Foucault and Breivik

Is Rubert Murdoch responsible for actions carried out by his employees?

Do murders by Anders Breivik reflect on islamophobic commentators?

Are feminists, egalitarians and liberals advancing a Europe-wide grand plan to actively undermine the basic structures of Western civilisation?

All of these questions reflect an underlying theoretical difficulty: how to understand unities in human society. When is it appropriate to see distinct actions by distinct agents as parts of a larger pattern, and when is it misleading?

The pertinence of the question is brought out by considering the sort of people who seem to do badly on this score, who we might call ‘paranoid’ or ‘conspiracy theorists’ – people who have no compunction against attributing apparently unrelated events to a single ‘plan’ or shadowy ‘power behind the scenes’. To the unconvinced, a lot of ‘radical’ theory might look rather like this: A does X, B does Y, and C does Z, all in different contexts, but they can all be explained as expressions of capitalist hegemony or whatever.

But it’s clearly also possible to err in the opposite direction: to treat a consistent series of events as a collection of uninformative coincidences, to ‘miss the forest for the trees’ and thus fail to learn from evident facts.

So the question is worth considering in the abstract. It’s really a version of a broader question, of how to understand unity in any domain – given that we need to ‘carve things up’, which scheme of division is most illuminating?

In relation to that broad question, I want to suggest that there are two different ways of thinking, separated by the question: must a principle of unity be itself unified? That is, when several things compose a (relatively) unified whole, will this be explained by citing some single thing, which they are all related to, or which they all share, or which otherwise unifies them? Or might they be unified by multiple links which are not themselves unified?

I think this issue runs through a number of philosophical topics. Here are some examples:

• Wittgenstein is famous for arguing that sometimes, a word can apply (non-ambiguously) to many things, without any single definition applying to all of them. Instead, there might be several different similarities which overlap, so that each item will have several relevant traits, but no trait is universal. These are often called ‘family resemblance’ terms.

 

• John Locke argued with Descartes over what it means for a person to remain the same individual over time; Descartes position was that a single, inherently unified entity, their ‘soul’, persists throughout someone’s life, even as their body and personality change. Locke argued, on the contrary, that they were the same person as long as enough threads of memory bound the different stages of their life together: even if the 80-year-old can’t remember the experiences of the 5-year-old, they can remember the experiences of the 30-year-old who can.

 

• Part of the goal of Spinoza’s theory of physical objects is to reject the Aristotelian idea of ‘form’ – that for an object to be really a single object it must have a single ‘form’ which is inherently a unity and which causally explains how it operates and what its properties are. Spinoza argues that, on the contrary, all that’s needed for an object to be a single object is that each of its parts be related in a stabilising way to some of its other parts, even if those relations are of irreducibly various kinds.

This photo shows the reanimated corpse of Michel Foucault at a party

Wittgenstein, Locke, and Spinoza are here making similar moves – explaining unity by reference something not itself unified – in different domains. I originally raised this topic in relation to a different domain – human society. The person I most associate with making the same move in this domain is Michel Foucault.

Foucault (at one stage in the orgy of re-invention, neologisms and orgies that was his life) uses the term ‘apparatus’ (French ‘dispositif’) for the sort of social unity he sought to study, a “system of relations… established between… a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble” of elements. The aim of this concept, he says, is to both show the role of “a dominant strategic function”, and avoid positing “any kind of strategic ruse on the part of some meta- or trans-historical subject”.

On my reading, the development of an apparatus involves two processes, one in which a “strategic objective” is addressed by some person or group, using the sort of deliberate, conscious intent that people display, and one in which, passively and without planning, “each effect…enters into resonance or contradiction with the others and thereby calls for a re-adjustment…of the heterogeneous elements”. But each element is also open to being “re-utilised” by some other personal project, which in turn would estblish further ‘resonances’ in society at large.

Consider how picture might apply to ‘islamophobia’. At various times, various people and groups have found some perceived utility in formulating and expressing the existential threat posed to ‘the West’ by ‘Islam’.

These might have been largely independent of each other at first – one president finds it fitting into his vision of re-asserting American power and values in Asia, one commentator finds it gets them readers, one angry conservative finds it a neat explanation and focus for their anxieties about cultural change, one angry young man finds it a satisfying target for their ambient feelings of persecution and frustration. Each of these situations is the product of previous ‘narratives’, previous ‘apparatuses’.

But each of these individual ‘strategic elaborations’ enters into ‘resonance’ with the others: the president’s speeches reinforce the columnist’s plausibility to readers, those columns in turn encourage the angry conservative’s anger, which leads them to vote for that president on account of his ‘tough stance’. The independent strategies connect via. a sort of feedback that tends to make them more coherent, producing a systematic social phenomenon which can easily appear planned.

Obviously this leaves a lot of questions unanswered, including the ones I began with. I’m really just trying to draw together certain threads of my own thoughts, unified by the idea of unification without a unified principle of unity.

Philosophy and Masturbation: Anatomy of a Metaphor

Marx famously claimed that “philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.” People have occasionally made similar remarks to me in the past, usually disparaging a particular type of philosophy, or the philosophy done by certain people, as ‘just mutual masturbation’.

I was reminded of this recently by reading this post about this response to this article, which don’t use the motif of masturbation at all, but do centre around the question of whether philosophy ‘matters’, whether it has any relevance to or effect on the rest of the world, or is merely, shall we say, a ‘solitary pleasure’. I was also reading this paper, about the role that metaphors play in our everyday thinking (turns out that role is: ‘big’). The disparagement of philosophy as ‘masturbatory’ is a metaphor, and I found myself wondering what exactly it was saying, and what exactly it was leaving unsaid.

The disparagement:

The disparagement of masturbation is actually a very complex thing. There are different definitions of masturbation, contrasting it with different things, and then different rationales for disparaging it.

On the definition issue, we might first assume that ‘masturbation’ essentially means solitary sexual acts, and is thus contrasted with any kind of sexual act with another person: hence it would be disparaged for failing to ‘make contact with’ other people.

But there is this phrase ‘mutual masturbation’, which primarily means two people ‘masturbating each other’, i.e. a form of sexual contact. Not all sexual activities are ‘sex’, whatever that means.  This suggests that masturbation has a wider meaning, not confined to solitary acts, which would imply that it must be disparaged for some other reason.

One possibility is that it’s disparaged as ‘sterile’, i.e. non-procreative; another possibility is that it’s disparaged as non-penetrative – it’s all very well to rub someone’s genitals but unless there’s a penis in a vagina you’re not having ‘real’ sex or ‘proper’ sex.

Then there’s the question of why any of this is disparaged. One possibility is that it’s morally objectionable – masturbating is wicked and wrong. Alternatively, it might be just less valuable or worthwhile than sex, in a non-moral sense: masturbating is not wrong but just sad, pointless, or pathetic. Thirdly, it might be the more nuanced view that masturbation is inferior to sex because you normally masturbate while thinking about sex, or at least about other people: the act itself posits (penetrative?) sex as more desirable.

The Analogy:

Then there’s more choices to make when drawing a link with philosophy. For one, what is the contrast with? For Marx it’s “study of the actual world”, whatever that is; for Fish it’s implicitly “energy policy, trade policy, debt reduction, military strategy, domestic life” and more or less everything else. Sometimes it’s just ‘better’ philosophy. Sometimes its politics, or science.

And the way that ‘masturbation’ is understood forces further questions: if masturbation is contrasted with procreation, what are the ‘babies’ – technological advances? Revolutions? If it’s contrasted with ‘making contact’, who is a philosopher trying to make contact with – other people? Other disciplines? ‘The actual world’? And what plays the privileged role of ‘penetration’ in each of those relationships?

The big question, next, is why philosophy is to be disparaged. If masturbation is disparaged as a moral failure to use the sexual organs in the right way, then philosophy might be a moral failure to use our intellectual faculties for their ‘proper purpose’. In a less moral tone, this failure might just be sad and embarassing.

Or, if masturbation is disparaged because it involves fantasising about something else, philosophy likewise might be disparaged for fantasising about something else – perhaps fantasies of radicalism and social ‘deconstruction’, perhaps fantasies of being able to learn meaningful things.

Defences:

Suppose you wanted to dispute this disparagement of philosophy. One way would be to accept the disparagement of masturbation, but deny the analogy, claiming that philosophy really is ‘penetrative’, or ‘procreative’, or whatever: it does what the disparaging analogy says it doesn’t do.

On the other hand, you might instead reject the disparagement of masturbation: sure, maybe philosophy is like masturbation, but that’s good! This, I think, will often reflect a different view of what philosophy is and what it’s for.

For instance, one might defend masturbation on the grounds that it allows us to have better sex, by making us more in touch with our bodies and feelings. The analogous defence of philosophy would be that by ‘conceptual analysis’, it puts us more in touch with (or more in command of, if that’s different) the concepts we use, the intuitions we rely on, the values we act on, etc. when we’re doing other things, like science or politics.

That, of course, still accepts that masturbation/philosophy needs to be justified by reference to something else. An alternative would be to say ‘I enjoy it, and that’s enough for it to be worthwhile, and I don’t need to justify it any further’. This makes sense on one level; but then, you might still wonder, if it’s fine to just do it just for enjoyment, why do I do so by filling my mind with thoughts that go beyond enjoyment – thoughts of the universe, the human soul, the human body, etc.

A fourth option is what we might call the ‘cynical’ view, in both its classical and its colloquial meanings. This view says that yes, masturbation/philosophy is delusional and impotent and stupid, but actually so is what it’s contrasted with. Most or all sex with other people is really you projecting your personal fantasy images onto a willing accomplice in exchange for letting them project theirs onto you. Most politics is ineffective or counter-productive posturing, and science never actually teaches us anything about how reality is.

On this view, philosophy/masturbation is the wisest activity, because at leasts it can be open about being just fantasy. The noblest thing that a person can achieve is to shout at everybody else for being hypocrites and masturbate in public.

So there’s five possible views of philosophy:

1. Philosophy is stupid and pointless, like masturbation is
2. Philosophy is potent and pregnant, unlike masturbation
3. Philosophy is an useful auxiliary activity to science/politics/life, as masturbation is to sex
4. Philosophy is just an idle, innocent amusement, like masturbation, and none the worse for it
5. Philosophy is no more pointless or empty than any other discipline, but (potentially) more able to understand its own emptiness, just as masturbation is sex without the bullshit.

I leave it up to the reader to decide which they prefer.

Does the Norwegian Terrorist Attack Reflect on Islamophobes in General?

Should the killings in Norway affect our opinion of ‘islamophobic’ writers more broadly? This question has arisen in several blogs I’ve seen over the last week, and it interests me. So, I will voice some thoughts. To start with, two representative quotations:

“[Anders Breivik] was imbued with some version of an ideology which is widespread on the internet and to some extent in Western societies: nativism, extreme anxiety about Islam, hatred for liberal multiculturalist “enablers” of this, and so on. Ideas to be found on thousands of blogs, in the writings of wingnut columnists and neocons, in the shared beliefs of Tea Partiers and birthers, among the rabble of the English Defence League, and among the further fringes of extreme supporters of Israel…they didn’t pull the trigger, but they helped to build an epistemic environment in which someone did.”

“This hard-right commentariat has bent over backwards to distort any facts it can come across to create an almost entirely fictitious bogeyman… and cannot wash its hands of the matter if a dangerous individual… decides to take this rhetoric to what they see as its logical conclusion.”

A note on terminology: ‘islamophobia’ is a contentious word, but I think it’s exactly right for the set of ideas under discussion. What I take it to mean is the idea that islam is a threat, and that we should be scared – the idea that muslims, by outbreeding, suicide bombing, and introducing ‘sharia law by stealth’, pose ‘an existential threat’ to Western societies.

Of course, ‘-phobia’ adds to this a suggestion of irrationality, but that also seems quite reasonable to me. Some muslims may pose a threat to some people, but there is no plausible scenario in which either muslim immigration or islamist terrorism could seriously threaten any western society as a whole society (e.g. by military invasion, armed insurrection, etc.)

Is Breivik ‘just mad’?

One idea that appears is that Breivik’s acts are ‘the acts of a lunatic’ and as such shouldn’t be connected with any particular social or political group or movement. This article even suggests he shouldn’t be called a ‘terrorist’.

One thing to say is that the category of ‘madness’ here may be an unhelpful or pernicious way to carve things up: most people with ‘a mental illness’ don’t shoot anyone, so ‘he’s mad’ doesn’t seem to do much explanatory term unless we’re implicitly suggesting they do, or might.

But set that aside, and suppose we substitute some more specific phrase like “delusions of persecution”. The more basic point is that this move – the attacks are not political because the perpetrator was delusional – seems to presume something like this idea: ‘causality in the mind of someone with delusions of persecution is disconnected from normal social causality’.

But when stated like that, this doesn’t seem to be true. People may be diagnosed with a mental illness because a particular sort of causality (between evidence and belief, or between desire and action, etc.) is operating in an abnormal or dysfunctional way, but that’s not the same as them being causally isolated from politics and culture.

Indeed, it seems that part of the social character of certain social phenomena might be precisely their resemblance to, or attractiveness to, people with delusions of persecution. Most obviously, social phenomena in which people claim to be persecuted with little cause. And that, arguably, is what Islamophobia is.

Is there an analogy to Islam?

Another talking point has been that if lefties blame Islamophobes in general for Breivik, then they must also accept the reasonableness of blaming Muslims in general for Bin Laden et al. But they don’t, and make a point of denouncing such a maneouvre, so they have no right to use an analogous maneouvre now.

But the analogy doesn’t hold. Islamophobia is a set of ideas about real-world priorities and real-world threats. It directly relates to what needs to be done here and now. Islam is a religion, and thus while it might present itself as having meaningful consequences for how to live one’s life, in practice it doesn’t. It provides a set of texts, symbols, etc. which people can weave into an indefinite variety of theories about what needs to be done here and now.

The right analogy would be to say “left-wingers shouldn’t say that Breivik’s actions reflect badly on everyone who espouses Norwegian patriotism or a love of the Norwegian flag”. And, of course, that would be true, but as far as I know nobody has said that.

What would be reasonable, I think, would be to hold islamist terrorism against some or all versions of islamism, which is precisely a mapping of the symbols of islam onto certain real-world priorities and threats. Even then, there are probably important distinctions between forms of islamism (by analogy, Salvadorean liberation theology and US Christian fundamentalism are not the same creature).

Is there an analogy to socialism?

A trickier question, though, is whether someone blaming, say, Melanie Phillips for Breivik’s actions, even only slightly, would be inconsistent if they didn’t blame prominent socialists for the actions of the Red Army Faktion. Historically, there have been a lot of murderous bastards who have justified themselves by citing Engels, Gramsci, or whoever.

(I’m using ‘socialism’ for convenience, but the strongest form of this rejoinder would no doubt select some narrower and more coherent strand of left-wing ideology)

The validity of this depends what sort of principle is being employed. If it’s of the form:

“When A publicly promotes ideas X, and B subsequently murders 100 teenagers and claims to have been motivated by ideas X, we should regard both ideas X and person A more negatively than before”

Then it seems like it probably will cut both ways. But maybe that’s the wrong principle. Consider that often we seem to employ two different moral principles with a conditionalising relationship.

For instance, we might think that society should adjust its criminal punishments to best serve the goal of deterrence, but only insofar as is consistent with an independent principle of desert – that is, nobody can be punished merely to deter others, they have to have done something to deserve it first.

So similarly, we might think that there are two principles at work here: one of judging people by the effects their ideas have, and one of judging people for flaws internal to their ideas – e.g. for dishonesty, hysteria, double standards, twisting evidence, etc. That is, people are to be blamed for the ways their writing falls short of ideal standards of honesty and wisdom, but how much blame they merit for those flaws can be affected by the contingent outcomes.

This would mean that the actions of ‘socialist’ terrorists could reflect badly not on all public defenders of socialism (or the relevant strand of ideas), but rather on those who wrote dishonest, prejudiced or misleading things. And that seems fairly reasonable.

I didn’t realise Agent Orange was still in use.

“Brazil’s environment agency, IBAMA, discovered a 178 hectare patch of dead trees during a recent overflight of an area of the western Brazilian Amazon…reportedly destroyed illegally with chemical defoliant sprayed from an airplane.

The uncontacted Indians thought to be living nearby rely completely on their forest to survive. Outsiders are banned from entering their area

…chemical defoliant can poison humans and animals, aside from killing trees and contaminating soil.”

To clarify why outsiders cannot enter the land of uncontacted people, “it is not unusual for 50% of a tribe to be wiped out within a year of first contact, by diseases such as measles and influenza….their decision not to maintain contact with other tribes and outsiders is almost certainly a result of previous disastrous encounters”

A few reactions:

Emotionally: ugh. This is awful and wrong, on multiple levels.

Philosophically: if there is such a thing as property rights not dependent on social conventions, they  have just been massively violated.  Also, if there’s any objective sense in which people can be grouped into distinct ‘societies’, then ‘our society’ may have just destroyed another one.

I’m fairly certain that the dispossession and poisoning of the humans and animals in this area is a horrifying crime. Intuitively, part of me wants to say that it’s also potentially a loss to ‘the world’, which we might imagine has some sort of non-instrumental interest in the existence of biodiversity and cultural diversity, which actions like this destroy. But I’m not sure if that’s a ethical claim (about real interests being harmed) or an aesthetic claim (about the things I consider beautiful, in the broadest sense of that word).

Bean-countingly: when all is said and done (i.e. when everyone affected has died a slow painful death) this almost unreported event may have a greater death toll than the Norwegian atrocities two days ago. At least the lack of media attention means nobody’s tried to blame it on Muslims.

Facetiously-bordering-on-disrespectfully: the ‘Prime Directive’ of Star Trek, which as it stands never made much real sense, would make a lot more sense if the likely outcome of any ‘First Contact’ was catastrophic epidemics.

(via. Feminist Philosophers)

Murdoch’s Responsibilities and Distinct Consciousness

I will confess that I watch the implosion of the Murdoch empire with moderate glee. I especially enjoy the way that responsibility seems to creep upward along various chains of influence, implicating bosses, police, and politicians as well as individual reporters.

But the question of responsibility is somewhat philosophically fraught. For instance, here’s an article that argues that “It may well be true that Ms. Brooks and Mr. Murdoch never told anyone to hack into the cellphone of Milly Dowler…or even knew it had happened. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t responsible for it.“

In response, this article calls that idea “wildly impractical if not totally illogical“, and one might be forgiven a certain puzzlement even though the reasons the article goes on to give are transparently fallaciou (namely, because the example used concerns a much more serious wrong, there can’t be the same manner of responsibility involved).

Now, I have no idea what the facts are – who said what, and who thought what, etc. But it’s instructive to consider various possibilities, and ask on what grounds it is or would be appropriate to blame Brooks or Murdoch for the actions of their employees.

To frame the question, here’s three possible ways for a subordinate to do something wrong.

A: they’re explicitly told to, with literal words like “hack that 13-year-old’s damn phone”

B: they’re not told to at all, in any sense – they’re told “Luke, get me an essay by Friday” and they then decide to hack into a 13-year-old’s phone

C: they’re deliberately told to, but implicitly, but not explicitly – the superior says “find out everything you can about this kidnapped girl”, and it’s consciously understood by both of them that this means illegal invasions of privacy, if necessary

Now, what actually happened might have been any of these three. But I think the suggestion in Roger Martin’s article above is that there’s a fourth option:

D: they’re told to, but in such a way that neither they nor their superior consciously understands the instruction that way

This is puzzling. How can I give an instruction I’m not conscious of giving? That’s what I’ll try to analyse.

Consider a simple example. I tell someone ‘bring me a chair’. There’s a lot of ‘unconscious’ content here. For instance, I’m conscious of the concept ‘chair’ that I employ, but this concept packs in a lot: it means, roughly, something artificial (unlike a rock) which people sit on (unlike a table) designed for one person (unlike a sofa) and with a back (unlike a stool). I don’t think about how chairs differ from stools or sofas, those facts don’t appear in my mind distinctly, but they are crucial elements in what the concept ‘chair’ is, and I’m conscious of that concept. They contribute to its ‘shape’ in my mind.

I want to call these aspects of a though ‘peripherally conscious’, in contrast to what’s ‘focally conscious’, because they’re analogous to the way that although I don’t consciously identify or think about most of the colours and shapes in the periphery of my visual field, they are still part of what my visual experience is right now. They’re elements of the conscious experience, but are not distinctly conscious.

(Incidentally, I think this is also a major theme of the cognitive psychology of Early Modern rationalist philosophers like Spinoza or Descartes – the key distinction among thoughts is between the more ‘distinct’ and the more ‘confused’)

A more relevant example might be the instruction “find out everything you can about this kidnapped girl, and no messing about!”, where the phrase “messing about” covers a wide range of things, only some of which are distinctly or ‘focally’ conscious. It covers laziness, and wasting time by trying to verbally one-up other workers. It covers uptight personal codes like “never speak ill of the dead”, or not asking a juicy question out of sympathy for the person being asked. But crucially, it might also include not doing something because it would be illegal or immoral. It might include this as a form of ‘messing about’, placing something unimportant above one’s job, without distinctly thinking about this case at all – after all, when you say ‘fruit’, you don’t mentally go through every different thing that you would count as a fruit.

So my thought is that option D, above, is something like this: the illegal action in question is part of the superior’s peripheral consciousness, because it’s comprised in the full meaning of their instruction but isn’t distinctly, focally, conscious.

What would this imply, were it true? Does this make the superior ‘responsible’? On the one hand, you might say they’re not responsible, because they didn’t “know” what they were peripherally conscious of – nobody can scrutinise all of their thoughts all the time, on pain of infinite regress. That is, what’s not focally conscious is not conscious in the necessary sense for responsibility.

On the other hand, they were conscious of the instruction they gave, and they voluntarily intended that it be expressed and followed. If illegal phone-hacking was a part of that conscious thought, doesn’t that make it consciously intended? Moreover, aren’t people under some obligation to be sensitive to and careful about what they say and mean, and what it might imply?

I’m inclined to think this is a matter of degree. I’m less responsible for something in the periphery of my intention than for something at the ‘focus’, but still somewhat responsible, and more so more that element was ‘close to the surface’, easier to reflect on or bring into focus. This supports the idea that Brooks, Murdoch etc. are partially responsible – even if they didn’t distinctly know about the bribes etc., which is quite possible. But it also suggests that in general, any given person accrues a constant low level of responsibility for the unscrutinised import of their everyday thoughts and actions, a sort of karmic dirt that gets on your feet wherever you tread – which may be a reasonable, or an unreasonable, conclusion.

Is Life Ultimately Futile?

The question that idiots always ask when they learn you’re a philosopher is “so what’s the meaning of life?” This question is probably unanswerable, and that’s probably because it’s not a real question, or at least not a single real question.

At the same time, it’s not entirely worthless to consider, at least because it expresses certain feelings or impulses that do seem to matter to people. Today I’m not going to even begin addressing that topic, but a preliminary topic: is life devoid of meaning? I think there are tendencies that might make it seem as though life is, ultimately, devoid of meaning, but that these tendencies are unreliable.

I suspect the argument I’ll consider is generally only used unconsciously, rather than explicitly spelt out. And I suspect it’s used not only by nihilists trying to make their position sound more reasonable, but also by theists or sundry mystics trying to make their opponents sound less attractive – if there is no God, then existence is just a huge meaningless sequence, and isn’t that horrible? So that’s an added reason to be interested in it.

Even that requires some clarification. Firstly, what is this ‘meaning’ that life might or might not be devoid of? I’m deliberately leaving that unspecified – it’s whatever people are trying to evoke the idea of when they use the word ‘meaning’ in this context. Same goes for ‘life’. Moreover, that life is ‘devoid of meaning’ might be a pessimistic doctrine, that really everything is genuinely futile, and if you’re not filled with despair you’ve misunderstood things, or it might be a ‘heroic’ doctrine, that life is to be given meaning, whatever meaning we wish. I will consider it in the first, gloomier, sense.

The Argument:

So here, in rough outline, is an argument that, if we consider things rationally (and there is no God), life is meaningless: life only seems meaningful when we think on small scales, about our lives, our countries, our species; when we think on larger scales, about the whole universe or the whole history of the solar system, life tends to seem meaningless. But the latter way to think is more ‘ultimate’, more genuine, and hence life really is meaningless.

Let’s unpack this a bit. The idea is that ‘life, the universe, and everything’ appears different from two different perspectives, but one perspective deserves to be taken more seriously. Of course, it might be disputed that things do seem that way: some people may feel inspired by the vast sweep of inky blackness that surrounds us, and others might find every event on this planet’s surface individually humdrum and stupid.

But let’s grant that we can have these sorts of emotional reactions: from one perspective, life seems meaningful, from another perspective, futile. Suppose also that life can’t be both meaningful and meaningless at once. The two impressions, then, are in conflict, and which should win?

The argument relies on something like the following principle: if something looks different from two perspectives, the more encompassing, or fuller, perspective is the one that should be taken more seriously. In this case, the ‘grand cosmic’ perspective would appear to be more encompassing, to take more into account.

I think this principle has a certain plausibility. For instance, if a given action seems very intelligent when you focus on how much money it would make you, but then seems very stupid when you think about the money, the time, the risk, and the effort involved, then surely you should pay more attention to the latter impression. Preferring partial perspectives to broader perspectives seems to be the essence of irrationality.

The Rebuttal:

The principle just appealed to is quite plausible, but here’s another principle: when we’re ill-equipped to understand some object, process, or subject-matter, we often don’t recognise the significance that it does have. Obviously this is sometimes a simple matter of lacking background knowledge, or having sense-organs that simply can’t pick out important details. But I think it can involve more subtle things.

For instance, imagine a mathematician trying to explain to a non-mathematician what makes a certain proof ‘beautiful’. Or imagine trying to explain to a psychopath why it matters that their business plan will hurt tiny rabbits. Or consider a set of numbers coming out a stock exchange, which to one person looks simply like a set of numbers, and to another looks like a picture of the whole world’s events of the last day. In each case, simply presenting the uncomprehending party with all the facts might not make a difference: what they lack is ‘understanding’, a certain way of grasping those facts and integrating them so as to make what they are observing meaningful.

A more general example is the difficulty that humans have with big numbers. 5? They can handle 5. They can maybe even handle a hundred. But above a thousand or so, they stop thinking ‘this particular number’ and start thinking ‘a really big number’. Hence it’s very easy to confuse them by throwing in big numbers, saying them as though they were breath-takingly important, and not providing the right sorts of comparisons to make them meaningful.

Generalising from these cases, we can say that the ‘meaning’ in something requires a certain amount of cognitive work to make it manifest. And cognitive work requires cognitive resources, which in the human case are finite.

Appealing to this principle, we might say that while ‘life as a whole’ is deeply meaningful, but we can’t really grasp how or why because our minds are built for dealing with much smaller things, or much more familiar things. To appreciate this meaningfulness would require not just our mind, considering the infinity of existence, but an infinite mind, considering the infinity of existence. And we have no idea what that viewpoint would be like.

That is, we might say that although the perspective from which life seems futile is more ultimate than the perspective from which life appears meaningful, it’s ultimate in a skewed way – it concerns itself with ultimate things, but lacks the cognitive equipment to deal with them properly – and this distorts it and makes it less reliable.

Conclusion:

This wouldn’t in itself be an argument for life being meaningful; it would just be a debunking of an argument for life being meaningless. Perhaps, given this, the reasonable inference is that if life seems meaningful ‘at our level’, then it probably is meaningful, deep down. But maybe that inference is itself unreasonable. Quite possibly, the whole question is ill-framed or otherwise unanswerable. But then again maybe it’s not: without a rigorous analysis of what the terms used mean (in particular, what does ‘meaningful’ mean?) we won’t be able to decide whether it’s even a real question.

On Revolutionary Baboons

(there will be proper posts soon, but today another link)

This link is to a Russian-doll of awesome. The outer doll is the blog, ‘sex nerd‘, which I am adding to my blogroll for its combination of science and militant humanism. The doll inside that is a post, about a story about baboons inside a documentary about stress.

I’m most intrigued by the baboon story. In essence, a mix of factors led to all the aggressive, stressed-out, anti-social baboons (mostly males) in a certain troop dying. As a result, the remaining members (mostly females) began to interact in a markedly different way: less aggression in general, less competition, more grooming, more getting-together-and-feeling-alright.

Moreover, that new culture seems to have been able to maintain itself by training new members to behave in the same way. That is, a new stable social arrangement became possible which had not previously been observed, and individuals behaved differently within that arrangement.

I’d like to use this to bolster a slightly more abstract point: I think the intellectually responsible course is to take mutability as a default assumption, not fixity. A mutable species, capable of a range of different social formations, might very easily display only a single, rigid, pattern in 100 different observations, because some non-obvious feature of the circumstances was keeping it in one of its stable states. But if we infer that it’s innately fixed that way, and can’t change, we’d be misled.

Moreover, we’re probably somewhat biased towards ‘innate fixity’ reasoning, because it simplifies our information processing. Certainly, our impressions of other people tend to over-estimate the role of internal dispositions in explaining situational behaviour. There may be more evidence regarding this that I’m not familiar with.

Given that, a certain active presumption of flexibility seems reasonable, to correct these two sources of error. But perhaps I’m myself being biased by my emotional investment in ideas of radical change, like economic co-ordination without private ownership of productive wealth. That’s something else to be wary of.