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The matter of house sprinklers might not appear worthy of philosophical discussion, but appearances can be deceiving. Interestingly enough, there is considerable debate over sprinklers and this debate has philosophical significance.
One key debate regarding sprinklers is whether or not people should be required by law to have sprinklers in their houses.
One argument that is both practical and moral in character is the cost argument. The average cost for sprinklers in a new 2,000 square foot two story house (with a basement) is $4,000. If the house in question is not connected to the municipal water supply, the cost can increase by $3,000 or more.
The practical argument is, obviously enough, that this increased cost would make it harder for people to afford houses and this would have a negative impact on potential homeowners, builders, sellers and others associated with the housing industry. Given that the economy is currently in rough shape, it would seem unwise to require sprinklers.
The moral aspect of the argument is consequentialist in character: the harms imposed by forcing people to have sprinklers outweighs the benefits of doing so. If it is assumed (or argued) that what generates more harm than good is wrong, then it would be wrong to compel people to have sprinklers.
One reply to this argument is that the safety provided by the sprinklers would offset the cost. A second reply is that making and installing sprinkler systems would create jobs. Of course, the key question would be whether or or not the benefits of the sprinklers would outweigh the negative aspects. On the face of it, the safety advantages would seem to rather significant. After all, sprinklers can keep people from being burned to death.
A second argument is a rights based argument. The idea is that the state has no right to compel people to install sprinklers. This falls under the general subject of whether or not the state has a right to compel people to take positive steps in regards to safety.
While it is generally accepted that the state can rightfully compel people to prevent them from inflicting harm on others (outlawing murder, for example), there is far more disagreement in regards to the state having the right to compel people to protect themselves from harm.
One basis for this distinction is as follows. Harming others can be seen as infringing on their rights and it would be odd for a person to claim that he has a right to violate the rights of others. As such, the state would seem to be in the right to compel people in such cases. In the case of forcing people to protect themselves, this does does seem to involve protecting people from the harm of others and would seem to fall under the realm of choice rather than compulsion. As such, forcing people to pay for such safety would seem to violate their rights. If an argument is wanting, it is easy enough to appeal to Mill’s classic arguments on the matter.
One obvious reply is that the homeowner’s choice does not just impact him (or her). For example, it would also have an impact on any children or neighbors who live close enough for the fire to spread. However, these factors could be dismissed as being less important than the right of the homeowner to decide what degree of safety she (or he) finds acceptable.
Naturally, if this sort of reasoning is acceptable, it would seem that people would thus have the right to make a broader range of safety choices. For example, they could presumable decide that they are willing to do without the added cost of such things as proper wiring, firewalls (the physical kind), and adequate structural strength in the house. This should also extend to other matters as well, such as automobile safety features, food safety and so on. Naturally, companies should not be allowed to pass off dangerous things to people, but it would seem to follow that people should be able to voluntarily and knowingly do without safety features if they chose to do so.
I do find this line of reasoning rather appealing-after all, Mill’s arguments for liberty are rather compelling and the idea of being an adult seems to involve the right to make poor choices when they primarily impact only oneself.
That said, it can also be argued that an individual does need to be protected from himself (being treated as both the actor and the acted upon) and such poor choices regarding safety could be taken as evidence of mental incompetence, thus warranting compulsion.
> One obvious reply is that the homeowner’s choice does not just impact him (or her). For example, it would also have an impact on any children or neighbors who live close enough for the fire to spread. However, these factors could be dismissed as being less important than the right of the homeowner to decide what degree of safety she (or he) finds acceptable.
We could appeal to existing tradeoffs and force acceptance of sprinklers on pain of inconsistency. Specifically, vaccination comes to mind.
A house caught on fire in many places, from urban to suburban (the majority of houses in this age where the rural population is, what, 15% of the USA?), has a pretty good chance of setting a neighbor on fire. And single fires can kill many people (a local fire confined to one building still killed something like 4 people a few weeks ago). This is how things like the Great Fire (all of them) happen.
In comparison, an unvaccinated child has a much smaller chance of contracting the relevant disease and an even smaller chance of then passing it on, much less being the victim which starts an epidemic. 3 in 1000 have never been vaccinated at all (http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvaccinated-children), implying 900,000 children (population of 300m), and only a few hundred deaths at most, for a really small percentage.
Since most people accept the public interest justification for vaccination, it seems inconsistent to reject a public interest justification for sprinklers without making some strong and dubious assumptions about either fires or vaccinations/epidemics.
There’s also the terrible property damage whenever a sprinkler turns on for some reason when there’s no fire. That’s mainly why I wouldn’t want a sprinkler in my apartment even if it was free.
One might imagine that if sprinkler systems were required by law, the government could sell them at cost, thus making them more accessible to low-income people.
The percentage of people who die in fires is very small. If it was higher then I would recommend sprinklers in ever home.
“One obvious reply is that the homeowner’s choice does not just impact him (or her). For example, it would also have an impact on any children or neighbors who live close enough for the fire to spread. However, these factors could be dismissed as being less important than the right of the homeowner to decide what degree of safety she (or he) finds acceptable.”
Of course the rights of children and neighbours can be dismissed as less important than the rights of homeowners. But can a plausible argument to that effect that such rights are outweighted be presented?
@Gwern:
>…without making some strong and dubious assumptions about either fires or vaccinations/epidemics
Or people.
Try telling them to loose weight (or stop smoking).
http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
There is no downside to living a healthy lifestyle (and please, “the poor can’t afford it” argument has been debunked!) and yet it’s an ever increasing burden on the Health Care System, in a country that can ill (pun) afford it. (see blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876674340970c-800wi or jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2009/12/national-geographic-compares-health.html)
Emily C
Good point. Getting people to do what is clearly in their best interest (like exercising) can be very challenging.
Philofra,
That is a point worth considering in doing the calculation. Once we have the cash value of human life (no doubt not very high) then that can be plugged into a utilitarian formula to see if the cost in money is worth the number of lives saved. Given the level of danger and death we tolerate, I suspect that the sprinklers would not make the cut as cost effective.
Interestingly enough, modern sprinkler systems are supposed to do little damage-they “mist” the area rather than flooding it with lots of water. In any case, they do far less damage than having firemen (and women) hosing down the house. They are also supposed to be less accident prone than the old models.
Gwern,
An interesting analogy. Fire and disease certainly do share the traits of being dangerous and having the capacity to spread.
My neighbors house caught fire years ago (well, his college age son and their buddies accidentally set it ablaze) and it could have easily set my house ablaze. Luckily for them, I saw the smoke pouring out and woke them up before they died. The fire department arrived in time to save both their house and mine. However, if I had not been around and alert, things could have played out very differently. As such, I do see some value in sprinkler systems.
> Given the level of danger and death we tolerate, I suspect that the sprinklers would not make the cut as cost effective.
Well, I’d just make a small note here: they only get rejected if you choose to resolve the inconsistency by rejecting sprinklers. One could just as validly reply, ‘yes, those other dangers are horrible! We must address them right away! That doesn’t change the fact that sprinklers are cost-effective, though, it just means they aren’t at the top of our TODO list.’
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, as the saying goes.
I can’t stop thinking that “sprinklers” is a metaphor for something.
I am thinking that more people die from second-hand smoke than they do from not having sprinklers in their homes.
Anyway, Mike, I wasn’t considering a utilitarian value put on people when I made my observation. I was just thinking about the practicality of it. Sprinklers are not as necessary as say seat belts in cars.
Now, if insurance companies insisted on sprinklers in every home, then I am sure all homes would have then. However, public places have sprinkler because of the liabilities involved, something that isn’t in private homes.
I think this depends on the size of one’s house and the combustibility of the materials with which it is made. Wandering around the world on Google Street View I have noted amongst other things, that some houses are larger, sometimes considerably larger than mine and also have the appearance of being built with materials which apparently are more combustible than mine for instance wood (I assume it is not treated in some way so as to be incombustible) Thus for my own part I currently rely on smoke alarms, CO detectors also, and the strategic positioning of fire extinguishers about the house. Awoken in the night by an alarm I feel confident that I could reach the seat of the fire pretty promptly. The smoke alarms are very sensitive occasionally cooking will set them off and smoking is banned here for the same reason. If I had a sprinkler system as sensitive we would occasionally get a soaking or intense misting which could cause unnecessary damage.
So what I am saying here is, Yes perhaps compulsory sprinkler systems should be installed on houses over a certain size and or composition. How retrospective this should be I hesitate to say because I currently know insufficient about it, or in addition, to the Building Acts and regulations in UK or those in other countries for that matter.
Hello Don,
Why do you assume that the fire will break out at night?
Could it not equally break out during the day when your home is empty? In that case, sprinklers would save your home.
In any case, you said some time ago that you had studied with Galen Strawson, and by chance, I was reading an article which he wrote on free will for the Routledge Encyclopedia. It must have been a privilege to study with such a brilliant man and one who does not fear the radical consequences of his arguments.
I remember hearing somewhere that we routinely accept risks on the order of 1/10000 like say driving an automobile. Not sure what the risk of harming a neighbor by having a fire in my house but I expect it’s far less that that. I guess what I’m saying is I don’t like the idea of compelling people to spend significant sums of money to eliminate risks that are less than say the risk of driving to work every day.
Who has dpne the hedonic calculus for this? The risk of this actually happening is de minimis and a cheap smoke alarm can do the job. Having said this, hedonic calculus is very common in engineering and other professions. In bridge design loss of life is quantified to be able to justify the budget. A 100% safe structure would cost an infinite amount of dollars to build.
Re S Wallerstein.
Thanks for your reply. Silly me, I had completely forgotten that I leave the house on occasions. Perhaps I need to get out more. We do turn off certain appliances when leaving the house but of course that is not to be completely fireproof.
Yes Strawson is an interesting man and he is generally, unlike so many, not too difficult to understand. That said he is a Panpsychist and in that connection I must confess he looses me which I suspect is probably due to inadequacies on my own part. His paper “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility” which I cannot at the moment find reproduced on the net, is one which falls into your class of radical consequences.
If you are not already familiar with it, I think his paper “Against Narrativity” may be of interest to you, where he brings out the distinction between Episodic and Diachronic views of one’s existence
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf
Rayovac Corp AL-9V Battery $1
Kiddie battery op Smoke Alarm $4
Kidde i12040 120V AC/DC Smoke Alarm $7
Pack of Cigarettes $4.74
(http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/what-a-pack-of-cigarettes-costs-state-by-state)
Miller Lite six pack – $4.99 Wegmans (NJ)
McD Happy Meal – $3 to $5
The “philosophy” you should be discussing is what makes people so damn stupid?
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=interview_strawson
Don:
Thanks. Here’s an excellent short interview with Strawson, about the myth of moral responsibility. I believe that he is right, after all.
Re S Wallerstein July 31st
If you are interested in coincidences I had just finished reading the interview with Strawson, checked my email, only to find your recommendation to read the interview. As you probably know, I most times look at life generally from the viewpoint of survival, and what might enhance it. Thus which has the better survival value? Belief in the myth that we have free will and are truly responsible for our actions in the strongest possible sense, or that we just cannot help the way we are and can be blamed for nothing. It seems that the former viewpoint is preferable here. However arguably I think this can be construed as a form of determinism. Biological determinism, sometimes called Genetic determinism, is the idea that each of our behaviours, beliefs, and desires are fixed by our genetic nature, cf Wiki.
For me some form of determinism must be the case. Current science certainly is not supportive of free will as Strawson has pointed out.
Don,
I am inclined to agree with you regarding determinism. But this belief seems somehow to remain isolated somehow from our practical day-to-day living. I wonder if we simply can’t help believing, or acting as if we believed, in free will.
It’s actually a relief to realize that people do not choose to be how they are or to do what they do.
Re curious
“I am inclined to agree with you regarding determinism. But this belief seems somehow to remain isolated somehow from our practical day-to-day living. I wonder if we simply can’t help believing, or acting as if we believed, in free will.”
I think this is currently the best explanation. I do not think evolution has essentially shaped us to explain what this is all about. We are shaped primarily to survive and reproduce. As a result all our understanding of the world is not necessarily in accordance with how the world is in itself. Our ingenuity has uncovered the mysteries of Relativity and Quantum physics but we are unable to understand outside of the mathematics, or experience, such phenomena as say, Time dilation, the mass of a body as a function of its velocity, Superposition, Quantum Tunnelling, because our dull daily routines never have occasion to take us as bodies out of the realm of Newtonian physics to the extremities where such phenomena can be measured. Yes we can do the maths, and things work, but human experience is as we currently stand is barred from such phenomena. On Page 54 of Alfred North Whitehead’s “Science and the Modern World”he writes inter alia, “The occurrences of nature are in some way apprehended by minds, which are associated with living bodies. Primarily, the mental apprehension is aroused by the occurrences in certain parts of the correlated body, the occurrences in the brain, for instance. But the mind in apprehending also experiences sensations which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone. These sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.
However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth century.
In the first place, we must note its astounding efficiency as a system of concepts for the organisation of scientific research. In this respect, it is fully worthy of the genius of the century which produced it. It has held its own as the guiding principle of scientific studies ever since. It is still reigning. Every university in the world organises itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organising the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reigning, but it is without a rival.
And yet—it is quite unbelievable. This conception of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions, and the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete realities.”
So yes we do as you say think and do as if Free will were an actuality. I suggest that even the hardened Determinist also does in his daily routines. What else could he do, sit and wait for the causal chain to some how embrace him and work him like a puppet?
Don,
Thank you for your thoughts (and those of A.N. Whitehead).
‘we do as you say think and do as if Free Will were an actuality… What else could [the hardened Determinist] do, sit and wait for the causal chain to somehow embrace him and work him like a puppet?’
The Idle Argument and Fatalism somehow come to mind. I don’t suppose accepting the truth of determinism suggests you should, or could, give up on deliberation about what to do next on the basis that whatever you do next, it was always determined that you would do that. Still some seem to think belief in determinism should make a big difference in day-to-day life – that the ‘reactive attitudes’ of resentment, indignation, or gratitude simply make no sense in light of determinism and could and ‘should’ be overcome. Strawson senior argued, I believe, that it is psychologically impossible to rid ourselves of these reactive attitudes and I was inclined, and meaning to point towards, that view. On reflection though, I don’t know that that this is true – even if it would be difficult to change in the way, say Derek Parfit, thinks we should. I suppose, thinking again about how I view the ‘bad’ acts of others my belief in determinism does break through into my moral outlook. I do find myself torn between the policeman’s “look at the evil they have done” and the social worker’s “look at what they were born with and into and how they were conditioned to be” and I think, on reflection, my belief in determinism does sometimes temper my feelings towards those my ‘gut’ condemns (just not often enough).
Peter Strawson also argued, as I understand it, that even if it were possible, it would be irrational to ditch our reactive attitudes (on broadly utilitarian grounds). A life without gratitude does sound profoundly unappealing. Perhaps that would be balanced by the alleged gains of being in some serene Buddhist state of Epoché but I have my doubts. In my own case, where determinism seems to get nowhere and I don’t think I want it to, is where I judge myself. I cannot see how I could be in a position in which I no longer feel shame or guilt, or ever think I have been indolent or said something I shouldn’t. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be the type of being who could. Obviously it’d be better if I didn’t have such frequent cause to exercise these quasi-virtues but I’m rather glad they are there.
It seems I need some way to clarify all this. I want the reactive attitudes to have some justification even if they should be mitigated by determinist thinking. I want a world with gratitude and I want to justify my sense of guilt not transcend it. Perhaps the Strawson I should attend to is the father not the son?
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm
Curious:
Feeling shame seems very different than feeling guilty in this context.
If I believe that I am not morally responsible because my behavior is fully determined, I may no longer feel guilty and that’s a relief.
However, I may feel shame, because I know that others will see me as morally responsible and the opinion of others, even if it is based on a myth of moral responsibility, matters to me.
That opinion matters to me, not because I see it as especially accurate, but because I seek their approbation and admiration.
Amos,
Certainly it seems useful to distinguish guilt from the, related and seemingly more complicated notion of shame. There seem different ways of making out that distinction but I take the point.
It is always a great relief to be freed from one’s guilt over a given action. Normally this comes with time, the making of amends and apologies. But if determinism entails that guilt is always unwarranted suffering (moral responsibility being an illusion) then it seems quite appropriate for the pharmaceutical industry to develop a cure for the guilty conscience.
And shame too, as a subjective experience seems, unless we can make out a case that such a reaction is still rational in light of determinism, in need of a medical cure. Taking a pill that means you no longer care what others think of you seems a rational choice. Surely you should want to dispel the hurt you feel about what others think if their admiration or moral disapproval is based on a myth? We should extend the attitude we should adopt towards those who condemn from a position of a religious fundamentalism, to cover all those who pronounce moral condemnation. For it seems all are equally wrong – though of course they could not have believed anything other than what they do believe, and should not be blamed for it but instead offered suitable medical treatment.
I do need to do more reading and thinking about all this. The Peter Strawson paper seems in need of my attention.
Curious:
I think that we all need to do more thinking about the implications of determinism, to take it seriously in our daily lives, to live with it, to sleep on it, to assimilate it and integrate it into our dealings with our selves and with others.
In any case, determinism is not fatalism. The fact that Galen Strawson convinces me that moral responsibility is true was not written in Big Bang, but is the product of my genes, of my education, of previous reading, of my life experience, all of which make me a fellow who upon reading Galen Strawson, agrees with him.
A few more thoughts which have occurred to me on this matter. Somehow I thought Mind which so far as I am aware is not a scientific term should be stripped of its mystery by concentration solely on the Brain alone.
A large amount of human mentation, or brain function never comes to consciousness. That which can, or, affects our conscious states we call Mind. Accordingly to borrow a phrase from Marvin Minsky “Minds are simply what brains do” p287 The Society of Mind. This leaves us with body alone of which the Brain is a part, an essential part. Some parts of the body we can manage without but take the brain away and we are finished
We may now ask what is the purpose of so called ‘mind’? Why is the brain enhanced by being able to generate this awareness of itself, and to control what it considers, and what it decides, what is to be done and somehow make itself believe that it has been done by an agent by name of Self, which has control over it by the exercise of what is called free will. There is some scientific evidence which supports this kind of view in that it has been shown that bodily action can occur before the onset of consciousness corresponding to that action. Notwithstanding, it seems we have decided, and then acted, but that is not the case.
If what I say above is anything like what is happening then Free will is probably a trick played by the brain which some of us have seen through.
The following may be of interest
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/reviews/Wegner02.htm
I joined a study group with the Department of Psychology concerning this book which is in my opinion well worth reading but don’t expect much Philosophy there. The reviewer Susan Blackmore is/was a dedicated Determinist and accordingly runs her life thereto. I cannot imagine how one would do that, notwithstanding my own sympathy with determinism.
Oh what a tangled web we weave….
..when we insist on the primacy of the material world, (with absolutely no justification, other than it’s a necessary assumption to Do Physics) and make everything else a derivative of it…
Excuse me a quite chuckle.
QUIET chuckle..
Amos,
Absolutely we need to distinguish fatalism – according to which it was your destiny, as writ by the gods, that you would end up being convinced by Galen regardless of what you did – from determinism. The latter holds that what you have done is part of the causal story of why you were convinced by Strawson – you accept his arguments (partly) because of prior experiences not despite them.
Still, I think that according to determinism it was indeed written in the Big Bang that you would read Strawson at a given time and accept his arguments, your genetic inheritance, education, previous reading, life experience, were all written and determined in the Big Bang.
Please explain “primacy of the material world”. What other world is there?
Don,
Free will seems to be the best bet. If we are not free, then we obviously just believe what we are determined to believe. If we are free, then we get to pick (within limits) and should thus elect to accept free will. So, if you believe in free will, either you must (and are in error, but could not do otherwise) or you are right.
Dudley,
There could be others. One option is there are multiple material worlds (as per Lewis or the many worlds hypothesis of some scientists). Another option is that there might be non-material worlds (other dimensions). A third option is an immaterial aspect to this world, such as Cartesian minds or some such thing.
Well, that is of course, the question…
Imagine that the material world is an interpretation of something more fundamental, by something that _cannot therefore exist in_ the material world.
The question then arises as to how many of the qualities of the material world, refer to that something more fundamental, and how many are simply aspects of the process of interpretation…
Incompleteness is the problem of placing the perceiving entity inside the set that comprises the material reality. The whole set is necessarily incomplete, since the perceptual entity cannot perceive itself perceiving without involving itself in infinite regression. And yet the set allegedly contains the perceiving entity.
Either you must place the perceiving entity outside the set of material reality, which solves the regression, but kicks the problem-can further down the road, or you have to accept incompleteness in the material set itself.
I am a can-kicker by nature. Realists and Determinists are schizophrenic. They claim completeness where none can exist. That leads to the tangled web…but never it seems, to them facing up to the inadequacies of the fundamental Realists’ and Detereminists’ propositions of the total ubiquity of their conceptions.
I’m with Mike: to save the data and produce a neat model requires one or other of those propositions.
I personally think that the neatest solution in theory-space, as it were, is what I outlined elsewhere… take existence, split it along orthogonal lines, and introduce one half of the duality as ‘consciousness’, make it the element through which the rest of existence is interpreted, and the interpretation becomes classical material reality.
And all these knotty issues simply become aspects of how consciousness works, not fundamental qualities of the universe, what ever that is.
Determinism then becomes a choice of consciousness. A way to order and separate stuff into causal event-chains. Fatalism becomes the acceptance of that particular ordering beyond all others, a locking of the consciousness into a set pattern. The ultimate trade-off of freedom, for security.
*shrug* some people like it that way.
As far as I can tell, the entire world is in my mind. After all, there is nothing I experience that is outside my mental states. That said, to deny an external world would be madness…
Don, Curious, Sam, Mike thank you for this great discussion. I just want to ask some questions and provide some comments.
1.- Regarding determinism, I believe that quantum mechanics through the uncertainty principle put an end to Laplace demon, is that correct? Is there any new development? If not, why do we said that science fully supports determinism?
2.- Regarding the biological role of the brain, a key role and probably overlooked is social connection. The ability to form societies, cultures and civilizations provide a significant advantage. Our DNA is more than 99% identical to chimps but where is the greater variation: in the gene/s associated with language, in my opinion the key building block of socities.
3.- Why do we assume that free will is concious? Why are we not still free is the process is unconcious? Our unconcious is ours and works significantly and I am not certain is fully determined. that is an assumption. A lot of creativity and novel ideas come from the unconcious. Can we consider that freedom?
4.- Are we confusing free will with omnipotence? When we talk about Deep Moral Responsability DMR what are the boundaries? If there are none then do we expect onmipotence? I mean, I am conditioned, I am human, I can not fly, I did not choose my genes and my enviroment, etc. But if I can do any of these things, then I would be omnipotent wouldn’t I? So ther are boundaries to our free will, it is not absolute. My question what are those boundaries? What is what we can actually decide?
5.- Finally, a personal story that move me deeply. Several years ago, I was visiting the holocoust museum in Washington, DC. At the end of the visit you can sit down and listen to survivors tales. One survivor was telling the story of a camp prisoner that was thanking God every day. Confused he asked him, why are you thanking God so much? We are in this terrible place. The camp prisoner answered: I am thanking him because he did not make me like them (pointing to the nazi guards)
My soul quivers remembering this story.
Hi JJM,
If indeterminacy is a true feature of the quantum world then Laplace’s demon would be unable to deduce the exact state of the universe at any given later (or earlier) time yes. Still, it remains open to deny that only a probabilistic description can be given of some of the odd things that go on at the level of micro-reality. I’m no expert on Quantum Mechanics, but I don’t know that it is settled that genuine randomness exists – that God does play dice. Philosophers are still arguing over what Quantum Mechanics tells us and there are, as I understand it QM theories that remain deterministic (the Broglie-Bohm theory being one I believe). And even if it is granted that quantum indeterminacy exists, it does not appear to do anything for those who want free will in the substantial sense – that some small number of your choices or acts could be caused by undetermined chance events at the quantum level does nothing to give you the type of freedom of will and moral responsibility that the truth of determinism seems sufficient – but not necessary – to rule out. That the conscious mind is not fully determined would not make it ‘free’. But only, in principle, unpredictable.
‘Are we confusing free will with omnipotence?’ Perhaps the only confusion is in the concepts of omnipotence and free will. I understand the idea of people being free to do as they will – not being constrained by others – and that’s all some mean by ‘freewill’. But others want more than this, seemingly they want the freedom to will what they will and this seems utterly confused to me. I just can’t make sense of this substantial freewill in the sense people want. The notion of omnipotence also seems confused – can God create a rock he can’t lift? As you say there are some things you seem to have no control over, common intuition suggests it is only those things you had some freedom of choice about that you should be deemed morally responsible for. But the claim of determinism is that freedom of choice is an illusion – it is always the case that you could not have done none other than you did. So you never have deep moral responsibility for anything.
It’s a tricky problem to get to grips with. And it doesn’t seem to me that its only the physicalist who has to deal with it. The Transcedental Idealism of Kant and Schopenhauer offer no intelligible sense of free will (Kant admits of his own solution that he can only comprehend its incomprehensibility). And it seems to me that being an Idealist or a Dualist does not save you the trouble of thinking about how human beings could be such that their previous mental states do not necessitate their future ones. They too do not pretend that we chose our own character and thoughts, and they have to explain how we are supposed to be predictable, explicable and rational – as it seems we are – if our prior mental states do not necessitate our future ones.
Good summary.
WRT determinism etc, it is an inevitable feature of a fully causal world bound by immutable law. As Curious says, modern quantum theory makes those laws statistical, so full deterministic causality (almost) works in the Macro, but not perfectly in the micro.
Indeed as I understand it, the Universe, in this model relies on a broken symmetry, on an a not-quite-perfect expression of Causality, for its actual existence.
You can understand that as the philosophical problem of the Prime Cause, in a linear space time world.
I.e. a general principle is that for existence to exist, something a-causal and a-rational must have happened. That maps into the Big Bang singularity and broken symmetry respectively, in the current physicists’ world-view.
In more religious world views, that philosophical necessity maps into a single act of supernatural Creation, which also contains elements of intelligence and purpose.
(One should not that these two generic solutions are indistinguishable in terms of current physical observation. I.e. a 5000 year old world ‘fixed up’ to look like its a few hundred billion years old, is the same world the physicist sees. The only difference is that the physicists’ world lacks any intention in its construction, or intelligence or purpose: these concepts have been taken out of the universe at large and placed in the mind of humanity).
By comparing and contrasting such differing views, I have come to the general conclusions that any world that contains rationality and causality has to be based on a-rational and a-causal principles.
Which boils down to the general philosophical question of ‘why anything?’ and ‘Why this thing in particular?’.
In a fully rational world we can only adduce these to either some deep Law at a level beyond those we are currently aware of (the Bohm/de-Broglie proposition, as I understand it) or the acceptance of some a-rational principle at work.
This leads me to a starling conclusion:
For existence to exist, and be rationally observable, there must always be an a-rational part of the Universe. I believe that the principles of incompleteness are reflections of this necessity.
Another way to say this is that inductive inspiration creates a proposition, deductive logic (rationality) dissects and fills in the details.
Back to Free will (or not).
Given that you can – e.g. – accept that the results of an act of Divine Creation can produce a world indistinguishable from one created by a Big Bang, you have real free choice at the RATIONAL level as to which model you choose to adopt.
That choice is Pre Rational. Ask anyone who has made it, why they have made it, and you are likely to get no better answer than ‘it feels right’ if they are deeply perceptive, or ‘because it IS just right’ if they are not.
Curious makes an excellent point:
“have to explain how we are supposed to be predictable, explicable and rational – as it seems we are – if our prior mental states do not necessitate our future ones.”
My intuition of my own thinking and feeling, suggests strongly that whilst our prior mental states do precondition our choices, they do not necessitate them. Occasionally true free choice exists, and we take it. On the basis of no more than an intuition, of what this will mean in terms of a future state of being.
What realm this feeling of choice, and the taking of it, inhabits, I do not pretend to know.
But I utterly understand the holocaust survivor’s story. He saw it as God’s choice for him: I see it as his own choice, to prefer to be a victim, than assume the mantle of what it meant to be not such.
In conclusion, all I can say is that these problems (can) never vanish, and at best we can relocate them to new realms. What appears to be free choice, a-rational and a-causal imperatives, may be seen as reflections of causality in some transcendental realm, or they may be accepted as complete in themselves.
The price of Reason itself, is that some things must remain unreasonable.
Curious;
Thank you for your response. What do you mean by “our prior mental states do not necessitate our future ones”? What does “necessitate” means in this context? Does this mean prior mental states determine future ones?
A lot of what we are discussing depends on definitions, what do we understand for free will? What do we understand for mental states? Is a decision to do or not to do something a mental state?
For me it is the ability to make choices, and in that context I believe we have a limited free will. As I say in reality we have limited choices but we do have them. Within the constraints of our circumstances (environment) and physical (genes) and psychological limitations, we can choose. And learning for example; acquiring new skills, could become a life changing choice that leads in the long run to different mental states/ways of being etc.
I agree that QM would not be applicable to our daily lives, but my point was that determinism is not scientifically proven as a universal law. At other levels, molecular, organism, society, culture, we can have other mechanisms/processes that are indeterminate. For example evolution based on natural selection operates at the molecular level and I cannot see how this process could be fully explained by determinism- by observation and definition is random. The individual ability to learn and change or the cultural changes in history depend on so many parameters that is hard for me to understand them from a deterministic point of view.
Even though I am not religious, there is a prayer that I hold close to my heart: God please grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I believe the holocaust “victim” understood this prayer; he understood his historical limitations (it is not easy to imagine how every Jew could have chosen not to be a victim of persecution) and had the wisdom and courage to change his mental state to forgiveness and compassion. Cruelty is a terrible form of madness as is indifference to people’s suffering.
I take ‘necessitate’ to mean ‘leaving no choice’.
an exact definition, in this case.
“determinism is not scientifically proven as a universal law.”
1/. No scientific law is ever ‘scientifically proven’, at least if you hold to Popper, which in this respect I do.
2/. Determinism is not a law, scientific or otherwise, it is held as a principle that underlies the world that allows scientific laws to be intuited. By induction.
It can never be “proven”, as such.
3/. At other levels, if we hold to a deterministic principle, other mechanisms ARE deterministic. They MUST be. They may be in-computable or subject to inability to determine initial conditions exactly enough for predictive purposes, but all of science comes crashing down if they are not, at the heart, deterministic. The realist position is that we can’t predict, not because they are inherently unpredictable, but because they are complex, and we don’t know enough or have powerful enough computers! Or they represent a class of in-computable realities where the computer needed is at least the size of the Universe, if not bigger..
Cf the ‘butterfly effect’ . If we knew exactly which butterfly and how hard it flapped its wings, and we had a really good computer program running on a computer the size of the solar system, we would then know that a particular raindrop will fall on your head Thursday week…
That is the basis of the Bohm proposition. All apparent randomness is merely the appearance of an Order beyond the limits of our knowledge and/or computing power.
whereas a more traditional view of QM is that it represents a statistical determinism. The debate in this area, is of course, large….:-)
Especially when the consequentialist arguments are so murky, I tend to err on the side of freedom.
Strawson said “You don’t have to get up off your couch… You don’t have to do any science”. So there’s the end of it right there. I can say one thing, you can say another, and we can both be right.
Blackmore (Is this the same Blackmore that “wrote” The Meme Machine?) says “By revealing these illusions Wegner may do for free will what science has finally done for God.” She makes no account for the difference between one side of the Atlantic and the other!
If determinism was “true” shouldn’t we all be perfect little ants by now, running around in circles with no thought for ourselves, just through shear numbers managing to maintain a society that can feed itself?
Is the illusion of free will less than its reality – if I choose to shoot you, will you choose to die? We’d have to factor in some probabilities – am I a good shot (I am!)? Did I aim for the heart or the stomach? Will the Ambulance arrive before you bleed out? Did the Ambulance driver finish his caustic call to his ex-wife on a happy note? Is the medic a complete nube? Oh wait, there are no probabilities. Everything is set. You’re dead.
Real freedom is having nothing.
Mike Tyson
Hi Jmiret,
You are most welcome to my thoughts for what little they are worth.
What I was getting at was the idea that our prior mental states determine our future ones yes. If this were not so it seems to me we would be radically unpredictable and inexplicable. And, of course, it seems we aren’t – whether the truth about reality is materialist, idealist, dualist or whatever. And in any case, the notion of free will seems so utterly incoherent that it appears to me there is just no ‘metaphysical’ free will to be had even if you deny the truth of physicalism and/or determinism.
A lot of things we are discussing depend on definition yes. To some people ‘free will’ is simply the freedom to do what you will. And those who define free will in this way might say that there only is free will because determinism is true. I think your intuition that free will is the ability to make ‘free’ choices is quite in keeping with what most people think. Commonly you think you chose to do x but you could have done y, determinism says no if you did x you could only ever have done x. A decision – if there are such things – seems to a be a process or event – a temporally extended ‘thing’. A mental state might be such a thing as a belief or a desire. Perhaps a mental process can be thought of as being composed of a series of mental states? It seems to me that a mental state can be fully captured in a snapshot of a moment of time. Those are my intuitions for what they are worth.
By limited free will I think you mean to say that you can only choose from the possible options. To me it seems that your psychological limitations, circumstances and genetic makeup are all determined long before you were born, so is everything else in the world and so all of your choices are inevitable – there are no real options. Determinism, as you say, is not proven as a universal law but it is determinism which makes the world explicable. The randomness at play in evolution is the randomness that comes with a lack of purpose, the shuffling of cards, the toss of a coin. But determinism says if it lands on heads it was always going to. Determinism doesn’t explain evolution, it is what makes evolution and all other natural processes explicable. It is by assuming the truth of determinism that we can expect experiments with exactly the same starting conditions to have the same results. It remains the case that we cannot predict in practice the outcome of complex events but that does not deny determinism – just our failure to be omniscient. That we can predict as much as we can depends, to my mind, on the truth of determinism.
The holocaust story is not something I quite not how to respond to. But given the Milgram experiments and such, it seems to me that, given the right circumstances almost all of us could do what the ordinary Germans did in being complicit in the horrors of Nazism. But for the grace of God (as it were) I think most of us could have ended up leading the minority group to the gas chambers, by a series of small steps towards evil in a culture of authority where one feels one is not responsible for one’s actions and is only following orders. By determinism’s lights the Nazi could not have chosen other than he did – he was always going to do what he did and the question is how we can hold him morally responsible for his actions given that.
Curious:
It seems to me that it’s unwise to make generalizations about human nature from the Milligram experiments.
People who, following the authority of a “scientist” in a white lab coat,
“apply electricity”, will not necessarily cooperate in genocide at the behest of a fascist dictatorship.
The example of soldiers (I’m not sure if it’s British or U.S. soldiers) during World War 2 comes to mind: a high percentage did not shoot to kill even though they were in combat and even though it was their duty as soldiers to kill the enemy.
My experience in authoritarian situations (under Pinochet) is that some people are actively complicit (generally, people who otherwise support the dictatorship or who stand to gain from being complicit), the majority pretend that they see and hear nothing, a surprisingly sizeable percentage actively avoids participation and a smaller group actively resists, even placing themselves in personal danger.
Re Leo Smith Aug 2st
“when we insist on the primacy of the material world, (with absolutely no justification, other than it’s a necessary assumption to Do Physics) and make everything else a derivative of it…”
“I am not sure we do need to make a necessary assumption concerning a material world in order to do physics” If you look at the work of a theoretical physicist like Dirac it is a vast bewildering area of mathematics which I for one do not understand. I don’t think he was much concerned with matter as we commonly think of it. Those of us who are Instrumentalists will deny Scientific reality and form our opinions by reading the dials of instruments and comparing them; if they come out right having applied Dirac’s equations then that is it; a refinement has to be made to existing knowledge. I have quoted Niels Bohr before but here it is again. “There is no Quantum World. There is only a quantum physical description. It is wrong to think the task of Physics is to find out how nature is, Physics concerns what we can say about Nature”
Hi Don.
Yes, I am a bit of an instrumentalist as well, however even in those rarefied mathematical descriptions (which I about 30% understand, and applaud those who understand more!) there is still “the dials of instruments”..and those do sit firmly in ‘classical reality’ even if the structures we may intuit from them do not.
I like Quantum physics because it comes closest to the model that I prefer.. an arbitrary noumenous realm which transforms itself into a phenomenal one. Through the process of observation…
I just don’t think it goes quite far enough to be satisfying… It still gets tangled up with using time space energy – all derivative quantities of the classical phenomenal world.
I.e. if you like to me its a halfway house. It sort of accepts there is weirdness going on, but it can’t break from expressing that as statistical wave functions of classical quantities.
Some of the string theory stuff seems (who can tell? ) to be getting closer to pure abstraction..but its like fitting a polynomial to an arbitrary set of points. You can always get a perfect fit if you use enough elements in the series.. to the point where the resultant equation doesn’t really tell you anything about the data at all…
I honestly think there is a real opportunity for philosophers to make an impact there, though. The way my ideas would translate to quantum theory would be if there was some totally abstract equation that was in terms of variables that don’t exist whatsoever in the (classical) world, and out of that a special solution would be space, time, energy and quantum wave functions.
If you like, the solution – or a solution – of that would be the exact equivalent of ‘making an observation’ – collapsing quantum ‘fields’ into phenomenal realities.
Free will would be in terms of the exact solution you chose to run with…
I apologise in advance for that being a really muddy and imprecise explanation.. I have a picture in my mind, but I don’t have names for the things in it… it stems from an absolute conviction that the phenomenal world is a creation of consciousness. It creates it by the process of observation, but what it creates it out of, is so utterly weird that neither physics nor religion comes close, though physics I feel is handier as a starting point.
One of the corollaries is there would be as many ‘material worlds’ as there are stable solutions to that equation.
But that doesn’t mean there are an infinite number of actual worlds. There is, if you like, only the one equation..
Heck, this is a long way from sprinklers. Maybe someone could open up a blog where ideas can really get chucked around, blue sky chatter. Something might emerge if enough minds get to polishing ideas properly.
Oh, I forgot to add, that Niels Bohr’s comment I find appropriate. We can’t ever say what it IS, just how it behaves. Qualitative Is-ness is a material world property, and not germane to realms beyond that.
I cant help repeating the mantra, that although I cant prove it, or express it very well, the mere fact of a phenomenal reality necessitates two completely different principles, which you might say are basic undifferentiated is-ness and some form of rule driven operator to react with it. I have no idea what the first is, but I name the second consciousness.
And its there that free will resides. Because consciousness is defined outside the limits of the material world, which is its creation as it were. So in that way we may claim free will with respect to the material phenomenal world, which satisfies ‘common sense’ .
Why we have that choice, and what drives us to make it in the ways we do, is quite another matter, however. As I said before, its simply kicking that can up the road a bit.
But at least we don’t have to be fatalists any more. we can choose what we do in the here and now, and it is as free as we can ourselves be. To claim otherwise is to simply admit to never having struggled with, and mastered, any of the impulses that come and go.
Or to say it in another way, we may not be ultimately free, but we don’t have to be a slave to anything less than our ultimate true natures, and that is really how I understand religious teachings: the sin is not this action or that action, it’s to defer to one impulse and deny a deeper one. Thus putting consciousness and the being at war with itself.
I find myself in a terrible quandary too, with the tale of the Nazi and the Jew..which is worse, to succumb to a Dream of Power, or a Dream of Compassion. I see both in my own nature, and fortunately, I have never had to succumb to either. The terrible realisation is that in either man’s shoes, I might well have behaved exactly as they did.
Or perhaps I might have achieved some Zen like transcendence, and seen all as victims of their particular Dreams, and accepted whatever came. I like to think I might have.
Re Leo Smith Aug 2nd.
I think the whole problem here is that we see, for want of a better term ‘Reality’, through the sense organs and understanding of human beings. We do not, and can never, so far as I can see, have immediate contact. So we are so to speak, locked in and the key forever turned on our uncertainty. We speak of superposition and the collapse of the wave function as if that actually happens, and we cannot understand it, although the maths work perfectly. This is the best we can do, but we should not make the mistake of assuming the ‘Reality’, in itself is as you put it, is weird; what is weird is the way we currently understand it. As time passes possibly human cognitive powers may improve and such problems as are faced in comprehending quantum Theory outside of its mathematical support, and additionally the hard problem of consciousness may be better apprehended.
I was hesitant to comment on the account of the Nazi and the Jew one does not wish to give offence. It occurred to me me that rather than thanking God for not making one otherwise one could at least remonstrate or at worse curse God for creating the monstrosity which we call Nazi. As I understand it (although the source eludes me), during the war a group of Rabbis having experienced Nazi ill treatment did just this. The Bible Luke 18 10-14 seems to suggest better a repentant Nazi than a thankful Jew. I am now asking myself is there any thing such that alternative Human viewpoints cannot exist? As you say “The terrible realisation is that in either man’s shoes, I might well have behaved exactly as they did.”
“We do not, and can never, so far as I can see, have immediate contact. So we are so to speak, locked in and the key forever turned on our uncertainty.”
I half agree. I agree that we cannot achieve the sort of certainty that we would prefer.
But we are not as locked in as we think we are.
The whole thrust of esoteric traditions, spiritual or shamanic ‘paths’ is to rip the consciousness to shreds, catch a glimpse of an underlying sense of things, and make access to consciousness altering tools the permanent property of the adherent.
Years ago I hoped to scientifically study this: but science cannot function there..science adheres to a particular position of consciousness – the ‘detached observer of a phenomenal world’ to derive ‘certain facts’ and you can’t gain consensus about unique personal experiences that are unique and personal!
I.e. before one can do science on what you might label ‘altered consciousness’ you have to agree on an ontology to describe the experiences and that the experiences are consistent, shareable and meaningful. And with the likes of Susan Blackmore pounding on the drum of ‘there is no such thing as consciousness’ it’s a pretty hopeless task
Not that I have anything but respect for her… but it’s a hopeless task. If I tell you there is an island 400 miles off the coast of a continent you have never seen where tortoises are as large as cows, you would be within your rights to say ‘more “sea stories” from an old sailor hoping for a free pint’.
Why would you believe them?
Especially if your ontology held that 150 miles off the coast of Ireland a flat world simply came to an end. It’s only common sense, after all. If it were round things would fall off the bottom…
But I do maintain there is something worth calling consciousness, and it is alterable by all the disciplines you have (n?)ever read about in all the happy clappy books in the ‘mind and spirit’ sections of the bookstore.:-)
In fact the working definition of consciousness is the thing all those techniques do in fact alter!
So to me a realist is someone who steadfastly refuses to fiddle with those strange buttons and dials in the human mind, and concentrates on stabilising as objective and as stable a world view as is possible. That’s a laudable feat in itself, too.
But in that case, he has locked the door, thrown away the key and bolted himself to the floor as well.
“but we should not make the mistake of assuming the ‘Reality’, in itself is as you put it, is weird; what is weird is the way we currently understand it.”
I stand by my original statement.. I picked the word ‘weird’ because I wanted to convey a sense of complete other-worldliness without getting stuck in words that have deep emotional content like ‘transcendental’ ‘mystical’ ‘spiritual’ or whatever. They have too much baggage. Too much history IN the material world. “Weird” is for me the best choice..utterly unlike anything we know. I’ll agree that the weird thing is how we actually translate that into something so mundane as ‘a cup of coffee’, though.
And yet that bit *isn’t* so weird.To me. I’ve lived with mathematical transforms like the Fourier transform, all my working life, and with software algorithms for the last half of it, and been heavily involved in information theory a la Shannon… one ends developing a feel for these that goes beyond the mathematics of them. By that I mean a way to get rapidly to a qualitative solution, though not necessarily a quantitative one.
Superposition and the collapse of a wave function is, both at the level we do it as mathematics, and potentially when ‘it really happens’, actually algorithmic processing in consciousness, so in that sense it’s not ‘real’.
My point is, that neither is anything else we may call factual or phenomenal. I see those as precisely similar transformations of the weird into the mundane.
I.e. I am not overemphasising the reality of what Penrose calls the U/R issue, I am de-emphasising the reality of the R itself!
So let’s say for the sake of lots of (fun) argument, that what consciousness does is to apprehend something like a wave function DIRECTLY, and translate it into a living picture of a material phenomenal world. According to a more or less similar algorithm amongst more or less similar people.
You end up with a neat, but very weird situation where the superposed quantum level stuff gives rise simultaneously to both the idea that something has ‘happened’, in the mind of the observer, and the change in the observed reality itself. Or in fact, they are one and the same event really. Only the issue of seeing them separated in space-time is due to our insistence that space-time exists above and beyond our conception of it.
I admit I am groping badly here, to describe a concept I can’t even visualise clearly myself.
I’ve mentioned Vlakto Vidral before – he does go a long way down the information/Shannon/algorithmic path himself. My instinct says he is largely correct: Or at least he is producing useful models that bear further scrutiny.
Penrose too argues for a quantum level mind…although I am less satisfied he has got past halfway to an acceptable answer, BUT it is at least an avenue.
I am pushing the proposition that all events facts and phenomena in a sense take place inside the mid of the observer, and that reality as we normally understand it, is fixed up to keep the picture consistent. And when we do Quantum physics we aren’t so much unpicking the way the world is, so much as the way we observe it*.
And we agree on what reality consists of because we are social animals, and seek agreement and shared perceptions.
*whatever it is!
Re JJM Aug 1st
1/ Yes I suppose the Uncertainty principle does throw a spanner in the works of Laplace’s Demon. I don’t think Determinism is a scientific term. In any case it is a word with a variety of meanings. I guess you are referring to Causal Determinism here which holds that future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature.
Much science is based on the inductive principle within which there is a gap, the inductive gap, such that after observing many instances of say X followed by Y we feel justified without further observation to say (jumping thed gap) that the next instance of X and all future instances of X will be followed by Y. Alfred North Whitehead stated, “This process of reasoning from the sample to the whole species is Induction. The theory of induction is the despair of philosophy –and yet all our activities are based on it.”1 Perhaps we might argue that we trust science supports determinism but Fully supports determinism is I think going too far. Imduction relies on basically two provisions 1/ each event has a cause and 2/ Nature is uniform. Cause and effect are a human construct used to understand Nature. In point of fact what we observe is a continuous system and to speak of a cause and effect is unjustifiably to single out two events from which is in fact a continuous series. The Uniformity of Nature is I think disputable. We are unable to predict the gender of offspring. The process of Natural Selection at this point in knowledge cannot be completely reduced to the Laws of Physics and Chemistry as there seems to be a physio-chemical indifference as to how Nucleotides combine. Science is based on the laws of causation from which predictions can be made and any system or a part thereof tantamount to randomness, poses a problem. Additionally there are for instance, meteorological variations, a history of Earth magnetic field reversal, gravity anomalies, continental drift, genetic mutations to name but a few. Replications of instances are not possible all we can hope for is similarity, resemblance between the past and the future, but never duplication. So far as we know the total state of the universe has never repeated itself. So only roughly speaking, is there a measure of uniformity in nature.
2/”where is the greater variation: in the gene/s associated with language, in my opinion the key building block of socities.”
It only take a single mutation in a gene to present a very substantial difference in the organism. This is apparent if you consider genetic diseases in for instance the human.
So that odd one percent difference between us and the chimpanzee can have huge physiological and brain differences. Certainly, notwithstanding what some respectable authorities have claimed, the chimpanzee does not have language. For instance has anybody ever had a sustained conversation with an encultured chimp? I am sure not. Notwithstanding the fact that chimps are non-linguistic they nevertheless do communicate with each other and are understood. Thus, they do form societies and cultures of some complexity be they rudimentary compared with humans.
3/ Dr Samuel Johnson said “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.” We assume free will just because it feels like we have it. We can, so it seems, consciously decide whether to get up or remain in bed.. The work of Benjamin Libet has shown that the brain has made a decision below the level of consciousness as to what we will do. When we actually do it however, we assume that it was on account of a conscious decision. There is an experiment one can do in this connection but it does not work or convince everybody, it works for me. When lying in bed prior to rising relax and but try to identify the precise moment when you made the conscious decision to rise, you have to be fairly relaxed and not worrying about getting up. If it works you will find that suddenly you are on your feet or at least sitting with your feet on the floor but you cannot actually remember any event which said ‘get up now’ although it does seem as if that is what happened. As I have already said much of our mentation occurs unconsciously. So where does this find us? It looks very much as if we are not in the driving seat although as Johnson said, our experiences suggest we are.
4/You ask what are the boundaries of our free will. I find this rather difficult to answer as I tend to hold that free will is a myth. Assuming it is not so and I am wrong. than I suppose our boundaries of what we may freely do are constrained by many factors including religious beliefs, cultural influences. the Law of the land. and our own physical and mental limitations. All this is certainly what it feels like. if one does not reflect too much. I do not think omnipotence enters into this.
5/I have already replied to in my answer to Leo Smith of 3rd June. I appreciate your feelings in that matter and hope you do not find my comments unpalatable
Don your message appeared while I was posting mine. We will read them together then.
“I was hesitant to comment on the account of the Nazi and the Jew one does not wish to give offence”.
Don, if you were worried about offending me please do not. If your worries were directed to other people, I value your sensitivity. In general, I am not easily offended and your comment did not offend me. I believe people’s opinion about events, people, etc say more about the person that has the opinion than the object of the opinion. However, I tend to avoid discussions that are not productive. I believe we are all learning in this world and I welcome the help of others, particularly if they have a point of view different than mine. What I do not welcome are fallacies, attacking the person that holds the opinion, creating straw man’s, etc; because they do not lead to meaningful and productive interaction.
Regarding the Nazi and the Jew comment
“The terrible realization is that in either man’s shoes, I might well have behaved exactly as they did.” Another way of saying this: “the problem with good and evil is that the line that divides them goes through the heart of every human being” from the book Meeting the shadow within. I do not remember the author of the phrase but I believe it was Robert Bly. In the previous email I focused on the historical limitations of the Jew. But there were historical limitations for the Nazi/German (in my mind they were different), as Curious pointed by citing the Milgram experiments. I believe the Jew prisoner understood that, and that was the source of his gratefullness.
From a personal perspective, if I had no option, I would hope I would have reacted like the Jew; I would rather die with my heart full of compassion than hate-just my personal preference. Had I had a choice, I would have blasted my way out of that place killing as many Germans as I needed. I do not think I would have blamed my God; I would have become atheist or change religion. For me it does not make any sense to have a God that hates me or I hate.
From the ethical perspective I have significant problems with the deterministic point of view, or at least with what I perceive as some of its conclusions. For example, according to determinism: mass murderers are determined and do not have DMR for their actions. I strongly disagree and in extension I believe we all have a DMR to prevent these events, to prevent either being a Jew or a Nazi. Multiple studies pointed to the cause of genocide and how to prevent it and I believe we all have a responsibility in one way or another. We all need to do our best to prevent these events.
Finally, science and philosophy have social consequences. For example the practice of eugenics rested on the theory of evolution based on natural selection. I strongly believe eugenics is a terrible practice, but I do not deny the theory of evolution. They are different things “Science is not moral in itself” Von Werner. We use science in different ways and that defines its morality. The same seems to apply to philosophical understandings, particularly the difficult ones, like we are all capable of good and evil. But this realization, in my opinion, confronts us with a choice, and I do not believe it is completely determined.
The problem with extrapolating from the Millgram experiment is that in the real world we are never abstract agents obeying or not obeying abstract authorities.
The Nazis come to power with a specific political program, and I either agree with it or am indifferent to it or oppose it.
Thus, if I become a Nazi, it’s because I either support their political project or at least am indifferent to it.
As far as I know, regular German army conscripts were not death camp guards; that is, ordinary Germans who may have opposed Nazism were not forced to commit systematic atrocities, with the emphasis on “systematic”.
What’s more, Nazism or any authoritarian political project is not a set of commands that are given one in an afternoon laboratory session, but are part of one’s daily life that one reacts to or does not react to day by day.
Thus, in my experience atrocities are committed within the context of a political project.
Nazism has never been one of my political ideals (I’m Jewish) nor was that of Augusto Pinochet (I’m on the left), so when I hear 4 generals screaming on the radio about extirpating the communist cancer from Chile, I know which side I’m on.
Now, let’s imagine that the situation in Chile degenerated into civil war between the army and a democratic left (Allende), but as the struggle progresses, the left becomes less and less democratic and begins to commit atrocities or human rights violations in the style of Cuba.
Would I, in that case, as a member of the once democratic left, torture?
If I thought that the only alternatives were Pinochetismo or the no longer democratic left and that torturing was necessary to the victory of the left, most probably I would torture.
But I would not torture because I was obeying some abstract authority figure, but because I believed that it was necessary to what I believed to be a good cause.
Re Leo Smith
3rd August
You say “I admit I am groping badly here, to describe a concept I can’t even visualise clearly myself.” I must admit I have problems following some of the points you make but notwithstanding I do see other aspects where we agree. I like my explanations simple and I accordingly try as best I can to write simply. I have read so much stuff in the past in Philosophy and other places which verges on the incomprehensible. I have never failed to be dismayed and perplexed by the prolixity and obscurity of many those, both ancient and modern, who purport to be philosophers of note. “Whenever is he/she going to reach the point?” I have often asked myself; and when the point is, at great length reached, it is again often, no more than the ‘bleeding obvious’, to quote Basil Fawlty. Not only that, but the main thrust of the argument has yet to be developed, and when that is accomplished, somehow or the other, all is stifled by its own language. We find another appalling characteristic; sentences running to hundreds or words, not to speak of parentheses, which by the time one has ploughed through them, one has lost the gist of what was being said in the first place.
I appreciate that philosophy often deals with abstract and profound problems and one must be thoroughgoing. However it is of no help if the language and sentential structure is not abundantly clear and concise, conveying the writer’s meaning unambiguously. That said however, I am not maintaining that the style of writing I am criticising, has never been the vehicle of great philosophical insight. There are philosophers and others who do write in a clear, educated and learned manner, which is a pleasure to read. Whether or not one agrees with their findings, one is left in little doubt concerning what is intended. Out of this I think the usefulness of philosophy is greatly threatened by those who cannot, or will not, write it attractively. A degree of conciseness and clarity would surely draw a larger more sympathetic readership.
It seems to me that you have had experience which I have not for instance you say “The whole thrust of esoteric traditions, spiritual or shamanic ‘paths’ is to rip the consciousness to shreds, catch a glimpse of an underlying sense of things, and make access to consciousness altering tools the permanent property of the adherent.” This I regret covers ground, which so far as I can see is terra incognita for me. You speak of areas where science as we currently understand it cannot be applied. this leaves me sort of groping in the dark. I know a bit of Philosophy and a bit of Science, which currently gets me by. By no stretch of the imagination would I claim however that is enough. That in itself would be unscientific and philosophical. I must face the possibility that you have the advantage of me which accounts for my inability to follow all you say.
The Vlakto Vedral book even now lies on my desk awaiting to be read, I shall approach it with enhanced interest.
Amos,
I appreciate that your personal experience gives you an insight into the realities of living in an authoritarian regime that I do not possess. And I would acknowledge that there were those who resisted in Germany – risking or losing their life in the process, as well as those who sought to avoid participation in events in so far as they could.
The Milgram experiments are said to show that most ordinary people will inflict (what they take to be) real and severe pain on a fellow human being if they are instructed to do so by an authority figure. That most people will obey such instructions, even though these acts run contrary to their own conscience, has been thought by social psychologists to help explain the actions of many ordinary Germans during the Holocaust – especially perhaps those bureaucratic ‘desk murderers’ without whom the system could not have functioned, many of whom were not committed Nazis or anti-Semites. Thatthose in the Milgram experiment sought to deflect responsibility for their actions onto the scientists – and see themselves as ‘only following orders’ – has been thought by many social psychologists to tell us something about those dark days in Europe too. The Milgram experiment, run during the time of the Eichmann trial was run with the Holocaust very much in mind and it has been commonly seen by social psychologists as pertinent to understanding the complicity of ordinary Germans in those events. Arendt’s thesis about ‘the banality of evil’ was explicitly referenced by Milgram, and some saw the two converging on a truth about human nature and evil. But we can turn to the words of Arendt herself to argue that the Holocaust was not simply a matter of people reluctantly following orders against their conscience. As Arendt points out:
“no one had issued orders that infants should be thrown into the air as shooting targets, or hurled into the fire alive, or have their heads smashed against walls; there had been no orders that people should be trampled to death, or become the objects of the murderous “sport”, including that of killing with one blow of the hand…” (from the introduction to Naumann’s ‘Auschwitz’(1966)
The Holocaust is not something I believe I can say very much that useful about. The Milgram an Stanford prison) experiments – to my mind – merely replicate in a scientific setting, aspects of what we know from a whole host of historical genocides and atrocities. To me it seems plain that most of us have the capacity to participate in the greatest of evils. But then perhaps I am a pessimist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QduJ121DBXU
A scene from quite a gripping play set during the Holocaust, a group of Jewish prisoners in a concentration camp put God on trial…
Curious:
Societies vary regarding the character of the masses and of so-called intellectuals, and in some societies, typical people may not guide their lives in terms of classical political projects and thus, may follow a fascist leader (or someone like Bush) in the same way as they change their preferences in tooth paste.
In fact, in her book, the Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt emphasizes the mass nature of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, emphasizing that totalitarianism is only possible when a mass society replaces one in which people identify themselves as members of a class, with class interests, what she calls a “class society”.
Thus, the Milgram experiment may tell us more about U.S. society in mid 20th century than about human nature. It may well be those people studied by Milgram had no political project and thus, followed authority without concern for who the authority is in political terms.
In my case, I happen to be a very ideological person, with fairly clear (and some say “rigid”)
political and ethical principles and thus, I only follow those authorities who share my principles, unless circumstances force me to submit (and I don’t believe that anyone was forced to join the SS units which worked in death camps or is forced to torture in Guantánamo, etc.).
As I stated above, I probably would, in certain cases, commit what you would call “atrocities”
in the name of those principles, although I have never been tested in that situation.
I put “atrocities” in quotation marks because while Amnesty International (and probably most people who participate in this blog) would undoubtedly condemn such acts, I would be prepared to defend them in political terms.
However, I have never had to “decide” whether to participate in atrocities or not, so I have no atrocities to defend.
Since it is very easy and comfortable to condemn the atrocities committed by others, I condemn them all without exception.
Amos,
Thank you for comments which, as always, are candid and thought-provoking.
For some reason your more recent comments about politically defensible atrocities brought to mind the scene in 1984 where Winston Smith (and Julia) are being quizzed by the resistance recruiter O’Brien about what they were willing to do in the fight against Big Brother.
‘You are prepared to commit murder?’ – ‘Yes.’
‘To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?’ -’Yes.’
‘To betray your country to foreign powers?’ -’Yes.’
‘You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases — to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?’ – ‘Yes.’
‘If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face — are you prepared to do that?’ – ‘Yes.’
Curious:
Thanks. That made me laugh.
However, I would note that O’Brien really works for Big Brother, not for the resistance.
He’s a police spy, a provocateur.
Having undergone military training in an earlier period of my life I now realise what a brutalising effect this has. Trained to kill, maim, cut, blow to pieces, poison with gas. Engulf in flames, I became able and knowledgeable in all departments and able to lead if necessary, a small band of likewise trained ‘psycopaths’ None of this actually repelled me I would do it when called upon so to do. There were some who could not wait to get ‘stuck in’ so to speak. Sent to an active zone we were now, I consider myself fortunate, never in a position where we could exercise our skills although we continued to train and remain ready. In a moment of boredom once and alone I noticed a civilian worker in a field some way off. It crossed my mind here was a good opportunity to experience the act of killing not to say my marksmanship, nobody would know I could never be apprehended, It was after all an active zone, why not? Fortunately I did not proceed not for humanitarian reasons though but because of some doubt that it may after all be perhaps not a good idea. I now look back on those days with horror and the surety that has I killed an innocent person my life would have been an abomination. Prior to joining the Army I was an ordinary harmless person never a bully or prone to violence just an enthusiastic amateur tennis player. Leaving the army in due course I reverted to type. And realised with some horror what I was perfectly prepared to do to my fellow creatures with no remorse.
My point here is to show how a person can become overwhelmed and engulfed by I suppose a brutalising system of brain washing which additionally stressed the rightfulness of what we were to do and the fact that God was on our side. Church parades I must confess always seemed a kind of paradox especially when weapons of killing had to be left outside the church.
All that said I do look back on those days with some pleasure the excitement seeing much of the World at no expense firm friends made, much laughter, much exercise and challenges and even the interest in how the weapons actually worked the Chemistry of them and the Physics were fascinating. One discovered one could do things physical one never dreamed of, All that was good but it was as I see it now, just the killing bit the institutional brutality which horrifies me, how could an ordinary person be turned into a potential monster, and possibly enjoy it
Amos,
I know but I was trying not to give it away to anybody who hadn’t read the book.
Amos;
It appears that while you were in Chile, I was in Argentina experiencing Pinochet’s cousins, Videla, Masera and the sort.
I agree with some of your comments, particularly those regarding the political project of Nazi Germany. The Nazi party won only 33% of the votes but inmediatedly after taking power they eliminated (killing) the opposition. If you were a regular german, it would have requiered a very strong humanistic formation to resist such regime.
Even if the Milgram experiment is not applicable to explain all the atrocities in the world (Rwanda, Stalin, etc) in my opinion they point to some aspects of our humanity. we are heavily influenced by authority or brain washing techniques, like the ones applied in the military (By the way, I was drafted in the army when Argentina nearly went to war with Chile, and one nigth I found myself shouting agaisnt my chilean brothers just because of brain washing. That taugth me a big lesson)
My point in all this is that we are all capable of good and evil; we are not completely inmune. Understanding this will help us tackle better our limitations and prevent cruely in all its forms. And finally in my opinion this is a choice, it is not pre-determined.
Hello JJM:
The Argentina dictatorship was bloodier than Chile, more arbitrary and probably, more corrupt.
What’s more, the Chilean left, from Allende to the MIR, were saints in comparison with the Montoneros and the ERP.
I hope that you don’t take my remarks as a form of Chilean chauvinism. I want to communicate to other readers that you lived through an incredible nightmare. I say that because many non-Latin Americans see Pinochet as the worst Latin American dictator, but you people had it tougher, but because of
the intrincacies of international politics (which I will not go into here), never received the same level of international solidarity. Ask Fidel Castro and Brehznev about that.
Saludos.
Hello Amos;
At that time, I was not very involved in politics; I did not like what I saw, and took refuge in a non-violence philosophy. After immigrating to the USA, I understood after many years, the incredible nightmare that my birth country went through, but more specifically the common people that lost family members, relatives, jobs,etc., and the overall country that went into a decline both morally and economic. Looking back, I only have deep sadness. Right now, I am an American citizen and I love America, particularly living without the fear to lose your life or my job because you think different than a person in power. I do not follow ideologies and for what is worth I would be considered a liberal or a moderate liberal in the USA.
Even I do not agree with some of your comments/ideologies, I value your honesty and courage
Don:
One way of looking at this is to say that in modern terms there are two branches of activity that lead to knowledge.
One is the study of an external reality, and the modification of it, in order to predict and control its behaviour. That is Science.
The other is the study of and the changing of the self. I view that as the most correct and appropriate modern interpretation of Religion.
Again, in modern terms, the most meaningful approach to that is to see the purpose of religion as bringing about a change in consciousness..not a change in the world, but a change in the relationship with the world.
Material realism doesn’t allow us much wriggle room to do that, but we can at least, as rational materialists, if not change the rational relationship with the world, still change the emotional one.
To go beyond mere ‘states of mind’, however, material realism has to be abandoned as an overriding single interpretation. If you like, what I am trying to do is to make the case for that, as a rational choice. By showing at the metaphysical level that there is no absolute ‘binding contract’ with material realism, I hope to encourage people to consider solutions that lie outside its boundaries.
This requires the breaking of the habit of a lifetime, that says that space and time gravity and energy are facets of a real world out there. It’s hard enough to conceive of it intellectually. Its virtually impossible to actually set up a psyche on the ad hoc conviction that its so.
It literally takes something like religious conversion, years of meditation, or the imminence of death to jerk the consciousness away from safe boundaries.
And yet I can only conclude that this is precisely the purpose of all the odd ‘spiritual’ and ‘magical’ traditions.
The common theme is that new worlds are there to be experienced, but the price is (temporary) loss of the normal relationship with the ordinary world.
There are many ways to achieve that..concentration and ritual..the concentration on something arbitrary and meaningless to the exclusions of all else – shamanic drumming, chanting, etc.. isolation and sensory deprivation as in hermitry fasting and meditations..brute force trauma as in near death experiences, and heroic use in native traditions of psychoactive drugs..initiation rituals, that shock and stun the consciousness and are guided towards a ‘new outlook’.
All the anecdotal literature has a common theme. Stop, or modify the flow of consciousness and things change, at least subjectively. The more fundamental the change, the greater is the perceived effect.
BUT there is a huge issue here. Things are subjective anyway. If everybody changed their minds, the world itself would change subjectively for everybody. How could we then know what the objective world was?
Since we only know it as a subjective analysis?
That was the step in thinking that led me to where I am today. I don’t find it useful to say that there is nothing beyond what the mind makes up, but I am convinced that what there is, is not what we live in. We live in our own construction, and a lot more of it is about us as constructors, than it is about what’s really ‘out there’.
This is the point at which science, religion, and magic meet.
All we need to do is in Matrix like terms take the right pill, and consider that the human world is just a vast virtual reality machine, but the computer it runs on is something else again, and the software it runs, is not immutable.
My point being that consciousness is the software, and we can change it, and also that the virtual reality looks NOTHING like, and betrays little hint of, the computer itself.
Although quantum physics is, I think, approaching some glimpse of some aspect of the computer itself.
This is a long way from the moral issues that underlie the original post, but it does underline a position here: If the whole nature of the world is relative to consciousness, so too is any profane morality. Morality can only be with respect to the value judgements of a particular consciousness and its elements.
Re Leo Smith
“There are many ways to achieve that..concentration and ritual..the concentration on something arbitrary and meaningless to the exclusions of all else – shamanic drumming, chanting, etc.. isolation and sensory deprivation as in hermitry fasting and meditations..brute force trauma as in near death experiences, and heroic use in native traditions of psychoactive drugs..initiation rituals, that shock and stun the consciousness and are guided towards a ‘new outlook’. “
How can you be sure this outlook is the right outlook? Or say better than mine which looks to conventional science and certain philosophical thoughts to support it. Yes I could be wrong, but on all the evidence before me currently, the best explanation comes from these above mentioned sources i.e.science and associated philosophy
I do not drink alcohol or knowingly take any drugs, or adhere to any religion which may alter my conscious states, to influence how I perceive the World. I guess I could do. Assume I did, and thereby had altered states of consciousness and understanding. I would then have two explanations of the world from which to chose. It would seem to me that my first explanation formed in sobriety would be the better.
I try to avoid introducing the concept Truth as this has its own problems, It seems to me better to decide where lie the best explanations. For instance for me, Darwinism is a better explanation than Creationism.
DON:
“How can you be sure this outlook is the right outlook?”
I can’t. In fact it’s definitely wrong:-)
Nevertheless, (people say) it works…
“It would seem to me that my first explanation formed in sobriety would be the better.”
How can you tell if you are in fact, sober?
Because everyone says so? So one should deny personal experience unless its socially acceptable?
Is ‘being in your right mind’ socially defined, or is it something one ‘just knows’ one is in?
I am reminded of the schizophrenic who years later was asked whether he still heard voices ‘I do, but I don’t do what they say any more’
This is recursive..perhaps you have spotted that already. You can’t define a normal state of mind as being normal without reference to the normal state of mind itself.
I had the same problem of course. I approached it by saying ‘let’s suppose ALL states of mind have validity: None are perfect, all have something to say (even if its don’t drink a bottle and half of wine if you don’t want to get dizzy and throw up, and feel crap for the next three days) What then?’
That led to the solution of the second problem you identified:
“I would then have two explanations of the world from which to choose”
Indeed. I have in fact been at that exact point, and bloody terrifying it was. But afterwards, I reflected on that …for a very long time…in fact it is probably the moment from which everything I have to say concerning this matter springs. I made at that time a good choice… the safe rational material one, but I didn’t forget the choice either. The sort of structures I propose now are to reflect that we do have a choice, and that it does change things, and that the only answer is to transcend those choices and see them as what I truly think they are, not selections between more real alternatives, but selections between temporary ad hoc realities, all imperfect, but each with something to say.
In my younger days those choices to some extent overwhelmed me: But these days I make them on a daily basis, if you like, I change my mind like a woman changes her shoes. Just for the evening and so on.
That is it doesn’t bother me to have imaginary conversations in my head, or engage in huge flights of imagination, or dream up strange equations of something, or cut the grass, or to write a computer program. I just ‘change heads’.
The great thing is I am not limited by one practical model of the universe. If I need to drive a car, rational materialism will get me there. But if I want to know whether I should, or where I want to go…that’s a very different story.
And indeed, even something as mundane as car driving, is subject to straying off beam. Several times I have done something irrational that later turned out to be an accident avoiding move, later on.
Other drivers are people, and people are not as rational as they like to think: Sometimes it pays to be irrational to the point of peculiarity when dealing with them.
None of this is rationally deducible from someone else’s experience of course. That is the problem. If you stick like a limpet to rationality you MUST deny all the other possibilities as being at best pure flights of fancy, and at worse mental disease..
But the problems of the purely rational approach – and this blog is all about just that, to me – will inevitably remain. I think we have made great strides in using reason to show the limits to reason in the last hundred years. Godel, Turing.. have in separate ways shown that any system of thought is always incomplete. That all reason and deduction must be based on at least (if not an irrational preposition), an a-rational one. Or pre-rational one.
I have merely tried to generalise that in word-talk rather than mathematics or strict formal logic, because I am not good enough to do that.
The fact that rational worlds have to have an a-rational element is the reason not to deny outright that other rational worlds based on very different a-rational prepositions (or propositions) – again I don’t have the exact word – could exist.
To the realisti ista bit like te argument between atheism and creationism. You take one or the other on trust. But to me, its more useful than that. The fat that – as with Big-bang versus creationism – two uniquely different a-rational propositions produce EXACTLY the same realities, or very close, suggest that the real issue is not which one is true, but which one we adopt, and why..and beyond that, when and for how long..
I have elsewhere mentioned that in terms of being ‘beyond belief’ (sic!)
What works, on the day, is what you use.
Don;
I just want to provide some responses to your previous comment and continue the discussions around induction, free will, etc. From now on I will speculate in most of the cases, but I hope it will be on some type of evidence. In the end, my formation is scientific and heavily empirical.
Regarding determinism or non-determinism, I agree is a principle and I was mistaken to express it as universal law. That lack of precision was used to mean it is not fully supported by empirical evidence.
Now my speculation starts. Can we conceive a world where determinism and non-determinism exists? Yes, and for me seems to be the current best explanation. At every level of organization, physical, molecular, organisms, cultural, we can observe a set of properties that are fixed or constrained and another that are flexible or variable (degrees of freedom). The latter are the source of variation and the non-determined properties of things. For example: as living organisms have genetically determined the majority of their features (fixed: species, gender, organs, etc) but random genetic variation-selection (flexible-variable) provides the source of non-determined events. Therefore, we can speculate that our world changes continuously (second law of thermodynamics and only evidence of irreversible time) through a process that is both determined and random. Since theory of chaos (butterfly effect) tells us that small changes can lead to big outcomes, we can explain big changes via a small un-determined component of reality.
Regarding the principle of induction, could it be possible that it is related or derived from a cognitive function: our ability to form concepts and then language. If I see an orange thing on a tree, I eat it is sweet and good, then I see more of these things, and I start calling them oranges. Then I form the concept orange and I teach my kids about oranges that are good to eat. However, not every orange is identical to each other; they vary a lot in size, color, taste, etc. Isn’t this very similar to philosophical/scientific induction? If so, induction reflects more a biological cognitive function and might not reflect a property of nature. And in that process, it is easier to conceptualize the determined part of the external world than its ever changing properties (undetermined).
Finally, I believe that science and religion have different relationships with the external world. If we take the standard definition of knowledge: justified true belief, the justification in the 2 disciplines is different. In science is empirical, we rely on measurements that can be reproduced if you define the conditions. In religion, is faith which is very personal and difficult to reproduce and translate into a justification. Religious beliefs vary significantly among human beings and there is no simple way to reach a consensus and test their validity. In science, there is the experiment; that with all of its significant limitations for me is the most reliable source of information. I do not know the source of justification for philosophy.
I hope that I have completely cleared up your concerns regarding the potential unpalatable comments.
JMIRET:
Agreed but for the final paragraph. The reasons why we differ are instructive.
And lie in the precise meaning we may assign to ‘relationship’.
For me both the religious and the scientific are of a similar order of relationship, and both rest on very very similar assumptions. Both posit a dualism, or in fact a Trinity, where we exist, the world exists, and behind the world is a noumenous structure which in one case is called ‘God’ and in the other ‘Natural Laws’.
The chief difference is that the scientific view loses ‘purpose’ and ‘intelligence’ in that noumenal area, and replaces them with abstract mathematics which allows a better qualitative and quantitative prediction to be applied.
There is in fact still room for God in that scientific area, but He has been driven back to the question of ‘why anything? why those particular laws?’. Everything else we place inside the human mind itself.
I suspect that was broadly where such as Newton would see their Faith. God is not IN science, but there is a place as the designer of the metaphysical ontology that allows science to be done. He didn’t craft the universe, he programmed the natural laws and our understanding of them that allowed the universe to come into being as it apparently has, and to make it what it is. Allegedly.
There is no way to test the validity of scientific ontology either. It is consistent with its premises, to be sure, but we cant say that the premises represent anything more than an accidental structuring of the world that has consistency and seems to allow us some limited power over the future.
The following extract from Wiki. Equates to my own views. Unfortunately my brain performance, falls vastly short of Feynman’s.
Statement (1959), quoted by James Gleick in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)
“Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers’. So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, “Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.” It is just more likely. That is all.”
‘If the whole nature of the world is relative to consciousness, so too is any profane morality. Morality can only be with respect to the value judgements of a particular consciousness and its elements.”
Leo,
This talk of ‘profane morality’* seems to come from a position of an individualistic meta-ethical moral relativism (MMR). According to MMR there are no independent standards of evaluation for moral claims such as “the Holocaust was evil” or “the Jews should be exterminated.” And given your individualistic turn such moral statements are true or false (for you) relative only to your judgments (tastes?).
It occurs to me that, if you truly subscribe to MMR (or something akin to it) – there simply is no ‘terrible quandary’ brought by the tale of the Nazi and the Jew. This is to say, there is no deep question of whether it “is worse, to succumb to a Dream of Power, or a Dream of Compassion” – there is only the question of which would be worse for you according to your personal moral tastes. There is no room for a genuinely deep dilemma – if the Dream of Power and Dream of Compassion seem equally appealing subjectively to you then they are equally ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ (morally).
And the only thing that recommends ‘Zen like transcendence’ and seeing ‘all as victims of their particular Dreams’ is that it is what you like to (think you would) do. And what you like to (think you would) do is either entirely determined or, as you speculate, the result of ‘merely preconditioned’ mental states and a choice, or series of choices, that was ‘somehow’ made in a realm that you do not pretend to know anything about (except perhaps that it exists).
* By ‘profane’ I presume you do not mean to single out ‘non-religious’ morality but simply intend to express your repugnance to group (herd?) moralities generally. Is your repugnance ‘moral’ or are in fact inclined towards some form of Moral Nihilism (or Eliminativism) rather than individual relativism?
Just curious…
Hell Curious, I may not agree with your answers, but you ask some fine questions!
I think your statement in para 2 is accurate with respect to my (a?)moral position.
The ‘terrible quandary’ you address is para 3 arises because these days I can see both other positions for what (I think) they are: choices between (if you like ontologies), neither of which I would like to adopt, and yet might not be able to avoid making, one way or the other. If not in a state of belief, in a state of pragmatic acceptance.
Para 3 I think is a cogent summary. All my experience has to say is that there is a clearly identifiable pre-rational realm where the deepest emotional and moral decisions of my life have been made, many badly. I know a bit more about it than you suggest, but since it’s all touchy feely stuff, its not really a matter for rational assessment. Let’s say that faced with quandaries, there are decisions that ‘feel right’ and some that don’t.
My repugnance to what you term herd moralities is that I think they are lazy, inadequate and cowardly responses to moral situations that avoid taking personal responsibility.
Which do NOT lead to the sense of ‘the right choice’ having been made..merely postpone the evaluation of the moral framework that guides and informs those decisions.
I,.e. its a ‘sin’ to act against your ‘true nature’, especially if that’s simply because ‘everyone else thinks its the right thing’.
In life I reckon that perhaps less than 1% of people create new ideas, less than 5% form opinion, and 95% are the herd.
Here, I hope I am talking to the 1%…
We need the herd for stability, but there is a balance to be struck.. rules are for the guidance of wise men, and the obedience of fools.
Leo:
You seem to posit taking personal responsibility as a good.
If that is the case, then you have one fundamental, bedroom value there, don’t you?
You also appear to be quite indignant about laziness and cowardness, so that I imagine the opposites of the two, resolution and courage, would be values for you too.
Leo:
A freudian slip on my part.
I meant to say “bedrock value” and I said “bedroom value”.
I guess that taking personal responsibility is a value in the bedroom too.
hers an interesting concept from an old production engineering/management discipline called ‘time span of discretion’
Essentially it says don’t give long term decisions to people who cant see past the end of the month pay cheque.
(You may compare the concept of the superiors and the inferior man, in the I-ching, or wisdom versus cunning.).
My conclusion is that many of the traditional virtues, as you cite, are in fact correct in the longer term and lead to personal advantage.
And it is entirely my selfish desires that make me selfless, insofar as I am, and my earnest desire for a more courageous responsible attitude in my fellow man, is because it benefits all, especially me.
As someone once remarked ‘I have never seen anyone work so hard to attain a state of slothful idleness’…;-)
My morality is personal,. but it impinges on others: The good of all, or a larger part is my good.
And I am ruthless in furthering my selfish goal, to improve the lot of my fellow man
Why thank you Leo. A good question is a fine thing indeed.
So you subscribe to something like individualistic MMR (“non-universal ethical subjectivism” seems to map onto the same position). Thus for you “x is immoral” (which equates to “x is immoral to me”) is truth-apt and on that account you are be distinguished from the amoralist/nilhilst (though some might associate you with the same due to your rejection of moral universalism). In any case, if I have got you right, if I respond to you by saying “x is moral” there simply is no scope for disputing (on matters of taste as they say) except perhaps when it comes to questions of utility. And your moral decisions (and existential quandaries) are ‘pre-rational’, matters of what ‘feels right’ (perhaps some sense of what it is ‘good for’ or ‘befitting of’ you comes into play?).
My talk of ‘herd’ moralities alludes to Nietzsche. And some of your comments remind me of him including your stated “repugnance” to the ‘moralities’ “which do NOT lead to the sense of ‘the right choice’ having been made” . I think there is some similarity, except that in Nietzsche (on whom Amos is better informed) it is seen that ‘herd’ moralities are (objectively) good for the herd – and should rule them, it is just that they are very bad indeed for higher men. Of course you are not Nietzsche and do not commit yourself to his claims (neither do I), but this question of what and who moralities are ‘good for’ seems to arise because your relativism seems to leave no room for an objective moral judgment of your ‘choice’ of a ‘higher’ morality over the herd’s ‘choice’ of a ‘repugnant’ one. All it seems we can judge perhaps is what is good for you and what is good for ‘the herd’
And on this score, even if herd moralities would be ‘lazy, inadequate and cowardly responses’ for you (because they seem that way to you) it seems plausible to say they are exactly right for the herd. And given that, as you say “we need the herd for stability” it also seems plausible to say that the adoption of herd morality by the herd is good for the ‘higher’ men too. It seems to me it could be said that the last thing the herd needs (for its own sake) to be doing (or the higher man needs the herd to be doing) is evaluating the moral framework that guides and informs its decisions. And it is not obviously a ‘sin’ against the ‘true nature’ of the herd member to do x simply because ‘everyone else thinks it is the right thing’ – that seems exactly the true nature of the herd member.
Perhaps you have greater faith in the potential of the masses than Nietzsche? I merely ponder…
Curious:
Thanks for the undue flattery.
However, as far as I know, Nietzsche would not say that master morality is objectively good for “higher men” or that slave morality is objectively good for the herd.
I don’t think that Nietzsche believes that there are “objective”
goods.
Rather, the higher man creates his own good and the herd lets their good be created for them.
Now, if there were one fixed type of higher man, there might be some thing which might be called an objective good for higher men,
but what distinguishes higher men from the herd varies from age to age, the only constant being that the higher man has the courage and integrity to create his own values.
For example, the higher man of the Homeric age would demand a very different set of ethical principles than one of Nietzsche’s century, Nietzsche’s favorite examples of truly higher men being Stendhal, Goethe and Beethoven, who have little in common with Odysseus, except, as I said above, they create themselves and their own values.
Upon further reflection, there might be some very general values, which Nietzsche would see as being objective for higher men:
authenticity, honesty with one’s self, courage, living creatively, etc.
So the jury is out about whether Nietzsche believes in objective values.
My Dear Amos,
Ah, of course, your estimable sense of humility obliges you to refer to that which is merely true as ‘undue flattery.’ I shall not press the matter.
One thing I don’t believe you will find in Nietzsche is the claim that the herd’s loyalty to herd morality is in the interests of the ‘higher man’. On this point at least I think Nietzsche is with Plato’s Callicles in the Gorgias in believing that the ‘inferior’ employ morality to make “slaves of those who are naturally better”. Nietzsche observes that “everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is…called evil” Of course questions can be posed without Nietzsche’s approval: it still seems possible to question whether the herd loyalty to herd morality might be good for the higher men.
And, whatever we say of Nietzsche, there are issues that arise if you are not a realist about value. Leo seems obliged to meet the point that, from his perspective, there can be no objective fact of the matter that would privilege his evaluative perspective over its ‘repugnant’ ‘herd’ target. Still he does want to say his values are (non-morally) ‘good for’ the masses in so far as they lead to the personal advantage of each member and conducive to the ‘good of all’. But we need evaluations simply to determine what is to the personal advantage, and what benefits ‘all’. So it seems there is a can being kicked…
But then, Nietzsche himself seemed to be a realist about non-moral value judgments about what is good or bad for particular types of people (even if he did not believe in objective ‘moral’ values for all). How else could he talk of slave morality as “the prudence of the lowest order” if he was not a realist about what is prudential for the lowest orders? And, perhaps then there is scope for Leo to say his morality (which values personal responsibility, resolution and courage) is ‘good for’ the masses even if he is a moral anti-realist/subjectivist/relativist. But being a realist about the non-moral benefits of courage and personal responsibility is not enough for Leo. He needs to argue that holding these values are or result in ‘welfare’ or utilitarian goods for all. And unlike Nietzsche, Leo needs to argue that what he values is good for all. This does seem a tall order but then tall orders are not the type of thing Leo would shy away from.
(For the above I have been referring to the entry on ‘Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy’ in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).
The article in the Stanford Encyclopedia which you refer to by Brian Leiter is excellent. You can find some talks by him about Nietzsche in Youtube.
I’m not that good at metaethics, and I’m a bit slower (no false modesty) than you and Leo, but it seems that the non-moral use of “good” is very different than the moral use.
Or maybe not.
Let’s see. A low-salt diet is good for your blood pressure, that is, for your health.
We all agree about health, physical health. No one with a heart attack is in good health.
High blood pressure can cause a heart attack and thus, is not good for your health nor is too much salt, which raises your blood pressure.
However, when we talk about moral goods, we do not all agree about what is “good”.
Spinoza and Nietzsche say that compassion is not a virtue. Buddha, Jesus and most of us claim that it is.
Is compassion good?
Good for what?
Good for whom, Nietzsche would ask?
“Good” questions.
However, it still seems that non-moral goods are easier to define than moral ones.
“I’m a bit slower (no false modesty) than you and Leo”
Well Amos, its no gain to go fast in the wrong direction. And going fast in the right direction is a mistake too – there’s so very much to miss by way of landscape and so very many things to collide with on the road…
“it still seems that non-moral goods are easier to define than moral ones”
How easy are aesthetic goods to define? Is Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ good art? Here we hit a difficulty because we cannot agree on what art is, never mind what ‘good art’ is. What I think is perhaps the important distinction, rather than that between moral and non-moral goods, is the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic goods. An instrumental good (a means) where the end is not brought into question, seems unproblematic: thus we can say moderate exercise is good for health and so on. (And I’m thinking ‘good health’ can be thought of as an instrumental good, a means to – or necessary condition of – a good life).
When we are discussing intrinsic goods – or ends – it gets more complicated. What has intrinsic value? The various moral theories offer up different answers: flourishing, happiness, virtue and so on. If you hold that one of these is the intrinsic good then it is easier to identify what things are instrumental moral goods.
But of course no one ‘intrinsic’ good (or set of goods) will be intuitively ‘right’ to everybody. And it seems you can’t argue for the goodness of an intrinsic good, at least not directly –you cannot be expected to prove that virtue is the intrinsic good by moral argument. Still perhaps you can *show* virtue to be more aesthetically valuable (more beautiful?) than vice or indeed utility or happiness. Supposing aesthetic value is a matter of taste thus there is no disputing as such. Still one can imagine pointing out the attributes of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine chapel in the hope your companion will come to the conclusion that it is of higher aesthetic value than the ‘ready made’ urinal Duchamp found, titled ‘Fountain’ and signed “R. Mutt”.
Nieztsche said that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified.” I’m not sure what he meant but it seems to me that intrinsic moral values – ends – cannot be justified morally. Perhaps though they can be justified aesthetically?
Here I merely speculate.
Curious: yes. I feel I am being dissected here, and actually do not mind at all.
Oddly, I have never read Nietzsche. Or bothered much with matters moral. I simply accepted at some point that what is right for me is not what other people SAY is right for them, though one has to at some level believe they are probably wrong.
I.e. the games people play with each other are, to an extent, all games of power, of fear, and of greed.
And profane morality is just a weapon in this game.
Great spiritual leaders say we should instead play games of love and compassion. And that this makes a difference.
And, having tried both, so indeed it does.
But, having played both, so what? Is one objectively better than the other?
I cannot say that I have found any objective standard to say that.
I merely observe that many many people cling to attitudes and opinions that make them confused and miserable. By their own standards, not mine.
At some level we must have a sense of there being a better place to be, or a better person to be, or we would not make the effort to be anywhere at all.
Even the most socialist and apologetic of philosophies – we are all only as good as we can be, given our backgrounds etc – seems to hold that we could in some way be better, even if only by not trying to be better.. I never did understand the socialist humanist view..
If that is a Nietzschian viewpoint, so be it.
I note that, and move on.
Perhaps the solution for me lies somewhere in he thought that if games of power, or games of compassion, whilst subjectively different, are in the end, just games.. is there a better game to play? Or should one not indulge in games at all? The latter would seem to be the conclusion of the lone hermit or meditating mystic. If you like, they have developed a meta game, a game of perhaps intellect to transcend the games of emotion.
In the end I suppose my aim is to be master of all games, and player of none, except in a limited way when particular circumstances dictate.
We are playing a game here, right now. Why am I playing it? I don’t know beyond the feeling that I should try, and it will make me somehow feel better if I do. I am not even sure what winning the game itself consists of, or whether in fact it is important.
I just know that I am no longer concerned with anything but the enjoyment of the game itself, and using what skills and power I have to play it.
In that my own personal morality is nearer to Castaneda’s protagonist, in that, if a man has the ability to be more than he is, it seems a shame to not at least make the attempt. The game is, to learn the games, and thereby become a Player. Or at least not to be subsumed by other peoples games.
You may have noticed my scathing responses to ‘renewable energy’ elsewhere. They are scathing not because I disagree with the motivation of such solutions, they are scathing because the proposed solutions will not actually solve the stated problem. I.e. they are deeply flawed in the sense that if you are going to use science to give status to a problem, you have to at least give science credence when proposing a solution.
That is about winning someone else’s game on their terms.
To put it simply, you, or I , or we, as people who ponder actions and consequences, may be moved to point out that (as I did to one of our dogs, when a puppy) that if you have jumped off a wall, and can’t jump back up, there exists a solution: namely to go away from the point you jumped off, where you will find a set of steps leading up …
I am unashamedly elitist: In the matter of walls and steps. I claim more knowledge than the pup.
That gives me no MORAL right to seduce distract or correct him into actions that will get him the result he wants.. but it does give me the POWER to know what those actions are, which is half the battle. The other half is the cunning to trick him into taking them, at least to start with, so that he will learn how to do it in future.
Result: A happier dog, one supposes, and a happier me. I personally like happiness, and it is my arrogance to suppose that so too, does he.
In fact I was pondering all these issues when I woke up, to find myself being licked by the aforesaid hound. Who I wonder, is playing games with whom? Perhaps he too is in some abstract doggy way, trying to make me aware of the solutions to MY problems.
I may know more of walls and steps, but I am sure he knows more of sniffs and emotions.
We are, in the end, at quite another level, entirely equal.
Throughout my life, it has seemed that I would get entangled in the games people play, until I had learnt how the game was played, and thereby worked out how to walk off the field…into a bigger game.
Until the point was reached whereby I assumed that the point of the game was not to win, but to learn how to play it.
Winning and losing is the emotional trap of getting one into the game at all, and the motivation to play it. To win it is the final demonstration that one is a player, that’s all.
My meta philosophy is to point this out. By all means play the game, but play it to be good at it and to win, not because you feel any compulsion beyond that. Personal freedom is better than enslavement. And if you don’t want to play it, don’t. There may be a price for that, but accept it. Or if you don’t accept it, it is useless to grumble that the rules are stacked. Of course they are. Put up or shut up.
Or if you feel that personal freedom is not better than enslavement, accept that as well.
We are slaves till we learn to unlock the chains. Get lock picking.
Re jmiret Aug.5th.
You state:-
“Can we conceive a world where determinism and non-determinism exists?”
Yes I suppose we could after all we conceive of one which is, or one which is the other. I assume you are suggesting that Determinism and Non-determinism function concurrently. This is all about explanation, Human explanation that is, the human take, or comprehension of the world. To a large extent I think we have a pragmatic approach to the world so far as our daily life is concerned, that is to say if it works then it is, the case. This is Okay, it has got us to the Moon and will get us to Mars but we need to be careful where more ultimate explanations are asked for.
In this connection we view the world as we know it from human experience, as a series of beginnings and ends because we generally run our own lives like that. One’s daily routine is a series of beginnings and ends from when one gets up to when one goes to bed. The word Determinism is related to the word Boundary, well it is according to my Dictionary. This word suits us in that it suggests there is an objective in almost everything.
I am going to suggest that ontologically such a view cannot be applied. By ontologically I mean what there actually is outside of human intervention. To apply our principles of beginnings and ends, and thoughts of determinism there could lead to error. Our examination of the world is conducted in accordance with the principles of cause and effect which elsewhere I have suggested has great problems. We only ever examine the world in samples that is to say abstractions from the whole. We take a piece of it as we do in causation/induction and make an assumption to the whole, on the assumption that Nature is uniform This is the Fallacy of misplaced concreteness; rather like looking at a menu and thinking it is the meal.
Reality is in itself a continuous process there are no beginnings and ends no causes and effects no determinism just a continuous process. This may be clearer if one considers the weather, the science of meteorology. Clearly weather is a continuous process. It is never going anywhere there is no end involved, just changing continually a huge vast system. Meteorologists make forecasts as to the future on a cause and effect basis with some success, the shorter the period forecast the better chance of of accuracy.
So what you say about Determinism I basically agree with but it is how we look at the world and what I have tried to show here is that it is a human construct which allows us to say things and speak about the World but not necessarily give an accurate description of it. If you have not already done so you might like to dip into the work of A N Whitehead in this connection but he is far from easy, and very time consuming. How all that affects what we regard as the Laws of Nature I cannot presently say. It seems to me that Humans construct these terms like Causation, Determinism, Free will. Certainty, Emergence, which embrace some idea they acquire and then they spend the rest of eternity abortively looking for perfect examples in the world.
You say:- “If so, induction reflects more a biological cognitive function and might not reflect a property of nature. And in that process, it is easier to conceptualize the determined part of the external world than its ever changing properties (undetermined).” which if I understand you correctly, is compatible with what I have just written.
You say:- “If we take the standard definition of knowledge: justified true belief, the justification in the 2 disciplines is different.” There is a problem here concerning Justified True belief as Paul Gettier pointed out in his short but very challenging paper. However I do not think it will affect what we say here.
All I can say about Religious belief and and belief in Science is that a belief can be either True of False. Science is used to this, such beliefs are its bread and butter. However as I see it Religion properly cannot easily accommodate the concept of belief because it leaves itself open to the accusation that a belief could be false. Thus those holding to Religious beliefs rightfully deal in Faith that such and such is the case. That is all, there is no question about it. Yes there is evidence often documentary, to support the Faith but similarly Faith again supports that such documents are by their nature unquestionable they exemplify what is, and or was, and or will be the case. Out of this there is an Unbridgeable gap between Science and Faith across which no meaningful discourse can take place as to what is the case. There are some interesting comments
in this connection found at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Overlapping_Magisteria
Unless I am badly, mistaken we seem to agree on many points I have raised here.
Curious:
People want to get what they want.
That is, it is difficult to say which goods are instrinsic and which are instrumental.
You say that health is an instrumental good and that a good life is an instrinsic good, but for some people, a healthy life might be the good life. For them, health would be an ultimate good. Don’t we all know people who in the pursuit of health sacrifice normal pleasures of eating and drinking and eat tasteless diets without the joys of a cup or two or three of wine?
For others, money seems to be an instrinic good.
For still others, power. They are willing to sacrifice all normal pleasures, friendship, family, etc., to the pursuit of power.
By the way, our friend Nietzsche suggests that the will to power motivates many, if not all, of our other actions, that perhaps on an unconscious level, power is the ultimate good. At times, Nietzsche seems to say that the will to power is the generally unconscious drive behind all our actions (much like Freud’s libido), while at other times, he suggests that the will to power is only an important drive, one developed or enabled by higher men.
So, on one reading of Nietzsche, power is the only real instrinsic good, even in the case of those, for example, Christians, who on a conscious level, believe that they are not seeking power.
You mention flourishing and happiness as possible instrinsic goods. That is the case, I think, only if the concepts of happiness and flourishing become almost empty or trivial. That is, if “flourishing” means to get what one wants, then whatever one wants, if one gets it, one flourishes. Here we have traveled a long way from the Aristotelian concept of flourishing.
Nietzsche’s comment about existence being justified as an aesthetic phenomenon comes from his earliest published work, The Birth of Tragedy.
I think that the later Nietzsche does not believe that the world can or should be justified. That is, the higher man does not justify existence: he affirms it
and says “yes” to it through his acceptance of the eternal return and of what Nietzsche calls “amor fati”. That senses like a sane point of view to me.
My last sentence should read:
“that seems like a sane point of view to me”.
I am not sure its even a will to power. Its a will to meet whatever comes along with as much as you can muster of yourself, in order that life becomes a glorious adventure of whatever, rather than a dull trip to Tescos.
Nietzsche would seem to be a Romantic, in that.
One should plan ones shopping trip like an expedition to Mars, not because its needful, but because it makes it a more complete and satisfying experience?
Reason says that good enough is good enough. Romance insists that nothing less than perfection will do
Perhaps that is what he means by an aesthetic experience..
Final words:
1/. Best Sunday in years thanks to Curious, Don & s. Wallerstein, and forcing the old brain to think…
2/. To merely defend life against death or pain is to merely defer the inevitable.
3/. In a Universe with no apparent purpose, purpose is what gives shape to one’s life.
4/. I argue it is more shapeful to have one’s own purpose for one’s own reasons than to simply adopt the purpose of someone else.
5/. However, if they aren’t up to that, people will align themselves with other peoples’ Purposes. That is a dangerous practice: It lends power to those who may not deserve it, and it may prove a hard thing to walk away from. The contract is that they get shape to their lives, but the price is the freedom of their minds.
6/. On an absolute basis, it is not possible to say what in the above context is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
7/. On a rational basis, it is not possible to say even what is good or bad for oneself.
8/. That tends to leave a fatalism or nihilism as the only rational solution. And yet that brings no satisfaction, either.
9/. Ergo pre rational solutions must be sought if satisfaction is the goal.
10/. Such pre-rational solutions are best expressed as ‘following a feeling’ : It may be that one is merely unravelling some psychological twist, some childhood imperative. Even so there is no choice BUT to unravel it, or remain bound by it. Ultimately unravelling one’s psyche is perhaps all our lives are about.
11/. That gives me at least an ad hoc externalised morality: Those forces that seek to bind people to their passion I call bad, and those that seek to liberate from passion, I call good.
12/. Ergo I regard all emotional narratives that capture the public imagination as bad, as things that seek to limit people to less than they might be, even though their first impact is to elevate people from slothful acceptance into passionate resolve. Ultimately such solutions become a different problem, they can never be ‘final solutions’. (I use that term deliberately with all its connotations. Nazism took a defeated people, imbued them with passion and showed they could achieve remarkable things. It also showed that some of the remarkable things they could achieve were disgusting beyond belief. Christianity took a barbarian population, and showed too that they could achieve remarkable things, and yet, in the limit, it had to be devalued or ditched altogether to progress any further.
Atheistic rationalism has taken us in the guise of science, yet further, but, in the end I think we will need to transcend even that. )
13/. There is no FINAL solution. But there are ways to move one. Whether or not a man takes them, is entirely his own business. My personal ‘predilection’ is that they should at least get a fighting chance..
G’night all….
Amos,
“it is difficult to say which goods are intrinsic and which are instrumental”
People value different things and if we suppose intrinsic goods are subjective/relative to individuals then there may well be a myriad set intrinsically valuable things. If we want to say, as most philosophers have, that there is such a thing as an objective intrinsic good (or set thereof) I do not think it is there to discovered by looking at what it is common in the wants of all men. As you say that line of enquiry can only lead to empty and trivial conceptions of flourishing, happiness and the like. I do not mean to do that.
I mention flourishing and happiness as possible intrinsic goods only because they are the given as ends-in-themselves in the moral theories of Aristotle and Bentham. I do suggest that either can plausibly be put forward as ends-in-themselves that all men would immediately recognise as such. Rather they are the type of thing that, perhaps, are (as Leo might put it) ‘pre-rational’ matters of what ‘feels right.’ They cannot be argued for morally – they are first principles. One can show they ‘match up’ with self-interest perhaps or – as I speculate that they have aesthetic value – but they must remain unproven in moral terms. My idle speculation was that perhaps we could hope to show others the beauty of virtue and to justify acting morally in aesthetic terms.
or rahher I do NOT suggest that either can plausibly be put forward as ends-in-themselves that all men would immediately recognise as such.
‘if games of power, or games of compassion … are in the end, just games.. is there a better game to play? Or should one not indulge in games at all?’
What could be meant when it is suggested that moralities of power and compassion are “just games”? Not I think that such are mere amusements or that they are undertaken in a spirit of levity. That they are but tricks perhaps? As in: “I see through your little game”?
Turning from the dictionary to Wittgenstein…
“Consider… the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? … if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.” (‘Philosophical Investigations’ Aphorism 66)
After so many mentions of the word ‘game’ in your post of August 7th 7:05 Leo I could not but think of Wittgenstein with whom the word ‘game’ is very much associated in philosophy. For him there is nothing common to all and only games – there is only ‘family resemblance’ (and he takes the notion of a game to be a useful analogy when it comes to considering language). If Wittgenstein’s take on ‘game’ is right there may will be no one essential thing shared in common by the ‘games’ of power, of fear, and of greed, the ‘games’ of love and compassion, the ‘game’ of reason and the ‘games’ of emotion it may transcend, the ‘game’ your dog might be playing with you and the ‘game’ we are playing here. But we can still ask: is there a good analogy between games proper and all of these activities you mention and can we truly see a ‘family resemblance’ between them?
This is mere aside.
I should not like you to think – and it is not the case – that I have asked difficult questions of you but not made the effort to give serious consideration to the answers you have put such serious thought into. Rather it is that I have been giving these matters too much thought to resolve a substantive response, and for the moment I must break off from the game. No doubt – and quite rightly – the players shall continue to move the pieces…
The metaphor of life being a game to play or being games to play is common.
How about seeing life as music to play? Music has rules too.
I think of contemporary jazz in which each player plays his own instrument in his own way, not in strict coordination with the others, as in chamber music, but
still in contact with the other instruments.
Perhaps there is competition between the players to see who plays best, but there is no zero sum game.
Somehow, the often very idiosyncratic solos of each instrument contribute to making music.
Today at least I see myself as playing contemporary jazz.
Re Games
When it was necessary for me to work for a living I found greatly enhanced interest in the job once I realised it was in fact exactly like a game. There were all sorts of rules just like you have in games . These included like games, standards of dress, forms of address, and behaviour, a time for starting and finishing and also many opportunities to practice and get better in the job. There was much competition too, to do better than one’s peers i.e. to win something so to speak. One could be paid for results in a similar way to professional sportsmen. There was much in the way of problem solving finding the best way through which again and again arises in games. I did not much like working for a living, but once I discovered I was in fact immersed in a game I played it as a serious game, and to win as best I could. I cannot claim I actually won the tournament but did not do too badly. This attitude served me well. I could play the game as I wanted, provided I was not seen to be breaking any rules. I found life more tolerable going to play a game each day, rather than going to work. I found some kindred spirits who agreed with me. We never cursed the referee either, and I am sure we were happier than those who did.
Games,
Wittgenstein, I suppose, could point out games where there are no standards of dress (darts) or address (solitaire), no opportunities to practice and get better or problem solving (games of pure chance), where there is no competition (as when “a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again”) and so on. And it remains open to him, if you were to identify something found in all games, to say that it does not characterise it as a game and is not only found in games. We could perhaps say this of rules – which both Amos and Don pick up I think as a necessary feature of any game. Initially what occurs to me is the question of whether there can be games without rules – video games come to mind, these may have virtual physical ‘laws’ but no ‘rules’ to be broken. But keeping with Wittgenstein he argues that there can be no such thing as a private language, because a language needs rules and ‘following a rule cannot be a private activity’ (‘private’ meaning something like ‘accessible only to one’s own mind’?). And what occurs is can we not have ‘private’ games? Can children (and indeed adults) not invent and play games on their own ‘in their minds’ where there is no distinction between thinking one is following a rule and actually following it?
Ps Don, I ‘get’ the ‘attitude’ you adopted towards your work, gardening on your own is a much easier game to play then those you must play in, say, an office. Leo, I will try to respond to you properly on matters ethical and meta-ethical soon but time is an issue at the moment… I have so very many grass cutting, hole-digging and weed-picking games to play just now (I’m a gardener) and Amos, improvisational jazz yes… that sounds like what I’m playing…
Re Curious:-
Just to add a bit of humour to my working life experiences. The organisation in charge of the game and I, came to an arrangement they would pay me a considerable amount of money to stay away from the game I was welcome to go and watch others play if I wished. That was all, game set and match. Additionally they still pay me regular substantial amounts which keeps me at bay. I envy the gardening career it is as I read you, obviously good for philosophy which in my game I had to squeeze in at half time, and similar intervals. How do you rate Wittgenstein as a philosopher. Without Russell’s initial backing would he have made any impact?
It is amazing the sprinkler effect this article on sprinklers has had on some people’s minds. I mean, people are sprinkling ideas around here that have nothing to do with sprinklers.
What’s going on?
On games…
Things that distract, that pass the time, that teach, that amuse, but are peripheral to the real life we all seem to lead.
Games are things where we treat the rules as absolute, and real. Even when they are arbitrary.
What do I have? My life, it’s experience, and my death, and what I make of it.
In that we are all equal. There are no winners, and no losers.
My only hint of an absolute morality is that it is a shame that people do not realise that.
But that is personal. At heart. I consider it a shame. Others my consider it a benefit. I have no answer for them.
Only for myself.
Final thought on games: a man who treats life as a game is aware that he plays by the game rules AS IF they meant something, without actually thinking that they do.
Those four letters AS IF are the cornerstone of my philosophy: I treat the material world AS IF it were real. Not because I think it actually is..
I behave AS IF a Christian God exists, not because I think He does.
When I do science or engineering, I behave AS IF the laws and principles existed, even if at another level I don’t think they do have an objective reality.
When dealing with objective reality I behave AS IF it existed in the way we normally consider it does, not because I believe it does (exist in that way).
And when I deal with a more touchy feely level of reality I behave AS IF it had some form of definite existence, not because I think it necessarily does, but because that’s the way to play that particular game.
So that’s what is meant by ‘game’..you don’t believe in its ultimate reality of validity. It’s not REAL.
Hi Leo,
I suppose what occurs first is the question of whether you have captured anything about games that characterises them as games, anything that is a necessary or sufficient feature for “x” to be a game.
So, do all (and only) games ‘amuse’? Wittgenstein asks even of ball-games “Are they all ‘amusing’?” In my case I question thus: during a final between two Chess Grand Masters or at a table of high-stakes poker is anybody ‘amused’? Or how about during a wargame? And of course many non-games ‘amuse’ – jokes, people slipping on banana skins etc. Do all games “teach”? In Wittgenstein’s example of “when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again” – what is he being taught? So many things in life can be said to ‘teach you something’ (failure, cookery books, classes in propositional and predicative calculus) so there are things outside ‘games’ that do this. Do all games merely “pass the time” and are they ‘peripheral to the real life we all seem to lead’? What does the professional boxer think? And what about the die-hard football fan who stands by his local team through thick and thin? Indeed of children and your average adult male generally – are games ‘peripheral’ to their lives? Can ‘games’ not fulfill an essential part of the social and emotional life of a working class male – can they not be central to what he identifies with? And think of bird-watching or train-spotting – they ‘pass the time’ but they are not games. What else is ’peripheral to our real lives’ if games are – music, reading?
You also say that “Games are things where we treat the rules as absolute, and real. Even when they are arbitrary.” But do all games have rules (absolute or not)? What rules are their in video games? Unlike with chess pieces, in many video games any possible move is valid and what of ‘private’ games? Even if all games could be said to have rules – which I question – rules are not a defining feature of games – there are so very many rule-governed activities in life: dinner part etiquette, armed conflict. What is it to say of a given rule that it is not in fact ‘absolute’ or ‘real’, that we only treat it ‘as if’ it were and same rule is only “arbitrary”? What would it be to treat a rule AS IF it were arbitrary? And ‘absolute’ in whats ense – as in ‘unqualified’ and ‘without exception’? Games are full of those: a bishop piece (being used as a bishop) in chess cannot move horizontally or vertically on a chess-board – only diagonally whilst you are playing chess. You can, of course, physically move the object however you like but not within the game. And it seems a ‘real’ rule – it is not somehow a ‘make-believe’ rule we use to make fools of new players and what other sense of ‘real’ has purchase here? Is the suggestion that the rule of a game is a mind-dependent rule? In contrast to what? Those of Jehovah? In what circumstances are rules ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ – or could they be – and is it only in games that they are not?
“Final thought on games: a man who treats life as a game is aware that he plays by the game rules AS IF they meant something, without actually thinking that they do.” What is it for a rule to “mean something” or for a man to think they do?:
“I treat the material world AS IF it were real.” How would I go about treating it AS IF it were unreal? Do Buddhists or idealists treat the material world AS IF it were real?
“I behave AS IF a Christian God exists, not because I think He does.” I can understand an extrinsic religiously religious person ‘going through the motions’ for family or social reasons sure. In what sense is this a game as you view it – does it amuse you, teach you anything, pass the time? And what would you be doing differently if you were behave as if a Christian God did NOT exist?
And once you get to the point of saying the laws and principles of science or engineering do not have an objective reality (do you feel safe in aeroplanes?), and that objective reality is not ‘really’ real and you say: “what is meant by ‘game’..you don’t believe in its ultimate reality of validity. It’s not REAL”…
Well, what real and valid things do you have left to contrast games with? What isn’t a ‘game’?
Curious: I was noting some of the things that games MAY be, (not necssarily ARE) but at the heart is the concept that they are ‘less than the whole of reality’ Does that convey the basic ontological concept better?
The game that is not quite a game is the game of life. Everything else is rightfully a game.
All games do have rules, even video games. They create a rule bound reality. Bullets travel in straight lines etc.
If there are no limits, its not a game really is it?
When dealing with aeroplanes, it’s still a game, but the stakes are higher than most.
All human social activities are shall we say, games.
You seem to have trouble with ‘as if’…
I’ve been fairly long winded and boring about the difference between a map of reality and reality. Aerodynamics may be in my mind, on the map, but where the map says ‘crash’ is still better avoided. The map is internally consistent, and the map of the aeroplane will do a map of a crash, just the same.
I am not sure I an explain it better: people for whom the map IS reality are not very good at using different maps for different purposes. If I – say – pull out the God map, and follow it, I get to the places indicated on it. I am not burdened with the fact that it’s not the Material Reality map so to speak. The territory doesn’t change, but the map does. Instead of ‘mountain 5,000 ft’ it says ‘good place to see most of California’ or some such.
Are you aware of Korszybski’s general semantics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics
Same basic idea, but expressed differently, perhaps better?
It seems so self evidently true, that its not worth making the point, and yet if you consider it to apply universally across all human experience – in the sense that EVERYTHING we know of ANYTHING, objectively, is a map of it, the moment we draw a single abstraction, we use a sort of mental language to describe, categorise and annotate the elements of our ontology….
Engineers are privileged here. We have our rules and our maths, but it is never perfectly applicable. It is always a ‘good approximation, within limits’ and we learn to work with imperfect components, inadequately described by simple models. One piece of wood is not quite the same as another, nor is one semiconductor ever quite the same as another…yet we strive for uniformity and integrity in an overall system. Our rules are ad hoc rules of thumb only. If we want a spring, we know what materials more or less conform to Hookes law, and in what region they do so, and when indeed they will deform or snap instead of behaving elastically.
Equally we may regard an amplitude changing with time, as in the time domain, or, via a Fourier transform, in the frequency domain. That doesn’t change the supposed reality, but it changes the whole approach.
(One of my earliest Philosophical thoughts was wondering if what people meant by God, was the Fourier transform of the Universe..think about it..the Big Bang theory is all ‘time domain’..).
I have noted that you always seem desirous of a precise ontology that describe everything. I am your antithesis: I say there is no such thing, there are only imperfect imprecise ontologies that describe partially. Each ontology is a game in itself, if you like. Each ontology treats the world ‘as if’ all the world consisted of, was the ontology itself.
My shout is that it is not. The map is not the territory, the ontology is not the reality of the world. It is a general semantic tool for doing things in relation to the territory, and so we shouldn’t cling to our maps: Treating them as ‘games’ is a way of achieving that.
We learn from games that to get angry or frustrated does not make us better players. And our parents tell us time and again (well mine did) “don’t get so upset”.
“IT’S ONLY A GAME”.
We also learn that different games have different constraints.
My point is we should make the leap to intellect to see that nearly everything we do is only a game, and not get so involved in dealing it to be the One True Game.
The One True Game is in fact learning that everything is a set of smaller limited games, play enough of them and the One Truth is occasionally glimpsed.
er ‘dealing with it as if it were the One True Game, BEYOND THE LIMITS OF IT’S APPLICABILITY’
That’s the essence of the ‘as if’… treat the map as real only when using the map for its actual intended purpose.
You wont find Heaven on a material realist map, and you wont find a gold deposit on a road map. The point being we cant deal with a complete map of everything. There’s simply too much.
So much of philosophy is arguing about which map is the One True Map…sigh…that’s why I get so dismissive of it.
Leo:
Rather than saying “it’s all a game”, wouldn’t it be clearer if you were to say “treat it all as if it were a game”?
Leo,
That a game is ‘less than the whole of reality’ does not really convey the basic ontological concept better no. All it says is that a game is not everything there is. If everything but “the game of life” is rightfully referred to as “a game” what work does the word ‘game’ do? It is easier to say such a thing because we have no fixed definition of what a game is but it seems unhelpful.If all “All human social activities are shall we say, games” the analogy or metaphor seems to lose all point, games are partly ‘defined’ in opposition to non-games. What use is the word ‘game’ if it describes “nearly everything” – what use can it have as an analogy or metaphor? It is a leap in intellect to think nearly everything is a game yes but on what ground do you expect to land?
I do have trouble with “as if” yes. I’d like to know how behaving AS IF material reality was real contrasts with behaving AS IF it wasn’t. And I’d like to know how the God Map differs from the non-God map, and how you get on following the God map when what if features are presumably entirely fictive roads and mountains and why you would do so when you know that. Maps only have the option of being ‘inconsistent’ –with the terrain, or inconsistent with each other (they cannot be inconsistent with themselves – unlike descriptions) if they are supposed to map the terrain of the same place and in the same way – inconsistency means one or more are in error. The value a map is how it correlates to reality, and whether it shows how to find the things the map user wants to find. I’m not even sure your reality has any terrain for a ‘map’ to fail to correspond to. Thus I’m not inclined to think either ‘map’ or ‘game’ are metaphors that will do the work you require of them. No metaphor will when it is stretched so far.
Gravity and so on are not ‘rules’ and the virtual reality world of computer games do not have rules either – to be a rule requires the option of following it or breaking it (which is different from changing it), they have as it were virtual physical laws. And even if all games had rules this is not a feature that characterises a game as a game. As far as aeroplanes are concerned the point was simply that if you say the laws and principles of science or engineering do not have an objective reality it does rather sound like you might distrust flying in one. And what, if anything, does have objective reality? What does it mean to say that something is possessed of such a quality and what does it mean to say of nearly everything that it doesn’t?
I do ‘get’ the ‘it is only a game’ attitude: don’t take it so seriously etc… But we do not adopt that attitude towards everything or nearly everything do we?
It is of course fine to do it here though (:
How curious, Curious, that you distinguish between man made rules, and natural Law. I suppose I am so used to thinking of Natural Law as essentially man made I forgot that to you, it isn’t…
I don’t see any difference in the game of making e/g. a model aeroplane fly, and the game of chess. In both there are rules or laws, which allow limitation, and yet have flexibility and allow different strategies to be adopted. Both are goal oriented.
I.e. there is a mix of freedom and limitation.
I may be guilty of lack of pedantry in the use of language, but not in concept.
Life is a game of rules. We are not quite sure who or what set them, but they exist, and cannot be broken.
Only human set laws may be broken.
All goal oriented behaviour consists of a game in which we understand the limitations of rules or laws, and attempt to find a strategy that achieves the goal by rational analysis of the rules tor laws we find.
But the reasons why we strive for those goals are a-rational. Good players learn to separate the emotion needed to
generate desire for the goal, from the rational process of achieving it.
Oh, and it is our mistake that we don’t treat everything as a game. We should.
It makes us more successful.
I do not have time to consider this problem of games in depth so excuse any shallowness in this posting. The essence of a game seems to me to be rules and competition even competition against oneself. Thus a person throwing a ball at a wall has rules. He/she decides to catch the ball on the fly or to catch it after a bounce. Additionally which hand will throw which hand will catch. The rules vary but at any instant of the game there is a rule. The competition here is against oneself. How skilled can one become, has one the patience to overcome sticking points and improve? We all know the pleasure derived from becoming better, or the best, at almost anything. Nobody really likes to fail even at catching balls. What does one learn about catching balls? Improving the skill I would say. So out of this If one does not compete, and or one has no rules to obey, then there is no game. In my example of working for a living I met people who obeyed the rules but had no desire whatsoever to improve, other than being satisfactory, no desire for promotion in the job. Absolutely uncompetitive at work. There was accordingly no way that they could properly regard their occupation as a game.
.
Leo Wrote:- “Oh, and it is our mistake that we don’t treat everything as a game. We should.
It makes us more successful.”
Some food for thought there I think.
Of all the tinpot philosophies of life, oddly the best one came from a work of (presumed) fiction.
To regard daily life as a challenge, not a chore, and to wait, knowing that this is not all there is. And that patience, persistence and self development may in time lead to it.
Hi Leo,
‘How curious, Curious, that you distinguish between man made rules, and natural Law. I suppose I am so used to thinking of Natural Law as essentially man made I forgot that to you, it isn’t…’
I find that often when people say that ‘x is “essentially” y’ what they say amounts to is ‘x is not y’. By saying that Natural Law is “essentially man-made” do you mean to get across the idea that it is composed of “rules” that “exist, and cannot be broken” and of which “we are not quite sure who or what set them” and to contrast these ‘essentially’ man-made laws with the “human set laws [which] may be broken”?
If you want to argue for anti-realism regarding the laws of nature all well and good, but being an anti-realist or a transcendental idealist does not mean there is not a useful distinction to be drawn between the rules of chess and the laws of physics. A rule is, by definition, the type of thing that can be broken: for example there are rules about how to use the word ‘rule’ which you can ignore or fail to know. You were not failing to be pedantic, Leo you were failing to employ words in a way that allows you to usefully discuss your ideas with others. And I grant that some of your ideas are worth discussing Leo – so worthwhile in fact that it seems a shame they are clouded by misused language and bad metaphors.
“it is our mistake that we don’t treat everything as a game. We should. It makes us more successful.”
- At what?
Curious:
If I try and break the rule of a game I am out of the game.
If I try and break a natural law, I am dead generally.
All you seem to be saying is that Natural Laws are Rules we don’t know how to break. And Human Laws are in fact simply Rules that we do know how to break.
As to your last comment, why, at whatever it is we had as a goal in the first place.
I am insisting that whatever Natural Laws are – they are not usefully called or thought of as “rules”.
I don’t really understand why you would do that, however.
“Rule: a principle or regulation governing conduct, action, procedure, arrangement, etc.: the rules of chess. ”
A natural law is a principle governing action.
“Law: any written or positive rule or collection of rules prescribed under the authority of the state or nation, as by the people in its constitution”.
“natural law: a principle or body of laws considered as derived from nature, right reason, or religion and as ethically binding in human society. ”
In short all laws or rules are restrictions of freedom of action.
Natural ones are just those enforced rigorously by Nature.
There is a possible confusion between Natural Law and what at least used to be called “the laws of nature”.
Natural law is a school of ethics associated with Aquinas, among others. Natural law thus becomes an explanation of or justification of ethical rules or principles.
The laws of nature, at least back when I went to school about 50 years ago, were the things that we learned in physics class, for example, the law of gravitation.
It would seem to me that the law of gravitation is not a rule, but a description of regularities found in nature.
It’s easy to disobey or not pay attention to the rules of chess or any ethical rules, while if you don’t pay attention to the law of gravitation, you will have serious problems.
“Law: any written or positive rule or collection of rules prescribed under the authority of the state or nation, as by the people in its constitution”.
Yes, sense 2 of 22 as found at dictionary.com is written exactly as above. It is a law in this sense that I can contrast with a law of nature (other dictionaries will list laws of nature as one sense of the word ‘law’). A law of nature is not a positive law (or rule) and quite clearly it is not laws in that sense that I am contrasting with rules.
‘Natural law’ as you note is described at the same location as “a principle or body of laws considered as derived from nature, right reason, or religion and as ethically binding in human society”. Clearly this is NOT what I am contrasting with rules. What I am contrasting with rules is non-normative laws of nature. Other dictionaries might tell you that a ‘natural law’ is “a non-logically necessary truth; law of nature”. It is, rather obviously, law in the the latter sense that I am contrasting with rules.
“In short all laws or rules are restrictions of freedom of action”.
There is a useful distinction to be drawn between the offside rule in football and the law of nature that means that two players cannot occupy the same location at the same time. There is a difference between the positive law that says you cannot drive faster than 70 miles per hour and the natural law that says you cannot go faster than the speed of light. This remains true whether you are transcendental idealist or an anti-realist regarding non-normative laws.
There is much of value you have to say – and much we can usefully discuss – but we have to be as precise and consistent as we can be in our thinking and use of words, and we have to draw distinctions where they can be usefully drawn, otherwise what wisdom you do have to share and gain will be lost in the fog.
Hi Don,
Sorry I haven’t had time to respond earlier to your comments.
Regarding working life, I did at one point have a very well-paid job with a major US company in which my job description was entirely fictive. The duties I was in theory paid to carry out would only delay what really needed to be done due to ‘technicalities’. I would note and solve problems on occasion but only if there was a solution that I could easily and quickly affected (more often I invented problems that had been solved). And sometimes if the illusion had been generated that ‘we’ had failed to do what should have been done by now I would ‘discover’ a mistake made by some other team in another country that had obliged us not to execute what we would otherwise executed. And take suitable credit for it. I took a lot of long walks and long lunches and sometimes I was instructed to do so – sometimes it was important I was not there. Had I had a family to support – or been simply more money orientated – the sensible thing to would have been to view it as a game, a well-paid and easy game.
But I didn’t want my working life, which made up such a large proportion of my time in those days, to be a game. I phoned up personnel one day and told them I felt sick, so sick in fact that I’d never be back. I hitched down to Dover and ended up in a squat on the French Riveria begging for a living. I view this as a good move career-wise. Nowadays the gardens that older people are unfit to maintain I accept a very moderate sum (I could charge double in most of my jobs) to help maintain them as a self-employed gardener. I enjoy the feeling of honesty, self-respect and general good karma that comes with it. I am not failing to get rich because I am making no attempt to do so. I enjoy my work, and there feels no sharp distinction between the jobs and ‘work I do on my allotment, and in the gardens I tend ‘pro bono’ (at my insistence) for older members of the family – such activities do not seem like things that are different in kind from those where, regrettably, money has to pass hands (taking and accepting payment being the bit I dislike most about working).
The ‘game’ is not something I want to partake in, and I think life is too worthwhile to adopt the attitude that it is all a game. I believe very much that a great many things in life do not matter they way people take them to. But I also take it to be the case that a great many things in life that do matter are ignored by people who treat life as if it were ‘only a game’. A great many people have no opportunity to treat their working life as a game – there is no competition, no way to improve and no prospects of promotion.
Regarding your thought that “If one does not compete, and or one has no rules to obey, then there is no game”. This does not sound wildly implausible as a necessary condition of a game. I do not want to bang on about video-games so I would return to the thought about ‘private games’ – are they impossible in the way private languages are? Is it not possible to play a game in which there is no distinction between following a rule and thinking you are following it? This was a thought that has occurred but I am unable to clarify.
As for Wittgenstein, I would not presume myself fit to rate him. But I do find the phenomenon rather odd. Phrases found a handful of times have been turned into jargon upon which volume after volume has been written. People read the notes taken by somebody like Rush Rhees after a rambling conversation some 60 odd years and try to make sense of a passing comments about, say, being a disciple, a follower of Freud in light of other scattered remarks found in the notebooks of Wittgenstein and his own disciples that are sharply critical of Freud. I think the man was a genius and who took life very seriously indeed – the notion that life is or should be treated as a game would, I think, greatly enrage him – but sometimes I feel people are – as Wittgenstein would say of dream interpretation – inventing meaning in him not discovering it.
Curious:
Your life sounds like a movie, a good one.
I’ve always been critical of the rules of the games, pointing out that they are unjust, sexist, greedy, racist, imperialist, consumist, anti-ecological, and elitist.
My criticism and my big mouth have cost me more jobs than I would care to mention.
Around 15 years ago, after an unsuccessful experience trying to teach English as a foreign language to govenment employees, people who saw me and my mentality as coming from outer space, people who accepted the rules of the game as the unquestioned laws of nature, I began to free lance, English classes and translation.
With the years, I’ve grown a bit more diplomatic with others, but as a free lancer, I no longer make any pretense of believing in the rules of the game or of playing them without questioning.
As I said before, at times I play jazz (metaphorically), accompanying the saxophone or the trumpet with my piano improvisations.
Leo,
If we can put aside the distractions of recent dispute…
I did follow your link to the wiki article on the General Semantics movement. I was not previously aware of Count Korszybski no. The related wiki entry on the ‘map-territory relation’ with its account of Korszybski’s “the map is not the territory” thesis does at least give some clue as to the genealogy of your own ‘map’.
I wondered if Hawking’s recent talk of Model-Dependent Realism (in The Grand Design) had come to your attention and was of any interest to you.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2017262,00.html
Btw Amos – I do very much enjoy your piano improvisations. They bring harmony and rhythm to the band…
Just a little comment, I believe that the idea that the map is not the territory, or the word is not what it means is as old a buddhism and has been revived multiple times since then in different forms.
“I believe that the idea that the map is not the territory, or the word is not what it means is as old a buddhism and has been revived multiple times since then in different forms”
Hi Jmiret,
In fairness, Leo admits elsewhere: “What I am saying, is so not new it’s hilarious … I am merely trying to make that most primitive of world-views accessible again, because I think it has something we need. And that is the understanding that, in the end, the map is not the territory. He has explicitly conceded that much of what he says is “a discovery of old arguments” that if he had known were in philosophical debate might have prompted him to go find them there. Leo makes some claims to independent discovery (of ideas found in, say, Kant) but I don’t know think he pretends to be saying anything actually new.
I suppose the question really is not whether there is anything novel, but anything useful, in the ‘map is not the territory’ message as Leo pushes it. I must admit I think the map metaphor beaks down – if, as Leo seems to, you deny that there is any sense in which the (non-temporal, non-spatial, non-causal, but otherwise unknowable) terrain corresponds to the map (or any sense in which you can compare the two or even the maps of others). And to me there seems to me some problem lurking in the background when it comes to putting into your map the relationship between you and your map and the map and the ‘real’ world (whose existence is simply assumed I presume) – as seems to occur in Leo’s map, and saying you can only see the map and nothing beyond it. I think the basic arguments can be made without, what I take to be a poor choice of metaphor.
Leo does seem something like a Buddhist monk though, quietly chuckling and telling us nothing is real or any more important that a game… and that if you come to view things as he does all the ‘big’ philosophical problems will simply melt away…
There does seem to be an underlying tendency in some of the remarks here to use the word Game in a derogatory sense. For instance “He is just taking it as a game” “He is not serious is all just a game to him” and so on (my quotations here nobody else). When I speak of a game in the philosophical sense I consider it a serious activity where some sort of serious achievement is involved. One can play a game well or badly and it is still a game. However once a carefree attitude enters and it becomes no more that an idle pastime it ceases to be a game in the strictest definition of the word. Thus my description of my working life as a game took into consideration that I was not messing about I really was serious and whilst the game was in progress I generally gave of my best, How ever like a game when it was over say for the day I went about more interesting things. Thus one does not have necessarily to enjoy a game I did not really enjoy my working game it was tolerable that is all. If you watch professional sports people playing their particular game it is dead serious it is how they earn their living. The tennis players Andre Agassi and Stephie Graff have both stated that they did not really enjoy tennis they were good at it and it was financially rewarding that was all; apart from the huge amount of work involved in reaching the standard they did. So we do not have to enjoy our games only to play them seriously and give of one’s best; if you enjoy it then that is a bonus.
Hello Don:
Perhaps I can explain my questioning of the game theory of life with an example.
Years ago, I taught English as as second language to professionals in a government service. One of my students was in charge of personnel selection and elimination: a very intelligent, self-aware, sensitive and attractive lady.
She tolerated my questionings more than most of my students, and we spoke of things more frankly. I wondered how such a sensitive and empathetic person, so concerned with others, could participate in rather cruel institutional practices of hiring and especially, firing others, not only for consequentialist reasons (the effect on others), but also
because of her own virtue, because of her own sense of integrity, which was and undoubtedly is more developped than it is in normal people.
“It’s only a game”: she answered.
She used the word “game” in two senses (as is permissible in Spanish, “juego”), that is, as a competitive practice with rules (for example, chess or football) or as something not “serious”, as “play” (also translated as “juego”).
Actually, what she did in her job was quite serious insofar as it affected her virtue and the lives of others, but when pressed regarding the ethical aspect of her practice, she would fall back on the second sense of “game”, something that is not serious or playful.
I get the impression that those who claim that what they do in life is only a game, often try to avoid an ethical judgment about
their practice (competitive, with rules), by falling back on the second sense of the word “game”, “not serious”, “playful”.
I’m not at all sure what in life is ethical or not, but I do think that the question of how one should live one’s life (that is, what is a ethical way of life) is important and that said question is not and cannot be avoided by the saying: it’s all a game.
This is not meant to be reflection about your personal ethics, since I have no idea what you dedicated and dedicate your life to nor do I want to know. I am simply raising a question about the game theory of life.
Hi Don,
I did not in any way mean to suggest that your work was something towards which you adopted a carefree attitude or was something you treated as ‘an idle pastime’. I appreciate it was a thing you took seriously and that viewing it as (if) a game only made it a more tolerable thing that you had to do until you could do ‘more interesting things’. And I am quite sure your working life was governed by rules that were not writ in company policy – that you did not leave your ethics at the office door and only play by the rules of the game.
It is simply a psychological – not an ethical fact – that I personally wasn’t able to adopt the ‘game’ attitude and write off the most part of my life (the part spent working) as a thing of instrumental value that I best learn to tolerate. I need there to be no clear distinction between my working life and the rest of it, and I am lucky enough to have found a way to be able to live like that. As I also noted, there are also “a great many people [who] have no opportunity to treat their working life as a game” for them ” there is no competition, no way to improve and no prospects of promotion” (and so no game as you conceive it).
This latter point and my own biographical meanderings should have kept quite separate from certain other remarks. To say that “life is too worthwhile to adopt the attitude that it is all a game” and that “a great many things in life that do matter are ignored by people who treat life as if it were ‘only a game’” are not comments ‘pointed’ at you in any way. It seems one thing to view your work (as if) a game and another to do so with your life as a whole.
Leo’s position seems to be that we should treat everything as a game because it makes us more successful (at achieving whatever our a-rational goals are). You said those words provided ‘food for thought.’ What thoughts do you feel were fed by it? Is all of life a matter of rules and competition? Are we to look at life and play its game by adopting whatever strategies will best achieve our ‘a-rational’ goals?
Re S Wallerstein and Curious.
Games properly played are not necessarily enjoyable. Consider a boxer at the end of twelve rounds who has given his all only to loose on points. Not much enjoyment there in addition to the cuts and bruises he has sustained. Again consider two tennis players after playing five sets I have seen them scarcely able to drag themselves off the court due to exhaustion and yet one of them has lost. So when people by way of excusing their own bad behaviour by saying its only a game they utter a insult against the idea and spirit of a game proper.
The word ‘game’ embraces so many trivial activities in our day to day conversation. Jumping out on people, teasing the cat, pretending to be something that one is not, Going on to a tennis court and knocking the ball about in an idle carefree fashion perhaps just for the pleasure of it, and so on, are often described as having a game. These activities are not what I mean for the purposes of investigating the nature of games.
When I decided my job was a game I certainly did not mean to denigrate it or make it less than it was. It occurred to me that many other activities in life that we do not normally think of as a game did in fact have the essential features of serious games. This in itself helped me to understand the structure of what was, and still is a huge business enterprise. Faced with what we would generally call preposterous instructions or demands I learnt to deal with these as part of the game they had to be dealt with as best as possible. This I did with some success whilst others merely ran around tearing out their hair and achieving nothing. An analogy here perhaps from Tennis. If your opponent suddenly finds he can win points by hitting shots off the frame rather than the strings, you have to deal with it it is not precluded by the rules. All the shouting and protesting to the umpire will avail you nothing, just deal with it as best you can. All this was probably why I was seen as a Laid Back
person never loosing his cool. Not always good reputation that; by some, mostly one’s peers, it is seen as not overbearing enough, not making enough fuss therefore probably underemployed.
S Wallerstein says
“I’m not at all sure what in life is ethical or not, but I do think that the question of how one should live one’s life (that is, what is a ethical way of life) is important and that said question is not and cannot be avoided by the saying: it’s all a game.”
Yes certainly to say of life ‘its all a game’ is like saying war is all a game, or ill health is a game. Life is certainly not a game in the same sense as Playing teasing games with the cat is, no matter how much she seems to relish it. I am not sure that Life itself easily falls into what I have described a serious game. It is too complicated. There are certain radical differences between human behaviour and the phenomena studied in the natural sciences. It is these differences which probably account for the fact that there is less pay off in the social sciences that that found in the say Physics, Biology, Chemistry. Too many uncontrolled variables in life at large for it ever to come under the
category of a game.
When I said regarding working as a game made it more tolerable I meant added more interest to it. I would at that time much preferred to be a professional Philosopher or a Scientist and in fact was always making serious efforts in those directions. The fact was the job paid so well, working conditions were good. At the Company’s expense I travelled at times extensively From the Orkney Islands down through Scotland and to the Midlands staying at the best hotels meeting people from all social classes and seeing much of the land, and no I was not in Sales. In addition to that I was also in the Company’s Tennis team, which I loved. Much of that was character building I think, but I still maintain it could be played as a game but as I have stressed a serious game So did I prostitute myself should I have ‘walked’? Possibly, it seems to have worked well for Curious, he writes Philosophy better than I.
Leo’s position of treating everything as a game does have some interest in it. However I am not sure that ‘everything’ is the right word. I do not see any elements of a game in being in love one is driven more by emotion there, than the kind of reason involved in a game. One can however set oneself targets to achieve in life that is a rule or rules and sometimes one competes against oneself or against others. For instance a member of a sales team can can think and reason and act how best to be top of the team. I can understand how this could be likened to a private language just you and your own rules with no one to check on you or act as umpire. But if I say I have a private language then who is to dispute it, It is private, it suits me, I get by with it, and once someone else starts poking their noes in, it ceases to be private. Wittgenstein, he always bothers me!!
Curious says “Are we to look at life and play its game by adopting whatever strategies will best achieve our ‘a-rational’ goals?” I am not sure if that is not what most people do. they may not regard it as a game, but people do strive to get what they want, somehow or the other.
I wondering if anyone is still there after all this c**p
Thank you for your thoughts Don.
There is no question in my head that you ‘prostituted’ yourself. You simply earnt an honest living and did well by your family, whilst adopting a healthy attitude towards your work.
It was, as it were, determined that I would ‘walk’. I simply have a certain psychological nature, you could say ‘issues’ – I am not more ethically courageous or principled. And most certainly I do not write philosophy better than you. You are quite obviously far better read and more careful about what you say – I am frequently wrong and sometimes not even that.
Don:
I see my life choices, as does Curious, as largely determined and then rationalized afterwards.
In no way do I intend to criticize yours.
I see my life as a long series of errors and blind attempts to work out an imagined ancient curse and to prove to nonexistent spectators that I am not who I am.
I’ve been away a few days…
Reading some interesting stuff (Deutz + Hofstadter) as well as sitting in a large field listening to music..sigh it’s that time of year…
.more of that when I have digested it.
The game thing. Its knowing when the game is over, that marks the game player from the geek so to speak. I am a man who has sold – large contracts – to people. But I am not a salesman.
There is a difference. My life is not defined by that game. Cf. Arthur Miller’s ‘death of a salesman’.
When I say everything ought to be a game, that’s what I mean, that above everything in our personal ontologies, should be a sense of personal intention that transcends the particular activity we are in, at any point.
Curious makes the point I am very Buddhist like: this is correct, but I want to make that position more accessible to people to whom it is somewhat foreign, not to ram an alien philosophy down anyone’s throat. The actual translation of Maya into ‘illusion;’ is not accurate IMHO.
AND I don’t think the model of Monism is especially helpful either.
Possibly the best way of explaining where I am coming from is to say that say 500 years ago, there was a balance between what we, in the West, would call a ‘spiritual dimension’ and what we know today as material realism.
MR has so to speak won a battle, with the last charge being lead by Dawkins, against what is largely seen as a bronze age superstition and death cult (as one Islamic friend put it !) to the point where we don’t just USE Realism to gain scientific insight, we ARE Realists.
My contention is the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.
Game playing is a hint that Realism is not what IS, but a way of *dealing* with what is, and it’s limited and not the whole answer.
The philosophical justification for that is to say that no model of the world is ever the world in itself, and yet we have no other tool than models.
Reading Deutz, it seems that I am a multiverser. Apologies to whoever I said I was not: I misunderstood the term (as used by him at least).
So I differ from Buddhism in that whilst the material world is in a sense a function of Mind, as it were, its also a function of something beyond Mind as well.
This I do claim as nearly original. The idealist/realist debate is solved utterly if you make perceived reality a function of both Mind (or consciousness) and *something else as well*. I just don’t want that something else to be material, energetic or exist in space-time. Any more than I want consciousness there.
My attempt is to show that is a reasonable hyper model, that not only solves many problems of either-or by saying ‘both’, but also drives a wedge into the necessary crack that has to exist in any ‘theory of everything’
(Necessary because as Hofstadter points out, recursion will always get any theory of everything – where in the theory of everything does the theorist himself fit?)
The phrases ‘as if’ and ‘as a game’ are meant to imply a ‘not all there is-ness’ about the models in play (sic!) That is our models are necessarily incomplete in a Gödelian sense, and cannot fully describe whatever it is that is, in an information sense.
I.e. my contention is that consciousness as an agency creating the (illusion) of materiality and space-time-ness out of (whatever is *not* consciousness) can never be found IN that materiality, and it’s a waste of time looking for it there. Although its EFFECTS for sure are reflected into the exact nature of whatever universe is selected from the ‘multiverses’ that potentially exist.
Games playing (as a pragmatic strategy), is a way of reminding oneself that the particular position that consciousness is at, at any given point, is not an ultimate position.
The art of being a psychonaut (a term coined by a devotee and of the arcane arts, Peter Carroll, inventor of Chaos Magic) is to maintain enough coherence to be effective (behaving ‘as if’ something IS real, yet hold other constructions of consciousness beyond the normal material world as equally valid and as real as the material world is, just in a different sort of way ( yet understanding that they are not ultimately real beyond modification) …hence the term ‘different mappings’…
We have so to speak squeezed the Material realism model to within an inch of it’s life..and achieved remarkable things – BUT my contention is we are approaching the point where we have to reassess it as THE One True Reality. Its no coincidence that Gödel and Turing is different ways have come up with essential limits of formal systems, that Quantum physics has an Observation problem..
I don’t want to destroy material realism as a tool – just to put enough doubt in the picture that it ever can be the One True ontology: and most definitely what I don’t want to do is to replace it with another One True ontology like – say Buddhism. Or Christian mysticism. I think we have to simply shuffle the things around a bit so that Material Realism becomes one of a class of ontologies that have utility. Good *enough* for most science, good *enough* for most aspects of daily life, but never ever complete or 100% accurate, and most definitely not good enough when it comes to quantum physics or the study of us as thinking beings with motivations.
My solution is in itself just another Ontology: BUT its flexible enough to solve the conflicts inherent in any single One True ontology.Like any theory, it stands till a better one comes along and it cant be said to be true, and being metaphysical its not refutable either. Any more than idealism or realism themselves are refutable except by indicating their incompleteness. My theory too is incomplete, but I think its incomplete at a higher level, and it doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. We have a choice in inadequacies when it comes to theories of everything. The only criteria left are whether the resultant picture is simpler and useful to us, or not.
Hi Leo,
Thanks for your thoughts.
“my contention is that consciousness as an agency creating the (illusion) of materiality and space-time-ness out of (whatever is *not* consciousness) can never be found IN that materiality…”
I remain puzzled by this…
Consciousness has to be consciousness ‘of’ something – what can consciousness be conscious ‘of’ in the absence of space and time? Space and time and causation seem prerequisites of agency i.e. the ability to act. The notion of consciousness or agency ‘outside’ of time seems problematic. And the idea that consciousness as agency can ‘create’ (cause) the ‘illusion’ of time, space and causation, and in so doing create the preconditions for consciousness and agency seems quite confused. To me there seems a big bootstrapping problem…
Curious: I use the terms loosely.. when I speak of agency and creating…
How can – say a piece if software called an MPEG codec ‘create’ a movie on a screen in time and (2D) space, when the movie is a just an (eternal?) collection of bytes on a disk somewhere..and neither the codec nor the disk are anywhere to be seen in the movie..
Does that hint at the sorts of orthogonal relationships between consciousness, reality as perceived, and reality as whatever is the case, outside of consciousness…and its perceptions..??
The Universe is the computer, and all its data and codecs if you like, the multiverse is all the possible movies you can play on it..and consciousness is the agency selecting which one is playing NOW.
But all you can see is a movie. And all you will see if you examine it really closely are quantum sized pixels. Furthermore its a sort of video game, and you can do some stuff in the game rules, like make a pixel turn a different colour..or affect the course the game takes..it may even be an online multi-player game..but there is still huge chunks of the game you didn’t write… and at any time you can get killed and its ‘game over’ according to the rules of the game..
NOW if you can’t change the codec the game might as well be the real thing. Your choice is play it, or not play it.
The Matrix IS the world. Until its red- pill time and suddenly you have loaded an entirely different program on the universe computer. Maybe you found the pause button and the world just ..stops. Or you got bored and fast forwarded it to get to an interesting bit which you play over and over..maybe you found some different programs altogether, somehow, ones that show the internal state of the machine, in machine code…or you looked at a bit of the screen where something seems to be showing network activity, and you begun to relate that to the stuff that’s happening on the screen..
But one things for sure, knowing that the world is made up of pixels tells you very little about what’s really going on in terms of the game itself, and how the software that takes it off the disk, or the internet works, or what the internet actually is, or how the data really is in it.
Space and time are screen co-ordinates. the data is not so organised. It’s displayed that way for your convenience, that’s all.
It may not even be recorded data, it may be a full blown virtual reality interactive game, where a lot of it – or even all of it – is synthesised by the codec. From rules in the codec. Maybe you simply chose, of all the possible codecs, the one that made a recognisable world appear containing images of other players like yourself. And because you wanted to play the game, tuned the codec by trial and error till the other people and you are in a similar rule state. You can even see yourself on screen there as well, with a body and other fine stuff. you know it’s you because it responds directly to the controls, whereas the rest of the game doesn’t.
Of course when you fire up other code, you disappear off the screen. you are not playing the game any more, maybe you go offline and play with the computer itself – solitaire maybe. Or you blank out for a while while the machine does a bit of garbage collection. That’s called ‘going to sleep’ and odd bits of machine code flash past the screen…but there is no normal action on it.
If you are as much of a computer geek as I am, that’s an easy analogy to follow.
Because the software is not in the time nor the space of the screen,. Nor is any internet sharing that’s going on. The screen has its own time and space but they are not the same as the time and space of the internet.
That’s ‘just data’ and the codec is ‘just software – both of which are ‘just information’ – they have no intrinsic space or time metric associated with them.
That two bits of data can interact to form complex patterns in time and space is the reality of how a virtual reality multiplayer game WORKS.
What is the reality? the onscreen game? (classical reality) the pixel level of the screen? (quantum reality) the reality of the computer as some sort of matrix to have a Turing machine run on it, (the unknowable ineffable whatever is the case?) or the pattern in that Turing machine (consciousness)? or the unfathomable desire in some utterly alien being, who nevertheless is actually what you are, to have a game to play at all..
I can’t answer any of those, and yet it makes some sense to look at it this way.
It shows why quantum events do conform to classical rules..the algorithm IN US that creates reality demands that they do. They are nothing like the ultimate reality at all.
But it does show how fine tuning the algorithm causes us to be in the same virtual space as similar beings.
And why the material world is so suited to us. We made it.
And why we can’t find those algorithms in the game, because they are not there at all. They are in another space entirely. But we may note their effects ON the game in terms of what I called world views or ontology sets.
The very key thing though is to realise the algorithms can be tuned. We do have free choice there. We can change the game a bit. At least as far as its screen behaviour goes. The question of who is changing what, however, is even more mysterious than the God problem.
As with all these things, fix some issues and others get worse…:-)
In the beginning was data soup, and the data soup interacted with itself, and there arose experience, and experience modified part of the data soup to make more experience, and being, was…
Yet all there was, was soup. Lumpiness in something ..patterns that arose and became locally stable..for a while, that they thought existed in a dimension they thought of as time..
Vidral calls the soup quantum. I am not so sure it is. I think it may be a couple of steps weirder than even that.
..but anyway, the fact is that red pills allegedly exist, and the taking of them changes the screen in a way that is along a dimension that is both utterly unexpected and strangely familiar…so they say..
But of course, reality is for people who can’t or don’t or won’t take the red pills
I just ask them not to discount the possibility that they do after all exist, and lots of people one meets have taken various flavours of them, and have warped their algos a little bit or in fact, rather a lot, in some cases.
Some of them go happy clappy in you, and prattle on about the Jesus button, having accidentally seen the machine code on the debugger and been so overawed by the whole computer they can’t stop telling you… some sit there shaking their heads in disbelief and hoping it will all go away, others have lost the plot and hear voices in their heads…maybe some simply vanish off screen altogether and are somewhere else playing an entirely different game..how could one actually tell?
You can sort of tell a bit about the other players because if you press Ctrl-Shift-D-N-A a little box pops up and says ‘homo sap alg. version 0.7.8.SN103457 (beta)’ and so on. Or Canis Lupus (sub.e Labradorius 2.4.3.8654098124 -high tail wag potential) etc.
(I guess that’s a sort of pan-pyschism, in a way.)
Folks who do that are called ‘molecular biologists’ Guys who have glimpsed the inner workings of the whole soupiness and asked themselves why it’s there, have just shrugged and said ‘there’s’ something off the reality screen behind it all, I guess that’s what folks call God or something’ and those that pondered why there is soup and lumpiness at all say ‘I guess that’s God’s Will’ I suppose.
Doesn’t do much for anything really.
Doesn’t help with the moral issues of sprinklers. That’s all in game stuff. Make up whatever rules you like. It’s only a bloody game innit?
God doesn’t give a goddamn what you do. Probably got less choice in the matter than you have.
Curious: I read what you said again, and I think that I answered the wrong question after all.
Consciousness in my terminology isn’t some thing that becomes aware of anything more than itself in terms of the patterns it creates to organise the data into something coherent. Whether those patterns are ‘in consciousness’ or ‘in something else’ is a matter of terminology at this point.
Consciousness (for me) is not a passive thing, it’s an active agency that does algorithmic reduction on the data to present it, categorise it and display it as a time stream of causal phenomena in a space time theatre.I suppose that agency lies roughly where you might term the deep subconscious or neural processing happens..that’s the nearest point on your world view that corresponds. The fact that it then becomes aware of it’s production without always being aware of the fact that it produces it, is what you would call consciousness and probably is the Freudian ego. Then there is the fact that it can monitor itself becoming aware of and creating the world, and that’s the super ego, and the fact that it bothers to even try is probably the Id – that’s Freud’s mapping of ‘god-swill’ if you like.
If you try and monitor yourself monitoring yourself monitoring yourself.. you get psychic howlround. Nasty. White lights on the road to Damascus. No knowing where you can end up. Might wipe the algo altogether and vanish in a puff of transcendental egotism. Or end up a gibbering mental case, complete with drool and starey eyes.
Buddhists reckon its what the game is all about really. Maybe it is. Maybe they got to level 5 and just got bored and started seriously reprogramming the computer. Cunning chaps, these Orientals, when all’s said and done.
Down here in the reality game its all just analogies and parables. Doing it is something else. It doesn’t map to the reality matrix at all really, all you can say is allusion. To try and shift someone’s consciousness by using analogy *in* the world, to allude to the possibility of a similar step to *outside* the world. Or at least a sideways step to a (slightly) different world.
The first step is to concede the possibility, then grapple with the subconscious and try and get it to change its algo a little bit. Then the world just shifts slightly..like being in love? everything rosy? same world..or is it?
My trick is to assume the world I live in is my construction. That forces me to take responsibility for all of it. At the same time I make it a pure game. That relieves the Awful Burden of Being God, as it were. That plus knowing roughly where the knobs and dials of my subconscious are, allows me to start reprogramming..and the world changes. Not a lot. I am not that insane, just mad enough to consider the possibility that I can change my own world a little bit in very odd ways. It’s tricky and it’s dangerous, but I love it.
And I just thought the toolbox might be useful to philosophers so I popped in to say hi, and try and describe the processes and systems in as good a language as I can learn from you guys, in case anyone was interested. And of course to learn any tricks YOU had.
Its been a while but this must be around the right time of year to go picking red pills and brewing pots of tea..
I shall try to attend to your thoughts more closely later, I must get back to work now. It occurs to me though that perhaps you are somewhat like the theologian who can speak analogically and say what God is not, but for whom, fundamentally, the truth isn’t effing effable.
(By the above I mean nothing barbed. I’m nodding to the thought that the Zen Master cannot be expected to describe what takes years of meditation to ‘get’ and the artist cannot describe what his artwork ‘means’ – in both cases you have to go look for yourself. Thus I’m suggesting you are not failing to describe what can be better described.)
Yeah. How to you use the languages and terms consistent with what’s inside a room, to describe what’s outside. Except in terms of negatives, no, its not got walls a ceiling or a floor. It’s not got tables chairs or a rug. It’s not got a TV ..’
And that is the problem. It is not possible to describe using terms inside an ontological set, the super set that contains that set. So you end up with meaningless terms of a religious or supernatural nature. Or words that do nothing to convey the sheer otherness of it all while misleading into superlatives.
Really all one can do is say ‘consider the proposition: there exists a doorway, and it may be opened and stepped through. Nothing in the room changes, but you are no longer in it. What does change however is that the room can never be for you ‘all that there is’.
Any attempt to describe it further leads to people frantically looking for the outside inside, failing to find it there, and declaring that ‘it doesn’t exist’. And in that context, they are of course essentially correct.
As I tried to convey, the impact of that may vary from ecstasy, through insanity, to a morbid comment ‘so what: I still have to live in the room:-(‘
Or as I found it in myself ‘What a curious and interesting state of affairs this seems to be.. Now, what use can I make of this apparent fact….?’.
And try to build a slightly bigger room.
Re Leo Smith 14th August:-
With some difficulty I have tried to follow your arguments over the last few months. They are thought provoking, and it is refreshing, whether one agrees or not with what is said, to see someone who is making considerable, and I believe sincere efforts, to reach some sort of explanation concerning this state of Being in which we all apparently find ourselves. In many instances our ontological viewpoints seem very similar. However I have to say rightly or wrongly and this is only a feeling, I cannot help but think it is all not so complicated as you say. Unfortunately I cannot enlarge on this. The complexities of your system so far as I understand, are something of a barrier to further penetration. This is not an adverse criticism of what you say more perhaps an expression of my own shortcomings. My own world outlook is I suppose about 80% scientific; the best explanations come from that source. I prefer explanations which are Simple, Testable, Have some predictive aspect to them, Compatible with previously well established hypotheses, and are Relevant to some fact or another. It is of course not always possible that a good explanation embraces all of such requirements. The best books I know of in this connection are John Hospers’ “ An introduction to Philosophical Analysis” and Irving M Copi’s “ Introduction to Logic” It think they are both out of print but are abundant second hand. It is not for me to suggest how you should present your system but I wonder if it would be possible to somehow condense, or simplify it, such that it may be more digestible for the likes of me who are a bit slow on the uptake so to speak. I have followed up your reference to Korszybski of whom I had, heretofore not heard, and find what I read very much to my liking. I have already ordered one book on him and have another in mind to order. I still have to read Vlatco Vedral’s “Decoding Reality” which is now in my possession.
There is some interesting stuff in “The Mind’s Eye” composed and arranged by Hofstadter and Dennett.. I find Hofstadter’s Godel, Esher, Bach: a strong brew, but very good in parts.
Deutz I am not familiar with, can you enlarge?
Leo,
‘consider the proposition: there exists a doorway, and it may be opened and stepped through. Nothing in the room changes, but you are no longer in it. What does change however is that the room can never be for you ‘all that there is’.
I did try opening various ‘doors of perception’ in days gone by, using magic mushrooms and LSD. At the time it did all seem very profound and the ways in which one’s perception had been altered would be very hard to describe. But it has been a very long time since I’ve seriously considered there to be any real wisdom to be gained from such experiences (though, as it happens, I do know somebody who genuinely seemed to become a better, more thoughtful person due to an experience on magic mushrooms).
I also had an interest in Buddhism at a slightly later stage in my youth. At the time certain aspects of its thought helped me become a better more thoughtful person myself. But talk of this world of suffering, of real children-riddled-with-cancer-suffering – as being something that was somehow ‘illusory’ was, once I faced up to it, something I simply couldn’t stomach. (Not to mention the notion that such suffering might somehow be the consequence of past misdeeds). I do appreciate that Buddhism contains a vast array of ancient traditions and teachings – there is pretty much bound to be some wisdom to be found there and indeed in other religious traditions.
To the jaded me of today – and I say this only to admit a bias – my instinctive reaction to talk of magic, the psychonautical, the spiritual, the religious or the mystical is, not particularly charitable and I can be rather impatient with analogy, metaphor and thoughts that seem rather less clear than those found in analytic philosophy and ‘popular’ scientific writing at their best. What Don is right to say, and what I have been slower to appreciate, is that you are making ‘considerable and… sincere efforts, to reach some sort of explanation concerning this state of Being in which we all … find ourselves’.
And what I feel willing to concede is the possibility that truths can be stumbled upon in ‘weird’ ways and that there are things language can’t clearly convey and perhaps cannot in principle convey – though talk in such circumstances may still provide nudges in the right direction.
If someone has a truth or knows a truth that he or she cannot communicate in language (including poetic language), does it make sense to call it a “truth”?
Actually, I have the impression that we are a fairly open-minded and widely read group of adults here (I too practiced Buddhism for a time) and if one makes an effort to communicate one’s truth, we will be able to decipher it or make sense of it, if it makes sense. After all, if I made my way through Heidegger’s Being and Time and Spinoza’s Ethics and and claim to have understood something, I have a fairly high tolerance for difficult prose.
Don, Curious and others have stumbled their way through equally dense and difficult tomes, I’m sure.
So, Leo, why not slow down and make an effort to communicate what you have to say, that is, if you are interested in us understanding you.
I have been practicing buddhist meditation for more than 15 years. I practiced in the Cambridge Insigth Meditation Center in Boston, MA. I have read many books in Buddhist teachings, have attended multiple talks, participated in retreats and discuss privately with teachers. My teachers were able to convey to me what Buddhist philosophy and meditation was about. It is not such a secret, it very simple but because of its simplicity very difficult to achieve.
If you are interested in the perspectives of a Buddhist Monk, I would recommend reading Mathew Ricard; he has been found to be the happiest man on earth by the current happiness scientists. Two very interesting books are The monk and the philosopher were Mathew discuss eastern and western philosophy with his father a renown french philosopher and for the science part The quantum and the Lotus where he discuss physics with a renown scientists ( I believe a Nobel Laureate). He also has an interesting book called Happiness
I have read quickly Leo’s comments but I have to say they are far away from what I have learnt.
J.JMIRET:
I also recommend The Monk and the Philosopher.
I often agreed more with the philosopher than with the monk, but the dialogue is quite thought- provoking.
As I recall, before becoming a monk, Ricard had studied some science, either biology or physics.
Sam
you are correct, he did his PhD thesis with Jacob Monod, Nobel Laureate that discovered the first example of genetic regulation. Mathew was very impressed with the images from Tibet at that time particularly the monks and he changed his career and life. His mother was also a reknowned artist in France. In my opinion, Mathew is a notable man.
And Sam it does not matter with whom you agree; I sometimes found myself agreeing with both.
‘If someone has a truth or knows a truth that he or she cannot communicate in language (including poetic language), does it make sense to call it a “truth”?’
Ah, ineffability Amos – I imagine there’s nothing I can usefully say about it. Though it is worth noting though that there is a fine tradition, which includes both Kierkergaard and Schopenhauer, of thinkers who have concluded that the truth is ineffable and gone on to write about it at great length…
I could try arguing that, strictly speaking, the possibility that I conceded was that there were ‘things’ (say ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘truths’) that language can not, in principle, convey. So, I could point to the fact that I know what it is like (for somebody) to experience the colour red and know how to ride a bike but cannot communicate it in any language (poetic or mathematical). And though I cannot communicate it, perhaps I can give useful verbal ‘nudges’ to somebody who wants to know what red is like or how one rides a bike? (And perhaps what Leo is really at is nudging us towards know-how and what-its-like). If I don’t try to dodge your question however – and I shouldn’t because it’s a good one – I have to concede that it does seem a stretch to say Mary learns incommunicable ‘truths’ when she becomes acquainted with redness or gains procedural knowledge about bike-riding. Clearly things can have meaning but be ineffable – works of art spring to mind. But can we possess ineffable truths? I’m rather inclined to say no. Truth seems to be reserved for propositional knowledge. And propositional knowledge certainly sounds like it must be, in principle, communicable. But then it also seems natural to say that non-linguistic animals possess knowledge about matters of fact. And I wonder if this opens up any room for the idea that humans could have propositional knowledge they could not, in principle, communicate. And if it does, does that leave enough room for us to sensibly suggest Mary might know a *truth* she cannot, in principle, communicate by saying (or indeed ‘showing’) in language? In truth, I don’t know.
http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Religion-and-Spirituality/Comparative-Religion/FORAtv-Religion-Today-Podcast/30228#3
There’s a talk by Matthieu Ricard ‘On Compassion’ I’ve just found at the spot above in case you’re interested. Its quite far down the page – if you tell your browser to find ‘monk’ you’ll get straight there.
The book looks interesting too – thank you both for the recommendation.
“When one man speaks to another man who does not understand him, and when the man who is speaking no longer understands, it is metaphysics” Voltaire, Candide, 1759
When I was growing up my grandmother, a very catholic woman, used to tell me this story. The great saint Thomas Aquinas was in deep meditation gazing the ocean in a beach. He was trying to understand God (we can take the license to replace God by Metaphysics/ Ontology: What does exists, which in the context of Aquinas is reasonable accurate). While he was doing that, he saw a cute child making a hole in the sand. Aquinas got curious because the child kept digging for hours, and then he finally asked.
-My dear child what are you trying to do?
-I am trying to make a hole so that I can put the ocean inside it; I want to put the ocean inside this hole. The cute kid answered
– But my dear child that is impossible; there is no way you can put all that water in a hole. A surprised Aquinas answered
-But you sir, are you not trying to do the same thing?
I always remember this story; perhaps my grandmothers knew me very well and sod this beautiful gem of wisdom inside me. Currently, I am not a religious person but I am heavily spiritually inclined (Please do not ask me to define this term) and this story along my practice of meditation have always warned me about what we can call spiritual greed. In the end we are limited people, and for me what only matters is the joy of thought and creativity.
JJMiret,
Thank you for both the quote and the anecdote.
Aquinas of course spent a great many words trying to explain the nature of our world, the divine purpose behind its creation and so on. But in December 1273, after a profound ecstasy during Mass he put down his pen for good saying that, in light of what had been revealed to him, he could no longer continue as what he had written now appeared to be of such little value.
I have not been subject to religious ecstasies, still often enough I have the revelation that all I have written is only so much straw.
Curious;
I share completely your feeling; I have never experience religious ectasies, and I have not written much anyway. But I enjoy our discussions they are fun, thougth provoking; they make my day more enjoyable.
Even though, I asked not to be asked to define spiritually inclined, I will try to do so for a reason. For me there is a feeling of awe, of wonder, of… about being alive, about thinking feeling, talking with people, communicating. The of…. is because it is very hard to describe, not possible to describe in words in my current vocabulary. And anyway, in any communication not only matters that I have the word but also that the person reciving the word will evoke the mental state represented for that word. And there is the crux of communication. Sam may help on this because both of us had the fortune or misfortune to experience different cultures, different languages. Often enough, I found words in English that are very difficult to translate into Spanish as well as words in Spanish that are very difficult to translate into English. The reason, those words refer to unique experiences on each culture. Of course after very long explanations the gap can be bridged. But I think this goes to your point around the difficulty or possibility of communicating particular mental states. Now for the more science inclined person, this problem appears not to happen only at the human level. For example cancer is a genetic disease; a particular mutation in a gene will cause changes that lead to uncontrolled growth. Now surprisingly, an specific change in a gene whose role is to translate signals, signal transduction gene, (code for communication), will only generate cancer in very specific tissues. Therefore, not only you need the signal but a receiver that can understand and act on that signal. I think the analogy is interesting. We can also give historical examples, Columbus actually did not discovery America but his discovery had an enormous impact in history.
All this points to the word revelation, what is the value of a revelation that can not be communicated, translated into action and corroborated?
As a final comment, I share your interested in animals; I believe thereis an enormous amount of things we can learn from them that will help us understand our own mental states and their value.
I suppose the possession of a truth personally delivered by the Almighty must have some value for the recipient, even if that truth can not be communicated, translated into direct public action or corroborated. I imagine such an experience must translate into action of some sort though… presumably one does not carry on exactly as before. Putting one’s pen down when one encounters the ineffable seems a sensible course of action…
But appart from a very personal experience,there is no clear value. Let’s compare it to a scientific law that appears to be put into the same category of a religious experience. Everyone can test it , can be corroborated, and defines and/or provides context to most of our current thougths on the universe. Or the enligthment of Buddha provide a system of thougth, action and practice (meditation) to release oneself from suffering, which has been followed by lots of people for more than 3000 years. by the way, buddhism is the only tradition that has not been involved in wars and has a deep reverence for all forms of life, including animals. I have met no buddhist practitioner that would even consider to kill animals for pleasure.
No one can possible know what happened to Aquinas. Did he truly received a message from the almighty? What type of emotion did he experience? Was it ectasis? Was it madness? We only know Aquinas writings, not his ectasis.
And I am realizing, we have a word “ineffable” but what we can not do is to reconstruct the mental state associated with the word. Therefore, can we call it knowledge? or can we call it truth?
Personally, I can live happily not knowing, but Aquinas ectasis have no impact on me. But science, meditation, philosophy have.
Jmiret:
It’s not entirely true that Buddhism has never been involved with wars or militarism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_at_War
In any case, I’m not “Sam”. I’m “Amos”. I don’t mind being called “Sam”. People have called me much worse things. In another blog, they ended up calling me “Sam” also, so maybe it’s a meme.
The mention here of religious ecstasies reminds me of the conversion Saul later St Paul. on the road to Damascus. A flash of light he fell to the ground and had a vision of God asking him why he persecuted him. Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran, the neuroscientist has stated that patients who suffered epileptic seizures often had intense mystical experiences like Paul’s.
The experience of Thomas Aquinas, the so called ecstasy, may also be better explained as some sort of neurological malfunction, which altered to some extent his way of life. Again consider Joanne of Arc another similar experience. “It was at the age of thirteen and a half, in the summer of 1425, that Joan first became conscious of that manifestation, whose supernatural character it would now be rash to question, which she afterwards came to call her “voices” or her “counsel.” It was at first simply a voice, as if someone had spoken quite close to her, but it seems also clear that a blaze of light accompanied it, and that later on she clearly discerned in some way the appearance of those who spoke to her, recognizing them individually as St. Michael (who was accompanied by other angels), St. Margaret, St. Catherine, and others. “ CF http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08409c.htm
I also seem to remember an instance of Jesus curing what most likely was a n epileptic “the devil tore him as it left him” or words to that effect. Epilepsy was regarded as being possessed of a Devil.
My point here is to say that so called Divine acts, Spiritual experiences and the like can now better be explained in the light of our better understanding of how the human brain functions. It is suggested therefore that phenomena which currently cannot be explained today may well have a satisfactory explanation tomorrow and it is accordingly unwise to to accept explanations which seem to rely on the faith alone, or some mysterious insight that such and such conjecture is the case.
“But apart from a very personal experience, there is no clear value.”
Hi Jmmiret,
Well I suppose I would suggest that the intrinsic value of very personal experiences is value enough. Indeed it is our most personal experiences that bring meaning to life. There may be no truth (or propositional knowledge) in the ineffable – that which cannot be spoken of – but there is certainly meaning for those who have, say, a religious or aesthetic experience even though they can not communicate it. I don’t think the intrinsic value of such things can be compared to the instrumental value of scientific laws which help us to ‘do’ things we might intrinsically value. And it occurs to me that the ‘trance’ states enjoyed during sustained meditation will defy proper description – you have to master them not just read about them – and that they will have value in themselves (even if its value is not exhausted by its intrinsic value).
It seems to me a mistake to question what value Aquinas’ last religious experiences might have for others. (We can point to the value of earlier ones by pointing to his work I suppose). The question is what value they had for him – and clearly to him they meant a lot (even if I am inclined to think they would be best explained by science not theology). If I say there is no clear value to your ineffable experience of watching the sunrise, of making love or of listening to a moving piece of music other than that of a very personal experience – suppose I say of these experiences that their meaning can not be communicated, translated into action or corroborated, and I try to contrast those experiences negatively with the value of a scientific law – would you not think I have lost sight of something?
Amos;
I am very sorry; it will not happen again. Regarding Zen and its relation to the japanese military, I was thinking on that on my way home. I was wondering if my statement was fully accurate. The relation of buddhism with martial arts started in China way before Zen buddhism, and it was caused because the monks needed exercise after long hours of sitting meditation. Perhaps, the precise statement is that the tradition was not a direct cause, and I mean by this buddhism never engage in a war to convert other religions nor that it has anything related to convert people. In that sense, contrast significantly with judeo-christian tradition. The Japanese country took the culture of the samurai, which in some areas took aspects of buddhist practice and meditation ( I will look into this in more detail). But up to my knowledge, there were no wars in the name of buddhism. but thank you very much for the comment, correction and observation. One of the main reasons, among many, of why I am not religious is the culture of intolerance that you can observe in many different traditions that claim to have the truth. To clarify, I do not consider myself buddhist, but its practice has had a significant influence in my life.
J.JMIRET:
No apology is due. As I said, I don’t mind being called “Sam”.
You’re correct. Buddhism is not a proselytistic religion.
Many years ago, I lived in California and there was a Zen Center in the town. One thing that attracted me to the Zen Center was that there was no sign in front of it announcing its presence nor did it appear in the phone book. The town was not that big and so anyone who wanted to find the Zen Center could find it, but one had to search a bit.
Also known as “playing hard to get”.
I was educated as a Jew, and one of the few things that I recall from my education was the statement in a textbook: Judaism is not a proselytistic religion.
In any case, for the last 2000 year or so, others have marketed their faith more skillfully, much more skillfully, than the Jews have.
If Saul/Paul were alive today, he’d work for Apple.
Maybe the Jews decided to make a virtue of necessity: given their inability to market their religion (I don’t buy it myself), they claim that it isn’t on the market.
As for proselytism, it’s better that people make their own mistakes, I guess, because you learn by making mistakes or maybe it is good, instrinsically good, for people to do it for themselves.
The value of being autonomous and authentic, they say.
In the decision as to whether we should have less compulsion on all house safety measures or to allow this measure of compulsion, it seems a lot harder to defend the claim that we should tear down all safety regulations for houses.
While aforementioned conversations about the possibility of sprinkler malfunction present a problem, if you set that aside, you see two types of physical damage that can be prevented with sprinklers: human damage and property damage. While it is tempting to reduce these damages to affecting individuals, externalities are hard to prevent. While the spread of fire is a property damage, another place where the we can find possible damage is with property values. A razed house next door is not exactly an appealing sight for visitors deciding if they want to buy the house next door.
Also, reductionism fails in saying that one individual is deciding with agency how safe he or she wishes his or her house to be. In a household, where children are likely to be residing as well, they would be affected by the collapse of the house in the same way that the parents would. While we, in our society, allow parents fairly wide latitude in parenting, we generally step in when the parents’ actions could cause a physical or emotional harm to the child, as the adverse effects of a house fire would absolutely cause.
While there are many factors besides these involved, the face-value attempt to reduce the harms involved with cutting corners on house safety to individuals overlooks some glaring externalities.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/sep/01/stanley-milgram-research-zealots-zombies
A good analysis of the Milgram experiment, which we discussed above.
Thanks Amos.
So the tentative conclusion is that “People don’t inflict harm because they are unaware of doing wrong but because they believe what they are doing is right”…
I gather that most of those who proceeded with the experiments to the ‘electrifying’ conclusion remained deeply troubled by their conscience throughout. And most would have said beforehand “oh, I wouldn’t do that” (and they’d have a similar response to utilitarian trolley problems too.) But they were persuaded perhaps of the utility or necessity of the task at hand. What those who honestly say “oh I wouldn’t do that” or felt the prick of their conscience throughout possess is an undamaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex – studies show that if you get the ‘right’ kind of damage there then you start thinking like a good utilitarian – you think it’s only right to push the fat men in front of the trolley and you feel no empathy for him.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-03-22/news/17236729_1_brain-damage-brain-and-creativity-institute-intact-brains
Even committed Nazis like Himmler found the sight of Jews being massacred difficult to bear, presumably the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (conscience) was still in discomfort despite complete belief in the cause. I found this interesting:
“In the autumn of 1941, Himmler witnessed the massacre of a hundred Jews in Russia. During each volley of shots Himmler looked at the ground. The local Nazi officer, von dem Bach-Zelewski, said to Himmler: “Look at the eyes of the [German] men in this kommando. How deeply shaken they are. These men are finished (‘fertig’) for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!” Himmler recognized that shooting Jews was not the answer, and asked one of his officers, Nebe, “to turn over in his mind” various other killing methods more humane (for the executioners) than shooting. The handicapped and insane in Germany had been killed by gas. The SS took one logical step and recognized that this technique could be applied to the Jews of Europe, beginning with the Polish Jews. On December 8, 1941, the Nazis first employed gas vans at the death camp Chelmno in western Poland.”
http://www.southerninstitute.info/holocaust_education/ds6.html
Given the button and the opportunity to execute them out of sight, or the opportunity to give the order for it to be pushed, I think most us could easily dispatch the child murderers and rapists. Given the option I imagine many of us would even prefer to urn up the dial on the electricity and listen to them scream.
Curious:
I’m not sure if I would turn up the electricity on child rapists or not.
It’s not that I’m so concerned about their suffering or so empathetic. What’s more, I have my cruel streak.
However, I have a visceral distaste for lynchings, for the righteous indignation of the masses and I do tend to identify with the victim of a lynching, independent of whether I consider him or her to be guilty or not and independent of my feelings about their alleged crime.
My distaste for lynchings, for the “justice” of mobs and crowds, trumps my indignation about child rape. I’m sure of that.
“However, I have a visceral distaste for lynchings, for the righteous indignation of the masses … My distaste for lynchings, for the “justice” of mobs and crowds, trumps my indignation about child rape. I’m sure of that.’
Hi Amos,
There’s a passage in Ayn Rand’d diaries, about the trial of William Hickman who chopped up a little girl for kicks: “The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the ‘virtuous’ indignation and mass-hatred of the ‘majority.’”
Mob mentality is another angle on the evil that men do, I don’t mean to promote torture and execution of child murderers, but given the opportunity, and the ‘push’ of the crowd, would my fine liberal amnesty-international rule-of-law principles, and the sight of a weeping child killer stop me from taking part in stringing him up? I doubt it. And once we’ve hung a few of those we deem truly evil, it’s a lot easier to start lynching other nasty undesirables… the junkies that thieve from pensioners and so on. We are a wrathful bunch (made in His image as they say), especially the moralists…
I applaud your principles and the strength of your conviction. I hoper the minority you belong to holds sway.
I’ve never read anything by Rand, but I do agree with her words that you quote.
Have you ever read Sartre’s Nausea?
If you have, bear with me.
The protagonist, Roquentin, going through a complex existential crisis which I will not try to explain, interacts with no one, except a character identified as the “self-taught” man.
The self-taught man is reading his way through the public library from A-Z.
Roquentin. who spend his days in the public library, generally unable to concentrate, finds him a bit ridiculous, but less despicable than the others around him.
At the end of the book the self-taught man, a closet pedophile, tries to touch some boys in the public library and is caught by the guard who begins to beat him, to the cheers of the other readers.
Roquentin, who up to now in the book, has shown zero concern for humanity, justice or any ideals at all, suddenly comes out of his self-immersion and saves the self-taught man from the guard and near lynching.
The others accuse Roquentin of being one more “queer”, but he does not care.
I first read the book almost 50 years ago, and from then until now, I have felt completely interpreted by Roquentin’s reaction.
The righteous indignation of the crowds or even of the courts, of lawyers, of judges, even of political causes, has never convinced me much. I might also appeal to Jesus’s remarks about casting the first stone as well as Nietzsche’s many ironic comments about the “just”, so strangely or not so strangely coincidental with those of Jesus.
Hi Amos,
There has been mention of Sartre and the paedophile before, but thank you for providing further details.
Nausea. I haven’t read no. A long time ago I did enjoy reading ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ and work through ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ during a semester at Dartmouth College in the States. And in my youth I did read the first two novels in the ‘The Roads to Freedom’ series (like Sartre himself I never got round to finishing it).
Doubtless, you will know of Sartre’s adoration for Che Guevara (who he met) saying (after the latter’s death) “I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.”
I don’t know suppose Sartre knew then of the conveyor built of mock trials, summary ‘justice’ and firing squads over which El Che presided. I wonder – if it would have changed his opinion? (I don’t know that he spoke out very loud about what he knew Stalin had got up to).
You say, and I believe you, that: “The righteous indignation of the crowds or even of the courts, of lawyers, of judges, even of political causes, has never convinced me much.”
But I also think of your earlier thought experiment, of a civil war in Chile where “the left becomes less and less democratic and begins to commit atrocities or human rights violations in the style of Cuba. You asked: “Would I, in that case, as a member of the once democratic left, torture?” And said “If I thought that the only alternatives were Pinochetismo or the no longer democratic left and that torturing was necessary to the victory of the left, most probably I would torture.”
If, summary justice, show trials, the stringing up of fascists seemed a political necessity … what then of your Roquentinesque moral character? If he stays in the library and watches the lynching or partakes of it, is he really so very different from the paedophile hating security guard? Or indeed from the early Nazi sympathiser in genuine (and understandable) terror of Stalinist Marxism and the breakdown of all order who joins or watches as they drag communists down dark alleys.
Hello Curious:
It’s hard to talk with a man with a good memory.
It’s late, so I’ll be brief.
As I said, I would torture, if I had to.
I said above (in first post in this conversation) that I have a cruel streak.
Would I then be different from a paedophile hating security guard or from a Nazi storm-trooper?
Obviously, I would be different. But you are asking another question: is there an ethical difference between me torturing and the paedophile hating security guard?
Maybe not, from your point of view.
I’m quite sure I would feel less righteously indignant about my victim’s “crimes”, less “just”, without God on my side.
That does not mean that I would feel guilty or tormented about torturing in certain circumstances, those I outlined previously.
I really do dislike the moral indignation of the “just” and the way that mobs single out and destroy victims with the justification of moral superiority.
There is a later Sartre play, Dirty Hands, which perhaps sums up my point of view, that of Hoederer, the older and more experienced revolutionary leader rather than that of Hugo, the young idealist.
It’s close to the point of view of Machiavelli in the Prince. I realize that it is not your point of view, which is why I say that from your ethical point of view I would be as ethically condemnable as the stormtrooper.
As for Che Guevara, I find him rather Quixotic and innocent.
I’m tired now, but while you surely find me to contradictory, I don’t see myself as such.
1. What I detest is the self-righteousness of the just, the way that they single out an individual to condemn in order to feel morally superior and to discharge their aggressions under the guise of punishment.
2. In certain circumstances (above, I was talking about civil war), I would play by Machiavelli’s rules if necessary.
Amos,
I don’t find you contradictory, most certainly I don’t find you ethically condemnable. These are speculations about what, psychologically, we might be capable of doing in extreme circumstances – and I appreciate your candour in that. I too, being a homo sapien, have a cruel streak. I didn’t mean to lump you in with the stromtrooper. It just occurred, that given your admissions that you might torture in the civil war against the against the forces of right=-wing evil you could see yourself taking part – or quietly being complicit – in ‘summary justice’ like that delivered by El Che. And again I appreciate your candour. Would I torture and lynch if it seemed necessary to to save us from Neo-Nazis or indeed Islamist fundamentalists? Yes, I imagine I would. And I can understand how some ordinary Germans in the early stages of Hitler’s rise to power might have been in genuine terror of anarchy and the communists (given the horrors of Stalinist Russia) and might thus have stayed quiet or joined in whilst the brown shirts murdered communists. And I wonder if they so very different from how we are or could be. And how we are to judge the morality of all this.
I don’t have quite the emotional reaction to (non-revolutionary) mob justice. There is a streak in me that would very much like to see child murderers and rapists swinging from a noose, and at an emotive level I have no problem with the harsh justice of hard labour and capital punishment for some of the worst offenders. It is, it feels, the moral ‘intellect’ – that overrules these things as wrong rather than my feelings of empathy as such. I admit rather than boast that I can see myself stringing up at the child murderers. I hope it never comes to that – or a time when torture and lynching seems necessary to save us from fascistic or Islamist totalitarian hell.
It seems worth noting that not all of the men Che summarily executed were killed whilst the Civil War was actually raging. During his 11 month post-victory command of the prison at La Cabaña, I believe he personally shot near 200 men without anything approaching ‘due process’ – of course revolutionary wars continue after the military battles have been won. The same is true of the wars for liberty and democracy I suppose. Can I then begin to understand the behavior of some of the sincere and unselfish American hawks (there mut be some)? Just pondering …
Curious:
Blind self-righeousness, the inability to see the beam in one’s own eye, is one of the left’s worst defects, and I imagine that such self-righteousness led El Che to execute 200 or so counter-revolutionaries with a clean conscience. However, his blindness was his downfall as it led him into a foolish adventure in Bolivia.
The left is resurging here in Chile, struggling to
make free quality education a right and of course I support that struggle.
However, the blindness, sectarianism, the lack of an ability to see or to listen to the point of view of the other, the moral smugness, the Manichaeism, the tendency to project one’s own defects on the other of many of my compañeros appalls me.
At times I agree with points made by certain rightwing commenters
and even find some of them to be quite likeable as human beings.
Still, I support the left, out of what Orwell calls “decency” (decency demands that all children gets a good education, for example) and out of loyalty with those I’ve spent so many years together with. Personal loyalty is high on my list of virtues.
Blind self-righeousness, the inability to see the beam in one’s own eye, is one of the left’s worst defects, and I imagine that such self-righteousness led El Che to execute 200 or so counter-revolutionaries with a clean conscience. However, his blindness was his downfall as it led him into a foolish adventure in Bolivia.
The left is resurging here in Chile, struggling to
make free quality education a right and of course I support that struggle.
However, the blindness, sectarianism, the lack of an ability to see or to listen to the point of view of the other, the moral smugness, the Manichaeism, the tendency to project one’s own defects on the other of many of my compañeros appalls me.
At times I agree with points made by certain rightwing commenters
and even find some of them to be quite likeable as human beings.
Still, I support the left, out of what Orwell calls “decency” (decency demands that all children gets a good education, for example) and out of loyalty with those I’ve spent so many years together with. Personal loyalty is high on my list of virtues.
Amos,
I agree with very much of what you say.
Blind self-righteousness, the inability to see the beam in one’s own eye is one of MAN’s worst defects – I don’t believe it is a failing unique to the left.
Living in Scotland I am in what many of those in the USA would deem a socialist hell – one even even worse than the UK as a whole. We have universally free (tax-paid) prescriptions, as well as free personal care and public transport for pensioners and free tertiary education (for all Europeans bar the English), and like the rest of the UK we have an NHS and primary secondary education (though in Scotland both are better funded).
There is a long history of socialism and left-wing politics in Scotland. For better or worse, without the solid block of left-wing Scottish MPs the Labour Party wouldn’t have been able to do much of what it has done at a UK level. The Labour Party dropped all pretence of ‘socialism’ 15 years ago or so, though it retains a few ‘Old Labour’ backbenchers it’s a slick ‘middle of the road’ working for the middle class vote affair now. And nowadays you’d have trouble slipping a tobacco paper between them and the Tories or Liberals.
When they resurrected a Scottish parliament there was a Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan who helped bring about an end to warrant sales in Scotland – this is where baliffs acting on the part of creditors go into the houses of those badly defaulting in debt and remove their belongings to sell at nominal process towards their debts. The second term pf the Scots parliament saw a number of Scottish Socialists elected but it all imploded amidst back-stabbing and schism and Sheridan (who I have met) got dragged into sex scandals leaked by members of the party he helped build. All very pathetic.
I am inclined towards Orwellian “decency”. I have benefited from a ‘free’ university education – and so very many other things that we have been able to take for granted in the UK (but probably won’t for much longer). I live in a council house (‘affordable rent with security of tenancy’ social housing provided by the local government. Council housing has been largely sold off now, and much of what remains has descended into run-down ghettos. But at one point they were a source of pride for the nation – the provision of decent affordable housing for the working classes was seen as a good thing. Now it seems there is no working class and that socialism is dead – except amongst a few naïve students or old intellectuals. And all that was achieved by it will, I fear, be dismantled.
And in truth much of what was done by left-wing politicians with an optimistic view of human nature has brought the country to its knees, many on the left never realized just how basically selfish and unpleasant people are.
Curious:
First of all, I speak of the left and criticize the left simply because I don’t personally know anyone on the right. All my few friends are on the left, and no one on the right would put up with me for long.
Even those family members who now barely speak to me, given some of my not so diplomatic criticisms of their lifestyle and commitments, are slightly left of center.
One must realize that during the Allende years (1970-73) and the ensuing Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), Chilean politics became polarized to a degree that there was no friendship between left and right, at least not among those who are politically active or politically aware.
I don’t know if it makes much sense to say that people are unpleasant. Compared to angels?
I do agree with you that the left often suffers from a failure to recognize the selfish aspects of human nature.
That often stems from what we have been discussing, the inability to see the beam in one’s own eye and the tendency to project one’s own “defects” (such as selfishness) on the other.
The hardline postures and purism of many people on the left often seem a flight from or refusal of the recognition of their own ambivalences, their own resentments, their own greed, their own envy, their own will to power and to control, all of which are part of human nature, not really defects. Still, when one refuses to accept those aspects of one’s self, one tends to create an other, an enemy, in one’s imagination who personifies precisely those qualities.
That makes for unrealistic politics, as those who cannot see themselves cannot see others or the society around them.
There is also what Bertrand Russell refers to as “the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed”: that is, the fallacy that someone who is the victim of injustice is necessarily a good or decent person. That fallacy is very current on the left.
Auden’s words, “those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”, have never been sufficiently assimilated by much of the left.
As I said above, I’ve never gotten to know anyone of the right well, so I will not comment on them.
“And in truth much of what was done by left-wing politicians with an optimistic view of human nature has brought the country to its knees, many on the left never realized just how basically selfish and unpleasant people are.”
Indeed.
However, Whilst – say – Hitler realised that, he didn’t realise either how selfless and decent, enough people were, to make a difference..
Left? Right? meaningless in the abstract: you have to look at the particular.
I have friends who claim to be in one or other camp. I don’t do camps. It is the peculiar virtue of England that that is a permissible, if eccentric position.
Perhaps it would be more true to say that I am fully in favour of socialist ideals, but see that the only people able to implement pragmatic policies towards (but never to) their fulfilment are in fact the Right wing politicians.
The left identifies the problems, the Right has the solutions…
The Left is at its best fighting the enslavement of peoples lives by material circumstance, opposing physical tyrants.
But let it get into power and it becomes something even worse: The enslaver of men’s minds and hearts and the destroyer of their souls..
I hold it as self evident that all men are not created equal, and that the concept of humans having any natural rights at all is pure hornswoggle.
The duty of care of those who have come to this realisation, is first of all to make the situation plain to as many of their fellow men as possible, and secondly to assist in any way they can to give them the tools to each come to a pragmatic relationship with the world, and thereby advance such parts of it as are within their power to alter, in order to alter them as best they can according to what they see fit.
It is, above all, profoundly misguided to second guess what their choices should be, and coerce them by centralised government diktat, into courses of action ‘for their own good’.
Men are not God, nor even (mostly) gods, to rule others by decree. To decide on their behalf what they should be capable of deciding for themselves. Socialist democracy is not democracy: It is totalitarianism that is given a veneer of legality by an appeal to some mythical ‘popular mandate’. Sometimes it is relatively benign, but it is never democratic.
True democracy is allowing people at every juncture, to have the choice, particularly the choice of what goods and services they purchase, by allowing them economic freedom.
A necessary part of the freedom, is allowing them the freedom to make an utter and complete mess of their lives.
But also allowing them access to the ideas and thoughts of each other – the ultimate liberal education, if you like – so they can construct their own personal strategies for life..
Governments are too big and too unwieldy and too full of inertia to respond adequately to changes in circumstance especially the changes we are undergoing: And the left wing governments are the worst of all. Hidebound, conservative, stuck in the 19th century..repressive and ideologically flawed: The only true radicalism is coming out of what used to be called the Right..traditionally the province of Conservatism. Weird times indeed. In fact conservation itself has become a radical concept.
It is probably time to give the power back to the people, and let them sort things out as best they can. But those least likely to do it are those committed to centralisation, power and control of society along ideological lines..which is why my personal opinion is that circumstance will sweep all of the away in a orgy of self destructive bankruptcy.
Frankly, I cant wait.
Out of anarchy, people see the need for organisation and rules, but not the rules imposed by bureaucracies, rules that work for them, right there, in the situations they find themselves in. We have gang culture because central government culture doesn’t work at their level. Its that simple.
There is a radical shift – unplanned and organic – away from centralisation of communication, of productivity, of distribution, and of authority. That is the world we find ourselves in, and the political class are only dimly beginning to realises it. Of course as is the nature of most things, they are devolving the things that should be centralised, and centralising the things that should be devolved. But stupidity and incompetence are the exact features that allow people into a centralised bureaucracy in the first place, so that should come as no surprise.
Interesting times..
Hi Amos,
The political events that have occurred in your homeland during your lifetime have, of course, been of a completely different nature to those I have experienced. Thatcher was not Pinochet and Harold Wilson no Allende. No Marxist – as opposed to what one might more loosely refer to as a ‘socialist’ – has been elected to high office here, and the army has never decided to remove them and murder their supporters. I know nothing of what the times you have lived through were like and apologize if I have been insensitive to your experiences.
It is indeed a bit foolish to refer to describe people as ‘unpleasant’ and actually it probably doesn’t make much sense to call them ‘selfish’ either. People can act in a way that is far from selfish, and if they didn’t the word ‘selfish’ would have little meaning. Within the rather colloquial British senses of left and right – these often referring to views about the penal code and the social security system as it is shared out to drug addicts and criminals – I find my intuitions in constant swing. At times I can find myself in sympathy with the stereotypical views of the policeman and at others those associated with social workers. All around me I see increasing numbers of people with no conception of what the word ‘duty’ might mean and to whom manners are some alien practice. There are whole generations of families who never have and never will work – and they have no wish to. I see a country corroded by drink and drugs (and it is only due to these two things that we have real child poverty in Scotland) and by obesity and idleness. Sometimes I pity and sometimes I condemn. I never really swing to the right – I’d never vote or argue in calm sobriety for right-wing solutions. But I see no political answers, from any of the parties, and I have very little hope for the future.
Hello Curious:
No, you haven’t been insensitive at all.
In an online group I used to frequent, there was a professor who used to divide the world into
strict father and nurturant parent mentalities, the first supposedly corresponding to the right and the second to the left.
This division was developped by George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist.
However, although I’m on the left, like you, I often adopt the so-called strict father mentality in terms of duties, responsibility, order, courtesy, child-raising practices, etc.
Decide where you want to go with your heart.
But let your head plan the route.
Leo,
That’s truly inspiring. Do you do t-shirts?
Where does one draw the line? e.g. If sprinklers are in, then I can see the argument for carbon monoxide detectors. At another level, should the state enforce how individuals take care of themselves? Health, sanity, safety, not over-eating, not being lazy, reading your daily dose of Talking Philosophy.