurred only in the past few hundred years, perhaps the vast majority of the genuine original value from the humanities and philosophy was generated within the first few hundred years of the Iron Age?

I think this statement is based on the Western bastardization of philosophy. Philosophy originally meant seeking truth. It was supposed to be a discipline to actually find answers to questions. Any discipline that is supposed to find answers should have certain properties.

One is that, over time, it finds answers. That means that the research questions of 100 years ago, are not the same research questions of today. It also means that most of the authors who were read 100 years ago, should no longer be read today. If you go to medical school, you don't start by reading the writings of Hippocrates, or medieval works describing how to drive demons out of a patient, or balance the humors in their body. If you study physics, you don't begin by learning about earth, air, fire, and water. We acknowledge that those early systems were wrong.

Another property is, that proposed answers are critically evaluated. Philosphy doesn't do this. Individual philosophers argue with each other, but none of them are going to teach in Philosophy 101 that Plato was dead wrong about the Forms, and then present the research of Eleanor Rosch (or even the ideas of the later Wittgenstein). They aren't going to show you the mathematical solution to Zeno's paradox. They will teach you Aquinas' and Descartes' proofs for the existence of God with a straight face.

Part of the critical evaluation of ideas is showing their consequences in history. A lot could be said about the effects of Plato's ideas on the development of Western thought. Yet philosophy courses rarely do this. Even when criticizing other philosophers, philosophers don't evaluate them based on the consequences of their ideas; they operate in a decontextualized, history-free space.

A discipline that seeks truth doesn't judge an idea in terms of its entertainment value. Philosophers, on the other hand, have learned that the way to become famous is to see how absurd a statement you can make and still support it. This practice makes convergence to the truth impossible.

Even though almost every writing of any philosopher prior to the 20th century can be classified as either a) wrong, b) so misconceived that it can't even be wrong, or c) something that we all know today and therefore don't need to read, philosophers still spend most of their training reading all this crap. As a result, majoring in philosophy ironically ensures that you will be less-qualified to answer philosophical questions than anyone else.

The questions that philosophers have asked, have been answered by mathematics, by biology, by economics, by physics, and more recently, by psychology and knowledge representation. If philosophy is properly seen as the pursuit of knowledge on the cutting edge, ahead of what experimental science can address, then it isn't the case that the great original ideas were come up with BC. This is only the case if you accept that "philosophy" is what philosophy departments teach.

I don't know how philosophy came to be this way. I think it's played as a bit of a game by many people. I remember a dinner party at which John Searle, a famous contemporary philosopher, defended his Chinese Room hypothesis against an audience of computer scientists, and my distinct impression was that it was all fun and games to him, and he didn't give a damn about truth, only about being on top. I think I see some of this attitude in the writings of postmodernists. At best, philosophy is easily parasitized by attention-seekers. At worst, it's an ancient Greek method for getting laid that we take way too seriously.

people: don't get hung up on the semantics. yes, science is natural philosophy. my allusion to "literary" intellectuals should make it clear what sort of cognitive style i'm speaking of....

people: don't get hung up on the semantics. yes, science is natural philosophy. my allusion to "literary" intellectuals should make it clear what sort of cognitive style i'm speaking of....

My point is that even if we do distinguish between philosophy proper (literary in your words) and the sciences proper, much of the sciences proper (economics, psychology, sociology, logic, etc) still owes phil proper some credit for giving birth to them. It's not just a semantics issue. It's a historical issue involving the history of ideas and there genetic lineage. Draw the semantic line where you will, it still does not take away the historical fact that many of these sciences were first devoloped as responses to philosophical issues or as a refinement of some philosophical methodology. Therefore, the idea: "...the vast majority of the genuine original value from the humanities and philosophy was generated within the first few hundred years of the Iron Age?" seems odd to me. If you consider the birth of so many empirical sciences which has given us many novel perspectives, practical palpable changes and insight not of any "genuine value" then I don't know what you mean by the term "genuine value".

It's not that I (probably the only one that's a reader of this blog) majored in the subject that I feel the urge to defend it, I really do think that it has great value (much deeper than just giving birth to sciences in fact) that people are not aware. I am giving credit where it's due. Notice that I did not credit phil with developing the infinitismal calculus and analytical geometry even though they were first developed by philosophers. That's a historical fact of coincidence, not of a proper genetic lineage. These subdisciplines of math just happened to have been developed by philosophers in response to non-philosophical (proper) subjects.

I think phil is still making major progress and just as it always has been, today's philosophy is tomorrow's "common sense" but for it to turn into common sense it takes a very long time.

Another property is, that proposed answers are critically evaluated. Philosphy doesn't do this. Individual philosophers argue with each other, but none of them are going to teach in Philosophy 101 that Plato was dead wrong about the Forms, and then present the research of Eleanor Rosch (or even the ideas of the later Wittgenstein). They aren't going to show you the mathematical solution to Zeno's paradox.

Phil Goetz,

you might like to know that:

1. Philosophers aren't sure that calculus completely solves zeno's. There are good arguments that this line of reasoning simply begs the question. See here.

2. It was philosophers (Russell and Grunbaum)who first applied calculus to "solve" zeno's.

Another property is, that proposed answers are critically evaluated. Philosphy doesn't do this. Individual philosophers argue with each other, but none of them are going to teach in Philosophy 101 that Plato was dead wrong about the Forms, and then present the research of Eleanor Rosch (or even the ideas of the later Wittgenstein). They aren't going to show you the mathematical solution to Zeno's paradox. They will teach you Aquinas' and Descartes' proofs for the existence of God with a straight face.

I once had a prof. who told me that he took a class on Plato where the entire class was devoted to showing the logical fallacies in Plato's reasoning. Philosophers teach Descartes' proof of god with as much of a "straight face" as physcists teach the luminiferous aether theory with a straight face. Descartes' "proof" of god is maybe the most ridiculed argument in the history of phil departments accross the globe.

Philosophy originally meant seeking truth. It was supposed to be a discipline to actually find answers to questions.

It does find answers and still seeks them. While we're on the subject of Hume and the ancient Chinese philosophers, here are just a couple of examples to illustrate this point.

Phil is difficult. Answers (usually) don't just appear and that's that. Hume's theory of causation is one example where a solution or "answer" continues to baffle philosophers because there are more questions raised by said answer. Hume's theory of causation cannot satisfactorily deal with 1. simultaneous causation 2. epiphenomenon. (and also the strange case of backward causation but we'll ignore that for now)

In simultaneous causation such as when I push an object, the cause (me pushing) is simultaneous with the effect (the movement of the box). Now, Hume's theory is that a cause is analytically prior to its effect because that is how we define what is a cause and effect relation. We associate two temporally contiguous events through repeated exposure and analytically stipulate that the prior event is called the "cause" and the later the "effect." But this doesn't explain why we normally do not confuse simultaneous causation's causes and effects even though the relationship in this case is not situated in the same temporal structure as a Humean cause and effect relationship. We easily know what is the cause and effect when we push a box but this cause-effect relationship does not follow the prior-after relationship with normal cause-effect relationships.

Epiphenomeon also seems to offer counter-examples to Humean causation. I see the mercury in my barometer drop and soon there's a storm. Does that mean the drop in mercury caused the storm even though there's repeatable cases of these two events in that temporal order? No, the drop in mercury levels is an epiphenomon and has a cause that's also the cause of the storm (a drop in air presure from certain weather patterns).

Since Hume's theory does not account for these two counter-examples, we must either formulate an alternative theory of causation or come up with a neo-Humean theory to answer the objections. Philosophers have since done both. Alternative theories of causation include counterfactual theories and other theories like the Kim-Goldman theory (with their associated strengths and weaknesses!). Paul Horwich has (to my mind) solved the problems with simultaneous causation and epiphenomeon within a neo-Humean framework. There are other problems with the Humean theory of causation (such as some semantic problems) but philosophers are working on these too ;).

One of the most contentious debates in classical Chinese thought was the essential nature of Man. Some argued that it is basically evil, others essentially good. Still others were tabula rasa theorists who placed heavy emphasis on "nurture" as oppossed to nature of Man and some Daoists believed that the categories of "evil" and "good" or any like-category used for Man to be too artificial and rigid for something as complex, fluid and nondescript as human nature. Now, this question is tough and equally compelling arguments on different sides has been offered in classical China but philosophers and social scientists are still asking these questions today.

So it's not that we can simply discard "bad" arguments and teach only "true" ones because much of phil is a work in progress. Even faulty or partially faulty arguments can lead to avenues of thought that would not have occurred had they not been made and a better understanding in the end. Even many of the "true" arguments has its problems to this day and must be tackled head on. Not all philosophical arguments in history can be separated into only two categories of "true" and "false". Many fall in between.

Okay, certainly the gnosis/reflection framing is useful in a taxonomic approach to religion and philosophy. I suppose I'd be a "primary atheist" as you have labeled the pigeonholes, whereas you might be a "secondary atheist" in the gnosis+/reflection+ box. Of course I get that your labels are just colored post-its at this point.

My current interest is on the paleontological evidence for the origins of recursive thought, which is somewhat upstream. Sort of. I see recursive thought emerging out of the mirroring system, and the connection between "reflection" and "mirroring" is worth some more reflection.

(Anybody know offhand where the most geologicaly recent Elephas recki recki bones turn up in Bed III-IV at Olduvai?)

JuJuby wrote:

I once had a prof. who told me that he took a class on Plato where the entire class was devoted to showing the logical fallacies in Plato's reasoning. Philosophers teach Descartes' proof of god with as much of a "straight face" as physcists teach the luminiferous aether theory with a straight face. Descartes' "proof" of god is maybe the most ridiculed argument in the history of phil departments across the globe.

I was overgeneralizing. I went to a Catholic college where Descartes' proof was taught with a straight face, and had an instructor who thought that Aquinas was the high point of philosophy. But my point is more that Descartes' proofs for God's existence are even mentioned. It's old crap that's wrong, and has no more business being in the curriculum of a serious discipline, than a description of phlogiston has in a chemistry class. Philosophy hangs onto its old junk as neurotically as an old man with a house full of newspapers from the 1950s.

It's my experience that people discussing philosophy don't take you seriously if you can't keep track of the ideas of Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, etc.; simultaneously, they are often unable to understand the implications of real data for the ideas under discussion, because they lack sufficient knowledge of history, evolutionary theory, statistics, optimization and search, game theory, information theory, psychology, and various other disciplines that are much more relevant to their questions than anything Hegel said.

I realize that questions are answered gradually. But as the questions are recast, new authors address these questions in new ways. There is little room for "classics" in a discipline of knowledge. Philosophy should change even faster in this respect than other disciplines, for the subject matter that philosophers can address shifts radically over time, as old fields of inquiry (e.g., the nature of matter, musical harmony, reproduction, theories of government, nature vs. nurture) are taken over by new sciences.

Even the old chestnut about causation will, I think, be resolved by science before philosophers ever figure it out. Hume's questions are not about the true nature of causation, but our perception of it. Neuroscientists and psychologists, not philosophers, are the people to ask about this. For instance, it has long been believed that, in many cases, a connection from neuron A to neuron B grows stronger when an event that fires A happens near an event that fires B. It's recently been discovered that, in certain important neurons, the function {change in strength of synapse(A->B) = f(firing time(B) - firing time(A))} is, very roughly, y = csch(x). This means that the causation of B by A is most strongly indicated when B closely follows A, and most strongly de-indicated when A closely follows B - a clever solution to a tricky problem. Other researchers are learning about the conditions under which an event that fires neuron A can be associated with an event that fires neuron B after a considerable time delay. The answer to Hume's question will not take the form that Hume expected; it will be a statistical description of the circumstances under which we perceive causation, possibly with a statistical explanation of how well that perception correlates with reality.

I have more respect for the philosophy of logic, although it seems to me that if you're going to go into that, you ought to go full-bore and become a mathematician or an artificial intelligence researcher. I don't know what goes on in graduate-level philosophy courses. However, the culture and methodology that I saw in undergraduate courses makes me dubious that much good can come of it later on.

I might point to Thomas Kuhn as one example of how philosophy could be done - work full of historical data from the real world (although he is also guilty of sensationalizing his conclusions in order to get famous), which has implications for ideas about progress and truth. But he's not a philosopher; he's a historian.

I can't get much further in this discussion without an agreement about what philosophy is. It seems to me that philosophical questions are usually answered by scientists, without reference to the vast body of philosophical works on the subject. It seems to me that a philosopher can perhaps be defined as a would-be scientist who's too lazy to do experiments, or who wants to address questions prematurely. I'd like someday to see a characterization of what philosophy is, and a historical analysis of cases where philosophical questions have been partly resolved, and an estimate, broken down by century, of (fraction answered by philosophy / fraction answered by science) / (resources invested in philosophy / resources invested in science). (This estimate should perhaps be weighted by the benefit to society of the questions in question.) In other words, does philosophy actually answer questions, or just pose them? More importantly, does the posing of questions by philosophers have any bearing on how quickly scientists answer them, and do the intermediate solutions proposed by philosophers provide a net benefit? In other words, is philosophy of any use?

It's easy to conflate love of wisdom and the search for it with the academic discipline called "philosophy." This is like conflating the followers of Christ's doctrines with nominal "Christians". Next thing you know, one can end up judging Christ on the basis of Pat Robertson's rhetoric.

Math and science are bounded on the "if-then" side of the divide between "if-then" and "you should-because." It's simpler and cleaner on the "if-then" side, but we all have to make some choices on the other side of the line from time to time. Philosophy has to cross that line. So I favor cutting philosophers some slack, though I share some of the concerns about the academic discipline.

It's recently been discovered that, in certain important neurons, the function {change in strength of synapse(A->B) = f(firing time(B) - firing time(A))} is, very roughly, y = csch(x). This means that the causation of B by A is most strongly indicated when B closely follows A, and most strongly de-indicated when A closely follows B - a clever solution to a tricky problem.

I am not sure what you are getting at with this example. This example seems to be well capable of fitting witghin a Humean framework. The neurophsyiological relationships between neurons and the eletrco-chemical firings are well known and they all fit within a correlational framework of causation which is Humean at its heart.

Other researchers are learning about the conditions under which an event that fires neuron A can be associated with an event that fires neuron B after a considerable time delay. The answer to Hume's question will not take the form that Hume expected; it will be a statistical description of the circumstances under which we perceive causation, possibly with a statistical explanation of how well that perception correlates with reality.

But that's sounds precisly Humean. A Humean explanation of causation is that we may logically (and normally do) infer from a correlational/statistical relationship empirically observed between two associated events to a nomic relationship between the two events. We adjust our observations and our nomic theories accordingly to new empirical observations. That's Humean and I am sure the neuro-scientists themselves would agree. So I am not sure what your example has to do with Hume's theory of causation or any theory of causation.

It's old crap that's wrong, and has no more business being in the curriculum of a serious discipline, than a description of phlogiston has in a chemistry class.

But what about the luminiferous aether theory? This theory is taught in beginning physics classes all the time and we know that it is wrong. We teach it because it lead to the Michselson-Morley experiment. The results of this experiment lead the theory of Special Relativity.

Also what about Newton's theory of absolute space-time? It's wrong according to Einstein but it's taught in physics classes. These are just two of many examples that could be given. Likewise, sometimes philosophy classes teaches incorrect theories.

I might point to Thomas Kuhn as one example of how philosophy could be done - work full of historical data from the real world ...which has implications for ideas about progress and truth. But he's not a philosopher; he's a historian.

This is additionally a very strange statement. Thomas Kuhn is a famed anti-realist who does not believe in scientific truth or even that we "approach truth" in science. He is famous for his attacks on this notion.

This is a logical consequence of his theory of incommensuribility of theory and paradigm shifts. So it is incorrect to say that he believes (or even infer from his ideas) that we are getting "closer to truth" because each theory posited in order to explan a given phenomenon is incommensurible with the next and that since there is no end to the paradigm nexus, no theory is any "truer" than the next. See here:

"Kuhn's incommensurability thesis presented a challenge not only to positivist conceptions of scientific change but also to realist ones. For a realist conception of scientific progress also wishes to assert that, by and large, later science improves on earlier science, in particular by approaching closer to the truth. A standard realist response from the late 1960s was to reject the anti-realism and anti-referentialism shared by both Kuhn's picture and the preceding double-language model...As we have seen, Kuhn thinks that we cannot properly say that Einstein's theory is an improvement on Newton's in the sense that the latter as deals reasonably accurately (only) with a special case of the former. "

This is additionally a very strange statement. Thomas Kuhn is a famed anti-realist who does not believe in scientific truth or even that we "approach truth" in science. He is famous for his attacks on this notion.

I don't like his conclusions at all. But I like his methodology. Read my statement carefully, and you'll see that's what I said.