Theory and Practice

I feel like I probably have at least one other blog post with the same title. Perhaps several. It's a pressing concern of mine: what's the relation between thinking about the world, and actually doing something in it?

I've been reading about diplomacy as of late, the history and reality of international cooperation. I'm thinking about possibly going into the foreign services at some point. But I've realized that in order to do that, I need to develop some very different mental habits from what I did in philosophy.

One key difference seems to come down to this: in practice, one needs to listen to all sides. In thinking about the world, though, sometimes there are sides that are just spouting bullshit. There always in fact exist multiple sides to a topic, but not all sides are equal. Just because conspiracy theorists exist does not mean that we should take their views seriously.

If everyone formed opinions purely rationally, then of course we should listen to everyone's opinion in formulating our own. But human beings do not always (or perhaps often) operate rationally (actually, I will revise that in a later post, but we'll work with that hypothesis for now). We (and I do mean "we") form opinions based on what makes us feel emotionally comfortable, on fear, on the basis that we have enough knowledge to form judgments for ourselves.

An opinion based on fear is not in itself a valid side in a rational discussion. One might have valid reasons for the position, but as soon as emotions get high, I have reason to suspect that the emotions were determinative in reaching the view. And I could be wrong; there always could be some truth to a person's position, just as it could be the case that we never landed on the moon, but there also comes a point where we admit that some people just spout nonsense.

I have no patience for climate change or evolution deniers. They fundamentally misunderstand basic terms and theories (like, for example, the word "theory"). Environmental scientists and biologists (you know, the people who actually know what they are talking about) are pretty settled on the basics. We can have a little (very little) debate over whether climate change is anthropogenic, and a lot of debate over what possibly could come of it (climate change doesn't mean that everything would change tremendously; it just means that it is a significant enough possibility to take seriously). But the fact that 1 out of 10,000 environmental scientists dissents, or that some physicist with no understanding of the specific subject matter (or, worse yet, your local doctor) doesn't form the same conclusions, is pretty much irrelevant. And the second an evolution-denier trots out the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the discussion is finished. I don't care how much education they have; they fail basic physics. (Not to mention the inanity of "missing link" objections, or the idea that the fossil record is even the primary evidence for evolution.) If a climate-change denier insists that climate-change is some new myth on top of global warming, or if they point to a cold day as evidence for their view or to a pleasant warm spells and 14th century English vineyards as evidence that global warming would in fact be good, they have removed themselves from having a valid opinion to contribute. They are misguided on so basic a level that they are not engaging the topic. They can be taught (a practical effort), but their opinion matters as little as a math student who claims that a theorem is wrong because it is “too abstract.” (To appease some members of my audience: claiming that a single warm day or season proves global warming, or being an atheist who claims that denying the Christian God is the same as denying Thor, is to be similarly clueless.)

So, as a philosopher or a scientist, the job is to judge. Not all opinions are rational or informed, and those that aren't can be culled. In trying to figure out the truth about politics, even, this can be the case (Scott Walker is a douchebag. The fact that there is "another side to the issue" doesn't mean that that side has a clue. And trickle-down economics just does not work.) But practically, standing around and telling people that they are clueless is in itself pretty clueless, if one's goal is to make things different. It's not enough to think true thoughts about the world. Things need to be done, and that requires compromise. Climate change is real; great, but you still have to work with the deniers who say that there is some vast left-wing conspiracy. You need to actually get things passed in legislature. You need to provide education that is approachable to them, not that pushes them away (this blog post, for example, is not a good example of such – but that wasn't my intent). Do you think racial profiling exists? Great, so do I – but for God's sake, don't present an oversimplified case which cuts out the actual details of why a shooting was considered to be self-defense. Doing so will only convince the deniers that you as a bleeding-heart liberal can only support your view by distorting evidence.

So that is the challenge: I have been trained to judge matters, to look into only the sides that have significant reasons. Doing this often puts me at odds with culture, which doles out such asinities as “everyone has an opinion,” as if the freshman knows as much as the seasoned economist. Democracy means that everyone has worth as a human being and that the government should be for the people. Understanding still has to be earned. But because I think that certain things are true about the world, I want to change the world for the better. Part of the problem as to why there are so many climate change deniers is that the scientists don't actually take the time to work better with media sources, to give the public an understanding of the issues involved. They abdicate the position of go-between because it's frustrating. There need to be more people bridging the gap between theory and practice, as difficult and as taxing to patience and to principles as that might appear to be.

Thoughts on Machiavelli

I had read The Prince a while ago and have been trying to digest it a bit. It raises some interesting questions for politics. Now, Machiavelli has a name for advocating ruthlessness and backstabbing in order to keep power. But his project is actually much more than that.

First, he sets out to write about how politics actually work. Too many people have been writing about the politics of some ideal, morally perfect world, he complains. He wants to tell it like it is. He is not saying that one should be a jerk, he's just pointing out that, actually, many good Roman emperors who kept the peace were assassinated by their own soldiers for the very fact. Do what you want with that information, but at least face the world we live in.

Second, Machiavelli brings up ethical problems in ruling a state. You might think that the gentle ruler is better than the brutal ruler - but what happens when your region is in chaos? He gives some examples from Italy of his day of a ruler who was nice and all, but whose city then was conquered, which of course destroyed the social fabric. By contrast, he points out another ruler who was horribly brutal. But after a few well-placed executions, his city ran smoothly. The latter actually brought peace to his city, which means that the citizens actually lived better lives. The former actually lost that peace. And the goal of ruling is to procure actual peace, stability, and comfort for one's own citizens.

This bothers me about politics, by which I mean any attempt to bring order to a community of people. When is force justified? Not just force in war, but also in pushing through opinions that will actually improve the lives of people, even if they don't realize it (and may even be antagonistic to it). What do we do when ideals of justice don't actually lead to good consequences? The world works the way it does, and complaining about corruption and social inertia doesn't change their existence. Procuring peace at the price of justice won't secure that peace, but pursuing through only just ends might not get anything at all. And this is ultimately Machiavelli's point: not that one should do whatever it takes to get power for oneself (he actually doesn't care much for such people), but that one needs to do what it takes to improve ones community (in this case, the incessantly warring states of Italy).

A Note on Islam

To balance out my persnickety-ness in the previous couple posts, I figured I would write on something a bit more positive. There seems to be a widespread gap of information on Islam in our society. Therefore, I am writing a short blurb on its incredible diversity and inability to be captured in any particular stereotype,as well as to give some clue as to why I might hope to join Peace Corps and spend some time in this portion of the world. I'll provide details and sources if anyone wants, but my point here is just to show how many cultures are part of the Islamic world, and how they are Islamic precisely in keeping that culture.

First off, Islam is much more than just the Arabic-speaking world, but I will start there. Even within North Africa and the Middle East, there are a range of cultures. Some North Africans would identify with nomadic Berber tribes (of which Augustine may have been descended). Other North African countries still contain traces of French occupation and participate in the Francophone world. Egypt is, well, Egypt, with a history of ancient pharaohs, Greeks, Persians, Fatimids, and Turks. The Arabian Pennisula itself is the main location of the Arab tribes themselves, whereas the Levant is home to Syrians (remember the Assyrians?) and Philistines (aka Palestinians – Gingrich is dead wrong in saying that they are an artificial grouping). As far as Arabic speakers go, Christians and Jews form and have formed significant communities, so Arabic and Islam are not by any means co-extensive.

Beyond the Arabic-speaking world, there is of course Persia and its territories, centered in present-day Iran but including all of the -stans as well (a suffix meaning roughly the same as the English “-land”). Islam did not merely take over Persia; the crumbling Persian empire was revitalized through Islam and both Zoroastrian and imperial motifs were reworked.

This empire extended into India – but Indian Muslims considered themselves Indians. They added their own legends about how Adam and Eve first stepped foot into India, giving a pride of place to their own homeland on par with that of their religion's own holy land. Some emperors worked on a “Divine Religion” in which Hindus and Muslims could come together and Hindu texts were translated into Persian to show the similarities between the religions. Unfortunately, on the political level, such a rapprochement did not last. However, some segments have continued to share their ideas and lives in pursuit of a common goal.

Up north a little are Chinese Muslims. Among other things, they formed their own school of Confucianism, showing the similarities with Sufi writings. An Islamic school of martial arts also arose as Islam adapted to the culture. And I could point out the spread of Islam into Indonesia or the rest of Africa, though I am unfortunately unaware of much of the specifics at this point.

Turkey is an example of diversity in Islamic opinions. The modern secular state was founded, not against Islam, but because of arguments from an Islamic position. The Caliphate, which had been seated in Turkey, was defunct – it was supposed to be the institution that succeeded Muhammad and carried out his work. There had been nothing of that sort for a thousand years, even if certain individuals were still using the name Caliph. Since a successorship can't just be restarted, the best thing to do with be to transition into a non-caliphal, non-religious government.

Then there is Europe. The Muslims in Spain have left their mark which can still be seen in the country today. The court of Abdul Rahman III of Cordoba was considered one of the high points of religious tolerance and freedom in the world. The Islamic jurist and philosopher Averroes might very well be an integral part in our own Enlightenment. Once the Western Roman Empire fell and knowledge of Greek was lost, it was through Arabic thinkers that Latin Europe reclaimed Greek science and philosophy.

And what of the present day? I remember sitting in a mosque a couple summers ago, watching the sermon. Much of it was indistinguishable from a Protestant church, except with more Arabic and more bowing. The main sermon points were the same. They had summer religious programs (Vacation Qur'an School?). And despite what many want to say, they didn't want to impose Shari'a law in the United States. They rather lauded the freedom that they had here as opposed to many of their home countries.

I could go on, talking about the Silk Road or the way in which Turkish, Persian, Indian, and Chinese painting styles intermixed. Or contemporary events in the Arab Spring with the numerous democratic movements coming from within these countries instead of imposed externally by warhawks. Or any number of other details.

I am not a Muslim. In case anyone could not tell from my other blog posts, I am actually rather antagonistic toward theism and scripture-based religions. And I can certainly recognize horrible flaws in many Islamic governments. But there's a lot of cool stuff in this culture too, and it deserves to be looked at without any mention whatsoever of jihad and terrorists. There is no one single picture of Islam, nor is there any particular restriction on what we could see even within our lifetimes.

Against Optimism

Around Thanksgiving, I heard many people talking about how they were grateful to have a job, despite the fact that they would have to abandon family gatherings in order to work Black Friday. I found myself thinking that "gratitude" is a horribly misplaced emotion for such a situation.

Now, granted, it is better to have a source of income than not. But gratitude implies that one owes some sort of debt to another, and a company is owed no debt for exploiting workers. One can accept the fact that one must go in and earn some money, and that this is reality. But one should not approve of corporate bullies.

I hear from a lot of people that we should be grateful for what we have, because many people have it worse. And I am admittedly privileged beyond most. Life also sucks sometimes, and this is true completely independently of people are starving halfway across the world. (And to whom would I be grateful? If it is to a god, then this god is responsible for the miserable conditions the world over just as much for my good fortune. Gratitude is not appropriate in such a situation, but rather a trembling fear that I might someday be put on the cosmic asshole's shit list. A god that gets people into Wheaton but then starves entire nations is not worthy of worship, only terror.)

But at this point someone might say, "But it makes me feel better to have hope in something, so what is wrong with that?" Because an unfounded optimism, a fantastic belief that the world is good, is selfish. One has chosen to make placate oneself with an opiate creating false beliefs, which render one unable to respond accurately to real problems. How can one meet others in their need, when one chooses comfort over truth? How can one address problems when the problems are ultimately good?

And if individual optimism is reprehensible, what shall we say of communal optimism? Of views which justify faith, because it is the only way of finding meaning for human existence (ignoring for the moment the direct counter-examples of people who have no problem finding fulfillment in such an existence – such an appeal to faith is an acknowledgement of one's own lack of imagination and inflexibility, not of the human condition)? Of beliefs which encourage a leap beyond the evidence, which by its very nature also is a leap beyond critical examination and which places ones wish fulfillment outside the realms of analysis?

Now, one might think that I would advocate a pessimism, by contrast. But that would not follow. Pessimism is its own set of fantasies which obscure the world. However, pessimism might at least encourage one to go out and change the world when necessary, so I have less of a problem with it. An acceptance of the actualities of the world as it is makes the most sense. Whether one wants to keep the world in stasis or to start a revolution, one must start with where things are presently. If I work a job I hate, I should go in and do it as calmly as possible, then search for new jobs afterwards in like spirit. But let us drop any view that valorizes fantasies.

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(Of course, some of this is overblown. But no one responds to carefully drafted and qualified posts, so let's see what this can incite.)

Closing the School of Athens

Philosophy, as its own department in the university, should be shut down.

Now, let me clarify that. It is not that I think that philosophy is worthless. In fact, quite the contrary. Philosophy is too important to be left as a discipline that only philosophers study. Scientists need some basic study of the philosophy of science. Political leaders need to know something about political philosophy. Quantum physics already is speculative metaphysics half the time. Everyone could use some ethics. If philosophers were forced to join other departments, they would actually contribute to discussions.

At the same time, philosophers need to spend some time in empirical studies. One cannot do philosophy of mind without some knowledge of contemporary cognitive science. One cannot do social and political philosophy without a rigorous scientific background in contemporary sociology. I am not saying that one must agree with the reigning scientific paradigms, but rather that one must understand what they are saying even if only for the purpose of critique. And any philosophers who cannot deal with the rigor of science are doing creative writing, not philosophy.

Finally, history of philosophy could join, logically enough, the history department. This not out of a sense of irrelevance. I have learned more from in-depth study of ancient and medieval thinkers than from almost any other intellectual endeavor. History has a pride of place in the humanities, to my mind, as the best window we have into human existence as it is played out.

Without a separate philosophy department, other people will have to listen to philosophy, philosophers will have to listen to other people, and we can finally get rid of these inane journals where everyone writes merely to have written. We would be closer in spirit to the philosophers of past ages, who considered an empirical understanding of the world around them to be integral to philosophizing. Aristotle was the quintessential biologist. Kant pretty much invented geology. Descartes was influential in physics. Avicenna and Maimonides were pioneering physicians who have provided techniques that are still used today. Many Chinese philosophers were statesmen concerned with proper running of their country. If philosophy is to be more than logic chopping and self-absorbed poetizing, it must no longer consider itself an entity unto itself.

Are Beliefs Practical?

Beliefs are slippery little buggers. On the one hand, they are tools for navigating life. We believe certain things so that we can get around in the world. We need some way of dealing with the complexities of reality. I believe that western medicine by and large works and that it works far and away better than the alternatives. Therefore, I go to doctors trained in Western medicine rather than homeopathy or Ayurveda.

The belief is a means to an end: namely, my getting better. If I didn't need to get better, why would I worry about different medical practices? We have finite lives. We can't spend all of our time trying to make sure that our believes are correct, so long as our lives are running well. If I pick a shoddy medical practice that works for me, even as a mere placebo, I still feel better. What's the harm?

Sometimes, the belief can even change the result. William James talks about a person who is about to jump across a chasm. If this person believes that they can make it, they will have a higher chance of doing so than the persons that doubts themselves and hesitates. So believing something simply because we want it to be true can sometimes make it true.

But beliefs aren't merely tools. Having a belief means that we take something to be actually true about the world already. I take it to be the case that most of my sicknesses are caused by microscopic bacteria, viruses, and so on. The world is not made up of either 4 or 5 elements. Theories based on balancing these elements are just plain false, despite occasionally producing useful results. I can't believe that balancing the fire and water in my body will heal me without also believing that this is actually how things are; the very idea that I could is just nonsense, though some people have astonishingly high skill at self-delusion which allows them to get around this logical nicety.

So how can we take something to be true about the world and not care about whether it is true? How can we believe something, but then be unwilling to put it to critical analysis and to search out whether it is true? But is this really a problem? Why not just take it all with a grain of salt? Use beliefs as tools only. Believing something becomes like watching a movie – we suspend disbelief rather than take the plot to be actually true. It's a story to guide our actions, but merely a story.

This helps with local events: both local in space (affecting me and those closest to me) and in time (short-term goals). Sure, if I follow the medical tip from some random second cousin and it makes me feel better, then it works for me. I don't have to believe anything more than that it has been personally useful. However, it is not clear that this approach deals effectively with broader issues, such as those affecting other groups or calling for short-term sacrifice for the sake of long-term gain.

Take climate change, for example. There does seem to be some truth to the matter as to what will happen in the future if we continue to live as we do. Either humans beings are actually causing climate change, or we are not. Either this will produce a wildly out-of-whack world, or it will not. Either changing emissions in certain ways will help us deal with the problem, or it will not. (There appears to be little actual evidence against the notion that (a) there has been climate change over the past century of alarming proportions, and (b) that it is in large part caused by human beings. However, there is still a lot of discussion over what that entails for the future.)

There is potentially a disaster coming up within a couple generations, and adjusting ourselves to meet it could result in short-term sacrifices. We cannot merely look at what is practical for ourselves here-and-now in our own country to decide what would be better overall in the longer-term. Even if we were to decide that large-scale changes would not need to be implemented, it would have nothing to do with the fact that such changes would be hard right now – it would have to do with our best scientific research telling us that climate change won't be mitigated by our efforts. People arguing from local practical concerns alone, such as loss of jobs and increase in price of goods, completely miss the point, regardless of what our best plan of action will be.

I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem; I merely point out that there is a problem which must be dealt with based on matters of truth beyond what is recognizably practical to us now. (I thought I would give religion a break for a blog post, so I went with science instead.) So beliefs about what are practical to me and those close to me for the short-term can be decided through purely practical means, with little regard to overall truth. But those beliefs are also only suited for these very particular circumstances. Change the context, and the validity of such practical beliefs also changes. So for more far-reaching goals, concern over truth and the theoretical value of beliefs becomes more important.

Politically, this is problematic. Democracy and a democratic voting system is based on people being able to know where their interests lie, and trusting that people overall are smart enough to figure this out on their own. And this might be well enough for locally practical beliefs, for those that guide people through their own day-to-day experience. But people also vote based on issues impacting their communities, their country, and even the world, and it is not at all clear that their experience is useful here; in fact, it might even cloud their judgment in such matters without proper education showing them the bigger picture (and taking a couple science classes hardly instills scientific literacy).

Vampire Ethics

After watching the Dracula ballet last night, I got to thinking: if someone got turned into a vampire, is it best for them to be killed or not? On the one hand, we would think of them as a moral abomination now. We think that if we ever reached that point, we would want somebody to off us. So too should we kill the new vampire, for their own sake.

But on the other hand, they are no longer human. The standards for human flourishing (which, although this is controversial, would probably include not killing off friends and family to feed your lusts) are not the standards for vampire flourishing. A human-turned-vampire would be like a rabbit-turned-lion. You may be surprised at what happened, but you should not feed this new being hay if you want it to be happy (and I would prefer happy lions around, if I had to have any at all). This new vampire then should also be judged according to vampire standards. The human would not have liked this new life, but that is irrelevant to whether it is best for the vampire to live.

This then gets at one moral dilemma, similar to if a young person makes a promise that she later regrets when older - "whose" moral standard becomes relevant in deciding whether she should be held to that promise? What about if I say that I would rather be euthanized than be a vegetable in a hospital bed?

Of course, even if it is worse for the vampire, we could still just stake the sucker for our own sakes. We don't want creepy supernatural predators preying off of us, as human beings. So we can fight for the human good, against a world that sometimes just doesn't care about us.

But, at the same time, part of being human is that we can transcend our own local interests for other things in the world. We can identify ourselves with causes that may have no direct human benefit. (The one point on which radical deep ecologists and conservative Calvinists can come together?) So simply doing something because it is a human good is not necessarily the same as doing something just because it is good overall. And we as humans can think about this distinction. So then should we let vampires live out of respect for life (er, un-life) as long as they don't prey on us too much?

This dilemma comes up too in both the Greek and Chinese traditions (and I'm sure many others). We have the debates between the philosophers and rhetoricians in Greece and Rome, where the rhetoricians and sophists favored a purely human-centered life concerned with building human communities. Search for "truth" is secondary to these matters of practice. The philosophers favored finding what is true, even if it goes completely against what people around them took to be good. And part of this could even be for the sake of humans: current values concerning what is "good" can be revised. The Daoists and the Confucians have had similar struggles, with the Daoists focused on the Way of Heaven even when it completely called into question all typical human values while the Confucians focused more on starting with human beings and only dealing with what is relevant to them. Of course, this was not always a pitched battle; sometimes the two sides in both traditions have complemented each other, since human beings are not actually separate from the world in which they live - another tricky ethical point to work through.

Biology and Metaphysics

Again, thinking about nature & stuff: how do biology & sociology differ? On the one hand, there seem to be conflicts and divergences between them. Let us take standards of beauty. To some extent, these are given to us biologically. We are hard-wired to find certain features attractive. Those who are attracted to females like human female breasts and are not looking for peacock tails instead. But at the same time, society can work with that and present differing ideals of beauty. Sometimes these even conflict. The American obsession with thin women goes against what seems to be a overall global trend, which is about 20 lbs heavier (or so I remember from an undergrad psych class. If anyone has the actual scientific data on hand to back this up, that would be appreciated, but the whole point of my writing a blog instead of a journal article is that I don't feel like looking that up to have a chat :p .) On top of that, it would seem that sociology could in turn affect biology: sociological constraints give new standards of fitness for evolution.

But at the same time, sociology is biology.¹ Even as we can talk about these conflicts in ideals of beauty, these conflicts are differing parts of biology. We are social beings by nature, and the social dimensions of beauty and sexuality are written into our genes.

So there is a sense in which it is all biology which is interacting with itself. Some biological features develop and turn around to influence the features already there; some of which gave rise to the "higher order" features in the first place. This feedback loop creates the domain of sociology, which has its own principles and objects as distinct from bilogoy, even though it is also explained by biology.

This seems to be what is going on with the Neoplatonic principle of emanation. There are higher orders of reality, more "real" levels, that give rise to lower levels of reality.² The lower levels, though, do really exist in their own way. (Some indian philosophy has similar stuff, but there seems to be less value give to these lower levels, to the point that they are all equally "mâyâ" or play/illusion.)

There is a possible study of societies as such. But at the same time, sociology is an "emanation" of biology (as chemistry is of physics and biology of chemistry). Similarly, the search for a Grand Unifying Theoroy of Physics would be a search of a originary principle, motion, force, or whatnot, from which the other features of the physical universe emanate;³ that is, whatever the originary principle is, it is a dynamic one which interacts with itself. Considered as itself alone, it is one. Considered as interacting with itself, as "stumbling as from a drunken slumber" as Plotinus describes the descent of Being from the One, it is regarded as multiple forces, and ultimately as the innermost essence of every existing thing.

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¹ Which is not necessarily to say that human nature is reducible to biology - that is a separate question. But it would seem that, insofar as societies can be studied scientifically and as mired in natural causes, it produced by biology. But if you still don't like this, than take physics and chemistry for the illustration instead.

² One might argue that Neoplatonism would go in the opposite direction, however - from the wholes to the parts. One admittedly cannot simply assume Proclus' entire metaphysical scheme and apply it to modern science. However, if we look at physics as describing the fundamental principles of the world, and so that which unifies it the most, instead of as all the quintillions of atoms rushing around forming everything, there is something to be said for a Neo-Neoplatonism.

³ I have been going through easy examples, in which we merely have concentric circles: physics emanates chemistry, which emanates biology, which emanates sociology. Of course, it could be (and probably is) more complicated. For example, at least restricting ourselves to scientific psychology (which is not in itself a slam against other types), biology would then give rise to psychology, which together with biology would give rise to sociology, or something like that (insofar as there are features of society which are not mediated by direct mental processes).⁴

⁴ Now, where would consciousness fit in? We can see how chemical rules follow from physical ones, and can have an inkling of how sociology follows from biology. However, it is hard to see how consciousness would follow from biology or whatnot except insofar as the latter provides a suitable base of neurons (and by "hard to see," I mean that I don't feel like going through the arguments right now, but I have them). In other words, biology provides the material and formal causes for sociology, but only the material causes for consciousness. It might be that the elusiveness of any Grand Unifying Theory is that such theory does not merely provide unify physics, but would also explain other features of the world; in other words, it would always be underdetermined by purely physical data. This is mere speculation, but it does present a possibility, akin to Spinoza's God.

Essential Futility

I was reading a book on evolution (Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth), and it made the point that an awful lot of nature is futile, if we look at it from the perspective of design.¹ Take trees: they don't actually get any more sunlight by being taller than if all of them were equally short. If every tree were 10 feet tall, they would be just as well off - better even, because they would not have to spend so many resources on what amount to mere stilts. But once one tree grows taller, it blocks the sun for others, and the race is on.

So this seems to be futile - futile because so much energy is expanded simply for the sake of competing with others when everyone would have been better if they hadn't entered into the competition in the first place.² My concern here is in what exactly "futility" is.

My impression is to regard this race as futile because the trees are merely reacting to each other and to their circumstances. Each response is deflected away from what "really" needs to be done and toward those other trees and their contingent actions. If only these trees could get on with living instead of pointless tasks!³

But what would it mean for the tree to get on with the task of being a tree? We might have a picture in mind of trees taking care of real tree stuff, like getting light using as few resources as possible, and not getting distracted by the pine race. But whatever this hypothetical entity is, it is no longer a tree. Trees are what they are because of other trees. This competition they are locked in is just as much a part of them as the need for light in the first place. Conversely, the need to survive by taking in photons and synthesizing them into nutrients is just as much a "futile" race as growing taller than the other trees. The replication of DNA in all of its myriad manners is its own race, in which each set of genes is "competing" against the others.⁴

So there would be no reason to think that the race of the trees against each other is any more or less futile than anything else going on in the trees' lives. There is no core essence to "being a tree." This other race against other trees is not extrinsic to the tree's true nature, a race to be avoided if possible so that it could live a more tree-ish life.⁵

Things are what they are because of their causes, or to put it more mystic-sounding-like, things are what they are not. The tree is what it is entirely because of its relations to other trees, to other plants, to animals, and so on. It is meaningless to dismiss any of this as "futile" as opposed to some other possible existence. If it had a different existence, it would be something else. Taken to the extreme, we have the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" - everything simply is its relations to everything else, with no ultimate underlying substance or essence to anything. There is no core "tree" that can be separated from everything else. There is no firm division between "this" and "not this," between "this kind of thing" and "that kind of thing."

How might this relate to human life? Let us return to the Prisoner's Dilemma again. If there were a well-defined human nature, we can say certain things are good, and it would be better for everyone if we had some agreement that no one should be a jerk. But given the current considerations, there is no well-defined good. Things are what they are, and what they are is defined by their competition and relations to everything else. Also, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, we see that short-term gains lead to long-term losses. But now we also see that there are even longer-term changes which alter the rules of the game.

How do we put these sundry ethical views together? On one level, maybe we can just acknowledge that different considerations lead to different conclusions, and that there has yet to be a single system to unify all of this. But these different views may not be contradictory. Human beings are what they are, both as biological beings striving to copy their DNA (whether or not they are aware of this) and as rational beings able to look at the big picture. The interaction between these aspects is not a theory to be solved.

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¹ Dawkins himself does not say that it is futile; his view I think at least dovetails with the one I put down here. He just points out that if we were to take as a hypothesis that there were a designer of the universe, many things that would see would be futile from that perspective.

² I won't go into whether this futility is evidence against design. I don't think that the example of trees settles it, but many other examples seem to me to present a rather sound case.

³ To some extent, of course, this is anthropomorphizing them, but there is no need to equate end-directedness to intent; more in another post.

⁴ Some readers but balk at the physicalism here. It seems to me that there needs to be a whole lot of work down to show that nature in any way, shape, or form demonstrates any sort of final cause beyond itself. Saying that it needs to be that way in order for there to be any hope in the world is an admission that any such view is wish fulfillment, pure and simple (not to mention the fact that many people find such a non-goal-oriented view of nature nevertheless inspiring and beautiful gives the lie to the assertion). Now, whether or not human beings can be reduced to such a physicalistic picture is a separate issue, one that is more complicated – all I am pointing out is that by our natures as human beings we have at least one foot in the same world as all of these physical going-ons.

⁵ Granted, trees that are planted all by their lonesome do not grow like trees in a forest, but a) they do not completely become like they would have had they not been the descendants of the other trees in the competition, & b) we can still talk about individual trees in the forest as being products of their environment.

Essentialism and Math

Many times, when we abstract pieces of information out of the world, we are trying to hold that little bit steady in order to have a fulcrum for moving everything else. When ask about what gravity is, we like at all of the things that move by gravitation - that is, everything gravity isn't. The apple that falls is not gravity itself, but what gravity acts upon. We ask what it is to be a cat, taking it as given for the moment that there is some roughly well-defined concept "cat" that interacts with the rest of the world.

Views that try to do away with this are considered sometimes to be incoherent. If I say that there are no individuals, that you are I are are really existent but are mere social constructions, that there are no stable selves, I must assume that there are stable selves in order to say this. I think that it is I who am thinking the thought "There are no stable selves," for example. And any view that denies that there is an ultimate truth takes this denial to be an ultimate truth.

It seems like we have to have two different views at the same time to make statements like these. We look at the world and see stable things, and then we look at the world and see flux. Problems like this abound in philosophy, and I will leave it to the audience to turn up more.

I want to look at mathematical functions & equations as an analogy. A mathematical function, as a function, has a dependent variable and at least one independent variable. Take a line, for example: that classic formula y = mx + b. Let us take in particular the line y = x + 5. x is the independent variable. It is what we control, the equivalent of these stable spots we make in the world. y is the dependent variable, which is everything else that we are explaining. If I set x to 1, y must be 6. If x is 200, y is 205. y is thus explained by x.

This is fine in many cases. y = x² + 2x + 1 makes a fine parabola. y = cos(3x/2 + π) makes a nice little wave. But what about a circle? The equation for a circle with a radius of 1 would be x² + y² = 1. But that is not a function. There is no longer an independent variable and a dependent one; we have to take it in all at once. If x is 0, then this does not explain y - there are the two possible values of 1 and -1. y cannot be the independent variable either for the same reason. No set of independent variables explains everything else.

We can describe a circle using two different functions: y = √ (1 - x²) and y = - √ (1 - x²). But there is no one function which does the job. It is not even in principle possible to describe a circle in a single function - we have to keep going back and forth between these two. If you want to set one variable constant, you can't have a unified grasp of the situation.

It were as if we were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle of the world. We have to set down a couple of pieces. However, this puzzle is odd in that, whenever we start with any pieces and then add the others, we can never get the whole puzzle. The only way to solve the puzzle is to set it down all at once.

There may yet be a way out. Take the equation r = 1. This describes the same circle, but in different coordinates. "r" is a variable representing radius, so r=1 is the function which captures all points at a distance of 1 from some central spot. Voila - a simple equation for a circle.

But just as it is hard representing a circle in rectangular coordinates, so too is it difficult to represent straight lines with polar coordinates (coordinates which describe shapes in terms of r, the radius or the distance from the origin, and θ, the angle of the line going out from the origin). So again, we can describe circles and spirals (r = θ) and other stuff like that at the cost of describing straight lines, or we can describe straight lines at the cost of describing circular curves. (I suppose we should talk about parametric functions here too, but I'm giving an analogy, not a full mathematical treatise). By making one thing set and settled, we have limited our options of what we can describe, even though at the same time there is something beyond what can be captured through independent & dependent variables.

This is not an argument for anything, but just a thought experiment to show that it is at least possible to say that we use our views of essences and substances, of fixed individual and set kinds, of steady states of whatever sort, to describe the world, even though they themselves are not in the end real constituents of the world. It is coherent to say that everything is dependent on everything else, without any first cause starting the chain. Or I can talk about myself as an individual being, as some set metaphysical reality with this particular "soul," even while at the same time acknowledging that there is some other "function" which does goes in a completely different direction. There may even be some grasp of the universe which must take things all together and not piecemeal (such as Platonic Forms & Neo-Platonic Nous), like how there is a equation for a circle in rectangular coordinates but no single function. But I'm more interested in leaving this as a playground of thought than any settled metaphysical view for now.

Reverse Prisoner's Dilemma

Often times in ethics, we are trying to give a reason why people shouldn't do bad things, and why doing the right thing is actually good for them. One way of doing this is using the prisoner's dilemma: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1899#comic. Basically, if only one person were a jerk, they could get off the hook. But if people start being jerks, everyone will be jerkish to compensate, and everyone ends up worse off.

But what about people being too nice? What sorts of ethical dilemmas does this raise? Let me give an example. I was biking up a (rather steep) hill the other day. Toward the top of this hill is a 4-way stop. Now, as I was nearing this hill, there was a car which had been fully stopped long before I reached the stop sign. They tried waving me on instead of going themselves.

If they had just gone as the rules dictated, without paying attention to me, they would have gone all the way through the intersection before I arrived. I would have slowed down, looked for traffic, and continued going through the intersection without having to come to a complete stop and start up again on a hill. Instead, they waited longer, and I had to completely regain all of my momentum. Everyone ended up worse off because of one person's niceness. (Admittedly, the world did not end for this egregious affront, but it does illustrate the point.)

A possible principle here seems to be this: special consideration for anyone throws off everyone. It doesn't really matter whether this is consideration for oneself or for another. It really ends up being the same, completely regardless of intention. Individuals are parts of some bigger whole because they interact with each other and affect each other; we are social animals and have to rely on others. The whole, in turn, is best off when order is preserved. Individuals may benefit short-term from acting disharmoniously (or from others doing such in mistaken niceness), but such behavior leads to long-term loss for everyone (of course, this “long-term” may be beyond the life of the particular individual, which is why asshole CEOs don't necessarily get what is coming to them, but that is yet another issue). (I would like to tie this to Kant's ethics, in particular to his “kingdom of ends” interpretation of the categorical imperative, but that is a different discussion.)

What is this “order”, though? Of course not every order will do – racist and sexist laws do not achieve what is overall best for everyone, so preserving any order simply for order's sake is not necessarily what is what will preserve the good. And there is not necessarily a single order – a 4-way stop sign arrangement seems to be reasonable and probably not oppressive, but there are other ways of managing residential intersections too. So ethics may be to some extent arbitrary, but that is not the same as saying that anything goes. (This actually was in part the view of the medieval thinker Duns Scotus: there is only one moral law which is necessarily true, i.e. that the first principle must be loved, while everything else is merely a fitting way of ordering the universe). So it might not be possible to find “the” one order to rule them all, but we can study particular ways of living to see which promote the good: which societies seem to give the best life for the most people?

Reason in Nature

I've started working with the Urban Ecology Center. It's actually nice to be out in the sun pulling weeds for a change, especially after sitting indoors in a chair all day. And, geek that I am, I am thoroughly excited to start learning about prairie plants and migratory birds (insert obligatory Monty Python joke here).

I was collecting seeds the other day, and one of the volunteers was explaining to a student about domestication and why domesticated rye has larger seeds than wild rye. I though about that, and how odd human cultivation is as a process of evolution. Normally, plants develop thorns and poisons and stuff to avoid being eaten. Here, though, under human care, they no longer resist us - they grow alongside us precisely to be eaten. We're on the same side instead of constantly opposed, as it were.

Now, I want to take this so far only as a metaphor - in reality, the rye doesn't care about having larger seeds or being domesticated, so we can't actually say that rye is "better" for the arrangement. I think that dogs and cats really do end up in a symbiotic relationship with human beings - they get regular food and shelter, lacking in the wild, and we get rid of mice and burglars, and we have funny internet memes.

But the point is this: human beings, given the sort of beings we are, can adapt to nature from within nature and rework it into an "everybody wins" sort of approach. Not always, granted, or in any way with even a modicum of grace at times. But think of how odd this is. If there are too many deer, they can't learn to cultivate grass or switch food sources. The grass gets eaten and the deer starve to death. The way to avoid this is an external force: add wolves or hunters to take down the number of deer.

That's where human beings differ. We have reason. We have an internal force for change. I don't mean by reason mere logic - that is merely one form that reason takes. Reason is the ability to take up the form of the world around us, to understand it and in so doing identify with it.

Think about this: What, in the end, am "I"? Something in some way tightly connected to this hunk of matter at particular spatio-temporal coordinates, to be sure. Certain patterns of brainwaves, yes. But I don't have to be just that. People identify with their good friends, parents identify with their children, patriots identify with their country, and so on. We all consider our "selves" to be something beyond ourselves (unless we really are concerned just with fulfilling basic needs, and honestly, that sounds like the most boring life possible to me.)

It is reason which lets us take up aspects of the world around us. If I identify with a certain task of domesticating wolves, for example, I have to know what wolves are like. I have to work with their natures as given - I have to accept the world and wolves as they are. To do otherwise will not result in the end I want nor in a dog that can benefit from my involvement. It may be an excellent way of getting mauled, however.

Of course, we also have people working with each other. When working with rye and wolves, human beings are not quite the same as the domesticated. With other humans, one might be concerned that I am giving a recipe for domination. But I am saying that we need to treat whatever we identify with as the sort of thing it is. Human beings aren't plants and can't be treated as such. If I were in a relationship, I would need to attend to my lover's needs as they in fact are. Failed and sickly relationships are the result of this not working, for any number of reasons. Good relationships are when both parties can in fact do this. Identification cannot be merely good intentions - it must involve trying as hard as possible to understand people and situations as they are in themselves. (Just trying to have good intentions usually results in trying to look good. Trying to have good results from within the world as it actually is and acting accordingly, is in itself a good intention.)

To act irrationally, by contrast, is to act counter to the way the world is, to act based on our own subjective whims and fancies, on what we "feel in our hearts" regardless of whether that stands up under scrutiny. It is, in short, to choose our current selves and our presently-limited preoccupations over what we could be, to choose deception and its short-term smothering comfort over truth. It is to become that deer that will starve to death unless it is ripped apart by wolves first. the deer that cannot even take care of itself because it could not take heed of its environment.

This is why I champion unending, thoughtful and careful analysis of our opinions and get tired of emotionalism, tribalism, and relativism of the sort that descends into mere etiquette and shuts off genuine debate. Reason is sometimes held up as the tool that divides and separates, but that is only its short term function. It must divide the true from the false, the real from the fantastic, and as long as society prefers its own whims, reason must break it. But this is for the goal of a better society, one in which the good is accessible to all in self-sustaining fashion, because people can take up themselves, each other, and the world around them as it is and as they are part of the whole. True, this is an ideal and most likely never reachable. But even though most of us will never reach the north pole, the direction North on the compass or GPS is still necessary for navigation.

Reason, ultimately, is justice.