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Thought Experiment 71: Life Support

10/31/2016

One last (heart)beating of this topic to death...

This week's thought experiment is so nearly a repeat of a previous one I've done, I almost skipped it. But that sin of omission would have been worse than committing the sin of repetition. Wouldn't it?

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Dr. Grey was depressed. One of his terminally ill patients was being kept on a life-support machine. Before she lost consciousness for the last time, she had repeatedly asked that the machine be switched off. But the hospital ethics committee had ruled that it would be wrong to take any action intended to shorten the life of a patient.
   Grey disagreed with the committee and was disturbed that the wishes of the patient had been ignored. He also thought that holding off death with the machine was merely prolonging the agony of her friends and relations.
   Grey stood looking mournfully at his patient. But then something odd happened. A hospital cleaner caught the power cable that led to the life-support machine and pulled it out from the socket. The machine emitted some warning bleeps. The cleaner, disturbed by the sound, looked at the nearby doctor for guidance.
   "Don't worry," said Grey without hesitation. "Just carry on. It's all right."
   And indeed for Grey it was now all right. For no one had taken any deliberate action to shorten the life of the patient. All he was doing by leaving the accidentally unplugged machine turned off was not taking any action to prolong it. He now had the result he desired without breaking the instructions of the ethics committee.

Source: Causing Death and Saving Lives by Jonathan Glover, 1977.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 211.
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What do you think? Regardless of your position about the right to die, is there always a meaningful distinction between killing someone and letting them die?

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Response to Thought Experiment 70: An Inspector Calls

10/28/2016

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Surprise!

This week's thought experiment is just a logic puzzle, and not one that requires an evolutionary perspective in any way, shape, or form to solve it. However, since I was just today named as one of the top 100 philosophy blogs on the web, I feel the need to live up to that prestigious award (I got the HTML code for a ribbon!) and find a good solution to the puzzle. What do think? Will you be surprised if I do? Here's the puzzle:

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When the health inspector visited Emilio's pizzeria and immediately closed it down, none of his friends could believe he had let it happen. After all, they said, he knew that an inspection was imminent, so why didn't he clean things up?
Emilio's answer was simple. He had been told that an inspector would be making a surprise call sometime before the end of the month. Emilio had sat down and wondered what day the inspection could be. It couldn't be on the 31st: if the inspector hadn't come before then, the inspection could only be on that day, and so it wouldn't be a surprise. If the 31st was ruled out, then so was the 30th, for the same reason. The inspection couldn't be on the 31st, so if it hadn't taken place by the 29th, that would only leave the 30th, and so it again would not be a surprise. But then if the inspection couldn't be on the 30th or the 31st then it couldn't be on the 29th either, for the same reasons. Working backwards, Emilio eventually concluded that there was no day the inspection could take place.
Ironically, having concluded no surprise inspection was possible, Emilio was very unpleasantly surprised when the inspector walked through his door one day. What was wrong with his reasoning?

Source: The widely discussed "surprise examination paradox" has its origins in a wartime Swedish radio broadcast.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 208.
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Baggini has turned this into a G-rated story about a pizza restaurant, but the puzzle is much better known as the unexpected hanging paradox, in which the logic is the same as above, but the details are about a judge passing sentence on a death row prisoner. It's also often set up using a teacher telling his students that they will get a surprise exam the following week. Regardless of the circumstances involved, the gist of the story is the same and its logic has been widely studied.

Before I try to tackle the answer though, let's make sure we understand the problem. A professor of mathematics from MIT named Timothy Chow has published a comprehensive paper on the paradox, which does a very thorough job of explaining the difficulties involved here, but I think it also illustrates why the complex language of mathematics and formal logic has perhaps gotten in the way of people finding a solution before now. Chow first acknowledges the main paradox whereby the logic seems correct for the pizza restaurant's owner (or the prisoner in the original version, or the students Chow uses in his chosen example), and yet the restaurant still gets inspected, and the owner is also surprised by that. Beyond this, there is also an important second paradoxical level to be aware of, which Chow describes as a "meta-paradox." He said:

"The meta-paradox consists of two seemingly incompatible facts. The first is that the surprise exam paradox seems easy to resolve. Those seeing it for the first time typically have the instinctive reaction that the flaw in the students’ reasoning is obvious. Furthermore, most readers who have tried to think it through have had little difficulty resolving it to their own satisfaction. The second (astonishing) fact is that to date nearly a hundred papers on the paradox have been published, and still no consensus on its correct resolution has been reached. The paradox has even been called a “significant problem” for philosophy. How can this be? Can such a ridiculous argument really be a major unsolved mystery? If not, why does paper after paper begin by brusquely dismissing all previous work and claiming that it alone presents the long-awaited simple solution that lays the paradox to rest once and for all?"

Okay, okay. I must be delusional if I hope to follow that up by claiming a solution to the paradox, so let's make sure we understand what those "nearly one hundred papers" had to say. As Chow summarises:

"In general, there are two steps involved in resolving a paradox. First, one establishes precisely what the paradoxical argument is. Any unclear terms are defined carefully and all assumptions and logical steps are stated clearly and explicitly, possibly in a formal language of some kind. Second, one finds the fault in the argument."

That's clear enough. Chow then explains that the majority of papers on this particular paradox can be divided into two main camps: the logical school from mathematicians like himself, and the epistemological school from philosophers (not like me). In long passages, Chow describes each of these in details that are excruciating to non-professionals. For example, here is the start of the logical proof:

"Let us reduce the number of days to two for simplicity (we consider one-day weeks shortly), and let Q1 and Q2 be statements representing the occurrence of the exam on days one and two, respectively. Then what we are seeking is a statement S such that:

S ≡ (Q1 & ([S ⇒ Q1] is unprovable)) or else (Q2 & ([S & ∼Q1 ⇒ Q2] is unprovable)).

Given a first-order language that contains enough elementary arithmetic to handle primitive recursive functions, together with some Godel numbering of the formulas, it is straightforward to formalize most aspects of this statement....."

Yikes! This "straightforward" explanation goes on for a full page, but ends with this summary judgment:

"[V]arious authors have raised objections to this [logical] analysis. The most important is that the proof does not give any explanation for why the teacher’s announcement appears to be vindicated after the fact. It appears to pin the blame on the teacher’s announcement instead of on the students, and surely this cannot be correct. A related objection rests on the observation that if the teacher had not announced the exam to the class but had simply decided in secret to give a surprise exam, then no paradox would have occurred. Therefore the trouble cannot be attributed solely to the propositional content of the teacher’s announcement; the act of announcing it to the students must play a crucial role. The purely logical analysis seems to ignore this. These objections have convinced many to reject entirely the “purely logical” approach, and to propose a different, 'epistemological' approach."

The epistemological (aka knowledge) approach, attacks the paradox by stating that various concepts in the situation must not be properly understood by one or another of the participants. Chow wonders:

"...if we can formalize the paradox in a way that lays bare these 'epistemic' aspects."

As before with the logical school, his formal attempts to describe the epistemic arguments are impenetrable to the layperson. If you thought the first one was bad, this one looks even worse!

"As before, reduce the number of days to two for simplicity; let “1” denote “the exam occurs on the first day” and let “2” denote “the exam occurs on the second day.” Let “Ka” denote “on the eve of the first day the students will know” and let “Kb” denote “on the eve of the second day the students will know.” The announcement can then be written

[1 ⇒ ~Ka 1] & [2 ⇒ (~Kb 2 & Kb ~1)] & [1 ∨ 2]. (‡)

We now introduce certain assumptions about knowledge and add them to our list of rules of inference in our logic.

KD: If one knows A & B, then one knows A and one knows B. Similarly, if one knows that A implies B and one knows A, then one knows B.
KI: All logical truths are known.
KE: It is not possible to know something that is false

We begin the argument with a lemma: Kb(‡) ⇒ ~2; remember that “⇒” here encompasses our new rules of logic KD, KI, and KE....."

Are you following that?? I sure can't. Chow summarises this epistemological line of argument thusly:

"Since we know that Ka ~2, it follows from KD that Ka 1. But since Ka(‡) is true, (‡) is true (by KE), and in particular its first disjunct 1 ⇒ ~Ka 1 is true. Then from Ka 1 we deduce 1 (from KE) and hence ~Ka 1, a contradiction. This shows that certain plausible assumptions about knowledge—KI, KD, and KE, together with the assumption that the students know that they will know the content of the announcement throughout the week—are inconsistent. Pointing out to the students that they are making these internally inconsistent assumptions about knowledge is enough to dissolve the paradox; we do not necessarily have to decide which assumption is the “wrong” one." (my emphasis added)

This is essentially the main conclusion of Chow's paper, although he buried it by going on to explore more about "KD" immediately afterwards, and he never points out in non-formal language how the assumptions are inconsistent. At least not to me. He wrapped up with nods to other minor approaches to solving this paradox, but as far as I could find, it still stands. I even read through the 132 comments on a youtube clip about the problem (I don't recommend you do that).

Okay, ready for my simple response? Here it is.

First, as Chow said above, to solve any paradox, "any unclear terms are defined carefully." I believe the term "surprise" is what is causing the problem here. I think we need to distinguish between a bounded surprise and an unbounded surprise. An unbounded surprise is a complete surprise where nothing is known about the occurrence of an event before it happens. The surprise could happen at any time or not at all. But that's not what we have in this paradox. Our surprise has been bounded by the fact that it has been scheduled sometime within an exact timeframe. It is therefore an incomplete surprise because whenever it does occur, you won't be completely surprised that it occurs.

Next, we need to point out that a surprise must involve at least two possible outcomes. If there's only one possibility, it's not a surprise. That seems obvious, but it affects the math of the scenario we are in, so it's important to point this out.

Now, we can finally see our solution clearly. Since the surprise in this paradox has been bounded, the possibility that the surprise inspection would not occur has been eliminated. Therefore, any surprise that the event will occur has already been eliminated; the only surprise left in this paradox is when it will occur. And since we need two possibilities to make a surprise, then for whatever number of days N that a bounded surprise can occur within, there can therefore only ever be N-1 surprises. In a 30-day month, there are only 29 surprises. In a 7-day week, there are only 6 surprises. Etc, etc. This doesn't mean that the last day can't be used for the surprise event; it just means that the surprise happens the day before. When you flip a coin, the result is a surprise. Once the result is known, it is still a surprise the next day—you've just known the surprise for 24 hours then. The same holds true here. The occurrence of the inspection and the surprise about the inspection are separable entities; they don't have to happen simultaneously. So the assumption that the inspection on the last day cannot be a surprise is wrong—it's just not a surprise on that day.

What do you think? Have I cracked it? Are you surprised that I did? Let me know in the comments below, or spread the word to help my blog climb up the rankings of the top 100 philosophy blogs in the world...

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Thought Experiment 70: An Inspector Calls

10/24/2016

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The streets of Naples during a garbage strike. I still ate lots of pizza there.

After a few difficult weeks of dealing with the value of diversity, what constitutes pain, and the need to find meaning in life, this week's thought experiment is just a nice, harmless, clever little logic puzzle. See what you think of this.

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When the health inspector visited Emilio's pizzeria and immediately closed it down, none of his friends could believe he had let it happen. After all, they said, he knew that an inspection was imminent, so why didn't he clean things up?
Emilio's answer was simple. He had been told that an inspector would be making a surprise call sometime before the end of the month. Emilio had sat down and wondered what day the inspection could be. It couldn't be on the 31st: if the inspector hadn't come before then, the inspection could only be on that day, and so it wouldn't be a surprise. If the 31st was ruled out, then so was the 30th, for the same reason. The inspection couldn't be on the 31st, so if it hadn't taken place by the 29th, that would only leave the 30th, and so it again would not be a surprise. But then if the inspection couldn't be on the 30th or the 31st then it couldn't be on the 29th either, for the same reasons. Working backwards, Emilio eventually concluded that there was no day the inspection could take place.
Ironically, having concluded no surprise inspection was possible, Emilio was very unpleasantly surprised when the inspector walked through his door one day. What was wrong with his reasoning?

Source: The widely discussed "surprise examination paradox" has its origins in a wartime Swedish radio broadcast.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 208.
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Okay, I think I have an answer for this. I'd say I'll be back on Friday to surprise you with it, but then...would I?

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Response to Thought Experiment 69: The Horror

10/21/2016

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Nietzsche looking at Nietzsche looking at Nietzsche looking at...

This week's thought experiment is about eternal recurrence so I hope you'll find it entirely excusable (if not downright fitting) for me to restate a few of the things I've already said on this subject. Okay? Okay.

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"The horror! The horror!"
Many have speculated about what inspired Colonel Kurtz to utter those famous last words. The answer lies in what he realised just before he let out his last breath. In that moment, he understood that past, present, and future were all illusions. No moment in time is ever lost. Everything that happens exists for ever.
That meant his impending death would not be the end. His life, once lived, would always exist. And so, in a sense, the life he had lived would be lived again and again, eternally recurring, each time exactly the same and thus with no hope of learning, of changing, of righting past wrongs.
Had Kurtz made a success of this life he could have borne that realisation. He could have looked upon his work, thought "it is good," and gone to his grave serene in his triumph over death. The fact that he instead reacted with horror testified to his failure to overcome the challenges of mortal existence.
"The horror! The horror!" Would you react to the thought of eternal recurrence any differently?

Sources: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1891; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, 1902.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 205.
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Lest anyone think otherwise, Baggini admits in his discussion of this that:

"As literary criticism and as metaphysics, this interpretation of Kurtz's dying words, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is at best complete speculation and at worst pure speculation. I am not aware of any textual evidence that this is how we should understand Kurtz's enigmatic last words. And the idea of the eternal recurrence, although seemingly believed in earnest by Nietzsche, is not considered by most commentators to have marked his finest hour."

My own commentating agrees with that. During my reviews of the survival of the fittest philosophers, I filed Nietzsche's ideas on the eternal return as having "gone extinct." Here specifically is what I said in my blog post Shed a Tear for Nietzsche:

Nietzsche's view on eternal return is similar to that of Hume: the idea that an eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variation - chaotic, pointless shuffling of matter and law - would inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives. This idea of eternal recurrence became a cornerstone of his nihilism, and thus part of the foundation of what became existentialism. Nietzsche contemplates the idea of eternal recurrence as potentially horrifying and paralyzing, and says that its burden is the heaviest weight imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life. To comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, a love of fate. It is not clear if the universe is finite or infinite, but even if it were infinite, Nietzsche misses the other logical outcome of an eternal multiverse - that not only would our own stories come true, but all other possible stories would arise as well. Any and every possibility could be repeated eternally. This does not doom us to accepting or loving our fate, but rather to choose wisely for the life we know.*

(* As a reminder, these fittest philosopher reviews stared with wikipedia-researched summaries in italics, and were followed by my own analysis of that summary in plain text.)

It's fair enough that Nietzsche settled on the idea of eternal recurrence because it had already been around for a very long time. He would have read about it from several thinkers in both Eastern and Western traditions, and the cosmology of his time, as understood by the latest science from physicists, held that the universe was eternal in time, but finite in matter. If that were true, eternal recurrence would have to be true as well. But in the 1920s, astronomers discovered that galaxies are flying apart. The universe, they realised, is expanding, and this ultimately led to our current best understanding that the universe started with the Big Bang and as yet has an unknown but likely finite destination. Because of these new scientific findings, and also because Nietzsche's interpretation of the scientific facts of his day were narrowly pessimistic, the horror of eternal recurrence just doesn't have any force behind it any more.

Baggini deftly morphs Nietzsche's old and weak consideration into something with more relevant strength though by focusing on Kurtz's inability to change the past, saying "in a sense, the life he had lived would be lived again and again, eternally recurring, each time exactly the same and thus with no hope of learning, of changing, of righting past wrongs." This is certainly true for us all, and it's a fact of life that requires us to respond in two ways: 1) we must always accept that what is done is done; and 2) we must strive to live well from now on so as not to reach the end of our lives and have only shame and regret to look back upon about things that can no longer be changed. Kurtz's horror is our own teachable moment.

If you've read my writings on how to Know Thyself, you'll remember that I broke down the way to analyze thyself according to basic elements of time. Where Did I Come From? considered the past; Where Am I? and What Am I? considered the present; and Where Am I Going? considered the future. We have to know the past and present, but we can only make changes going forward, so as I considered that journey through Life, I wrote:

There are six time perspectives you can have on your life: 1) past - positive events; 2) past - negative events; 3) present - hedonism; 4) present - fatalism; 5) future - goal oriented; 6) future - worry oriented. Recognize the benefit of focusing predominantly on 1 and 5 with some 3 for energizing enjoyment. Learn from 2 when it happens. Do not believe in 4; it is irrational. When 6 arises, use 5 to make a plan, and 1 to believe you will achieve it.

On his deathbed, it's obvious Colonel Kurtz had not done this properly. He lived a life only in the moment, full of 3) hedonism, or 4) fatalism, so that he arrived at the end and only had the horror of looking back on 2) negative events in the past. He (and we) would do much better to live a life focused on 5) future goals so that our own deathbeds are comforted by 1) positive events of the past. What kind of future goals? Which ones will turn out to mean the most? In my Response to Thought Experiment 52, I explained that this is...

...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 then 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. Baggini closed his thought experiment with perhaps the most important question for us there is: how do you live your life so that it does not end in horror? I've found an answer that gives me comfort. Does it give comfort to you?

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Thought Experiment 69: The Horror

10/17/2016

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Nice. This week's thought experiment is filled with deep, dark, existential angst. Now we're philosophising!

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"The horror! The horror!"
Many have speculated about what inspired Colonel Kurtz to utter those famous last words. The answer lies in what he realised just before he let out his last breath. In that moment, he understood that past, present, and future were all illusions. No moment in time is ever lost. Everything that happens exists for ever.
That meant his impending death would not be the end. His life, once lived, would always exist. And so, in a sense, the life he had lived would be lived again and again, eternally recurring, each time exactly the same and thus with no hope of learning, of changing, of righting past wrongs.
Had Kurtz made a success of this life he could have borne that realisation. He could have looked upon his work, thought "it is good," and gone to his grave serene in his triumph over death. The fact that he instead reacted with horror testified to his failure to overcome the challenges of mortal existence.
"The horror! The horror!" Would you react to the thought of eternal recurrence any differently?

Sources: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1891; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, 1902.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 205.
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What do you think? This isn't meant to be an accurate interpretation of what Conrad was trying to tell us through Kurtz's last words, but the thought experiment is thought provoking nonetheless. How can we deal with the eternal permanence of our actions? How do you?

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Response to Thought Experiment 68: Mad Pain

10/14/2016

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Although pain can be ignored, we cannot ignore the question of pain.

Pain and pleasure are the two most fundamental motivations for biological behaviour. There is practically an infinite variety of stimuli in the universe that cause us to feel those responses, and we can say that we feel pleasure or pain for our taste buds, our lungs, our eyes, our skin, our muscles, our genitals, our mental understanding of the world, our grasp of our social reputations, and many, many other things, including any of these items for other animals too through the effects of our mirror nuerons. It seems ludicrous to describe all these various sources and locations of sensation as simply pleasurable or painful, but that does seem to be accurate because of the simple logical fact that we as living creatures either act to get more of what keeps us alive, or we act to avoid that which tries to kill us. (Keeping in mind the definition of "us" is changeable and can be extended to others.) There is no third state of existence that we need to be motivated towards or away from. Life or death. Pleasure or pain. That's all there is.

(And yet, as a brief aside, that's more than what Artificial Intelligence researchers, or those who think we can "upload our consciousness" to computers, seem to think is sufficient for their pursuits. As Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions, but without the biochemical ability to stimulate pleasure and pain, how can silicone circuits ever feel passions to drive their logic? They can't. But more on that another time.)

So pain—the focus of this week's thought experiment—has been an important subject for philosophers since the beginning of the field. Not only are we concerned with the morality of actions that cause suffering for individuals across society, but examining pain can trigger deeper questions about the nature of reality behind such consequences too. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, pain is:

"...the most prominent member of a class of sensations known as bodily sensations, which includes itches, tickles, tingles, orgasms, and so on. Bodily sensations are typically attributed to bodily locations and appear to have features such as volume, intensity, duration, and so on, that are ordinarily attributed to physical objects or quantities. Yet these sensations are often thought to be logically private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge for those who have them. Hence there appear to be reasons both for thinking that pains (along with other similar bodily sensations) are physical objects...and for thinking that they are not. This paradox is one of the main reasons why philosophers are especially interested in pain."

Once again, the mind-body problem comes alive. We have had trouble finding a fully physical, bodily definition for pain, so some philosophers turn for an explanation to an imaginary realm of ideas or minds, which must operate in a separate plane of existence. But even if you don't agree to such dualism, then which of the many flavors of monism make the most sense? Let's read the thought experiment now and then dive into these issues.

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The accident left David with a very unusual form of brain damage. If you scratched, pricked, or kicked him, he felt no pain. But if he saw a lot of yellow, tasted oak, heard an opera singer hit a high C, made an unintentional pun, or had one of several other apparently random experiences, then he would feel pain, sometimes quite acutely.
Not only that, but he did not find the sensation of this pain at all unpleasant. He didn't deliberately seek out pain, but he did not make any efforts to avoid it either. This meant that he did not manifest his pain in the usual ways, such as crying out or writhing. The only physical signs of David being in pain were all forms of involuntary spasm: his shoulders would shrug, eyebrows lower and rise in quick succession, or his elbows flap out, making him look like a chicken.
David's neurologist, however, was deeply sceptical. He could see that David no longer felt pain as he had before, but whatever David was now feeling when he saw "too much yellow," it couldn't be pain. Pain was by definition an unpleasant thing that people tried to avoid. Perhaps his brain damage had made him forget what the sensation of real pain felt like.

Source: "Mad Pain and Martian Pain" by David Lewis, in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, 1980.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 202.
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Baggini has simplified the discussion considerably here by only looking at half of the original thought experiment from David Lewis. This story only concerns itself with what Lewis called "mad pain" — the case where pain doesn't act the way it does for the rest of us. As Baggini describes this:

The story of David's "mad pain" is an attempt to play with the variables associated with pain to see which are essential and which are incidental. The three main variables are private, subjective experiences; typical causes; and behavioral responses. Mad pain has only subjective experience in common with ordinary pain; its causes and effects are quite different. If it is nonetheless accurate to describe mad pain as pain, then we should conclude that it is the subjective feeling of being in pain which is the essence of pain. Its causes and effects are merely incidental, and could be different from what they usually are. ... The rub of the issue, however, concerns the relation between the inner and the outer. It might seem easy to say that pain is defined by how it feels to the sufferer, and that this has an essential link to behaviors such as avoidance and grimacing. But this solution is too quick. For if pain really is a feeling, then why should it be inconceivable to experience pain without any of the associated behavior? It's no good just saying it must manifest itself in some way; you need to say why it must do so. Until you can, mad pain remains a possibility.

That's easy enough. First, let's agree that pain is a feeling. Since David in the thought experiment "did not find the sensation of this pain at all unpleasant," reader Pedrag Selimanovic commented:

It's not pain then. I know that some people experience pleasure while experiencing (some type of) pain but the unpleasant part is actually a real and important aspect of it.

That's true. The feeling is necessary, as illustrated by the people who don't feel pain who often suffer severe self-inflicted injuries and premature death as a result of that deficiency. So then what about Baggini's main question: why must pain be associated with typical behaviours? In general, that is exactly what does happen. (Hence, they are called typical.) Explaining why, from an excellent evolutionary standpoint, reader Steve Willey commented:

Pain is a survival mechanism to bring priority awareness of bodily damage to conscious thought to facilitate corrective action. It's essential to survival for all animate life, insects included. Depending on severity it overrides other brain processes as an emergency signal for needed avoidance action. In brain damage as described, its function / manifestation has been modified and purpose defeated.

From the facts given in the thought experiment, this is why David's reactions to his "mad pain" may be possible but they are problematic. The fact that his "shoulders would shrug, eyebrows lower and rise in quick succession, or his elbows flap out, making him look like a chicken," all means that his specific pain response has been rendered defective. However, this alone does not mean that he does not feel pain. Pain does not need to "have an essential link to behaviors such as avoidance and grimacing," as Baggini pointed out. Think of the self-immolating monk in the picture at the top of this post. Surely, he felt extreme pain. His nociceptive neurons must have been firing with the greatest intensity they were capable of. But in one of the most extreme acts of courage and self-control we know of, the monk expressed no reaction to it. We can explain his behavior by my earlier comment that although pain is meant to keep us alive, the definition of "us" is changeable and can be extended to others. In this case, the monk performed his act of protest for the purpose of keeping a larger "us" alive than merely himself. We humans can do that.

So yes, mad pain is possible. Among the three main variables for pain, two of them—typical causes, and behavioral responses—have exceptions. Only the third variable—the private, subjective experience—is necessary for pain. Our shared evolutionary histories mean those private experiences are extremely likely to be shared, but sane pain doesn't have to look normal, and truly mad pain will lead to failure with respect to the true goal of pain, which is to lead us away from extinction. That's the answer to Baggini's version of the thought experiment.

But what about the original experiment from Lewis that Baggini cited? While we're here, I ought to try and address that as well. As the title of his paper makes clear, Lewis discussed both mad pain and something else he called Martian pain. Just to reiterate the first type (as it was originally written) and then contrast that with the second, here's a nice summary of Lewis's two forms of pain:

1) The being with "mad pain" is a human being, except when his brain is in a state of pain, his mind turns to mathematics and he begins to snap his fingers. He is not at all inclined to prevent the pain from occurring. Lewis ultimately goes on to explain that pain is relative to a species, implying that the man who exhibits mad pain is essentially an exception. In Lewis' words, "In short, he feels pain but his pain does not at all occupy the typical causal role of pain."

2) A being with "Martian pain" is not human but, when subject to pain, will react in the same way that humans do. He is strongly inclined to prevent whatever stimulus is causing discomfort. However, the physical explanation of Martian pain is different from that of human pain. He has a "hydraulic mind" and pain is identical with inflation of cavities in his feet. In Lewis' words, "In short, he feels pain but lacks the bodily states that either are in pain or else accompany it in us."

Why introduce these two types of pain? As Lewis states in the original paper: "If I want a credible theory of mind, I need a theory that does not deny the possibility of mad pain, [and it also] needs to make a place both for mad pain and for Martian pain." We've already checked off the first requirement, agreeing to the possibility of mad pain, but before we get to why Lewis thinks his two types of pain are two horns of a dilemma that pose problems for any coherent theory of mind, I want to place this in some context. Bear with me for just a second. (Or skip to the next asterisk if you already know all the ins and outs of the Philosophy of Mind.)

*

Philosophers have proposed loads and loads of theories of mind in their attempt to solve the mind-body problem. I've already briefly described the two major schools of thought on this—dualism and monism—but there is a third minor camp called mysterianism that I should mention too. That idea claims that since we haven't solved it yet, it seems likely that we must be biologically unable to solve the mind-body problem, sort of like the way that mice lack the symbolic brain apparatus to ever know particle physics. However, since our scientific inquiries into the universe in general have not slowed to a halt, and since neuroscience in particular is still a long way away from a complete mapping and understanding of the brain, I'm going to dismiss mysterianism until we're done learning. As for dualism vs. monism, let's first see a quick list of the options for each that I found:

Monism: physicalist (behaviorism, identity theory (type or token, or reductive materialism), functionalism, non-reductive physicalism, weak emergentism, or eliminative materialism); non-physicalist (idealism (pluralistic, solipsistic, or absolute)); or neutral monism.
Dualism: interactionist dualism, psychophysical parallelism, occasionalism, property dualism (strong emergentism, epiphenomenalism, non-reductive physicalism, or panpsychism), dual aspect theory, experiential dualism, or hylomorphic dualism.

This is kind of insane, isn't it? This sort of proliferation without any means of elimination (kind of like religions) can only really happen in areas where there is no clear evidence (again, kind of like religions). I'm not going to begin to go through this entire list, but "most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position." This makes sense since we have only found evidence for physical elements in a natural universe. So, like most other philosophers, I'm willing to dismiss all the dualist ideas as imaginary fiction. As someone who accepts the evolutionary history of life, it makes no sense to me to think minds winked into a new and separate existence somewhere along the journey from chemistry to simple biology to complex biology.

So, drawing down through the list of choices, first of all I'm a monist. From within that group, physicalists argue that "only entities postulated by physical theory exist, and mental processes will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve." I agree with that. Searching further down, reductive materialism (within identity theory) is the one that argues that "a mental state is well defined, and that further research will result in a more detailed, but not different understanding." Due to my epistemological stance that knowledge can only ever be: justified, beliefs, that are surviving, I'm comfortable agreeing to this and waiting for science to uncover any necessary changes. Continued progress in neuroscience has helped to clarify some of the mind-body issues (e.g. the belief by Descartes that the mind exerted control of the brain through the pineal gland was thrown out long ago), but without knowing how life first arose or what consciousness really is, the exact answer to the mind-body problem is for now uncertain.

Getting back towards our thought experiment, but still clarifying its location within the vast discussion of the mind-body problem, I must explain that David Lewis is a functionalist. So he, like most of us, is also a monist and also a physicalist, but of a slightly different flavour. Functionalism is a theory of the mind:

...developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role – that is, they have causal relations to other mental states, numerous sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Functionalism is a theoretical level between the physical implementation and behavioral output. It is only concerned with the effective functions of the brain, through its organization or its "software programs".

In Lewis' abstruse words, functionalists "speak of the place of pain in the causal network from stimuli to inner states to behavior." In my simpler words, functionalists think the function of pain is necessary and sufficient to identify pain. Got it? Good. Now back to the dilemma.

*

In "Mad Pain and Martian Pain," Lewis sets up a supposed difficulty for simple theories of mind, and then defends his functionalist position as able to overcome the supposed difficulty. As he himself explains it in the original paper:

"A credible theory of mind needs to make a place both for mad pain and for Martian pain. Prima facie, it seems hard for a materialist theory to pass this two-fold test. As philosophers, we would like to characterize pain a priori. As materialists, we want to characterize pain as a physical phenomenon. ... But the lesson of mad pain is that pain is associated only contingently with its causal role, while the lesson of Martian pain is that pain is connected only contingently with its physical realization. How can we characterize pain a priori in terms of causal role and physical realization, and yet respect both kinds of contingency? A simple identity theory straightforwardly solves the problem of mad pain. It goes just as straightforwardly wrong about Martian pain. A simple behaviorism or functionalism goes the other way: right about the Martian, wrong about the madman. ... It seems that a theory that can pass our test will have to be a mixed theory. It will have to be able to tell us that the madman and the Martian are both in pain, but for different reasons: the madman because he is in the right physical state, the Martian because he is in a state rightly situated in the causal network."

Here we go again, where a philosopher has gotten himself into an unnecessary battle because he insists on trying to think his way to knowledge alone. Lewis asks, "how can we characterize pain a priori"? Well, we can't. If Lewis would drop the latin jargon for simpler language, his argument might be easier to see through. A priori literally means "from before," but is taken more broadly as an adjective "relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience." Pain cannot be theoretically deduced (a priori) without observation or experience, because pain is precisely a reaction to observation and experience. Descriptions of pain must reflect the evolutionary history of experience for the creature in pain being considered. The "simple identity theory" that Lewis finds flawed is one that would define pain as the identity of a single specific physical state. Something like "pain = firing of nociceptive neurons." But this is a straw man, as if anyone would think all pain in the universe could be defined this way. Looking at the list of painful and pleasurable stimuli and responses in my opening paragraph, we can agree that "pain" is a complex category of things rather than a simple individual thing. Its general function for survival must be understood, but then its physical identities for specific instances can all be investigated and described. To search for a single physical phenomenon for "pain" is a category error; it's like looking for a "university" rather than all the buildings and people that make one up.

So that explains why Lewis' argument is flawed from the start against my flavour of physicalism (reductive materialism within identity theory), but let's take a quick look at where he ended up. How does Lewis go on to define pain using his functionalist viewpoint? Here is the relevant passage:

Our view is that the concept of pain, or indeed of any other experience or mental state, is the concept of a state that occupies a certain causal role, a state with certain typical causes and effects. It is the concept of a state apt for being caused by certain stimuli and apt for causing certain behavior. ... It is the concept of a member of a system of states that together more or less realize the pattern of causal generalizations set forth in commonsense psychology. ... In short, the concept of pain as Armstrong and I understand it is a nonrigid concept. Likewise the word "pain" is a nonrigid designator. It is a contingent matter what state the concept and the word apply to. It depends on what causes what. The same goes for the rest of our concepts and ordinary names of mental states.

Well that answers that doesn't it?! I underlined all the weasel words in Lewis' description of pain, which make it pretty clear that he hasn't done much to actually define pain....even though reading his paper sure caused me some pain!

After considering all of this, I'd like to end with some thoughts on pain that came to me while writing this post. It is obvious that we humans feel pain when flesh and bones are torn apart, but perhaps we can feel physical pain when neuronal connections are torn apart as well. When something we've "known" for a long time is undone, this is what must literally happen inside our brains. This would explain the observation I quoted last week from Edgar Schein who said that any challenge of a basic assumption will release anxiety and defensiveness. Such challenges painfully tear our minds apart. If that is true, this would also explain why philosophy can often be painful to read, and why my own new work is particularly painful for most. Ripping off the duct tape that holds most worldviews together though seems much more preferable to me than feeling the continual anxiety that seems to arise when most worldviews are faced with evidence from the real world. So thanks for working through such pain with me. It's a pleasure to have you here.

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Thought Experiment 68: Mad Pain

10/10/2016

3 Comments

Ach! Something yellow that tastes of oak! Owww!!

Here we go. Another supposedly great challenge to materialist philosophers like myself. The subject of pain.

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The accident left David with a very unusual form of brain damage. If you scratched, pricked, or kicked him, he felt no pain. But if he saw a lot of yellow, tasted oak, heard an opera singer hit a high C, made an unintentional pun, or had one of several other apparently random experiences, then he would feel pain, sometimes quite acutely.
Not only that, but he did not find the sensation of this pain at all unpleasant. He didn't deliberately seek out pain, but he did not make any efforts to avoid it either. This meant that he did not manifest his pain in the usual ways, such as crying out or writhing. The only physical signs of David being in pain were all forms of involuntary spasm: his shoulders would shrug, eyebrows lower and rise in quick succession, or his elbows flap out, making him look like a chicken.
David's neurologist, however, was deeply sceptical. He could see that David no longer felt pain as he had before, but whatever David was now feeling when he saw "too much yellow," it couldn't be pain. Pain was by definition an unpleasant thing that people tried to avoid. Perhaps his brain damage had made him forget what the sensation of real pain felt like.

Source: "Mad Pain and Martian Pain" by David Lewis, in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, 1980.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 202.
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What do you think? What can pain possibly be if it is private and subjective, as seems to be the case for David? How can we ever know what pain really is? I'll be back on Friday with an answer that hopefully isn't too painful to produce. Not that you'd know anything about it.

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Response to Thought Experiment 67: The Poppadom Paradox

10/6/2016

2 Comments

Another highly simplified view of multiculturalism.

After a few decades of increased globalization, the backlash against the multiculturalism that has come with that seems to be reaching a tipping point. The Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency launched his campaign by promising to spend $10 billion to build a wall along the border with Mexico. In the U.K., an unelected prime minister has taken a 52/48 referendum vote on Brexit to mean companies should be forced to publish lists of their foreign E.U. workers, and only the top universities should be allowed to accept foreign students. Some of these terrible ideas can be written off as political pandering to the large segments of society that have been prevented from sharing in the huge benefits of a more connected world. But some of the backlash against multiculturalism comes from a philosophical misunderstanding that equates it with relativism. This week's thought experiment, and the original commentary that accompanied it, show exactly what I mean, and they really must be addressed. Let's look at them now, and then take their arguments apart so that the location and value of diversity and multiculturalism becomes clear.

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As life-transforming events go, the arrival of poppadoms at the table hardly counts as the most dramatic. But it gave Saskia the kind of mental jolt that would profoundly alter the way she thought.
   The problem was that the waiter who delivered the poppadoms was not of Indian descent, but was a white Anglo-Saxon. This bothered Saskia because, for her, one of the pleasures of going out for a curry was the feeling that you were tasting a foreign culture. Had the waiter served her a steak and kidney pie it would have been no more incongruous than his skin color.
   The more she thought about it, however, the less sense it made. Saskia thought of herself as a multiculturalist. That is to say, she positively enjoyed the variety of cultures an ethnically diverse society sustains. But her enjoyment depended upon other people remaining ethnically distinct. She could enjoy a life flitting between many different cultures only if others remained firmly rooted in one. For her to be a multiculturalist, others needed to be monoculturalists. Where did that leave her ideal of a multicultural society?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 199.
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Since this is one of the relatively few unsourced thought experiments in Baggini's book, it stands to reason that this is therefore one of his personal ideas. As such, and considering my disdain for it, I feel I ought to let Baggini have his full say before I tackle this. Here, then, is the entirety of his commentary to this thought experiment. (You'd better buckle up—it's a short but frustrating ride!)

Saskia is right to feel uncomfortable. There is a problem at the heart of liberal multiculturalism. It advocates respect for other cultures, but what it values above all is the ability to transcend one culture and value many. This places a major constraint on the extent of its respect. The ideal person is the multiculturalist who can visit a mosque, read Hindu scriptures, and practise Buddhist meditation. Those who remain within one tradition do not embody these ideals, and so, despite the talk of "respect", they can be seen only as inferior to the open-minded multiculturalist.
     There is something of the zoo mentality in this. The multiculturalist wants to go around admiring different ways of living, but can do this only if various forms of life are kept more or less intact. Different subcultures in society are thus like cages, and if too many people move in or out of them, they become less interesting for the multiculturalist to point and smile at. If everyone were as culturally promiscuous as they were, there would be less genuine diversity to revel in. And so the multiculturalists must remain an elite, parasitic on internally homogeneous monocultures.
     It may be argued that it is possible to be both a multiculturalist and committed to one particular culture. The paradigm here is of the devout Muslim or Christian who nonetheless has a profound respect for other religions and belief systems and is always prepared to learn from them.
   However, tolerance and respect for other cultures are not the same as valuing all cultures more or less equally. For the multiculturalist, the best point of view is the one which sees merit in all. But one cannot be a committed Christian, Muslim, Jew, or even atheist and sincerely believe this. There may be a tolerance, or even respect, for other cultures, but if a Christian really believed that Islam is as valuable as Christianity, why would they be a Christian?
   This is the multiculturalist's dillemma. You can have a society of many cultures which respect each other. Call that multiculturalism if you want. But if you want to champion a multiculturalism which values diversity itself and sees all cultures as of equal merit, then you either have to accept that those who live within just one culture have an inferior form of life — which seems to go against the idea of respect for all cultures — or you have to argue for erosion of divisions between distinct cultures, so that people value more and more in the cultures of others — which will lead to a decrease in the kind of diversity you claim to value.
   In our concrete example, for Saskia to continue to enjoy a diversity of cultures, she must hope that others do not embrace multiculturalism as fully as she has.

My first reaction is to scream about this, but I've come to think that Baggini is punching at a straw man of extreme multiculturalism, which I don't agree with either. Let's get a few definitions out of the way first, and then I can tear into this with some precision. First, what exactly do we mean when we use the word "culture"?

Culture is an incredibly broad and abstract concept, so it's no surprise that it has many definitions. According to anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is: "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." That's an all-encompassing list, but what is culture for? Terror Management Theory says culture is "a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as 'persons of worth within the world of meaning'—raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo Sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain." That again may be true—that humans try to deny their animal insignificance—but an evolutionary philosophy would rather accept that lack of supernatural purpose or meaning and find another reason to study culture. I therefore like the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism, which holds that "human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions." That sounds properly grounded in the natural world, and based on evolutionary facts, but there's still one other definition of culture I like because it is simple, precise, scalable, and something you can diagnose in order to change. It comes from the business management field of organizational psychology where Edgar Schein has described the elements of culture in his book Organizational Culture and Leadership: His definitions can be captured in this summary:

What is culture ? A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration. There are three levels of culture: artifacts (visible), espoused beliefs and values (may appear through surveys), and basic underlying assumptions (unconscious taken for granted beliefs and values: these are not visible). The last being the more important since human minds need cognitive stability and any challenge of a basic assumption will release anxiety and defensiveness.

That last clause is especially powerful to me. Challenges to basic assumptions release anxiety and defensiveness. How many times have you witnessed that in your own life? Isn't that why most people stay away from reading philosophy? (Even philosophers.) Isn't that what's causing the breakdown in political discourse in society at both the professional level of government as well the personal level of Facebook? And isn't that what is essentially driving the backlash against multiculturalism in this week's thought experiment?

Now that our basic underlying assumptions about the definition of "culture" have been stated (see what I did there?), let's quickly do the same for "multiculturalism." Multicultural ideologies and policies vary widely too, ranging from "the advocacy of equal respect to the various cultures in a society, to a policy of promoting the maintenance of cultural diversity, to policies in which people of various ethnic and religious groups are addressed by the authorities as defined by the group to which they belong. Multiculturalism that promotes maintaining the distinctiveness of multiple cultures is often contrasted to other settlement policies such as social integration, cultural assimilation, and racial segregation." Got it? Baggini never gets into these alternatives, but his strong criticism of multiculturalism implies he must be for one of them. Before I just defend multiculturalism, however, there's one more underlying assumption that will be helpful to the discussion—my definition of "knowledge."

As I stated a few weeks ago on this blog, knowledge cannot be justified true belief. This has been the widely held definition of knowledge since Plato, but eternal truths simply cannot exist in a changing universe where any future discoveries may cause knowledge to change. Therefore, knowledge can only ever be: justified, beliefs, that are surviving. What's the best way to find knowledge that survives? By following the example of evolution where blind variation, natural selection, and retention produce organisms that adapt to their environments and survive. In a parallel fashion, multiple cultures and the scientific method provide the means for purposeful variation, rational selection, and a retention of the ideas that aid the survival of all cultures of life.

Now, let's finally take a look at some of the particular mistakes that I think Baggini makes in his discussion of this thought experiment. I'll reprint his commentary in a numbered list and try not to scream too much as I tackle them one by one.

1) There is a problem at the heart of liberal multiculturalism. It advocates respect for other cultures, but what it values above all is the ability to transcend one culture and value many.

Wrong! What my multiculturalism values "above all" is the survival of life. Diversity is not valued for diversity's sake; it is only a proximate goal for an ultimate cause. Also, the implications of Baggini's point would seem to be that he thinks one culture ought to be valued over and above crossing to others. But this is exactly the kind of tribalism that has caused much of humanity's self-inflicted misery!

2) Those who remain within one tradition do not embody these ideals, and so, despite the talk of "respect", they can be seen only as inferior to the open-minded multiculturalist.

Firstly, it's practically impossible for anyone to remain completely within one tradition these days. There are vanishingly small numbers of uncontacted peoples in the world now compared to 500 years ago. After the industrial revolution, powered travel has meant that most cultures on Earth will eventually influence one another directly. And due to human contamination of the entire ecosystem, all cultures are now influenced indirectly by others. With the advent of the information revolution, computers and mobile devices connected to the Internet have also created the possibility for a nearly instantaneously globalised world.

Secondly, even if monoculturalists practically remain within one tradition and insist that their knowledge is the only truth, then yes, their culture is inferior. That doesn't mean there is nothing to be gained from the rest of that culture, but its insistence on being closed is something we can judge as bad, for it ultimately leads to stagnation and extinction. In the philosopher Kwame Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Appiah noted that the concept of tolerance can only make sense if there is something it is intolerant of. No one is "tolerant" of breathing or the shining sun. Those just are facts of life. For cosmopolitan multiculturalists, we are intolerant of intolerance. That is something we cannot "respect."

3) The multiculturalist wants to go around admiring different ways of living, but can do this only if various forms of life are kept more or less intact.

The weasel words "more or less" allow some wiggle room here, but no culture (or any living thing for that matter) can ever stay static in a changing environment without going extinct. Despite this recognition of the fundamental need for change, there is still plenty of room for "different ways of living" that we multiculturalists can admire.

4) If everyone were as culturally promiscuous as [multiculturalists] were, there would be less genuine diversity to revel in. And so the multiculturalist must remain an elite, parasitic on internally homogenous monocultures.

Augh! Them's fightin' words. First of all, we've established that homogenous monocultures are not technically possible, and they barely even occur on a practical level when looked at over a generous length of time. No cultures are fully medieval anymore, for example. They have all grown and modernised in some technological and / or moral sense that has been influenced by the rest of the world.

Secondly, multiculturalists do not demand or expect everyone to be "culturally promiscuous" (whatever that means). One of the elements of diversity we value in all life is also the diversity of what I'll call explorers vs. nesters. If every member of a species nested and stayed put no matter what, it would quickly be wiped out by any change in the environment. On the other hand, if every member of a species explored no matter what, no cooperative societies or mutualistic ecosystems would have ever developed. All species need individuals who explore and nest. (And remember, every living thing in any species that has sex, which is damn near everything we can see, produces individuals that are absolutely unique in one way or another.) So while some "culturally promiscuous" people will bring back ideas to the more "culturally chaste" members of a culture, both types can and must learn from one another. What multiculturalists "revel in" isn't just "genuine diversity," it's breadth as well as depth. Both are required. Neither are parasitic.

5) For the multiculturalist, the best point of view is the one which sees merit in all. But one cannot be a committed Christian, Muslim, Jew, or even atheist and sincerely believe this. There may be a tolerance, or even respect, for other cultures, but if a Christian really believed that Islam is as valuable as Christianity, why would they be a Christian?

This is wrong because of my definition of knowledge, where we lack the ability to find eternal truths. In the face of uncertainty, one must see the merit in different attempts at finding solutions. To carry on with the religious example that Baggini started, we don't know what happens after we die, so sure, people can believe what they want about that. Some beliefs will motivate better living than others, and none should be used to force others to change their behaviour since there is no evidence for the belief, but the exact "value" of one religious viewpoint compared to another is one that cannot currently be known. Without knowing the "truth," we may think that religious or non-religious worldviews all have some range of value, let's arbitrarily call it 200-500, but we won't know the exact score in that range for any one worldview until we die. And maybe not even then. Given that scenario, it would be perfectly acceptable for a multiculturalist Christian to say Islam and Christianity are both equally valuable, with a range of 200-500, while still hoping (having faith) that Christianity will come out on the high end of the spectrum when/if the final answer is revealed. Until then, we live and let live. No serious multiculturalist though, would say that this applies to differing cultural points of view about the roundness or flatness of the Earth. Those are views with known values: let's call it 0.000001% likelihood of being flat, and 99.99999% likelihood of being round. The only uncertainty there is in the case of radical skepticism where an evil demon is revealed in the future who shows us he's been screwing with us all along. In other words, where there is strong evidence, the multiculturalism I am describing expects different cultures to adopt the same underlying assumption about that evidence. Where there is less or no evidence, others ought to carry on searching.

6) If you want to champion a multiculturalism which values diversity itself and sees all cultures as of equal merit, then you either have to accept that those who live within just one culture have an inferior form of life—which seems to go against the idea of respect for all cultures—or you have to argue for erosion of divisions between distinct cultures, so that people value more and more in the cultures of others—which will lead to a decrease in the kind of diversity you claim to value.

Finally, I think it is becoming clear that Baggini is aiming his argument at radical relativists. The point I made earlier about ranges of values for religious views applies to cultures too (e.g. we may not know if the French or German culture is worth 400 or 450, but we can think both of them are worth 200-500), but still, only radical relativists would accept Baggini's premise that multiculturalism sees 100% of "all cultures as of equal merit." That's not the multiculturalism or diversity that I espouse. Especially since I have an objective definition of good that arises from nature. Rather than hammer home my point any longer though, let's let Kwame Appiah have the last word to show that I'm not the only one who disagrees with Baggini. Here are two more relevant passages from Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers:

One characteristic of European cosmopolitanism, especially since the Enlightenment, has been a receptiveness to art and literature from other places, and a wider interest in lives elsewhere. This is a reflection of...the second strand of cosmopolitanism: the recognition that human beings are different and that we can learn from each other’s differences. A cosmopolitan openness to the world is perfectly consistent with picking and choosing among the options you find in your search.

[However,] if relativism about ethics and morality were true, then at the end of many discussions we would each have to end up saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.” And there would be nothing further to say. From our different perspectives, we would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People often recommend relativism because they think it will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn’t a way to encourage conversation; it’s just a reason to fall silent.

And with that, I'll fall silent and wait for the conversation to continue from the other side.

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Thought Experiment 67: The Poppadom Paradox

10/3/2016

0 Comments

Mmmm. Poppadoms.

The title of this week's thought experiment made me hungry. But then I read the experiment and got angry. Now I'm hangry!

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As life-transforming events go, the arrival of poppadoms at the table hardly counts as the most dramatic. But it gave Saskia the kind of mental jolt that would profoundly alter the way she thought.
The problem was that the waiter who delivered the poppadoms was not of Indian descent, but was a white Anglo-Saxon. This bothered Saskia because, for her, one of the pleasures of going out for a curry was the feeling that you were tasting a foreign culture. Had the waiter served her a steak and kidney pie it would have been no more incongruous than his skin colour.
The more she thought about it, however, the less sense it made. Saskia thought of herself as a multiculturalist. That is to say, she positively enjoyed the variety of cultures an ethnically diverse society sustains. But her enjoyment depended upon other people remaining ethnically distinct. She could enjoy a life flitting between many different cultures only if others remained firmly rooted in one. For her to be a multiculturalist, others needed to be monoculturalists. Where did that leave her ideal of a multicultural society?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 199.
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Baggini's subtle attack on multiculturalism seems to rest on a false point. What do you think it is? Or do you agree with him that multiculturalism is a doomed paradox? I'll be back on Friday to share an answer from my point of view.

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Thought Experiment 71: Life Support

Response to Thought Experiment 70: An Inspector Calls

Thought Experiment 70: An Inspector Calls

Response to Thought Experiment 69: The Horror

Thought Experiment 69: The Horror

Response to Thought Experiment 68: Mad Pain

Thought Experiment 68: Mad Pain

Response to Thought Experiment 67: The Poppadom Paradox

Thought Experiment 67: The Poppadom Paradox

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