This Is Not News

I went to Neil Sinhababu’s site to research something for a longer, more serious piece I wanted to write. And I will still write that piece. Tomorrow. Because what I found on Neil’s site was a link to a webcomic called Lump of Clay, which did a long series of strips attempting to use the ontological argument to prove the existence of a perfect girlfriend.

(If you don’t know the ontological argument, here’s the very condensed version: if you can imagine a perfect x, then there must be an x in the world. Because a perfect x would have to be an x that exists. Why? Because existing is better than not existing. So an x that didn’t exist would have something wrong with it, and couldn’t be perfect. This argument is usually used to try to prove the existence of God. It is much more entertaining when used to prove the existence of a perfect girlfriend.)

The forum at the Library went pretty well today, I believe. When the conversation between Kloppenberg, Kuklick, and Westbook expanded to include the audience, there was definitely an intellectual energy that I found welcome. It brought me back to the excitement I felt when I first started studying pragmatism, and felt like I had found philosophical work that had some of the resources I was looking for. So I feel fortunate to have had a chance to help out with the event. It also left me thinking that there’s a useful purpose to this site, in getting some of these ideas out into the electronic conversation. Since I finished the dissertation, I think I’ve been taking the pragmatist background of the site more for granted and occasionally bringing it up in reference to particular issues. So I’m going to try to balance those posts out with the occasional re-visit to some of the important themes and texts in the pragmatist democratic tradition. We’ll see how that goes.

The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium is hosting a public forum on American Pragmatism and American Politics this Saturday at the Free Library on Logan Circle. The event is at 1:00 PM in the Montgomery Auditorium. I’m actually pretty excited about it, because three of the people other than John Dewey who are most responsible for my interest in pragmatism are going to be there: Robert Westbrook (who wrote John Dewey and American Democracy), Bruce Kuklick (who assigned me the aforementioned book in an intellectual history seminar in 1999) and James Kloppenberg (whose Uncertain Victory was one of the first comprehensive overviews of pragmatism and American social politics I read in my research). So if you’re in the area, come on down and philosophize.

Following up somewhat on yesterday’s post, here’s an article from today’s Inquirer about brain research in Germany, where scientists are conducting research to see if they can use brain scans to determine a person’s intention to perform a mathematical operation.

In one study, participants were told to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers a few seconds before the numbers were flashed on a screen. In the interim, a computer captured images of their brain waves to predict the subject’s decision – with one pattern suggesting addition, and another subtraction.

What’s not fully clear from this article – and I’m going to see if I can track down more details – is whether or not the patterns were noticeable before the subjects consciously made their decision. It sounds like they did, but I’m not 100 percent sure. If so, it would seem to be an indication that what feels to us in our inner thoughts like we’re “making a decision” is just our phenomenal consciousness getting something of a status report about what our entire organism has already set out to do.

In turn, there’s a potentially important semantic discussion about whether the brain pattern in question is an explanation for the decision, or if it is the decision. (Although even in the latter case, one would presume that there is an explanation for the particular brain pattern in the relationship between the nervous sytem and the environment. That is, I presume all this until the neuroscience experts show up to take me to school.)

I’ve been giving some thought to explanations lately. As a teacher and as the parent of a five-year-old, I spend a lot of time explaining things, and I’ve been wondering a bit about what makes a good explanation. I’m talking here about explaining why things happen the way they do – explaining what the heck Descartes means in contemporary English is a whole other ball of wax. And it strikes me that if we’re trying to give a full explanation of why Event A occurs, what we’re trying to do is identify a set of conditions X, Y and Z. And if the explanation is a full one, then whenever you have conditions X, Y, and Z, you are assured that you also have Event A. (I’m fudging the distinction between what philosophers call necessary and sufficient conditions here. I’ll try and get back to that.) If you can have conditions X, Y and Z but not have Event A, then there’s something that’s missing from your explanation. (For example, if I say “The explanation for that water boiling is that it reached 212 degrees Fahrenheit,” and then we go into high altitude and discover that 212-degree water doesn’t boil, we have to add somethign to our explanation about atmospheric pressure and sea level.) Now, maybe there’s a condition W that we hadn’t identified, and maybe there’s a pure random element such that you can’t ever give a full explanation. But in terms of defining a good explanation, it seems like this is what we’re going for.

And something that has struck me a number of times over the years is that if we think that there’s an explanation for things, then we’re essentially saying that there’s a mechanism driving events, that specific conditions dictate certain outcomes. Now, maybe we human beings won’t ever discover the explanations and the mechanisms. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. So if the world is explainable, doesn’t that suggest that the world is what is, and that it can’t be changed? That whatever efforts we might make to change or not change the world are, in fact, already part of the mechanism? (“I’m sorry my paper is late, Dr. Thomer. A pterodactyl took a wrong turn millions of years ago, so I overslept.”)

Not that a world that can’t be explained is a whole lot more reassuring. I mean, the reason we want explanations is so that we can feel like we have some control over our lives – if I do X, I will get Y. To the extent that the world is random, I can’t have any control over it.

When I think about things like this, I get the sense that I’m sticking myself into a binary, either-or box, and like a good pragmatist I should try and find the shade of gray somewhere in between. But I’ll be damned if I have a clear idea of what that shade is, sometimes.

• Dave Thomer posted on March 6, 2007
  Glad the posting problems are over. On the one hand, pragmatism helps a ittle, especially Dewey's idea that the universe ...
• Robn posted on March 6, 2007
  OK, my posting woes are fixed! Thanks, Dave! (I'm just going to use different browser for different wordpress accounts ...

If there is one philosophical device I am absolutely sick to death of, it’s the dialogue. Apparently some writers figure that no one wants to read a boring treatise about some kind of abstract theory. So instead, they write a boring play in which multiple characters debate the abstract theory through stilted dialogue. Maybe it’s the fiction-reader in me, but I read these things and I just want to scream “exposition dump!” Characters don’t sound natural, they have to contort themselves to drop names and establish theories, and usually there’s clearly one character who’s destined to be right. (In Plato, it was Socrates.)

I remember in college our professor had us watch a movie called Mindwalk, in which Sam Waterston plays a senator who’s just dropped his campaign for the presidency and so his poet friend takes him to a beach in France, and while touring a castle they meet some French woman who decides to start talking to them bout how the Cartesian worldview has affected Western society for hundreds of years. On the one hand, the characters had their own existential crises they were trying to get through. On the other, they had to recount hundreds of years of Western philosophy while they traipsed around the beach. By the end of it I was begging for a lecture.

I am reminded of all this by one of my education textbooks, which is full of dialogues. And boy oh boy are they stilted. And full of stereotypes – the author has apparently decided to be “edgy” by occasionally having one character call another a racist or a conservative idiot or what-have-you. At least there’s no clear voice-of-the-author character.

In the end, I think I’d rather read or see a work of fiction, with fleshed-out characters delivering compelling dialogue, that illustrates a philosophical conflict rather than make the philosophical debate the centerpiece of the story. It’s not like anyone’s breaking down my door to start a philosophy reality show – these conversations are interesting to participate in, but not much of a spectator sport.

Another education class tonight, and I’m trying to process everything that we discussed. It’s weird – the economic disparities underlying education in this country, and the way those play into racial/ethnic distinctions, seems like an undercurrent of the class, and something that’s very much on the mind of the professor. But it’s not being brought to the fore in a systematic way, so that people can understand it and use it to analyze other issues.

We spent a lot of time talking about the notion of tracking in public schools tonight, for example. And as someone who took a lot of honors classes in school, I know I felt a little defensive about the idea that my own education didn’t live up to the democratic ideals I have now. And then right at the end of the discussion, someone else mentioned that so far neither we nor the textbook had discussed the contrast between public schools and expensive private schools in terms of creating separate expectations for students. Which was a really good point, but one that kind of implied that the entire discussion so far had been kind of missing a key piece, you know?

Look, I’m all for making students construct knowledge for themselves. But I still kinda think that a little more structure would be helping us do so more efficiently.

• Robn posted on January 25, 2007
  Awesome, on all 3 counts. You ARE as crazy as me. A rare gift.
• Dave Thomer posted on January 25, 2007
  Little of door number 1, little of door number 2, plus some of door number 3 to go with it. Door ...
• Robn posted on January 25, 2007
  I hope you don't mind me asking a personal question here! Are you doing a Master's in Ed. because ...

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic!

I couldn’t decide whether to file this under Philosophy or Culture & Media, but figured that the more interesting material is the philosophical questions touched on by the media, so I went with Philosophy. And it’s a good way to talk about the memory theory.

The memory theory is a way of trying to answer the question of personal identity: what is it that makes me, me? What is it that, if it were changed, would mean that the person I am would cease to be? Theories based on the body tend not to work, because the use of artificial limbs, organ transplants, and so on provide a pretty easy counterexample – our physical composition can change in some pretty dramatic ways, but we don’t think that we’ve become different persons. Likewise, it’s hard to use personality or beliefs as the key identifier, because people tend to change their minds about things.

The memory theory basically argues that we can form a viable definition of the person based on the following:

• As human beings, we each have a unique perspective on the world. I don’t see through your eyes, you don’t see through mine.
• We are aware of our perspective of the world – we have the sense that this is what I’m seeing/thinking/experiencing at any given time.
• We are aware that what we’re experiencing right now is part of a sequence of events that have been perceived from my particular unique perspective. I remember what I saw an hour ago, what I thought a week ago, how I felt a year ago. I am aware that these things all felt like they were happening to me in the same way that what I’m seeing right now is happening to me.

So this awareness of myself, my memory of my continued consciousness, is what makes me who I am. As long as those memories are intact, I’m me. When they’re lost, I cease to exist. Now, the memory theory has a lot going for it, but there are potential problems with it. If the relevant memories/perceptions/consciousness are physical states, it is at least conceivable that they can be replicated – that you could build another physical structure that would have the memories that are considered key to personal identity. Science fiction loves this problem. Any time there’s a transporter accident or a clone with duplicated memories followed by existential angst, you have an examination of the memory theory and its consequences.

So a few months ago, I was playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a computer role playing game (RPG). The idea of an RPG is that the player creates a character and then plays that role in the story. From a mechanical standpoint, the player decides the strengths and weaknesses of the character. From a narrative standpoint, the player is supposed to make decisions that shape the unfolding of the story’s plot. In a computer RPG, this is somewhat limited – all of the possible branches have to be programmed into the game from the start. But through dialogue options and other branching points, the player can make things unfold in different ways. In a Star Wars computer RPG, it should be little surprise that one of the big factors the player controls is whether the central character is going to fall to the Dark Side of the Force or not.

What the heck does any of this have to do with the memory theory? Well, I’m going through, playing the game, playing a goody two shoes, Light Side character trying to help out the Jedi. In this game, set during a time well before any of the movies, the Jedi are getting their butts handed to them by a Sith Lord named Darth Revan and his apprentice Darth Malak. The Jedi manage to get the drop on Revan, fight him, and he’s presumed dead, but Malak just ascends to the top spot and keeps making life hard for the Jedi. So they need the central character to go on various quests to find the mystical doo-dads that might help them turn the war around, and as I’m playing the game, all of a sudden there’s a big twist. Revan wasn’t killed in the big attack. He was critically wounded, and brought back to the Jedi. Who promptly put a new personality and a new set of memories into Revan’s body, hoping that the new personality would be able to use Revan’s subconscious memories to find the aforementioned mystical doodads.

Yep. My character turns out to be, or to have been, Revan, the big bad guy. My responses to this twist were twofold:

1. Jeez, I’ve been trying to play this guy as a goody two shoes, and you’re telling me his subconscious wants to take over the galaxy? Thanks for the late tip, folks!
2. For crying out loud, have these game designers never heard of the memory theory?

The latter response may not be entirely fair, since it’s certainly not required that everyone in a fictional universe have an understanding of and agreement with a particular philosophical theory. But conveniently, the good characters decide to stick around because hey, my character isn’t the same guy as Revan, so they want to give me a chance. The not-so-good characters stick around because they’re hoping I’ll start being more Revan-like. Meanwhile, I had to decide whether to start playing the game differently, and going in more of a bad-guy direction, and I decided to stick with my previous idea of who the character was. Basically, using the memory theory, even though my character was in the body that Revan had, he was a different character. But as I kept to the goody-two-shoes path, all the other characters kept talking about how this was a chance for Revan to redeem himself. And the game is not giving me any “Hey, you people killed Revan when you stuck me in here. Don’t give me that redemption crap!” dialogue options. I’m not sure if I’m upset about what they did to my mental image of “my” character or about the seemingly cavaier way the big twist was handled. Or maybe I’m just upset that they didn’t give me the option to stop swinging a lightsaber around and have a deep conversation with my compatriots.

Ah well. It was still a fun game. And just another example of how you never know where you’re going to run into some philosophy fodder.

Happy New Year, everyone. I’m gonna try and get back on the horse with a post I’ve been mulling over for far too long.

I’ve talked before about the idea of deliberative democracy – that people should have a great deal of political power, but that they must provide reasons to each other for the decisions they make. I mentioned theorists like John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, but my introduction to the term actually came through the work of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In books like Democracy and Disagreement and Why Deliberative Democracy?, Gutmann and Thompson try to steer between the procedural and substantive poles and make the case that any successful democracy implies both. Equal access to power and mutual respect are necessary for the procedures of democracy to function properly, but they are substantial moral commitments. I find Gutmann and Thompson’s arguments to be clear and well-presented and a good picture of what a deliberative democracy should look like.

One of the things I find most interesting about their sense of deliberative democracy, though, is that they argue that it is a second-order system for answering political/ethical questions. What’s a second order system? It’s the system you use to figure out what system you’re going to use for settling contentious questions. Think of it this way. A law is the answer to a particular question – how much should we tax such-and-such, what should the penalty be for this action, etc. The first-order system by which we answer that question is our government – Congress, the executive branch, and so on. That system is put in place by the Constitution. Attempting to amend or even replace the Constitution would be a second-order question – important because it sets the ground rules for everything that follows, but hopefully giving room to maneuver when it comes to the nitty-gritty details.

Gutmann and Thompson see deliberative democracy as a second-order system for sorting out some of the contentious social and cultural controversies of early-21st-Century American life, such as the role of religious precepts in the lawmaking process. And I personally find that to be an appealing prospect. But I do wonder if part of the reason I find it appealing is that it stacks the deck in the direction I like. Most deliberative democrats say that the reasons that we provide to one another to justify a course of action should be publicly accessible – inspired, perhaps, by the empiricism of the scientific revolution, the idea is that if I say that something justified a particular course of action, you should be able to check my work and see if that justification actually holds. That would tend to “solve� the contentious social and cultural controversies of early-21st-Century American life by short-circuiting them, because many of these arguments rest on a conflict between pluralism and belief in a particular absolute moral code. Whether that code is divinely inspired or just part of a universal natural law, it does not appear to be publicly accessible. So many of the justifications that one side would offer can’t even be brought to the table.

Now, like I said, there’s a certain appeal to me here. But I’m a pluralist. And I doubt any absolutist is going to participate in a second-order decision process with me that would put them at such a disadvantage. My gut instinct is that deliberative democracy, with is combination of procedural and substantive concerns, is more like a first-order system that gets adopted once certain ground rules are accepted, and that a messier second-order system will have to determine whether we adopt the ground rules that deliberative democracy requires. But I’m still trying to work this one out for myself.

Lemme just point you over to a discussion on hyper-textual ontology about the concept of “natural ability” and its relationship to effort, level of interest, and those things about ourselves that we generally feel like we have some control over. In the comments, I press the notion that “natural ability” means something. But on an even-numbered day, I might feel differently. I do think that if we’re going to take seriously the idea that we are embodied beings, it makes sense to say that those bodies might have some specific constraints built in. But I will add the caveat that this is all working from our current understanding of nature, matter, and physicality, and sometimes I think those notions are going to get a serious thrashing one of these days.