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Response to Thought Experiment 59: The Eyes Have It

7/28/2016

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We're pretty sure this isn't what's going on in other peoples' heads.
Hopefully we'll see eye-to-eye on this, but I think this week's thought experiment is just a quickie. It's much more interesting biologically than philosophically, so let's not wring our hands about it too much and just get to the good stuff. Here's the experiment:

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     If you could view the world through other people's eyes, what would you see? This question had ceased to be either hypothetical or metaphorical for Cecilia. She had just tried out the remarkable U-View™ Universal Visual Information Exchange Web. This enables one person to connect themselves to another in such a way as to see exactly what that person sees, as she sees it.
     This is a remarkable experience for anyone. But for Cecilia it was even more startling. For when she saw the world as her friend Luke did, it was as though the world had turned inside out. For Luke, tomatoes were the colour she knew as blue. The sky was red. Bananas turned from yellow to green when they ripened.
     When the U-View people heard about Cecilia's experience they subjected her to further tests. It transpired that she saw the world with what they called an inverted spectrum: every colour looked to her like the complement of the colour it looked to other people. But of course, because the differences were systematic, if it weren't for the U-View system no one would ever have known. After all, she rightly called tomatoes red just like everyone else.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 175.
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As Baggini says in his own discussion of this, "The fact that people might see the world in a different way to ourselves (or hear, smell, taste, or feel it differently for that matter) is little more than an intriguing sceptical doubt. ... There is no way to get behind your eyes to see what blue really looks like to you. I just have to assume that, given our similar biologies, there is not much difference between how we both see a clear summer sky."

We've gone over this barrier to others' knowledge quite a lot in other experiments, and I'm sure we'll need to talk about it again in the future. In my post containing An Evolutionary Response to Hume's Missing Shade of Blue, for example, I further discussed the famous thought experiment where "a girl named Mary 'knows everything' there is to know about red but has never seen red. Once she does, she learns something new, which supposedly shows there must be something beyond the physical world. As I said, this is hogwash "because Mary does not have 'all the physical information' and cannot know 'all there is to know' about this subject without having experienced it firsthand. Why? Precisely because we live in a physical universe where mental imaginings are not enough to move the physical atoms that make up the nerves in our eyes and the synapses in our brains. In philosophical terms, there is a real epistemic barrier to what we can learn no matter how much we sit in our rooms and read and think."

So fine, knowledge is probabilistic and we admit we can't *Know* with a capital K that others see the world as we do, but the "similar biologies" that Baggini casually mentioned actually make it profoundly likely that we do. This is where an evolutionary perspective on the matter really helps.

In 2013, BBC ran a great five-episode program hosted by Brian Cox called Wonders of Life, which (besides being full of wonder) contained an excellent seven-minute segment during episode two about the evolution of sight. It's a perfect clip for illuminating the depth of the biological similarities that Baggini wants us to consider. You can watch the seven-minute video below, but here are the most relevant bits of dialogue taken from the transcript of the entire show:

"Sensing—the ability to detect and to react to the world outside—is fundamental to life. Every living thing is able to respond to its environment.

​Almost all animals can see. 96% of animal species have eyes. And on a molecular level, every eye in the world works in the same way. In order to form an image of the world, the first thing you have to do is detect light, and I have a sample here of the molecules that do that....specifically, the molecules that are in the black and white receptor cells in my eyes, the rods. The molecules are called rhodopsin. And the moment I expose them to light, you'll see an immediate physical change. [SEE IMMEDIATE CHANGE IN COLOUR OF SOLUTION]

In my eyes, what happens is that change in structure triggers an electrical signal which ultimately goes all the way to my brain, which forms an image of the world. It is this chemical reaction that's responsible for all vision on the planet. Closely related molecules lie at the heart of every animal eye. That tells us that this must be a very ancient mechanism. To find its origins, we must find a common ancestor that links every organism that uses rhodopsin today. We know that common ancestor must have lived before all animals' evolutionary lines diverged.

So what is that common ancestor? Well, here's where we approach the cutting edge of scientific research. The answer is that we don't know for sure, but a clue might be found here, in these little green blobs, which are actually colonies of algae, algae called volvox. We have very little in common with algae. We've been separated in evolutionary terms for over one billion years. But we do share one surprising similarity. These volvox have light-sensitive cells that control their movement. And the active ingredient of those cells is a form of rhodopsin so similar to our own that it's thought they may share a common origin.

To find a source that may have passed this ability to detect light to both us and the algae, we need to go much further back down the evolutionary tree. To organisms like cyanobacteria. They were among the first living things to evolve on the planet, and it's thought that the original rhodopsins may have developed in these ancient photosynthetic cells. So the origin of my ability to see may have been well over a billion years ago, in an organism as seemingly simple as a cyanobacteria."


I wrote quite a bit more in my post on Hume's Missing Shade of Blue about how our color-vision cones work on a similar chemical basis, but there's no need to rehash that here. After looking at all the knowledge biologists have gained about how our vision works at the molecular chemical level, it seems really silly to me for philosophers to keep pondering about whether we individual humans see the colors of the world the same way or not. Sure there are slight variations and mutations that may change things in teeny, tiny ways, but with a billion plus years of shared evolutionary history behind us (and considering that history also includes the development of eyes throughout the entire kingdom of life), the differences are nothing to really worry about. Of course, if you see things differently, let me know in the comments below.
​
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Thought Experiment 59: The Eyes Have It

7/25/2016

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This is how you see the Lake District, right?
I don't find this week's thought experiment all that troubling, but I'll be interested to see how others see it...

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     If you could view the world through other people's eyes, what would you see? This question had ceased to be either hypothetical or metaphorical for Cecilia. She had just tried out the remarkable U-View™ Universal Visual Information Exchange Web. This enables one person to connect themselves to another in such a way as to see exactly what that person sees, as she sees it.
     This is a remarkable experience for anyone. But for Cecilia it was even more startling. For when she saw the world as her friend Luke did, it was as though the world had turned inside out. For Luke, tomatoes were the colour she knew as blue. The sky was red. Bananas turned from yellow to green when they ripened.
     When the U-View people heard about Cecilia's experience they subjected her to further tests. It transpired that she saw the world with what they called an inverted spectrum: every colour looked to her like the complement of the colour it looked to other people. But of course, because the differences were systematic, if it weren't for the U-View system no one would ever have known. After all, she rightly called tomatoes red just like everyone else.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 175.
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It feels like we're back to freshman-year dorm-room philosophy with this, but I'll try to find something deeper in it when I discuss it on Friday. Until then, let me know in the comments below how you see this.
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Response to Thought Experiment 58: Divine Command

7/22/2016

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At least Moses had a burning bush to point to for the voices he heard.
After Abraham showed he was willing to kill his own son because he thought God had commanded him to do so, he became enshrined as the "father of faith." For this, he is given "a high position of respect in three major world faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam," which together dominate the religious beliefs of the entire western world. But what if he hadn't been such a blind follower? What if he had preferred to question the dictates of authority? This is what Julian Baggini would like us to contemplate with this week's thought experiment.

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     And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord thy God, and I command thee to sacrifice thy only son."
     The philosopher replied, "There's something not right here. Your commandments say, "Thou shalt not kill."
     "The Lord giveth the rules and the Lord taketh away," replied God.
     "But how do I know you are God?" insisted the philosopher. "Perhaps you are the devil trying to fool me?"
     "You must have faith," replied God.
     "Faith — or insanity? Perhaps my mind is playing tricks? Or maybe you're testing me in a cunning way. You want to see if I have so little moral fibre that at the command of a deep voice booming through the clouds, I commit infanticide."
     "Me almighty!" exclaimed the Lord. "What you're saying is that it is reasonable for you, a mere mortal, to refuse to do what I, the Lord thy God, commands."
     "I guess so," said the philosopher, "and you've given me no good reasons to change my mind."

Source: Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, 1843.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 172.
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In Kierkegaard's original text on this topic, the Danish philosopher was actually trying "to understand the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham when God tested him." Scholars think Kierkegaard may have been trying to work his way through the loss of his fiancee, whom he abandoned after a tortured decision-making process that he later often regretted. Perhaps, as a means of justifying his own uncertain decision after the fact, Kierkegaard used the parable of Abraham to develop his own idea of the need for a "leap of faith." As I pointed out in my blog post on Kierkegaard, "Perhaps the most oft-quoted aphorism from Kierkegaard's journals, and a key quote for existentialist studies, is: "The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”

Readers of this blog will already be well aware of the dangers of such faith. It is the motto of the suicide bomber, as well as the potential child sacrificer. This is all obvious to Baggini too, who said in his own comments on this thought experiment:

​
"Before you say that God could never command such wicked things, remember that the God of the three Abrahamic faiths not only ordered the sacrifice of Isaac, but also condoned the rape of a wife as punishment to the husband (2 Samuel 12), ordered the killing of followers of other religions (Deuteronomy 13), and sentenced blasphemers to death by stoning (Leviticus 24). It seems there are no limits to what God might ask, and some people of faith will do."

Rather than continue to harp on about the clear winners and losers in this reason vs. faith debate, however, Baggini instead puts a twist on the Abraham story. He may have done so by turning to a theory about the difference between right and wrong that Kierkegaard wrote about at the end of his work, 
Either/Or. In that book, Kierkegaard wrote:

"If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, to some degree in the right, to some degree in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong? Or is he a different person when he judges his act then when he acts? Is doubt to rule, then, continually to discover new difficulties, and is care to accompany the anguished soul and drum past experiences into it? Or would we prefer continually to be in the right in the way irrational creatures are?"

So, Kierkegaard clearly recognizes the doubt and skepticism that any philosopher would bring to a discussion with God about an obviously horrific command. But then why didn't Abraham express such doubts? Where did he get his certainty from? It's easy to see why his blind obedience is held up by the priests, rabbis, and imams as a paragon of virtue, but why do so many followers actually, you know, follow? This, to me, is what Baggini is really asking us to look at.

The answer to that may actually be on display this week at the Republican National Convention where Donald Trump (who is more of a burning dumpster fire than a burning bush) has ignited a sizable and passionate following of people who are willing to back him for the presidency even though he has no political experience, a terrible track record in business, and is a lying bully with a terrible personal history by almost any measure. Just like a booming voice out of the wilderness though, he does have certainty. And that's something that appeals strongly to some kinds of people.

In psychology, the authoritarian personality is "a state of mind or attitude characterized by belief in absolute obedience or submission to one's own authority, as well as the administration of that belief through the oppression of one's subordinates." According to the original theory behind the description of this trait, personal insecurities can result in an adherence to externally imposed rules of convention. During childhood, the formation of this personality trait can occur within the first few years of a person's life whenever "hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitative parent-child relationships" are common in the family life. "Parents who have a need for domination, and who dominate and threaten the child harshly, and demand obedience to conventional behaviors with threats, foster the characteristics of this personality." In evolutionary terms, children are born with the ability to adapt to their social environments. Humans have the flexibility to be highly competitive or highly cooperative depending on what is required of them. So when environments are filled with harsh adults who are unable or unwilling to explain themselves, children learn to obey to survive. This can easily lead to a perpetual cycle as these children also learn to dominate when they can, and they don't learn to think clearly on their own. This sounds a lot Abraham's relationship with his God. It sounds a lot like the abusive police making headlines lately. And it also sounds a lot like Donald Trump.

In an excellent article titled, The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter, a doctoral student of political science explains that: "While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations."

Currently, the most effective way to spot an authoritarian is to ask him or her four quick questions about their actual or potential parenting style. (This is in agreement with the theory about where authoritarianism comes from.) The four questions are:

Is it more important to have a child who is:

1) respectful or independent?
2) obedient or self-reliant?
3) well-behaved or considerate?
4) well-mannered or curious?

Now that you know what we are talking about, it's easy to see that people who lean towards the first option in each of these questions are the ones who lean towards authoritarianism. As the author said, causes for these parenting behaviors haven't been determined, but I have to think they come from several sources: a population that hasn't been taught philosophical skills of logic and argumentation; a lack of any good reasons for many traditional beliefs; a lack of working traditions at all; the expediency of "because I said so" when dealing with children who are often very illogical; the peace and harmony (on the surface anyway) of living in a group that behaves similarly; and several other causes I'm sure you can think of. Scientists may not say that this authoritarian personality trait is "good" or "bad", but even though we can't all be leaders without some followers, an emphasis on leading by authoritarianism is clearly causing situations where "might makes right," and that is definitely not good.

So the authoritarianism that runs through humanity is problematic to say the least, but it is not necessarily a permanent problem. We are flexible creatures, and what can 
be learned from the environment can also be unlearned through subsequent training. Perhaps this is why educated citizens who have gone through the experience of college and university are much more likely to see through Trump (or Brexit, or religion) and not just fall in line behind such damaging styles of leadership. We should learn from all of this and teach better parenting skills to pass this on to everyone. Maybe then we'd have fewer Trumps, suicide bombers, and religious extremists. And wouldn't that really make America (and the world) great.
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Thought Experiment 58: Divine Command

7/18/2016

1 Comment

 
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In the wake of yet more religiously-motivated murders, I don't expect this week's thought experiment to reach and change the minds of any potential perpetrators, but I know that anyone reading this blog must interact with people of faith and perhaps they can use this story to sow seeds of reasonable doubt where there is currently unwarranted certainty.

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     And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord they God, and I command thee to sacrifice thy only son."
     The philosopher replied, "There's something not right here. Your commandments say, "Thou shalt not kill."
     "The Lord giveth the rules and the Lord taketh away," replied God.
     "But how do I know you are God?" insisted the philosopher. "Perhaps you are the devil trying to fool me?"
     "You must have faith," replied God.
     "Faith — or insanity? Perhaps my mind is playing tricks? Or maybe you're testing me in a cunning way. You want to see if I have so little moral fibre that at the command of a deep voice booming through the clouds, I commit infanticide."
     "Me almighty!" exclaimed the Lord. "What you're saying is that it is reasonable for you, a mere mortal, to refuse to do what I, the Lord thy God, commands."
     "I guess so," said the philosopher, "and you've given me no good reasons to change my mind."

Source: Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, 1843.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 172.
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What do you think? Can people of faith be taught to doubt like this philosopher speaking to "God"?
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Response to Thought Experiment 57: Eating Tiddles

7/15/2016

2 Comments

 
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ALF loved eating cats. Why don't we?
It's relatively easy to make moral judgments about a situation where one person directly harms another, but what about when no one is harmed? This week's thought experiment is drawn from psychology researchers who devised experiments to examine just such scenarios. In the opening abstract for their paper about this study, the authors wondered if "disgusting and disrespectful actions [are] judged to be moral violations, even when they are harmless." To give you an idea of what kinds of situations we're talking about, here are four of the five stories the researchers devised for their test subjects:

  1. Flag: A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old national flag. She doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
  2. Promise: A woman was dying, and on her deathbed she asked her son to promise that he would visit her grave every week. The son loved his mother very much, so he promised to visit her grave every week. But after the mother died, the son didn't keep his promise, because he was very busy.
  3. Kissing: A brother and sister like to kiss each other on the mouth. When nobody is around, they find a secret hiding place and kiss each other on the mouth, passionately.
  4. Chicken: A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Yuck. And now here is the fifth story, which was called "Dog" in the original study, but was slightly changed and embellished by Baggini:

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     "Waste not, want not," was Delia's motto. She had a great respect for the thriftiness of her parents' generation, people who had lived through the war most of their lives with relatively little. She had learned a lot from them, skills virtually no one her age had, such as how to skin a rabbit and make tasty, simple dishes from offal.
     So when she heard a scream of brakes one day outside her suburban semi in Hounslow, and went outside to find that Tiddles, the family cat, had been struck by a car, her first thoughts were not just of regret and sadness, but practicalities. The feline had been bashed but not run over. In effect, it was a lump of meat just waiting to be eaten.
     The pungent meat stew her family sat down to that evening was of a kind not found on many British dining tables today, but Delia's family was used to eating cuts of meat that were no longer fashionable. She had told her husband what had happened, of course, and had always been direct with her children. Still, the youngest, Maisie, ate reluctantly and cast her mother occasional accusing glares over her steaming bowl. Delia was sympathetic, but the child surely had no reason to think she had done anything wrong.

Source: "Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?" by Jonathan Haidt, Silvia Helena Koller, and Maria G. Davis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1973.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 169.
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The first two of the five stories listed above are designed to show disobedience or disrespect. The last three, including the one about the cat/dog, are designed to trigger feelings of disgust using unconventional food and sexual practices as triggers. But in none of the stories is anyone directly harmed according to traditional definitions of that term. After hearing these stories, however, test subjects were asked six types of questions to determine how moral or immoral the stories were. They were asked to give:


  1. an overall evaluation; (Is it very wrong, a little wrong, or perfectly okay.)
  2. a justification; (Why they answered the way they did.)
  3. a specific description of the harm; (Who was harmed and why?)
  4. their personal levels of bother; (How would you feel if you saw it directly?)
  5. judgments about interference; (Should the person be stopped?)
  6. judgments about universality. (What if country A does this, but country B does not?)

The details of the results across different demographics for each of the five stories are rather fascinating, and make the full paper well worth a read. Now that I've given the wider picture, however, I'm going to confine the rest of this blog post just to the story that Baggini chose for us. For the tale about eating the family pet, 45% of all adults surveyed said the family should be stopped from doing so, but there was a wide variation in that response. At the two extremes, 80% of people in Philadelphia from low socioeconomic-status backgrounds said eating the pet should be stopped, while only 10% of Philadelphians from high socioeconomic-status backgrounds thought the same thing. Those are practically polar opposite viewpoints! While writing about such variations across the entire study, the authors close their paper with this observation:

"If something disgusts you, does that make it wrong? In groups with a harm-based morality it does not, for moral condemnation requires a victim. Just as murder charges cannot be filed until a body is found, moral condemnation cannot be declared until harmful consequences are found or plausibly invented. The mere fact that one is bothered by something (e.g. heterosexuals bothered by homosexuality) does not give one the right to condemn it. In cultural groups with a non-harm-based morality, however, moral condemnation requires no victim, and one's own affective reactions may be considered relevant. Rules of discourse allow moral condemnation to be backed up by assertions such as "because that's disgusting," or norm statements such as "because you're not supposed to do that to a chicken." The role of affect in moral judgment may therefore be variable across cultures."

I don't believe that morality is or should be a matter of simple democracy. The section of the paper that discussed people's justifications for their evaluative beliefs showed (unsurprisingly) just how poorly most people actually reason about this subject. While psychologists who simply study the world as it is do a great service in reporting these facts, I don't think that cultural relativism is a resting place that philosophers should be satisfied with for morality. So, what principles can we use from evolutionary philosophy to try to clear up the matter? Given a natural, physical world with no evidence for souls; no means for the transmission of behavioural prowess through the digestion of another being; a long and shared evolutionary history of life eating life, and humans being omnivores; and an interconnected world where cooperation within and among species works better than competition over the long term; how might we best judge the morality of eating animals like Tiddles?

First, some basic facts. The wikipedia entry on cat meat lists over a dozen examples of nations from around the world that eat such meat. In the wikipedia entry on dog meat, the proliferation of such consumption is even higher. "It was estimated in 2014 that worldwide, 25 million dogs are eaten each year by humans." In the United States, "the term "dog" has been used as a synonym for sausage since 1884 and accusations that sausage makers used dog meat date to at least 1845."

Unlike cannibalism,
 the physical act of eating cats and dogs is at least as safe and nutritious as eating any other animal. We know that cannibalism--which "has been said to test the bounds of cultural relativism as it challenges anthropologists "to define what is or is not beyond the pale of acceptable human behaviour"--is not merely disgusting to most of us, it is unhealthy for the devourer. "Depending on what parts are eaten (the most infected include the brain, spinal cord, bone marrow, and small intestine), human cannibals run the risk of contracting a fatal prion malady, similar to Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (think Mad Cow), known as kuru." And yet, even 
cannibalism "was widespread in the past among humans in many parts of the world." So if that's the case, can eating pets really be that bad?

Serendipitously, I'm currently reading Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and there is an excellent passage in it about this topic. This sci-fi novel from 1961 with some philosophical touches is about a human named Mike who was born on Mars and raised by Martians where (according to the author) the belief that eating one another was considered a very high compliment. In one conversation (pp. 178-180), a character named Jubal who has thought about Mike's background, is trying to convince his employee named Duke that really, it's all relative. Check this out:


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     "But it is not a matter of free choice for me, nor for you—nor for Mike. All three of us are prisoners of our early indoctrinations, for it is hard, very nearly impossible, to shake off one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that if you had been born on Mars and brought up by Martians, you yourself would have exactly the same attitude toward eating and being eaten that Mike has?"
     Duke considered it, then shook his head. "I won't buy it, Jubal. Sure, about most things it's just Mike's hard luck that he wasn't brought up in civilisation—and my good luck that I was. I'm willing to make allowances for him. But this is different, this is an instinct."
     "Instinct. Dreck!"
     "But it is. I didn't get any 'training at my mother's knee' not to be a cannibal. Hell, I didn't need it; I've always known it was a sin—a nasty one. Why, the mere thought of it makes my stomach do a flip-flop. It's a basic instinct."
     Jubal groaned. "Duke, how could you learn so much about machinery and never learn anything about how you yourself tick? That nausea you feel—that's not an instinct; that's a conditioned reflex. Your mother didn't say to you, 'Mustn't eat your playmates, dear; that's not nice,' because you soaked it up from our whole culture—and so did I. Jokes about cannibals and missionaries, cartoons, fairy tales, horror stories, endless little things. But it has nothing to do with instinct....because cannibalism is historically one of the most widespread of human customs, extending through every branch of the human race. .... It's silly to talk about a practice being 'against instinct' when hundreds of millions of human beings have followed that practice."
     "But— All right, all right, I should know better than to argue with you, Jubal; you can always twist things around your way. But suppose we all did come from savages who didn't know any better—I'm not admitting it but just supposing. Suppose we did. What of it? We're civilised now. Or at least I am."
     Jubal grinned cheeerfully. "Implying that I am not. Son, quite aside from my own conditioned reflex against munching a roast haunch of—well, you, for example—quite aside from that trained-in emotional prejudice, for coldly practical reasons I regard our taboo against cannibalism as an excellent idea....because we are not civilised."
     "Huh?"
     "Obvious. If we didn't have a tribal taboo about the matter so strong that you honestly believed it was an instinct, I can think of a long list of people I wouldn't trust with my back turned, not with the price of beef what it is today. Eh?"
     Duke grudged a grin "Maybe you've got something there. I wouldn't want to take a chance on my ex-mother-in-law. She hates my guts."
     "You see? Or how about our charming neighbour on the south, who is so casual about other people's fences and live stock during the hunting season? I wouldn't want to bet that you and I wouldn't wind up in his freezer if we didn't have that taboo. But Mike [the Martian] I would trust utterly—because Mike is civilised."
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This is a discussion targeted squarely at the question of nature vs. nurture (or genes vs. the environment), with what I think is an excellent set of observations about the unconscious pervasiveness of culture upon our nurture. While it's possible for disgust mechanisms to become embedded in our genes (I think the aversion to blue or green mold is one of these), there has not been nearly enough time or selective force for the disgust of eating pets to be coded into our genetic instincts. In fact, the widespread practice of such "disgusting" behaviour confirms it has not been hard-coded.

I also particularly like Jubal's point that we may have taboos "for coldly practical reasons" concerning our fellow citizens. Relevant examples of why this is important for this week's thought experiment can be seen in Cambodia, Vietnam, and China where people's pets are being stolen, sold, and eaten, which causes enormous grief for the owners. In fact, in the Vietnamese story linked above, human victims of dog kidnapping have become so distressed that they are increasingly resorting to vigilante justice, violently killing dog thieves when they are caught. "Since 2012, at least 20 dog thieves have been beaten to death by community members fed up with having their beloved pets stolen." We've allowed domesticated wolves into our society for the help and companionship they give us only to have their instinctual trust of humans come back to haunt them. It's a disgraceful abuse of trust to our fellow animals, both human and non-human, and that loss of trust is badly corrosive to the project of building cooperative societies.

​So, we have a lot of customs and emotions at play here, both individually and societally. It's a complex problem, but let's try to wrap this discussion up with some concrete decisions. There are essentially three options: 1) Eating cats and dogs is always okay. 2) Eating cats and dogs is sometimes okay. 3) Eating cats and dogs is never okay. As usual, I would have to come down on the side of finding balance between the two extreme positions. When might it be okay? That's difficult to say with precision. When trying to suss out the details for problems of applied ethics, the number of potential options to explore is myriad and changes to any of the preconditions can easily change the outcome of the final decision. But the choice for when it might be acceptable to eat cats and dogs could be informed by the following lines of inquiry, all of which could be greatly expanded during an exhaustive evaluation of this problem.

Which stakeholders must be considered in the decision? The individual eating the cat or dog? Yes. Humans with prior relationships to the cat or dog? Yes. The individual cat or dog? Yes. Other members of society who interact with the person doing the eating? Somewhat; their potential future actions must be considered. Other cats or dogs who may be eaten in the future? Yes; their ongoing welfare should be taken into account. Other non-human animals? Potentially yes. Since carnivores are impractical or very difficult to raise for food, cats and dogs are really only likely to be potential food sources if they have been raised as pets or if they have become feral. Once they are feral, cats and dogs can fall into the same discussions of regulating ecosystems that are used to talk about other hunted animals. For example, feral cats and dogs could quite justifiably be encouraged to be eaten in areas where they are a great danger to other endemic species, such as in Australia, New Zealand, or other isolated island habitats.

When should you not eat cats or dogs? If there is a physical danger to the consumer: there are none inherently, but environmental conditions where poisons or diseases are present may change that. If there is a mental danger to the consumer: future feelings of guilt and grief could hinder many people, although examples show this is relative and therefore able to be overcome. If it would harm the "spirit" of the pet who is dead: but they will be eaten by something eventually, so this is not a valid concern. If the pet is still alive: we should not be tempted to end their sentient lives prematurely while they still have something to give to others unless there is a much greater need, although current end-of-life considerations may remain unchanged. If eating the cat or dog would harm other people: certainly there is harm if the cat or dog belonged to someone else and they did not wish for their pet to be taken from them, but there is no harm if another person is merely personally repulsed by the idea of a cat or dog being eaten.

When could you eat cats or dogs? If there is a physical need: when there is little or no other choice for sustenance, such as in war-torn areas or places of extreme environmental poverty. There is no "need" though when the animal is eaten for mere preference because the animal is tasty to you, or because you have mistaken beliefs about the personal benefits the consumption will bring. If there is an emotional need: as long as other conditions allow it, eating the animal may be a celebration of its life. Currently, however, many people insist upon the opposite—a wilful ignorance about where their meat comes from.

Boy oh boy, this is not a comfortable discussion to try to reduce to intellectually precise terms. I'd love to hear other thoughts on this matter, including whether I've put my foot wrong, but please give me some benefit of the doubt because of my previous record of philosophically being a strong defender of animal rights, as well as personally being a very loving pet owner. I personally don't think eating my pets would ever be the best way to celebrate their lives (it's too temporary a pleasure), but I don't think I can justify stopping others who might want to do so under perfectly-designed harmless conditions like the fictional one that befell poor Tiddles.
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Thought Experiment 57: Eating Tiddles

7/11/2016

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For those of you obsessed with lolcats on the internet, here's your warning that you may want to skip this week's thought experiment. If you think you can "stomach it" though, read on.

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     "Waste not, want not," was Delia's motto. She had a great respect for the thriftiness of her parents' generation, people who had lived through the war most of their lives with relatively little. She had learned a lot from them, skills virtually no one her age had, such as how to skin a rabbit and make tasty, simple dishes from offal.
     So when she heard a scream of brakes one day outside her suburban semi in Hounslow, and went outside to find that Tiddles, the family cat, had been struck by a car, her first thoughts were not just of regret and sadness, but practicalities. The feline had been bashed but not run over. In effect, it was a lump of meat just waiting to be eaten.
     The pungent meat stew her family sat down to that evening was of a kind not found on many British dining tables today, but Delia's family was used to eating cuts of meat that were no longer fashionable. She had told her husband what had happened, of course, and had always been direct with her children. Still, the youngest, Maisie, ate reluctantly and cast her mother occasional accusing glares over her steaming bowl. Delia was sympathetic, but the child surely had no reason to think she had done anything wrong.

Source: "Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?" by Jonathan Haidt, Silvia Helena Koller, and Maria G. Davis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1973.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 169.
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What do you think? What are the possible reasons one could give for NOT eating Tiddles? Do any of those reasons have an objective basis for being true? I'll be back on Friday to try and sort through my thoughts and feelings on this.
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Response to Experiment 56: The Total Perspective Vortex

7/8/2016

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What is the most awe-inspiring thing you have ever seen? For me, the choice from among many things much greater than myself is hard to make. I've seen bristlecone pine trees in the Nevada mountains — at 5,000 years of age they are the oldest living things on the planet. I've seen Lake Baikal — the deepest, oldest, largest lake in the world that holds 20% of all the fresh water on Earth, more than all the Great Lakes of North America combined. I've been to the Grand Canyon — a massive gash that exposes 1.75 billion years of rock history, about 40% of the Earth's entire existence. But none of these scales of grandeur even come close to those offered by cosmology.

In the small book NightWatch--one of the preeminent guides available for amateur astronomers—author Terrance Dickinson takes the reader on a brief "Tour of the Universe in 11 Steps" by using a succession of growing boxes. His first cube is 20,000km on each side, which is just enough to encompasses the entire Earth. We actually know this cube quite well, and many of us have personally travelled all of the way around it. Continuing on, however, Dickinson expands his box step-by-step by multiplying each side by a factor of 100 and the results quickly begin to boggle the mind. Each successive box has 1,000,000 times the volume of the previous one, and yet, in all this extra space in box 2, only one celestial object is available for the astronomer to see: the moon. Within the third box, we get segments of the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The fourth box contains very nearly our entire solar system, but the fifth box adds almost nothing to that but empty space. It's not until step 6, now a box that is 20 light-years on each side, that a few other stars first begin to show up. In step 7 we get a few familiar constellations, and in step 8 the entire Milky Way galaxy is contained—an average size galaxy that contains an estimated 400 billion stars. In step 9, 20 million light-years on each side, we get a handful of other galaxies, but mostly just incomprehensible stretches of empty space. Step 10 reveals, however, that even in such emptiness there are bands that galaxies form across. There is a slight structure, a vague concentration, that appears almost like wrinkles across the outermost face of the expanding universe. Finally, in step 11, we get to the edge of the known universe, beyond which we can currently see and know nothing. Among the initial tenets of my evolutionary philosophy, I noted the makeup of this realm in my third tenet:

3. The universe is composed of trillions and trillions of stars and is currently expanding after a Big Bang and 13-14 billion years of evolutionary processes.* We are just another species of animal life on a single planet orbiting one of the stars in the universe. (* The best current estimate of the age of the universe is 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years. The best current estimate of the number of stars in the universe is from 3 to 100 × 10^22 or between 30 sextillion and 30 septillion.)

Now THOSE are some awe-inspiring numbers. I was happy to see that someone had recorded NightWatch's journey through the universe onto a youtube video, but it's 16 minutes long and exceedingly dry. You can watch it if you have ever been a star-gazing geek like me, but I found a much more powerful presentation about the size of the universe in a classic film made by Charles and Ray Eames for IBM in 1977. It's called Powers of Ten, and I've embedded it below. It's 9-minutes long, but I was mesmerized by it and the time flew by.
​

​So, now that we are all suitably impressed by the universe, let's turn to this week's thought experiment, which comes from Douglas Adams's Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which is part two in his series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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     Ian Ferrier had for years dreamed of building the total perspective vortex. But now, as he stood ready to test it out, he was questioning whether the whole endeavour was a terrible mistake.
     The machine, which he had first come across as a piece of science fiction in a late twentieth-century radio programme, would enable whoever went into it to see their true place in the universe. The idea of the original fiction was that anyone who used the machine would find the fact of their own insignificance so crushing that it would destroy their very soul.
     Ferrier had cheated a little in building the machine: everyone would see the same thing, since, he reasoned, we are all more or less as insignificant as each other. But throughout the project he had been convinced the machine would not crush his soul at all. He, like Camus's Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder endlessly uphill only to see it roll back down again, would be able to confront the absurdity of his own insignificance and prevail.
     And yet, now he was about to test it out, he did feel more than a little apprehensive. Could he really accept his own infinitesimal smallness in the grand scheme of things? There was only one way to find out...

Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, 1980.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 166.
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Baggini doesn't say exactly what's in his total perspective vortex (TPV), but on the Hitchhiker's wiki we get this description from the original book:


"The Vortex is now used as a torture and (in effect) killing device on the planet Frogstar B. The prospective victim of the TPV is placed within a small chamber wherein is displayed a model of the entire universe - together with a microscopic dot bearing the legend "you are here". The sense of perspective thereby conveyed destroys the victim's mind."

This is almost exactly what is shown in the videos linked above. Have you watched them yet? Do you now dare? Well I don't know about you, but far from "crushing my soul," I find that it actually lifts my spirits. Why is that? Perhaps it is because, as reader Steve Willey wondered in a comment on Monday's post, "is a conscious brain the most grand thing we have ever encountered in the known universe?" Seeing as how there are more potential configurations of connections in our brains than there are atoms in the entire universe, this isn't as narcissistic and human-centered as it sounds. We may be constructed of the material jettisoned from stars, but we have gained a free will that none of those trillions of suns or their planets could ever have. The size of the universe is grand, but the complexity of life is even grander. Also, in my post on Immanuel Kant, we can see another important component to the reason why the total perspective vortex doesn't crush us. In that post, we see that:

Kant divides the feeling of the sublime into two distinct modes - the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime is situated in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or that appear absolutely great. This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In the dynamical sublime, there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character. Given that the meaning of life is to perpetuate the long-term survival of life, it follows that we should feel awe when contemplating infinity and extinction. Exposure to both of these concepts does aid our judgment and moral character in choosing actions that comport with the meaning of life.

Ah, but what is that meaning of life, I can hear you asking. In such a vast, cold, and mostly empty universe, can there be anything more for us than Sisyphus pushing the rock up a hill over and over again? As Camus said of such efforts: "The struggle itself [...] is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." In his absurdist writing, Camus continually pointed to "the conflict between (1) the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and (2) the human inability to find any." And although he didn't have an answer to resolve this conflict, Camus thought that "individuals should embrace the absurd condition of human existence while also defiantly continuing to explore and search for meaning." In my Response to Thought Experiment 52, I explained my own take on such a search. I said:

...first we must give an answer to one of the very biggest philosophical questions—what is the meaning of life? I recently finished an excellent book by philosopher John Messerly on this topic called The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives. It is an excellent summary of the best modern answers to this question from all the major philosophical positions. In the book, Messerly notes that none of these positions have generated an accepted viewpoint yet, but his analysis along the way caused me to generate my own thoughts on the question, which I shared with him in a private exchange. I wrote:

When asking the question, “what is the meaning of life?”, a fundamental clarifying question must be “for whom?”. Wants and meaning must be applied to someone. The "universe" doesn't want anything, and nothing is meaningful to it. This is why searches for "ultimate meanings" are senseless. They look for emotionally-led oughts where there can be no emotion. But life does want. So life ought to live. (See my ASEBL Journal article.) The scope of the universe is too large for one human life to have an impactful meaning upon it. Our imagination scales infinitely though, so we can imagine that we could. The story of life in general, however, is big enough to have meaning in the universe. And our role in the story of life could actually be quite large. Even if individually a life were not very important, we've evolved to feel pleasure at the scale we can affect life, so our lives can still feel quite meaningful when we accept the size of the role we've inherited. We don’t long for the role of a stellar nursery giving birth to stars, nor are we satisfied with the accomplishments of a mayfly. The 'big freeze' or the 'big crunch' are still possibilities for universal death within this universe, which would render everything meaningless, but maybe those outcomes can one day be affected by life within this universe. Maybe dark energy, dark matter, or something else altogether unknown can be manipulated in such a way as to balance things for survival. Until we can do that, that is a goal which gives meaning to life. We may not be able to answer any ultimate questions now of why the universe and life exist, but maybe someone will be able to someday. It is our job to do what we can to get to that. Survival and scientific progress are prerequisites along that path. Just as Renaissance people (to take one example) could be said to have found meaning in supporting a society that lead to the growth of the scientific method, which helped us get this far, we can find meaning today by doing our job to support a society laying the groundwork for future knowledge explorers too.

Messerly turned this into a blog post on his wonderful site Reason and Meaning, where he quoted my response and said:

I think the reader has it about right. The only way our individual lives have objective meaning is if they are part of something larger. We hope then that we are links in a golden chain leading onward and upward toward higher levels of being and consciousness. The effort we exert as we travel this path provides the meaning to our lives as we live them. And if our descendents, in whatever form they take, live more meaningful lives as a result of our efforts, then we will have been successful.

And there you have it.​ In Douglas Adams's fictional farce, the character Zaphod Beeblebrox is reported to be the only person to have ever survived the total perspective vortex. But in real life, we can all not only survive such experiences quite easily, we may actually use them to help us learn the key to thriving.
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Thought Experiment 56: The Total Perspective Vortex

7/4/2016

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My last post about Brexit was by far the most successful one I've had in terms of Facebook readership, and this tempts me to stray from continuing my plan to write about philosophy thought experiments. But my Brexit post was still just a drop in the ocean of coverage for that issue, so I should really step back and look at things from a wider perspective before making any changes. Good thing this week's thought experiment is encouraging me to do exactly that!

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     Ian Ferrier had for years dreamed of building the total perspective vortex. But now, as he stood ready to test it out, he was questioning whether the whole endeavour was a terrible mistake.
     The machine, which he had first come across as a piece of science fiction in a late twentieth-century radio programme, would enable whoever went into it to see their true place in the universe. The idea of the original fiction was that anyone who used the machine would find the fact of their own insignificance so crushing that it would destroy their very soul.
     Ferrier had cheated a little in building the machine: everyone would see the same thing, since, he reasoned, we are all more or less as insignificant as each other. But throughout the project he had been convinced the machine would not crush his soul at all. He, like Camus's Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder endlessly uphill only to see it roll back down again, would be able to confront the absurdity of his own insignificance and prevail.
     And yet, now he was about to test it out, he did feel more than a little apprehensive. Could he really accept his own infinitesimal smallness in the grand scheme of things? There was only one way to find out...

Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, 1980.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 166.
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So what do you think? Could anything we ever do actually make a difference in the grand scheme of things? I'll be back on Friday with thoughts on this....as long as I am able to pull myself back from the nihilistic brink.
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Brexit — A Symptom of Poor Evolutionary Philosophy

7/3/2016

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Image credit The Spectator (https://is.gd/WZThuB)
(Hi all. I want to first say a quick apology for not getting around to posting a thought experiment this week. Even though I had friends visiting from America I had planned to find time to blog normally, but a case of the shingles has weighed me down and sapped any strength I had reserved for such writing. I'll get back to my regular blogging schedule next week, but before then I wanted to post some quick thoughts about Brexit from my viewpoint as an evolutionary philosopher since this is turning into a really momentous political revolution. I hope you don't mind the short diversion into current events.)


I'm going to talk about Brexit in a moment, but bear with me as I set the stage with some philosophical, economic, and political history. The early phase of evolutionary philosophy—beginning with Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley and continuing through to the nadir of Nazi eugenics—was a time most easily characterised by an emphasis on the idea of the survival of the fittest. Darwin's big idea, that natural selection is what drives the evolution of all things, led directly to a simplistic belief that competition reigns supreme in an eat-or-be-eaten world where only the strong survive according to the law of the jungle. The morally disgusting behaviours that resulted from this faulty view of the world drove evolutionary philosophies underground for decades. During that time, scientists refrained for the most part from telling us what we ought to do, but their further study of the way the world really is has led us to realise that in the long run cooperation defeats competition. And c
ooperation is everywhere. I don't mean the kind of cooperation only seen in altruistic, sacrificial behaviour by noble individuals; I mean the kind of cooperation that can be seen in the actions of rivals not killing other rivals, in predators not hunting prey to extinction, or in species learning to coexist profitably next to one another in small ecosystem niches. This is rarely (if ever) some sort of kind-hearted, well-meaning, intentional cooperation, but this is nevertheless the textbook definition of cooperation: the action or process of working together toward the same end. All life slowly learns to work together in order to symbiotically survive. That is our shared end goal. Every element of life must learn this lesson or it will ultimately fail to remain alive.

Because of this understanding of ecological connectedness and ubiquitous cooperation, a second wave of modern evolutionary philosophy is emerging, one that emphasises this requirement for survival. My own writings on this Evphil website have made the continual call for cooperation towards the goal of survival for all life. In our modern, connected world, this shared goal requires a vast cooperation unlike anything we've ever seen before—a cooperation across individuals, families, tribes, races, nations, and even species. Such cooperation would allow us to attain the one long-term goal we all share (the survival of life), but such cooperation also means we cannot get everything we want all of the time. We must learn to walk the fine balancing act between meeting the needs of the individual and the needs of each collective that is vital to our shared goal. This balancing act is required for a successful democracy, but lately we have seen large swaths of people unable to bear it. I believe this is due to a hangover from the early first wave of evolutionary philosophy.

Once the communist experiment collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union, the concept of neoliberal, market-driven political economies came to unquestionably rule the world. Cooperation became associated with a kind of evil that was imposed by totalitarian regimes from the top down, while competition became the saviour that drove efficiency and the creation of enormous wealth. For a time, this worked. During the 20th century, people were lifted out of poverty around the globe and first-world nations now enjoy technological wonders that make our lives seem like those of gods compared to our ancestors. Unfortunately, the heavy emphasis on the miracles of competition has led many to believe that it is good all of the time and everywhere. Any advantage that can be snapped up, must be snapped up. If you don't agree with this logic, you are standing in the way of progress and you will be run over. If you are 5% slower getting to market, your rival will capture 100% of the profits. The problem with this line of winner-take-all thinking, of course, is that it leads to tremendous income inequality. If you are a basketball star who won a game of inches by making 2% more of your shots, then you deserve the max salary of whatever the market will pay you. If you are a CEO at the helm of a company buffeted by international economic storms, you would be a fool not to negotiate for every cent you can extract from your company. What kind of business leader would do otherwise? And if part of your negotiation means having to move 10,000 jobs to a poor, unregulated foreign economy for the sake of a few million dollars of profit, well that is just what has to be done. Remember, your rivals are doing this too and they will eat you alive if you don't do it first. The neoliberal belief system that built our economic world has made it into one that resembles the mistaken evolutionary model of the law of the jungle.

Such desires to dominate have also infected the political world. Republicans get a slim majority in the House and Senate? Then Obama and the Democrats don't get to do anything. The Tories win a plurality in the last general election? Then it's austerity measures for all, and especially in downtrodden Labour constituencies where the electorate are against you anyway. If you lose by a little, you lose by a lot. That's the motto of a world dominated (literally) by competition. And it's precisely the motto that makes democracy absolutely unpleasant for all. Slim majorities become controlling elites who are later voted (or revolted) back into the minority to take their turn of the punishment of the loser. With all of these natural, economic, and political views about competition and cooperation in mind, let's now look at this week's very unsatisfactory Brexit vote.

On the right, we have half the Tories happy with the current arrangement of the world where access to the European market gives them huge spoils for their competitive wins. These are the London bankers who voted Remain. The other half of Tories though, the OxBridge social and political elites, are worried their dominant position of influence is being threatened by EU technocrats so they're willing to vote Leave and forego a larger pie for the sake of getting to eat whatever they want. Meanwhile, on the left, the majority of the Labour party see the opportunities the EU provides them for organised resistance of the corporate overlords and they voted Remain, but plenty of other Labor voters think the whole system is rigged and they have nothing in common with people from other countries who are also scraping to get by so they voted to try and Leave it all behind. When David Cameron forced this complex and divisive issue into a binary outcome, we arrived at two coalitions in name, but neither of them actually get along with all of the people they voted with. And there is only a slim majority for one of those groups as well. In a neoliberal world, however, where the winner is supposed to get everything, the Leave campaign now fully expect to drag everyone else to a Brexit. This is worse than a simple tyranny of the majority, it's the tyranny of a competitive majority that has been taught by the world around them to be as greedy as possible. We know that 52% of a population could not vote to kill the other 48%, but just how much pain should they be allowed to inflict on the losers? Should 52% of any vote ever lead to 100% execution of the winner's idea? No. Not where compromise is possible. And there is almost always a third choice.

After these close and complicated referendum results, we have been bombarded from the press by stories of palace intrigue with reporters likening all the political battles to fictional ones in House of Cards or Game of Thrones. But does anyone think those Hollywood stories are ones we should be emulating? Most of the joy of watching those TV shows comes from knowing we are safe in our living rooms from the horrors portrayed on screen. In the real world, cooler heads must prevail. It is time for the death throws of the neoliberal obsession with competition to be replaced with a modern evolutionary philosophy of cooperative balance. The next Prime Minister cannot cater only to a slim majority of voters who are quite possibly a minority of residents. She or he must seek compromise. The voters who yearn for a smaller isolationist world must be told they cannot get what they want; such a world no longer exists. And the voters who want to keep winning according to the current economic rules must be told that no one wants to play their game anymore. These are unpleasant truths to everyone, but that is exactly what must be said in a world where everyone cannot get everything they want. That is what widespread cooperation for the long term feels like. Leaders must be prepared to say this, and followers must be prepared to hear this. Don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.
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