Archive for January, 2005

It’s all Subjective

Published at January 21, 2005 in philosophy. 7 Comments

I am often interested in the objections to Ethical Subjectivism and Richard is stirring some up in what I imagine is his Reductio Ad Absurdum.

I would probably describe myself as a subjectivist, however I think the conclusions drawn (from all parties) from the doctrine of subjectivism in the realm of ethics tend to be absurd.

It is not contrary to subjectivism to consent to objective moral standards. For example, that taking an innocent human life is wrong, and should be avoided. The difference is, the subjectivist admits that there is no objective truth to this value, it only has power through agreement, not because it is rational, adheres to a moral formula, or was carved into stone a very long time ago.

The problem most opponents have with this is that you can have sub-cultures within society that create and agree to their own moral standards and seek to impose them on others (KKK, Nazi Germany, Christian Right, Muslim Fundamentalists) and whilst proponents of alternative ethical theories can be comfortable in proclaiming “This is clearly wrong” subjectivists have no basis to do so.

But to me this is just a creature comfort to think that whatever our preferences are must be right for the reasons we think are reasonable and therefore those that oppose them must be wrong. The subjectivist admits that neither is ultimately right or wrong but it does not follow that he must stand by whilst Germany invades Poland or whilst extremists behead women for adultery. He has a charter of morals to which he (and others) subscribe which may include intervening to prevent innocent lives to be taken and so he does. (Much like in my discussion of torture.)

Admitting that saving innocent lives is a subjective value, held by most people does nothing to detract from its function as a value, which is to be upheld and practiced. How do you go about deciding what values and morals should be included in the charter? Maybe you start with one’s written on rock, or use a logical formula?

Who cares?

Here you are in no less murky waters than any other theory.

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Are we all torturers now?

Published at January 15, 2005 in politics and philosophy. 2 Comments

Following a discussion on the justifiability of torture at Fake Barn Country
I wrote this:

If someone had taken my family and I had access to someone who knew where they were, I would probably torture on the slimmest possibility that it would help.

I would probably feel justified when doing this, just as I would probably feel justified in pleading to the court to execute him if he had killed my family too. But this kind of justification and righteousness is a far cry away from institutionalised torture and capital punishment, both which I oppose.

Why? Because all ethics is about is drawing a line. You can give reasons to draw here instead of there or move it back and so forth but you draw lines. Some of which are set in stone, they cannot be moved, allowing the state to torture its or other state’s citizens crosses that line, well and truly.

You can give a thousand utilitarian arguments against that but it doesn’t matter, would we have the police rape ten women if it would save thousands, or is that ‘too’ much? Would we have the state go nuclear on an entire country if it would save our citizens, or is that ‘too’ much? Would we have the state negotiate with terrorists, just give them a little, or would that set a dangerous precedent? Or maybe we draw a line and we say, “this shall not be crossed.”

I think it is pertinent to publish an article by Marian Wilkinson I read in The Age newspaper

Are we all torturers now?
January 15, 2005

The “urgent report” landed on the desk of FBI director Robert Mueller just as Washington was preparing for summer holidays last June. It was carefully copied to every key law enforcement officer in the bureau. It could not be lost, destroyed, misplaced or overlooked. It was explosive.

A witness had walked into the Sacramento office of the FBI with first-hand accounts of “serious physical abuses of civilian detainees” in Iraq. He described to agents “strangulation, beatings, placement of cigarettes into detainees’ ear openings and unauthorised interrogations”.

These claims alone did not hold the shock value in the report. Two months earlier, sensational photographs depicting gross sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad had been splashed around the world. What was more disturbing in this report was the allegation from the witness that US officials “were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses”.
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But the report, dated June 25 last year, stayed buried at FBI headquarters for the next six months, as the Pentagon and the CIA went through the motions of investigating allegations of prisoner abuse triggered by the Abu Ghraib scandal.

None of those investigations resulted in criminal charges being laid against any senior figure, and in the euphoria of President George Bush’s re-election, the prisoner abuse scandal appeared dead.

But last month - due largely to the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union, human rights groups and the American Bar Association - the Bush Administration was compelled under the Freedom of Information Act to release hundreds of new documents graphically detailing evidence from FBI and US military officers of the abuse of prisoners under interrogation in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the documents released was the heavily censored copy of the report sent to the FBI director last June.

While nearly all the documents have censored deletions, their damning contents have forced the Bush Administration and Congress to re-examine the abuse scandal.

At the heart of this is whether, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush, his top legal advisers and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorised interrogation techniques that were so extreme they amounted to torture under both US and international law. If so, did this approval from the White House result in the beatings, sexual abuse and deaths of scores of detainees held by the US in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq?

“It is now reasonably clear that there was action by the President,” the American Bar Association’s Scott Horton told The Age. “I have now seen several further documents which persuade me that there is in fact a determination by the President that dates from roughly April 2002. It is addressing extreme interrogation procedures, though not in detail.”

Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, signatories to which include the US, states that all detainees should be treated humanely. To this end, it says, acts including cruel treatment and torture “are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place”.

The US is also a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental” for political or military reasons. Article 2 states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

While the White House now vehemently denies that Bush signed any secret executive order authorising torture, Scott Horton and other independent lawyers question those denials. “They are consciously deceptive,” says Horton, who has worked closely with US military lawyers trying to expose the scandal. While there was no “executive order”, he believes a so-called “presidential determination” or top-secret authorisation opened the door to torture and abuse of terrorism suspects.

The new round of congressional and legal probing has enormous implications for the Howard Government, a key US ally in the war on terror. If the use of interrogation techniques tantamount to torture was authorised up the chain of command to the President’s office, Prime Minister John Howard and the Australian Defence Force chief Peter Cosgrove will likely be forced to examine whether any Australian military or intelligence personnel engaged in or witnessed criminal acts of torture or abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay.

Until now, the Howard Government has brushed off allegations of abuse made by the two Australian detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, and failed to press the Bush Administration for a final report on the cases.

But the dramatic descriptions of Habib’s torture in Egypt after US officials helped render him to that country raise the question of whether Australian intelligence agencies, including ASIO and the Federal Police, have relied on information gained from torture or criminal abuse.

It is not only a legal and moral question. Well-trained interrogators have rejected the use of torture to extract intelligence because they believe it is unreliable, especially in the war on terror. Douglas Johnson, of the US Centre for Victims of Torture, explains: “Nearly every client at the Centre for Victims of Torture, when subjected to torture, confessed to a crime they did not commit, gave up extraneous information or supplied names of innocent friends or colleagues to their torturers.”

In the US, a string of legal cases involving lower-ranking military officers and a CIA contractor is also threatening to push the scandal up the chain of command to Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet.

Last October, two US military intelligence officers, chief warrant officers Lewis Welshofer and Jeff Williams, were charged over the death of an Iraqi Air Force major-general, despite the strong objections of their commanding officer, who described Abed Hamed Mowhoush as “a very, very bad man”.

Mowhoush died in November 2003 at a US base in Iraq after being subjected to days of interrogation. At the time, the Pentagon put out a death certificate and press release claiming the general had died of natural causes. But an army investigation, forced by the Abu Ghraib scandal, found the major-general died of “asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression” and there was evidence of “blunt-force trauma to his chest and legs”.

Welshofer and Williams had allegedly placed Mowhoush in a sleeping bag and rolled him back and forth during the interrogation. One had then sat on his chest and covered his mouth. An electrical cord was also used. When questioned by a Denver Post reporter who obtained a copy of the investigators’ report, Welshofer simply said: “I saved lives.”

Welshofer’s defence is expected to rely heavily on the claim that he was following orders and using interrogation methods known to his commanders. But the much-anticipated evidence may never be heard publicly. Last month, the US military succeeded in closing the court martial to the media. Frustrated US military lawyers and human rights advocates are now pressing Congress to support a full, open investigation into the prisoner abuse scandal to determine whether it does lead to the Oval Office. Senator Ted Kennedy is publicly advocating “an independent 9/11-style commission”.

Kennedy and several other Democratic and Republican senators last week turned a day-long Senate hearing into the appointment of Bush’s new attorney-general, Alberto Gonzales, into the first serious probe of the White House’s role in the abuse scandal. As White House legal counsel, Gonzales is a key figure in the unfolding scandal. When Bush launched the war on terror after the September 11 attacks, Gonzales sought to provide him with the legal cover he wanted to fight a “new kind of war” against al-Qaeda and its allies. The war on terror would include targeted assassinations and the kidnapping and rendering of suspects to allies known to practice torture and harsh interrogations. The CIA and Pentagon believed this would produce “actionable intelligence” to help prevent another terrorist attack on US soil.

In intensifying his questioning of Gonzales last week, Kennedy bluntly told him: “It appears that legal positions that you have supported have been used by the Administration, the military and the CIA to justify torture and Geneva Convention violations by military and civilian personnel.”

Kennedy said that Gonzales believed that in fighting the war on terror, Bush held almost unlimited presidential power as commander-in-chief to override US laws on torture. “The Administration ignored and excluded top military lawyers and experts in the State Department and Defence Department who raised objections to your policies,” he told Gonzales. “That arrogance of executive power has led to national embarrassment.”

Gonzales repeatedly denied that Bush had authorised the use of torture, but thousands of pages of declassified documents and testimony from military officers and officials tell another story. They indicate that the White House embarked on a series of decisions from early 2002 that freed the CIA and teams of US Special Forces to use interrogation methods since denounced by the International Committee of the Red Cross and US military lawyers as violations of international and US laws on torture.

At last week’s Senate hearings, Gonzales did admit that in 2002, he asked the Department of Justice for a legal opinion on the US laws on torture that had come into effect after the US ratified the International Convention against Torture. Gonzales directed his request to a Bush appointee, Jay Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel.

Bybee was already on record advising the White House that Bush had sweeping powers as commander-in-chief to fight the war on terror. After discussions with Gonzales, Bybee produced an extraordinary memo in August 2002. He stated that the statutes on torture should only be read as covering what he called extreme acts.

“Where pain is physical,” he wrote, “it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure. There is a significant range of acts that, though they might constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, fail to rise to the level of torture.”

Even more arresting in Bybee’s 60-page memo to Gonzales was a detailed list of “possible defences that would negate any claim that certain interrogation methods violate the statute (on torture)”.

The principal defence, as Bybee saw it, was Bush’s power as commander-in-chief in wartime. Applying the laws on torture to interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects or their allies would be unconstitutional, he wrote, because it would interfere with the defence of the country.

Finally, Bybee said, even if an interrogation method vio- lated the torture statutes, “self-defence could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability”.

Last week, Harold Koh, the dean of international law at Yale University, described the Bybee opinion as “a stain upon our law and our national reputation”.

Appearing at the Senate hearings, he said: “A legal opinion that is so lacking in historical context, that offers a definition of torture so narrow that it would have exculpated Saddam Hussein, that reads the Commander-in-Chief power so as to remove Congress as a check against torture, that turns Nuremberg on its head and that gives government officials a licence for cruelty, can only be described as a disaster.”

As Koh pointed out, the US bill of rights and the constitution include a prohibition on “the use of cruel or unusual punishment” and, in 1994, the US ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. But for almost two years, until the Abu Ghraib scandal, Gonzales and the White House accepted Bybee’s advice.

Within weeks of the Bybee advice, military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were lobbying for harsher interrogation techniques. A struggle developed among US military lawyers, between those who supported Bybee and those who argued officers would be exposed to court martial.

While the new interrogation methods may or may not have extracted “actionable intelligence” from top al-Qaeda suspects, by December 2002, abuse of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan was becoming widespread. That month, a young Afghan man died in US custody under a savage interrogation that would ultimately result in charges against 28 US personnel.

Major-General George Fay, who investigated US military intelligence officers after the Abu Ghraib scandal, found that by December 2002, “interrogators in Afghanistan were removing clothing, isolating people for long periods of time, using stress positions, exploiting fear of dogs and implementing sleep and light deprivation”.

Critically, Fay noted that “the use of clothing as an incentive (i.e. nudity) is significant in that it likely contributed to an escalating ‘dehumanisation’ of detainees and set the stage for additional and more severe abuses.”

By April 2003, Rumsfeld had approved scores of interrogation techniques that many military lawyers believed broke military law and that human rights lawyers and the Red Cross believed violated the convention on torture. While some of the techniques, such as sleep deprivation, were within the law if used within strict time limits, at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan they were applied at the extremes.

The US had already begun the invasion of Iraq and very quickly the abusive interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan began in Iraq. Rumsfeld and Bush publicly stated the Geneva Convention would apply to the Iraq conflict. But within a month of the overthrow of Saddam, the drive for intelligence appeared to be overriding that commitment. In May 2003, the Red Cross wrote to the head of coalition forces in Iraq detailing 200 allegations of ill-treatment of detainees.

By November of that year, the Red Cross was reporting that interrogation techniques in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq had shifted from harsh to becoming “tantamount to torture”.

Johnson, of the Centre for Victims of Torture, says that once abusive interrogation is officially sanctioned, even in a few cases, it is impossible to control. “Torture has always been justified by reference to a small number of people who know about the ‘ticking time bomb’, but in practice it has always been extended to a much wider population.”

Military investigators found that this is what happened at Abu Ghraib. On one day in November last year, the CIA and Navy special forces, the SEALs, brought in an Iraqi suspect they believed to have been involved in a deadly attack on the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad.

Within an hour the suspect was dead, with a bag over his head, face down on a floor and handcuffed. The elite intelligence officers then persuaded junior soldiers to help cover up the death until the body could be disposed of quietly. One of the soldiers photographed the body packed in ice, with his colleague grinning next to the corpse.

That night, elsewhere in the prison, a junior female soldier and her colleagues, apparently on a whim, forced another detainee to stand on a box with simulated electrical wires attached to his fingers and penis and a hood over his head. They also captured this in a photograph that would later become infamous around the world.

By then, even relatively junior military police and intelligence officers had ran amok at Abu Ghraib, physically and sexually abusing detainees, forcing them to masturbate, riding them like animals and making them pose in graphic sexual scenes. Sometimes it was to assist military intelligence operations, sometimes it was for “fun”.

Evidence this week in the court martial of military police officer Charles Graner, one the alleged ringleaders of the Abu Ghraib abuses, indicates he enjoyed the unchecked sadism of his role as much as helping out on military interrogations.

Until recently, Bush cocooned his Administration, in particular Rumsfeld and the CIA, from responsibility in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Every investigation so far has been run by hand-picked officials who have placed the blame at the lower rungs of the chain of command. But this strategy is unravelling.

Days before Gonzales was to face the Senate last week, the Justice Department replaced the Bybee advice on torture with an opinion expressly stating that torture is prohibited under US law and opposed by the President. But even this new opinion evaded the issue of whether Bush had the authority as commander-in-chief to override the laws on torture in the war on terror. Last week, Gonzales repeatedly evaded answering that question, leaving some senators deeply sceptical and threatening to support calls for an independent investigation of the scandal.

More than 100 of America’s leading military, academic and human rights lawyers have written to the Senate judiciary committee saying it is time for an independent bipartisan commission with full subpoena powers to find out whether the White House approved the torture.

It was essential, they said, to ensure that the treatment of prisoners adhered “faithfully to the constitution, the laws of the United States and to its treaties”.

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Common Sense?

Published at January 12, 2005 in philosophy. 11 Comments

In discussion over an engaging post about altruism by Richard over at Pixnaps he introduced an interesting point about common sense.

Richard: It involves rejecting our common-sense understanding of human action, and implies that we are engaged in massive self-deception.

IM: Definitely, why would you suppose that common-sense understanding of the human mind in reference to how we act just happens to be the best and most accurate model.

All else being equal, it counts against a theory if it is counter-intuitive. Similarly if it implies that most of our beliefs are false, that we are engaged in massive self-deception, etc. This isn’t a decisive objection, of course, but such uncharitibility does count against a theory. (The Brain-in-a-Vat hypothesis can account for all the data, but we reject it because it implies that all our common-sense beliefs are false. Simple realism is an alternative theory that serves much better in this regard. I have two hands, and I have other-regarding desires. We prefer theories that don’t contradict these core beliefs.) So the onus is on the theory’s proponent to show there is some advantage which makes this cost worth bearing.

I think that it is probably right in one sense that the counter-intuitive nature of a theory counts against a thoery but that this is outweighed by explanatory power.

The reason we develop theories is to grant an understanding of reality. If one theory gives an account of reality that confirms our common-sense beliefs and intuitions then it is far more palatable than one that requires us to reject our previously held notions and assumptions about the world and ourselves.

The danger here however is that because of its palatability we may search for theories to confirm our preconceived notions and ideas and our perspective may therefore skew.

Our aim and intent should always be to seek out those theories which grant the most explanatory power’. What does this mean? Well take the following passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Macbeth: Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

1. Now one interpretation could be that in this line Macbeth is describing an actor whose name is ‘Life’ and only had one hour playing a part upon the stage before loosing his voice forever.

2. Another is that it is referring to the fragility and absurdity of life, demonstrating Macbeth’s morose reaction to the news that Lady Macbeth has killed herself.

Now neither one of these interpretations/theories are any more valid than the other, they are both logical in the sense that they are semantically clear and follow from the original passage. What differs between them is their explanatory power, interpretation two is clearly far more powerful when considered in the context of the scene and the play and enables the reader to gain an intimate understanding of the character Macbeth. Interpretation two makes the reader why Macbeth would bring up such an irrelevant anecdote at a time like this.

Equally, Copernicus theory of the orbits of heavenly bodies in our galaxy granted far more explanatory power than the alternatives of his day even though it required people to suppose that they were victims of a massive self-deception at the hands of the Church who were convinced of the veracity of the account of Genesis.

The brain in the vat hypothesis may explain why some people appear to have advanced telekinetic capabilities but it disables us from understanding how we interact with reality and raises further questions of how we came to exist in vats. This is why we reject it, or at least this is why we should reject it.

Why should the counter-intuitive nature of a theory count against it? Not because of the effort involved in adjusting long-held intuitions, but because common sense holds a great deal of explanatory power.

I think that common sense intuitions are developed through an evolutionary biological manner. That if are brains are formed at the same time as our bodies it makes sense that we are intuitively attracted to features that happen to be indicators of health in our mates. It makes sense that we are intuitively fearful, or less empathetic with foreigners who look different from ourselves. It makes sense that we can easily conceive of the idea of ten things but not of a trillion things.

Along this view it would also make sense that our common sense grants us very simple ideas with great explanatory power but with no ability to discover the inner mechanics of reality that may link everything together. It makes sense that we are engaged in a massive self-deception because these intuitions are based upon the interface between an evolving primate and the world.

In this sense, I propose that counter-intuition does not detract from a theory at all. Whereas limited explanatory power and over-complexity does.

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Milieu (art)

Published at January 9, 2005 in art. 1 Comment

Milieu

Song art for Milieu

 

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Milieu

Published at January 9, 2005 in music. 2 Comments

Well I was up until six in the morning last night, channeling whatever creative forces might have been passing through me to compose probably my first ambient piece of music.

Until now I’ve down mostly instrumentals and melodic trance, though you couldn’t tell from the limited samples uploaded at PureVolume and Download.com.

You’ll notice two links in the sidebar on the right, Illusive Art and Illusive Music. These will be updated with links to my latest creations. For example, I also designed an album cover this morning to go with the song:

Milieu

Illusive Mind - Milieu

An uplifting melodic ambient piece with the trademark “Illusive Mind” flavoured note composition.

The “Milieu” is the totality of our surroundings, our external reality. It is the environmental arrangement of the insane.

So the idea is, that we have constructed this bizarre milieu, external reality and this is synonymous with that of the environments prepared for the insane.

Milieu@MakeTunes

Remixes Etc.

Octavian - Laughing Shadows (June 3rd 2008)

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Language may shape human thought

Published at January 8, 2005 in philosophy. 2 Comments

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.

Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support yet for the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts. So-called “linguistic determinism” was first proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever since.

“It is a very surprising and very important result,” says Lisa Feigenson, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who has tested babies’ abilities to distinguish between different numerical quantities. “Whether language actually allows you to have new thoughts is a very controversial issue.”

Peter Gordon, the psychologist at Columbia University in New York City who carried out the experiment, does not claim that his finding holds for all kinds of thought. “There are certainly things that we can think about that we cannot talk about. But for numbers I have shown that a limitation in language affects cognition,” he says.
“One, two, many”

The language, Pirahã, is known as a “one, two, many” language because it only contains words for “one” and “two”—for all other numbers, a single word for “many” is used. “There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirahã need to count,” explains Gordon.

In order to test if this prevented members of the tribe from perceiving higher numbers, Gordon set seven Pirahã a variety of tasks. In the simplest, he sat opposite an individual and laid out a random number of familiar objects, including batteries, sticks and nuts, in a row. The Pirahã were supposed to respond by laying out the same number of objects from their own pile.

For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.

The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four of five taps.
Babies and animals

Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.

Previous experiments show that while babies and intelligent animals, such as rats, pigeons and monkeys, are capable of precisely counting small quantities, they can only approximately distinguish between clusters consisting of larger numbers. However, in these studies it was unclear whether an inability to articulate numbers was the reason for this.

The Pirahã results provide a much stronger case for linguistic determinism, says Gordon, because, aside from their language, they are otherwise similar to other adult humans, whereas there are many more factors that separate babies and animals from adult humans.

However, scientists are far from a consensus. Feigenson points out that there could be other reasons, aside from pure language, why the Pirahã could not distinguish accurately for higher numbers including not being used to dealing with large numbers or set such tasks.

“The question remains highly controversial,” says psychologist Randy Gallistel of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. “But this work will spark a great deal of discussion.”

Journal reference: Science Express (19 August 2004/ Page 1/ 10.1126/science.1094492)

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Get Your Fix

Published at January 6, 2005 in blog. 0 Comments

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Today I thought I’d kick off the redesign of the Illusive Mind website by publishing one of its advertisements!

Drop me a line, let me know what you think.

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Suspending Belief

Published at January 4, 2005 in philosophy. 1 Comment

Following on from my previous post: “I believe, not” the question is asked “how does one go about refraining from belief?”

Note that thanks to Richard’s comment I am distinguishing between two types of beliefs, those that are a matter of trusting or placing confidence in something “I believe it is warm” and being convinced of the truth of something “I believe the world exists”. The former I call, ideas, thoughts, and notions. The later I call beliefs.

The easiest thing to construe first up is that refraining from believing is believing in nothing. But this is clearly different, just as the strong atheist believes in the non-existence of God and the weak atheist refrains from believing anything about God.

A chap named Arcesilaus came up against the same problem. Arcesilaus was the sixth head of Plato’s academy and was a skepticist. Arcesilaus primarily attacked the Stoics for relying on sense impressions for knowledge in creating various systems of metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. According to the Stoics a wise person would never assent to anything that is uncertain, Arcesilaus said that you could never tell if your senses were completely accurate or not and as such a wise person should never assent to anything.

Some say that by arguing for this kind of skepticism Arcesilaus abandoned Platonism. However, In the apology of Socrates by Plato, Socrates says:

I will endeavor to explain to you the reason why I am called wise and have such an evil fame I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him,’ Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest.’

Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him, his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom first among I selected for examination, and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and because I heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away:

conceit of Man, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him

Arcesilaus goes further by saying not that he knows that he knows nothing because if he knows nothing he knows nothing at all.

Arcesilaus often refuted the arguments of the Stoics by providing reasonable explanations for both sides, establishing aporia (perhaps in a Derridian fashion) and thus suggesting that the only wise action was epoche, the suspension of belief or mental commitment to either or any view, i.e. refraining from belief.

The Stoics thought that without knowledge of something there can be no basis upon which to act. Much like having ‘foundational beliefs’ in order to play the game at all.

The skeptics challenge this by saying that we act upon the appearance of reality not the truth of reality and admitting this does not preclude men from continuing to act on such appearances, that “Men naturally seek what appears good and avoid what
appears bad; in this sense they follow nature as their guide.” Custom or tradition can also be the basis of action or decision, as customs can be observed at the level of appearance and followed without a mental conviction or belief. “It is on this basis, for instance, that the skeptic performs acts of piety and avoids impiety. Thus Cotta, the Academic spokesman in Cicero’s De natura deorum, insists that he may be a philosophical skeptic and still participate in the traditional Roman religion”

Arcesilaus goes further by suggesting that such skepticism need not be reduced to what we might today call Nihilism by virtue of eulogon. Eulogon is the reasonable, so we may perform actions for which reasonable defence may be given. It is not contrary to skepticism according to Arcesilaus to use as one’s guide the actions any reasonable man would do.

I think that these are reasonable methods of making decisions and acting in the face of skepticism, or whilst refraining from belief. These were criticised by the early skeptics however, by the proponents of Pyrrhonism.

Pyrrhonians disagreed that these kinds of reasonable or probable standards for action or knowledge are required. They argue that the path of skepticism is maintaining epoche, the state in which you neither affirm nor deny anything in hope of attaining ataraxia. Ataraxia is the state of tranquillity, calmness, mental and emotional disquiet supposed to be achieved from letting go of the human need to believe in truths about the world. Pyrrho (B.C. 360-270) coined the term Acatalepsia, which means it is impossible to know things in their own nature, thus the validity of not only the senses but of the objective world could not be verified. (Much like Kant’s noumenal reality).

Does this mean Pyrrhonians sat under Bhodi trees refraining from judgement of the world whilst calmly meditating their lives away? No, they too like the Academic Skeptics of Arcesilaus supposed that you can act upon the senses and upon reason so long as you don’t infer from ‘it seems or feels x” to “it is x”.

I think it is right to “act as if” the world is known and the truths are real, however this is a far cry from “suppose that” or “think as if” my sense are infallible receptors of the truth. To me this means, admitting skepticism does not mean abandoning science by denying empiricism. It does not mean that you should give up doing what you think is right, and being ‘ethical’. It does mean giving up thinking your perspective is privileged, that you are right, and that you know the truth.

How can these things be compatible? Well that is most definitely the subject of another post, however I will say that there are many ways of deciding actions or making scientific progress without believing in an objective existence. Consensus reality, for one.

I would like to make further studies into the similarities and connections between early skepticism and post-modernism and also eastern philosophy. Pyrrho is generally attributed as the founder of skepticism, (a precursor to Academic Skepticism).

“He took part in the Indian expedition of Alexander the Great, and met with philosophers of the Indus region. Back in Greece he was frustrated with the assertions of the Dogmatists (those who claimed to possess knowledge), and founded a new school in which he taught that every object of human knowledge involves uncertainty. Thus, he argued, it is impossible ever to arrive at the knowledge of truth.”

I would not be surprised to learn that the whole movement has its roots in Indian philosophy. Some of the core ideas of Zen Buddhism bear striking resemblance to the practices of Epoche and Ataraxia.

Upon googling +epoche and +zen I found a journal article by Philip J. Bossert in the Journal of Chinese Philosophy called:

PARADOX AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN ZEN DIALOGUE AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION

“In a recent article in this journal, Dr Chung-ying Cheng discussed the seemingly paradoxical use of language in Zen dialogues and suggested a means for understanding this paradoxical quality. The “principle of ontic non-commitment” and the method of “ontological reduction” which he described as an approach to resolving the paradoxical qualities of Zen language appear to me to be quite similar to the phenomenological technique of epoche and the method of phenomenological reduction which the German philosopher Edmund Husserl developed early in this century to deal with certain paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity”

I for one think that Eastern philosophy has been remarkably overlooked in understanding the intricacies of post-modernism and post-structuralism. Though perhaps not entirely due to ethnocentrism but due to the bizarre manner in which writings on Zen for instance appear to the western academic.

From On Zen (Ch’an) Language and Zen Paradoxes

By Chung-Ying Cheng
Journal of Chinese Philosophy

“Zen (meditation school; Ch’an in Chinese) as a form of Chinese Buddhistic religion and proto-philosophy seems to be constantly puzzling and persistently inscrutable to modern philosophers in the Western world. Even philosophers of religion with the most broad-minded approach to religion do not seem to be able to make intelligible and intellectual sense of Zen thinking and Zen practice.”

In the midst of studying continental philosophy of the likes of Saussure, Foucault and Derrida, imagine my amazement when perusing Wikipedia and finding the entry on Shunyata :
“Shunyata signifies the nonsubstantiality or lack of essential nature of everything one encounters in life. (i.e., that everything is empty of substance, being, soul, essence, etc.) Everything is inter-related, never self-sufficient or independent; nothing has independent reality”

I don’t know by how many centuries this Indian term predates the writings of those philosophers, but I am looking forward to finding out.

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I believe, not

Published at January 3, 2005 in philosophy. 4 Comments

I haven’t posted in awhile, primarily due to a judo injury that has caused me some discomfort. I was thrown (quite slowly) and as a result landed and rolled quite slowly over my right shoulder, during which I dislocated my AC joint.

In light of the recent Tsunami disaster there has been a lot of renewed discussion of how the notion of a good, omnipotent, interventionist god can be reconciled with natural disasters, or natural evil.

I took a philosophy of religion subject, during which I became a devout atheist, mostly because of the problem of evil. You see, if God were good then he wouldn’t want evil in the world (i.e. innocent people suffering) and if he is omnipotent (which traditional theists suppose he is) then he can prevent evil. If evil exists, then a good, omnipotent god does not.

In 1710, Leibniz invented the term “theodicy”. A theodicy is an argument that seeks to reconcile the existence of evil and god. The most compelling theodicy to my mind is the ‘free will’ theodicy, at least it was the one I was taught in school growing up as a catholic. That is, evil exists only as a product of human will, were god to prevent it he would remove a greater good, the good of free will.

What does this have to do with Tsunamis? Well in 1979 William L. Rowe published a paper in the American Philosophical Quarterly 16, called The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism. He suggests the existence of ‘natural evils’ that is evils that exist without any connection to human free will. An earthquake occurs, triggering a Tsunami killing over a hundred thousand people, many woman and children. Unless living by the coast is a sin, these people would have been killed regardless of any wrong doing by people. These are evils that a good and omnipotent can and should prevent because the removal of which would pose no threat to the existence of free will.

If you find this argument compelling like I did, then you probably have reason to doubt the existence of god. Maybe you a cold hearted rationalist, maybe you had religion thrust upon you as a child and you have an affinity for rebellion. If you are unmoved by this argument then you are most likely a snooty philosopher with a better one or a person of faith. Maybe you have felt God in your heart or you have been taught to have faith no matter what tempts you. Regardless, at the end of the philosophy of religion subject I lost my atheism and found agnosticism, I saw that the people who walked into the first lecture held the same views at the last lecture. I saw that their beliefs were reinforced, no matter what. This is what this post is about.

I have spent a lot of time in philosophy forums debating evolutionary theory against creationists and debating God against theists. It was fun and I actually ruined a few people and became quite disgustingly arrogant and righteous in the process. Mostly though nothing changed. I pointed to flaws in their reasoning that I found compelling and they did the same, though more often than not they denied my reasoning by providing ‘evidence’ and sometimes counterexamples.

I later came to realise, (or at least suppose) that beliefs are self reinforcing. You arrive in the world empty, something happens and you construct a belief, you then seek for evidence to support your belief and so it happens that the world starts to emerge and look just as you imagine it would, because you play the principal role as editor, choosing what information you accept and how you filter your reality.

This is not a closed loop, people are able to change their minds, I know I have. But for the most part they don’t. My change of heart can be seen simply as constructing a new belief that contradicts old ones, that is a belief in scepticism, and a belief in open mindedness.

If you view beliefs in the way I have described it becomes quite difficult to have an open mind. How can you view other ideas, if it is from the vantage point of a reality constructed by opposing concepts. If you believe in truth, then you can never hope to find it if you are simply ‘locked in’ to the idea that you have held for most of your life.

I’m not specifically talking about God, this applies to every form of belief. Beliefs about human nature, about reality, about truth, about everything. I have come to believe in not having beliefs at all. Some people will read that and think that I have settled for some wimpy ‘it’s all to hard’ agnosticism and others may see some value in what I am writing. Depends on your vantage point, doesn’t it? Where you’ve come from.

A belief is a mental acceptance, a conviction in the truth of something. Once you have such a conviction about anything you are liable to be blind to the alternatives. However if you have a notion, idea or concept of something, you are unattached, unconvinced and open to the possibility of possibility.

If you combine this with the idea that truth is unattainable then you arrive first and foremost at the ‘fortasse’ the perhaps. The realm in which any theory is possible, and all that determines your reactions to them are your preconceptions. It is not easy, but I also freely admit that this notion may be completely wrong and the best thing to do is have beliefs. To be open minded, you must first doubt yourself. I think that perhaps this is where all philosophy starts, but then as you wander you find ideas you like and you can loose this, and so you have eternal debates of belief where each opponent is unwilling and unable to see the world from another vantage point. That reduces philosophy to a faith of logic.

So sneer if you will at those who are desperately trying to reconcile their beliefs about God with the suffering in the world today. Perhaps anyone who thinks they are in possession of the truth are the greatest fools of all and those who are prepared to doubt their convictions are those with courage.

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