2006 February archive at Illusive Mind

Archive for February, 2006

Not Between Two Horses

Published at February 8, 2006 in philosophy. 1 Comment

I was looking for something I have previously written on Hume and the Reason vs. Desire dichotomy and I did indeed find a section on Hume from my essay: Evolution, Altruism and Ethics, and whilst it is relevant it’s also very ‘academic’ and embedded in a very different context.

The basic idea is that Hume challenged a dichotomy put most eloquently by Plato story of Phaedrus the charioteer. Phaedrus represents the soul of a man who is constantly pulled by two forces in different directions. One horse named reason, and the other named passion.

However, a closer examination of human decision making reveals that nothing can be done without a desire / passion to do so. Reason only has the power to examine how effective one’s course of action may be in achieving their desire. If I desire to eat a bar of chocolate then eating this chocolate shaped poison would be a very unreasonable thing to do…

So why does the dichotomy exist? Well it helps to explain why we take courses of action that are at times completely irrational. A heat of the moment, a loss of willpower, a feeling of our reason being subjugated by our writhing selfish passions. How can we feel guilty after such an action if we only do that which we desire?

The answer is simply that a person can want more than one thing at once, even completely contradictory things. I can want a healthy, stable and monogamous relationship with my wife, but I can also want to have a quickie with my secretary on my lunch break. Both of these are desires, but one seems to be more informed by reason than the other. This is quite accurate and has to do with the dichotomy of the human brain.

Consider the fact that reason is a recent addition to the cognition of mammals. Underneath it in the primal brain is instincts and more complex instincts. Reason is an abstraction device that allows us to think of things that don’t actually exist, they are long term, non-concrete usually idealistic kinds of things.

How can you fulfil the desire of a healthy, stable, monogamous relationship with your wife? You can’t really, it’s a never-ending desire, the only moments of gratification probably come at anniversary and all the times you thought about but didn’t go through doing something else.

Immediately gratify, sensuous and emotionally driven desires on the other hand are very easily and quickly satisfied. These are powerful forces, forces of nature or forces of selfishness or Satan if you subscribe the religious/cultural mythology Phaedrus has gotten us into. If you exalt reason as the pinnacle of man’s achievements of nature and the natural world, the paragon of animals etc. then it is no wonder you feel a great deal of guilt when you follow these ‘base’ desires.

I don’t think willpower is what the issue is here, we’re talking about a reprogramming of how you view your desires. Faced with the choice of fulfilling the immediate desire and the never-ending desire it’s a contest with a serious handicap.

I think to even up the match a little you need to replace your never-ending desires with concrete ones. If you want a healthy marriage the feeling of having not done something to destroy is nowhere near good enough. In doing this you are focusing on the thing you wish to avoid and fixating on your own weaknesses. Instead think of actions you can do right now that fulfil your abstract desire. Write an e-mail, buy flowers, write a poem whatever…

Only by giving your abstract desires a concrete failure are you giving yourself a real choice. A choice between conflicting passions not between two horses.

The eventuality of Utilitarianism: “You dodgy bastard God”

Published at February 6, 2006 in philosophy. 1 Comment

Buddhist morality seems to me to be an entirely utilitarian affair. That is, once one realizes that life is suffering and all human beings suffer, the right course of action is to alleviate suffering and replace it with the good: happiness. The good in this case being a specific spiritual happiness as oppose to the tradition material and physical conceptions of happiness common in Utilitarian theory.

Now the problem of Utilitarianism has always been in my view finding the method to best maximize the good. You might work very hard to make a large number of people happy only to find that in doing so you have made an even larger group of people unhappy. Or you just could have simply set off a chain of events which results in the whole earth being destroyed to make way for a intergalactic hyperspace bypass. Whoops.

However, the Mahayana Buddhists have the answer and what I would regard to be the only answer to this problem which would give someone any hope of redeeming this dangerous ethical theory:

Omniscience.

That’s right. The only way you can effectively (and safely) maximize the happiness of all sentient beings is to know everything, especially the exact effects your actions will cause.

The only person you could really trust to be a utilitarian is an omniscient being after all. When someone is performing all manner of ghastly and counter-intuitive acts such as running people over with trains and killing people for their organs and they say, “Don’t worry, it’s all for the best”, you really wanna be sure about that.

So this seems to be the justification for a whole lot of monks removing themselves from the world and sitting still in a monastery for a few decades. As utilitarians dedicated to helping the suffering of all, they’re trying damn to become omniscient.

Of course, such actions are only justifiable if you believe becoming omniscient is actually possible. If not, I think you just stay way from ‘the ends justifies the means’ theories in general.

It is worth noting that the Judeo-Christian God is often given a pass for all the obvious evil and suffering in the world because he has a ‘grand plan’ and being omniscient we have every reason to trust that it will work out in the end. That all this, blood, sweat and tears are not shed in vain. (Can’t wait to find out how the Holocaust was necessary to the great cosmic game!)

However, this tends to neglect the fact that this god is a professed believe in moral absolutes, I mean we’re talking about written in stone, literally! I mean if killing innocent people is part of the grand plan, that’s all well and good, but you might want to revise your own rules and regulations there Yaweh! You’re not living up to your own standards and by your own definition down live up to being ‘good’ and since God being good is part of your definition as an entity you have just contradicted yourself out of existence.

Apologists can of course counter that this too is part of the plan. That we should act in accordance with his moral absolutes whilst he goes on killing and causing all manner of suffering to fulfil the grand plan. By this stage though there seems to be nothing which can’t be explained by the ‘grand plan’ scenario which renders the explanation the equivalent of, “stop asking questions, just trust me!” (At least that’s what the priest said to me.)

But let us for the moment suppose that this is right. It is now somehow good to lie and murder, because god is good and this is what god does, and yet it is wrong to do these things, god said so. In any case such a dodgy character can clearly be up to no good and it is hardly worth worshiping a lying murderer. But then that was probably part of the plan all along.

For Want of a Metaphor

Published at February 4, 2006 in philosophy. 1 Comment

I’m trying to come about with a metaphor that will help me express the absurdity of logic. Logic as we all know is a system of rules, inductive and deductive that were created by us people that we use to apply to the world, reality in order to ascertain truth.

We don’t mind the fact the logic was created by us and not reality because we tend to forget that fact and think that it in fact exists independently of us out in the world. It just seems to be a happy coincidence that what qualifies as a rule of logic is that which seems to make sense to the human brain and what is disqualified is that which seems absurd.

I mean if you have a cause you must then have an effect, and X cannot be both P and not P right!!! That just doesn’t make sense!!!

In fact (I’m using the term figuratively) logic appears to be more a corollary of language than anything else. Language rules which are of course governed by the particular arrangements of our brains.

So what is a metaphor (or a simile, or even an analogy) that expresses the absurdity of inventing a system of rules and then finding absolute truth by testing everything against these rules and forgetting the fact that you invented them in the first place?