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Justice For All?

2008-09-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

"When somebody fucks with what we do, we go after them." Thus spoke drummer Lars Ulrich in an interview about Metallica's lawsuit against Napster. Other than the complete absence of guitar solos on St Anger, nothing has hurt Metallica more than the Napster fiasco.

In 1999, Shawn Fanning, a freshman at Northeastern University, stayed awake for 60 hours straight writing the code for a program that would change the music scene forever. Napster, named after its author's nappy hair, allowed people to connect to its centralised file server and share music. The genius of Napster was that its server did not host any songs at all. Instead, it simply provided a listing of songs that were on other people's personal computers and allowed you to download directly from them for free. Word spread and soon millions of people were sharing music over the Internet.

It didn't take long before recording artists, music labels, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began to complain. The RIAA sued Napster in December 1999, arguing that it was helping people to pirate copyrighted music "on an unprecedented scale". A few months later, in April 2000, Metallica sued. Lars went on record saying that users of Napster were "trafficking in stolen goods" and that this was "morally and legally wrong".

Initiallly, Napster was defiant. The company refused to remove Metallica's content from its listings unless "Metallica could provide proof of specific violations". So Metallica hired NetPD, a British company, to monitor Napster. After a 48 hour period they had catalogued 1.4 million violations. A few hours later Lars Ulrich personally delivered thirteen boxes of documents that fingered 335,435 Napster usernames who were trading Metallica songs. Within a week Napster had banned most of those users. The legal battles dragged on until July of 2001, when Metallica finally reached a settlement with Napster. But the damage had been done, and things would never be the same for Metallica or its fans.

Were the fans right to be angry at Metallica? Or was Metallica right to take action against Napster? From the beginning, Lars claimed, "This is not just about money." But many fans didn't buy that. His comment implies that it is partly about money. This interpretation is supported by other comments that singer and guitarist James Hetfield made during on online chat: "Would you go do your job five days a week for absolutely nothing, just to do it?... This could kill Metallica and music if we were doing it for free." But then, shortly before he was to testify in front of the United States Senate in a hearing on Internet music distribution, Lars said: "It's just got nothing to do with money." Nothing? First, he implied it partly dealt with monet. Then James made it seem that it was all about money. Now it had "nothing" to do with money. Which was it?

In fairness to Lars, I believe it is possible to resolve his seemingly contradictory statements. Lars's point appears to be that Metallica was not suing Napster in order to win a sum of money. Metallica already had a lot of money, and any money they were losing to Napster was "pocket change". But the lawsuit was about money in the sense that artists' work should be protected so that they could earn a living. Metallica was simply standing up for artists' rights. This interpretation is supported by Lars's clearest statement of this point: "It's about the principle of the thing and it's about what could happen if this kind of thing is allowed to exist and run as rampant and out of control for the next 5 years as it has been for the last 6 months. Then it can become a money issue. Right now it's not a money issue. I can guarantee you it's costing us tenfold to fight it in lawyers' fees, in lawyers' compensation, than it is for measly little pennies in royalties being lost, that's not what it's about... Where it can affect people, where it is about money, is for the band that sells 600 copies of their CD, ok? If they all of a sudden go from selling 600 copies of their CD down to 50 copies, because the other 550 copies get downloaded for free, that's where it starts affecting real people with real money."

The focus on artists' rights not only heps explain the quotations about money and earning a living, but it also explains Metallica's talk about "control" and "property". On July 27, 2000, after a district court ruled in Metallica's favour, the band issued a statement: "We are delighted that the Court has upheld the rights of all artists to protect and control their creative efforts."

Metallica was making a moral argument that artists, because they create and own their art, have certain rights. These include the right to sell their art, to control how it is sold, and to decide if they wish to give it away for free. What troubled Lars was that people were acting as if "they have a right to any piece of information that comes to them through the Internet". Had he been taling about physical property, such as a car, I doubt many would have disagreed with him. After all, no one wants their car stolen.

What is important about the Napster case is that it involved intellectual property, not physical property. Napster's central file server did not even store any songs. It just helped individuals trade digital songs with each other. How ironic then that Metallica was now against music trading when it was the underground tape trading of their demo No Life 'Til Leather that led to their success. How could Metallica, a band that envouraged fans to "bootleg" their own shows, be against Napster? Was this hypocrisy? Was there a contradiction within Metallica's argument against file sharing?

Because artists own their music they also have the right, if they wish, to give it away for free. So the fact that Metallica gave away their demo No Life 'Til Leather and encouraged others to copy it and spread it world-wide was not a contradiction. When Metallica performs live that is also their music. So if Metallica permits fans to "bootleg" their concerts that is their right as artists.

The contradiction lies in Lars's position on "home taping", which was popular in the 1980s. For example, my friend owns Iron Maiden's album Piece of Mind. I borrow it and I like it, but I don't want to spend the money to buy it, so I just copy it onto cassette tape. Since Iron Maiden has not given me permission to copy their music, and since I have not paid for it, one would expect Lars to argue that this type of activity is wrong. But he didn't. Instead, he seemed to say it was ok for several reasons.

His first reason is that the quality of cassette tapes is not that good, and when you copy a tape there is a loss of sound quality. His second reason is that the scale of tape trading is much smaller than Napster. But I think these arguments fail.

Isn't it true that cassette copies can still have good quality? I remember listening to And Justice For All during high school on cassette. (I bought it in case you were wondering.) I listened to it so many times I wore out the tape so I bought it again. But the second time I bought it I copied it onto a chrome cassette tape and listened to the copy so that I would not have to buy it again. Let me tell you that copy still sounded damn good.

So I think Lars's first argument about tape quality fails. Many people were enjoying second and third generation tape copies during the 1980s. If stealing songs is wrong it should not matter whether you steal them on tape or by mp3. What level of quality is needed for the copying to be ok anyway? And who decides what level of quality is enough?

By the way, Lars was mistaken to call the mp3 files of Metallica on Napster "perfect digital copies". While it is true that mp3s don't degrade or wear out, mp3 is a "lossy" format that contains less information than the CD. At high bit rates many people cannot tell the difference between an mp3 and the original CD, but at low bit rates mp3s can sound crappy, especially for heavy metal. "Squishy" cymbals, anyone?

Lars's second argument about scale also makes no sense. While he is correct to point out that Napster helped people trade at higher volumes - literally millions of files over a weekend - this would just mean that Napster was far worse than home taping. It does not let home taping off the hook. If stealing songs is wrong it is wrong whether you steal two songs or two million.

Aside from the home taping point, Metallica did have a logically consistent argument against Napster and file sharing. But just because something is logically consistent does not make it true. Was Metallica correct to suggest that the act of artistic creation carries with it certain rights?

Metallica appeared to endorse what is sometimes called the labour theory of property rights. In his statement before the US Senate, Lars said: "[Just] like a carpenter who crafts a table gets to decide whether to keep it, sell it or give it away, shouldn't we have the same options? My band authored the music which is Napster's lifeblood. We should decide what happens to it, not Napster - a company with no rights in our recordings, which never invested a penny in Metallica's music or had anything to do with its creation."

Lars is arguing that a person has a right to the fruit of his or her own labour. Centuries earlier, John Locke had argued for the same in Two Treatises of Government: "The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property."

Some philosophers have argued that there are serious problems with the labour theory when it is extended to intellectual property. For example, Tom G Palmer points out that Locke's argument for private property is based on a person's right to their own body. Intellectual property, according to Palmer, restricts how people can use their own bodies. Therefore intellectual property contradicts Locke's initial point that we have a right to our own bodies. For this reason Palmer thinks that Locke's theory cannot be used to defend intellectual property rights. Using music as an example, he explains, "[A] copyright over a musical composition means that others cannot use their mouths to blow air in certain sequences and in certain ways into musical instruments they own without obtaining the permission of the copyright holder. Thus the real objects the copyright holder controls are the bodies and instruments of the other musicians."

Is Palmer correct? No. One of the first songs I learned to play on guitar was Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls". According to Palmer, since Metallica owns the copyright to that song I must ask them for permission to use my fingers to play certain power chords in certain sequences on my guitar.

But that is not true. I am allowed to play their songs in my house and with my band in my basement. Why else would stores sell guitar tablature books if people were not allowed to play songs? What I cannot do is perform Metallica songs with my band for profit in a club without Metallica's permission. But that is hardly a serious restriction of my rights to my own body.

I would need more space than I have here to defend Metallica's argument for artists' rights using the labour theory, but I think it can be done. What is important is that Metallica had the courage to be the first musical artist in the Internet age to put forth this argument. For that they took a beating. Was it worth it?

In the song "Shoot me Again" Lars's lyric refers to the Napster controversy, posing the question: What difference did I make? Let me supply an answer: Metallica did make a difference. They initiated an important debate about the ethics of file sharing while it was in its infancy. They were able to bring millions of fans into the debate in a way RIAA could never have done. And they advanced a philosophical argument about artists' rights that I think is basically correct.

Sure, they could have done all of this in a clearer and less confrontational way, but hey - they're Metallica - not Britney Spears. The fact that they remained true to their convictions despite heavy backlash only enhances their legacy.

-Robert A Delfino

This is an abridged version of a chapter from Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery, edited by William Irwin.

Is God a Taoist?

2008-09-02T02:43:00.000-07:00

MORTAL:
And therefore, O God, I pray thee, if thou hast one ounce of mercy for this thy suffering creature, absolve me of having to have free will!

GOD:

You reject the greatest gift I have given thee?

MORTAL:
How can you call that which was forced on me a gift?
I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen
to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!

GOD:
Why would you wish not to have free will?

MORTAL:
Because free will means moral responsibility, and moral
responsibility is more than I can bear!

GOD:
Why do you find moral responsibility so unbearable?

MORTAL:
Why? I honestly can't analyze why; all I know is that
I do.

GOD:
All right, in that case suppose I absolve you from all moral
responsibility but leave you still with free will. Will this be satisfactory?

MORTAL (after a pause):
No, I am afraid not.

GOD:
Ah, just as I thought! So moral responsibility is not the
only aspect of free will to which you object. What else about free will
is bothering you?

MORTAL:
With free will I am capable of sinning, and I don't want
to sin!

GOD:
If you don't want to sin, then why do you?

MORTAL:
Good God! I don't know why I sin, I just do! Evil temptations
come along, and try as I can, I cannot resist them.

GOD:
If it is really true that you cannot resist them, then you
are not sinning of your own free will and hence (at least according to
me) not sinning at all.

MORTAL:
No, no! I keep feeling that if only I tried harder I
could avoid sinning. I understand that the will is infinite. If one wholeheartedly
wills not to sin, then one won't.

GOD:
Well now, you should know. Do you try as hard as you can
to avoid sinning or don't you?

MORTAL:
I honestly don't know! At the time, I feel I am trying
as hard as I can, but in retrospect, I am worried that maybe I didn't!

GOD:
So in other words, you don't really know whether or not
you have been sinning. So the possibility is open that you haven't been
sinning at all!

MORTAL:
Of course this possibility is open, but maybe I have
been sinning, and this thought is what so frightens me!

GOD:
Why does the thought of your sinning frighten you?

MORTAL:
I don't know why! For one thing, you do have a reputation
for meting out rather gruesome punishments in the afterlife!

GOD:
Oh, that's what's bothering you! Why didn't you say so in
the first place instead of all this peripheral talk about free will and
responsibility? Why didn't you simply request me not to punish you for
any of your sins?

MORTAL:
I think I am realistic enough to know that you would
hardly grant such a request!

GOD:
You don't say! You have a realistic knowledge of what requests
I will grant, eh? Well, I'll tell you what I'm going to do! I will grant
you a very, very special dispensation to sin as much as you like, and I
give you my divine word of honor that I will never punish you for it in
the least. Agreed?

MORTAL (in great terror):
No, no, don't do that!

GOD:
Why not? Don't you trust my divine word?

MORTAL:
Of course I do! But don't you see, I don't want to sin!
I have an utter abhorrence of sinning, quite apart from any punishments
it may entail.

GOD:
In that case, I'll go you one better. I'll remove your abhorrence
of sinning. Here is a magic pill! Just swallow it, and you will lose all
abhorrence of sinning. You will joyfully and merrily sin away, you will
have no regrets, no abhorrence, and I still promise you will never be punished
by me, or yourself, or by any source whatever. You will be blissful for
all eternity. So here is the pill!

MORTAL:
No, no!

GOD:
Are you not being irrational? I am even removing your abhorrence
of sin, which is your last obstacle.

MORTAL:
I still won't take it!

GOD:
Why not?

MORTAL:
I believe that the pill will indeed remove my future
abhorrence for sin, but my present abhorrence is enough to prevent me from
being willing to take it.

GOD:
I command you to take it!

MORTAL:
I refuse!

GOD:
What, you refuse of your own free will?

MORTAL:
Yes!

GOD:
So it seems that your free will comes in pretty handy, doesn't
it?

MORTAL:
I don't understand!

GOD:
Are you not glad now that you have the free will to refuse
such a ghastly offer? How would you like it if I forced you to take this
pill, whether you wanted it or not?

MORTAL:
No, no! Please don't!

GOD:
Of course I won't; I'm just trying to illustrate a point.
All right, let me put it this way. Instead of forcing you to take the pill,
suppose I grant your original prayer of removing your free will – but with
the understanding that the moment you are no longer free, then you will
take the pill.

MORTAL:
Once my will is gone, how could I possibly choose to
take the pill?

GOD:
I did not say you would choose it; I merely said you would
take it. You would act, let us say, according to purely deterministic laws
which are such that you would as a matter of fact take it.

MORTAL:
I still refuse.

GOD:
So you refuse my offer to remove your free will. This is
rather different from your original prayer, isn't it?

MORTAL:
Now I see what you are up to. Your argument is ingenious,
but I'm not sure it is really correct. There are some points we will have
to go over again.

GOD:
Certainly.

MORTAL:
There are two things you said which seem contradictory
to me. First you said that one cannot sin unless one does so of one's own
free will. But then you said you would give me a pill which would deprive
me of my own free will, and then I could sin as much as I liked. But if
I no longer had free will, then, according to your first statement, how
could I be capable of sinning?

GOD:
You are confusing two separate parts of our conversation.
I never said the pill would deprive you of your free will, but only that
it would remove your abhorrence of sinning.

MORTAL:
I'm afraid I'm a bit confused.

GOD:
All right, then let us make a fresh start. Suppose I agree
to remove your free will, but with the understanding that you will then
commit an enormous number of acts which you now regard as sinful. Technically
speaking, you will not then be sinning since you will not be doing these
acts of your own free will. And these acts will carry no moral responsibility,
nor moral culpability, nor any punishment whatsoever. Nevertheless, these
acts will all be of the type which you presently regard as sinful; they
will all have this quality which you presently feel as abhorrent, but your
abhorrence will disapear; so you will not then feel abhorrence toward the
acts.

MORTAL:
No, but I have present abhorrence toward the acts, and
this present abhorrence is sufficient to prevent me from accepting your
proposal.

GOD:
Hm! So let me get this absolutely straight. I take it you
no longer wish me to remove your free will.

MORTAL (reluctantly):
No, I guess not.

GOD:
All right, I agree not to. But I am still not exactly clear
as to why you now no longer wish to be rid of your free will. Please tell
me again.

MORTAL:
Because, as you have told me, without free will I would
sin even more than I do now.

GOD:
But I have already told you that without free will you cannot
sin.

MORTAL:
But if I choose now to be rid of free will, then all
my subsequent evil actions will be sins, not of the future, but of the
present moment in which I choose not to have free will.

GOD:
Sounds like you are pretty badly trapped, doesn't it?

MORTAL:
Of course I am trapped! You have placed me in a hideous
double bind! Now whatever I do is wrong. If I retain free will, I will
continue to sin, and if I abandon free will (with your help, of course),
I will now be sinning in so doing.

GOD:
But by the same token, you place me in a double bind. I
am willing to leave you free will or remove it as you choose, but neither
alternative satisfies you. I wish to help you, but it seems I cannot.

MORTAL:
True!

GOD:
But since it is not my fault, why are you still angry with
me?

MORTAL:
For having placed me in such a horrible predicament in
the first place!

GOD:
But, according to you, there is nothing satisfactory I could
have done.

MORTAL:
You mean there is nothing satisfactory you can now do,
but that does not mean that there is nothing you could have done

GOD:
Why? What could I have done?

MORTAL:
Obviously you should never have given me free will in
the first place. Now that you have given it to me, it is too late – anything
I do will be bad. But you should never have given it to me in the first
place.

GOD:
Oh, that's it! Why would it have been better had I never
given it to you?

MORTAL:
Because then I never would have been capable of sinning
at all.

GOD:
Well, I'm always glad to learn from my mistakes.

MORTAL:
What!

GOD:
I know, that sounds sort of self-blasphemous, doesn't it?
It almost involves a logical paradox! On the one hand, as you have been
taught, it is morally wrong for any sentient being to claim that I am capable
of making mistakes. On the other hand, I have the right to do anything.
But I am also a sentient being. So the question is, Do I or do I not have
the right to claim that I am capable of making mistakes?

MORTAL:
That is a bad joke! One of your premises is simply false.
I have not been taught that it is wrong for any sentient being to doubt
your omniscience, but only for a mortal to doubt it. But since you are
not mortal, then you are obviously free from this injunction.

GOD:
Good, so you realize this on a rational level. Nevertheless,
you did appear shocked when I said, “I am always glad to learn from my
mistakes.”

MORTAL:
Of course I was shocked. I was shocked not by your self-blasphemy
(as you jokingly called it), not by the fact that you had no right to say
it, but just by the fact that you did say it, since I have been taught
that as a matter of fact you don't make mistakes. So I was amazed that
you claimed that it is possible for you to make mistakes.

GOD:
I have not claimed that it is possible. All I am saying
is that if I make mistakes, I will be happy to learn from them. But this
says nothing about whether the if has or ever can be realized.

MORTAL:
Let's please stop quibbling about this point. Do you
or do you not admit it was a mistake to have given me free will?

GOD:
Well now, this is precisely what I propose we should investigate.
Let me review your present predicament. You don't want to have free will
because with free will you can sin, and you don't want to sin. (Though
I still find this puzzling; in a way you must want to sin, or else you wouldn't.
But let this pass for now.) On the other hand, if you agreed to give up
free will, then you would now be responsible for the acts of the future.
Ergo, I should never have given you free will in the first place.

MORTAL: Exactly!

GOD:
I understand exactly how you feel. Many mortals – even some
theologians – have complained that I have been unfair in that it was I, not
they, who decided that they should have free will, and then I hold them
responsible for their actions. In other words, they feel that they are
expected to live up to a contract with me which they never agreed to in
the first place.

MORTAL:
Exactly!

GOD:
As I said, I understand the feeling perfectly. And I can
appreciate the justice of the complaint. But the complaint arises only
from an unrealistic understanding of the true issues involved. I am about
to enlighten you as to what these are, and I think the results will surprise
you! But instead of telling you outright, I shall continue to use the Socratic
method. To repeat, you regret that I ever gave you free will. I claim that
when you see the true ramifications you will no longer have this regret.
To prove my point, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I am about to create
a new universe – a new space-time continuum. In this new universe will be
born a mortal just like you – for all practical purposes, we might say that
you will be reborn. Now, I can give this new mortal – this new you – free will
or not. What would you like me to do?

MORTAL (in great relief):
Oh, please! Spare him from having
to have free will!

GOD:
All right, I'll do as you say. But you do realize that this
new you without free will, will commit all sorts of horrible acts.

MORTAL:
But they will not be sins since he will have no free
will.

GOD:
Whether you call them sins or not, the fact remains that
they will be horrible acts in the sense that they will cause great pain
to many sentient beings.

MORTAL (after a pause):
Good God, you have trapped me again!
Always the same game! If I now give you the go-ahead to create this new
creature with no free will who will nevertheless commit atrocious acts,
then true enough he will not be sinning but I again will be the sinner
to sanction this.

GOD:
In that case, I'll go you one better! Here, I have already
decided whether to create this new you with free will or not. Now, I am
writing my decision on this piece of paper and I won't show it to you until
later. But my decision is now made and is absolutely irrevocable. There
is nothing you can possibly do to alter it; you have no responsibility
in the matter. Now, what I wish to know is this: Which way do you hope
I have decided? Remember now, the responsibility for the decision falls
entirely on my shoulders, not yours. So you can tell me perfectly honestly
and without any fear, which way do you hope I have decided?

MORTAL (after a very long pause):
I hope you have decided to
give him free will.

GOD:
Most interesting! I have removed your last obstacle! If
I do not give him free will, then no sin is to be imputed to anybody. So
why do you hope I will give him free will?

MORTAL:
Because sin or no sin, the important point is that if
you do not give him free will, then (at least according to what you have
said) he will go around hurting people, and I don't want to see people
hurt.

GOD (with an infinite sigh of relief):
At last! At last you
see the real point!

MORTAL:
What point is that?

GOD:
That sinning is not the real issue! The important thing
is that people as well as other sentient beings don't get hurt!

MORTAL:
You sound like a utilitarian!

GOD:
I am a utilitarian!

MORTAL:
What!

GOD:
Whats or no whats, I am a utilitarian. Not a unitarian,
mind you, but a utilitarian.

MORTAL:
I just can't believe it!

GOD:
Yes, I know, your religious training has taught you otherwise.
You have probably thought of me more like a Kantian than a utilitarian,
but your training was simply wrong.

MORTAL:
You leave me speechless!

GOD:
I leave you speechless, do I! Well, that is perhaps not
too bad a thing – you have a tendency to speak too much as it is. Seriously,
though, why do you think I ever did give you free will in the first place?

MORTAL:
Why did you? I never have thought much about why you
did; all I have been arguing for is that you shouldn't have! But why did
you? I guess all I can think of is the standard religious explanation:
Without free will, one is not capable of meriting either salvation or damnation.
So without free will, we could not earn the right to eternal life.

GOD:
Most interesting! I have eternal life; do you think I have
ever done anything to merit it?

MORTAL:
Of course not! With you it is different. You are already
so good and perfect (at least allegedly) that it is not necessary for you
to merit eternal life.

GOD:
Really now? That puts me in a rather enviable position,
doesn't it?

MORTAL:
I don't think I understand you.

GOD:
Here I am eternally blissful without ever having to suffer
or make sacrifices or struggle against evil temptations or anything like
that. Without any of that type of “merit,” I enjoy blissful eternal existence.
By contrast, you poor mortals have to sweat and suffer and have all sorts
of horrible conflicts about morality, and all for what? You don't even
know whether I really exist or not, or if there really is any afterlife,
or if there is, where you come into the picture. No matter how much you
try to placate me by being “good,” you never have any real assurance that
your “best” is good enough for me, and hence you have no real security
in obtaining salvation. Just think of it! I already have the equivalent
of “salvation” – and have never had to go through this infinitely lugubrious
process of earning it. Don't you ever envy me for this?

MORTAL:
But it is blasphemous to envy you!

GOD:
Oh come off it! You're not now talking to your Sunday school
teacher, you are talking to me. Blasphemous or not, the important question
is not whether you have the right to be envious of me but whether you are.
Are you?

MORTAL:
Of course I am!

GOD:
Good! Under your present world view, you sure should be
most envious of me. But I think with a more realistic world view, you no
longer will be. So you really have swallowed the idea which has been taught
you that your life on earth is like an examination period and that the
purpose of providing you with free will is to test you, to see if you merit
blissful eternal life. But what puzzles me is this: If you really believe
I am as good and benevolent as I am cracked up to be, why should I require
people to merit things like happiness and eternal life? Why should I not
grant such things to everyone regardless of whether or not he deserves
them?

MORTAL:
But I have been taught that your sense of morality – your
sense of justice – demands that goodness be rewarded with happiness and evil
be punished with pain.

GOD:
Then you have been taught wrong.

MORTAL:
But the religious literature is so full of this idea!
Take for example Jonathan Edwards's “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
How he describes you as holding your enemies like loathsome scorpions over
the flaming pit of hell, preventing them from falling into the fate that
they deserve only by dint of your mercy.

GOD:
Fortunately, I have not been exposed to the tirades of Mr.
Jonathan Edwards. Few sermons have ever been preached which are more misleading.
The very title “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” tells its own tale.
In the first place, I am never angry. In the second place, I do not think
at all in terms of “sin.” In the third place, I have no enemies.

MORTAL:
By that do you mean that there are no people whom you
hate, or that there are no people who hate you?

GOD:
I meant the former although the latter also happens to be
true.

MORTAL:
Oh come now, I know people who have openly claimed to
have hated you. At times I have hated you!

GOD:
You mean you have hated your image of me. That is not the
same thing as hating me as I really am.

MORTAL:
Are you trying to say that it is not wrong to hate a
false conception of you, but that it is wrong to hate you as you really
are?

GOD:
No, I am not saying that at all; I am saying something far
more drastic! What I am saying has absolutely nothing to do with right
or wrong. What I am saying is that one who knows me for what I really am
would simply find it psychologically impossible to hate me.

MORTAL:
Tell me, since we mortals seem to have such erroneous
views about your real nature, why don't you enlighten us? Why don't you
guide us the right way?

GOD:
What makes you think I'm not?

MORTAL:
I mean, why don't you appear to our very senses and simply
tell us that we are wrong?

GOD:
Are you really so naive as to believe that I am the sort
of being which can appear to your senses? It would be more correct to say
that I am your senses.

MORTAL (astonished):
You are my senses?

GOD:
Not quite, I am more than that. But it comes closer to the
truth than the idea that I am perceivable by the senses. I am not an object;
like you, I am a subject, and a subject can perceive, but cannot be perceived.
You can no more see me than you can see your own thoughts. You can see
an apple, but the event of your seeing an apple is itself not seeable.
And I am far more like the seeing of an apple than the apple itself.

MORTAL:
If I can't see you, how do I know you exist?

GOD:
Good question! How in fact do you know I exist?

MORTAL:
Well, I am talking to you, am I not?

GOD:
How do you know you are talking to me? Suppose you told
a psychiatrist, “Yesterday I talked to God.” What do you think he would
say?

MORTAL:
That might depend on the psychiatrist. Since most of
them are atheistic, I guess most would tell me I had simply been talking
to myself.

GOD:
And they would be right!

MORTAL:
What? You mean you don't exist?

GOD:
You have the strangest faculty of drawing false conclusions!
Just because you are talking to yourself, it follows that I don't exist?

MORTAL:
Well, if I think I am talking to you, but I am really
talking to myself, in what sense do you exist?

GOD:
Your question is based on two fallacies plus a confusion.
The question of whether or not you are now talking to me and the question
of whether or not I exist are totally separate. Even if you were not now
talking to me (which obviously you are), it still would not mean that I
don't exist.

MORTAL:
Well, all right, of course! So instead of saying “if
I am talking to myself, then you don't exist,” I should rather have said,
“if I am talking to myself, then I obviously am not talking to you.”

GOD:
A very different statement indeed, but still false.

MORTAL:
Oh, come now, if I am only talking to myself, then how
can I be talking to you?

GOD:
Your use of the word “only” is quite misleading! I can suggest
several logical possibilities under which your talking to yourself does
not imply that you are not talking to me.

MORTAL:
Suggest just one!

GOD:
Well, obviously one such possibility is that you and I are
identical.

MORTAL:
Such a blasphemous thought – at least had I uttered it!

GOD:
According to some religions, yes. According to others, it
is the plain, simple, immediately perceived truth.

MORTAL:
So the only way out of my dilemma is to believe that
you and I are identical?

GOD:
Not at all! This is only one way out. There are several
others. For example, it may be that you are part of me, in which case you
may be talking to that part of me which is you. Or I may be part of you,
in which case you may be talking to that part of you which is me. Or again,
you and I might partially overlap, in which case you may be talking to
the intersection and hence talking both to you and to me. The only way
your talking to yourself might seem to imply that you are not talking to
me is if you and I were totally disjoint – and even then, you could conceivably
be talking to both of us.

MORTAL:
So you claim you do exist.

GOD:
Not at all. Again you draw false conclusions! The question
of my existence has not even come up. All I have said is that from the
fact that you are talking to yourself one cannot possibly infer my nonexistence,
let alone the weaker fact that you are not talking to me.

MORTAL:
All right, I'll grant your point! But what I really want
to know is do you exist?

GOD:
What a strange question!

MORTAL:
Why? Men have been asking it for countless millennia.

GOD:
I know that! The question itself is not strange; what I
mean is that it is a most strange question to ask of me!

MORTAL:
Why?

GOD:
Because I am the very one whose existence you doubt! I perfectly
well understand your anxiety. You are worried that your present experience
with me is a mere hallucination. But how can you possibly expect to obtain
reliable information from a being about his very existence when you suspect
the nonexistence of the very same being?

MORTAL:
So you won't tell me whether or not you exist?

GOD:
I am not being willful! I merely wish to point out that
no answer I could give could possibly satisfy you. All right, suppose I
said, “No, I don't exist.” What would that prove? Absolutely nothing! Or
if I said, “Yes, I exist.” Would that convince you? Of course not!

MORTAL:
Well, if you can't tell me whether or not you exist,
then who possibly can?

GOD:
That is something which no one can tell you. It is something
which only you can find out for yourself.

MORTAL:
How do I go about finding this out for myself?

GOD:
That also no one can tell you. This is another thing you
will have to find out for yourself.

MORTAL:
So there is no way you can help me?

GOD:
I didn't say that. I said there is no way I can tell you.
But that doesn't mean there is no way I can help you.

MORTAL:
In what manner then can you help me?

GOD:
I suggest you leave that to me! We have gotten sidetracked
as it is, and I would like to return to the question of what you believed
my purpose to be in giving you free will. Your first idea of my giving
you free will in order to test whether you merit salvation or not may appeal
to many moralists, but the idea is quite hideous to me. You cannot think
of any nicer reason – any more humane reason – why I gave you free will?

MORTAL:
Well now, I once asked this question of an Orthodox rabbi.
He told me that the way we are constituted, it is simply not possible for
us to enjoy salvation unless we feel we have earned it. And to earn it,
we of course need free will.

GOD:
That explanation is indeed much nicer than your former but
still is far from correct. According to Orthodox Judaism, I created angels,
and they have no free will. They are in actual sight of me and are so completely
attracted by goodness that they never have even the slightest temptation
toward evil. They really have no choice in the matter. Yet they are eternally
happy even though they have never earned it. So if your rabbi's explanation
were correct, why wouldn't I have simply created only angels rather than
mortals?

MORTAL:
Beats me! Why didn't you?

GOD:
Because the explanation is simply not correct. In the first
place, I have never created any ready-made angels. All sentient beings
ultimately approach the state which might be called “angelhood.” But just
as the race of human beings is in a certain stage of biologic evolution,
so angels are simply the end result of a process of Cosmic Evolution. The
only difference between the so-called saint and the so called sinner is
that the former is vastly older than the latter. Unfortunately it takes
countless life cycles to learn what is perhaps the most important fact
of the universe – evil is simply painful. All the arguments of the moralists – all
the alleged reasons why people shouldn't commit evil acts – simply pale into
insignificance in light of the one basic truth that evil is suffering.

No, my dear friend, I am not
a moralist. I am wholly a utilitarian. That
I should have been conceived in the role of a moralist is one of the great
tragedies of the human race. My role in the scheme of things (if one can
use this misleading expression) is neither to punish nor reward, but to
aid the process by which all sentient beings achieve ultimate perfection.

MORTAL:
Why did you say your expression is misleading?

GOD:
What I said was misleading in two respects. First of all
it is inaccurate to speak of my role in the scheme of things. I am the
scheme of things. Secondly, it is equally misleading to speak of my aiding
the process of sentient beings attaining enlightenment. I am the process.
The ancient Taoists were quite close when they said of me (whom they called
“Tao”) that I do not do things, yet through me all things get done. In
more modern terms, I am not the cause of Cosmic Process, I am Cosmic Process
itself. I think the most accurate and fruitful definition of me which man
can frame – at least in his present state of evolution – is that I am the very
process of enlightenment. Those who wish to think of the devil (although
I wish they wouldn't!) might analogously define him as the unfortunate
length of time the process takes. In this sense, the devil is necessary;
the process simply does take an enormous length of time, and there is absolutely
nothing I can do about it. But, I assure you, once the process is more
correctly understood, the painful length of time will no longer be regarded
as an essential limitation or an evil. It will be seen to be the very essence
of the process itself. I know this is not completely consoling to you who
are now in the finite sea of suffering, but the amazing thing is that once
you grasp this fundamental attitude, your very finite suffering will begin
to diminish – ultimately to the vanishing point.

MORTAL:
I have been told this, and I tend to believe it. But
suppose I personally succeed in seeing things through your eternal eyes.
Then I will be happier, but don't I have a duty to others?

GOD (laughing):
You remind me of the Mahayana Buddhists! Each
one says, “I will not enter Nirvana until I first see that all other sentient
beings do so.” So each one waits for the other fellow to go first. No wonder
it takes them so long! The Hinayana Buddhist errs in a different direction.
He believes that no one can be of the slightest help to others in obtaining
salvation; each one has to do it entirely by himself. And so each tries
only for his own salvation. But this very detached attitude makes salvation
impossible. The truth of the matter is that salvation is partly an individual
and partly a social process. But it is a grave mistake to believe – as do
many Mahayana Buddhists – that the attaining of enlightenment puts one out
of commission, so to speak, for helping others. The best way of helping
others is by first seeing the light oneself.

MORTAL:
There is one thing about your self-description which
is somewhat disturbing. You describe yourself essentially as a process.
This puts you in such an impersonal light, and so many people have a need
for a personal God.

GOD:
So because they need a personal God, it follows that I am
one?

MORTAL:
Of course not. But to be acceptable to a mortal a religion
must satisfy his needs.

GOD:
I realize that. But the so-called “personality” of a being
is really more in the eyes of the beholder than in the being itself. The
controversies which have raged about whether I am a personal or an impersonal
being are rather silly because neither side is right or wrong. From
one point of view, I am personal, from another, I am not. It is the same
with a human being. A creature from another planet may look at him purely
impersonally as a mere collection of atomic particles behaving according
to strictly prescribed physical laws. He may have no more feeling for the
personality of a human than the average human has for an ant. Yet an ant
has just as much individual personality as a human to beings like myself
who really know the ant. To look at something impersonally is no more correct
or incorrect than to look at it personally, but in general, the better
you get to know something, the more personal it becomes. To illustrate
my point, do you think of me as a personal or impersonal being?

MORTAL:
Well, I'm talking to you, am I not?

GOD:
Exactly! From that point of view, your attitude toward me
might be described as a personal one. And yet, from another point of view – no less
valid – it can also be looked at impersonally.

MORTAL:
But if you are really such an abstract thing as a process,
I don't see what sense it can make my talking to a mere “process.”

GOD:
I love the way you say “mere.” You might just as well say
that you are living in a “mere universe.” Also, why must everything one
does make sense? Does it make sense to talk to a tree?

MORTAL:
Of course not!

GOD:
And yet, many children and primitives do just that.

MORTAL:
But I am neither a child nor a primitive.

GOD:
I realize that, unfortunately.

MORTAL:
Why unfortunately?

GOD:
Because many children and primitives have a primal intuition
which the likes of you have lost. Frankly, I think it would do you a lot
of good to talk to a tree once in a while, even more good than talking
to me! But we seem always to be getting sidetracked! For the last time,
I would like us to try to come to an understanding about why I gave you
free will.

MORTAL:
I have been thinking about this all the while.

GOD:
You mean you haven't been paying attention to our conversation?

MORTAL:
Of course I have. But all the while, on another level,
I have been thinking about it.

GOD:
And have you come to any conclusion?

MORTAL:
Well, you say the reason is not to test our worthiness.
And you disclaimed the reason that we need to feel that we must merit things
in order to enjoy them. And you claim to be a utilitarian. Most significant
of all, you appeared so delighted when I came to the sudden realization
that it is not sinning in itself which is bad but only the suffering which
it causes.

GOD:
Well of course! What else could conceivably be bad about
sinning?

MORTAL:
All right, you know that, and now I know that. But all
my life I unfortunately have been under the influence of those moralists
who hold sinning to be bad in itself. Anyway, putting all these pieces
together, it occurs to me that the only reason you gave free will is because
of your belief that with free will, people will tend to hurt each other – and
themselves – less than without free will.

GOD:
Bravo! That is by far the best reason you have yet given!
I can assure you that had I chosen to give free will, that would have been
my very reason for so choosing.

MORTAL:
What! You mean to say you did not choose to give us free
will?

GOD:
My dear fellow, I could no more choose to give you free
will than I could choose to make an equilateral triangle equiangular. I
could choose to make or not to make an equilateral triangle in the first
place, but having chosen to make one, I would then have no choice but to
make it equiangular.

MORTAL:
I thought you could do anything!

GOD:
Only things which are logically possible. As St. Thomas
said, “It is a sin to regard the fact that God cannot do the impossible,
as a limitation on His powers.” I agree, except that in place of his using
the word “sin” I would use the term “error”.

MORTAL:
Anyhow, I am still puzzled by your implication that you
did not choose to give me free will.

GOD:
Well, it is high time I inform you that the entire discussion – from
the very beginning – has been based on one monstrous fallacy! We have been
talking purely on a moral level – you originally complained that I gave
you free will, and raised the whole question as to whether I should have.
It never once occurred to you that I had absolutely no choice in the matter.

MORTAL:
I am still in the dark!

GOD:
Absolutely! Because you are only able to look at it through
the eyes of a moralist. The more fundamental metaphysical aspects of the
question you never even considered.

MORTAL:
I still do not see what you are driving at.

GOD:
Before you requested me to remove your free will, shouldn't
your first question have been whether as a matter of fact you do have free
will?

MORTAL:
That I simply took for granted.

GOD:
But why should you?

MORTAL:
I don't know. Do I have free will?

GOD:
Yes.

MORTAL:
Then why did you say I shouldn't have taken it for granted?

GOD:
Because you shouldn't. Just because something happens to
be true, it does not follow that it should be taken for granted.

MORTAL:
Anyway, it is reassuring to know that my natural intuition
about having free will is correct. Sometimes I have been worried that determinists
are correct.

GOD:
They are correct.

MORTAL:
Wait a minute now, do I have free will or don't I?

GOD:
I already told you you do. But that does not mean that determinism
is incorrect.

MORTAL:
Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or
aren't they?

GOD:
The word “determined” here is subtly but powerfully misleading
and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism
controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature,
but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally
misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be
in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more
powerful than you, and could “determine” your acts whether you liked it
or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with
natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.

MORTAL:
What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature?
Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the
laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn,
even you could not stop me!

GOD:
You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you.
Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could
not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, “In trying to
oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according
to the laws of nature!” Don't you see, that the so-called “laws of nature”
are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings
do act. They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription
of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines
your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact
you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.

MORTAL:
So you really claim that I am incapable of determining
to act against natural law?

GOD:
It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase
“determined to act” instead of “chosen to act.” This identification is
quite common. Often one uses the statement “I am determined to do this”
synonomously with “I have chosen to do this.” This very psychological identification
should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might
appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says
that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism
appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside
you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality
into the “you” and the “not you.” Really now, just where do you leave off
and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe
leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called “you” and the so-called
“nature” as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by
such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature
who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism
will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward
each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient,
might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the “force.”
In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it
is the configuration of the two which is crucial.

MORTAL:
You said a short while ago that our whole discussion
was based on a monstrous fallacy. You still have not told me what this
fallacy is.

GOD:
Why, the idea that I could possibly have created you without
free will! You acted as if this were a genuine possibility, and wondered
why I did not choose it! It never occurred to you that a sentient being
without free will is no more conceivable than a physical object which exerts
no gravitational attraction. (There is, incidentally, more analogy than
you realize between a physical object exerting gravitational attraction
and a sentient being exerting free will!) Can you honestly even imagine
a conscious being without free will? What on earth could it be like? I
think that one thing in your life that has so misled you is your having
been told that I gave man the gift of free will. As if I first created
man, and then as an afterthought endowed him with the extra property of
free will. Maybe you think I have some sort of “paint brush” with which
I daub some creatures with free will and not others. No, free will is not
an “extra”; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness.
A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

MORTAL:
Then why did you play along with me all this while discussing
what I thought was a moral problem, when, as you say, my basic confusion
was metaphysical?

GOD:
Because I thought it would be good therapy for you to get
some of this moral poison out of your system. Much of your metaphysical
confusion was due to faulty moral notions, and so the latter had to be
dealt with first. And now we must part – at least until you need me again.
I think our present union will do much to sustain you for a long while.
But do remember what I told you about trees. Of course, you don't have
to literally talk to them if doing so makes you feel silly. But there is
so much you can learn from them, as well as from the rocks and streams
and other aspects of nature. There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation
to dispel all these morbid thoughts of “sin” and “free will” and “moral
responsibility.” At one stage of history, such notions were actually useful.
I refer to the days when tyrants had unlimited power and nothing short
of fears of hell could possibly restrain them. But mankind has grown up
since then, and this gruesome way of thinking is no longer necessary.

It
might be helpful to you to recall what I once said through the writings
of the great Zen poet Seng-Ts'an:

If you want to get the plain truth,

Be not concerned with right and wrong.

The conflict between right and wrong

Is the sickness of the mind.

I can see by your expression that you are
simultaneously soothed and terrified by these words! What are you afraid
of? That if in your mind you abolish the distinction between right and
wrong you are more likely to commit acts which are wrong? What makes you
so sure that self-consciousness about right and wrong does not in fact
lead to more wrong acts than right ones? Do you honestly believe that so-called
amoral people, when it comes to action rather than theory, behave less
ethically than moralists? Of course not! Even most moralists acknowledge
the ethical superiority of the behavior of most of those who theoretically
take an amoral position. They seem so surprised that without ethical principles
these people behave so nicely! It never seems to occur to them that it
is by virtue of the very lack of moral principles that their good behavior
flows so freely! Do the words “The conflict between right and wrong is
the sickness of the human mind” express an idea so different from the story
of the Garden of Eden and the fall of Man due to Adam's eating of the fruit
of knowledge? This knowledge, mind you, was of ethical principles, not
ethical feelings – these Adam already had. There is much truth in this story,
though I never commanded Adam not to eat the apple, I merely advised him
not to. I told him it would not be good for him. If the damn fool had only
listened to me, so much trouble could have been avoided! But no, he thought
he knew everything! But I wish the theologians would finally learn that
I am not punishing Adam and his descendants for the act, but rather that
the fruit in question is poisonous in its own right and its effects, unfortunately,
last countless generations.

And now really I must take leave. I do hope
that our discussion will dispel some of your ethical morbidity and replace
it by a more naturalistic orientation. Remember also the marvelous words
I once uttered through the mouth of Lao-tse when I chided Confucius for
his moralizing:

All this talk of goodness and duty, these perpetual pin-pricks
unnerve and irritate the hearer – You had best study how it is that Heaven
and Earth maintain their eternal course, that the sun and moon maintain
their light, the stars their seried ranks, the birds and beasts their flocks,
the trees and shrubs their station. This you too should learn to guide
your steps by Inward Power, to follow the course that the Way of Nature
sets; and soon you will no longer need to go round laboriously advertising
goodness and duty. . . . The swan does not need a daily bath in order to
remain white.

MORTAL:
You certainly seem partial to Eastern philosophy!

GOD:
Oh, not at all! Some of my finest thoughts have bloomed
in your native American soil. For example, I never expressed my notion
of “duty” more eloquently than through the thoughts of Walt Whitman:

I give nothing as duties,

What others give as duties, I give as living impulses.

Intentionality

2008-08-23T22:39:00.001-07:00

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on...

This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhivits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contatin an object intentionally within themselves.

- Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 1874

Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The word itself, which is of mediaval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century. 'Intentionality' is a philosopher's word. It derives from the Latin word intentio, which in turn derives from the verb intendere, which means being directed towards some goal or thing.

-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Intentionality entry

The Optimism Delusion

2008-03-27T02:54:00.000-07:00

The Optimism Delusion
by David Benatar

In the first of our three pieces responding to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, David Benatar suggests that Dawkins is preaching 'the gospel of secular optimism'.

Richard Dawkins seems to take a special pleasure in puncturing what he calls 'the God delusion', the delusion that there is a God. That basic idea and even many of the details are not new. Atheism has had many earlier proponents. What Professor Dawkins brings to these matters is his own accessible and flamboyant style, and the Dawkins branding.

In debunking theism in more than one of his books, Professor Dawkins reveals his own delusion - namely, a bad case of optimism. Optimism is the delusional belief that things are (or were, or will be) better than they really are (or were, or will be). Optimism can take various forms, but the relevant one here is optimism about humanity and the human condition. It is a delusion much more prevalent than theism. It blinds most people - both theists and atheists. Professor Dawkins is no exception.

For example, noting how amazingly small the chance was that any one of us would come into existence, he marvels at how lucky each one of us is to have been born. He suggests that wasting even a second of our lives is a 'callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never be offered life in the first place'. Elsewhere he says that we are lucky that we are going to die because most 'people are never going to die because they are never going to be born'. There 'unborn ghosts' 'outnumber the sand grains of Arabia'.

Although most people share his view that they have been bestowed a great good by being brought into existence, it is a thoroughly confused idea. Coming into existence can only be a good fortune if the alternative would have been worse. Yet the alternative is not bad at all - indeed it is much better than existing. Although one would not have experienced the joys of life had one never come into existence, one would not then have been deprived of those goods - quite simply because one would not have existed. In other words, there would have been nobody who would have been deprived. In contrast, by coming into existence we suffer the many harms for which existence is the precondition.

Optimists tend to forget just how much pain and suffering there is in the world. Professor Dawkins, for example, says that we 'live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life', noting that it is neither too warm nor too cold, and that it contains both water and food. He is correct, of course, that our planet has the minimum conditions necessary to sustain life (at least for the moment). However, it is far from 'all but perfect'. Most people, most of the time, are too hot or too cold - not too hot or too cold in order to live, but rather too hot or too cold for comfort. Natural disasters and infectious diseases kill millions. The planet is not to blame for all our ills, however. Our own bodies fail us, causing vast amounts of suffering. There are millions of victims of human evil. Even the luckier inhabitants of our planet suffer much discomfort, pain, anxiety, disappointment, fear, grief, death and much else, All of these harms could have been avoided if the people suffering them had never been brought into existence. The belief that people are benefited by being brought into existence is, then, an extremely harmful delusion, for it only encourages the creation of further generations of suffering people.

The deeply deluded will deny that life is even nearly as bad as I have suggested. Such protestations are unreliable. There are well-established features of human psychology that lead most people to underestimate how bad the quality of their lives is. Chief among these psychological features is 'pollyannaism', an inclination most people have towards optimism. Research has shown, for example, that people selectively recall the good more often than the bad, overestimate how well things will go, and tend to think that the quality of their life is above average.

It is curious that Professor Dawkins seems so unaware of these optimistic biases, given their obvious evolutionary explanation. Those with the right dose of delusion are more likely to produce offspring, whereas those who see the human condition for what it is, are unlikely to want to reproduce it. Optimistic delusions, within a normal human range, are thus adaptive. The delusions that help people cope with the human predicament are often theistic, but they are not always so. Professor Dawkins is quick to debunk the theistic consolations and to begrudge those who seek comfort in them. Yet he does not cast the same critical light on his own delusions and consolations.

He speaks rapturously about the 'feeling of awed wonder that science can give us', saying that it 'is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable'. Yet this secular equivalent of religious awe is no guarantor of life's meaningfulness. It is no proof that a Godless world is a meaningful one. Just because the universe and human life lack the meaning that theists often say a God would bestow on them, does not mean that the void has to be filled by some secular alternative. It might simply be the case that our lives are pointless. To ward off this conclusion, Professor Dawkins makes the common suggestion that one's life is 'as meaningful, as full and as wonderful' as one chooses to make it. But that assumes that subjective meaning is the only meaning our lives require. However, if that were the case, then a religious life could have immense meaning even when it is founded on delusions - because such lives too are 'as meaningful, as full and as wonderful' as the people living them choose to make them. It is one kind of delusion to think that one's life has meaning because it fits in with God's plan when, in fact, there is no God. It is another kind of delusion to think that one's life has meaning because it fits in with one's own plan when, in fact, one is mistaken that one's own plan can endow (the right kind of) meaning.

These are complex matters and they obviously cannot be explored in full here. It is curious, though, that Professor Dawkins preaches his gospel of secular optimism without feeling the need to engage seriously with philosophical pessimism - the ultimate delusion buster.

David Benatar is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford, 2006)

-Think, Issue 16

Monty Hall Problem

2008-03-27T02:37:00.000-07:00

Monty Hall Problem: A decision problem associated with the American television game show host Monty Hall. Contestans are shown three closed curtains. Behind one is a prize, behind the other two are lemons. They pick a curtain. Monty Hall (who knows where the prize is) then pulls one of the other curtains, revealing a lemon, and contestants are asked if they would like to switch to the remaining curtain, or stay with their original choice. There seems to be no particular reason to switch, yet in fact switching doubles the chances of winning: your chance if you stay with your original curtain is what it always was, namely 1/3; the remaining curtain has a probability of containing the prize of 2/3. The problem was the subject of a minor scandal when several distinguished statisticians failed to see how this could be true. In fact it is true because there is now a significant difference between the curtain originally chosen, and the other one on offer, namely that Monty Hall avoided the second. The logic is more easily seen with a greater number of curtains. If there were 100, and you picked one, then by the time Monty Hall has pulled open 98 with lemons behind them, the chance that the remaining one that he did not pick conceals the prize is 99%. See also three prisoners, paradox of.

-Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 1997

Brave New World

2008-03-24T12:05:00.001-07:00

'...Isn't there something in living dangerously?'

'There's a great deal in it,' the Controller replied. 'Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.'

'What?' questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.

'It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.'

'V.P.S.?'

'Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.'

'But I like the inconveniences.'

'We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.'

'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right, then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

A Proof of the Existence of Fairies

2008-03-24T07:18:00.001-07:00

A Proof of the Existence of Fairies
by Tink R. Bell

Here is the third of our three responses to Dawkins’s The
God Delusion

In his latest book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins writes that belief in God is just as irrational as belief that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden. Well, I don’t know about God, but we fairies resent such uncalled-for disrespect. It is bloody well time that we stood up for ourselves. Now, I know perfectly well that this is an age of skeptical disbelief, and that all kinds of high-minded and self-appointed debunkers have had their go at us. Admittedly, there have been famous frauds perpetuated in the name of demonstrating our existence, like The Cottingley Fairy Hoax. But the fact that there have been bad reasons to accept us fairies does not mean that there are no good reasons.

We fairies, especially garden fairies like myself, are a shy lot. We are not prone to flashing our wings in public or making spectacles of ourselves with fancy magic tricks and the like. Well, sure, sometimes we’ll do that to entertain children, but adults tend to be too unappreciative. They would just as soon try to capture one of us, stick us in a cage, and charge €10 a customer to have a look. Either that, or they would truss us up and ship us off to some unpleasant scientist like Professor Dawkins who would like nothing better than to dissect us, classify us in a phylum, or some other nasty thing. Nevertheless, despite our (justifiably!) reticent nature, regular human folks have an excellent reason to acknowledge our existence. And it’s high time you do so.

I live in The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. No, I’m not going to tell you exactly where – the last thing I need is a bunch of gawkers and paparazzi coming out, pestering me, and keeping me from my work. What work? Well, as a garden fairy, my job is to make beautiful gardens. More precisely, my task is the creation of beauty itself. As you no doubt know, Kew Gardens has a large staff of human gardeners, all devoted to planting of plants and their care and upkeep. Perhaps you think that it is they who make Gardens beautiful. To be fair, we fairies have by-and-large been happy to let you believe this fiction. However, I need to set the record straight here – human beings do not make beautiful gardens. Fairies do, and that’s the end of it.

Let me explain. The humans who work in any garden, from my home at Kew down to the humblest villager’s window box, are engaged in what we might call naturalistic activities. They till, plant, prune, arrange, graft, weed, move one species into another part of the garden, change out the plantings by season, and so on. The more scientific ones at my home do things like the ‘cryopreservation of seeds and pollen’ and worry about ‘micro propagation’ and other technical-sounding activities. My point is that none of these things amount to beautification.

‘Beauty’ is a non-natural property. It is non-natural in the sense that the philosopher Robert Adams discusses: it ‘cannot be stated entirely in the language of physics, chemistry, biology, and human or animal psychology.’ But let me tell you, beauty is a real thing in the world. Who among you is so cold-hearted as to deny that there is beauty in a piece of music, a poem, a painting, the face of a lover, an artful bed of tulips? You might well start pontificating that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ or some other such cynical nonsense. Are you going to start saying the same thing about the non-natural property of morality? That it too is merely in the eye of beholder? Of course not. No, you may dispute about the degree to which something is beautiful or ugly, lovely or unlovely, but that is merely to debate the measurement of those aesthetic qualities. To engage in such a debate at all is already to concede that there are aesthetic properties. The aesthetic qualities themselves are there, real, and not some physical thing that one might pick apart on a lab bench.

Some clever humans (they call themselves 'metaphysicians') have suggested that physical quantities give rise to aesthetic ones in this sense: if you have two gardens, with exactly the same flowers, creepers, shrubs, etc., and these are arranged in precisely the same way, and in the same state of health and bloom, then the two gardens must have the same aesthetic qualities. If the first garden is lovely then so is the second. If the first garden is a visual abomination, then so is the second. As the metaphysicians say, 'aesthetic properties supervene on the physical ones.'

Yes, yes, that's so, and as I said, clever to figure it out. But have the smarty-pants metaphysicians ever stopped to think about why the beauty of a garden supervenes on the physical properties of the plants? It is because we fairies make it so. I mean, honestly. The supervenience idea isn't going to let us reduce or eliminate beauty or ugliness in favor of purely natural properties. Temperature may be man molecular kinetic energy, but that doesn't mean that a half-pint of bitter (a whole pint is a bit of a bender for a fairy) at the Flower and Firkin doesn't really have the property of being cool to the touch. Likewise, the recognition that the loveliness of a bed of roses is invariably connected with the colour, health, and arrangement of the flowers does not mean that they aren't really lovely at all. Of course they are.

Recall what Immanuel Kant wrote in The Critique of Practical Reason about another non-natural property, namely morality. He said that the only way that reason can conceive of 'the exact harmony of the kingdom of nature with the kingdom of morals, which is the condition of the possibility of the summum bonum; and at the same time the only one conducive to morality' is upon 'the assumption of a wise Author of the world' that guarantees that harmony. Just so. There is n connection between natural properties and moral properties unless there is a wise Author of the world who creates and sustains that connection.

Likewise there is an aesthetic order to the world that makes the appreciation and understanding of beauty a rational enterprise. And the aesthetic order of the world requires a guarantor no less than the moral order. Lucky for you it is we fairies that guarantee that order and rationality. Maybe you want to know why we fairies are so consistent, why certain sorts of gardens are always beautiful and others not, or why we are so diligent about holding to the supervenience principle. Why do we choose to do so? Well, certain things are private. There is a fairy code of omerta, after all.

So again, it is your humble, hardworking fairy at the bottom of the garden who ensures its loveliness, and warranties the connection between your diligence in gardening, your careful selection of plants, your painstaking watering, weeding, pruning, and care, with the beauty that follows. And while we fairies are not generally a vindictive lot, should Professor Dawkins wonder why he lacks a 'green thumb', he would do well to consider that a lack of gratitude to the garden fairies may be behind it.

Tink R. Bell is a garden fairy who lives and works in The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London. Tink may be contacted through Steven D. Hales, Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania.

From Think, Issue 16

Spirit

2008-03-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

Spirit

Allen Wheelis

Excerpt from On Not Knowing How to Live, 1975

We come into being as a slight thickening at the end of a long thread. Cells proliferate, become an excrescence, assume the shape of a man. The end of the thread now lies buried within, shielded, inviolate. Our task is to bear it forward, pass it on. We flourish for a moment, achieve a bit of singing and dancing, a few memories we would carve in stone, then we wither, twist out of shape. The end of the thread lies now in our children, extends back through us, unbroken, unfathomably into the past. Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have fallen away as we now fall away. Nothing remains but the germ-line. What changes to produce new structures as life evolves is not the momentary excrescence but the hereditary arrangements within the thread.

We are carriers of spirit. We know not how nor why nor where. On our shoulders, in our eyes, in anguished hands through unclear realm, into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation, we bear its full weight. Depends it on us utterly, yet we know it not. We inch it forward with each beat of heart, give to it the work of hand, of mind. We falter, pass it on to our children, lay out our bones, fall away, are lost, forgotten. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, more strange, complex.

We are being used. Should not we know in whose service? To whom, to what, give we unwitting loyalty? What is this quest? Beyond that which we have what could we want? What is spirit?

A river or a rock, writes Jacques Monod, “we know, or believe, to have been molded by the free play of physical forces to which we cannot attribute any design, any ‘project’ or purpose. Not, that is, if we accept the basic premise of the scientific method, to wit, that nature is objective and not projective.”

That basic premise carries a powerful appeal. For we remember a time, no more than a few generations ago, when the opposite seemed manifest, when the rock wanted to fall, the river to sing or to rage. Willful spirits roved the universe, used nature with whim. And we know what gains in understanding and in control have come to us from the adoption of a point of view which holds that natural objects and events are without goal or intention. The rock doesn’t want anything, the volcano pursues no purpose, river quests not the sea, wind seeks no destination.

But there is another view. The animism of the primitive is not the only alternative to scientific objectivity. This objectivity may be valid for the time spans in which we are accustomed to reckon, yet untrue for spans of enormously greater duration. The proposition that light travels in a straight line, unaffected by adjacent masses, serves us well in surveying our farm, yet makes error error in the mapping of distant galaxies. Likewise, the proposition that nature, what is just “out there,” is without purpose, serves us well as we deal with nature in days or years or lifetimes, yet may mislead us on the plains of eternity.

Spirit rises, matter falls. Spirit reaches like a flame, a leap of dancer. Out of the void it creates form like a god, is god. Spirit was from the start, though even that beginning may have been an ending of some earlier start. If we look back far enough we arrive at a primal mist wherein spirit is but a restlessness of atoms, a trembling of something there that will not stay in stillness and in cold.

Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless, complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illumine good and evil, would have though, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above, changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way to more distant heavens, the last… but there is no last, for spirit tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever upward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever greater freedom.

Particles become animate. Spirit leaps aside from matter which tugs forever to pull it down, to make it still. Minute creatures writhe in warm oceans. Ever more complex become the tiny forms which bear for a moment a questing spirit. They come together, touch; spirit is beginning to create love. They touch, something passes. They die, die, die, endlessly. Who shall know the spawnings in the rivers of our past? Who shall count the waltzing grunion on the shores of ancient seas? Who shall hear the unheard poundings of that surf? Who will mourn the rabbits of the plains, the furry tides of lemmings? They die, die, die, but have touched, and something passes. Spirit leaps away, creates new bodies, endlessly, ever more complex vessels to bear spirit forward, pass it on enlarged to those who follow.

Virus becomes bacteria, becomes algae, becomes fern. Thrust of spirit cracks stone, drives up the Douglas fir. Amoeba reaches out soft blunt arms in ceaseless motion to find the world, to know it better, to bring it in, growing larger, questing further, ever more capacious of spirit. Anemone becomes squid, becomes fish; wiggling becomes swimming, becomes crawling; fish becomes slug, becomes lizard; crawling becomes walking, becomes running, becomes flying. Living things reach out to each other, spirit leaps between. Tropism becomes scent, becomes fascination, becomes lust, becomes love. Lizard to fox to monkey to man, in a look, in a world, we come together, touch, die, serve spirit without knowing, carry it forward, pass it on. Ever more winged this spirit, ever greater its leaps. We love someone far away, someone who dies long ago.

“Man is the vessel of the Spirit,” writes Erich Heller; “… Spirit is the voyager who, passing through the land of man, bids the human soul to follow it to the Spirit’s purely spiritual destination.”

Viewed closely, the path of spirit is seen to meander, is a glisten of snail’s way in night forest; but from a height minor turnings merge into steadiness of course. Man has reached a ledge from which to look back. For thousands of years the view is clear, and beyond, though a haze, for thousands more, we still see quite a bit. The horizon is millions of years behind us. Beyond the vagrant turnings of our last march stretches a shining path across that vast expanse running straight. Man did not begin it nor will he end it, but makes it now, finds the passes, cuts the channels. Whose way is it we so further? Not man’s; for there’s our first footprint. Not life’s; for there’s still the path when life was not yet.

Spirit is the traveller, passes now through the realm of man. We did not create spirit, do not possess it, cannot define it, are but the bearers. We take it up from unmourned and forgotten forms, carry it through our span, will pass it on, enlarged or diminished, to those who follow. Spirit is the voyager, man is the vessel.

Spirit creates and spirit destroys. Creation without destruction is not possible; destruction without creation feeds on past creation, reduces form to matter, tends toward stillness. Spirit creates more than it destroys (though not in every season, nor even every age, hence those meanderings, those turnings back, wherein the longing of matter for stillness triumphs in destruction) and this preponderance of creation makes for that overall steadiness of course.

From primal mist of matter to spiralled galaxies and clockwork solar systems, from molten rock to an earth of air and land and water, from heaviness to lightness to life, sensation to perception, memory to consciousness – man now holds a mirror, spirit sees itself. Within the river currents turn back, eddies whirl. The river itself falters, disappears, emerges, moves on. The general course is the growth of form, increasing awareness, matter to mind to consciousness. The harmony of man and nature is to be found in continuing this journey along its ancient course toward greater freedom and awareness.

Reflections
by Douglas Hofstadter

In these poetic passages, psychiatrist Allen Wheelis portrays the eerie, disorienting view that modern science has given us of our place in the scheme of things. Many scientists, not to mention humanists, find this a very difficult view to swallow and look for some kind of spiritual essence, perhaps intangible, that would distinguish living beings, particularly humans, from the inanimate rest of the universe. How does anima come from atoms?

Wheelis’s concept of “spirit” is not that sort of essence. It is a way of describing the seemingly purposeful path of evolution as if there were one guiding force behind it. If there is, it is that which Richard Dawkins in the powerful selection that follows so clearly states: survival of stable replicators. In his preface Dawkins candidly writes: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known to us as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others.”

The Soul of the Mark III Beast

2008-03-18T07:00:00.001-07:00

The Soul of the Mark III Beast
by Terrel Miedaner

"Anatol's attitude is straightforward enough," Hunt said. "He considers biological life as a complex form of machinery."

She shrugged, but not indifferently. "I admit being fascinated by the man, but I can't accept that philosophy."

"Think about it," Hunt suggested. "You know that according to neoevolution theory, animal bodies are formed by a completely mechanistic process. Each cell is a microscopic machine, a tiny component part integrated into a larger, more complex device."

Dirksen shook her head. "But animal and human bodies are more than machines. The reproductive act itself makes them different."

"Why," Hunt asked, "is it so wonderful that a biological machine should beget another biological machine? It requires no more creative thought for a female mammal to conceive and give birth than for an automatic mill to spew forth engine blocks."

Dirksten's eyes flashed. "Do you think the automatic mill feels anything when it gives birth?" she challenged.

"Its metal is severely stressed, and eventually the mill wears out."

"I don't think that's what I mean by 'feeling.'"

"Nor I," Hunt agreed. "But it isn't always easy to know who or what has feelings. On the farm where I was raised, we had a brood sow with an unfortunate tendency to crush most of her offspring to death - accidentally, I imagine. Then she ate her children's corpses. Would you say she had maternal feelings?"

"I'm not talking about pigs!"

"We could talk about humans in the same breath. Would you care to estimate how many newborn babies drown in toilets?"

Dirksen was too appalled to speak.

After some silence Hunt continued. "What you see in Klane as preoccupation with machinery is just a different perspective. Machines are another life form to him, a form he himself can create from plastic and metal. And he is honest enough to regard himself as a machine."

"A machine begetting machines," Dirksen quipped. "Next thing, you'll be calling him a mother!"

"No," Hunt said. "He's an engineer. And however crude an engineered machine is in comparison with the human body, it represents a higher act than simple biological reproduction, for it is at least the result of a thought process."

"I ought to know better than to argue with a lawyer," she conceded, still upset. "But ı just do not relate to machines! Emotionally speaking, there is a difference between the way we treat animals and the way we treat machines that defies logical explanation. I mean, I can break a machine and it really doesn't bother me, but I cannot kill an animal."

"Have you ever tried?"

"Sort of," Dirksen recalled. "The apartment I shared at college was infested with mice, so I set a trap. But when I finally caught one, I couldn't empty the trap - the poor dead thing looked so hurt and harmless. So I buried it in the backyard, trap and all, and decided that living with mice was far more pleasant than killing them."

"Yet you do eat meat," Hunt pointed out. "So your aversion isn't so much to killing per se as it is to doing it yourself."

"Look," she said, irritated. "That argument misses a point about basic respect for life. We have something in common with animals. You do see that, don't you?

"Klane has a theory that you might find interesting," Hunt persisted. "He would say that real or imagined biological kinship has nothing to do with your 'respect for life.' In actual fact, you don't like to kill simply because the animal resists death. It cries, struggles, or looks sad - it pleads with you not to destroy it. And it is your mind, by the way, not your biological body, that hears an animal's plea."

She looked at him, unconvinced.

Hunt laid some money on the table, pushed back his chair. "Come with me."

A half hour later Dirksen found herself entering Klane's house in the company of his attorney, for whose car the entrance gate had automatically moved aside and at whose touch the keyless front door had served immediately open.

She followed him to the basement laboratory, where Hunt opened one of several dozen cabinets and brought out something that looked like a large aluminum beetle with small, colored indicator lamps and a few mechanical protrusions about its smooth surface. He turned it over, showing Dirksen three rubber wheels on its underside. Stenciled on the flat metal base plate were the words Mark III Beast.

Hunt set the device on the tiled floor, simultaneously toggling a tiny switch on its underbelly. With a quiet humming sound the toy began to move in a searching pattern back and forth across the floor. It stopped momentarily, then headed for an electrical outlet near the base of one large chassis. It paused before the socket, extended a pair of prongs from an opening in its metallic body, probed and entered the energy source. Some of the lights on its body began to glow green, and a noise almost like the purring of a cat emanated from within.

Dirksen regarded the contrivance with interest. "A mechanical animal. It's cute - but what's the point of it?"

Hunt reached over to a nearby bench for a hammer and held it out to her. "I'd like you to kill it."

"What are you talking about?" Dirksen said in mild alarm. "Why should I kill... break that... that machine?" She backed away, refusing to take the weapon.

"Just as an experiment," Hunt replied. "I tried it myself some years ago at Klane's behest and found it instructive."

"What did you learn?"

"Something about the meaning of life and death."

Dirksen stood looking at Hunt suspiciously.

"The 'beast' has no defenses that can hurt you," he assured her. "Just don't crash into anything while you're chasing it." He held out the hammer.

She stepped tentatively forward, took the weapon, looked sidelong at the peculiar machine purring deeply as it sucked away at the electrical current. She walked toward it, stooped down and raised the hammer. "But... it's eating," she said, turning to Hunt.

He laughed. Angrily she took the hammer in both hands, raised it, and brought it down hard.

But with a shrill noise like a cry of fright the beast had pulled its mandibles from the socket and moved suddenly backwards. The hammer cracked solidly into the floor, on a section of tile that had been obscured from view by the body of the machine. The tile was pockmarked with indentations.

Dirksen looked up. Hunt was laughing. The machine had moved two meters away and stopped, eyeing her. No, she decided, it was not eyeing her. Irritated with herself, Driksen grasped her weapon and stalked cautiously forward. The machine backed away, a pair of red lights on the front of it glowing alternately brighter and dimmer at the approximate alphawave frequency of the human brain. Dirksen lunged, swung the hammer, and missed-

Ten minutes later she returned, flushed and gasping, to Hunt. Her body hurt in several places where she had bruised it on jutting machinery, and her head ached where she had cracked it under a workbench. "It's like trying to catch a big rat! When do its stupid batteries run down anyway?"

Hunt checked his watch. "I'd guess it has another half hour, provided you keep it busy." He pointed beneath a workbench, where the beast had found another electrical outlet. "But there is an easier way to get it."

"I'll take it."

"Put the hammer down and pick it up."

"Just ... pick it up?"

"Yes. It only recognizes danger from its own kind - in this case the steel hammer head. It's programmed to trust unarmed protoplasm."

She laid the hammer on a bench, walked away slowly over to the machine. It didn't move. The purring had stopped; pale amber lights flowed softly. Dirksen reached down and touched it tentatively, felt a gently vibration. She gingerly picked it up with both hands. Its lights changed to a clear green color, and through the comfortable warmth of its metal skin she could feel the smooth purr of motors.

"So now what do I do with the stupid thing?" she asked irritably.

"Oh, lay him on his back on the workbench. He'll be quite helpless in that position, and you can bash him at your leisure."

"I can do without the anthropomorphisms," Dirksen muttered as she followed Hunt's suggestion, determined to see this thing through.

As she inverted the machine and set it down, its lights changed back to red. Wheels spun briefly, stopped. Dirksen picked up the hammer again, quickly raised it and brought it down in a smooth arc which struck the helpless machine off-center, damaging one of its wheels and flipping it right side up again. There was a metallic scraping sound from the damaged wheel, and the beast began spinning in a fitful circle. A snapping sound came from its underbelly; the machine stopped, lights glowing dolefully.

Dirksen pressed her lips together tightly, raised the hammer for a final blow. But as she started to bring it down there came from within the beast a sound, a soft crying wail that rose and fell like a baby whimpering. Dirksen dropped the hammer and stepped back, her eyes on the blood-red pool of lubricating fluid forming on the table beneath the creature. She looked at Hunt, horrified. "It's... it's--"

"Just a machine," Hunt said, seriously now. "Like these, its evolutionary predecessors." His gesturing hands took in the array of machinery in the workshop around them, mute and menacing watchers. "But unlike them it can sense its own doom and cry out for succor."

"Turn it off," she said flatly.

Hunt walked to the table, tried to move its tiny power switch. "You've jammed it, I'm afraid." He picked up the hammer from the floor where it had fallen. "Care to administer the death blow?"

She stepped back, shaking her head as Hunt raised the hammer. "Couldn't you fix-" There was a brief metallic crunch. She winced, turned her head. The wailing had stopped, and they returned upstairs in silence.

Reflections
by Douglas Hofstadter

Jason Hunt remarks, "But it isn't always easy to know who or what has feelings." This is the crux of the selection. At first Lee Dirksen seizes on self-reproductive power as the essence of the living. Hunt quickly points out to her that inanimate devices can self-assemble. And what about microbes, even viruses, which carry within them instructions for their own replication? Have they souls? Doubtful!

Then she turns to the idea of feeling as the key. And to drive this point home, the author pulls out every stop in the emotional organ, in trying to convince you that there can be mechanical, metallic feelings - a contradiction in terms, it would surely seem. Mostly it comes as a set of subliminal appeals to the gut level. He uses phrases like "aluminum beetle," "soft purring," "shrill noise like a cry of fright," "eyeing her," "gentle vibration," "the comfortable warmth of its metal skin," "helpless machine," "spinning in a fitful circle," "lights gleaming dolefully." This all seems quite blatant - but how could he have gone further than his next image, that of the "blood-red pool of lubricating fluid forming on the table beneath the creature," from which (or from whom?) is emanating a "soft crying wail that rose and fell like a baby whimpering"? Now, really!

The imagery is so provocative that one is sucked in. One may feel manipulated, yet one's annoyance at that cannot overcome one's instinctive sense of pity. How hard it is for some people to drown an ant in their sink by turning on the faucet! How easy for others to feed live goldfish to their pet piranhas each day! Where should we draw the line? What is sacred and what it dispensable?

Few of us are vegetarians or even seriously consider the alternative during our lives. Is it because we feel at ease with the idea of killing cows and pigs and so on? Hardly. Few of us want to be reminded that there is a hunk of dead animal on our plate when we are served a steak. Mostly, we protect ourselves by a coy use of language and an elaborate set of conventions that allow us to maintain a double standard. The true nature of meat eating, like the true nature of sex and excretion, is only easy to refer implicitly, hidden in euphemistic synonyms and allusions: "veal cutlets," "making love," "going to the bathroom." Somehow we sense that there is soul-killing going on in slaughterhouses, but our palates don't want to be reminded of it.

Which would you more easily destroy - a Chess Challenger VII that can play a good game of chess against you and whose red lights cheerfully flash as it "ponders" what to do next, or the cute little Teddy bear that you used to love when you were a child? Why does it tug at the heart-strings? It somehow connotes smallness, innocence, vulnerability.

We are so subject to emotional appeal yet so able to be selective in our attribution of soul. How were the Nazis able to convince themselves it was all right to kill Jews? How were Americans so willing to "waste gooks" in the Vietnam war? It seems that emotions of one sort - patriotism - can act as a valve, controlling the other emotions that allow us to identify, to project - to see our victim as (a reflection of) ourselves.

We are all animists to some degree. Some of us attribute "personalities" to our cars, others of us see our typewriters or our toys as "alive," as possessors of "souls." It is hard to burn some things in a fire because some piece of us is going up in the flames. Clearly the "soul" we project into these objects is an image purely in our minds. Yet if that is so, why isn't it equally so for the souls that we project into our friends and family?

We all have a storehouse of empathy that is variously hard or easy to tap into, depending on our moods and on the stimulus. Sometimes mere words or fleeting expressions hit the bull's-eye and we soften. Other times we remain callous and icy, unmovable.

In this selection, the little beast's flailing against death touches Lee Dirksen's heart and our own. We see the small beetle fighting for its life, or in the words of Dylan Thomas, raging "against the dying of the light," refusing to "go gentle into that good night." This supposed recognition of its own doom is perhaps the most convincing touch of all. It reminds us of the ill-fated animals in the ring, being randomly selected and slaughtered, trembling as they see the inexorable doom approach.

When does a body contain a soul? In this very emotional selection, we have seen "soul" emerge as a function not of any clearly defined inner state, but as a function of our own ability to project. This is, oddly enough, the most behavioristic of approaches! We ask nothing about the internal mechanisms - instead we impute it all, given the behavior. It is a strange sort of validation of the Turing test approach to "soul detection."

Panpsychism

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Either the view that all parts of matter involve consciousness, or the more holistic view that the whole world 'is but the veil of an infinite realm of mental life' (Lotze). The world, or nature, produces living creatures, and accordingly ought to be thought of as itself an alive and animated organism, literally describable as possessing reason, emotion, and a 'world-soul'. The view that man is a microcosm, or small version of the cosmos, which can therefore be understood in anthropomorphic terms, is a staple theme in Greek philosophy. It passed into the medieval period via Neoplatonism, and became shared by Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Schelling, and many others. Its most intelligible modern version is perhaps the view that for environmental reasons we do well to think as if the world is a complex organism (sometimes rather preciously called Gaia), whose unity is as fragile as that of any living thing.

-Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 1997

Mind-Body Problem

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For many people understanding the place of mind in nature is the greatest philosophical problem. Mind is often thought to be the last domain that stubbornly resists scientific understanding, and philosophers differ over whether they find that a cause for celebration or scandal. The mind-body problem in the modern era was given its definitive shape by Descartes, although the dualism that he espoused is far more widespread and far older, occurring in some form wherever there is a religious or philosophical tradition whereby the soul may have an existence apart from the body. While the most modern philosophies of mind would reject the imaginings that lead us to think that this makes sense, there is no consensus over the best way to integrate our understanding of people as bearers of physical properties on the one hand and as subjects of mental lives on the other. See also consciousness, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, perception, occasionalism, physicalism.

-Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 1997

Perception

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A fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in any theory of knowledge, and its central place in any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception. (i) It gives us knowledge of the world around us. (ii) We are conscious of that world by being aware of 'sensible qualities': colours, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (iii) Such consciousness is effected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of the three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (iv) There ensues even more complex neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpret the information so received. (Much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulties of writing programs enabling computers to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of there being a central, ghostly, conscious self, fed information in the same way that a screen is fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a veil getting between us and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is especially acute when we consider the secondary qualities (see primary/secondary qualities) of colour, sound, tactile feelings, and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensations of pain. Calling such supposed items names like sense data or percepts exacerbates the tendency. But once the model is in place, the first property, that perception gives us knowledge of the world around us, is quickly threatened, for there will now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include scepticism and idealism.

A more hopeful approach is to claim that the complexities of (iii) and (iv) explain how we can have direct acquaintance of the world, rather than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have is at best indirect. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensations, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world as being such-and-such a way, rather than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. But such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining how we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be consciousof what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, rather than a strange optional extra.

-Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 1997

Representationalism

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Generally the doctrine that the mind (or sometimes the brain) works on representations of the things and features of things that we perceive or think about. In the philosophy of perception the view is especially associated with Malebranche and Locke, who, holding that the mind is the container for ideas, held that 'of our real ideas, some are adequate, and some are inadequate. Those I call adequate, which perfectly represent those archetypes which the mind supposes them taken from; which it intends them to stand for, and to which it refers them' (Locke, Essay, ii. 31). The problems in this account were mercilessly exposed by Arnauld and Foucher, writing against Malebranche, and by Berkeley writing against Locke. The fundamental problem is that the mind is 'supposing' its ideas to represent something else, but it has no access to this something else except by forming another idea. The difficulty is to understand how the mind ever escapes from the world of representations, or, in other words, how representations manage to acquire genuine content, pointing beyond themselves. In more recent philosophy, the analogy between the mind and a computer has suggested that the mind or brain manipulates symbols, thought of as like the instructions in a machine program, and that those symbols are representations of aspects of the world. The Berkeleyan difficulty then recurs. The programmed computer behaves the same way without knowing whether the sign '$' refers to a unit of currency or anything else. The elements of a machine program are identified purely syntactically, so the actual operations of the system go on without any reference to any interpretation of them (see syntax). Hence, according to critics, there is no way, on this model, for seeing the mind as concerned with the representational properties of the symbols. The point is sometimes put by saying that the mind, on this theory, becomes a syntactic engine, rather than a semantic engine.

-Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 1997