I've been listening to a lot of Irish folk music recently. I've been listening to it as long as I've been alive but over the past few months I've begun to branch out and reacquaint myself with Irish culture and history. The song, The Foggy Dew, is one of my favourites at the moment. Lots of people have recorded it, but I think that these are the two best performances.

Luke Kelly performed this in 1966, 50 years after the Easter Rising in Dublin. This is my preferred version, because Kelly is, as always, intense.

This is Sinead O'Connor and The Chieftains. At first I didn't like the slow start to this version, but she is a brilliant singer and pulls it off. They play this song before Dropkick Murphys concerts and I bet it gets a great reaction from the crowd as the band enter to it.

I have another purpose for this post which is to talk about the Easter Rising. In 1916 several rebel leaders decided to "invade" Dublin on the Easter weekend of 1916 and proclaimed independence from Great Britain. They had already had dealings with the Germans, who had told the Irish that after they won the war they would consider Ireland to be an independent nation.

The rebel plans were put into massive disarray when their plan to import arms was scuppered by the British. Their (public) leader called off the uprising but those who were secretly in charge went ahead with it, with considerably few members than they had hoped for. It seems that when they went ahead with it they could have been reasonably sure that it would fail.

Although the Home Rule movement had been gaining momentum before the start of WWI, the leaders were concerned by how many Irish Volunteers had signed up to fight for the British, and that by the time the war was over public support for Home Rule might fizzle out. Those that had stayed in Ireland were clearly the most nationalistic, refusing to fight for Britain. It's also possible that they didn't want to be seen as cowardly by those who had gone to fight in the war. As the song says, "Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky".

The rebels held Dublin for 3 days, while a few smaller uprisings occurred around Ireland. After the 3 days the British reinforcements had shelled them into submission. Within the next month, all those who took part were arrested and the leaders (except famously, de Valera) were executed.

I don't think the Easter Rising is really a proud moment in Ireland's history, although it might have to do for them because they don't have very much else.

'Twas Britannia bade our Wild Geese go that small nations might be free
But their lonely graves are by Sulva's waves or the shore of the Great North Sea.
Oh, had they died by Pearse's side or fought with Cathal Brugha
Their names we will keep where the Fenians sleep 'neath the shroud of the foggy dew.

This verse scolds those Irish volunteers who fought and died for the British away from home, but the rebel leaders hardly died honourably.

In conclusion, the Irish are better musicians than they are at anything else. The Foggy Dew is a great song and could easily convince somebody that there is some reason to be proud of being Irish.

This is my analysis of 2nd order desires.

Firstly, a 2nd order desire to X is equivalent to the desire to desire X. Usually we talk about the 2nd order desire to not X, which is the desire to desire not X. The typical example is of the drug addict, who desires his drug, and also desires to have the desire not to do the drug. Some have argued that to have second order desires is to have free will, saying that agents like the drug addict have them and are therefore free, whereas animals don't (presumably) have them and so aren't free. I don't agree with that analysis of free will because 1) it's clearly rubbish and 2) we can completely dissolve talk of 2nd order desires.

When I think of the drug addict, I imagine somebody who both desires the drug, and desires to not have the drug. He sees utility both in taking the drug and utility in not taking the drug. Furthermore, because the two kinds of utility are very different, he finds it difficult to analyse which has the greater utility. In the end he opts to take the drug, because that is the stronger desire, because he sees more utility in that action than in the opposite action.

Now I'm not claiming that 2nd order desires do not exist. They do exist trivially, because they do no work, and that's my reason for why we can't have a decent analysis of free will in terms of them. The drug addict is bound to realise that he still has the desire to not take the drug, even after taking it. The desire he fails to act upon then instantiates itself as a desire to have the desire to not take the drug. But at the same time he has the opposite 2nd order desire: he desires to have the desire to take the drug. It's just that this other 2nd order desire never gets reflected upon because it's more easily noted as being just the first-order desire to take the drug.

Here's another example. At the moment I am within a few feet of a sharp knife. Most of all I desire to continue writing this entry. You can tell that that is my greatest desire because it is the one I am acting upon. There are a few actions that I only desire slightly less than writing this, like playing the guitar and getting some juice to drink. One of the actions I am least inclined to is of getting the knife and stabbing myself to death with it. It's an easy decision for me to choose to write this rather than stab myself. At the same time I still have the 2nd order desire that is wanting to desire not to stab myself. I just don't dwell on it because it was an easy decision for me not to stab myself.

2nd order desires are simply products of indecision and contemplative regret. Suppose I'm playing poker and somebody makes a big bet at me on the river. I have a mediocre hand, and I think about calling or folding for a long time. In the end I decide it's slightly better to fold than to call, so I do. But I'll dwell for some time on whether that was the right decision, even if I'm not given any more evidence regarding it. I'm really considering what the world where I called would most likely be like. By folding I've effectively rejected one possible world and accepted another.

Here's another way of saying that 2nd order desires are equivalent to 1st order desires. According to my analysis of them, it's impossible to have a 2nd order desire to not X stronger than a 1st order desire to X, and still to X. That is, a drug addict can't desire not to do the drug more than they desire to do the drug and still do the drug. I think that's pretty standard.

So what about the animal story? Well, suppose that animals don't have 2nd order desires. That would be the same as saying that they don't feel regret and don't contemplate counterfactuals. I think we could explain that in terms of them having a primitive method of decision, possibly even one that doesn't include thinking about the future, or very far into the future. I think what has happened, biologically speaking, is that somehow humans have inherited a concept of calculating expected utility which is considerably more complicated than they are intelligent enough to use it. Animals (and perhaps children) are both less intelligent than human adults, but their methods of decision-making are a lot more simple. Human adults can think about how they are going to act for a very long time, perhaps even years, on and off. I don't think this behaviour is observed in animals or children. In terms of evolution, I think it must pay dividends to think in-depth before you act. Yes, you lose precious time, but you make the better decisions. Maybe in a world where there are constantly asteroids hitting the ground (say 10 asteroids, 10m cubed in any space 100m squared every minute), and no caves or shelter anywhere, agents that thought very quickly but perhaps didn't make the best decisions would be rewarded better than those who think too long. Probably actual humans 4000 years ago more resembled these "asteroid-world" humans than they do resemble actual humans of the present day.

Peter Unger
John Searle
Graham Preist
Hartry Field
Gary Watson
Derek Parfit
Susan Hurley
Peter Gärdenfors
Richard Jeffrey
Frank Jackson
W.V.O. Quine

This is an idea I had for a variant of chess. Chess is one of those games that has very little luck factor in it. Of all the people I have played at it, I have quite a good idea who is better and who is worse than me. Furthermore, those who I am slightly slightly better than I feel that I could beat them 80% of the time, and those who are slightly slightly better than me I think could beat me 80% of the time. (I'd say these people respectively are only about 1% worse and better than me). Those 20% values only really allow for the possibility of somebody making a stupid error which they would probably regret as soon as they had seen it (as opposed to being outplayed by a long term strategy)

For these reasons I would be unwilling to bet very much money playing chess. If somebody challenged me who I had previously thought was a worse player than me, I'd find it likely that they had improved sufficiently, and the bet would not be worth it. If the game was heads up poker, and again somebody challenged me confidently who I had previously thought I was better than, I would probably accept because I know that no matter how great they have become at it, I still have a half-decent chance of winning, because luck is so important to heads up play.

So I have thought of a version of chess that involves dice and therefore chance. There are obviously lots of variants of Chancy Chess, so these rules are just suggestions and subject to later agreement with whoever I'm playing with.

As with standard chess, a player must decide what move they want to make first, and then the dice take over.

With sliders (queens, castles and bishops), the piece can only move maximum D6 places (i.e. the number given by a fair 6-sided die). If you say you want to move 5 places, then if the die rolls 5 or 6, you are successful, if it is 4 or less than the piece must stop short and move only the number of spaces in that direction prescribed by the die.

With non-sliders, the piece may only move if you roll 3+ on a D6. If you roll 1-2 your turn is effectively forfeited. (A variant could be that it is only forfeited if you roll a 1, and that if you roll a 2, you have to make a different move with a different piece)

Kings can move on a 2+.

If a player is in check, they can opt to move a piece to intercept the check, and if that fails to move, they get another opportunity to move the king.

So what are the main effects of these sorts of rules?

It means there is a lot of risks with using sliders, because if you miss your target you may end up in front of a pawn. You ought really to consider the expected utility of your piece ending up on any of the pieces it could end up on if you are making a long move.

It means there are surprise victories. In standard chess, in my experience at least, the player that wins is usually the one that grinds down his opponent bit by bit. In Chancy Chess, you ought to put your opponent in check as much as possible, because you could get a surprise early victory if their king fails to move by rolling a 1. This also means you should attempt to get out of check by moving other pieces before you have to move your king.

Chancy Chess is a lot like poker, because you have to weigh up the expected value of many possible outcomes that your choices could lead to. Consider the following sort of trivial example. Say that you are black and it is your turn to move.

What is the expected value of you attempting to take the white queen? Let's say that this is a mini-game, where you get 1 point for taking the opponent's queen and -1 for being taken.

If you attempt to take it, you succeed directly 1/3 of the time. The other 2/3 of the time you put yourself in a tough position. 1/6 of that time you end up right in front of their queen so they instantly take you next turn.

1/6 of the time you end up 4 places from them, 1/6 of the time 3 places and 1/6 2 places. Furthermore we know that if any of those possibilities occur, they try to attack us next turn. I think we can calculate the EV of attacking here as so:

(1/3 x 1) + (1/6 x -1) + (1/6 x [5/6 x -1 + 1/6 x 1]) + (1/6 x [4/6 x -1 +1/6 x 1 + (1/6 x [5/6 x -1 + 1/6 x 1])])
+ (1/6 x [1/2 x -1 + 1/6 x 1 + {1/6 x (5/6 x 1 + 1/6 x -1)} + (1/6 x (4/6 x 1 + 1/6 x -1 + 1/6 x {5/6 x -1 + 1/6 x 1}))])

= 1/3 - 1/6 - 4/36 - 22/216 - 44/1296

= (432 - 216 - 144 - 132 - 44)/ 1296

= -104/1296

= - 13/162

= -0.08

So in this particular version of chancy chess, it is always irrational to attack enemy pieces that are 5 or more squares away. Of course some players might still do it because they are in a gambling mood, and if they take that one piece, the whole game could swing in their favour (maybe it leads directly to a check-mate as well for added EV, but how can you calculate it?)

What if they are 4 squares away from you? I suspect it is really borderline to attack them, but probably slightly +EV. The calculation is:

(1/2 x 1) + (1/6 x -1) + (1/6 x[5/6 x -1 + 1/6 x 1]) + (1/6 x [4/6 x -1 +1/6 x 1 + 1/6 x (5/6 x 1 + 1/6 x -1)])

= 1/2 - 1/6 - 4/36 - 7/108

= 1/26

= 0.04

Yes, slightly +EV to attack a piece 4 spaces away. These calculations have taken me about an hour, and this is in a 2-piece game! It gets more complicated if you include something like this:

So yeah, this looks like a pretty tough game. It's possibly one of those games like No Limit Holdem where a computer cannot yet play better than a person can play it. I really don't know. I think this game (in the long run) would be a better test of human intelligence than standard chess is.

Suppose the following scenario: There is a father and a daughter having a conversation about Santa. The daughter believes Santa to be an actual entity. The father believes Santa to be a fictional (possibly possible) entity. Suppose that the father says, “Santa rides a sleigh led by flying reindeer”. Is that statement true? I think we would analyse it in terms of being a fiction and say that it is true, that what he really meant to say was “In the fiction of the Santa story, Santa rides a sleigh led by flying reindeer”. What if the daughter says the same statement? I think we would now say that the statement as uttered by her is false, even though comprised of logically the same components, because she believes Santa to be actual. Surely this is an argument that if Fictionalism, then Contextualism? That isn’t really worded very well, because we can be Fictionalists and Contextualists about lots of things. So it should go more like:

If we analyse sentences about X Fictionalistically, then we are committed to being Contextualists about knowledge and TRUTH-statements about X.

I’ll leave that there for now.

Isn't Fictionalism really just a form of Contextualism, and hence why the above conditional holds?

Some of Descartes’ critics argued that he may as well have said something of the form, Ambulo Ergo Sum, I walk therefore I am. If an entity walks then it quite clearly is. It simply has to be. But are there any examples of properties we can ascribe to a being that we cannot derive existence from? Let’s look at some candidates:

I am possible.
I am impossible.
I am perceived.
I am conceived.

Now the vocabulary has changed slightly with some of these terms. We ought now to shift “existence” to “actuality”. My position has to be that “everything exists”, but only some things are actual. It clearly doesn’t follow that because something is possible it must be actual. If we were to re-phrase Descartes’ argument it would go as follows:

I actually think, therefore I actually am.

But is the following argument valid?

I am actually possible therefore I actually am.

I don’t want to reject this too hastily. In terms of modal logic it fails tremendously, but perhaps we can admit entities that are merely possible into our ontology for the actual world, in the form of an accessibility relation. If X is possible then it is true in the actual world that there is some world w such that @Rw and vw(X) = 1 even when v@(X) = 0. Is the accessibility relation between @ and w a metaphysical part of @, or is it somehow outside? Well, we seem to know about these relations, although that’s not a great argument that they are inside. I think if anything this is somewhat of an argument for Ersatz Modal Realism. I will continue to think about this though…

On to the second two candidates. This is now a different subject. I think I want to just work out the meanings of the words “perceive” and “conceive”. We take it as true that we can actually conceive Santa Claus, but that does not entail his actuality. It does not even necessarily entail his possibility. Lewis gives us the example whereby we can conceive a world where there is a largest prime (and people have believed such things), but those worlds aren’t possible. (The alternate, he says, is where we cannot conceive worlds with 10 dimensions, but they are possible). I’m not sure what to make of this right now.

I am reasonably certain now that if an entity is perceived then it must be actual. Suppose a child sees somebody dressed as Santa and they say “I perceived Santa”. Is that statement true? I think not. The child is stringing together thoughts like the following:

1. I perceived X
2. X is Santa
3. Therefore I perceived Santa.

The mistake is with the identification of the thing they saw with Santa. They perceived something other than Santa. Is it the case that for there to be perception there has to be a percept? I’m not sure. One might say that we perceive even when dreaming, but then we are really still perceiving things that are in our memory. There surely has to be some kind of causal stimulus, so I will conclude for now that there does have to be a percept if there is perception, and for it to be true that you perceived X, X must have been the percept of your perception, and not some thing, Y, such that you falsely believe that X=Y.

This is the first of two arguments for the non-actuality (read: existence) of God taken from some work I did last year. In that period of time I've read them over a few times, and think I can present them more analytically now. The more time you spend thinking about certain areas in philosophy, the more rubbish and noise you can sieve out. I will write about the second argument at a later point. (I think the second one is probably stronger) I should also note that I first read an argument of this form by John Mackie, and it’s the sort of thing that has probably existed as long as Theism itself.

Both arguments use the same logical form, which goes as follows:

P1: If God exists then He has properties A,B,C.

P2: If God had properties A, B, C then He would act in X-fashion.

P3: If God had acted in X-fashion, we would observe Y.

P4: We don't observe Y.

C1: Therefore God didn’t act in X-fashion.

C2: Therefore God doesn’t have properties A,B,C.

C3: Therefore God does not exist.

The argument is valid. All that remains is to fill in the gaps and attempt to justify the premises. So for each argument I will need four separate premises. If I need to give new arguments for some of the premises then I will use "L" for "lemma", so as not to confuse them with the premises of my main arguments.

Argument 1

P1 If God exists then he has the properties, omnipotence and omnibenevolence.
P2 If God has the properties omnipotence and omnibenevolence, then He would create no Evil, and would not allow any Evil to exist that He has not created. i.e. there would be no Evil. That is: If there were no Evil, then we would observe no Evil.
P3 If God had acted as specified in P2, then we would observe no Evil.
P4 We don't observe no Evil. (We observe Evil.)

P1 is analytically true, in virtue of the meanings of the words in the premise. This is simply a definition of "God". Anybody who disagrees with me on the truth of P1 is talking about some other concept "God", and we are talking past each other.

P2 requires some reasoning, and there will be room for a theist to deny it. I will discuss objections to P2 in the next paragraph.

P3 is true and I shall argue for it here. Let's just consider what would make it false. For P3 to be false there would have to be no Evil, but we would still observe Evil. In the sense I am using the term "observe", an object does not necessarily have to exist for it to be observed. For this to be the case, one of two scenarios would have to be true:
1) We don't know what Evil is.
Suppose we think that Evil is a kind of bird, and we see these birds flying around and some of us conclude, "Bah! God can't exist because these birds exist."
2) We don't observe the world as it really is. There are birds but we don't see them.

Now I want to reject 1) immediately. Some theists might say in response to this argument as a whole and other arguments, that if God does something then that thing is good. If God murders people, then people being murdered becomes good. In other words, we don't know what the meaning of "good" really is, besides "the things that God does or might choose to do." People who say that are really thinking of some other concept other than goodness. Most of us have the intuition that if God raped babies purely for fun He would be doing something bad. We know what Good and Evil are, so 1) is to be rejected.

Now 2) is a real possibility. A theist might say, "Well actually, I know it looks like there is Evil, but actually there isn't. You are a brain in God's vat. You might perceive the world correctly in some areas, but wrongly when it comes to ethical events. You see somebody crying in pain but actually they have the mental state of happiness."

The problem with that seems to be that if I observe some unnecessary pain, for example somebody crying because an earthquake destroyed their house, but really they are happy at that fact (or maybe they've really perceived their house having a new extension built onto it?), it still causes pain in me to see it. Some of that "Evil" washes over into my own mental state, and I can be reasonably certain that the contents of my mental states are really happening.

A third way for the theist, I haven't properly mentioned yet, is the argument that all so-called Evil in the world, is really necessary. For example, we might think it bad that we feel pain when we graze our knee, but we would not will that the pain went away. Imagine being such that your knee is grazed and you don't feel the pain. We need pain to tell us that our body is injured and without that knowledge we would have a poor survival rate. So we analyse pain as being a necessary evil in the actual world. But in a world with God in it, why could He not have just made us immortal in the first place? We wouldn't need to suffer pain or injury then. But is a world without any unnecessary evil metaphysically possible? I can conceive it but that doesn't make it possible (necessarily). The thing is that it does not have to be possible. I'm fairly certain (using my modal intuitions) that a world is possible that has slightly less Evil than this world. Only the possible world with the least Evil in is a candidate for a world with God inhabiting it.

There are two final tenable positions for the theist (and by "theist" I mean the theist who believes in the sort of God I am describing, e.g. somebody of the Abrahamic religions). The first is some kind of Fatalism, whereby there are no possible worlds other than the actual world, and therefore the actual world has the least Evil in it of all the possible worlds. But this sort of view is simply inconsistent with our basic intuitions. I think I know things like "Possibly I could have got up earlier this morning". Fatalism is inconsistent with agents being responsible for their actions, which is something that these very deranged theists sometimes forget. It really isn't consistent with a lot that we find extremely intuitive.

The second possibly tenable position is that all worlds necessarily have equal degrees of Evil in them. This is a completely new view of Goodness, but not a necessarily unintuitive one. This analysis of Goodness might say something like: Suppose there is a possible world identical to our own but where there is some new species of maize which grows in the desert, and therefore there is far less hunger than in the actual world. This doesn't mean that there is more Good in this possible world (even supposing that less hunger is a relatively good thing), because the standards for Goodness of the people in that world shift as a result of there being seemingly more Good in it. Really, there is always an equilibrium of Good to Evil in any possible world, just in virtue of the meanings of those worlds. In some worlds that resemble Heaven, the worst parts of those worlds are when agents choose not to hold doors open for others. In worlds that resemble Hell, the most apt instantiations of Supreme Good are times when the Devil only whips you a thousand times a day. Goodness and Evil are relative concepts. This whole analysis of Goodness falls apart however. If we really thought this way, then why would we ever act at all? Surely we act so that we can bring some more Good into the world? The game of experiencing Goodness isn't zero-sum. If it were then we may as well be dead than eat that Belgian Bun on the worksurface. It all means the same anyway. We clearly don;t think like this, so I have tor eject this (also Fatalistic) analysis of Goodness. I think that that caters for all the possible lines of attack of the reasonable theist.

P4 is as well-supported as P3. We observe Evil and we know this because it is being presented to us in terms of a mental state. It is one of the things we can be most sure about.

Overall, I think the premises of this argument are very well-supported. I originally thought this argument to be slightly empirical, but it's about as slight as one can even imagine. One of the beliefs we are most justified in believing is that we exist. Our existence is only supported by the fact that we are experiencing some mental state. We can't falsely be experiencing a mental state. (Or at least if you deny that, you ought to have a damn good reason to)