November 20th - World Philosophy Day
Nov. 20th, 2008 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxToday is, as the title states, World Philosophy Day. And on the BBC''s website, four weighty questions to puzzle and perplex the minds of young and old alike:-
The page in question
And the four thorny questions themselves?
1: Should we kill healthy people for their organs?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?
Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)
If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.
But then why not kill Bill? [Irrelevant and cheesy Tarantino reference not mine - FK]
This was not the same question asked three times. Each one had a different slant.
The first - the healthy man being harvested - you could sense the selfish motives of the recipients, and I'd refuse. Let the recipients wait for bequests. The State has no rightful claim to ownership of someone's organs while they are still using them.
Hell, in fifty years' time transplant surgery might be so simple, because all you'd need would be a supply of your own stem cells and they could grow new organs for you while you wait. You wouldn't even need to live on immunosuppressives for the rest of your life, because the vatgrown organs would have your DNA and rejection would be a thing of the past. The technology's been developed and used already. Harvesting organs is going the way of slavery, smoking and religion, baby.
My short, sharp answer to the organlegging quandary is, therefore, "What the hell is this, fucking Tenochtitlan? HELL, no!"
And the desert island quandary? I'd ask the kidnapper which hostage he wants to live the most ... and shoot that one, just to piss off the kidnapper. Failing that, I'd shoot the loudest Tory, closed-minded religious fundie, US Republican or any other kind of open bigot. And then, before parting, I'd shoot the kidnapper. No sense in keeping that bastard alive to threaten another bunch of future hostages. Besides, the kidnapper's harvested organs could give life to five other people ...
The second version of this dilemma is a decision taken under duress; and, like any good warlock or demon, I'd ensure that the kidnapper regretted ever forcing this dilemma upon me or anybody else. The kidnapper would face swift and certain justice.
And the train wreck puzzle? This is also known as The Miner's Dilemma: There's a cave-in, and you have eight miners trapped in one pocket. You can rescue them, but the pocket is filling with water, and it will drown them an hour before you can reach the cave. Or you can save them by diverting the flow of water to another pocket where one miner waits, safe in the knowledge that he will be rescued, and theretofore unthreatened by the rising waters. Do you divert the waters and drown that one miner to save eight?
Now could I do this? Could I switch the tracks, or order a man's death, to save others? If it was a choice of one man or many, I'd have to look at the many. If the one man was an Einstein, and the many were Man United FC or the cast of EastEnders or something ... bye bye, you irrelevant timewasters. It was nice knowing you. Not.
I think there was a Star Trek episode once, where Deanna was faced with the choice of ordering Geordi laForge into a Jeffries tube to save the thousand crew of the Enterprise, knowing that Geordi would be killed by the radiation in that tube: in other words, the command quality of being able to order someone to their certain death.
Even this slant differs, because unlike the Miner's Dilemma and the train wreck dilemma, in this version the one man being sacrificed to save others is a specific, and valued, man. He has a name, and he'd be someone I would greatly miss.
So why would I order this specific person to his death? If I was absolutely certain that the man had the precise skill set necessary to make safe the reactor, even knowing that this would kill him, I'd do so - but I'd make sure he knows what's what, and I'd keep in touch with him the whole time, so he wouldn't just die alone, or forgotten ... and that whatever loved ones he leaves behind, I'd arrange to take care of them. The Soviets faced this dilemma in 1986, when Chernobyl blew up.
2: Are you, right now, the same person that you were when you began reading this article?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.
But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.
[And Bush would be sentient for the first time ... - comment added by me]
But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.
But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once. [Is this guy fucking serious? He's already flying free in the realm of cyberpunk - MY REALM - with all the brainwipes and memory engrams and shit. We're living in an object-oriented programming world. Why the hell can't we think in terms of OOP, and imagine a "class" of my mind, spawning multiple simultaenous instantiations - objects - across a distributed domain - the temporally coterminous Einsteinian 3space mapped over the surface of this little Class M planet?]
In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.
And yet my tastes, my perverse desire to wipe the smiles off the smug and self-righteous, the sheer inward ache to deflate the pompous declarative statement, the tendecncy to show the two fingered salute to authority ... that's been there since the days of my earliest psychological imprinting.
I learned my politeness and compassion at my mother's knee: my rebellious streak, I picked up at some other lowdown joint.
And, like my four-toed right foot, they are my constant companion in life.
Nope. I'm still me. [Could you ever doubt that?] You kind of forgot that this machine has a ghost, and that a sentient mind concerns itself with far more than what he or she wears, buys, eats, fucks or owns.
3: Is that really a computer screen before you?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.
Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.
Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."
*slaps it hard* *ow* I refuted your argument thus, to paraphrase a certain Dr Johnson. I didn't have a rock to kick, so thumping the screen and experiencing the consequent pain arising from my action, had to suffice as my argument and refutation.
4: Did you really choose to read this article?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.
After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.
And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.
Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."
How could Fred have predicted our every move, when the slightest error, even one below the threshold of Fred's perceptions, can cause events to unfold in an unpredictable manner?
Nothing is fixed; nothing is certain; nothing is forbidden; everything is permissible.
And yeah, I chose to glance over this article. I was looking for something to post on my blog, and this looked like just the thing.
I hope to Chaos and Unholy Mother Mrs Satan that I'm not wrong.
And the four thorny questions themselves?
1: Should we kill healthy people for their organs?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?
Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)
If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.
But then why not kill Bill? [Irrelevant and cheesy Tarantino reference not mine - FK]
This was not the same question asked three times. Each one had a different slant.
The first - the healthy man being harvested - you could sense the selfish motives of the recipients, and I'd refuse. Let the recipients wait for bequests. The State has no rightful claim to ownership of someone's organs while they are still using them.
Hell, in fifty years' time transplant surgery might be so simple, because all you'd need would be a supply of your own stem cells and they could grow new organs for you while you wait. You wouldn't even need to live on immunosuppressives for the rest of your life, because the vatgrown organs would have your DNA and rejection would be a thing of the past. The technology's been developed and used already. Harvesting organs is going the way of slavery, smoking and religion, baby.
My short, sharp answer to the organlegging quandary is, therefore, "What the hell is this, fucking Tenochtitlan? HELL, no!"
And the desert island quandary? I'd ask the kidnapper which hostage he wants to live the most ... and shoot that one, just to piss off the kidnapper. Failing that, I'd shoot the loudest Tory, closed-minded religious fundie, US Republican or any other kind of open bigot. And then, before parting, I'd shoot the kidnapper. No sense in keeping that bastard alive to threaten another bunch of future hostages. Besides, the kidnapper's harvested organs could give life to five other people ...
The second version of this dilemma is a decision taken under duress; and, like any good warlock or demon, I'd ensure that the kidnapper regretted ever forcing this dilemma upon me or anybody else. The kidnapper would face swift and certain justice.
And the train wreck puzzle? This is also known as The Miner's Dilemma: There's a cave-in, and you have eight miners trapped in one pocket. You can rescue them, but the pocket is filling with water, and it will drown them an hour before you can reach the cave. Or you can save them by diverting the flow of water to another pocket where one miner waits, safe in the knowledge that he will be rescued, and theretofore unthreatened by the rising waters. Do you divert the waters and drown that one miner to save eight?
Now could I do this? Could I switch the tracks, or order a man's death, to save others? If it was a choice of one man or many, I'd have to look at the many. If the one man was an Einstein, and the many were Man United FC or the cast of EastEnders or something ... bye bye, you irrelevant timewasters. It was nice knowing you. Not.
I think there was a Star Trek episode once, where Deanna was faced with the choice of ordering Geordi laForge into a Jeffries tube to save the thousand crew of the Enterprise, knowing that Geordi would be killed by the radiation in that tube: in other words, the command quality of being able to order someone to their certain death.
Even this slant differs, because unlike the Miner's Dilemma and the train wreck dilemma, in this version the one man being sacrificed to save others is a specific, and valued, man. He has a name, and he'd be someone I would greatly miss.
So why would I order this specific person to his death? If I was absolutely certain that the man had the precise skill set necessary to make safe the reactor, even knowing that this would kill him, I'd do so - but I'd make sure he knows what's what, and I'd keep in touch with him the whole time, so he wouldn't just die alone, or forgotten ... and that whatever loved ones he leaves behind, I'd arrange to take care of them. The Soviets faced this dilemma in 1986, when Chernobyl blew up.
2: Are you, right now, the same person that you were when you began reading this article?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.
But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.
[And Bush would be sentient for the first time ... - comment added by me]
But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.
But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once. [Is this guy fucking serious? He's already flying free in the realm of cyberpunk - MY REALM - with all the brainwipes and memory engrams and shit. We're living in an object-oriented programming world. Why the hell can't we think in terms of OOP, and imagine a "class" of my mind, spawning multiple simultaenous instantiations - objects - across a distributed domain - the temporally coterminous Einsteinian 3space mapped over the surface of this little Class M planet?]
In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.
And yet my tastes, my perverse desire to wipe the smiles off the smug and self-righteous, the sheer inward ache to deflate the pompous declarative statement, the tendecncy to show the two fingered salute to authority ... that's been there since the days of my earliest psychological imprinting.
I learned my politeness and compassion at my mother's knee: my rebellious streak, I picked up at some other lowdown joint.
And, like my four-toed right foot, they are my constant companion in life.
Nope. I'm still me. [Could you ever doubt that?] You kind of forgot that this machine has a ghost, and that a sentient mind concerns itself with far more than what he or she wears, buys, eats, fucks or owns.
3: Is that really a computer screen before you?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.
Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.
Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."
*slaps it hard* *ow* I refuted your argument thus, to paraphrase a certain Dr Johnson. I didn't have a rock to kick, so thumping the screen and experiencing the consequent pain arising from my action, had to suffice as my argument and refutation.
4: Did you really choose to read this article?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.
After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.
And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.
Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."
How could Fred have predicted our every move, when the slightest error, even one below the threshold of Fred's perceptions, can cause events to unfold in an unpredictable manner?
Nothing is fixed; nothing is certain; nothing is forbidden; everything is permissible.
And yeah, I chose to glance over this article. I was looking for something to post on my blog, and this looked like just the thing.
I hope to Chaos and Unholy Mother Mrs Satan that I'm not wrong.
