John G. Messerly's Blog, page 9

The Weirdness of the World: Schwitzgebel

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I have recently been made aware of a new book, The Weirdness of the World, by the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel.

Here’s a brief description from Princeton University Press:

Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth—whatever it is—is weird. Philosophy, he proposes, can aim to open—to reveal possibilities we had not previously appreciated—or to close, to narrow down to the one correct theory of the phenomenon in question. Schwitzgebel argues for a philosophy that opens.

[In the process] … Schwitzgebel makes a persuasive case for the thrill of considering the most bizarre philosophical possibilities.

In his review of Schwitzgebel’s book (in the journal Science) the philosopher Edouard Machery writes:

There are two kinds of philosophers: swallows and moles. Swallows love to soar and to entertain philosophical hypotheses at best loosely connected with empirical knowledge. Plato and Gottfried Leibniz are paradigmatic swallows. Moles, on the contrary, rummage through mundane facts about our world and aim at better understanding it. Aristotle, William James, and Hans Reichenbach are paradigmatic moles. Eric Schwitzgebel is unabashedly a swallow.

Machery’s goal in his recent book Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds was “to curtail the flights of fancy with which contemporary philosophers are enamored.” Obviously, Machery and Schwitzgebel disagree about the value of philosophical speculation.

In defense against Machery’s critical review, Schwitzgebel made the following three points in response on his blog:

First, if anyone is going to speculate about wild possibilities concerning the fundamental nature of things, philosophers should be among them.

It would be a sad, gray world if our reasoning was always confined to “proper bounds” and we couldn’t reflect on issues like dream skepticism, group consciousness, and infinitude. Shouldn’t it be part of the job description of philosophy to explore such ideas, considering what can or should be made of them?

Such speculations needn’t be entirely unconstrained by empirical facts, even if empirical science fails to deliver decisive answers. In The Weirdness of the World, my speculations always start from empirical observation. My discussion of dream skepticism engages with the science of dreams; my discussion of group consciousness engages with the science of consciousness; my chapter on the possible infinite future — collaborative with physicist and philosopher of physics Jacob Barandes — is grounded in the standard working assumptions of mainstream physics. Scientifically informed philosophers are as well-positioned as anyone to speculate about wild hypotheticals that naturally intrigue us (at least some of us). To stand athwart such speculations, saying “Thou shalt not enter this epistemic wilderness!” is to reject an intrinsically valuable form of human philosophical curiosity.

Second, we can distinguish two types of swallow: those confident that their wild hypotheses are correct and those who merely entertain and explore such hypotheses.

Maybe Plato was convinced of the reality of Forms and the recollection theory of memory. Maybe Leibniz was convinced that the world was composed of monads in pre-established harmony. But Zhuangzi was a self-undermining skeptic who appears to have taken none of his wild speculations as established fact.

I don’t argue that the United States definitely has conscious experiences; I argue that if we accept standard materialist approaches to consciousness, they seem to imply that it does and that therefore we should take the idea seriously as a possibility. I don’t argue that this is a dream or a short-term simulation; I argue that our ordinary culturally-given understanding of the world and mainstream scientific assumptions combine to justify assigning a non-trivial (maybe about 0.1%) credence to both of those possibilities. Barandes and I don’t argue that there definitely is an infinite future in which future counterparts of you enact almost every possible action, but only that it follows from “certain not wholly implausible assumptions”.

When soaring in speculation far beyond the mundane local tree branches, doubt is appropriate. The most natural critique of swallows is that they appear to believe wild things on thin evidence. That critique is harder to sustain when the swallow explicitly treats the speculations as speculations only, rather than as established facts.

Third, the swallow and the mole can collaborate — even in the work of a single philosopher. As Jonathan Birch comments in my Facebook post linking to Machery’s book review, two of Edouard’s paradigmatic examples of moles — Aristotle and William James — are probably not best thought of as pure moles, but rather as swallow-moles. They dug around quite a bit in mundane empirical facts, yes. But they sometimes also soared with the swallows. Aristotle speculated on the existence of a supraphysical unmoved mover responsible for the existence of the physical world. James speculated about metaphysical “neutral monism” concerning mind and matter and celebrated religious belief beyond the evidence.

I too have done a fair bit of mundane empirical work — for example, on the moral behavior of ethics professors (e.g., here and here), on introspective method (e.g., here and here), and on the consequences of exposure to ethical argumentation (e.g., here and here). Even when I am not myself running the empirical studies, much of my work engages with nitty-gritty empirical detail (e.g., on the history of reports of coloration in dreams, on the cognitive capacites of garden snails, on the accuracy of visual imagery reports, and on psychological measures of well-being).

Often, I think, deep empirical mole-digging is valuable for one’s subsequent speculative soaring. Digging into the details of cosmological models enables better informed speculation about the distant future. Digging into the details of the behavior of ethics students and professors enables better informed speculation about the general relation between ethical reflection and ethical behavior. Digging into the details of dream reports enables better informed speculation about dream skepticism. As Zhuangzi imagines, a low-lying fish can transform into a soaring phoenix.

No single researcher needs to do both the digging and the soaring, even if some of us enjoy both types of task. But it’s valuable to have a whole ecosystem of moles and swallows, foxes and hedgehogs, ants and anteaters, truth philosophers and dare philosophers, and so on.

I’m honored that Machery counts me among the swallows. I celebrate his moleishness. Let’s dig and soar!

[Author’s Note. The mole/swallow distinction is similar to William James’ distinction between tough and tender-minded thinkers and Alan Watt’s differentiating between pricklies and gooeys.]

Is Philosophy Good For You?

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I had a recent conversation with someone who is reading my book Short Essays on Life, Death, Meaning, and the Far Future. He told me that he was now enthusiastic about reading more philosophy. But this got me thinking. How much should you philosophize? Is philosophy dangerous? Does philosophizing make your life go better? If I had to do it all over would I have spent so much of my life thinking about life?

I have previously written an essay “The Relevance of Philosophy” and shared the views of two of my intellectual heroes on the topic: “Will Durant: The Value of Philosophy” and “Bertrand Russell: The Value of Philosophy.” I don’t deny that there is great value to philosophical thinking, after all, I’ve devoted almost a lifetime to it. Still, I have questions.

How much should you philosophize?

I’d begin with Aristotle’s suggestion that virtue is the mean between the extremes. Too little or too much philosophical thinking is problematic. Too little and we fail to follow Socrates’ wise maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living; too much and we fail to recognize that the overexamined life is not worth living either.

So while I encouraged the students I spent over 30 years teaching to think more I also warned them not to let thinking consume them. As another intellectual hero of mine David Hume said,

that nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

Is philosophy dangerous?

Yes. It may lead to Hume’s “pensive melancholy” and “endless uncertainty.” It may destroy the beliefs that sustain you. Whether this is good or bad depends on the content of those beliefs but as Camus warned “beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.”

Does philosophy make your life go better?

It also seems to me, on the briefest reflection, that whether philosophy is valuable for a person depends somewhat on their circumstances and their stage of life. For example, you must have financial security and free time to philosophize; philosophy is a luxury. If you’re just trying to survive there is no time for idle speculation.

Moreover, if you are, for example, a young college student with your parents footing the bill, independently wealthy, or a philosophy professor making a living by philosophizing that’s one thing. But if you’re a new parent, starting a career, or just perfectly content with your life then you may have more important things to do. And the same goes for those experiencing mental or physical health issues, homelessness, poverty, etc. The opportunity to philosophize is indeed a luxury.

In addition, I’m thinking of all those good, happy people who might find that questioning may make their lives worse. For instance, say you’re newly married and a prospective parent who is excited about your life. Or you’re a happy-go-lucky college student who enjoys life. I don’t think your life will necessarily go better—and possibly go worse—if you head down the philosophical rabbit hole.

Surprisingly, I’ve known a few philosophers who seemed to enjoy causing people cognitive dissonance. It was almost as if they thought to themselves, “I’m an unhappy thinker and I’ll make sure others are too.” This isn’t typical, but I have occasionally detected this. Here I’m reminded of the wise words of Will Durant,

I note that those who are cooperating parts of a whole do not despond; the despised “yokel” playing ball with his fellows in the lot is happier than these isolated thinkers, who stand aside from the game of life and degenerate through the separation … If we think of ourselves as part of a living … group, we shall find life a little fuller … For to give life a meaning one must have a purpose larger and more enduring than one’s self.

If … a thing has significance only through its relation as part to a larger whole, then, though we cannot give a metaphysical and universal meaning to all life in general, we can say of any life in the particular that its meaning lies in its relation to something larger than itself … ask the father of sons and daughters “What is the meaning of life?” and he will answer you very simply: “Feeding our family.”

My main point is that upon reflection philosophers must ask in good conscience whether or not to try to get others thinking. When you are paid to do this, as I was for many years, I suppose you do your best with all the caveats mentioned above. But now that I’m retired I never bring up philosophy with my friends and acquaintances unless asked—and almost no one ever asks, even if they know I used to be a philosophy professor. I suppose that tells you something about how philosophy is valued in our culture.

If I had to do it all over again would I have spent so much of my life thinking about life?

This is tough. In one sense the answer is yes because I was so drawn to philosophy. Philosophical questions and the desire for answers to them came naturally, whereas questions about how my car runs or how to fix something around the house don’t. Philosophy was irresistible to me in my youth. When I encountered those first philosophy books I read I felt I had discovered some secret information that had previously been hidden from me. Surely the key to life and its meaning was within those books. (It wasn’t.) So I probably couldn’t help doing it all over again.

Yet there have been regrets. I may have made more money and brought greater financial security to my family had I chosen a different path. Even now I could help my grown children and grandchildren in ways that I now cannot. This causes some regret. And I don’t like when people say, as they often do when talking about the past, “I wouldn’t have changed a thing.” This strikes me as stupid; if you wouldn’t change something about what you did in the past then you haven’t learned anything. Surely every decision you made as an adolescent wasn’t the right one. Surely every choice I made yesterday wasn’t the right one either.

So perhaps I could have started philosophy earlier, studied more, went to different universities, learned not to analyze things to death, focused on different philosophical problems, etc. Maybe I should have been a physician, a scientist, or a social worker. Who knows how we should live a life?

In the end, all I can say is that the best things are the simple things. The fun of playing ball or the piano or whatever you can play; the joy of being with those you love and who love you; the communion you feel when engaged in honest conversation; the contentment felt from doing your duty. These things are more than enough.

Philosophizing is a small part of a good life but it is far from the whole of it.

Best Foods To Help Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

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I’ve read extensively about the relationship between diet and ASD. The bottom line is that a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is beneficial for autistic children (as it is for all of us). The most important foods are cruciferous vegetables with sulforaphane (broccoli, cabbage, collard green, kale, and cauliflower) with broccoli sprouts probably the single best food for children with autism. Here is a brief video that summarizes the research.

Another key idea I’ve found is that the evidence strongly suggests that kids on with ASD who have fevers improve. This means that autistic brains aren’t damaged irreversibly. And cruciferous vegetables with sulforaphane (broccoli, cabbage, collard green, kale, and cauliflower) produce this fever effect in the brain. Cruciferous vegetables also reduce brain stress and brain inflammation in autistic individuals (and others too.)

Here are a few other things I’ve found the evidence supports:

1. Kids with autism have less healthy gut microbiomes than other children. (But did the bad gut microbiome lead to autism or is it an effect of the fact that autistic children generally eat less fruits and vegetables than other children? We don’t know.)

2. Gluten-free and Casein-Free Diets for ASD help alleviate symptoms. Cow’s milk is particularly bad for children with ASD.

3. ASD is on the rise, at least in the last few decades. (We don’t know the rates from many years ago.) Exactly how much ASD has increased is unclear.

4. Pesticides, and air and water pollution seem to play a role in the increasing rates of ASD.

My First Semester Teaching

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In the fall of 1987 I taught my first college classes—two sections of ethics at a major midwestern university. I admit to being scared of speaking in front of 40 students who weren’t much younger than me. What would I talk about for an hour three times a week? What was I going to say for 16 weeks? Could I really do what so many professors I idealize seem to do with such ease?

Well, I found out quickly that I could talk for an hour easily:) In fact, I enjoyed it thourougly. It took time to become comfortable; not until my second year did it seem natural. Still, even after many years of teaching I still felt some jitters on the first day of a class. Yet, at the same time, I was thrilled knowing that I was the professor and this was my turf. I did my best to put everything I had into it, even if it was a topic that I had covered many times.

Yes some students were unpleasant, some uninterested, but some eager to learn—the kind teachers live for. In the end, I’m grateful I had the opportunity to engage with so many students—between 8,000 and 10,000 is a good estimate.

I recall many of them fondly to this day.

How The Past Pervades The Present

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Responding to a recent post, Chris Crawford offered a beautiful image of how our lives might be meaningful despite our deaths. He writes,

… the meaning of one’s life resides in the story that one creates by living. When we die, those who knew us tell others the story we forged by coping with the vicissitudes of life. That story is condensed down to its essence and becomes part of the culture.

Think of our culture as a massive crowd of the ghosts of our ancestors and their lives. Then de-anthropormorphize that crowd, leaving just the stories behind. Our contribution to that crowd is the meaning of our life. It is permanent; faint echoes of the lives of our most distant ancestors ripple through our culture today. That is the ever-lasting contribution we make to humanity. It is measured not by personal success, but by the example we set.

We can quibble with a few details here. Perhaps others won’t tell our story or, even if they do, it will be forgotten. Maybe humanity and the universe won’t survive, so any positive contribution is fleeting.

Nevertheless, I think there is something profound about this image. The present—our science, art, philosophy, government, etc.—is largely the result of what people have done in the past. The good and bad deeds and ideas of our past reverberate into the present; to say nothing of the reconstitution of the genes themselves from one generation to the next. Mr. Crawford is right, “faint echoes of the lives of our most distant ancestors ripple through our culture today.”

Is the meaning of life to create a positive echo? Put differently, don’t we find meaning by being a part of the larger whole of humanity? I think that’s as close as we might get to there being a meaning to our lives. Here I think Mr. Crawford’s ideas echo those of Will Durant who wrote,

… do not despond; the despised “yokel” playing ball with his fellows in the lot is happier than these isolated thinkers, who stand aside from the game of life and degenerate through the separation … If we think of ourselves as part of a living … group, we shall find life a little fuller … For to give life a meaning one must have a purpose larger and more enduring than one’s self.

If … a thing has significance only through its relation as part to a larger whole, then, though we cannot give a metaphysical and universal meaning to all life in general, we can say of any life in the particular that its meaning lies in its relation to something larger than itself …

But can we go further and say that our stories and our love conquer 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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On Dying, Grieving, and Judgment

by Marie Snyder (Reprinted with author’s permission.)

My dad passed away this week. He was older than the hills: 93 and a half years old. I’m not sad about his passing; he lived a long and fulfilling life. But I am troubled by how he went, and our expectations around grief. At his 90th birthday party, he was jovially talking with old friends and extended family. He lived a quiet life with his wife in a beautiful care facility. I once likened him to a cat, sleeping much of the day, and happy just to watch the world out his window. We don’t need to be doing things to be content. But the past few years haven’t done him any favors. He had a commanding presence that gradually shrunk until he disappeared into the ether, cremated a block from his residence.

A couple weeks ago he got pneumonia. He was verbal and lucid, but didn’t recognize anybody accurately. Last Sunday I visited, and he was no longer saying words. He could just make sounds. His mouth was slack-jawed, but he would grin reflexively and wide-mouthed from time to time, with the unselfconscious extended gaze of an infant. When we walked in the room, he was sideways on the bed (they’re not allowed to use waist restraints), completely uncovered, and wearing only a diaper. His body was skin and bones, riddled with age spots and moles. As we tried to cover him, he kept throwing the blankets off his tiny body. His nurse said she tried to put a dressing gown on him, but he kept pulling at it, so she left it off.

It reminded me of being in labour. My body was working hard and heating up, and my instinct was to tie my hair back and strip down naked regardless friends and family coming and going, oblivious to typical standards of decency. My focus was surviving the ordeal of birthing. I wasn’t thinking at all of the baby I was about to have, but about my own ability to live through the process. My clothes were simply in the way, every fibre a distraction making coping with the task at hand all the more difficult.

And it reminded me of every Christmas and Thanksgiving of my childhood, when the house was so full of family milling about, and there were so many pots on the stove cooking that the windows would weep condensate. My dad would start carving the turkey in the kitchen, fully dressed, but by time he was digging the last bits off the carcass, he’d have stripped down to his boxers in fits of swearing and chasing all of us kids out of the kitchen. He couldn’t do things with his clothes getting in the way. A former student once astutely remarked on the new trend of falling asleep with phones in hand: “We’re too lazy to get ourselves to sleep.” Going to sleep is an effort. I wonder if dying is similar.

Or maybe he was just hot.

So there he was in bed, sideways with his legs partially over the edge, working, like he was struggling to get through it all. His toes were curled under and his legs bending and pushing frenetically, arms flailing, looking for something to grasp on to, like a baby thrashing and kicking but failing to have any useful effect on his surroundings. The movements didn’t stop when he was sat up and then was repositioned in bed. It’s hard to watch frustration. He looked confused and scared and agitated. My sister and I each held a hand to comfort him the way I was taught to hold a newborn’s hands during the first couple diaper changes to help them feel safe and secure. It seemed to help a bit, slowing the thrashing down and keeping him steady, but soon enough the nurse came in with more morphine. We waited with him until he was calm enough to fall into a light sleep, and loosen his death grip on us, then we stole away home.

Relief from the pain of bearing witness to his plight was much stronger than my sense of guilt and cowardliness. They crept in to show themselves later, after it was too late. It would have been nice to be with him when he passed, but nobody knew how long it would take. As it was, he left us the following night.

And I wondered at the possibility of the nurse giving him just that much more morphine to make this end a little sooner and with us in the room at his side. His days had tipped the balance into far greater pains than pleasures, with no hope for any improvement. Is there a purpose or meaning to be garnered from these last days? The morphine suppressed his coughing, and he was barely drinking or eating. He was essentially dying of suffocation and dehydration, and it’s lucky he had the means to do it with the best possible care so his pain was minimized. But does a natural death trump a peaceful one?

This might seem morbid, but I regret that I didn’t take photos of his body, so foreign to anyone raised in a world sanitized of death. But it would have felt objectifying and disrespectful. There were instructions in place to take his body to the hospital for cremation immediately, so I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to marvel at what becomes of us, to, at my leisure, stare prolonged in wonder at photos of his curled feet and aged-marked back, the skin hanging from his legs, and the twisted and contorted postures of his final days. As it is, I already can’t quite remember what he looked like at the end. I also wanted to make a plaster casting of my mother’s face when she passed at home, but my siblings don’t see art as the useful path to healing that I find it to be. It can help mark that moment of transition from one form to another. It allows us to redefine the situation on our own terms and turns the chaos of being into a thing of beauty. Maybe I should leave instructions or permissions for my own children, all of whom have a creative bent.

I recently re-wrote my will because I’m taking a trip, and I’m always pretty sure I’ll die any time I get on a plane. I have a pull-the-plug clause, but, after seeing my dad, I asked about including instructions in case I’m mentally unfit or incapable of communicating but clearly languishing. My lawyer clarified that advance directives like that can’t be included in a will because, according to the new law, the patient must be mentally competent at the time of an assisted suicide to agree to it. I understand that it prevents people from terminating the lives of anyone against their wishes, but, in cases like this, I can’t see the point of a natural death.

I’m projecting my own preferences here, but I’d rather be surrounded by family at a predetermined time, allow my children to say goodbye and hold my hand while I’m given an injection, than to have my kids rush to visit one last time, one at a time, some of them too late, and know that I died alone essentially of dehydration or suffocation. I can’t see any way that it was beneficial for my father to continue struggling and suffering. Is there something to gain from seeing the end come naturally? Do we have something to learn from it? Or is it just our belief in life at any cost that maintains laws to keep suffering people alive? The only argument that I’d give some leeway to is one based on the family’s faith or tradition. For the atheists among us, it seems absolutely barbaric, and most of us wouldn’t let our pets die like that. But I really have no right to say anything. I was negligent in visiting since he first moved more than walking distance away.

I was never very close to my dad; I always found him difficult to be around. We’re both introverts who were awkward together once my mom was no longer around to carry the conversation along. Even before that, he spent much of his time in his basement study reading and playing music at ungodly hours of the day. I kept books on the register in my bedroom to muffle the sound of his trumpet playing or his opera records, cranked to ten, jolting me awake before the sun was quite up. My bedroom faced a forest, and I looked forward to waking with the sun filtering through the trees, not the pitch blackness of his pre-dawn rituals.

Unlike most family rifts, we agreed on every fundamental issue. He was very progressive for someone of his generation, and he held feminist principles even if he might never have used that word. He had a strong sense of equity and justice and was extraordinarily sensitive to the plight of others. When we were kids, he would sometimes walk into the TV room and then storm back out, revolted by the violence we took for entertainment. It didn’t stop me from enjoying those kinds of films, but it did make me question my choices. He made me think about a lot of things along the way. He was a brilliant man, and I greatly admired him, but largely from a distance.

We didn’t talk much at any point in our lives together beyond sharing knowledge. Before the internet, he was my go to for translating the odd word from Greek, Latin, or German. As a kid, he let me break a thermometer and poke the mercury with a toothpick on a disposable plate, and he let me play with a soldering iron and his power tools with minimal supervision. I made a maze for my pet mice and an outhouse for my Barbie dolls. We spent the summers camping, and he told us the names of the plants and the types of rocks surrounding us, and he could name most of the stars in the sky, too. He admired the experiments I set up labelling rose petals coated with any liquid I could find in the house to determine the liquid with the best moisturizing properties. He was always there when there was something to teach. But that was as far as we ever got.

Truth be told, he was an ornery bugger. He was neither gentle nor patient. He wanted to spend his days reading and thinking and playing music, but he was surrounded by noisy children thwarting his efforts. His frustrations with us were duly noted. I added “irascible spirit” to his obituary to ensure we acknowledge the man he really was rather than mourn a glorified version of him. None of my siblings objected. It’s important to bury the right person. I’m so thankful to family members who did all the dirty work. I’m glad he was comfortable and cared for, and that although I largely ignored my responsibilities, my negligence had little impact on the quality of his life.

And then I didn’t mention anything to my friends or colleagues until yesterday. How weird is that? I found out about it at work Tuesday morning, and I wrote the first draft of his obituary at lunch, surrounded by colleagues who would have been very supportive. Because I’m not sad about it all, I was worried that people would misread my behaviour. There seems to be a narrow range of acceptable reactions to death.

I didn’t want to take any time off work because it’s always more work and stress than it’s worth. Taking three days off from teaching would have required a full evening of preparing, and another day afterwards of cleaning up and catching up. And I wouldn’t grieve any differently at home alone. It was in the forefront of the mind the whole time, but I wasn’t teary-eyed at all. I felt like since I wasn’t behaving in a grieving fashion, it might draw suspicions that I must be coldhearted. I’m not repressing emotions or distracting myself with work, and it’s not that I’m not affected, but sometimes it just doesn’t come out like it does for most people.

Times of trauma and tragedy bring out a lot of projecting. People look at someone going through a death of a loved one, and they overlap their own feelings and responses onto the freshly grieving. Any behaviour that doesn’t match their own expressions is sometimes suspect. People watch people’s reactions at these times and make assumptions about their inner life. That’ll happen in retrospect anyway, once someone reads about it in the paper and shares the news, but my silence on it got me almost a week to process without a battery of questions and concerns about my decision to be at work while I was most vulnerable.

It gave me time to steel myself for any possible onslaught of whispered accusations of heartlessness or aloofness, or of just plain being weird. If they think it must be a hard time, and you’re as happy as ever, that disconnect begs for a label. Even the kindest people can sometimes fall into the trap of judging others. I needed private time to process. I needed a week to get my head around it all before I had people sharing their condolences and looking at me with sympathy, quickly followed by disdain. As soon as people know you’re going through something difficult, they pay more attention to you in a way that can be oppressive. Well-meaning people can feel intrusive sometimes, and I wasn’t ready to deal with that just yet.

And although I’m affected by it, it’s just not that sad to me. He had lived a really long, fulfilling life. This was a good death in that respect. I’m not beside myself weeping because it was long expected. I am still grieving a colleague who took his own life almost a year ago. That one haunts me, and I can’t get over the guilt of not doing more; I’m sometimes ill with remorse. But my dad went when he should.

When my mother died, twenty years ago, we all expected him to go quickly after. They were a couple so united that it seemed impossible for one to live without the other. When students say that being raised with divorced parents makes it unlikely they’ll have a good marriage, I counter it that I was raised watching an intensely happy marriage, which totally ruined my chances at a relationship. Nothing could live up to that ideal. Yet after she died, he quickly re-married and moved and had a whole other life. Life’s full of surprises like that.

So it goes.

So bring on the dancing girls!  (My dad’s common refrain after an especially good meal.)

My Uncle Jack and My Dad

Posted by Marie Snyder at 8:53 AM, October 2, 2016. 

Author’s Note. I share Ms. Snyder’s view that we should be able to choose the time of our deaths. Many, many people do not die idlyically surrounded by friends and family as the obits often read. I thank Ms. Snyder for her wonderful essay and our correspondence.

Should I Choose To Live Forever? A Debate

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I have just been made aware of a new book, Should I Choose To Live Forever? A Debate

The book is a debate between the philosophers Stephen Case–who answers the question in the negative, and John Martin Fischer—who answers in the affirmative. The book also includes a Foreword by Lord Martin Rees, the current Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom.

While I have only read excerpts from the book I am familiar with the writing on this topic by both of these philosophers. And, as my readers might also know, I am firmly on the side of those who argue for having the choice to live forever—as I wrote in my Salon essay “Death Should Be Optional.”

What I did notice in the book’s early pages was Case’s helpful distinctions between

a) moderate life extension – increasing our current longest lifespans by about 40 years;

b) radical life extension – eliminating aging such that one could only die from some outside force such as a meteor hitting the planet;

c) contingent immortality – being immortal from any possible cause and living forever unless one chooses to die;

d) true immortality – one cannot die from any cause and one cannot choose to die.

My view that death should be optional falls into group c. I find option d quite undesirable since it condemns one to live no matter what. Even a god might want to die. Moreover, many people worry about radical life extension or contingent immortality for the same reason—in such states, they will be unable to choose to die. For example, we might be kept alive by malevolent beings and tortured thus unable to put an end to our miserable existence. So I think the allure of death is that no matter how bad life is there is some way out. People find that comforting.

I don’t know how to ameliorate these worries. All I’m saying is that the option to be immortal which includes an escape clause that could be exercised at any time seems best. In that case, we are immune to aging, disease, accidents, etc. but are able to die. (Yes, I do realize that this is currently fantasy.)

I do look forward to reading the book and if any of my readers get to it first please share your findings.

Should we be grateful for death?

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by John Danaher

Most people think death is bad. They approach it with a degree of trepidation, possibly even denial. The prospect is particularly acute for someone who does not believe in an afterlife. Could such a person ever view death as a gift, something for which they should be grateful? That’s the intriguing question asked by Mikel Burley in his article “Atheism and the Gift of Death”. I want to take a look at his answer in this post.I’ll start by dismissing a relatively trivial sense in which a non-believer can view death as a gift. They can view it as a gift when the life they are living is unremittingly bad. They could be suffering tremendous pain due to a terminal illness. There might be no prospect of recovery. Death could be, consequently, the only possible release from the burden of existence. A person in such a state could view death as a gift. In fact, they might even want to hasten death. This position is common in defences of euthanasia.

I dismiss this sense of a death-as-a-gift not because it is uninteresting or unimportant. It is clearly both. But it is also relatively trivial. The deeper question is whether someone whose life is otherwise good can welcome its end as a gift. In other words, can death be viewed as a gift no matter what the life it ends involves?

1. The Standard Religious View
Let’s start by looking at the religious view. The typical monotheistic position maintains that there is an afterlife (heaven/paradise) in which we (and all our friends and family members) will live after we die. In this place, we will be united with our creator (God) and will be rewarded with an existence that is greater than what we previously had on earth.

This typical religious position makes it relatively easy to conceptualise death as a gift. It is an opportunity to shake off this veil of tears. Burley uses a nice quote from Hermann Lange to underscore the point. Lange was a Catholic priest in Nazi Germany. He publicly opposed the Nazi party and was executed for his troubles. Just before his execution he sent a letter to his parents:

For, after all, death means homecoming. The gift we thereupon receive is so unimaginably great that all human joys pale beside it, and the bitterness of death as such — however sinister it may appear to our human nature — is completely conquered by it.

The logic applies both to those whose lives are going well and those whose lives are going badly. If their life is going badly then they be compensated for this by the unimaginably great joys in the afterlife. And if their life is going well, then they should still regard death as a gift because the joys they will experience in heaven are so much greater than those they currently experience.

In essence, according to this religious view, death is a gift because it allows for our lives to continue in a superior form. There is no way that an atheist (who disbelieves in an afterlife) could embrace a similar view.

2. An Alternative Religious View
But this typical religious view has been challenged by some religious scholars. They consider its conception of the afterlife as a temporal continuation of this life (only in a much better form) to be ethically and metaphysically flawed. Nicholas Lash is one such scholar. He doesn’t conceive of the afterlife in temporal terms. He does not think that we continue to live on in some cloudy paradise, dancing and frolicking with our friends and families. Instead, he thinks we will join with God and partake of His eternal (non-temporal) existence.

On this view, the afterlife is less a continuation of life here on earth and more a completion of life. It is the end of our existence as we know it and the transition to something else. Lash thinks that the continuation view is ethically damaging. We have duties to perform here on earth. We should take these duties seriously. If we think that the present life is simply a waiting room to something better; and that no matter how bad things presently are they will be recompensed in the afterlife; then we run the risk of thinking that our present duties do not ultimately matter. This can erode ethical sensibilities. And the risk is not entirely negligible. There is a destructive and apocalyptic tendency in some religions which is in part driven by the belief that the afterlife will compensate for everything.

This alternative religious view is interesting. It still conceives of death as a gift, but it does so in a different way. It conceives of death as a gift because it is the moment at which life is completed, not continued in a better form. It seems more plausible for there to be an atheistic equivalent of this view. There is nothing obviously metaphysically out of line with an atheistic conception of death as a fitting capstone or end to life taken as a whole. As Burley puts it:

Despite the atheist’s being unable to join the Christian in regarding death as a completion of that which stands in eternal relation to God, he may nevertheless concur that death constitutes the final moment of a finite whole, and thereby gives a determinate structure or shape to that life. To see death as a gift may be to regard it as that which completes and to some extent defines who one is…When one’s death actually occurs, life becomes complete; in so far as one’s life as a whole is a gift, so is one’s death, for it is one of the conditions of having a recognizably human life at all. (Burley 2012, 538).

This is a somewhat complex view. It presumes that the atheist is grateful for their life. Whether such an emotional reaction is appropriate for the atheist is a contentious matter, but one that I explored in a recent blogpost. For the time being we will assume that the atheist can indeed be grateful for living. This is usually premised on the belief that life itself is good (i.e. has positive value) and so we should be grateful for the opportunity to live it. What Burley is proposing is that we add to this the view that death is necessary to give the atheist’s life-as-a-whole its value. How can we make sense of this?

3. How does death complete the atheist’s life?
We can start by considering an obvious objection. There is a life extension movement out there. Members of this movement think that medical breakthroughs can be leveraged to enable us to extend our lives indefinitely. In my experience, most members of this movement tend to be non-religious. They do not believe in an afterlife. They accept the claim that life is good and hence something we can be grateful for. They dispute the claim that death gives life value. They favour the polar opposite. They think that death robs life of its value. We should do everything we can to avoid it.

If Burley’s suggestion is to gain any traction, it must be able to show why this view is flawed. Burley doesn’t attempt a full-blown critique. He isn’t trying to show that the atheist should view death as a gift always and everywhere. He argues for a more abstract view: particular instances of dying could be bad, but mortality itself (i.e. the fact that life must come to end) could be essential for value. Burley chooses a popular line of support for this: the arguments of Bernard Williams in his famous article ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Morality’. I’ve covered these arguments before in pretty exhaustive detail. In essence, they maintain that an immortal life (one in which death is not possible) would be bad in various ways. The two main ways are that it would erode individual identity (you cannot live forever and maintain a single consistent identity) and that it would lead to boredom.

Other philosophers, like Martha Nussbaum and Aaron Smuts, offer similar arguments. Nussbaum claims that an immortal life would rob our decisions of their normative significance; and Smuts argues that an immortal life would take away the good of achievement. These arguments can be challenged, of course, but if they work they lend support to the kind of view that Burley is trying to push. They suggest that mortality is essential to a life with the sorts of values we deem important to life as it is currently lived. (Samuel Scheffler has also supported this kind of argument and I covered his contribution in a previous blogpost).

Burley covers two objections to this line of thought. The first holds that the atheist still cannot view death as a gift because in order for one to conceive of death as a gift there must be a recipient of the gift. But, of course, if you cease to exist after your death you cannot receive the gift. One can quibble with the details of this. You will still be alive during the process of dying, so perhaps the gift accrues at that point. This seems somewhat unpalatable. Alternatively, you could embrace the idea of posthumous gifts. Burley notes that honours are sometimes conferred on deceased persons. Even if those people continue to exist in another form, they are definitely not around to receive those honours. This suggests that recipients may not be necessary for gifts. Gifts may be possible sub specie aeternitatis.

The second, and slightly more interesting, objection focuses on the strength of Burley’s argument. Burley claims that, if he is right, it is possible for the atheist to view death as a gift. But so what? Mere possibility is not enough in this debate. It may be possible for the atheist to do this but should they? Will they?

Burley has some interesting things to say about this. First, he suggests that philosophical argument has a limited role to play in changing how people will view their lives and deaths:

To come to see one’s life as a gift, and perhaps one’s death as well, and to express gratitude for these things, is not a matter of assenting to the truth or plausibility of certain propositions….It is more like coming to see life, or the world, under a different aspect — coming to feel the compulsion of that way of looking at things. And that compulsion is unlikely to be generated by means of arguments, at least in any formal sense of ‘argument’. (Burley 2012, 542)

So what will generate the compulsion?

More likely, I think, is that someone will come across the words of individuals who, either in life or in literature, express the attitude concerned, and will come, gradually or perhaps in some cases suddenly, to feel an affinity with those forms of words; will recognise that speaking of life and death, and many other things besides, as gifts expresses something with which she can identify. (Burley 2012, 542)

This may be the function of certain literary passages from famous atheists. I think, in particular, of Richard Dawkins’s famous ‘We are going to die’ passage, which I analyzed on a previous occasion.

To sum up, Burley is arguing that it is possible for an atheist to view death as a gift, not just because it sometimes offers a release from a horrendous existence, but because it gives shape and purpose to a life that is valuable. I find all of this very interesting.

[Author’s note. I have argued strongly against the “death as a gift” idea previously. Death is an evil and death should be optional. Nothing in Burley’s arguments have changed my mind.]

This work by John Danaher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The ethics of human extinction

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I recently finished reading Emile Torres‘ essay in Aeon magazine, “The ethics of human extinction,” a topic I have thought and written about much over the years. Torres doesn’t come to a definitive conclusion noting “that human extinction would be a mixed bag.” Nonetheless, Torres argues that “the horrors of Going Extinct in a global catastrophe are so enormous that we… should do everything in our power to reduce the likelihood of this happening.” Yet this results in the predicament that those who agree

… are left anticipatorily mourning all the suffering and sorrow, terrors and torments that await humanity on the road ahead, while simultaneously working to ensure our continued survival, since by far the most probable ways of dying out would involve horrific disasters with the highest body count possible.

Torres’ analysis is extraordinarily deep and thoughtful and the essay deserves a careful reading. But I’d like to share just a few “off the top of my head” reactions to the piece.

First I feel humble, ignorant, and perplexed. My mind simply isn’t up to the challenge of answering the “to be or not to be” question. Is it better for humans and the universe to exist or not to exist? Philosophers have answered the question variously. Schopenhauer answered in the negative, Spinoza in the positive. However, the late philosopher Paul Edwards concluded that there are no knock-down arguments either way. Regarding the “to be or not to be” question, he compared it to trying to prove that “coffee with cream is better than black coffee,” or “that love is better than hate.” 

So I just don’t know how to compare the value of existence to non-existence for an individual life, societal life, or even universal life. I’m often drawn to David Benatar’s anti-natalism, but then I see my grandchildren and I’m skeptical. Thus I’m humbled by my ignorance yet continually perplexed by the question of life’s value.

Furthermore, I feel impotent. This impotence stems both from my inability to resolve the issue intellectually as well as from being unable to do much about the issue even if I knew what I should do. Suppose for example that humanity’s extinction is the greatest evil there could be. What then am I supposed to do? Sure I can write about the issue or try to keep life going as best I can but let’s be honest. The effect that I could have here is minuscule. Now suppose I come to the opposite conclusion. We ought to go extinct to eliminate all future suffering. It’s not as if I could destroy the world by myself or convince everyone not to have children.

So not knowing the answer to my question reveals my ignorance and knowing the answer, if it were possible, reveals my impotence.

But there is more. I, like you dear reader, am one small lonely consciousness on a planet spinning on its axis, hurtling through space at unimaginable speed, separated from the cold, dark, inhospitableness of space—where my existence is impossible—by a sliver of atmosphere.

And I have no idea whether it would be better if humankind destroyed itself or not. Suppose I somehow, for the sake of argument, helped keep humanity alive and thereby was complicit in enabling a horrific future? Or suppose, again for the sake of argument, that I somehow helped destroy humanity and thereby prevented a glorious future? Either way, I would have done something monstrous.

The upshot of all this is that I don’t know the answer to such big questions and thus don’t know how to act in light of my ignorance. Pascal expressed my sentiments,

When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.

Yet, filled with such angst, my old friend David Hume comes to the rescue as he has many times in my life,

Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? … I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

~ David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

More On “Is The World Better Than Ever?”

[image error]By Anton Alterman

[Note. This is a follow-up essay to my many recent posts about human progress.]

Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times publishes a column at the end of every year with the same idea as Pinker’s book … and a lot of the same data points.  It always seems spurious to me. I appreciate having someone take a crack at saying just what’s wrong with it, but there is much more to be said. For example, progress in income levels and education in China and India alone may account for a good deal of the perceived progress, and though they really do constitute progress, it may obscure other much more negative phenomena, like the fact that more than 1% of the world’s population are now internally or externally displaced refugees, whose level of economic, medical and educational well-being is off the charts in the other direction.

I am also not sure how you would graph the progress in civil liberties when so many putative democracies have veered towards authoritarianism, when torture is still regularly employed across wide swaths of the world, and religious fundamentalism has if anything tightened its grip over the last 50 years.

But while I appreciate the critique of the quasi-laissez-faire approach to progress attributed to Pinker, I think Lent may be too hasty in dismissing Pinker’s centrism, as we do not currently have a single example of really radical change that has ended up well. Or, if we do, it is changes that have tended towards the mean of liberal democracy.

In fact, where the author appears to endorse Pinker’s position, I rather disagree:

“Global shaming campaigns,” he explains, “even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.”

No, I don’t think any of this has been due to “global shaming”, nor does any of it suggest more than a movement toward basic democratic norms. The only “dramatic reduction” in slavery or Apartheid was the result of bloody civil wars. Nuclear testing was reduced by the Test Ban Treaty which was not a result of shaming but of recognition that nuclear radiation anywhere was a global threat. Foot-binding was terminated after the spread of education and a series of government bans, accompanied by other economic, social and political changes. Etc.

The point is, Lent wants to credit Pinker with recognizing the role of what amounts to cancel culture – pointing out, too, that he has also re-tweeted BLM and #MeToo posts, and also defending “identity politics” as something progressive – but I see no evidence that any of this has played a positive role in whatever social progress there has been. Progress is something you have to fight for, and not in the divisive way that these Tweet-based identity movements do, but in ways that can unite very large groups of people – the civil rights and women’s movements, the labor movement, the vast network of environmental organizations, as well as broad-based movements in science, education and jurisprudence.

Philosophy, especially ethics, plays a bigger role than “shaming” or identity politics, which, if anything, turns off so many people that it generates a regressive backlash that impedes progress. Occupy Wall Street, short-lived though it was, had a more positive impact than all the shaming and identity politics of recent years. A mass movement to reign in and break up the technopolies of Silicon Valley would do more to defend democracy than a lot of the nonsense that litters the current political landscape.