Number 94 : November 1998 |
IS / OUGHT (C93/39) : Theo, It’s no good saying I am a lone voice; we’re not taking a vote. But I would contend that of the innumerable moral choices of people now and in the past hardly any would be characterised as arbitrary (what the heck, I’ll do it anyway) trivial and flawed by infinite regress. On the contrary I think our experience is of making a creative act in our personal relationships.
I wonder if any readers find your example is like their own experience of moral choice :
It is the Draconian injunction at the start which is crucial to your argument and outside my own experience, which is as follows.
What I voted for when I supported a change of government and what I support when I give money to third world concerns arise from two main sources neither of which is a prescription for what I ought to do :
Arising from this feeling I am determined to support policies that prioritise and target those in need so that prosperity will benefit them. From such value free beginnings, I can now say that if you are in sympathy then you ought to have voted labour and you ought to give to Oxfam. In this way, we create new values as we have done recently in the environment, child welfare, animal rights, refugees. Ethics change in a changing world. From what people considered they ought to do in the past we cannot derive what we ought to do in the present. So where does that new infusion come from ?
I would love to hear how members of PDG derive their moral imperatives. I suspect there may be a healthy plurality on this central ethical question.
DUALISM - Theo (C93/40) : You say Dualism requires extra mental "stuff" to explain consciousness. This is not so. The problem of dualism is that there appear to be two components of the world, ie. the external world and our experience of the world. No one has satisfactorily explained the one in terms of the other. So though we wish to believe that there is physical reality we remain reluctant dualists until what you call the "hard problem of what it is like to experience qualia" is resolved. I tried not to resolve solve the problem but to narrow the gap by showing the phenomena of consciousness to be more minimal, peripheral and determined than is generally thought. I still do not know whether you found any fault in these arguments.
The attempts to give an explanation for the problem of consciousness are something else. In The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Professor Gregory lists six forms of dualism and more appear under mind body problems. Only one depends on "mind stuff". This is Descartes famous explanation of dualism which Ryle caricatures as the "ghost in the machine". That theory led to such confusion that I know of no philosopher that supports Cartesian dualism so it need not enter into our debate.
I will try to say in a new way for the third time what I meant by "light operates on both sides of the divide". The visual receptors at the back of the eye are integral parts of the brain. Light acts on them in both a physical and chemical way and much of the organisation of the brain and mind results from a direct consequence of this. I maintain that most of the information in the brain is reducible to the evidences of the senses of which the perception of light is the overwhelming part. In the selection of essays Modern Philosophy of Mind (Everyman) Hilary Putnam writes :
"Strange as it may seem to common sense and sophisticated intuition alike, the question of the autonomy of our mental life doesn’t hinge on and has nothing to do with the old question about soul stuff. We could be made of swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter. Functional isomorphism is the key to unravelling the mysteries of the philosophy of mind. Two systems are functionally isomorphic if there is a correspondence between the states of one and the states of the other that preserves functional relations".
This is what I was correlating when I wrote :
Consider a black and white film of a day’s outing. Shifting white light conveys the totality of all data. Predetermined patterns of interpretation operate away from the screen but the raw data itself has been entirely controlled by the physical world. The distribution of light on the film varied directly in accordance with the light waves on the day of filming. The contents of consciousness are determined by the outside world in the same manner as the surface of the film.
You may object to the phrase "light operates on both sides of the divide" but what are your objections to the explanation.
On dualism and is/ought we are in total disagreement. Is this a situation in which your suggestion of a mentor could come into its own ? I would be most pleased if Professor Hanfling could review what has been written on these subjects and make a final reply.
May I add to your reading list How Brains Think by William Calvin (Weidenfeld) - a thrilling read.