John G. Messerly's Blog, page 46

Make the Angels Weep

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Watching and listening to so many politicians, clergy, evangelists, television blowhards, and ordinary citizens in my country today reminds me of one of my favorite passages in all of world literature. It is from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, [image error]and it occurs when the character Isabella begs for the life of her brother, Claudio, who has been condemned to death for impregnating his fiancée before they were married.

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d;

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,

As make the angels weep.

When I hear those vying for the most important political position in the country court the support of those who advocate death for people with certain sexual orientations, and want to kill thousands of innocent civilians—to say nothing of rejecting and traumatizing refugees, mass incarceration and solitary confinement, denial of health-care and more

—it reveals the fact that puritanical legal codes, barbaric punishments, and ape-brain ignorance and treachery are still with us. It reminds me of how those who know so little—of biology, psychology, history, culture, political philosophy and more—propound on those topics nevertheless.

The ignorant are so self-assured. They know nothing of the people they despise, of the countries they bomb, and of the people they punish, but they ignore their own infallibility. They know nothing of economics or philosophy, of science or technology, of culture or history, but they correct the experts. And why not? They don’t believe in experts.

They are angry apes—as Shakespeare said centuries before Darwin confirmed the fact. They have neither knowledge nor self-knowledge. We are not angels; we are modified monkeys. Of course, there are no angels, but if there were they would surely weep at the spectacle. Given a little fame, fortune, and authority … apes become so self-assured.

So much better to be a skeptic, a fallibilist, or issue humble disclaimers.

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(Note. This post was originally published on this blog on November 21, 2015.)

 

We Must Love One Another or Die

In my last post, I reflected on Philip Larkin‘s poem “An Arundel Tomb,” especially it’s haunting last line, “What will survive of us is love.” It reminded me of another great 20th century English poet, W. H. Auden, who also wrote a poignant line about love and death, “We must love one another or die.”

Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939“—with its obvious reference to the beginning of World War II—begins like this:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

And the poem originally had this penultimate stanza:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Auden famously turned against this stanzas final line, omitting it when the poem was reprinted in Collected Poems[image error] (1945). He later wrote that he loathed the poem, resolving to exclude it from further collections, refusing to grant permission that it be reprinted, and calling the poem “trash which he is ashamed to have written.” He eventually allowed the poem to be included in a collection, but only after altering the line to read: “We must love one another and die.”

Clearly the original sentiment—we must love one another or die—suggests that love could save us from war, or even conquer death. The revised version—we must love one another and die—expresses an existential sentiment. We can love, but it makes no real difference, for we all die. Life is ultimately tragedy.

I am not sure why Auden turned against the line so vehemently and publicly. Maybe he was embarrassed by its emotional earnestness or ashamed of such a public display of sentiment. Yet the line as originally written is at least partly true—unless we become more altruistic, we will destroy ourselves. But can we go further and say that love conquers death? Here we have no answers, we only have hope.

The hope that traces of our love will reverberate through time, in ripples and waves that will one day reach peaceful shores now unbeknownst to us.

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(Note. This post was originally published on my blog on May 22, 2014.)

Philip Larkin: “An Arundel Tomb”

Pictured above is the 14th-century tomb effigy in Chichester Cathedral that inspired Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb.” It is the tomb of Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel (1306-1376), and his wife, Eleanor of Lancaster, Countess of Arundel (1311- 1372). Notice how Richard’s glove has been removed so he can grasp the flesh of Eleanor’s hand. The poem ends with these evocative lines:

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin is generally considered one of the greatest English-language poets of the last century. However, the last line above is uncharacteristic of Larkin’s typically downbeat poetry.

So what does the line “What will survive us is love” mean? Larkin may be implying that the lovers are joined in death as they were in life, at least until the ravages of time finally erase their stone figures. Maybe the joined hands were the sculptor’s idea and do not reflect a real love at all—perhaps that is the meaning of the line “transfigured them into untruth.” Larkin himself said the tomb deeply affected him, but he also scribbled at the bottom of one draft: “love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years.” Yet the poem doesn’t say that “love is stronger than death.” It says love survives us, and to survive something doesn’t make you stronger than it.

Still, survival is a partial victory. But what might survive? Perhaps it is the enduring belief that love is remarkable, that its appearance in a world of anger and cruelty is so astonishing. Or perhaps it is that traces of our love reverberate through time, in ripples and waves that may one day reach peaceful shores now unbeknownst to us. Maybe love doesn’t disappear into nothingness, after all, maybe love is stronger than death.

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(Note. This post was originally published on this blog on May 21, 2014.)

Could Rhetoric in the USA Lead to Genocide?

“Ten Stages of Genocide” was a document developed by Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, a professor at the University of Mary Washington. Stanton has served as the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and now leads Genocide Watch, a non-profit organization dedicated to the fight against genocide. (“Ten Stages of Genocide” was originally published in 1996 as the “Eight Stages of Genocide,” and revised in 2013.)

“Ten Stages of Genocide” is a formula for how a society can engage in genocide. Genocide cannot be committed by an individual or small group; rather, it takes the cooperation of a large number of people and the state. The genocidal process starts with prejudice that continues to grow. By knowing the stages of genocide, citizens are better equipped to identify the warning signs and stop the process from continuing.1

Stanton notes that:

Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear. Stages may occur simultaneously. Logically, later stages must be preceded by earlier stages.  But all stages continue to operate throughout the process.2

Reflections on Where We Stand in America Today

The USA has committed war crimes, engaged in unlawful torture, annihilated civilian populations, supported brutal dictators, and overthrown democratically elected governments. The USA certainly committed genocide on the Native Americans and came close to doing so to African-Americans. So there is no reason to think that won’t commit more genocide in the future. Let’s look at where we stand on each stage in America today regarding various groups.

1. Classification – The “us vs. them” mentality is everywhere–conservatives vs. liberals; evangelicals vs. secularists; rural vs urban; whites vs. African-Americans, Hispanics; Native Americans; Asian Americans;  etc. SUCH CLASSIFICATION OCCURS IN THE USA, AND IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

2. Symbolization – Certain groups–especially African-Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics—are forced to identify themselves with papers to document residency, with identification to vote, etc. Conclusion – SUCH SYMBOLIZATION OCCURS IN THE USA, AND IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

3. Discrimination – Discrimination against certain groups is rampant—especially of the above ones plus the LGBTQ community. Conclusion – SUCH DISCRIMINATION OCCURS IN THE USA, AND IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

4. Dehumanization – This occurs regarding the above groups. Hate propaganda and hate speech is ubiquitous in the media consumed by millions. Conclusion – SUCH DEHUMANIZATION OCCURS IN THE USA AND IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

5. Organization – State-backed police brutality, and an increasingly biased Department of Justice, especially against the above groups, is well-known in the USA. Militias motivated by hate are on the rise. Conclusion – SUCH ORGANIZATION OCCURS IN THE USA, AND IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

6. Polarization – Right-wing media broadcasts anger, outrage, and hate. Conclusion – SUCH POLARIZATION OCCURS IN THE USA, AND IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

LAST FOUR STAGES HAVE NOT BEEN REACHED IN THE USA.

(** UPDATE – JULY 2019 ** – Stage 7 has begun at our southern border. Denial of asylum, children in cages, etc. All of which violates international law. The irony is that: 1) our country desperately needs young immigrants; and 2) conditions in Central America result in large part from American intervention there—especially related to the war on drugs.)

7. PREPARATION: Official action to remove/relocate people. Conclusion – SUCH PREPARATION OCCURS TO SOME EXTENT, MOSTLY REGARDING HISPANICS AND AFRICAN-AMERICANS, BUT IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

8. PERSECUTION: Murders, theft of property, segregation into ghettos. Conclusion – SUCH PERSECUTION OCCURS TO SOME EXTENT MOSTLY REGARDING HISPANICS AND AFRICAN-AMERICANS, BUT IS INCREASING WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

9. EXTERMINATION: THIS STAGE HAS NOT BEEN REACHED.

10. DENIAL: THIS STAGE HAS NOT BEEN REACHED.

Reflections on Where We Are Going in the USA 

I have written previously about the possibility of civil war in America today. As for the presence of hate speech directed toward certain groups—especially African-Americans, Hispanics; Native Americans;  Asian-Americans; LGBTQ persons and women—the trends are ominous.

There is no way to predict where this will lead. Perhaps we are going through an especially ugly phase brought about by technology’s impact on employment, maybe we are just experiencing a particularly bad political moment, or maybe we haven’t learned how to be proper gatekeepers of the new media landscape which allows individuals to be manipulated in protective bubbles of disinformation and lies. Or perhaps the situation is just what you expect periodically from modified monkeys with brains formed in the Pleistocene.

But hate, anger, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies have gone mainstream, especially with the rise of right-wing media over the last twenty years, a situation exacerbated by the Trump administration. Let’s hope this is a passing phase, for it is a dangerous one. The anger, hatred, and division sown by right-wing fanatics, along with their attacks on expertise, science, education, tolerance, and the liberal values that help humans escape the Dark Ages, is taking its toll. And a society divorced from science and truth, from tolerance, justice, and fairness, is not a place where humans will flourish. In fact, in an increasingly complex world we need to have faith in experts more than ever.

For more detail on each stage, here are some quotes from Stanton’s document:

1. CLASSIFICATION:

“All cultures have categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality … The main preventive measure at this early stage is to develop universalistic institutions that transcend ethnic or racial divisions, that actively promote tolerance and understanding, and that promote classifications that transcend the divisions … This search for common ground is vital to early prevention of genocide.”

2. SYMBOLIZATION:

“We give names or other symbols to the classifications … and apply the symbols to members of groups … When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups … To combat symbolization, hate symbols can be legally forbidden (swastikas) as can hate speech. Group marking … can be outlawed … The problem is that legal limitations will fail if unsupported by popular cultural enforcement …”

3. DISCRIMINATION:

“A dominant group uses law, custom, and political power to deny the rights of other groups. The powerless group may not be accorded full civil rights or even citizenship … Prevention against discrimination means full political empowerment and citizenship rights for all groups in a society. Discrimination on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion should be outlawed …”

4. DEHUMANIZATION:

“One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder. At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group … Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable … Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished.”

5. ORGANIZATION:

Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, often using militias to provide deniability of state responsibility … Sometimes organization is informal … or decentralized … Special army units or militias are often trained and armed. Plans are made for genocidal killings. To combat this stage, membership in these militias should be outlawed.”

6. POLARIZATION:

“Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda … Extremist terrorism targets moderates, intimidating and silencing the center … Prevention may mean security protection for moderate leaders or assistance to human rights groups.”

7.  PREPARATION:

“National or perpetrator group leaders plan the “Final Solution”… They often use euphemisms to cloak their intentions, such as referring to their goals as “ethnic cleansing,” “purification,” or “counter-terrorism.” They build armies, buy weapons and train their troops and militias. They indoctrinate the populace with fear of the victim group.  Leaders often claim that “if we don’t kill them, they will kill us.”

8. PERSECUTION:

“Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. In state-sponsored genocide, members of victim groups may be forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is often expropriated. Sometimes they are even segregated into ghettos, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved.  Genocidal massacres begin.”

9. EXTERMINATION:

Extermination begins, and quickly becomes the mass killing legally called “genocide.” It is “extermination” to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. When it is sponsored by the state, the armed forces often work with militias to do the killing. Sometimes the genocide results in revenge killings by groups against each other, creating the downward whirlpool-like cycle of bilateral genocide …”

10. DENIAL:

“is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.”

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from the Genocide Education Process
from “The Ten Stages of Genocide.“

(Note this essay was originally published on this blog on September 11, 2017.)

Pandora’s Box

[image error]Lawrence Alma-Tadema‘s water-color of an ambivalent Pandora, 1881

In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman created by the gods. Zeus ordered her to be molded out of the earth as part of humanity’s punishment for Prometheus’ theft of the secret of fire. According to the myth, the gods gave her a jar that contained all the evils of the World and ordered her not to open it.

Nonetheless, Pandora opened the jar (in modern accounts often mistranslated as “Pandora’s box“) releasing all the evils that visit humanity like pain and suffering, leaving only hope (expectation) inside once she had closed it again. (Most scholars translate the Greek word elpis as “expectation.”) The Pandora myth is a theodicy—an attempt to explain why evil exists in the world. (The idiom “to open a Pandora’s box”, means to do or start something that will cause many unforeseen problems.)

The key question is how to interpret the myth. Is the imprisonment of hope inside the jar a benefit for humanity, or a further bane? If hope is another evil, then we should be thankful that hope was withheld. The idea is that by hoping for or expecting a good life that we can never have, we prolong our torment. Thus it is better to live without hope, and it is good that hope remained in the jar. But if hope is good, then its imprisonment makes life even more dreary and insufferable. In this case, all the evils were scattered from the jar, while the one potentially mitigating force, hope, remains locked inside. However, this latter interpretation causes us to wonder why this good hope was in the jar of evils in the first place. To this question, I have no answer.

But I do have another interpretation. Perhaps hope is good, and it is good that it remained in the jar. Perhaps hope was originally another evil but after being opened hope was transformed into good hope. It’s as if hope, separated from evil, takes on a new character. So its preservation in the jar preserves this good hope which can then (somehow) be accessed when needed. I grant this is a strained interpretation.

Still, my interpretation depends on understanding hope, not as an expectation, but as an attitude that leads us to act rather than despair. This is the good kind of hope preserved in the jar. To better understand this, remember the words of Aeschylus from his tragedy,

Prometheus Bound. Prometheus’ two great gifts to humanity are hope and fire. Hope aids our struggle for a better future while fire, the source of technology, makes success in that struggle possible. Hope, in fact, is the first gift that Aeschylus mentions.

Chorus: Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?

Prometheus – I stopped mortals from foreseeing their fate.

Chorus – What kind of cure did you discover for this sickness?

Prometheus – I established in them blind hopes.

Chorus – This is a great benefit you gave to men.

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(Note. This essay was originally published on this blog on March 11 2017.)

Is There A Future for Humanity?

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Bill Joy (1954 – ) is an American computer scientist who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. His now famous Wired magazine essay, “Why the future doesn’t need us,” (2000) sets forth his deep concerns over the development of modern technologies. 

Joy traces his worries to a discussion he had with Ray Kurzweil at a conference in 1998. He had read an early draft of Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and found it deeply disturbing. Subsequently, he encountered arguments by the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski argued that if machines do all of society’s work, as they inevitably will, then we can: a) let the machines make all the decisions; or b) maintain human control over the machines.

If we choose “a” then we are at the mercy of our machines. It is not that we would give them control or that they would take control, rather, we might become so dependent on them that we would have to accept their commands. Needless to say, Joy doesn’t like this scenario. If we choose “b” then control would be in the hands of an elite, and the masses would be unnecessary. In that case, the tiny elite: 1) would exterminate the masses; 2) reduce their birthrate so they slowly became extinct; or 3) become benevolent shepherds to the masses. The first two scenarios entail our extinction, but even the third option is bad. In this last scenario, the elite would fulfill all physical and psychological needs of the masses, while at the same time engineering the masses to sublimate their desire for power. In this case, the masses might be happy, but they wouldn’t be free.

Joy finds these arguments both convincing and troubling. About this time Joy read Hans Moravec’s book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind[image error] where he found predictions similar to Kurzweil’s. Joy was especially concerned by Moravec’s claim that technological superiors always defeat technological inferiors, as well as his claim that humans will become extinct as they merge with the robots. Disturbed, Joy consulted other computer scientists who, for the most part, agreed with these predictions.

Joy’s worries focus on the transforming technologies of the 21st century—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR). What is particularly problematic about them is their potential to self-replicate. This makes them inherently more dangerous than 20th-century technologies—nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—which are expensive to build and require rare raw materials. By contrast, 21st-century technologies allow for small groups or individuals to bring about massive destruction. Joy also argues that we will soon achieve the computing power necessary to implement some of the scenarios envisioned by Kurzweil and Moravec, but worries that we overestimate our design abilities. Such hubris may lead to disaster.

For example, robotics is primarily motivated by the desire to be immortal—by downloading ourselves into them. But Joy doesn’t believe that we will be human after the download or that the robots would be our children. As for genetic engineering, it will create new crops, plants, and eventually new species including many variations of human species, but Joy fears that we don’t know enough to safely conduct such experiments. And nanotechnology confronts the so-called “gray goo” problem—self-replicating nanobots out of control. In short, we may be on the verge of killing ourselves! Is it not arrogant, he wonders, to design a robot replacement species when we so often make design mistakes?

Joy concludes that we ought to relinquish these technologies before it’s too late. Yes, GNR may bring happiness and immortality, but should we risk the survival or the species for such goals? Joy thinks not.

Summary – Genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are too dangerous to pursue; we should abandon them. (I think Joy’s call for relinquishment is unrealistic. For more see my peer-reviewed essay “Critique of Bill Joy’s ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.’“)

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Bill Joy, “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired Magazine, April 2000.

(Note, This essay was originally published on this blog on February 15, 2016.)

Vacation?

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I’ve written over a thousand posts in the 61/2 years since I started my blog, so an average of about 3 a week. With the nice weather outside I thought I’d take a little time off to just walk around the city, read many things that I’ve put on hold, spend more time with my grandchildren, etc. I won’t be going anywhere as our kids still need us to babysit, so the above is not a picture of the vacation I’m going to take! My vacation just means that for the next month or so I’ll reprint some of my older posts. I’ll try to reprint good ones (I assume there are some bad ones) and use essays from at least 3 or more years ago that might be forgotten. This will give me a little break from working on the blog for the first time since I started it.

In addition, as Oxford University Press has agreed to commission an original essay from me on the meaning of life to be published in the new 7th edition of Lewis Vaughn’s anthology, The Moral Life, this will allow me some time to think about that project. The book now includes a chapter on the meaning of life consisting of a short intro by Vaughn plus a selection of readings by Viktor Frankl, Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, Voltaire, Epicurus, Siddhartha Gautama, and Richard Taylor and now me. As you are probably aware, collectively these guys are known as the big 8 of philosophy! (This is a joke but I think its very funny:)

So I hope you enjoy some of my previous essays that you may have missed. I’m just going to keep up with all the world’s bad news, watch a few movies, read philosophy as always, enjoy my wife’s and grandkids company, and take long walks in the sunshine. My guess is that I’ll tire of this and be right back to writing new essays. On the other hand, maybe not!

“Freedom And Determinism: What We Can Learn From The Failures Of Two Pretty Good Arguments”

[image error](This essay first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily. Reprinted with permission.)

by CHARLIE HUENEMANN

The “Consequence Argument” is a powerful argument for the conclusion that, if determinism is true, then we have no control over what we do or will do. The argument is straightforward and simple (as given in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

Premise 1: No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.

Premise 2: No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).

Conclusion: Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

Premise 1 seems awfully secure. Authors of history books might change people’s beliefs about the past, but try as they might, they won’t actually change the past. Similarly, scientists may write about the laws of nature however they please, but nothing they write will change those laws. No one can control the facts of the past, or the laws of nature.

Premise 2 looks pretty good too. For at least great big patches of nature, events happen because of the way things are or have been, and because of the continuous governance of the laws of nature. True, there are subatomic phenomena that seem to be indeterministic (Einstein was wrong, and God or nature does seem to roll teensy-weensy dice). But for whatever reason, it also seems that as these subatomic bits are assembled into larger parts of nature, the dice rolling seems to no longer have any effect, and at that point we enter upon a deterministic universe. Certainly by the time we get to big globs of neurons within the skulls of homo sapiens, wired up to eyeballs and limbs, we are in a domain where the fact is that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future.

And the conclusion follows: we have no power to affect the future. So that’s it. We’re done.

Of course, this conclusion seems false to most of us, since we spend inordinate amounts of time and energy in attempts to shape the future. We buy groceries for dinner, invest in retirement accounts, look both ways before crossing the street, and so on. In fact, some philosophers are so convinced that the conclusion of the Consequence Argument is false that they use it to argue that Premise 2 must be false (that is, that determinism is false).

Now here is another simple and compelling argument, which I will call the “Unpredictability Argument”:

Premise 1: No one has thorough knowledge of the facts of the past and the laws of nature.

Premise 2: Successful prediction of the future requires thorough knowledge of the facts of the past and the laws of nature.

Conclusion: No one can successfully predict the future.

Again, Premise 1 is unassailable. No matter how much history someone knows, they certainly don’t know all the relevant facts of the past that go into making things happen in the way they happen. Even the simple event of pouring cream into coffee entails countless interactions among countless particles that only Laplace’s demon could track. There’s too much information for any real being to master.

Premise 2 is pretty secure also, if determinism is true. If we think of the future as determined by all the relevant facts of the past put together with the laws of nature, then making a successful prediction of the future should require knowing those facts as well as knowing the relevant laws of nature. Making a prediction without that knowledge is simply making a guess, and even if the guess turns out to be true, it would not be honest to call it a prediction. It was just a guess or a hunch.

And, once again, the conclusion follows; though, once again, it sure seems false. Consider the predictions you make while entering a busy traffic intersection. That guy looks like he’s going to turn, even though his blinker isn’t on; that other guy seems to be going straight; the pedestrian is waiting to see what I’m going to do, etc. We make wrong predictions sometimes, with tragic consequences, but it is astonishing how often we are right, and how brilliant we are in general at making accurate predictions of incredibly complex phenomena. And we make these predictions armed with only the slightest knowledge of the most superficial facts. Indeed, none of the data we use in making our predictions is of any use whatsoever for any physicist or neuroscientist who is trying to construct an account of the situation. All our knowledge and predictions are superficial in the extreme. They do not consist of any of the sorts of facts that are at work in the Consequence Argument.

There is a lesson to be learned from these two plausible but ultimately unconvincing arguments. The lesson is that there are many levels of causality. If we insist that the only real causes are those treated by the most fundamental sciences, we end up with the Unpredictability Argument. So, to make sense of our remarkably successful powers of prediction, we need to open the gates a little and allow for causality that isn’t covered by the most fundamental sciences.

We have to allow for entities like beliefs, motivations, and goals, and the sorts of behavior that convey to us the presence of those entities. We have to allow also for further background assumptions, not quite laws of nature, about what people are likely to do, or what makes sense for them to do. We have to let into our account the sorts of things we actually use as we go about making ordinary predictions. Call these auxiliary epistemic resources “squishy stuff”.

It’s not clear that any of the squishy stuff can be identified strictly with neural states, let alone with the more basic physical facts underlying them. Not that there’s no connection, of course; it’s just that the more fundamental account will not help us at all in understanding what those beliefs are or what causal roles they play. It would be like trying to understand the plot of Anna Karenina by doing histograms of the words in the novel, or diagramming all its sentences. Our understanding of what’s going on doesn’t require knowledge of facts at that level. Instead, we require knowledge of states or entities that don’t show up at the basic level. We require psychological and social knowledge, which isn’t unnatural or miraculous, but also isn’t at all augmented by our understanding of the more basic physical facts underlying it.

But once we let in the squishy stuff, we can start talking about people’s beliefs, motivations, and intentions to affect the future. We can identify behavior that arises from an agent’s own beliefs and goals, and behavior that is caused by other factors. In this way we can begin to identify the actions that count as “free” as well as those that seem less free, or forced by circumstance. At that point, we have undermined our confidence in the conclusion of the Consequence Argument. If we try to put our finger on where it goes wrong, we might point to the appeal to “the facts of the past.” For the facts of the past are not the most relevant determinants of what we end up doing. What is more relevant are our goals, our hopes, our motivations, our beliefs, etc., which are not exactly facts of the past, but features of our present states of mind, states in which we make our decisions about what to do. For obviously we do have some power over some facts of the future, even if that power is not evident in an analysis of all the microphysical bits and forces composing us. Once again, if we are skeptical that there is more to us than what the microphysical account offers, we shall have to face the Unpredictability Argument, and we shall have to try to explain our success in prediction when we have no access to the microphysical account.

The moral of this story is that sometimes this is how philosophy works: we learn a bit more about our ways of conceiving the world by noticing the shortcomings of plausible arguments that are based upon intellectual oversimplifications. We learn that the squishy stuff we thought could be safely ignored in one context turns out to be crucial in some other context. Human reality, it turns out, often has two hands: on the one hand is this, and on the other hand is that. The on-going challenge is to assign appropriate weights to the things in those hands.

(The ideas in this essay were caused (at some level) by listening to Sean Carroll’s conversation with Jenann Ismael in episode 80 of his podcast, Mindscape.)

The Past Is Alive

[image error]Will and Ariel Durant (1930)

“It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time.

You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.” (As quoted in “The Gentle Philosopher” (2006) by John Little at the Will Durant Foundation)

Durant is clearly right. The present is the result of the past, and the future will be the result of what preceded it. This thought brings with it unimaginable responsibility, assuming we reject moral nihilism. The choices we make will play a small part in determining whether a better or worse future will come to be or if there will be a future at all. A sobering thought.

In addition to the moral realm, there are great metaphysical questions regarding time. I’ll address those briefly in a future post.

Dan Fogelberg: In The Passage

I’ve expressed my appreciation for the music and lyrics of Dan Fogelberg before. I also find myself especially moved by songs about the passage of time. In this song, Dan writes about the value of looking to and learning from the past. Here are the song’s lyrics.

There’s a ring around the moon tonight and a chill in the air

And a fire in the stars that hang so near, so near

There’s a sound in the wind that blows through the wild mountain holds

Like the sighs of a thousand crying souls, crying souls

There’s a time when the traveler is fated to find

That insight has turned his gaze behind, behind

And the steps taken yesterday will beckon again

And lead to his weary journey’s end, his journey’s end

And in the passage from the cradle to the grave we are born, madly dancing

Rushing headlong through the crashing of the days

We run on and on without a backwards glance

We run on and on without a backwards glance

I cast my fate with the wife of Lot I turned my gaze around

Knowing neither what I sought nor what was to be found

Heeding weakness, feeding strength, oh life at length is frail

I seek again the river’s source through time’s dark shadowed veil

In the fast fading century, as we spin through the years

I pray that our failing vision clears, our vision clears

And in the passage from the cradle to the grave we are born, madly dancing

Rushing headlong through the crashing of the days

We run on and on without a backwards glance

We run on and on without a backwards glance

The places dash and the faces dart like fishes in a dream

Hiding ‘neath the murky banks of long forgotten streams

The lines of life are never long when seen from end to end

The future’s never coming, and the past has never been

There’s a ring around the moon tonight, and a chill in the air

And a fire in the stars that hang so near, so near

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Dan Fogelberg
In The Passage lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC