philosophy at last

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, May 21, 2010

I’ve neglected philosophy on this blog in favor of linguistics, which is the nobler science for providing factual knowledge and explanation; philosophy is mostly a lot of talk. But here’s a challenge for a friend who has a theory of volition according to which all voluntary actions seek some kind of happiness.

Now one familiar response will claim that such a theory is circular and therefore vacuous: whatever one seeks, that is happiness, so that if one seeks pain, then pain is happiness, and if happiness can be even pain, then happiness has no meaning. But my friend is a materialist too. Happiness is defined, for him, a favorable mental state identifiable with a brain chemical state.

And so I have a mind experiment for him. Consider a curious learner. A deeply devoted learner, for whom the worth and meaning of life is learning. And suppose his doctor has discovered a chemical that can induce the learner’s mental state when he is learning or having learnt. And suppose the chemical will be permanent and will prevent his ability to learn forever. Will the learner prefer ingesting the chemical to the effort of learning?

It seems to me that anyone who is truly curious will reject the pill out of hand, although the temptation to feel it might be great. Not every voluntary action has as its goal some pleasure. Sometimes our goals are based on values, and they are beyond our sensibilities. They are moral in nature.

Now, that’s not the whole story. If the pill might allow a few tries without permanence, I’m sure the learner would try it, and might try it repeatedly, and, like a junky, might keep on with it to the exclusion of learning. And if this chemical induced a complete sense of well-being, I have no doubt that the learner, or, at least, many learners, will end up as permanent junkies. But that doesn’t decide the mind experiment. The question is whether our goals are solely determined by seeking brain states, rather than say, accomplishments or moral actions. The answer seems to be a bit of both. It depends on whether we’ve eaten the lotus fruit or just contemplated it: some of our goals are beyond well-being, but we are easily corrupted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022 An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens: If we were to assume that all of human futures are determined by those elements of human nature that have persisted through history, we might conclude that we will continue to expand our influence on nature, organize it, harness it etc. This seems to be the assumption Hanson makes in predicting that aliens with advanced technology will be grabby — they will succeed by Darwinian selection over their environment, dominating it, organizing it, harnessing it just as we have in our Darwinian selection here. Darwinian libertarianism is Hanson’s idee fixe which he applies to everything. But as David Deutsch likes to say, not without some (though not entire) justification, we can’t predict the technology of the future. More important, technological advances have been the great game changers in human history. They are changes in our relationship with our environment, and in our selection. Rel
Read more

my Proudest Moment (and the problem with Dawkins)

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, May 15, 2012 One of my proudest moments: A religious student in one of my linguistics classes challenged Darwinian evolution as “just a theory.” For a moment I thought I’d try to explain that the theory of evolution is scientific because it could be wrong, whereas Creationism is not scientific because it can never be wrong, but I realized that even if I spent the rest of the hour explaining that conundrum of falsificationism, they’d come away thinking that science is false and Creationism is necessarily true, so I’d not only be digressing from class topic, but it would be counterproductive. Instead I suggested that the difference between the millions of years of evolution that resulted in the complexity and usefulness of natural language, on the one hand, and on the other, the clumsy strictures of standard languages, are exactly like the difference between god-given perfection and the imperfect creations of the human hand: helicopters,
Read more

The limits of imagination, scifi, art and UFOs -- or: the intrinsic mediocrity of art

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022 “Truth is always strange — stranger than fiction” – Byron It’s widely assumed that the arts are imaginative while the sciences are too constrained by reality, by formalisms, by math and by logic for flights of imagination. What if we’ve all got this backwards? One look at the history of the arts tells us that the arts are more imitative than innovative, otherwise it would be impossible to identify historical periods in the arts, and styles in the arts might be their most obvious trait, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult for an observer to tell one artist from another. This should not surprise anyone. It has a structural reason that is all too often ignored. Art is usually made for an audience. It is a game theoretic activity in which the artist must entertain the audience, which entails that the art work not lose the audience’ attention but continually communicate and engage. If the art is too innovative for th
Read more