Philosophy

Can We? Ought We?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Just because it can be done, it does not follow that it ought to be done.

This commonplace strikes me as generally reasonable and perhaps platitudinously so. So, for example, just because you can ram your car into your garage door, it doesn’t follow that you should. In ethical debates with a philosophical orientation one often hears the claim, first articulated by Hume, that you can’t get ought from is. In this case, we might say that you can’t get ought from can.

When the ought is generally established or commonsensical, as in the example above, then there is little to talk about. But there are cases when matters are not nearly as obvious. The principle is often cited in connection with new technologies and it is often articulated by those who believe that the mere ability to achieve some specified end, say human cloning, through scientific knowledge and technical manipulation tells us nothing about whether or not such an end ought to be pursued.

Two very recent articles raise the question of the ought-ness of a capability that may be on the horizon.

The first, “Should We Erase Painful Memories,” is an excerpt from Alison Winters new book, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History. It discusses the possibility of memory dampening or therapeutic forgetting, basically erasing certain memories a la The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The second, “The Future of Prediction,” discusses the possibilities opened up for more accurate forecasting by the emerging ability to crunch immense amounts of data. (Unfortunately, you’ll have to endure the Boston Globe’s atrocious formatting to read this article.)

In both cases, an ability to achieve a particular end is in view and it is not at all obvious whether the end is unproblematically desirable or not. Enjoy thinking through these issues. At the moment it is an interesting, speculative debate. In the not so distant future, it may be a concrete decision.

For an interesting model of how to go about thinking about these issues, you may want to consider reading Leon Kass’ “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls” in which he tackles a similar questions with regards to biotechnological enhancements.

Play, Politics, and Worship

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Here is a thought for the day:

“I assert that in all the cities, everyone is unaware that the character of the games played is decisive for the establishment of the laws, since it determines whether or not the established laws will persist.”

This assertion was made by Plato in The Laws (book VII) and it suggests that the political culture of a society is bound up with the nature of its games. More specifically, Plato goes on to observe that the persistence of a society’s laws is bound up with the persistence of its games:

“Where this is arranged, and provided that the same persons always play at the same things, with the same things, and in the same way, and have their spirits gladdened by the same toys, there the serious customs are also allowed to remain undisturbed; but where the games change, and are always infested with innovation and other sorts of transformations … there is no greater ruin than this that can come to a city.”

We typically remember that Plato treated music with a great deal of seriousness in The Republic, we less often hear of the seriousness with which he treated sports and games, but there it is (courtesy of James Schall from whose essay, “The Seriousness of Sports,” these quotations are drawn).

There’s a good deal to think about here.

It is not insignificant that with regards to the two great civilizations of the classical period, Greece and Rome, we readily think of games which seem to characterize their societies: the Olympics and the gladiatorial games respectively. In Constantinople, that enduring but infrequently remembered enclave of classical civilization, the Blues and the Greens which functioned as part gangs and part political associations not infrequently contributing to riots and coups began and were sustained as fans of popular charioteering teams. More recently, in Egypt, one not insignificant block of participants in the current political turmoil are bound together primarily by their love of soccer.

On a related note, perhaps at the root of soccer’s inability to take in American culture there is more than a hint about the national character (insofar as we may legitimately speak of one).

Moreover, what might it mean that for a time baseball could legitimately be called America’s sport? And what, in turn, might it mean that while baseball remains popular, it’s place in American culture has been challenged if not replaced by basketball and football? Both of these, of course, have been around for some time and it could be argued that they too are distinctly American. So perhaps we may create a political taxonomy of sorts based on the three dominate sports of American society: baseball, football, and basketball. I wonder, has anyone studied whether a preference for one of these sports is a reliable predictor of political inclinations?

Two titles come to mind in connection with the theme of play and culture. The earlier one is historian John Huzinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture, the first Dutch edition of which appeared in 1938. Huzinga aimed at demonstrating the elements of play that variously manifest themselves in culture. The other is a more recent work,  Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, which similarly stresses the links between play and worship.

The link between religion and sports is frequently noted and perhaps there is more to it than we usually imagine, more than the surface similarities between the worship of the religious and the devotion of the fan.

In The Laws, Plato puts the following claim in the mouth of the Athenian:

“I assert that what is serious should be treated seriously, and what is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of a complete, blessed seriousness, but that what is human … has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing the noblest possible games, and thinking about them …”

This is all well and good, but it seems to describe less and less the reality of sports in America. Perhaps because sport has become an end to something other than itself. Schall also cites the following from Aristotle:

“Men have been known to make amusement an end in itself … for there is indeed a resemblance; the end is not pursued for the sake of anything that may accrue thereafter but always for its own sake.”

Sports at their best, Schall notes, approach a form of contemplation:

“Here, in a way, we near what is best in ourselves, for we are spectators not for any selfish reason, not for anything we might get out of the game, money or exercise or glory, but just because the game is there and we lose ourselves in its playing, either as players or spectators. This not only should remind us that what is higher than we are, what is ultimately serious, is itself fascinating and joyful.”

It is these realizations that explain our collective fury and anger when sports is tainted with betting scandals or steroid controversies and even haggling over the distribution of dollars in the billions. In each case, the happy myth of sport played and watched for its own sake as a kind of end in itself channeling even higher realities is shattered. It is not that men and women have disappointed us –although this also is true — it is rather that the vessel of a certain secular grace has been broken and we are all the poorer for it.

Technology Use and the Body

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Here is David Nye again, this time on the embodied character of our tool use and of our knowledge of technology:

“Tools are known through the body at least as much as they are understood through the mind. The proper use of kitchen utensils and other tools is handed down primarily through direct observation and imitation of others using them. Technologies are not just objects but also the skills needed to use them. Daily life is saturated with tacit knowledge of tools and machines. Coat hangers, water wheels, and baseball bats are solid and tangible, and we know them through physical experiences of texture, pressure, sight, smell, and sound during use more than through verbal descriptions. The slightly bent form of an American axe handle, when grasped, becomes an extension of the arms. To know such a tool it is not enough merely to look at it: one must sense its balance, swing it, and feel its blade sink into a log. Anyone who has used an axe retains a sense of its heft, the arc of its swing, and its sound. As with a baseball bat or an axe, every tool is known through the body. We develop a feel for it. In contrast, when one is only looking at an axe, it becomes a text that can be analyzed and placed in a cultural context. It can be a basis for verifiable statements about its size, shape, and uses, including its incorporation into literature and art. Based on such observations, one can construct a chronology of when it was invented, manufactured, and marketed, and of how people incorporated it into a particular time and place. But ‘reading’ the axe yields a different kind of knowledge than using it.”

This is a remarkably rich passage and not only because of its allusion to baseball. It makes an important point that tends to get lost in much of our talk about technology: technology use is an embodied practice. This point gets lost, in part, because the word technology, more often than not, brings to mind digital information technologies, and the rhetoric surrounding the use of these technologies evokes vague notions of participation in some sort of ethereal nexus of symbolic exchange.

On the one hand, we tend to forget about our more prosaic technologies — cars, refrigerators, eye glasses, drills, etc. — that are still very much a part of our lives, and, on the other, we forget that even our supposedly immaterial technologies have a very material base. We are not, as of yet, telepathically interacting the Internet after all. Having recently switched from a PC to a Mac, whenever I have occasion to use a PC again I am reminded of the embodied nature of our computer use. My fingers now want to make certain gestures or reach for certain keys on a PC that only work on the Mac. Or consider the proficient texters (or are they text messengers) who are able to key their messages without so much as glancing at their phones. Their fingers know where the keys are.

These sorts of observations resonate with the work of philosopher Hubert Dreyfus on knowledge and skill acquisition. You can read a very brief overview of Dreyfus’ position in this recent post on the body and online education. Simply put, Dreyfus, not unlike Merleau-Ponty, argues for the irreducibly embodied nature of our knowing and being in the world. Much of what we know, we know more with our bodies than with our minds. Or, perhaps better put, our mind’s engagement with reality is unavoidably embodied.

Likewise, our engagement with technology is unavoidably embodied and we would do well to focus our analysis of technology on the body as the intersection of our minds, our tools, and the world. The use a technology may ultimately have more in common with learning a skill, than with acquiring knowledge.  There is, as Nye points out, some value in “reading” our tools is if they were a text, but a deeper understanding, at least a different sort of understanding can only be had by the use of the technology under consideration.

Opaque Surfaces and the Worlds They Hide

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 6 Comments

Thinking about the opacity of life.

All around us our devices present us with surfaces below which lie complexities few understand. Our technologies are increasingly opaque to us. But this is, from a certain perspective, not very different from much of the rest of our experience.

As I look up at the sky, it presents me with a surface which, during the day, hides from my view the vastness of the space that lies beyond it. Even at night, the starlit sky discloses only a glimmer of the magnitude of the universe.

As I look at the blade of grass and my hand that holds it, a surface presents itself beyond which lies another, atomic and sub-amtomic, universe whose infinitesimal scale is entirely concealed to my unaided senses.

How much of reality lies beyond these surfaces that present themselves to us as the perceived limits of lived experience? And yet there is one other surface that veils a world from view.

As I look into the eyes of the persons I encounter day in and day out, a surface once again presents itself in seemingly uncomplicated fashion. But beyond this surface too lies a complex and unfathomable universe. The mind, dare I say soul of every person is another world — vast, complex, mysterious, wondrous, and beyond the reach of my ordinary perception.

In the end, I suspect that of all these, it is my own consciousness that is most opaque to my perception and the most challenging to penetrate.

All our learning is finally an effort to see beyond these surfaces.

Weekend Reading, 11/5/11

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Alright so here’s our reading for the weekend. We start with four pieces on brain science and philosophy:

“Telling the Story of the Brain’s Cacophony of Competing Voices” by Benedict Carey at the NY Times: Discussion of the life and work of neuroscientist and professor of psychology Michael Gazzaniga on the brain, freedom, responsibility, and law.

“A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain” by Samuel McNerney at Scientific American: As the title implies. Focusing on the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

“Raymond Tallis Takes Out the Neurotrash” by Marc Parry in the The Chronicle of Higher Education: Profile of Raymond Tallis whose made a reputation for himself challenging reductive theories of the brain that, for example, reduce things like love to neural impulses. If you click through on this one make sure to listen to the audio of the exchange between Parry and his editor on Tallis. In fact, listen to that rather than read the article if you have to choose. You can also read a longish essay by Tallis on the subject here: “What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves.”

“Your Brain Knows A Lot More Than You Realize” by David Eagleman at Discover Magazine: Excerpt from Eagleman’s new book, Incognito, on how much our brain does without our conscious awareness. Interesting case studies, good read.

We’re following that up with a couple of pieces on advertising, and the segue is legitimate if not entirely obvious:

“Thinking Vs. Feeling: The Psychology of Advertising” by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: Light blog post, true to the title.

“Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we’re hooked on it” by George Monbiot at The Guardian: Hmm, well, that title pretty much says it all no? It’s a rant, enjoy.

And finally, to wrap up with a lighter piece:

“Dialing Up Twenty Years of Gadget Reviews” by Walter S. Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal: Nice retrospective jaunt through twenty years of consumer tech history beginning with those brick phones.