Random Points for Discussion on Mongolia and Autism

A less technical post today, just a few points which I was pondering while watching a documentary last night and which I want to write now so as to postpone grading. The gist of the show was this: a couple had a severely autistic kid who was pretty much non-functional. They discovered that their child tended to calm down around horses, on the one hand, and on the other, the father had been a journalist who had covered many stories on traditional shamanistic healing thought that it was worth a try. So, where do horses and shamans intersect? Mongolia, evidently, so they took a trip out there to see what could be done for their child.

The first point concerning which I would like to have discussion is, to what extent do we need to actually understand the world to get around in it? This family went to Mongolia, saw the shamans, and after a trip to a tribe which herds reindeer, the child came away significantly better. Is it because of the shamans? Or because of the adventure taking him out of his normal circumstances? Both, perhaps? The family had a rather pragmatic attitude about it: it worked, and how it worked didn't really matter. To what extent would such pragmatism justify taking a mythical view of the world (which, for purposes of discussion, I am leaving vague)? And where do we draw the line for evidence for a belief? The child who regularly had temper tantrums and incontinence issues eerily got better after seeing the reindeer tribe shaman, but this is still only a single sample however striking and mixed with all sorts of other factors potentially responsible for his improvement.

Second, some of the experts on autism raised the point that there is a reason for genes related to autism: in limited manifestations at least, it is important that the human race have some autistic individuals. These individuals can do things that other people cannot in mastering immense amounts of details about very specialized topics, and having some people like this is an advantage. Now, if we were to have genetic engineering such that we could choose what our children would be like, we probably would not want them to be autistic. Similarly, it may be that most genetic expressions that we consider to be detrimental exist for some evolutionary reason, and while we don't want any given individual to have them, human society as a whole needs such individuals. So if we could choose what our children would be like, would this entail the eventual collapse of society?

Third, the documentary noted that most shamans had undergone a period of sickness, often with neurological symptoms. They were people on the margins of society, but their societies have places for them. By labeling all sorts of mental disorders and then institutionalizing programs and medicating individuals, do we lose out on being able to utilize human diversity? Even when we champion things like autism awareness, do we really create spaces in our society for such people to not only function in spite of their nature but to flourish because of it?

Isomorphisms and Essences

I do want to follow up on the previous post; I think that there are some interesting ways in which the notion of chance in the third case can be applied to other situations, such as Advaita Vedanta and Neoplatonic emanation to help make sense of them (I know you're all terribly excited by the prospect). But, I was thinking about Avicenna's notion of essence today, especially as worked out by certain Scholastic thinkers, and I think that I made sense of something and I wanted to jot it down while I remembered it.

For Avicenna, essences exist either in reality or in the mind. I can talk about real, individual horses, or I can talk about the concept "horse" in my mind. Now, these can't be the same. If the essence of horse as it exists in the world were what it really is to be a horse, then horse would have to be an individual; but the idea of horse applies to many individuals. Similar considerations prevent us from taking horse as it exists as an idea in the mind to be what horseness really is. So, there is some way in which we can consider "horse" in itself apart from either real individuals or general concepts. But "horse" only exists in one way or the other. So what could we mean by horse in itself?

I thought, as usual, about mathematical systems. Let us take the natural numbers (N), that is, all whole numbers from 1 on up. Let us also take just the even natural numbers (2N). We'll just be adding numbers; other operations would make this more difficult. We can take any natural number x and transform it into a 2N number y using the formula x*2, and we can take a 2N number y and turn it into a regular natural number x using the formula y/2. It doesn't matter whether we add first and then switch systems, or switch systems then add. For an example, take 1 + 2 = 3:
1 + 2 = 3; 3*2 = 6
1*2 + 2*2 = 2 + 4 = 6
And similarly if we wanted to go in the opposite direction. This is a mathematical isomorphism between N and 2N under the operation of addition.

What the isomorphism means is this: there is the same structure between N and 2N under addition. On the one hand, it doesn't make any sense to say that this structure exists independently of some system; the structure simply is the way the different symbols interrelate and it makes no sense without such symbols. But there is still a sense in saying that there is a structure which is in both N and 2N. This seems to me to be the same logical move as Avicenna is making with essences, and as there is nothing wrong with it in the mathematical case (it at least makes perfect sense to me), the are grounds for thinking that it is intelligible in the metaphysical case as well.

On Chance

Last night, I was watching a show (Flash Forward) in which the premise is that, one day, everyone blacks out and has a vision of their life at some point in the future. Now, of course, people are going to be acting to either meet that future or avoid it, which brings up all sorts of issues with determinism and the like. The point of interest in the episode I saw last night, though, was how some people had avoided things that were supposed to happen. People were supposed to die at some time, avoided it, but then some of them ended up dying anyhow. One of the characters tried to pass it off as an accident, but another replied that there are no accidents. But what does this phrase mean? It comes up in other contexts, such as with those who believe that God (or the universe, or whatnot) doesn't do coincidence. It seems that there are at least four different ways of looking at the reality of chance, though: (1) chance is a necessary explanatory principle, (2) chance is a property of events, (3) chance is a mode of consideration of events, and (4) chance has no place at all.

In the first case, chance is a necessary explanatory principle. What do I mean by this? I mean that, if we have all of the determinate causes for an event, we still don't have a full explanation. Something utterly random could happen, and this randomness is simply a brute fact of the world which comes into play. There would be something profoundly unintelligible about the event, not just from our standpoint as limited human knowers, but even if we were to have perfect knowledge. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics may flirt with this approach, but that would get us involved in too many issues for the present post.

In the second case, chance is a property of an event. Let us say that I throw a stone, and that you throw a stone, and the two stones hit. I didn't mean for the stones to hit, and you didn't mean for the stones to hit, but they did so anyhow. The event was a chance occurrence. However, unlike in the first case, chance is not a cause of the event; we can completely explain the event by talking about how I threw a stone and you did the same. It is the intersection of these causes which is chance, since there is nothing in the causes themselves to lead to the chance event when regarded apart from each other.

In the third case, chance is merely a mode of consideration, but a mode of consideration made possible by the way the world is. So let us go back to the example of throwing stones again, and this time, let us assume that the world is entirely determined by the laws of mathematical physics (or substitute your own form of determinism if you prefer, and make the throwers zombies lacking free will but with wicked cool cybernetic rock-launchers). So I throw the stone, and you throw yours, and they hit again. There is still an element of chance here, since my throwing and your throwing do not in themselves contain the fact that the stones will hit. But, at the same time, we can find some prior state of affairs such that all of this is determined already, perhaps at the big bang if necessary. There is some point in time such that, if we but work out what it means for everything to exist as it did then, we would see that I must throw the rock, you must throw the rock, and they must intersect. Therefore, the event is not a chance event in itself, but only when we consider the relation of causes abstracted from their context. Chance is therefore an illusion, one which arises because we were not looking at reality according to its own structure, but an illusion which yet has some basis in reality. We have this particular illusion because the world is a certain way, and we bring our own set of expectations which cut against the grain of the world, and chance is where our expectations and reality's structure fail to line up.

In the fourth case, there is no chance whatsoever. This is what seems to be entailed by those who claim that there is no coincidence at all. But the way in which it is intended has to be stronger than the third case: when we think of two events having happened together, there is no chance involved. In the third case, there is still a basis in reality for my thinking that the stones hitting is a chance event when I simply think about my act of throwing the stone and yours. In this fourth case, even that event is not accidental. A character in the TV show who is supposed to die from a car accident, who survives past that day and later gets hit by a car anyhow, does not experience any chance event in any consideration.

I'm not sure that the fourth case is actually intelligible when analyzed. Denying that chance is a real feature of the world doesn't mean that there isn't some conceptual and relative reality to chance when I measure up the world compared to human ends, including my own needs and interests. I can affirm the third case, say that the world is entirely determined in one way or another, and still say that the relation of two events pulled from the larger context (which I am incapable of truly understanding) is a chance relation.

Even if I were to believe that there were a benevolent deity running the universe (and I think that http://thomstark.net/?p=834 has some good points to raise about that, h/t Daniel), then I still end up with case three. Let's say that God has some end in mind, such as self-glorification. God needs to accomplish two other ends to meet this end (pick whatever you want), x and y. Now, x requires some means to accomplish it, and y requires some means to accomplish it (not that God would need to work this out step by step or think through it discursively, but there is some logical order in the structure of the realization of the action). The means for x and the means for y, then, considered in themselves and abstracted from the context of God doing something for his ultimate end, are related by chance. They only lose that aspect of chance when regarded as both leading to that ultimate end. What this means is that the means for x and the means for y may have nothing to do with each other in themselves, and so even in the case of God's providence, there still would be coincidences of the third case sort.

In sum: even if there is no real chance in the universe, coincidences generally have absolutely nothing to do with you.