Optimistic equivocations

I want to elaborate on the last paragraph of the previous post. I said that I don't believe in free will, but I also said that I'm not a determinist. What gives? Briefly, I don't think that consciousness could exist in a deterministic reality, as in such a reality everything would be "given at once", and consciousness occurs in an unfolding present that defies a timeless reality. Consciousness exists, therefore reality is not deterministic (and another bad argument is added to philosophy's pantheon of failure).

Where do we fall into this indeterministic scheme, given the incoherence of free will? It may be the case that the indeterminacy of reality is incidental to the human decision-making process, but I wouldn't give up on the idea just yet. For one thing, I think that human brain function is sensitive to indeterminacy in some way, or it wouldn't be sufficient for conscious experience. More importantly, even if the indeterminacy of reality isn't directly exploited by neural processes, humanbeasts get along by imagining possible futures and making efforts toward those we value most highly on balance. The better we understand ourselves and our world, the closer our imagined possible futures will be to actual possible futures, and the greater will be our power to select our own destinies, in the long term, barring the inevitable occasional hideous accident. This isn't full-blown free will, but it's still an extremely valuable tool. If we think of it as a weak form of free will, we also find ourselves faced with this point: free will is something that is achieved by degrees, through learning, through rationality, and through mental and emotional discipline, rather than something that is shared equally by all and can simply be taken for granted.

Sheer heresy

I don't know how well I'll be able to express this thought right now but it's my blog, so eat it. I think the apparent reality of objective values and the apparent reality of free will have something important in common, other than being nearly universal errors. Both of these suppositions arise in people as a result of their ignorance regarding the inner workings of their minds. This is not the kind of ignorance that people can be blamed for; we simply do not have immediate voluntary or conscious access to much of what our minds are doing because it occurs subconsciously. With practice, we can become aware of more of what our minds are doing, more of the time, but we can never perceive even a largish fraction of the whole. That said, I propose that the illusion of free will is due to our ignorance regarding the causes of our actions, and the illusion of objective value is due to our ignorance of our own role in evaluating. Maybe it's a little ironic that we live our lives believing in the illusion of an abstract "self" who perceives values and wills actions, when in fact each of us is characterized by a very concrete natural self-construct that perceives its actions and wills its values.

By the way, I don't believe in strict determinism any more than I believe in free will. I don't think our actions, thoughts, values, or feelings are in vain, and I don't think our paths are set. Free will is just an incoherent notion that offers no direct insight into the nature of human behavior.

rambling note on normativity

norms and normativity

an organism devotes energy to "correcting" deviations from a range of physiological states within which "comfort" is defined. This response occurs spontaneously or "mechanically". In an outrageously complex organism like a humanbeast, physiological thresholds are coordinated by a system of communications that is multiply elaborated into a self with interests extending far beyond the organism's physical boundaries. The elaboration is achieved largely through internal modeling of the body and its physical and social environments, through symbolic thought, and through metaphorical understanding. Normativity, the tendency to correct deviations from the comfort range in all dimensions, is present at every level. A mind contemplating normativity is like a fish contemplating water.

I'm going to talk about "is" vs. "ought" but I'm going to use the words "description" and "prescription" because "ought" is an ugly word.

David Hume's immortal observation that prescriptive statements cannot be derived from purely descriptive statements is under attack by smarmy asshat Sam Harris, author of a philosophical abortion called The Moral Landscape.

I personally agree with David Hume, and while I don't have much time to write right this second, I want to briefly clarify what this important disjunction between description and prescription means to me.

In a deductive argument, there is no case in which a prescriptive conclusion can be derived from a collection of strictly descriptive premises. If a prescriptive conclusion is reached through a valid deductive argument, there will always be a prescriptive statement somewhere among the premises. Value judgments are always assumed, though in many arguments they are brought in quite cryptically. They tend to be (but are not necessarily) implicit in words like "good", "best", "should", "ought", and their opposites.

To give an example, one might argue that it's raining today, therefore Sally should take an umbrella if she goes out. This has the form of an argument in which a prescription has been derived from a prescription, but clearly there is an implicit premise that Sally should avoid getting wet, as well as a standard piece of normative logic that looks something like "(A should P) and (If A does Q then A will P) implies (A should Q)", a kind of moral modus ponens.

Oog, I gotta go.

On respecting and not respecting other cultures

There are endless good ways to live. Part of the beauty of our species is that new ways to live well are perpetually being realized by us, and that we have created civilizations in which, occasionally, circumstances allow at least a few people to follow their hearts, to appreciate, to love, and to create, without being hindered by arbitrary rules or fears of being outcast, marginalized, or extinguished. Such eruptions of freedom and goodness may be rare and short-lived, but they show us the best of what we are, and what kind of world we might live in if we have the vision, the cunning, and the strength.

I am not likely to change my mind about this: I don't think there is any objective morality or any ultimate justification. Some people seem to think that this leads to "cultural relativism", the idea that we cannot and should not judge cultures outside of our own, or people attached to those cultures. This is a fallacy: if there is no objective morality, there is no objective imperative to respect other cultures. Still, people who don't believe in any objective morality are happy to hold their own commitments and respect those of others, and are entirely capable of choosing to stand up for their commitments when conflict is imminent. Moral skepticism/nihilism/relativism need not lead to paralyzing indecision any more than it must lead to cartoonish indiscriminate violence.

When do I respect cultures that differ from my own, then, in belief or in practice? To what extent do I tolerate, respect, or even celebrate difference, and when do I despise and condemn it?

I hope the first paragraph offers a clue: to the extent that your culture allows its members to live well in their own way, I consider it respectable. To the extent that it does not, I consider it shit. This is not a matter of whether your society is predominately Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, atheist, marxist, capitalist, or whatever; it is a matter of whether people living within it find the freedom and the resources to live the lives they think are best. If your culture can't support that, your culture sucks.

That said, it's not always easy to draw the line. It shouldn't be too hard for any of us to remember a time when we've misjudged another individual after failing to see why they're living the way they are, and the difficulty in accurately assessing another person's point of view is multiplied in assessing the value of a whole culture for the people within it.

Announcement

Normativity is animal impulse.

This is the bright little seed at the core of my moral philosophy.

More later.

Your categories are obsolete.

Spirit is that which is nourished by music.