Sorry this took so long, but I kept reading further in hopes of getting to something more meaty to talk about before my first post on this subject. I’m through 3 chapters and it has essentially only been basic definitions and a few thought experiments.

My first comment is that I always forget that I’m not actually interested in philosophy of consciousness. What I associate to phil. con. (my abbreviation from here on out) is not what the typical philosopher associates to it. I tend to view all of philosophy through the lens of philosophy of language. So I usually start form some sort of premise about how language is more primary and fundamental than consciousness. Now lets try to figure out how it is that language brings about consciousness. Of course, this is not at all how the book goes about it. In fact, I think the opposite assumption is implicit here. So needless to say, the book isn’t as interesting to me as I would have hoped.

The one argument that was presented right at the beginning that I had heard before but forgotten that was pretty interesting was about debunking the “brains in a vat” idea. Basically this goes back to Descartes who wanted to know if there was any way we could tell if we actually existed or if our brains were bodiless in a vat somewhere and scientists were just stimulating certain neurons to make us think we were people (well, so Descartes’ description was a little different, but this is the modern Matrix-esque interp). Essentially we don’t have to go through the trouble that Descartes went through to debunk this possibility. The standard sort of pragmatic argument is that it just isn’t possible for any reasonable interpretation of the term “possible”. The amount of computer power needed to do this would encounter a combinatorial explosion for even the simplest experience of the world. Thus, it is not possible we are being tricked (so before a torrent of arguments fill my replies, I watered it down, try to fill in the details yourself before arguing).

Other than that the only sort of important terms that might show up in later posts have to do with phenomenology. All of chapter 3 is essentially devoted to this. Essentially it is a method of philosophy of consciousness developed by Husserl that tried to remove subjectivity. I really don’t want to go into this much, since I feel like it won’t play much of a role later and it is giving me flashbacks of my 20th century philosophy class when we had long tedious arguments about the method of “bracketing”. Overall, what you should know is that it played a huge role in influencing major philosophers and schools of thought on philosophy, but in general is highly criticized and probably has been overtaken by neuroscience studies and interpreting them.

My one complaint so far is that the results of thought experiments (which play a major role in this book) are very skewed by leading questions. I don’t doubt that the visualization of X was harder than Y, but coming to that conclusion before asking, “Wasn’t visualization of X harder than Y?” would have been more convincing for your argument. I’m not sure if any were that bad, and I should look a specific one up, but I don’t really feel like it now.

My guess is that the next chapter is on a rejection of Husserl’s phenomenology, and then hopefully it will get into some of the crazy things our brain’s do from a neuroscience perspective. That could make things more interesting.

I should make it a vow of the new year to not get into ethical debates with mathematicians. I’m not going to lie. Mathematicians seem to be much harder to argue with than philosophers. They seem to be much more rigorous, they accept much fewer axioms, and are willing to admit to craziness just to not present a contradiction with their side.

Where is this all coming from? Well, on Friday I got into a few debates with a certain person. The most interesting of which was on whether or not agnosticism is a defensible position. This ended up continuing today with a different person. Amazingly enough, the characterizations given above apply equally well to both of these people, yet they both argued different points (I stayed on my one).

It went a little bit like the following. I claim that agnosticism is not a defensible position. In my brief encounters with the subject, it seems as if mathematicians tend to believe that it is the only position that you can defend from a rational standpoint. We can never know whether there is a God or not, and hence we cannot make a definitive statement one way or the other.

I claim this is nonsense. An agnostic formulates definitive beliefs about the world all the time instead of claiming to “not know.” Most contradictorily being that they are not agnostic with respect to most gods created in human history. Most agnostic are actually atheists with respect to Greek or Norse gods. Less contradictorily, but even more absurd is that an agnostic that actually practices what they preach should say that we cannot know whether or not an invisible pink unicorn follows them around everywhere they go. We have no evidence for or against it, thus the truth of its existence cannot be known for sure. (You may as well consider this line of reasoning to be a variant on Okham’s Razor).

Alright, well that is just one of my arguments, but it turns out that one of the two people were actually willing to agree to not knowing things like the pink unicorn. So on further pressing, like whether or not my eyes were deceiving me and instead of solid ground three feet in front of me there was actually a cliff, he admitted we could not know that for sure as well.

At this point you may be wondering what this has to do with ethics. And here it is. I decided to shift to an ethical argument. I say that an agnostic must ethically make the shift to atheism, because to not do so is to endorse unethical behavior. A person goes and kills someone and says that God told them to do it. The agnostic has to accept that this is possible. In fact, we could use the old standard of the categorical imperative and think about a world of all agnostics. Someone is on trial for a murder. Their case is that God told them to do it. They must be let off free. What if they are telling the truth? Who are we humans to condemn someone carrying out God’s command? Thus I claim that agnosticism tacitly supports an ideological system that allows for immoral behavior to be confused with moral behavior.

The person on Friday bought this argument, but then decided that the same case could be made against atheism. I don’t wish to go into detail, since it completely changes the topic, but essentially the tangent topic dealt with moral relativism vs absolutism and whether or not a case could objectively be made against nihilism (as you may be able to piece together, the argument was that a purely absolute ethics cannot exist, so an atheist system of ethics tacitly supports a nihilistic ethics which devalues human life unless there is a sound argument against it). I’m still thinking about it, but it is a harder case to make.

As I’ve probably stated in the past. My general view is that an absolute ethics does exist, and we can know parts of it, but in general we will probably never know all of it.

I really do want to get back to some actual math that I’ve found interesting recently, but there is one last thing that has been turning in my head recently. It is on the ethics of a certain attitude that has developed in our culture. It is the apathetic attitude toward things labeled as “political.”

My family is a largely non-political family. In fact, they are so anti-political that certain members aren’t familiar enough with politics that they probably would have to take a 50/50 guess at what party Obama belongs to (or Bush, to emphasize that it isn’t a confusion of being close to center).

Don’t get me wrong. I hate “politics” as much as the next person. I hate the lies for political gain. I hate talking around issues instead of about them. Heck. I hate the idea of endlessly talking to stall doing things. I hate that you have to satisfy a constituency instead of thinking what the best option would be. I hate that religion has incredible amounts of influence on decisions that should be rational. And so on….

So here is my claim. It doesn’t matter if you hate or love politics, in any case it is unethical to use this as an excuse. What do you think about the fact that gay marriages could be repealed? Oh, that’s just a political thing. I don’t really follow that. What about the genocides in Darfur? Well, there isn’t really anything we can do about that. Oh, you went to that protest? That was pointless. It is political and the politicians aren’t affected by protests. The examples are endless.

This idea that because something can be linked to politics (or that it is something that politicians will have to vote on) is hopeless to change and hence a waste of time and money to try to change is unethical. It has become an excuse to stand by and watch inhuman things happen without feeling guilty. The main problem is that people that do this are completely unaware that this is what they are doing. It isn’t really their fault. This idea has been culturally accepted, and culturally reinforced when we see all the scandals and lying going on.

I guess my main point is that this cultural acceptance needs to start to turn around if we really want to see positive changes. The next time you hear someone turn something down or refuse to comment or act on something for this reason point it out. The best way is to head-on point out that there is a moral issue that is not political that they are standing by and letting happen and just using that as an excuse. I mean, what can’t be considered “political”? The statement, “That’s all politics,” is really void of meaning when you think of it that way.

I never thought the day would come where The Fountain would have a rival for greatest work of art produced in my lifetime. Charlie Kaufman has done it with Synecdoche, New York. I don’t want to say too much except, “Go see it now!”

In an attempt to not give anything away, but to talk about why it rivals Darren Aronsofsky’s brilliant work, it is basically about the same thing. The only thing. Fear of death. But of course, it wouldn’t be great if that was it. It also pulls in all that I love about modern art. It really isn’t as confusing as most would make it out to be either. The Fountain is probably the harder of the two to follow. But Kaufman’s film is more complex. More subtle.

So there is the post-modern paradigm. The greats of Pynchon or DeLillo. They try create these sprawling novels that keep splitting off in different directions: following different characters. They try to incorporate the ideas from math and science that say formal systems are incomplete or that uncertainty always exists. They try to self-reference themselves without contradiction.

Then people like DFW (David Foster Wallace for the non-initiated) come along and use the post-modern paradigm to reject it. You can’t self-reference without paradox. A self-reference creates an infinite recursion, but the novel itself is finite, so it doesn’t work. The very attempt at showing the incompleteness of the system creates a meta-system more powerful than the one in which it is trying to live. It is a rejection of post-modernism.

Kaufman says, “No! DFW, you should know better. You have some mathematical training. I’ll show you a return to classic post-modernism without contradiction. You can have an infinite recursion take up finite space. It just has to converge somewhere.” This is the brilliance of it. Let’s combine the only theme in art worth exploring (fear of death (note that I have a fairly good argument based on The Fountain that all things stem from this)), with a return to the classic post-modern paradigm. Where does the infinite self-reference converge to? Death of course! It was so obvious all along.

Don’t worry. I’ve given nothing away. A few more words are necessary, though. This movie is without a doubt the most demanding I’ve ever seen. Hopefully you have a degree in literature to catch all the references (Hedda Gabler, Death of a Salesman, White Noise, post-modern philosophy, etc). The details are so intensely packed in as well. I’m pretty sure you could just randomly flip to any 5 second period of the movie and I could point out some important detail.

Lastly, what does synecdoche mean? [From wikipedia] Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which:

• a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing, or
• a term denoting a thing (a “whole”) is used to refer to part of it, or
• a term denoting a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or
• a term denoting a general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or
• a term denoting a material is used to refer to an object composed of that material.

The movie takes place in Schenectady, NY. What an amazing play on words. DFW would be proud.

How great! Go now!

CA Proposition 8: Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. Fiscal Impact: Over next few years, potential revenue loss, mainly sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars, to state and local governments. In the long run, likely little fiscal impact on state and local governments

Reason number 1 for teaching basic philosophy and ethics in high school (yes, just replace a phys ed or home ec credit or something it can be done). Proposition 8 passed in CA. This officially writes discrimination into their state constitution. If it nullifies 10,000 marriages, it could have extremely detrimental affects to 20,000 people.

None of these things are acceptable. The fact that adults can make it to adulthood and not realize how unethical this voting choice was is astounding. We must immediately mandate a course in ethics to all high school students to prevent things like this from happening. How this could have helped:

Let’s look at what all the main ethical theories say about this.

Absolutism: I certainly hope that even if you subscribe to moral absolutism, that one of your “moral absolutes” is non-discrimination.

Relativism: Even if you hate homosexuals, you should realize that their are spheres of people who don’t. You should respect that and put your bias aside. Namely, if you don’t like gay marriages, then don’t have one. To write your opinion into the constitution is to break with the whole concept of relativism.

Egoism: Well, the egoist should probably just abstain from voting on this issue if he/she is not a homosexual, since it doesn’t affect them. Obviously, the homosexual egoist should vote agaisnt it.

Utilitarianism: As stated before, we look at the consequences of nullifying 10,000 marriages, and it is awful. I can’t see any effect on non-homosexuals, so these are the only consequences we need to consider.

Kant: Only act on a maxim you can wish to universalize. Hmmm…would I want to universalize non-discrimination. Uh, yes!

I’m tired of this, but I’m pretty certain that under NO ethical theory can writing discrimination into a constitution can be seen as ethical or moral behavior.

Is it ethical to vote based on well-informed opinions? By well-informed opinions I mean an opinion in which an educated rational person could successfully argue both sides. Take abortion for instance. I have an opinion on it, but I can also put that opinion aside and “successfully” argue either side. This is in opposition with something like an ill-informed opinion in which no rational person could successfully argue for slavery, say. If you are an issue voter voting on ill-informed opinions, then without discussion I’ll consider that unethical or at least ignorant and irresponsible.

The idea now is that we should be free to vote based on our (well-informed) opinions. The side with the most number of people wins and policies are created based on the majority. But what happens if fact comes up that doesn’t allow us to vote based on our opinions? This is our current situation. It has become apparent that Palin is not fit for the VP position. These are indisputable facts. She cannot name a single major newspaper of the world. She has no experience on a global scale. She believes things that are not true (e.g. the world is 6000 years old). When asked a question she has not been told the answer to, she becomes completely incoherent or changes the question to one that she has been told the answer to.

We have been put into a moral dilemma. Are we ethically obligated to put our opinions aside and vote for the qualified side? I hate to apply to a utilitarian argument, but it is very overwhelming at this point. We are not some small country that can do what we want (i.e. vote on single issues or on our opinions alone). We must take into consideration the rest of the world. We are voting into office a world leader, yet the rest of the world doesn’t get to vote.

Suppose for the next four years people continue to have abortions (insert issue of choice). The world continues. Suppose McCain is elected and then dies a few months or even years in. I’m not saying the world will end, but it will be drastically changed and not in a good way. How can Palin have reasonable conversations with other world leaders when at this point they probably don’t respect her? She won’t be taken seriously and her presence at these meetings will be purely for show.

Outside of America, abortion (insert any issue) isn’t really even considered an issue. To ignore the rest of the world in this decision and vote for a world leader based on something the rest of the world is not concerned about is to vote unethically. Thus, the ethical decision when fact turns up, is to put aside your opinions and vote in alignment with fact.

Clearly McCain’s choosing Palin was the initial unethical decision, since assuming a rational and ethical population, we no longer have the freedom to vote on our opinions. Now that his unethical decision was made, we must shed our opinions and partisanship and vote against him.

When war comes up in conversations, it tends to polarize people. Only two options seem to be available: you’re for it or against it. I don’t fit either one/I fit both.

The problems with war…in every situation. I tend to raise the point that in basically every situation, war has been to fight some sort of violence. The problem with that is that violence feeds violence. Violent people want precisely what war is giving them. More specifcally, you can’t fight a war on terror by causing terror. Comments such as these tend to throw me into the anti-war group.

Clearly, the nonviolent side isn’t correct either. A million nonviolent people will be killed by a single violent one. Of course, nonviolence has worked in the past, and in fact it wasn’t a form of non-action as many people try to say. The problem is that first times have changed. The nonviolence of Ghandi and King Jr. clearly won’t work against things like nuclear or biological weapons. The other part that made those nonviolent actions effective, in my opinion, is that it relied on the fact that the people hitting the nonviolent protestors did not actually want to hurt them. They were under orders and doing their job. The nonviolence brought out a feeling of immorality in the violent side. I don’t think that this is the case in our current situation. Suicide bombers kill innocent people, and this is the point of the action. A huge group of nonviolent protestors will just make their job easier.

So the two sides of the argument don’t work. Both have had some form of success in the past, and people tend to polarize toward one or the other, but I think our times have changed enough that pursuing either one is completely hopeless.

I now propose a lateral thinking puzzle: What type of solution at least has some sort of potential to work?

First off, I am not a relativist, but there is one refutation of relativism that has always seemed a little fishy to me. Lots of famous people have used this argument including Sam Harris featured several posts ago.

Relativism says that there is no universal moral code, and that all moral standards need to be created within a cultural/social/individual situation. So there are no absolutes in right or wrong, it all needs to be considered in context.

So lets look at the argument against it. It comes from logic. There are no universals. But that statement seems to indicate a universal moral principle: we must always make moral judments based on context. So it is a condtradictory theory in that it proposes a statement that can’t be true or false. “There are no universals” is sort of Godel-esque. If it is true, then it itself cannot exist, and if it is false, then the theory is wrong.

There are a few issues I have with this analysis. First off, I think that we change levels when we talk about that statement. The statement’s truth or false refers to the content of the theory, whereas to talk about the truth or false of the statement is a meta-level higher. For example, you can globally define a variable in programming (not recommended, by the way). You have a universal for your program, but each time it is instantiated it could take on a different or varying meaning. This is like saying relativism can have the universal principle to not harm others, but in different contexts this could be displayed rather differently. Maybe a few people have to be harmed to prevent a lot of others from being harmed. Maybe two people get pleasure out of harming eachother that outweighs the harm. So there is a level distinction, where even if relativists don’t make any of these universal claims, we can see how a universal claim can be implemented relativistically.

Well, I used the term “first” but accidentally did both of my refutations in one. I was going to separate how logically statements involving universals can be done at different levels, and then the second point as how there could be implicit universals in relativism without changing the essence of the theory.

As with any post on ethics, I’m not sure if this has been done before or if this is a good argument, but it has always been something that bothered me since I didn’t think it really had any merit in attacking relativism. (Remember, it is sort of weird that I’m defending it since I don’t subscribe to it for reasons not mentioned here).

What is the difference between linguistics and philosophy of language? Often when posting on one of them or thinking about one of them, I get confused as to if I really know the difference. Here I will try to sort out what I think the difference is.

Taking a purely academia perspective at first, if you look at degree requirements for philosophy of language you get readings like Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Strawson, Searle, Kripke, and Putnam. If you look at degree requirements, well, I’m mostly finding classes, so sociolinguistics, phonology, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, semantics, and syntax. So there is a lot of overlap, but let’s try to pull some of it apart.

From the list it seems that phil lang is concerned with questions of foundations. Is language fundamental, or do we interpret through language? It seems intimately tied to philosophy of mind. What is a concept? Can we think in conceptual terms and bypass language? How do we attribute meaning to language? These types of things. Linguistics seems to be more interested in the language itself. What are the origins of this word? Is their a father language that all others come from? How do sounds differ between cultures? What are allowable constructions in a language? Can these be modeled mechanically, as in computer translators? These types of things. So there does in fact seem to be a difference.

There is probably more similarity than people would guess, though. Clearly questions dealing with logic apply to both. Is a language a formal system? Also, the effect of language is in both. How do words affect brain chemistry? How does language affect how a social system interacts? Can we determine something about human nature by determining which words are culturally specific and which are universal?

Not sure why I posted this. Just something I was trying to sort out. Also, I know almost nothing about linguistics, so this could be way off. It is interesting that you can tell when I’m mathematically frustrated, because my posts become things like this for awhile. You can tell when I’m having a good math week, because my posts become essentially unreadable to people without a degree in math.

There has been a lot of talk about Eastern vs Western worldview differences, and I was curious as to whether mental illness had a lower frequency in the East. My hypothesis was that people whose worldview involved meditation and introspection as opposed to a worldview almost entirely based on external things would make a significant difference.

There are two immediate problems. Due to the worldview differences, the documented cases of mental illness in the East is probably significantly lower than the actual cases. The other major problem is that these worldviews are not very separate anymore. Any study in today’s globalized world would be tainted, since there are very few people who have exclusively one or the other view.

So I started web researching to see what would come up. It seems as if a study such as this may not have ever been done, but there has been lots of social studies to see how conceptions of mental illness are difference. So I altered my search to see if meditation in particular had been studied in relation to mental illness. This proved challenging as well, in that many non-scientific sites came up as personal testimony from someone that claimed to have cured an illness/mental illness through meditation.

There were far too many sites for me to try to sort through if any had what I was looking for considering this is just a random passing question I had. So briefly let’s look at some causes and see if these causes are less likely to occur in someone with an introspective worldview.

Cause 1: Neurotransmitter imbalance. I don’t really want to comment on this one without scientific support, but I am sure that there are scientific studies of people seriously altering their brain chemistry. Now if they had any control over neurotransmitters is another question. It doesn’t seem too unreasonable that meditation could help prevent this.

Cause 2: Heredity. Now according to webmd.com it is pretty random whether or not you inherit a mental illness, and it usually takes high stress, abuse, or trauma to trigger it. This seems to suggest to me that it is not genetic (though they claim it is), and that it is more of a mimic syndrome. You see someone in your family with a mental illness your whole life, then something traumatic happens and you develop those same symptoms. If this is the case, then meditation can definitely help empower someone to overcome the sense that you must develop these symptoms.

Cause 3: Infections/Brain injury. There doesn’t seem to be much you can do about an actually physical accident that occurs. There are without a doubt people who claim to have healed themselves through meditation, but this is far less common and also we are looking at prevention not healing. So can meditation help prevent an accident from occurring, probably not.

Cause 4: Poor nutrition/toxins. I do have to say that this is where Eastern culture and not just meditation can probably help. Many Eastern cultures such as Buddhism, Taoism, etc advocate a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian all-natural diet. The West seems obsessed with highly processed food and also animal products that have been produced in mass quantity. This mass quantity usually means that chemicals were used to enhance the amount. So I’d say the Eastern vs Western can be a prevention here, but meditation alone probably won’t do much.

I’ll keep digging randomly to see what I turn up and maybe post on this topic again in a week or two if I find anything new. Note: this is not a scientific or documented study. It was all opinion. No information here should be used as if it were fact.