#deepities

In a perfect storm of interactive Paris art museum preening Daniel Dennett stands out as a storm shelter, full of provisions with nary a leak. 

                                 what up Slavoj Žižek? 

Last Week’s Winner Of The Deepity Award

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: You can get from impatient to "I'm patient"...with just an apostrophe and a space

— Rabbi Michoel Green (@rabbigreen)

March 18, 2014

Soon at the DMV those take-a-number dispensers will also hand out punctuation pacifying millions each year. Thank you Rabbi Green, thank you so much for changing the world though the depth of your brilliant concepts. Truly a deserving recipient of this illustrious award. 

This Week’s Deepity Award Nominees

"The reason I don't play the lottery is the reason I can't believe life doesn't have a creator. I don't have the blind faith of atheism."

— Jaclyn Glenn (@JaclynGlenn)

July 26, 2014

Only thinking you are going to win the lottery is blind faith, the lottery does in fact exist. Your parents likely created you Jaclyn with their genitals, DNA test results do not need faith. "Blind faith" is redundant and atheism is the absence of it. The odds you have the correct religion are equal to the odds of winning a lottery you don't play. 

If you want to understand WHAT MAKES SCIENCE POSSIBLE, read the Bible.

— Bristers Blister (@BristersBlister)

July 13, 2014

“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” (1 Timothy 2:12) I would think the Bible would make Marie Currie's scientific endeavors impossible, or at least impossible for us to learn from. The circumference of the earth was calculated, atoms were discovered and some guy invented a steam engine before the Bible was even written. I would assume evangelical Liberty University will be pumping out Nobel Prize winners after Nobel Prize winners any day now. 

The Greenwald-obsessed Twitter leftists are Dostoevsky's Demons, minus anything that makes them interesting from an aesthetic point-of-view.

— Clifford (@BigRedDreck)

July 25, 2014

Demons, or The Possessed is a shit novel by Dostoevsky about revolutionary democrats clashing against Imperialism in Russia and the conservative forces that support it. Glenn Greenwald exposing government overreach is apparently a bad thing and not as aesthetically pleasing as the characters described by one of the greatest writers ever. Congratulations Clifford, you read a book and stretched it to make a worthless comparison to modern times. HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK OVER HERE, CLIFFORD READ A BOOK. GOOD JOB CLIFFORD.  "The Czar-obsessed Twitter wingnuts are J.K Rowling's Slytherin, minus anything that makes them interesting from an aesthetic point of view."  That means nothing and by the way the Dostoevsky's "Demons" end up winning you fucking moron (although only temporarily). 

I want to believe in God's existence,because the moon looks same size as the sun.It is a miracle not an accident.

— ジョシュボット (@joshu_bot)

July 31, 2014

Let me know in the comments who the Deepity Volume 6 winner is. 

Some deepities I have grown to love and laugh at are these. There's no such thing as an enduring human nature. Oh, you reply, so human beings don't need to eat or rest? There aren't common abilities like the use of language and such? Comes back the reply: we didn't mean that by human nature; we meant that not all humans are greedy, or power-loving, or interested in unlimited wealth. So it turns out that the denial of an enduring human nature amounts to some changeable or non-universal features of the human character not being unchangeable. What else is new?

In a tutorial I used to run on the Modern Political Thought course at Manchester, I would sometimes ask students if there are any biologically-based differences between men and women. You'd be surprised how many of them answered 'No'. What?! How about the ability to bear children? Oh... we thought you meant differences like being cleverer or more fit to govern. So there are possible differences then? Yes, perhaps.

It’s some good fun at the expense of his students, but are the claims presented really “deepities” in Dennett’s sense of the term? Recall that Dennett presents two conditions that must be met for a claim to count as a “deepity.” First, there must be a reading by which the claim is “manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true.” Second, there must be another reading by which the claim is “true but trivial.”

Consider first the supposed deepity that “there’s no such thing as an enduring human nature.” Such a claim certainly seems to meet Dennet’s first condition: it would be amazing were it true, and, as per Geras’ explanation in the block quote, is manifestly false. Yet it is not clear at all that the claim meets Dennet’s second condition. For the reading according to which the claim is true, Geras suggests, is one where what is meant by “there is no enduring human nature” is that people aren’t necessarily selfish of dominance-seeking. This does seem true, but is it really trivial? As someone who has written an entire book relevant to the subject, Geras must be aware of the widely-held view that people are inevitably self-interested and power-loving. Why, then, does he think it so trivial that these elements of the human character are changeable?

Similarly, consider Geras’ example of biological gender differences. Here, again, Geras shows that there is a reading by which the claim in question would be earth-shattering if true but is manifestly false. Were men and women physiologically identical, that would be astounding, but one set has ovaries while the other has testes and so the claim is obviously untrue. (Or perhaps not so obviously. My impression is that Judith Butler has done some interesting work to cast doubt on this claim by noting many cases that trouble such neat biological divisions, e.g., syndromes where individuals have a combination of male and female sex characteristics). But what about the other reading where the claim is supposedly trivially true? According to Geras, what the students mean by “no biologically-based differences between men and women” is that there are no biologically-based differences that are of political consequence. Again, this claim appears to be true, but is it trivial? Perhaps we should ask Erick Erickson or a few of the other pundits and activists who represent the socially-conservative right. Such individuals frequently express some variant of the view that innate biological sex differences justify some form of patriarchal culture, whether that involves men acting as economic providers and head of the household, or the major discrepancies in the gender-makeup of powerful institutions.

For a claim to be “trivial,” it must be one so obvious that no rational (and reasonably informed) party could deny its truth. Or, if this definition is too strong, it seems that, at the very least, a “trivial” claim isn’t one subject to the sort of broad debate where one’s political affiliation will often correspond to whether one believes the claim to be true or false. Given that it is exactly this sort of debate that surrounds both of the claims that Geras considers to be true but trivial, it is not clear that either of his examples actually meet Dennett’s criteria for what counts as a deepity.

Given the non-triviality of the students’ claims, it seems that the true deepities would, in fact, be the inverses of the examples Geras presents. Thus, the idea that “there is an enduring human nature” is true but trivial if one counts things such as “using language” and “eating” as human nature, as Geras does, and it is false but of great consequence if taken in the more limited sense to mean that people are unchangeably power-seeking and greedy. Likewise, the claim that “there are biologically-based differences between men and women” is true but trivial if one counts things like reproductive organs, but consequential and false if one takes it to mean that there are biological differences that are of political significance.