I am half inclined to start by just gesturing toward Merleau-Ponty and various articles which have made similar points. There is more I want to say than they say, however.
First, the external conception of nature is the notion of nature as a bunch of particles combining in various ways, governed by various laws. This is all well and good. The notion goes on to view everything as reducible to the particles which each have a nature of its own, independent of other particles. Some people hold this kind of view in some domains but not others, but my concern here is with the trajectory of this sort of view.
First off, we are part of nature. We are thus equally subject to these laws of nature. This gives rise to psychological experimentation on motivation and grit, which, again, I am not against. The problem in this realm arises when we start treating ourselves as things. That is, when we start treating our problems as engineering problems, where we expect a five step troubleshooting plan to solve our issues. Most self-help falls into this category, as do many blog posts. Life becomes skill, rather than wisdom.
Next, nature becomes something to control. It is resource, problem, or solution. By viewing its parts as external to each other, we fail to recognize the dynamic systems which occur in nature, and imagine instead that we can simply engineer our way to a world built for ourselves.
By now it should be clear how nature is not related externally to itself. Nature is full of systems, from atoms to electrical circuits to the weather to the solar system, there are an immense variety of interlocking facets, where each part reacts to a change in every other part. By disrupting these systems beyond their capacity to accommodate change, we discover that nature is not infinitely resilient, but is constructed to resist us should we play god too far.
At this point it may be good to try to articulate a little more of what we might call gestalt metaphysics. A gestalt is a form. However, particularly in Merleau-Ponty's usage, a gestalt is a dynamic form. A system which holds together, accommodates changes, and maintains itself to some degree. Merleau-Ponty's definition holds that a gestalt occurs where each part depends for its properties on every other part (if I remember correctly). What I have been trying to sketch in these posts is the view that much of what we think of as independent of its surroundings actually exists in a gestalt and contributes the form of that gestalt. Our social institutions form a system which holds together and accommodates changes to some extent, sometimes reacting against threats whether we notice or not. Social groups collect in a way such that they can sustain themselves without much effort from participants. Even with means/end relations, the meaning of an action depends on the situation which provides the background against which the action appears as any particular action, and thus the action depends on its situation to be the action it is.
Showing posts with label Metaphysics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Metaphysics. Show all posts
Friday, May 11, 2018
Thursday, May 10, 2018
Society as Organism
The following is essentially a restatement of Hegel's views on society modulated through my own metaphysical views (which are, themselves, heavily influenced by Hegel).
The relation of people to society or each other can likewise often be thought of as an external relation. Each individual is thought of as a unit, in principle independent of others, free to define him or herself however he or she chooses. This lies behind our notion of how democracy should operate, the capitalist notion of freedom of exchange, and much of our obsession with personal freedoms.
Let me try to trace the ligaments of this a little more. On this model, each person is ontologically independent of others. One is who one is solely because of one's own decisions. Perhaps, of course, one's environment has shaped one, one's particular body has given one certain skills or impediments, but none of this is supposed to come into who one is. One is supposed to be externally related to all of these factors. You are supposed to be an individual, independent of your past. In principle, then, who you are cannot be essentially related to your community or any other obviously contingent facts about one's concrete existence. You must be free, then, to create yourself--and, indeed, reality--however you like.
But your creation is your own creation. It is therefore distinct from that of others, even unique. No one can understand the real you because you are not accessible through the cultural medium you express yourself in. Any mode of expression must be felt as inadequate because it expresses one as in a particular culture in a particular time, not as a free and independent individual. One thus inevitably becomes lonely, since one cannot express oneself in a manner which will feel adequate to one's self conception, and thus one cannot feel known in one's expression.
There are two attitudes one may take to these individuals. They may be basically good or basically bad. In the former case, restrictions on expression must be bad, and must therefore be done away with. In the latter case, the individuals must be restrained from hurting themselves. Generally, the view will be mixed, but this only means that the individuals will be treated as alternately a source of good potential to be harnessed and a danger to be restrained. The relation of government to people will thus be felt as that of regulation. There will be only either the imposition of restraints, whether for our own good or not, and the removal of such restraints, either for our good or to our harm.
Once we are independent individuals, we lose the communal ties which bound us together and provided a rich web of connections such that we could discuss issues civilly with other whom we respected independently of the particular issues. Overlapping communities provided ways of expressing ourselves which others in those communities could understand, but depended on the assumption that culturally situated modes of expression could adequately express us. As individuals, we seem to have lost that belief. We experience ourselves as beyond our cultures.
Still, however we may act, we are related to each other internally. I mentioned some about how men and women are internally related, although I cannot flesh that out thoroughly. We are also internally related to society in that our ways of experiencing the world are picked up from others. We understand ourselves in relation to others or not at all. We cannot find ourselves without recognizing ourselves in the world. This is way going out into the world to find oneself is such a strange idea. You are far more likely to discover who you are by examining how you came to views you hold, by tracing the threads which make up your life, and by acknowledging your socially situated perspective. This need not make one less confident of one's views, although it should make one a little more circumspect about rejecting others' views out of hand, but should rather give one a greater ability to articulate what draws one to one's views, what fallacies one might be making, and thus make one more confident that one has thought through one's views well.
Because we are internally related to others in society we are stuck with group affiliations, however much we may deny them. These groups metastasize into factions and oppose each other because each claims to be independent. Each faction wants to be seen as made up simply of free independent people who think rightly. Neither faction, therefore, can stand the other. This results in something like war, where neither side can recognize the other as right thinking, but winds up dehumanizing the other.
I have already said something about how thinking of ourselves as internally related to society and to each other may work itself out, but let me develop it a bit more. First off, we should think of society on the model of an organism, rather than on the model of a contract of people. This is a rather biblical notion of society, in that the Bible expresses often that the Church is a body made of many members who perform different functions. In society, too, there are many sorts of people, and not all have the same talents and skills. Not all have the same cultural background. If we want genuine diversity, we will need to find some way to allow for cultural situatedness to have a substantial role in society, to be validated. Hegel works this out be arguing for a form of government where different kinds of workers have different relations to government. I doubt that would be quite right. What I find intriguing, however, is his idea that each group, rather than geographical locale, should be represented. The details of how this might work today are, however, obscure.
The notion of society as an organism should help us discuss issues which disproportionately affect one class or one kind of worker. By articulating how our nation holds together organically, we can start to picture why all of the nation should care about parts of the nation, and thereby help move us to a place where we all care what other groups think, rather than hiding away in our own groups which we deny are groups.
The relation of people to society or each other can likewise often be thought of as an external relation. Each individual is thought of as a unit, in principle independent of others, free to define him or herself however he or she chooses. This lies behind our notion of how democracy should operate, the capitalist notion of freedom of exchange, and much of our obsession with personal freedoms.
Let me try to trace the ligaments of this a little more. On this model, each person is ontologically independent of others. One is who one is solely because of one's own decisions. Perhaps, of course, one's environment has shaped one, one's particular body has given one certain skills or impediments, but none of this is supposed to come into who one is. One is supposed to be externally related to all of these factors. You are supposed to be an individual, independent of your past. In principle, then, who you are cannot be essentially related to your community or any other obviously contingent facts about one's concrete existence. You must be free, then, to create yourself--and, indeed, reality--however you like.
But your creation is your own creation. It is therefore distinct from that of others, even unique. No one can understand the real you because you are not accessible through the cultural medium you express yourself in. Any mode of expression must be felt as inadequate because it expresses one as in a particular culture in a particular time, not as a free and independent individual. One thus inevitably becomes lonely, since one cannot express oneself in a manner which will feel adequate to one's self conception, and thus one cannot feel known in one's expression.
There are two attitudes one may take to these individuals. They may be basically good or basically bad. In the former case, restrictions on expression must be bad, and must therefore be done away with. In the latter case, the individuals must be restrained from hurting themselves. Generally, the view will be mixed, but this only means that the individuals will be treated as alternately a source of good potential to be harnessed and a danger to be restrained. The relation of government to people will thus be felt as that of regulation. There will be only either the imposition of restraints, whether for our own good or not, and the removal of such restraints, either for our good or to our harm.
Once we are independent individuals, we lose the communal ties which bound us together and provided a rich web of connections such that we could discuss issues civilly with other whom we respected independently of the particular issues. Overlapping communities provided ways of expressing ourselves which others in those communities could understand, but depended on the assumption that culturally situated modes of expression could adequately express us. As individuals, we seem to have lost that belief. We experience ourselves as beyond our cultures.
Still, however we may act, we are related to each other internally. I mentioned some about how men and women are internally related, although I cannot flesh that out thoroughly. We are also internally related to society in that our ways of experiencing the world are picked up from others. We understand ourselves in relation to others or not at all. We cannot find ourselves without recognizing ourselves in the world. This is way going out into the world to find oneself is such a strange idea. You are far more likely to discover who you are by examining how you came to views you hold, by tracing the threads which make up your life, and by acknowledging your socially situated perspective. This need not make one less confident of one's views, although it should make one a little more circumspect about rejecting others' views out of hand, but should rather give one a greater ability to articulate what draws one to one's views, what fallacies one might be making, and thus make one more confident that one has thought through one's views well.
Because we are internally related to others in society we are stuck with group affiliations, however much we may deny them. These groups metastasize into factions and oppose each other because each claims to be independent. Each faction wants to be seen as made up simply of free independent people who think rightly. Neither faction, therefore, can stand the other. This results in something like war, where neither side can recognize the other as right thinking, but winds up dehumanizing the other.
I have already said something about how thinking of ourselves as internally related to society and to each other may work itself out, but let me develop it a bit more. First off, we should think of society on the model of an organism, rather than on the model of a contract of people. This is a rather biblical notion of society, in that the Bible expresses often that the Church is a body made of many members who perform different functions. In society, too, there are many sorts of people, and not all have the same talents and skills. Not all have the same cultural background. If we want genuine diversity, we will need to find some way to allow for cultural situatedness to have a substantial role in society, to be validated. Hegel works this out be arguing for a form of government where different kinds of workers have different relations to government. I doubt that would be quite right. What I find intriguing, however, is his idea that each group, rather than geographical locale, should be represented. The details of how this might work today are, however, obscure.
The notion of society as an organism should help us discuss issues which disproportionately affect one class or one kind of worker. By articulating how our nation holds together organically, we can start to picture why all of the nation should care about parts of the nation, and thereby help move us to a place where we all care what other groups think, rather than hiding away in our own groups which we deny are groups.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
The Means/End Relation
In this post I will likely be drawing more than I know from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. I will also be drawing from others, however. The aim is to show how we think of the means/end relation as external, how that works out in practice, how it is an inaccurate way of thinking of the relation, and how we should think instead.
First, what does it mean for the means/end relation to be external? It would mean that any action we might do is only externally, contingently related to its effects. Such a conception can work out in one of two main ways. Either it is only the thought that counts, and what happens from there is inconsequential, or the actions are evaluated solely in terms of their effects. There are also middle grounds, where the intentions are weighed against the consequences.
This lies behind a particular kind of reasoning, called calculative reasoning, where I act for the sake of some goal in such a way that I select my aims simply to achieve the goal. The means do not matter so long as they achieve the maximum of the specified goal, whatever that goal might be. It also lies behind a particular kind of justification or excuse, where one apologizes only for the effects, refusing to accept that one may have done something really wrong because one "didn't mean it."
If I understand contemporary critiques of capitalism, they tend to rely on a critique of calculative reasoning, whereby this kind of external relation of goals to means whereby we seek to achieve them results in a flattening of the moral imagination and of the kinds of goods we can be sensitive to. Money becomes the symbol of commensurable values, and thus money gain is to be maximized at any cost. This results in the loss of non-monetizable goods, such as community and virtue. My point in bringing this up is that it won't be enough to shift away from seeing money as the medium of exchange of all values, thereby excluding non-monetizable goods, but the underlying problem is calculative reasoning about goods.
What, then, would it look like to think of the means/end relation as an internal relation? MacIntyre talks about goods internal to practices, where the good one is after is inseparable from the practice. The fun one has playing chess is inseparable from actually playing chess, as his famous example goes. This can be extended, however. The Hegelian way of articulating this is to talk of the means as the end in motion, or the end as the means at rest. In this way of thinking, the means have to fit the end, they have to be fulfilled by the end. The kind of action which the means is has to be the sort of thing which can come to rest in the end, the kind of behavior which will not tend to extend itself beyond the intended consequences. Similarly, the intent has to become embodied in action which aptly expresses it and brings it to fulfillment. One cannot sacrifice one's goal in pursuit of one's goal, in other words. One cannot oppress others for the sake of freedom or vote for a vicious person in order to preserve virtue.
First, what does it mean for the means/end relation to be external? It would mean that any action we might do is only externally, contingently related to its effects. Such a conception can work out in one of two main ways. Either it is only the thought that counts, and what happens from there is inconsequential, or the actions are evaluated solely in terms of their effects. There are also middle grounds, where the intentions are weighed against the consequences.
This lies behind a particular kind of reasoning, called calculative reasoning, where I act for the sake of some goal in such a way that I select my aims simply to achieve the goal. The means do not matter so long as they achieve the maximum of the specified goal, whatever that goal might be. It also lies behind a particular kind of justification or excuse, where one apologizes only for the effects, refusing to accept that one may have done something really wrong because one "didn't mean it."
If I understand contemporary critiques of capitalism, they tend to rely on a critique of calculative reasoning, whereby this kind of external relation of goals to means whereby we seek to achieve them results in a flattening of the moral imagination and of the kinds of goods we can be sensitive to. Money becomes the symbol of commensurable values, and thus money gain is to be maximized at any cost. This results in the loss of non-monetizable goods, such as community and virtue. My point in bringing this up is that it won't be enough to shift away from seeing money as the medium of exchange of all values, thereby excluding non-monetizable goods, but the underlying problem is calculative reasoning about goods.
What, then, would it look like to think of the means/end relation as an internal relation? MacIntyre talks about goods internal to practices, where the good one is after is inseparable from the practice. The fun one has playing chess is inseparable from actually playing chess, as his famous example goes. This can be extended, however. The Hegelian way of articulating this is to talk of the means as the end in motion, or the end as the means at rest. In this way of thinking, the means have to fit the end, they have to be fulfilled by the end. The kind of action which the means is has to be the sort of thing which can come to rest in the end, the kind of behavior which will not tend to extend itself beyond the intended consequences. Similarly, the intent has to become embodied in action which aptly expresses it and brings it to fulfillment. One cannot sacrifice one's goal in pursuit of one's goal, in other words. One cannot oppress others for the sake of freedom or vote for a vicious person in order to preserve virtue.
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Relations Internal and External
In this post I want to try to explain the concepts of internally related and externally related things and how they differ.
When two things are internally related, understanding one requires understanding the other. If two concepts are internally related, then one simply cannot really understand one of the concepts without understanding the other. Black and white, male and female, up and down, are all cases of internally related concepts, in this case, related via opposition. Some things are internally related in other ways, however. A tree and the seed from which it sprouted or the seed it spawned are internally related in that one does not really understand a tree without understanding the life cycle of a tree. Male and female are internally related not only by contrasting, but by being formed in such a way that their organs go together in a natural manner. One cannot understand manhood apart from womanhood not only because manhood excludes womanhood but because manhood presupposes womanhood for its subsistence.
When two things are externally related, they exist simply alongside each other. They may be related, as when an apple rests on a desk, but they are so only contingently. It is extraneous to what they are that they are related. A finger and the hammer which hits it are externally related. I do not need to understand anything about a hammer to understand a finger, nor a finger to understand a hammer. A world without hammers could have fingers in just the same way as ours does (granted, not having fingers might alter how we constructed hammers, but I think the point is clear).
There are a variety of phenomena which are internally related but which we have been trained to think of as externally related. The means/end relation is one, the relation of people to society is another, and the relations of various parts of nature is a third. I will spend a post analyzing how thinking of these as external relations works itself out, why they are actually internally related and what that means in each case, and at least a gesture in the direction of how thinking about them correctly might work out.
When two things are internally related, understanding one requires understanding the other. If two concepts are internally related, then one simply cannot really understand one of the concepts without understanding the other. Black and white, male and female, up and down, are all cases of internally related concepts, in this case, related via opposition. Some things are internally related in other ways, however. A tree and the seed from which it sprouted or the seed it spawned are internally related in that one does not really understand a tree without understanding the life cycle of a tree. Male and female are internally related not only by contrasting, but by being formed in such a way that their organs go together in a natural manner. One cannot understand manhood apart from womanhood not only because manhood excludes womanhood but because manhood presupposes womanhood for its subsistence.
When two things are externally related, they exist simply alongside each other. They may be related, as when an apple rests on a desk, but they are so only contingently. It is extraneous to what they are that they are related. A finger and the hammer which hits it are externally related. I do not need to understand anything about a hammer to understand a finger, nor a finger to understand a hammer. A world without hammers could have fingers in just the same way as ours does (granted, not having fingers might alter how we constructed hammers, but I think the point is clear).
There are a variety of phenomena which are internally related but which we have been trained to think of as externally related. The means/end relation is one, the relation of people to society is another, and the relations of various parts of nature is a third. I will spend a post analyzing how thinking of these as external relations works itself out, why they are actually internally related and what that means in each case, and at least a gesture in the direction of how thinking about them correctly might work out.
Monday, April 30, 2018
Truth
A Christian account of truth should be able to do three things, at a minimum.
1. Show how statements can be true or false.
2. Show how God can be the truth.
3. Show how truth can be something one walks in.
Now, it is possible that these three involve different sorts of truth, the term "truth" used in three different ways. Even so, a Christian account should show how the uses are connected and that the extension of the term makes sense.
If we start with the everyday notion of truth as correspondence with reality, we can make some vague headway. We will need to articulate what correspondence consists in, but we can make sense of how we can walk in correspondence with reality, and how God can be the ultimate reality and thus in fundamental correspondence with it. With this talk of correspondence uniting our success at achieving our the three criteria, we now must show what this correspondence consists in in each case, and how the kinds of correspondence are at least similar.
The standard talk about correspondence as a theory of truth applied to statements tends to be quite unclear. It says that a statement is true if and only if what it says actually is. But this does not get us any further: it is still unclear what has to be if what it says is to be.We have other resources, however: recall that I have already argued that knowledge that something is the case can be understood in terms of the capacities which one possesses if one possesses that knowledge. Thus, the truth conditions of a statement should be able to be cashed out in terms of capacities in some manner. We may better expand this to dispositions in the case of beliefs, although true beliefs produce dispositions which are also capacities.
How shall we articulate this truth in terms of dispositions? There are two properties which the dispositions must possess: they must be are fruitful and they must be stable. Fruitfulness means that the dispositions have benefit: you can get something from them. Stability requires that the dispositions stick. It means that having further experiences does not remove the disposition. To articulate truth in these terms, however, we should take the long view: fruitfulness and stability over the course of eternity is what matters, short-run fruitfulness and stability are only hints of the long-run fruitfulness and stability.
With an account of the truth of statements in place, the account of walking in the truth is relatively easy. To walk in the truth is simply to act in such a way that one is exercising those dispositions and capacities which knowing the truth produces. We can also articulate it as walking in correspondence with reality, since this is what knowing truth claims enables one to do. Knowing the truth enables walking in the truth.
In the case of God being the Truth, correspondence is not much at issue. Rather, the fact that God is who must be known if we are to live rightly, if we are live fruitful and stable lives in accord with how things are, is made clear. It is only in knowing God's power and mercy, his foresight and provision, his deep knowledge of us and his deep love for us, that we can live well. To live without this personal knowledge is to be doomed to live without good dispositions and without the capacity to--at least reliably and for the right reason--do what is right.
1. Show how statements can be true or false.
2. Show how God can be the truth.
3. Show how truth can be something one walks in.
Now, it is possible that these three involve different sorts of truth, the term "truth" used in three different ways. Even so, a Christian account should show how the uses are connected and that the extension of the term makes sense.
If we start with the everyday notion of truth as correspondence with reality, we can make some vague headway. We will need to articulate what correspondence consists in, but we can make sense of how we can walk in correspondence with reality, and how God can be the ultimate reality and thus in fundamental correspondence with it. With this talk of correspondence uniting our success at achieving our the three criteria, we now must show what this correspondence consists in in each case, and how the kinds of correspondence are at least similar.
The standard talk about correspondence as a theory of truth applied to statements tends to be quite unclear. It says that a statement is true if and only if what it says actually is. But this does not get us any further: it is still unclear what has to be if what it says is to be.We have other resources, however: recall that I have already argued that knowledge that something is the case can be understood in terms of the capacities which one possesses if one possesses that knowledge. Thus, the truth conditions of a statement should be able to be cashed out in terms of capacities in some manner. We may better expand this to dispositions in the case of beliefs, although true beliefs produce dispositions which are also capacities.
How shall we articulate this truth in terms of dispositions? There are two properties which the dispositions must possess: they must be are fruitful and they must be stable. Fruitfulness means that the dispositions have benefit: you can get something from them. Stability requires that the dispositions stick. It means that having further experiences does not remove the disposition. To articulate truth in these terms, however, we should take the long view: fruitfulness and stability over the course of eternity is what matters, short-run fruitfulness and stability are only hints of the long-run fruitfulness and stability.
With an account of the truth of statements in place, the account of walking in the truth is relatively easy. To walk in the truth is simply to act in such a way that one is exercising those dispositions and capacities which knowing the truth produces. We can also articulate it as walking in correspondence with reality, since this is what knowing truth claims enables one to do. Knowing the truth enables walking in the truth.
In the case of God being the Truth, correspondence is not much at issue. Rather, the fact that God is who must be known if we are to live rightly, if we are live fruitful and stable lives in accord with how things are, is made clear. It is only in knowing God's power and mercy, his foresight and provision, his deep knowledge of us and his deep love for us, that we can live well. To live without this personal knowledge is to be doomed to live without good dispositions and without the capacity to--at least reliably and for the right reason--do what is right.
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Objections to Heaven: Eternity and Memory
This post is, roughly, a response to an old post by the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel about the choices we would have for our memories if we lived forever. He concludes that post with "Either amnesic infinite repetition or a limitless range of unfathomable alien weirdness. Those appear to be the choices." He puts the argument well, and it is a pretty easy read.
Now, heaven puts us in this exact situation: we expect to live forever, and we expect to remember it all. This premise excludes "amnesiac infinite repetition," leaving "a limitless range of unfathomable alien weirdness."
Amnesiac infinite repetition (henceforth: AIR) results from the universe having a finite number o possible states. Finite number of possible states results from having a finite amount of stuff, which can thus be arranged in a finite number of ways. Limitless range of unfathomable alien weirdness (LRUAW) results from denying AIR: if there is not a finite amount of stuff, then there is an infinite amount of stuff, thus put together in an infinite number of ways, and those ways must gradually diverge from normal.
It might seem that we can dodge LRUAW by supposing we merely increase the number of atoms of recognized kinds. This keeps the universe from repeating, but it does not help our experiences from repeating. Assuming the range of our senses stays the same, the area in which the non-repetition of states matters is an area centered on us with a range equal to that of our longest range sense. It also requires the potential states of our brains to not repeat, and thus our brains will have to grow to immense sizes over time.
A Christian might accept LRUAW, noting that we will be ever increasing in our knowledge of God, who is infinite and thus inexhaustible. The alien weirdness will be, at least in part, God's. So alien weirdness is not, per se, a problem. It is actually part of what Christians claim heaven will involve.
But we still have to deal with the expanding brain problem. The obvious solution would be to hold that our memories will not rely on neural connections but on our souls. This is logically possible, but falls afoul of views I hold about how we should extrapolate from our current situation to heaven. That is, in heaven, we will have resurrected human bodies, and these bodies will work as our current ones were meant to work, albeit perhaps ratcheted up a bit. That is, our resurrected bodies will operate on the same principles as our current ones, but in sanctified and perfected form. Currently, memories require neural connections, thus our memories in heaven will require neural connections.
The number of neural connections needed will approach infinity very slowly over time. It does not matter how slowly they increase, however, since we will have forever. The only way I can see to solve this problem is to conjecture that we will offload memories from our brains onto something external to ourselves. So, here are two offloading proposals.
First, it may be that we can store ever-expanding brains off-site. Perhaps our entire brains or only part of them. There need be no problems with resurrection brains taking over, since God can create extra space for the brains. The offsite brains might be able to communicate with our onsite bodies via whatever science fiction mechanism or divine assistance one likes. A variation on this would use a silicone mainframe to replace our offsite brains.
Second, we might simply purge some of our memories every now and then. Since God has them at his disposal, being omniscient, we can re-access them from him whenever we and he pleases. Perhaps we might even be able to share processing power with God or each other, allowing us to hold more in our own working memory than before (as many of us hope).
Both of these solutions are a little weird. Either one, however, solves the problem of ever-expanding brains for ever-expanding memories. There may be other solutions, but I am at least satisfied that I have provided a defense against the objection.
Now, heaven puts us in this exact situation: we expect to live forever, and we expect to remember it all. This premise excludes "amnesiac infinite repetition," leaving "a limitless range of unfathomable alien weirdness."
Amnesiac infinite repetition (henceforth: AIR) results from the universe having a finite number o possible states. Finite number of possible states results from having a finite amount of stuff, which can thus be arranged in a finite number of ways. Limitless range of unfathomable alien weirdness (LRUAW) results from denying AIR: if there is not a finite amount of stuff, then there is an infinite amount of stuff, thus put together in an infinite number of ways, and those ways must gradually diverge from normal.
It might seem that we can dodge LRUAW by supposing we merely increase the number of atoms of recognized kinds. This keeps the universe from repeating, but it does not help our experiences from repeating. Assuming the range of our senses stays the same, the area in which the non-repetition of states matters is an area centered on us with a range equal to that of our longest range sense. It also requires the potential states of our brains to not repeat, and thus our brains will have to grow to immense sizes over time.
A Christian might accept LRUAW, noting that we will be ever increasing in our knowledge of God, who is infinite and thus inexhaustible. The alien weirdness will be, at least in part, God's. So alien weirdness is not, per se, a problem. It is actually part of what Christians claim heaven will involve.
But we still have to deal with the expanding brain problem. The obvious solution would be to hold that our memories will not rely on neural connections but on our souls. This is logically possible, but falls afoul of views I hold about how we should extrapolate from our current situation to heaven. That is, in heaven, we will have resurrected human bodies, and these bodies will work as our current ones were meant to work, albeit perhaps ratcheted up a bit. That is, our resurrected bodies will operate on the same principles as our current ones, but in sanctified and perfected form. Currently, memories require neural connections, thus our memories in heaven will require neural connections.
The number of neural connections needed will approach infinity very slowly over time. It does not matter how slowly they increase, however, since we will have forever. The only way I can see to solve this problem is to conjecture that we will offload memories from our brains onto something external to ourselves. So, here are two offloading proposals.
First, it may be that we can store ever-expanding brains off-site. Perhaps our entire brains or only part of them. There need be no problems with resurrection brains taking over, since God can create extra space for the brains. The offsite brains might be able to communicate with our onsite bodies via whatever science fiction mechanism or divine assistance one likes. A variation on this would use a silicone mainframe to replace our offsite brains.
Second, we might simply purge some of our memories every now and then. Since God has them at his disposal, being omniscient, we can re-access them from him whenever we and he pleases. Perhaps we might even be able to share processing power with God or each other, allowing us to hold more in our own working memory than before (as many of us hope).
Both of these solutions are a little weird. Either one, however, solves the problem of ever-expanding brains for ever-expanding memories. There may be other solutions, but I am at least satisfied that I have provided a defense against the objection.
Monday, April 2, 2018
Language and Metaphysics
I ended the last post by endorsing an account of abilities as more precise than the language we articulate them in, and by giving an account of how our language refers to specific abilities. This raises the question of how we should regard our ordinary use of terms when theorizing about the nature of what those terms are about.
There are two extremes here. On the one hand, one may follow Ordinary Language Philosophy and claim that, at least by and large, how we use terms is the best clue as to the nature of those terms. One would therefore claim that if a theory does not neatly fit with how we usually use language, then so much teh worse for the theory. On the other hand, one might take the opposite point of view and think that how we generally talk about things has no necessary connection to how things actually are. The fact that we talk about chairs existing would then have no bearing at all on whether or not chairs should be thought of as actually existing.
The first point I want to make is that both views have to take language as at least capable of articulating how things actually are, however. If one denies this claim completely, then one cannot write anything about metaphysics. I can imagine someone claiming that it holds in a particular domain, but such a claim would deserve argument, and would leave metaphysics generally articulable in language. Indeed, one must hold that metaphysics is articulable at the most general level, since any domain one argued was not articulable would be one where one was making a metaphysical claim about the domain as a whole.
My second point is that we begin theorizing from a linguistic position. When we start discussing the nature of some object, we start with what seems obvious to us, but what seems obvious to us is quite different from what seemed obvious to the ancient Greeks. Reading metaphysics from, say, before Darwin or before Einstein's relativity theories reveals how much of what we take as obvious is actually just scientific and metaphysical views which have percolated down to the general public. Some of what strikes us as obvious is actually early modern philosophy, some is particular interpretations of scientific theories, and some is oddly altered theology. All of it is simply "in the air," spoken about by everyone, often without any felt need to check or cite. This point is a somewhat Heideggerian claim.
Thirdly, how things are constrains our talk about them. Wittgenstein, among others, holds that if we understand how a word is used, that is usually sufficient to understand the meaning. How we use terms is constrained by what the terms are about (or, inversely, how we use terms constrains what someone may take the terms to be about). There are facts about our nature and that of other phenomena in the world which restrict what we can meaningfully say. Linguistic behavior thus reveals something about how we relate to phenomena, and thus provides hints about the phenomena and about ourselves. Linguistic behavior need not always get things exactly right, partly because it is vague about both ourselves and the world in virtue of revealing something about both. Common linguistic behavior is also imprecise: it only needs to be as precise as necessary for how we live.
Thus far, my points have been highly sympathetic to Ordinary Language Philosophy: I have claimed that language is a suitable medium for metaphysics, that metaphysics begins from language, and that language gives clues as to how things are metaphysically. However, my fourth point is that language prioritizes the immediately practical over the theoretical or only long-term practical. Language is therefore most prone to mislead when we use it to provide hints about phenomena which are distant from everyday life, or which only matter in the very long term. Unfortunately, a great deal of metaphysics falls into these categories. It is only when we are dealing with relatively practical metaphysics, such as freedom and ability, rather than less practical metaphysics, such as the disambiguation of natural kinds or the nature of time, that language is a helpful guide.
Fifthly, even in domains which are distant from immediately practical concerns, however, language is a helpful starting point and check on wild theorizing. Our theories ought to make sense of our language, either by showing what we were getting at, or showing the phenomena which led us astray. All language, even that which is metaphysically inaccurate, is motivated by how the world is, and thus a theory which leaves linguistic phenomena without motivation is suspect.
There are two extremes here. On the one hand, one may follow Ordinary Language Philosophy and claim that, at least by and large, how we use terms is the best clue as to the nature of those terms. One would therefore claim that if a theory does not neatly fit with how we usually use language, then so much teh worse for the theory. On the other hand, one might take the opposite point of view and think that how we generally talk about things has no necessary connection to how things actually are. The fact that we talk about chairs existing would then have no bearing at all on whether or not chairs should be thought of as actually existing.
The first point I want to make is that both views have to take language as at least capable of articulating how things actually are, however. If one denies this claim completely, then one cannot write anything about metaphysics. I can imagine someone claiming that it holds in a particular domain, but such a claim would deserve argument, and would leave metaphysics generally articulable in language. Indeed, one must hold that metaphysics is articulable at the most general level, since any domain one argued was not articulable would be one where one was making a metaphysical claim about the domain as a whole.
My second point is that we begin theorizing from a linguistic position. When we start discussing the nature of some object, we start with what seems obvious to us, but what seems obvious to us is quite different from what seemed obvious to the ancient Greeks. Reading metaphysics from, say, before Darwin or before Einstein's relativity theories reveals how much of what we take as obvious is actually just scientific and metaphysical views which have percolated down to the general public. Some of what strikes us as obvious is actually early modern philosophy, some is particular interpretations of scientific theories, and some is oddly altered theology. All of it is simply "in the air," spoken about by everyone, often without any felt need to check or cite. This point is a somewhat Heideggerian claim.
Thirdly, how things are constrains our talk about them. Wittgenstein, among others, holds that if we understand how a word is used, that is usually sufficient to understand the meaning. How we use terms is constrained by what the terms are about (or, inversely, how we use terms constrains what someone may take the terms to be about). There are facts about our nature and that of other phenomena in the world which restrict what we can meaningfully say. Linguistic behavior thus reveals something about how we relate to phenomena, and thus provides hints about the phenomena and about ourselves. Linguistic behavior need not always get things exactly right, partly because it is vague about both ourselves and the world in virtue of revealing something about both. Common linguistic behavior is also imprecise: it only needs to be as precise as necessary for how we live.
Thus far, my points have been highly sympathetic to Ordinary Language Philosophy: I have claimed that language is a suitable medium for metaphysics, that metaphysics begins from language, and that language gives clues as to how things are metaphysically. However, my fourth point is that language prioritizes the immediately practical over the theoretical or only long-term practical. Language is therefore most prone to mislead when we use it to provide hints about phenomena which are distant from everyday life, or which only matter in the very long term. Unfortunately, a great deal of metaphysics falls into these categories. It is only when we are dealing with relatively practical metaphysics, such as freedom and ability, rather than less practical metaphysics, such as the disambiguation of natural kinds or the nature of time, that language is a helpful guide.
Fifthly, even in domains which are distant from immediately practical concerns, however, language is a helpful starting point and check on wild theorizing. Our theories ought to make sense of our language, either by showing what we were getting at, or showing the phenomena which led us astray. All language, even that which is metaphysically inaccurate, is motivated by how the world is, and thus a theory which leaves linguistic phenomena without motivation is suspect.
Saturday, March 31, 2018
Ability
In the last post I mentioned the need for an analysis of ability in order to tell whether my account of the freedom required for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Here, I am going to take a stab at providing such an analysis.
First off, it seems obvious to me that, if I have the ability to do something, then it is possible for me to do it. Some will likely disagree with me about this, and many will likely claim that there is more to ability than the possibility of acting in a certain manner, but it is at least a reasonable starting point for our investigation. I am not committed to this being a complete analysis of ability, but it seems unlikely that any other part of an analysis would conflict with determinism if this part does not.
The puzzle which arises with an analysis of ability in terms of possibility is as to the kind of possibility. A compatibilist, of course, must deny that it is possibility in the sense of being compatible with a proposition stating how things were in the distant past together with the laws of nature (or stating whatever might be determinative of whatever happens). Jack Spencer at MIT has argued that ability needs to be understand in a manner compatible with our having the ability to do things which are logically impossible, and I find his argument compelling (Able to Do the Impossible, Mind (2017) 126: 465-96). So the possibility in question cannot be one which entails even such a weak kind of possibility as logical possibility.
Abilities are possessed by individuals. Further, such abilities can be carried around from situation to situation. I thus propose that we understand ability to phi as holding with respect to an agent when the agent, taken as she is at the time she is said to have the ability to phi, possesses the properties in virtue of which some individuals who actually phi, do so. Or, better, to decouple abilities completely from their exercise, we could better say that an agent possesses the ability to phi when that agent possesses the properties which are required for an agent to phi.
This need not be the only case where an agent can be said to have an ability. For instance, some abilities may be built up from lower-level abilities. If A has the ability to teach something in general, and B has the ability to learn it in general, then A, ceteris paribus, has the ability to teach it to B, even if no one has ever taught it to B. The ceteris paribus clause is required in this case to deal with cases where the learning style of B conflicts with the teaching style of A, such that A can teach a topic to students in general, but not to B, because A lacks the ability to teach the topic to students of the sort which B is--but this would be clear in a more fine-grained account of the abilities of A and B, which would still not require A's ability to include the ability to teach a topic to B in particular.
Jack Spencer argues that there are cases where there are necessarily unexercised abilities. That is, that it is possible for someone to have an ability in a world where no one exercises the ability. His example involves a lonely genius in a deterministic world who could, but never does, discover what things were like in the distant past and the complete description of the laws of nature. Again, however, by analyzing ability at the level of the properties required of an agent to phi, we can simply note that the lonely genius has all the required properties himself, and simply is never caused to utilize those properties.
The difficulty for my view is to say what keeps an agent from trivially having the ability to go 10 feet into the air simply because he has the properties required to do so in the event that a giant gust of wind blew him up into the air. There are a couple ways we could solve this problem. In the given case, we might require that the mode of ascent be specified. The agent lacks the power to propel himself 10 feet into the air under his own power, even if he contributes to the height he ascends with the gust of wind. Alternatively, we might specify that abilities only count under normal conditions. Thus, the agent in this example only has the ability to ascend 10 feet if gusts of wind of this kind are normal. I suspect that the latter better tracks the way we talk about abilities, while the former is more precise for metaphysics. To put it another way: when we talk about abilities, we mean abilities under normal conditions, and so it is the context of what counts as normal which specifies which ability in the more precise sense we are talking about.
First off, it seems obvious to me that, if I have the ability to do something, then it is possible for me to do it. Some will likely disagree with me about this, and many will likely claim that there is more to ability than the possibility of acting in a certain manner, but it is at least a reasonable starting point for our investigation. I am not committed to this being a complete analysis of ability, but it seems unlikely that any other part of an analysis would conflict with determinism if this part does not.
The puzzle which arises with an analysis of ability in terms of possibility is as to the kind of possibility. A compatibilist, of course, must deny that it is possibility in the sense of being compatible with a proposition stating how things were in the distant past together with the laws of nature (or stating whatever might be determinative of whatever happens). Jack Spencer at MIT has argued that ability needs to be understand in a manner compatible with our having the ability to do things which are logically impossible, and I find his argument compelling (Able to Do the Impossible, Mind (2017) 126: 465-96). So the possibility in question cannot be one which entails even such a weak kind of possibility as logical possibility.
Abilities are possessed by individuals. Further, such abilities can be carried around from situation to situation. I thus propose that we understand ability to phi as holding with respect to an agent when the agent, taken as she is at the time she is said to have the ability to phi, possesses the properties in virtue of which some individuals who actually phi, do so. Or, better, to decouple abilities completely from their exercise, we could better say that an agent possesses the ability to phi when that agent possesses the properties which are required for an agent to phi.
This need not be the only case where an agent can be said to have an ability. For instance, some abilities may be built up from lower-level abilities. If A has the ability to teach something in general, and B has the ability to learn it in general, then A, ceteris paribus, has the ability to teach it to B, even if no one has ever taught it to B. The ceteris paribus clause is required in this case to deal with cases where the learning style of B conflicts with the teaching style of A, such that A can teach a topic to students in general, but not to B, because A lacks the ability to teach the topic to students of the sort which B is--but this would be clear in a more fine-grained account of the abilities of A and B, which would still not require A's ability to include the ability to teach a topic to B in particular.
Jack Spencer argues that there are cases where there are necessarily unexercised abilities. That is, that it is possible for someone to have an ability in a world where no one exercises the ability. His example involves a lonely genius in a deterministic world who could, but never does, discover what things were like in the distant past and the complete description of the laws of nature. Again, however, by analyzing ability at the level of the properties required of an agent to phi, we can simply note that the lonely genius has all the required properties himself, and simply is never caused to utilize those properties.
The difficulty for my view is to say what keeps an agent from trivially having the ability to go 10 feet into the air simply because he has the properties required to do so in the event that a giant gust of wind blew him up into the air. There are a couple ways we could solve this problem. In the given case, we might require that the mode of ascent be specified. The agent lacks the power to propel himself 10 feet into the air under his own power, even if he contributes to the height he ascends with the gust of wind. Alternatively, we might specify that abilities only count under normal conditions. Thus, the agent in this example only has the ability to ascend 10 feet if gusts of wind of this kind are normal. I suspect that the latter better tracks the way we talk about abilities, while the former is more precise for metaphysics. To put it another way: when we talk about abilities, we mean abilities under normal conditions, and so it is the context of what counts as normal which specifies which ability in the more precise sense we are talking about.
Monday, March 12, 2018
Emergence and Grounding
I want to develop a concept I have been using without definition for a little while now: emergence or grounding. As I use these terms, they are reciprocals of each other. If A grounds B, then B emerges from A.
Let us begin with emergence. When B emerges from A, A serves as a ground for B. B begins to exist on account of how A is structured. Ordinarily the claim that B emerges from A mean that A is the main locus of activity making B be instantiated in the context of other events which are also required for B's instantiation. Thus, when I say that our bodies ground our selves, I am leaving space for the idea that other factors are also required for us to be selves beyond our bodies, such as a cultural milieu. The body nevertheless is the ground for our selves.
Let us now turn to grounding. If A grounds B, then A provides a basis from which B can emerge. This need not mean that B requires A, but it (ordinarily, at least) means that B requires something to ground it. Perhaps C can also ground B independently of A. A ground provides the resources for what it grounds. It need not necessitate what it grounds. Further, if A grounds B, B need not occupy the same space as A. B can go beyond what A requires. It may be odd to speak of B occupying a space at all. Nevertheless, A will continue to be required for B to be maintained. This is what distinguishes a ground from other conditions required for something to emerge. A ground provides the relatively stable point amidst a flux of other enabling conditions. The instantiation of an emergent entity thus tracks its ground.
There are two questions which this raises. First, if A emerges from B, could A have failed to emerge from B? Second, if A emerges from B, could A have emerged from C instead? We will address these in order.
First, it is not hard to see that, if emergence involves not only a ground but also a particular kind of context, then a ground would fail to cause the emergence of something if it failed to be in the proper context. Thus, if selves require a culture in order to emerge from bodies, then a body could fail to ground a self in virtue of failing to find itself in a culture.
Second, by necessity of origins it seems that, if A emerges from B, then A must emerge from B if it is to be A. I want to push back against this, however, in order to dodge an argument of Kripke's, which has been expanded on by Eli Hirsch, against materialism. Note that we cannot use necessity of identity here, because A is not B, but only emerges from B. Further, A might not have emerged from B even if B had been identical. However--and this is the point where Hirsch would push--if the entire universe had been the same, then A could not have but emerged from B. This is also what David Chalmers puts pressure on in his similar argument. The way all of these arguments go is that, if the mental is necessitated by the physical, then we cannot rule out knowing a priori that the mental comes from the physical, but we can, so the mental does not come from the physical. The argument works equal well for any theory on which the mental is necessitated by a particular substrate.
The way I want to dodge this is, on the one hand, by noting that it is not clear to me that any given instantiation of a self could be the same self if brought about through a different body. Here we are all in agreement: the necessity of origins usually results in the view that I would not have existed had I not come from my parents (and, more particularly, the particular egg and sperm which I came from). This is relatively uncontroversial.
On the other hand, I want to claim that had the entire universe been identical to this one, it is not at all clear that it could be so without being the same subjectively. That is, I see no reason to think that a suitably smart being could not know a priori that certain arrangements of matter through space and time would give rise to selves (that is, I reject the possibility of "p-zombies"). I doubt that one could take a snapshot of the universe and derive consciousness. Rather, I suspect that consciousness, and selves in particular, require events over time. This is compatible with consciousness being simple and non-localized, because it is not identical to, but emerges from, a physical thing in a suitable environment.
Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind: In search of a fundamental theory Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Hirsch, Eli. "Kripke's Argument Against Materialism" in The Waning of Materialism Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010, pp.115-136.
Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1980.
Let us begin with emergence. When B emerges from A, A serves as a ground for B. B begins to exist on account of how A is structured. Ordinarily the claim that B emerges from A mean that A is the main locus of activity making B be instantiated in the context of other events which are also required for B's instantiation. Thus, when I say that our bodies ground our selves, I am leaving space for the idea that other factors are also required for us to be selves beyond our bodies, such as a cultural milieu. The body nevertheless is the ground for our selves.
Let us now turn to grounding. If A grounds B, then A provides a basis from which B can emerge. This need not mean that B requires A, but it (ordinarily, at least) means that B requires something to ground it. Perhaps C can also ground B independently of A. A ground provides the resources for what it grounds. It need not necessitate what it grounds. Further, if A grounds B, B need not occupy the same space as A. B can go beyond what A requires. It may be odd to speak of B occupying a space at all. Nevertheless, A will continue to be required for B to be maintained. This is what distinguishes a ground from other conditions required for something to emerge. A ground provides the relatively stable point amidst a flux of other enabling conditions. The instantiation of an emergent entity thus tracks its ground.
There are two questions which this raises. First, if A emerges from B, could A have failed to emerge from B? Second, if A emerges from B, could A have emerged from C instead? We will address these in order.
First, it is not hard to see that, if emergence involves not only a ground but also a particular kind of context, then a ground would fail to cause the emergence of something if it failed to be in the proper context. Thus, if selves require a culture in order to emerge from bodies, then a body could fail to ground a self in virtue of failing to find itself in a culture.
Second, by necessity of origins it seems that, if A emerges from B, then A must emerge from B if it is to be A. I want to push back against this, however, in order to dodge an argument of Kripke's, which has been expanded on by Eli Hirsch, against materialism. Note that we cannot use necessity of identity here, because A is not B, but only emerges from B. Further, A might not have emerged from B even if B had been identical. However--and this is the point where Hirsch would push--if the entire universe had been the same, then A could not have but emerged from B. This is also what David Chalmers puts pressure on in his similar argument. The way all of these arguments go is that, if the mental is necessitated by the physical, then we cannot rule out knowing a priori that the mental comes from the physical, but we can, so the mental does not come from the physical. The argument works equal well for any theory on which the mental is necessitated by a particular substrate.
The way I want to dodge this is, on the one hand, by noting that it is not clear to me that any given instantiation of a self could be the same self if brought about through a different body. Here we are all in agreement: the necessity of origins usually results in the view that I would not have existed had I not come from my parents (and, more particularly, the particular egg and sperm which I came from). This is relatively uncontroversial.
On the other hand, I want to claim that had the entire universe been identical to this one, it is not at all clear that it could be so without being the same subjectively. That is, I see no reason to think that a suitably smart being could not know a priori that certain arrangements of matter through space and time would give rise to selves (that is, I reject the possibility of "p-zombies"). I doubt that one could take a snapshot of the universe and derive consciousness. Rather, I suspect that consciousness, and selves in particular, require events over time. This is compatible with consciousness being simple and non-localized, because it is not identical to, but emerges from, a physical thing in a suitable environment.
Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind: In search of a fundamental theory Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Hirsch, Eli. "Kripke's Argument Against Materialism" in The Waning of Materialism Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010, pp.115-136.
Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1980.
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Properties
I mentioned in the previous post that one need not think of properties as existing apart from their instantiations. In this post, I want to elaborate on that idea, and try to show how God's existence can collapse the distinction between platonism and nominalism about properties in some cases, and thereby defend a Christian form of nominalism.
Platonism about properties says that properties exist independent of and prior to their instantiations. Generally, platonism also holds that these properties are eternal and unchanging entities. Christian Platonism holds that they are ideas in the mind of God.
Nominalism about properties says that there is nothing to properties above and beyond their instantiations. There are just various things which exist in certain manners. We abstract properties from these various things in virtue of similarities we find in them.
Now, if one starts with the nominalist picture of properties and posits that God always exists, then the ways in which God and creation are similar will be eternally existing properties. Further, if properties which exclude one another also entail the concepts of each other--so that any degree of power brings along all other degrees, and so on--then a larger set of properties are given as properties with God's existence as what God is not.
Some properties are left out of the collapse. That is, sense properties are left out. Ethical and modal properties are included, as concepts of number ("being one," "being three"). Concepts such as "side" or "blue" are not included.
By adopting a nominalist account of properties, we can adopt divine simplicity without claiming that God is identical with each of his properties. We can, nevertheless, maintain that there are properties which form a kind of blueprint for reality. Given that God created the world, and particularly human beings, in order to reveal his character, the properties which apply to God will also be applicable, in some way, to creation insofar as creation succeeds in revealing God. Thus, God is the standard of goodness and is the being whose expression of certain properties shows what the perfection of those properties consists in.
Platonism about properties says that properties exist independent of and prior to their instantiations. Generally, platonism also holds that these properties are eternal and unchanging entities. Christian Platonism holds that they are ideas in the mind of God.
Nominalism about properties says that there is nothing to properties above and beyond their instantiations. There are just various things which exist in certain manners. We abstract properties from these various things in virtue of similarities we find in them.
Now, if one starts with the nominalist picture of properties and posits that God always exists, then the ways in which God and creation are similar will be eternally existing properties. Further, if properties which exclude one another also entail the concepts of each other--so that any degree of power brings along all other degrees, and so on--then a larger set of properties are given as properties with God's existence as what God is not.
Some properties are left out of the collapse. That is, sense properties are left out. Ethical and modal properties are included, as concepts of number ("being one," "being three"). Concepts such as "side" or "blue" are not included.
By adopting a nominalist account of properties, we can adopt divine simplicity without claiming that God is identical with each of his properties. We can, nevertheless, maintain that there are properties which form a kind of blueprint for reality. Given that God created the world, and particularly human beings, in order to reveal his character, the properties which apply to God will also be applicable, in some way, to creation insofar as creation succeeds in revealing God. Thus, God is the standard of goodness and is the being whose expression of certain properties shows what the perfection of those properties consists in.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Possibility of Best of All Possible Worlds
It has been argued that there might be no best of all possible worlds. Alvin Plantinga finds it suspect in God, Freedom, and Evil, and I believe argues against it elsewhere. I am only vaguely aware of the argument at this point, so the following should be taken as my starting point prior to investigation.
The argument that there might be no best of all possible worlds seems to go as follows. Suppose you have some possible world. It has various properties in virtue of which it is a world of such-and-such goodness. If it had more of this sort of property, called "world-great-making properties," it would be a better world. But there seems to be no reason to suppose that we could not add some of these world-great-making properties on to a world ad infinitum, and thus there would be no cap to greatness of worlds.
The examples of world-great-making properties tend to be physical things like happy people and beautiful beaches. Other examples are also possible, such as good deeds or magnificent accomplishments. Where I seem to disagree with those who hold that there may be no best of all possible worlds is that I find the idea that we could keep on adding world-great-making properties on ad infinitum without consequence.
Take the example of possession of beautiful beaches. Suppose that a world is better the more beautiful beaches it has. In that case, we would, all else being equal, want as many beautiful beaches as we could. Not all else would be equal, however, because the world is one where beaches take up space and physics is set up in such a way that one cannot just keep enlarging the earth. Even if one did, perhaps at some size it would be a world-ungreat-making property in virtue of making it take so long for civilizations to communicate with each other.
One might respond that God could have altered the laws of physics to accommodate the scale of the planet and thus the beaches. This is not obvious, however. Physics is rather elegantly set up. This elegance is quite likely a world-great-making property. It is not at all obvious what options God had for logically consistent, life enabling physics systems. Perhaps others were too clunky, or had other problematic side effects.
A similar response can be given to the case of good deeds. Given that time does not end, in fact, if good deeds are a world-great-making property, then this world has an infinite quantity of greatness, since we will do an infinite number of good deeds after the resurrection. Nevertheless, it is plausible that, in actualizing some world, God might bracket that phase of each world. What we seem to be interested in is, rather, whether this is the best of all possible world segments from creation up to, but not including, heaven.
Each good deed takes some amount of time. Actually reaching heaven seems to be a world-great-making property, and the supposition that God might bracket heaven out of the best-world equation relies on heaven actually occurring in each possible world under consideration. So one could not have an infinite number of good deeds, and one might only be able to fit so many before the amount of time added counteracted the greatness added to the world.
Just as world-great-making properties might not be worth adding because of world-ungreat-making properties which they require, some world-ungreat-making properties might be mitigated or redeemed by world-great-making properties which they enable. Our understanding of how various events interact and the values of various world-great- and world-ungreat-making properties makes it quite difficult to tell preecisely how great of a world we have ended up with. As a case in point, the death of Jesus Christ occurring is a very large world-ungreat-making property. However, the resurrection is a much greater world-great-making property which the disciples did not anticipate.
My argument is not a knock-down argument, of course, but neither is the one I am responding to. What I have read of Plantinga seems to say little more than that it is not obvious that one could not keep increasing greatness by adding various items or states of affairs. I am responding that it is not obvious that one could do so. It may well come down to a clash of intuitions.
The argument that there might be no best of all possible worlds seems to go as follows. Suppose you have some possible world. It has various properties in virtue of which it is a world of such-and-such goodness. If it had more of this sort of property, called "world-great-making properties," it would be a better world. But there seems to be no reason to suppose that we could not add some of these world-great-making properties on to a world ad infinitum, and thus there would be no cap to greatness of worlds.
The examples of world-great-making properties tend to be physical things like happy people and beautiful beaches. Other examples are also possible, such as good deeds or magnificent accomplishments. Where I seem to disagree with those who hold that there may be no best of all possible worlds is that I find the idea that we could keep on adding world-great-making properties on ad infinitum without consequence.
Take the example of possession of beautiful beaches. Suppose that a world is better the more beautiful beaches it has. In that case, we would, all else being equal, want as many beautiful beaches as we could. Not all else would be equal, however, because the world is one where beaches take up space and physics is set up in such a way that one cannot just keep enlarging the earth. Even if one did, perhaps at some size it would be a world-ungreat-making property in virtue of making it take so long for civilizations to communicate with each other.
One might respond that God could have altered the laws of physics to accommodate the scale of the planet and thus the beaches. This is not obvious, however. Physics is rather elegantly set up. This elegance is quite likely a world-great-making property. It is not at all obvious what options God had for logically consistent, life enabling physics systems. Perhaps others were too clunky, or had other problematic side effects.
A similar response can be given to the case of good deeds. Given that time does not end, in fact, if good deeds are a world-great-making property, then this world has an infinite quantity of greatness, since we will do an infinite number of good deeds after the resurrection. Nevertheless, it is plausible that, in actualizing some world, God might bracket that phase of each world. What we seem to be interested in is, rather, whether this is the best of all possible world segments from creation up to, but not including, heaven.
Each good deed takes some amount of time. Actually reaching heaven seems to be a world-great-making property, and the supposition that God might bracket heaven out of the best-world equation relies on heaven actually occurring in each possible world under consideration. So one could not have an infinite number of good deeds, and one might only be able to fit so many before the amount of time added counteracted the greatness added to the world.
Just as world-great-making properties might not be worth adding because of world-ungreat-making properties which they require, some world-ungreat-making properties might be mitigated or redeemed by world-great-making properties which they enable. Our understanding of how various events interact and the values of various world-great- and world-ungreat-making properties makes it quite difficult to tell preecisely how great of a world we have ended up with. As a case in point, the death of Jesus Christ occurring is a very large world-ungreat-making property. However, the resurrection is a much greater world-great-making property which the disciples did not anticipate.
My argument is not a knock-down argument, of course, but neither is the one I am responding to. What I have read of Plantinga seems to say little more than that it is not obvious that one could not keep increasing greatness by adding various items or states of affairs. I am responding that it is not obvious that one could do so. It may well come down to a clash of intuitions.
Monday, February 26, 2018
Argument for Everything Being Necessary
Here I present an argument that everything is necessary. The argument can be modified to result in different types of necessity depending on the types of necessity used in the premises. Let me present the argument, and then elaborate.
1. God necessarily exists. (Premise)
2. Necessarily, if God exists, then God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. (Premise)
3. There is a best of all possible worlds. (Premise)
4. Necessarily, if God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent, then, if there is a best of all possible worlds, God actualizes the best of possibility worlds. (By definition of terms)
5. Necessarily, God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. (from 1 and 2)
6. Necessarily, if there is a best of all possible worlds, God actualizes the best of possibility worlds. (from 4 and 5)
7. Necessarily, God actualizes the best of all possible worlds. (from 3 and 6)
If the weakest necessity involved above is logical necessity, then this proves that it is a logical necessity that God actualize the best of all possible worlds. Ceteris paribus for other types of modality.
A defense of there being a best of all possible worlds would take a post of its own. Let me say merely that for this argument I am conceiving of these worlds as not merely initial states but including all of time from their beginnings into eternity. If this is problematic, then conceive of possible worlds as possible initial conditions and add an argument for divine determinism. This is required to preserve the strength of modality. If a view like molinism is right, and we have some say in what worlds are possible in the relevant sense, then this will weaken the modality of the conclusion by weakening the modality of premise 3.
Premises 2 and 4 should be familiar to anyone who has thought much about the problem of evil. Actualizing the best of all possible worlds, in the present context, is roughly equivalent to making it the case that there is the least possible evil. To the extent that they are not equivalent, the problem of evil needs a more nuanced account of what is wrong. Let the best of all possible worlds be defined such that, were we to know that God had actualized it, we would be satisfied that God had, in fact, done the right thing in actualizing it, and thus God would be vindicated.
If one does not hold that God necessarily exists, one can dodge the argument, although it is a pretty common claim. This does not, however, require one to reject the claim that God exists, and leaves one with a conclusion that everything is necessary given God's existence, which is not much weaker. Weakening the strongest modality via molinism, as mentioned above, also brings the argument down to a more intuitive level.
So, there are three ways to respond to this argument. One can accept the conclusion that everything that occurs is, say, metaphysically necessary, one can reject a premise (likely 1 or 4), or one can weaken the modality so far that it is more intuitively plausible.
1. God necessarily exists. (Premise)
2. Necessarily, if God exists, then God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. (Premise)
3. There is a best of all possible worlds. (Premise)
4. Necessarily, if God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent, then, if there is a best of all possible worlds, God actualizes the best of possibility worlds. (By definition of terms)
5. Necessarily, God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. (from 1 and 2)
6. Necessarily, if there is a best of all possible worlds, God actualizes the best of possibility worlds. (from 4 and 5)
7. Necessarily, God actualizes the best of all possible worlds. (from 3 and 6)
If the weakest necessity involved above is logical necessity, then this proves that it is a logical necessity that God actualize the best of all possible worlds. Ceteris paribus for other types of modality.
A defense of there being a best of all possible worlds would take a post of its own. Let me say merely that for this argument I am conceiving of these worlds as not merely initial states but including all of time from their beginnings into eternity. If this is problematic, then conceive of possible worlds as possible initial conditions and add an argument for divine determinism. This is required to preserve the strength of modality. If a view like molinism is right, and we have some say in what worlds are possible in the relevant sense, then this will weaken the modality of the conclusion by weakening the modality of premise 3.
Premises 2 and 4 should be familiar to anyone who has thought much about the problem of evil. Actualizing the best of all possible worlds, in the present context, is roughly equivalent to making it the case that there is the least possible evil. To the extent that they are not equivalent, the problem of evil needs a more nuanced account of what is wrong. Let the best of all possible worlds be defined such that, were we to know that God had actualized it, we would be satisfied that God had, in fact, done the right thing in actualizing it, and thus God would be vindicated.
If one does not hold that God necessarily exists, one can dodge the argument, although it is a pretty common claim. This does not, however, require one to reject the claim that God exists, and leaves one with a conclusion that everything is necessary given God's existence, which is not much weaker. Weakening the strongest modality via molinism, as mentioned above, also brings the argument down to a more intuitive level.
So, there are three ways to respond to this argument. One can accept the conclusion that everything that occurs is, say, metaphysically necessary, one can reject a premise (likely 1 or 4), or one can weaken the modality so far that it is more intuitively plausible.
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Existence
The question of what it is for something to exist is, in some ways, the prototypical philosophical question. It takes a word, "is," which seems quite ordinary, and manages to make it puzzling. The most intuitive answer to the question is to disregard it, perhaps by claiming that the concept of existence is a basic concept, that is, a concept which cannot and need not be explained except by pointing out what does and what does not exist.
In the continental tradition, however, it seems more is said. Heidegger, of course, made the question famous, but throughout the continental figures I think we find a shared conception of being. I do not intend to argue that any particular individual held this view, but rather, here, I would like to focus on sketching it. If theoretical physics loses you, skim those paragraphs, the rest should only be as hard as usual.
First, some background. Kant held that there was only one unified experience, at least in any individual's case. That is, I have a single unified experience of a continuum of space and of time which are tied together, and likewise for everyone else. Thus, everything I find around me belongs to the same space-time. Every object is affected by what is before it in time, affects what is after it in time, and mutually affects what is at the same time as it (See the Critique of Pure Reason I. Division one, Bk.2, Sec.III.3 titled "Analogies of experience"). On Kant's view, these relations are how things get ordered in time to begin with.
This fits well with current understandings of spacetime and relativity on which an object which is unable to have an effect on another object does not stand in any particular relation of before, after, or simultaneous with the other object. On the other hand, it clashes with views of quantum mechanics which permit backwards-causality or hold that events are determined by the boundary conditions, i.e., the conditions at the start, end, and along the light-cone bounding an area. It also has the consequence that if God cannot be effected from without, then he is necessarily in the past. One could, however, strip the claim that the causal relations order events in time, and simply claim that for an object to exist, it must effect other objects, and that the collection of objects effected, mediately or immediately, constitute a reality.
Kant does not hold the view I am seeking to sketch, since he holds that noumena may exist, and that we have no way of knowing how they really are. However, from here, it seems Kant's followers, in seeking to do away with the noumena, wind up holding that for something to exist, not merely for us but at all, it must be related to other existent things in just this manner. Thus, a reality is given as a set of things which interact with each other, whether mediately or immediately. In order to be part of reality, then, an object must somehow have an effect on other parts of reality.
The difficulty with such a definition is that it seems to permit multiple realities, so that existence is relative to realities. Such realities would be incapable of interacting, otherwise they would form a single reality. One might say, then, that existence would be relative to the observer. An observer in one reality would find different existent things than would an observer in a different reality, and each reality would fail to exist from the point of view of the other.
Let us return to the possibility that God effects all of reality without, himself, being effected by it. In order for such a God to exist on this view, the view must hold that an object can exist even if it only effects other objects without being effected itself. However, one does not want realities to be able to branch. If we say that there is only one continuum of time, and that events are ordered in time by how they effect each other, we can avoid branching while maintaining the possibility of effecting without being effected, but at the cost of excluding some quantum mechanical views and likely relegating God to the past (although the later could be handled by holding that God's place in time would always be found just a moment ago, since he acts at all times, and thus he would be found to be at all times).
If we permit events in time to have separate orders, which Kant does not but relativity might, then we can get branching even if relations of what affects what determine temporal order. If objects only affect further objects, however, then some objects are affected. If we exclude for other reasons the possibility of two creators, we can limit unaffected things to God, and everything else will both affect and be affected. This still does not guarantee a unified reality, but it does make it vastly more plausible.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Culture and Self
In this post I intend to continue to sketch my view of selves and of culture.
First, a definition: selves are beings who act with respect to other selves qua selves. This is a tad circular, but has important consequences. Spelling these consequences out should clarify why it is difficult to write the definition so as to be completely non-circular. First, selves are agents, since they act. Second, they are able to act with respect to other agents, since they act with respect to selves and selves are agents. Third, some of the agents which they act with respect to can reciprocate, since they are selves, too.
Next, a definition of culture. Culture is the remains of the actions of selves which allows other selves to recognize selves. That is, culture is what happens when selves act in such a way that something is left behind whereby another self can act with respect to them. Culture is, then, the modification of the world by selves in a manner which is recognizable as such.
Selves, being agents which act with respect to other selves qua selves, are bound to inhabit a culture. On the view I am sketching, a self in a community picks up on the remains as actions of selves and appropriates them. Thus, a self absorbs elements of other selves into its own manner of being a self. It learns language and ways of gesturing, for example. A self is the modification of a self-receptive body by culture, or is always a self which has been informed by culture.
Culture is the remains of the actions of selves, and selves are beings which appropriate culture. There is a reciprocal relation between the two such that culture is carried on by selves who, in carrying it on, also change it by developing it in their own selves.
In order to express oneself in culture, a self must be able to modify the world. Likewise, in order to appropriate culture one must have, or at least presume, the capacity to copy it. Culture and selves are thus limited to the same kinds of stuff. If culture is totally physical, then selves must be able to modify the physical. If selves cannot modify the physical, then the culture of such selves cannot be physical. In other words, the cultural world of a self is the world which is shared by other selves. To recognize another as a self is to recognize that individual within culture.
In recognizing ourselves as like others, then, we recognize ourselves as beings who are visible in the shared world of culture. Unless one wants to claim that there is something else available to be recognized--and I suppose one might--this means that our bodies constitute our selves in culture. Likewise, material things constitute culture. Agents, selves, and culture are not material things, but they exist through material things. They (we) may be something along the lines of either events or properties. This is not to say that we do not exist, but rather that most of what we think of as existing are not material things in the way we usually think. That is, most things do not strictly supervene on their material parts. In particular, cultural things, and selves qua beings in culture, exist only with reference to a culture. This does not mean that we would cease to exist on a desert island, but that we would exist only by bringing along our culture with us. Our selfhood can only be recognized via the concepts which a culture provides.
Because we are constituted by culturally situated bodies, our bodies have an impact on how we appropriate culture. Our biology places boundaries on what we can do and imposes consequences which may differ from self to self. Culture is likewise constituted by a world situated among selves. The physical, biological, and environmental nature of the world places boundaries on the development of culture. It likewise imposes consequences on us depending on how we develop it into culture.
In both cases, the consequences imposed by nature, whether our own biology or physical nature, impose norms on how we should act by excluding some actions from the set of those which will permit the flourishing.of selves and culture. Thus, a further value to autonomy is that it allows for the variation in human beings to be properly accounted for. In this way, autonomy is good precisely because our bodies impact how we should seek the good life.
What counts as flourishing in each case is attaining the goals of the kind of thing in question. Thus, a flourishing self will be a self which attains the end of selfhood. A flourishing culture will be a culture will be one which attains the end of culture. We must ask, then, what the particular end of each is.
Because selves are beings which act with respect to other selves, to be a self is to act in a manner which takes into account the nature of other selves as selves. This means that it requires recognizing other selves as like oneself in being selves, and thus as like oneself in being agents whose actions are performed as actions with a cultural meaning and motivated, in part, on account of how other selves are. A culture is the remains and support of such actions, and thus for it to flourish is for it to express correctly the selfhood of all selves and support the mutual recognition of selves. As materially constituted, however, the end of each self is particular to itself and involves the good of the body. Likewise, the end of culture involves the maintenance of the basis of culture. Sustainability is a good of both culture and selves. The sustainability of culture is the ability of the culture to continue as a culture, which includes the ability of the environment to provide the material basis for culture practices, including housing and food. The sustainability of a self is most obviously the ability of a self to survive, but also to avoid burnout and maintain a resilient concern for others.
First, a definition: selves are beings who act with respect to other selves qua selves. This is a tad circular, but has important consequences. Spelling these consequences out should clarify why it is difficult to write the definition so as to be completely non-circular. First, selves are agents, since they act. Second, they are able to act with respect to other agents, since they act with respect to selves and selves are agents. Third, some of the agents which they act with respect to can reciprocate, since they are selves, too.
Next, a definition of culture. Culture is the remains of the actions of selves which allows other selves to recognize selves. That is, culture is what happens when selves act in such a way that something is left behind whereby another self can act with respect to them. Culture is, then, the modification of the world by selves in a manner which is recognizable as such.
Selves, being agents which act with respect to other selves qua selves, are bound to inhabit a culture. On the view I am sketching, a self in a community picks up on the remains as actions of selves and appropriates them. Thus, a self absorbs elements of other selves into its own manner of being a self. It learns language and ways of gesturing, for example. A self is the modification of a self-receptive body by culture, or is always a self which has been informed by culture.
Culture is the remains of the actions of selves, and selves are beings which appropriate culture. There is a reciprocal relation between the two such that culture is carried on by selves who, in carrying it on, also change it by developing it in their own selves.
In order to express oneself in culture, a self must be able to modify the world. Likewise, in order to appropriate culture one must have, or at least presume, the capacity to copy it. Culture and selves are thus limited to the same kinds of stuff. If culture is totally physical, then selves must be able to modify the physical. If selves cannot modify the physical, then the culture of such selves cannot be physical. In other words, the cultural world of a self is the world which is shared by other selves. To recognize another as a self is to recognize that individual within culture.
In recognizing ourselves as like others, then, we recognize ourselves as beings who are visible in the shared world of culture. Unless one wants to claim that there is something else available to be recognized--and I suppose one might--this means that our bodies constitute our selves in culture. Likewise, material things constitute culture. Agents, selves, and culture are not material things, but they exist through material things. They (we) may be something along the lines of either events or properties. This is not to say that we do not exist, but rather that most of what we think of as existing are not material things in the way we usually think. That is, most things do not strictly supervene on their material parts. In particular, cultural things, and selves qua beings in culture, exist only with reference to a culture. This does not mean that we would cease to exist on a desert island, but that we would exist only by bringing along our culture with us. Our selfhood can only be recognized via the concepts which a culture provides.
Because we are constituted by culturally situated bodies, our bodies have an impact on how we appropriate culture. Our biology places boundaries on what we can do and imposes consequences which may differ from self to self. Culture is likewise constituted by a world situated among selves. The physical, biological, and environmental nature of the world places boundaries on the development of culture. It likewise imposes consequences on us depending on how we develop it into culture.
In both cases, the consequences imposed by nature, whether our own biology or physical nature, impose norms on how we should act by excluding some actions from the set of those which will permit the flourishing.of selves and culture. Thus, a further value to autonomy is that it allows for the variation in human beings to be properly accounted for. In this way, autonomy is good precisely because our bodies impact how we should seek the good life.
What counts as flourishing in each case is attaining the goals of the kind of thing in question. Thus, a flourishing self will be a self which attains the end of selfhood. A flourishing culture will be a culture will be one which attains the end of culture. We must ask, then, what the particular end of each is.
Because selves are beings which act with respect to other selves, to be a self is to act in a manner which takes into account the nature of other selves as selves. This means that it requires recognizing other selves as like oneself in being selves, and thus as like oneself in being agents whose actions are performed as actions with a cultural meaning and motivated, in part, on account of how other selves are. A culture is the remains and support of such actions, and thus for it to flourish is for it to express correctly the selfhood of all selves and support the mutual recognition of selves. As materially constituted, however, the end of each self is particular to itself and involves the good of the body. Likewise, the end of culture involves the maintenance of the basis of culture. Sustainability is a good of both culture and selves. The sustainability of culture is the ability of the culture to continue as a culture, which includes the ability of the environment to provide the material basis for culture practices, including housing and food. The sustainability of a self is most obviously the ability of a self to survive, but also to avoid burnout and maintain a resilient concern for others.
Monday, February 19, 2018
Mind/Body Dissonance
This post is about mind/body dissonance, that is, cases where what one thinks or feels about one's body does not align with how one's body is.
If all a human person is is a human mind, then to respect the human being will always be to view those thoughts and feelings as authoritative for how the body should be, assuming the individual understands what they are thinking or feeling correctly. Neither cutting nor anorexia are authorized by the individuals' feelings about themselves. So even in this case there is a requirement that the actions be rationally authorized in some manner. What is that manner? It is not immediately obvious.
If one grants that human beings are partially or entirely constituted by their bodies, then one cannot make nearly so strong a claim about the mind's authority over the body. In cases of mind/body dissonance, it is clear that something has gone wrong. The puzzle is over whether the mind ought to be molded to fit the body or vice-versa. In either case, the embodied human being is changed yet preserved.
Notice here that we all agree that individuals with cases of mind/body dissonance should not exist. Disagreements occur over how to make it the case, if we should, that no such individuals exist. No one (at least that I would be inclined to take too seriously) would hold that such individuals should be eradicated qua individuals, but merely qua cases of mind/body dissonance. That is, the dissonance should be resolved in some manner.
Our desires about how to appear carry some weight. We can dress ourselves in various ways, work out, get our hair cut in different styles, etc. Conflicts in society begin to arise when the changes are more permanent or less superficial or have a more direct impact on health or bodily integrity. The conservative approach is to hesitate, to be wary of irrevocable change. The logic here is the same as the argument against the death penalty. One had better be quite sure that one knows and wants what one is getting oneself into.
The same argument, incidentally, can be marshaled in favor of acting according to the view that global worming is real, against abortion, and for safety-net policies. It is not a knock-down argument, and no one thinks it is. It is a solid consideration, however.
How can we tell when to take the risk and change our own bodies? This is what is argued about in discussions of transgender and transhuman thought. When do the benefits outweigh the costs? In the next post, I will consider one possible benefit: preserving autonomy, that is, letting people do as they please.
If all a human person is is a human mind, then to respect the human being will always be to view those thoughts and feelings as authoritative for how the body should be, assuming the individual understands what they are thinking or feeling correctly. Neither cutting nor anorexia are authorized by the individuals' feelings about themselves. So even in this case there is a requirement that the actions be rationally authorized in some manner. What is that manner? It is not immediately obvious.
If one grants that human beings are partially or entirely constituted by their bodies, then one cannot make nearly so strong a claim about the mind's authority over the body. In cases of mind/body dissonance, it is clear that something has gone wrong. The puzzle is over whether the mind ought to be molded to fit the body or vice-versa. In either case, the embodied human being is changed yet preserved.
Notice here that we all agree that individuals with cases of mind/body dissonance should not exist. Disagreements occur over how to make it the case, if we should, that no such individuals exist. No one (at least that I would be inclined to take too seriously) would hold that such individuals should be eradicated qua individuals, but merely qua cases of mind/body dissonance. That is, the dissonance should be resolved in some manner.
Our desires about how to appear carry some weight. We can dress ourselves in various ways, work out, get our hair cut in different styles, etc. Conflicts in society begin to arise when the changes are more permanent or less superficial or have a more direct impact on health or bodily integrity. The conservative approach is to hesitate, to be wary of irrevocable change. The logic here is the same as the argument against the death penalty. One had better be quite sure that one knows and wants what one is getting oneself into.
The same argument, incidentally, can be marshaled in favor of acting according to the view that global worming is real, against abortion, and for safety-net policies. It is not a knock-down argument, and no one thinks it is. It is a solid consideration, however.
How can we tell when to take the risk and change our own bodies? This is what is argued about in discussions of transgender and transhuman thought. When do the benefits outweigh the costs? In the next post, I will consider one possible benefit: preserving autonomy, that is, letting people do as they please.
Saturday, July 5, 2014
The Bodily Person
I am my body.
I am not just my body.
My crankiness due to lack of sleep, for instance: it is still my crankiness, even though I can point to its biological causes. My crankiness is in my body, so to speak, but it is still a feature of my person that I am cranky.
It is possible to say to oneself, "I did not get enough sleep, I must beware of my crankiness." Consider: "be angry, but do not sin." I may, in my person, experience human emotions, yet I may act contrary to them (emotions are not the only motivators).
This is to subordinate the emotions to the "I" who chooses. The emotions are still to be considered a part of me, but not the whole. This is the subordination of the part of a person to the whole of the person.
The emotions are, therefore, linked to the biological. Nevertheless, even when we know the biological causes of our emotions, we do not necessarily disregard our emotions. That is to say, even when we consider the emotions fully explained by biology, we do not on that account disregard or silence them. Though we may disregard our emotions when we regard the causes as not warranting them.
All this goes to show that the mere fact that something has biological causes does not simply on that account absolve the subject of responsibility for them, nor does it entail that those things are not part of the person.
A human person interacts with other human persons and with the environment only through their bodies. My body is how I interact with what is not me.
Could a person, or part of a person, exist apart from being expressed?
Is there anything more to a person than the expression of personhood?
Surely, my motives are not fully expressed, yet they are fully a part of my person. Is a person truly without anger simply because the anger is not expressed? But anger has a physical component to it, and even apart from that we know that anger can be said to fester and build. The anger exists, that is to say: it will show itself. This answers the first question in the negative.
To the second I would like to say that there is more to a person than their expression, that there is something it is like to be conscious, to be a person, which I know (only) firsthand. But let us refine the question some more.
Can there be an expression which appears as the expression of a person, without there being a person?
We would not know. At the very least, we could not hold that such an illusion occurred both regularly and naturally, lest we lose confidence in the personhood of other humans. If such an illusion could be expected, then it would no longer be an illusion--we would not read those things as an expression of personhood.
What I am puzzling over here is the mind-body problem: how is the conscious subject related to his physical body? This is different from, though related to and frequently identified with, the question as to whether we have non-physical souls or not. Many, if not most, answers to the mind-body problem identify the mind with the soul, but that is to beg other questions which I do not intend to address here just yet (viz., what is the mind? What is the soul? How are they related?). What I have expressed above are reasons for being suspicious of mind-body dualism. They do not invalidate soul-body dualism, so long as the soul and the mind are not identified with one another. It is possible for soul-body dualism to be true and the mind to have aspects which cannot be accounted for without reference to each, yet the mind not be a third thing (for that reason, I will need to address the questions in the above parenthesis eventually).
I am not just my body.
My crankiness due to lack of sleep, for instance: it is still my crankiness, even though I can point to its biological causes. My crankiness is in my body, so to speak, but it is still a feature of my person that I am cranky.
It is possible to say to oneself, "I did not get enough sleep, I must beware of my crankiness." Consider: "be angry, but do not sin." I may, in my person, experience human emotions, yet I may act contrary to them (emotions are not the only motivators).
This is to subordinate the emotions to the "I" who chooses. The emotions are still to be considered a part of me, but not the whole. This is the subordination of the part of a person to the whole of the person.
The emotions are, therefore, linked to the biological. Nevertheless, even when we know the biological causes of our emotions, we do not necessarily disregard our emotions. That is to say, even when we consider the emotions fully explained by biology, we do not on that account disregard or silence them. Though we may disregard our emotions when we regard the causes as not warranting them.
All this goes to show that the mere fact that something has biological causes does not simply on that account absolve the subject of responsibility for them, nor does it entail that those things are not part of the person.
A human person interacts with other human persons and with the environment only through their bodies. My body is how I interact with what is not me.
Could a person, or part of a person, exist apart from being expressed?
Is there anything more to a person than the expression of personhood?
Surely, my motives are not fully expressed, yet they are fully a part of my person. Is a person truly without anger simply because the anger is not expressed? But anger has a physical component to it, and even apart from that we know that anger can be said to fester and build. The anger exists, that is to say: it will show itself. This answers the first question in the negative.
To the second I would like to say that there is more to a person than their expression, that there is something it is like to be conscious, to be a person, which I know (only) firsthand. But let us refine the question some more.
Can there be an expression which appears as the expression of a person, without there being a person?
We would not know. At the very least, we could not hold that such an illusion occurred both regularly and naturally, lest we lose confidence in the personhood of other humans. If such an illusion could be expected, then it would no longer be an illusion--we would not read those things as an expression of personhood.
What I am puzzling over here is the mind-body problem: how is the conscious subject related to his physical body? This is different from, though related to and frequently identified with, the question as to whether we have non-physical souls or not. Many, if not most, answers to the mind-body problem identify the mind with the soul, but that is to beg other questions which I do not intend to address here just yet (viz., what is the mind? What is the soul? How are they related?). What I have expressed above are reasons for being suspicious of mind-body dualism. They do not invalidate soul-body dualism, so long as the soul and the mind are not identified with one another. It is possible for soul-body dualism to be true and the mind to have aspects which cannot be accounted for without reference to each, yet the mind not be a third thing (for that reason, I will need to address the questions in the above parenthesis eventually).
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Two Places at Once
You have one body. Two arms, two legs, a mouth, two eyes, two ears, a nose, lungs, a heart, a stomach, all physically connected to the same nervous system. Your nerves aren't wireless. Your body is one whole thing, and it can't be separated and made to occupy multiple places without harming you. So you can't be in two places at once.
Or can you?
To occupy a place is to be able to interact with it. I first encountered this view in discussions of God's omnipresence. It is a solution to the problem of how God can be entirely everywhere. Not some part of him everywhere, as a distributed body, nor all of him multiplied so as to be reproduced everywhere, but him, entire and complete, at every place. The solution is to suggest that God's omnipresence is his ability to know what is going on everywhere and to respond to it from anywhere and everywhere. His actions and knowledge are not bounded by space, and this makes him omnipresent.
So, if I were to be in two places at once, I would need to be able to perceive both places and perform actions in both places--at once.
The biggest problem we face in doing this at this point is that it involves multitasking, which we can't technically do. What we actually do is switch back and forth between tasks very rapidly. Let's ignore this problem for the time being, because we get close enough.
When you are talking on the phone, your ears and voice can reach two different, and usually distant, locations. You can usually still hear what is going on around your body, but you can also hear what is going on where you are calling. Two locations become linked by your phone. That is just the most common way it works, of course: there is pretty high demand for technologies that will let you be in two places at once now. That is what allows for telecommuting: your presence is no longer limited to the geographical space around your body.
It gets weirder.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games create a new, shared space which many people can occupy. You occupy both your desk, and this artificial world. The feature which makes it most obviously a world is that multiple persons can communicate in it and about it, and can get results relative to it, and all this can happen within its space. So within these games a person can occupy, not only two places, but two distinct, though connected, worlds.
You are still limited, though. You can't fix a sandwich and work at the office at once. Pretty much all our devices for telecommuting involve our fingers, and, even if they didn't, it would hard to multitask so thoroughly.
And this is just descriptive. I haven't even started thinking about the ethics of this.
I want to say we should avoid multitasking, and that we should be present wherever we happen to be. That needs some nuancing, however, especially seeing that we can't really function in this era without phones.
Or can you?
To occupy a place is to be able to interact with it. I first encountered this view in discussions of God's omnipresence. It is a solution to the problem of how God can be entirely everywhere. Not some part of him everywhere, as a distributed body, nor all of him multiplied so as to be reproduced everywhere, but him, entire and complete, at every place. The solution is to suggest that God's omnipresence is his ability to know what is going on everywhere and to respond to it from anywhere and everywhere. His actions and knowledge are not bounded by space, and this makes him omnipresent.
So, if I were to be in two places at once, I would need to be able to perceive both places and perform actions in both places--at once.
The biggest problem we face in doing this at this point is that it involves multitasking, which we can't technically do. What we actually do is switch back and forth between tasks very rapidly. Let's ignore this problem for the time being, because we get close enough.
When you are talking on the phone, your ears and voice can reach two different, and usually distant, locations. You can usually still hear what is going on around your body, but you can also hear what is going on where you are calling. Two locations become linked by your phone. That is just the most common way it works, of course: there is pretty high demand for technologies that will let you be in two places at once now. That is what allows for telecommuting: your presence is no longer limited to the geographical space around your body.
It gets weirder.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games create a new, shared space which many people can occupy. You occupy both your desk, and this artificial world. The feature which makes it most obviously a world is that multiple persons can communicate in it and about it, and can get results relative to it, and all this can happen within its space. So within these games a person can occupy, not only two places, but two distinct, though connected, worlds.
You are still limited, though. You can't fix a sandwich and work at the office at once. Pretty much all our devices for telecommuting involve our fingers, and, even if they didn't, it would hard to multitask so thoroughly.
And this is just descriptive. I haven't even started thinking about the ethics of this.
I want to say we should avoid multitasking, and that we should be present wherever we happen to be. That needs some nuancing, however, especially seeing that we can't really function in this era without phones.
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