Last night I was watching 'Late Night News with Loyiso Gola', a South African spoof news show akin to Jon Stewart's 'The Daily Show', but with more SNL-type humour than Stewart, and, as far as I know, no serious interviews. I suppose more like 'Royal Canadian Air Farce' or 'This Hour Has 22 Minutes' (for those in Canada).
It contained a very amusing 'tape from the caves of Pakistan that not even the CIA had' that had a guy dressed in a white tunic with a beard singing a rendition of P.Diddy's 'I'll Be Missing You' SLIGHTLY MODIFIED as a tribute to his esteemed 'B.I.N. Laden'. I tried to look for it online, but I guess it isn't up yet.
The other thing that I was reminded of by the LNN was that 'the world is supposed to end this weekend'. I chuckled at this reminder. Ahh yes, May 21, 2011 is supposed to be 'Doomsday' or 'the rapture' or what not from some cultists, though it is rather interesting that these supposed 'Christians' which are supposed to uphold some notion of 'not sinning' seem to fly in the face of stories like "Every day Mr Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, speaks to his followers via the Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded entirely by donations from listeners. Such is their generosity (assets total $120m) that his network now owns 66 stations in the US alone." (And just look at the ridiculously esoteric numerological justification for this date.) Though, of course, this is to be expected. While I was on a board reserved for politics (which I will withhold the name of to protect my identity...), someone had come on and posted the following:
"will you believe someone says today is friday the 13 so is expecting something bad to happen? but to me today is the day my Lord has made and i will rejoice and be glad in it"
I was a little disheartened that someone would post this on a board that was supposed to be reserved for more political posts, so I looked at this woman's profile pic and, having a very African name with the photo of a fancily-dressed white woman, I thought 'hmmm... perhaps I can exploit the opportunity to open the eyes of this victim of neo-colonialist idiocy' so I clicked on her profile and saw amongst her 'inspirational people' was one 'Joyce Mayer'. Comparing the photos, I was fairly sure that this individual was also the one posted in the pic. So I went on wiki to see who this person was. 'Ahh... an American evangelist is she? Hmmm... let's scroll down and see what money-spinning hypocritical scandals this evil imbecile is involved in, shall we?' So (VERY VERY PREDICTABLY) I was able to post the following cut-and-paste reply from wikipedia:
"On November 11, 2003, the St. Louis Post Dispatch published a four part series exposing Mayer’s "$10 million corporate jet, her husband’s $107,000 silver-gray Mercedes sedan, her then $2 million home and houses worth another $2 million for her four children," her $20 million headquarters, furnished with "$5.7 million worth of furniture, artwork, glassware, and the latest equipment and machinery, including a malachite round table, a marble-topped antique commode, a custom office bookcase, a $7,000 Stations of the Cross in Dresden porcelain, an eagle sculpture on a pedestal, another eagle made of silver, and numerous paintings," among many other expensive items — all paid for by "her ministry." The article prompted Wall Watchers (a Christian nonprofit watchdog group) to call on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Meyer and her family."
Not surprising. As Søren Kierkegaard once said:
"The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly."
And who wants to 'act accordingly'? In my next post, I will finish the 'Morals of the Wretched' thread (because I know you're all in suspense!!!) with a rather amusing anecdote of just this type of hypocrisy. But anyway, enough about crooked iconoclasts and religious swindlers. Let's get back to the coming apocalypse, shall we?
Personally, this would be a very sad thing. First of all, we would never know how the Champion's League final between Manchester United and Barcelona was decided, but even worse than that, it would mean that I wouldn't be able to chalk 'go to Mzoli's' off my list of things I felt I should do (aka 'bucket list', a term I only came across recently, aka Murtaugh list, an inside joke that me and a friend of mine started throwing around while we were in India after a certain episode of 'How I Met Your Mother'), because I'm scheduled to go on Sunday. Such is apocalypse I suppose.
So what is this obsession with 'the end of the world', anyway? We already passed Y2K and 6/6/6 with little more apocalypse than, perhaps, a fit of convulsive laughter, which rarely proves fatal. Shouldn't these modern day Nostradamuses simply let bygones be bygones, sit tight, and just wait?
Well I suppose, in a rather cynical way, the obsession with the end of the world with respect to some people (like, for example, David Koresh, Jim Jones, and, well, Mr Camping) might stem from it being a VERY win-win situation. Either you are correct and you become some sort of demi-god or, more likely, you lose, but still have managed to hoodwink a bunch of fools out of millions of dollars. But this only appeals to the minority of shepherds. What about the sheep who are at fault for creating the personality cults and inflated Swiss bank accounts for these 'apocalypticists'?
Again, I can't speak for everybody, but I liken it to a similar story to that of the psychology surrounding a close football (soccer) match: your team is up 1-0 with about 5 minutes to go. A win will seal your club a first trophy in 35 years and finally cause a certain banner to be pulled down from the Stretford end of Old Trafford (no payouts for guessing what I'm talking about here...), but you NEED that final whistle to blow. And when it does, the sense of relief you feel after an 'all hands to the pumps' last few minutes needed to hang on passes and you hear that final whistle is amazing.
I believe it's the same thing. These religious people are in the battle of their lives, wanting the final whistle to go to end the world and make their devotion all worth while; to prove them right in their choice of following, and to end millenia of uncertainty. And, of course, to whisk them away from the difficulties of the real world to their idealized fantasies of heaven, where everything will be eternal bliss for them: 'I've done all this work, but when will I get my reward???'
The unfortunate thing is that it is not known when (or if) this final whistle will ever blow. We have December 2012 to look forward to, probably Easter of 2033 to look forward to, etc., etc. So long as people are desiring a break from the ups and downs of reality, there will be people who are only too happy to throw their weight behind some new-fangled cultist that declares such-and-such to be the day of rapture (and I can PROVE IT!!!).
Of course, if my laptop and I are not here on Sunday, but rather sitting in Limbo waiting for my turn to step up to the plate to be judged by an old ethereal bearded dude, I guess my dismissive cynicism will have been misplaced.
Still, if that happens, what will Herr Camping and Ms Mayer do with all their cash? They can't burn it once they see the heavens start to open up and pretend they were innocent of greed and swindling the world over. God is watching, remember?
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Ahh... free will...
My landlady (who lives in the house) is 81 and regularly drinks whiskey for her 'medicinal needs', but is very intelligent and sharp even at her age, and has many interesting things to speak of. One of her favourite topics is her theory of metaphysics, as she often talks about us being here 'only temporarily', and that Earth is a 'learning planet' and it prepares us for some metaphysical eternity in a spirit world. And this often leads me to believe that perhaps she was one or the other of Schelling or Hegel in a former life.
Hegel because of the manner in which her conception of this spirit world seems to accord with Hegel's notion of 'Spirit'. She told me last night that when she is alone in bed, she sits awake and recalls anecdotes about the many friends that she has lost over the years and says that 'this makes them happy'. So I asked her about how spirits can have any sort of state of emotion. She said that it was impossible for them to have such, so I pushed her on what she meant by 'happy'. And then she said that thoughts create vibrations that connect with these spirits and (I am not sure on details, but perhaps one of these days I will have her dictate a pamphlet that goes into details about her theory) helps to 'right them' in some way. For example, she talks of how addictions pass to the spirit world, so of the many who died in this house: her husband, a few of her friends including Danny, and various other tenants; nearly all had an affinity for whiskey and that is why whiskey is a constant 'problem' in the house (e.g. for her), because the spirits need their fill as well. And these spirits who are still addicts and such are not ready yet to proceed to the next level/dimension/state or what have you. In a sense, it reminded me of the whole notion of Hegel's 'self-realization of Spirit' concept.
But more importantly for the purposes of this topic is the manner in which she is like Schelling, because although she speaks of some form of determinism, it is a 'soft determinism' as it were. She speaks of 'cosmic nudges' being the reason why, instead of reading a book from cover to cover, she opens it to a random page and begins reading, since this is where she was 'meant' to begin. I didn't go into the problems surrounding the ad hoc methodology of this act, though it does (probably not deliberately) open up some rather paradoxical questions... Freedom, she says (just like Schelling) is an UNCONSCIOUS decision that comes about before we are born: we choose the role we wish to play in life and then life is simply our playing out that role (and learning from it on this 'learning planet').
So this is Schelling's notion of free will. Basically, he agrees with Kant's agreement with Hume that there must be some sort of deterministic structure within the phenomenal world, but in attempting to solve the problem of 'Kantian duality', he proposes that solution.
One of the reasons why I thought to explore this topic now (and, by doing so, have put off for the moment continuing/concluding the 'Morals of the Wretched' train of thought, even though I know how I intend to go on with it) is because recent events (call them 'cosmic nudges' if you will) have brought a number of interesting videos to my attention. First was one that was shared on facebook by a friend of mine who I have known almost from the beginning of my school days and is fairly religious. It was called 'The God Within: exposing the false philosophy of modern science'. Now, there are quite a few strikes against it from my point view already: the mention of 'God' in direct contrast to 'modern science', and the fact that it was on a site called 'Natural News', where 'natural' often implies 'unscientific' and, hence, 'religious'. So I went in spoiling for a fight, but what I found that this documentary (part I of it, at least) is completely and utterly correct. It criticizes Hawking's narrow-minded 'scientism' and declaration that 'philosophy is dead' on perfectly legitimate grounds. In fact, it seems that 'The God Within' has a number of possible connotations within the video, referring to, at different times the Higgs boson (the so-called 'God particle), omniscience in the form of a 'theory of everything', the notion of consciousness (i.e. the deus ex machina mind-body duality), and, of course, the manner in which science (albeit very legitimately) always side-steps the notion of the existence of some form of omniscient, omnipotent 'God' as presented in most monotheistic religions.
Because of the effect that this had on me, I passed it on to a close friend (and former philosophy professor) of mine, who replied that she would 'probably show it to her next 102 class' which is the 'Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge' philosophy course at the University of Alberta. In her reply, she also talked about Libet's experiment and sent me a video about mathematician and BBC Correspondent Marcus du Sautoy (who, funnily enough, was the supervisor of my current supervisor) doing an interesting scientific experiment into notions of free will and consciousness in the form of simple decision making. I won't spoil the ending (watch the video), but the results are quite scary and profound.
Another idealist, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote an award-winning 'essay' called 'On the Freedom of the Will'. He concluded that there was no such thing, because, as the above video shows, there is a 'deterministic mechanism' to the manner in which decisions are made (and the notion of 'free will' can be entirely summed up by decision making). BUT, the problem with this 'scientific proof' is that all it does it 'push' the notion of conscious decision making back into the unconscious. Schopenhauer's Will/Representation duality implied that our unconscious acts depend on (i.e. we are enslaved by) 'will', which in turn, is determined by a complicated combination of 'empirical programming' from the world of representations (i.e. the empirical world) and an unconscious development that we cannot know, but is also somehow deterministic. So basically, what the above experiment shows is that yes, there is a deterministic process going on that we are unaware of. However, it does not necessarily follow that the 'origins' of this process, whatever they might be, are also deterministic.
The alternative, then, leads into a sort of 'soft determinism' or 'compatibilism' that allows us to say that we are CONSCIOUSLY deterministic, but UNCONSCIOUSLY free somehow. How are we free? Well, as I mentioned above, Schelling provides one theory in terms of how we are free, and there are many others. From what I know, one of the most interesting and complex ones is the recent compatibilist theory put forward by Daniel Dennett. I have not read any of his stuff, so I cannot go into details about what it implies or how it is different, but if anyone is interested, they can hear some of Dennett's own reflections on both the difficulty of the topic and the manner in which he attempts to circumvent it. (On another note, I came across a further interesting notion of compatibilism while attending a political science conference in Chicago in 2010 as part of my thesis. It that of the post-Marxist Ernst Bloch, who tries to 'unpack' Marxist notions of determinism as they arrive from historical dialecticism. The best summary can be found in his book 'On Karl Marx' as I have heard that his magnum opus 'The Principle of Hope' is very long, complicated, and oftentimes rambling.)
But to get back to 'The God Within' documentary, it also had an effect on me because the manner in which this 'narrow-minded scientism' is attacked based on its unwillingness to engage with notions like consciousness reminded me a lot of Adam Curtis' 'The Trap' (for those interested, there are three sections, 'F*ck You Buddy', 'The Lonely Robot', and 'We Will Force You to Be Free', each divided into six youtube sections) which launches a similar attack at similarly narrow-minded political and economic 'models' that are based on assessments of people as 'rational games players' which, for the most part, they are not.
And with respect to my landlady, although she has some rather unwanted habits (like allowing her dogs to lick the pots of the remnants of what's been cooked in them and then deeming it sufficient 'cook' the pots themselves on the stove to re-sanitize them), her amazing breadth of interesting idiosyncracies make it so that I'm more than willing to make certain sacrifices to stick around.
Hegel because of the manner in which her conception of this spirit world seems to accord with Hegel's notion of 'Spirit'. She told me last night that when she is alone in bed, she sits awake and recalls anecdotes about the many friends that she has lost over the years and says that 'this makes them happy'. So I asked her about how spirits can have any sort of state of emotion. She said that it was impossible for them to have such, so I pushed her on what she meant by 'happy'. And then she said that thoughts create vibrations that connect with these spirits and (I am not sure on details, but perhaps one of these days I will have her dictate a pamphlet that goes into details about her theory) helps to 'right them' in some way. For example, she talks of how addictions pass to the spirit world, so of the many who died in this house: her husband, a few of her friends including Danny, and various other tenants; nearly all had an affinity for whiskey and that is why whiskey is a constant 'problem' in the house (e.g. for her), because the spirits need their fill as well. And these spirits who are still addicts and such are not ready yet to proceed to the next level/dimension/state or what have you. In a sense, it reminded me of the whole notion of Hegel's 'self-realization of Spirit' concept.
But more importantly for the purposes of this topic is the manner in which she is like Schelling, because although she speaks of some form of determinism, it is a 'soft determinism' as it were. She speaks of 'cosmic nudges' being the reason why, instead of reading a book from cover to cover, she opens it to a random page and begins reading, since this is where she was 'meant' to begin. I didn't go into the problems surrounding the ad hoc methodology of this act, though it does (probably not deliberately) open up some rather paradoxical questions... Freedom, she says (just like Schelling) is an UNCONSCIOUS decision that comes about before we are born: we choose the role we wish to play in life and then life is simply our playing out that role (and learning from it on this 'learning planet').
So this is Schelling's notion of free will. Basically, he agrees with Kant's agreement with Hume that there must be some sort of deterministic structure within the phenomenal world, but in attempting to solve the problem of 'Kantian duality', he proposes that solution.
One of the reasons why I thought to explore this topic now (and, by doing so, have put off for the moment continuing/concluding the 'Morals of the Wretched' train of thought, even though I know how I intend to go on with it) is because recent events (call them 'cosmic nudges' if you will) have brought a number of interesting videos to my attention. First was one that was shared on facebook by a friend of mine who I have known almost from the beginning of my school days and is fairly religious. It was called 'The God Within: exposing the false philosophy of modern science'. Now, there are quite a few strikes against it from my point view already: the mention of 'God' in direct contrast to 'modern science', and the fact that it was on a site called 'Natural News', where 'natural' often implies 'unscientific' and, hence, 'religious'. So I went in spoiling for a fight, but what I found that this documentary (part I of it, at least) is completely and utterly correct. It criticizes Hawking's narrow-minded 'scientism' and declaration that 'philosophy is dead' on perfectly legitimate grounds. In fact, it seems that 'The God Within' has a number of possible connotations within the video, referring to, at different times the Higgs boson (the so-called 'God particle), omniscience in the form of a 'theory of everything', the notion of consciousness (i.e. the deus ex machina mind-body duality), and, of course, the manner in which science (albeit very legitimately) always side-steps the notion of the existence of some form of omniscient, omnipotent 'God' as presented in most monotheistic religions.
Because of the effect that this had on me, I passed it on to a close friend (and former philosophy professor) of mine, who replied that she would 'probably show it to her next 102 class' which is the 'Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge' philosophy course at the University of Alberta. In her reply, she also talked about Libet's experiment and sent me a video about mathematician and BBC Correspondent Marcus du Sautoy (who, funnily enough, was the supervisor of my current supervisor) doing an interesting scientific experiment into notions of free will and consciousness in the form of simple decision making. I won't spoil the ending (watch the video), but the results are quite scary and profound.
Another idealist, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote an award-winning 'essay' called 'On the Freedom of the Will'. He concluded that there was no such thing, because, as the above video shows, there is a 'deterministic mechanism' to the manner in which decisions are made (and the notion of 'free will' can be entirely summed up by decision making). BUT, the problem with this 'scientific proof' is that all it does it 'push' the notion of conscious decision making back into the unconscious. Schopenhauer's Will/Representation duality implied that our unconscious acts depend on (i.e. we are enslaved by) 'will', which in turn, is determined by a complicated combination of 'empirical programming' from the world of representations (i.e. the empirical world) and an unconscious development that we cannot know, but is also somehow deterministic. So basically, what the above experiment shows is that yes, there is a deterministic process going on that we are unaware of. However, it does not necessarily follow that the 'origins' of this process, whatever they might be, are also deterministic.
The alternative, then, leads into a sort of 'soft determinism' or 'compatibilism' that allows us to say that we are CONSCIOUSLY deterministic, but UNCONSCIOUSLY free somehow. How are we free? Well, as I mentioned above, Schelling provides one theory in terms of how we are free, and there are many others. From what I know, one of the most interesting and complex ones is the recent compatibilist theory put forward by Daniel Dennett. I have not read any of his stuff, so I cannot go into details about what it implies or how it is different, but if anyone is interested, they can hear some of Dennett's own reflections on both the difficulty of the topic and the manner in which he attempts to circumvent it. (On another note, I came across a further interesting notion of compatibilism while attending a political science conference in Chicago in 2010 as part of my thesis. It that of the post-Marxist Ernst Bloch, who tries to 'unpack' Marxist notions of determinism as they arrive from historical dialecticism. The best summary can be found in his book 'On Karl Marx' as I have heard that his magnum opus 'The Principle of Hope' is very long, complicated, and oftentimes rambling.)
But to get back to 'The God Within' documentary, it also had an effect on me because the manner in which this 'narrow-minded scientism' is attacked based on its unwillingness to engage with notions like consciousness reminded me a lot of Adam Curtis' 'The Trap' (for those interested, there are three sections, 'F*ck You Buddy', 'The Lonely Robot', and 'We Will Force You to Be Free', each divided into six youtube sections) which launches a similar attack at similarly narrow-minded political and economic 'models' that are based on assessments of people as 'rational games players' which, for the most part, they are not.
And with respect to my landlady, although she has some rather unwanted habits (like allowing her dogs to lick the pots of the remnants of what's been cooked in them and then deeming it sufficient 'cook' the pots themselves on the stove to re-sanitize them), her amazing breadth of interesting idiosyncracies make it so that I'm more than willing to make certain sacrifices to stick around.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
On Death and Dying
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
--T.S. Eliot, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"The situation is an ambiguous one. Observed from without, human beings obviously have a natural lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred years. A man's sense of his own experience, on the other hand, does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so tolerable in the past. Having been gratuitously introduced to the world by a collection of natural, historical, and social accidents, he finds himself the subject of a life, with an indeterminate and not essentially limited future. Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods. Normality seems to have nothing to do with it, for the fact that we will all inevitably die in a few score years cannot by itself imply that it would be good to live longer. Suppose that we were all inevitably going to die in agony -- physical agony lasting six months. Would inevitability make that prospect any less unpleasant? And why should it be different for a deprivation? If the normal lifespan were a thousand years, death at 80 would be a tragedy. As things are, it may just be a more widespread tragedy. If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all."
--Thomas Nagel, "Death"
I have chosen this morbid topic because it seemed there was no better time. Yesterday, after excusing myself from the home of my friends to return home quickly to drop my things off before going to the pub to watch the Champions League fixture, my landlady of 81 came to me with a rather distressed look on her face, saying "I think Danny's dead. Can you go into his room and see if you can get a pulse?"
When I first moved in at the beginning of March, I was told that there was an individual 'Danny' who was living for free in the house in return for being a 'handyman' but, they told me, he really didnt do much. I only ever saw him once before, an instant where he had made his made to the kitchen one afternoon. A very frail individual, I wasnt sure what had been expected of him. My landlady kept me informed of his worsening condition. He had gone to Groote Schurr hospital and both he and the landlady herself had been rather put out by the conditions. It was Danny's wish that he shouldnt go back and that he should be simply left with his whiskey and cigarettes to die in his bed. So there was plenty to say that this was going to happen. Later, she would tell me what basically amounted to admitting that he had been in his death throes recently: evacuating his body at regular intervals and general in a great state of weakness. She had brought him the Fanta and Sprite he had requested, went to feed the cats and dogs, and then returned to watch television with him, only to discover that in that short span, he was no longer.
As for me, I have been to a few funerals in my day. Not just of 'older' individuals, but of young ones as well. During my first few years of school, I had a best friend who was a year older than me, and I would always spend a lot of time with him. He eventually moved away and I never heard from him again until I saw a large article in the newspaper: he had been a poster child for cancer research for the past few years, and had done his utmost to battle on, but eventually succumbed. I had spent some time doing Muay Thai between about 9 and 12 to keep my fitness up, and at the time there was a fighter named Roy Lilley that everybody looked up to and idolized. The night of his last fight, which I had been present at, he was killed running into the middle of the highway, supposedly he had wanted to get out of the car he was riding in because he was 'going crazy' from LSD that he had taken. I went to his funeral too. And then when I was in university in Edmonton, I came home one day and turned on the news. They had announced that there was another motorcycle fatality in the city. I thought to myself 'Why can't these people before more careful??' Then they cut to the person in question. It was a guy from my soccer team. I remember a particular moment at the funeral when me and a bunch of teammates were at the internment; we were huddled together in a collective gloom when the guy's mother came over and said, in the most matter of fact way, "Don't worry. Just have faith and God will take care of you all." I don't know what moved me more, the mother's stony demeanor, or the manner in which she dealt with her pain. (Everything seems to remind me of Fanon these days, but) as Fanon describes one means to deal with hardship: "A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm."
But it was rather strange walking in on this frail old man, sprawled on the bed, head tilted back, mouth open as if he had died in a moment of catatonic rigidity. I had not seen him in the weeks leading up to this moment, so I didnt know whether his face had a deep purple tinge to it because of these sudden death throes, or if it had slowly grown on him as his condition worsened. I walked around the bed and leaned down to feel first his wrist and then his neck. What does having no pulse feel like? It is difficult to know when it is too easy to think that the pulse of another is only the blood moving through your own fingers. I had never really done this before, and worse I had just come out of the cold, wet weather, so my hands were freezing cold, whereas, almost ironically, the wrist and neck of this man was still warm. I tried jostling him a bit. Nothing. What does one do in such a situation without some sort of understanding of what to expect? You are used to waking stubborn people from their sleep but death, one could say, is the most obstinate sleep of all. I couldnt be absolutely sure, but it seemed to me that if he wasnt already dead, he was past any sort of state where a return to even a semi-conscious state was possible. I went to comfort the landlady as much as I could. Trying times, especially for one so vulnerable. As with everything that happens to her: people not paying rent, thefts, verbal abuse, she proceeded to rationalize it away: "I should be used to death by now," she told me, and showed me a picture of her son at his grad night. He had been killed that night by a drunk driver at the age of 17. She told me of others that she knew, her husband, some that had resided in the house, Danny's fiance who had died of cancer. She put her hope in her metaphysical assessment of a spirit world, cosmic nudges, etc., to hope that their souls were now free to mingle in some ethereal plane. Such as it is.
As Thomas Nagel says in his assessment, there is not much to say about death if one does not go into conjecture about immortality, reincarnation, etc. It is the ultimate judgment. I recall from my Junior High School health class that we would always walk into the class to see a quote on the board that we would have to copy down. The only one I really remember was "Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" (well... I also remember the quote "Objects in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appear", but only because I remember commenting about how it was very close to the title of a song by Meat Loaf and asked if she knew of this song). Permanent indeed.
And there are other issues. I recall a brother and sister from Australia that I befriended during my time in Oxford. I was told that Huntington's Chorea was present in their genetic line. Basically, if you have the proper genetic inheritance (and it is autosomal dominant, so you have a 50-50 chance of inheriting it), you die around the age of 50. There is a test that tells you immediately whether this is the case or not. From what I understand, neither of them wished to take the test. It is a double-edged sword: take the test and get a negative, live 'normally', take the test and get a positive, live in fear. I don't know if I could do it.
But one must be careful. The head of the philosophy department here at the University of Cape Town has published a book entitled 'Better Never To Have Lived', where he argues that people are actually doing their children a disservice by bringing them into a world of suffering and strife. The reactions that he received from critics was idiotic: they made the leap that equated 'dont bring people into the world' to 'take everybody out of the world', i.e. saying, for example, that 'it is of his opinion that we should all be dead'. And, of course, that is not it at all. If you are not brought into the world, then you cannot know what your missing; you maintain 'ignorance' in a void of non-existence (if that makes any sense), whereas if you are killed, this ends certain prospects that are now achievable. It is a fine line that sometimes borders on absurdity, but a line that must be considered nonetheless.
It is like the argument I put forward with respect to animal ethics: these mice are being bred for the sole purpose of being sacrificed at the bio-altar; is it 'better that they not have lived'? Perhaps. It all depends on which species' well-being takes priority. They are being utilized, yes, but utilized by a group of overseers that 'puppetize' them. A form of oppression? Also a possibility.
But the idea of death and various thought experiments that may go with it provide interesting philosophical insights into teleological assessments of humanity. If humans' purpose is to procreate the species, then, if it would be possible to slow down the 'telomerization' of DNA and allow us to live to be closer to the age of Methusaleh, yet were still only given a window of 20 to 30 years to reproduce, what would this say about purpose? And wouldn't overpopulation became a major problem? The birth rate wouldn't change, but the turnover would be a lot slower: imagine the brunt of the population from the past 600 years still living? It seems chaos would reign. But perhaps not. Perhaps, like everything else, the need to curb such problems would have been dealt with earlier before they reached a critical stage. Who knows?
At any rate, as morbid as death and discussions about it sounds and is, it really is also a very interesting topic of discussion. I also seem to remember something else in health class when we were talking about the topic of suicide: that those who are more likely to talk about it are much less likely to take it as a valid 'way out', whereas those who tend to avoid the issue may have it in close quarters in the back of their mind somewhere. But of course, this fatalistic psychological assessment shouldn't be universalized past 'the vulnerable', i.e. those that one has a genuine concern for the personal safety of.
As is evident from the quote from Nagel (or, for that matter, Eliot) at the beginning, many simply dont want to discuss it because it reminds them of their own mortality.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
--T.S. Eliot, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"The situation is an ambiguous one. Observed from without, human beings obviously have a natural lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred years. A man's sense of his own experience, on the other hand, does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so tolerable in the past. Having been gratuitously introduced to the world by a collection of natural, historical, and social accidents, he finds himself the subject of a life, with an indeterminate and not essentially limited future. Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods. Normality seems to have nothing to do with it, for the fact that we will all inevitably die in a few score years cannot by itself imply that it would be good to live longer. Suppose that we were all inevitably going to die in agony -- physical agony lasting six months. Would inevitability make that prospect any less unpleasant? And why should it be different for a deprivation? If the normal lifespan were a thousand years, death at 80 would be a tragedy. As things are, it may just be a more widespread tragedy. If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all."
--Thomas Nagel, "Death"
I have chosen this morbid topic because it seemed there was no better time. Yesterday, after excusing myself from the home of my friends to return home quickly to drop my things off before going to the pub to watch the Champions League fixture, my landlady of 81 came to me with a rather distressed look on her face, saying "I think Danny's dead. Can you go into his room and see if you can get a pulse?"
When I first moved in at the beginning of March, I was told that there was an individual 'Danny' who was living for free in the house in return for being a 'handyman' but, they told me, he really didnt do much. I only ever saw him once before, an instant where he had made his made to the kitchen one afternoon. A very frail individual, I wasnt sure what had been expected of him. My landlady kept me informed of his worsening condition. He had gone to Groote Schurr hospital and both he and the landlady herself had been rather put out by the conditions. It was Danny's wish that he shouldnt go back and that he should be simply left with his whiskey and cigarettes to die in his bed. So there was plenty to say that this was going to happen. Later, she would tell me what basically amounted to admitting that he had been in his death throes recently: evacuating his body at regular intervals and general in a great state of weakness. She had brought him the Fanta and Sprite he had requested, went to feed the cats and dogs, and then returned to watch television with him, only to discover that in that short span, he was no longer.
As for me, I have been to a few funerals in my day. Not just of 'older' individuals, but of young ones as well. During my first few years of school, I had a best friend who was a year older than me, and I would always spend a lot of time with him. He eventually moved away and I never heard from him again until I saw a large article in the newspaper: he had been a poster child for cancer research for the past few years, and had done his utmost to battle on, but eventually succumbed. I had spent some time doing Muay Thai between about 9 and 12 to keep my fitness up, and at the time there was a fighter named Roy Lilley that everybody looked up to and idolized. The night of his last fight, which I had been present at, he was killed running into the middle of the highway, supposedly he had wanted to get out of the car he was riding in because he was 'going crazy' from LSD that he had taken. I went to his funeral too. And then when I was in university in Edmonton, I came home one day and turned on the news. They had announced that there was another motorcycle fatality in the city. I thought to myself 'Why can't these people before more careful??' Then they cut to the person in question. It was a guy from my soccer team. I remember a particular moment at the funeral when me and a bunch of teammates were at the internment; we were huddled together in a collective gloom when the guy's mother came over and said, in the most matter of fact way, "Don't worry. Just have faith and God will take care of you all." I don't know what moved me more, the mother's stony demeanor, or the manner in which she dealt with her pain. (Everything seems to remind me of Fanon these days, but) as Fanon describes one means to deal with hardship: "A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm."
But it was rather strange walking in on this frail old man, sprawled on the bed, head tilted back, mouth open as if he had died in a moment of catatonic rigidity. I had not seen him in the weeks leading up to this moment, so I didnt know whether his face had a deep purple tinge to it because of these sudden death throes, or if it had slowly grown on him as his condition worsened. I walked around the bed and leaned down to feel first his wrist and then his neck. What does having no pulse feel like? It is difficult to know when it is too easy to think that the pulse of another is only the blood moving through your own fingers. I had never really done this before, and worse I had just come out of the cold, wet weather, so my hands were freezing cold, whereas, almost ironically, the wrist and neck of this man was still warm. I tried jostling him a bit. Nothing. What does one do in such a situation without some sort of understanding of what to expect? You are used to waking stubborn people from their sleep but death, one could say, is the most obstinate sleep of all. I couldnt be absolutely sure, but it seemed to me that if he wasnt already dead, he was past any sort of state where a return to even a semi-conscious state was possible. I went to comfort the landlady as much as I could. Trying times, especially for one so vulnerable. As with everything that happens to her: people not paying rent, thefts, verbal abuse, she proceeded to rationalize it away: "I should be used to death by now," she told me, and showed me a picture of her son at his grad night. He had been killed that night by a drunk driver at the age of 17. She told me of others that she knew, her husband, some that had resided in the house, Danny's fiance who had died of cancer. She put her hope in her metaphysical assessment of a spirit world, cosmic nudges, etc., to hope that their souls were now free to mingle in some ethereal plane. Such as it is.
As Thomas Nagel says in his assessment, there is not much to say about death if one does not go into conjecture about immortality, reincarnation, etc. It is the ultimate judgment. I recall from my Junior High School health class that we would always walk into the class to see a quote on the board that we would have to copy down. The only one I really remember was "Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" (well... I also remember the quote "Objects in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appear", but only because I remember commenting about how it was very close to the title of a song by Meat Loaf and asked if she knew of this song). Permanent indeed.
And there are other issues. I recall a brother and sister from Australia that I befriended during my time in Oxford. I was told that Huntington's Chorea was present in their genetic line. Basically, if you have the proper genetic inheritance (and it is autosomal dominant, so you have a 50-50 chance of inheriting it), you die around the age of 50. There is a test that tells you immediately whether this is the case or not. From what I understand, neither of them wished to take the test. It is a double-edged sword: take the test and get a negative, live 'normally', take the test and get a positive, live in fear. I don't know if I could do it.
But one must be careful. The head of the philosophy department here at the University of Cape Town has published a book entitled 'Better Never To Have Lived', where he argues that people are actually doing their children a disservice by bringing them into a world of suffering and strife. The reactions that he received from critics was idiotic: they made the leap that equated 'dont bring people into the world' to 'take everybody out of the world', i.e. saying, for example, that 'it is of his opinion that we should all be dead'. And, of course, that is not it at all. If you are not brought into the world, then you cannot know what your missing; you maintain 'ignorance' in a void of non-existence (if that makes any sense), whereas if you are killed, this ends certain prospects that are now achievable. It is a fine line that sometimes borders on absurdity, but a line that must be considered nonetheless.
It is like the argument I put forward with respect to animal ethics: these mice are being bred for the sole purpose of being sacrificed at the bio-altar; is it 'better that they not have lived'? Perhaps. It all depends on which species' well-being takes priority. They are being utilized, yes, but utilized by a group of overseers that 'puppetize' them. A form of oppression? Also a possibility.
But the idea of death and various thought experiments that may go with it provide interesting philosophical insights into teleological assessments of humanity. If humans' purpose is to procreate the species, then, if it would be possible to slow down the 'telomerization' of DNA and allow us to live to be closer to the age of Methusaleh, yet were still only given a window of 20 to 30 years to reproduce, what would this say about purpose? And wouldn't overpopulation became a major problem? The birth rate wouldn't change, but the turnover would be a lot slower: imagine the brunt of the population from the past 600 years still living? It seems chaos would reign. But perhaps not. Perhaps, like everything else, the need to curb such problems would have been dealt with earlier before they reached a critical stage. Who knows?
At any rate, as morbid as death and discussions about it sounds and is, it really is also a very interesting topic of discussion. I also seem to remember something else in health class when we were talking about the topic of suicide: that those who are more likely to talk about it are much less likely to take it as a valid 'way out', whereas those who tend to avoid the issue may have it in close quarters in the back of their mind somewhere. But of course, this fatalistic psychological assessment shouldn't be universalized past 'the vulnerable', i.e. those that one has a genuine concern for the personal safety of.
As is evident from the quote from Nagel (or, for that matter, Eliot) at the beginning, many simply dont want to discuss it because it reminds them of their own mortality.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Probability, Philosophy, and Monty Hall
I'm not sure that it is possible to come up with something original every weekday, and today is one of those days where my mind is elsewhere. So here is something I've plagiarized word-for-word from a photocopy tacked to a wall in the mathematics department at UCT (the original author is Dr. J Ritchie, a senior lecturer on the Philosophy of Science here at UCT). I thought the ending fit nicely with some of the things I said yesterday with regard to consequentialism and finitism.
The Monty Hall Problem
Here's a puzzle you might have heard before. Imagine you are taking part in a game show. The host, Monty Hall, has three doors in front of him. Behind one there is a car and behind the other two a goat. At the end of the game you will have chosen one of the doors and you'll win whatever is inside. You want to win the car.
You start by choosing one door at random. Monty looks behind the other two doors and opens one of them to reveal a goat. He now offers you the chance to swap your door for the one he didn't open. What should you do?
Many people argue like this. There are only two possibilities: the car is either behind your door or Monty's, each is equally likely, so it doesn't matter which door you choose. But that's a mistake. There are three possibilities at the beginning of the game, all of which we assume are equally likely. Either you have chosen the door with the car or you've chosen the door with goat 1 or you've chosen the door with goat 2. If you swap in the first case, you'll win a goat. If you swap in the other two cases, then you'll win the car. Hence you're twice as likely to win if you swap, so you should swap.
That's a simple problem in probability theory but let's now think about it in a different way. Imagine instead of winning a car that Monty promises to shower you in riches, if you win. But if you lose, Monty will shoot you. Of course, you might not want to play that game. But tough, Monty has kidnapped all your family and threatened to kill them all and you unless you play. The game proceeds as before. You choose a door, Monty opens one of his doors to reveal a goat (which now represents your imminent death) and asks if you want to swap. What should you do?
We've ratcheted up the drama a bit, you might think, but the logic of the case remains the same. You are more likely to win if you swap. So you should swap. Let's say you swap and it turns out the door you are left with contains a goat; so Monty shoots you. In what sense, then, was it the right decision to swap?
The obvious response is that it is the right thing to do because, if you play the game a lot, you will win twice as often (on average) as you lose. Probabilities in other words tell us about long-run frequencies. But this kind of game you can't play a lot. Once you lose, you are in a very serious way out of the game for good. In fact since relative frequencies only converge on probabilities in the infinite long run and in the long-run we're all dead, is there any good reason ever to choose the more probable option? Now we've moved from a simple problem in probability theory to a hard problem in philosophy... But I've run out of space to offer you any solutions.
(By the way, you are invited to send possible solutions to jack.ritchie@uct.ac.za)
The Monty Hall Problem
Here's a puzzle you might have heard before. Imagine you are taking part in a game show. The host, Monty Hall, has three doors in front of him. Behind one there is a car and behind the other two a goat. At the end of the game you will have chosen one of the doors and you'll win whatever is inside. You want to win the car.
You start by choosing one door at random. Monty looks behind the other two doors and opens one of them to reveal a goat. He now offers you the chance to swap your door for the one he didn't open. What should you do?
Many people argue like this. There are only two possibilities: the car is either behind your door or Monty's, each is equally likely, so it doesn't matter which door you choose. But that's a mistake. There are three possibilities at the beginning of the game, all of which we assume are equally likely. Either you have chosen the door with the car or you've chosen the door with goat 1 or you've chosen the door with goat 2. If you swap in the first case, you'll win a goat. If you swap in the other two cases, then you'll win the car. Hence you're twice as likely to win if you swap, so you should swap.
That's a simple problem in probability theory but let's now think about it in a different way. Imagine instead of winning a car that Monty promises to shower you in riches, if you win. But if you lose, Monty will shoot you. Of course, you might not want to play that game. But tough, Monty has kidnapped all your family and threatened to kill them all and you unless you play. The game proceeds as before. You choose a door, Monty opens one of his doors to reveal a goat (which now represents your imminent death) and asks if you want to swap. What should you do?
We've ratcheted up the drama a bit, you might think, but the logic of the case remains the same. You are more likely to win if you swap. So you should swap. Let's say you swap and it turns out the door you are left with contains a goat; so Monty shoots you. In what sense, then, was it the right decision to swap?
The obvious response is that it is the right thing to do because, if you play the game a lot, you will win twice as often (on average) as you lose. Probabilities in other words tell us about long-run frequencies. But this kind of game you can't play a lot. Once you lose, you are in a very serious way out of the game for good. In fact since relative frequencies only converge on probabilities in the infinite long run and in the long-run we're all dead, is there any good reason ever to choose the more probable option? Now we've moved from a simple problem in probability theory to a hard problem in philosophy... But I've run out of space to offer you any solutions.
(By the way, you are invited to send possible solutions to jack.ritchie@uct.ac.za)
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