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Response to Experiment 90: Something We Know Not What

4/28/2017

2 Comments

 
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How many ways can you slice and orange?
To make sure you get the most out of reading this week's thought experiment, I really think it helps to start with the wikipedia summary of the book that it is based upon.

"A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge" is a 1710 work by Anglo-Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley. This book largely seeks to refute the claims made by Berkeley's contemporary John Locke about the nature of human perception. Whilst, like all the Empiricist philosophers, both Locke and Berkeley agreed that we are having experiences, regardless of whether material objects exist, Berkeley sought to prove that the outside world (the world which causes the ideas one has within one's mind) is also composed solely of ideas. Berkeley did this by suggesting that "Ideas can only resemble Ideas" - the mental ideas that we possess can only resemble other ideas (not material objects) and thus the external world consists not of physical form, but rather of ideas. This world is (or, at least, was) given logic and regularity by some other force, which Berkeley concludes is God.

Uh oh. This probably isn't going to end well. But here's the thought experiment.

--------------------------------------------------
     George Bishop stared intently at the bowl of oranges before him and then thought it into thin air.
     He started by making an obvious distinction between the features of the oranges that are mere appearances and those properties that they really have. The colour, for example, is a mere appearance: we know that the colourblind, or animals with different physiologies, see something very different from the normal human experience of "orange". The tastes and smell are also mere appearances, as these too vary according to who or what is perceiving the fruit, while the fruit itself remains the same.
     But as he started stripping away the "mere appearances" from the fruits, he found himself left with vanishingly little. Could he even talk about the actual size and shape of the fruits, when these features seem to depend on how his senses of sight and touch perceive them? To truly imagine the fruit in itself, independent of the mere appearances of sense perception, he was left with the vague idea of something, he knew not what. So what is the real fruit: this gossamer "something" or the collection of mere appearances after all?

Source: The Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley, 1710

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 268.
---------------------------------------------------

I've always found it odd that Bishop Berkeley gets lumped in with the great British empiricists along with Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume (numbers 4, 11, 13, and 2 on my ranking of the survival of the fittest philosophers). They all did so much to advance the scientific method and our efforts to understand the world using only what we naturally perceive, as opposed to what some say was supernaturally revealed. But there's an impossible barrier to break through at the core of such a physicalist worldview and Berkeley did well to point it out. The barrier to knowledge requires a fundamental assumption to be made and while I make one (that an objective universe exists independently of us), Berkeley made quite another (that we only know ideas so the universe must be made of ideas). His solution sounds like nonsense to the common view of the world, but let's hear Berkeley's argument in full to give him a fair hearing.

To do so, you could read the full
original book—it's only 55 pages—but as you might expect from a religious apologist, it's full of a lot of motivated reasoning like this:

We should believe that God has been more generous with men than to give them a strong desire for knowledge that he has placed out of their reach. That wouldn’t square with the kindly ways in which Providence, having given creatures various desires, usually supplies them the means—if used properly—to satisfy them. I’m inclined to think that most if not all of the difficulties that have in the past puzzled and deceived philosophers and blocked the way to knowledge are entirely of our own making. We have first raised a dust, and then we complain that we can’t see. (Intro, section 3.)

Modern readers with access to the cruel details of evolutionary history find this portrayal of "Providence" laughable, but there are actual portions of the book that are impossible to refute. As noted in the wikipedia entry on the book:

"But, though it were possible that solid, figured, moveable substances may exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it possible for us to know this?" Knowledge through our senses only gives us knowledge of our senses, not of any unperceived things. Knowledge through reason does not guarantee that there are, necessarily, unperceived objects. In dreams and frenzies, we have ideas that do not correspond to external objects. "…[T]he supposition of external bodies is not necessary for the producing our ideas…." Materialists do not know how bodies affect spirit. We can't suppose that there is matter because we don't know how ideas occur in our minds. "In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it…." Suppose that there were an intelligence that was not affected by external bodies. If that intelligence had orderly and vivid sensations and ideas, what reason would it have to believe that bodies external to the mind were exciting those sensations and ideas? None.

This is really the root of Berkeley's objection to naive empiricism and it's a thorny one. Like the other empiricists, Berkeley grants us that "knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience." But then what do we really know? Baggini frames the issue well in his discussion of the thought experiment. He wrote:

We understand the difference between the world of appearances and the worlds as it is, but it seems impossible to get behind appearances and see this "real" world. ... This leaves us with a dilemma. Do we remain committed to the idea of a world beyond appearances, and accept that we have no idea what this world is, and can't even imagine how we might come to know it? Or do we give up on this idea and accept that the only world we can live in and know is the world of appearances after all?


Of course, Berkeley solved this by invoking God, That's an issue that I already covered in Thought Experiment 81: Sense and Sensibility, which was about the tree falling in the forest and no one being there to hear it. In that thought experiment (which was also based on Berkeley's book), I dismissed Berkeley's God because that's a notion that is just like Bertrand Russell's teapot orbiting the sun, or the flying spaghetti monster—it's another unknowable nonsense that does nothing to clear up our dilemma. Where does the real thing called God come from? How can we know that if we only know our sense experience? And on and on it goes.

But that still doesn't answer our problem.

David Hume came along and basically ended the British empiricist movement by "keeping with the view that all knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has implications not normally acceptable to philosophers. ... Hume concluded that suc
h things as belief in an external world and belief in the existence of the self were not rationally justifiable. According to Hume these beliefs were to be accepted nonetheless because of their profound basis in instinct and custom. Hume's lasting legacy, however, was the doubt that his skeptical arguments cast on the legitimacy of inductive reasoning, allowing many skeptics who followed to cast similar doubt."

Hume's skepticism has proven to be unsolvable, and this eventually it opened the doors to postmodernism and the post-truth society we see being argued about today. But I think it's time for a different perspective to take hold. Rather than continuing to fight for TRUTH, or giving up on it entirely, I wrote extensively about a redefinition of Knowledge i
n my response to thought experiment 63. In that post, I noted that:

"[T]here is a distinction to be made between ontology (the nature of being, of what is) and epistemology (what we know, what we can know). My first tenet claims that--ontologically--the universe is real. This means there is one objective reality that does not spontaneously mutate in any supernatural ways. Unfortunately, my second tenet states that--epistemologically—all of our knowledge can only ever be subjective, for reasons I've explored in other thought experiments. So, my first claim, that there is one objective reality, can really only be known provisionally. It must be an assumption. I would even go so far as to call it: the first assumption.

[Since we have no access to TRUTH,] knowledge can only ever be: justified, beliefs, that are surviving. In this, my JBS Theory of Knowledge, propositions are either surviving or they have gone extinct after having passed or failed a number of rational selections. Just as billions and billions of iterations of natural selection have shaped all of life, billions and billions of iterations of rational selection have honed knowledge. The more successful passes through rational selection that have been made (e.g. over greater numbers of years, numbers of people, numbers of experiments, and diversity for all of these), the more robust that knowledge can become. However, no knowledge is ever safe from the threat of extinction. This is equivalent to the robustness of life surviving through numerous environmental conditions, but always needing to adapt if conditions change.

Finally, this brings us back to tenet #1, our first assumption. Through the eons of the entire age of life, and over all the instances of individual organisms acting within the universe, the ability of life to predict its environment and continue to survive in it has required that ontologically the universe must be singular, objective, and knowable. If it were otherwise, life could not make sense of things and survive here. As we now see, we may never know if that is TRUE, but so far that knowledge has survived. The objective existence of the universe may indeed be an assumption, but as a starting point, it now seems to be the strongest knowledge we have."

This is how I answer the dilemma Baggini is raising here. Berkeley thought the world (and all the fruit in it) was only an idea since ideas are all we can really know. Hume's acceptance of this inability to know led him to throw his hands in the air and just go on living anyway according to "instinct and custom." This wasn't acceptable to other philosophers, but perhaps my assumption that we live in a knowable universe of independent objects, backed by the survival of life in that universe, but willing to change if new information comes along, is the kind of humble claim about knowledge that is acceptable. Is it for you? If not, why not?
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Thought Experiment 90: Something We Know Not What

4/24/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Okay, yeah, it's fruit, but what is REALLY there?
This week's thought experiment is one of the better portrayals I've seen of an idea that I find nonsensical. I therefore really look forward to teasing it apart.

--------------------------------------------------
     George Bishop stared intently at the bowl of oranges before him and then thought it into thin air.
     He started by making an obvious distinction between the features of the oranges that are mere appearances and those properties that they really have. The colour, for example, is a mere appearance: we know that the colourblind, or animals with different physiologies, see something very different from the normal human experience of "orange". The tastes and smell are also mere appearances, as these too vary according to who or what is perceiving the fruit, while the fruit itself remains the same.
     But as he started stripping away the "mere appearances" from the fruits, he found himself left with vanishingly little. Could he even talk about the actual size and shape of the fruits, when these features seem to depend on how his senses of sight and touch perceive them? To truly imagine the fruit in itself, independent of the mere appearances of sense perception, he was left with the vague idea of something, he knew not what. So what is the real fruit: this gossamer "something" or the collection of mere appearances after all?

Source: The Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley, 1710

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 268.
---------------------------------------------------

So what do you think? Is the world only observed? Is there anything really there if we take all of our observations away? I'll be back on Friday with my own observations on this. Try not to disappear before then.
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Response to Thought Experiment 89: Kill and Let Die

4/21/2017

1 Comment

 
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The choice looks pretty obvious. Until philosophers get ahold of it...
Ah the famous Trolley Problem. Finally! It's been the subject of many surveys in which approximately 90% of the public chooses one seemingly obvious answer. If you tweak the problem in various ways though, respondents are much less likely to give the same answer. This is what leads professional philosophers to answer in a much less straightforward fashion. A 2009 survey by David Bourget and David Chalmers showed that only 68% of professional philosophers would choose the obvious answer, 8% would not, and the remaining 24% had another view or could not answer. So what is the problem and why does one's knowledge about it change the way you consider it? Let's take a look.

--------------------------------------------------
     Greg has just one minute to make an agonising choice. A runaway train is hurtling down the track towards the junction where he is standing. Further down the line, too far away for him to reach, forty men are working in a tunnel. If the train reaches them, it is certain to kill many of them.
     Greg can't stop the train. But he can pull the lever that will divert it down another track. Further down this line, in another tunnel, only five men are working. The death toll is bound to be smaller.
     But if Greg pulls the lever, he is deliberately choosing to bring death to this gang of five. If he leaves it alone, it will not be him who causes deaths among the forty. He must bring about the deaths of a few people, or allow even more to die. But isn't it worse to kill people than it is simply to let them die?
     The rails are humming, the engine noises getting louder. Greg has only seconds to make his choice. To kill or let die?

Source: "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect" by Philippa Foot, 1967

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 265.
---------------------------------------------------

​Seems awfully straightforward. Greg is faced with a choice of killing 5 people or 40 people. He therefore ought to kill fewer people. You probably didn't even need your full minute to make that choice. But as the source of this thought experiment Philippa Foot said:

You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don't understand your question any more.

How true. And if you need yet another example of that, go ahead and read Foot's original paper which this thought experiment is based upon. As may be apparent from the title, it's actually an exploration of the subtle arguments used in the debate about abortion, such as the doctrine of double effect and the acts vs. omissions doctrine. I've already covered these topics in my responses to thought experiments 29: Life Dependency (re: abortion), 53: Double Trouble (re: double effect), and 71: Life Support (re: acts/omissions). I toyed with rehashing all of those debates again here, but that would put me at great risk of living up to Foot's caution about philosophers answering questions. Instead, I thought it would be much better to simply point out that the "kill" or "let die" choice isn't a meaningful one here. "Acting" or "not acting" are both options we must choose from, and one is not necessarily less implicative than the other. I happened to pick up a book this week by Jean-Paul Sartre (​Existentialism and Humanism), which had this quote in one of its reviews that shows what I mean:

Whatever your choice you will nonetheless be making a choice even if that choice is not to make a choice. Or as Sartre would put it, in a far more philosophical manner, you can always choose but you must know that even if you do not choose that would still be a choice. For what is not possible is not to choose.

So the choice is the thing we judge for its moral implications. And the choice for the thought experiment above seems obvious. But what if we vary the situation slightly? Can that teach us more about the moral judgments we are making here?

​Before I go through the standard variations of the trolley problem, let's remember the moral rules I've asserted for evolutionary philosophy. I believe the ultimate judge for the goodness or badness of actions is whether or not they lead to the survival of life in general over the long term of evolutionary timeframes. And contrary to the academic divisions of moral philosophy, we must look at the whole picture to evaluate any such questions. As I described in my response to thought experiment 60:

Deontological moral rules are not sufficient. Consequentialism shows that results matter too. And virtue ethics says intentions also count. Together, these three schools of thought make up the three main camps of moral philosophy. However, as is often the case with thorny philosophical issues, the best position on morality isn't an "either/or" decision from among these three choices, it's an "all/and" decision which considers the three of them. For any morally-considered human behaviour, there is an intention, an action, and a result. That's the way an event is described prior to, during, and after it occurs. It's the way the past, present, and future are bound together by causality yet allowed to be looked at separately across time. Virtue ethics concerns itself with the intention. Deontology focuses on the action. Consequentialism focuses on the result. But all three may be evaluated individually for moral purposes. ... We can hold all three of these judgments in our head at the same time and use them to guide future decisions accordingly with respect to blame, praise, imitation, or change.

Got it? If we were to apply this to the standard trolley problem as outlined in the thought experiment above, we would see that Greg's virtuous intentions ought to be that fewer people die in this situation. That's the consequence that we are rooting for. So even though his action produces some deaths, that is not a bad action because some deaths were going to occur no matter what.

Now let's explore this further by simply listing some variations discussed in the wikipedia entry on the Trolley Problem. Try to intuit your answers to these as you go along.
  1. The Fat Man - A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
  2. The Fat Villain - The same situation as #1, except the fat man standing next to you was the one who tied the five people onto the tracks below. Would you throw that man onto the tracks?
  3. The Man in the Yard - As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You can divert its path by colliding another trolley into it, but if you do, both will be derailed and go down a hill, and into a yard where a man is sleeping in a hammock. He would be killed. Should you proceed?
  4. The Transplant - A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Do you support the morality of the doctor to kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives?
  5. The Judge - Suppose that a judge is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Should she convict the scapegoat?
  6. Personal Connections - A trolley is hurtling down the track towards 5 people who will certainly die if the train reaches them. You cannot stop the trolley, but you can divert it onto another track where only 1 person will be killed. That person, however, is your daughter. (Or wife, or son, or best friend.) Should you flip the switch so fewer people die?
  7. Numbers Games - A trolley is hurtling down the track towards 5,000 people who will certainly die if the train reaches them. You cannot stop the trolley, but you can divert it onto another track where only 1 person will be killed. That person is your daughter. (Or wife, or son, or best friend.) Should you flip the switch so fewer people die?

As I said in the opening to this blog post, 90% of people agree that Greg should pull the switch to kill 5 people rather than 40. The data for these other scenarios have been gathered in many different forms, but generally people would be willing to throw one fat villain onto the tracks to stop a train, but not if that fat man were an innocent bystander. Similarly, they wouldn't crash the train if it would then go kill a man just sitting in his yard. Few people think the surgeon or judge should sacrifice innocent people, but intuitions change wildly if personal connections or large numbers enter into the equation. And answers change once people have been exposed to the different manifestations of this problem too, as we see in the results from professional philosophers, 24% of whom basically say "it's complicated." So what can we learn from all of these scenarios?

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the set of trolly problem problems is that there is no single simple rule that answers them all. Even a seemingly sturdy deontological maxim such as "Kill Less People" just doesn't hold up in all circumstances. The level of certainty about the outcomes changes things. The relative guilt or innocence of the people involved changes the math. Our connections to the people changes the math too, but maybe not so wildly that we would ignore the opportunity to save thousands of other lives.

While pioneering the theory of kin selection, J.B.S. Haldane once joked that he would gladly give up his life for two brothers or eight cousins. It would be nice if we could 
find something morally equivalent to this, but we can't because Haldane was only talking about concerns with genetic evolution. Human evolution, however, as well as the evolution of other advanced animals, is governed to a greater or lesser extent by a mix of genetic AND cultural traits. Given the practically unknowable value of one unique human to the cultural evolution of our species, we just aren't going to be able to weigh life and death trolley decisions accurately according to some simple rule. ​In my journal article, I wrote that the end goal of morality may now be known, but...

Is the way forward clear? Are the answers to all of our moral dilemmas suddenly obvious? Hardly. But that’s okay, because any framework for morality that does not account for the friction that has continually accompanied our difficult moral choices is a framework that does not account for reality. We would not have such a long history of questions in this sphere if we did not have an extremely complicated set of competing wants that we all feel and must try to make sense of. But at least now we can see the locations of all those sticking points. All moral dilemmas can be understood as conflicts somewhere along the consilient spectrum of biology. 

Our intuitive moral feelings are often in conflict because of the debates that rage within us regarding the self vs. society, or society vs. the environment, or the short-term vs. the long-term, or just the fundamental choices between competition and cooperation. This is what drives the two faces of humankind. We are neither inherently good nor inherently evil – we are capable of both, a flexibility we must have in order to have the power to choose between alternate paths that are right some of the time and wrong some of the time. 

These and many other questions of morality still remain to be answered. Knowing these locations and desired outcomes though will help us empirically evaluate our choices wherever it is possible to experiment with them. Good answers will strike the best balance between all the options. Evil answers will get the mix wrong. Most commonly, evil will involve weighting the needs of an individual too heavily in comparison to the needs of other individuals or other groups. But there will also be instances of evil being done to individuals in the name of social or ecological forces that have been overweighted.

These are the tradeoffs that must be addressed correctly by our moral urges if we are to survive. These are the base sources of all our competing wants, which drive all our competing oughts, which our systems of ethics must choose between. By utilizing the comprehensive framework for biology to understand the totality of wants for all forms of life, we come to a clearer understanding of morality, which seeks to satisfy those wants in an optimal manner.


I could go through all the various scenarios of the trolley problem and give theoretical answers to their theoretical setups, but that seems a bit unnecessary once my general attitudes are known. Act to support life, which requires care for the self balanced against care for others. But what do you think? Are there any other lessons to be learned from all of these trolleys running over people? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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Thought Experiment 89: Kill and Let Die

4/17/2017

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Picture
The greatest killing machine known to philosophical thought experiments.
A trolley problem! A trolley problem! Finally we get to explore this paragon of philosophical conundrums.

--------------------------------------------------
     Greg has just one minute to make an agonising choice. A runaway train is hurtling down the track towards the junction where he is standing. Further down the line, too far away for him to reach, forty men are working in a tunnel. If the train reaches them, it is certain to kill many of them.
     Greg can't stop the train. But he can pull the lever that will divert it down another track. Further down this line, in another tunnel, only five men are working. The death toll is bound to be smaller.
     But if Greg pulls the lever, he is deliberately choosing to bring death to this gang of five. If he leaves it alone, it will not be him who causes deaths among the forty. He must bring about the deaths of a few people, or allow even more to die. But isn't it worse to kill people than it is simply to let them die?
     The rails are humming, the engine noises getting louder. Greg has only seconds to make his choice. To kill or let die?

Source: "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect" by Philippa Foot, 2002

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 265.
---------------------------------------------------

Okay so it's a runaway train and not a trolley, but still—a trolley problem! What do you think is at stake here for Greg? What would you do if you were in his shoes? And how would you feel about it afterwards? Leave your comments below and I'll try not to kill them in my answer on Friday.
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Response to Thought Experiment 88: Total Lack of Recall

4/14/2017

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Picture
Have you read this guy's remarks (https://is.gd/SK1Wrs)? Seriously, where's the recall?
Is it just me or is Baggini losing steam while getting to his 100th thought experiment? I mean, I wouldn't blame him. I'm just wondering. Take a look at this latest entry.

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     Arnold Conan had just made an unpleasant discovery: he wasn't Arnold Conan at all. Or rather, he used not to be. It was all rather confusing.
     This is the best sense he could make of his unusual autobiography. He was born Alan E. Wood. Wood was, by all accounts, a deeply unpleasant man: egotistical, selfish, cruel, and ruthless. Two years ago, Wood had got into deep trouble with the State Bureau of Investigation. He was given a choice: spend the rest of his life in maximum security prison, where they would make sure he was victimised by the other inmates; or have his memory erased and replaced with that of an entirely fictitious creation of the spooks at the SBI. He chose the latter. And so it was that Alan E. Wood was put under a general anaesthetic, and when he woke up, he had forgotten all about his life to date. Instead, he remembered an entirely fictitious past, that of Arnold Conan, the man he now believed he was.
     Conan had established that these were the facts. But he still did not know who he was: Wood or Conan?

Sources: Total Recall, directed by Paul Verhoeven, 1990; "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick, 1990.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 262.
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By my count, this is now the 12th thought experiment out of 88 so far that touch upon the issue of personal identity. Once I finish all 100 thought experiments I plan to do a recap of my findings for each of the different categories, so for now, rather than repeat myself again and again, let's just file this one under the identity list since there's nothing new to consider here. I've spoken about identity here:

Response to Experiment 2: Beam Me Up...
Response to Thought Experiment 11: The Ship Theseus
Response to Thought Experiment 12: Picasso on the Beach
Response to Experiment 30: Memories Are Made of This

Response to Thought Experiment 32: Free Simone
Response to Thought Experiment 38: I Am A Brain

Response to Thought Experiment 39: The Chinese Room
Response to Thought Experiment 46: Amoebaesque
​Response to Experiment 49: The Hole in the Sum of the Parts
Response to Thought Experiment 54: The Elusive I
Response to Thought Experiment 65: Soul Power


Newbies to the blog who want to know more about personal identity are encouraged to go back and read a few of these, but I don't want to keep torturing the rest of you who likely have good recall...

If you're still looking for a new voice to read on this issue, I highly recommend an article I read in Aeon magazine this week by Adeba Birhane, an Ethiopian woman pursuing a PhD in Ireland in cognitive science. Her article — Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ — starts off like this:

According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’

Great stuff. Seriously, click here for the rest. And stop worrying whether Total Recall could be a documentary.

0 Comments

Thought Experiment 88: Total Lack of Recall

4/10/2017

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Picture
Maybe the Governator really was changed into a new man.
I could swear I've dealt with this week's thought experiment before. But it's getting harder and harder to remember for some strange reason...

--------------------------------------------------
     Arnold Conan had just made an unpleasant discovery: he wasn't Arnold Conan at all. Or rather, he used not to be. It was all rather confusing.
     This is the best sense he could make of his unusual autobiography. He was born Alan E. Wood. Wood was, by all accounts, a deeply unpleasant man: egotistical, selfish, cruel, and ruthless. Two years ago, Wood had got into deep trouble with the State Bureau of Investigation. He was given a choice: spend the rest of his life in maximum security prison, where they would make sure he was victimised by the other inmates; or have his memory erased and replaced with that of an entirely fictitious creation of the spooks at the SBI. He chose the latter. And so it was that Alan E. Wood was put under a general anaesthetic, and when he woke up, he had forgotten all about his life to date. Instead, he remembered an entirely fictitious past, that of Arnold Conan, the man he now believed he was.
     Conan had established that these were the facts. But he still did not know who he was: Wood or Conan?

Sources: Total Recall, directed by Paul Verhoeven, 1990; "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick, 1990.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 262.
---------------------------------------------------

What do you think? Is this character Wood or Conan now? How do you think identity is formed and sustained? On Friday...I'll be back...with my answer.
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Response to Thought Experiment 87: Fair Inequality

4/7/2017

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If you had to come up with a new name for a fictional video game platform, and you wanted to make an amalgam using PlayStations and GameBoys, what title would you choose? Would you use GameStation or PlayBoy? Yeah. Me too. Although this week's thought experiment would beg to differ.

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     John and Margaret went shopping to buy Christmas presents for their three sons: Matthew, aged fourteen, Mark, who is twelve, and Luke, ten. The loving parents always tried to treat their children equally. This year, they had budgeted to spend £100 on each of them.
     For once it looked as if their shopping would be trouble free, for they soon found what they were looking for: handheld PlayBoy game consoles at £100 each. Just as they were about to take three to the checkout, John noticed a special offer. If you bought two of the new, top of the range PlayBoyPlusMax consoles at £150 each, you would get an original PlayBoy free. They could spend the same amount of money and get superior goods.
     "We can't do that," said Margaret. "That would be unfair, since one of the boys would be getting less than the others."
     "But Margaret," said John, excited at the thought of borrowing his sons' new toys, "how can it be unfair? This way none of them gets a worse gift that he would have done, and two of them do better. But if we don't take the offer, two of the kids are worse off than they would otherwise be."
     "I want them all to be equal," replied Margaret.
​     "Even if it means making them worse off?"

Source: A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, 1971.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 259.
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If I was the parent, I'd get the two extra-nice consoles (with one regular one thrown in) and insist on rotating them among the kids on an equal time basis or perhaps according to how well they've done their chores.
Societies are most productive where everyone works hard, has purpose, and cooperates fully, so I try to encourage that dynamic every chance I get. What stops such a utopian dream from occurring? Free riders, misdirected hedonism, and hierarchical oppression mostly, but since I've already written quite a lot about these subjects in general—and economic inequality in particular—let's hear what Baggini had to say about this thought experiment during his discussion:

What we need to ask is when inequality is acceptable. John's explanation to Margaret about why they should treat their sons differently provides one answer. Inequality is permitted when no one is worse off as a result, but some people are better off. This is very similar to what the political philosopher John Rawls called the "difference principle." In essence, this says that inequalities are permitted only if they are to the benefit of the least well off. ... One reason to be against inequality is precisely the effect it has on social cohesion and the self-esteem of the poor. As social psychologists have pointed out, even though materially people are no worse off if their neighbours get rich at no financial cost to themselves, psychologically they can be harmed by their increased awareness of the wealth gap between them. Seeing equality and inequality solely in material terms could thus be a terrible mistake, both in politics and in families.

That's nice, and Baggini had major space constraints, but I would go much further in my analysis of why inequality is an important problem to tackle. As I said though, I've already written a lot about this, particularly in my posts on
 Karl Marx, on John Rawls, and on What Evolution Can Tell Us About the Economy. If you haven't read those, go back and check them out. Especially that last one, which included this point which acts as a nice summary:

Perfect equality is not possible, but extreme inequality is not sustainable in the long-term. Wealth is generated by talent and effort. Extreme wealth is generated by the economic system and the rules that society has evolved over the course of its history. A large portion of extreme wealth is therefore owed to society. Citizens will need to come to an agreement over what are acceptable ratios of wealth inequality. Ten to one? Thirty to one? Two hundred to one? Three thousand to one? Over the vast history of evolution, the ratios of wealth within tribes were significantly less than they are today.

If you don't need to go back and reread any of those posts, then maybe just watch this video as a great reminder of what we are up against. Thanks.
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Thought Experiment 87: Fair Inequality

4/3/2017

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When justice is blind behind a veil of ignorance, how just can it be?
This week's thought experiment may sound like child's play, but really it is asking an enormous question for society. Let's take a look.

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     John and Margaret went shopping to buy Christmas presents for their three sons: Matthew, aged fourteen, Mark, who is twelve, and Luke, ten. The loving parents always tried to treat their children equally. This year, they had budgeted to spend £100 on each of them.
     For once it looked as if their shopping would be trouble free, for they soon found what they were looking for: handheld PlayBoy game consoles at £100 each. Just as they were about to take three to the checkout, John noticed a special offer. If you bought two of the new, top of the range PlayBoyPlusMax consoles at £150 each, you would get an original PlayBoy free. They could spend the same amount of money and get superior goods.
     "We can't do that," said Margaret. "That would be unfair, since one of the boys would be getting less than the others."
     "But Margaret," said John, excited at the thought of borrowing his sons' new toys, "how can it be unfair? This way none of them gets a worse gift that he would have done, and two of them do better. But if we don't take the offer, two of the kids are worse off than they would otherwise be."
     "I want them all to be equal," replied Margaret.
​     "Even if it means making them worse off?"

Source: A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, 1971.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 259.
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In this small example, John and Margaret could quite easily control the distribution of game consoles such that the resources could be distributed to their family in a fair and equitable manner. But what about the parallels to society at large? How much progress can be made at the expense of inequality? How much equality can be had at the expense of progress? Let me know in the comments how you think about this issue. I'll be back on Friday with my own ideas.
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