A Political Song

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Were You Ever

 

Were you ever right

When you arrived that night

With your books and your guns

With your daughters and sons

 

Were you ever right

 

You landed and looked

You built and you cooked

You cut down and burned

You rampaged and spurned

 

You landed and looked

 

Did you do right

When you used all your might

To bring them in ships

To work in your fields

 

Did you do right

 

You bought and you sold

You made them grow old

You forced them to change

You locked them in chains

 

You bought and you sold

 

Are you sure it was good

When you imported more men

To toil under ground

Until soon they were dead

 

Are you sure it was good

 

Did you ever care

Do you feel it was fair

Did you really mean well

Did you really do well

 

Did you ever care

 

Was it part of the plan

To elect such a man

Is that what you need

To see them bleed

 

Was it part of the plan

 

Were you ever

Were you ever

That beacon of light

Did you ever

Did you ever

Do right

 

Did you ever

Did you ever

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Ex-Friends

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Ex-Friends

I have many ex-friends. Consider the case of Mark Rowlands: this is a person who I’ve known for forty years. I supervised him at Oxford; I asked him to contribute to a series I was editing on ethics; I brought him to Miami; I saw him every day for lunch when I was in the department; my wife was good friends with his wife. I have not set eyes on him in over ten years and I live close to him in Miami. I have tried many times to arrange a meeting with him. After giving me the runaround for years, he finally made it clear that no meeting was going to happen. No explanation was given. Or Otavio Bueno: I was instrumental in bringing him to Miami as a junior member of the department; I befriended him when he arrived; we were on good terms. That friendship is over. No explanation given. Some nasty emails exchanged. Told me I was not welcome on campus. Or Aimee Thomasson: I literally saved her life when she was in danger of drowning; she came to my house and I to hers; we had a good relationship. I reached out to her to discuss things, but got no response. She publicly took against me. I haven’t seen her or heard from her in over ten years. I could mention many others. You might want to ask these people to explain themselves, because I have no explanation from them. Cancellation can get very personal.[1]

[1] I should say that I have many academic friends who have not distanced themselves from me.

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True Lies

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True Lies

Suppose you see John steal a cookie. He did it and you saw him do it. However, you don’t believe that Johnstole the cookie because John disguised himself as Jack. You believe, falsely, that Jack stole the cookie. As it happens, you don’t like John so you decide to lie and say that John did it. You therefore say, “I saw John steal the cookie”—while believing that Jack did. You intended to say something false but ended up saying something true. Did you tell a lie? If you did, it was a true lie. No false belief was produced in anyone by your assertion of John’s guilt, even though that was your intention. No injustice occurred because of your statement—the right person was punished. Still, is it true that you lied? I think not: there are no true lies—though there can be true attempted lies. You tried to lie, but you failed. You are guilty of attempted lying but not actual lying. The case is rather like an attempted murder when you aim at a wax effigy you mistake for a living person. You can’t actually murder unless you really kill someone, but you can attempt to murder without killing anyone. Similarly, you can attempt to lie but fail in the attempt—you didn’t actually lie. Incompetent failed lying isn’t lying. It is a necessary condition for lying that the proposition you put forward is false: “false lie” is redundant and “true lie” is contradictory. A very incompetent and unlucky would-be liar could go through life never telling a lie yet always attempting to. He could not be called a liar (he is a liar manque). The same goes for perjury: someone might try to commit perjury but fail, because she accidentally tells the truth, contrary to intention. She is guilty of attempted perjury and may therefore be legally sanctioned accordingly, but technically there was no perjury, i.e., lying under oath. The same goes for truth-value gaps: if your statement is neither true nor false, it cannot be a lie. Suppose I try to lie about the state of the king of France’s head—I say “The king of France is bald”. That can’t be a lie because my statement was not false (if we follow Strawson). It is the same if I say something meaningless under the impression that I am making a meaningful statement: I have not said anything false, so I have not lied. Whether I lie is not completely up to me; it requires the cooperation of the world. It is not enough that I have a lying intention; I also need the right beliefs and the right linguistic vehicle. What I say has to be objectively false, but I may be wrong about this. Should we blame a person less if his attempted lie turns out not to be a lie? No: he had a lying will and that is what matters to blameworthiness. We should certainly not say “No harm, no foul”—no actual lie, so no blame attaching. Attempted murder is a crime, and attempted lying is unethical. You can’t plead innocence on the basis of factual error. Such cases very seldom arise (I have never even heard the possibility discussed), but the concept of lying seems clear enough—no falsehood, no lie. Lying is stating a falsehood with the intention to deceive, not merely intending to do that. What this shows, I think, is that the badness of a lie resides mainly in the falsity of what is said not in the speaker’s intention. If attempted lies never led to actual lies, i.e., false statements that lead to false beliefs, then we would not care much about the prevalence of would-be liars—they would be powerless to propagate false beliefs. Insincerity is not the problem; the problem is actual falsehood. We abominate lying because it leads to false belief, not because liars aim to produce false belief. If they failed in their aims, we would regard them as negligible cranks. There is nothing to fear in truth-telling (would-be) liars. Liars have to be able to make actually false statements in order to be a menace to society.

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Fuck

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Fuck

The word “fuck” has multiple uses. The OED gives us two definitions: “have sex with” and “damage or ruin”. Thus, we have “fuck up”, “fuck about”, “fuck with”, “fuck all”, “fuck off”, “fuck you”, “fucked”, “what the fuck?”, “cluster fuck”, “mind fuck”, “fuck face”, “fuckable”, “fuck!”, and so on. The two definitions are opposed to each other: we don’t normally think that having sex with someone is damaging or ruining them; nor do we think that damaging or ruining someone is having sex with them. The word slides from positive to negative with remarkable ease. Generally, it connotes something not at all good. Its literal meaning has given way to an opposite conversational meaning. All very curious and no doubt indicative of deep psychic currents. However, I am not concerned with such psycholinguistic matters here; I am interested in promoting a new use for the word. I think it expresses our present political moment. Yesterday was a fuck. Tomorrow will be a fuck. The next four years will be a giant fuck. I started using the word this way while being treated for cancer—it was a fuck. Surgery is a fuck; so is radiation treatment—but immunotherapy isn’t much of a fuck (except expense-wise). This usage is particularly useful in the future tense: “That is going to be a fuck”. The meaning is roughly “deeply unpleasant, aggressive, and unavoidable”. Not many experiences qualify for this use of the word—a bad lunch or movie is not a fuck. It has to make an impact on the suffering psyche. It has to hurt; you have to grit your teeth. A visit to the dentist can be a fuck, though it need not be. Inflation is a fuck if it’s high enough. Being sued is a fuck. Is being cancelled? Not really. A fuck has to be extreme, ruinous, spectacular, life-altering. True, there can be minor fucks, like being towed or audited; but the concept is really designed for the big things. Being thrown in jail is definitely a fuck. The word must be using sparingly in this sense or else its impact will be debased. So, feel free to use the word in this way if the spirit takes you. I have the feeling we are going to need it.[1]

[1] Speaking of novel linguistic uses, I said to my son the other day (he is forty-five) that I wanted to go into an English country pub with him one afternoon and whisper “Phasers on stun”.

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Meme Selection

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Meme Selection

What kind of selection applies to memes? According to my scheme, there are two kinds of selection: intentional and nomological.[1]  Suppose the meme is a jingle: if it takes up residence in your mind, is that an intentional act? Not generally, since jingles usually repeat themselves against your will. You don’t choose to have a jingle running through your head all day. Maybe someone intended to put it there, but its ability to stick around is not a result of the recipient’s intentions. So, the selection must be of the nomological type—the jingle must gain a foothold in virtue of laws of nature (plus initial conditions). What are these laws? They are not physical laws, presumably, so they must be psychological laws. The relevant law might be this: catchy tunes tend to be remembered and rehearsed. The jingle acquires meme status in virtue of that law. Other laws of meme propagation might be more complex (consider fashions). There are psychological laws governing gene propagation and these are the selective agents in bestowing meme status (meme “survival”). Thus, meme selection is a case of nomological selection. This is a form of “natural” selection. So, meme selection belongs with body selection, as conceived by Darwin. This seems like a nice result. Stars, organisms, and memes all exist because of nomological selection—unlike selective breeding, works of art, machines, political systems, etc. Intentions and laws cover the whole field.[2]

[1] See my “The Selective Universe”.

[2] We now have a useful structure for the subject of selection science (including philosophy). This is the general theory as opposed to the special theory represented by animal breeding and Darwinian natural selection.

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American Trump

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American Trump

Perhaps I see the current catastrophe differently from others. To me it reveals and magnifies the worst American traits: stupidity, credulity, nastiness, thirst for violence, love of bullshit, childishness, amorality. I have seen these traits manifested so many times in my thirty-five years here that Trump’s rise hardly surprises me. Only in America could this happen; as a Finnish friend of mine (Esa Saarinen) recently said to me, “Trump is impossible in Finland”. The same traits operate even in university settings: there is a bit of Trump in (nearly) everyone, even on the left. Oh, how they love to demonize and destroy! Careful thought is alien to their raucous cramped minds. But I will not expatiate further.[1]

[1] If you think I enjoyed writing that, you are very much mistaken.

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Double Death

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Double Death

You might think there is nothing more to say about death. You might think death has been done to death. But I am here to report, from the depths of death studies, that death has a new wrinkle—it has a surprise up its sleeve. It turns out that every death is a double death. When a person dies two things die, not one. Both these things have value; we would like both to go on. But the death of one entails the death of the other—not necessarily, but contingently. Death has always been double, but it need not be; the two deaths are in principle detachable. This is good (but not very good).

What (on earth) am I talking about? The thought occurred to me while I was taking a massage, so that I was focused on my body. The two things are the self and the body. The thought I had was that it would be nice if my body went on when I died. We are familiar with the thought that the self could survive the body—say, by transferring the brain to a new body. That would certainly be good; it would take most of the sting out of death, especially if the new body was a splendid specimen. The old body would die, but the old self would live on. But what about the converse? What if the self died but the body lived on? In particular, the skills of the old body were preserved, especially the cool useful skills. Suppose you are a ballet dancer and your brain is in bad shape—it’s not going to make it. But you are told that the surgeons can keep your body alive along with your dancing skills, with a new brain installed in it. It will be up on stage again exercising the skills you have instilled in it. Realistically, this will require keeping alive and well your motor cortex and associated brain structures—but not you (not your frontal cortex etc.). Suppose, indeed, that they can preserve all your motor capacities, though not (alas) the person that is you—musical, athletic, balletic. It took years to acquire those capacities, and it is possible to retain them in your healthy body (pity about the dying self-brain). Wouldn’t this be better than the usual double death? Isn’t it some kind of compensation? We might describe it as the survival of the bodily self, if not the mental self. Instead of two deaths, there is only one. True, you might prefer things the other way round, because your mental self is more precious to you, but it would at least be something if your bodily self survived. Offered the choice, you would opt for the single death over the double death. This might be called half-death.[1]

Can we extend this idea to the mind? Suppose my mental abilities are located in a part of my brain separate from the part that houses my self: could we preserve the former part while losing the latter part? It doesn’t seem impossible. Then we could preserve Beethoven’s musical genius while not preserving him. Surely, that would be better than losing both. It would be possible for Beethoven to lose his musical genius because of brain deterioration while not losing his self, because they are separately located. Equally, it should be possible for the converse to happen; a new self could be conjoined with the old genius. If I were Beethoven, I would prefer this to losing both things. Could the same be done with memories—keep the memories, lose the self? That seems pushing it, because of the close connection between the self and memory; but maybe some kinds of memory could be retained in the absence of the old self, in which case a lot that is valuable could be preserved without survival of the self. This never happens as things are, but in principle it could. Double death leaves open the possibility of partial survival. Survival of the self is not the only thing that matters. Death is more discriminating (in principle) than we thought. Death need not always be total death. Death may come in degrees and types.[2]

[1] I can see a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie: Half-Death.

[2] When do we start dying? Is it when we reach adulthood? We don’t begin to die when we stop growing, do we? We start losing capacities quite early on, whittled away by the years. We are certainly beginning the dying process when we reach sixty normally—the journey to death has already begun. We become less and less young. We gradually start to fade away, sometimes passing through dementia and physical collapse. We don’t suddenly grow old. Maybe we die many deaths before the Big Death.

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The Selective Universe

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The Selective Universe

In The Origin of Species Darwin introduces the concept of natural selection via the concept of artificial selection. His idea is that nature operates in a manner analogous to human actions of selective breeding and cultivation. Variety is generated by both processes. Some breeds or phenotypes or species are favored by the two processes, leading to their survival, while some are disfavored, leading to their removal or extinction. However, Darwin doesn’t generalize the concept of selection further: he stops at the selective action of nature on living things. I am going to describe a further type of selection. We will need some terminology (in an area where terminology can be a problem[1]): I will speak of intentional selection and nomological selection. Intentional selection is the most familiar and easy to understand: it is a matter of conscious choice, usually on the part of humans but not restricted to humans (we must consider intelligent aliens too). In this kind of selection an agent intentionally selects a type of entity that he or she wants to bring into existence—say, a certain variety of dog. I don’t say “artificial” because there is nothing necessarily “contrived or false” (OED) about it: it is perfectly genuine and natural, because intention is a natural phenomenon. Nor is it “insincere or affected”—it isn’t fake in any way. It is simply a matter of decision, foresight, planning, choice. This is not what “natural” selection is supposed to be—hence the process is analogous to intentional selection but not a case of it. Natural selection is blind, unwilled, unplanned, not chosen—it is “mechanical”. It results from impersonal forces of nature not conscious choices. That is why I call it nomological selection: it is selection according to the laws of nature, not the laws of man (psychological or legal). It is selection by natural laws not by intelligent minds—by things like temperature and gravity. I will be suggesting, then, that nomological selection is a broader concept than Darwinian natural selection, though that phrase would not be semantically incorrect—laws of nature are certainly “natural”.

There are two directions of generalization I want to pursue. The first is that intentional selection applies to more than selective breeding and cultivation: many things can be intentionally selected—clothes, husbands, cars, hairstyles, words, musical notes, food, paint, accents, pets, countries. Where there is intention there is selection: intention is inherently selective. All of it is “artificial” in the sense that it isn’t the result of impersonal forces of nature. Art, in particular, is the result of intentional selection—selecting words (literature), audible notes (music), dabs of color (pictorial art). One might even say that dog breeds are artistic products, if the breed selected is chosen on the basis of aesthetic criteria. Intentional selection is selection from a range of possibilities according to certain ends, and this includes artistic works. Thus, we should include under that heading not just cultivated living things but also artifacts of all kinds. A huge amount of the human environment is the result of intentional selection—the action of human intention on the world. Intention is a powerful engine of creation that has transformed the world around us (also within us). It brings things into existence, and also lets things languish and die. Things are born and survive (or perish) according to human intention—fashions, machines, art works, political systems. A large part of the human world is the upshot of intentional selection. That is what culture is. In the case of nomological selection, we likewise have a natural direction of generalization to consider: the composition and structure of the physical universe is the result of it. The things that exist do so by virtue of the laws of nature: planets, mountains, valleys, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, etc. Without the laws of nature being what they are we would not have these entities (the law of gravity plays an obvious formative role). The laws of nature create and they destroy, which is why stars are said to have a “life” and to “die”. Glaciers can come to exist and cease to exist according to the ambient temperature. Deserts can be created and disappear depending on the climate and other factors. This is analogous to what happens to species and individual animals: they too can be created by courtesy of the environmental physical conditions and made extinct by them. In this respect dinosaurs are like stars: both can exist for a period and then fade away—by environmental catastrophe or internal dynamics. This is why I introduce the phrase “nomological selection”: I want to mark the similarity to Darwinian natural selection, on one hand, and the dissimilarity to intentional selection, on the other. Of course, Darwin’s natural selection includes genes and reproduction, which are absent from the physical universe of stars and planets, but still the analogy exists and is appropriately labeled “nomological selection”. Selective breeding of plants and animals also involves genes and reproduction, but that doesn’t undermine the analogy with art and artifacts. We are talking about the basic structure of the creative processes involved, not the specific mechanisms, which are peculiar to the case at hand. The important point is that the universe divides into two sorts of selective process: intention-guided and law-guided, personal and impersonal, agential and non-agential. True, laws are like intentions (as intentions are like laws) in that both determine the future: you can predict the future from them. They both act causally, creatively, transformationally—but the two are not identical. We are dealing with two distinct natural cosmological kinds—law-governed creation and mind-governed creation, the unwilled and the willed. Everything you see around you (and don’t see) is the result of one or the other type of selection—hence “the selective universe”. Darwin divided animal creation into two categories—the artificially selected and the naturally selected; I am dividing the whole universe into two categories—the intentionally selected and the nomologically selected. I see this as an extension of Darwin’s basic conception. Everything is about selection under pressure, differential survival, forces of creation and destruction. Our world is a selected world. If God were behind it, it would be a chosen world. This would be supernatural selection.

I intend this as a type of metaphysics—a general conception of reality as a whole. We might call it “selection philosophy” (compare “process philosophy”), or simply “selectionism”.  If I were to draw a diagram of this theory, it would look like the following: at the top we have “Selection” with two arrows pointing to “Intentional Selection” and “Nomological Selection”; then two arrows under each of these pointing to nodes labeled “Aesthetic Selection” and “Non-Aesthetic Selection”, and “Animate Selection” and “Non-Animate Selection”, respectively; these would then branch out into varieties of each category (e.g., music, dogs, and planets). This is how the universe gets carved up. Everything is a variation on the selective theme. It would be possible to adopt different views on priority within this scheme: you might take intentional selection as basic, evincing idealist predilections; or you might take nomological selection as basic, perhaps for physicalist reasons; or you might view the two as mutually irreducible. You could regard intention itself as law-governed or not law-governed. You could have varying views about the nature and status of laws. I would say that intentional selection is a result of nomological selection, because natural selection favored it. You could claim that no coherent universe could exist that was not nomologically selective. You could speak of two types of evolution, both properly so called: biological evolution and cosmological evolution—both types of evolution working by natural (nomological) selection. The galaxies evolved, and so did animal species. You could even argue that both evolutions involve progress or improvement of sorts. You could ponder brain teasers such as whether it would be metaphysically possible to invert the two categories: could the actual results of one sort of selection be exchanged for the other sort? Could art objects have arisen by purely nomological selection and planets evolved by intentional selection? Is the type of origin necessarily linked to the essence of the objects produced? A lot of metaphysics could be constructed around these questions; many doctoral theses could be written debating them. Interdisciplinary work in Selection Science could flourish. Is selection fundamentally dualistic, as Darwin apparently believed concerning his distinction, or is it possible to construct a unified theory of selection in general? Could there be selection in an immaterial universe? What kind of selection would it be if God engaged in his own type of selection? Presumably God selected the laws of nature, so that he is more selectively basic than they are—unless there are laws governing God’s nature. Etc. And what exactly is thisselection we so breezily talk about? Isn’t that a mentally tainted notion? Can it be “naturalized”? All good philosophical questions. Selection metaphysics could be the next Big Thing (heaven help us). Is the actualization of the merely possible the most fundamental kind of selection? How is a possible world to be selected as actual? Is it in the nature of reality to be essentially selective? Is a non-selective reality possible? Is the world the totality of selected facts? Are mathematical and moral facts selective? Contingent truths are selective, but are necessary truths? Thus, the philosophy of selection in all its variety (or uniformity).[2]

[1] I discuss this in “The Language of Evolution”, in Philosophical Provocations (2017).

[2] It might be said that Darwin put the concept of selection on the scientific map, along with gravity, electricity, mass, and motion. We need the concept to do biology. The laws of biology cannot be stated without it. It is the cornerstone of biological science. But he didn’t generalize it beyond the biological world, even though selection involves (among other things) the action of the non-biological world on living things. I am suggesting that universal selection is latent in Darwinian biological science, as universal gravitation is explicit in Newtonian physical science. Gravity operates everywhere, in the large and the small, and so does selection, biological and non-biological, mental and physical. Gravity is itself a selective force, because it causes matter to concentrate and thereby become the objects that define our universe—it selects stars, planets, and galaxies. Then it selects life forms that can exist alongside it. Everything in the biological world is naturally selected; everything in the physical world is nomologically selected, according to the constituents and forces of nature. Selection is a universal (and unifying) principle of nature. Granted, seeing this requires an imaginative leap, but then so did Darwin’s theory. Selection is a ubiquitous active ingredient in the universe—not unlike gravity, in fact. We just need to accept a bit of conceptual extension.

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