Links for March

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1. The infamous Ethan Muse v Dustin Crummett debate on the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima is now available, courtesy of Bentham's Bulldog. More than anything, the debate was a triumph of the human spirit. When I argue with Ethan, I struggle to stay afloat on topics that I have researched for days and which Ethan has never heard of before; yet Dustin, powered by several hours of Wikipedia research and a couple of blog posts, was able to keep up the fight for almost two hours on a topic that Ethan knows more about that nearly anyone else on the planet. Dustin’s most formidable debate tactic, which he tells me is not a tactic, is to involuntarily chuckle and then casually repeat what his opponent said back to them in a way that makes it sound like the dumbest thing that has ever been said by anyone. He also employs the counter-signal, whereby he drops all pretentions and academic verbiage, thereby revealing that he doesn’t need them. Ethan’s style is to methodically and articulately say why you are wrong, interweaving ‘clear appeals to common sense that any ordinary person can understand’ with the fact that he actually corresponded with the author of the study you’re appealing to, searched his bins, hacked into his mind, memorized all of his prior work on the embryology of dinosaur embryos, and found two-hundred and fifty independently converging lines of evidence that the work is an academic fraud whose data, interpreted correctly, actually supports Ethan’s contention about how “Augustine” ought to be pronounced. It’s a worthwhile debate even if you don’t care about cool and interesting miracle reports that are obviously cool and interesting; for rhetorical lessons alone, I think there is a lot to be gleaned from it.

2. I really like this normative ethics paper by Sacha Arridge, “Morality demands more of you the better you are”. Insanely good people often believe that their insanely good actions are morally required of them, even though nearly everyone else would think their actions go above and beyond what morality requires. One solution is to say that the heroes are wrong, and the moral normies are right; another is to say that the heroes are right, and the moral normies are wrong. Sacha’s solution is to say that morality demands more of you the more virtuous you are. That way, a moral hero who rushes into a burning building to save two children can be right that what they did was required, and we lesser beings can be right that morality wouldn’t demand such heroism of us.

3. My in-studio debate with Josh Sijuwade is now available on YouTube and Spotify! Our host was the inestimable John Nelson of Behind the Gospels , and the topic was a priori arguments for Christianity. (In particular, Josh has a priori arguments for the Trinity and the Incarnation, which am not convinced by.) Having interacted with Josh, my conclusion is that he is a stand up guy, and I am pleased with how it went, especially the second half, which was on Josh’s argument for the Trinity. My only concern is that the audience might have trouble following all the argumentative moves, given the time constraints we were under.

4. One of the topics that came up was ‘omnisubjectivity’, the divine attribute whereby God knows what it’s like to be a bat. If that tickles your interest, there was a recent symposium in the new philosophy of religion journal Agatheos on omnisubjectivity and whether it makes sense. All of the papers are open access, and you can read them by clicking this link.

5. Watch me pull a tic tac from my eyeball.

6. Cool coincidence: in the 19th century, a powder-keg for millenarian religious movements, the largest millenarian movement in the Christian world—the Millerites—and the largest millenarian movement in the Islamic world—Shaykhism—both independently converged on the year 1844 as the year we would receive the return of an old prophet (for the Millerites, Jesus Christ, for the Imami Twelvers, the Twelfth Imam). (Well, sort of. The Millerites predicted that Christ would return within the window of March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844; still, pretty neat, given that both groups got the 1844 number from different places—the Millerites, from William Miller’s mathematical interpretation of Daniel 8; the Shaykhis, by counting 1000 lunar years from when the Twelfth Imam went into occultation.)

7. Brian Cutter (author of a paper arguing that substance dualists should have at least a middling credence that future AIs will be ensouled) debates Bálint Békefi (author of a response paper, arguing that we should doubt this) on the The Analytic Christian YouTube Channel, hosted by Jordan Hampton. (Watch here.)

8. In 1984, Alvin Plantinga published a famous essay called “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Since then, periodically, Christian philosophers have written follow-ups in an attempt to update his advice for each generation. Last year, Christian B. Miller, Meghan Sullivan, Devin Gouvêa, Gregory Robson, Matthew Frise, and Philip Swenson put out “Advice to Christian Philosophers, Forty Years Later”; last month, Ryan Mullins put out a podcast called “Advice to Young Christian Philosophers”. I suspect both will be relevant to people in my audience who want to do work in philosophy of religion, Christian and non-Christian both.

9. Andreas Mogensen has an interesting argument for why, even if AIs aren’t conscious, they might still be welfare subjects (as in, things can be good or bad for them in a morally relevant sense). Basically, if we’re somewhat sympathetic to desire satisfaction accounts of wellbeing (on which your life goes better for you to the extent that your desires are satisfied, and worse for you to the extent that your desires are frustrated), and we take seriously the idea that there can be unconscious desires (e.g., Martin Luther King’s desire for justice, which he has even while he is sleeping), then we should be open to the idea that AI systems literally have desires that can be frustrated or satisfied, making them welfare subjects. You’ve probably already thought of an objection, and I, too, suspect that the argument breaks down; still, I am not entirely sure why it breaks down, and I encourage you to read the paper, since it is very careful, and it almost certainly addresses your objection.

10. Not a fan of desire satisfaction theories? Your work isn’t done. Mogensen has another paper, where he does the same thing for objective list theories.

11. If you’re driving today, here is a longform podcast with Mogensen where he breaks down the arguments, and then talks about negative utilitarianism.

12. From the same podcasters (80,000 hours): mirror bacteria is terrifying, and we should all be freaking out about it.

13. A paper on why successful religions are more likely to be true.

14. A paper on the doctrine of divine simplicity.

15. Friction, hosted by Troy Dana, is the best analytic philosophy channel on YouTube. He’s interviewed a boatload of analytic philosophers on everything from philosophy of fiction to decision theory to God to time to everything under the sun. Recently, in a fit of benevolence, he dumped all of his past episodes on Spotify!

16. There is a new book out from Oxford University Press called The Nature of Belief, edited by Johnathan Lewis-Jong and Eric Schwitzgebel; the whole thing is open access, and it looks fantastic.

17. Philip Goff debates two proponents of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism; wins.

18. Tim Mawson debates Asha Lancaster-Thomas on pantheism; wins.

19. Joe Schmid and Miles K. Donahue on whether philosophy is a waste of time.

20. Would you still love me if I were a worm?

21. In a paywalled post, I argued that the only plausible conception of eternal hell is one where life in hell is net-positive, but worse than life in heaven. A new paper by Martin Lembke makes a similar argument, bringing in a bunch of historical stuff I had no idea about. (Did you know that in 1884 there was an article called “Happiness in Hell” defending this position that got put on the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading?)