Nice post! I like the idea of justice as "minding your own business". I think Aristotle says it's something like giving each their due, which seems to get at roughly the same idea, if we allow that "your business" = "what each is due from you". It's underrated in these pushy and judgmental times, I think.
"Socrates compares the city-soul analogy to reading different sizes of print. But it’s not clear from this description how the larger writing could help us make out the smaller since we’d have to know what the smaller writing says in advance to know it was saying the same thing as the larger."
I find that if I'm not wearing my glasses but I know or have a good guess what some writing says, if I focus I can make it out and confirm whether or not it says it, even if I'd be completely unable to make it out if I had no clue and had to go letter by letter. That's why the opticians don't use real words for eye tests. It's an odd kind of perception. Some kind of Bayesian process in the brain, I guess. Like, our informed guesses and our imperfect perception gives us enough to work off to either confirm or reject it.
Thanks! I have forgotten so much of Aristotle, including that.
By the way, the Republic actually begins with that definition. Here's a nice summary of that part:
"For Cephalus’ son Polemarchus, justice is more than following a few specific rules, but not much more. Following the poet Simonides (c. 548-468 B.C.), he generalizes justice to mean “giving to each what is owed to him” (331e). More specifically, he posits, justice is grounded in friendship. Friends owe it to their friends to do good for them, never harm. Conversely, enemies owe it to one another to inflict harm upon one another (334b).
Again, it does not take long for Socrates to disband Polemarchus’ view as he did his father’s. Using the method which dons his very name, Socrates leads Polemarchus to admit that justice, as he defined it, is both useless (333d) and at times harms good people (334e). Eventually, this leads Polemarchus to nuance his definition: treating well friends who are actually good and harming enemies who are actually bad (335a).
But this cannot be right, Socrates points out. After all, does not harming things actually make them worse with regards to what they are intended to be? Does not harming a racehorse make it a worse horse? In the same way, would not harming someone, even a wicked enemy, make the enemy an even worse human? How could a just person do that?
Moreover, if justice is a virtue, and virtue is the excellence of a thing, then how could good people make people bad through justice? They certainly cannot. It is the function of an unjust person to harm others, while just people are called to be good.
In conclusion, viewing justice as simply giving what is owed is insufficient. On the surface, it has a reasonable draw, but when you dig deeper, it is flawed. “It is never just to harm anyone,” is Polemarchus’ conclusion. Insofar as virtues are manifestations of the good, justice as a virtue cannot do the opposite and engage in harm."
I know exactly what you mean about vision. I used to wear glasses myself, from second grade on up through my last year of college when I got the lasik procedure done (which is nothing short of a fucking miracle).
Anyway, I get your point. I was trying to explain that Plato was trying to get us to think between the lines of simple logic there. In the Republic there are times when the law of non-contradiction is emphasized. The first books in the dialogue involve some pretty tedious logic chopping, and that's where the definition of justice of giving each his due gets brought up and then demolished. All of that logic chopping creates a kind of friction with what's being said in the passage about comparing the smaller with the larger. What I meant to demonstrate there was how some simplistic use of the law of non contradiction would turn this passage into total baloney. Plato's trying to get us to think outside the box, to accept partial truths rather than simply rejecting anything that doesn't fit a binary logic. So in light of that, I would interpret the "giving each their due" definition of justice as not being negated, exactly, by what follows later in the dialogue, but as something that needs to be reevaluated in a new light. It has a kernel of truth to it, in other words, a kernel which the logic-chopping version of Socrates in the earlier part of the dialogue seems to discard.
Ahh... thank you for pointing this out. I thought I was being particularly original in speculating about the mind, soul, and consciousness of nations, only to realize I had reinvented the wheel. Well, if even Plato and Socrates contemplated similar subjects, then at least the idea can't be too silly! :)
Oh I think you'd dig Plato. And these ideas are definitely not silly, despite what our contemporaries may think. At the very least they've stood the test of time!
I can't tell you how many times I've thought things through myself only to find out later someone else had already beat me to the punch. It's not so much wanting to be original (although that too) but realizing I just did all that work for nothing. Not cool! On the other hand, maybe something is gained in the work. Who knows. I'm sure an argument could be made for that.
Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure I've ever had an original thought, or at least nothing I can definitely say, "That's mine!"
As a physicalist, I actually have no problem with the idea of group minds. They are supersets of us, and cities, countries, and other groups all have their own personalities, make their own collective decisions, and exude many other properties we might attribute to minds.
Whether we have sub-selves within us depends heavily on how we define "self", "mind", or "soul". What I think we can say is any sub-components are going to be less sophisticated than the whole. Which to me avoids any danger of an infinite regress. At what level of sophistication there is a mind or soul is, to me, a definitional issue.
But we should consider what the simpler versions are missing that the more complex ones possess. For example, it's not clear to me that individual cells build models of themselves and their environment, at least without a very liberal conception of "model".
I agree it's a definitional issue, though I think the definitions can be better or worse and are subject to what intuitively captures the idea we're trying to describe. Which is in part why I find that Eric's point interesting, since there he's appealing to intuition (we don't intuitively think of the United States as conscious.) It's also interesting that he picked out a country rather than the universe as a whole. To me that seems very unintuitive. I don't find it terribly unintuitive to think the universe as a whole is, if not conscious, at least alive in a holistic organic sense. But a country? Suddenly a conscious entity is born just because we pick out the boundaries of a country and declare it a country? Hm. I'd need to hear more. That isn't intuitive.
—But we should consider what the simpler versions are missing that the more complex ones possess. For example, it's not clear to me that individual cells build models of themselves and their environment, at least without a very liberal conception of "model".
This is an interesting question, whether an individual cell models itself and its environment. I guess it does depend on how liberal our conception of a model is, but it seems at least at a minimum they must know (in some sense of that word) the boundary of what counts as self (their own interest) vs. not self. In other words, in order to be what it is, in order to be something that's differentiated from the environment, it must know what counts as "me" vs. "environment to exploit" and act accordingly. Whether this counts as a model, I'm not sure, but if it is, it's not like a definition of "what it's like to be a cell" along with a fixed map of the environment laid out in advance.
To take the analogy of the Republic further, the minimal boundaries of the individual cell's selfhood expands when it joins the collective so that it "knows" its own function in relation to some greater whole to which it belongs. It can't simply be a matter of "me" vs. "not me" anymore (as if this weren't incredible enough!), it needs to shift its goals as an individual cell to align with the greater good. How? Well it somehow must "know" that greater good—bear with me!—otherwise it wouldn't "know" that it must "do its own thing", some function on behalf of the greater good that involves not interfering with other functions in the collective; i.e. without treating the other cells belonging to the collective as the environment to exploit for its own gain. And yet it also needs to retain some modicum of selfhood as an individual cell, a memory of it, perhaps, otherwise we'd never see cells defect as they do in cancer. (I'm reminded of the phrase "a cancer to society"). How does something so tiny do all this? How does it "know" some future function of itself, a future self that will be able to recognize other functions as "not my business and not the environment either" while also retaining some minimal individualistic self that it can return to when it later defects and returns to a single cell? This is mind blowing when you think about it. How is all this possible without it having some dynamic "model" of an expanded version of itself stored within it all along, even as an individual?
I find it easier to think of a culture, country, or even an entire planet as conscious. But for the whole universe, we run into some physical limitations that ruin it for me. The speed of light limit coupled with the metric expansion of space, seems to short circuit the information processing that would be necessary, at least unless we're just going to assume something non-physical is happening.
A country’s consciousness would emerge from whatever countries it combined from or was colonized from. In the case of the US, it would see it beginning with Native American culture, then being transformed by Dutch and British colonialists, gradually emerging into its own distinct presence until the Revolutionary War reified it. But the boundaries between a country culture consciousness and those of other countries, is a much more gradual and amorphous thing compared to animal consciousness.
Daniel Dennett in his 2017 book, *From Bacteria to Bach and Back* coined a phrase that might address what you’re discussing: competence without comprehension. His point is that we find a lot of competence in biological systems, but comprehension is rare. A good way to distinguish is to ask, is the behavior of the organism something an individual, or even a small group of individuals originated? Or is it behavior all of its species engage in? The former doesn’t guarantee comprehension, but without it, we’re probably just looking at instinct / programming.
In that sense, an individual cell inherits a large range of automatic responses, responses that through natural selection are highly adaptive. It’s very tempting to look at it and think there’s comprehension, knowledge there. But in most systems we look at it’s just going to be adaptive but mostly automatic responses.
Overall, when observing these systems, we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize them. Of course, we have to be equally careful not to be anthropocentric. But our hyperactive agency detection impulses seem to err on the side of assuming agency. It’s more adaptive on evolutionary time scales to be spooked by the wind than eaten by the tiger in the brush.
—A country’s consciousness would emerge from whatever countries it combined from or was colonized from. In the case of the US, it would see it beginning with Native American culture, then being transformed by Dutch and British colonialists, gradually emerging into its own distinct presence until the Revolutionary War reified it. But the boundaries between a country culture consciousness and those of other countries, is a much more gradual and amorphous thing compared to animal consciousness.
That's an interesting account!
—A good way to distinguish is to ask, is the behavior of the organism something an individual, or even a small group of individuals originated? Or is it behavior all of its species engage in? The former doesn’t guarantee comprehension, but without it, we’re probably just looking at instinct / programming.
I'm not sure I follow. I don't see why the behavior of all the species vs. an individual or small group makes such a difference. All humans have similarities in human intelligence, but we wouldn't call those instinct or programming or competence without comprehension (I hope). Why does the exception count but not the norm?
—But our hyperactive agency detection impulses seem to err on the side of assuming agency.
Except for scientists, of course, who have for a very time erred on the side of treating animals like furry robots that can be tortured alive. I'd rather err on the side of hyperactive agency. Perhaps the wind is alive too!
All right, I'll say no more. I wouldn't want to spook you. ;)
“I don't see why the behavior of all the species vs. an individual or small group makes such a difference.”
It’s the difference between inventing the behavior, which requires at least some degree of comprehension, and inheriting it. Consider that building webs isn’t something some spider invented. All spiders do it, even when it makes no sense. Same for squirrels storing nuts. No squirrel ever observed that the winter months were difficult to get through and tried storing food as a strategy. Squirrels who’ve never experienced winter still store nuts.
Compare this to humans building ships, drawing art, or writing mathematical proofs. Many of us may sample these behaviors growing up, but none come naturally. They have to be learned. On the other hand, eating, walking, and having sex are things we’re often going to do even when it’s not in our best interest.
“Except for scientists, of course, who have for a very time erred on the side of treating animals like furry robots that can be tortured alive.”
It depends on the scientist. A lot of animal researchers err the other way. Although a huge part of the difference lies in those definitions. My own view is that, rather than arguing about where we should draw a sharp line, we should acknowledge what a particular species has and doesn’t have. A dog is much more cognitively endowed than a bee, but a bee has a lot more than a worm, a plant, or a single cell.
“Perhaps the wind is alive too!”
Hey, I’ve cussed out the wind before when it was cold and blowing in my face. Personifying reality comes easy. It’s what we do as social creatures. But like the other examples above, we tend to do it even when it’s a poor prediction.
“I wouldn't want to spook you.”
I welcome being spooked in this manner, but it rarely succeeds anymore. :-)
"Compare this to humans building ships, drawing art, or writing mathematical proofs. Many of us may sample these behaviors growing up, but none come naturally. They have to be learned. On the other hand, eating, walking, and having sex are things we’re often going to do even when it’s not in our best interest."
I'm still not sure I see much of an observable difference between invention and inheritance. I get the distinction you're making, but I'm not sure if there's a clear way to tell what's what, especially in nature. Animals teach their young too, so you might say those lessons don't come "naturally" in the same way music or ship building don't come "naturally" for us. Birds have to be tossed out of the nest...and sometimes they just splat on the ground. I've seen adult dogs learn how to do what we think of as typical doggie things (like scratching the dirt with their hind paws, which I think is a visible "sniff here" sign to other dogs). Howling is another example (I had to teach Geordie how to do that). In some sense they must have had the capacity to learn these things, just as we have the capacity for language, music, and whatever else we might invent, like computers. So in both cases there is an inherited capacity combined with learning or what you're calling invention. After all, human babies learn language from their parents, and if they were never exposed to language (as in some of those unfortunate cases we've all heard about), they would live an inarticulate life. Many baby animals are quicker on the uptake when it comes to the basics. They pop out into the world and get right on their feet and know where to get their milk. We take...for...ev...er. And some of us never move out of our parent's basement. (Maybe we need a kick in the pants?)
Why is winter a necessary condition for storing nuts? I store nuts, and I live in Tucson! The amazing thing about squirrels is that they remember where they put them. That's more than I can say about myself. And dogs, my god, they're downright ridiculous when it comes to squirreling away bones. Somebody should study stupid animal behavior, including humans. That would be interesting.
I'm not keen on calling intelligent animal behavior "instinct" either, not when it's used as a fallback explanation to save our prior conception of the limits of their capacity. So I definitely agree with what you said about not drawing a sharp line. Especially since the closer we look, the more intelligence we seem to find.
Certainly every animal is a combination of instinct and learning. The distinction is in where the majority of their adaptive behavior comes from. Humans, primates, cetaceans, crows, and some other species have a large portion of their behavior learned (learned by the individual, albeit often from a wider culture). And mammals and birds overall seem to have larger learned portions than most of the animal kingdom. Except for cephalopods, which goes to demonstrate that learning-intelligence isn't a one off evolutionary event.
Hi, Mike. I'd just like to throw in some half-formed thoughts.
"But for the whole universe, we run into some physical limitations that ruin it for me. The speed of light limit coupled with the metric expansion of space, seems to short circuit the information processing that would be necessary, at least unless we're just going to assume something non-physical is happening."
The speed of light is an odd thing. I used to wonder sometimes whether, if we had no senses for detecting light, we might have arrived at some relativistic conclusion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of sound. I doubt the analogy would hold up for long. Still, when it comes to the speed of light, we might be up against some limit of understanding or perception, beyond which we can glean only theoretical intimations of non-locality -- for example through the Bell inequality. Because of certain quantum effects, the limiting speed of light is to some extent "on the table" again, even if most physicists regard it as something too fundamental to be questioned. In that case, a way is open to consider the possibility of cosmic connections beyond our ken.
But even if the speed of light and the expansion of space-time present difficulties for a conception of cosmic consciousness, they are not insurmountable. The relatively slow speed of chemical communication in human bodies does not seem to interfere with the possibility of human consciousness.
I think the speed of light limit is one of those things physicists accepted only reluctantly, after the data forced them into it. And the problem is this isn't just an engineering challenge. The speed of light appears to be the speed of causality in our universe. Which means exceeding it would introduce questions of causality violations and paradoxes. It would amount to time travel. I'm a sci-fi fan and love to explore these ideas, but exceeding lightspeed would lead to a much stranger world than sci-fi usually portrays.
The problem with quantum entanglement is that, even in interpretations where non-local interactions are happening, it doesn't happen in a way that allows for any information to be transmitted. Both sides learn what their indeterminate but correlated outcomes are, but there's no way for us to put our finger on the scale and manipulate that random outcome for communication.
The big issue with the speed limit and expansion is it rules out two way communication in most cases. 94-97% of the observable universe is forever unreachable. It's communication with us is now one way from its distant past. No events in our region today will ever be able to affect those distant regions and vice versa. Given how important recurrent feedback is in cerebral neural processing, it seems incompatible with the universe on these scales.
Of course, we can say that's as we understand it today. But we can always say that and then go on to imagine whatever we fancy. My interest is more in what reality appears to be telling us. But it's always possible I'm missing something.
The phenomena exposed by the Bell inequality are not well-understood. How does it work that the spin of one particle is always correlated to the spin of another, when relativistic physics eliminates any causal connection? There are attempts to drag this question back into the frame of causality, for example by pointing out that the separate observers cannot share their results faster than the speed of light, and therefore, perhaps, this gives us some way to finesse causality back in. Maybe the correlation does not actually happen until the speed of light catches up.
This mode of thinking is an (understandable) attempt to preserve Einsteinian relativistic physics -- to avoid the prospect that something we don't yet fully understand is happening, outside the space-time structure that confines our reality. Interestingly, it seems to lead back to observer dependence in another guise.
From what I've read, the math covers what happens in the Bell inequality scenarios. The issue is most of us don't like the implications of what the math says, so we have a tendency to introduce additional assumptions to wrench things back to our preferred metaphysics, one where the classical world is the primary reality (or where we are). But doing so leads to paradoxes, mysteries, and non-locality. After years of being agnostic on this, I've come around to just accepting the math.
My difficulty with the idea of observer dependence is quantum computing. The internal operations of a quantum processor happen out of sight of any conscious observer. Yet environmental decoherence remains a daunting design constraint. We could say the environment counts as an observer, but to me that just renders the phrase "observer dependence" meaningless. It seems like if "observer" means everything, it doesn't really mean anything, and we're back to square one.
That said, I've love it if some form of non-locality could be convincingly demonstrated. Anything that cracks open a possibility for FTL would be welcome. But I've learned to be leery of accepting what I want to be true.
The problem with justice is that it needs to be rooted in faith. Without faith as a foundation for justice, it all too easily goes off the rails. Just look at modern "social justice" which glorifies victimization and marginalization, and encourages people to demonize people. And when you think of someone as a monster, any action taken against them seems just- even if it's just blind violence. Vengeance for imagined sights.
That's why I think greater than justice is mercy. There's an old saying, "Mercy smiles in the face of justice." Because justice is easily perverted and used for evil. All monsters and bureaucrats think their actions "just." The people who put Socrates to death thought themselves just. But mercy is uncorruptible, because it requires grace and willing the good of the other.
Thanks for stopping by! If you listened to the podcast, I hope the audio wasn't an utter travesty.
—Because justice is easily perverted and used for evil. All monsters and bureaucrats think their actions "just."
Yes, this is a big topic in the first part of the Republic. The question is, if justice is used for evil, is it really justice we're talking about? It's hard to get a grip on what justice is. Polemarchus begins with the idea that justice is 'giving to each his due', but after Socrates goes to work on him, he comes to the idea that if justice is a virtue, justice can't make people bad. So it is never just to harm someone. Then Thrasymachus breaks in like a beast and spouts Nietzsche. :)
Ultimately, I think Socrates-Plato would agree with you, but that would require some discussion and interpretation, especially taking into account Book 10 and the NDE experience described in the Myth of Er. Have you read the Republic?
I did listen to the podcast! I thought the reading was great! Though there were points where the volume of the narration and the volume of the music were fighting for the readers ear. I usually get around this in my own readings by doubling up the reading in the audio software. (So that there's two identical reading tracks and one music track.)
All in all though it wasn't a big issue.
I haven't read the entirety of Plato's Republic yet, just bits here and there, but I'm familiar with a number of the arguments in it. It's on my list to get to though. 😊
One of the reasons I call myself "the Foolosopher" is because I'm really not properly educated in philosophy, though I have a general familiarity with many Western and Eastern philosophers. I mostly just like to wonder about things and think big thoughts and make jokes. 😊
Ah, right, double the tracks. I forgot about that trick. Thanks for reminding me!
Just got back from recording at Tim's (T. Jack) today, and I do believe that was the first time I had the bandwidth to think about the performance rather than disgusting mouth noises, airplanes, laptop fan kicking on and off, that obnoxious mourning dove who won't stop mourning right outside my window, husband coughing in the other room, how to pronounce some word I've seen a thousand times but never actually heard (since it was my story), jackass with no muffler on his hot shit hot rod who spends the entire day cruising up and down my street for the sole purpose of ruining my audio... And it was a fight scene, so that's always fun.
There's a link in this post to a fairly smooth translation of the Republic, just so you know. I read the Benjamin Jowett translation in college. Not fun.
Nice post! I like the idea of justice as "minding your own business". I think Aristotle says it's something like giving each their due, which seems to get at roughly the same idea, if we allow that "your business" = "what each is due from you". It's underrated in these pushy and judgmental times, I think.
"Socrates compares the city-soul analogy to reading different sizes of print. But it’s not clear from this description how the larger writing could help us make out the smaller since we’d have to know what the smaller writing says in advance to know it was saying the same thing as the larger."
I find that if I'm not wearing my glasses but I know or have a good guess what some writing says, if I focus I can make it out and confirm whether or not it says it, even if I'd be completely unable to make it out if I had no clue and had to go letter by letter. That's why the opticians don't use real words for eye tests. It's an odd kind of perception. Some kind of Bayesian process in the brain, I guess. Like, our informed guesses and our imperfect perception gives us enough to work off to either confirm or reject it.
Thanks! I have forgotten so much of Aristotle, including that.
By the way, the Republic actually begins with that definition. Here's a nice summary of that part:
"For Cephalus’ son Polemarchus, justice is more than following a few specific rules, but not much more. Following the poet Simonides (c. 548-468 B.C.), he generalizes justice to mean “giving to each what is owed to him” (331e). More specifically, he posits, justice is grounded in friendship. Friends owe it to their friends to do good for them, never harm. Conversely, enemies owe it to one another to inflict harm upon one another (334b).
Again, it does not take long for Socrates to disband Polemarchus’ view as he did his father’s. Using the method which dons his very name, Socrates leads Polemarchus to admit that justice, as he defined it, is both useless (333d) and at times harms good people (334e). Eventually, this leads Polemarchus to nuance his definition: treating well friends who are actually good and harming enemies who are actually bad (335a).
But this cannot be right, Socrates points out. After all, does not harming things actually make them worse with regards to what they are intended to be? Does not harming a racehorse make it a worse horse? In the same way, would not harming someone, even a wicked enemy, make the enemy an even worse human? How could a just person do that?
Moreover, if justice is a virtue, and virtue is the excellence of a thing, then how could good people make people bad through justice? They certainly cannot. It is the function of an unjust person to harm others, while just people are called to be good.
In conclusion, viewing justice as simply giving what is owed is insufficient. On the surface, it has a reasonable draw, but when you dig deeper, it is flawed. “It is never just to harm anyone,” is Polemarchus’ conclusion. Insofar as virtues are manifestations of the good, justice as a virtue cannot do the opposite and engage in harm."
https://educationalrenaissance.com/2021/03/13/life-in-platos-republic-part-1-is-justice-worth-it/#:~:text=548%2D468%20B.C.)%2C%20he,upon%20one%20another%20(334b).
I know exactly what you mean about vision. I used to wear glasses myself, from second grade on up through my last year of college when I got the lasik procedure done (which is nothing short of a fucking miracle).
Anyway, I get your point. I was trying to explain that Plato was trying to get us to think between the lines of simple logic there. In the Republic there are times when the law of non-contradiction is emphasized. The first books in the dialogue involve some pretty tedious logic chopping, and that's where the definition of justice of giving each his due gets brought up and then demolished. All of that logic chopping creates a kind of friction with what's being said in the passage about comparing the smaller with the larger. What I meant to demonstrate there was how some simplistic use of the law of non contradiction would turn this passage into total baloney. Plato's trying to get us to think outside the box, to accept partial truths rather than simply rejecting anything that doesn't fit a binary logic. So in light of that, I would interpret the "giving each their due" definition of justice as not being negated, exactly, by what follows later in the dialogue, but as something that needs to be reevaluated in a new light. It has a kernel of truth to it, in other words, a kernel which the logic-chopping version of Socrates in the earlier part of the dialogue seems to discard.
Ahh... thank you for pointing this out. I thought I was being particularly original in speculating about the mind, soul, and consciousness of nations, only to realize I had reinvented the wheel. Well, if even Plato and Socrates contemplated similar subjects, then at least the idea can't be too silly! :)
Oh I think you'd dig Plato. And these ideas are definitely not silly, despite what our contemporaries may think. At the very least they've stood the test of time!
I can't tell you how many times I've thought things through myself only to find out later someone else had already beat me to the punch. It's not so much wanting to be original (although that too) but realizing I just did all that work for nothing. Not cool! On the other hand, maybe something is gained in the work. Who knows. I'm sure an argument could be made for that.
Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure I've ever had an original thought, or at least nothing I can definitely say, "That's mine!"
As a physicalist, I actually have no problem with the idea of group minds. They are supersets of us, and cities, countries, and other groups all have their own personalities, make their own collective decisions, and exude many other properties we might attribute to minds.
Whether we have sub-selves within us depends heavily on how we define "self", "mind", or "soul". What I think we can say is any sub-components are going to be less sophisticated than the whole. Which to me avoids any danger of an infinite regress. At what level of sophistication there is a mind or soul is, to me, a definitional issue.
But we should consider what the simpler versions are missing that the more complex ones possess. For example, it's not clear to me that individual cells build models of themselves and their environment, at least without a very liberal conception of "model".
Hey Mike,
I agree it's a definitional issue, though I think the definitions can be better or worse and are subject to what intuitively captures the idea we're trying to describe. Which is in part why I find that Eric's point interesting, since there he's appealing to intuition (we don't intuitively think of the United States as conscious.) It's also interesting that he picked out a country rather than the universe as a whole. To me that seems very unintuitive. I don't find it terribly unintuitive to think the universe as a whole is, if not conscious, at least alive in a holistic organic sense. But a country? Suddenly a conscious entity is born just because we pick out the boundaries of a country and declare it a country? Hm. I'd need to hear more. That isn't intuitive.
—But we should consider what the simpler versions are missing that the more complex ones possess. For example, it's not clear to me that individual cells build models of themselves and their environment, at least without a very liberal conception of "model".
This is an interesting question, whether an individual cell models itself and its environment. I guess it does depend on how liberal our conception of a model is, but it seems at least at a minimum they must know (in some sense of that word) the boundary of what counts as self (their own interest) vs. not self. In other words, in order to be what it is, in order to be something that's differentiated from the environment, it must know what counts as "me" vs. "environment to exploit" and act accordingly. Whether this counts as a model, I'm not sure, but if it is, it's not like a definition of "what it's like to be a cell" along with a fixed map of the environment laid out in advance.
To take the analogy of the Republic further, the minimal boundaries of the individual cell's selfhood expands when it joins the collective so that it "knows" its own function in relation to some greater whole to which it belongs. It can't simply be a matter of "me" vs. "not me" anymore (as if this weren't incredible enough!), it needs to shift its goals as an individual cell to align with the greater good. How? Well it somehow must "know" that greater good—bear with me!—otherwise it wouldn't "know" that it must "do its own thing", some function on behalf of the greater good that involves not interfering with other functions in the collective; i.e. without treating the other cells belonging to the collective as the environment to exploit for its own gain. And yet it also needs to retain some modicum of selfhood as an individual cell, a memory of it, perhaps, otherwise we'd never see cells defect as they do in cancer. (I'm reminded of the phrase "a cancer to society"). How does something so tiny do all this? How does it "know" some future function of itself, a future self that will be able to recognize other functions as "not my business and not the environment either" while also retaining some minimal individualistic self that it can return to when it later defects and returns to a single cell? This is mind blowing when you think about it. How is all this possible without it having some dynamic "model" of an expanded version of itself stored within it all along, even as an individual?
Hey Tina,
I find it easier to think of a culture, country, or even an entire planet as conscious. But for the whole universe, we run into some physical limitations that ruin it for me. The speed of light limit coupled with the metric expansion of space, seems to short circuit the information processing that would be necessary, at least unless we're just going to assume something non-physical is happening.
A country’s consciousness would emerge from whatever countries it combined from or was colonized from. In the case of the US, it would see it beginning with Native American culture, then being transformed by Dutch and British colonialists, gradually emerging into its own distinct presence until the Revolutionary War reified it. But the boundaries between a country culture consciousness and those of other countries, is a much more gradual and amorphous thing compared to animal consciousness.
Daniel Dennett in his 2017 book, *From Bacteria to Bach and Back* coined a phrase that might address what you’re discussing: competence without comprehension. His point is that we find a lot of competence in biological systems, but comprehension is rare. A good way to distinguish is to ask, is the behavior of the organism something an individual, or even a small group of individuals originated? Or is it behavior all of its species engage in? The former doesn’t guarantee comprehension, but without it, we’re probably just looking at instinct / programming.
In that sense, an individual cell inherits a large range of automatic responses, responses that through natural selection are highly adaptive. It’s very tempting to look at it and think there’s comprehension, knowledge there. But in most systems we look at it’s just going to be adaptive but mostly automatic responses.
Overall, when observing these systems, we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize them. Of course, we have to be equally careful not to be anthropocentric. But our hyperactive agency detection impulses seem to err on the side of assuming agency. It’s more adaptive on evolutionary time scales to be spooked by the wind than eaten by the tiger in the brush.
—A country’s consciousness would emerge from whatever countries it combined from or was colonized from. In the case of the US, it would see it beginning with Native American culture, then being transformed by Dutch and British colonialists, gradually emerging into its own distinct presence until the Revolutionary War reified it. But the boundaries between a country culture consciousness and those of other countries, is a much more gradual and amorphous thing compared to animal consciousness.
That's an interesting account!
—A good way to distinguish is to ask, is the behavior of the organism something an individual, or even a small group of individuals originated? Or is it behavior all of its species engage in? The former doesn’t guarantee comprehension, but without it, we’re probably just looking at instinct / programming.
I'm not sure I follow. I don't see why the behavior of all the species vs. an individual or small group makes such a difference. All humans have similarities in human intelligence, but we wouldn't call those instinct or programming or competence without comprehension (I hope). Why does the exception count but not the norm?
—But our hyperactive agency detection impulses seem to err on the side of assuming agency.
Except for scientists, of course, who have for a very time erred on the side of treating animals like furry robots that can be tortured alive. I'd rather err on the side of hyperactive agency. Perhaps the wind is alive too!
All right, I'll say no more. I wouldn't want to spook you. ;)
“I don't see why the behavior of all the species vs. an individual or small group makes such a difference.”
It’s the difference between inventing the behavior, which requires at least some degree of comprehension, and inheriting it. Consider that building webs isn’t something some spider invented. All spiders do it, even when it makes no sense. Same for squirrels storing nuts. No squirrel ever observed that the winter months were difficult to get through and tried storing food as a strategy. Squirrels who’ve never experienced winter still store nuts.
Compare this to humans building ships, drawing art, or writing mathematical proofs. Many of us may sample these behaviors growing up, but none come naturally. They have to be learned. On the other hand, eating, walking, and having sex are things we’re often going to do even when it’s not in our best interest.
“Except for scientists, of course, who have for a very time erred on the side of treating animals like furry robots that can be tortured alive.”
It depends on the scientist. A lot of animal researchers err the other way. Although a huge part of the difference lies in those definitions. My own view is that, rather than arguing about where we should draw a sharp line, we should acknowledge what a particular species has and doesn’t have. A dog is much more cognitively endowed than a bee, but a bee has a lot more than a worm, a plant, or a single cell.
“Perhaps the wind is alive too!”
Hey, I’ve cussed out the wind before when it was cold and blowing in my face. Personifying reality comes easy. It’s what we do as social creatures. But like the other examples above, we tend to do it even when it’s a poor prediction.
“I wouldn't want to spook you.”
I welcome being spooked in this manner, but it rarely succeeds anymore. :-)
"Compare this to humans building ships, drawing art, or writing mathematical proofs. Many of us may sample these behaviors growing up, but none come naturally. They have to be learned. On the other hand, eating, walking, and having sex are things we’re often going to do even when it’s not in our best interest."
I'm still not sure I see much of an observable difference between invention and inheritance. I get the distinction you're making, but I'm not sure if there's a clear way to tell what's what, especially in nature. Animals teach their young too, so you might say those lessons don't come "naturally" in the same way music or ship building don't come "naturally" for us. Birds have to be tossed out of the nest...and sometimes they just splat on the ground. I've seen adult dogs learn how to do what we think of as typical doggie things (like scratching the dirt with their hind paws, which I think is a visible "sniff here" sign to other dogs). Howling is another example (I had to teach Geordie how to do that). In some sense they must have had the capacity to learn these things, just as we have the capacity for language, music, and whatever else we might invent, like computers. So in both cases there is an inherited capacity combined with learning or what you're calling invention. After all, human babies learn language from their parents, and if they were never exposed to language (as in some of those unfortunate cases we've all heard about), they would live an inarticulate life. Many baby animals are quicker on the uptake when it comes to the basics. They pop out into the world and get right on their feet and know where to get their milk. We take...for...ev...er. And some of us never move out of our parent's basement. (Maybe we need a kick in the pants?)
Why is winter a necessary condition for storing nuts? I store nuts, and I live in Tucson! The amazing thing about squirrels is that they remember where they put them. That's more than I can say about myself. And dogs, my god, they're downright ridiculous when it comes to squirreling away bones. Somebody should study stupid animal behavior, including humans. That would be interesting.
I'm not keen on calling intelligent animal behavior "instinct" either, not when it's used as a fallback explanation to save our prior conception of the limits of their capacity. So I definitely agree with what you said about not drawing a sharp line. Especially since the closer we look, the more intelligence we seem to find.
Certainly every animal is a combination of instinct and learning. The distinction is in where the majority of their adaptive behavior comes from. Humans, primates, cetaceans, crows, and some other species have a large portion of their behavior learned (learned by the individual, albeit often from a wider culture). And mammals and birds overall seem to have larger learned portions than most of the animal kingdom. Except for cephalopods, which goes to demonstrate that learning-intelligence isn't a one off evolutionary event.
Hi, Mike. I'd just like to throw in some half-formed thoughts.
"But for the whole universe, we run into some physical limitations that ruin it for me. The speed of light limit coupled with the metric expansion of space, seems to short circuit the information processing that would be necessary, at least unless we're just going to assume something non-physical is happening."
The speed of light is an odd thing. I used to wonder sometimes whether, if we had no senses for detecting light, we might have arrived at some relativistic conclusion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of sound. I doubt the analogy would hold up for long. Still, when it comes to the speed of light, we might be up against some limit of understanding or perception, beyond which we can glean only theoretical intimations of non-locality -- for example through the Bell inequality. Because of certain quantum effects, the limiting speed of light is to some extent "on the table" again, even if most physicists regard it as something too fundamental to be questioned. In that case, a way is open to consider the possibility of cosmic connections beyond our ken.
But even if the speed of light and the expansion of space-time present difficulties for a conception of cosmic consciousness, they are not insurmountable. The relatively slow speed of chemical communication in human bodies does not seem to interfere with the possibility of human consciousness.
Hi Jim,
I think the speed of light limit is one of those things physicists accepted only reluctantly, after the data forced them into it. And the problem is this isn't just an engineering challenge. The speed of light appears to be the speed of causality in our universe. Which means exceeding it would introduce questions of causality violations and paradoxes. It would amount to time travel. I'm a sci-fi fan and love to explore these ideas, but exceeding lightspeed would lead to a much stranger world than sci-fi usually portrays.
The problem with quantum entanglement is that, even in interpretations where non-local interactions are happening, it doesn't happen in a way that allows for any information to be transmitted. Both sides learn what their indeterminate but correlated outcomes are, but there's no way for us to put our finger on the scale and manipulate that random outcome for communication.
The big issue with the speed limit and expansion is it rules out two way communication in most cases. 94-97% of the observable universe is forever unreachable. It's communication with us is now one way from its distant past. No events in our region today will ever be able to affect those distant regions and vice versa. Given how important recurrent feedback is in cerebral neural processing, it seems incompatible with the universe on these scales.
Of course, we can say that's as we understand it today. But we can always say that and then go on to imagine whatever we fancy. My interest is more in what reality appears to be telling us. But it's always possible I'm missing something.
The phenomena exposed by the Bell inequality are not well-understood. How does it work that the spin of one particle is always correlated to the spin of another, when relativistic physics eliminates any causal connection? There are attempts to drag this question back into the frame of causality, for example by pointing out that the separate observers cannot share their results faster than the speed of light, and therefore, perhaps, this gives us some way to finesse causality back in. Maybe the correlation does not actually happen until the speed of light catches up.
This mode of thinking is an (understandable) attempt to preserve Einsteinian relativistic physics -- to avoid the prospect that something we don't yet fully understand is happening, outside the space-time structure that confines our reality. Interestingly, it seems to lead back to observer dependence in another guise.
From what I've read, the math covers what happens in the Bell inequality scenarios. The issue is most of us don't like the implications of what the math says, so we have a tendency to introduce additional assumptions to wrench things back to our preferred metaphysics, one where the classical world is the primary reality (or where we are). But doing so leads to paradoxes, mysteries, and non-locality. After years of being agnostic on this, I've come around to just accepting the math.
My difficulty with the idea of observer dependence is quantum computing. The internal operations of a quantum processor happen out of sight of any conscious observer. Yet environmental decoherence remains a daunting design constraint. We could say the environment counts as an observer, but to me that just renders the phrase "observer dependence" meaningless. It seems like if "observer" means everything, it doesn't really mean anything, and we're back to square one.
That said, I've love it if some form of non-locality could be convincingly demonstrated. Anything that cracks open a possibility for FTL would be welcome. But I've learned to be leery of accepting what I want to be true.
The problem with justice is that it needs to be rooted in faith. Without faith as a foundation for justice, it all too easily goes off the rails. Just look at modern "social justice" which glorifies victimization and marginalization, and encourages people to demonize people. And when you think of someone as a monster, any action taken against them seems just- even if it's just blind violence. Vengeance for imagined sights.
That's why I think greater than justice is mercy. There's an old saying, "Mercy smiles in the face of justice." Because justice is easily perverted and used for evil. All monsters and bureaucrats think their actions "just." The people who put Socrates to death thought themselves just. But mercy is uncorruptible, because it requires grace and willing the good of the other.
Thanks for stopping by! If you listened to the podcast, I hope the audio wasn't an utter travesty.
—Because justice is easily perverted and used for evil. All monsters and bureaucrats think their actions "just."
Yes, this is a big topic in the first part of the Republic. The question is, if justice is used for evil, is it really justice we're talking about? It's hard to get a grip on what justice is. Polemarchus begins with the idea that justice is 'giving to each his due', but after Socrates goes to work on him, he comes to the idea that if justice is a virtue, justice can't make people bad. So it is never just to harm someone. Then Thrasymachus breaks in like a beast and spouts Nietzsche. :)
Ultimately, I think Socrates-Plato would agree with you, but that would require some discussion and interpretation, especially taking into account Book 10 and the NDE experience described in the Myth of Er. Have you read the Republic?
I did listen to the podcast! I thought the reading was great! Though there were points where the volume of the narration and the volume of the music were fighting for the readers ear. I usually get around this in my own readings by doubling up the reading in the audio software. (So that there's two identical reading tracks and one music track.)
All in all though it wasn't a big issue.
I haven't read the entirety of Plato's Republic yet, just bits here and there, but I'm familiar with a number of the arguments in it. It's on my list to get to though. 😊
One of the reasons I call myself "the Foolosopher" is because I'm really not properly educated in philosophy, though I have a general familiarity with many Western and Eastern philosophers. I mostly just like to wonder about things and think big thoughts and make jokes. 😊
Ah, right, double the tracks. I forgot about that trick. Thanks for reminding me!
Just got back from recording at Tim's (T. Jack) today, and I do believe that was the first time I had the bandwidth to think about the performance rather than disgusting mouth noises, airplanes, laptop fan kicking on and off, that obnoxious mourning dove who won't stop mourning right outside my window, husband coughing in the other room, how to pronounce some word I've seen a thousand times but never actually heard (since it was my story), jackass with no muffler on his hot shit hot rod who spends the entire day cruising up and down my street for the sole purpose of ruining my audio... And it was a fight scene, so that's always fun.
There's a link in this post to a fairly smooth translation of the Republic, just so you know. I read the Benjamin Jowett translation in college. Not fun.
I totally get that struggle! I usually record my readings late at night after the rest of the world has gone to bed. 😁
Glad the reading went well! That sounds fun!
I'll check out the link!