Personal Narratives

The blog Findings, written by a fellow former Wesnothian, had a post today about narrative which ties in nicely with something I’ve been thinking about myself: perhaps, just as that post implies that we are each trying to write our own narratives, we could say that the world is a grand story composed of the multitude of personal narratives we are all crafting, and which cannot be reduced to a simpler form, and it is impossible to understand the world entirely, because we can never fully understand another person…

Of course, this isn’t a fully thought out idea, but I want to post that link before I forget about it. Perhaps I’ll come back to this when I have a fuller description of what I mean. Incidentally, this is a thought I had after reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; if I end up able to draw a coherent concept out of this mess, I’ll have to revise my opinion of that book upwards.

Accidental Dualism and Responsibility

I am often irritated by reading about how scientists have found a “physical explanation in the brain” for a given behavior/personality trait. It is treated as if this discovery means that the trait, which was previously considered as under the control of the possessor or completely part of their genetic make-up is now in this weird third state where it’s not under the control of the possessor, but neither is it natural – it’s caused by something, but no one knows what because we don’t understand how the brain develops. A few examples:

• Suicide linked to brain changes
• Brain tests show child wealth gap
• Evidence of risk-taking brain
• Obesity ‘controlled by the brain’

It’s not that I think there is something wrong with any of these findings in particular. It is that I think the fact that this is how we present the findings – they’re all cast in terms of discoveries about how the brain is linked to our behavior – is wrong. Of course people who commit suicide will have a different brain structure than people who don’t; they’re thinking in a different way, and thinking differently is synonymous with having a different brain structure. And we already know children from poor families do worse in school on average than children from rich ones; why would it surprise us that their brains look different as well? The same with the article about the risk-taking brain. The obesity one is different; it talks about how, because what is controlling obesity is in the brain, not the glands, it is under the control of the possessor in a way it was not when it was glandular.

All of these, I think, reflect a kind of dualism. The first three represent a mind-body dualism, where if something is present in the body (which includes the brain), it means it’s not present in the mind, and free will does not apply to it – rather it acts as a constraint on the mind, one beyond the control of the mind. The last one represents a brain-body dualism, which functions similarly to the mind-body dualism except that the brain is the mind.

Now, I tend to think all such dualism is fundamentally flawed (mainly because of my extremely anti-dualistic Phil of Man class I had in Rome). Why are they popular then? I think because they let people shuffle off responsibility… if there is something in their brain that makes them want to take risks/commit suicide/be stupid, then their desire to do so isn’t their fault; their brain made them do it. And since if you look hard enough the brain will be different according to every change in personality, you will always be able to blame your brain.

What people don’t realize is that this removal of responsibility also removes free will. If what is in our brain is not our fault, it also is not to our credit. And since there would be evidence for everything we do in our brain (whether or not it is the ’cause’ is another story), we wouldn’t have free will at all. This doesn’t seem desirable.

Of course free will is a complex question, and it is really difficult to find a philosophic position that makes sense of it, but I think the dualism reflected by these BBC articles is worse than most. If we really were Cartesian points floating above our head controlling our actions through the pineal gland it would make sense, but the truth is we’re not, and the brain either controls or reflects (I’m not even sure there’s a difference) all of our actions and personality traits, so this kind of dualism makes nonsense of free will (because the Cartesian point would control nothing).

So… what are the chances we’ll ever stop seeing it in popular culture? Probably slim to none. The ghost in the machine is a powerful concept.

Minority Report

So, I recently saw the movie Minority Report (which, I know, is several years old). It was vaguely interesting – the world it is set in, which is futuristic but still very similar to ours and quite disturbing, was well portrayed. But the movie had a fundamental problem. Its premise was nonsensical.

Now, the movie revolves around a form of crime prevention known as “pre-crime” – they have these three psychics who can predict when a murder will occur before it does, and then they dispatch police officers to prevent the murder from taking place. There hasn’t been a murder for 6 years in Washington, DC (which is where this program is being tried out before it goes nationwide).

Then, one day, one of the pre-crime cops, while monitoring the machine that reports on the psychics’ visions, sees that HE is now predicted to commit a murder! And so he must run away and lead the other police on a wild goose chase all across the city, all the while trying to avoid committing the murder he was predicted to commit, but being apparently drawn inexorably to commit it anyway. (He ends up committing it, though unintentionally [the guy wants to die and grabs his gun-hand and forces him to shoot].) How suspenseful! How like the Greek tragedies in which the protagonist knows his fate and yet cannot avoid it! (And then there’s a half-hour left of the movie in which little of actual interest happens.)

Except… does anyone else see what is terribly wrong with this situation? Let’s think for a second. How pre-crime works is, the psychics see the murder happening in the future, they tell someone about it, and then the murder is prevented. There’s nothing fundamentally different about the situation the protagonist is in – the psychics see the murder happening in the future, and they told someone – the perpetrator – about it. But somehow, instead of him just saying “ok, I’ll just avoid that situation and so not commit murder” (which is philosophically no different from the cops jumping in and preventing the murder at the last second, which they do all the time), it is treated as if he is somehow fated to do it. In fact, he wouldn’t have even wound up in the situation where he could commit murder if the prediction hadn’t been made!

So, basically, the movie is not consistent. Either seeing the future allows you to change it – in which case there’s no reason the protagonist would have been worried at all – or seeing the future does not allow you to change it – in which case pre-crime makes absolutely no sense to begin with, and would only have been good for ensuring that the murderer was always caught after the fact.

Thus Minority Report is, I think, while a somewhat interesting and amusing movie, fundamentally flawed, and so not really worth watching. There are much better philosophically-minded sci-fi movies out there for those so inclined.

And A Possible One

This post is, in a way, a sequel to my previous one (“Story Without a Moral“). In that post I said that Orbivm is not meant to have any preset philosophical interpretation; still, I thought it might be interesting to examine one “theory” of Orbis Terrarvm philosophy.

This idea is, one might say, that of “anti-Pelagianism”. Now, Pelagianism was an ancient Christian heresy that said humans could save themselves – they did not need God’s grace or the Resurrection (Christ was just setting a good example for the rest of us). How does this apply to Orbivm? Well, since there is no Christ and no Resurrection in Orbivm, then if Pelagianism is not true then mankind cannot be saved, since he cannot save himself. And I think this is backed up by examples from the history of Orbivm (is that a result of my skewing the history to support this interpretation? maybe).

Basically, it’s clear that the residents of Orbivm can be virtuous in different ways. But they cannot save themselves; this is why all heroes of campaigns are in the end flawed. Caius Regilius goes back to the front to fight a battle he knows is hopeless; Alfhelm lets his wife get killed and loses his kingdom; Vaniyera is consumed by his hatred for humanity in a way that eventually leads to his death; Sparxus thinks that he found freedom, but his “freedom” consists of the ability to kill who he wants to. And it goes on.

Basically, in the end, I don’t think any of the heroes of Orbivm campaigns has reached happiness or salvation or anything like that. And if none of the heroes of the campaigns manage it, how could anyone?

Of course, this poses a problem for those who would like to interpret Orbivm in light of Christianity (which of course is the only reason you would be talking in terms of Pelagianism at all)… namely, if the menn of Orbivm cannot save themselves, how are they to be saved? It seems to me there are two possibilities. One, that there is some sort of salvific event late in the history of Orbivm, after all events outlined in the histories. The problem with this is, what could such an event possibly be? Two, that, even if the menn are fallen and there is no salvific event in history, God could still redeem them without any informed consent on their part (their desire to do good being enough). This latter possibility is of course not really Christian, but it might be that a constructed world can’t really be Christian, since it seems stupid to try to write your own version of the Resurrection story (you couldn’t possibly do it justice – I don’t think Aslan really succeeds in Chronicles of Narnia, if you couldn’t tell), and without some form of Crucifixion and Resurrection it’s not really a Christian universe.

Which means, I suppose, that it’s not really a possible universe. Oh well. I guess the best we can do is to stay somewhat vague on the idea to make sure it’s not explicitly non-Christian, even if it’s not explicitly Christian. Which is what we’re doing so far.

Lying Minds

It’s strange how our brains lie to us sometimes.

For example, for some unknown reason, I was under the vague impression a few years ago that Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher, was somehow related to the constructed language Esperanto. This belief was, of course, baseless, and as soon as I thought about it for two seconds and browsed the wikipedia pages of each that became quite clear. I still, however, subconsciously link the two, and so my gut response to the question of “who thought up Esperanto” is going to be “Spinoza”, and I’ll have to consciously correct myself. Presumably with time this will correct itself, but for now, my brain insists on this link between these two unrelated things.

I think  the fact that our brain is able to do this probably encourages the belief that we somehow have a
mind that is separate from our brain. There is this obvious (if actually non-existent) interplay between our brain, which we think of as functioning as a kind of storage and retrieval system, and our mind, which does the actual thinking – and the brain, we think, can give false information the the mind – when it does this is the brain’s fault, not the mind’s. This makes us want to say, for example, that we could somehow take our consciousness and transplant it to another body and “we”, meaning our consciousness abstracted from our brain, would somehow take control of that body. Really, it’s another example of gnosticism.

This distinction is, of course, absurd. Scientifically there is no basis for it, and neither does religion provide one – at least not the Catholic religion. The person, for the Catholic, is both body and soul, and the soul is intimately intertwined with the body – separating the two leaves you without a complete person. (I suspect that the state of the soul is somehow reflected in the physical state of the brain – this would mean that even if you could observe the process of decision-making in the brain before the person was conscious of their decision, it would not mean that the decision was not freely arrived at by the soul – but I know of no doctrinal support for this belief.)

Yet many of us, whether atheists, Christians, or something else, approach life as if this were the case. I suspect this is because we are predisposed to do so given how we can observe our brains lying to us – even if the distinction between “brains” and “us” is completely meaningless.

God vs. the gods; Literary Relativism

Last Thursday I went to a debate between two professors, one of theology and one of English, about “God vs. the Homeric gods”. It was enjoyable, and I agreed with a lot of what they said, but…

There seems to me to be a fundamental problem with how both of the speakers approached Homer. What both failed to address, I think, was whether or not the Homeric portrayal is coherent. Some mention was made of how Homer’s portrayal is confusing. It was assumed, however, that Homer had some deeper vision behind the confusion, and thus our inability to make sense of religion in the Iliad is in some sense our fault. Homer was a poetic genius; if he indeed said what he meant, as we assume, he would have had arguments for what he said.

Now, Christians view polytheism as fundamentally flawed and illogical. We cannot but say, then, that Homer must have been in error in his poetic theology. This position seems forbidden; one cannot say that the Iliad is flawed, only that it is confusing. Because it is one of the founding works of Western civilization, it is assumed that its composer – who, I agree, was a genius – must have intended everything he composed. When we look at what he has said in light of Christianity, however, we find that it is not only confusing, it is contradictory.

For example, there is somehow both free will and fate in Homer’s world. In the Christian view, free will and fate can coexist because God is timeless, and so he can know our destiny already and yet allow us free will because it just doesn’t make sense to speak of “already” when talking about God. For the Homeric gods, however, this is not the case. This is a contradiction.

We could make excuses for Homer, saying it is just an additional complexity in the work, but this is disingenuous. It is better to simply explain why the contradiction arose. Homer recognized that men had free will, and that if there were gods – as he saw that there must be – they must be great, much greater than men, and also that there was this thing “fate”, though he did not completely understand it. He then wrote his epic poems with this understanding, and this is why his poems ring true in so many ways – they are true in many ways. Homer did not see, however, how much greater than men God must be, or that there must be only one of him, or that he must be outside of time, and so he did not put that into his poem. Because of this, his poem is not just confusing, but contradictory and at times wrong when it talks about those subjects.

It really frustrates me how nobody is willing to say this. It strikes me as a kind of literary relativism; every author is always correct in the argument they make in their work, and our job as an audience is just to absorb their message…

Except for the first and last paragraphs, this was written as an extra-credit assignment for THEO 1310:06 “Understanding the Bible”. Most likely I won’t get docked points for posting it here as well; if I do, well, it’s extra-credit anyways.

Childishness

I have never had a cell phone, and I don’t really want one. But now that I’m in college I have a phone in dorm room. I actually do have to use a phone every day or two, so I guess it’s useful.

But I don’t really like having it. Here’s an example of why. Last night I was awoken about half an hour past midnight by an idiot (I’m still not sure who it was, and I really don’t care) making a crank call. It was really obvious, too. He claimed to be someone from CSO (Campus Safety Office) who had gotten a tip from my dorm room’s extension that something or other had happened (he was really vague on this point) and my roommate was in trouble, and for some reason they wanted to talk to me. Obvious tip-offs were, he didn’t know my dorm room number or my name (I would assume CSO had access to that information given my extension), he didn’t know my roommate’s name, and he didn’t know whether or not my roommate was in my room or not.

He said that he was in the lounge, which is about 50 feet from my room. Which wasn’t plausible either, since if he was there he would have just came and knocked on my door. But anyway, he said to go and talk to him.

At this point, I had already been woken up, and I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep immediately anyways, so I wandered out of my room down to where the guy had said he was. I assumed the guy would be watching through the window and would see me there, and I might find out who it was. There were people out there, but I didn’t bring my glasses so I was too blind to see who it was… not that I would have recognized them anyways. I suspect they enjoyed themselves laughing at me.

The question is, what should I have done in that situation? As I see it, what I did was as good as anything. It gave me minimal inconvenience (just ~30s of my time, which I would only have wasted anyway, to paraphrase Hans Moleman), it gave them amusement, and there was a miniscule (~0.001%, maybe) chance that it was real, in which case I should definitely go down and talk to them. So I think I did the right thing.

I’m reminded of the story about Thomas Aquinas. His fellow Dominicans came up to him and said there was a dragon out the window. So of course Thomas went over and looked out the window. When they started laughing at him, he said that he’d rather believe that there was a dragon out the window, improbably as that was, than that one of his fellow brothers would lie to him. When someone gives you a crank call, it’s not your fault that they’re being idiots, you should just go along with it. Definitely if it won’t cause you much inconvenience, and perhaps even if it will.

The problem with this philosophy is that it encourages the pranksters. It would be nice if people didn’t do stuff like that once they realized you went along with it not out of stupidity, but out of not caring, but it won’t happen. I’m not sure what the solution to that is, but perhaps it is that that isn’t a problem at all. After all, God allows man free will even though it often results in evil.

Still, I prefer not having my time wasted. I think the next time someone tries something like that on me, I’m just going to ask them, is there a dragon outside your window?

In Heaven… Everything is Fine

The character Peggy in Tales of Alvin Maker is a ‘torch’. This means she can see into people’s souls, know their darkest secrets, and also know their future, and know what effects their decisions will have on their future (free will still exists).

This has two rather frightening consequences for the people around her. For one, she seems to be able to control other people’s lives. She tells the main character (Alvin) where he has to go to fight the bad guys, what to do to keep himself safe, only revealing as much information as seems fit to her. But more frightening, I would think, though a bit less important in the books, is that she can see everything, every embarrassment, every thought that flashes across your mind. That’s kind of scary, that someone you know could see you that well, because most of us know (and those who don’t are deceived) that they wouldn’t like what they saw, at least not entirely.

But think for a moment about the dead. In Heaven, what do people know of what happened on Earth? In the Divine Comedy people are washed of their memory of any sin or suffering. But that doesn’t sound right to me. I wouldn’t really be me without my knowledge of what I’ve done wrong, would I?

I can’t prove this or really make an argument for it, but it seems to me that in Heaven, everybody will be a torch. They will be able to look on earth, see all of our actions, see what we might want to keep hidden – sins, yes, but also secret infatuations, social blunders that never manage to come to light, intellectual weaknesses.

There’s nothing wrong with them seeing our sins. We will either have repented of them, and reached Heaven, and look on our sins with scorn, or gone to hell, in which case those in Heaven will feel no pity for us, and rightly so. But they will also by necessity see all these embarrassments. Are we going to feel no embarrassment in Heaven? But isn’t it something to be embarrassed about that you were once foolish enough to believe X, to think that just because you’re attracted to Y you’re in love with her, or to have done something that could have caused pain to someone else, even if it didn’t?

And what about those people that you didn’t like but tolerated in life because it made life easier – what will they think when they realize this upon reaching Heaven? Everyone will know your true opinion of everyone else. Even if you weren’t letting these opinions cause you to sin, they’re not something to be proud of.

So does that mean that those things are sins? In which case anything that we rightly regret are sins, and there are no ‘innocent embarrassments’? Or that they are not in fact things to be embarrassed about, that they are right and good, in which case – how could they possibly be so?

I don’t have an answer to the above. But all of this speculation has led me to at least one conclusion that actually does have an effect on my actions.

Everybody that you currently know in life, they will one day know everything that you have ever done or thought. Whether or not you will be shamed upon them learning this, I don’t know. But it does seem that, in that case, one could talk to them even if they were not there. The same way people sometimes talk to dead relatives – which it seems to me is a right good thing to do – one can talk to people still living, and, in the same way that those dead relatives will eventually hear what is said to them, the people still alive will as well.

So I occasionally talk to the dead spirits of alive people and try to defend my actions to them. Complete honesty is obviously a requirement, but that’s really not that hard (at least, it’s not hard to think you’re being honest, I don’t know how hard it is to actually be honest). It may seem kind of odd (almost like I’m praying to people who are still living), but I think it makes sense. And it can be quite amusing.

(Though so far they’ve never answered back.)

—

I began reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien last night, and am to follow by reading two books, entitled “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth” and “Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World”, that will I hope give me some insight into how to better craft my own mythopoeic landscape. If you hadn’t picked up on this yet – Tolkien is essentially my hero.

And of course he’s dead (completely off-topic – his tomb, shared with his wife Edith, reads “Beren and Luthien”, which I think is simply awesome). So what I wrote above applies to him as well. I’m really not sure what he would think of me, but I hope it would be good.

Freedom!! (June)

A few recent developments:

1) As of May 19th, I am now a high school graduate. Any more schooling I do is entirely voluntary. I’m going to go to the University of Dallas, as I’ve mentioned before, but I’m not yet a student there (I’m not enrolled yet), so for the first time in 11 years or however long it’s been I am free.

2) As of May 30th, I have my own laptop (I got it for college). I’m making this post from it. (It took me another four days to get it working properly with Debian Etch, but oh well.)

3) As of June 2nd, I now officially have nothing I have to do until September 1st. (This includes both school-related and social items.) I’ll probably have some stuff come up between now and then (like maybe get a job), but for now, I have absolutely no obligations except those that are self-imposed – i.e. Wesnoth- or Orbivm-related.

So what does this mean? All together, these things mean that I am FREE. I can go wherever the wind takes me, beholden to no one. Or so I’d like to believe – the reality is rather different.

“Wherever the wind takes me” is a Muppet Treasure Island (greatest muppet movie ever, by the way) reference. And what were they doing in Muppet Treasure Island? They were sailing after buried treasure. On a boat. They were mariners.

Just like Meneldur.

God and Free Will

God cannot do anything he wants.

I know that sounds partly heretical (of course he can, he’s omnipotent!), and partly nonsensical (what does it even mean for God to want something that he can’t have?). But I’m serious, and I’m going to give my argument for why this is true. I don’t know if it is heretical or not, and I’m not sure whether I believe this argument or not, but it is certainly intriguing.

(Note that my argument presupposes free will on the part of humanity.)

The argument goes as follows:

PREMISES:

1. God created the world.
2. God could have created the world differently than he did.
3. God is omniscient.
4. Existence is meaningless unless there are beings to do the existing.
5. To exist is to be free.

CONCLUSIONS:

1. God knows what the world would have been like if he had created the world differently (>premise 2).
2. This knowledge is perfect (>p3, >conclusion 1).
3. The only difference between the real world and this perfectly imagined world is our inhabiting the real world as metaphysical beings (>p4, >c2).
4. God cannot control our actions, for we are free (=p5).
5. God must know what would result from any possible action we take as free beings (>p3, >p5).
6. If God had created metaphysical beings in every world, such that c3 was a false distinction, we would not be free, because we would take every possible action (=c5), and there would be metaphysical beings who had taken every possible course of action, which is tantamount to contradicting c4.
7. God could not have actually created every universe he is able to imagine perfectly (>c6).

(I use “>” to mean “is derived from” and “=” to mean “is a restatement of”.)