Abandon Text! - Philosophy

Self-serving Simplification

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:13:00 -0700

Kenny pointed out to me another example of people feeling a yearning for a simpler existence: "What Could You Live Without?" a New York Times op-ed about a family who, at their daughter's urging, downgraded to a smaller home and donated the proceeds to charity. The family experienced a double benefit: not only did they get the warm-and-fuzzies for making an enormous gift to the needy, they also discovered that a smaller house gave them more time together.

The benefits of cutting back are getting renewed attention these days. The recession certainly removed a lot of excess buying power, forcing people to look for happiness that couldn't be bought. The environmentalists, as we had discussed before, consider overconsumption to be a moral issue, since consumption of energy and other resources is what ultimately drives pollution, deforestation, and (is widely believed) global climate change. Kim John Payne, a therapist who recently spoke at our school, published a book called Simplicity Parenting that urged parents to jettison substantial amounts of both material possessions and scheduled activities as a means of making their kids happier and more well-adjusted.

I'm glad that people are rediscovering these truths. But I put the emphasis on re-disovering, since these are hardly new. While some forms of evangelical Christianity have occasionally gotten sidetracked down the doctrine of wealth, the mainstream Christian message has always advised people to "lay up their treasure in heaven" – moral action, not material accumulation, is the secret to happiness. It used to be that thrift – only buying what you needed – was a common-sense virtue, not a startling epiphany.

The Salwens, the family that sold their house, did so because their daughter observed, ""Dad, if that man [in the Mercedes next to us] had a less nice car, that man there [begging for food on the other side of us] could have a meal." While I admire the moral bravery of such a statement, I shudder at its economic naiveté. It's such a small step, intellectually, from wanting to help those in need, to believing that poverty can be "fixed" through a simple redistribution of wealth. It reinforces the massively mistaken notion that economics is a zero-sum game – that someone having more is somehow taking away from those who have less. My ethical heroes are not the sackcloth-and-ashes folks that make "sacrifices," but rather the mega-philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who generate enormous value and wealth by doing what they love, and who then use that wealth for something better than mere conspicuous consumption. You never know – that guy in the Mercedes might have already fed more hungry people than you could even dream of helping with your modest means.

Agency is Essential to Meaning

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:33:36 -0700

A reminder to all "Abandon Text!" readers: if you're not reading the comments, you're missing half the fun. (Maybe even two-thirds of the fun, since Kenny can usually say twice as much as I do in half the space.)

In response to my critique of Felder's Wager (a philosophy I myself believe in and practice, I should remind everyone), Kenny writes:

Imagine that you see a rock, teetering on the edge of a cliff. There is no one below the cliff, who might be hit. There is, in fact, no one around but you. It's not a particularly big rock, not part of any structure, etc. So you can go put the rock back on the cliff in a more stable place, or you can throw it off the side of the cliff, or you can just leave the whole thing alone. Here is my question: do you have any moral or ethical reason to do any of the above?

Well, sure you do, if you imagine that the rock is trying to launch itself off the cliff. That's what it looks like, when you look at it that way: like Tantalus, it keeps straining for the edge, but can't quite get there. Life is probably a lot better down at the bottom of the cliff, it reasons. So you really ought to help it out and give it a toss.

But of course, all that is completely fanciful. Really, the rock doesn't care one way or the other. You get no ethical high marks, or demerits either, no matter what you do.

And here's the point of this unnecessarily-lengthy analogy. In a purely material world, everything and everyone is just like that rock. A small child is "trying" to get some food? Not really, that's just a fanciful way of putting it. What's really happening is a complex series of mechanical, electrical, and chemical reactions that all lead the child to move its legs, hold out its arms, and act for all the world as if it really matters if it gets the food. Those physical events are the whole story: anything else we add to them is self-indulgent anthropomorphism. Maybe the child gets the food and lives, maybe it doesn't and dies, and as Dr. Manhattan says, a dead body contains roughly the same number of molecules as a living one, so what's the diff?

If nothing matters, then nothing matters.

Ok, this is good, because we've teased out something that wasn't in the original description of Felder's Wager. Let's break out the argument into pieces:

Meaning and morality are related and tied together. In order for life to be meaningful, it must somehow conform to a moral order, a way things ought to be. Meaning derives from the degree to which a life makes the universe more like it ought to be (or at least tries to).
Morality requires people. It's not enough that something happens (e.g. a rock falling off a cliff); there has to be someone who intends to do something that affects someone else (e.g. a Red Cross volunteer gives food to an earthquake victim in Haiti) to aid or thwart their desires. Philosophers would call that someone – an entity that has desires and acts with intention to fulfill those desires -- an agent. So, morality requires agency.
Agency is not possible in a totally material world. There is no agent at work in a materialist's brain, just pieces of matter bouncing into each other.
If there is no agency in a totally material world, then there is no morality, and therefore no meaning. Therefore, a totally material world is a meaningless world.

This argument has some problems.

One of the things we were trying to prove or disprove is whether consciousness, awareness, and/or agency -- whatever it is that we think is essential to personhood – can arise from purely physical computational processes or not. But Step #3 of the argument above takes it as a given that agency cannot arise from purely physical means. So, it's trying to use its conclusion as one of its premises. It's begging the question.
As I've understood Kenny's arguments so far, the experiential, phenomenological, direct evidence from meditation is that consciousness is NOT thoughts, NOT feelings, NOT desires. Those are all perceived as mechanical processes that happen on their own, and that a person's true identity is the observer of those thoughts, feelings, and desires. That would suggest that agency IS possible in a purely physical world. Moreover, even if you succeed in the spiritual enterprise of demonstrating awareness is non-material, you have demonstrated that awareness has nothing whatsoever to do with the process of agency, which was supposedly the basis of morality and meaning. So, instead of being a physical body stuck in a meaningless mechanical universe -- congratulations! -- you're now a non-material ghost stuck in an equally meaningless mechanical universe. How exactly is that any better?

Material evidence

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:42:58 -0700

Good philosophers, like good scientists, should share their raw data, warts and all. (Yes, that's a dig at Phil Jones.) In the interests of full disclosure, what would change about my life, were I suddenly to become a materialist?

Pursuing my own pleasures would suddenly take a higher priority. If physical death is the end of life, then one's calculations for deferral of gratification could change significantly. No more "laying up treasure in heaven," doing good deeds with the thought that one will be rewarded in the afterlife. I wouldn't even wait for retirement, much less death; I'd make darn sure that I had rewarding experiences along the way, since tomorrow might be the end. As Kenny put it, more chess and movies, and less meditation. But again, I don't think that necessarily changes my lifestyle much – I deliberately developed a life in which my work and my play were pretty close to the same thing.

I think what we might term ordinary morality -- a basic respect for other human beings, generosity towards your immediate friends and neighbors, an aversion to crime -- is totally intact. No one needs a God in order to naturally do these things. I would still be trustworthy, give blood every couple of months, and help out a stray dog now and then.

What takes a real hit is the superrogatory goodness -- goodness above and beyond the call of duty, goodness that involves sacrificing my own self-interest. I would not "give 'till it hurts," as the Red Cross asks. I would be a decent person, but most likely I would not be a saint. It would still be possible for me to give generously to causes in which I or my family had a vested self-interest (like volunteer work at the school) or in which I had a personal intellectual interest (like technology work at the school or the SKS) or which provided other compensations like interesting friends (school and SKS again). But I wouldn't consistently put those causes ahead of my family's interests, or if they got to be unpleasant or felt unrewarding I would probably drop them.

Or, to put it another way: I would stop doing good things that I thought I ought to do, and only do those good things that I felt like doing.

The loss of the prospect of sainthood is significant. I'm currently reading David McCollough's history 1776, and I am acutely aware of how much I owe to people who made extraordinary sacrifices to establish the society I live in. I'm not sure if our way of life could have come to be, or be maintained, without people who live and die for something outside their narrow personal interests.

Oddly, and ironically, all good deeds (those I do for others, and those others do for me) would be imbued with a greater significance than if I was counting on a spiritual reality. If a Christian does you an unexpected good turn, it's nice, but you know they are just investing in their immortality 401k plan -- it's just a rarified form of self-interest. But when an atheist does you an unexpected good turn, it means a heck of a lot more. That person just gave you time and energy they will never get back again, for no other reason than they really wanted to. What a gift. What a pure act of self-expression. I am reminded of Angel, Joss Whedon's vampire-with-a-soul who discovers that no amount of good deeds can win him ultimate redemption, and who still does good anyway, because, in his words, "What else are we gonna do?" When he faces despair and has an epiphany that leads him back to life, he sums it up thus: "If nothing you do matters, then all that matters is what you do -- right now." Somehow it makes more sense to me when he says it, instead of Nietzsche or Sartre.

Living in a Material World

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:52:24 -0700

Here is one argument against Felder's Wager. (I have others.)

Felder's Wager depends in part on the assumption that meaning and purpose cannot be found in a purely material world. So let's run a thought experiment to test that assumption.

Assume for a moment that you came to the firm, unshakeable conclusion that materialism is true: there is nothing in the universe but matter and energy, all mental phenomena are emergent properties of matter and energy, and when you die, "the mind doth perish with the house that hoards it." (Let's not worry about how you come to that conclusion; that's not relevant to the argument.)

So, now that you're a materialist: how does that change your life? Specifically, what do you do differently? How does your notion of a good, meaningful, worthwhile life change?

I had initially expected (like Kenny) that losing spiritual reality would change everything. If life is just a random swirl of order passing through an ocean of chaos, and the universe has no purpose or direction or grand design, then of course life is meaningless. Logically, rationally, that is the inevitable conclusion.

Yet, when I run this experiment, for my own self and my own life, I find that things don't change nearly as much as I expected. In a totally material world, my desires for my own life are pretty much the same: I want to do work I enjoy and find interesting, enjoy the company of my peers and my family, be a respected and valued member of a community, and enjoy a moderate level of physical comfort and security. My notion of goodness doesn't change much, either, nor my desire to be a good person: I still want to be kind, generous, thoughtful person whose life has a positive effect on his fellow human beings. And I still recoil at the notion of being a bad person: murder, theft, selfishness, thoughtfulness are still just as bad. A shallow existence (watching reruns of Friends and eating lots of potato chips) still looks shallow and unsatisfying to me. A deep life, full of contemplation, conversation, and challenging tasks still looks appealing.

True, things are not exactly the same. I can't deny that my sense of confidence would be shaken. Without some spiritual plan or order, some eternal framework to hold existence, I would feel forced out into the open, exposed to the horrors of tragedy with no refuge. I would feel the overwhelming bitterness of being robbed of an enormous fortune. And yet . . . goodness is still good, and evil still evil. I would still "love that which is worthy of love." My rational calculations about the nature of the cosmos do not seem to put a dent in my convictions here on the ground.

So . . . if my notion of goodness doesn't change much, and my idea of a good life doesn't change much, and my actions don't change that much, once I become a materialist, in what sense can I say that meaning is dependent on a non-material, spiritual reality? If my instinctive, core sense of what is good and right is unchanged, even when all hope of spirituality is removed, then I can't say that there is no meaning without spirituality. The meaning might be different, but it's still there.

[Even if you're skeptical of the argument, go ahead and run the thought experiment for your own life. What would you change about your life, in a totally material world? Be as specific as possible, and as honest as possible. Ask yourself: would you still love your children? Would you still admire people who were generous and kind? Would you still have the same job you have now? Would you vote the same way in the next election? Would you try to be a different kind of person?]

One could explain these results away, and many an apologist does. "There, you see? Your moral convictions persist, in spite of your rational beliefs, so there must be a God somewhere, putting those moral ideas in your head!" Or, "You say you don't believe in a non-material reality, but you've just buried it beneath some abstractions. I bet if we dig deep enough we'll find out you still believe in something transcendent." Or perhaps the Ernest Becker, Denial of Death answer: "You still act like there is still meaning in the universe because you are in abject denial. Your mind simply refuses to acknowledge meaninglessness, because if it did, it would totally crush you. So you pretend there is meaning, even when there isn't."

Perhaps. Perhaps I'm just not that imaginative, and I would become a hopeless, helpless, despairing, despicable wreck without the hope of spiritual reality. But somehow I doubt it. I know lots of good people -- people more virtuous than I, by any measure -- whose virtue and meaning is not impeded by their materialism.

Felder's Wager attempts to use reason to overturn meaning, but in the end the contradictions can flip the other way: the persistence of meaning and morality invalidate reason. You can never argue away our sense of meaning, because it was never rational to begin with.

Felder’s Wager

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 06:43:01 -0700

In his conversation on consciousness, Kenny proposes his own personal version of Pascal's Wager:

I find the scientific world empty of the things I want most, which are purpose and certainty. In terms of purpose, we always say things like "It's better to be good to people than to hurt them," or even "It's better to know the truth than to live with superstition," but if science is the only basis for truth, then those statements are utterly meaningless: they can never be scientifically proven, right? In terms of certainty, science bases everything on logic (which we can't prove works) and the evidence of our senses (which in fact we know lie to us all the time), so nothing in science is ever certain beyond "that's the best we have so far."

So where does all that leave me? Certainly, I don't meditate because I have any certainty that it will lead to ultimate truth of any kind, although I am quite convinced that it has led me to a better understanding of who I am than I had before I started. But I meditate because, if I can't find real truth that way, then it just seems hopeless that I can find it in any way whatsoever.

So, as Kenny sees it, a purely physical universe, knowable only conditionally and devoid of values, is inherently meaningless. Therefore, if you want to have a meaningful life, your best bet is to turn your attention toward the Mind. Mind, for all its baffling nature, is at least directly apprehensible, and therefore offers a certain existential certainty. Of all the things you know, the only thing you know for sure is that you exist, and that you experience. Many spiritual teachers hold out the hope that if one pursues the mind deeply enough, one might eventually arrive at complete certainty about one's own nature and the nature of the universe – that is, enlightenment. Mind also seems to be the only place where a moral reality can be found, since science can only tell us what is, but not what ought to be. Like Pascal's Wager, this isn't a proof that spirituality inquiry is true. Rather, it says spirituality is the last refuge for meaning and certainty to exist, if it exists at all.

I like Felder's Wager, primarily because it's pretty close to where I've place my own existential bets. Like Kenny, what I want most out of life is moral certainty – clarity that I am living my life the best possible way, and doing the right thing. And like Kenny, I don't see any way to achieve that end without arriving at some certainty about my nature and my place in the universe.

Unfortunately, like Pascal's original version, Felder's Wager is dependent on certain premises that are open to attack. More on that tomorrow.

In Praise of Middle Age

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:43:00 -0700

I turn 40 today. In our youth-worshipping culture, today is the day I'm supposed to bemoan the loss of physical vitality and attractiveness. Truth is, I kind of like being this age. Consider the benefits:

Awareness. In theory, it's the young people who are supposed to be "living for the moment," but strangely they almost never do. Young people are obsessed with the future, because they believe their life is ahead of them, and that nothing they have now can compare to what's behind Door Number 3. The middle-class American slaves away in their youth, clawing their way to "success", to the best colleges and biggest careers and (not coincidently) the best possible spouse. You have to get older, with the right mix of satisfaction and disillusionment, for that future-fixation to fade. A forty-year-old looks to the future and sees his own diminishment and death – it's a lot easier for him to pay attention to the present, in both his work and his pleasures, and appreciate what he's got. Spirituality, we're told, begins and ends with the acceptance of the Now, and the middle-aged seeker, who neither longs for the future nor regrets his past, is perfectly positioned to really pay attention.
Commitment. Carpe diem sounds inspiring when you're young, but it's really a matter of necessity for those of middle age. Young people think they have all the time in the world, and so they have a hard time committing to single course of action. An older person, knowing their opportunities will be finite, will not waste them.
Experience. There is a trade-off between the vitality of youth and the experience of age. If you can maintain your health, though, experience is vastly preferable. The young have time and energy, but sadly the must spend it all getting what the old already have: experience and knowledge to solve the problems before them. A young person has the gumption to tackle a difficult problem and solve it in eight hours; the older person has seen these problems before, and solves them in two. A youth can endure his mistakes; his elders do better and avoid those mistakes entirely. Young people hit trouble and think the world is ending; older people have survived enough trouble before to know how to persevere.
Freedom. Young people have a lot of practical freedom. It costs very little to sustain just yourself, and with few responsibilities a young person can go do just about anything. As long as you don't get pregnant or wind up in prison, a young person is as free as they want to be. However, an older person has the psychological freedom of knowing who they really are. I wouldn't trade the angst of middle age for the outright anxiety of youth.
Connection. Speaking of anxiety, the most isolating sort of anxieties are the concerns about one's personal status – am I smart enough? Am I rich enough? Am I good enough? I, I , I, I, I . . . most of youth is spent obsessed with these questions -- that is, in narcissism. After a certain amount of time on this planet, all these questions seem less relevant, and you finally have the capacity to pay attention to things bigger than yourself. Family is usually the biggest wake-up call – as my wife put it, "A baby is a 24/7 Zen master whose mission in life is to demonstrate that your desires don't matter any more." The trend continues past family, though – the longer you're alive, the more you define yourself in terms of how will you serve your colleagues, your community, your country, and all of humanity. August Turak has proposed that this is direction of all personal and social evolution: "The purpose of life is to move from selfishness to selflessness." No matter what your beliefs, that seems to be the most universal definition of a meaningful life that I've yet found.

Zombies among us

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:46:00 -0700

As a side-note to our discussion on consciousness, I should point out that while Kenny and I and lots of others have strong intuitions about awareness as the seat of identity, there are some others who consistently fail to have the same intuition. I'm thinking especially of the computationalists who dream of uploading the entire contents of one's brain into a computer or robot (or, in the case of Dollhouse, another human brain), as a strategy for immortality.

I always find these schemes to be enormously frustrating, because they smack of such a wrong-headed identification – even if the computationalists are right about the mind being reducible to patterns of information. Let's say you sit down in the mad scientist's chair with the hat full of wires, and he reproduces all of your brain's thoughts, feelings, memories, and other mental capacities and puts them in a robot sitting in the chair next to you. Well, it's more like a cyborg, really – the brain is replaced by a near-indestructible chip, but the rest of the body is real flesh, created with cloning technology to be an exact replica of your body. Let's even skip over the enormous questions of qualia and consciousness, and assume that he can even reproduce those in his cyborg brain.

The question is: what will your experience be when the process is done?

I think that some people imagine that they will wake up in their new immortal robot body, still themselves but now ready for lots more life and love and happiness. Drinks are on me!

But . . . I don't think that's what happens. What happens is that you wake up in the same old body, just like before. Only now, there is a perfect copy of you sitting in the chair next to you. He's just like you – same face, same hair, same smug smile. You feel uncomfortable self-conscious watching him, just like you do when you watch a videotape of yourself. You never realized your hair looked that way from the back. The mad scientist is shaking his hand, telling him that the procedure was a complete success, and wishing him the best of luck. You watch your doppelganger walk out of the lab, ready to take over your life, go to your home, make love to your wife. And then the mad scientist turns to you, pulling a .38 caliber revolver from his pocket, saying, "We won't be needing this old body any more . . ." And you scream, "Wait! No! I'm still here! This is still me! That's not me!"

A perfect copy of yourself is now walking the street, enjoying himself, dreaming new dreams, making plans for his immortal life. So . . . are you immortal? Maybe your thoughts and feelings and ideas and hopes and dreams are alive and kicking . . . but what good is all that, if you don't get to experience them? Someone else is experiencing them – and if someone else is experiencing them, what does it matter that that person is just like you? You might feel proud to have given birth to an immortal, and happy that someone will carry out your lifelong mission of perfecting fusion reactors . . . but are you immortal?

Yes, I know, I'm ripping off dozens of sci-fi stories with this scenario. That's kind of the point. I'm not the only one who has thought this through, and concluded that copying yourself is not the same as being immortal. And yet people keep bringing it up . . . some of them really, really smart people. I used to think that people who thought that way were just not subtle enough to understand the argument . . . but now I'm starting to wonder if some people are just wired differently, that they really don't have the experience of observing experience the same way I do. Maybe there really are philosophical zombies, who don't care at all about consciousness when planning for their eternal persistence.

By the way, if I ever start a garage band, I'm going to call it the Philosophical Zombies. You heard it here first.

Consciousness as Evidence for the Non-material

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:33:12 -0700

Continuing our discussion on Kenny's conversation on consciousness . . .

As I described yesterday, when we empirically observe the nature of our own thoughts and consciousness through meditation or introspection, we observe that:

Consciousness is something apart from our thoughts. We don't experience it as another kind of thought. It is not experience -- it is the field within which experience happens. It is therefore undeniably real, and yet totally (and maddenly) undefinable. And not only undefinable, but irreducible. Consciousness – the awareness of qualia, the field within which thoughts and perceptions happen – is not the sum of lots of thoughts, not the result of an algorithm.
Consciousness is the locus of our ultimate sense of identity.

That's the evidence of our introspection. The question is: how do we interpret that evidence? What does it mean? There are at least two approaches to that evidence:

The Spiritual View. Because consciousness is undefinable and irreducible to physical processes, it is directly observable evidence for an immaterial aspect of reality. It is immaterial, and therefore possibly the basis on which one can construct a "spiritual" reality. Moreover, because we intuit consciousness to be the locus of identity – the ultimate "I" – that means the Self is really an non-material, spiritual thing: a soul. This is the interpretation adopted by lots of spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rose, Andrew Cohen, or most anyone else who's written a meditation manual in the last century.
The Materialist View. Because consciousness is undefinable, it is somewhat suspicious and weird. Perhaps it doesn't exist at all as a definite "thing", but is rather an emergent property of the brain, something that happens when you have reflexive processes looping back on themselves in unspeakably complicated ways. Regardless, when confronted with something baffling, something we don't understand and don't even know how to approach, we do not necessarily need to jump to the conclusion it is therefore unexplainable, irreducible, or non-material.

Currently, I find both interpretations to be almost equally compelling.

The spiritual interpretation of consciousness was the most compelling case I had ever found for spirituality – much more compelling than traditional religion could muster. It generally satisfies my intuition. I can't deny that consciousness is – it is the one thing I am most sure about – so I am perpetually annoyed by people like Dennett or Hofstadter who refer to it as an "illusion." (If it is an illusion, to whom is it an illusion? Can something be an illusion to itself? This is what Ken Wilber would call an "operative dysfunction": if it's right, it's wrong.)

On the other hand, the materialists have some good points I can't shake off. As I wrote previously, I think the Churchlands were right: just because we can't imagine something does mean it's not true. Steven Pinker made the same point in How the Mind Works, arguing that not only might we not understand consciousness now, we might never understand consciousness, for the simple reason that our species never evolved the capacity to do so.

Most significantly, there are the troubling correlations between the mind and the brain. So far, the only minds we've ever found appear to be housed in brains. (Some mystics would claim that ALL things are aware, which is an interesting idea but impossible to verify.) Electrical wave patterns in the brain are strongly correlated with states of consciousness in the mind. If you damage the brain, the nature of consciousness also appears to be affected. (I cannot for the life of me understand why so many spiritual people are all gaga over Jill Bolte Taylor, when her experience only lends credence to the notion that supposedly "spiritual" states are the product of the brain, and a damaged one at that.) Even if you accept the spiritual interpretation of the phenomena of consciousness, you are left with difficult questions: if awareness is "a thing apart", total separate from thoughts and feelings, why does awareness only occur in brains? And what makes us so sure that awareness will continue when the brain is gone? It's at this point that I start to feel like the materialists are winning the argument: the mind is the product of the brain, and awareness, though mysterious, is part of the same physical package. It's only the fact that the neuroscientists still don't have a satisfactory explanation for qualia and consciousness that keeps me on the fence.

Who the “I” Is

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:04:39 -0700

Ok, I'm going to start running down my own arguments and positions related to Kenny's conversation with Keli Y on the nature of consciousness and how it relates to meaning, purpose, and how we choose to live. Please forgive me if this is all repetitive of things you've read from me before.

Starting from the top of the list: who do I think I really am? Am I a body, or thoughts or emotions, or the consciousness observing the body, thoughts, and emotions?

On this question, I'm right in there with Kenny – I am the conscious awareness of thoughts, emotions and perceptions. Like Kenny, I find this to be empirically self-evident: if I sit in quiet meditation and observe my thought processes, it inevitably becomes clear that "I" do not control my thoughts. The thoughts happen, and "I" observe them happening. Whatever that "I" sense is, it is NOT in the thoughts themselves.

The best thought experiments to hone in on the nature of identity are to imagine immortality. What would it take for "you" to live forever? Does your physical body need to survive, forever unchanging? Does the pattern of your thoughts and feelings, your personality, have to survive? Or is it something else entirely – for lack of a better word, your soul?

Most people will readily agree that their body is not who they really are. Were that that case, we couldn't even imagine stories like "Freaky Friday", in which a mother and daughter trade bodies for a day. We observe people losing parts of their body (an arm, a leg) and replacing them with prosthetics, and we don't consider them to be different people. A body seems like something we have, not something we are. So we can readily believe we might be immortal without keeping our bodies.

What about our thoughts? Here it's a lot harder to see the distinction between what I am and what I have. In English we use both forms for describing thoughts and emotions: "I am angry", versus "I have a lot of anger", or "I lust after her" versus "I keep having lustful thoughts." It seems like we can go either way on that one, as Kenny described, through a process of identification, in which our sense of self temporarily attaches to particular thoughts and feelings. When you observe carefully, though, you will ultimately conclude thoughts are not essential to the self. We can easily imagine dying, finding ourselves in Heaven, and realizing that we don't feel angry, hateful, or lustful any more. Our thoughts can change (they do all the time anyway) but we are still the same person. In fact, such change is almost necessary for us to feel like we are alive: we call it "growth."

What about memories? Do we need to remember our lives in order to continue being, essentially, "us"? This gets even harder to pin down, since almost everybody thinks the sum of their experiences are what makes them them. And yet, even that doesn't seem to be central to our notion of ourselves, for an obvious reason: we forget. We forget lots of stuff. In fact, we forget most of what happens to us. We even construct memories of thing that never actually happened. And (getting back to immortality) we can imagine getting to Heaven, and enjoying ourselves so much there that eventually we forget everything that came before – our jobs, our worries, our fears, even our own names. And yet it would still be us that were living on in Heaven.

What's left, after you take away body, thoughts, feelings, and memories? Only consciousness – that which observes everything and is nothing in itself. That's who we know ourselves to be.

And yet . . . in spite of all that . . . the argument is still not won. More on that tomorrow.

Conscious Conversation

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:42:04 -0700

Kenny posted his latest essay -- actually, an ongoing dialog on the nature of consciousness -- with the apology: "Somewhat intellectual and abstract, even by my standards--sorry!"

No need to apologize. Of all the topics on which one can get intellectual and abstract, this is the one worth doing it for. The questions that Kenny discusses with Keli Y are exactly the questions I have been struggling with for most of the last year. I have a dozen or more unfinished essays, all taking different stabs at the same questions:

What exactly is my sense of identity, my "I", in relation to my thoughts?
Is that sense of "I" just another kind of thought, or something radically different and irreducible?
Could consciousness be the product of a physical brain, or is it an overpoweringly self-evident sign of something that transcends physical nature?
What is necessary for life to be meaningful? Is a transcendent (i.e. "spiritual") reality necessary for meaning to exist? How does my day-to-day experience of a meaningful, good life relate to ultimate meaning and purpose?

Anyone familiar with the SKS, which defined most of my spiritual life for the last twenty (!) years, would recognize that these are all the perennial koans of a genuine spiritual path, at least as Augie Turak and many other teachers define it. This should all be old hat. So why should I be so fired up about them now?

A long process of humiliation. I started out on the spiritual path young, confident, and cocky. I knew that I would find the Truth, if the Truth were to be found. I have now had twenty years of learning all kinds of things, but not experiencing transcendent reality. Not even close. I have the humility to admit I don't know much, which goes a long way to permitting genuine questioning free of wishful thinking.
A new sense of mortality. In a few days I will turn 40. I am done waiting to see how my life will turn out. It has now officially turned out -- this is who I am. I can no longer pin my purpose on the hope of some future revelation. I've got to work with what I've got. This is it!
New influences. I hate to say it, but I think I spent most of those last twenty years only reading the things that confirmed my own worldview. Now that I've spent time reading all the people who disagree with me -- the materialists, the atheists, the rationalists -- I'm finding myself failing to win the argument. I am not without hope in my spiritual life. But, as Ursula le Guin put it: "There is a certain bleakness that comes from finding hope where one expected to find certainty."

So, in a nutshell: I started out agreeing almost entirely with Kenny's position on all these questions . . . And over the last year or so I have been dragged kicking and screaming to a position closer to Keli Y's. It might take me a while to explain why.

Education = ethics

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:53:51 -0700

Paul Lockhart's "Lament" repeatedly questions the purpose of education as well as its methods. He doesn't just grieve that true mathematics isn't being taught, but rather that it is not recognized as an art, something that ennobles the spirit and gives joy, something loved for its own sake and not any sort of utility that it brings. He wants math to be lumped in with the liberal arts – literature, music, painting, etc. – things that the education establishment teaches without regard to vocational preparation. This sort of thinking runs counter to the "3 R" crowd just who want their kids to get jobs and balance their checkbooks.

Anyone who would divide education into "the useful" and "the beautiful" is bound to run into trouble, because they are not separate. The useful is beautiful – ask any engineer, businessman, homemaker or child who set about to solve a practical problem and found an elegant solution. The beautiful is also useful – if nothing else, by giving pleasure to its consumers and creators. Any attempt to divide them invariably leads to people running to unhealthy extremes in either direction. On the one hand, you get college professors determined to magnify their greatness by emphasizing their uselessness. On the other hand, you get No Child Left Behind, in which anything that's not part of a pathetically low standard of usefulness is jettisoned. Either way, both utility and joy get destroyed.

What neither side seems to realize is that they are arguing about ethics – in the classic Greek sense of answering the question: "What is a worthwhile life?" Education is just the practical implementation of a notion of ethics. Once you've decided what a good life looks like, you try to prepare your citizens to have that sort of life. Everyone educator and politician starts by saying, "We all agree that we want what's best for the child" – without acknowledging that we have vastly different notions of what "best" really is. You can't say what's a good curriculum until you decide what kind of life you want your children to have . . . and you can't decide that without determining what life is, ultimately, all about. Is life about Work? Is life about Experience? Is life about Happiness?

Last year I went to a workshop for directors of independent schools, a crash-course for new board members. One of the duties of a board of directors is to define the mission statement of the school and to make sure all policies are serving the mission. In talking about mission statements, the facilitator explicitly made the connection to ethics: "Your mission is really about what you want your kids to be. In general, every parent and every school has the same three goals for their kids. We want them to be Successful. We want them to be Happy. And we want them to be Good. The priority you assign to each of those goals will determine the character of your school."

I thought that was a pretty good analysis. Most public schools emphasize Success as the primary goal, with Happiness a distant second and Goodness not even on the radar. Many parochial schools put their notion of Goodness at the top, and then Success, and then Happiness. Waldorf schools explicitly put Goodness (i.e. spiritual capacity) at the top of the list. Happiness probably comes next; Waldorf schools are the few I've ever seen that took Happiness seriously as an important part of human development. No one wants to say that Success comes last – it's hard to be happy without some measure of success – but it is correctly recognized as a means, and not an end in itself.

Marital Duties

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:16:57 -0700

I got some comments off-line on yesterday's post regarding Sandra Tsing-Loh's affair and subsequent divorce, which have prodded me into clarifying my position on sex within marriage. Discussions of sexual morality always seem to get people worked up – yet another clue that it's something important, and worth discussing.

I thought I was pretty safe, in terms of political correctness, because nine-tenths of my arguments were just citations of things women had written about sexuality within marriage. However, I because I said something directly about marriage partners being obligated to "put out on a regular basis," I crossed some mysterious line that men are not allowed to cross. If a woman like Sandra Tsing-Loh writes about a man who refuses to have sex with his wife for two years, she's allowed to say "that's a raw deal." If a man says it's unreasonable for a spouse to refuse to have sex for two years, then suddenly everyone thinks I'm talking about the sexual enslavement of women, the subjugation and humiliation of half the human race. In other words, I'm the Taliban.

There were multiple levels of rights and responsibilities that are involved in all sexual activity, and it's easy to get them confused:

One's legal and basic human rights
One's moral responsibilities to their spouse
Strongly recommended advice for having a happy and stable marriage

When I spoke about "putting out on a regular basis," I'm definitely not talking about #1. All human beings have a right to the sanctity and integrity of their own bodies. Everybody has a right to freely choose when and with whom to have sex. Using physical force to coerce sex from another is rape, even in marriage, and is a crime in all civilized nations. Nobody's forcin' nobody to do nothin', ok? And, to be 100% clear, everything I'm writing here applies equally to woman and men, so there's no double standard going on.

So, that being said . . . I do think a married person has a moral obligation to have sex with their spouses. There are very few conditions in the typical, traditional marriage contract that are spelled out in detail. All that "love, honor, cherish" stuff is pretty vague on the details and open to lots of interpretation. There are a couple things that are extremely explicit, though:

The couple is "forsaking all others" – and we all know what that's supposed to mean: sexual exclusivity.
This is a permanent commitment.

If an arrangement between two people lacked these principles, I don't think we would call it "marriage." (We could argue about that, but let's not. I think we can agree that this is the traditional understanding of the meaning of marriage.) Because sexual exclusivity is explicitly stipulated as a core principle of the arrangement, I think it deserves very special consideration. It wouldn't be spelled out that way unless it was important. I think it's also clear that this is something going against the grain of human nature: if it were perfectly natural and normal and expected to be monogamous for our entire lives, we wouldn't have to make solemn promises about it.

If you make a commitment to lifelong sexual exclusivity, it seems to me that the conscious, prolonged attempt to withhold sex from a spouse, contrary to their desires, is clearly breaking faith with that commitment. People don't get married to become celibate. They have a reasonable expectation to reasonable access to sex.

Ahh, but what's "reasonable"? That's where all the marriage counselors and sex therapists get involved. I'm sure the answer is dependent on lots of personal factors of health, opportunity, and desire. I've already said that "never" is not reasonable. Usually, "reasonable" is whatever the couple can mutually agree upon as reasonable, or at least acceptable.

This is the point at which I move from "moral obligation" to "strongly recommended advice." And that advice is just a rehash from a dozen pop psychologists, which is this: you should have sex whenever either spouse wants it.

Mostly, this comes out of my functional extension of the Golden Rule, strongly recommended for good working relationships of all kinds, which states: All reasonable requests made in good faith should be met in good faith. If your spouse asks you to do something, and it's reasonable, then you should do it. Or, to put it another way, the default answer to spousal requests should be Yes. If your wife asks you to move the junk off the porch because company is coming over, you should do it. Maybe you have a perfectly good reason not to move the junk right this moment, because you're busy or tired or whatever – that also is a reasonable request. Of course, this principle would be quickly subverted if it wasn't coupled with another principle, which is: Don't make unreasonable requests. Ask for what you need, with the understanding that everyone will work in good faith to meet everyone's needs.

Usually, when I spell out this philosophy, people think it's silly – either because they agree with me and think it's so obvious that it isn't worth saying, or because they totally disagree and think such an rule would result in someone, at some point, being totally taken advantage of. For my money, it is an essential part to any good working relationship. All kinds of interpersonal friction are minimized if you trust that the other person has a good reason for their requests. It restricts arguments to things that are worth arguing about. It communicates trust and respect.

If it works for putting the cap on the tube of toothpaste or taking out the trash, it also works for sex. Make your best effort to meet the needs of your spouse, and you will maximize everyone's peace and contentment. If you ignore their needs and desires, you will pay a price for it.

Privacy Rights and Children

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:38:00 -0700

Kenny wrote an excellent defense of the rights of minors in his essay "Of Strip-Searches and Students," in which he commented on the recent Supreme Court case of Safford Unified School District v. Reading. 13-year-old Savana Reading was strip-searched by school administrators on suspicion that she was carrying ibuprofen. (Yes, you read that right -- an OTC drug available in every household in the country is contraband in a government-run school.) The High Court found (thank God) that Savana's 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were violated. But Kenny is looking for a larger legal precedent. He wonders: why shouldn't minors enjoy the same legal rights as adults, when it comes to respecting their basic human dignity?

Read Kenny's essay if you haven't already. Then come back here, because I want to propose another angle from which one could construct a theory of the legal privacy rights of minors.

^ ^ ^

It's hard to talk about the legal rights of minors without also talking about the legal rights of parents. In general, the law provides parents with absolute power and authority over their children. Children do require a lot of governing, relatively speaking, and our culture trusts that the parents are the ones most likely to have the child's best interests at heart when using that authority. A parent's powers are pretty broad – they can search, seize, and physically restrain the freedom of their children as they see fit. Most people see that arrangement as appropriate; so long as the children are not physically endangered and adequately provided for, parents should have that right to exercise those powers. (As a matter of good parenting, I think parents are well advised to restrain their use of those powers. You should, in general, treat children with all the respect and autonomy you would accord to any adult, within the bounds of the child's ability to hold up their end of an adult relationship. But I still think it is appropriate that parents have the legal right to those powers.)

The only problem with that arrangement is that it gets us used to thinking of children as entities without rights. We wouldn't think it wrong to search our own children's rooms if we suspected wrongdoing, so we generalize that out to "children have no privacy rights at all." I think parents have rights that may trump the child's right to privacy (or association, or religion, or speech, or many other constitutional rights) but that doesn't mean the children don't have those rights at all.

Things get especially murky with schools, in which the teachers and administrators are acting in loco parentis – that is, they are delegated some of the powers of the parents while the children are in their care. They are permitted to control where the children go, what they are allowed to say, and can even apply certain punishments. The question is: do teachers and administrators have the same powers as parents when it comes to privacy, or not?

My feeling is no. I think the only parental powers over children that are given to other adults are those that are explicitly delegated from the parents. If a school wants the right to search a child's backpack or locker, they need the explicit consent of the parent. If a parent does not delegate those parental powers, then a child has exactly the same constitutional rights as an adult. (You may find, by the way, that adults don't have as many rights as you might think. There is no legal expectation of privacy in most workplaces, for instance – your email can be read, your desk searched, etc.)

This model isn't perfect. Savana could still be strip-searched for ibuprofen under this legal theory, had her parents signed some consent form that gave administrators the power to do so. As long as there are bad parents, there would be bad outcomes. But this, at least, would start us from the correct basis: children have the same rights as adults, unless some other parental power prevails.

One White Glove

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:18:58 -0700

Ethics, in the classical Greek sense, is an attempt to answer the question, "How should we live?" Or, to put it another way, "What would be a good life?" If you develop a system of ethics, you should be able to apply it to your own life, or any other life for that matter, and answer the question: "Was that a good life?"

Which brings us to Michael Jackson.

Yes, sirree, that's a real stumper.

People find meaningfulness in all kinds of things: success, fame, power, impact, uniqueness, love, happiness, virtue. On some of those measures, Michael was off the charts. He was enormously talented, enjoying the kind of fame and fortune and cultural influence that was shared by few, and not likely to be repeated again in our hyper-fragmented culture. Thriller not only holds the record for most albums sold, it's actually still a really good album; popular music doesn't often have that much staying power. The economic productivity of this one life is staggering -- Jackson's annual residuals alone are about 100 times greater than my entire lifetime output. He generously supported lots of charities, which almost lets you forgive the new levels of personal extravagance he reached with his Neverland. And man, could he dance. It must have been fun, to be able to dance like that. So, yeah . . . a lot to admire. Who could say it wasn't Good?

And yet . . . there is the other side. It's hard to gauge whether he was happy, since he was so far withdrawn from reality, but the smart money would guess he was miserable in his freakishness. Lots of people withdraw from reality, but few have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to propel their weirdness. We accept that great artists sometimes suffer for the sake of their creative powers, and even behave badly. We are not used to them becoming barely recognizable as human. Robbed of a real childhood, he spent the rest of his life trying to get it back, and becoming more and more grotesque in the process. (The Onion, as always, nailed it with their headline: "King of Pop dead at 12." I doubt that he molested those children, but I do think he lusted after their innocence in a manner that was disturbing. None of this was immoral, exactly, though it was repulsive.

So how do you add all that up? Was it worth it? Had a 12-year-old Michael been offered a vision of his future life, would have accepted the whole deal? Unparalleled fame and accomplishment, along with misery, isolation, suspicion, and disgust? Some people would, but I know I would not and, I suspect, neither would Michael. Achievement is pretty empty when you find yourself cut off from the rest of world. It's not the sort of life one would choose. That, I think, is the source of the international mourning – people recognize the tragedy of someone being so poor while being so rich. Now that the awkward man-child is gone, everyone is free to embrace the good things of his life and try to forget, or at least forgive, the shadows. I like to remember him playing the Scarecrow in The Wiz, when he was at the peak of his powers, still recognizable as a black male with magnificent talent and vitality, and not yet transformed into mythological figure, the fey creature with the one white glove.

Effort, Free Will, and Destiny

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:37:30 -0700

In response to Kenny's comments on the primacy of effort:

If social scientists can accurately predict whether someone will drop out of high school on the day they are born, does that necessarily mean that effort is not the primary factor in their success or failure? Maybe the social scientists have merely learned how to predict who will make the effort (e.g. people in a cultural context that values education and economic advancement) and those who will not (e.g. those who lack those forms of support). And, even if their predictions are 80% right, we could still look at the 20% who defy those predictions, and I'm fairly certain we would find greater effort as a common characteristic of those who beat the odds.
Along those same lines, consider the results of the KIPP schools (mentioned both in the New Yorker article and in Gladwell's book Outliers). 80% of the eighth graders in the KIPP program in the South Bronx scored at or above grade level in reading or math – nearly twice the New York City average. The core difference of KIPP schools: effort. Between extended school calendars and piles of homework, they make students spend 100% of their time working on academic success. The differences are dramatic. Again, nothing is a guarantee (there are still the other 20% who are not performing at grade level) but that still a huge difference.
Kenny is correct that an individual's success is vastly dependent on the context in which they are born, and that effort is insufficient without opportunity. If you pull back and consider a family's success over several generations, you will see the correlation between effort and success become much stronger. If one or more generations are willing to make the effort and sacrifices necessary to create the environment of opportunity (e.g. coming to America, working two jobs to save for kids' college, etc.) then families can readily advance from poverty to the middle class, or from the middle class to the outright wealthy. One can argue whether it is morally just that the virtues or the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children . . . but most humans would agree that it is just (to the extent anything is just in this world), and that we have a right and a responsibility to work for the advancement of our children.
All of this is tying back to our earlier (and ongoing) discussion about our moral obligations to the poor. Yes, we have vastly more than most other people in the world . . . but that's not an accident. Our wealth is the result of a particular context of opportunity, which was primarily created out of the effort, sacrifice, and risk-taking of our forebears. I think we need to pay as much attention to the virtues that created this wealth in the first place, as well as the impulse to share it with others. (More on this later.)
I agree that intelligence and willpower are strongly correlated. Notice the kind of intelligence, though. The article explicitly points out that willpower is a feat of imagination – the ability to create a mental vision of the future rewards, or to mentally erase the prospect of immediate gratification. And yet most of our schools (at least, the schools I grew up in) do very little to stimulate our capacity to imagine. Imagination and creativity were usually regarded as something extra-curricular, something beyond the pale of standard education. If you look at the report cards from the Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools, you will see that for grades one through five, "imagination" and "creativity" are never mentioned.