Philosophy – Page 10 – Me on the net

Terrorism

Terrorism. It’s a hard subject to discuss rationally, because the very essence of terrorism is to stir up emotion. Fear or terror in the populations being attacked. Exultation and joy in the terrorist organisation. Horror and disgust in those not directly affected.

It demonstrates the relativity of morality. From the point of view of the terrorists there is nothing wrong with targeting people in the streets because they are considered less than people for believing differently from the terrorist, and therefore deserve to die. From the point of view of everyone else, this is callous sickening nonsense.

An interesting argument which bring home this point is the contention that, in the Star Wars films, that the rebels, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Hans Solo and all the rest are simply terrorists and not freedom fighters at all. After all, they kill people, destroy property and cause mayhem. They consort with criminals, use violence and trickery to advance their cause.

Since we only see their side of the issue, can we be sure that the Empire is the evil entity that it is portrayed as? For all we know the Rebel Alliance may be causing untold damage within the Empire, and their support may only come from a few disaffected planets.

The Death Star in A New Hope (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, in the real world it is easy to see who the terrorists are. Targeting and killing innocent people who can’t fight back is a heinous crime and cannot be justified in any way. People who use their religion to try to justify such actions are not right in the head.

The religious bigots interpret the words of their holy book or books to justify such things as punishing women who have been raped, and stoning to death people who have been caught committing adultery.



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Some would try to excuse terrorists by pointing out that all religions tend to lead to murder and torture, and this is so. Christians have raped, tortured and killed people who subscribe to other religions. Even sectarian disputes (such as that between the Christian Protestants and Christian Catholics) frequently lead to violence between the parties involved.

Some people use such facts to argue that religion causes its adherents to perform such violence against non-believers, but it is evident that adherents to mere ideologies will on occasion torture and kill non-adherents. Nazi Germany and Communist Russia are cases in point, but even the American military has been caught using torture on prisoners.

Torture and killing, along with random bombing and shooting targeted at killing or maiming and inducing terror in a population is never justified. That’s as close to a moral absolute as there can be.

Is there something in the human psyche that makes us want to kill and harm others, perhaps. Certainly a fear of strangers is large part of our make up, especially if the stranger is large. The big guy with the leather and the tattoos may be only returning the keys which you dropped in the street, but that doesn’t help when he comes up to you.

It doesn’t take much for fear to turn into violence, but that only helps a little with understanding terrorists. It is probably true that terrorists are scared of the religion or society that they are attacking. It is likely that they are incited by religious leaders who see others’ religions or beliefs as wrong, and that they believe that the end result of their actions will be rewards in the next world and the destruction of the “evil” that they are attacking.

The idea that you will die one day is scary to some people and the concept of an after-life is some consolation for that. In general religions tend to describe the after-life as like real life, but better. Or like real life, but worse, if you contravene any of the rules and laws of the religion. That’s a powerful incentive to follow the religion, and even if you can’t fully believe in God and the after-life, Pascal’s Wager suggests that it would be a good idea to try.

Terrorists act as if they fully believe that their religion or belief is true, in an absolute sense. They act convinced that they are doing God’s work in blowing men, women and children to bits, not to mention maiming many more. They must truly believe that they are working for the greater good, and that is true of any extremist. I can’t help thinking that either the fanaticism has crowded out any common sense that they might possess or they are so fanatical because they want to squash a small amount of doubt which cannot be assuaged.

The difference between terrorist and rebels is that a rebellion mostly doesn’t bring God into it, though exceptions exist, and generally a rebel will do his/her utmost to avoid hurting those who are mere bystanders, but it is not a black and white thing. Suppose I told you that to save billions of people you would need to kill, say, a thousand people in cold blood? Most people would have a problem with that.

As an example of this sort of thing is the example of the Death Star II in Star Wars. When building something that size, the Empire would have had to have employed millions or even billions of people, depending on how far the building process could be automated. If we assume that most of them were neutral about the Empire/Alliance conflict, then they were, in the horrible phrase, collateral damage.

Obviously that’s a contrived example, but it is true, as someone once said “History is written by the winner” (variously attributed to many people). If the Empire eventually wins the Alliance will be reviled as traitors. If the Alliance wins, then the rebellion overthrew a corrupt and oppressive regime. The winning side’s acts will be whitened and the losing side’s acts will be blackened.

None of the above should be seen as an apologia for the acts of the terrorists in Paris. In that case, the situation is as clear as it can be – these were terrible acts directed at those who were not able to defend themselves, who would have no idea that they should defend themselves. Who were murdered without warning, and mowed down without mercy, by people whose sick minds were harnessed by the sick terrorist organisation behind these crimes, to cause chaos, havoc and suffering. Terrorist pawns who were recruited from among the very people that they massacred.

The muse

(Whoops! I forgot to post this on Monday, though I had finished it on Sunday)

My musings are generally thought up on the spur of the moment, as I’ve said before. Sometimes I get an idea a few days before I write my post, but sometimes it will come to me when I open WordPress and click on the “new post” link. Today’s post is inspired by a new television show that has just started here, about someone who writes a newspaper column. “Inspired” is too grand a word for it really – the TV show gave me the idea.

I’ve set myself a target of a thousand words per week. The writer in the TV series (called “800 Words“) has a column that is exactly 800 words long. He has just suffered a bereavement and decides to take his kids and relocate to a small town in New Zealand.

Naturally the kids don’t want to go, and when he gets to his new home, it’s only half built and it isn’t the house that he thought it was. On the trip to the new house he meets a bunch of eccentric locals and stumbles on the local nudist beach. So far, so standard sitcom. I’ll have to see how it goes, but it has apparently gone down well in Australia.

The interesting thing to me, for the purposes of this blog, is the 800 words thing. OK, I set myself a target of over 1000 words, and I generally don’t go many words over that, but to keep it to exactly 800 words seems a bit obsessive. The writer, as part of the continuity of the story, is seen typing his article, and the number of words is shown on the screen.



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Now, I don’t (usually) take much notice of the structure of my blogs – I don’t do an intro, a body, and a wrap up, but I presume the writer does (or is supposed) as he is writing for a newspaper. That’s more complicated than what I do. I can imagine reaching around 900 words and realising that I need to do a wrap up in 100 words or so. Or worse, maybe, reaching 750 to 800 words and realising that you’ve covered your main points and the wrap up is going to have to be stretched to 200 to 250 words.

Of course he is a professional writer so such matters are his bread and butter. This brings me to another point. He gets paid for his column, and apparently gets paid enough to feed himself and his kids! This is slightly more than a little bit unbelievable, to say the least, as what he is shown writing amounts to not much more than a blog. If he writes 800 words a day, 5 days a week that amounts to 4,000 words, and his rate per word would have to be astronomical to keep him and his kids fed and watered.



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The writers of the series have thrown in a few classic clichés in the first episode. There’s the end of the world cell phone coverage or lack of it. There’s the being swindled by the savvy locals, and there’s the saving the bad boy by hiding him from the cops thing. Oh well, perhaps things will get better. It’s not that bad a little show.

The writer in the show is inspired to write about all the things that are happening to him, so he has a ready source of material but my intent is not to make my blog anecdotal in that way. I might mention stuff in passing (like the Rugby World Cup. Yeah! All Blacks!) but in general I want my post to be like a bead necklace with beads on a wire, rather than a single long chain of interrelated links.

Cloisonne beads (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, I will use the same themes repeatedly, such as science or maths or computing, just as a bead necklace generally has similar beads in many places but my intent is that each “bead” will stand alone.

I get messages from WordPress saying that so and so is now following my blog, but I don’t know what that really means. Does it mean that Mr Blobby is avidly waiting for my blog to come out and is disappointed if I am late? Probably not! But thank you for reading the blog, even if you only do it once. I do occasionally go and look at the blogs of those who are mentioned as following me and I may follow some of them.

Start of the Oracle Act (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nevertheless, I write my posts with no specific reader in mind. By that I mean that I don’t visualise a person reading, which is odd, because that means that I send my words off into a vacuum. They must however sound good to me, as I write them, and if something that sounds awkward to me reaches the page, it gets altered.

Actually now I come to think about it, the “me” that writes the words seems to be different, or slightly separated from the “me” that does the reading, like Siamese twins in my head. It’s like a different aspect of myself.

For me the actual process of writing goes like this. I form a sentence or part of a sentence in my head and start to type it. My reading self closely follows this process and notices any typos and mistakes and my writing self corrects them, but these things happen so fast and the two processes are so integrated that it seems seamless.

It’s like an ongoing game of ping pong in my head. One part of my mind says to type the word “the”. Another part tells the fingers what to do. I’m unaware or maybe unconscious of what this part is doing, and I specifically don’t think “move the fingers to the letter t and push”. So far as the conscious part of my mind is concerned it just happens.



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The fingers move and the letters get typed. Another conscious part of my mind follows the letters that appear on the screen and passes off to an unconscious part the instructions to edit and retype. After a person has been writing for a while, it seems to your conscious mind that you think the words onto the screen.

Hmm, I’ve reached just over a 1000 words, so it is time to stop. I’ve shifted from talking about the muse and shifted to the mechanics. Either way the process is, as usual, more complex than it appears at first. I’ll have to think some more about how my words reach the page.



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A pain in the…

Everyone has experienced pain at some time, even it is caused by a simple knock or scratch. Many people have experienced pain over the whole range from mild to excruciating. Of course it is impossible to know what another is experiencing so we compare pains by saying that a pain is like, for example, toothache, or that it is a stabbing pain.

We still don’t know exactly what others feel. As JLS sings “Do you feel what I feel?”. But we might have some idea, by comparison with our own experience. Another way that doctors use is to ask the patient to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to ten. as in this case the doctors can usually assess the type of pain. But they will sometimes ask if the pain is stabbing, pricking, aching, or whatever.



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There is no doubt that pain, real pain, is an intense feeling. but our memories of pain that we have experienced seem curiously muted. If you think back to a time when you were injured, however, you will probably not be able to exactly how intense the experience was. I recall from somewhere that a mother, reflecting on the whole process of child-bearing said of the pain that if mothers could remember how it felt to give birth then it would be unlikely that there would be any second or third babies in a family.

Just as one remembers some life events and forgets others, seemingly at random, we may remember some injuries and forget others. I remember vividly scraping my skin on a rock which resulted in a nice scar, but I don’t remember the pain that I must have suffered when I received another scar, on my hand this time. It could of course simply be that the second injury happened decades before the first, and the memory of the pain may have simply faded. I think that there is more to it than that, though I don’t know what, exactly.



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When a predator brings down its prey, say a lion captures a gazelle, it may often start to feed on the prey even though it might not yet be completely dead. This seems to us, today, to be cruel, but some people say that the prey doesn’t experience the pain as its brain switches off the pain and its consciousness, as a result of the shock. I’m not sure that this isn’t wishful thinking with nature thereby being thought of as “being kind” to the prey.

I put the scare quotes in there because it is gross anthropomorphism to say that. Nature is neither kind nor cruel. Also, on the rare occasion that a prey animal is accidentally freed by the predator, the prey will immediately try to escape, which it would not if it were stunned by the shock of its capture.



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Nevertheless, there is something in the idea. People who have been stabbed or shot sometimes say that they thought that someone has hit them and that they were unaware that they had been stabbed or shot. This could be for a number of reasons. The nerves that affected by such puncturing wounds pain are mainly located on the surface of the skin, and a projectile or blade may affect only a few of them. When a person notices that they have been stabbed, they may suddenly experience the pain.

My experience backs this up. I have found that even a quite deep cut may not hurt until you notice it. A burn, however, is usually felt very quickly. In fact the body’s response to a burn is an almost immediate recoil.

Some pain, organ or visceral pain, happens deep inside the body. It’s the pain of appendicitis for example, or of gall bladder disease to name just two examples out of many. It may be difficult to tell which organ is affected as the pain may seem to be located in a different location from the affected organ. For instance in appendicitis the pain may start towards the middle of the abdomen rather than at the side where the appendix is located.

A different category of pain is mental pain. This is distinct from physical pain, though the two types may be linked as pain can affect the emotions, either directly through the autonomic nervous system, or indirectly through the sufferer’s physical restrictions caused by the pain, such as frustration, anxiety and other symptoms.



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Mental pain is often likened to physical pain, as when grief is described in terms of physical pain and other symptoms. To someone who has suddenly been bereaved it often seems very much like a physical blow, and physical effects such as weight loss, nausea, sweating and feeling cold are all possible. I believe that mental pain can be as deeply felt as physical pain.

While we have pain killers for physical pain which can be targeted at specific symptoms and even organs, treatments for mental pain seem to me to be primitive in comparison. I need to add a disclaimer here, as I am not a medical practitioner nor have I experienced grief or other deep mental pain, so I simply do not know for sure if what I said above is true.



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I do know that treatment for depression, which I suffer from now and then, appears to be effective, but there appear to be as many treatment and drugs as there are people suffering from the disease. Again, this is my non-medical view and I may be unaware of why there seem to be so many treatments for one condition. There may be reasons.

One other thing from my random stroll through the topic of pain – we seem to be able to feel things outside of our bodies. Amputees often report feeling itching and pain in their removed limbs or parts of limbs. This is known as “phantom pain“, and strangely it can be helped by superimposing an image of the patient’s intact limb over the absent or partial limb.

The phantom limb pain obviously arises in the mind and the mirror trick fools the mind somehow into thinking that the limb is intact again. Of course, all pain is, fundamentally, in the mind, but apparently the mind can be fooled into firstly creating the phantom pain and secondly, into forgetting it, even though the patient knows that the limb has been damaged.

The reason for pain seems obvious – the body (or mind) is damaged in some way, and the pain is a signal that something needs to be done. But this simplistic answer doesn’t cover a lot of cases – the phantom pain of an amputated limb, for example. Nothing can be done about such pain, so why do we feel it? I think that I need to do some reading!

Atoms versus Electrons

English: Underside of a DVD-R disc, modified t... — English: Underside of a DVD-R disc, modified to have transparent background. Français : Dessous d’un DVD (sur fond transparent) Frysk: DVD/dûbelskiif (Unterkant) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In “Being Digital” by Nicolas Negroponte, he touches in the Introduction on the irony of printing a physical book whose theme is the digital world and how we are moving holus bolus into it. Most human activities can be performed on line, and at the moment that we want to do them. We can watch a movie, do our banking and communicate face to face with others, and many other social things.

Nevertheless, there persists in many people a strong desire to do things the non-digital way. People go to the cinema to sit in uncomfortable seats, eat over expensive popcorn, to crane their necks at huge images on a vast screen and be blasted with a (usually) over loud sound track. They presumably return home, having breathed the same air and germs as dozens of others for a couple of hours, with ringing ears and throbbing heads.

The Westgarth Cinema, former home of the Valha... — The Westgarth Cinema, former home of the Valhalla, as it was in 2004 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why? They could have caught the same movie while sitting in their own comfortable chairs at home, with the volume set to a comfortable level, eating whatever snacks they fancy, all without the hassles of driving to the cinema, finding and paying for parking, going through ticketing and most importantly, at a time of their own choosing.

Why indeed. Mostly I think that it is the sense of occasion, of doing something special, that drives us to visit cinemas and theatres. There is the excitement of getting up and going out there, being social, going to an actual cinema, buying and eating actual popcorn and ice blocks, sitting in a seat made damp and sticky by some previous customer, of being blasted out of one’s seat by the sound system and blinded by the brightness of the pictures on the screen.

At one time it used to be that new movies would only released into cinemas, and they would then be circulated through the cinema chains, so you might wait, literally, years to see a particular movie. Less popular movies may not even have reached local cinemas if they did not make enough money.

While they were not a digital medium, video tapes started to erode the monopoly that the cinemas held. The local video store became an institution. Movies good or bad could be obtained locally, and the only restriction imposed by the movie companies was that tapes were not released for movies that were circulating in the cinemas.

Of course, the movie companies could not keep new movies under wraps for too long before illegal copies of their “blockbusters” became available so the delay before movies reached local outlets were reduced. A new category of movies – “straight to video” – became common. These were movies which the movie studios made which did not warrant being released through the cinema chains.

Video technology proved to be a mostly transient phenomenon. DVD and later Blue Ray technology was developed and this was true digital technology. A movie could be pressed onto one or two disks, and sound and video quality was hugely improved over both cinema and video tape technology. The era of the “Home Theatre” was born.



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Both video tapes and DVDs were susceptible to copying. This causes huge issues for the movie studios as, from their point of view, a DVD copied is one less DVD sold, and thus copying was, in their view, cutting into their profits. As a result, the DVD producers started encrypting their products, but of course they needed to let their customers view the DVDs that they have purchased.

It is likely that this encryption, plus the threat of prosecution for illegal copying deterred many people from casual copying, but a small minority are determined to circumvent such barriers, which they saw as preventing them from doing “legitimate” copying, for example for backup purposes. When a single game may cost more than $100, and a single scratch could render the disk useless, they argue that a backup of the DVD is essential.



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One of Negroponte’s main points was that we are switching from transporting physical objects (atoms) to transferring only digital data (bits), and piracy is a case in point. It is easy to transfer the contents of a DVD if you can decrypt it and copying is merely the matter of a couple of clicks. Pirated (or decrypted) games will circulate on the Internet within hours of their release.

On the other hand, some enterprising software firms actually distribute their software on the Internet for anyone to download. All that you have to do is pay for the key to decrypt it. Others have found that if you allow someone to play a game, that if they like it enough they will pay for boost and assists as they play the game. These are known as “in app purchases” and are common in phone and tablet app downloaded for free.



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Much the same applies in the world of books. Most books are available in digital or ebook form and some people download thousands of free or decrypted ebooks are store them on their handheld devices. It makes me wonder if they are even going to read any of them, as I have about half a dozen books that I have downloaded which I haven’t got around to reading yet. Maybe this is a collector passion and not bibliophilia as such!

Some people do get a lot of pleasure from reading real books. They love the heft, the smell, the texture of a real book and this love of physical books may fade as people get used to reading on a screen, until, one day perhaps, real books will seem quaint and old-fashioned, just cinemas and theatres are tending to become.

I like the digital media, especially the subset of digital media that I can store on my computers. I like being able to watch what I want when I want to watch it. I like the easy portability of digital media. Although I can see the attraction of watching Robbie Williams or Lady Gaga in the flesh, I’ll pass on that and maybe watch them on YouTube instead, where I can watch their performance virtually, with clarity, with good sound. The mosh pit can have it to themselves!

Trust

English: Feathers and wedges are being used to... — English: Feathers and wedges are being used to split a large slab of sandstone. A three pound sledge hammer is being used to drive the wedges into holes drilled in the stone. The crack is just visible as a ragged line connecting the holes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing”. Sledge Hammer’s famous line encapsulates many things about trust in its seven words. The ironic twist is that the first iconic series ends with Hammer saying the words as he tries to dismantle an atomic bomb. He is not successful!

Trust is a belief that the person or thing that is trusted can be relied upon to do what is promised. There is trust between you and the bank. You trust them to look after the money that you hand over to them to invest and maybe pay you some interest. You also trust them to give you the money back when you request it. There may be conditions on the investment, such as minimum deposit periods or maximum withdrawals, interest rates and so on, but fundamentally you can get you money back.

California Bank & Trust Building in LA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Similarly the bank may loan you money, under conditions, which you can use to purchase a house, or a boat, or for any other reasons. They trust you to pay back the loan sooner or later, together with interest, and have the right to pursue you through the law if you don’t repay it.

The money in your pocket requires you to trust in it. After all the value of ordinary coins and notes in terms of the metal and paper is negligible, although gold sovereigns are nowadays worth much more than their nominal one pound sterling. Every coin or note represents something much more nebulous than the distinct coins and notes. Early notes had a “promise to pay” written on them, with the signature of a financial authority to encourage people to trust in them as money.

Hammer’s exhortation implies that his companions don’t trust him, which is ironic because, in a back-handed, gun-related way, he usually did. As is evidenced by the way that he encouraged a suicidal jumper to abandon his intents by shooting chunks out of the ledge that the jumper was standing on. His companions’ distrust was related to the non-standard way that he approached problems and their prior knowledge of his previous actions in such circumstances.

As in Hammer’s case, when two or more people interact, they need to trust each other in many ways. Threats are promises of harm, and there may be promises of benefits. Two people may form an alliance against a joint threat, and in such a case they need to trust each other. Each one trusts the other to back them up.

Often conditions are written down in the form of a contract. All the things that are expected by both parties, that are promised by both parties, or as many of them as can be, are written down, and both parties make their mark or sign the document. The contract can be authorised by a third-party or each party may merely carry away a copy of the document.

A contract strengthens the trust between two parties. If a contract in place, goes the reasoning, then all parties know exactly what is required of them, and what the consequences are if one party or another doesn’t do what is required. If there is complete trust between two parties, then no contract would be required, of course, but there never is complete trust.



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However we trust other people all the time without contracts or other documentation. In fact we are sometimes too trusting. Sometimes nefarious characters arrive on our doorsteps and we let them in if they, for example, claim to be from the Gas Board. It is recommended that we always ask for proof of identity if someone who we don’t know knocks on the door. Of course we have to trust the proof of identification if any is proffered, and it could conceivably be faked.

This brings up and issue about trust – we can never be absolutely sure that we can trust someone. We could know someone very very well and still not be absolutely sure that we can completely trust them. The extent to which we cannot completely trust them may be very very small of course.

We cannot even completely trust someone when we have a contract with them. Unexpected occurrences may occur which are not covered by the contract, but relate the the matter that the contract covers. If one of the parties to the contract dies then what happens to the provisions of the contract? Well, there are laws, of course, that relate to contractual matters and it may be that lawyers are needed to sort such matters out.

There’s another sort of trust, other than trust between people. We trust the laws of science. If we throw something up into the air we expect it to come down again. We expect and trust that the sun will come up tomorrow, and it appears that we are justified in our trust. Through many millennia we have trusted that the whole is a sensible logical place where everything has a cause and cause and effect go hand in hand.



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There is a dissenting voice and that voice is the voice of religion. Religions espouse the concert of miracles, that is occasions when the laws of nature are violated, as for instance, water is changed to wine, or a flood covers and destroys the whole earth.

We may trust that the world is a logical place, but we cannot prove that it is. If we keep throwing stones into the air, it is conceivable that one might not come down again. While we can verify that throwing stones into the continues to work, we may for some reason experience a case where the stone does not fall to the ground again.



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If the stone doesn’t come down, our instinct is to look for a reason why it did not, rather than suspect that the law of gravity has been repealed. We trust the law of gravity. The stone may have lodged on a roof of course, or been caught by a passing bird. After we have considered all the possibilities then we might suspect that the law of gravity as we know it has failed.

So we pass it over to the physicists to look into the matter, and they would ponder and experiment, and eventually, we hope come up with a modification to the law of gravity to cover our “special case”. And we can trust the law of gravity again. For now.

Animation showing the motion of a small body (... — Animation showing the motion of a small body (green) in an elliptic orbit around a much more massive body (blue). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, the question arises, when we have found out all that there is to know about the Universe and so be able to predict anything with 100% accuracy. Well, suppose our knowledge of the laws of the Universe is 80% accurate. There’s an old adage that says that the first 80% of anything takes 80% of the time, and the remaining 20% also takes 80% of the time. In other words it is feasible that we could know all the laws of the universe and be able to apply them, but there probably isn’t enough time.

In the meantime, I’m going to trust that the sun is going to come up tomorrow, as, after all 80% is still pretty good!

Why Philosophers are Never Asked to Parties



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The philosopher went to a party. He grabbed a drink and looked around. After a while he looked around again and started to frown. His host came up to him and asked him why he was looking puzzled. The philosopher replied that he wasn’t sure that he was at a party.

The host looked around and everyone was chatting, drinking and eating or dancing. Music was playing and the lights had been dimmed. The host asked him why he wasn’t sure, and the philosopher replied that, while it appeared that he was at a party, he couldn’t be sure that he was, because it could be that, in spite of appearances, he wasn’t at a party and that all the people here could be merely pretending that it was a party.

English: Saul Kripke (philosopher) on juquehy ... — English: Saul Kripke (philosopher) on juquehy beach (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, if he asked anyone, they would say that it was a party, but they would say that whether or not it really was a party. When the host asked why anyone would go to the trouble to set up a fake party, he stated that he didn’t know, but if he could determine that it was a fake party, then that would be the next question. If it proved to be a real party then he could relax and enjoy himself. At this point that the philosopher found himself alone, as his host had left him to his musings.

There’s a saying that “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”. This saying satisfies most people most of the time, but (philosophers aside) doesn’t satisfy everyone, all of the time.

When a top politician is replaced mid-term, the person who replaces him or her often showers praise on him or her, and states how much the party is in debt to the “retiring” politician, who may be stepping down to “spend more time with family”, most people would recognise this for what it is, a political coup. Few would believe that the top politician wanted to resign and that he or she really had a choice.

In this case the metaphorical bird is most likely a turkey, but everyone insists that it is a duck. Even though it doesn’t look like a duck and doesn’t quack like a duck, and doesn’t even walk like a duck.

It’s pretty easy for us to detect the coup for what it is and mostly the media will report it as a coup, but the sceptical philosopher has no easy way to determine if he should relax and enjoy himself or go home. He knows about the political coup and sees this happen fairly often. Something happens and it is presented in one way, and everyone knows that this “duck” is not in fact a duck. So, why could not the same be true about the party?

The basic question that underlies the philosopher’s dilemma is “How do we know what we know?”, which a branch of philosophy that philosophers call “Epistemology“. When we read in the papers that a top politician has stepped down, or we go to a party, most people are quite aware of what is going on. We base our awareness on previous knowledge of prior political coups and previous parties.

English: Cartoon expression of Frank Jackson's... — English: Cartoon expression of Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. One of the popular thought-experiment discussed in philosophers of mind. 日本語: 心の哲学における有名な思考実験。マリーの部屋。 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are quite happy to apply the negative (he didn’t really want to resign) and the positive (it’s a great party!) to these situations based on experience. The philosopher can’t do that, as this leads to the “problem of induction”. Maybe in the last three coups the politician didn’t want to resign, and maybe the last three gatherings were in fact parties, but this time it may be different and the philosopher has the problem of knowing one way or the other.

Well, actually the philosopher has the problem of needing to know one way or the other. A true philosopher is a sceptical about everything he sees or hears or otherwise experiences, but there is a fundamental problem with the issue of “knowing”.

English: Knowledge, mural by Robert Lewis Reid... — English: Knowledge, mural by Robert Lewis Reid. Second Floor, North Corridor. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Caption underneath reads: IGNORANCE IS THE CVRSE OF GOD KNOWLEDGE IS THE WING WHEREWITH WE FLY TO HEAVEN. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you tell a philosopher that the sun will rise tomorrow, he or she may ask you how you know it will. If you reply that you know it because the sun came up yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, the philosopher will question how you know that what happened in the past will happen will happen in the future. He will point out that if you toss a coin and it turns up heads three times in a row, that it doesn’t mean that it will turn up heads the next time it is tossed. It’s a 50:50 chance that that it will come up tails.

If you then appeal to science the philosopher can point out that science is built on theories and experiments to disprove them. No experiment can prove a theory as such because you can do as many experiments as you like which turn out to agree with the theory and the philosopher can suggest that one more experiment might disprove the theory, and if it does, bang goes the theory.

Actually, if a theory is any good, then it won’t be completely destroyed by an experiment that goes against the theory. No, it is more likely that the theory is patched up to take account of the errant data, and the process goes on. Also if the theory is any good any experiment which contradicts it is likely to happen at the extremes of the domain of the theory, and it can be usefully used for the vast majority of cases that don’t occur in those extremes.

What about the philosopher at the party? He can prove one way or another that the gathering is really a party, and not something else. His host has a couple of options at least. Firstly he can suggest that the philosopher takes it as a working hypothesis that it really is a party. Then he can take part, and if he enjoys himself, that doesn’t disprove the working hypothesis. Secondly the host can find another philosopher and introduce the two, who can then jointly discuss the validity of the hypothesis (that it is a real party).

Or thirdly, he can avoid asking a philosopher to any of his parties.



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Consciousness continues to amaze and elude



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I make no excuse for returning to the topic of consciousness. It’s a phenomenon that, apparently, everyone experiences, and almost certainly some animals experience it too. However, it is the ultimate in subjectiveness. No one except yourself knows how you experience consciousness.

It can’t currently be measured and we can only detect it by the behaviour of a person. The old chestnut of a comatose patient coming round with hovering relatives and medical staff is familiar to all. “He’s coming round!” says a person at the bedside as the patient’s eyes flicker and his muscles twitch.

English: Man in coma still not responding to s... — English: Man in coma still not responding to stimuli. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is not a reliable way of determining consciousness. People have surfaced from comas or anaesthetics and have reported that contrary to the physical evidence they were in fact conscious for at least some of the time when they were comatose. Also, deep brain scans have shown changes which may indicate that the patient was responding to question in that his brain patterns changed, which has led to a medical furore. There is disagreement as to whether or not the changes in the brain indicate that the patient was in fact conscious.

Definition of “Conscious”

1.

a. Characterized by or having an awareness of one’s environment and one’s own existence, sensations,and thoughts. See Synonyms at aware.

b. Mentally perceptive or alert; awake: The patient remained fully conscious after the local anesthetic was administered.

2. Capable of thought, will, or perception: the development of conscious life on the planet.

The fact that consciousness is an objective phenomenon (so far as we can currently tell) means that we can only subjectively assess if it exists in a person. Even if a person behaves as if he or she were conscious, feeling pain, drinking beer, doing all the things that a conscious person would do, how does one know that this person is actually a conscious person? It is conceivable that what looks like a person is a sort of zombie, programmed to behave exactly like a conscious person would behave.

(These philosophical zombies are not like the usual cinematic concept of a zombie – they look like ordinary people, they have not died and revivified, bits do not fall off them, and they don’t have a hunger for brains. It’s a technical philosophical term).

The short answer is that there is currently no objective was to tell. Everyone except yourself might be a zombie. Erm, although I subjectively know that I am not, which might mean that I am the only conscious person in a world of zombies. It’s probably simplest to argue, that I am conscious, and I appear to be little different to everyone else, so it would be silly to argue that everyone else is a zombie. It’s much more likely that we are all subjectively conscious in our own heads.



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Consciousness appears to be an aspect of the brain/mind. If parts of the brain are destroyed, or momentarily shocked by a blow, consciousness ceases and the person becomes unconscious. As above, though, it is conceivable that a person might not be able to move or respond, but still be conscious in the prison of their skull. It sounds like a particularly unpleasant fate.

Consciousness appears to be an emergent property of the brain/mind, because there does not appear to be a particular part of the brain that is related to consciousness as such. I think that it is fair to say this, though I haven’t delved into the subject much recently, though I do read things as I write these posts. In doing this I read an article on The Time website which hits many of the same high notes as I’ve hit here. It’s nice when I find an article that does that!

An emergent phenomenon is something like a family or a sports team or a termite nest. The emergent phenomenon is not implicit in individual members of the family or the sports team or the termite nest, but all the members make up a new entity which has an identity of its own.

Emergent phenomenon rely on the synergistic effect of all the members working in a concerted way to achieve more than a single individual can achieve by themselves. (Emergent phenomenon are not restricted to social interactions – water is wet, though an individual water molecule cannot really be considered to be wet in itself).

Synergy-reaching-with-kite (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It follows that, just as the higher animals band together into families, bands and packs, which is an emergent phenomenon seen in humans societies, that the brains/minds of some animals are likely to experience the emergent phenomenon of consciousness, as they behave as if they do. It is highly unlikely that consciousness only evolved in one species, though of course it is possible.

Opponents of the idea that animals may exhibit consciousness suggest that we are anthropomorphising when we detect conscious behaviour in animals, and that they may be be zombies (in the philosophical sense of the word), and that the apparent consciousness is merely behaviours that are instinctive.

Of course, no one knows for sure if animals do experience consciousness or not. I rather feel that it is likely that they do, and the extent to which they do is determined by how sophisticated their minds and brains. Certainly, I feel it is unlikely that consciousness is controlled by a genetic on/off switch and that it evolved in animals in the same way as any other trait, that is gradually, and our near relatives on the genetic tree are to some extent at least conscious.

If this is so, then consciousness in animals other than ourselves inform ethics – we should treat animals as if they are conscious beings, as far as we can. I read a science fiction story once in which every being on the earth got a boost in brain function as a result of the earth leaving any area of space where a brake was put on brain function by some physical field or similar phenomenon.



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The human race immediately became super-intelligent, and apes became at least as intelligent and conscious as we were. Also other animals, which we used as food sources became to some extent aware. As the story ended one of the characters was musing on this fact and suggested that maybe a religion of self-sacrifice could be given to these animals so that we could continue to eat them. I’d suspect that, more likely, the human race would become vegetarian! Or possibly, as suggested in the story, we would employ the apes to do the dirty work for us.

Seeing things



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I sometimes suspect that I return to the same topics time and again. Not too often I hope, because that will put people off reading this blog (in case anyone does!) This is possibly a topic which I may have already addressed, but hopefully this post will be interesting anyway.

It seems obvious to me that we all see things differently, and I’m talking about vision here, not “seeing” as a philosophical point of view. Some are short sighted, some long sighted, and others have impaired vision. I see a colour as a shade of blue, while my wife sees it as a shade of green.

One could argue that the difference is merely where the line is drawn, but I think that it is more than that. Apart from the physical differences in the lenses of our our eyes, we may have differences in the physical structure of the rest of our eyes, perhaps in the rods and the cones, and it is highly likely that the physical structures of our brains are different, and our minds (which I think of as the software that runs of the hardware of the brain) are definitely different.

It’s no surprise then that my wife and I disagree on whether a colour is a shade of blue or of green. (Actually we disagree about a lot of things. I believe that it goes with being married for 40+ years!)

Plymouth Valiant 100 of some 40 years ago seen... — Plymouth Valiant 100 of some 40 years ago seen on street in New Orleans (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Googling around as I write this post I found an article about the brain’s colour processor. Interestingly it has a section entitled “Color is Personal” which is a part of my theme for this post. This section, however, is not really relevant to my theme as the author then discusses Achromatopsia, where damage to the colour processor causes all sensation of colour to disappear.

It seems that even in our own brains and thinking processes the idea of colour is not fixed. I read another article which describes our own personal perception of colours as “malleable”. The implication of this is that a person might describe a colour as “a shade of green” one day, and “a shade of blue” on another day. Is there no hope of a definitive answer?

A physicist could help us out, couldn’t he/she? He/she could measure the frequency of the light and say, definitively, that the colour is blue, or it is green, couldn’t he/she? Well, sort of. This would work for very simple colours, but real world colours are rarely made up of just one colour. The scientist’s scope would likely show a range of frequencies resembling a mountain range. That blue/green colour might have traces or red or violet, and is fairly certain to have more than one peak in the blue/green range.

Albert Einstein showed us that if a scientist was moving at a high speed relative to us, he/she would measure the frequencies in the colour differently from a scientist whose spectroscope was alongside us and not moving or moving at the same speed as us.

General Relativity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The ambient light has an effect on the colours that we perceive. A red object in red light doesn’t look red. Other objects of different colours look different in a red light. Similarly, it is difficult to determine the colours of cars and other objects under the yellow/orange sodium lights. According to Wikipedia, the colour of a street light has effects other than simple colour perception – it appears to affect peripheral vision. New LED technology may be able to remove some of these deficiencies.

There are innumerable effects which affect or perception of colour. The most recently famous illusion is the dress which appears to people to be either black and blue or white and gold, but there are many such illusions. One which I came across a long time ago is the chessboard illusion. In this illusion, two square appear to be different colours, but are in fact the same colour. This illusion is usually shown in monochrome, but the illusion works in colour too, and depends on the shadow of the cylinder to produce the effect.



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One brain is very like any other brain. When a scientist shows someone a colour on a card, the same areas of the brain show activity in all individuals, if we exclude some cases where brain function is abnormal for some reason. We can’t delve very much deeper into this issue as we don’t know what this activity signifies, beyond the bare fact that the person was shown a card with a colour on it. We certainly can’t tell if they see it as a shade of blue or a shade of green, and we can’t tell what their subjective experience is when the brain activity occurs.

In some individuals a number or letter may invoke a sensation of colour. Such people might have the sensation of seeing something green when they think of or read the number 6. I don’t know if this imprinted behaviour because the person was presented with a green symbol when first learning their numbers or whether or not it was merely a chance association that arose at a different time, or indeed if it was because of some neurological happening or trauma that has allowed the association to happen.

Anyhow, when we see something, there are many stages to the process that starts with light leaving the object, reaching our eyes, being refracted by the lens of the eye to form an image on the retina at the back of the eye, being sensed by the rods and cone cells in the retina, and sending signals to the brain, which then processes the data.

The amazing thing here is that the image sent to the brain is pretty messy. The eye is not a perfect sphere, the retina is curved in three dimensions and the resolution is pretty rubbish. The retina has at least one major gap in it, rods and cones are not evenly distributed across the retina. Our perception however, is smooth and break free. We have our image processing hardware and software in the brain to that for that.

It means we can watch a soccer match, and we can see the black and white panels or the ball rotating as it spins across the television screen, when the unprocessed image that reaches our eyes may be quite blurred. Seeing is believing!



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Spring is in the Air

English: Graeme Crosby at Pukekohe race track ... — English: Graeme Crosby at Pukekohe race track in New Zealand on 17 April 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the race track of the year, spring is the bendy bit just before the long fast straight of summer. You have left the tedious long drag of the back straight of winter and you are looking forward to being able to blithely put the foot down before, eventually braking for the twists and turn of autumn.

Spring promises a lot, daffodils, apple and cherry blossom, even the first flush of grass that requires you to dig the mower out of the shed or garage. It carefully doesn’t promise sudden drops to what feels like arctic temperatures and gales that knock trees over! One term for spring weather is “changeable”. It doesn’t promise equinoctial gales, though apparently there is no real evidence for any such thing.

When we pass the magic date of September 1, it becomes officially spring, but no one told the weather. We try and persuade ourselves that the weather this week is better than the weather last week, and sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

As spring wears on the signs of the approach of summer start to appear. The length of the day increases, and spring flowers start to blossom. I like to watch the deciduous trees come into leaf. First the buds swell, and then they burst into vivid green clusters of leaves, firstly quite pale as the leaf’s internal factories start manufacturing chlorophyll, and then darker green as the chlorophyll builds up in the leaves.



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Some trees, like the cherry and apple trees seem to favour blossom over leaves at the start of the blossoming season. The little new leaves are there, on the apple trees, but they are overshadowed by the mass of blossom. Cherry trees appear to be all blossom. They are not the only ones – magnolias trees blossom before bearing leaves. The rather showy magnolia flowers appear before the leaves and quickly fall apart to carpet the ground with rapidly btowning petals.

Daffodils spring up, again promising better weather to come, and temperatures do start to slowly rise, but not without a few cooler spells as a nod back to winter. On the warmer days, I’ve seen Monarch butterflies tempted out of hibernation, but it’s a dangerous time for Monarchs. I seen those that failed because they are caught by a cold snap or because they have exhausted the reserve built up in the autumn, lying dead on the grass.

Other birds and animals become more active, like the Tuis brawling in the trees like a bunch of youths fuelled by testosterone. Moreporks become more active in the night, though their calls never really stop the whole year round. All birds ramp up their activities.

Spring is a time for lambs. Usually they will have been born for a month or more when spring starts, but late comers will still be found and the early comers are still quite small, leaving them very vulnerable to a late cold snap.

If I’ve made Spring appear bleak, it isn’t really. The lengthening of the days as well as the increases in temperature make the nicer days very pleasant, and one can slowly, layer by later, reduce the stifling amounts of winter clothing, with the prospect, round the corner, of the much lighter styles of summer.

With food being shipped around the world these days, the so-called summer vegetables can be purchased the year round, though in the depths of winter some vegetables attract premium prices, and out of season produce can be somewhat lacking in flavour. But soon enough more local vegetables come into season and prices fall and flavour improves.



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I just noticed that the Vernal (spring) Equinox is nearly here. It will be on September 23 at 8:22pm NZST. This of course means that the day and the night will be approximately the same length, 12 hours, on that day, and from then on until the Autumnal Equinox in March days will be longer than the nights. Nights will shrink to 8 hours and 50 minutes at the Summer Solstice.

We move to daylight saving time (NZDT) at the end of the month. The clocks go forward so we lose an hour in bed! Never mind, it’s another sign that summer is on its way. The dog will enjoy getting his food an hour earlier too.

In the autumn we expected the temperatures to start to fall, but if they don’t for a day or two, and summer temperatures persist, we sometimes call this an “Indian Summer”. I don’t think that there is a similar term for a late cold period except perhaps a “cold snap”. Of course, there may well be an unseasonably warm period in early spring, which causes plants to bloom or animals to come out of hibernation early. Hopefully this would not be followed by deep cold, which would spell disaster for the animals and plants.

Weather forecasting is not capable of predicting the onset of cold or warm periods, but long term trends are able to be predicted, though only in terms of probability. One such prediction involves something called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and the effect leads to changes to the patterns of weather over the country. The western areas tend to get more rainfall and the eastern areas tend get less, to the extent that drought conditions ensue. It is likely according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology that the current El Niño effect may continue into next year.

While this promises a golden summer in the east of the country and a wetter time in the west, this is not good news for dairy farmers, who have been struggling as a result of the global downturn in dairy prices. Farmers who plant crops will also be hit, as they will need to provide water from other sources, such as bores, irrigation schemes, or they may even have to truck water in. Lack of water will also affect power generation, and also tap water.



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It seems strange writing that, since at the moment we are experiencing a period of wet weather over much of the country as a low pressure weather system has stalled over the country, becoming disconnected from the systems that move lows and highs across the country. So we are stuck with wet weather for the next few days.

Never mind. This may, hopefully, be winter’s last gasp. We are probably tracking through the first chicane of spring, and the rest of the season will see a general improvement until we turn the final corner and accelerate into summer.



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Trains, boats and planes

Refugees arrive in Travnik, central Bosnia, du... — Refugees arrive in Travnik, central Bosnia, during the Yugoslav wars, 1993. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a horrifying refugee crisis going on in Europe where floods of people from the Middle East are trying to get into the richer and stabler countries like Germany and the UK. They are fleeing wars and persecutions in their own countries, and are paying ruthless individuals to transport them mainly in overloaded boats from Asia to Europe.

Tragically, people are being killed in this process, as people are stifled in trucks and drowned falling from boats or suffering similar misfortunes. I haven’t heard of cases, but it would not surprise me to learn that unscrupulous have been killing refugees and taking whatever small possessions that they have.

Children of the United Kingdom's Children's Mi... — Children of the United Kingdom’s Children’s Migrant Programme (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Whether a person is a refugee or merely a migrant, they are leaving one country for another because they believe that life will be better in a new country. Such movements are older than the human race itself. It is believed that the human race evolved in Africa and relatively quickly spread though much of the then accessible world. Members of the “Homo” family of species at that time were widely spread in Eurasia as well as the home continent of Africa.

The Homo family of species spread through much of Europe and Asia probably as a result of their intelligence and their high rate of breeding. Being hunters and gatherers and increasing population would put pressure on scarce resources, forcing families and groups to travel further for food and resulting in migrations in search of food.

This is a recreated vector image in SVG. The o... — This is a recreated vector image in SVG. The original “Human_evolution_scheme.png” was made by José-Manuel Benitos. The following was stated by the original author: “Simplified scheme of human evolution, it does not try to be trustworthy, but a symbol of this process” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course there would have been many other factors, but I’ll not go into that as I don’t know much about early human migrations. One effect of the rise and spread of humanity was the decline of the other Homo species. I assume that there is a link between the two phenomenon as they happened, apparently, at about the same time.

Maybe a cleverer Homo Sapiens stole the resources that the other Homo species needed, or maybe the other Homo species succumbed to some influence that did not affect Homo Sapiens, such as a disease or a climate change. Maybe our ancestors destroyed the other species in a pre-stone age holocaust. I’ve not studied the literature on the subject, so I’m ignorant of what was the likely cause of the decline of the other Homo species.

Whatever happened in those early days appears to have left the human race the urge to keep moving on. This urge has prompted us to send people to the moon and to send spacecraft to all (local) parts of the universe. Of course refugees in general don’t have much choice in the matter. They need to move or they are dead.

There is probably a spectrum stretching from migrant to refugee that covers all people who change countries or even regions. At the one end you have the forced movement of people between countries, by the authorities or an invader, through people fleeing war or persecution, to those who flee unpopular regimes which won’t actually kill or persucute them, to those who choose to migrate for political, cultural, reasons, right through to those who like to experience a different living environment.



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I’ve changed countries myself, and though my migration was voluntary and for a better life, it was a huge upheaval to move countries. You have to leave friends and relatives, all the things that you have known, much of which you may miss, to pack up your life and relocate it to a new country, where the culture is different if not in type then in detail, and you do not know how you will cope.

Of course, voluntary migrants have it easy in comparison to the refugees. They often cannot bring any possession with them, and they may not like the culture (which may espouse a different religion of course) and the likelihood of them returning to their original homes is remote. As refugees they will almost certainly miss their countries more than a person further up the migrant-refugee spectrum would.

Nevertheless, some voluntary migrants suffer at some stage from home sickness. Perhaps when an elderly relative dies and they cannot return for the funeral, or when a sibling who has remained in the “homeland” has a child. I’ve seen home sickness triggered by a simple treat brought by a visitor from the “homeland” that is unavailable in the new country.

I’ve not suffered very much from the syndrome myself, but I’ve known people who have and it is not a trivial thing. Home sickness can make a person physically ill, and if they are frail, it can even kill them. It can seriously disturb a person’s mental health, especially if they are prone to depression or similar mental illnesses. I’d say, however, that almost every single person who leaves one country for another suffers from it, except perhaps those of a persistently roving disposition.

Some voluntary migrants cannot cope with living in a new country. These are the ones that pack up and go back “home”. It may be culture, it may be relatives, it may be what you can buy in the shops, but these people make the decision to return from whence they came. I used to wonder why they did it, until I went back for a couple of years, and found that I hated it and couldn’t wait to get back to the new country. After that I had more sympathy for those returning migrants.

This contrasts strongly with refugees, who, although they see their target countries as being better than their homelands, are going to face a hugely different culture, possible religious and racial intolerance, all without the safety net of being able to return to their homelands. Even if they are able, at some time in the future, to return, it is likely that their homelands would have become strange and alien. Likely other people will be living their, with new customs and even religions.



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We have a phrase which describes the process of settling in a new land, or adapting to local customs, to making friends and watching children forming bonds with others in the new country. It’s called “putting down roots”. Let’s hope that the refugees all find a place where they can join happily with the local society and put down some roots. Not to forget their homelands totally, but to rejoice in their new homeland. Those of us who are voluntary migrants should welcome these “involuntary migrants”.



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