Skepsis

I recently read an article written by Peter Singer, found here, defending act-utilitarianism against the objections of D.H. Hodgson in his book Consequences of Utilitarianism. Hodgson’s objections have been described by Peter Singer in his article, so I will not elaborate. The short version of one of his objections (the one I’m interested in) is that if everybody followed act-utilitarianism, they would lie when it has net utility, thus making it difficult for people to trust one another. This would lead to a breakdown of communication, which will have net negative utility, thus making utilitarianism self-defeating.

Peter Singer answers Hodgson’s objections wonderfully. His logic is impeccable, which makes this article one of my favourites on ethics. I had thought about the objection Hodgson raised before reading the article, and did not find it strong enough to persuade me to eschew utilitarianism. The rebuttal I thought of is the same as one that Singer writes in his article, so I am saying it now at risk of sounding like a copy-cat I am not a copy-cat, but it is in the nature of philosophy that when philosophizing people will often arrive at the same conclusions and make the same inferences. This is so uniformly the case, that I see the sum total of people’s philosophizing as if it were the activity of one mind. In any event, here is my answer to Hodgson’s objection:

The distinction between calculating the utility of a general (not absolute) adherence to a habit or practice (such as telling the truth) and calculating only the utility of any specific instance of the application of that practice is not the distinction between being an act-utilitarian and not being one. It’s the distinction between what is included in that set of things that are worth preserving/pursuing for a utilitarian, and what isn’t. The answer appears obvious: happiness is worth preserving/pursuing; but how many steps removed is an act allowed to be from the experience of happiness before it is considered to maximize happiness? If the goal of a good action can be the preservation of something that maximizes utility, rather than being restricted to the maximization of utility directly, then Hodgson’s counterexample doesn’t work.

People’s expectation that other people will behave a certain way is an important determinant of their own willingness to engage in good behavior, and that trust can only be created by others’ demonstration of their trustworthiness. So demonstrating trustworthiness has utility, even though it appears that to demonstrate it in a particular instance might involve doing the less good act (e.g. telling the truth even if it causes someone to suffer). Hodgson would complain that that goes against the terms of his thought experiment where everyone was supposed to be utilitarian in every act and perfectly rational, but actually it would not, if it is considered a utilitarian act that preserves a practice that maximizes utility: then one is in fact being utilitarian when telling the truth even if it causes someone to suffer.

If Hodgson does not accept my answer, then we can just rephrase the theory to act-and-habit-utilitarianism. It’s just semantics after this, after we understand that the justification for lying to save someone from hurt is the same as making it a habit to tell the truth most of the time.

Cross-posted in The TRASH Bin.

Meera Nanda, an Indian skeptic and atheist, has written a rather naïve article criticizing spirituality and especially Sam Harris’ so-called ‘mystifications’. In her attempt to be an equal-opportunity skeptic, she has neglected to engage in decent philosophizing or respectable research. This post is an explanation for my disagreement with her.

In her article she has misrepresented Sam Harris’ philosophy, as well as made errors both in reasoning and in fact. Her errors are the following:

She says: ‘While he is quick to pour scorn on such childish ideas as the virgin birth, heaven and hell, the great rationalist has only winks and nods to offer when it comes to such “higher” truths as near-death experiences, ESP and the existence of disembodied souls, all of which he finds plausible.’

Sam Harris does not refer to ESP as a higher truth, but suggests that it is worth considering that people have had psychic experiences, including experiences where they remember seeing themselves during comas and while approaching death. Merely to consider something is not to accept it thoughtlessly. The rhetoric that people such as Meera Nanda and other ‘rationalists’ use of scientific rigor and skepticism derives its power from the positive connotation surrounding notions that decent, intelligent people value. When we hear ’scientific’ it sounds nice and warm, but when we hear ‘unscientific’ or ‘anti-science’ it sounds harsh and accusatory. Why is this so? Because scientific rigor is something people rightly see as good and valuable. What Meera Nanda is offering is not scientific rigor, but an anti-intellectual attitude of narrow-mindedness and rigidity, which she sells in the shiny packaging of the same enterprise that she abuses in the process.

The notion of a disembodied soul, or more palatably, the proposition that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of our brains stands beside the proposition that it is, with a slight pragmatic advantage going to the latter. Science – an epistemology – cannot entail either a materialistic or non-materialistic ontology. Scienticians are prone to believing that science ‘proves’ the absence of non-material reality, simply because science is only equipped to deal with material reality. But even a rudimentary exposure to logical entailment should help anyone understand the problem with this reasoning. Supposing there was a non-material reality, knowable through a non-scientific epistemology (though prima facie I don’t see why it can’t be knowable through a scientific one, but we’ll forget that for now), and people are using that epistemology for its domain and science for the material domain. Is there any impossibility in this? The answer is ‘no’. The scenario seems odd, but it is by no means impossible.

For those who are wondering what skeptics have on the gullible who believe ghosts can cause illnesses and witches can put curses on you, the answer lies in pragmatism. The cancer patient who just puts crystals on his body is not likely to survive as long as the one who visits a hospital. There are good reasons to be skeptical, and they do not involve logically unjustified denials of anything that has not made up the subject matter of science yet, or that ever will. Sam Harris’ distinction between believing in a virgin birth and believing in a non-material consciousness can be justified pragmatically: a virgin birth is an event in the material world, and the positing of supernatural intervention has not served us well in understanding material problems (such as illnesses, how to have babies, how not to have babies, how to get from point A to point B and so on). If you’re infertile, prayer won’t help you, but fertility medication will. Thus, using pragmatism, we can designate a general area of ‘the world’ (meaning that which is relevant to us, which we interact with) to an epistemology that is most fit – that is, most useful – within that area. But to propose that no area exists other than the one designated to your favourite epistemology is quite another matter.

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One characteristic I have disdain for, that is common among non-intellectuals, is this tendency to view a potentially enlightening discourse or debate as a battle of wills. To a certain extent we all identify with our opinions so ego and emotions enter the picture when we’re arguing, but intellectuals generally have a recognition that there is something larger happening, and that keeps us at the debate in spite of the stress or unpleasantness of it. There is a compulsion, a sense of being drawn, that takes you over when you encounter something larger than yourself. Mathematical theorems, logic, music, philosophical and scientific truth, and spiritual insights have this hold over us that temporarily silences our egos. But those who place their egos in the forefront rather than the goals of enlightenment or growth during discussions and debates, are not only cowards but also hindering the process of enlightenment. By doing so they are more prone to dogma, because they are less likely to learn from the contributions of others.

The hallmark of an intellectual pansy is the statement: ‘I have the right to my opinion’, ‘I don’t feel the need to explain my philosophy / opinion / religion / moral view etc. to you’ or some other variant of that defensive statement. It is true that one does not have to explain intellectually and morally neutral things such as one’s dress sense or favourite colour to somebody else, but one does have to explain such things as whether one believes in God, whether one believes the Earth is round and whether one believes that animals are morally worthy. It is not a special, personal characteristic of the interlocutor such as their power or position in a hierarchy that creates the desirability of explaining oneself, but the mere fact that they are an intelligent listener and can act as your Socratic messenger, which is desirable given the goals of learning and doing the right thing. They symbolize the other side of the story, which you can understand somewhat without them if you’re self-critical enough. But no matter what your powers of internal argumentation, it is necessarily so that one benefits from discussions with others at least some time in one’s life. It is not logically necessary, but the probability is high; and in addition the benefit of learning something new is so high and the cost of engaging in discussion low, that the risk evaluation works out in favour of engaging in discussion, unless one has an explicit reason not to (for example the other person is a Christopher Hitchens, who I wouldn’t waste time talking to).

So, in a legal sense one does not ‘have’ to explain oneself to another, but in another sense one has to explain oneself, whether it is to one person or another, or an animal or a vegetable or the sky, as long as the other thing is capable of engaging one in intelligent discussion. Since it just happens to be the case that animals, vegetables and the sky cannot engage one in discussion, we’re left with other human beings, preferably other philosophers. But if a person can’t care less whether he’s on the right track or not, I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether he engages in practices conducive to refinement, correction and enlightenment; since those things will be value-less to him anyway.

Cross-Posted in The TRASH Bin.

‘I say, let’s not be perfect. I say, let’s evolve. Let the chips fall where they may.’

- Tyler Durden from Fight Club, referring to consumerism.

It’s amazing how looking at other people’s actions with an understanding that things cannot be otherwise than what they are makes all human behavior perfectly explicable. The frantic questioning of the stupidity of others’ behavior is pointless when you know that the way they’re behaving is the inevitable way they must behave. They still ought to behave in certain ways, but cannot be expected to have behaved in those way in the past if that is not in fact how they behaved; though one can always try one’s chances with changing their behavior in the future by creating the antecedent conditions to generating that behavior.

This means that my - indeed, everybody’s - focus should only be on change and not on distributing responsibility. From a deterministic POV only future-oriented policies and responses to others make sense. This whole practice of demanding explanations from people becomes redundant and rather ludicrous, like demanding an explanation from a particle that started moving after being collided with by another particle. ‘Why’d ya move, huh? Why didn’t you stay still? You could have stayed still, but you chose not to!’ Hehehee.

I actually found something on After Ellen that I like. Normally I find After Ellen far too saturated with Hollywood-related content, too preoccupied with celebrities, ‘glamor’ and status. There’s something disconnected and elitist about it. But yesterday I discovered a comedian who’s not entirely intolerable named Liz Feldman. She’s interviewed Kate Moennig and the woman who played Dana on the L Word (I’m bad with names) in her new show This Just Out. She’s decently funny, though of course she’s no Russel Peters.

Besides this I would recommend www.alluc.org’s Gay & Lesbian section (it’s in Movies). In it my favourite movies are The Children’s Hour, My Summer of Love, Being John Malkovich, High Art and D.E.B.S. Like queer culture in general, the Gay & Lesbian section of alluc is dominated with gay male material. Gay men and lesbians have nothing in common except their deviance from heterosexuality, which is important only from a heterocentric perspective.

I don’t agree with the philosophy behind abolitionism, but going through the links section of Gary L. Francione’s website I found a blog with an ingenious paper on horse maiming. It’s the March 29th, 2008 entry. In it the author uses the case of cruelty to horses to illustrate human-nonhuman relations, pathologization of criminals, the sane/insane dichotomy, how norms influence our moral outrage, the formation of moral communities and other interesting sociological and criminological analytics I don’t actually know much about.

I am amazed at this Ted Talk I just saw. In it a neuroanatomist describes a stroke she had, during which she lost her sense of seperateness from the universe. Her left hemisphere stopped functioning, in other words her language faculties ceased to operate. It’s interesting how substantive the connection appears to be between language and ego/identity. Her consciousness at that moment was not less, but different than her consciousness during normal states. We value the realness of the left-brain-mediated perceptions that we have on a moment-to-moment basis, that involve linear time, identity, mental chatter, anxiety and embodiment. We value it because we have it, and because we have it all the time. But we have no reason not to value another style of perception, which is had just as much by people when they have it as our normal perception is by us when we have it. It is absurd, then, to say that her state at that time was less real or somehow deluded because it was not our state, when our state is equally not her state. So if the one is deluded because it is not the other, than the other should be deluded because it is not the one. Any placing of a norm is arbitrary.

In the comment section of this entry on LJ:

Ned: It was an interesting talk, though I don’t buy into such a clear-cut right-brain, left-brain dichotomy.

Looks to me like the usually noisy mental structures were shut down and she was able to experience something beyond that.

Btw the mental chatter thing is pretty much considered a mental illness in Buddhist and yogic psychology. By that standard virtually everyone is mentally ill.

Me: But it was her left hemisphere that was malfunctioning, so presumably that noise originates in the left hemisphere.

Ned: Well, I’m not quite sure it’s that simple. This is just a single dissociation; you’d need a double dissociation to talk about causality — i.e. find a case where the right hemisphere shuts down and this experience becomes impossible to create (which is impossible to prove really). Even if it were demonstrated that the experience *never* occurs when the opposite condition is created, i.e. right hemisphere shuts down and left hemisphere is intact, there are still lots of problems with that kind of double dissociation methodology (I can send you papers on this if you want!).

This sort of dissociative methodology assumes modularity at the start. But we’ve also found that connectionist networks create dissociations and double dissociations when they are damaged. So you can’t really draw such clear-cut causal relationships. At best you could say the left hemisphere are likely to be mediating some of the mental processes that got shut down for her.

Ned: Here’s a good blog post on the problems inherent in dissociative methodology:
http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/06/breaking_down_the_brain_proble.php

Also, I think there are lots of problems in general with trying to localize cognitive processes in specific brain areas. If you get a chance go through William R. Uttal’s “The New Phrenology” in which he explains a lot of problems underlying the use of neuroimaging for localization.

Me: Yeah it occurred to me that her corpus callosum was not severed, so perhaps part of her left hemisphere was still participating in what was going on. Other than that it seems pretty airtight that if part of her brain is not functioning, and another part is, any subjective experience must be a result of activity in the part that is, since neither non-functioning neurons nor non-brain things can produce subjective experience.

Am feeling too miserable to read science blogs right now. I have the brain but not the heart

I’m reading The End of Faith and in the first few pages I’ve already found so much objectionable content. Does anybody really think that evil comes from holding views on insufficient evidence? It takes an astounding kind of stupidity to reduce evil to not being a scientist, or having a scientific or ’secular’ (whatever the hell that means) attitude. It is not only that evil is not reducible to disregard for evidence, but that a regard for evidence, the very desire for knowledge and evidence and scientific learning is a source of enormous suffering. The so-called ’steady march’ of science occurs on the corpses of mutilated, tortured, traumatized and murdered animals and humans.

Evil is something very fundamental, and has nothing to do with believing a proposition, or a set of propositions. It has nothing to do with one’s methods of inquiry. It is fundamental to existence. By the time we’re born we’re already evil. In a sense I’m a big believer in Original Sin. We’re all evil, and demonstrate this all the frikkin’ time. Terrible crimes have been committed in the absence of religion, in the presence of religion, in the name of science, without any regard for science, in the name of nationalism, in the name of the supremacy of one’s ethnic group etc.

Something the New Atheists but especially Dawkins should take note of is that human beings are not filing cabinets with propositions archived in them. Cognition does not work by collecting categorical statements about the world and then referring to them later. It is easy to express things in propositions, but we should not confuse this way of stating things with how we remember or understand reality, and we should not make the additional fallacy of assuming that there is nothing in the human condition other than what is explicitly stated. There is only so much you can understand about society and history merely by understanding propositions that incompletely hint at people’s cognition. Even if you were to understand individuals’ cognition, you couldn’t understand society and history. What about what emerges from interactions among things, persons and all?

Religion is a sociological phenomenon, like the family system. The family is not a set of beliefs, and cannot be understood in that light. What if a million people who had families of one sort or another had a book that related perhaps a myth about the origin of families or the codification of a marriage taboo? And what if a small group of obtuse researchers decided that the whole of the meaning of family is contained in that book, and the appropriate way to analyze family violence, birth, divorce etc., to make factual connections and normative claims is an assessment of the correspondence between propositions contained in the book and scientific knowledge. Sometimes studying mere ‘beliefs’ just doesn’t cut it.

Lastly, it takes a very low degree of sophistication to poke holes in the Bible or the Quran. To notice that Jesus could not have been born of a virgin should not win you accolades, and the smugness that people like Hitchens have when engaging in the intellectually bankrupt exercise of making fun of ancient literature makes me pity them. They are childish, the New Atheists. Right about some things, but childish.