This Is Not News

If there is one philosophical device I am absolutely sick to death of, it’s the dialogue. Apparently some writers figure that no one wants to read a boring treatise about some kind of abstract theory. So instead, they write a boring play in which multiple characters debate the abstract theory through stilted dialogue. Maybe it’s the fiction-reader in me, but I read these things and I just want to scream “exposition dump!” Characters don’t sound natural, they have to contort themselves to drop names and establish theories, and usually there’s clearly one character who’s destined to be right. (In Plato, it was Socrates.)

I remember in college our professor had us watch a movie called Mindwalk, in which Sam Waterston plays a senator who’s just dropped his campaign for the presidency and so his poet friend takes him to a beach in France, and while touring a castle they meet some French woman who decides to start talking to them bout how the Cartesian worldview has affected Western society for hundreds of years. On the one hand, the characters had their own existential crises they were trying to get through. On the other, they had to recount hundreds of years of Western philosophy while they traipsed around the beach. By the end of it I was begging for a lecture.

I am reminded of all this by one of my education textbooks, which is full of dialogues. And boy oh boy are they stilted. And full of stereotypes – the author has apparently decided to be “edgy” by occasionally having one character call another a racist or a conservative idiot or what-have-you. At least there’s no clear voice-of-the-author character.

In the end, I think I’d rather read or see a work of fiction, with fleshed-out characters delivering compelling dialogue, that illustrates a philosophical conflict rather than make the philosophical debate the centerpiece of the story. It’s not like anyone’s breaking down my door to start a philosophy reality show – these conversations are interesting to participate in, but not much of a spectator sport.

Another education class tonight, and I’m trying to process everything that we discussed. It’s weird – the economic disparities underlying education in this country, and the way those play into racial/ethnic distinctions, seems like an undercurrent of the class, and something that’s very much on the mind of the professor. But it’s not being brought to the fore in a systematic way, so that people can understand it and use it to analyze other issues.

We spent a lot of time talking about the notion of tracking in public schools tonight, for example. And as someone who took a lot of honors classes in school, I know I felt a little defensive about the idea that my own education didn’t live up to the democratic ideals I have now. And then right at the end of the discussion, someone else mentioned that so far neither we nor the textbook had discussed the contrast between public schools and expensive private schools in terms of creating separate expectations for students. Which was a really good point, but one that kind of implied that the entire discussion so far had been kind of missing a key piece, you know?

Look, I’m all for making students construct knowledge for themselves. But I still kinda think that a little more structure would be helping us do so more efficiently.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic!

I couldn’t decide whether to file this under Philosophy or Culture & Media, but figured that the more interesting material is the philosophical questions touched on by the media, so I went with Philosophy. And it’s a good way to talk about the memory theory.

The memory theory is a way of trying to answer the question of personal identity: what is it that makes me, me? What is it that, if it were changed, would mean that the person I am would cease to be? Theories based on the body tend not to work, because the use of artificial limbs, organ transplants, and so on provide a pretty easy counterexample – our physical composition can change in some pretty dramatic ways, but we don’t think that we’ve become different persons. Likewise, it’s hard to use personality or beliefs as the key identifier, because people tend to change their minds about things.

The memory theory basically argues that we can form a viable definition of the person based on the following:

• As human beings, we each have a unique perspective on the world. I don’t see through your eyes, you don’t see through mine.
• We are aware of our perspective of the world – we have the sense that this is what I’m seeing/thinking/experiencing at any given time.
• We are aware that what we’re experiencing right now is part of a sequence of events that have been perceived from my particular unique perspective. I remember what I saw an hour ago, what I thought a week ago, how I felt a year ago. I am aware that these things all felt like they were happening to me in the same way that what I’m seeing right now is happening to me.

So this awareness of myself, my memory of my continued consciousness, is what makes me who I am. As long as those memories are intact, I’m me. When they’re lost, I cease to exist. Now, the memory theory has a lot going for it, but there are potential problems with it. If the relevant memories/perceptions/consciousness are physical states, it is at least conceivable that they can be replicated – that you could build another physical structure that would have the memories that are considered key to personal identity. Science fiction loves this problem. Any time there’s a transporter accident or a clone with duplicated memories followed by existential angst, you have an examination of the memory theory and its consequences.

So a few months ago, I was playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a computer role playing game (RPG). The idea of an RPG is that the player creates a character and then plays that role in the story. From a mechanical standpoint, the player decides the strengths and weaknesses of the character. From a narrative standpoint, the player is supposed to make decisions that shape the unfolding of the story’s plot. In a computer RPG, this is somewhat limited – all of the possible branches have to be programmed into the game from the start. But through dialogue options and other branching points, the player can make things unfold in different ways. In a Star Wars computer RPG, it should be little surprise that one of the big factors the player controls is whether the central character is going to fall to the Dark Side of the Force or not.

What the heck does any of this have to do with the memory theory? Well, I’m going through, playing the game, playing a goody two shoes, Light Side character trying to help out the Jedi. In this game, set during a time well before any of the movies, the Jedi are getting their butts handed to them by a Sith Lord named Darth Revan and his apprentice Darth Malak. The Jedi manage to get the drop on Revan, fight him, and he’s presumed dead, but Malak just ascends to the top spot and keeps making life hard for the Jedi. So they need the central character to go on various quests to find the mystical doo-dads that might help them turn the war around, and as I’m playing the game, all of a sudden there’s a big twist. Revan wasn’t killed in the big attack. He was critically wounded, and brought back to the Jedi. Who promptly put a new personality and a new set of memories into Revan’s body, hoping that the new personality would be able to use Revan’s subconscious memories to find the aforementioned mystical doodads.

Yep. My character turns out to be, or to have been, Revan, the big bad guy. My responses to this twist were twofold:

1. Jeez, I’ve been trying to play this guy as a goody two shoes, and you’re telling me his subconscious wants to take over the galaxy? Thanks for the late tip, folks!
2. For crying out loud, have these game designers never heard of the memory theory?

The latter response may not be entirely fair, since it’s certainly not required that everyone in a fictional universe have an understanding of and agreement with a particular philosophical theory. But conveniently, the good characters decide to stick around because hey, my character isn’t the same guy as Revan, so they want to give me a chance. The not-so-good characters stick around because they’re hoping I’ll start being more Revan-like. Meanwhile, I had to decide whether to start playing the game differently, and going in more of a bad-guy direction, and I decided to stick with my previous idea of who the character was. Basically, using the memory theory, even though my character was in the body that Revan had, he was a different character. But as I kept to the goody-two-shoes path, all the other characters kept talking about how this was a chance for Revan to redeem himself. And the game is not giving me any “Hey, you people killed Revan when you stuck me in here. Don’t give me that redemption crap!” dialogue options. I’m not sure if I’m upset about what they did to my mental image of “my” character or about the seemingly cavaier way the big twist was handled. Or maybe I’m just upset that they didn’t give me the option to stop swinging a lightsaber around and have a deep conversation with my compatriots.

Ah well. It was still a fun game. And just another example of how you never know where you’re going to run into some philosophy fodder.

Happy New Year, everyone. I’m gonna try and get back on the horse with a post I’ve been mulling over for far too long.

I’ve talked before about the idea of deliberative democracy – that people should have a great deal of political power, but that they must provide reasons to each other for the decisions they make. I mentioned theorists like John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, but my introduction to the term actually came through the work of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In books like Democracy and Disagreement and Why Deliberative Democracy?, Gutmann and Thompson try to steer between the procedural and substantive poles and make the case that any successful democracy implies both. Equal access to power and mutual respect are necessary for the procedures of democracy to function properly, but they are substantial moral commitments. I find Gutmann and Thompson’s arguments to be clear and well-presented and a good picture of what a deliberative democracy should look like.

One of the things I find most interesting about their sense of deliberative democracy, though, is that they argue that it is a second-order system for answering political/ethical questions. What’s a second order system? It’s the system you use to figure out what system you’re going to use for settling contentious questions. Think of it this way. A law is the answer to a particular question – how much should we tax such-and-such, what should the penalty be for this action, etc. The first-order system by which we answer that question is our government – Congress, the executive branch, and so on. That system is put in place by the Constitution. Attempting to amend or even replace the Constitution would be a second-order question – important because it sets the ground rules for everything that follows, but hopefully giving room to maneuver when it comes to the nitty-gritty details.

Gutmann and Thompson see deliberative democracy as a second-order system for sorting out some of the contentious social and cultural controversies of early-21st-Century American life, such as the role of religious precepts in the lawmaking process. And I personally find that to be an appealing prospect. But I do wonder if part of the reason I find it appealing is that it stacks the deck in the direction I like. Most deliberative democrats say that the reasons that we provide to one another to justify a course of action should be publicly accessible – inspired, perhaps, by the empiricism of the scientific revolution, the idea is that if I say that something justified a particular course of action, you should be able to check my work and see if that justification actually holds. That would tend to “solve� the contentious social and cultural controversies of early-21st-Century American life by short-circuiting them, because many of these arguments rest on a conflict between pluralism and belief in a particular absolute moral code. Whether that code is divinely inspired or just part of a universal natural law, it does not appear to be publicly accessible. So many of the justifications that one side would offer can’t even be brought to the table.

Now, like I said, there’s a certain appeal to me here. But I’m a pluralist. And I doubt any absolutist is going to participate in a second-order decision process with me that would put them at such a disadvantage. My gut instinct is that deliberative democracy, with is combination of procedural and substantive concerns, is more like a first-order system that gets adopted once certain ground rules are accepted, and that a messier second-order system will have to determine whether we adopt the ground rules that deliberative democracy requires. But I’m still trying to work this one out for myself.

Lemme just point you over to a discussion on hyper-textual ontology about the concept of “natural ability” and its relationship to effort, level of interest, and those things about ourselves that we generally feel like we have some control over. In the comments, I press the notion that “natural ability” means something. But on an even-numbered day, I might feel differently. I do think that if we’re going to take seriously the idea that we are embodied beings, it makes sense to say that those bodies might have some specific constraints built in. But I will add the caveat that this is all working from our current understanding of nature, matter, and physicality, and sometimes I think those notions are going to get a serious thrashing one of these days.

Peter Levine offers a cautionary tale on his blog about service learning programs in education. Levine sees such programs as a valuable tool for building the skills that people would need to be deliberative citizens – he sees a direct connection between a method of educating and a particular kind of political environment. He sees parallels to many of the reforms Dewey advocated. He then argues that many of those reforms lost their direct connection to a desired political outcome, and became more compartmentalized and separated from a larger social view. Levine sees the same thing possibly happening with service programs, as other priorities take hold. Not to say that any of the other priorities are bad, but that if we’re really going to build a better democracy, we have to pay attention to how we prepare ourselves to live in it.

Levine also participates in the blog at deliberative-democracy.net, which worth a look-see.

A quick link to Philosophy, Etc., and a post that discusses the burning question of what kind of contribution philosophers should try to make to the public discourse.

A couple of bloggers mention Dewey in the context of the role of religion in today’s world. Thoughts from Kansas discusses a Washington Post article where physics is called a “secular ideology” along with capitalism and communism. Josh Rosenau brings up Barack Obama’s recent speech on religion (which I really need to discuss in its own right as soon as I get the energy to do so) and says:

Persuade people about a common reality, eh? What field of human endeavor seeks to understand our common reality? Ask John Dewey about that, and he’d have known that we’re talking about scientific pragmatism. Communism and capitalism adhere to unverifiable personal (unshared) assumptions about the nature of people, history, and morality. As such, they are unable to reach any synthesis but death or peaceful coexistence. Science, because it is the study of our shared reality is capable of synthesis. I can convince you that physics works because I can show it to you. We share that experience, and so long as we both value a commitment to reality, physics is the same for everyone.

I think this is a pretty good capsule of Dewey’s approach to empiricism. I do think that Dewey, at least, would be inclined to bring both communism and capitalism under empiricism’s scrutiny as well. Those “assumptions about the nature of people, history and morality” lead people to make predictions about how the future will unfold. We should be able to see whether or not these predictions pan out. Indeed, I’d argue that one of the reasons so many people either reject or want to modify capitalism and communism is that the predictions haven’t come to pass.

Todd at Todd’s Hammer – a really good blog that I’m going to add to the links sections here as soon as I hit post – briefly mentions Dewey in the context of the religion-vs.-science conflict. I’d like to quote a fair chunk of his opening paragraph along with the Dewey mention that comes later on:

Religion is a “meaning-maker� that for thousands of years has been mis-apprehended as a “truth-spring�, a source of empirical truth. The problem with religion and science over the past 500 years is that our human understanding of knowledgecraft, that is, how we know, has progressed to what we commonly call the “scientific method,� leaving religious truth-claims in the dust. Truth-seeking guided by the assumptions of scientific method produces a radically different kind of knowledge than that produced by religion (or philosophy or music or art or literature), one anchored in embodied experience, observation, deductive reasoning and generalizing inference from experimental data. Religion produces meaning through tradition, story, theorizing from foreknown assumptions, and affective experience or feelings. The conflict arises when religion is mistaken as the truth-spring, the source of our knowledge of the natural world, rather than a meaning-maker.
. . .
John Dewey’s particular version of Naturalism sees human meaning production, that is, the humanities, as a biological function. Our brains are set up to produce meaning. And George Herbert Mead argued that, psychologically, despite our formal knowledge systems in modern societies, at its root, meaning arises in interaction with the world. That is, our brains produce meaning through interaction and experience. We know what something means but, crassly put, using it. Thus, meaning production is embodied and social, by nature.

This probably cuts right to the core of why Dewey and pragmatists are so fiercely criticized by strong supporters of religion. When pragmatists says that meaning comes from use, on the one hand there’s a very basic and “practical” way to take it. If I say “The sun is bright outside,” I can describe a lot of different phenomena that I might be trying to point out in terms of light and color. But in order for me to understand what the sun being outside means, the sentence has to call to mind different ways that the sun being bright shapes the world around me. I need sunglasses, I should think about sunblock, and so on and so forth. We know more about what it means for the sun to be bright now than we did years ago when we didn’t understand UV radiation so well. Well, you can take this concept and scale it up to the big ideas, which is what Dewey is famous for doing with things like democracy and education. We grasp the meaning of democracy to the extent that we take actions that increase human potential to understand and act and unlocks that potential in everyone. This is a big idea, on the scale of many religious ideas, and Dewey tries to explain how meaningful it is to him in his book A Common Faith. But it is based entirely on the natural world that we experience, and so it isn’t a satisfactory source of meaning for many people.

Those interested in the ethics of genetic screening of embryos should head over to hyper-textual ontology or Technoprogressive, where Robn’s started an interesting thread. I’ve already started commenting in the h-t o thread, so I’ll just point you over there and encourage you to join in.

Nick Shay has a series of posts on Democrats’ approach to political discourse and his suggestion for a new approach. He draws heavily on Dewey, James, and other pragmatists in the later osts, but it’s probably worth checking out the whole thing. Shay’s basic argument is that Democrats appear to be too focused on “discovering truth” about the world and not focused enough on the power of language to shape the world. The launch point for his discussion is the phrase “reality-based community,” which was fairly prominent during the 2004 election. In the fifth part of his series, he says:

When we think in this way, it becomes clear that speech itself is a mode of action. It does work in the world because of the uses that we give it. Language is, according to pragmatist thinkers like Dewey and Richard Rorty, entirely made, is not something that is simply found “out there� in the world, and is not frozen in some predetermined, unitary relationship to reality. It is less a medium that stands between the self and the reality that we are trying to comprehend and more a performative tool.

This means that the history of linguistic expression is not a progressive history. Our language is not something that becomes better fitted to a reality that is somehow separate and distinct. Any true statement is only true as long as it is functions as a tool that we can use. When the language that we employ no longer does the work that we want it to do, when we find that it is getting in the way of the production of new forms that could be put to more effective use, it does us no good to hold onto a particular linguistic tool. We have to constantly be aware of the fact that we are making choices between many competing vocabularies, and we have to decide which language we want to take up for a particular purpose or end. Each word that we use, however, is a not a solution in and of itself. Instead, a word or collection of words is something we put to work in our stream of experience as a possible indicator of the ways in which existing circumstances or experiences can be changed or shifted.

I think it’s significant that Shay includes Rorty in this passage, because the notion he’s putting forward draws more on Rorty than it does on Dewey and James. Yes, the pragmatists emphasized contingency and change. But they were undoubtedly empiricists. They felt that there was a stability to the world that we experience, such that we can use language to make predictions about it. We can test our linguistic constructions for how well they match up with the actual world of experience. James emphasized that verification was vital to truth; Dewey looked to empirical results to show us whether we are warranted in saying something.

This isn’t to say I totally disagree with Shay’s argument. I think the emphasis may be a tad too much to one side, but that may be the result of Shay’s effort to correct what he sees as a leaning too far in the other direction. And there is something of the idea that discourse changes the world that is very much in keeping with the classical pragmatist tradition. In “The Will to Believe,” James argues that it’s OK for us to believe something even before we have completely solid verification of it – so long as it doesn’t actually contradict any of the things that we have verified. And in fact, he says it’s necessary for us to do so, because those beliefs motivate us to act in ways that help verify and make the belief true. If you believe a particular candidate or policy will have a positive effect on the world, you may be motivated to act to support that candidate or policy, by voting, donating, campaigning, or whatever. If the candidate/policy then wins, and turns out to have the beneficial effect you anticipated, that change became real because you, and others, believed in the change before you could verify it. So there’s no doubt that part of creating a better reality is finding the words to help other people see the possibilities that you see.