Category Archives: Philosophy

Happiness, Especially For the Demented

Posted on by

Not being a Dutch citizen, I’m not sure how much it will cost to live in this great-sounding village, but I’m moving in as soon as possible. I bet they encourage blogging for all the residents.

ku-xlarge

If you want to join me at this “dementia-focused living center called De Hogeweyk, aka Dementia-Village”, you can read about it here.

It’s a very serious subject, of course. How to keep millions suffering from dementia safe and even reasonably happy, if possible. Although that raises the question: should we invest any resources in making the demented happier? 

Mari Ruti, a professor at the University of Toronto, argues that happiness is overrated. Or rather, the kind of well-balanced, anxiety-free happiness demanded by one’s corporate co-workers (“Smile!”) is overrated. The pursuit of that kind of happiness:

(1) Stifles the “idiosyncratic and potentially rebellious energies that, every so often,” break through our bland social personas;
(2) Encourages emotional numbness;
(3) Serves the cultural, economic and political status quo;
(4) May be contrary to human nature (evolution didn’t design us to be happy); and
(5) May lead to lives that are ultimately less satisfying or productive than more anxious lives would be.

Professor Ruti’s conclusion:

There is something quite hollow about the ideal of a happy, balanced life—a life unruffled by anxiety. It’s why I think that underneath our quest for vibrant health lurks a tragic kind of discreet death: the demise of everything that is eccentric and messy about human life. Our society sells us the quick fix: If you get a cold, take some decongestants; if you get depressed, take some antidepressants; and if you get anxious, take those tranquilizers. But what are we supposed to take when we lose our character?

Clearly, if we define “happiness” as “a well-balanced state marked by a lack of anxiety and the presentation of a pleasant persona”, it sounds like a questionable goal, especially for the budding Beethovens and Van Goghs among us (although it sounds pretty good for those of us with dementia). I wouldn’t dismiss Professor Ruti’s critique, however, even if she seems to exaggerate the benefits of living on the edge. There are, after all, more important things in life than happiness. For example, the elimination of real suffering, both physical and psychological:

I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness (Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 1895).

A Guide to Reality, Part 9

Posted on by

Alex Rosenberg begins chapter 4 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by pointing out how wasteful biological processes are. For example, a frog or fish may lay thousands or even millions of eggs and only produce a few offspring. Many organisms go through an entire life cycle without having any offspring at all. In addition, 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, partly as the result of various prehistoric cataclysms (like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Rosenberg says this is what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “a lot of order relentlessly turned into entropy” [75]: 

Can any process produce entropy as fast as natural selection?… Build a lot of complicated devices out of simpler things and then destroy all of them except the few you need to build more such devices… [Adaptations] persistently get more complicated and so use even more energy to build and maintain themselves…. Any process competing with natural selection as the source of adaptations has to produce adaptations from non-adaptations and every one of the adaptations it produces will have to be rare, expensive and wasteful [77].

However, Rosenberg’s main thesis in this chapter is that it’s logically impossible to reconcile God and Darwin (although many have tried). He begins with the traditional idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent (aside from being unable to perform impossible tasks like creating a rock so heavy He or She can’t lift it). Rosenberg also assumes for the sake of argument that God intended to create us or something like us “in His image”.

So, assuming that God knows everything, can do anything, and wanted us to exist, how can we harmonize God and evolution? The common approach is to suggest that God used evolution to make us, either by kicking off the process long ago, knowing it would eventually lead to us, or by manipulating evolution at key points, with the same result. In other words, evolution is part of God’s plan.

A problem with this idea, as Rosenberg explains, is that natural selection is a matter of probabilities. That’s what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Mutations just happen. Organisms that might do very well never get the chance because of some random event (like being eaten while still in the nest). There is no guarantee that particular species will evolve. That’s what science tells us.

If God cooked the evolutionary books, therefore, interfering with the randomness of evolution, Darwin got it wrong. We didn’t evolve in the way the theory predicts. On the other hand, if God let evolution take its random course, He or She didn’t know what the result would be. Our evolution wasn’t planned. Either evolution is a random, probabilistic process or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

My guess is that a proponent of intelligent design or creationism would say “so much for evolution”. It doesn’t work exactly like the biologists say. So what? Or that God in His infinite wisdom can arrange things any way He wants. It’s all way beyond our understanding.

Personally, I don’t have any religious faith that needs to be reconciled with Darwinism. But what if you’re serious about reconciling your faith and your scientific views? Is there a good response to Rosenberg’s argument?

I think there is. My first reaction to Rosenberg’s argument in chapter 4 is that he seems to be ignoring something he discussed in chapter 2, namely, the “multiverse”. As Rosenberg pointed out, many theoretical physicists, perhaps most of them, think that our universe is just one among many, where “many” could be a truly vast number, even an infinite number. But if there really is a multiverse, it seems beyond question that people like us were certain to evolve in universes here or there, given enough time and randomness. God, being omniscient, could have initiated the multiverse knowing full well that people just like us would eventually exist in some of its parts. If anyone would, God would understand that if you roll the dice often enough, you’ll eventually get all the combinations.

Along with Rosenberg, we can accept the fact that evolution is a truly random process in our universe. It might even be a random process in every universe. But if there are enough universes around, pretty much everything will end up evolving somewhere or other many, many times. If that’s God’s plan, there is no conflict with the Second Law or the theory of evolution. God and Darwin can be reconciled.

My other reaction to Rosenberg’s argument is that he should take into account what physicists and many philosophers say about the nature of time. I have trouble with the idea, but the current scientific view of time is that all moments are equally real. Ours is a “block” universe in which there is no past, present or future; there is merely earlier and later. It isn’t clear to me at all how the universe can be probabilistic and physical events truly random if what’s going to happen is just as real as what did happen, but that’s what physicists believe. I guess it just means the past doesn’t fully determine the future at the quantum level, even though future events are just as real as past events. 

Anyway, if anyone can reconcile quantum indeterminacy and a block universe, it’s God. After all, according to the theologians, God is outside of time (whatever that means). God isn’t sitting around, waiting to see what happens. As Rosenberg says, God is “omnipresent”, which means there is nothing in space or time that is off-limits to God. Being omniscient as well, God knows the whole story. That should be especially easy for God if earlier and later events in the story are equally real.

For that reason, even if evolution is random and inherently unpredictable, God is fully informed. Every event, earlier or later, is right there in the history of the universe for God to know about. If what physics tells us is true, it’s a perfect setup for someone like God, being outside of time, to know how evolution eventually leads to people like us. Randomness prevails, Darwinism is correct and God knows the whole story anyway. If indeterminacy and the supposed nature of time are in harmony, so are physics, Darwin and God. 

Rosenberg ends chapter 4 with some remarks on purpose:

Scientism means that we have to be nihilists about the purpose of things in general, about the purpose of biological life in particular, and the purpose of human life as well….There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the universe. It’s just one damn thing after another. Real purpose has been ruled out by physics [92].

I don’t think he’s right about that, but to avoid repeating myself, we’re going to move on. In our next installment, we’ll consider chapter 5. It’s called “Morality: the Bad News” (the good news supposedly comes later).

A Pessimist’s Pessimist

Posted on by

Giacomo Leopardi, born in 1798, was the son of a minor Italian aristocrat. He spent most of his youth in his father’s extensive library. By the time he was ten, he had taught himself Latin, Greek, German and French. Leopardi suffered from poor health throughout his life and died at the age of 38. He is now considered one of Italy’s greatest poets.

He is also revered as the author of a massive intellectual diary, first published in 1898 in seven volumes. Originally titled Pensieri di varia filosofia e bella letteratura (“Various thoughts on philosophy and literature”), it’s now known as Zibaldone (“Hodge-podge”). Last year, a complete English translation was published for the first time. (The translated text is 2,000 pages long, so if you’re interested, an electronic edition might be a good idea.)

In addition to being a great poet, Leopardi was one of Western culture’s great pessimists. Arthur Schopenhauer, probably philosophy’s most famous pessimist, had this to say about him: 

But no one has treated [the misery of our existence] so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi…. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence. He presents it on every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect [The World as Will and Idea].

More recently, Tim Parks summarizes Leopardi in The New York Review of Books (behind a paywall):

Obliged by frequent illness to pass his firstborn’s right to inherit to his younger brother, troubled by constant problems with his eyes, frail and almost grotesque, Giacomo saw before him a life without physical love or financial independence. Studying was the one thing he knew how to do, but the knowledge so gained only revealed to him that knowledge does not help us to live; on the contrary it corrodes those happy errors, or illusions as he came to call them, that give life meaning, shifting energy to the mental and rational and away from the physical and instinctive, where, in complicity with illusion, happiness lies.

In a later biography of his son, [Leopardi’s father] would write of Giacomo in this period that “setting himself to thinking about how one breathes” he found he could no longer breathe… “Thought,” Giacomo wrote in a letter in his early twenties, “can crucify and torment a person.”

Maybe more careful thought, perhaps a life devoted to philosophy, might help? That’s what Plato and Spinoza recommended. Leopardi is skeptical:

Those innumerable and immense questions about time and space, argued over from the beginnings of metaphysics onward,…are none other than wars of words, caused by misunderstandings, and imprecision of thought, and limited ability to understand our mind, which is the only place where time and space, like many other abstract things, exist independently and for themselves…”

In his review, Tim Parks suggests that if Leopardi were writing Zibaldone today, it would be a blog. I wonder if he’d throw in a few lighthearted posts to generate traffic.

A Guide to Reality, Part 8

Posted on by

Chapter 3 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is called “How Physics Fakes Design”, although Professor Rosenberg would be the first to object that physics isn’t the kind of thing that can fake anything. His point, of course, is that everything that looks like it’s been designed in the natural world (the human eye, for example) is merely the result of activity at the atomic and molecular level, which itself results from subatomic particles doing what they normally do.

In fact, Professor Rosenberg holds that things that really were designed (like your computer) are the result of the very same natural laws. Design, wherever it appears to occur, whether the result of evolution or conscious effort, is just another illusion. 

In this chapter, however, Rosenberg is focused on evolutionary adaptation:

If the physical facts fix all the facts, then the emergence and persistence of adaptations had better result from the laws of physics alone. In fact, they had better be the result of the operation of thermodynamics. Otherwise we will have to admit that there is more going on in the universe than physics tells us there is. Some physicists may be okay with this, but scientism has to reject it. We need to show that the process Darwin discovered starts with zero adaptations and builds them all as the result of the laws of physics alone. (51-52).

Rosenberg begins by offering a statement of the three essential features of the theory of natural selection, as stated by the biologist Richard Lewontin:

  1. There is always variation in the traits of organisms, genes, hives, groups or whatever it is that replicates or reproduces;
  2. The variant traits differ in fitness;
  3. The fitness differences among some of the traits are inherited.

As Rosenberg explains, the replication or reproduction that occurs in nature doesn’t always result in an exact copy being made (mutations occur, for example). He prefers calling this “blind variation” instead of “random variation” to emphasize the point that nature doesn’t cause these variations on purpose. Most such variations yield no benefit. Occasionally, one does. A “beneficial” variation is one that tends to be passed on to the next generation. Given enough time, such variations can result in complex structures like the eye. Evolution occurs.  

Getting back to physics, Rosenberg argues that the second law of thermodynamics (closed systems tend toward disorder) makes natural selection “inevitable” (although at the end of the chapter he says that the second law only makes it “possible”). He admits that the relationship between the second law and natural selection is puzzling, since natural selection seems to increase the amount of order or organization in the world. But he quickly disposes of this objection by pointing out that the second law only requires a “net increase” in disorder over time. Organization will occasionally increase, but almost always at the cost of more disorganization elsewhere (as when organisms grow by digesting food).

Next, in the space of 11 interesting pages, Rosenberg shows how molecular activity, all subject to the second law, results in what he calls “molecular evolution” (69). As he explains it, there is a lot of “thermodynamic noise” in the universe. Molecules are constantly copying themselves, sometimes imperfectly, and forming bonds with each other. These processes result in new molecular forms. Some molecules are more stable than others, meaning that they will tend to last longer in particular chemical environments. As environments change, however, certain molecules become less stable and break apart, while others come together, just as organisms adapt or fail to adapt to changes in their environments. These various processes satisfy the criteria for evolution described above:

Natural selection requires … reproduction, variation and inheritance. It doesn’t really care how any of these three things get done, just so long as each one goes on long enough to get some adaptations. Reproduction doesn’t have to be sexual or asexual or even easily recognized by us to be reproduction. Any kind of replication is enough (59).

The same goes for variation and inheritance. I would add that these processes must occur in an environment filled with enough matter and energy to keep things moving along. Then, through the course of countless such chemical interactions over immense periods of time, complex organic molecules can develop:

Thermodynamic noise constantly makes more and more different environments – different temperatures, different pH, different concentrations of chemicals, different amounts of water or oxygen or nitrogen, or more complicated acids and bases, magnetic fields and radiation. As a result, there will be a corresponding selection for more and more different molecules (69).

And here we are today, each of us a collection of atoms and molecules, each doing its individual thing:

And so on up the ladder of complexity and diversity that produces assemblies of molecules so big they become recognizable as genes, viruses, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms … and us (69).

Not being a scientist myself, I can’t vouch for Rosenberg’s account of how all this works. However, it all sounds plausible to me. If you read the chapter, you will probably feel the same way.

One closing comment: people who don’t accept the fact that natural selection could eventually lead to a particular complex entity usually argue that such a thing couldn’t possibly happen. It’s inconceivable, they might say, that the human eye, which needs a bunch of parts that work together in order to work at all, could have resulted from a long series of evolutionary steps. It was Charles Darwin himself who offered the human eye as the biggest challenge to his theory. Rosenberg mentions this issue near the beginning of this chapter but doesn’t return to it. His goal in chapter 3 is to show how adaptation gets started, not how far it can go. I think, however, that it’s unwise to bet against science in its pursuit of explanations for mysterious things like the human eye or consciousness. Too many phenomena that used to be mysterious have already been explained.

In our next installment (assuming I stay sufficiently motivated): Good design isn’t just an illusion, it’s also rare, expensive and accidental.

Friedrich Nietzsche on Doing It Again

Posted on by

Friedrich Nietzsche had a recurring thought about recurrence.

In one of his early works, he imagines people being asked “whether they would wish to live through the past ten or twenty years once more”.

In a later work, he appears to raise the stakes:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”.

Assuming the demon and I didn’t get hung up on questions like “Who are you anyway?” and “Are you sure about that?”, I’d want some clarification. (I can’t imagine gnashing my teeth, since I don’t know what that is.)

Tell me, demon. Would I know that I was living my life again? There wouldn’t seem to be much point in doing it again from scratch.

The demon would probably have a ready answer: if you knew you were living it again, it wouldn’t be the same as living it the first time. You’d have more knowledge the second (or third, or fourth) time around, and presumably be in a position to make different choices.

Right, the Debbie Anderson thing again.

But if I didn’t know anything more this time or remember how things turned out before, what difference would it make? Even if things turned out differently, I wouldn’t know they were turning out differently. I’d simply be living my life as if it were the first time. In fact, for all I know, I’m living my life right now for the umpteenth time, even though it sure feels like the very first (and only) time.

The demon might be nonplussed at this point. Hey, he might say, I never thought of it that way. If you remember you’re doing it again, you’re not really doing it again. But if you don’t know you’re doing it again, you might as well be doing it for the first time. Oh well, I guess it was a stupid question to begin with.

Nietzsche clearly didn’t think it was a stupid question. He thought that a superior person would willingly live the very same life over and over again. To do so would be the highest affirmation. Life is tragic and full of pain, but the best among us will embrace it anyway.

He’s probably right about that, even though the idea of “eternal recurrence” is a dead end.

What some of us really want, of course, is to go back and do things differently. If I could only go back to that one moment ten years ago, or forty years ago, I’d do it better this time.

Since we’re merely human, fantasizing about the past is much easier than getting the future right.