John G. Messerly's Blog, page 38

Boredom

Do we get bored with everything? Do friends and lovers, work and play, and even life itself eventually become dull and tedious? Does dissatisfaction with people and projects always set in? If so, should we quit what we are tired of, and try something else? Or should we accept the familiar because that’s our duty, or because we know that what’s new will become boring too?

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who I’ve written about many times in this blog, (here, here, here, here, here, and here) famously thought that boredom was the essence of the human condition, which we experience when life is devoid of its usual distractions. We keep busy so as not to experience this essential boredom. But are we bored because life is boring or because we are bores? Some are bored by everything, others find simple things fascinating. So boredom is not inevitable, nor is it essential. Schopenhauer was wrong.

Do particular activities that were once fascinating later become boring?  Yes. As a teenager I played competitive table tennis; after a few years, I was bored with table tennis. Later I played high-stakes poker; within a short time, I was bored with poker too. Later I learned to play golf; once I played reasonably well, I found golf boring. (Although I still enjoy the exercise.) Does my boredom say something about me, or does it say something about these activities? Maybe I bore easily, or perhaps these activities were not sufficiently stimulating. I know that stimulating persons need stimulation, and both our minds and bodies will atrophy without it.

Fortunately, some activities are more stimulating than others. I have never ceased to find the pursuit of knowledge interesting. Yes, I grew bored teaching introductory college ethics classes for the one-hundredth time—literally—but if you master philosophical ethics to your satisfaction, then find another topic. Don’t worry. There are plenty of things to do and learn. Might we eventually know everything and get bored? I don’t know. If I become omniscient I’ll let you know.

How about people? I have known people who have few thoughts, and others who have shallow thoughts. Such people ask few questions. And they already have their answers—usually the first ones they were exposed to. I find such people boring. By contrast, people on a journey are interesting, they are evolving. With them you never encounter the same person, they are as petals unfolding. They are like ships that sail in the ocean rather than being stuck in dry dock. How can you tire of their constant surprise?

Still, you may find yourself disappointed with someone you previously respected, or discover that someone is not as good or as interesting as you thought they were. What then? This is a difficult question and relates to a previous post about “settling,” especially for intimate partners. If your expectations for such partners are too high, you are bound to be disappointed; if your expectations are too low, you will settle for a bad partner and be discontent or even traumatized.

Here’s my advice. If you are almost always bored and you find your friends or lovers boring, it’s probably your problem. If you are usually interested in people and you find your friends or lovers boring, you should probably find more stimulating friends and lovers. If we could live multiple lives simultaneously we could discover which friends, lovers, activities, and projects were best. (A theme explored in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.) But we can’t walk two paths at the same time. We must choose. As Sartre’ said we are “condemned to be free.”

Another problem is that it is impossible for us to really know ourselves; for we are too close to ourselves. We don’t know if we deserve better friends, lovers or jobs, or if we are lucky to have our current ones. The best thing we can do is ask others who know and love us what they think. Should I try something or someone else? Do I deserve better? Or should I be satisfied with what I have? Those who love us can’t know with certainty the answer to these questions, but they can be more objective about us than we can—for they stand outside of our subjectivity. In some ways, they know us better than we know ourselves. So ask those you trust, those who care about you, and ask yourself too. Then listen.

Unfortunately, this is not a complete answer, since we can never know for certain which road to travel. In the end, we don’t know which life is best, either for ourselves or others. Perhaps this is what Viktor Frankl had in mind when he wrote:

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

I’ll end by leaving my readers with some advice I received long ago from Walt Whitman:

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

Damaged Psyches

[image error]Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.

Let me begin by stating unequivocally that we are all flawed psyches; we are all damaged, we all deviate from psychic harmony. The world is full of damaged psyches.

If we learn from experience, we soon discover the above truths. Still, this obvious truth is not apparent to children or to unreflective adults. The unreflective are satisfied with platitudes like “she seems nice” or “he’s so sweet” or “I’m a good person.” The inexperienced peer no deeper into the psyche. But the reality behind the mask that humans wear often differs from the appearance. Seemingly nice and ok people are often neither nice nor ok—and you and I might not be good persons either.

It goes without saying that understanding the psyches around us is important. Individuals and groups are led astray when they misread them. Women think they’ve found the perfect man, and six months later they have bruises. Nations trust their leaders and later die in their unjust wars. Americans wonder about the appeal of Hitler or Stalin, psychopaths full of rage and patriotic fervor, but they fawn over their own psychopathic leaders and provocateurs. We are drawn to those who make us feel good about ourselves by directing animus toward others. Many political pundits and politicians are vile, horrific human beings filled with hate and vitriol, but people listen to them intently. Without a careful reading of the psyche, the demagogues hold sway.

And this says as much about most of us as it does about them. We too are often filled with hate, anger, treachery, irrationality, homophobia, xenophobia, and sadism. As Shakespeare put it: “The fault … is not in our stars, but in ourselves …” We suffer in the presence of damaged psyches that spew their psychic waste, and we suffer enduring our own psyches too. So what can we do about this?

As for recognizing and eradicating our own demons, we might begin, as was suggested in a recent column, by quieting our minds, re-assessing who we are, and trying to become whole, integrated human beings. But how do we do this? It may involve professional counseling, rigorous study, meditation, exercise,  and more. But I do think that people should be continually in the process of becoming, changing, transforming. This pursuit should last a lifetime. We must begin by changing ourselves.

As for changing others, that is unlikely. Instead, we should avoid those who spew their toxic, psychic waste. If you can escape their presence, do so expeditiously. They will damage you. If you must interact with them, minimize contact. But respond to such interaction not with anger but with sympathy, for others had no control over the external situations that in large part created them. All you can control, as the Stoics taught long ago, is your own mind. Try not to be disturbed, but avoid masochistic tendencies too. You have no obligation to endure the psychologically unhealthy, escape them if you can.

As for recognizing severely damaged psyches in others, be patient. Don’t conclude too quickly that someone is “nice.” Aristotle said that everyone slowly reveals their character … and they do. No one remains opaque for long. People slowly become translucent and then transparent. Just wait. I didn’t know my wife well after I’d known her for a few months, and she didn’t know me. But now, after 40 years of living together, I sleep soundly next to her as she does with me. We don’t fear the other will kill us in our sleep.

How then should we live in a world of healthy and unhealthy psyches? Through the experience of living, we can slowly learn to discriminate between them. We can learn to be astute, savvy, judicious, sagacious, and discerning. We can learn to discriminate between those who care for us, however flawed they might be, and those who don’t care for us or who would hurt us. We learn that everyone, even the psychologically healthy, will sometimes hurt us. But this isn’t necessarily a reason to avoid them, for solitude and loneliness damage us too. Avoid then those who intend to hurt you, but love those that sometimes hurt you inadvertently, if they have shown previously that they care for you.

Thus a lifetime of experience teaches us that a large part of living is psychic intercourse; that is largely what it is to be conscious. In such a world, interact with beauty and avoid ugliness as much as possible, while continually trying to beautify yourself. And yes sometimes it is good to be alone.

Benatar: The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.

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I have previously written about the philosopher David Benatar’s anti-natalism. Now Oxford University Press has published his new book [image error]The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.  Here is a brief summary of the book followed by a few comments.

Benatar’s book addresses the biggest questions such as whether our lives are meaningful or worth living, and how we should respond to our impending death. He warns his readers that he won’t provide comforting answers to these questions. Instead, he argues

that the (right) answers to life’s big questions reveal that the human condition is a tragic predicament—one from which there is no escape. In a sentence: Life is bad, but so is death. Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vice—the wretched grip that enforces our predicament. (1-2)

The rest of the book explains this predicament. The basic structure of the argument goes something like this. While our lives may mean something to each other, life is meaningless from a cosmic perspective; life has no grand purpose. “The universe was indifferent to our coming, and it will be indifferent to our going.” (200) Whatever little meaning our lives have is fleeting, and all human achievements ultimately vanish. In the end, it will all be as if we never were. This doesn’t imply that life has no meaning whatsoever, but “that meaning is severely limited.” (201)

However, even if our lives have some little meaning they are poor in quality and involve endless suffering. Some lives are better or luckier than others but in the long run, none of us fare well. It’s not that every moment is horrible but that sooner or later life will probably deal us some terrible fate. Still, Benatar doesn’t conclude that since life is bad death is good. Instead, he argues that death is bad too. “Death does nothing to counter our cosmic meaninglessness and usually (though not always) detracts from the more limited meaning that is attainable.” (2-3)

Benatar doubts claims of immortality, even scientific ones, and also argues that immortality may not be a good thing. He grants that having the option of immortality would be better than not having it, but doubts that we will ever have that option. And while suicide doesn’t solve the human predicament it is sometimes the best choice. Yet, even when it is rational, suicide is tragic because it both affects others and annihilates an individual. Thus the prescription to “just kill yourself if it’s so bad” fails to appreciate our existential predicament.

This human predicament is not the product of a conscious agent, but of blind evolutionary forces. Yet human consciousness worsens the situation because humans “inflict colossal quantities of suffering and death on other humans. The deceits, degradations, betrayals, exploitations, rapes, tortures, and murders …” (203) However, while we should be pessimistic about the possibility of cosmic meaning, we can still obtain limited meaning. And this implies that

One should not desist from loving one’s family, caring for the sick, educating the young, bringing criminals to justice, or cleaning the kitchen merely because these undertakings do not matter from the perspective of the universe. They matter to particular people now. Without such undertakings, lives now and in the near future will be much worse than they would otherwise be. (205)

Naturally, people resist pessimistic views of life. Furthermore, they try to undercut them by claiming that adherents to pessimism are grouchy or pathological individuals.  While Benatar admits these adjectives describe some pessimists, they don’t describe them all.  For many pessimism is an authentic response to an understanding of the human predicament.

So how then should we respond to the human predicament? First, we should cease having children and thereby perpetuating the cycle of suffering. But as we already exist, what can we do about our situation? Suicide might be a rational response, but better to create some meaning in our lives.

An even better response would be to adopt a pragmatic optimism that recognizes the human predicament but uses optimism to cope. This would be most successful if one actually believed in an optimistic view. But suppose you only accept optimism as a kind of placebo? The optimist might recognize the horror of the human predicament but try to keep this horror at bay and remain optimistic. However, Benatar worries that this compartmentalization will be hard to maintain—to acknowledge the bleakness of life and yet remain optimistic. If you can’t maintain the correct balance here, you might become overly optimistic or revert back to pessimism.

The best coping mechanism would be to adopt pragmatic pessimism. Here you accept a pessimistic view of life without dwelling on it and busy yourself in projects that enhance and create terrestrial meaning. In other words “It allows for distractions from reality, but not denials of it. It makes one’s life less bad than it would be if one allowed the predicament to overwhelm one to the point where one was perpetually gloomy and dysfunctional … ” (211)

Benatar admits that the distinction between pragmatic optimism and pessimism as well as between denial and distraction are ambiguous. They exist midway in a continuum between “deluded optimism and suicidal pessimism.” (211) Like terminally ill patients we should confront our imminent death but not be so obsessed with it that we don’t spend time with our friends and family. So, while we can ameliorate our predicament somewhat, doing so “is the existential equivalent of palliative care.” (7)

In the end, the best we can do according to Benatar is to be the kind of “pessimists who have the gift of managing the negative impact of pessimism on their lives.” (213)

Reply – There is much to say about this book but let me mention a few things in passing. I believe that life is bad in many ways and so is death. The solution is to make life better and eliminate death. It may indeed be better if nothing had ever existed—assuming nothingness is even possible—but I just don’t know how to evaluate that claim. It may also be that something like Schopenhauer’s idea of blind will drives us and reason actually recommends putting an end to consciousness. But again I just don’t know how to evaluate such claims.

Right now I enjoy my life, but then I’m a privileged white male in a first-world country with a roof over my head, food in my refrigerator, access to medical care, and the recipient of a wonderful education. I certainly understand that for many others life isn’t worth living and this fills me with irredeemable sadness. I wish I could say more.

The other thing I’d say is that the pragmatic response may be best. This aligns well with the kind of attitudinal and wishful hope that I’ve written about previously. The main difference in my approach is that I begin with ignorance about answers to the big questions whereas Benatar claims that the answers to life’s big questions are pessimistic ones. Starting from my ignorance I argue that, assuming we have free choice, we might as well be optimists as that is pragmatically useful. As I’ve said many times this is no answer but a way to live. In the end, my own attitude is very close to Benatar’s.

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Note. This post originally appeared on this blog on November 14, 2018.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Climate Change

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Global temperature anomalies for 2015 compared to the 1951–1980 baseline. 2015 was the warmest year in the NASA/NOAA temperature record, which starts in 1880. It has since been superseded by 2016.

The Science

To understand climate change you just need basic physics and mathematics. The physics works like this. The earth’s surface temperature is governed by the absorption and emission of thermal radiation, and greenhouse gases (GHG) like CO2 and CH4 (methane) trap thermal radiation making the earth’s surface warmer. The mathematics is even simpler. GHG + GHG = more GHG = more warming. It’s that simple.

The connection between the concentration of GHG and warmer temperatures is well-established, with the analysis reaching back at least 400,000 years. If we look at the last few hundred years we find that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1750 and have reached almost 400 ppm today. Models project that, unless forceful steps are taken to reduce fossil fuel use, they will reach 700–900 ppm by 2100. According to climate models, this will lead to a warming averaged over the globe in the range 2 to 11.5 degrees F.1 

What is the cause of the increase in the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere? According to the IPCC, the leading international for the assessment of climate change; the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the leading scientific organization in the United States; and nearly two hundred scientific organizations, it is now beyond any reasonable doubt that humans are the main cause of global climate change.2 3 4

The Problem

Climate change is already beginning to alter the land, air, and water upon which life depends.5 Higher temperatures, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, fires, changing landscapes, risks to wildlife, economic losses, and heat-related disease are just some of the consequences of changing the planet’s climate. In addition, there are consequences we can’t predict.

The Solutions

One of the first to understand the problem and propose an economic solution was the Yale economist William Nordhaus. Putting GHG into the atmosphere is free, it is an economic externality leading to a “tragedy of the commons.” The solution forces persons, countries, and corporations to pay for the GHG they pump into the atmosphere, thereby reducing the incentive to do it. He has detailed how to do this in his book The Climate Casino.6 But how do we get multiple countries to cooperate in this endeavor?

The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World

Others, like the Australian public policy professor Clive Hamilton, are even more pessimistic. He worries that as we enter the “climate casino,” humans won’t do anything until the situation is critical. His book, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, argues that humans aren’t rational actors and this prevents them from doing what’s necessary to avoid catastrophe.7 This will lead to risky technological fixes—to reckless gambling—like spraying sulfur particles into the stratosphere. Such radical solutions will be more attractive to some capitalist than taxing GHG, but there are catastrophic risks associated with high-tech fixes. Still, Hamilton thinks this is what will happen.

Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering

 Why the Problem?

But why is the situation so intransigent? The reason is that humans find themselves in this situation because it has the structure of a Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). The PD is a non-zero sum game with roughly the following structure: it is one in which we all do better if we all cooperate, yet individually each has a strong incentive not to cooperate regardless of what others do. In the climate change debate, the situation is simple. Consider two countries A and B (for the moment we’ll assume there are only two countries in the world) who have to decide to dump or not dump their carbon.

Country                                                         B


 
 


 
Don’t Dump Carbon
Dump Carbon


A
 (S, S)
   (W, B)


(B, W)
     (T, T)

The best outcome for a country is one where the other country doesn’t dump carbon and your country does since they pay to develop, say, greener technologies or pay carbon taxes while you do not. The second best outcome is where we all share the cost by using alternative energy sources and not dumping carbon. The third outcome is where everyone is dumping carbon and the earth’s atmosphere and environment are being destroyed. (This is the situation we are in.) The worst outcome for a country is if they pay the cost of developing and using new technologies but other countries don’t, and the climate changes for the worse anyway.

Of course, everyone would do better and no one would do worse if we reached the second best outcome—the environment would be cleaner and catastrophic climate change might be avoided. So how do we get everyone to cooperate?

What are the Ultimate Solutions?

There are only a few realistic solutions to the PD. First, we need people to agree to cooperate on the matter by signing a global warming treatise. Of course, even if you could get agreement that still would not solve the problem because you have to guarantee that everyone complies. One way to do this is by negative reinforcement. We would need someone (a world government or the UN) to have the power to punish violators with fines or carbon taxes. Alternatively, we could use positive reinforcement, by offering huge incentives for developing climate-friendly technologies. More radically we could use disablement strategies. We could outlaw oil companies and methane producing factory farms, but this too would demand an international coercive power, hardly realistic at this point.

Perhaps most radically of all, we could use technology to change human nature itself, say by using genetic engineering or neural implants to make us more cooperative. Personally, I think we should take this radical step. We’ll soon reach a point at which we will be forced to try some risky high-tech solution to survive, hoping that our science and technology save us.

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1. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1750 and have reached 390 ppm today. Models project that, unless forceful steps are taken to reduce fossil fuel use, they will reach 700–900 ppm by 2100. According to climate models, this will lead to a warming averaged over the globe in the range.
2. http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organ...
3. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/27/12...
4. http://opr.ca.gov/s_listoforganizatio...
5. http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/...
6. http://www.npr.org/books/titles/27203...
7. http://www.npr.org/2014/02/11/2715374...

Bertrand Russell on Thinking

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. ~ Bertrand Russell (“Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel,” pp. 178-179)

I have not dedicated a column to a discussion of a quote before, but I had forgotten about this old chestnut and thought it merited comment. Let me begin by saying that I doubt that people fear thought more than they fear torture, cancer, or the death of their children. But with those caveats out-of-the-way, let’s proceed.

Russell thought that most people don’t like to think, as another of his quotes reveals: “Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.” When he says that people “fear thought,” he is giving a reason why many people don’t like to think. Of course, persons reject thinking because of laziness or inability or other reasons too, but fear is a major inhibitor of thought. But why?

People reject thinking not just because it is hard, but because they worry it will undermine their long-held, comfortable beliefs. Having taught university philosophy for more than 30 years I have seen this first hand. Students often dread thinking about controversial topics like politics, ethics, and religion.

But probe even deeper. If you start thinking, you may reject not only god and country but love, friendship, freedom, and more. You may discover that what is called love is reducible to chemical attraction; that friendship is mutual reciprocity; that morality is what those in power decree; that messengers of the gods are often psychologically deranged; that freedom is an illusion; and that life is absurd. Thought breeds the fear that we will lose our equilibrium, that we will be forced to see the world anew. We fear thinking because what we and others think matters to us.

I used to tell my students to not believe that ideas and thoughts don’t matter—that they only exist in the ivory tower with no significance for the real world—as if beer and football are more important. No. Thoughts and ideas incite political revolutions; they inspire people to sacrifice their lives or kill others for just and unjust causes alike. They determine how one treats both friends and enemies, and whether family is more important than money.

Even the most abstract thinking affects the world. Non-euclidean geometry or symbolic logic are about as abstract as thinking gets—yet you can’t understand Einsteinian gravity without the one, or run computers without the other. Thinking matters to us, to others, and to our world. That’s one reason why we fear it so much—it shakes our foundations.

But not just any thinking will do. If we truly love truth we will engage in careful and conscientious thinking informed by the best reason and evidence available—our dignity consists, in large part, on good thinking. Almost fifty years ago I entered a university where the following inscription was etched on its library’s wall. I have never forgotten it:

“This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

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Martin Hägglund’s, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

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Martin Hägglund’s, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, is one of the most sublime books I’ve ever read—and I’ve devoured thousands of books in my life. It is a work of great erudition and originality; it is carefully and conscientiously crafted; it overflows with thoughtful insights, poetic passages, and sparkling prose. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.

Since I cannot do the book justice in a brief review, I’ll focus mostly on the compatibility of Hägglund‘s views about death and meaning with my transhumanism.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Hägglund critiques religious ideas of an afterlife as both unattainable and undesirable. Instead, he says, we should find meaning in the fragility and finitude of this life by practicing what he calls secular faith. In part two, he argues that capitalism alienates us from our finite lives while democratic socialism best provides the conditions in which we can use our time to express our spiritual freedom.

Hägglund defines finitude as being dependent on others and living in the shadow of death. Likewise, our projects are finite because they live on only to the extent that someone is committed to them. (For me, finitude also includes my physical, psychological, moral, and intellectual limitations. Regarding my projects, I’d add that they can survive us if others carry on our work after our deaths. Bertrand Russell expressed this idea beautifully.)

Religious immortality might seem to solve the problem of finitude but, according to Hägglund, an eternal afterlife is not only unachievable but undesirable. Why? Because it would be a reality where there would be nothing to be concerned about and nothing could go wrong. Moreover, activities there would be self-sustaining—not requiring any effort on our part. Therefore, activity in a heaven wouldn’t be our own.

Hägglund offers other arguments to undermine the supposed value of immortality: that things only matter to us because we could lose them; that the question of how we live our lives only makes sense if we’re finite; and that we wouldn’t use our time well if it was unlimited. Most importantly, he argues that the unchanging, permanent nature of heaven would render it static and unappealing. 

While I agree with Hägglund that a religious afterlife is unattainable and undesirable, I don’t think his arguments apply to secular or scientific immortality—using science and technology to extend good lives as long as possible, perhaps even prolonging them indefinitely. (For more see my “Death Should Be Optional“.) My wife would matter to me as much if not more if she were going to live a thousand or a million years; the question “what should I do with my life?” is perfectly intelligible without the constant threat of death; and people waste time or use it wisely independent of how much of it they think they possess.

I also agree that if things were eternally perfect, there would be nothing to do or be concerned about, but in my vision of scientific immortality, we approach perfection like an asymptote in analytic geometry—a line approached by a curve that gets continually closer to the line without ever reaching it. So there is nothing static about my view of an exceptionally long life. (Ed Gibney has suggested another image where immortality can be compared to approaching a perfect circle by shaving the edges off a polygon forever.) 

Next Hägglund says that to care about this life is the essence of secular faith. Note that this isn’t faith as in believing without evidence but the faith of savoring the fragility of what we love and care about in this life. “To have secular faith is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down.” I’d amend this quote slightly to say “a life that [may] end…” As long as there is the possibility of loss, we can have secular faith. So striving for scientific immortality is consistent with and even depends on secular faith because we can’t be sure of success. 

Furthermore, Hägglund claims, the prospect that the Earth will be destroyed exemplifies our finitude. Transhumanists would agree because, even if we defeat death, we may still succumb to other existential risks including the likely death of the universe itself. So secular immortality cannot promise immortality the way religion claims to. But the advantages of secular immortality are 1) it is based on real scientific and technological possibilities and 2) it can be reconciled with Hägglund’s emphasis on finitude. 

Notably, Hägglund states “Far from being resigned to death, a secular faith seeks to postpone death and improve the conditions of life … The commitment to living on does not express an aspiration to live forever but to live longer and to live better, not to overcome death but to extend the duration and improve the quality of a form of life.” And later he adds, “To affirm mortal life is to oppose death, to resist and delay it as best as possible … When we wish that the lives of those whom we love will last, we do not wish for them to be eternal but for their lives to continue.”

While Hägglund doesn’t long for immortality either for himself or others, I’d argue that the desirability of immortality is implicit in what he says about wanting to resist and delay death. As I’ve argued previously, all things being equal, longer lives provide the possibility for more meaning than shorter ones. Once you realize this there is no non-arbitrary point at which a meaningful life should end. As long as you find your life meaningful—whether you’ve lived a hundred or a thousand or a million years—you won’t want it to end. Yet if you want to end your life at any time you should have that option—that follows from respect for personal autonomy. 

Hägglund also notes that, in contrast to secular faith, religious faith isn’t ultimately concerned with the fate of the Earth. For religious believers, the essential is the eternal afterlife, not this finite life. No matter the fate of the Earth, they look to God to preserve the ideal order. In fact, many religious doctrines and visions actually look forward to the end of the world.

Therefore as a consequence of emphasizing an eternal afterlife, the religious have less reason to care about, for example, climate change, nuclear war, and other existential threats. These are less important to them because they don’t believe the most valuable things depend on finite life. For if you have religious faith what is most valuable remains even if finite life is obliterated. Yes, religious believers care about this life too, but if they think this life is intrinsically valuable they manifest secular faith. 

This secular faith is committed to finite human flourishing as an end in itself. We care about our planet, ourselves, and others because we believe they’re valuable and we can lose them. Even religious people mostly care about others—not because of divine commands or the possibility of heavenly reward—but because we are all finite beings in need of care. If we care about things besides ourselves, we have secular faith.

The idea of secular faith leads to his conception of spiritual freedom—being able to use our time as we choose. But political, social, and economic environments constrain, to varying extents, our being able to choose how we live our lives. Thus we must consider these environments in order to understand how spiritual freedom can best flourish.  

Turning to these considerations in Part 2, Hägglund argues that political theology promotes the idea that secularism has no moral foundation and cannot provide life with meaning. These are pernicious ideas, as even many religious believers admit. He notes Max Weber’s claim that secular life is a disenchanted one without values or meaning. Weber says that death once had meaning because we died fulfilled knowing that we were going to heaven. But now we die dissatisfied, believing that our lives were incomplete because we can’t know that our hopes for future progress will be fulfilled. Life and death have become meaningless—this life isn’t complete and it no longer gives way to eternal life. 

But Hägglund denies that secular life is meaningless. Weber, like Tolstoy, didn’t understand a fulfilling life. “Being a person is not a goal that can be achieved but a purpose that must be sustained.” If you say that you have had enough of life you are saying that your life is no longer meaningful. (This implies, it seems to me, that to say you haven’t had enough of life is to say that your life is still meaningful. And to say that is to say that you want to continue to live. Thus, if your death precedes your desire to keep on living, then your death is bad.)

Much of the second half of the book discusses how Karl Marx’s view that a meaningful life is one in which we get to choose how to spend our time. As Hägglund states, “The real measure of value is not how much work we have done or have to do … but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us … our own lives … are taken away from us when our time is taken from us.”

Having taught Marx’s theory of alienation, I agree that most work in a capitalist economy doesn’t allow us to express or elaborate ourselves. We often must do what we don’t want to do in order to survive. But I’d also argue that this is a feature of much of the required work in any economic system. Most of us are too good for the work we do. How then might this situation be rectified?

… we can pursue technological development for the sake of producing social goods for all of us and increasing the socially available free time for each of us. We can employ nonliving production capacities for the sake of our emancipation—giving ourselves time to lead our lives—-rather than for the sake of exploiting our lifetime.

Here the compatibility of Hägglund‘s vision with transhumanism is straightforward. The spiritual freedom he imagines depends on the success of future technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. These have the potential of decreasing our labor time and increasing our free time. With an army of robotic workers and friendly AI, we might really be able to exercise spiritual freedom.

Concluding remarks

When I first heard about Hägglund‘s book I assumed he was a deathist—one who defends the value of death. But he is not.1 His views are consistent with living extraordinarily long, if not immortal, lives. Moreover, he has helped me clarify the difference between secular or scientific immortality and religious immortality. The former implies that we can and should be able to live as long as we want although we have no guarantees we will. The latter is unachievable and undesirable.

As I’ve stated many times, I love this life so much that I want the option to live forever. My desire testifies to the value and fidelity I place on both my own life and the lives of others, especially those I love, as well as to the projects I deem important. But the long and hopefully immortal lives I imagine are not static, but ones that continually change and evolve —all moving restlessly toward more truth, beauty, goodness, love, and joy and away from their opposites. This never-ending process is, by definition, never complete and its ultimate goal of heavenly perfection never finally achievable. Perhaps this is the best, truest, and most meaningful existence possible.

This life is enough, but it can be more if we continually transcend its limitations—including the ultimate limitation imposed by death.
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In personal correspondence with me, Professor Hägglund wrote “I am particularly happy that you clearly see that I am not a “deathist”–an all-too-common misreading of my book. Living for an indefinitely long time (tens of thousands of years, etc) is completely compatible with my notion of mortality.”

This post originally appeared on April 6, 2020. 

Summary of “the pig that wants to be eaten”

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My friend Ed Gibney has written on each and every one of the thought experiments in  Julian Baggini’s, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher. Gibney has also summarized his own 100 blog posts on Baggini’s 100 thought experiments in “What I learned from 100 Philosophy Thought Experiments.” (Here is his summary of, and my brief commentary on, Baggini’s thought experiments.)

1. Epistemology

What do I know? From #1 The Evil Demon, we cannot be absolutely certain of anything. #62 I Think, Therefore? shows that not even cogito ergo sum is a bedrock. Everything is uncertain and all knowledge is probabilistic. In #41 Getting the Blues, we saw that knowledge comes only via sensory experiences. We haven’t found any exceptions to this. This is reinforced in #13 Black, White, and Red All Over, where the physical nature of the universe creates an epistemic barrier to our knowledge. As a consequence of all this, #63: No Know shows that since we can never be certain that any TRUTH will remain unchanged in a changing universe, our cosmological revolutions need to sink into our epistemological understanding. Knowledge can only ever be: justified, beliefs, that are surviving. For such an evolutionary epistemology, all theories are “true” only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived. #73 Being a Bat showed that this evolutionary perspective provides a clear and interlocking set of beliefs that consistently come together to help solve the most fundamental questions of philosophy.

What about the knowledge of others? What do they know? And what can we ever really say to one another? #47 Rabbit! showed that we cannot know for certain that we are talking about the exact same thing whenever we talk to someone, in this language or another. Through #74 Water, Water, Everywhere, we see that the meaning of our words evolves as more information comes in. This is why the many and varied efforts of philosophers of language to find logically perfect and universal definitions of meanings are doomed to failure. There is hope, however. #23 The Beetle In The Box shows that we cannot know what is inside other minds, but our shared evolutionary history makes it highly probable that there is much in common. For example, in #59 The Eyes Have It, vision has shared the same chemical basis across the entire animal kingdom for over a billion years. We can’t Know with a capital K what others see, but it is extremely likely to be the same as what we ourselves perceive. In #19 Bursting the Soap Bubble, our shared evolutionary history shows that we all see the world similarly, but we must still be open to hearing others’ views and change our minds when it is justified. In fact, according to #3 The Indian and the Ice, we absolutely must change our minds, although only when it’s appropriate.

How do we know when it’s appropriate to change our beliefs? In #40 The Rocking-Horse Winner, we see that knowledge cannot be generalized from prior perceptions, nor predicted using the assumption that the universe is uniform. The best we can do is prove through falsification via the scientific method what does not work. In the face of this, #28 The Nightmare Scenario shows that there is a big difference between productive speculation, which is the hallmark of good science, and pernicious speculation that specifically eliminates the possibility of testable hypotheses. As shown by #51 Living in a Vat, there are infinite unfalsifiable notions about reality so none of them are more probable than any other. Therefore, none of them ought to have any bearing on our behavior. In fact, as shown by #81 Sense and Sensibility, if a belief is completely unscientific because it is unfalsifiable, then the burden of proof for such strange ideas must fall on the person advocating the notion, since such things cannot be disproven, and there are infinite such nonsenses (like Bertrand Russell’s teapot orbiting the sun, the flying spaghetti monster, or all historical notions of God).

To reiterate, according to #93 Zombies, we cannot use our general epistemological uncertainty to arrive at any epistemologically certain statements, such as “physicalism is true” or “physicalism is false.” Philosophers seem to enjoy speculating about the unknown and fighting about what may or may not be there while the evidence is gathered by scientists, but none of these merely potential occurrences have any weight whatsoever to actually affect our current knowledge. They are observations with an n of zero.

So now that we have some knowledge—justified, beliefs, that are surviving—what can we do with this?

My brief reflections – I agree with Gibney’s epistemological fallibilism/skepticism modified by the view of the provisional nature of all truth. I would only emphasize that this does not imply relativism, as the provisional truths of science are often supported by mountains of empirical evidence. The best a rational person can do, as Locke and Hume taught us, is proportion their assent to the evidence.

2. Logic

First off, as seen in #42 Take the Money and Run, logic puzzles alone don’t always teach us much. However, #6 Wheel of Fortune helps us see that our guts are bad at statistics. And to solve any paradox, like the one in #70 An Inspector Calls, you must carefully define unclear terms. #64 Nipping the Bud shows that simple answers to complex situations are always wrong in some way. And via #49 The Hole in the Sum of the Parts, it’s a “category mistake” to treat concrete things and abstract ideas as if they both existed as singular entities.

In #85 The Nowhere Man, we see that “meaningless statements” whose meanings seem clear is a contradiction in terms, but this is the kind of problem that was solved in mathematics by the invention of the concept of zero. Just as “the present King of France” or “the round square” don’t refer to anything, neither does the number zero, and so such linguistic oddities might, therefore, be labeled xero, as in, they are neither true nor false, but technically xero.

In another problem for the application of logic, we see in #16 Racing Tortoises that time cannot be slowed to a halt. This then shows us in #94 The Sorites Tax that the concepts of TRUE and FALSE were built on an ancient’s view of the universe as an unchanging and eternal thing. Once we discovered evolution in 1859, and the Big Bang was confirmed by background radiation in the 1960s, our cosmological revolutions should have led to logical revolutions as well. You cannot impose eternal and unchanging TRUE/FALSE logic on an evolving and expanding universe. I call this the Static-Dynamic Problem of philosophy. One can only apply logic to a static picture where TRUE or FALSE definitions can remain valid. Once you move to the dynamic realm, classical logic breaks down.

Nonetheless, as in #61 Mozzarella Moon, when mutually exclusive ideas mingle, they must either adapt or go extinct, and it would be much better for all involved if the changes didn’t have to come from violent conflict (might doesn’t make right), so it’s vital we figure out how to root out truly maladaptive thoughts by using logical reason alone. Sadly, as seen in #24 Squaring the Circle, irrational beliefs in gods are unaffected by rational arguments. And so we, therefore, must move to the subjective realm to understand emotions and other views about the nature of one’s reality.

My Brief Reflections – There is a lot here but I agree that as long as there is time, as long as there is a tomorrow, we cannot claim to know something definitively.  Still, I’d argue that if we can enhance our intelligence, merge with AIs, create a global brain, become transhuman, etc., then there is a possibility of adjudicating our disputes with reason alone.

3. Metaphysics

Traditional metaphysics seeks to answer the questions: 1) What is there?; and 2) What is it like? On the first question, we see in #90 Something We Know Not What, that there is an impossible barrier to break through at the core of a physicalist worldview, which requires a fundamental assumption to be made in order to act at all.

Then, in #63 No Know, we see that through the eons of the entire age of life, and overall the instances of individual organisms acting within the universe, the ability of life to predict its environment and continue to survive in it has required that ontologically the universe must be singular, objective, and knowable. If it were otherwise, life could not make sense of things and survive here. We may never know if that is TRUE, but so far that knowledge has survived. The objective existence of the universe may indeed be an assumption, but as a starting point, it now seems to be the strongest knowledge we have.

After this first assumption, we can (provisionally) bring into our worldview the entire accepted cosmology of scientific facts from the realms of physics and chemistry and their related offspring. But when we get to all the fields of biology and the social sciences, there are a few more mysteries left to uncover. Namely, the mind-body problem with its concerns about identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, and the rationality of emotions.

As for identity, #12 Picasso on the Beach shows that everything is ephemeral over long enough time horizons. #11 The Ship Theseus shows that identity is not a fixed, unchanging thing; all borders are fuzzy. In #2 Beam Me Up, we see that I am material, but not only this present material. That is because, according to #65 Soul Power, a full grasp of identity must be multi-level, it must take account of what the self knows as well as what others know, both of which change over time. #88 Total Lack of Recall expands on this by noting that according to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. In John Mbiti’s words: ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’ This helps explain why #46 Amoebaesque shows that none of the four traditional locations of identity — body, brain, memory, or soul — can stand alone to explain who “I” am.

In fact, according to #38 I Am a Brain, our personal identity is some bundle of our purely physical body parts plus our mental parts that reside in our physical brains. As seen in #30 Memories Are Made Of This, the individual self can be regarded as the totality of a set of perceptions within a body. In #54 The Elusive I, it’s even more apparent that we are collections of mental states or events: “bundles of perceptions”, as Hume said. This bundle theory view of the self may take away some personal, religious notion of a lonely, individual, immortal “I”, but in return, it binds us together with all of the rest of life who are in the same boat as “we” are. This is comforting. For #56 The Total Perspective Vortex shows us that we are just another species of animal life on a single planet orbiting one of the 30 sextillion to 30 septillion stars in the universe. We should feel awe when contemplating infinity and extinction, and exposure to both of these concepts does aid our judgment and moral character in choosing actions that comport with the meaning of life.

Can we really choose? Do we have totally free will? Or has everything already been determined by prior physical states? From our subjective perspective, something in the middle makes the most sense. #9 Bigger Brother shows that observer effects lead to unpredictable actions in humans. In #21 Land of the Epiphens, we see how thinking can affect our choices, and so hard determinism is unproven. According to #31 Just So, however, there is nothing outside of our evolutionary history that influences us. And so we arrive, via #25 Buridan’s an Ass, at the conclusion that the chaos of small influences in a changing universe may have been required to cause some decisions, especially in early forms of life, but our evolved freedom to now choose influences from any past action ever known and any possible future ever imagined gives us practically infinite free will now, even if that freedom is ultimately constrained at the limits of what is possible.

Is artificial intelligence something we can include in this realm of possibility? Can we create metaphysical subjectivity in new forms of existence? The limitations of epistemology in a physical universe mean we’ll never know for sure, but according to #39 The Chinese Room, emotions, definitions for good and bad, and the ability to learn to meet a hierarchy of needs are probably enough to create strong artificial intelligence. They are all we have ourselves.

Psychology and all the related sciences of biology can then inform us about the physical basis for these mental things. In #18 Rationality Demands, we see that reasons and feelings are not separate, they influence one another. Further, according to #80 Hearts and Heads, there’s a bi-directional feedback loop between reasons and emotions. These connections aren’t always consciously known or personally understood, but the link is always there. Our job as philosophers is to improve the functioning of this system by improving the logic behind our evaluations so that our emotions motivate us in the right direction. But what then is the “right” direction? To answer that, we must have ethics and definitions for “good” or “bad.”

My Brief reflections – Again so much substantive material here. As for personal identity, I think that Hume’s bundle theory and/or Buddhism’s idea of no-self is about right. Clearly, we just don’t have identity the way most of us imagine; if indeed we have any real self at all. And there almost certainly is no kernel that is us.

As for free will, I’m not sure what Mr. Gibney means by ” practically infinite free will” but I’m skeptical. I’m not a hard determinist, but I think that to say we are genomes in environments is a nearly exhaustive explanation of what we are. Still, we are not rocks, and free choice (which needs to be defined carefully but which is very, very limited) is something that emerged along with consciousness. That is, unlike rocks which are completely determined (let’s forget quantum theory for the moment), we have some deliberative faculties because we are conscious.

As for strong AI, I see no reason whatsoever why consciousness can’t exist on substrates other than our biological brains. In fact, in an infinite universe, consciousness may exist in almost limitless forms.  Finally, I completely agree with Mr. Gibney on the interrelationship between reasons and emotions and that it is a moral imperative to improve our thinking. Quoting from Pascal: “Let us endeavour then to think well; this is the principle of morality.”

4. Ethics

The most commonly cited source for human ethics today is religion. This invention is understandable because it fills the void of our longing to know how to survive in our inherently uncertain universe. As seen in #58 Divine Command, when environments are filled with harsh adults who are unable or unwilling to explain themselves, children learn to obey to survive. This can easily lead to a perpetual cycle as these children also learn to dominate when they can, and they don’t learn to think clearly on their own.

However, #95 The Problem of Evil shows that Gods have all just been made up ideas, and the particular one invented and followed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the one that is supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving—is a logical impossibility given the facts of the world. #45 The Invisible Gardner illustrates how scientific discoveries have made the gods of the gaps vanishingly small. Poof. In fact, according to #8 Good God, no gods tell us what is good; we determine it ourselves. In #78 Gambling on God, religious answers for epistemology and logic have been shown to be flat-out wrong and dangerous. They must be discarded. All of the good benefits of religion can be provided by a secular worldview.

So what are the secular sources of ethics? Traditionally, in philosophy, as in #60 Do As I Say, Not As I Do, we see how any morally considered human behavior has an intention, an action, and a result. That’s the way an event is described prior to, during, and after it occurs. It’s the way the past, present, and future are bound together by causality yet allowed to be looked at separately across time. Virtue ethics concerns itself with the intention behind an act. Deontology focuses on the action alone. [Kant’s deontology focuses on intention too.] Consequentialism focuses on the result. But all three may be evaluated individually for moral purposes. Also, #71 Life Support points out that neglecting to act is still an act that can be morally judged for intentions and consequences.

Exploring these philosophical options, deontological rules and universal virtues don’t work by themselves because sometimes, as in #7 When No One Wins, it’s possible to do long-term good by doing short-term bad. Even further, as in #99 Give Peace a Chance?, more deaths over the short-term may be preferable to more misery and death over the long-term, although empirically it’s not very easy to know the difference ahead of time, and I personally am very glad that my best course of action hasn’t involved such sacrifice. The most universally known deontological rule is #83 The Golden Rule, but the Golden Rule is simply calling for reciprocity, for empathy, for more cooperation. But this isn’t enough! Cooperation towards what? Putting a bagel on Saturn? Subjugating ladybugs? Spreading the message of Moses? It’s terribly misguided to focus on means without considering ends too.

Consequentialism or utilitarianism tries to focus on ends, but historically they have only considered well-being, pleasure, or avoidance of pain as the ultimate goal. #84 The Pleasure Principle, however, shows that pleasure or freedom from pain are not ends in themselves, they are means towards something else. They are signposts for how to act towards survival. #98 The Experience Machine says the best prospects for long-term survival and well-being lie in dealing with the real world. Pleasure or pain avoidance are merely proximate goals in service of an ultimate goal, they are not intrinsically or inherently valuable or costly on their own. This is partly why utilitarianism fails. In #89 Kill and Let Die, we see another reason is because human evolution, as well as the evolution of other advanced animals, is governed to a greater or lesser extent by a mix of genetic and cultural traits, so the practically unknowable value of one unique human to the cultural evolution of our species means we cannot weigh life and death trolley-problem decisions by using some simple rule such as “one human = one human.”

According to #96 Family First, the equal weighting of persons or sentient creatures in the theoretical mathematics of utilitarianism doesn’t hold up in the real-life decision-making of individuals because we are not indistinguishable widgets that can be perfectly substituted one for another. While all human beings originally have equal standing for moral claims, the actual force of their claims on us is variable depending on many things such as our ability to satisfy their claims, their reputation from prior actions, or their possibility of reciprocating aid over repeated interactions in the future. In other words, as in #22 The Lifeboat, moral concerns are a force that behaves somewhat like gravity with stronger pulls by larger bodies at close distances often overshadowing the background tugs of fainter objects far away, and moral actions get harder to determine the farther away their actions are directed.

So prior sources of ethics all have problems. It’s okay to discard these old values though since we see in #27 Duties Done that oughts must be derived from more than just current norms of oughts. In #50 The Good Bribe, we see that in order to truly consider “the big picture” of a moral decision, you must look at the largest and longest view of life. In #100: The Nest Café, we see that due to the deep interrelatedness and interconnectedness of all living things, hierarchies of needs ought to be considered for each and every form of life. This includes all seven areas of E.O. Wilson’s consilient view of life: 1) Biochemistry → 2) Molecular Biology → 3) Cellular Biology → 4) Organismic Biology → 5) Sociobiology → 6) Ecology → 7) Evolutionary Biology.

Thus, as described in #52 More or Less, evolutionary ethics are based upon a deontological rule — “good is that which enables the long-term survival of life” — and that gives us an objective and universal consequence towards which we ought to act using virtues derived from evolutionary studies that scientifically prove to us which traits are successful in leading life towards that goal. We may not be able to answer any ultimate questions now of why the universe and life exist, but maybe someone will be able to someday, and it is our job to do what we can to get to that day. Therefore, the number of people and the quality of their lives ought to exist within some range that balances scientific progress against existential robustness.

To clarify, in response to someone Questioning All This, too little life in terms of quantity, quality, or diversity is a fragile state, and too much life full of overcrowded, competitive, misery is another fragile state. Evolutionary ethics looks for robust optimization in the middle where well-being is also optimized, but this is only reached by recognizing that comfortably assured survival for life is the ultimate goal. The only position that contradicts this would be an argument for universal death, but that is an argument we living beings reject. Once you agree that any part of life ought to continue, then you agree that life, in general, wants to continue and we are then down to questioning the details of how that works, which is an empirical question. So, therefore: 1. Life is. 2. Life wants to survive. 3. Life ought to act to survive. By discovering this objective basis for morality, we can examine history and see how the moral values of humans have grown and changed over time and we can try to judge them using the meta-principles of what we see best survives over the long-term during evolutionary processes.

Okay. That is what “good” is, but how do we live a good life?  What does this mean for me, for individual flourishing, or for what the Greeks called eudaimonia? We want to be happy and to feel pleasure, but we must recognize, as in #26 Pain’s Remains, that pain in life is unavoidable, and may, in fact, be necessary for all of the wisdom and empathy it gives us. Pain is a useful signal. Further, #91 No One Gets Hurt shows how we carry a host of biochemical “side effects” from our evolutionary history. We have freedom and flexibility to overcome many of them, but they cannot be completely forgotten. When one knows that some part of their actions are bad they will be subject to feelings of guilt. In #76 Net Head, we see that these guilty feelings or other perpetual feelings of anger are sure signs that your worldview isn’t working. They come from cognitive appraisals that “something is bad and I need to do something about that.” That “something bad” is either the world or your worldview.

From #68 Mad Pain, it is obvious that we humans feel pain when flesh and bones are torn apart, but perhaps we can feel physical pain when neuronal connections are torn apart as well. This would explain the observations that any challenge of a basic assumption will release anxiety and defensiveness. Such challenges painfully tear our minds apart. But ripping off the duct tape that holds most worldviews together seems much more preferable than feeling the continual anxiety that seems to arise when most worldviews are faced with evidence from the real world. In #61 Mozzarella Moon, we see that speaking in a debate probably moves too quickly to change deeply held beliefs. Surprising validators can change some minds. But dysrationalia stops many minds from changing, and that is caused by cognitive biases (hardware), but also a lack of understanding of probability, logic, and scientific inference (software).

It may be difficult to turn your back on your past beliefs, but according to #69 The Horror, we must always accept that what is done is done, and we, therefore, ought to strive to live well from now on so as not to reach the end of our lives and have only shame and regret to look back upon things that can no longer be changed. This will not be easy. In #75 The Ring of Gyges, we see how our intuitive moral feelings are often in conflict because of the debates that rage within us regarding the self vs. society, or society vs. the environment, or the short-term vs. the long-term, or just the fundamental choices between competition and cooperation. This is what drives the two faces of humankind, but wise people can see this and act accordingly. When we do so, we may truly begin to love life, and even see, as in #20 Condemned to Life, that immortality is not a curse. It is the logical outcome of evolution, and we ought to be able to bear it. Such long good lives, or at least, for now, such a good long succession of them, would indeed be “beautiful.” But what exactly do I mean by that?

My brief reflections – Traditional religious beliefs are mostly nonsense. Moreover, the divine command theory is ridiculous as Plato demonstrated in the Euthyphro, the problem of evil devastating for classical theism, there is no invisible gardener, etc.

I’ve never found much to recommend Kantian deontology, although I think a modified utilitarianism has a lot to offer. Like Mr. Gibney, I think that evolutionary ethics explains the origins of ethics and can also function well as a normative ethical theory. I would modify Mr. Gibney’s “good is that which enables the long-term survival of life” by adding “and flourishing of life.” Survival isn’t sufficient by itself for goodness. (Note that Mr. Gibney seems to recognize this later on in the essay.)

I would also modify Mr. Gibney’s “1. Life is. 2. Life wants to survive. 3. Life ought to act to survive.” While I think you can get is from ought I don’t think you can get it quite that easily. (Perhaps Mr. Gibney is just summarizing here.) For example, Schopenhauer would argue that life wanting to survive is just a will to live that perpetuates suffering. So again we must enter the picture and choose to try to survive well, live well, or flourish.

5. Aesthetics

In #48 Evil Genius, we see now how ethics and aesthetics can be united. Beauty is good; it is that which promotes the long-term survival of life. Bad art, no matter how well it is executed, is blind emotion that purports falsehoods for truth. #37 Nature the Artist helps us understand that this idea of beauty is objective to reality, but the beauty of any object is subjective to the considerations of each specific observer. That is how we make sense of the confused and competing definitions of beauty and art that exist at present. But in #86 Art for Art’s Sake, we see that artistic objects have no intrinsic worth on their own; they are not a form of life. Art must provoke emotions in someone (even if it is just the artist) in order to be considered art. And therefore, as in #66 The Forger, a true connection to the emotions and knowledge of an artist undoubtedly adds an extra dimension to any work of art, and that dimension can even become priceless whenever such a connection is deemed irreplaceable and full of inspirational beauty. When such art impels us to grasp for good lives, we reach out to those around us in order to actually accomplish it. And that leads us to the final branch of philosophy in our worldview.

My brief reflections – I probably know less about aesthetics than any other branch of philosophy. Let me just say that there is something about beauty that is intrinsically worthwhile. Truth, beauty, and goodness are the 3 great ideas by which we judge things. Here I’ll quote from Bertrand Russell’s last manuscript: “There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.”

6. Political Philosophy

First off, how are we to treat one another. #44 Till Death Us Do Part shows that love of another person is rational, or it is not love. Personal interactions are best modeled by iterated prisoner’s dilemmas, which explains how cooperation evolves. More specifically, in #82 The Freeloader, we see how cooperators pay the price for all freeloaders, which is why we have powerful urges to discover cheaters and stop them. Rather than being tempted to cheat, better strategies over the long-term have been discovered. They are: 1) be nice – cooperate, never be the first to defect; 2) be provocable – return defection for defection, cooperation for cooperation; 3) don’t be envious – focus on maximizing your own ‘score’, as opposed to ensuring your score is higher than your ‘partner’s’; and 4) don’t be too clever – tricks are eventually discovered. Cooperative groups then go on to develop cultures.

We see in #67 The Poppadom Paradox that culture is a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration. Multiple cultures and the scientific method provide the means for purposeful variation, rational selection, and a retention of the ideas that aid the survival of all cultures of life.

#61 Mozzarella Moon shows how Elinor Ostrom’s eight design features enable groups to manage their common-pool resources successfully. This is particularly applicable to all of humanity and the common resource we share called Earth. Ostrom’s first criterion requires “strong group identity and understanding of purpose.” Evolutionary philosophy identifies life as all of our group’s identity, and survival as its purpose. From this, our required behaviors should be clearer. But still, as in #15 Ordinary Heroism, doing good requires difficult judgments, which ought to be encouraged. Such encouragement can come from mutually understood norms among individuals, but in order to grow large anonymous societies, they must be encoded in laws through the formation of governments.

Why governments? And how might these governments be organized? We see in #82 The Freeloader that even if every individual was committed to cooperating with their fellow citizens, there would still be things that we need centralized and collective action to address. We know that the invisible hands of the market will lead to market failures if they are left to act on their own. The purpose of government is to regulate the economic system by correcting these market failures. #10 The Veil of Ignorance shows we ought to organize our political economies to promote the long-term survival of life.

But as noted in #100 The Nest Café, the most cited definition for the purpose of government comes from the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, which goes like this (with some numbering added for ease of analysis): “We the People of the United States, in Order to (1) form a more perfect Union, (2) establish Justice, (3) insure domestic Tranquility, (4) provide for the common defense, (5) promote the general Welfare, and (6) secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The framers of the U.S. Constitution gave no guidance on how to prioritize among these six interests though, which often compete directly with one another. How do we choose between more liberty and more justice, other than by the democratic squabbling of the loudest groups or wealthiest interests? This vacuum of ambiguity has been filled by the Cold War Philosophy and the Washington Consensus to promote the liberty of individuals as the highest end goal, but that is entirely amoral. A much better way to prioritize among the six interests in the Preamble would be according to the way we ought to prioritize all moral decision-making: we ought to act for the long-term survival of life in general. If that means slower economic growth, so be it.

Clearly, the fastest economic growth is blowing up in our face, and it does not meet the wider needs of life on Earth. It’s only when our absolute highest priorities are concerned with the evolution of life in general that we can find ways for all of life to flourish together and ensure its long-term survival. This can even be proven mathematically, as seen in #55 Sustainable Development where any supply of “widgets” becomes vanishingly small whenever those things are deemed irreplaceable and individual. The cost of replacing irreplaceable things in this world essentially runs to infinity, and these infinite values cause a breakdown in the use of classical economics. In the case of businessmen calculating the return on their investment while trying to use up natural resources, we might, therefore, speak “their language” and still hope to persuade them to set some things aside, to hold some things as sacred.

Wealthy oligarchs howl against such restraints on their personal liberties, but in #87 Fair Inequality we see that societies are most productive where everyone works hard, has purpose, and cooperates fully. Although people are no worse off materially if their neighbors get rich at no financial cost to themselves, they can be harmed psychologically by their increased awareness of the wealth gap between them. Seeing equality and inequality solely in material terms could thus be a terrible mistake. Perfect equality is not possible, but extreme inequality is not sustainable. Extreme wealth is generated by the economic system and the rules that society has evolved over the course of its history. A large portion of extreme wealth is therefore owed to society. As a final warning against any all-too-certain authoritarianism, however, #92 Autogovernment shows we may get better at modeling complexity and acting towards agreed-upon goals, but we must never mistake such contingent knowledge for complete clairvoyance.

In the effort to create and enforce such a fair and well-aimed political economy, there will, of course, be some individuals who will give in to the temptation to gain rewards illegally. First, we ought to endeavor to show such people, as in #14 Bank Error in Your Favour, that crime doesn’t pay because we may always be caught. This will not always be successful though, so as in #34 Don’t Blame Me, despite the fact that there is always external causality for our actions, we must be held responsible for those actions. We cannot change the past, however, so any punishment and blame must be forward-looking.

To expand upon that, we see in #97 Moral Luck that moral factors are not always in our control. We can’t know the future. Our wider environments are out of our control. Who we are (nature x nurture) is substantially out of our control. Free will determinists would say everything is out of our control. Given all this uncertainty in the world, there really ought to be much less moralizing judgment.

Of the four types of punishments used for doling out justice — restoration, rehabilitation, incapacitation, and retribution — only retribution is aggravated when we ignore the role that moral luck plays, but retribution should be ignored anyway since it is not forward-looking. Retribution is also pointless, as we see in #17 The Torture Option because torture does not work in the short-term since humans can obey internal motivations and deceive one another. Cooperation over the long-term is best gained by refraining from torture altogether. #36 Pre-emptive Justice shows that improving social conditions as a means of crime prevention works better than heavy-handed law enforcement, which often backfires.

We see why in #77 The Scapegoat because inhumane acts of justice can never be fully private. Such means will therefore always undermine the ends. The state is supposed to be that entity which possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. When justice systems are corrupted by individuals who think they can wield force outside of the rule of law, that is a necessary and sufficient ingredient for the failure of an entire state because the government will then no longer have a legitimate monopoly on the use of force.

It is far better, as in #79 A Clockwork Orange, to see that we are neither inherently good nor inherently evil—we are capable of both, a flexibility we must have in order to have the power to choose between alternate paths that are right some of the time and wrong some of the time. Understanding this leads to holistic approaches to social and criminal justice, which have been proven to work in other countries.

In addition to these economic and criminological elements of just societies,  #33 The Free-Speech Booth shows that free speech is necessary for society to explore ideas, but it can be curtailed by harm principles (not offense) and public nuisance laws. #29 Life Dependency explores why abortion is a difficult issue to deal with because of the fuzziness that exists around the definitions of life and individuals. Therefore, we currently compromise socially. What we should not compromise on is seen in #35 Last Resort where suicide attacks are infinite ends to finite lives, which demand 100% certainty to justify them. But since this is unobtainable, suicide attacks are never justified.

At the end of our lives, #53 Double Trouble shows that voluntary euthanasia could be good for the long-term survival of life by giving us control over our own death and helping us avoid personal pain and suffering. Voluntary euthanasia can also take away worry from loved ones, and it can free resources for better use. It allows us to lose some of the fear of death, which means death becomes less a topic we need to repress, and more one that can be looked at plainly in order to motivate better living.

Finally, what can we say about how to deal with those who are outside of the social contract of government, which can only be entered into through conscious consensual cooperation? For non-human animals, #5 The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten shows that animals can have higher purposes than being eaten. But in #57 Eating Tiddles, we don’t necessarily need to pull ourselves entirely out of the food chain to morally cooperate with the project of life. Harm to any individual stakeholders, however, ought to be eliminated or minimized when weighed against the benefits. It may be correct that in #72 Free Percy, the independent existence of rights is “nonsense on stilts,” but we as members of a society agree to grant them to one another. We can also agree to grant rights to non-human animals and plants even though these forms of life cannot now recognize or reciprocate such agreements. Respecting the billion-year-bonds we share with other forms of life is precisely what we need to help us recognize that the selfishness of human tribes is inane.

What about non-living things? #32 Free Simone shows that artificial intelligence can be accepted where it is forced to cooperate with life, just like the rest of us. But #4 A Byte on the Side cautions that computers cannot currently meet our psychological needs for love. (Even though I just spent a LOT of time gazing into mine…)

Phew! Let’s pause for a break and think about the many details of this broad view.

My brief reflections – I’m glad that Mr. Gibney discussed the prisoner’s dilemma at length as it is the key to understanding moral and political philosophy and many other things as well. (For more see “American Authoritarianism: Coming 2017.”) The desire to defect—to follow one’s own short-term interest at the expense of the group—may be the major problem of humankind today and it will (quite likely) lead to the destruction of the entire ecosystem on which life depends.

The question then arises as to how to deter egoistic behavior and encourage cooperative behavior. I advocate disablement strategies, that is making the selfish move impossible. Today this would involve enhancing human cognitive and moral functioning. We must re-engineer human beings or we will not survive. Radical as this may seem, I see no other option that is likely to be successful.

I also agree with Mr. Gibney about 1) limits to free speech, especially given the speed at which lies now spread quickly around the world; 2) the moral value of voluntary euthanasia; and 3) the need to include animals and AIs into the moral sphere.

I would like to thank Mr. Gibney for all the work he did in preparing this material.

Finding Meaning in a Life Prison Sentence

In 1930 the historian and philosopher Will Durant—who was at that time a famous public intellectual—received a number of letters from persons declaring their intent to commit suicide. The letters asked him for reasons to go on living. In response Durant asked a number of luminaries for their views on the meaning of life, publishing those responses in his 1932 book, On the Meaning of Life.

As the manuscript was being prepared for publication, Durant received a letter from “Convict 79206” at the Sing Sing maximum-security prison in New York. The convict had been recently sentenced to life in prison and Durant published the letter as an appendix to the above-mentioned book. Of its contents, Durant wrote: “It is incredible that we should be unable to find any better use for such intelligence than to lock it up forever.”

Convict 79206’s response is too long to print here, but we can highlight a few of its points. He argued that suicide would be permissible for those who found life meaningless, but that he had not yet reached that point. He maintained that life was accidental but not necessarily meaningless. He was not religious and advised against seeking “comfort in delusions, false tradition, and superstition.” He discussed the difference between truth, which is neither beautiful or ugly, and belief  “the idol-worshiping strain in our natures.” He said that “happiness is a state of mental contentment [which] can be found on a desert island, in a little town, or the tenements of a large city.” And he was optimistic about the future:”[Humans are] an integral part of the universe in which [they] live, that universe which is ever-moving forward to some appointed destiny.”

At the end of the letter, before heading back to live what most of us would assume is a futile and meaningless existence, convict 79206 painted a picture with his words. Through them, his dignity, integrity, and strength of character shone forth.

This evening I stood in the prison yard amid other prisoners, with eyes lifted aloft  gazing at that great … airship … as it sailed majestically over our heads. Into my mind came the thought that, just as that prehistoric creature struggled up out of the sea to the land, so is man struggling up from the land into the air. Who dare deny that, some day, up, ever up he will struggle thru the great reaches of interstellar space to wrest from it the knowledge which will enable him to lift his life to a plane as high above this, our present one, as it is above that of prehistoric man?

I do not know to what great end Destiny leads us, nor do I care very much. Long before that end, I shall have played my part, spoken my lines, and passed on. How I play that part is all that concerns me.

In the knowledge that I am an inalienable part of this wonderful, upward movement called life, and that nothing, neither pestilence, nor physical affliction, nor depression, nor prison, can take away from me my part, lies my consolation, my inspiration, and my treasure.

Owen C. Middleton (convict 79206) was a transhumanist before his time and a man of greater depth and humanity than most. How much potential wastes away in our prisons.

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Note – This post first appeared on this blog on March 7, 2014. 

What is Cosmological Natural Selection?

[image error]Messier 92 in the Hercules constellation.

I came across a wonderful piece in the June 10, 2014 issue of Scientific American, “The Logic and Beauty of Cosmological Natural Selection” by Lawrence Rifkin MD.Rifkin argues that “The hypothesis [of] cosmological natural selection, and its power, beauty, and logic provide what may be the best scientific explanation for the existence of complexity and life in the universe.” CNS has been most extensively formulated by the physicist Lee Smolin in his 1992 book The Life of the Cosmos[image error]. Here is a basic description:

Throughout the universe, stars that collapse into black holes squeeze down to an unimaginably extreme density. Under those extreme conditions, as a result of quantum phenomenon, the black hole explodes in a big bang and expands into its own new baby universe, separate from the original. The point where time ends inside a black hole is where time begins in the big bang of a new universe. Smolin proposes that the extreme conditions inside a collapsed black hole result in small random variations of the fundamental physical forces and parameters in the baby universe. So each of the new baby universes has slightly different physical forces and parameters from its parent. This introduces variation.

Given these “inherited characteristics, universes with star-friendly parameters will produce more stars and reproduce at a greater rate than those universes with star-unfriendly parameters. So the parameters we see today are the way they are because, after accumulating bit by bit through generations of universes, the inherited parameters are good at producing stars and reproducing.” Of course, the existence of stars is crucial because the molecular material contained in stars is a prerequisite of life.

One of the advantages of CNS is that it directly addresses the so-called “fine-tuning problem”—why the laws and parameters of nature are remarkably conducive to life. It answers that the laws of our universe “are the way they are because of non-random naturalistic cumulative inherited change through reproductive success over time.” CNS also explains the complexity and the apparent design of our universe without positing gods, analogous to how natural selection explains the complexity and apparent design of our biology.

Critics might argue that there is no evidence for CNS, but Rifkin points out that there is no direct evidence for other scientific alternatives that would explain the existence of our universe like quantum fluctuations, multiverses, cyclic universes, or brane cosmology. And CNS has the advantage of explaining the fine-tuning problem better than the alternatives, which is why Rifkin thinks CNS will eventually be vindicated.

Furthermore, CNS has profound implications for the question of life’s meaning. “In a world of branching universes conducive to life, ultimate cosmic doom may be avoided, keeping alive the possibility of eternity—not for us as individuals, or for Homo sapiens, but for the existence of life at large in the cosmos.” So the future of the cosmos is open, still to be determined—surely a more hopeful message that inevitable cosmic death. Yet this does not imply that we were meant to be here, that the universe cares about us, or that any teleology is at work—Rifkin definitely rejects any god of the gaps.

In the end, CNS, like any scientific idea, stands or falls on the evidence. “If evidence proves any one of the cosmological alternatives—or an entirely new idea altogether—we will embrace reality, no matter where it leads, and be struck with awe at our ability to discover the grandest of cosmological truths and our place in the universe.”

Commentary

I am unqualified to adjudicate between various cosmological theories but CNS appears to be a robust theory that is consistent with perhaps the greatest idea of all time—the idea that everything, from the cell to the cosmos, evolves over time.

Moreover, CNS provides a straightforward solution to the so-called fine-tuning problem. I have no doubt that there is a naturalistic solution to this problem—assuming we can even be sure the cosmos is fine-tuned. (Some theorists suggest we don’t know enough to say for sure.) But if our universe is fine-tuned, then naturalistic solutions will explain it. Scientific solutions will close this gap in our knowledge like they have previously closed so many others. This is after all one of the main reasons why so few philosophers are non-naturalists. Science works.

Still, people will find their gods hiding in the gaps of quantum or cosmological theories, or in dark matter or energy. If you are determined to believe something it is hard to change your mind. But defenders of the gods fight a rearguard action—scientific knowledge is relentless—and these hidden gods are nothing like the traditional ones. Traditional gods are dead.

And as science closes the gaps in our knowledge the gods will recede further and further into the recesses of infinite space and time until they vanish altogether, slowly blown away, not by cosmic winds, but by ever-encroaching thought.

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This essay was originally published on this blog on June 20, 2014.

Bryan Magee: The Agnostic

Bryan Magee (1930 – 2019) has had a multifaceted career as a professor of philosophy, music and theater critic, BBC broadcaster, public intellectual, and member of Parliament. He has starred in two acclaimed television series about philosophy: Men of Ideas (1978) and The Great Philosophers (1987). He is best known as a popularizer of philosophy. His easy-to-read books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages, include:

Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper;
The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy;
Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with Fifteen Leading Philosophers;
Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper;
The Story of Philosophy: 2,500 Years of Great Thinkers from Socrates to the Existentialists and Beyond;
and Men of Ideas.

Now, at age 86, he has written Ultimate Questions, a summary of a lifetime of thinking about “the fundamentals of the human condition.” Its basic theme is that we know little about the human condition since reality comes to us filtered through the senses and the limitations of our intellect and language. The most honest response to this predicament is agnosticism.

Magee begins considering that “What we call civilization has existed for something like six thousand years.” If you remember that there have always been some individuals who have lived a hundred years this means that “the whole of civilization has occurred with the successive lifetimes of sixty people …” Furthermore, “most people are as provincial in time as they are in space: they huddle down into their time and regard it as their total environment…” They don’t think about the little sliver of time and space that they occupy. Thus begins his meditation on agnosticism.

Furthermore, we are ignorant of the knowledge of our ultimate nature: “We, who do not know what we are, have to fashion lives for ourselves in a universe of which we know little and understand less.” Yet this situation doesn’t lead Magee to despair. Instead, he calls for “an active agnosticism,” which is “a positive principle of procedure, an openness to the fact that we do not know, followed by intellectually honest enquiry in full receptivity of mind.” If he had to choose a tag he says, it would be “the agnostic.”

However most people can’t live with uncertainty, with pieces missing from the jigsaw puzzle as Magee puts it, and they replace the unknown with religion. But religion “is a form of unjustified evasion, a failure to face up to the reality of ignorance as our natural and inevitable starting-point.” The challenge of life is to live and die in a world that we don’t understand “without either … denying the mysteriousness of it or … grasping at supernatural explanations.”

Yet he takes comfort in what he calls the “us-dependent,” rather than the independent or isolated: “One essential aspect of our situation is that we are social creatures, indeed social creations: each one of us is created by two other people. If we are not cared for by them or someone taking their place, we die. Our existence and our survival both require active involvement by others.”(What a beautiful rejoined to all those who banter on and on about being self-made men. Those who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.)

In the broadest light, the book attempts to reply to the assertion: “I know that I exist, but I do not know what I am.” But Magee, after decades of searching, replies that none of us know the answers to the big questions. As for faith, Magee answers firmly: “I can think of no other context in which people are commended for the firmness of beliefs for which there is little or no evidence.” Magee accepts that some need the comfort of religion because, for example, they can’t accept their own death, and he leaves such people undisturbed. “But I do regard such people as no longer committed to the pursuit of truth.”

Magee believes contra Hume that he has a self “but I am unable to fathom its inner nature, and I have no idea what happens to it when I die.” But he rejects the view that being unable to answer ultimate questions implies that asking them is worthless, inasmuch as some understanding of ourselves and the world can still be attained. “We may not know where we are, but there is a world of difference between being lost in daylight and being lost in the dark.” Still, none of this implies relativism, as reason and evidence support some ideas and theories over others. Some things are more likely to be true and rational people proportion their assent to evidence.

As for death, “the prospect of permanent oblivion” is painful. In death, the magic of the world and our consciousness of it vanishes. Nonetheless, the brave face this truth without comforting themselves with false narratives. Magee says that at the moment of death “I may then be in the position of a man whose candle goes out and plunges him into pitch blackness at the very instant when he thought he was about to find what he was looking for.”

These are the words of a brave and fearless intellect. What a wonderful book.

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Note. This post first appeared on this blog on May 26, 2016.