Can God as the perfect omniscient knower guarantee the possibility of a reality disidentified from all local perspectives and thus independent of them, though remaining inherently intelligible (by God Himself)? It depends on how one understands God.

As discussed already here, Indian authors can mean at least four different things when they speak about “God”, namely:

1. —the devatās of mythology, like Indra and Zeus (during this workshop in Hawai’s, Andrew Nicholson has shown several examples of how philosophers make fun of this naive conception of Gods)
2. —the īśvara of rational theology. He is usually omniscient and omnipotent and mostly also benevolent. In Indian thought, He can be proven to exist and to be such through rational arguments (e.g., through an inference from the fact that mountains, being an effect, need a creator, like pots).
3. —the brahman of Advaita Vedānta is an impersonal Deity. In some forms of Vedānta it is interpreted pantheistically as tantamount to the universe.
4. —the bhagavat kind of God is the one one is linked to through a personal relationship. His or Her devotees might consider Him omniscient or omnipotent, but in fact their reasons for loving Him of Her are different and regard their being in relation with Him or Her.

Which God can help guaranteeing the world’s reality? The devatā kind of Gods are clearly irrelevant for this purpose, since they are not even omniscient and surely do not represent an impartial perspective. The brahman kind of God is omniscient only in a sense akin to the Buddha’s being omniscient, namely insofar as it does not lack any relevant information, but it does not at all guarantee the reality of the world of direct realism. In fact, the world is for Advaita Vedāntins an illusion.

The īśvara kind of God seems the best candidate. But which kind of īśvara? Matthew Dasti‘s talk elaborated on the early history of īśvara in Nyāya, showing how the system’s basic premisses at least facilitated the elaboration of an īśvara concept. This evolution culminates in a full-fledged rational theology by Udayana. For Udayana, the īśvara he tries to prove rationally is not just any intelligent maker that can be inferred as the cause from the premise that the earth, mountains and plants sprouting from it are effects. That intelligent maker had to be:*

• A super-soul with eternal knowledge of everything, and especially of the past and future good and bad actions of all human beings that ever lived.
• One who has natural control or lordship over the material universe and other individual souls whose bodies he creates according to their beginninglessly earned merits and demerits.
• One who joins the eternal atoms in the beginning of each cosmic cycle according to a remembered blue-print giving rise to the two-ness in a dyad by his primordial act of counting.
• One who makes the otherwise unconscious “destiny” (unseen karmic traces, adṛṣṭa)) or law of moral retribution work.
• One who acts directly through his eternal will and agency without the mediation of a body, although all the “intelligent makers” one has ever encountered produce effects with a body of their own.
• One who composes the Vedas which tell human beings how to live a good life, through “do”s and “don’t”s, which would otherwise be devoid of the imperative force that they command.
• One who establishes the conventional connection between primitive words and their meant entities.
• One who, after creating the world, also sustains and in the fullness of time destroys it.
• Showers grace on humans and other creatures so that each soul can eventually attain their summum bonum—final liberation from all ensnaring karma and suffering.
• One who remains constantly and uniformly blissful through all these actions which do not touch his changeless essence and for which he has no “need”.

Such an īśvara has been discussed by Arindam Chakrabarti in his final talk on Vācaspati, insofar as He seems to be the only kind of God who can be said to be omniscient in the “hard” sense of possessing a complete knowledge of all states of affairs. However, He is vulnerable to objections to omniscience raised both in European and Indian philosophy. E.g.: How to delimit the range of “all” in “omniscience“? Can He really know also future events? If so, this seems to contradict our free will and even the possibility of non-necessary, contingent events. More in general, how can God know past and future events as such, though being Himself atemporal (this topic has been dealt with by Shinya Moriyama in his talk as well as in his 2014 book)? Not to speak of the pragmatic problems caused by omniscience, namely that it is altogether different from the way we usually experience knowledge to happen, i.e. in a processual way, and that one could never be sure that anyone (even God) is omniscient, since we are not omniscient and, therefore, could not test Him. Last, as outlined by Arindam (and by Patrick Grimm’s Cantorian argument against omniscience), God’s omniscience seems deemed to fail, since it cannot be proven to be logically conceivable.

The general problem appears to me to be that the īśvara is at the same time the knower of all and part of the system which He should know completely, so that He cannot escape the restrictions which apply to this world (in which knowledge is experienced to be processual, entities are not at the same time temporal and non-temporal, and one element cannot know the whole).

*The following points are all discussed by Udayana. For further details, see Chemparathy 1972. The present formulation of the list is largely indebted to Arindam Chakrabarti.

Shinya Moriyama also wrote a report about the same workshop, unfortunately (for me) in Japanese. Google translate was enough to understand that it is quite interesting and gives one a perceptive insight in the Philosophy Department in Hawai’i. You can read it here.

from http://www.popsci.com/should-animals-same-rights-people

1. If, in fact, humans have more rights than animals because they are the dominant group, then this resembles very much racism or any other dominion of one group over the other.
2. If, by contrast, humans have more rights than animals because they are different than animals, then what does this difference consist of? If it amounts to rationality, should psychically empaired human beings have no rights?

Since after the end of the Nazi experiments a (more or less) general consensus has been achieved about the fact that psychically empaired human beings deserve the same rights, one is led back either to No. 1 or to a different basis of the human claim for rights. This could be Peter Singer’s claim that one’s moral stand should be calculated not on the basis of one’s ability to reach a soteriological goal or one’s rational value but on the basis of one’s ability of experiencing pain (Singer 1975). This includes psychically empaired human beings. But it also includes at least many animals (one might argue about the fact that many invertebrates with no nerve ganglia cannot literally speaking experience pain).

The discussion about the inclusion of animals within the realm of beings to whom human rights can be ascribed, thus, seems to hit a nerve in Western thought. It seems that no straight line can be legitimately drawn to separate animals and humans and that there is more a net of family resemblances than a straight opposition between the two groups (a dolphin or a gorilla, just to take an obvious example, seem to me to resemble a human being much more than they resemble an amoeba, although all three can be used for the sake of medical research or kept in zoo-like institutions).

The situation is slighly different in other traditions of thought. In Classical Chinese Confucian philosophy, for instance, the idea that we have stronger obligations towards the members of our extended family and towards further “proximate” people is a viable option and one could easily extend this model to animals, so that it would be legitimate to attribute rights first to the members of our families, then to members of our communities, then to further human beings, then to pet-animals, then to further animals with whom we are somehow connected and only at last to further animals. However, this option clashes with the Western ambition of building a universal ethical system, does not it?*

I wrote about Indian reflections on this topic in a forthcoming article (a preliminary draft of which is available here), where I basically argue that most Indian thinkers seem to see non-human and human animals along a hierarchical sequence with no brisk interruption.
Daya Krishna connects this with the utilitaristic approach to knowledge which characterises most Indian explicit reflections about it:

The usual Indian analysis is centered around the hedonistic view of human nature which sees it as naturally seeking pleasure and avoding pain and has a pragmatic view of knowledge which sees the `truth’ of knowledge in terms of its ability to avoid pain and afford pleasure to the humanking. But on this view no distinction is possible between the human and the animal world as the latter also is supposed to seek pleasure or avoid pain and `sees’ the `truth’ of its knowledge in terms of the `success’ achieved by it in this enterprise. In fact, the whole learning theory in modern psychology and the training of animals is based on this premiss (2004, p. 237)

Let me just add that Daya Krishna is thinking of the first aphorism in the foundational text of the Nyāya school (NS 1.1.1), where knowledge is linked to the achievement of one’s summum bonum. In another philosophical school, the Mīmāṃsā, animals are also considered on the same level as humans when it comes to the fact of desiring happiness (PMS chapter 6).

* I am grateful to L.E. for having discussed this topic with me. For a critical discussion of the concept of “rights”, see Amod Lele’s discussion here (and in the previous posts). On why I am citing Daya Krishna, see this post. Within Chinese philosophy, on Confucius vs. Mozi regarding the universality of rights see this post by Eric Schwitzgebel.

Suppose X has done something wrong. A legal trial (or its equivalent in non-legal contexts) is certainly not completely reliable but offers at least some warrants for all the parties involved: If you have blamed X of having done Y, you must be able to prove it. By contrast, public shaming allows no epistemological check: It is enough for one in a position of authority to say that X did Y to elicit reactions, as it recently happened in Afghanistan where a man accused a young woman who was blaming him for selling amulets of having burnt a copy of the Quran: the mob beat her to death). One shames and continues shaming, without ever having to encounter an epistemological control. Moreover, since shaming is a collective enterprise, the individuals participating in it hide in the crowd and forget their personal responsibility.

Should you think that shaming is the weapon of the underrepresented —who would never get a fair trial— against the established power, think again. In the article linked above, Eric Posner interestingly observes that the targets of public shaming are rather exactly the weakest groups:

[T]he truth is nearly the opposite. If you try to think of which group has been the most consistent target of social media shaming, it is surely women who dare to express their opinions or to break up with boyfriends. The major effect of social media is that it enables people to broadcast an opinion—or, more accurately, a gut reaction—to the whole world, instantly, without pausing to give it any thought. This, combined with pervasive anonymity and traditional animosity to anyone who acts or thinks unconventionally, has awoken atavistic instincts that are multiplied a hundredfold through herd mentality. And then these ill-considered reactions are stored indefinitely, while being immediately accessible to anyone, thanks to the efficiency of search engines.

It is possible to argue that the Internet has re-created small-town society, where everyone knew everything about everyone, so everyone acted virtuously in order to avoid ostracism and other sanctions. But this argument rests on a romanticization of that era. Small-town societies bred small-mindedness and conformity, and if they were ever tolerable, it was only because one could leave. One can’t leave the Internet. Once shamed, always shamed.

As an antidote for the problem of epistemological weakness, I would recommend, as usual, testing one’s sources and evaluating them as one should evalute any other piece of linguistic communication. As an antidote for the problem of lack of personal responsibility, I would recommend acting in one’s own name (no pseudonyms, no anonymous comments) and thinking of one’s action as if one were alone. Would one persist shaming X if there were no one else doing it and thus justifying the fact that what one is doing is right?

As a general framework, let me start with Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ review of Williamson’s Tetralogue, discussing the possibility of rational dialogue to advance knowledge —that is, the reason which could make philosophy more than a Glasperlenspiel.

Should philosophy (of religion) go out of its comfort zone?
In this post, Aaron Thomas-Bolduc suggests that we should go out of our comfort zones and test our ideas outside them. A few days before, Adriano Mannino had posted here his comments on a study by Helen De Cruz and asked whether philosophy of religion is more than Christian apologetics.
This post by Michael Almeida shows that arguments about philosophy of religion can be dealt with in a purely logical way (from premisses to absurd consequences). Similarly, Eric Schwitzgebel discusses here the application to artificial intelligence of a problem originally dealt with within philosophy of religion, i.e., God’s responsibility for our well-being (and our responsibility towards AI, if we ever were to create one). By the way, the author includes in his dialogue also the Confucian approach of ethical obligations (which get stronger the closer one is to oneself, so that one has higher obligations towards one’s family than towards strangers).

Free will within and without contemporary Western philosophy
The idea of going out of one’s comfort zone brings me to the following series of posts, dedicated to free will. One can start with John Danaher‘s general summary of the possible meanings of “Liberty” and “Free will” as explained by Skinner (John Danaher has further interesting posts on freedom and work and democracy).
Next, this post by Jayarava Attwood discusses the Buddha’s defense of free will while debating with a denier of free will in a text of the Pāli Buddhist Canon. The same author has also dedicated a more general post to the issue of free will at the boundaries of philosophy and neurosciences, here. Again on Buddhism, Amod Lele discusses here how ethics is possible even within a deterministic worldview. Last for the non-Western series, this post discusses Free will vs. divine omnipotence in a Vaiṣṇava theologian, Rāmānuja. Stewart Duncan discusses here some passages of Leibniz which suggest that he might have conceived of things deterministically and of thoughts as actions, depending on the souls only.
Flickers of Freedom is the usual reference point when it comes to free will. This month, this post by V. Alan White on whether responsibility comes in degree especially recommends itself.

Language and reality
Richard Yetter Chappell discusses here an aspect of the problem entailed in the naturalistic account of meaning.

On a similar vein, Tristan Haze discusses here a paradox, namely

If you’re a brain in a vat then you don’t have hands
You don’t know that you’re not a brain in a vat
Therefore you don’t know that you have hands

Interestingly, Haze does not enter into the ontology of the topic, but rather dwells in its linguistic and logical consequences (what does it mean to say that one has hands? To what does language refer?).

On the arbitrariness of the signified and its implications for linguistics, Alexander Pruss discusses here the problems one encounters when translating English hand with Polish rȩka. Pruss closes his post with a thought on false implicature (could occur in cases such as the one described) and lying (morally problematic).

On a sidetrack, Jon Cogburn discusses here how some misunderstandings of the so-called Continental Philosophy by Analytic Philosophers might just be due to wrong translations of French expressions such as l’event or l’autre as “The Event” (=the creation? what other key event?) and “The Other” (Satan?), does creating unwanted metaphysical entities.

Concerning lying, a post at Experimental Philosophy and PeaSoup by John Turri discusses how people react when one asks them whether telling the truth while trying to lie still counts as lying. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the answers depend on how the question is phrased.

Ethics
At Practical Ethics, Hannah Maslen discusses a bias which seems to lead to more problems than it can solve, namely the hostile attribution bias, which is the cause of avoidable bloody fights, especially among teenagers, just because someone was “looking at me funny”. If you are schocked and ask yourself what could be done to interrupt this vicious circle, have a look at Eric Schwitzgebel’s memories of his father and of how he engaged young criminals, thus automatically making them relinquish crime.

Again at Practical Ethics, this post by Chris Chew discusses what could be the best death.

A new blog on the philosophical problems connected with disability has helped in raising an interesting debate on whether the discussion on some problems, such as the abortion of disabled fetuses, or the moral justification of evil, should be altogether avoided. On the Philosophers’ Cocoon, Marcus Arvan summarises the discussion and adds his view.

Aesthetics
At Aesthetics for birds, Rebecca Victoria Millsop discusses the role of originality in painting and whether the research of originality at all costs does not lead astray (I agree). Rebecca is herself an artist (beside being a fifth-year PhD student in philosophy of art) and this perspective deeply enriches her post.

Politics
Last, although this is a philosophical Carnival, I hope readers will forgive me —given the high symbolic impact of the Paris attacks on the issues of freedom of thought and critique— if I add this post (which I discovered through Catarina Dutilh Novaes at NewApps) by Juan Cole, a historian of the Middle East, discussing the recent facts in Paris.

By coincidence, the colleague who will host the next Philosophers’ Carnival, Samuel P. Douglas has also a post on the epistemology of conspiracy theories, in relation to the Charlie Hebdo attack.

In fact, an objector staged by Rāmānuja observes that if God is omnipotent, then there can be no human being who is fully responsible of his or her action.

What is specifical for the South Asian theological discourse is the fact that this, in turn, leads to the conclusion that there can be no adhikārin. The adhikārin is the person who is eligible to perform a given ritual and that is consequently responsible for carrying it out. In order for one to be an adhikārin, one should be able to actually carry out the action (e.g., a physically disabled person cannot be an adhikārin), but this is in fact something which lies beyond each person’s possibilities, says Rāmānuja’s opponent, since one can only act if God makes him or her act.

By contrast, common to Western speculations on free will is the appeal to Sacred texts stating that there is no such thing as free will:

He alone causes the person whom He wishes to lead out of these worlds, to perform a good deed. He alone causes the person whom He wishes to fall down to perform an evil deed

(eṣa eva sādhukarma kārayati taṃ yam ebhyo lokebhya unninīṣati, eṣa eva asādhukarma kārayati tam yam adho ninīṣati, Kauśitaki Upaniṣad 3.8).

Even more striking is the conclusion driven by Rāmānuja’s opponent:

Thus, since He is the one who causes [people] to perform good or evil deeds, He is cruel.(sādhvasādhukarmakārayitṛtvāt nairghṛṇyaṃ ca.)

Rāmānuja’s answer to this (powerful) objection is worth quoting in full:

[R:] To this, we answer: The Supreme Self arranged for all conscious beings in a general way (i.e., he just gave each conscious being the presuppositions for acting, without interfering with one’s intentions) the whole multitude of undertakings and ceasings consisting of the connection with the power to think, the connection with the power to undertake and [the connection with the power to cease]. He then entered [into each conscious being] being their support in order to realise these [powers] and He rules as one who permits [that each conscious being undertakes the action s/he wants to undertake]. In this way, He remains the Entire to which all parts belong.

Therefore, [each conscious being], having received the power [to think, undertake or cease an action], undertakes, ceases to act or [thinks] from himself/herself alone. The Supreme Self observes the one who does so without interfering (\emph{udāsin}). Therefore, everything is logical.

In contrast [to what the opponent claimed], the fact of causing to do good or evil acts is the content of a specific arrangement, it is not generally directed to all.

(atrocyate —sarveṣām eva cetanānāṃ cicchaktiyogaḥ pravṛttiśaktiyogaḥ ityādisarvaṃ pravṛttinivṛttiparikaraṃ sāmānyena saṃvidhāya, tannirvahaṇāya tadādhāro bhūtvā antaḥ praviśya, anumantṛtayā ca niyamanaṃ kurvan śeṣitvena avasthitaḥ paramātmā. etad āhitaśaktis san pravṛttinivṛttyādi svayam eva kurute; evaṃ kurvāṇam īkṣamāṇaḥ paramātmā udāsīna āste ataḥ sarvam upapannam.

sādhvasādhukarmakārayitṛtvaṃ tu vyavasthitaviṣayaṃ, na sarvasādhāraṇam (Vedarthasangraha 1894, 138–141).

Rāmānuja’s solution implies a double level of interpretation, ontological and ethical. On the former, Rāmānuja is an upholder of Viśiṣṭādvaita, i.e., a form of Vedānta according to which nothing exist but God and His attributes. Included within the latter category are the world and all individuals. Thus, God is present as the substrate of each individual. Can an attribute of God develop any action independently of Him? Surely not. What, however, an individual attribute can develop independently is the thought, or the resolution to act or cease to act. In other words, the individuals constitute God’s physical body in their physicality, whereas their psychic component appears to be independently able to conceive thoughts. Accordingly, God performs what humans have only desired or thought.

On the concept of adhikārin, you might want to read this post and its comments. On free will in Indian philosophy in general, see this post. You can read more on free will in another exponent of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, namely Veṅkaṭanātha, here.

Therefore, this śarīra is of two types: permanent and impermanent. Among them, permanent are God’s body —consisting of auspicious substrates, namely substances with the three qualities, time and [individual] souls— and the intrinsic form of Garuḍa, the snake (Ananta), etc. belonging to permanent [deities]. The impermanent [body] is of two types: not made of karman and made of karman. The first one has the form of the primordial natura naturans (the prakṛti of Sāṅkhya), etc.* of God. In the same way, [an impermanent body not made of karman] assumes this or that form according to the wish of the liberated souls, such as Ananta and Garuḍa. Also the [body] made of karman is of two types: made out of one’s decision and karman and made out of karman alone. The first type belongs to great [souls] like the Muni Saubhari. The other one belongs to the other low [souls] (i.e., all normal human beings and the other conscious living beings). Moreover, the body in general is of two types, movable and unmovable. Wood (i.e., trees) and other [plants] and rocks and other [minerals] are unmovable. […] That there are souls also in rock-bodies is established through stories such as that of Ahalyā.

tad etat śarīraṃ dvividham —nityam anityañ ceti. tatra nityaṃ triguṇadravyakālajīvaśubhāśrayādyātmakam īśvaraśarīram; nityānāñ ca svābhāvikagaruḍabhujagādirūpam. anityañ ca dvividham —akarmakṛtaṃ karmakṛtañ ceti. prathamam īśvarasya mahadādirūpam. tathā anantagaruḍādīnāṃ muktānāñ ca icchākṛtatattadrūpam. karmakṛtam api dvividham. svasaṅkalpasahakṛtakarmakṛtaṃ kevalakarmakṛtañ ceti. pūrvaṃ mahatāṃ saubhariprabhṛtīnām. uttarañ ca anyeṣāṃ kṣudrāṇām. punaḥ śarīraṃ sāmānyato dvidhā jaṅgamam ajaṅgamañ ceti. kāṣṭhādīnāṃ śilādīnāñ ca ajaṅgamatvam eva. […] śilādiśarīriṇo ‘pi jīvā vidyante iti ahalyādivṛttāntaśravaṇāt siddham (Nyāyasiddhāñjana, pp. 174–176).

Thus, the deities have an intrinsic form which is permanent and can assume further impermanent ones at wish, not depending on karman.
As for rocks and stones, the rationale of their inclusion is the story of Ahalyā, who was transformed into a stone and then back into a woman, a fact which proves that a soul was present also while she was a stone. Her story is told, e.g., in the Rāmāyaṇa.

*The first commentary explains this ādi as referring to God’s emanations, the vyūhas, which are a typical mark of Pāñcarātra theology throughout its history.

Note the limitation in the precinct of application of karman, which seem to only determine one’s body and not one’s entire life. Further, why do you think Veṅkaṭanātha does not explain away Ahalyā’s story? What is he aiming at through the inclusion of stones?

On nature and sentience of plants in Classical Indian Philosophy, see this post and this one (in general) and this one (on Buddhist philosophy) and in general this label in my old blog. On Veṅkaṭanātha, see this label.