Gene Roddenberry has often pissed me off. He didn’t invent the stereotype, but he certainly crystallized it in popular culture with his Star Trek character, Mr Spock. What is the end result of intelligence and education? Why, an emotionless robot who assesses impossible probabilities instantaneously in his head and denies love and friendship. It’s a caricature I run into all the time — I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve received informing me that True Scientists™ do not get angry about anything, and therefore everything I say is invalid. It’s annoying, but mainly what it tells me is that the correspondent doesn’t know any scientists at all.
Guess what, people? Scientists are human beings! We’re even aware of it, because there human/emotional/fun/expressive/imaginative things we like to do! This is also true of atheists, who contrary to popular opinion, are not grim and bloodless beings out to grind feelings out of existence. (You can imagine the kinds of fantasies about their existence that godless scientists hear all the time.)
The latest perpetrator of this idiotic and tiresome canard is that epitome of dull-witted mediocrity, the columnist David Brooks. And it’s not just the atheist scientists he snipes at, but a lot of other things, as you might guess from the presumptuous title of his latest column, The End of Philosophy. The reason for his argument? The amazing (to him) discovery that human beings are not rational, which leads him to conclude that reason isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
It seems Mr Brooks has just now discovered the work of Jonathan Haidt, who has found that many moral judgments are not the product of reason, but of emotional responses — the reasoning is after the fact, and is usually nothing but an exercise in rationalizing a decision that was already made. This is not surprising, an assessment which is not intended to denigrate Haidt’s work, which has done a good job of testing and affirming that idea. We are not rational actors, and we know this … even those of us who are supposed to don pointy ears and pretend to be a Vulcan.
Where Brooks falls flat on his face is his unthinking adoption of the naturalistic fallacy — the idea that if many of our moral decisions are the product of snap judgments built on emotional responses, then all that hoity-toity philosophy and thinking about what is good and what is right to do are irrelevant and wrong. Reason just doesn’t matter, emotion is primal and dominant, and therefore, this is the way we should think.
I would like to suggest some remedial reading in the philosophy of reason vs. emotion; I strongly recommend that classic treatise in the subject, Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. It’s beautifully written and clear, and most of us — even us atheist scientists — learned the story in kindergarten. There seems to be a gap in Mr Brooks’ education.
That is the real problem here. You won’t get any argument from me that most moral decisions are built more on wishful thinking or disgust or blind prejudice — I will concede that point, and throw in many examples that I know about to support it further. The question is whether that is the best way to make decisions, and I would say that in many cases it is not, that it leads us astray, and that what this property of human nature tells us is that we need philosophy and reason even more to help us correct a flaw in our makeup.
It’s the same thing biologists have been saying since Darwin. Nature may be a bloody tyrant that is ruthless in its execution, but that does not imply that human beings must model their behavior after natural selection. Rather, what we should do as sentient beings is act to create a society that balances the harshness of evolution with a culture that tries to elevate virtues like reason and social justice and equality. Similarly, if emotion tells us to recoil from harmless behaviors, maybe we should counter that with practiced reason, rather than simply succumbing to our biases.
Maybe, if David Brooks were not embracing any excuse to justify his prejudices and were instead trying to think rationally, he would hesitate before saying stupid things like this:
The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
There’s that cartoon again. The atheists are not convinced of the purity of their reasoning — we know the human mind is flawed and easily twisted askew from reality. That’s precisely why we demand verifiable, empirical evidence for truth claims. It is not enough to simply say you know the answer and it is right, we expect you to show your work, and we’re going to reject claims, like those of faith, that insist on an unwarranted certainty of the possession of knowledge. The idea that humans are emotional and make choices on weak grounds is not at all antithetical to our goals, but instead explains why it is more important that we critically self-analyze and inspect all of these religious arguments with more skepticism.
I hate to admit it, but it’s also not a strike against Talmudic reasoning, which tries to ground decisions in law and tradition. That is also an ongoing effort to overcome the fallacies of the appeal to transient passions. (I would argue that the focus on old texts is invalid, however, so don’t imagine that I’ve gone soft on Judaism.)
And finally, Brooks closes with a whole string of nonsense.
Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.
He begins by approvingly citing Jonathan Haidt, whose work is describing the emotional basis of moral decision-making. Now he tells us that scientists are challenged and struggling. Mr Brooks: Jonathan Haidt is a scientist. Think about it.
Feelings of transcendence exist, and no one denies it. Those feelings seem to be rather easily triggered by a whole host of phenomena, from a focal seizure to a morning in ritual to a beautiful sunset. We don’t neglect the phenomenon, but it does seem to be a poor mechanism for achieving an understanding of physics. There is more to the universe than morality and feelings, you see, and what I would argue is not that emotions like those listed don’t exist or are unimportant, but that they have a place, and it is not as sufficient evidence for how the world works.
As for this strange idea that the evolutionary approach says nothing about individual responsibility…I have no idea what the man is talking about, other than that he is blithering ignorantly. I strongly urge that Mr Brooks try using his cerebral cortex in addition to his brain stem and hypothalamus when writing — that’s another of those areas where emotional prejudices need to be supplemented with reason and knowledge.
*raises one eyebrow*
Fascinating.
David Brooks is remarkably unselfaware. He projects his prejudices into everything (a human trait, I know), but lacks the ability to reflect on what he is doing. That’s why he gets to lecture scientists and philosophers, waving his finger at them, because he knows The Truth. Must be nice to be so smart.
I love it when non-scientists and non-atheists mouth off.
No one is wrong like them.
I can throw a treat to my dog and time after time he will catch it in mid air. I am pretty sure he does not understand physics, math, or parabolic trajectories. However, time after time his mouth is almost always in the exact right position to catch the treat. His mind has evolved the ability to essentially do the calculations and figure out where the treat will be in the future.
Similarly when I see a person in pain my mind immediately goes to how I can help. I don’t need to understand philosophy or ethics, or anything else in order for my mind to figure out the correct response.
However when we want to understand these things beyond simply our instinctual responses we turn to rationally informed philosophy or ethics, just as when we design rockets we turn to scientists and not dogs.
I feel some emotion reading this – mostly giggles with a twist of cringe.
Periodically, someone rehashes (whether knowingly or not) Shakespeare’s timeless observations into irrationality, emotionalism, and rationalization, and thinks that they are profound for doing so.
Unfortunately, Brooks not only lacks original insight, he’s not even close to writing as well as Shakespeare.
And by the way, it is a triumph of rationality and empiricism that we can evaluate emotionalism and irrationalism.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/592
*headdesk*
Zeno said
“David Brooks is remarkably unselfaware.”
My thoughts exactly. This man needs go back to the beginning of his argument and finish his thought process before he lands his hands on a keyboard again.
Bet it took some “ration” and “thought” to write that article, hmm? Not such bad traits afterall.
What’s with the Spock hating? Spock wasn’t emotionless because he was a scientist, its because he was a vulcan. Seriously, ream David Brooks all you want, but don’t blame his idiocy on Spock, whos character offers, by counterpoint, a contemplation of the role of emotion in human life.
Another excellent post PZ, hurry up and finish that book already :)
[geek]
Um. Vulcans DO have emotions. Volatile, powerful, sometimes overwhelming emotions. They choose to learn to keep them in check.
They also do experience love and friendship, demonstrated beautifully at the end of “Amok Time,” where Spock’s biologically-driven blood fever is immediately cooled when he thinks he’s killed Kirk.
T’Pau tells him to live long and prosper. “I shall do neither,” he says, “for I have killed my captain and my friend.” When he finds Kirk alive on the ship, he grabs the captain and swings him around, yelling “JIM!” with a huge joyous smile on his face. I can hardly think of a more explicit display of friendship and love than that from any Trek species.
[/geek]
Oh, and Brooks is an idiot. My head hurt trying to understand that tangle of nonsense.
In a rare burst of sagacity, Ezra Pound once wrote, “Stupidity beyond a certain point becomes a public menace”.
Brooks weekly crosses that point.
But that’s the only pleasure I have left (don’t believe the blood stains, the hair-free bits of skin on my table, and those rumors about baby eating).
Well, that and denying the plainly evident fact that the world and all life are designed. I look forward to burning for eternity with grim determination, knowing that I could possibly deceive a few others into joining my torment.
Sheesh, haven’t you been listening to how atheists actually think and feel?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
You say that now. Just wait until our fido overlords take over.
Well aside from the silly confusion over awe and transcendence, who the hell snuck “patriotism” in there? He thinks people have a hard time explaining overblown in-group/out-group behavior? And tons of other animals exhibit self-sacrifice. One need only open their eyes to the evolutionary precursors. And he’s confused over joy? Our positive response to favorable experiences? Really? Arn’t there more numinous things to ponder?
Fixed.
So… does that mean that PZ Myers is the real McCoy after all?
Thanks PZ nice post
Giffy #4 well put thanks
Also when our instincts (which we can study and clinically find reasons for that are totally natural) are wrong — when we are tricked because we are wired to be receptive in ways not advantageous in modern world who do we turn to for corrective mechanisms? Scientists / logical grounded philosophers that is who.
Since we started to became socially active we have been in a game of wits with our intuitions and false perceptions. We are basically wired to be instinctive. The best of us I think use logic and reason and rules to adjust or tamp down our savage beasts, and to amplify the wired instinct to empathize with our fellow travelers, protect new borns, etc.
What is so mysterious or damning to science about this .. good gosh it has been a theme in literature for centuries — and long ago William S showed more intelligence and truth I think in one short paragraph than DB has in all of his.
Do not bother trying to understand David Brooks. He is a professional salesman of Republican talking points — from trickle-down economics to global preemptive warfare — that is, a professional liar. He is slime and his words are virulent. Don’t spread them around.
Why are so many columnists bad at making arguments?
He really is aggressively mediocre, isn’t he?
I’ve only read his pieces that others have pointed me to, but they seem to follow a basic pattern:
I read a book. In it I learned that scientists have just [wrong] learned about X [mischaracterized]. The implications of X [mischaracterized differently] are revolutionary in overturning [wrong] the existing paradigms P [mischaracterized] and Q [mischaracterized], particularly those aspects of P [mischaracterized in a way oddly unrelated to mischaracterization of P] that are central [wrong] to atheism [mischaracterized] and materialist science [mischaracterized].
Is he just flinging out “Everything is different now!” darts in the hopes that one might hit something, or could he really be this muddled a thinker? I think he’s damaging my neural pathways.
I sighed deeply upon reading Brooks this morning, but tried to find a silver lining. His predecessor William Krystol was so very much worse, I frequently broke into —- invective. When Krystol was on The Daily Show not too long ago, Jon Stewart began the converstaion by asking, ” Are you EVER right, about anything?”
While I found myself cringing as Brooks’ blithe assertions about things he knows nothing about, I read the whole essay. Usually when I saw Krystol’s name, I just skipped over it the way I do here when I see our lesser trolls.
And this outright misrepresentation pisses me off. Spock wasn’t just a scientist, but an alien, from a species noted for its cold use of logic. Vulcans weren’t even depicted as scientifically superior to the humans (or if they were at some point, this definitely wasn’t much emphasis on this).
There were lots of human scientists and scientifically knowing characters in Star Trek, who weren’t anything like Spock.
Glen D #6 — I wrote my WS reference before I read yours.
Wow — sometimes even my instincts can be right (said respecting your scholarship as affirmation) :-).
Bobo is stupid?
No! Colour me surprised!
Not.
The entire Internet cannot contain all the information Bobo doesn’t know anything about but is willing to claim authority on. Having zero grasp of any subject has never stopped him from spouting off about it.
Not only has Brooks not read the classic philosophical text “Green Eggs and Ham,” it’s also clear he’s never been to Vegas–a city that owes its very existence to the ability of humans to base decisions on wishful thinking rather than logic or even self-interest.
Scientific reasoning has the best track record of any human activity for helping people to avoid such emotional traps…at least for those people capable of reasoning scientifically. The question is: What about the other 75% of the human species (and I think I’m being charitable here)? There are a goodly number of males of the species who are sufficiently dim that they would probably mate better if the female devoured their head during the process, and their other daily activities would likely not be adversely affected, either.
So, while Brooks is an idiot, he does have a point when we look at the left side of the bell curve.
I’ve always been intrigued by the interaction between Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine. After the revolution, Paine had written an anti-clerical and anti-religious tract. Franklin urged him not to publish it, despite the fact that by that time in his life, Franklin was likely an agnostic if not an atheist, himself. Although we are not privy to the reasons behind Franklin’s counsel, it is likely that he was concerned whether the average human could behave decently without the threat of eternal damnation over his head. To be honest, I wonder about that myself.
I think “I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve received informing me that True Scientists™ do not get angry about anything, and therefore everything I say is invalid” is an oversimplification on both your and the complainers’ parts.
I’d say that it’s accurate to say that “True Scientists” do not get angry about theories that are incorrect. For example, I don’t think that someone else believing in God itself makes you angry (or at least, it shouldn’t).
But it is perfectly justifiable for the True Scientist to be angry when other supposedly True Scientists use inaccurate or misleading results, waving the flag of scientific neutrality, in order to convince laymen of their viewpoint. That is dishonest, and dishonesty should make a person angry, True Scientist or otherwise.
To not be angry when others are led into falsehood frankly just seems inhuman – and that’s precisely the opposite of the True Scientist’s purpose, IMO.
I’ve come to the conclusion that David Brooks writes, on average, 1.5 columns a year that I actually agree with. He’s not off to a good start this year–he may lower that average. We’ll see.
Take that back! I am so! *runs to his room, crying, and slams the door*
David Brooks,
So you’ve realized that people can be irrational. And then you failed to notice the pervasive irrationality of religion?
Isn’t ironic that many accuse the “New Atheists” of not being thoughtful enough, and then a prominent critic commits this massive oversight? Also, I knew about Jonathan Haidt way before Brooks did, and I’m a nobody. Criminy, they should fire him and hire me. I could do that job more effectively.
Epistemological modesty — isn’t that one of Brooks’ pet concepts? Wouldn’t it be nice if he applied that to his own columns? Sheesh.
Plus, Spock was half human. Or will be.
The Spock Fallacy was exposed for me when I read D’Amasio. Haidt came later, providing more along the same lines (and has the virtue of being a damn sight more readable). Ever since then, I’ve found the whole Logic vs. Emotion dichotomy enormously irritating.
Best post in a while, PZ. Mucho points for self-assessment without excessive deprecation.
>>>It seems Mr Brooks has just now discovered the work of Jonathan Haidt, who has found that many moral judgments are not the product of reason, but of emotional responses — the reasoning is after the fact, and is usually nothing but an exercise in rationalizing a decision that was already made.
This of course goes on an awfully lot around here (and on most blogs). Do not think it limited to trolls and Libertarians.
Glen D,
>>>Periodically, someone rehashes (whether knowingly or not) Shakespeare’s timeless observations into irrationality, emotionalism, and rationalization, and thinks that they are profound for doing so.
Ever ponder the evo-psych implicit in the quote, Omnia Vanitas? Bible seems to me worth reading after all.
Most of you Americans out there, that is. I have barely
heardread of the good doctor. Can someone explain that story?What is this “make decisions” thing I keep hearing about?
If you acknowledge that “decisions” are made emotionally, rather than rationally, then you’re not far from realizing that we don’t actually make decisions at all; we’re just fancy meat robots following built-in (we have no decision about those) programs or learned behaviors (since learning is environmental we have no decision there, either). We live at a scale in which the universe is deterministic and the whole concept of “free will” that’s so crucial to “decisions” and “choice” is about as defensible as the tooth fairy.
I was eight years old when Trek started, and in the second or third show Spock said “I am frequently appalled at the low regard you humans show for other species”. That was my first WOW moment – where everything you know is suddenly changed and you will never be the same again. That one sentence has been my entire life’s basis – to respect and show a kind regard to everybody from the slender blade of grass to the tallest tree, from bug to bear to bum. I hope you realize you’ve slagged off on my Ghandi and Lao-tze in one fell swoop.
OT to Sven: how’s the Valentine’s day ’68 Carousel Ballroom set? My copy is a third generation cassette, so the hiss is bad enough to put the cymbals into phase shift noise.
The whole point of civilization is that we have found a rational way to deal with the emotional animals within all of us. Our own evolution is what gave us the rules, laws, customs, etc., of civilization that ensure we do not wipe out each other in an orgy of violence as the dominant species on the planet with ever increasing means of annihilating our own species. Unfortunately, it is the fact that we are still ‘wild’ underneath that allows leadership to play with us in an array of emotional tricks with the most prominent control method being the vague yet contradictory religions that sprouted up in our civilized infancy. It is the realization that religion is a superfluous control within civilization that, for a person like myself who was brought up in a deeply religious household, makes atheism so liberating but, at the same time, so frustrating knowing that others do not understand the freedom of breaking those bonds.
The next step in Brooks’ argument (based on my experience in arguing points like this) will doubtless be that because we are such emotional beasts, religion is necessary to control that. This is very telling that he can admit we (via projection) therefore need god to control those instincts, i.e., it is a mark of a person’s inability to evolve that they fear we will be so self-destructive without those chains.
A synopsis of Green Eggs & Ham, from the Wiki entry:
That should all have been blockquoted, as should be obvious.
Hmmmm. This raises an interesting question: as an unabashed, out-of-the-closet Trekkie, I know that Spock repressed or nullified his emotions because he was half-Vulcan. I can also go through the canon and think of other scientists who were as emotional as anybody else (even not counting the ones who turned out, ah, imbalanced — Richard Daystrom or Kila Marr, anyone?).
But what do people who aren’t basically Wesley Crusher incarnate get from the show? Ah, now that’s a question worth exploring with a holodeck simulation.
Some of these theists out there make some off the wall assumptions on what atheists believe, and once they get it in their heads, it gets to the point that they consider it fact.
We were having a discussion on the Atheism Examiner’s page about the guys in New Jersey that pulled of a UFO hoax with balloons and flares, when a theist popped up saying:
“And further an Atheist worldview is more logically going to believe in flying saucers and little green men from mars (or planet X) than a theist. So who’s really the gullible one?”
So he really believes that beyond the possibility that life could exist on other planets, we’ll throw any further logic and rationality out the window and be the first ones to call the funny lights in the sky an alien invasion? He obviously hasn’t looked at the class of people that normally report UFO abductions.
Only fucking awesome! This is the second show I’ve owned as an xth-generation cassette, a bootleg soundboard CD and an official release (the first was 11/11/73). In both cases the upgrade was well worth the $$ IMO. The boys were all-balls-out that night for sure; just smokin throughout. It’s pretty cool to hear these early versions of career stand-bys like China Cat (drummers flailing away like drunk punks) and Dark Star (at a quick jogging pace). I’m not a big Pig-head but it’s cool to have some crisp-sounding historical documentation. Bonus stuff is almost equally mind-twisting. Recommended.
And the 5/28/77 set might be in my mailbox even now!!!!!
[/deadgeek]
“Spock wasn’t emotionless because he was a scientist, its because he was a vulcan.”
Exactly. And Vulcans didn’t claim that they held their emotions in check because it made them better scientists. Vulcans held their emotions in check to avoid violence. Vulcan was a planet full of murderous people who developed a religion based on logic in order to stop killing each other. That is what Roddenberry was hinting at.
@40
OK, time to make another order at dead.net. I loved the Pigpen Dead – I thought they got noticeably less “black” (i.e. funky, bluesy, soulful) after Pig died, and having him up front really let the guitars go off into realms unknown. Thanks for the review, I knew it was an awesome show, but I’m a cheapskate so I need a push before I spend money.
What’s awesome is that he effectively demonstrated why we still need Philosophy:
If someone doesn’t know the arguments for a given position, especially the flawed ones, they are doomed to repeat past failures.
Or in Brooks’ case: think they have uncovered something new.
(BTW: I’m not on my high horse here. There’s much I haven’t studied in philosophy. I’m just saying there isn’t any ‘gotcha’ element here).
What does Roddenberry have to do with this man’s ineptitude?
The Vulcan culture considers emotion a taboo, whether or not Vulcan culture is correct in doing so.
Anyone who cares enough to watch will see Spocks inner struggle and perhaps evaluate this facet of Vulcan culture/philosophy… its virtues as well as its pitfalls.
:( Don’t blame Roddenberry for the misinterpretations of his creation.
psssssssst, KI!
Look over here!
Spock – an emotionless robot?
“I have been – and always shall be – your friend. Live long and prosper.”
~ Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan
‘scuse me, I think I’ve got something in my eye.
aw, pz, don’t pick on roddenberry.
there were plenty of characters on star trek that were brilliant, educated and had plenty of emotion.
mr. spock was simply a being from a hypothetical culture that had stifled its emotions — i’m sure there were vulcans with intelligence all along the bell curve.
It’s a sad state of affairs when a columnist can publish a piece called “The End of Philosophy,” when he’s clearly never even read any Hume, e.g.,
>>>The next step in Brooks’ argument (based on my experience in arguing points like this) will doubtless be that because we are such emotional beasts, religion is necessary to control that. This is very telling that he can admit we (via projection) therefore need god to control those instincts, i.e., it is a mark of a person’s inability to evolve that they fear we will be so self-destructive without those chains.
LGRooney, you say “will doubtless be”, then go on to say “he can admit” etc.
Careful now, did he say that or not?
Not that I much disagree with you, but ask yourself some of the Platonic, Straussian questions,
“What is good for the City and Man?”
“Are some truths too dangerous for the masses?”
“Such a thing as a noble lie, if employed only to save both City and Man?”
Dont kid yourself this kind of thinking is limited to the warlike Republican party; James Hansen has been rather high-handed with climate data in the past.
Thanks, Sven, the rest of my day just got filled.See ya! kthxby
Does this mean I don’t have to wait 7 years to have sex?
Brooks has long been the bad boy on the right…well, not bad – more naughty. The sort of child who knows he can draw some attention by smearing cake on his little sister’s mug and saying, “Shit face!”
He loves nothing more than making the ultra-argument…taking the entire notion of a slippery slope, pile driving it deep into the mud and then insisting that that’s where it ought to be in the first instance.
He doesn’t really believe any of it, any more than Gallagher thinks he’s a comedic genius…but so long as people will pay to watch him bash fruit with a giant hammer…
Speaking of being self-unaware
“reasoning is after the fact, and is usually nothing but an exercise in rationalizing a decision that was already made”
is pretty much the job description of a neocon.
I think Brooks puts about as much effort into his columns as Andy Rooney puts into those “things stuck on the bottom of my shoe after walking over here” bits he does at the end of “60 Minutes”.
To be fair and balanced though, Brooks did achieve a Hall-of-Fame, bladder-voiding moment of comedy gold a few years back when he wrote a column blaming criticism of Paul Wolfowitz on anti-semitism.
Reminds me of a newspaper editor who kept opposing intellectualism. He never said what the opposite of “intellectual” was, but I often thought it must be some sort of emotional slobbering fit.
I’m convinced that there exists a David Brooks column formulator, the heart of which— the kernel, so to speak– is a parasitic pop culture browser. It undulates greasily through the world of ideas, attracted to those emitting buzz. It adopts a guise of probity and articulateness while attaching itself to the victim.
The next actions are gruesome. The formulator detects and extracts intellectual honesty and comprehensiveness. It shreds and ingests them, excreting as replacements special pleading and prejudice, which bear a protective coating of whining. These are discharged into the environment accompanied by belches of rectitude.
The entire apparatus is linked to the media under the trade name “David Brooks,” who doesn’t actually exist, but was constructed for publicity purposes out of leftover Fox News parts that had been condemned for being insufficiently vapid and vicious.
If you acknowledge that “decisions” are made emotionally, rather than rationally, then you’re not far from realizing that we don’t actually make decisions at all; we’re just fancy meat robots following built-in (we have no decision about those) programs or learned behaviors (since learning is environmental we have no decision there, either). We live at a scale in which the universe is deterministic and the whole concept of “free will” that’s so crucial to “decisions” and “choice” is about as defensible as the tooth fairy.
But which concept of “free will”? Obviously, any concept that requires us to be somehow magically divorced from the causal universe is a non-starter. In my view, the issue isn’t how to define “free will” up front, but how to conceive of “self.” Saying learning is environmental, so we have absolutely no choice in how/what we learn isn’t quite right. It’s a feedback process, between environmental factors and those built-in programs, that makes a self. While conscious deliberation is largely after the fact as regards any particular decision, the sum total of all past deliberations are a part of the self that’s making decisions now.
I guess I would say, in your formulation, there’s a lot of weight on “fancy” as it modifies “meat robot.” “Fancy” enough, and you’ve got a variety of “free will,” albeit one that won’t satisfy dualists, or the religious concept of the soul, or even the everyday, naive view of these matters, but reality doesn’t conform to those conceptual systems in any other regard, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
Semi-related: I have occasionally encountered reliogiobots defending their various dogmas who have opined, most oddly, in my ever so humble opinion, that they do not grasp why an atheist would actually feel passion about anything–such as, say, the miserable things religion has done and does do to people–as tho’ apparently one who is trying to employ reason in making the decisions they do should be entirely without emotion, fer some reason. To the point, apparently, that they shouldn’t even give a damn about any of it…
Struck me as truly weird. And possibly a Star Trek artifact too, I suppose. Dunno. Occasionally have toyed with writing somethin’ to sort this out for ’em in a fashion that gives ’em something a little more organized than a network scifi stereotype to chew upon (see motivations, see humanity, see drives, see these as crucial and central and critical to defining what you are in the first place, see reason as tool for directing activity, sorting said drives, working out how you satisfy them and when you should and perhaps shouldn’t, working out where that leads if you do, so on), but honestly, when ya encounter that sort of fractal silly, sometimes ya don’t even know where to begin.
And, to extend this a bit further, they learned to keep them in check precisely because their prior savage emotions almost destroyed their civilization. In other words, as a race they recognized the dangers of unchecked passions, and thus rigorously trained themselves to prevent such disasters in the future.
And I really don’t understand Brook’s logic here — we are, for example, susceptible to all sorts of visual illusions, but I doubt that Brooks would argue that this means rationality can’t be used to determine when such perceptions are indeed illusions. How are judgements any different?
“that epitome of dull-witted mediocrity, the columnist David Brooks”
This is absolutely the best and most succinct characterization of David Brooks that I’ve ever heard.
I wanted to say something interesting and clever about this topic, but it has all been said above. So, I will go another way, and say that Brooks is an idiot, and leave it at that.
PZ, judging by your great posts today, I suspect that today, Paul Nelson Day, must be your favorite day of the year, Am I right?
Does it matter if the actual decision making process is emotional in nature? Does that really mean that rationality is completely disconnected from it? Surely memory must factor into them in some way.
ckitching: No, the point where the argument breaks down is right at the beginning. Emotion vs. reason is a false dichotomy.
Because so few editors demand that the columnist actually formulate an argument or are capable of recognizing when the columnist did not present one. Contradictions and unsubstantiated assertions that are strung together without any logical coherence may make a Brooks column, but they do not make an argument.
Nothing to worry about Myers, Brooks writes for papers published for the Gammas. It’s just part of their social conditioning to make them feel good about themselves. “Alphas are so very smart, but they have to work so hard and have no feelings.”
Now now PZ, don’t make me have to choose between you and Gene.
I really laughed at:
“We don’t neglect the phenomenon, but it does seem to be a poor mechanism for achieving an understanding of physics.”
Not sure why but that really tickled me.
I knew something strange had happened to the New York Times. Thanks for explaining it.
“Get a life, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it’s just a TV show. Grow the hell up! I mean it’s just a TV show damn it, it’s just a TV show.”
William Shatner, 1986
Would you call this an example of quote mining, or cherry picking?
Ah, yes, William Shatner, the most successful bad actor of his time.
One of the favorite canards of the right-wing is to accuse the left of emotional decision making. This looks like some bizarre way of trying to express something similar.
David Brooks, the William Shatner of columnists.
Thanks for explaining it.
My slam was intended to cut both ways. The central premise of BNW was that all castes were conditioned to the same degree, but with different, identity-reinforcing premises.
Oh, PZ. At the risk of repeating the comments of others, you’ve got old Mr. Spock all wrong. He wasn’t emotionless because he was a scientist, but because he was a Vulcan. And really, he wasn’t emotionless at all. He may have looked down on his human shipmates’ emotional behavior when he was a young and more judgmental man, but as he grew older, he started to realize that the logic vs. emotion thing was a false and unhealthy dichotomy. The last time we see him on screen (before the new movie, which premiered last night in Texas as a surprise to Austin fans — damn you, Austin!), he is far from emotionless. He is extremely self-aware. I think the arc of his journey epitomizes the very human struggle to find out who you are, accept what you find and live your life with compassion, integrity and balance.
That said, David Brooks is, in fact, an idiot.
I read Brooks article this morning and had nearly exactly the same reaction. When will they find columnists who can think anyway?
I’m also pretty amused by the spirited defenses of Spock in the comments.
If goodness is “an end in itself”, then what the fuck is Heaven for? I thought the economy was a shambling ruin because Wall Street is run by atheist materialists who have no moral compass.
I really wish these blithering morons would get their obscurantist, medievalist, apologetic nonsense straight.
Ah, now, don’t go putting down William Shatner as well! He’s very good at staring at a woman’s breasts as if he were a bad actor staring at a woman’s breasts.
Vulcans knew very well the utility of emotions such as ‘heart’ and ‘soul’.
The problem with people like Brooks is that they’ve never studied any actual science, but draw their entire understanding of the world from freshman political science and philosophy courses which present the musings of 17th century theorists as if they’re revelatory insights into the nature of the universe, untouchable by dirty, empirical ‘science’. I guarantee that whenever you hear someone opine that scientists are baffled by ‘joy’ or ‘love’, you’re dealing with one of these, someone who still thinks “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and that “[they] think, therefore [they are].” Further evidence of this kind of empirical luddism is the claim that humans are not ‘rational’. Wrong again, Mr. Armchair Theorist. Humans are eminently rational; it’s just that the rationality that we follow is one cobbled together by evolution, not Descartes. If you’re still basing your understanding of human behaviour on Bentham and Locke, I’m afraid you’d best sit down and listen to what actual, modern, still-living scientists like VS Ramachandran have to say.
Know a lot of people hated the series “Enterprise”, but…
Ambassador V’Lar to T’Pal: “They’re our emotions, as well. We simply hide them better.”
In fact, one whole section of the series involved Archer being sort of possessed by the “copy” of the consciousness of the Vulcan who invented the whole idea of controlling their emotions, and bringing back a copy of the original teachings, which had been hidden. Why? Because a subset of Vulcans had turned a practice of “controlling” emotion into a religion of “suppressing” them, and that was never the intent of the practice.
Some people, I think, spend way too much time focusing on the things they dislike about series, and not enough on what is good in them. Which is why I have no problem, for example, watching most of the movies certain stars have made, including the idiotic “Battlefield Earth”, without being “forced” by my emotions about the people or concepts into denying what ever entertainment can otherwise be gained from them. The other end of the spectrum is of course, some people that have such **huge** emotional reaction to just the “concept” of some things that they will ban, burn, picket, or otherwise try to destroy, things they have not even seen, read, watched, or properly understood. Such people are of precisely the sort that the Vulcans attempted to purge from their society. They barely use logic in the process of figuring out how to commit their acts of idiocy, never mind in making any sort of attempt to justify those idiocies based on some sort of vaguely sound reason.
I was about to say that the “epitome of dull-witted mediocrity” is the best description of David Brooks I’d ever seen. And then I scrolled down to see “the William Shatner of Columnists”. LOL
PZ:
David Brooks deserves all he gets, and more of the same. A characteristic nausea befalls me whenever I witness him, NYTimes after NYTimes, being unable to avoid the most obvious logical pitfalls in his arguments.
But, Earthling: Thou art mistaken in Thy conceit regarding the immortal Mr. Spock, the kindest and most charming of all of Mr. Roddenberry’s creatures. Many hours of my unbearded youth did I spend trying to catch every subtle nuance of emotion repressed, every kind deed logically explained away, every selfless gesture of our Vulcan friend, masked as relentless rationality. Can it really be that you missed it all?
Pharyngulated Trekkies! Shall we present our much admired PZ with a DVD box of the entire original Star Trek, so that he may ponder and reconsider the merits of ‘Pointy Ears’ ?
After all, watching old Trek episodes is less of a waste of time than brooding over David Brooks’ latest entanglement in his own cingulate gyrus, surely?
David Brooks wrote:
Yeah, it’s not like anyone has ever had to think about the taste of truffles, sharp cheeses, anchovies, coffee, wine, durian, etc. before developing an overall opinion. You just know! Instantly!
This is why David Brooks lives entirely on sugar water and Wonderbread.
Meh. Haven’t read all the comments, so perhaps someone has mentioned it. But the extreme version of Haidt’s thesis is questionable. Others to look to with different perspectives are Joshua Greene (dual process) and Marc Hauser (Rawlsian action analysis). Both accept the importance of emotion/affect, of course.
Sven@45 –That link just made my day (week, maybe month). Thanks, and yet another reason to visit Pharyngula.
“We are not rational actors, and we know this … even those of us who are supposed to don pointy ears and pretend to be a Vulcan.”
I dunno, Zachary Quinto seems pretty rational to me, AND he had to shave his eyebrows off, too!
Oh, no. Now I’ve pissed off the trekkies.
I know that Spock wrestled with emotions — it was the plot point in quite a few episodes. However, I stand by my assessment: what Roddenberry did was create a character out of an annoying extrapolation about what an exceptionally intelligent person and culture would be like. He perpetuated a stereotype. It’s just that stereotypes make for very poor storytelling, and Spock had to have some internal tension to keep him interesting.
ST:TNG did the same thing with Data.
And no, nobody needs to send me the DVDs. Unlike many of you whippersnappers, I actually stayed up late on Thursday nights to watch the original show as it was broadcast. I even fought with my parents for the privilege (It was a school night!).
That’s the advantage of Central time, the feed comes along with the Eastern feed so we got prime time an hour earlier. No fights about staying up.
Then too, in many episodes this was portrayed as being due solely to his being half human, not to Vulcans having any emotionality.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
onset Ponn Far, methinks.
good thing you’re taking a sabbatical. ;)
A friend of mine used to quip that Data displayed the most humanity in his quest to become more human-like: “Boo-hoo! Oh, I wish I had emotions so badly! Why can’t I have emotions, why?! Boo-hoo!”
Happy Fun Brownian did not like having his favourite TV show be made the subject of taunts.
David Brooks wrote:
LOL! Yeah, you just know after ingesting something whether it’s good or disgusting. But some of us choose to rationally analyze what we stick in our body.
“This cocaine feels great! But hey, I’ve read some studies and I’m going to go ahead and make a rational decision to not continue snorting this cocaine, in spite of how great it feels when I consume it!”
But…from his opening bit about Socrates, David Brooks seems to be saying that reasoning your way through a moral problem almost never leads to a moral solution.
So…screw all that rationality! Let’s go with our emotions. Party at my place!
So, um…I don’t know quite how to ask this, but…um, based on what you wrote earlier, you’ll be bringing the eight-ball?
David Brooks is a boil on the butt of humanity, and he needs to be lanced. He’s not your run-of-the-mill boil. He’s a Pilonidal cyst, positioned in the most irritable part of our collective ass.
This is the thing: if we gave into our emotions all the time and never thought things through, we would not be alive as a species anymore. As any breastfeeding mother will tell you, nursing your baby does not come naturally. It is something you must learn how to do and teach your baby how to do. It used to be a matter of survival. Nowadays, with formula and scientific breakthroughs that have helped to lower infant mortality rates, breastfeeding is not necessary to guarantee survival, but it used to be.
If every mother back in the days of non-alternatives gave into her emotions and made irrational decisions without contemplating the consequences of her actions, I wouldn’t be here to write this post, and Brooks wouldn’t exist to inflame my ass crack.
While David Brooks may be a mediocre columnist, at least he’s not Cal Thomas.
you’re dealing with one of these, someone who still thinks “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
Woooo!
Oh wait, that was an insult.
/slinks back to poor, solitary room to write bad poetry and play WoW
I dunno PZ, It just seems to me you’re reading this book with your brain. You need to go back and read it with your gut. I’m sure you’ll find it’s full of all manner of truthiness. WWCD?
Hear, hear.
It’s just flatly absurd to say that irrational emotion exists in the human mind… and to therefore conclude that rationality is a lost cause. Rationality and the ability to think logically also exist in the human mind. Does that negate irrationality and emotion?
It is possible to acknowledge and accept both reason and emotion, as central and indeed valuable aspects of the human experience. And it’s possible, at least sometimes, to recognize when your emotions are leading you to false conclusions, and to act on what you rationally know to be correct instead of what you fear or hope to be true. (Just like it’s possible to recognize when you’re being too bloodless and calculating, and to choose to act on impulse instead.)
Oh, and this point I feel a need to cite the book “Descartes Error,” and the theory that emotion is not actually the enemy of rational thought, but is actually crucial to it. Emotion is what gives us the values that we base our rational decisions on. Without it, we would just drift.
might as well break this one out again for the Trek theme
Ferengula
Good point, Richard (#91). And you don’t even have to go as far as cocaine. Snickers bars make a fine counter- example as well. If I relied entirely on emotional reactions of liking or disgust to decide what to eat, I would weigh four hundred pounds within a year.
That’s actually a good analogy, now that I think about it. Like our sense of taste, our emotions evolved to he appropriate in a specific environment — the African savannah. But since we no longer live in that environment, we have to reply on our ability to reason to decide how best to eat. And similarly, we have to rely on our reason to decide whether or not to act on our emotions… since our emotions are important and informative but not entirely reliable.
I agree with you PZ, but nevertheless, speaking as someone who got his BA in Philosophy, it is a completely meaningless and worthless discipline that does nothing whatsoever for the struggle to find goodness and rightness and so on. Basically, the field is nothing but the study of worthless a priori arguments fielded by ancient idle-rich authors who (a la Haidt) were trying to use reason to justify their prejudices.
You can do a whole lot better nowadays with Sociology or Social Anthro or Ethology. Those are the disciplines that care about basing their theories on empirical evidence – NOT Philosophy.
PZ, I agree with you most of the time, but this is nonsense. The Vulcans aren’t presented as necessarily more scientifically intelligent than the humans. Technologically, the humans and the Vulcans are always pretty close. As for Data being so overwhelmingly smart…couldn’t that have something to do with the fact that he’s a DAMN ANDROID?!?
I think Roddenberry’s portrayal of scientists is nuanced, and all around admirable. In Star Trek, the boundaries between scientists and non-scientists are thoroughly blurred. Scientists seem to be mostly blended with the rest of society, and Roddenberry seldom feels the need to explicitly say that a certain character is a “scientist”. Even ordinary members of the crew seem to understand what’s being talked about when the discussion turns to Heisenberg compensators, ruptures in the space-time continuum, baryon sweeps, etc.
PZ Myers:
This is what Richard Dawkins is always saying:
When I am trying to explain the way things are, I keep saying, it’s nothing to do with the way we ought to be. … I see absolutely no reason why, understanding the way the world is, you therefore have to promote it. The darwinian world is a very nasty place: the weakest go to the wall. There’s no pity, no compassion. All those things I abhor, and I will work in my own life in the interests of thoroughly unDarwinian things like compassion.
PZ Myers:
Where could have got such an idea from? Maybe he got it from this:
“Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn’t the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn’t surprise me).
But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment. Don’t judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.”
– Richard Dawkins
So … on the one hand Dawkins says we ought to strive to overcome our Darwinian programming, that we need not be helpless puppets of our cruel genetic overlords — but on the other he posits an explicitly mechanistic, deterministic view of human actions which makes nonsense of the whole notion of personal responsibility.
Worse still, his scientific determinism not only makes free will impossible, it also renders the desirability of it incoherent. Why shouldn’t we allow our cruel atavistic impulses free rein? If we cannot use the language of blame and moral responsibility, how do we register our disapproval of acts which Dawkins calls “heinous”? His answer is that we should use the terminology of malfunction, as exemplified by computer hardware/software or Basil Fawlty’s car. By logical extension, if malfunction replaces responsibility, repair must replace punishment (and, presumably, repentance).
But by what criteria do we judge the murderer of a child to be a “malfunctioning” man? The physical laws which Dawkins says govern the murderer’s actions cannot themselves malfunction, can they? They are what they are, they do what they do, and what happens happens. If this roll of the dice produces a murdered child, where is the “error” or “fault” in this impersonal, pitiless process?
We might legitimately say a man was in some sense “faulty” if he had been born with a physical disability – in that instance, the interplay of physical laws has produced a self-evident defect in physical function. But how can we talk about a moral malfunction when the very language of right and wrong is, literally, meaningless?
This is where Dawkins’ analogy of Basil’s car falls down. Basil’s car is the creation of a human intelligence. It is designed with a specific purpose in mind. If the laws of physics, the throw of the dice, mean the car fails to fulfil the purpose for which it was designed, then we can reasonably say it has malfunctioned. But, as we all know, concepts like “design” and “purpose” are precisely the ones which we cannot apply to human beings, according to Dawkins et al. To do so would be to subscribe to a Christian/Aristotelian philosophy of human nature incompatible with the insights of Charles Darwin. No teleology allowed here, remember …
PZ’s right, and the discussion on this thread is a perfect example of what often happens when someone points out a stereotypic portrayal. Everyone piles in to say “But look at all the counterexamples! That’s not a stereotype!”
The same thing happens when the portrayal of women as objects is pointed out–is this TV commercial sexist? Or when it’s pointed out that fat people are portrayed as clumsy or depressed or sexless or otherwise inferior–PC vs Mac? If you watch the commercials, do you find yourself saying things like “But women CHOOSE to do that” or “But that guy’s not fat”?
So, yeah, maybe Spock’s emotional control and his status as a scientist can be dissected and separated and discussed, and it’s full of nuance and detail that the casual observation doesn’t take into account. And maybe you can do that kind of dissection for EVERY portrayal of the logic-driven, unemotional scientist type.
But you have to start asking yourself why there are so many examples like that to dissect.
I still love Spock, though :).
Perhaps Piltdown Man isn’t aware that Dawkins withdrew the essay quoted in post #102.
It was submitted to Edge, as Dawkins’ answer to one of their annual questions. (That year it was, I believe, “What is your dangerous idea?”)
Dan Dennett emailed Dawkins about this and explained that even if blame and responsibility is a fiction, it might nonetheless be a very useful fiction. Dawkins subsequently retracted his essay.
I’ve been wondering how well Spock would have done on Sudoku. Maybe there’s one particular style of Sudoku he just can’t do.
Piltdown Man, get your own damned blog, and quit polluting this one with your insane ramblings.
The only intelligible things in that entire screed were the quote mines from PZ and Dawkins. The rest? Utter tripe. No offense to tripe.
he posits an explicitly mechanistic, deterministic view of human actions which makes nonsense of the whole notion of personal responsibility.
Only where “nonsense” = “insufficiently absolutist for Pilty’s atrophied brain to deal with.”
Hint: what do you suppose it is about this “fiction” that he allows is “useful”? He’s not saying that you can just get rid of the fiction, he’s saying that he hopes that one day we as a species can move beyond it to a finer-grained view of these matters, unobscured by the centuries of self-serving embellishment with which your intellectual forebears have burdened these folk concepts of “freedom” and “responsibility”.
If you’re such a fan of Dawkins as your go-to source for arguments you can misconstrue in order to attack materialist accounts of mind, you ought to look into his concept of “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind.” You’re exhibit A.
Finally, you’re ultimately just making the argument from consequences. Whether we would like our behavior to be determined by mostly uncontrollable factors or not, whether we find comfortable old notions of personal responsibility more congenial to our naive view of ourselves, is irrelevant to the truth of the matter.
Spock was merely part of along tradition of Sci-Fi thought experiments that attempted to act as though emotion and reason were opposing aspects of consciousness.
I’d even say they were reflective of our (or at least Western) concepts of mind for much of the 20th century and rational stoicism before that. There were some true believers in this sort of ‘modular mind’ concept, no doubt. But I like to think most of them knew what was going on, or what was implied by this. Even when I was a kid I recall asking how Data could even say half the things he said without some sort of emotional basis for it all (the handwave is of course that he’s programmed that way, which doesn’t explain his desire to be ‘a real boy’ in the least. In this way I find Data a throwback to really old sci-fi in a way that Spock was not. Spock at least struggled with aspects of himself).
Recently the general concept of mind has become a lot more ‘biorationalist’ (as I like to call the era we live in. Dunno if there’s a more accepted name for it) thanks to all the neuroscience, dev-psych and cog-psych trickling down, and our impression of our selves is getting a lot more sophisticated than emotion/reason (slowly). So think Mr Brooks up there is terribly behind the times.
Hyperon @ 104:
No, I wasn’t aware of that. He might want to tell Edge, as they’ve still got it online.
Did he retract it because he no longer believes in his mechanistic paradigm? Or because he agreed with Dennett that blame and responsibility are useful fictions? If it’s the latter, he no longer has any basis to condemn religion (or anything else) as being untrue – all that matters is whether or not it’s useful.
Either position would be extremely problematic for Dawkins and his fellow travellers.
+++
Aquaria @ 106:
Forgive me for saying so, but your response seems more emotional than rational. Remember: building an argument on emotional biases happens, but that doesn’t make it true.
New Atheists don’t use reason that much either (I am an old atheist). They seem to argue mostly via emotion and ad hominem, and saying “fuck you” alot.
Fuck you, edw. A lot.
Unless, of course, you can make a meaningful and coherent set of statements.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
If it’s the latter, he no longer has any basis to condemn religion (or anything else) as being untrue – all that matters is whether or not it’s useful.
Fucking sophistry. It’s a fiction, not in the way your scriptures are fiction, but in the way any higher-order decription of a complex process is: it leaves out a great deal of messy detail to arrive at a tractable account of what’s going on. (We could debate the usefulness of religion too: useful to whom? but that’s one for another day.)
It’s a fiction like turbulence is a fiction. All those little molecules could be followed one by one, in theory. But it’s easier for our finite minds (some more than others, of course) to describe the action at a macro level. The same with neurological processes and behavior.
CJO @ 107:
Er, no I was quoting (not “quote-mining”) Dawkins:
But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility …?
The fact that without it his life would become considerably more uncomfortable than it is now?
A “finer-grained view of these matters” that he “hopes” we may one day attain “as a species”??
What the flip does that mean? IDIC?
I quite agree. But isn’t Dawkins doing just that when he clings to “unDarwinian things like compassion” …? He finds the consequences of reality unpalatable so goes running back to old notions of morality.
Nietzsche had his number.
I feel obligated to point out that Mr. Spock denied his more tender emotions because he never met me. The power of my looove would heal his wounded soul. OK, I was 12 at the time.
I still suspect that crushing on Spock as an adolescent led to my attraction to emotionally unavailable men. Curse you, Spock!
I defer to Damasio on anything related to emotion, feeling, thought, conscious and unconscious… Check out The Feeling of What Happens
Cat Ballou, HAH! I too had a giant Spock-crush in my pre-adolescence, and thought I was the only one.
Sounds like Brooks needs to do a little reading.
Dave, here’s some possible places to start (by no means a complete list) from the ed. psych. literature alone:
Alexander, P. & Murphy, P. K. (1998). Profiling the differences in students’ knowledge, interest, and strategic processing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(3), 435-447.
Brunstein, J. C., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (1996). Effects of failure on subsequent performance: The importance of self-defining goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 395-407.
Chan, C., Burtis, J., & Bereiter, C. (1997). Knowledge building as a mediator of conflict in conceptual change. Cognition and Instruction, 15(1), 1-40.
Cornelius, R. R. (1996). The science of emotion: Research and tradition in the psychology of emotion. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Do, S. L. & Schallert, D. L. (2004). Emotions and classroom talk: Toward a model of the role of affect in students’ experience of classroom discussions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(4), 619-634.
Pekrun, R., Elliot, A. J., & Maier, M. A. (2006). Achievement goals and discrete achievement emotions: A theoretical model and prospective test. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(3), 583-597.
Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54-67.
Schallert, D. L., Reed, J. H., & Turner, J. E. (2004). The interplay of aspirations, enjoyment, and work habits in academic endeavors: Why is it so hard to keep long-term commitments? Teachers College Record, 106(9), 1715-1728.
Sideridis, G. D. (2006). Goal orientation, academic achievement, and depression: Evidence in favor of a revised goal theory framework. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97(3), 366-375.
How much would you expect to pay for this fabulous offer, Dave? Well don’t answer yet because there’s MORE! Yes, in addition to these fabulous examinations of some of the issues at the root of your misunderstanding, there are tremendous further readings you can do! Don’t delay, read TODAY!
No kings,
Robert
Cat, Tomecat:
Indeed. It can happen, but it’s not inevitable. A good friend of mine (who is now a successful novelist) once wrote a Trek novel featuring a female character whose name was remarkably similar to her own (but who may as well have been named Mary Sue) who, by story’s end, had bedded and wedded Spock.
My friend the writer married a first-rate, emotionally-available guy, though. Go figure.
CJO @ 112:
That analysis could conceivably be applied to observable phenomena – what we call acts of compassion or altruism, for example. But “personal responsibility” is not a phenomenon – it’s an abstract philosophical concept which, even if regarded as a fiction, cannot be derived from phenomena, no matter how micro or complex.
What the flip does that mean? IDIC?
I don’t know what the flip “IDIC” means either.
What it means, and I’ll admit it’s a compressed formulation that doesn’t carry the weight it should in the sentence, so let me expand upon it: Higher-order decriptions are to messy, nonlinear processes as maps are to the territory they represent. Maps are “fictions” in that they sacrifice detail for tractability –“usefulness” in our discussion. The “hope” is that, as we mature as sentient beings in this universe, we will cease to clutch at the comfortable fictions the way you cling to mummy-church’s skirts, and internalize the hard truths about brain and behavior that are emerging from neuroscience. It won’t mean an abolishment of the concept of personal responsibility, as you like to pretend, but it will entail a wholly new way of understanding what terms like “freedom” and “responsibility” mean.
Cat Ballou (great name!), Tomecat:
See: my life.
Although, like Watchman’s friend, I did marry an emotionally available guy…who also happens to have severe ADHD and wears his emotions on his sleeve. All the time. So as I like to say to my Trekkie friends, I wanted Spock. I got Neelix. Go figure.
edw (#110). I’ve always loved the ad hom argument of ‘This particular group is stupid. They just make ad hom arguments and insult people’. How do you fail to see the irony in that?
As for ‘new’ or ‘old’ atheist, I wouldn’t know which I am. I never received my membership card. All I’ve ever known is that I don’t believe in God, I had no idea the whole atheist thing had hierarchies and so on.
I’m an old Trekkie though and I will curse the new Trekkies (and the new Trek) with my dying breath.
Interesting. You really think manifestations of compassion and altruism are observable phenomenon, but manifestations of the concept of personal responsibility are not? The concept of responsibility is nothing that cannot be derived from what we observe. This even manifests in the social behaviors of chimpanzees, though I doubt they spend a lot of time philosophizing about it. Don’t confuse the map with the territory. The turbulence analogy is apt.
I seem to partly recall a study published two or three years ago. It was of people who’d suffered brain injuries of a kind that caused them to lose their capacity to experience emotions. One of the observations was that the injured people found it extremely difficult to prioritize potential acts. So, for instance, such a person might spend 30 minutes debating with himself whether to go to lunch or make a crucial phone call. That is, without emotions, they became dysfunctional agents rather than hyper-rational agents.
Does anyone recall the authors of that study?
Hmmm. Sorry about the formatting at #117. Seems a little bunched up.
Rarely is the question asked: is our computer skills students learning?
No kings,
Robert
I seem to partly recall a study published two or three years ago. It was of people who’d suffered brain injuries of a kind that caused them to lose their capacity to experience emotions. One of the observations was that the injured people found it extremely difficult to prioritize potential acts. So, for instance, such a person might spend 30 minutes debating with himself whether to go to lunch or make a crucial phone call. That is, without emotions, they became dysfunctional agents rather than hyper-rational agents.
Does anyone recall the authors of that study?
IDIC stand for “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” which referred to in Star Trek canon.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/IDIC
“The invention of the IDIC by Gene Roddenberry was rumored to have caused friction between him and Leonard Nimoy, who saw it as a cheap ploy to sell replica merchandise to fans.”
CatBallou and Tomecat:
me too. i even taught myself to be able to raise one eyebrow because of that
I wanted Seven of Nine, but got a cross between Tasha Yar, Deanna Troy, and Jeane Louise Finch. Go figure. ;-)
Captain Picard was a scientist! An archaeologist, specifically.
And nobody would accuse Jean-Luc Picard of being a cold emotionless robot man! He had a guy for that.
CJO @ 120:
Thank God for that.
I understand what you’re saying but I don’t see how “personal responsibility’ can be abstracted from the flux of matter in the same way as “wave” can be abstracted from the motion of water molecules. Personal responsibility is simply meaningless in any mechanistic system. It’s not just a philosophical, it’s positively metaphysical.
“… as we mature as sentient beings in this universe”
Are you sure you’ve never heard of IDIC?
” … a wholly new way of understanding what terms like “freedom” and “responsibility” mean …”
From IDIC to INGSOC!
CJO @ 120:
Thank God for that.
I understand what you’re saying but I don’t see how “personal responsibility’ can be abstracted from the flux of matter in the same way as “wave” can be abstracted from the motion of water molecules. Personal responsibility is simply meaningless in any mechanistic system. It’s not just a philosophical, it’s positively metaphysical.
“… as we mature as sentient beings in this universe”
Are you sure you’ve never heard of IDIC?
” … a wholly new way of understanding what terms like “freedom” and “responsibility” mean …”
From IDIC to INGSOC!
@70 and 72 Hey! William Shatner knows he’s a ham actor. It is what he’s best at. Just check out his Priceline ads, or Boston Legal. Did you see his Roast? He did a better job lampooning himself than the pros. Brooks on the other hand obviously takes himself very seriously.
Melior’s Observation: “Should” and “think” never belong next to each other in the same sentence.
INGSOC
Oh, go drown in a toilet. It’s your conception of “freedom,” not mine, that is a disingenuous euphemism for slavery, doled out in single servings as it is by a psychopathic cosmic overlord.
@110 Fuck You!:]
‘Spock’ was only one of Gene Roddenberry’s characters and I never thought of Spock as the heartless scientific one – he was just another alien with a very strange society and that was both the character flaw and the strength of Spock.
Brooks is just spouting the usual uninspired creationist garbage: big bad science won’t let us believe our fuzzy thoughts, but science can’t explain everything and therefore my sky fairy exists and ignorance is better than science. Any behavioral psychologists around to smack down Mr. Brooks on his allegations of being unable to explain emotions or the insinuation that science denies the existence of emotions?
Apologies for the double post.
(Or at least I would apologize if I were responsible for my actions.)
+++
Watchman @ 123:
I think the difference is that a map is a visual representation of the territory, just as the word “altruism” is a verbal signifier that represents particular modes of behaviour … they are in a sense secondary, descriptive concepts applied to pre-existing phenomena; whereas “personal responsibility” does not refer to a type of action in itself but is a philosophical concept that presupposes ethically meaningful actions.
CJO @ 135:
OK then wise guy, you tell me — what IS this “wholly new way of understanding what terms like “freedom” and “responsibility” mean“? So far, all you’ve said about it is that it – whatever “it” is – will eventually emerge “as we mature as sentient beings in this universe“, that it’s an altogether “finer-grained view of these matters” that we “hope” to attain “one day” when “we as a species” outgrow the inadequate fictions of traditional morality.
Which sounds suspiciously like New Age woo.
As bad as it might be, it can’t possibly be any worse than your Old Age woo. Can’t you handle the competition, Pilty? Surely there are enough credulous for both your lot and the upstarts to peddle their snake oil to.
Speaking of William Shatner (nice hijacking, by the way), raise your hand if you’ve seen his great movie, “Incubus.” I believe it’s the only feature-length movie filmed entirely in Esperanto. Brilliant!
everyone should scroll back up and re-read #15. would’ve cost me a keyboard if i weren’t posting remotely
And thus this is why I call myself a spiritual atheist – that is spiritual in the sense and definition of spirituality as a natural outgrowth of man’s own consciousness. Thus having nothing to do with the superstitions of ascribing spirituality to most other living things nor some unseen, unproven sky-god from whence spirituality need be derived.
Miltdown Pan @ 138:
Should read “… that is the presupposition of ethically meaningful actions.”
And William Shatner’s most magnificent film is – without a doubt – Free Enterprise.
Mr. Brooks makes an art of mashing together ideas and jargon in a conscious effort to support his Meme-of-the-Day. Today happens to be his day to distract from less kindly news for his political masters – a liberal Iowa, further disclosures about Red Cross allegations of torture, and the bottomless pit of the bankers-only bail-out.
Mr. Brooks is as careful in conflating his words and ideas as John Yoo, to the equivalent good of humankind.
I don’t think there’s any woo about it at all; indeed, I’m talking about squeezing the last vestiges of woo out of our perforce colloquial and imprecise vocabulary surrounding free will, intentionality, and responsibility.
Until quite recently, with the advances in neuroscience that hover just behind Piltdown’s officious bulk in this discussion (he keeps squirming about, trying to obscure them from view), there simply was no other vocabulary to use, so now I’m being taken to task because I won’t be any more precise about how the neurophilosophers of the 23rd century will regard these antiquated concepts? I’m no prophet to offer up the details, but I believe I can see which way the wind is blowing.
I’d think harder about it, and write something longer and more cogent, but Piltdown isn’t interested in actually understanding my point of view anyway, beyond finding something to belittle, so I’m going to save myself the effort.
“that epitome of dull-witted mediocrity”
What a great line, I’ll have to remember it so I can steal it in the future. And doubly potent in that it refers to David Brooks. It seems like we ought to be able to add the word insipid in there somewhere, perhaps next time.
I have to disagree with you PZ on the idea that morality coming from emotions is automatically a bad thing. We are emotional creatures, without emotion why would we do anything at all? Like write in this blog or go to all the work of becoming a scientist. We do things because we desire to do them and that desire comes from some kind of emotional fulfillment.
Emotions are quite wonderful and delightful, they merely cannot be left to play outside on their own, they require constant supervision.
This is where rationality comes in, we need to temper the emotions with rational thought, but the underlying source and purpose of everything is emotions.
The Talmud is an excellent example of the use of reason to temper emotions. In it, all sorts of behavior is codified so that someone doesn’t run off at a full emotional tilt and damage himself or others. What a shame it’s based on a fictional character but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some valuable lessons there.
#15 was good, also liked #125- we’ve been ambus[h]caded.
All that is left for me is a bad pun: David, without a paddle, just babbles on.
Hi all! First time poster here.
I read Brooks’ article this morning and was hoping that PZ would respond to his claims about ‘new atheists’. PZ, your response was really terrific! I wish there was a way it could find a wider audience, because part of what upsets me most about Brooks’ article is the large number of people that will read it and take Brooks as some kind of intellectual. Currently, it’s the most e-mailed NYtimes article. The whole format of Brooks’ article was exactly like one called “The Neural Buddhists” that he wrote last year- another article that was also extremely infuriating for its mischaracterization of atheism, science, and reason. (and unfortunately also reached a large audience.) I specifically remember him mentioning Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, when it was clear from the article he had never read the book. I can’t believe that sort of fraud gets past the NY Times editors.
Great response, PZ- it should be mailed to Brooks himself!
Wowbagger @ 140:
“When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.”
An oldie but a goody.
Truth is not a free market but a monopoly. There can be only one.
Piltdown Man says “Truth is not a free market but a monopoly. There can only be one”.
That’s right, which is why there is only ONE Christianity and only ONE Islam and only ONE Hinduism and only ONE Judaism…oh wait, that isn’t the case for any of them.
Yes, once you include the Reformation, the modern Evangelical movements, and the split between the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, you’ve moved way beyond “one truth” into the reality of a religious free market.
So if your religious views are true, Piltdown Man, why is there not a monopoly but a free market? Are you not religious? Please explain this apparent contradiction.
CJO:
But can you read the writing on the wall?
First, I’d like to point out that some of the discussion about Spock became muddled because the distinction between Roddenberry’s purpose in creating the character (which PZ commented on) and the specific dramatic plotlines which developed the character (which may or may not be parallel) was missed. I agree with PZ; Spock was created to illustrate if not promote a common myth about how rational creatures should “overcome” their emotions and emulation of computer logic leads to morally superior outcomes.
Second, to jump onto this discussion with Piltdown, because I also think it relates. Unfortunately, I have a completely original Theory of Mind to explain it.
It would, if you let it. That would be irrational, since then the term ‘responsibility’ would be just as useless as you claim the idea would be. The necessity of responsibility would, I’m sure you would agree, still be there. And so something must give.
Since it is based on empirical data and irrefutable logic, the scientific (which is to say truly mechanistic) view of the universe will not be the thing which breaks down. Your question seems to indicate you’d agree.
So how are we to reconcile the mechanistic nature of the nervous system with the notion of responsibility?
Why should we have any need to do that? We do not base criminal justice on who should be punished in order to improve the situation. The fact that someone is not philosophically responsible does not mean that they are blameless and cannot be justly punished for being the one who committed the crime. Still, a society that eternally refuses to even look at what changes in society might cause occurrences of crime to decrease will eventually be (not coincidentally as we are now) suffuse with crime.
The problem you highlight is quite real, though. I’m not suggesting that a criminal justice system devoid of a sound and consistent philosophy would be tolerable. And it is true, I believe, that the advances in neurobiology and related fields make the mirage of free will more evident for what it is (an illusion caused by perspective and subject to circumstance.) So as you suggest, something must give.
What gives is not personal responsibility, but the assumption that personal responsibility is a function of free will. You don’t have a magical power to be a cause without cause , but what you do have is self-determination. You don’t have the supernatural gift of a soul that makes your decisions independent of the action of molecules in your brain, but what you do have is the power of speech and volition. You don’t get eternal life and absolute right and wrong, but what you do get is dignity and liberty.
So, yes, Piltdown, science demolishing free will does have repercussions for philosophy, and will affect criminal justice. Professor Dawkins was quite right that responsibility doesn’t work the way we think it would. But you are suggesting, I think, that this means giving up religious delusions would cause humans to act without responsibility. In fact, it means the opposite. Something most atheists are already well aware of: humans tend to act responsibly by nature (and teach others around them to do the same), without any religious sentiment being necessary. What Dawkins is pointing out is that your conception of responsibility breaks down, not that responsibility does.
In short (too late!) religion does not cause us to be moral. It just tries to take credit for it.
Teleprompter @ 151
Truth cannot contradict itself. The fact that there are so many religions which contradict each other means they cannot all be entirely true. They may all be entirely false. Or some may be true in places. Or one may be entirely true.
“As for this strange idea that the evolutionary approach says nothing about individual responsibility…I have no idea what the man is talking about, other than that he is blithering ignorantly.”
Ah, PZ. you have not been keeping up with your readings, buddy. In case there’s a few typos keep in mind that I just killed off a bottle of white zinfandel.
Take Edelman for instance. He’s the Director of the Neuroscience Institute and the ’72 winner of the Nobel for medecine.
“How can we maintain morality under mortal conditions?” Under the present model this is a problem of major proportion.
Or, take Owen Flanagan:
Yep, the only TRUE religion is the one where god doesn’t exist, and the bible is a work of fiction, and there is no dogma. That leaves Pilty’s morally bankrupt religion out of the running.
Sorry to interrupt the typical troll-stomping here, but for at least the next coupla weeks, you can catch a podcast of Thom Hartmann’s Air America broadcast of 4/7/09, which starts in its first hour with about 10 minutes of an ad hoc “debate” with Christopher Hitchens regarding the subject of atheism. Hartmann is a very intelligent and rational liberal authority on history, economics, politics and a champion of the middle class as far as American politics are concerned. He’s also cursed with an inability to avoid falling for anything that’s got “woo” in it, including firewalking, neuro-linguistic programming, and some sort of newage-suffused Christianity (because he wants to reclaim Christianity from the right wing, almost more than he wants it to be true). He insists that atheism is a faith, that Hitchens is being “evangelical” in trying to convince people of the rightness of his position, and uses all of his solipsistic defenses of religious beliefs to insist that nobody can convince him he isn’t entitled to believe whatever he feels like believing, so long as he gets to say that people reject his beliefs out of a place that can be no more than religious. Of course it’s a funhouse mirror style of rejection of reason as if it were reason, and he’s way smarter than the usual low-level stale repetitive asswipe trolls that don’t clean up after themselves (hello Pilty, go fall down a deep well onto some spikes, will you, please? Thanks! there’s a good troll). Apparently, while I was running errands, I missed just about all of his program except for a couple of moments in the second or third hour where he was talking with Chris Hedges, who has decided that all the new atheists (and he can name all of them except PZ! Where’s that book, dammit?!) are even more wrong than wrong because they’re so rational, which is so Western Imperialist. The lovely wife started threatening to hurl things at the radio and asked if I’d been listening at one point, so if it’s better and more intelligent people who share your political views you want to hear, but who are making the soundness of their political views suspect by how utterly credulous they sound when they talk shite about how much they need their woo, Thom Hartmann’s show from today will make your blood boil.
Piltdown Man,
Thanks for acknowledging that possibility.
Now, what do we do with that? We have all of these different religious claims which contradict themselves, and we need a way to sort out the various truth claims.
I think of each claim as a hypothesis. Are circumstances in our world consistent with the various claims? That is how I approach the conundrum.
David Brooks was needlessly pointed in criticizing the Talmudic tradition. I see that as his critique of the rule of law generally. Talmudic criticism isn’t simply a dependence on generic “texts”. It is the virtual adoration of the rule of law, of respect for prior authoritative voices about human relations with God and each other. It is an attempt, flawed at times, to make pragmatic decisions today in a way that respects those earlier voices.
Mr. Brooks, after all, is an apologist for the political party that adopted torture as state policy and almost single-handedly crippled the rule of law (as it applies to the elite).
Paul Sunstone@ @124: I don’t know the specific studies you’re talking about — but that is the thesis of the book “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain” by Antonio R. Damasio. Interesting book. And the thesis makes sense when you think about it: without emotion, we don’t care about or value anything, and if we don’t care about or value anything, decision- making becomes well nigh impossible.
Nobel prizeman sed it, therefore it must be true.
After all the time you’ve been on here, have you not understood how morality works?
This may have been brought up earlier in the thread but ‘Spock’ was crafted as a preconceived plot device that goes back to the beginning of theater, which is the trinity device.
This device is also exploited by Freud’s ,Id Ego Superego and all over the place in literature.
Rodenberry’s adaptation was
McCoy as the emotional, the conscience, the sense of humanity and compassion, with aspects of the subconscious
Capt Kirk was the conscious judgement, decider, ego
Spock was the unemotional, pure reason character.
So as the Star Trek morality plays unfolded, the intricacies of the problem and the struggle toward a solution were expressed in the form of dialog between the three characters, whom, when combined became a sort of singular protaganist. Its a way of being inside somebody’s head, the somebody being the playwright, the characters as internal storytelling devices.
Spock was not intended as a stand alone complete character, only a misunderstanding of old school theatrical tools would lead one to mistake ‘spock’ as a developed entity outside the star trek formula.
You see this device all over scripts since the Greeks, the cartoon version is the devil on one shoulder, your head, and an angel on the other.
Godfather was James Caan as the emotionl id character, Duvall as the cool calculator, with the Godfather as the Central Ego. Neither the Sonny character nor the Consierge(Duvall) are intersting or developed, they exist to embellish the godfather character, by portraying his totality in dialog and action, and so it is with the Spock character.
Obviously, people who see in black and white always miss the shades of meaning and shifting field of moral dillemmas that are reality.
Religious dogma, bad education, and patriotic jingoism make people blind, and so stupid that they don’t even understand the nuance of a basic human situation, and deadens their awareness of the treacherous winds that just blow then to and fro all their lives while they waste their energy shaking their fist and proclaiming their eternal right to personal liberty as they do EXACTHY what they are told, contrary to their own basic interests.
sorry about the speling, left my reading glasses somewhere.
Also, of course, Captain Kirk was a slut. What does that say about the ego?
“Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain” by Antonio R. Damasio.”
Ah, yes Greta. Antonio of Iowa with the smart wife, Hanna. I remember him well dear Greta; he is a man of infinite jest.
Ken:
“a very intelligent and rational liberal authority on history, economics, politics and a champion of the middle class as far as American politics are concerned.”
Oops, sound like someone cloned me while I wasn’t looking.
I think someone has had too much wine.
It amazes me sometimes how some people’s view of the world and other people can be so simplistic. They seem to see other people as 2 dimensional cartoon characters. I find it difficult to understand how they can’t see how complicated people are.
That wasn’t even true for the Highlander movies.
I completely concur with your astute analysis, Scooter. I’m also of an age where the worst possible punishment was being denied Star Trek as it originally aired on Thursday nights (PST), i.e., I have a year or two on PZ. Spock was my favorite. A teacher gave me some oil paints and my first portrait was of Spock, in his pose on his album that contained The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.
In the early nineties, I had the privilege of playing some more with the character with a troupe of improvisational comedians in North Hollywood, who managed to collectively commandeer some microphones on Wednesdays at midnight on KIEV, an AM station out of beautiful downtown Glendale in 1992, simultaneous with the midnight broadcasts of Classic Trek episodes on channel 13. We encouraged people to turn down the TV sound and listen to us supply the soundtrack on the radio, in a show we called Simul Trek, Sam Longoria’s idea (applied after watching Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lilly and Proctor and Bergman’s J-Men Forever), which was sometimes brilliant, but usually dangerous. We managed to find sponsors who would feed us in Pasadena after the show, and found out we had fans at Cal Tech. I got to play Spock for 13 episodes, where I got to say things while Nimoy’s lips were moving, like “It’s not easy being green!” but just after we’d gotten good at it, after 13 weeks/episodes, channel 13 switched to Trek Lite, the Now! Generation, so I ended up playing Data. Sam and I happened to watch the re-release of Pinocchio at the El Capitan, and suddenly, Data’s character was instantly defined. I got to play Data, the Captain’s Log, searching the Galaxy for the Blue Fairy who would turn him into a Real BoyTM. The problem with Data was that the camera would stay on him while his lips moved for a long time, and that meant that I had to keep saying things that were ostensibly funny while also setting up the show. I managed to get a line out for Data that went something like, “Captain, we appear to have entered a Heisenberg Uncertainty Narrative, where the more we understand our characters, the less we can comprehend what is happening, while the more we understand the plot, the less we know who we are!” To which the Captain would have to reply with something like, “Very good Data. I shall be forced to give a sharp tug to my shirt, which appears to have mysteriously shrunk in the wash.” Whereupon we would all start singing, “Hurray for Captain Balding, the Galaxy Explorer (did someone call me schnorer?) Hurray Hurray Hurray!” for no apparent reason.
Thank you Scooter. I jumped ahead to make my previous post and then read some more comments. I guess lots of people just never grow up mentally. Stuck in mental childhood, thinking what they are told to by the authority and never becoming truly independent. And they don’t see it.
someone cloned me while I wasn’t looking and what was it I said about Thom Hartmann right after that? oh, yes, here it is: “…cursed with an inability to avoid falling for anything that’s got “woo” in it.” That’s the problem, SF, while I might be inclined to vote in a similar manner, TH’s total ineptitude WRT reason, religion, science and faith, is what makes me suspicious about where and why and how my political sentiments overlap with such a dunderhead.
PiltMan:
An oldie, yes – but utter nonsense, as I suspect you may already realize.
“Captain, we appear to have entered a Heisenberg Uncertainty Narrative, where the more we understand our characters, the less we can comprehend what is happening, while the more we understand the plot, the less we know who we are!”
Ah yes, Heisenberg, I remember him well. He couldn’t get position and vector together at the same time. Poor fellow, if he knew where he was going, he didn’t know where he was and if he knew where he was, he didn’t know where he was going. Poor fellow. I felt sorry for him and for the other guy, Schodinger, I think it was, who could never figure whether his cat was alive or dead.
Silver Fox, they had ideas, now scientists work on making quantum computers. It’s called progress.
Your mob, instead, only have wild guesses they call Revelation* and then seek to justify.
* more like stultification.
In our college version of Star Trek, Spock opens a closet to find a couple making out. He orders them out of the closet. One of them says “But sir, we’re engaged!” Spock replies, “Then disengage and get out of the closet.”
Puerile, I know. Chances are that joke has been around for decades. But we thought we were so funny!
CaBallou, that’s a bit from Star Trip (a link that will probably try to pop up a “Rhapsody Player” with the entire 11+ minute bit) by The Congress of Wonders, who had occasion to open for The Dead in the 60s. I’m reasonably certain that the parody was recorded before Season Three’s first run had ended. I am more certain that the first time Dr. Demento played it, it was from my cassette recording that I had mailed to him, from the original album, Revolting (Karl Truckload and Winslow Thrill recorded only two album as The Congress of Wonders, the second was Sophomoric) Just do a search for Congress of Wonders Star Trip and you’ll find it.
Grrr! My blood did boil. I will never listen to Thom Hartmann again. He actually slipped up and said, “Thank you, Christian–er–Christopher Hitchens,” at the end to top it all off.
@PZ [speaking of Mr. Spock],
As this wiki notes, the portrayal of “logical” behaviour in fiction is frequently wrong. Including Spock’s.
But the denigration of rational behaviour and the promotion of emotional behaviour as more “correct” is old hat in Hollywood. Steve Dutch has repeatedly noted this on his site.
edw (#110). I’ve always loved the ad hom argument of ‘This particular group is stupid. They just make ad hom arguments and insult people’.
It’s not an ad hominem argument, it’s an empirical claim — incorrect in this case. (It’s also a strawman; edw’s actual statement wasn’t quite so hyperbolic.) An ad hominem argument would be to claim that something a New Atheist said was wrong because New Atheists argue mostly by emotion etc.
How do you fail to see the irony in that?
There’s irony in someone erroneously attributing a fallacy to another.
That would be a compliment to any godbot, – they are one-dimensional!
So long as they are quiet they can easily be mistaken for a human being, but as soon as they open their mouth . . . godzombies.
nothing’s sacred said,
“It’s not an ad hominem argument, it’s an empirical claim — incorrect in this case. (It’s also a strawman; edw’s actual statement wasn’t quite so hyperbolic.) An ad hominem argument would be to claim that something a New Atheist said was wrong because New Atheists argue mostly by emotion etc.”
… Fuck you.
Teleprompter @ 158:
That would seem a reasonable way to proceed.
tmaxPA @ 153:
That’s almost witty.
Of course – just as I’m sure many folks here would be happy to consign the word “God” to the dustbin of history along with the concept. But I suppose you can always try to save the term by completely redefining it, as CJO wants to do with “freedom” and “responsibility” and liberal Protestant theologians want to do with “God”.
The most you could say would be that the necessity for people to act as if they were responsible free agents would remain – as a “necessary fiction” that keeps society running smoothly. Always assuming, of course, that you can get enough people to agree to act ‘as if’ …
I don’t pretend to be au fait with all the baroque curlicues that have lately come to adorn the scientific edifice, but is it not the case that scientists themselves have been questioning the mechanistic view? This article, from a presumably reputable journal, assures us that “entanglement also appears to entail the deeply spooky and radically counterintuitive phenomenon called nonlocality—the possibility of physically affecting something without touching it or touching any series of entities reaching from here to there. Nonlocality implies that a fist in Des Moines can break a nose in Dallas without affecting any other physical thing (not a molecule of air, not an electron in a wire, not a twinkle of light) anywhere in the heartland.”
It rips the penitential and expiatory heart out of the concept of justice. Under such a worldview, the state might execute a mass murderer – but this would not be an act of just retribution, merely the elimination of a threat to social stability. Executing a murderer would be no different in principle to shooting a tiger that’s gone man-eater. Punishment becomes pest control. Similarly, rehabilitation becomes a purely procedural matter of correcting the “faulty unit” (to revert to Dawkins’ language).
Reminds me of TS Eliot’s line: They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Without a change of heart, ‘changes in society’ just amount to shuffling the same counters in different configurations.
CJO implied as much. I don’t see how neurobiology does this, but perhaps I’m just not abreast of the latest advances.
I honestly don’t understand how “self-determination” can be meaningful without free will. If our decisions are wholly dependent on “the action of molecules” in our brains, then the power of speech itself is a mere epiphenomenon, volition is a mirage and “dignity and liberty” are up for grabs.
Don’t count your chickens — the ‘secular society’ is a very recent phenomenon historically speaking.
… Fuck you.
Sorry, but that’s not an effective retort. Note that I did not defend what edw wrote, I only pointed out errors in what you wrote.
Out of so much muddle here — for example, the difficulty of many to understand that, regardless of details of Spock’s character, what emotion and logic are is grossly mischaracterized in the series — tmaxPA #153 is a gem of clarity.
As for troll named after a hoax that demonstrates the opposite of what he imagines: mediocre and muddled thinking. Just for starters, there’s nothing non-mechanical about nonlocality. “spooky” doesn’t refer to ectoplasm, and “counterintuitive” doesn’t imply random, unaccountable, or exorable.
Piltdown:
I doubt that, because I wouldn’t.
The concept of animism and theism (both mono and poly) is part of humankind’s heritage.
That would be philosophy of science.
Also, non-locality and mechanism are not mutually incompatible, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say other than that science questions everything. There is no impending paradigm shift, as you would imply.
#153, #186:
For Zarquon’s sake, Spock is a character in a soap, not a philosophical treatise! For all I know, Life, the Universe, and Everything have always been mischaracterized in all soaps; always are, always will be. This is commercial TV, right? Roddenberry wasn’t pretending to be dabbling in philosophy; David Brooks, on the other hand, is, and therefore deserves all the criticism expressed in this forum and elsewhere.
Next thing you’re going to pick on Gregory House for failing to live up to the principles of Hippocratic ethics.
chaospet nailed this http://chaospet.com/2009/04/07/126-the-end-of-philosophy/ (via Language Log)
It’s quite odd, seeing as i often got the same response (philosophy ,ethics, and metaphysics are useless, evolutionary psychology has all the answers), when I was talking about ethics earlier here.
“David Brooks, the William Shatner of columnists.”
This would only be true if Brooks admitted that he was a bad writer and was willing to have fun at being bad. For example, if anyone criticized his writing he would respond, “It’s just a stupid article in a stupid newspaper. Get over it!”
You don’t talk ethics, you just claim to have resolved the Euthyphro dilemma and ignore any atheist that challenges you on your circular presupposition.
Nobody said that, Simplicius. What’s been obvious to everybody but you is that you don’t understand squat about philosophy, ethics, metaphysics or logic; to you they’re just abstractions you misappropriate to lend credibility to your ludicrously feeble crayon scribble essays.
Emotion is a path to reason. Ignorance is the obstacle. The root of the word ignorance is ignore. Ignoring an issue on the fear that it will cross some moral boundary is the lack of reason. Emotion and competition provide motivation to seek reasonable solutions approaching a common good.
The technology exist to make an intriguing game of all these cultural issues based on emotion, respectful competition, refinement, and argument visibility.
The Do Good Gauge is an abstract of this game.
Professor Myer great reply to David Brooks and thank you for your forum.
This explains much about Vulpes argentum, no?
Red pedant flag! Still, I think scooter should be appointed the Gene L. Coon Professor of Star Trek Studies around here. The connection between ST, Coppola, and the angel/devil cartoon trope (while perhaps old hat to you North Campus types) might be the coolest thing I learned this week.
meh. The stardate thing was funny right at the top, and I laughed at “ship’s apse,” but other than that rather sad. Points for opening for the Dead, of course. When might that have been, Ken?
I too have Trek parody in my past, a little community-access TV show in Lansing, Michigan back in the early 80s. As the only white-enough-looking guy in the cast, it was my job to play Kirk and generally direct the whole (completely improvised, lysergically enhanced) thing by swivelling crazily around in my central chair (and theatrically falling out of it occasionally; we’re travelling at greater than light speed and no seatbelts?) and firing orders and questions around the bridge for others to react to. No memory at all of what might have actually been said, but I think it was pretty funny sometimes. The fake-dialogue-on- the-radio schtick sounds like a blast.
Ah, the Mot du jour. By “baroque curlicues” you mean quantum mechanics (nonlocality etc.)? Because note the word “mechanics” in there? But not my kinda science either.
Brooks’ hackneyed view of rational vs irrational is best exemplified by the old Star Trek characters Spock and McCoy. Mr. Spock was of a race, the Vulcans, who suppressed emotions in favor of reason, and is taken by many, to be a picture of rationality. McCoy, on the other hand, was an emotional geyser. Brooks sees both scientists and the “new atheists,” as Spocks, devoid of emotion. But this is a straw man, which is the very point that the information he gives us is designed to show. Brooks’ article is incoherent because he maintains this antiquated view even while espousing evidence that refutes it! (see above URL)
nothing’s sacred (#185)
Not sure if it’s too late to clarify here but I just thought I should point out. The ‘fuck you’ comment was a joke based on edw’s original accusation. I agree that I shouldn’t have used the term ad hom and maybe I was a bit keen to mentally link edw’s comments to others I’ve heard before that were much more pointed. Still though, I do think the ‘this whole group of people does nothing but insult other people’ with no supporting examples or anything is a rather silly thing to say as it’s an unsubstantiated attack on the credibility of an entire group of people and something of an insult.
You mean you aren’t all dispassionate, objective, rational, methodical investigators? *sigh* Another cherished myth trashed.
Never mind. The new movie opens May 8 and you can already get models of the new phaser, communicator and tricorder on Amazon. Woohoo!
Besides, Spock was really a plot device through which the writers could comment on the irrationality of various aspects of human thought and behavior without appearing partisan. And there were stories which explored the pitfalls of a lack of emotion and the dangers of untrammeled logic.
Here I go gettin’ all groupie again…
Another wonderful, spontaneous and stimulating rant PZ. Sometimes you just tickle the crap outta me.
Does the PZ sleep I wonder? Does his watch have 13 numbers instead of the usual 12 so that he gets an extra 2 hours every day to write this stuff?
How does he do it? I wonder.
He can queue up a few posts for “timed release” so to speak. So it looks like he spends all day/night at the computer. It also gives our Antipodian and European contingent first crack at some threads.
Piltdown Man:
Fair enough, and well put, but I must object to your contention that the concept “presupposes” the actions. The notion of responsibility grows out of a society’s observations of how the actions of one party affect another. Eventually, the idea that an individual ought to be held accountable for his actions becomes encoded in the mores of the society – and on that level, yes, it’s abstract, but it didn’t start out that way. It evolved, if you will, from observation and experience. Ethics are, first and last, about what people DO, not what they think, and are a collective response to perceived patterns of behavioral cause and effect. It is not the other way around. Only once ethical codes are established in a society do they begin to influence the behavior of individuals.
This may sound like a chicken-egg ambiguity, but I don’t think it is. It’s a bootstrapping process. Once the process starts, the two components do play off one another, but the seed is in the observed action and consequence, not in the formulated concept of responsibility for that action.
Or so it seems to me.
nothing’s sacred @ 186:
John Morales @ 187:
Sven DiMilo @ 195:
If this non-locality wheeze can be incorporated into a mechanistic system, there must be a mechanism whereby “the possibility of physically affecting something without touching it or touching any series of entities reaching from here to there” becomes a reality, or theoretical reality.
Otherwise it’s “unaccountable”, to employ nothing’s sacred’s word.
Anyone know what this mechanism is? Can it be explained in layman’s terms?
Why should I? YTF should I?
This quote is entirely correct*, but utterly fails to mention how
astronomicallyfinancially minute the probabilities of anything like that ever happening are.* For a very particular value of “touching”, that is!
However, it’s deeply amusing how you seem to imply is that quantum physics is something that was only dreamt up last year. It was developed in the 1920s, and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment has been done again and again despite having been intended as a pure thought experiment. I mean, what next? Will you tell us that some scientists now question whether mass and energy are really fundamentally different things?
Ever heard of “therapy instead of punishment”?
Because that’s what would happen if free-will-for-practical-purposes would be disproven. It’s also already increasingly happening over here in Europe…
We are rational and methodical, alright. We’re just zealous and obsessive about it. :-)
I’ve twice been accused of having the patience of a saint. Each time I had to explain that I have the perseverance of a nerd instead. :-)
No – the probabilities of anything happening can be calculated with very high precision.
That’s the great big advance over classical physics; classical physics tried to lump all probabilities into 1 and 0, and that’s simply not how the observable world works. Take a radioactive nucleus and try to predict when it will decay…
Oops, my first paragraph is supposed to be a response to just the last paragraph of the quote above it. All the rest of that quote should have been deleted, except:
Individuals can’t evolve. Only populations can. Remember: descent with heritable modification – that’s not something a single individual can do!
Pilty, the answer will never be your corrupt imaginary god, so why even bother to ask the question. Science has no need for your delusions. We at Pharyngula don’t need them either.
#153, #186:
For Zarquon’s sake, Spock is a character in a soap, not a philosophical treatise!
Quite the silly strawman.
Roddenberry wasn’t pretending to be dabbling in philosophy;
Wrong. Not that it matters what he was pretending to be dabbling in; that doesn’t change the social impact.
Not sure if it’s too late to clarify here but I just thought I should point out. The ‘fuck you’ comment was a joke based on edw’s original accusation.
Duh. Why do you suppose I noted that I hadn’t defended him in explaining why your retort was ineffective?
Still though, I do think the ‘this whole group of people does nothing but insult other people’ with no supporting examples or anything is a rather silly thing to say as it’s an unsubstantiated attack on the credibility of an entire group of people and something of an insult.
In the case of some groups — e.g., creotards and wing nuts, but not “New Atheists” — there’s plenty of substantiation. As for it being “something of an insult” — gee, ya think? But contempt for bad faith is justified.
Piltdown,
Yes. Quantum entanglement.
The stardate thing was funny right at the top, and I laughed at “ship’s apse,” but other than that rather sad.
It doesn’t age all that well, but the best bit for me was the Alan Watts impersonation, as the ship’s non-sectarian chaplain–“…may Vishnu be within you, may Christ be above you, and may Umbleeb of the Seven Moons light your way.”
A visit to Wolfgang’s Vault yields many handbills and posters from the era when they were opening for acts including the Dead, Quicksilver and Big Brother. They’re billed with the Dead on July 21, 1967, and again in August ’68. All the recorded material is from that period.
Doing community access TV sounds like a blast, although it might have taken more cat-herding than we were up to. The radio thing was challenging, because we’d find out what would be playing Wednesday Night on Saturday morning, scramble to find a copy, run through a couple of times without ever paying attention to original audio until we’d cobbled some actual narrative, then try and squeeze three more run-throughs before going on live, where we learned the hard way that they cut out minutes worth of material for time, and didn’t put it back together in the original order, so places where punchlines went didn’t have their setups–we really had to be on our toes. We did a lot of silly sound effects, and had a great musician on a Casiotone keyboard–we called him the Starfleet Symphony Orchestra, but he was able to get that 40’s radio soap thing going pretty well. We kept it going once a week for 26 episodes, and at least one of the original cast is doing a lot of professional cartoon voice work today. We were on the radio with no Star Trek on TV only once, pre-empted for 10 minutes or so of live footage of LA in chaos from the Rodney King riots, when suddenly they cut to The Naked Time, the one with Sulu running around shirtless wielding a foil.
#206:
“Wrong. Not that it matters what he was pretending to be dabbling in; that doesn’t change the social impact.”
Right. The social impact. So let’s assume people don’t differentiate between fantasy, fun, and fact. Let’s ban sinful thoughts, for fear of their social impact. Let’s ban theatre and all that follows, for fear of its social impact.
Puritanism, circa 1600. The “social impact” argument for censorship has been tried, you know; t h a t had an impact on people and societies, and that impact was not pretty. “Ideas have consequences”, the mantra from the neocon’s kookbook, was just the mildest among recent varieties.
Otherwise it’s “unaccountable”, to employ nothing’s sacred’s word.
Have you ever taken accounting? It has to do with rules; that’s the “mechanism”.
Anyone know what this mechanism is?
The universe is the mechanism — thus, it’s mechanistic. Or the laws of physics are the mechanism. Or the mathematics with which all laws of physics are consistent is the mechanism. If you want to know why the mathematics is as it is — perhaps because of the strong Anthropic Principle, perhaps because of Modal Realism, perhaps because of something we nothing about, or perhaps for no reason at all — that really would be unaccountable, but c’est la vie. But to say “because of God” says nothing at all and/or says something with no substantiation.
But let’s backtrack a little. tmaxPA wrote “the scientific (which is to say truly mechanistic) view of the universe”. One might question whether “scientific” is in fact “to say truly mechanistic”, but to blithely suggest that “scientists themselves have been questioning the mechanistic view” without pinning down what “mechanistic” means is muddled and dumb. Certainly nonlocality is not un-scientific, and thus it is no counter to tmaxPA’s statement.
So let’s assume people don’t differentiate between fantasy, fun, and fact.
Let’s assume you’re a dimwit … not much of a stretch.
Let’s ban sinful thoughts, for fear of their social impact. Let’s ban theatre and all that follows, for fear of its social impact.
Puritanism, circa 1600. The “social impact” argument for censorship has been tried, you know; t h a t had an impact on people and societies, and that impact was not pretty. “Ideas have consequences”, the mantra from the neocon’s kookbook, was just the mildest among recent varieties.
No one — certainly not PZ — advocated banning anything, fool.
I’ve always preferred hedonistic-amoral-harlot to grim and bloodless. But that’s just me.
#212:
If your last resort is name calling, I must assume that
a) you have run out of arguments
and
b) you are unfit for a civilised debate in the jocular jousting style appropriate to this forum and the subject at hand.
Come on, man! Engage me, enlighten me, convince me, put your best arguments forward, show me the error of my ways.
Calling someone a fool and a dimwit during a civilised debate is hardly conducive to substantiating you stance.
Ugh.
“Nature may be a bloody tyrant that is ruthless in its execution, but that does not imply that human beings must model their behavior after natural selection. Rather, what we should do as sentient beings is act to create a society that balances the harshness of evolution with a culture that tries to elevate virtues like reason and s social justice and equality.”
I wonder how can an intelligent man, a scientist be so narrow and ideological… let’s see.
1) Evolution isn’t a bloody tyrant in the sense that yes, the natural conditions outside primates, are harsh, but the primates very rarely kill each other, most fightings within primate species are on the level of mere bar brawls, and there is a lot of social cooperation going in amongst primates. Primate life within the species isn’t about a war of all against all _at all_.
It’s not like the purpose of culture is to counter-balance a very harsh, evil nature: primate nature isn’t that harsh at all to begin with.
Such extreme misrepresentation of our natures leads to extreme ideologies as a counter-balance, which we can just observe here – the (historically) extreme stuff about “social justice” and “equality”.
2) See, there are many ways to be civilized. The stuff about “social justice” and “equality” is merely one way, a definitely modern way and ideological way i.e. something invented by bookish intellectuals, something that’s not rooted in historical experience, in social evolution (which is the slow social process of finding the custons that work best).
The core idea of “social justice” is that whatever people receive, get should be NOT related on what they do, give, i.e. people should NOT be getting paid or offered opportunities (or not) as basically rewards and punishment (as the free market does), but based on “need”.
**Thus, “social justice” wants to disconnect action from reaction, cause from effect.** Like, my pay (effect) should not be based on how much value I produce (cause), but on how much I “need”.
How can scientists believe this nonsense?… Where the hell is causality, cause and effect, action and reaction, action and reward or punishment in “social justice” and equality?… Really, it makes no sense at all.
This is a very idealistic, very fragile view.
And the only people who really believe in it deeply are the folks in the soft, padded, unreal worlds of Western universities, who have not experienced the realities of life outside the unis.
Almost everybody outside (everybody who does not have a degree from a Western uni) think people should get not what they _need_ but what they _deserve_, from american rednecks to brazilian or indian peasants, this is our _natural_ definition of justice (to each what he deserves, “jedem das Seine”), this is our historical definition of justice (Plato etc., “suum cuique” etc.) and this fits the correct view of (primate) nature and does not need to “counter-balance” it: nature isn’t a bloody tyrant, it’s just… a strict, just judge and thus she does not give us what we do not deserve.
David Marjanović @ 203:
“You needn’t take it any further, sir. You’ve proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I’ve learned me lesson, sir. I’ve seen now what I’ve never seen before. I’m cured!”
Shenpen is anthropomorphizing nature. Nature is not just. It has no concept of justice. Justice is an invention, and it is what we decide it should be.
Hear that, child born with HIV? You deserved to die.
Also not true. There are many examples like the fossil of this severely mentally handicapped child that indicate otherwise. That child could not have helped gather food like other children the same age.
He or she could not have done any of the reciprocal work expected of other children, and so in Shenpen’s imagined law of the jungle, the child could not have “deserved” the food and care he or she received from others. Nevertheless, they did care for the child, according to the child’s needs. Abandonment did not have feel like justice to them.
Yeah? So? What civilized society isn’t based to some degree on the concept of pooling resources for the greater good?
Bullshit, and bullshit again.
Contrary to left-wing laments over the alleged effects of political illiteracy and stupidity, George W. Bush won the college-educated vote in the 2000 election. What does this tell us?
Wait a second. You don’t get to translate as you feel like at the moment. Both the Latin and the German mean “his to each implicitly masculine one” and completely fail to define what “his” is – whether it’s what “he” deserves and/or what “he” needs and/or whatever.
Not sharing your education, I don’t know where that quote comes from and thus fail to see what your point is… please explain.
Bingo – and that holds for the entire concept of “justice”, including that of “deserve”.
WTF???
Watchman @ 201:
That was a slip of the keyboard – I meant to write that ethical actions presuppose responsibility.
I wonder if confusion arises because of colloquial expressions like “responsible acts” and “acting responsibly”, which are taken to refer to consideration for other individuals and the wider community, actions we consider “good”.
These sorts of acts can plausibly be explained in naturalistic terms as the product of an interaction between human empathy and demonstrable social utility. And, as you say, such acts could be seen as preceding considered reflection about them.
But responsibility – at least as I understand the term – is not a particular type of behaviour or mode of action (“good” or otherwise) but rather relates to the perception that human beings are responsible for their actions – ie that they are free moral agents. It is because a murderer is responsible for his actions that we can justly punish him. If this perception is wrong, if humans are merely part of an impersonal mechanistic process, they cannot be said to be responsible for their actions and punishment must be redefined in non-moral utilitarian terms.
+++
David Marjanović @ 220:
It’s a quotation from A Clockwork Orange and refers to a form of psychological conditioning undergone by a teenage rapist and murderer in order to prevent him acting out his violent impulses.
I wrote @ 184:
You responded @ 203:
Now there is no intrinsic reason why therapy rather than capital punishment would be favoured by a society that felt it had disproven free will. If that appears to be the case in practice today, it’s only because our mechanistically-minded society happens, at the moment, to be a liberal one.
More importantly, your distinction between “punishment” and therapy” misses the point. Even if such a free will-denying society did execute murderers, it would not be punishment at all in the traditional sense because the element of expiatory retribution would be lacking. It would be the moral equivalent of cutting a blemish from a piece of fruit or surgically removing a tumour from a patient.
Similarly, the “therapy” you speak of would bear no resemblance to traditional notions of repentance involving remorse, penance and reconciliation, all of which demand free will; instead it would be conceived of as a cure for a sickness or repair of a faulty component.
OK, who let Pilty out of his straitjacket?
danke,
Uncle BoboWolfgang!Ha! Synchronicity at its puckiest.
OK, back to scooter’s exposition of the trinity device (which itself sounds like the title of a Star Trek episode)(and which turns up all sorts of different stuff at teh Google) up at #162 for a minute. It’s interesting to me that this trope can be spun either value-neutral (reason v. emotion) or value-sodden (bad animal lust v. good conscience).
I must assume
No, you need not, but it’s a handy ad hominem way to avoid the fact that your argument was refuted.
Come on, man! Engage me, enlighten me, convince me, put your best arguments forward, show me the error of my ways.
Silly hypocrite. I did all of that by noting that no one advocated banning anything. Your retort is non-substantive, to whine about calling you a fool and a dimwit and to blather about what you must assume about me — thereby demonstrating the validity of my characterization.
“You needn’t take it any further, sir. You’ve proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I’ve learned me lesson, sir. I’ve seen now what I’ve never seen before. I’m cured!”
It would be stupid enough to use a quote from that movie to make a point even in the absence of Pauline Kael’s devastating review.
Now there is no intrinsic reason why therapy rather than capital punishment would be favoured by a society that felt it had disproven free will.
There are no intrinsic reasons for much of anything, and the disproving of free will is irrelevant.
If that appears to be the case in practice today, it’s only because our mechanistically-minded society happens, at the moment, to be a liberal one.
As if that were just a random fact, a mere roll of the dice.
Piltdown,
I find it interesting (and no doubt it’s been mentioned before by others) that your handle is that of an exposed fraud. Further, it was a fraud debunked almost immediately it was “discovered”. It just took 40 years to bury it totally and completely. Think of it like the fraud of religion being obvious from the start (to anyone that bothered to spend about 3 seconds critical thinking on the subject – and another 5 minutes to pick ourselves off the floor from laughing). It’s taken 2,000 years to expose the evil of theist rule, but the community now knows logically that there is no god. It will take a little while for this to filter through to an emotional acceptance of the fact, but it is inevitable. The god of gaps is running out of mysterious places to hide.
Idiot. As pointed out by another poster – there is a reason we live in a liberal society. I hope you like it piltdown. If you think society looks liberal now, wait until we purge this god bullshit from our laws. The problem you personally may encounter will be that once the tyranny of closed-minded dogma is identified, it has a low chance of gaining traction again (eg we are unlikely to return to accepting “rape in marriage”).
Free will is just one of many religious fictions used for marketing purposes and to reinforce guilt and sexual suppression. The inevitable penance works like a call-back subroutine.
If you don’t understand why it is wrong to kill another human, then I can only assume you have been indoctrinated into some religion from a very early age. People that grow up naturally and within a caring (or at least nurturing) environment invariably understand this point. Having archaic, homophobic and corrupt value systems drilled into children denies them their full reasoning faculties (actually insisting they reject reason for dogmatic inanities).
You and other theists truly scare me. I don’t want the like of you in a position where you would have input to any new legislation. Your respect for human life seems to hinge exclusively on another fiction – “soul” (man). Do you seriously believe you would have no morality when you finally realise there is no god? Your concept of god evaporates and you start killing? scarey stuff. get help.
repentance = theist crap
penance = more theist crap (anyway, no god, no sin)
free will required WTF???? Are you aiming for gold in the Idiot Olympics?
But basically – your point? Oh, thats right, theists think they can pray disease away, heal broken bones etc. An ex-workmate of my son’s said a friend of her brother’s (maybe it was that friend’s friend, or maybe the friend’s, friend’s friend) saw a person brought back to life by the “POWER of Teh LORD” (hallelujah, god be praised, baby jesus stopped crying).
Mental illness should be treated, not become the justification for exorcism. Misguided people should be punished, then permitted to re-enter society. Incorrigible violent criminals will always need to be isolated from society, but I would advocate incarceration rather than your inference that we should just shoot them like dogs/execute them. You seem bereft of logic, morals or any sense of compassion (god left you to your own thoughts for a few minutes, eh?)
What? Spock’s character was not intended to be a harmful stereotype… and actually, I don’t see him as emotionless either. He’s in constant struggle to keep his violent emotions under control, just as we humans should, instead of hurting and killing each other all the time. And on the WrongPlanet forum somebody quite a longtime ago pinted out that he doesn’t understand human social cues and acts very autistic-like in several situations, which has interesting implications… maybe a new, positive stereotype that could get a little more respect for autistic scientists (who also tend to be the greatest ones)?
Spock acted the way he did not because he was a scientist, or because he is a Vulcan, but because he adheres to the philosophy of Surak, which is pure rationalism. The Romulans are the descendants of Vulcans who rejected Surak’s teachings.