After a marathon post last week, I'm hoping this week's thought experiment will be a bit easier for me to do it justice. Let's see what's in store.

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     Hew, Drew, Lou, and Sue all promised their mother they would regularly write and let her know how they were getting on during their round-the-world trip.
     Hew wrote his letters, but gave them to the other people to post, none of whom bothered. So his mother never received any letters from him.
     Drew wrote her letters and posted them herself, but she carelessly put them in disused boxes, attached too few stamps and made other mistakes which meant none of them ever arrived.
     Lou wrote and posted all her letters properly, but the postal system let her down every time. Mother didn't hear from her.
     Sue wrote and posted all her letters properly, and made brief phone calls to check they had arrived. Alas, none did.
     Did any of the children keep their promise to their mother?

Source: The moral philosophy of H.A. Prichard, as critiqued by Mary Warnock in What Philosophers Think, edited by J. Baggini and J. Stanghroom (Continuum, 2003)

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 79.
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Seems simple enough. Do intentions or consequences make all the difference? I promise to write you on Friday to let you know how I'm getting on with that debate.

If you'll excuse the, ahem, painful metaphor, this week's thought experiment opens up a gaping hole for inquiry and explanation. I'll cut to the quick though as best I can and try to avoid too much bloodletting onto the page. First, here's the experiment:

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     The tension in the auditorium was palpable as the doctor donned his mask and gloves and prepared to take his needle and thread to the conscious patient's strapped-down leg. As he pushed the needle through the flesh, the patient let out an almighty cry of pain. But once the needle had passed through, he seemed unnaturally calm.
     "How was that?" asked the doctor.
     "Fine," replied the patient, to gasps from the audience. "It's just as you said, I remember you putting the needle through me, but I don't remember any pain."
     "So do you have any objection if I do the next stitch?"
     "Not at all. I'm not at all apprehensive."
     The doctor turned to the audience and explained: "The process I have developed does not, like an anaesthetic, remove the sensation of pain. What it does is prevent the memory of the pain being laid down in the patient's nervous system. If you are not going to remember your momentary pain, why fear it? Our patient here shows this is not just theoretical sophistry. You witnessed his pain, but he, having forgotten it, has no fear of repeating the experience. This enables us to conduct surgery with the patient fully conscious, which in some instances is extremely useful. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some stitching to do."

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 76.
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Anyone who has watched a movie set in the days when biting down on a stick was all you got from your doctor in preparation for the amputation of a diseased limb knows what a major reduction in suffering for humanity it was to discover anesthesia. You might be surprised when asking "How does anaesthesia work?", that the answer is we don't really know — "although we know a great deal about the physiologic effects and macroscopic sites of action, we don't yet know the molecular mechanism(s) of action for general anesthetics." This is why discoveries in this field still have much to teach us about consciousness. We do know that the effects of anesthesia had better be reversible though. People with a very rare congenital insensitivity to pain have been reported to be at great risk of self-inflicted trauma such as chewing their own tongue off or continuing to walk around on broken bones. But what of Baggini's thought experiment? Would an inability to remember pain allow us to keep walking right back into a painful situation? Some have joked that women's ability to forget the pain of childbirth is what keeps us repopulating the world (although the scientific evidence of that is mixed at best), so sure, this type of mental anesthesiology would probably do the job if it really worked.

But if that's true, what does that imply about any concern we might have for other creatures who may or may not feel pain, let alone remember it later? In my blog post on Descartes, I wrote how "Descartes believed that only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes' practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals) became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment." This seems undoubtedly a sad chapter in our history and we hail Jeremy Bentham for being "widely recognized as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights - he argued that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, should be the benchmark in determining their proper treatment."

Over at the website reducing-suffering.org, there are many essays discussing how the ability to suffer extends all the way up and down the animal kingdom. In "The Importance of Insect Suffering", the author points out that:

"Insects have numerous sensory systems, including for vision, smell, taste, touch, temperature, and humidity. While it’s sometimes claimed that insects lack pain sensors, these have been discovered in a few species of bugs, including fruit flies. And even insects that lack pain sensors specifically may still respond aversively to other kinds of stimuli. Insects show negative reactions to, among other things, excess heat, electric shock, and poking and pinching. As in humans, opiates can affect insect responses to pain. Crickets were slower to escape a heated box when given morphine, and this effect was blocked if the crickets were given the anti-opioid drug naloxone. The effect of morphine decreased over time (“drug tolerance”), and when morphine was stopped suddenly after four days of administration, the crickets jumped more aggressively in response to vibration than usual (“drug addiction”). ... Those who accept some form of utilitarian theoretical framework, in which the basic moral currency consists of frustrations and satisfactions of desires and preferences, will find it difficult to resist the conclusion that sympathy is owed to at least some invertebrates, just as it is owed to other human beings. ... When making ethical decisions, we shouldn’t wait for conclusive proof. Rather, we should take precaution by assessing different possibilities and evaluating the consequences if each turned out to be true. Even if your probability for insects feeling conscious pain is low, if insects do suffer, the moral consequences are significant."

But in a recent long, dense essay, in Scientia Salon called "Why fish (likely) don’t feel pain", Brian Key, a professor of developmental neurobiology, argued that the conclusive scientific proof *is* rolling in that many animals can't suffer. First, he establishes some key terms.

"We must be very clear in our definition given the claim that fish do not feel pain. Pain is the subjective and unpleasant experience (colloquially referred to as a “feeling”) associated with a mental state that occurs following exposure to a noxious stimulus. The mental state is the neural activity in the brain that is indirectly activated by the stimulation of peripheral sensory receptors. A noxious stimulus is one that is physically damaging to body tissues (e.g., cutting, cold and heat) or causes the activation of peripheral sensory receptors and neural pathways that would normally be stimulated had the body been physically damaged."

So Professor Key is making a distinction between mere reflexive avoidance of harm, and the mental feeling of suffering pain. He continues:

"To feel pain requires that you are aware or conscious of your own mental state. To be aware first requires that you attend to the stimulus. ... In humans, the cerebral cortex in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain is intimately involved in attending to input from our sensory receptors. In summary, feeling pain requires the activity of neural circuits associated with attention. Once the brain is attending to a sensory stimulus then it becomes possible to subjectively experience a specific sensation. ... If the signal is strong enough and if sufficient information is transferred and integrated, then the feeling of pain emerges (at present, how this occurs remains a mystery). In summary, to the best of our knowledge, for any vertebrate nervous system to feel pain it must be capable of transferring and integrating a certain level of neural information."

After a very in-depth tour of the sections of the brain that are involved in conscious processing, Key finishes by saying:

"On this basis it should be concluded that fish lack the prerequisite neuroanatomical features necessary to perform the required neurophysiological functions responsible for the feeling of pain. ... What, then, does it feel like to be a fish? The evidence best supports the idea that it doesn’t feel like anything to be a fish. They are non-conscious animals that survive without feeling; they just do it."

Professor Key believes this may explain why horses and bears become habituated to pain and give up struggling when they are reigned in or trapped, while fish can mindlessly struggle for hours and hours at the end of a hook. The parliament of Canada agreed with this type of stance when it ruled:

Although it is impossible to know the subjective experience of another animal with certainty, the balance of the evidence suggests that most invertebrates do not feel pain. The evidence is most robust for insects, and, for these animals, the consensus is that they do not feel pain.

Yet in Britain, the RSPCA now formally prosecutes individuals who are cruel to fish. So the evidence and conclusions are very much mixed on this issue and the formation of norms in society are still being played out. Meanwhile, back in "The Importance of Insect Suffering", the author concedes:

"There’s no a priori reason why life in the wild should be good on balance. As Richard Dawkins wrote in River out of Eden: The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

Yes. Any objective review of evolutionary history would suggest that pain in life is unavoidable. Heck, remember Westley's words from The Princess Bride.

That doesn't mean we have license to go around inflicting as much pain as possible, but we do run into great difficulties trying to live when guided chiefly by the goal of reducing all pain as far as possible. The reducing-suffering website, for example, recommends putting gravel on your lawns to stop insects from being born and suffering. But that also eliminates the joy of life that one must believe the insects feel if you are to entertain this position. It's easy to endlessly tie yourself up in knots trying to calculate the balance of joy minus pain in past, current, or future forms of life, so I still believe we are better guided by my definition of good, being "that which promotes the long-term survival of life in general."

The other big question that Baggini's thought experiment raises is what, if anything, should we do about our own mental pain if it can be eliminated? This subject has a large literature of its own, but I'll just bring up some fascinating modern issues that were described in a long Wired article titled "The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever." Here is a selected summary:

"In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice. ... For years scientists have been able to change the emotional tone of a memory by administering certain drugs just before asking people to recall the event in detail. New research suggests that they’ll be able to target and erase specific memories altogether. ... In one 2010 clinical trial, subjects suffering from PTSD were given MDMA (street name: ecstasy) while undergoing talk therapy. Because the drug triggers a rush of positive emotion, the patients recalled their trauma without feeling overwhelmed. As a result, the remembered event was associated with the positive feelings triggered by the pill. According to the researchers, 83 percent of their patients showed a dramatic decrease in symptoms within two months. That makes ecstasy one of the most effective PTSD treatments ever devised. ... They work OK, but their effect is indirect. What reconsolidation therapy really needs is a drug that can target the fear memory itself. The perfect drug wouldn’t just tamp down the traumatic feeling. It would erase the actual representation of the trauma in the brain. Here’s the amazing part: The perfect drug may have already been found. The chemistry of the brain is in constant flux, with the typical neural protein lasting anywhere from two weeks to a few months before it breaks down or gets reabsorbed. How then do some of our memories seem to last forever? It’s as if they are sturdier than the mind itself. Scientists have narrowed down the list of molecules that seem essential to the creation of long-term memory—sea slugs and mice without these compounds are total amnesiacs—but until recently nobody knew how they worked. ... A form of protein kinase C called PKMzeta hangs around synapses, the junctions where neurons connect, for an unusually long time. And without it, stable recollections start to disappear. ... What does PKMzeta do? The molecule’s crucial trick is that it increases the density of a particular type of sensor called an AMPA receptor on the outside of a neuron. It’s an ion channel, a gateway to the interior of a cell that, when opened, makes it easier for adjacent cells to excite one another. (While neurons are normally shy strangers, struggling to interact, PKMzeta turns them into intimate friends, happy to exchange all sorts of incidental information.) This process requires constant upkeep—every long-term memory is always on the verge of vanishing. As a result, even a brief interruption of PKMzeta activity can dismantle the function of a steadfast circuit. ... The trick was finding a chemical that inhibited PKMzeta activity. “It turned out to be remarkably easy,” Sacktor says. “All we had to do was order this inhibitor compound from the chemical catalog and then give it to the animals. You could watch them forget.” ... While scientists have long wondered how to target specific memories in the brain, it turns out to be remarkably easy: All you have to do is ask people to remember them. ... By coupling these amnesia cocktails to the memory reconsolidation process, it’s possible to get even more specific. ... The careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. ... And PTSD isn’t the only disease that’s driven by a broken set of memories—other nasty afflictions, including chronic pain, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and drug addiction, are also fueled by memories that can’t be forgotten. ... The problem with eliminating pain, of course, is that pain is often educational. We learn from our regrets and mistakes; wisdom is not free. If our past becomes a playlist—a collection of tracks we can edit with ease—then how will we resist the temptation to erase the unpleasant ones?"

(Of course, this article was written by Jonah Lehrer who was disgraced for fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan, so take it all with a tiny grain of salt. I'm going to choose to forget that though because I like this piece of work...)

So it looks like Baggini's treatment method is closer to becoming reality than I thought. If it does become available though, we should be careful in how we use it and remember that wisdom really isn't free. In fact, this type of drug treatment could render us insane, according to my definition of insanity:

Insanity is the inability of reason to control the emotions, either through brain chemistry that does not respond to cognitive appraisals or cognitive appraisals that refuse to respond to reality. This lack of control also ranges from mild (neurotic) to extreme (psychotic). Treatment for insanity must be based on the correct cause and severity of the affliction.

When this was discussed in a blog post on Psychology Today's website, Professor John Johnson said:

"I like this definition because it meshes well with what we know at this point in time concerning the most effective therapies for psychological problems. Two of the most common problems that lead people to seek therapy are anxiety and depression. Feeling anxious or depressed is a normal, adaptive response to certain situations, but sometimes these emotions get out of control, becoming inappropriately pervasive and/or intense. For all but the most severe forms of these disorders, cognitive therapy tends to be the most effective treatment. In cognitive therapies, people learn how to reappraise their situation. When people can think about their situations in ways that are possibly more realistic than the narrow, distorted appraisals that leave them mired in anxiety or depression, they have a chance of reducing or even dispelling the inappropriate feelings that are making them miserable. Sometimes, though, anxiety or depression can be so severe that the person cannot engage in cognitive reappraisals. In these cases, medication can improve brain chemistry to a point where the person can start using cognitive techniques to improve their condition. The bottom line is that being able the reason realistically in order to avoid loss of control over feelings turns out to be a pretty good definition of sanity."

But how will we be able to cognitively reappraise events in our lives if we decide to just forget them? Should we be happy if our life has been filled with repeated mistakes that we will just keep on repeating? It will take great wisdom to know for certain what if any scenario should be permanently left unremembered. In another fantastic article that I've mentioned before--Metaphors are Us--the professor of biology and neurology at Stanford Robert Sapolsky shows another reason why the feeling and remembering of pain is so important:

Consider the following: you stub your toe. Pain receptors there send messages to the spine and on up to the brain, where various regions kick into action. This is the meat-and-potatoes of pain processing, found in every mammal. But there are fancier, more recently evolved parts of the brain in the frontal cortex that assess the meaning of the pain. Maybe it’s bad news: your stubbed toe signals the start of some unlikely disease. Or maybe it’s good news: you’re going to get your firewalker diploma because the hot coals made your toes throb. Much of this assessing occurs in a frontal cortical region called the anterior cingulate. This structure is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. And pain from out of nowhere surely represents a discrepancy between the pain-free setting that you anticipate versus the painful reality. Now let’s go a little deeper, based on work by Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA. While lying in a brain scanner, you play a game of virtual catch, where you and two people in another room toss a cyberball around on a computer screen. (In reality, there aren’t two other people, only a computer program.) In the control condition, you’re informed mid-play that there’s a computer glitch and you’re temporarily off-line. You watch the virtual ball get tossed between those two people. Now in the experimental setting, you’re playing with the other two and suddenly they start ignoring you and only toss the ball between them. Hey, how come they don’t want to play with me anymore? Junior high all over again. And the brain scanner shows that the neurons in your anterior cingulate activate. In other words, rejection hurts. “Well, yeah,” you might say. “But that’s not like stubbing your toe.” It is to your anterior cingulate. Both abstract social and literal pain impact the same cingulate neurones. We take things a step further with work by Tania Singer and Chris Frith at University College London. While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too. As evolution continued to tinker, it did something remarkable with humans. It duct-taped (metaphorically, of course) the anterior cingulate’s role in giving context to pain into a profound capacity for empathy. We’re not the only species with an anterior cingulate, but studies show the human anterior cingulate is more complex than in other species, with more connections to abstract, associational parts of the cortex, regions that can call your attention to the pains of the world, rather than the pain in your big toe. And we feel someone else’s pain like no other species. We extend it over distance to help a refugee child on another continent. We extend it over time, feeling the terror of what are now mere human remains at Pompeii.

Yes. Pain in life is unavoidable, and may be so for all of the wisdom and empathy it gives us. When I explored life in my blog posts about how to know thyself, I mentioned this aspect of pain:

Adversity may be required for growth - it is certainly an opportunity. Do not try to cope with adversity by avoidance, by denying events, or blunting emotions through substance abuse or distraction - the adversity will only return in the long term. You must cope with crises by direct action to fix them, or reappraisal to get your thoughts right. You emerge from introspection when you develop internal consistency / reflective equilibrium. You triumph over adversity when you get your thoughts right.

And with that, I'll stop this long post, hopefully before it became too painful. It's time I left this subject and went to go get my own thoughts right about some pains I've been feeling lately. Let me know if you ever want to talk about any of yours. I won't ignore or forget it.

After a brief pause to discuss my own thought experiment and the implication it has on some narrow forms of humanism, it's time to get back into Julian Baggini's book of thought experiments, which have been inspired by the history of philosophy. This week, I'll be looking at number twenty-six in the series of one hundred experiments, but here it is now so you can form your own opinion on it before I share mine.

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     The tension in the auditorium was palpable as the doctor donned his mask and gloves and prepared to take his needle and thread to the conscious patient's strapped-down leg. As he pushed the needle through the flesh, the patient let out an almighty cry of pain. But once the needle had passed through, he seemed unnaturally calm.
     "How was that?" asked the doctor.
     "Fine," replied the patient, to gasps from the audience. "It's just as you said, I remember you putting the needle through me, but I don't remember any pain."
     "So do you have any objection if I do the next stitch?"
     "Not at all. I'm not at all apprehensive."
     The doctor turned to the audience and explained: "The process I have developed does not, like an anaesthetic, remove the sensation of pain. What it does is prevent the memory of the pain being laid down in the patient's nervous system. If you are not going to remember your momentary pain, why fear it? Our patient here shows this is not just theoretical sophistry. You witnessed his pain, but he, having forgotten it, has no fear of repeating the experience. This enables us to conduct surgery with the patient fully conscious, which in some instances is extremely useful. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some stitching to do."

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 76.
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So, assuming this is possible, would the doctor's new process be a good thing? Would this have any implications for our considerations of causing pain and suffering in other people? What about other animals? I'll be back on Friday to discuss these and other issues.

On Monday, I wrote A Brief Interlude, Featuring Lawrence Rifkin, which wholeheartedly agreed with several points that were made in a new video titled "Evolution Will Change How You See the World." Specifically, I really liked how Rifkin said understanding the story of evolution shows our place *within* the web of life, how we are a heroic *and* humbled species in this story, and how the future of all life depends on our responsibility to continue this great epic. These sentiments are completely aligned with many public things I've written, including my article in the July/August 2015 edition of Humanist magazine, "Proposing an Objective, Godless Basis for Morality," where I say that the survival of "life in general" over evolutionary timespans is an objective goal that we all must want and is the fundamental bedrock upon which all moral prescriptions must be built.

This seems to me like an uncontroversial desire to agree to (the real difficulties lie in finding the right path towards the survival of life), but sadly the history of evolutionary ethics has put these ideas in a box for some people that they refuse to examine again in an unbiased manner. In the September/October 2015 edition of Humanist, the following letter to the editor was published, which shows exactly what I mean.

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And Now for Your Regularly Scheduled Philosophy Break

     In his article, "Proposing an Objective, Godless Basis for Morality" (J/A 2015), Ed Gibney writes that "until now" no one has ever found an objective measuring stick for what is good. He didn't check with me. About fifteen or twenty years ago I came up with this idea: That which is good is that which has positive survival value for the human species; that which is evil is that which has negative survival value for the human species.
     I always welcome any discussion that points us in the direction of an objective code of morality, but I think Gibney overshoots his mark. He thinks the measure of morality is whether something contributes to the survival of "life in general," and that's where he misses the target. First of all, for life to survive, it isn't necessary that every species survive. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that life in general would have a much better chance of surviving on this planet if human life ceased to exist. Gibney says that in order to get from what "is" to what "ought" to be, we need to decide what we "want." I don't think many people would "want" to commit their lives to a moral regime that had so little concern for the survival of our species.
     Thank you for publishing Gibney's article. He shows that there are a few of us working on a moral system that finds its authority in scientific evolution instead of the Bible.

Ray Sherman
Duarte, CA
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I was really disappointed to be mischaracterised as a "moral regime that had so little concern for the survival of our species," so I did a bit of hunting after reading this to try and locate my accuser and discuss this with him. I discovered that Ray Sherman is a retired jazz pianist who was born in 1923 and has had a distinguished career as a musician performing with various bands on tv shows and at live gigs around the world. His only philosophical writings that I could find, however, consisted of two self-attributed quotes on a section of his personal webpage that listed quotes he likes from other philosophers. I did also find a nice youtube playlist though that he's made of his performances that are available online, so perhaps listening to one of his jaunty little ditties in the background will make his rough replies to my attempts at dialogue go down a little smoother. To do that, click play on the video below and then read our unedited back and forth.

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On Sun, 30 Aug 2015, Edward Gibney <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello Ray - I saw your letter to the editor in the latest edition of Humanist magazine and thought I’d try to find you to reply to your concerns about my philosophy article “Proposing an Objective, Godless Basis for Morality.” First, let me thank you for reading my article and taking the time to write your thoughts about it. I do what I do so I can engage with others about these ideas and you have helped me do that.

First, I should apologise for the inaccurate phrasing in my short magazine article. In that piece I said, "Is there an objective measuring stick for what is good? Until now, no one has ever found one.” I was discussing the history of moral philosophy when I said this, so I meant that no published philosophical account for an objective definition of “good" has been accepted by the field. I can’t possibly claim that “no one” has said what I’ve said before (or something even better)—that would be impossible to know—but I took it in good faith that my meaning was understood. Likewise, I don’t think you can reasonably claim that I should have “checked with you” before writing my articles, seeing as how you haven’t published these thoughts anywhere I can find but in a single quote on your personal website, but I see your definition of good now though, so let’s talk about it.

You say that “good is that which has positive survival for the human species” and you believe that I overshot the mark by claiming “the measure of morality is whether something contributes to the survival of ‘life in general.’” First, I should acknowledge that this is an accurate literal representation of what I am claiming. You seem to misconstrue the meaning of this though when you state that this is “a moral regime that has so little concern for the survival of our species.” On the contrary! I think the survival of our species is incredibly important (more important than religious rights or economic freedom, for example), especially since we are the only current species that would be able to save us all from something dire like an impending asteroid strike. Because of this, our survival concerns may be weighted as more important than those of, say, a tropical leech, but I think we have to be really careful about valuing our non-existential concerns (again, economic freedom as an example) over the survival concerns of other species. Because all of life is so enmeshed in an intricate web of support, and we are indeed just a subset of "life in general”, if you concern yourself with the survival of humans, you have to concern yourself with the survival of other forms of life. For that reason, there is a great deal of overlap between your definition of good and mine. When we truly do what is good for the very-long-term survival of humanity, we are obliged to take care of much of the rest of life as well. I fear that stating good and evil in purely human terms though can lead to overweighting of minor human concerns when comparing them to the concerns of other species. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it’s enough of a cause for concern for me to prefer not to use the term “humanism.” (See, for example, how you as a humanist were quick to jump on my argument and assume I had little concern for the survival of humans.)

Now, to show why the leap to my larger definition for good is necessary, I like to use a simple thought experiment. Imagine a sci-fi scenario where humans discovered a new substance that gave us feelings of tremendous happiness for 20 years, but then, unbeknownst to us, the substance degraded and began to dissolve all carbon molecule bonds in our bodies. Such a substance, if it were to be let loose in the world, would destroy all life as we know it. But because the first 15 years of the use of this substance went so well, every human on earth had consumed it. So, in this thought experiment, the survival of humanity is over. We screwed up big time. But the survival of life is still in the balance. What would be the “good” thing to do? Moral concerns wouldn’t just disappear. We would feel compelled to act for the survival of life in general (by jettisoning our contaminated bodies into space for example). The biggest possible picture is the fundamental base upon which morality is built. Any smaller concerns can always be enlarged somewhere in an imagined scenario. Do you see what I’m actually arguing for now?

Ed Gibney

PS I enjoyed listening to some of your youtube videos while I wrote this. Congratulations on having had such a long and distinguished piano playing career!

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On Thu, 3 Sep 2015, [email protected] wrote:
Dear Ed:

I think that maybe the most important "good" in your article is that you maybe got through to the AHA VIPs the idea that one can't tell people "Good Without God" without telling them what "good" means.

Regarding "checking with me" about an objective measuring stick for what is good, I couldn't resist needling you a little for a statement that seemed to me a trifle arrogant. (Maybe you've taken too many of those self-promotion courses.)

"...if you concern yourself with the survival of humans, you have to concern yourself with the survival of other forms of life." Exactly right! Why did you assume that I didn't include that concern as something that has "positive survival value for the human species"?

Regarding your thought experiment, you say that if our species was deemed to be doomed, "We would feel compelled to act for the survival of life in general." How do you know that?

Yes, I do see what you're actually arguing for. You want the survival of our species to be of secondary concern (at best) to the survival of life in general. According to my definition of good and evil, that position would be considered to have negative survival value for the human species, and therefore evil.

Regards,

Ray

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On Thu, 3 Sep 2015, Edward Gibney <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello Ray. I’ll respond to your questions because if one wants to have one’s philosophical ideas taken seriously, one should seriously attempt to engage with others and their ideas...

"(Maybe you've taken too many of those self-promotion courses.)”

Definitely not. That’s a different generation.

"...if you concern yourself with the survival of humans, you have to concern yourself with the survival of other forms of life." Exactly right! Why did you assume that I didn't include that concern as something that has "positive survival value for the human species”?"

I did no such thing. I merely clarified my own point and said that "I fear that stating good and evil in purely human terms though can lead to overweighting of minor human concerns when comparing them to the concerns of other species.” I still don’t know how carefully you would decide between the competing desires of humans and other forms of life. Would you back something like the “half earth idea” that E.O. Wilson is soon to publish a book about? (See here: https://theconversation.com/setting-aside-half-the-earth-for-rewilding-the-ethical-dimension-46121)

"Regarding your thought experiment, you say that if our species was deemed to be doomed, "We would feel compelled to act for the survival of life in general."  How do you know that?”

Because the evolutionary history of life on earth shows that we were all kin at some point. We care deeply about the well-being and survival of other species that we are cooperating with. Have you never loved a dog or a forest? Would you not want them to go on when you are gone? If the possibility of our own survival disappeared in a truly bleak scenario like my thought experiment, our concern for our other extended kin would still remain. In my scenario, if one were to insist upon the destruction of the rest of life for the sake of, let’s say, one more day of human existence (not survival, we know we’re a goner), that would be the very definition of selfish, destructive, and therefore immoral and evil behaviour. I believe humans would be better than that, and I surely think we *ought* to be. Do you disagree? Why?

Arguing in good faith,

Ed

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On Fri, 4 Sep 2015, [email protected] wrote:
Dear Ed:

I'm not too crazy about dogs, but I do like forests—but not to the degree that I would allow my species to be destroyed to preserve them.

I don't like to argue.  I'll just point out what I believe to be the basic flaw in your approach to morality—your approach is based on sentiment, not reason ("Have you never loved a dog or a forest?"). It's not objective, as is your claim. You've substituted nature worship for God worship.

I don't expect you to concede my point, and I don't expect my information to have any effect on your approach to morality.

I think we should just agree to disagree.

Regards,

Ray 

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On Fri, 4 Sep 2015, Edward Gibney <[email protected]> wrote:
Sorry Ray, I don’t want to hector you so I’ll keep this short and not expect a response. You took the time to write a public rebuke of my argument though so I thought I would give you the chance to discuss this before I make my response public as well.

There are two basic strategies when faced with confrontation: compete or cooperate. I am trying to cooperate with you because I think we have very much in common and we have very many common enemies. I don’t want to “argue” in the sense you are using; I just want to discuss and discover our arguments until misunderstandings have been removed and a truth becomes evident. Unfortunately, I feel you still misunderstand me and aren’t making much effort to remove me from a preconceived notion you have.

In no way have I ever advocated for destroying my species to preserve others. I only point out we need to cooperate with others to survive ourselves. I have not substituted nature worship for God worship.

As David Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. Without sentiment, we would be computers with no motivation for our reason. I am arguing that our sentiments *ought* to be directed toward an objective outcome—the survival of life over evolutionarily long timeframes. That is not a subjective goal like well-being, or happiness; that’s the biggest objective goal we can and must have so it must be satisfied before any other goal can be striven for. Hence my claim that my rules for morality are objective. That doesn’t mean they don’t elicit feelings. A sense of morality *is* an emotion.

I’m sorry if you still disagree with this and no longer want to discuss it. Perhaps you should stay away from philosophy and philosophers if that is the case.

Ed
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How sad to be called "evil" by someone who seems so close to being on the same side. But it just goes to show that even once the supernatural explanations of gods are thrown off, it still takes quite a leap to recognise the natural connections that exist between realms of life and realms of morality, which are one and the same thing. As a quick reminder of the realms of life, here they are in ascending order of size and magnitude of time:

(1)  Biochemistry → (2) molecular biology  → (3) cellular biology  → (4) organismic biology  → (5) sociobiology  → (6) ecology  → (7) evolutionary biology.

At least I can give Mr. Sherman credit for not being stuck with his moral concerns in a small subsection of level 5 by chiefly caring about the needs of one society of religion vs. that of another. Because of his age, and having grown up before the modern environmental movements, I could almost forgive him for not expanding his concerns beyond those of our society of humans to the levels of ecologies changing over evolutionary timelines. But there have been others, older than him, who saw this need.

For example, I recently finished Aldo Leopold's wonderful A Sand County Almanac, which included many marvelous passages building up a description of his Land Ethic. Leopold was born in 1887, just twenty-eight years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, yet in his lifetime he wrote such things as:

The extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be described in ecological as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing.

[Ethics] has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by cooperative mechanisms with an ethical content.

The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals. ... Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society. ... There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. ... The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for). The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members and also respect for the community as such. In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves.

The ecological fundamentals of agriculture are just as poorly known to the public as in other fields of land-use. For example, few educated people realize that the marvelous advances in technique made during recent decades are improvements in the pump, rather than the well.

In all these cleavages, we see repeated the same basic paradoxes: man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharpener of his sword versus science the searchlight on his universe; land the slave and servant versus land the collective organism.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is a space between cities on which crops grow.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

As the ethical frontier advances from the individual to the community, its intellectual content increases.

And with that, I'll stop this long post and wait some more for the Ray Shermans of this word to increase the intellectual content of their ethical frontiers and stop trying to conquer the world rather than live in cooperation with it. If you've read this far, you probably agree with me and Aldo Leopold and hopefully have some advice on how best to engage others and pull them along in this ethical growth process. If so, please share your tips in the comments below. I'll be glad to get them.

Last week, I mentioned that I had finished examining one-quarter of the philosophical thought experiments that Julian Baggini chronicled in The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten. I'll diligently continue to go through all of these, but I want to take a break this week to go over a thought experiment I recently wrote myself. Rather than break the story into two parts like I usually do, I'll introduce AND discuss my thought experiment all at once on Friday. So, for today, I thought I'd just share a brief post about a 5-minute video that a friend and fellow evolutionary thinker recently produced.

The video is called Evolution Will Change How You See the World, and it was made by Lawrence Rifkin. As you can see from his website, Larry has written dozens of articles along this line of thought for the Huffington Post, Scientific American, The Humanist, and other great publications. Check out the video to understand why he's managed all this:

While I obviously agree that evolution has changed the way that *I* see the world, I particularly liked nine points that were made in this video:

1. The story of evolution gives us a connection to all life and the world.
2. Evolution shows us we did not come from outside of the world; we grew out of it.
3. We humans have become the most wonderful AND the most despicable animal on earth.
4. We are a heroic AND humbled species in this story of evolution.
5. We are part of something larger than ourselves.
6. This process of evolution has gone on long before us and will continue on long after our deaths.
7. We have a responsibility to this great epic, which our ancestors struggled with their lives to maintain.
8. This is an inspiring and dramatic vision.
9. The future of all life depends on this.

Great stuff. It fits very well with my definition of good as "that which leads to the long-term survival of life in general over evolutionary timespans." I bring this up now though because of its importance to my story on Friday, which revolves around a Letter to the Editor that was printed about my recent article in Humanist magazine. I'll talk more about the back and forth I had with the man who wrote that letter, but he desperately could have used the message imparted by this video from Larry. So, please share it, and check back on Friday when I show why it's so important.

When I was about 25 or so, still freshly graduated from a pragmatic and scientific engineering program, and full of questions about my religious upbringing and the world in general after moving across the country to the shockingly alternative mecca of culture in the United States (the San Francisco Bay Area), I remember being really excited to read James Gleick's book called Chaos: Making a New Science. All of the order I had grown up in and been educated to believe seemed to be undermined by this provocative title and field. As a study of things that just happened randomly, chaos theory seemed to offer the promise of foundation-shaking possibilities that just had to be explored as I sought to solidify the positions I stood on before I launched the project of building my life. As I turned page after page, expecting to see examples that flew in the face of the scientific method, I slowly gathered that "chaos" didn't actually happen where we had measured everything possible and the outcomes just flatly contradicted predictions. "Chaos" only ensued when there were just too many small variables for us to measure accurately. To me, that wasn't the chaos I had hoped for, that was only common, garden-variety ignorance that could be defeated over time by the normal orthodoxy of hard scientific data collection and calculation. In every respect, I now see that as a good thing.

Shortly after that unmasking of chaos though, I took a trip to the least visited national park in the continental U.S. and saw the limestone caves in Great Basin, Nevada. I was by myself in a small group tour when a pretty, young ranger pointed a flashlight at what I now know are helictites, and she asked if anyone could guess what explained how these strange formations grew in all sorts of random directions. No one else had any idea, so after a few moments of silence I ventured, "chaos theory?", and the ranger was astonished that someone had uttered these magical words. "That's right!" she said, before going on to explain to the group how we just couldn't predict some mysterious forces of nature. I was pleased with myself for having possessed the right answer, but in several ways, the magic for me was broken...

Why did I open with this story? Because this week's thought experiment deals with precisely those tiny moments where forces are so very nearly evenly balanced that motion in any direction seems impossible to choose—so much so that we wonder if motion is therefore even possible at all. Let's read about this concern that dates from medieval times in a modern update.

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     Buridan was very hungry indeed. It had all started with his resolution that every decision he made should be completely rational. The problem was that he had run out of food, but lived equidistant between two identical branches of the Kwik-E-Mart. Since he had no more reason to go to one rather than the other, he was caught in a perpetual state of suspension, unable to find any rational grounds for choosing either supermarket.
     As his stomach rumbling grew intolerable, he thought he had hit upon a solution. Since it was clearly irrational to starve himself to death, wouldn't it be rational to make a random choice between two Kwik-E-Marts? He should simply toss a coin, or see which direction he felt like heading off in. That was surely more rational than sitting at home and doing nothing.
     But would this course of action require him to break his rule about only making decisions that were completely rational? What his argument seemed to suggest is that it would be rational of him to make an irrational decision -- such as one based on the toss of a coin. But is rational irrationality rational at all? Buridan's plummeting blood sugar level made the question impossible to answer.

Source: The paradox of Buridan's Ass, first discussed in the Middle Ages

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 73.
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Before tearing into this thought experiment, it's important to realise that it actually comes from a satire meant to ridicule the position of hard determinism that was articulated by 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan during the free will debate of the day. In the original Buridan's Ass thought experiment,  "an ass that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other." Of course, no donkey in history has starved because of such indecision, so determinism was refuted because it led to such a ridiculous conclusion. We must have free will; that is the point of this.

Or is it? Perhaps my helictite story above illustrates that in the material universe, there is no such thing as two perfectly identical choices. At some level, even if it's on the sub-atomic or inaccessible subconscious level, a difference between options exists and so determinism is not ruled out. Movement happens, and the decisions that drive this movement are just "chaotic" in the sense that we may not be able to calculate them ahead of time. The Principle of Sufficient Reason that Leibniz articulated on behalf of determinism can be stated in support of this in various ways:

• Nihil sine ratione: Nothing is without a reason.
• Nothing happens without a sufficient reason/cause.
• For each event A there is another event B (or a combination of events) that precedes it and fully explains why A had to happen.
• Ex nihilo nihil fit: Nothing comes out of nothing.

Although it's true that nothing comes from nothing, and we don't have completely untethered free will, at this point in our history of accumulated culture, we sure have a LOT of possible influences to choose from. Perhaps human learning does progress at the edges by one seemingly chaotic and random choice at a time, but those steps have led to the discovery of preferred paths. And now that those paths have been discovered, we owe it to ourselves and others to use the capability of reason that we've evolved to possess to learn what is wise and choose wise actions. We have the freedom to observe both the random and reasoned actions that have come before us and be moved to go in the right direction. To do otherwise, and to turn your back on our accumulated wisdom, is to lead a life that spirals indiscernibly like a helictite.

That would have made a really nice ending to this post, but Baggini tacks another subject on top of this free will debate—that of rationality vs. irrationality—which leads him down a path that I feel is misguided. He says:

The apparent [Buridan] paradox is a result of a sloppiness of language. Tossing a coin is not necessarily an irrational way to make a decision, it is simply a non-rational one. That is to say, it is neither rational nor irrational, but a process into which rationality does not enter. Much of what we do is non-rational in this way. For example, if you prefer red wine to white, that is not irrational, but nor is it rational. The preference is not based on reasons at all, but on tastes.

Now who's getting sloppy with language? First, there's the matter of the wictionary definition of non-rational: 

non-rational ‎(adj)

1. Contrary to reason; lacking an appropriate or sufficient reason; irrational.
2. Lacking the ability to reason.
3. (often philosophy) Not within the domain of what can be understood or analyzed by reason; outside the competence of the rules of reason.

This shows us we can only speak of the philosophically restricted definition of "non-rational" as something actually different than irrational — a restriction that's dangerous to do when considering the possibility of general audiences.

Second, however, and more importantly, while some processes (the processes of plate tectonics or hurricane formations for example) are certainly outside of the rational vs. irrational spectrum because no reason is involved in them, that cannot be said for the case of preferences and tastes, which must involve cognitive appraisals (and therefore rationality) at some level, even if it is on a subconscious level that is not well-accessed by the user of those preferences.

Summarising all of this, I do believe we can always use rational processes to move forward through life and take advantage of the freedom we have to make wise decisions. Sometimes, when the differences between the outcomes of two possible options is very, very small, we can spend very, very little time on weighing up the factors in our choice. There may be a teeny, tiny difference somewhere that would favour one direction over another, but to spend time trying to detect it would be very irrational indeed. Just move on; like I'm about to do with the further editing of this post.

We've reached the quarter pole of Julian Baggini's one hundred thought experiments and it's been a (mostly) fascinating tour through the history of problems that philosophers have tried to think about. Last week's experiment questioned if God was handcuffed by the rationality of logic, but this week we see if we can put the handcuffs on ourselves.

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     Buridan was very hungry indeed. It had all started with his resolution that every decision he made should be completely rational. The problem was that he had run out of food, but lived equidistant between two identical branches of the Kwik-E-Mart. Since he had no more reason to go to one rather than the other, he was caught in a perpetual state of suspension, unable to find any rational grounds for choosing either supermarket.
     As his stomach rumbling grew intolerable, he thought he had hit upon a solution. Since it was clearly irrational to starve himself to death, wouldn't it be rational to make a random choice between two Kwik-E-Marts? He should simply toss a coin, or see which direction he felt like heading off in. That was surely more rational than sitting at home and doing nothing.
     But would this course of action require him to break his rule about only making decisions that were completely rational? What his argument seemed to suggest is that it would be rational of him to make an irrational decision -- such as one based on the toss of a coin. But is rational irrationality rational at all? Buridan's plummeting blood sugar level made the question impossible to answer.

Source: The paradox of Buridan's Ass, first discussed in the Middle Ages

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 73.
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What do you think? Is there always a rational choice to be made? Do you have to be irrational or have free will to break a perfect deadlock between choices? I'll be back on Friday with my answer.

I'm in Porto, Portugal all week doing some important "research" about living a philosophically sound life, so it's  probably best if I allow Julian Baggini himself to explain this week's thought experiment. Since he hasn't cited any source for it, it seems he invented the story on his own anyway. First, the experiment:

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     And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord thy God, and I am all-powerful. There is nothing that you can say that can't be done. It's easy!"
     And the philosopher spake unto the Lord, "OK, your mightiness. Turn everything that is blue red and everything that is red blue."
     The Lord spake, "Let there be colour inversion!" And there was colour inversion, much to the confusion of the flag bearers of Poland and San Marino.
     And the philosopher then spake unto the Lord, "You want to impress me: make a square circle."
     The Lord spake, "Let there be a square circle." And there was.
     But the philosopher protesteth, "That's not a square circle. It's a square."
     The Lord grew angry. "If I say it's a circle, it's a circle. Watch your impertinence or else I shall smite thee very roughly indeed."
     But the philosopher insisteth, "I didn't ask you to change the meaning of the word 'circle' so it just means 'square'. I wanted a genuinely square circle. Admit it - that's one thing you can't do."
     The Lord thought a short while, and then decided to answer by unleashing his mighty vengeance on the philosopher's smart little arse.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 70.
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Now, as Baggini explains it,

"The problem with such things as square circles is that they are logically impossible. ... This much rationality demands. So if we are to say that God's omnipotence means he can create shapes such as square circles, then we wave goodbye to rationality. For that reason most religious believers are happy to conclude that God's omnipotence means that he can do all that is logically possible. ... If we accept this concession, however, the door opens to rational scrutiny of the concept of God and the coherence of belief in him. By accepting that belief in God must be in harmony with reason, the religious believer is obliged to take seriously claims that belief in God is irrational. ... It is not good enough to say these are simply matters of faith, if you accept the requirement for faith to be compatible with reason. The alternative route for believers is even more unpalatable: deny that reason has anything to do with it and bank solely on faith instead. What appears contrary to reason is thus dismissed as simply a divine mystery. Such a route is open to us, but to abandon reason so readily in one sphere of life while living as a reasonable person the rest of the time is arguably to live a divided life."

This is a neat bit of rhetoric, but in my own experience, the fear of living "a divided life" is not really a problem for religious believers. They have never claimed the entire universe is rational and logical so they aren't uncomfortable having some divine mystery in their lives. I've already written a lot about the evolution of religion, the arguments for religion that all fail, and my hope for a world without religion, but this passage examining the irrationality of religion seems most appropriate to bring up again when thinking about Baggini's explanation of this thought experiment:

Another way to examine the issue of atheism vs. religion is through the idea that rational thought is a societal system for decision-making. Irrational thought cheats this system. Faith, by definition, is irrational, and as soon as one irrational belief is permitted, all irrational beliefs are allowed. If irrational thought is allowed to win arguments, then the system of rational thought is no longer evolutionarily stable. But clearly, we cannot allow irrational thought to become the norm - that leads to ignorance and the destruction of the species. Irrational thought must not be allowed to win. And yet, irrational thought does win, because it isn't playing the same game. By its own declaration, irrational thought cannot rationally lose an argument. In this way, irrational thought can never be entirely defeated through reason. Perhaps the best we can do in the short term is to stop societal decisions based on irrational beliefs. In the long term, the teaching of rational thought and the benefits of rational thought must be shown to be more attractive to individuals. The tangible, emotional benefits to shedding irrational beliefs must be improved and made better known. Control over one’s emotions, membership in beneficial social groups, better job opportunities, cooperative grants, happiness with life, lasting love - these are all areas where rational thinkers can and must outcompete irrational believers.

And with that, I'll get back to living the good life in Porto as a fine example of what life without gods can look like. Please do more of the same yourself. Obrigado!

I don't think readers of this website will have any trouble with the implications of this week's thought experiment, but they may enjoy having it at their disposal once it's explained.

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     And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord thy God, and I am all-powerful. There is nothing that you can say that can't be done. It's easy!"
     And the philosopher spake unto the Lord, "OK, your mightiness. Turn everything that is blue red and everything that is red blue."
     The Lord spake, "Let there be colour inversion!" And there was colour inversion, much to the confusion of the flag bearers of Poland and San Marino.
     And the philosopher then spake unto the Lord, "You want to impress me: make a square circle."
     The Lord spake, "Let there be a square circle." And there was.
     But the philosopher protesteth, "That's not a square circle. It's a square."
     The Lord grew angry. "If I say it's a circle, it's a circle. Watch your impertinence or else I shall smite thee very roughly indeed."
     But the philosopher insisteth, "I didn't ask you to change the meaning of the word 'circle' so it just means 'square'. I wanted a genuinely square circle. Admit it - that's one thing you can't do."
     The Lord thought a short while, and then decided to answer by unleashing his mighty vengeance on the philosopher's smart little arse.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 70.
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So, any thoughts on what this says about the limits of "God's" omnipotence?