TurnitIn

[Golden Applesauce]

I'm curious to see if TurnitIn actually works.  To this end, I'm pasting the midterm exam I'm turning in later tonight below and seeing if it gets caught.
You can read it if you want to, but it's just pretty uninspired stuff about Descartes and his crazy bullshit.


2.   What contribution does Descartes's discussion of mathematical truths make to his proof of    God's existence in Meditation V?

   The fact is, no matter what Descartes says, the essence of God is not always perfectly obvious.  (Otherwise, there would be no need for a proof!)  Since his argument rests partially on the obviousness of certain characteristics of God's essence, there appears to be a contradiction. Descartes solves this apparent contradiction by invoking an analogy with geometry.  Many theorems in geometry are not obvious; for instance, that the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two opposite sides, or that the sum of the angles in a triangle must be that of two right angles.  Descartes submits that it is impossible to do anything but affirm these theorems once a proper proof of them has been understood, as long as one is "paying close attention" to it.  He clarifies this a bit further on: "When I consider the nature of a triangle ... it appears most evident to me ... that its three angles are equal to two right angles.  And so long as I attend to its demonstration I cannot help believing this to be true."1  In other words, the ideas are obvious after they have been understood, for as long as one pays close attention.  Therefore, the essence of God need not be obvious in general; it suffices that the essence is obvious only when one is actually contemplating an idea.


3.What justification does Descartes give for the Evil Demon Hypothesis?

   Descartes has a two main reasons for the Evil Demon Hypothesis.  The first, and the one he himself gives in the text, is that "it is not enough simply to have realized [the doubtful nature of his knowledge] ... I would do well to deceive myself by turning my will in completely the opposite direction and pretend for a time that these opinions are wholly false and imaginary."2  He claims is that, for the sake of freeing his mind from all preconceptions, he must actively disbelieve everything he once thought he knew rather than merely holding them as 'doubtful.'  By taking what he believes in most strongly, the benevolent God, and inverting it, he accomplishes all of this (and then some.)  Actively believing in a malevolent deceitful god implicitly entails disbelieving everything else, since every belief would then only be the product of deception and not true knowledge; he can disbelieve everything with a single stroke.  At least, it allows him to claim to his reader that he is disbelieving everything with a single stroke of rhetoric.
   The real reason, I think, is to make his conclusions valid even in the face of the harshest scenario he can imagine so as to finish off the Skeptics and atheists of his time.  If he were to take his position anywhere short of the most extreme, hyperbolic doubt imaginable, the Skeptics could take that level of doubt and thereby not be forced to concede to his immaculate arguments by simply doubting a premise he neglected to doubt himself.  It also anticipates a stock atheist response to the ontological argument, namely maltheism.  By disproving the Evil Demon Hypothesis on the way to his proof of God, he prevents atheists from saying, "Of course there is a perfect god... perfectly evil, that is!  Muahahaha!" and doing that obnoxious little dance satanists do when they think they've got one up on you. 

4.Explain the concept of time, as set out by Descartes in Meditiation III, and explain how it    comes    into play in his second demonstration of the existence of God.

   Luckily for Descartes, the Evil Demon has neglected to misinform him on the nature of time.  Time, "as is obvious to one who pays close attention" is composed of "countless parts, each one wholly independent of the rest."3    Descartes uses the independence of the moments to show (in perhaps the most amusing subject in the meditations) that he is not himself God.  It has previously been established that Descartes did not create himself, because if Descartes were running things he would have made himself better.  The independence of time lays to rest the idea that perhaps he had existed for all time, not being derived from anything, because existing in one moment does not follow from existing in the previous – continuing to exist implies being continually recreated, the difference being "solely a distinction in reason."4  Thus, the case where Descartes continues to exist has the same pitfall as the case where Descartes created himself, and Descartes must be derived from some other being.

5.Evaluate Elizabeth's criticisms of Descartes's account of the mind's interaction with the    body and the adequacy of Descartes responses.

   Descartes has one good response to Elizabeth's question, which was the distinction he drew "between the force by which the soul acts upon the body" and "that by which one body acts upon another."5  The dilemma posed by an incorporeal thing moving or being moved by a corporeal thing is only a dilemma because the only kind of forces that were known about were those between two material objects.  Descartes should have simply left it at that, and said that he did not have a clear and distinct understanding about how such forces operate; instead he tried to explain something he knew nothing about by analogy to something else he also knew nothing about (and Elizabeth calls him on it in her second letter, saying his analogy with weight can only be "feigned out of ignorance."6)  His specific response to her raising the contradiction of how it could be that "a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and habit of reasoning well, can lose all of it on account of some vapors," while still being able to  "subsist without a body,"7 unless I am mistaken, is completely missing from his letters.  I would have liked to have read it; the fact that damaging the body can damage the mind is a real threat to the notion that destroying the body leaves the mind unharmed, and in general his entire notion of a mind-body duality.  I find his attempt to explain that mind-body unity while also holding on to mind-body separation to be somewhat lacking;  it seems that he clearly and distinctly perceives their separation while in 'philosopher mode,' and their unity while in 'everyday mode,' but never both at the same time.  In fact, the the ability to clearly and distinctly conceive two apparently contradictory statements at two different times should be ringing some alarm bells in Descartes's head about his "clearly and distinctly" epistemology.

A.   1.  Explain the central concepts in Descartes's first demonstration of Gods' existence.
2.  Explain any difficulties in the demonstration that might undermine its soundness.
   3.  Explain why he undertakes this demonstration at this stage in the Meditations.

      Descartes's argument for the existence of God is essentially (hah!) as follows:
      1.  Ideas are possess reality and perfections.
   2.  The amount of reality and perfections of an idea is related to the reality of the          subject of the idea.
   3.  Reality can only come from an efficient cause with at least as much reality as          the effect.
   4.  There is an idea of an God of infinite perfection and reality.
From 1 and 3, we know that ideas require an efficient cause with at least as much reality.  Applying 2 to 4 tells us that the idea of God possesses more reality than any finite thing.  Applying the combination of 1 and 3 to 2 and 4, we know that there is a cause with more reality than any finite thing.  Therefore, and infinitely real being exists, which is by definition God.  As for difficulties that undermine his argument ... can I say all of them?  Present-day philosophers deny all four of his premises, and only the denial of the fourth (theological non-cognitivism) is controversial.  But that would be anachronistic and unfair to Descartes.  I believe premise number 2, insomuch as the reality in an idea about the infinite is inherently infinite itself, could be argued on Descartes's own terms, (that is, one could argue that the idea of the infinite could have a large but finite reality,) but that isn't the real problem here.  The real problem is the Evil Demon Hypothesis he has not dealt with yet.  Since he freely admits that it "would be easy" for the Evil Demon to "cause me to err even in those matters that I think I intuit as clearly as possible,"8 he has no grounds, on his own terms, to assert any of the four premises – the fact that he clearly and distinctly perceives them does not guarantee their accuracy until after he has vanquished the Evil Demon, which he cannot do until after this proof.  Moving away from the Evil Demon Hypothesis was the point of doing this argument in the text, because once he shows a priori that the Evil Demon Hypothesis cannot be correct he can start to trust his senses and clear and distinct thoughts, and thereby move beyond the fact that he exists.


   B.   1.  Explain what Galileo meant by objective and subjective properties and
      2.  how this is related to Descartes's analysis of the wax.
   3.  What claims does Descartes's think he proves through the analysis of the wax,
   4.  what are his arguments, and
   5.  are there any flaws in this reasoning?
   
   When Galileo talks about objective properties of something, he is referring to those properties which are essential to the object, those that "by no stretch of the imagination can I conceive of any corporeal body apart from."9  He has a somewhat larger list of objective properties than Descartes admits, but they are fundamentally in agreement on the word.  A subjective property is a quality that "resides exclusively in our sensitive body,"10 and is therefore not properly a property of the object but rather the observer.  The class of subjective qualities is complementary to the class of objective qualities; so either a quality resides in the senses of the observer or it is a fundamental immutable part of the object's essence.
   Descartes uses the example of a piece of wax (which he insists he is actually holding in his hand as he writes, as opposed to a hypothetical piece of wax – am I being overly paranoid when I wonder if he really had a piece of wax or not?) to illuminate these objective and subjective properties, eventually concluding that only the properties of being extended, flexible, and mutable are essential to the wax.  His claim that these three properties are the only essential properties of wax are sketchy at best – if those three truly were the only essential properties of wax, then wax would be indistinguishable from any other object whose essential properties are only those of extension, flexibility, and mutability, which Descartes claims to be the whole class of corporeal things.  Since the brain of Descartes is also an extended, flexible, and mutable thing, Leibniz's Law of the Identity of Indiscernibles allows us to conclude that Descartes has nothing but wax between his ears.  But again, I am being anachronistic.  More temporally, there is no reason for him to have only chosen those three properties to total of the wax's objective properties.  It is true that in every state the wax had an extension and the potential to change, but it also had one or more optical characteristics, a solubility in a solvent, a density, a hardness, an effect on the body if consumed, etc.  That these were different in each state is of no consequence, since the wax was extended differently in each state as well.  Furthermore, there are transformations that destroy the wax without affecting any of the properties he claims to be essential; burning the wax, for instance, converts it into smoke, which is extended, mutable, and flexible, but clearly not the same as wax.  (If you disagree, remember that his justification for considering the wax to be the same after melting was that "no one denies it; no one thinks otherwise."11  By the same reasoning, smoke is not the same thing as wax.  Capiche?)  The other definition of objective properties, those without which an object cannot even be conceived of without, doesn't hold in the case of flexibility – it is no contradiction to conceive of a hard, brittle piece of wax.


C.   In spite of his arguments for the existence of bodies, Descartes claims that the senses are    unreliable guides to the true properties of bodies.
   1.  How is this compatible with God's veracity?
   2.  To what extent are the senses reliable and
   3.  what reasoning does Descartes's use to support these claims?

   Descartes's claim that the unreliability of the senses with respect to determining the properties of bodies is compatible with the undeceptive nature of God hinges on the notion that senses aren't actually meant to be used to determine the nature of objects, but rather the way a person ought to respond to those objects.  The perception of something being dangerously hot does not necessarily mean that the object is dangerously hot, but does reliably mean that the object is to be avoided.  Using the senses to determine the true properties of something is a misuse of our will in an area we lack understanding, no different than acting on a belief not known to be true.  Since the error comes not from the senses, but from our choosing to use the senses for something they were not designed for, the fault of the error lies in us, and God cannot be blamed.
   He addresses the problem of confused senses giving causing maladaptive inclinations (for example, the person for whom consumption of food would be inimical but is hungry anyway) by asserting that there are only a limited number of sensations capable of being felt by the mind.  Since there are only so many sensations to choose from, the best system is one that "produces the one sensation that, of all the ones it is able to produce, is most especially and most often conducive to the maintenance of a healthy man."12  An occasional error in an uncommon situation is acceptable as long as in general the system produces the sensation that keeps you alive and well.  Descartes does not explain why the number of sensations able to be perceived by the mind-body union, were it to be built differently, must be finite, or even small; it would be well within God's powers to create the human brain such that it would be capable of distinguishing as many sensations as it needs to give the correct response to all stimuli.
   As to how Descartes arrived at these claims, he doesn't really explain why.  By the end of the meditations he's given up on trying to seem impartial and just asserting pet theorems left and right on the basis that he is infallible whenever he clearly and distinctly perceives something to be true.  Perhaps, like this author, he has tired of writing and finds himself less and less willing to put real effort into anything.

Legal Notice:
This work is © 2009 by author under the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988.
Permission for personal use and educational use is granted to Professor Dan Fouke, East Coast Hustle, and Faust, who are additionally allowed to retransmit this work to other individuals in good faith so long as this notice is left intact.  Permission is explicitly NOT granted to TurnitIn, iParadigms, LLC, or affiliates (hereafter known as "Data-grubbing Capitalist Pigs") to retransmit this work, allow it to be retransmitted, allow it to be stolen, or allow it to be read or otherwise accessed by any government or agent thereof, unless the author is in charge of the above government.  Furthermore, by digitally reading this license, all Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs agree to notify the author in event of an attempt by an unauthorized party to access this work, explicitly including any requests under the heading of law enforcement or national security, and, in the event of litigation between the author and Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs, agree to pay the author's legal fees plus 20% tip.

Well, alright, there were a few bits I was actually a little proud of:

By disproving the Evil Demon Hypothesis on the way to his proof of God, he prevents atheists from saying, "Of course there is a perfect god... perfectly evil, that is!  Muahahaha!" and doing that obnoxious little dance satanists do when they think they've got one up on you.

If those three truly were the only essential properties of wax, then wax would be indistinguishable from any other object whose essential properties are only those of extension, flexibility, and mutability, which Descartes claims to be the whole class of corporeal things.  Since the brain of Descartes is also an extended, flexible, and mutable thing, Leibniz's Law of the Identity of Indiscernibles allows us to conclude that Descartes has nothing but wax between his ears.  But again, I am being anachronistic.

Legal Notice:
This work is © 2009 by the author under the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988.
Permission for personal use and educational use is granted to Professor Dan Fouke, East Coast Hustle, and Faust, who are additionally allowed to retransmit this work to other individuals in good faith so long as this notice is left intact.  Permission is explicitly NOT granted to TurnitIn, iParadigms, LLC, or affiliates (hereafter known as "Data-grubbing Capitalist Pigs") to retransmit this work, allow it to be retransmitted, allow it to be stolen, or allow it to be read or otherwise accessed by any government or agent thereof, unless the author is in charge of the above government.  Furthermore, by digitally reading this license, all Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs agree to notify the author in event of an attempt by an unauthorized party to access this work, explicitly including any requests under the heading of law enforcement or national security, and, in the event of litigation between the author and Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs, agree to pay the author's legal fees plus 20% tip.

but trust me, overall it's really not worth reading.  I wrote it under the influence of at least three different psychoactive substances, none of which my body had been very accustomed too, week long sleep deprivation due to every professor demanding a major project due the same week, including my dad who needed me to give up half my weekend of study time to go home and pour concrete, and an empty stomach because I forgot to eat that day.  Also, under the influence of Rationalists.  Later that day, I was helping run a conceptual physics review session, and I quoted Descartes multiple times without thinking about it - "It is obvious to those who are paying close attention..."  "We must carefully distinguish between the forces..."  Also I read Spinoza that evening and I swear it almost made sense

[Rumckle]

Hmm, I have to use Turnitin for the first time this session as well, I'm interested to see how this turns out.

[Golden Applesauce]

A few immediate results:

1. They allow @mailinator.com addresses.
2. The javascript on their submit essay function apparently doesn't work on Unix-based systems?    This is bizarre, there's no reason other than laziness not to support it.
3.  They don't allow OpenDocument.  To be expected, but it's a pain to convert it to .doc while keeping formatting.  (I'd have used .pdf, but my prof wants to type his comments directly into the text itself.)
4.  and don't bother, because they strip all formating from essays, turning mine into an unreadable jumble of bullet points, footnotes, and rogue indentations.
5.  Their servers are slow as fuck near midnight, at least in my timezone - I suspect it's every hour, on the hour while the western hemisphere is rotating through midnight.  So don't wait until 11:55 to submit your essay due at midnight.

[Rumckle]

Wait, your prof's are only accepting submissions via turnitin? That's odd, we have to submit via turnitin and directly to the prof. Which I assume is so it doesn't bugger up the footnotes etc. because I think the profs would be aware of such a problem.

[Requia ☣]

wtf is turnitin?

[Iason Ouabache]

wtf is turnitin?

Here, maybe this will help you: http://tinyurl.com/yehrxj2

[Golden Applesauce]

wtf is turnitin?

It's an essay collection service - they get paid to be a landfill for essays.  Professors give them money, and TurnitIn take papers which are the original work of students, stores them in a repository, and makes money off by showing them to strangers.  In the event that TurnitIn gets a paper that looks familiar (i.e., not original enough), it gets all angsty and shows the professor the similar looking paper, (which is what the professors are really paying for.)

Additionally, when TurnitIn inevitably gets hacked, future generations' school essays will become public information for all time, so whenever your kid goes to apply for a job, the hiring guy will find That One Paper, which might reveal any number of things like political affiliation, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, mental illnesses, pre-existing conditions, utter lack of creativity, terrible writing skills, etc., laugh, and not hire your kid.  Or at least, they'll have to wear the millstone of the worst poetry ever written that they made in college when they were too busy to put real effort into it, etc.

Also the Feds can get your school essays by using one of those provisions in the Patriot Act.

[LMNO]

If most of your essay was similar to the excerpts you provided, I'd actually be interested in reading it. 

Descartes is boring as shit, so I liked how you treated it.


The prof might not, though.

[Golden Applesauce]

If most of your essay was similar to the excerpts you provided, I'd actually be interested in reading it. 

Descartes is boring as shit, so I liked how you treated it.


The prof might not, though.

No, the rest was boring stuff - those were just the only spots with any real inspiration.

[Template]

If most of your essay was similar to the excerpts you provided, I'd actually be interested in reading it. 

Descartes is boring as shit, so I liked how you treated it.


The prof might not, though.

It's the tiny text up there, if you hadn't noticed.

[Rumckle]

So, nothing happened then?