Philosophy at the Movies (repost)

Reposting because I just saw Moon again and I'm back to thinking about its connection to the issue of personal identity. Terrific movie!

Last night I watched Moon (2009), the movie Duncan Jones made before Source Code (2011).   Duncan Jones went to graduate school in philosophy for a while, before fleeing to film school, and yes indeed, both movies deal with philosophical issues--in fact, the same issues.

Source Code: a soldier (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) seems to be in a capsule at a military base, but can enter the mind and perspective of a man on a train that blew up the day before (?).  His mission is to find out who planted the bomb so the guy's next terrorist attack can be prevented.  Back the solider goes, again and again, Groundhog Day style, and gradually he learns what he needs to know--and falls in love, too.  But it's not really "back", we are told.  This isn't time travel. It's... it's something-or-other. All the while, Jake longs to get out of the capsule, get back to reality, and make contact with his father. 

Moon: in the far distant future, Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is stationed for three years on the moon, where helium-3 is being harvested for use in fusion reactors on earth. He's all alone, except for a robot named Gerty, and something is not right.  Sam longs to get back to earth to see his wife and child.  And then things ... happen ...

Now's where the spoilers begin, so you might want to stop reading!

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I warned you!

Looking at these movies from a philosophical angle, they're both about personal identity.  Jake Gyllenhaal escapes the capsule at the end of the movie because his final "trip" turns out to be time travel.  He's become that man on the train.  Now--how's that?  His brain doesn't make the journey, so could he really be the man on the train? Etc. etc.

Sam Bell makes it off the moon courtesy of the fact that the Lunar Corporation has equipped the moon station with a whole series of Sam Bells, a huge set of clones.  At one point, three of them are alive.  Sam1 dies, Sam2 gets back to earth, and Sam3 stays on the moon.  We are invited to think Sam1 actually survives, because the real Sam is the whole collection.  (This is a view of personal identity championed by Mark Johnston in Surviving Death; he uses it to explain how there can be an afterlife without there being heaven or soul).

So--are these moves supremely philosophical explorations of personal identity?  Well, no, I have to say. In the "extras" on the Moon DVD, there's an interview in which Duncan Jones is asked whether his philosophical background influenced the movie.  He instantly says no, "there's nothing academic." (Or something close.)  He says Moon is about long distance relationships!  (Hey, I thought, what about that cool group theory of personal identity?!)

Likewise, I have to say, Source Code doesn't come across as really being about the time travel, personal identity, or philosophy of mind issues it raises. It's about the feeling of being trapped in that capsule, and trying to get back to reality.  It's about Jake's desire to reconnect with his father, to go back to the girl on the train.  It's also about the sheer excitement of trying to avert a terrorist attack, and the cool way that he learns more by going back to the beginning of the 8 minutes so many times. 

In fact (aha!), Moon especially, but Source Code too, evokes exactly the mood of Duncan Jones' father David Bowie's song Space Oddity.  Far away, alienated, can't get back to the one I love (stuck in a Scottish boarding school, far from mom and dad?).

It's not very often that movies with philosophical themes are really primarily about those themes (The Adjustment Bureau, reviewed by Dana Nelkin and Sam Rickless in the new issue of The Philosophers' Magazine is one.)  Next stop:  The Tree of Life.  My hope is that this will be the subject of my next column in TPM, and that it will make sense to call the column "Texastentialism," since the movie is set in Texas and I hear it's about the meaning of life.  Who knows, though, it might really be about something else.

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Update:  Saw The Tree of Life.  A dozen people walked out in the first half hour and the movie induced incontinence in many others--as in, frequent bathroom breaks.  My review, short version:  GOD!!!!  (Sadly enough, I'm going to have to save the title 'Texastentialism" for another occasion.)

Beauty and Effort

Spring break....and I find myself in central Texas, trying to convince my family members of a certain theory I have about beauty.  Or at least, that I've learned to have, as a result of living in Texas. The theory is that austere landscapes are actually appealing.  No, I didn't say "ugly" or "drab".  They're appealing because the mind has to actively work to make them appealing.  You see--it's easy to see beauty in a perfectly balanced Hawaiian beach scape.  Yeah yeah, white sand, aquamarine water, mountains in the background, lush green trees framing the beach.  Of course that's pretty.  But seeing the beauty in stark, arid, nuthin-much-there Texas--that takes effort.  So it's more satisfying. "Oh come on... " No really, I mean it!

The joy of effort is understood by movie makers who make movies frantically paced and hard to follow.  That's the point--to force the viewer into a pleasingly active state of mind. Ditto: logo makers.  Have you noticed that the "Starbucks" is gone from the Starbucks logo?  Now you and I can experience the pleasure of making just a tiny bit more effort to recognize the logo.

Alright, I won't multiply examples beyond necessity.  I've got a drab landscape to go out and --with a little effort--enjoy.

Does Determinism Rule out Responsibility?

From the department of fun coincidences--my "Meaning of Life" class read "Why Immortality Is not So Bad" by John Martin Fischer on Monday, and then had the pleasure of chatting with him yesterday--he was on campus to give a talk on free will.

Here's an example from Fischer's talk-- a "Frankfurt case," since Harry Frankfurt discussed a case like this in his 1969 paper "Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility."

Because Black dares to hope that the Democrats finally have a good chance of winning the White House, the benevolent but elderly neurosurgeon, Black, has come out of retirement to participate in yet another philosophical example. (After all, what would these thought-experiments be without the venerable eminence gris—or should it be noir?)   He has secretly inserted a chip in Jones’s brain which enables Black to monitor and control Jones’s activities.  Black can exercise this control through a sophisticated computer that he has programmed so that, among other things, it monitors Jones’s voting behavior.  If Jones were to showany inclination to vote for McCain (or, let us say, anyone other than Obama), then the computer, through the chip in Jones’s brain, would intervene to assure that he actually decides to vote for Obama and does so vote.  But if Jones decides on his own to vote for Obama (as Black, the old progressive would prefer), the computer does nothing but continue to monitor—without affecting—the goings-on in Jones’s head.

In fact Jones (shown in white in the picture) shows no inclination to vote for anyone but Obama, Black doesn't intervene, and Jones does vote for Obama. 

What's the point?  Well, it's often assumed that determinism rules out moral responsibility.  Why?  Because if determinism is true, then whatever you do, you couldn't have done otherwise; whatever you choose, you couldn't have chosen otherwise.  On the face of it, it seems as if a person who couldn't have done or chosen otherwise isn't responsible for what he did do or choose.

But perhaps not!  Jones couldn't have done otherwise than voting for Obama.  But is it really obvious that he's not responsible for doing so?  Black never actually intervenes (he's a "counterfactual intervener"). All unfolds exactly as it would have, had Black not inserted the chip.  Fischer makes a cautious assessment:  if Jones is not responsible, it's not because he couldn't have done otherwise.  That then calls into question the standard reasoning that runs "determinism...so couldn't have done otherwise...so no responsibility."

Once you get to thinking about Black and Jones, you just can't stop. Have fun.

The Absurdity of Life

Thomas Nagel's well known essay "The Absurd" (1971) is one of those memorable, truly eye-opening works of philosophy (sorry, I can't find it online).  The basic idea is that we inevitably oscillate between two attitudes.  On the "inside" of our activities, we feel engaged, take things seriously, find them meaningful.  But inevitably, we step back and take the "outside" view, from which absolutely anything can seem silly and pointless.  The absurdity of life is that you can't stay still, you can't permanently maintain one stance or the other.

Now, I think this is a bit exaggerated, and there are things that never seem silly and pointless. For example, in the middle of taking care of a sick child, nobody stops to think "What's the point?"  But a counterexample or two (or even three or four) doesn't overthrow the whole idea.  There is a lot of oscillation.  The irony is:  the activity that may be most absurd is philosophy itself--since it has such an air of seriousness, but is especially open to doubt.  Nobody makes fun of philosophy as well as Woody Allen.  Without further ado...a clip from Love and Death.

Women's Intuitions

Here's an interesting paper about why women are under-represented in philosophy.  Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich propose that part (but only part) of the explanation is that women's philosophical intuitions differ from men's.  When students are presented with philosophical thought experiments (Thomson's famous violinist, Jackson's case of Mary, Foot's trolley cases, Gettier cases, etc.), their study reveals that men and women don't have the same reactions.  The authors think women's intuitions may make them feel "different" and thus less inclined to join the profession.

There's a problem though...  In several of their cases it's women, not men, who have "the right intuitions"-- the ones that "most people have," as philosophers like to say.  How does that square with the exclusion hypothesis?  The authors speculate that philosophy is more often taught by men, who are likely to have the intuitions seen more often in men, so female students are likely to find themselves at odds with their professors.  The resulting sense of alienation will outweigh whatever validation comes from one's intuitions meshing with a well-known author's. 

I'm not so sure about that.  One of the thought experiments is Frank Jackson's case of Mary, the color-blind neuroscientist.  She learns all the physical facts about the color red.  Will she thereby be in a position to know what it is like to see red?   The data shows that females are more skeptical than males.  Are we really to believe that male philosophy professors are typical males, instead of having Jackson's intuitions--that Mary cannot know what it is like?  That would surprise me a great deal.   Still, in the majority of the cases Buckwalter and Stich look at, it's men who have "the right intuitions"--the ones that match the author's.  That's got to be off-putting for women.  What to do?  Read the paper for their answer....

The paper got me thinking about other aspects of philosophy that may be off-putting for women (research needed--I'm just speculating).  For example, there are the thought experiments themselves. A lot of them are really weird.  Both male and female students can be impatient with these things, and it could be that women feel especially that way.  The good news is that the thought experiments are easily transposed into the key of real.

Take, for example, Thomson's case of the famous violinist.  You are kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers and hooked up to him, and have to lie next to him for 9 months giving him life support.  Granted, he has a right to life; does that mean you have to stay there and keep him alive?  The analogy is supposed to help us think about what would follow if a fetus were a person with a right to life.  We are supposed to conclude: not much.  Women would still have a right to choose abortion.

The violinist story is a lot of fun, but it's not impossible to replace it with a real life story. I don't have the perfect story to suggest, but there's an interesting variation on the violinist theme in Joe Simpson's book Touching the Void.   Joe is mountain climbing in the Andes with a friend.  The two are connected to each other by a rope, and Joe falls into a deep crevasse.   Joe is (of course) a person with a right to life. Does that mean that the friend who is connected to him must stay there trying to save his life?  The friend thought otherwise--he cut the cord.  Was that permissible or impermissible?  For some students, that would be a more engaging question than the one about the violinist. 

Another potentially aversive aspect of philosophy classes is the way the most opinionated people are rewarded.  If you are "still thinking" and not ready to declare a preference for one view over the others, let alone to defend it tooth and nail, you will get very few pats on the head.  The expectation that one will quickly have firm views might be more off-putting to women than to men.  And it could be a bigger problem than aggressive combat--a feature of philosophy often said to be particularly bothersome to women.  It's fun to fight (isn't it?) when you're 100% sure what you think. Not fun at all when you're still thinking, still trying to understand.  In philosophy culture as it is, one must have a view now, not tomorrow, not next week.

[Update: Why would women especially resent the "must have an opinion" culture of philosophy?   I can think of lots of possible explanations, but I don't think it's because they're simply slower then men.  Heavens!]

So--there are lots of potential factors that could be studied, and if they really do affect men and women differently, some are fairly easily changed.

Obama's Faith

At one of his backyard meet-ups today, President Obama was asked why he's a Christian (this is from the New York Times)--

“I’m a Christian by choice,” the president said. “My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. Being my brothers and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me, and I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes and we achieve salvation through the grace of God.”

Mr. Obama went on: “But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace. That’s what I strive to do, that’s what I pray to do every day.’’ Yet he said that as president, he also “deeply believes that part of the bedrock strength of this country is that it embraces people of many faiths and of no faith.’’

Based on this, no doubt everyone will now admit he's a Christian, not a Muslim or an atheist.  Non-believers will be happy to know that this country "embraces people of many faiths and no faith."  In short, everyone will be satisfied, and we will never talk about Obama's religion again.

Ha!

Are Philosophers Ugly?

I very much doubt that philosophers suffer from cranial deformities more often than everyone else, but you'd think so, judging from Steve Pyke's photo album.  Among the few who look normal is David Chalmers, but that's thanks to his face being covered by a great deal of hair.

Feminist Philosophers calls attention to the personal statement under Slavoj Zizek's picture (mild cranial deformity, generous hair coverage)--

The bit about women reminds me of the days when men used to exclaim quite the opposite-- 'I love women!"  I never understood what it meant.  They love all women?  Even the cashier at the 7-11?   "Women are impossible" ...."I love women"... I think this sort of thing is supposed to make us think the speaker is manly and passionate.  Zzzz.

But it's the bit about writing that really struck me. I always thought I might have something in common with Zizek, because his name is just about mine spelled backwards, but I can't relate.  I like to be gripped by a philosophical problem, and would rather be in the middle of writing a book than be done.

Dumb Things Watch

Today on Dumb Things Watch we have Ross Douthat's really dumb column from a few days ago.  The dumb argument he makes for keeping gay marriage illegal is that lifelong heterosexual marriage with kids is ideal. Okaaaay....let's suppose it is.  That means various things are sub-ideal. For example,  it's sub-ideal when two people can't stay together for life, because one dies. A new relationship involving the survivor can't possibly measure up to the ideal of lifelong heterosexual marriage, cuz it ain't lifelong.  So... second marriages should be illegal?   But no, that's silly, so there must be something wrong with his argument.

And there is. We simply don't attack or disrespect or challenge the ideal of lifelong heterosexual marriage if we let widows and widowers have second marriages.  Likewise, if lifelong heterosexual marriage is ideal, we don't disrespect that ideal by allowing gay people to marry. Now, some will say I'm granting too much.  Are lifelong heterosexual marriages really ideal?  It's not an outlandish notion, even if I'm not straining at the bit to agree.  The point is: so what?  Even so, it wouldn't even begin to mean gay marriage should be illegal.

Plagiarism no big deal?

It's just a convention that students aren't supposed to plagiarize.  There's nothing really wrong with it.  I hasten to add, that's not my view--it's the view of NYT columnist Stanley Fish--

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession.  If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game  you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no.  But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some) and if you’re a politician it may not occur to you, as it did not at one time to Joe Biden, that you’re doing anything wrong when you appropriate the speech of a revered statesman.

And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale  (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless  you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself.  It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

Amazingly enough, this professor and former academic dean does not understand the purpose of student assignments. A book or magazine article or encyclopedia entry is supposed to inform or provide entertainment, so you can imagine different rules regarding originality and attribution, but that's not the point of a student paper.   Students write papers in order to demonstrate what they've learned, what their own skills are, etc.  When students plagiarize, they receive grades that reflect another person's knowledge and skills.  And then their transcripts tell people downstream the wrong thing.  Plagiarizing students wind up with jobs and scholarships and positions in colleges and graduate schools, etc., that aren't merited by their own knowledge and skills.  It's not fair to competitors whose grades do reflect their knowledge and skills.  And it's not fair to the public either, because we don't want the most skilled plagiarists becoming our teachers and doctors and lawyers. We want people with the requisite skills.

Um, isn't all this completely obvious? But to go on in the same vein..."Not fair" is a moral concept. Nothing to do with conjugating irregular verbs.  Not a matter of arbitrary conventions.  QED

While it's obviously a moral problem to plagiarize--a crime, so to speak--what's the appropriate punishment?  Do academics punish too much because within their own world originality has such tremendous importance?  Had Fish raised that question, he would have been on firmer ground, but then I guess he wouldn't have been earning his keep as resident academic contrarian and provocateur at the NYT website.

Incep(yawn)tion

UPDATE: I saw it again and changed my mind!  Never mind! See comments.

As promised, and mindful of the fact that I'm in a small minority (9.3 at IMDB!!!), here goes...

Inception bored me so much I literally had to get up in the middle and seek amusement--in the form of a $4.00 box of chocolate chip cookie dough candy.  I managed to stay awake only by consuming said confection for the final hour.

Why so boring?

#1   We are to believe that Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team of dream manipulators who are tasked with implanting an idea in a a rich guy's head to get him to break apart his dead father's mega-business.  Their modus operandi is not just altering the guy's dreams, but setting up group dreams.  The whole team, plus the rich guy, wind up on an airplane having an exciting and eventful team dream which has been planned ahead of time by a dream architect.

Now, I'm willing to suspend disbelief.  I don't need to know how things work in painstaking detail.  The Matrix, for example,  works just fine for me. In principle a person could have their brain manipulated by a computer, so that they experience a completely convincing virtual reality.  It's not hopelessly incoherent to think this could happen in the way The Matrix depicts: characters lie down in a chair and put on a helmet.

But what's with these team dreams? To begin with, how do they get going?  The dream team has some fancy suitcases. When they open them up, we can see some bottles and wires inside.  They set them down next to the group, and they all start dreaming.  But wait--dreams take place in our brains. We see nothing that connects the suitcases to people's brains. This is....nuts.

And how does the architect create the dreams to begin with?  Well, she creates models--real world architectural models.  But how do the models get into the suitcases that somehow get into people's dreams?   Why (on earth) should we go along with this?

But it's even worse.  How does it make a difference whether a group is dreaming, or just one person?  How do the team members exert control during the dream, so that they can make the rich guy dream the right thing, and receive the crucial idea?

In short:  WHAT???

#2  Much of the movie consists of the team dream that commences on the airplane, and by all means it's a visual phantasmagoria. But I'm afraid still a big bore.  In real life, and in movie depictions of real life, we know that when someone falls down or gets shot, that can change the outcome.  So we feel concern and suspense.  In a dream events don't matter in the same way.  There are no rules for ordinary dreams--anything can happen next.  Granted, the laws for preplanned team dreams are somehow different.  The events somehow matter, and the team members somehow affect the events.  But how does it all really work? Who knows.  So it really doesn't exactly matter what happens all along the way in the dream.  Or does it? I'm afraid this uncertainty really makes it hard to care.  (Did you know that chocolate chip cookie dough candy is actually quite good?)

#3   But wait, what about the marvelous stuff about the difficulty of telling the contents of our minds from reality?  There's talk about this, but it just sounds like talk (yadda, yadda)--and not fresh talk either, given all the previous mind/reality movies.  The movie doesn't create any gripping anxiety about the line between dream-reality and actual-reality until the very end (which I won't spoil by discussing), unlike great mind/reality movies like The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Strange Days.

Granted, 99% of people who see this movie find it suspenseful and intellectually engaging, but I'm right and they're wrong. (Hey, I write an arts column for a small circulation magazine.  That gives me authority!)  Go ahead, tell me what you thought. I promise to be civilized about this.

Public Philosophy

If you don't subscribe to The Philosophers' Magazine, you really should. It's always excellent, and the last issue is especially excellent.  For this 50th issue of the magazine, Julian Baggini asked 50 philosophers to pick a "best idea" of our young century.  You can find out a lot about what's going on in philosophy from these very readable, short essays. Here's a link to the series, which is gradually being published online. 

I had already written my usual arts column when I was asked to contribute to the series (I'm not usually this diligent!).  Here's the column, which is on Rebecca Goldstein's novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.  Curious addendum to the column:  I belong to a Jewish book group composed of 12 women, almost all atheists or agnostics.  We discussed the book, agreed that we liked the main character and thought highly of his defense of atheism, had a big laugh about the ridiculous orthodox world portrayed in the long (yawn!) middle section, and then...what?  Then we decided it would be fun to attend services together in the near future.  Most of us are nonbelievers in Rebecca Goldstein's mold. No God, but also no general hostility to religion.  (Granted, one or two are more hostile, and one or two believe.)

I've always wondered why there's so much more public philosophy in the UK than in the US.  While I figure it out, I'm having the pleasure of seeing the situation change.  The Stone (despite it's wobbly beginning) is turning out to be a great forum.  Martha Nussbaum's recent essay on banning the burqa is a must-read for anyone making up their mind about this tricky issue.

One of those 50 TPM essays was about the same subject. Catherine Audard says the important question is whether there's a "public reason" to ban the burqa.  The phrase is useful--have a look at her essay.  It was at the back of my mind when I asked yesterday whether there's any reason "in the public domain" for people not to combine science and some elements of religion in their own heads.

Why Socrates Didn't Write

An intriguing paragraph about Socrates in a New York Times review of a book by William Powers:

It should surprise no student of history that this moment in time — when many of us feel as if we’re teetering on the edge of a brand-new technological cliff — can also be seen as a familiar human problem. Powers reminds us of when Socrates, the greatest of all oral communicators, was freaking out over “the very latest communications technology, written language based on an alphabet” (though as Powers concedes, “writing wasn’t completely new”). Socrates believed that scrolls would erode thought by permitting people to forget what they had learned because they’d be able to look things up, that “they wouldn’t feel the need to ‘remember it from the inside, completely on their own.’ ” Worse, writing wouldn’t “allow ideas to flow freely and change in real time, the way they do in the mind during oral exchange.”

It never occurred to me to think Socrates had worries about writing per se.   I thought he committed nothing to writing because he was an interrogator of other people's ideas, and because all these interrogations ended in aporia--uncertainty, puzzlement.  He didn't write anything down because he didn't have any theories to write down.  But no, Powers says he was worried about writing messing up our minds, like today you might have worries about electronic communication.  Fun analogy, whether accurate or not!

On the subject of "messing up," Gary Shteyngart's essay in the review comes across as a big whine, but y'know, I think he's right.  "Only disconnect."  (Get the reference?  Cute!)  OK, let's do it, but first I need to do a little blogging.  Hope you don't mind if I check a few websites too.  I wonder if I have any email.

Free Speech for Adjuncts

An adjunct religion professor at the University of Illinois has been let go for sending his students an email preparing them for an exam and making the Catholic case against homosexuality.  One important issue is the way the Catholic church selects and pays the staff who teach courses on Catholicism (more here), but surely decisions about this individual shouldn't focus on that larger problem.

The more directly relevant issue is freedom of speech--why is the instructor being denied it?  Well, he's an adjunct, rehired (or not) every semester.  But how can that be decisive?  A recent survey showed that 50% of US faculty have part-time adjunct status, and another 19% are full-time adjuncts or lecturers.  Just 31% are tenured or tenure-track.  If freedom of speech among US faculty is going to continue to mean anything, it has to extend to adjuncts.

A complicating factor is that the email does raise questions about the instructor's knowledge and judgment.  Given that his stated goal is to help students prepare for an exam, he should be simply setting forth positions and their pros and cons.  Instead, he clearly tries to convince students that the utilitarian way of judging homosexuality is wrong and the natural law approach is right.  I would not object to him doing that in the classroom ("Now I'll tell you my view--but of course you're free to disagree."), but in an exam-prep email, it comes across as excessive proselytizing.  Just as problematic: the email misrepresents utilitarianism, and the explanation of natural law isn't very impressive either.

Because of the other problems with the email, it's tempting not to insist on freedom of speech for this particular adjunct professor, but the department apparently had no previous concerns about his teaching ability, and has no other concerns at this time.  He's really being let go because of his stance on homosexuality.  People who value free speech ought to hold their noses--his position is inane and easily refuted--and stand up for this guy.

Update:  Or at least that's what I think without first spending 3-4 hours reading everything out there on this subject.  What say you?

Laughing at the Misfortunes of Others

Carlin Romano starts an editorial about Chrisopher Hitchens's cancer in scandalous fashion--

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who's boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

As organs go, it's long and conveniently placed, stretching from throat to stomach, making a good target for an elderly yet determined deity with possibly shaky hands. Its importance to speech heightens the symbolic force intended. And its connection to swallowing suggests the irony some believers think God enjoys too much: You can't swallow me? You won't swallow anything!

What a terrible thing to say!  For shame!  But never fear, he says this stuff to raise...

...the peculiar issue of parallelism that comes up when curmudgeons, contrarians, and provocateurs find themselves on the ropes, as with all violators of society's norms. Just as we can debate whether it's acceptable to use terrorism or torture against terrorists and torturers—those who don't sign on to the social contract by which everyone else lives—we can ask whether it's OK to be scabrously unsympathetic to a stinging gadfly who is possibly in his ninth inning.

Hitchens has said wicked, wicked things about other people.  Is turn-around fair play?   Yeah, yeah, two wrongs don't make a right.  On the other hand, a "stinging gadfly" is in no position to complain.  And if he can't complain, how can anyone complain on his behalf?   This is what Saul Smilansky calls "the paradox of moral complaint" --for more on that, see here.

To make the puzzle about Hitchens even more puzzling, consider an interview (will provide link when I find it) where he's asked how he would define the good life. He lists several ingredients, but focuses on one in particular, mentioning it twice.  What would that be? Laughing at the misfortunes of others.

Brain Freeze

There's something immediately funny about cryogenics--freezing dead people so they can come back to life some day, if the technology is every invented.  Sunday's NYT article on the subject tickled my funny bone, but also got me thinking about a very creepy eventuality. Say you opt for brain freezing, rather than whole body freezing (like the man featured in the story). OK, so they unfreeze you some day. 

We tend to think of the brain as what really matters. But embodiment is, well, kind of important. Let's say you wake up in 2100. Maybe they've wired you up so you get inputs from a video camera. (Note: this is the premise for my first screenplay. DON'T steal it!) You look around the room. Not so bad! I survived! There are nice people in the room, intriguing new gadgets you'd like to experiment with. Great. (This part goes on for a while.) Then your automatically scanning videocamera changes perspectives and reveals you--now, just a brain in a tank.

Oh my god! This is really, really bad! Whatever the personal identity theorists may say, what we really feel is "our bodies, ourselves." Maybe the brain is the real me, but it's very, very freaky not to be a brain in a body. And not just freaky. Bodies do great things for us, like allowing us to move around and change the world. You know--walk across the room, pick up a cup, stuff like that.

The article doesn't get into this. In fact, for all its virtues, it has a continuity problem. At one point we're talking about whole body freezers. Next, the author is back to freezing brains. The people featured in the story never talk about the matter. Can you wake up "whole" if you don't bring your own body?

Right, maybe they'll come up with ways to simulate embodiment, as in Robert Nozick's experience machine or the famous brain-in-a-vat. So bodiless people will feel as if they have bodies...and won't have to freak out. But maybe not. Keeping the brain going seems much more doable than putting it in another body, and getting all the sensory and motor connections to work again.

Maybe we make too little of our embodiment--a holdover from the old idea that the real me is my soul. We figured out it's really the brain, but at least in some existential sense, to be me is to have my brain in more or less the same body.

The Banning Business

We'll be back to regular programming soon.

An awful lot of people have said scathing things about me (here and elsewhere) over the banning business, so I'm going to come back to it for a nanosecond.  The apocryphal version was repeated at this blog by recent commenters. Here's Chris Mooney's account.

If there's an interesting question anywhere in here, it's whether a person who is called something very bad (a liar, dishonorable, obstructing justice, ethically blinkered, just to choose a few insults from recent memory)  has an absolute right to comment at the blog where the insult was paid.  Must a ban (even if not groundless) be postponed or temporarily reversed?

When Internet Ethics 101 is taught in philosophy or journalism departments some day, no doubt that question will be on the syllabus.  I'm going to say no.  When you get sent packing, you do lose your voice.  But not in some inexorable fashion, especially if you're a well-known blogger.  There's lots and lots of space on the internet.  The right to respond can still be exercised, just not in the blogger's "home."

If you want to know what she thinks about this, you know where to find her.

Dante does Da Internet

Preface: Here (plus the 570+ comments) and here.

The pseudonymists
In the outer vestibule of upper hell there are people who post under pseudonyms. You can keep track of them, and they're honest about what they think. They have reputations to maintain. Really, they can't be blamed. After all, it's odd to speak (under your own name) to the entire blogsphere. Talk about public speaking! Google makes it even worse. Plus, pseudonymists can have specific, perfectly good reasons to avoid using their real names. So--they're merely in the vestibule, but I'm afraid they don't get to lounge in heaven, nibbling on cotton candy for eternity. Being brave enough to use your own name has to have its rewards.

The Anonymists
These people go by "anonymous" or "Fred" or "zippy," as it might be, but the main thing is that they don't always use the same name. So you can't keep track of them. They have no reputations to maintain, which can lead them into temptation. They'll wind up in the inner vestibule, next to the hot, hot door. If they're careful, it's not that bad. But cotton candy...no.

The Puppeteers
These people (odd that they even exist!--see preface, link #1) indulge a strange vice--they post on blogs using multiple pseudonyms, for purposes of associating their opinions with a multitude. They may even make their aliases talk to each other, for pleasing effect. Pleasing to whom? It's not quite clear.  These people are deceivers, but also fools, since they confuse a true proposition with one that has many adherents.  Sixth circle of upper hell, alongside the heretics, seems like a fitting place for them.

The Identify Thieves
Puppeteers who want to be taken especially seriously will sometimes resort to identity theft (amazing but true--see preface, link #2), claiming that one or their aliases is such-and-such a real person. Thus, the real person unwittingly becomes associated with whatever view the puppeteer is trying to promote. The torments of lower hell (alongside the thieves in the 8th circle) are a suitable recompense. Burns, festering sores, relentless itching, the whole nine yards.

Dead People

Strange but true story at ABC news: 91 year old woman digs up and lives with the bodies of her dead husband and twin sister.  Because she missed them.  Aww!  And then the authorities came and took them away.

What was the harm, really?  It couldn't have been a disease issue. People handle corpses every day--the dead animals they eat. If they were removed to protect the feelings of the bereaved, that can't make sense--she was evidently the primary bereaved.  Most plausible explanation--the husband and sister wouldn't have wanted it.  We respect people's preferences, even when they're not around anymore to care.

Speaking of the dead.  I've been thinking about Stieg Larsson, the Swedish author who didn't live to see his three unpublished novels become international bestsellers.  (I just read and much enjoyed the first one.) Which brings to mind Aristotle's famous question about whether posthumous events make any difference to whether a person's life went well.  He says: maybe some, but not enough to change a life from good to bad or bad to good.

OK, that sounds nuanced and judicious, but granting that events can matter to the dead, it's kind of hard (understatement) to say how they matter.  Does Larsson's posthumous success ennoble his life? Or is it a tragedy, because he never got to know about it or enjoy it?  Was the unearthing of the husband and sister bad for them (because...eww!) or good for them (because it gave the wife/sister solace)? One of the distinctive things about the dead is that it's very hazy what's good and bad for them!

What is Philosophy?

Alexander George asks today at The Stone, and then gets some truly abysmal comments.  Toward the end of the essay he writes--

So--you're doing philosophy by asking "what is philosophy?"  But I would suggest that this is not the first philosophy you ought to "do."  If you haven't already done other philosophy, you're not in a position to fruitfully contemplate what philosophy is.  That, I hypothesize, is the problem in the comment section.  All signs are that readers are trying to characterize a discipline they've never really engaged in. 

Here's a sampling of the nonsense over there--

Maybe The Stone isn't really the best place for the nature of philosophy to be discussed?

50 Greatest Ideas

The Philosophers' Magazine 50th issue is on the 50 greatest ideas of the 21st century (so far!). The magazine's website is publishing the ideas one at a time (you'll have to wait a long time for mine--I'm #27). Today's great idea (#2 in the series) is "public reason"--see here.