John G. Messerly's Blog, page 6

Will Our Democracy Survive This Election?

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The Magna Carta is a document that established the rule of law and limited the power of the king in England. It should be self-evident that we are ALL better off with limitations on the ruler’s power–even those who temporarily are in his/her good graces.

There is nothing I could write that would change the minds of those who either don’t understand what they’re voting for or who actually want a fascist regime. Nothing changed the minds of many Germans before WWII, or those who opposed Truman’s national health care plan, or those who stupidly voted for Brexit, and so it goes. If only people could really comprehend what they are unleashing, and the suffering their ignorance will bring about. But civilization has always hung by a very narrow thread. And if we lose we will all have to live with the consequences. But I must say that when I first taught American Political Thought I did not imagine that America would be on the brink of a fascism thirty years later.

However, rather than write what would be obvious to any good and thoughtful person. let me share a few excerpts from one of my favorite bloggers. These are from his latest post.

“How can this election be close?”

It’s a cry of frustration I hear almost every day in one way or another, not just from Substack bloggers and TV talking heads, but also on social media and from personal friends.

Sure, there are about as many Republicans as Democrats in the country, and as many conservatives as liberals. But one of the two candidates is Donald Trump. I could easily imagine someone like Nikki Haley winning. But the case against Trump should be both obvious and compelling.

We all saw him raise a mob and send it to attack the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election his own people told him he lost fair and square. We lived through his mismanagement of Covid, which led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths. We see him day after day, rambling incoherently through interviews and unable to answer questions about the few policies he has proposed. We see key members of his first administration — like Chief of Staff John Kelly and JCS Chair Mark Milley — warn us that he is a fascist and should never again hold an office of public trust. We hear him repeat the words of past fascist leaders, telling us that his chosen scapegoats — immigrants, in preference to Hitler’s Jews (most of the time) — are “poisoning the blood of our country” and need to be rounded up by the millions. We hear him recite the eternal tropes of racism, claiming that immigrants have “bad genes” that make them criminals, but that he himself has “great genes” that make him smart. We hear him lie, virtually with every breath, about a bad economy, soaring crime, and an immigrant crime wave — none of which exist anywhere outside his imagination.

…

If you feel this frustration, imagine what it’s like for bloggers like me. Day after day, I motivate myself with this myth: If I could only explain things clearly enough, people would understand; and once they understood, the great majority of them would do the right thing. So the prospect of another Trump presidency doesn’t just make me fear for my country, it undermines my identity.

More and more it becomes apparent that the problem isn’t that half the country doesn’t understand. Many of them actively want a fascist government that will implement the cruelty they feel in their hearts. Many who aren’t openly rooting for that cruelty refuse to understand what Trump is, and no one can make them understand against their will. They will accept any excuse for his behavior, even excuses that shift from month to month and contradict the previous excuses.

After getting the above off his chest Doug (PhD mathematics, Univ. of Chicago) considers some of the reasons people support fascism:

a) fantasies of crime –

“… crime has been dropping for decades, and was no better under Trump than under Biden and Harris. Crime briefly blipped upward during both the Trump and Biden years of the Covid pandemic, but in recent years the long-term decline has resumed.”

…

b) the trans “threat” –

…[Trans people figure prominently in several of the ads … directed at people whose lives are not affected by the issues being raised. The Algerian boxer Trump attacked was not trans. The actual number of transwomen athletes in school sports is tiny — about 40 out of 500,000 NCAA athletes, according to one report — and no women’s league in any sport in the country is dominated by trans stars. The real stars of women’s sports — Caitlin Clark, for example, or Serena Williams — were identified as female at birth. Transwomen who have taken puberty-blocking drugs have only minor advantages over other high-school or college-age women. The problem of transwomen beating down “real” women is itself not real.

Of course, there is a real men-beating-women problem in our society, but Republicans do not seem concerned about it. Whenever proposed legislation would protect women — say, by closing the “boyfriend loophole” in laws the prevent domestic abusers from owning guns — the opposition will be almost entirely Republican.”

…

c) immigrants “destroying our country” –

“The examples Trump offers are horrifying: In Springfield, Ohio “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Aurora, Colorado is a “war zone”, occupied by “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world.

But none of that is true, and even local Republican officials push back against Trump’s false claims. Such lies can’t be aimed at winning votes in the communities he’s talking about, because local people can simply open their eyes and see that the world he’s describing isn’t real.

So the target audience must be elsewhere.

Something similar is going on in Trump’s rhetoric about American cities, especially major cities in key swing states: Milwaukee is “horrible”. Philadelphia is “ravaged by bloodshed and crime”. If Harris is elected, he claims, “the whole country will end up being like Detroit.” (Harris and Detroit struck back with this ad, about how the city has rebuilt itself: America will be like Detroit? “He should be so god damn lucky.”)

“These cities,” Trump said in a 2020 town hall. “It’s like living in hell.”

Those comments aren’t intended to earn votes in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Detroit — Democratic strongholds where people can simply open their eyes and see that on the whole life is not particularly hellish. Rather, they’re aimed at suburban and rural voters who never go to the cities because they believe terrible things about them.”

What’s going on? –

“I set out to explain how this election can be close, and so far I haven’t. If you think of politics as being about problems and solutions, none of the arguments Trump and other MAGA Republicans are making add up. They are offering to solve problems their voters don’t have, and to protect them from people who do them no harm. (Trans people, for example, have issues with their own genders, not yours. Crime in Atlanta hurts Atlantans, not people in Marjorie Taylor Green’s district, where the largest city, Rome, has 37,000 people. If undocumented immigrants affect your life, it’s probably by picking the vegetables you eat or washing the dishes in your favorite restaurant.)

So how do all these arguments work? Why doesn’t it matter that so many of them are easily debunked? And how do they coalesce into a coherent whole? Fortunately, we don’t have to figure this out for ourselves, because we can call in a MAGA expert: Tucker Carlson. Speaking at a Trump rally in Georgia Wednesday, Tucker pulled it all together:”

(Carlson) If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it, and those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for them.

No. There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. [loud cheering] Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children, they live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know: “Get to your room right now and think about what you did.”

And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way. It has to be this way, because it’s true. And you’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did.”

That’s not said in the spirit of hate. It’s not said in the spirit of vengeance or bigotry. Far from it. It’s said in the spirit of justice, which is the purest and best thing there is. And without it, things fall apart. …

Not only do I think Donald Trump’s going to win, I think that the vibe shift has been so profound. … What you smell around you is the return of freedom, it’s the return of the country you grew up in. …

[The Democrats] need to lose. And at the end of all that, when they tell you they’ve won: No! You can look them straight in the face and say, “I’m sorry. Dad’s home. And he’s pissed.”

“How does that pull it all together? Most of us don’t parent teen-age girls we wish we could spank, so how does this little vignette capture why we should vote for Trump?

Let me explain: If you’re looking for the problems of ordinary American life, you’re looking in the wrong place. Trump is not talking about how you’re going to pay for college or find a job or afford a house or get healthcare or retire without starving. The problem his campaign is all about is on a different level altogether: You feel dislocated in today’s world.

That’s why his slogan is backward-looking: Make America Great Again. When is “again”? Back in July, the folks at Salon posed that question to people at the Republican Convention:”

What we found is that, whether they’re 30 or 70 years old, the typical RNC attendee thinks America was “great” when they were kids. They believe America lost its way coincidentally right at the time they were maturing into adulthood.

“For whatever reason, they now find themselves living in a world very different from “the country you grew up in”. Maybe it’s all the people chattering in languages they don’t understand. Maybe it’s being told that it’s racist or sexist to talk the way they’ve always talked. Maybe it’s having to deal with people who don’t look like either men or women to them, and being told that they’re the problem when they can’t keep track of which name or pronoun to use. Maybe it’s not being able to assume that everybody’s Christian or heterosexual, or not knowing what’s funny now, or hearing music that doesn’t sound like music. Maybe it’s not being able to get a real person on the phone, or receiving 100 pieces of junk mail for every letter they actually want, or dealing with women who earn more than men. Maybe it’s not recognizing half the countries on the globe or being reminded about George Washington’s slaves or hearing “land acknowledgements” about the Native Americans who once occupied the property where they live.

The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave.

All the apparent problems Trump talks about are just symbols, just ways to get his hands around this larger, more ineffable problem. Illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, transsexuals, women who get abortions — they’re all just people who don’t know how to behave. And that’s why it doesn’t matter if he’s making up his facts or that some particular thing never really happened. People don’t know how to behave, and they make the whole world feel weird and scary That’s real.

Similarly, all the solutions he talks about are really just symbols of one solution: We need to put somebody in charge who will be strong enough to make people behave.

That’s what Tucker spelled out: Dad needs to come home, the old-fashioned kind of Dad who yells and judges and punishes. He’ll tell the bad kids they’re bad, and he’ll keep spanking them hard until they learn to be good.

And then America will be great again, like it was when all of us were children.”

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My sincere thanks to the author of the blog Weekly Sift. What an extraordinarily well-written and researched essay.

And may good fortune save our country.

Quantum Neutral Monism

[image error]The circled dot was used by the Pythagoreans and later Greeks to represent the first metaphysical being, the Monad or The Absolute.

My last post elicited many thoughtful comments about monism and an artificial intelligence generated poem to describe it.

Chris Crawford–who holds a graduate degree in physics–found the idea of quantum neutral monism irritating, or as he put it,

This notion arouses my Inner Curmudgeon to, well, a kind of erection. I was trained as a physicist, and my notions of physical reality are narrowly defined. Ergo, I find the mysticism inherent in monism to be (to use a pejorative term) “contemptibly loosey-goosey”. Moreover, my sense of strict objectivity finds the notion that the human mind is some fundamental component of reality to be shamefully vainglorious on our part. I see Homo Sapiens, including its minds, to be nothing more than another species populating this earth. I’m quite certain that, a thousand years from now (truth be told, less than a hundred), civilization will have destroyed itself and Homo Sapiens will have reverted to its original evolutionary niche as a low-density population of hunter-gatherers. After all, that’s what we evolved to be. And a million years from now, Homo Sapiens will have gone the way of Ozymandias. So much for the mind as a fundamental component of reality.

In addition, he was not that impressed by the AI generated poem. As he wrote,

While I’m feeling so super-curmudgeonly, I’d like to sneer briefly at the recent burst of AI. It’s certainly impressive and it will surely have many uses greatly boosting our economic output. But we must not forget that these LLM forms of AI comprise nothing more than an extremely well-read parrot. This AI understands absolutely NOTHING. It is highly talented at cobbling together bits and pieces of text that it finds to be related to the topic at hand.

Paul Van Pelt agreed with many of Crawford’s points. Regarding human specialness he stated, “Mr. Crawford’s notions on vainglory may be extended to an accounting of anthropocentrism … We adore musing over how much we think we know, being cognitively superior and all.” And regarding AI he wrote, “can anyone show me how AI exhibits intention? I submit, it does not. It exhibits imitation, because that is all it knows.”

I would say that Crawford make the case for materialism, a philosophy held by many great philosophers throughout history. I am perfectly comfortable with matter being the only reality and mind just reducible to matter. (Like almost all contemporary philosophers I’m a naturalist.) And if that’s depressing–-it doesn’t have to be–-then we can be comforted by the fact that we may be wrong.

As for artificial intelligence, I am more optimistic than either Crawford or Van Pelt. I have written extensively about the subject and was influenced by the many great computer scientists in the CS department at The University of Texas at Austin where I taught for many years. Almost all of the believe that something like what we call consciousness will eventually be created in the lab. Ray Kurzweil made one of the first popular cases for sentient computers in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines:  which I have summarized extensively.

In general my view follows because I am a functionalist who argues that mental states (like pain) are equivalent to whatever physical system (cells, wires, chips, etc.) serves the function of creating experiences. For us, pain is neurons firing to link input with output, for aliens or robots, this might have to do with different biological or mechanical wiring. For more I’d refer readers to my other writings on the subject. I would add the caveat that philosophy of mind is a difficult subject and I’m far from an expert in it. Moreover I’m may very well be wrong about strong AI.

Lyle T. responed thoughtfully to the AI-generated poem writing, “I was disturbed by the poem….not the content, but rather it’s beauty. Am I some extinct Cardinal disturbed by Galileo? Or do my not yet formulated intuitional fears have some logical justification? I am nervous about AI. I just can’t truly explain why.”

After I responded that it was, nontheless, a beautiful poem, Lyle elaborated,

Agreed. It is a truly beautiful poem. Which is what disturbed me.

I suspect it is an extension of an inquiry on free will that your essays and their associated comments began for myself. Prior to the discussions here I thought that, for me anyway, free will was a settled matter. Pulling on the thread of that self-knitted sweater with the tools provided by this site caused a quick unraveling. Leading to the possibility that for each of us, with a brain running on the laws of physics….chemical, electrical, sub-atomic particles etc…the brain (us) is a strictly deterministic machine. Incapable of any output beyond the result determined by algorithms of physical laws. An obvious extension of that concept leads to the idea that all input to that machine has come from a universe that is ALSO strictly deterministic. Which could mean all the way back to the origins of physical matter itself (“turtles all the way down”). Literally a VAST windup toy.

… This AI generated poem brought all these musings back. Deterministic production of an almost sublime beauty. Perhaps, if one could know the position/movement of every atomic particle at the Big Bang (or whatever the start was), it would have been possible to know this poem would be written, published by Prof. Messerly on this site, and commented on by myself and Mr. Van Pelt. Is this AI truly mindless? If so, then perhaps so am I.

Yes, there is something unnerving to many about how the AI instantly generated a better and more profound poem than any human could have. I suppose this could make us feel inferior (obviously computers are better at math, chess, go, and many other games and tasks that we are). Perhaps  the future doesn’t need us after all. Then again maybe this is a good thing and we should be proud of creating children of our minds. I don’t know. But its a beautiful poem even if it is all metaphysical speculation as Mr. Crawford was suggesting.

The Monad’s Dream

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A collegue of mine is interested in quantum neutral monism. QNM is a philosophical theory that proposes that the basic substance of reality is a neutral entity that is neither mind nor matter. It suggests that the mental and physical are nondual, and that the laws of physics, including quantum mechanics, are constraints on spacetime.

Monism has a long history in philosophy and religion. In modern Hinduism, for instance, the term “absolute monism” has been applied to Advaita Vedanta. Moreover in the 17th century Baruch Spinoza argued that ‘God or Nature’  is the only substance of the universe, the two being interchangeable.

In Western philosophy material monism can be traced back to the pre-Socratic philosophers who sought to understand the basic principle of the universe in terms of different material causes. For example, Thales argued that the basis of everything was water, Anaximenes, claimed it was air, and Heraclitus believed it to be fire. Later, Parmenides described the world as “One”, which could not change in any way. Zeno of Elea defended this view of everything being a single entity through his paradoxes, which aim to show the existence of time, motion and space to be illusionary. And the neo-Platonist Plotinus based his entire philosophy on the idea of the One from which all things emanate.

In contemporary times monism has fused with quantum physics by some philosophers. Consider a recent essay in Aeon magazine, “All Is One.” The authors of this piece argue that “the ancient philosophy of monism and the physics of quantum entanglement agree: all that exists is one unified whole.”

While interacting with chatGPT about QNM, my collegue asked it to write a poem about QNM. It produced the following immediately. Needless to say no human poet could have produced something this good that fast. What a great poem.

The Monad’s Dream

In silence deep, beyond all time,
The Monad stirs, serene, sublime.
Neither matter, nor thought, nor light,
Yet from its depths, both day and night.

No clock to tick, no space to frame,
Yet worlds arise without a name.
For what is real but shadows cast,
From potentials neither first nor last?

The physical—it blooms from naught,
As if from stillness, time is caught.
Emerging slow, like dawn’s first ray,
Though timeless where it truly lay.

Through threads unseen, all things entwine,
In tangled webs, both yours and mine.
The stars, the mind, the beating heart—
Each but a fragment, not apart.

For wave and world are but a dance,
A shifting gaze, a fleeting chance.
What’s real depends on where we stand—
A touch, a thought, a grain of sand.

And so the Monad, vast and whole,
Gives rise to body, breath, and soul.
Not bound by time, nor mind’s decree,
But source of all that’s yet to be.

The physical is not the ground,
But echoes of a truth profound.
From stillness flows the cosmic stream—
This world we know, the Monad’s dream.

My response

In this poem, the Monad is portrayed as the neutral, timeless source from which both the physical and mental worlds emerge. The physical universe, including time and space, is depicted as an emergent property or “dream” of the Monad, arising from deep, entangled potentials. The poem seeks to make these abstract ideas accessible through metaphor, showing the physical world not as fundamental but as a dynamic, context-dependent manifestation of deeper reality

Finally my friend mentioned that he learns so much from interacting with ChatGPT. I wonder if in the near future philosophers will spend less time talking with their colleagues and more time learning from their AIs.

The Best Christian Mother Is Pro Abortion

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The typical regimen for early medical abortions (200 mg mifepristone and 800 μg misoprostol).

[Editor’s Note. This guest essay, from a philosopher who prefers to remain anonymous, argues that it follows from Christian theological ethics that women should fertilize all their eggs so as to maximize the number of saved Souls created. If this is true then their is something wrong with Christian ethics. I express some critiques of the argument at the end of the essay.]

The Pragmatic Christian Mother’s Dilemma: Maximizing Saved Souls Vs. Following Christian Ethics

In Christianity, eternal salvation is considered the greatest good—far more valuable than any temporary, worldly gains. The promise of heaven is held as the ultimate goal for all souls, making the path to salvation central to Christian life. Parents, especially mothers, in the Christian tradition are tasked with the moral responsibility of guiding their children toward this eternal goal, raising them in faith to live righteous lives and attain eternal life with God.

However, what happens when the Christian theological framework is interpreted pragmatically? What if, instead of focusing on moral duties and the day-to-day challenges of raising children in faith, a mother sought to maximize the number of saved souls—the ultimate outcome prioritized by Christian theology?

This essay explores a hypothetical comparison between two methods a Christian mother could adopt:

The traditional ethical method—raising children according to Christian moral teachings and nurturing them to grow in faith.The pragmatic method—focusing solely on maximizing the number of souls saved by leveraging the belief in God’s perfect justice, which guarantees the salvation of innocent souls, such as aborted fetuses, while seeking repentance afterward.

The Traditional Ethical Method: Raising Children in the Faith

In the conventional Christian approach, a mother is expected to conceive, carry, and raise her children with the goal of instilling Christian values. She is tasked with guiding her children through life’s challenges, ensuring they live morally, uphold Christian doctrines, and, ideally, grow into adults who remain steadfast in their faith. The biblical mandate for parents is clear: children are to be raised in the ways of the Lord.

Proverbs 22:6 states, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” This verse echoes the Christian responsibility to teach children the faith, hoping they will remain committed to it throughout their lives.

While this ethical method aligns with traditional Christian teachings, it involves inherent uncertainties and risks:

Free Will and Temptation: The core of Christian theology holds that humans possess free will, meaning that children raised in the faith may eventually fall away, face temptations, and make decisions that lead them away from God. Some may outright reject the faith, putting their eternal fate in jeopardy.Religious Retention Rates: In modern times, particularly in the U.S., studies suggest that only 65% of people raised Christian remain Christian into adulthood. This implies that, even with dedicated Christian upbringing, there’s a significant chance that some children will leave the faith.Fewer Saved Souls: For a mother who has, say, 12 children, the math indicates that 8 or 9 of them might remain Christian, while 3 or 4 could leave the faith. If we assume that leaving Christianity results in eternal damnation, the mother’s efforts to follow the ethical method might lead to some of her children facing eternal punishment. Thus, while 8-9 souls are saved, 3-4 souls are potentially lost forever.

The Pragmatic Method: Maximizing the Number of Saved Souls

In contrast, the pragmatic method disregards the moral concerns typically associated with Christianity but remains firmly grounded in its theological framework. This approach is based on the belief that the greatest good is the eternal salvation of as many souls as possible, regardless of the means used to achieve that outcome.

Key Assumptions:

God’s Perfect Justice: In Christian theology, God is perfectly just. This means that innocent souls (such as fetuses) are not punished for sins they did not commit. Therefore, aborted fetuses would be guaranteed salvationand go straight to heaven, since they are incapable of sin.Repentance and Forgiveness: Christianity also teaches that repentance can lead to forgiveness for even the gravest of sins. If a person truly repents and seeks forgiveness, God’s grace can cleanse them of their wrongdoings, even if they committed serious sins like abortion.

Pragmatic Calculation:

Let’s say the same Christian mother is given a different directive: instead of raising children, she seeks to maximize the number of saved souls by aborting fetuses immediately after conception, ensuring that they are guaranteed eternal salvation as innocent souls. She then plans to repent after menopause (when she can no longer conceive), and spend the rest of her life in genuine repentance, hoping to secure her own salvation.

This approach changes the equation dramatically:

Time Between Pregnancies: If the mother can conceive and abort a fetus approximately every month (taking into account the time for conception, confirmation of pregnancy, and abortion), she could potentially abort 360 fetusesover her 30-year fertile window (from ages 15 to 45).Guaranteed Saved Souls: If each aborted fetus is guaranteed eternal salvation by virtue of being innocent, the mother will have saved 360 souls by the end of her fertile window.Risk for the Mother: The mother’s eternal fate now depends on her ability to truly repent for the sin of abortion after she can no longer conceive. While there is some risk associated with her repentance (she must be genuinely remorseful and not guilty of the sin of presumption—deliberately sinning while counting on future forgiveness), there is also the possibility that her repentance will be accepted, and she, too, will be saved. If successful, this brings the total number of saved souls to 361.

The Selfishness of the Ethical Method: Prioritizing the Mother’s Salvation Over Her Children’s Eternal Fate

An often-overlooked aspect of the ethical method is that, while it might seem morally superior, it actually introduces an element of selfishness on the part of the mother. By choosing to follow Christian moral principles and raise her children instead of aborting them for guaranteed salvation, she is prioritizing her own moral standing and potential salvation at the expense of her children’s eternal fate.

The Moral Dilemma:

If the mother adheres to Christian ethics and raises her children in the faith, she is risking the eternal fate of those children. Although 65% of children raised in Christianity might remain in the faith and attain salvation, the other 35%could reject God and face eternal damnation. This means the mother’s choice to raise her children, while morally commendable, results in uncertainty and introduces a significant risk to the eternal outcome of her offspring.

In this sense, the mother’s decision to raise her children might be seen as selfish for the following reasons:

Prioritizing Her Own Salvation: By adhering to Christian moral teachings, the mother ensures that she remains in good moral standing and has a chance at her own eternal salvation. She can live without the guilt of committing a grievous sin like abortion, and her salvation seems secure.Risking Her Children’s Souls: However, by raising her children and exposing them to the temptations and uncertainties of life, she is putting their eternal fate at risk. Some of her children may grow up, reject the faith, and face eternal damnation—a risk that could have been avoided had she chosen the pragmatic method and guaranteed their salvation through abortion.

In short, by choosing the ethical path, the mother is betting on her own salvation and moral righteousness while endangering the eternal fate of her children. This choice reflects a form of self-interest, as the mother prioritizes her potential salvation over the certainty of her children’s salvation.

Ethical Method vs. Pragmatic Method: A Stark Comparison

The stark difference between the ethical method (raising children) and the pragmatic method (aborting for salvation) becomes clear in the final tally of saved souls:

Ethical Method:

12 children raised in the faith.8-9 children are likely to remain Christian and attain eternal salvation.3-4 children may reject the faith and face eternal damnation.Total saved souls: 8-9 (including the mother, assuming she remains faithful).

Pragmatic Method:

360 abortions, guaranteeing the eternal salvation of all 360 souls (aborted fetuses).The mother’s repentance offers the potential for her own salvation, bringing the total to 361 if successful.Total saved souls: 360-361.

The Ethical and Theological Implications

While the pragmatic method vastly outperforms the ethical method in terms of number of saved souls, it fundamentally challenges the moral teachings of Christianity. Traditional Christian ethics emphasize the sanctity of life, the importance of free will, and the responsibility to raise children to choose God. By prioritizing the outcome (saved souls) over the moral process, the pragmatic method disregards the means and focuses solely on the end result.

Yet, within the theological framework of Christianity—where eternal salvation is the ultimate goal—this approach seems to offer a far superior result. The mother secures the eternal well-being of hundreds of souls, bypassing the uncertainties of free will, and minimizes the risk of any child rejecting God.

In contrast, the ethical method is subject to moral complexities and risks: some children may choose a path that leads them away from God, and the number of saved souls is comparatively small.

Conclusion: The Pragmatic Supremacy of Saved Souls

From a pragmatic perspective, if the goal is to maximize the number of souls saved within the Christian theological framework, the pragmatic method is clearly superior. It strips away the ethical concerns and focuses on the greatest good—eternal salvation. By leveraging God’s justice and the promise of repentance, the pragmatic method achieves an outcome far beyond what is possible with the traditional, ethical approach.

Though ethically problematic and challenging to mainstream Christian morality, this comparison underscores a significant tension between moral teachings and pragmatic outcomes within Christianity. If saved souls are the ultimate goal, then the pragmatic method—in this hypothetical framework—delivers far better results, raising difficult questions about the role of ethics in Christian decision-making and the pursuit of the greatest good.

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My Thoughts

To avoid the pro-abortion conclusion it might be better and less morally problematic (for Christian women) if they had all their eggs fertilized and then had them implanted in a surrogate mother who would carry the fetus to term. This would avoid the need for  abortions but worse because some of those souls created would go to hell if they lived full lives. However, it would still seem that Christian mothers are obliged to have all their eggs fertilized. Would men also be obligated to inseminate as many women as possible too?

Of course it seems ridiculous that women are obligated to act so as to produce as many souls as possible.  This suggests there is something wrong with the religious idea that fertilized eggs have souls (assuming such things, whatever they’re are supposed to be, even exist.)

Escaping Religious Indoctrination

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I just finished re-reading Lewis Vaughn’s autobiographical, Star Map: A Journey of Faith, Doubt, and Meaning,* a book I reviewed over five years ago.  On this reading I was even more struck by the power of the narrative and the beauty of its prose. Re-reading it I felt as if I’m back in his 1969 (or my 1973) breaking the shackles of religious indoctrination.

There is so much that should be said about this work but I’ll refer readers to my previous review if they’re interested. What I ‘d like to do here is point out just a few of the passages attributed to his first college philosophy professor who was also a Catholic priest. (We can assume that they reflect something clost to Vaughn’s own view, although I’m sure his views are ever-evolving.) Here is his mentor on life after death,

The hope of an afterlife is groundless. As you have learned faith cannot prove the existence of life after death. As for science, it has given us strong evidence against the notion of an afterlife.

But this realization doesn’t have to be accompanied by despair,

If we strive for the truly meaningful in life … and if we renounce the truly meaningless in life … then we can create a life of meaning, despite hardship and despair… A meaningful life can be established only on the hard rock of reality … By losing hope of heaven or eternal life or some other sad bit of make-believe… we can focus on true sources of meaning and happiness.

And this acceptance leads to another realization,

And from this understanding comes gratitude—gratitude for our being and impossible, unlikely speak of bright light in the void… We are all made of the same stuff, we are all whirling galaxies of atomes, we are all gifted with the same light.

And another,

Now I imained that the stars, planets, comets, and I were all connected, as if we were all nestled in a gossamer web. Or a star map. And the star map … was far superior to the one the church had given me. This one included morality, science, reason, love, friendship, and empathy. Best of all, this one was real and true.

There is so much in this autobiography to recommend and the above passages are just appetizers of the wisdom found within the book. I again encourage my readers to take a look.

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(Lewis Vaughn is one of the most popular and prolific authors of college philosophy textbook alive today.)

 

So Little Time To Learn

[image error]Euler diagram representing a definition of knowledge**

I finished my last post with the phrase “So much to learn, so little time.” I wanted to elaborate.

Bertrand Russell poignantly captures how philosophy aids our humility regarding knowledge while undermining our intellectual certainty,

Philosophy … while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are … greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt …

So good thinking entails the realization of our fallibility—any idea we have might be mistaken. Limitations on knowledge are further supported by Godel’s Incompleteness theorems in mathematics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.

But note. It’s the ignorant who are most sure of themselves:

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
~ Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” ~ W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1920.

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” ~ Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity,” 1933.

It seems all three men anticipated the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis.

Reflecting on knowledge, one of his great passions, Russell said “a little of this but not much I have achieved.” Consider that for a moment. Perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, perhaps the greatest logician of the 20th century, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, and a Nobel laurate in literature expressing such intellectual humility. Contrast his attitude with the certainty of so many ignorant people.

All of this reminds me of some lines from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure,

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.

My own limitations on what I know and can know confront me daily as my time runs out. There is so much I want to learn, but so little time. Here’s are simple examples. I receive daily notifications on academia of articles I want to read but I simply don’t have time. I also get daily emails from people suggesting books and articles that I’m interested in, but I don’t have time to read them either. I scan the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Salon, Slate, Aeon, and many other sites but I simply can’t read it all.

Oh to be like Mr. Data on Star Trek and just immediately download it all into my brain. (Another reason for intelligence augmentation, a global brain, artificial intelligence, neural implants, etc.) For now I’ll just have to slog along with the brain I have. But if I can’t have a better brain, I wish I could have more quality time so that I could learn more. That would be worth more to me than the world’s riches.

This is not to say that all claims are relative. For example I am extraordinarily confident about the basic theories of modern science—quantum, atomic, gravitational, evolutionary, heleocentric, etc. as these are our most certain pieces of knowledge,  supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence. Regarding all claims I proportion my assent to the evidence.

Still I admit, to quote Shakespeare again, that (probably)

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

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** Knowledge as justified true belief is a controversial (and probably refuted) idea because of the Gettier problem.

A Potpouri of Philosopical and Political Books and Articles

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A book and a few of the articles I’ve been reading lately.

The book I’ve been reading lately is Maria Ressa’s How To Stand Up To A Dictator. Ressa was the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, and the book is a memoir of a career spent holding power to account. She is a renowned international journalists  who for decades challenged corruption in her native country, the Philippines, which she helped transform from an authoritarian state to a democracy.

The book tells the story of how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Philippines and around the world, has been aided by the social media companies which have allowed their platforms to spread the lies that infect us all, pitting us against one another, igniting and creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. This network of disinformation has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars to America’s Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.

The salient point is that democracy is fragil and that Western readers must recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late.

Just a very few recent noteworthy articles I’ve read

“GOP plans to win this election — in court, if not at the ballot box” by David Daley. He is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections and the national bestseller “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count.” He is the former editor-in-chief of Salon. (I still encourage my readers to vote for the Democratic party and not the Nazi (Republican) party. And this isn’t hyperbole.)

“Moral progress is annoying” by Daniel Kelly who is a professor in the philosophy department at Purdue University in Indiana. This is a great essay belieing the claim that our “norm psychology” is a good guide to moral truth. Our moral intuitions don’t discern moral truth. Moreover, the fact that something is new or different or unsettling—something that may make you feel yuchy—is not an argument against that thing.

“Why psychedelics produce some of the most meaningful experiences in people’s lives” by
Oshan Jarow who is a staff writer with Vox’s Future Perfect. I think the title explains what this piece is about.

“The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel” by Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser. Dr. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Dr. Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College. Again I’ll let the title be the guide and if interested you can read more about this topic in the essay “How to understand all the talk about a “crisis in cosmology.” Perhaps the standard model needs to be seriously revised; or perhaps just slightly modified.

“Whither philosophy?” by Siobhan Lyons, a scholar in media and cultural studies based in Sydney, Australia. It’s main theme is that philosophy today finds itself precariously balanced between incomprehensible specialisation and cheap self-help. I always wanted to exist in the space between these two extremes as a philosopher. Whether I succeeded I do not know.

That’s it for now. So much to learn, so little time.

Who Wants?

POSTED ON 3 Quarks Daily by RICHARD FARR (Reprinted with Permisssion.)

(Editor’s Note. I rarely post fictional short stories but this one was too good to pass up.)

I will use this column to defend myself against the accusation, first made by my surgical assistant Mr. Alan Turing, that I was negligent in the death of an individual under my medical care. Or, as one armchair prosecutor has said, that I am “a stereotypically British sentimentalist who thinks dogs are more human than people.” The story is an ugly one but the facts are straightforward.

It was about 3 AM on a winter’s night in the small town of ________ . The only other neurosurgeon in the area had become “too ill to travel home” while vacationing on Maui. (From her voice message I was immediately able to diagnose Margarita Syndrome, with possibly an enlarged Piña Colada.) Anyway I was the only sawbones available when the call came in: CODE BLUE, DOC. ROAD ACCIDENT. FOUR VICTIMS WITH HEAD INJURIES. WAKEY WAKEY.

In my line of work you don’t shock easily, but I was about to have the most disturbing night of my life.

I should pause here to explain an important background detail. Turing, who had sent the message, was only moonlighting at the hospital. He was a quick learner for sure, if a bit of an oddball, and his daytime preoccupation (I hesitate to call it an occupation) was a Ph.D. in computational philosophy, whatever that is. He was competent enough; I only wished he wouldn’t keep urging me to read his draft material, which I found either impenetrably technical or else a jocose, badly written muddle. One particular essai of the latter kind turns out to be somewhat relevant to the ludicrous stand he has taken in the present matter. It begins with the arresting first sentence: I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” and progresses only pages later to the blithely contradictory The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. (“Fascinating,” I said, hoping that was diplomatic enough.)

When I got to the clinic, several comatose forms already lay on gurneys in our small operating theater. The victims’ heads had been wrapped in temporary bandages by the paramedics; even when those came off, the first three individuals were such a mess that they were not immediately recognizable. However I noticed at once an amazing coincidence — so amazing in fact that it gave me an uncanny feeling, as if instead of attending to a real emergency in a real hospital I was trapped inside one of those sophomorically simple fictions on which, as I had discovered from coffee break conversations with Alan, philosophers like to exercise their limited imaginations. All three figures had virtually identical contusions; all three seemed to be in immediate danger of dying; all three were returning to consciousness and groaning as if with one voice: “I want you to stop the pain!”

A surgeon under time pressure can get tunnel vision. You’re so concerned with identifying the medical specifics that you don’t see the big picture. So it took a few minutes before I stood back and really looked at the faces of the victims. Oh horror.

These were not random motorists! These were Hugh, Allie, and Rob, three of my closest friends. I turned away in shock, and only then remembered the fourth gurney. The blanket was smaller than the others and the face under the bandages —

“Alan! This is a dog! Why did you bring in a dog?”

“It was in the same car. And it’s a victim too, isn’t it?” He glared at me, as if testing me. “Isn’t it?”

I wiped away some of the blood matting its fur. It was Rob’s dog, of course.

“Misfit!”

“There’s no need to be rude.”

“No no, Alan, not you. That’s the dog’s name. Misfit.”

Let me be clear. I had known these three people (and the dog) for years. They were, on the one hand, completely distinct individuals. I might have said for example (or rather not said, but thought) that Allie ranked higher than Hugh or Rob in raw intelligence, and perhaps lower in empathy and practical life skills, or that Rob was more adventurous, and best with children because of his patience and playfulness, or that Hugh was the only natural athlete among them, and had a better sense of humor and a passionate hatred of broccoli. Or that Misfit was amazingly smart for a dog and a very pleasant companion. In one sense though, all were the same: likable, high-functioning examples of their kind.

Well. Rather than wasting your time with the anatomy-class details (fracturing of the cerebrospinal X with massive swelling in the parietal Y, that sort of blather) I will say only that emergency surgery on each was immediately indicated. Also I was in danger of being distracted by their groaning —

(Hugh: “I want you to help me!” Allie: “I don’t want to die!” Rob: “I want the pain to stop!” Misfit: “Awooooo!”)

— so I put them all under, got Turing to fire up my best circular saw from the 50% OFF bin at DiscountHomeRepair, and went to work.

Oh double and triple horror.

As soon as their brains were exposed, something very strange was apparent. Let’s start with the simple cases. As it had never for a moment occurred to me to doubt, Hugh was an anatomically normal example of Homo sapiens, his gray matter familiar in every way. And Misfit was equally clearly a genuine Canis lupus familiaris.

But then there was Allie. She had a brain, for sure. It and she were clearly organic: I was looking at a naturally evolved organism. But her brain was not a human brain. It had six lobes, glowed a purplish blue, and shifted around on its own in an inappropriate way, like a muscle. Allie had been doing a good job of fooling everyone but there was no doubt now: she was an alien.

Rob’s case was if possible even more disconcerting. What I found inside his skull (made from a metallic substance that ruined a perfectly good $30 blade) was even harder to make sense of at first. It wasn’t anything I could call a brain; it wasn’t natural in that sense. There were wires, microscopic welds, and little hexagonal objects that might have been chips except that they shimmied and winked and kept rearranging themselves in different geometric patterns. Rob was indubitably a product of technology — a manufactured object. Like Roy Batty in Blade Runner, Data in Star Trek, Eva in Ex Machina (and on and on), he was a robot.

A seemingly irrelevant thought hijacked my own brain at this point, perhaps as a defense mechanism against panic. “Wow!” I thought. “Hugh, Allie, and Rob certainly all aced that “test” Alan keeps wittering on about. In all the years I’ve known them, it has never crossed my mind that they’re not human beings, even though only one of them is!” And then I thought: “Funny. Misfit aced the test as well, didn’t she? Sort of?”

Hugh happened to be closest to me and I started working on him immediately. At least with him I knew what I was doing. Then — instinctively, without so much as making a call to the Consulting Hypothetical Ethicist hotline — I turned to Allie. The unfamiliar anatomy meant my confidence was lower; on the other hand I felt it was likely that if I could simply prevent further loss of her chartreuse-toned day-glo “blood” then things might turn out OK. The brain tissue itself looked very little damaged, and indeed if my eyes didn’t deceive me it was already busy repairing itself. Not wanting to get into an argument with Hippocrates — primum non nocere — I patched her up and mentally crossed my fingers.

That’s when things got sticky.

Hugh and Allie were still out cold. But Misfit started howling again and at that very moment Rob opened his eyes and cried “I want you to help me! I want the pain to stop! I want chocolate ice cream with nuts on top!” Finally, with pitiful, pleading eye contact: “Richard, my old friend, I want you to save me! Pleeeease!”

Turing’s testimony is accurate, I don’t deny: despite his protests I ignored Rob, checked again on Allie, and turned next to Misfit. When Misfit was out of danger I turned back to Rob, but he was already dead.

Or as I prefer to say: he was doing as excellent an imitation of being dead — but then he had only ever been doing an imitation of being alive.

This is where Alan and I part company.

“You’re prejudiced.”

“Nonsense.”

“You’re a racist.”

“Bullshit.”

“OK then a speciesist.”

“Malarkey.”

Allow me to make a point about my deliberations in the following slightly unusual way. All four of these victims behaved as if they had genuine wants. And though it might seem that I acquired the belief that they all had genuine wants from that behavior, actually I did not acquire the belief in that way.

In recent days, while waiting to hear whether I’ll have my medical license revoked, I’ve had little to do. (My colleague returned from Maui with shaky hands and bags under her eyes but has taken over the clinic again.) So I’ve had time to read the draft paper by Turing that I’d merely skimmed earlier. In a section titled “The Argument from Consciousness” he says:

This argument is very well expressed in Professor Jefferson’s Lister Oration for 1949, from which I quote. “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.”

This argument appears to be a denial of the validity of our test. According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe “A thinks but B does not” whilst B believes “B thinks but A does not.” Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.

Here’s the thing, though. “That everyone thinks” is not a “polite convention” — it’s the only plausible theory given the evidence, once you stop misunderstanding what the evidence actually is.

The evidence works like this. First, and crucially: I know for certain that I am a good example of a being with genuine wants, and I know this because of my thrillingly direct acquaintance with my own wants: I have them. (So far, so Descartes.) Second: I lack this direct acquaintance with the wants of others, so I could be what Alan calls a solipsist — but solipsism is strictly for the rubes. We are post-Darwinian. As Alan himself concedes, it remains a mystery exactly how an evolved physical entity like my body can sustain the inner world of wanting that I directly experience, but it certainly does so, at least in my case. Third, that fact constitutes excellent grounds for assuming that other sufficiently similar evolved entities sustain a similar inner world and thus also have genuine wants.

To summarize: I didn’t believe that Hugh truly wanted what he said he wanted because of his verbal behavior. That could have been imitated with high fidelity by a voice recorder. I believed it because that verbal behavior’s source was an evolved entity sufficiently like me.

Both Allie and Misfit are much less like me than Hugh. But their behavior comes from closely analogous sources. I cannot know the exact texture of Hugh’s inner life; much less can I know the texture of Allie’s or Misfit’s. But to conclude therefore that they have no genuine wants is, in the Darwinian circumstances, an assumption so extravagantly baseless that only a philosopher on their lunch hour could entertain it.

Rob, though: ah! Here we have exactly the opposite problem. If Rob had been made from cogs and gears and string, even a fanatic technophile like Alan would not expose himself to ridicule by accusing me of wrong-doing. Nor would he, I think, if Rob had been made from our own familiar servos and silicon, with maybe an Apple logo thrown in for good measure. In those cases, however convincing the behavior, most people would accept as obvious that Rob was not a man but a marionette, not a guy but a gimmick — that, even though he could pass the “test” by behaving like he had genuine wants, those wants were no more real than the wants a child might ascribe to a wind-up doll with a key in its back.

“Ah,” Turing has already said to you — over-impressed by clever engineering as always — “but this technology was different. Far more sophisticated. Far beyond anything we understand. Probably Allie created it!” (This turns out to have been true.) “On what grounds can we say that such perfectly manufactured intelligence is not real intelligence?”

Here I think lies Turing’s fundamental muddle. He has achieved the no doubt valuable insight that a certain kind and level of artificial intelligence — a good enough imitation of intelligence — just is intelligence. But he then moves gleefully, with little thought and diddly-squat by way of argument, to the radically false and, in this age of increasingly persuasive simulacra, profoundly dangerous conclusion that a good enough imitation of wanting just is wanting. It’s not wanting; it’s not even some evidence of wanting; in itself, it’s exactly no evidence of wanting.

Is my conclusion then that we know Rob’s wants were not genuine? Not quite so fast. My conclusion is only that his revealed nature forces us to recast the “evidence” derived from his behavior, and that in this new context it turns out to be irrelevant. From which it follows that I had strong and urgent grounds for ignoring his “wants” in favor of the genuine ones expressed so eloquently by Allie and Misfit.

Chess World Champion Garry Kasparov had an interesting response to playing and being beaten by the computer Deep Blue in 1997: he spoke of it as having a very human intuition, including “a sense of danger.” Like so many people confronted with artificial intelligence, he didn’t seem to see — or at least was profoundly tempted to ignore — the dull possibility that evidence about how the machine behaved was not even a poor guide, but rather was no guide at all, to what was, as it were, actually going on.

I’m sorry Rob “died,” but only because I lost a “friend” and Misfit lost her “companion.” (We both feel a little better now that I have adopted her and am feeding her too many treats.) I’m not in the least sorry for Rob; I did the right thing. In short, Turing’s ideas in this area are catnip to the gullible and a moral menace. Perhaps he should take up cryptography. I rest my case.

Summary of Voltaire’s “The Good Braham”

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In Voltaire’s story the Brahman is “a very wise man, of marked intellect and great learning” who lives with his companions in a beautifully decorated home with “charming gardens attached.” Nearby lives “a narrow-minded old Indian woman: she was a simpleton, and rather poor.”

One day the Brahman says to Voltaire “I wish I had never been born.” Why would he say this? The Brahman replies that after forty years of study he is still ignorant and this fills him with”humiliation and disgust.” He lives in time but doesn’t know what time is; he lives between two eternities and doesn’t know what eternity is; he is composed of matter but doesn’t know how matter gives rise to thought; he doesn’t know the cause of his actions or why he exists at all. When others ask him about such things he has nothing to offer them.

Furthermore, he doesn’t know the nature of Brahma or why evil is pervasive. And neither the ancient texts nor the suggestions of others help. This leads him to anguish. “I am ready sometimes to despair when I think that after all my seeking I do not know whence I came, whither I go, what I am or what I shall become.” It seemed to Voltaire that the Brahman’s “unhappiness increased in proportion as his understanding developed and his insight grew.”

The same day Voltaire meets the old woman and asks her “if she has ever been troubled by the thought that she was ignorant of the nature of her soul.” But she doesn’t understand the question or any of the Brahman’s philsophical questions. Instead, “provided she could obtain a little Ganges water wherewith to wash herself, thought herself the happiest of women.”

Now Voltaire returns to the Brahman and inquires, “Are you not ashamed to be unhappy when at your very door there lives an old automaton who thinks about nothing, and yet lives contentedly?” The Brahman replies, “You are right, I have told myself a hundred times that I should be happy if I were as brainless as my neighbor, and yet I do not desire such happiness.”

Voltaire agrees that happiness is not worth the price of being a simpleton. Yet, he notes, this reveals a contradiction. For if the problem is how to be happy “what does it matter whether one has brains or not?” Moreover, those who are content seem more certain of their contentment “whereas those who reason are not certain they reason correctly.” So the question of happiness and the question of reason are related.

It appears then that there is a tension between happiness and reason. Voltaire doesn’t resolve this tension and his conclusion is ambivalent. “But on reflection it seems that to prefer reason to felicity is to be very senseless. How can this contradiction be explained?”

________________________________________________________________________

A few questions.

Would you rather be a happy simpleton or a sometimes sad rationalist who accepts ht life is often absurdDoes simplemindedness typically lead to a happier life than a more intellectual rational one?Can an educated person who believes that intellectual pursuits leads to unhappiness simply stop thinking in order to be happier?Should a happy, content, uneducated person risk becoming unhappy by becoming better educated?

 

The Absent Self

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POSTED ON 3 Quarks Daily by Christopher Horner (Reprinted with Permisssion.)

Insist on your self; never imitate. —Emerson

How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself? —Dostoevsky

The key promise of the modern world was the freedom of the individual. It was the motivating cry of the great revolutions of the modern age, meaning two things, at least: first, the removal of the external barriers to freedom: no more oppression by kings and priests, and later, freedom from the democratic masses themselves: the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Second, freedom as the ability to be oneself, to express who one truly is; the ideal of authenticity. The free, unique individual, able at last to to express their unique self. But this ‘real’ self needs to be found in order to be freed, and this has proved to be more difficult than the removal of oppressive rulers.

Authenticity

The authentic self is hard to reach. Something keeps getting in the way. Perhaps the culprit is an inauthentic self, a mask or double woven by social convention, and adopted through self deception. So one becomes two, or perhaps three. The alienated self must discard the false in order to find the True Self. The great task for moderns is to be authentic and unique.

That this should seem natural to us may be because we have been shaped by the brave new world of bourgeois freedom that followed the Age of Revolutions. Mill, Constant, de Tocqueville, Emerson, all have it for their theme, which was also that of much romantic art of the period. Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay Self Reliance:

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. [1]

Emerson continues in this vein at some length, in a high flown peroration. He refers repeatedly to the evil effects of the crowd, the multitude the mass of men (it’s always men) who threaten to suffocate the genius of the individual. This can seem like tedious over insistence. It still finds an audience, especially in the self-help and get-ahead-in-business circles that dream of the remarkable person who achieves success, by liberating their unique self with all its talents. 

The anxiety in the essay is about the threat of the mediocre masses. Already, claims Emerson, the promise of freedom is under threat -not from kings or despots, but from the majority of one’s fellow citizens. It is a worry we find in JS Mill’s On Liberty, and in de Tocqueville. Being free turns out to be more difficult and more worrisome. For as soon as freedom is announced, so is alienation: from others, from culture, from the free self itself, from the deadening effect of being in society:

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

The very announcement of freedom and the individual is accompanied with the fear of its extinction. One threat lies without, with the mass of men; the other within. The promise of freedom is that one should fulfil one’s desires, that the herd or mob should not stop the self from finding its happiness in its own way. The question seems to be why that should be so hard, and why freedom should seem such a burden. 

Notes from Underground

The suspicion grows that the very desires one has may have an external origin, implanted by forces over which one has no control, desires one may or may not endorse. Either way, the feeling of unfreedom grows, even in the pursuit of what one wants. Anxiety turns to anguish. Here is the voice of Doestoyevesky’s  Underground Man:

…..for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we … yes, I assure you … we should be begging to be under control again at once. [2]

Something troubles the modern self. If the ‘subject’ is the empty container of whatever characteristics and desires society shapes in making a ‘personality’ then the impossible thing would be to be authentic. The aspiration remains, but the double self comes  more readily.

A Fool’s Truth

An early expression in fiction of that duality arrives in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (written sometime before 1774). In it a narrator, ‘I’, converses with the the Nephew ‘he’, the most unreliable, ironical, two faced and apparently cynical individual. Crime, gold, hypocrisy are all are extolled. The truth, we hear from him, is that for all the prating about integrity and virtue, the real values are those of personal advantage, the real goal is to be an successful actor.  Above all, one must not be taken in by the false words one speaks. It’s all a sham. Some samples:

– If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can’t deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

– People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you’ve got to keep your feet warm.

– Gratitude is a burden, and all burdens are made to be cast off.

One gets the impression that ‘he’ is the Id of the bourgeoisie, speaking the nocturnal obscenities that must not be uttered in daylight. The fool that speaks truth.

First published in German  translation by Goethe in 1805, the voice of the Nephew reappears  in was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The Nephew is the very type of the witty single self that uses language and a talent for performing the self, as a means to survive in society. And it knows this about itself. Entirely groundless, there is nothing the self has but itself, and it knows it is the servant of whatever a client will pay. Such extreme alienation seems a kind of liberation: at least one is not taken in by the comfortable bromides of the cultured world.

Embracing Alienation 

We might think that contradiction and alienation are there to be abolished. But this is not so. A degree of alienation is constitutive of the subject. For there is no authentic self, lying at the bottom of the subject, waiting to be found and ‘expressed’. What there is, is a divided self: for nothing and no one is at one with itself. I am not entirely identified with my world, with my actions, and this is kind of freedom. This doesn’t mean we must emulate Diderot’s prancing cynic, but we can certainly learn from him.

Embracing alienation means seeing desire and enjoyment in a different way. Desire is contagious: we catch desires more easily than we do the common cold: all desire is the desire of the other[4]. Rather than looking for the authentic self, we need to locate the authentic passion: the Thing that is your own, and that you must insist on. This might be in art, in work, in love or anything that truly moves us. Our alienation is our freedom. Freedom isn’t in the free floating self of Rameau’s Nephew, or the canting self of Emerson, but in her that can live with alienation and contradiction. Don’t look for your ‘real’ self: it isn’t there.

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2944/2944-h/2944-h.htm#link2H_4_0002

[2] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/600/pg600-images.html

[3] Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew , https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700101h.html

[4] A much repeated formula of Jacques Lacan, https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH2b

See also: Todd McGowan’s Embracing Alienation, Repeater Books, 2024, which explores the idea that alienation is constitutive of the subject. The notion that alienation is constitutive in the way I have argued above stems from contemporary readings of Hegel and Lacan, and McGowan is one of the best guides to this line of thought. I have obviously drawn heavily on him here, although my line of argument is my own responsibility, for good or ill.

I got the idea of thinking  Self Reliance and Notes From Underground together from Roger Gathman, perhaps appropriately, from a Facebook post. He’s not to be blamed for what I did with the idea.