Punishment and Justice

What should we do with those who commit heinous crimes? What about those who commit minor crimes?

Punishment as a deterrent--like any overt deterrent, I suppose--functions as a threat. If you misbehave, you will be hurt or slain, or something will be taken from you. Yet that isn't where punishment ends, psychologically: people feel a rage towards particularly vile criminals, a rage that is more of a bloodlust or "righteous" fury than anything else. In these moments, the thinking is not, "We must make a warning to keep others from doing this", but rather, "That bastard must pay!"

Someone who hurts others deserves to be hurt themselves. When paired with the view that those who do good deserve good themselves, this sentence is a very near relative to the Golden Rule. We see the sentiment naturally manifested in the Judeo-Christian punishment of sinners and reward of believers, and indeed, in Jesus's famous explicit formulation of the Golden Rule. Hinduism's principle of karma is another example; even if it's not seen as a "punishment" per se by the Hindus, clearly it stems from the same sort of thinking. More recently, the neo-Pagan/Wiccan Rule of Three tells us that our decisions, beneficent or maleficent, will be visited upon us again, with threefold consequences.

Nietzsche described the general punishment urge in depressingly incisive terms:

... to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering—a real celebration, something that, as I’ve said, was valued all the more, the greater it contradicted the rank and social position of the creditor. [1]

I would quibble with him here about harming others being "the highest degree of pleasure" for most people, but I think the general gist of this passage is right. Causing others to suffer, in certain contexts, brings pleasure which is supposed to "make up" for wrongs perpetrated against oneself. (If "pleasure" is too strong a word, then "satisfaction" may be substituted, though mayhap that sugarcoats the situation too much.)

Considered less aesthetically and more economically, as it were, one gets the impression that there exists some metaphysical balance or scale, upon which doing wrong tilts the scale; and this tilting must be accounted for. "Harm" or "hurt" is the currency being weighed here, and so a person (or, more usually, a government) does what would normally be "wrong" to a criminal, and thus the upset scale is righted.

When generalized and made normative, we call this meting out of harm for harm "justice". For Western culture, Lady Justice (Justitia) symbolizes the concept quite plainly: she carries a scale of judgment and a sword, the first for determining where and how much harm to dole out, and the second for applying it. In "civilized" societies, now that we feel a conflict between wanting wrongdoers to suffer and squeemishness about the dirty work that that entails, we do not directly apply punishments ourselves; instead, we license a certain body of people--viz., the government and its police force--to enact the tenets of justice, which is to say, the tenets of reciprocity. Not literal reciprocity in the sense of an eye for an eye, of course; we are sufficiently advanced that we can invent substitutes and equivalents such as fines and imprisonment. Or, in some dire cases, the punishment probably exceeds the crime quite excessively.

Actually, the vast majority of crimes don't incite much ire (bloodlust) in the average citizen, because the vast majority of crimes are misdemeanors that do not directly harm individuals.[2] Jay walking; smoking cigarettes in a non-smoking area; smoking marijuana; downloading and sharing copyrighted material illegally on the internet; most other forms of copyright infringement; violating the terms of agreement in a competition or an online game by cheating; minor speeding or another small traffic offence; violating a zoning ordinance, that sort of thing. While opponents of drug use agree abstractly that smoking marijuana deserves punishment, I do not think they actively feel rage when they see or hear of such use, as long as it is not, say, "contributing to their children's delinquency". Players of an online game may feel that cheaters should be banned from the game--and in a fit of passion, perhaps more than that--but they typically do not believe that cheaters should be fined or locked up. (Indeed, perhaps these aren't even "misdemeanors" or "infractions", although most of the time legal agreements have clearly been broken.)

Along the continuum of wrongdoing, two things influence a bloodthirsty emotional reaction: personal impact, which is to say, how much an individual is personally affected by it, and severity or depravity of the crime. The former is more of a selfish thing, perhaps, insofar as we tend to care less about vandalism when it is not our very own property or part of a public space we care about. The latter is more universal or normative insofar as we can be riled up by hearing about child molesters, serial killers, or any perpetrator who inspires serious revulsion in us in spite of our own lack of personal investment in the matter.

[1] The Genealogy of Morals, more specifically the online edition here, because I'm lazy. Second essay, §6.

[2] "Misdemeanor" may not be the appropriate legal term here. "Infraction" or "regulatory offence" might be better. I should also add that whether another person is directly harmed or not can be argued in each of the following examples, but hopefully you can put that aside or mentally substitute your preferred examples as necessary.

More About People Misjudging Themselves

The Philosopher's Eye reports:

Chances are, you will be a less reliable indicator of your own behavior than a brain scan will...

... [A] research team, led by Matthew Lieberman, a psychology professor at UCLA, had subjects watch a public service announcement about the benefits of sunscreen while in an fMRI machine. The researchers looked for an increase in activity of the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with values, preferences, and self-reflection. Then, the researchers asked the subjects how likely they were to use more sunscreen during the upcoming week. After one week, the subjects were asked how often they ended up using sunscreen.

What the researchers found was that the subjects who showed an increase in medial prefrontal cortex activity were 75% more likely to use sunscreen, whereas the subjects who self-reported the intention to use more sunscreen were only about 50% more likely to do so. Thus, the researchers had better information about how the subjects would behave during the upcoming weeks than the subjects themselves.

Here is a link to the original research (also found in the Philosopher's Eye page, of course.)

Thinking vs Acting

I still don't understand exactly the "internal" difference between doing and just..... thinking about doing. Imagining it.

If I now intend to make a physical action, such as wiggle one of my toes, there's something happening in my mind that precedes that action--an anticipatory "planning" or intention stage. (If I remember correctly, studies by Benjamin Libet suggest that we don't even become conscious of our brain's decision to initiate an action until some 200-500ms after our brain starts setting it in motion.) But I can think about wiggling a toe without actually doing it--in fact, that's what I'm doing now as I make these observations, and what you the reader will likely be doing as these words call forth involuntary recollections in your mind. I can imagine wiggling a toe, even. Since most of us are such visual creatures, this will probably be first and foremost a mentally created image of my own toe wiggling (somehow); as I add detail to the imagining, I can recall the other sensations that accompany such a feat: the quale of my toe shifting position, the accompanying movement of my skin, the small shifts in texture or whatever that my skin will register if my movement causes it to encounter new surfaces/objects, etc.

I can even try to mentally re-create (simulate) the very willing, or whatever it is, that causes genuine movement. I can do this at a somewhat intuitive level, I think, but I feel I have a very poor grasp on what is actually happening.

Now, the curious thing about my imaginings here, is that imagining itself is another type of action; so, while I'm tinkering with how my mind translates thought into action, I am meanwhile doing just that in order to "experiment" at all. (Proper scientists will be horrified to here such phenomenological investigation referred to as "experimentation", but hey, I'm not talking about proper scientific experiments in this context.)

It seems that there is always some kind of buffer or gap that I cannot quite cross here.

Opaque Introspection

Some time ago, Psyblog posted a series called "What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds". Appropriately enough, it covers different ways in which humans typically completely misunderstand (or misjudge) components of their own behavior such as motivations, reasons, and predictions about their own responses. Sometimes this involves resolving cognitive dissonance, where a subject changes some of her beliefs in order to better match other beliefs they had been opposing; other times the explanation is less clear.

The whole subject is a curious one, since, subjectively, most of us feel like we have pretty transparent access to the inside of our own heads. For example, if asked to give reasons why we find one face more attractive than another, we usually think we can do so so; and we feel moreover that the reasons we come up with will be true to whatever processes actually go on inside our heads. Not so, as one of the Psyblog posts reports; at least not with the accuracy that we'd think we would have.

My impression is that we are sometimes alien to our own minds, insofar as we don't understand most of our inner machinations. Yet, strangely, we have this need to "tell stories", even to ourselves, about why we've done things a particular way: a need for explanation or justification of our inner landscape, much in the fashion of the need that we have to explain (and understand) the outer world. This isn't such a bad thing, since seeking explanations is the heart of science (and rational inquiry). But it does emphasize the necessity of being relentlessly critical and skeptical if your aim is truth -- skeptical even about your own thought processes -- lest you settle too firmly on the first story that seems plausible to you.

A downside of the above skeptical strategy, in my own experience, is that it tends to drive you a little bit crazy. Constantly doubting your own motivations, values, judgments, and ostensible motivations is not a very enjoyable way to go about your day. After a certain point, if you lose too much faith in your own understanding with regard to the contents of your own head, you may end up impeding your own progress, due to constantly looking for nonexistent solid ground. From a practical "getting things done" standpoint, it may be better to be wrong about a few little details here and there if you're still able to function well in the main.

We may suppose, perhaps, that this was why we did not evolve to be more naturally self-critical and self-reflective creatures. Don't get me wrong, compared to any other form of intelligence that we know about, we still go pretty far toward it -- even the least reflective of individuals tries to purge logical inconsistencies from her thoughts, though the amount of tolerance for inconsistency obviously varies from person to person. But, based on experiments like those linked above, plausible-seeming beliefs about your own motivations were evolutionarily much more relevant to fitness than numerous safeguard mechanisms to ensure internal accuracy. Apparently.

Controlling oneself

Fascinating post over at Less Wrong about the influence of control systems on human behavior, and the role they seem to play in the brain. A control system here basically means a feedback device that catalyzes or inhibits some variable in order to maintain it within an accepted range. (Thermostat, homeostasis, etc.)

Here's a lengthy quote that seems most pertinent to me:

In a primitive, tribal culture, being seen as useless to the tribe could easily be a death sentence, so we [likely] evolved mechanisms to avoid giving the impression of being useless. A good way to avoid showing your incompetence is to simply not do the things you're incompetent at, or things which you suspect you might be incompetent at and that have a great associated cost for failure. If it's important for your image within the tribe that you do not fail at something, then you attempt to avoid doing that.

You might already be seeing where this is leading. The things many of us procrastinate on are exactly the kinds of things that are important to us. We're deathly afraid of the consequences of what might happen if we fail at them, so there are powerful forces in play trying to make us not work on them at all. Unfortunately, for beings living in modern society, this behavior is maladaptive and buggy. It leads to us having control circuits which try to keep us unproductive, and when they pick up on things that might make us more productive, they start suppressing our use of those techniques.

Furthermore, the control circuits are stupid. They are occasionally capable of being somewhat predictive, but they are fundamentally just doing some simple pattern-matching, oblivious to deeper subtleties. They may end up reacting to wholly wrong inputs. Consider the example of developing a phobia for a particular place, or a particular kind of environment. Something very bad happens to you in that place once, and as a result, a circuit is formed in your brain that's designed to keep you out of such situations in the future. Whenever it detects that you are in a place resembling the one where the incident happened, it starts sending error signals to get you away from there. Only that this is a very crude and unoptimal way of keeping you out of trouble - if a car hit you while you were crossing the road, you might develop a phobia for crossing the road. Needless to say, this is more trouble than it's worth.

(P.S., I should note that the author of the quoted blog post, Kaj_Sotala, draws this conceptual material largely from a self-help article by PJ Eby).

Fascinating stuff. Maybe not without its problems though, as commenter Silas Barta notes:

The explanations here for behavioral phenomena look like commonsense reasoning that is being shoehorned into controls terminology by clever relabeling. (ETA: Why do you need the concept of a "feedback control system" to think of the idea of running through the reasons you're afraid of something, for example?)

The thought concerns me a bit too. Are we really getting any benefit from describing these aspects of behavior as control mechanisms? Are we getting a more accurate model of behavior? At an individual, practical level, does it help us to conceive of our thought processes in this way?

Following From

[I wish that I had the interest/dedication to actually pursue these thoughts more rigorously by studying existent philosophical work on the topic, but alas.]

Consider a state governed by absolutely no physical or metaphysical laws. Does this mean anything can happen? Or for "something to happen", does that require that there be something to guide or direct "happenings"?

Natural laws, of course, probably don't "guide" action by any means. They're simply descriptions of how phenomena behave. But... how do phenomena "know" how to behave? What makes them behave in a particular way versus some other way?

I suppose I'm inquiring about how causation works in general--what exactly goes on when some observed or postulated event (which we call the antecedent) is supposed to cause, or in some way be responsible for, another event (the consequent). (As a side note, "event" is too loose of a term. Really, I suppose I mean "states of affairs" or "sets of circumstances" that obtain at a certain point in time. But event is a bit quicker to write, and most of the discussion examples that I can think of are events in the more standard sense too.)

If nothing else, we can at least say that human minds (and thus what we call rational thought) work best thinking under the following paradigm: to understand how/why a circumstance came to be, the circumstance must have followed from, or been enabled by, a pre-existing framework. {{And it is this necessity of thought unchecked that Kant rebukes in his Critique. The search for the unconditioned condition--a final explanation--the prime mover--God--is an attempt to step outside of the infinite regress that otherwise results, and thus to give us a circumstance which needs no further explanation. Kant (perhaps rightfully) claims that reason oversteps its justifiable boundaries when it tries to make this move.}} This paradigm seems to have served us fairly faithfully so far, but we cannot nonetheless discount the possibility that this fundamental "strategy" of thought might be flawed. {{As you will notice, the current topic is regrettably plagued by difficulty (impossibility?) of discussion. Like many other areas of philosophy, we are trying to grapple with notions that extend into the core of our most basic assumptions, and even trying to think about them will be difficult, much less to question their "accuracy".}}

What, however, does any of this mean? The ideas I suggest now may be completely nonsensical, possibly incoherent as well. And surely there is nothing to be gained by indulging nonsense.

I believe the question ties into (is enrooted in?) regress and the problem of finding first causes. Which in its own way mirrors the confusing interrelationship between objectivity and subjectivity.

Motivation

How can we (or I?) motivate ourselves to do things that we do not want to do?

Seems to me that "instrumental" and "punitive" approaches have been most popular over the years. Which is to say, under the instrumental approach we think, "X is unpleasant, but I need to accomplish/tolerate X in order to achieve Y, which I do desire", and thence derives motivation to do X.

The punitive approach--maybe it should be called the "threat of punishment" approach, but that just sounds long and awkward--is more along the lines of, "Q is unpleasant; but Z is even more unpleasant than Q, and Z will happen if I do not do Q".

Actually, these are analogous (although not perfectly so) to modus ponens and modus tollens, like so:

X->Y
X
Y

Z->~Q
Q
~Z

From a motivational standpoint, one looks toward the conclusion for a desired outcome. In the first case, we want Y to happen, and we know that one of the ways to effect Y is to do X. That is, if we do X, unpleasant though it may be, we will be rewarded with Y.

Similarly, in the second case Z is even more odious than Q, but we know that if Z is going to happen, it must be in Q's absence. Thus, we can prevent Z from happening (effect ~Z) by doing Q.


These also (unsurprisingly) map pretty handily onto the psychological principles of operant conditioning: what I've called the "instrumental approach" (modus ponens) is analogous to positive reinforcement and positive punishment, and the "punitive approach" (modus tollens) to negative reinforcement and negative punishment.


All four approaches are logically equivalent, depending on how we choose our premises. It is worthwhile to note, however, that they are not psychologically equivalent--and that people may react better to what they understand as a positive stimulus versus a negative stimulus, etc.

Fallibility vs Infallibility

And binary.

This is another variant of the same old theme I keep rehashing.

If we have no perfect (infallible) knowledge, then we cannot know with certainty that we have no perfect/infallible knowledge. Even as fallible beings, we must know at least that--but then, we're not completely fallible after all. Just, mostly.

Maybe 99.99%.

...

In the mystical traditions, "one" is unity, "two" is a division (from a whole to distinct things). Dualistic thinking. If we had no powers of discrimination whatsoever, presumably we would experience all things as one giant homogeneous, indistinguishable conglomerate.

That is, assuming it is possible to "experience" at all without discriminating in some way or another. Don't our senses detect contrast best? When exposed to a single, unwavering stimulus, that stimulus loses its edge, its flavor, its ability to be sensed at all?

From the concept of "two"--of one thing distinct from another--we can build up, perhaps, the entirety of mathematics (and thus, we think, physics, nature, human thought) through binary; binary being a meaningful alternation between two distinguishable states (represented in computers as "0" and "1").

If we can reduce any piece of information to "yes" or "no" questions--true or false statements--then we can represent it as a series of bits. Just as, even before George Boole came along, logic traditionally separated all propositions into those which are the case and those which are not, knowing that some thing cannot both be the case and not be the case simultaneously. Presumably, a mind simply needs to know, from the list of infinite propositions, which are true, which false. (Perhaps we would need to know which propositions are senseless or lacking truth/false values too; but then we shouldn't have included them in the list to begin with.)

This would be sufficient for omniscience...? Leibniz thought so, or at least that God comprehended the universe through such eyes.

Infinity does seem to present a problem, among many other obstacles. Recursion, describing oneself while describing the universe.

And what about the infinity of imaginary possibilities? Are conditional/subjunctive statements "true" or "false"?

Hegelian Precursor to Derrida

If we cannot indeed make true statements about the whole (because they inevitably lead to an incomplete thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, which in turn becomes a leg of a new triad...), then yes, I think Derrida's theory of deconstruction--wherein all statements undermine themselves--follows more naturally.

Note, by the way, that I know next to nothing about both Hegel and Derrida here. But anyway.

My objection to deconstructionism hitherto has been similar to my complaints about extreme skepticism generally: by attempting to demolish all foundations, one must necessarily presuppose a new foundation from which to do that demolishing. In other words, the statement "all propositions undermine themselves" necessarily undermines itself, rendering it false. Discussing that with a lit-theory friend of mine, he laughed and called that a beautiful part of the theory; to him, it "shows" the theory in operation on itself. It bothers me, however, since it leaves us left with a paradox and/or a jumble of contradiction.


Parallels

We can view the deconstruction of "All propositions undermine themselves" as analogous to the eternal war between a skeptic and a dogmatist, or an unraveling of the Liar's paradox. To wit, each valid step may be succeeded by a contradictory, equally valid step in the argument. E.g.,

(1) All propositions undermine themselves.

(2) "All propositions undermine themselves" undermines itself, by (1). Ergo, (1) is false.

(3) If (1) is false, then there can be propositions which do not undermine themselves after all. In which case, (2)'s reasoning is incorrect, because (1) might be one of those propositions, and so (1) might be true. Since (1) was given as an initial premise, we should then consider (1) true.

(4) (3)'s conclusion is a proposition which, by (1), undermines itself. Hence (3) must be false, and if (3) is false, then (1) is not true after all.

...etc, etc. This may be argued back and forth as long as we like without resolution.

[Note again: as said before, I know crap-all about Derrida. I have no idea if genuine deconstructions follow the form I just gave, and at the moment am too lazy to verify. Hooray, I'm a bad scholar. You caught me, want a prize?]

Just as with the Liar's Paradox,

(5) This statement (5) is false.

(6) Because (5) is false, (5)'s negation, "This statement (5) is true", must be true. Hence (5) is true.

(7) Since (5) is true, we know that the proposition "(5) is false" is true. Thus, (6)'s conclusion is false, because (5) is not true after all.

(8) Yet, if (5) is false, then its proposition "(5) is false" is false itself, meaning that (5) is really true. That means (7)'s conclusion is falses.

... etc. Clearly, an infinite succession of licitly derived contradictions. I'm trying to make a point about steps directly contradicting the directly previous step, but that's probably confusing, and under an ordinary analysis it is not necessary, so let me show a more intuitive route which is equivalent:

(9) (9) is false.

(10) Because (9) is false, "(9) is false" is false. Thus (9) is true.

(11) But if (9) is true, then "(9) is false" is true. And that means (9) is really false.

(12) If (9) is false, the same reasoning as from (10) shows that (9) is true.

(13) But if (9) is true, then the same reasoning as from (11) shows that (9) is false.

(14) The same reasoning from (10) and (12) shows that (9) is true.

(15) The same reasoning from (11) and (13) shows that...

The main difference is that I'm not spelling out the contradiction of the last step so much as just reasserting either (10) or (11) to refute the last conclusion. Which is really the same thing, so why am I making a fuss about it? The Lord only knows. Really, the smart thing to do is to stop as soon as you've found a contradiction in the argument (since otherwise we run into problems with explosion), but I'm trying to make the analogy to Hegel more explicit.


And speaking of whom, back to Hegel.

Suppose we call the assertion that "The Liar's Paradox statement is true" our thesis, and "The Liar's Paradox statement is false" our antithesis. Clearly, we can always reason toward thesis or antithesis, successfully proving or disproving each conclusion however many times we like, without ever reaching a final resolution. To Hegel, I believe, we should then realize the futility of this exercise, at which point we need to step outside of the system and create a synthesis between thesis and antithesis. Being a Hegelian neophyte, I don't know what the synthesis should be in this case, but it might be something like, "The Liar's paradox is both true and false" or it is"partially true, partially false," or "true at one time, false at another," or some other means of effecting reconciliation.

Now, the fun part about Hegel is that he says the new synthesis, whatever it is, now becomes the thesis or antithesis of a new thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, which will need its own extra-dichotomous resolution. And we approach (but never reach?) truth through an infinite chain of these triads--reminiscent of Kant's moral progression, where practical reason must postulate an infinity of time (or lifespans?) through which we imperfect beings aspire toward perfection.

Now, where this is relevant more specifically to my thoughts, is that an infinite chain of dialectical syntheses reminds me very strongly of the warring double-helix Ouruborus I mentioned earlier. It seems to me wishful thinking on Hegel's part to claim that the addition of a synthesis makes a new kind of "progression" or development. Rather, the chain of triads fighting with each other is precisely ismorphic to the chain of contradicting (10)s and (11)s I outlined above, the simply unending contradiction. So, either the Liar's Paradox and Derrida's deconstruction already exemplify Hegel's described growth, or there exists simply no progression to speak of either way.

Hegel's syntheses are attempts to establish a new "groundless ground" or self-supporting justification in each controversy. By my thinking, however, this is not progression, since the new synthesis remains just as much a part of the very system it attempted to escape. This is just like trying to defuse Gödel's incompleteness theorem by adding axioms to a formal system; it doesn't matter how many or what axioms you introduce: by the very nature of the system at hand, you will leave yourself open to a new version of the incompleteness theorem. (Unless you reduce your system's axioms to a point where they express less than you originally wanted.)

Now, we might be able to argue that there's a kind of progression/development/growth/whatever here anyway, but I'm not going to investigate further at this point. It may explain (in part) the impossibility of halting philosophical inquiry.

By now, it's beginning to seem to me, naively, that the history of thought is little more than a horribly convoluted deception, an intriciate illusion, contrived to hide the fact that all we've been doing is saying "Nuh-uh!" and "Yeah-huh!" to each other for the last two thousand years.

Silly children.

Skepticism and the Root of All Things

Vancouver Philosopher at The Chasm makes the following point about Heidegger:

Heidegger's denial about a fundamental unifying characteristic to philosophy is foolish. When we employ such skepticism about the reality of the ground/central concept, we only wind up grounding such skepticism in denial. The very act of denial becomes its own ground, and this strategy winds up being self-defeating in the end. Instead, we shouldn't think of various philosophical systems as themselves foolhardy in establishing a ground or framework. We should interrogate the framework or ground on its own merits.

This follows my own thoughts about skepticism regarding truth: we cannot sensibly make a statement like "There is no truth" without simultaneously undermining that statement by implying that it itself is true. For skepticism to assert a meaningful proposition (that is, a proposition which supplies us with genuine information), the skepticism itself must be grounded in something. And if the brand of skepticism at hand denies the existence or reliability of all grounds, it necessarily denies its own conclusions. Hence, as Vancouver Philosopher says, denial becomes its own ground, and it invariably ends up defeating itself.

Similarly, skepticism about our epistemic relation to truth undermines itself as well. Suppose our skeptic offers us "an irrefutable argument" that, whether there exist truths or not, we simply cannot possess knowledge of them. E.g., all claims must be justified by other claims, and there are no unjustified, self-supported claims; ergo all claims are unjustified/unacceptable. And yet, if we accept the skeptic's conclusion, we (presumably) have now acquired a new bit of knowledge, viz., the knowledge that "All knowledge is impossible", or "We possess no knowledge"! Wait, how did that happen? How do we know this when we can't know anything? Again the skeptical conclusion undermines itself; it presupposes its own new ground from which to criticize the whole of another position, yet in doing so creates and relies upon that which it seeks to demolish.

Similar arguments apply to skepticism toward the legitimacy of reason generally.


Roots

The essential problem, as I see it, is that the skeptic must engage the opponent on her own territory, so to speak, and using her own tools. This makes strategic sense, since otherwise why should the anti-skeptic (let's say "dogmatist") accept whatever point the skeptic tries to make? Unfortunately, this is a rigged game for the extreme skeptic: when playing by the dogmatist's rules, there is simply no way to "win" or "break outside" the system, because every attempt to do so places you right back into a new system. (This all ties into the Liar's Paradox, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and the Halting Problem; I don't know how to make this more explicit yet, but see Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter for related discussion).

Now, life isn't exactly a bed of roses for the dogmatist, either, since she can never really answer the skeptic's demands for an "unmoved mover" in the realm of logic, so to speak. But it's fascinating to imagine the two positions, intertwined together as an infinity of recursive, dialectic contradiction. The skeptic asserts, "You know nothing"; the dogmatist responds, "Then I must know that I know nothing"; the skeptic rejoins, "But to know that, you must presuppose other principles for which you have no justification either!"; and the dogmatist counters, "But in order to know that I need those principles, surely I must know that I need them, so I do know something after all!", and so on ad infinitum. Or ad nauseam, take your pick. The two warring sides endlessly wrap around each other, neither overcoming the other--perhaps like twin strands of intertwined DNA which end up consuming their own tails as an involuted Ouroborus?

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, nor lost in mystical/metaphorical speculation. The key here is that we could apparently resolve the tension if we could ever find a groundless ground. What I call a "groundless ground" shows up in many places: as Aristotle's "prime mover," as Aquinas' "uncaused cause," as the idea of a necessary entity or fact in general, as a self-caused being, as that which needs no justification, as a "primitive fact," as Kant's description of "the unconditioned." To find such a ground and look out from it would yield the fabled view from nowhere, the view sub specie aeternitatis, the God's-eye view. This perspective, and none other, would be satisfactorily "outside of the system" to satisfy both skeptic and dogmatist. (Hopefully.)

It's no surprise, then, that my description of the clash above mirrors Kant's Antinomies of Pure Reason, where my "dogmatism" would map on to the rationalist understanding of metaphysics, and skepticism to the empiricist understanding. Roughly, anyhow. To be more precise, Kant thought that both rationalist and empiricist sought a "groundless ground" (the "unconditioned"), but they sought it from different starting premises; whereas my dogmatist/skeptic divide does not show both sides seeking an unconditioned ground so much as the denial that there is such a thing on the skeptical side. So take the comparison with a grain of salt--I'd have more to say about justifying my analogy/mapping, but I'm running out of motivation at this point.

Silly details about numbers

The ancient Greeks found numbers fascinating in an unprecedented way (or so Morris Kline's Mathematics for the Nonmathematician informs me). Rather than adopting the more practical attitude of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians toward numbers, the Greeks recognized a conceptual beauty in the ability use the self-same methods on any possible collection of objects. That is to say, abstraction, and the universality thereof.

To assign a single, unique label to every quantity, and then to perform mental operations upon them which, amazingly, correctly modeled comparable situations in reality--astonishing. And I do mean that without irony.

Take a pie or any appropriately divisible object. Cut it into halves, then cut each half into thirds. We take it for granted today that the answer may be computed easily through a mechanical procedure: (1 * 1/2) * 1/3 = 1/6. This is to say that, without having made any cuts or further measurements, we already know with certainty what size the smaller pieces will be! (Or the size that they will approximate, because it is not an ideal world.)

But this is a fantastic discovery, for by beginning from only a few known facts, we discover what must be the case for physical objects after manipulating them--all without having left our armchairs.

Neo-Mystical Idealism: the Interrelationship Between Belief, Truth, and Action

Preamble.
This post is concerned with what I will call Neo-Mystical Idealism (NMI) of the sort often hinted at - or even explicitly endorsed - in pop-spirituality/self-help books (e.g. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior), movies (ranging from fiction like The Matrix and The Waking Life to allegedly "factual" films like The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know), fantasy and sci-fi books (Philip K. Dick), video games, various other popular sources (the Planescape expansion for the game Dungeons & Dragons), new age spirituality, ancient mystical traditions, certain idiosyncratic philosophers (Anaxagoras, perhaps), literary figures (Jorge Luis Borges, on some interpretations?), and a few fringe theories of modern physics.

Definition.
What I call NMI, broadly construed, is the belief that our thoughts, desires, beliefs, and/or intentions exert a direct, significant, formative influence on reality (and our ability to interact with it). Depending on the variant of NMI, this may be as subtle as influencing a random number generator toward a particular bias simply by willing it so, or it may be as drastic as the belief that reality simply is a dream constructed wholly by our own minds. I say "neo-mystical" due to its overwhelmingly mystical nature and its current prevalence in pop-culture, and I say "idealism" in reference to philosophical idealism where the world consists of mind-objects rather than "real" objects.

Notes:
+ "Idealism" may be a bit of a misnomer, since it is not necessary to believe that nothing exists beyond what the mind perceives in order to accept NMI; but, it's the most relevant term I can think of.
+ Accepting the efficacy of prayer or magic rituals could be seen as embracing NMI, since they both consist in effecting results through extra-physical means. But I would prefer to exclude them from NMI-hood since both prayer and magic rituals seem to be an appeal toward an external power, whereas proponents of NMI seem to focus very much on the personal mind's power.

Example.
In The Matrix, those who have been awakened - that is, those who have been taken from out of the computer simulation and shown the real world - realize a fundamental truth about what they thought was reality. Reality does not actually work the way they had learned and placidly accepted all their live. Rather, there is an underlying substratum - in this case, a digital reality designed and maintained by artificial intelligences - which governs phenomenal appearances. This means that what were thought to be unbreakable rules of reality are actually subordinate to the rules of the simulation. If one is in the know, one can "hack" the system to do things which aren't supposed to be allowed: as Morpheus puts it, "Some rules can be bent. Others can be broken."

This all pertains to Neo-Mystical Idealism in that belief is inextricably intertwined with overcoming the rules of the fake reality. Time and time again, The Matrix stresses the power of the mind and the power of belief. One of the most memorable scenes occurs during a training program where Neo, the recently-awakened hero, receives his first genuine test: he must leap a vast distance from the roof of one building to another, in defiance of his firmly entrenched beliefs about the laws of gravity. Notably, Morpheus tells Neo the following just before he jumps across the gap himself: "You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind. " Morpheus sails across the humongous distance practically without effort, but when Neo jumps, he plummets like a rock; he did not successfully follow Morpheus' advice, but clung to his old beliefs and preconceptions about the functioning of the world. Hence, he failed.

From this and many other instances that emphasize belief, The Matrix conveys a pretty clear message: your beliefs are intensely related to your abilities (at least when one is in a computer simulation, at any rate). This message is, indeed, essentially the same as that handed down from so many other sources. Transcend the world of illusion (realize The Truth), and you will be able to do the previously unimaginable. This is one of the key components of NMI - it always requires a sort of "awakening" or "enlightenment" process.

Reality?
There is a grain of truth in the lesson taught by NMI: false beliefs can easily inhibit our full potential. Certainly history abounds with examples where the "impossible" later turned out to be quite possible, and there resulted a dramatic shift in outlook to accommodate that change. In quite a few cases, it seems as though a belief (or lack of belief) hindered progress, as when it was thought (prior to 1954) that humans could not run a mile in less than four minutes. Yet, after an initial pioneering spirit showed that it was possible, suddenly many others followed suit, and improved upon his time.

So that seems pretty uncontroversial. However, there is a very big difference between being limited by a false belief and a belief creating or affecting reality. Beliefs do not and cannot create reality They can only accord or disaccord with it. Hence, while we should take from The Matrix the lesson that we should not grow complacent in our beliefs, this does not mean that NMI generally is true. If NMI were true, we ought to be able to find confirmation of it beyond the shaky pseudoscientific studies published in disreputable journals.

On the other hand, perhaps my belief that "Beliefs do not and cannot create reality" is itself a false belief? And perhaps I am limiting myself when I latch onto it so ferociously? And perhaps others do the same?

So, what, it's just a fractal after all?

Click the above picture for a larger version with more details about what's actually being shown. Still, you should be able to make out the words labeling the left image "Brain cell" and the right image "The Universe," and you should be immediately struck by the startling similarity between the two. The brain cell is from a stained slide of a mouse brain, and the universe picture is from a computer simulation portraying how we think the universe developed (it must be a simulation, of course, since we can't very well photograph the universe from outside, nor travel back in time to witness its formation—or so we think).

These two pics were apparently put together by a David Constantine for a New York Times article (or something? that's where the image is hosted, at any rate), although I cannot find the article itself. The "universe" screenshot is from the Millennium Simulation, an international project meant to visually model the universe's development at an unprecedented level of detail and realism. The aforementioned site includes download links for the simulation video, but here's a YouTube link for those who want it.

What do we make of this striking resemblance betwixt neuron and universe? Well, part of me wants to immediately go off on an excited rant about how this confirms all these things I keep noticing about looping/circularity/recursion/self-reference/things-building-upon-themselves, and perhaps there's some sort of mystic significance to be drawn from it all.

But my more cautious side—which, generally speaking, holds more sway for me in these matters—has a few things to say. First and foremost, this is just a simulation; we have no genuine fact of the matter about what the universe, taken as a whole, looked like then or looks like now. Second, this was a simulation designed by humans, creatures who thrive on centralized, hierarchical methods of understanding nature. Seeking out (and, for that matter, imposing) structured hierarchies in nature is one of our most revered conceptual tools, sometimes to the hindrance of our own knowledge—for example, we spent the longest time trying to identify "pacemaker" or leading/guiding cells to account for the slime-mold's self-organizational abilities before Evelyn Fox Keller and Lee Segal showed how they (slime-molds) group together without centralized direction (see Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software for a very readable description of this and many related topics). I find it very likely that, assuming the universe simulation is not perfectly accurate, the simulator designers will tend to incorporate their own biological biases into their work, meaning that human simulation designers will favor simulations that mimic centralization and hierarchies.

Now, for all that, I still grant that the universe demonstrates this kind of arrangement in a number of different non-biological places as well: atoms have nuclei around which electrons orbit, planets and stars form from molecules accumulating around one point, planets orbit about stars, stars orbit about black holes—or whatever-the-hell is in the center of our galaxy. (Note that it pays to be cautious with these analogies: thinking of an atom in terms of planets revolving around a sun can lead to a number of unfortunate misconceptions).

Yes, systematized and centralized thinking is often very helpful.

The problem is, much like the search for theoretical unification and the willful employment of Occam's razor, perhaps it causes us to overlook other things, and see hierarchies where they may not necessarily exist.

(As a final point, there are quite a few images from the universe simulation one can select; given that there are probably thousands of neuron images out there too and given the, ahem, nebulous nature of the astronomical simulations, it can't be that hard to find a few that coincide fairly well.)