Towards the Dark Horizon or "Silence is Golden"

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Politics, religion, and abortion

I probably agree with this author's political program for abortion. I want to keep government out of it, period, and I guess she does too. But I find her reasoning horrifying: half of it amounts to "Criminalizing abortion is bad because it requires women to accept responsibility for their lives and for the consequences of their decisions."

Should men not have to pay child support because it may "limit their economic future"?

I'm a leftie for right-wing reasons, to put it in the humorously shallow American vernacular.

Just a Buckeye-bound misfit, I

Q: I read a couple of words of Rawls today and decided I was putting him off for another year because he's just too much of a tool. Back to Neal Stephenson and Neil Postman.

Ben: Rawls is a tool.

Ben: But there are very few political philosophers, with the exception of the Founders and Aristotle (and perhaps Machiavelli, although he was a hack) that I don't think are tools.

Hear, hear!

Q: If we agree on this point, without clarification, it must be true.

Ben: Yes, I think so.

Ben: I think, even with clarification, we might still agree, and it would still be true.

Q: And as Oscar said, even things that are true can be proved.

Up and down I sow them for lads like me to find

When I have a week in which I hate humanity a little too much, I reach for one of the therapeutic old standbys on the bookshelf. This weekend I dug back into a few chapters of Send In the Waco Killers and came across this charmer, which easily nails something righties and lefties often mistake for a quandary:

The apparent contradictions do take a little patience. Consider these three statements:

1) The vast majority of American reporters are honestly convinced that they and all of their cohorts are objective and politically neutral.

2) People from the political right, and especially Libertarians and constitutionalists, are convinced that 98 percent of the American media are handmaidens to the oppressive, collectivist state, puking forth little but undigested, unquestioned, manipulative, pro-government propaganda.

3) Both of the above statements are true.

The problem involves definitions and paradigms....

Reporters think "bias" is when you're accepting cash in plain brown envelopes to keep a corporate chemical spill out of the paper, or writing only nice things about a political candidiate because you're shacking up with him/her in the guest cabin on the weekends. If they're not involved in such stuff -- if they cover their press conferences and rewrite the government press releases the way they've been taught -- they take great offense at any accusation of "bias...."

An Asterisk of One's Own

I wonder if I wasn't clear enough in my last, emdash-riddled line: I think determinism shouldn't (and, in any case, usually doesn't) have a practical effect on how we deal with others. We live in a world that seems very much as if it's run by free will, cause and effect, etc. They may be persistent illusions, but they're still the illusions by which we're bound to run our lives, which is exactly what I take Ben's final paragraph to mean.

I do want to challenge this a bit:

For practices such as giving and accepting reasons, coming to conclusions, making distinctions between good and bad arguments, etc. to be sensible, a prima facie assumption of agency must exist; and this assumption does much to work against the argument of the determinist, who is at pains not to find some sort of notion of agency Trojan Horsed into his position....

That may be, but the fault, dear Brutus, lies in our determinists, not in ourselves. It's consistent to say the world is (or is likely) a determined one, which one is bound to discuss through the lens and in the vocabulary of perceived free will. Is it so absurd to believe a consciousness could believe itself to be "choosing" among alternatives -- selecting among them through some mystical process, in other words, by appeal to deity, explicit or not -- when in fact he is carrying out a program? The belief in choice remains the one that requires an odd sort of faith. Belief in the "human program" running on wetware requires none.

All of this fails even to address the modern physical evidence that the universe is way more complex than determism or free will can even begin to cover; they border on absurd oversimplifications, of course.

Speaking Past Anon or "A Footnote of My Own"

Regrettably, I believe I articulated only poorly my position on determinism during the conversation with Q that he references in his last post. My point about determinism wasn't that it shouldn't have a practical effect on our treatment of human beings as "sentient, responsible individuals with moral agency", it was rather that determinism (regardless of its truth value) simply doesn't have any practical effect on our treatment of human beings as moral agents.

I want to say that whether or not the universe is deterministic is a moot point of academic interest at most, and I want to say this because the assumption of agency undergirds virtually all human social practices - even, especially, that of rational discourse.

That is to say that the determinist, when he argues for a deterministic universe, does so within a framework undergirded by the idea that human beings have some sort of substantial agency. For practices such as giving and accepting reasons, coming to conclusions, making distinctions between good and bad arguments, etc. to be sensible, a prima facie assumption of agency must exist; and this assumption does much to work against the argument of the determinist, who is at pains not to find some sort of notion of agency Trojan Horsed into his position (it is the rare determinist, after all, who hasn't contemplated the implications of how we ought to behave towards one another, if, indeed, our reality is a deterministic one; a concern, which, when examined, is obviously senseless.)

This, of course, doesn't mean that the universe isn't deterministic. It just means that the notion of a deterministic universe, when taken seriously, is largely incoherent from our current, human, perspective.

In megatexels, report cards, in spoke wheels...

I put Ben's mind at ease the other day, assuring him that I don't think everyone is precisely an untrustworthy bastard; that is, to say so was an error of tone, not of content. But then I casually mentioned or implied that free will was a silly concept, and that didn't go over so well either. Oh yes: I said I am a determinist, but with footnotes.*

It's understandable that people, even some philosophers -- especially philosophers -- want to believe in free will. I don't take a dogmatic position on the metaphysics of the thing, but I think it is plainly a mere word game, a symbol pointing to a concept that is ineffable and therefore useless. "God" is another example of this. However, unlike "God," which means nothing because it means pretty much everything (spirit, nature, Zeus, God the Father who called forth Abraham, Dionysus, chi), "free will" does mean something. It is, I believe, a synonym for a chaotic process: a process which appears random, unordered, and indescribable and unknowable by science. Which is to say, a mystical process. But it isn't; it's just complex.

This is a sticky problem for nontheisitic, nondeterministic philosophers. If you don't believe the human nervous system is a complex software system running on wetware -- a super-duper version of your desktop computer, in other words -- then you believe there is something beyond the physical. This is not unreasonable, and not irrational, but it is mystical. It is properly called faith, not science, because the chaotic explanation is simpler, is sufficient, is complete -- it is the rational explanation, even though it may not ultimately prove correct. When we found out Newton's equations were wrong, it was a bit of a blow to the perceived perfection of Old Ike's Frame of the System of the World, but you were still better off believing in Newton all along than believing exclusively in some primitive shamanistic conception of causal mechanics.

I'm rambling. I'm going to try to scurry back to the reservation and take this wherever it was going. And I will do it by way of an apt analogy.

Even someone trained in computer science and engineering has trouble conceiving of the possible states of a computer. Most people never try; perhaps you never have. Consider it now. Your computer has exactly one state† that represents "playing World of Warcraft, hooked up to server X, swinging my sword at player Y (whose handle is EaterOfZebras) and player Z (who is an elf with so many hits points, and widgets A and B in his inventory, and whose handle is NilesCrane)...." There is one state -- this and that bit set in memory, this and that bit flipped on your hard drive, this and that register holding such and such a value in your CPU -- that corresponds to that one freeze-frame moment in that one game.

To the non-technical user, it is simply magic. To the technical or relflective user, it is simply complex: hard to get one's head around, but uncontroversially deterministic.

Now, we built the computers that run computer games and web broswers and stuff. What would it be like to deal with a computer way more complex than a human being has ever built, or will be able to build for at least several decades?

It'd look a lot like the human central nervous system. There is no reason to suppose that consciousness isn't simply an emergent property of a sufficiently complex network with enough nodes and enough interconnections; indeed this seems fairly likely. The process by which such a software system selects a "choice" among alternatives would appear random and unpredictable to us -- or in any case entirely opaque. That doesn't mean there's a mystical property called "free will" saving it from determinism. It just means the system is nonlinear, and the computer is really complex.

As Ben pointed out, and thank goddess this is plain as day to him, since most philosophy majors somehow can't get it through their Chomsky-addled skulls because they're too busy suggesting gravity can be defeated by jumping off the Sears Tower, not that I am bitter, this needn't (and shouldn't) have any practical effect on one's treatment of individuals as sentient, responsible individuals with moral agency.

Man, I need a cold beer.

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* Saying things like this is a great way to make philosophers apoplectic. The torture may be supplemented with irony via a strategically placed footnote; see?

† Actually a family of closely related states, but that doesn't affect the example, so I'm keeping it simple.

Perchance to Posit

I have written that most disagreement is misconstrued agreement, and of course I'm right, which is why Ben and I are both right.

Truth is simple. Whether one paints it with optimism, cynicism, mysticism, or anything else is what makes the fake philosophical quandaries that give people something to argue about.

I say this in part because it's true, and partially just to bait Ben again.

In Absentia or "Responses and the Like"

I must say, despite the fact that Q and I tend to think along similar lines, I disagree with his last post, on the whole.

I think it's important that we generally consider the situation that Jon describes as tragic rather than as the normal course that human relationships take. Betrayal and/or abandonment tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

Granted, people can be "untrustworthy bastards", but not everyone is so, and the potential for everyone to be so is not something which requires the assumption that everyone is so. (Reputation, after all, still stands for something.)

It's important, I think, to make neither angels nor devils of people. We all have our ethical failings, but we all have our ethical successes as well; and the world is nothing if not nuanced.

My Hearty Friend

Everyone is an untrustworthy bastard. The most important emotional skill I grokked from being with my ex is living under the assumptions that:

1) Everybody will eventually fuck you over. People like him are cynical, but "cynical" in this instance only means more attuned to the truth. And,

2) A primary determinant of a person's character is how he responds to this reality.

Do it right, and you can be a suprisingly (if not profoundly) happy and optimistic person. The key is not to become too attached to any person or any set of assumptions about the trustworthiness of people collectively. When your baseline assumption is that people are going to treat you like crap, the world frequently is a much better place than you "expect," and you're not as suseptible to the onset of suicidal fits of rage and despair when the world is falling apart all around you. It's just that nobody happens to be putting on the show of niceness at that moment. It's only the base case showing through, nothing to be alarmed about.

A demystified view of the human being as automaton — or, more optimistically, as well engineered hardware-software system &mdash makes it much less disappointing when people behave as if only responding to sufficiently strong stimuli: that is precisely what they're doing. Enough horniness, enough anger, enough fear, enough lust will make anyone do anything. I wouldn't be too out of sorts if my computer crashed when I gave it twice as much work to do as its hardware can handle. Likewise, I've come to expect that other human beings, even and especially the ones of whom I have expectations, will substantially and, on the whole, frequently disappoint me; I chalk it up to the way the machine works.

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.

Knowledge and communication

This is a bit off of what I usually think of as apropos for this blog, but what the hell:

Today my extended family celebrated my grand-uncle's 90th birthday. After the party, I learned that one of my cousins had been abandoned by her husband. Of course, "abandoned" doesn't entirely cover it, since he cleaned out all their bank accounts and other finances, and just up and disappeared one day. No one knows where he is, even now.

The thing that gets me is, they were married for as long as I can remember, certainly almost as long as I've been alive, seeing as they have an 18-year-old son... who's barely gonna be able to graduate from high school now, in shock as he is, and I can't say I much blame him.

The whole sorry business just makes me wonder whether or not we can truly ever trust other people. I mean, not that I was a fly on the wall for their entire marriage or anything, but... two decades plus, and it ends with that kind of betrayal? I can't wrap my mind around that at all. Recently, I was watching an episode of Six Feet Under in which one character said to another: "Nobody ever really knows anybody else. If you think they do, you're living in a fucking dreamworld."

Before today, I would have dismissed that sentiment out of hand. I still would, in a way, if only for its absolutist denial of alternatives, but I understand it better now.