What, Why & How do we Know ?
This story of several writers pulling out of an event where Hebdo are to be honoured with an award. Quotes Salman Rushdie, and a twitter storm has arisen. Showing that the following are consistently held:
As I have done here. Not complicated.
[And here, Alex Massie in The Spectator.]
Interesting case. I don’t know any more than this piece and what I’ve seen tweeted about it (*), but it seems clear religious communities, press and individuals put pressure on voters. How much that was active (or passive) “corruption” by the candidate and their campaign is hard to tell from the reporting, but at least the vote was voided.
It says two things to me.
It shows the basic secular drive to separate religious faith from institutional legal governance, but there are a couple of corollaries that are harder to handle. It’s hard to imagine how religion-based opinion within any given community could be legislated against amongst the electorate.
The formal segregation is one thing – disestablishment of any one church – but mixed community religious values are another. Any vacuum of values is going to be filled by competing values from the community, religious or otherwise. It’s time the knotty topic of “national values” was taken seriously. National means adopted and valued by the nation; it says nothing about exclusive origination or ownership, nor whether previously adopted by religions. The more widely they’re shared with humanity and valued in historical experience the better in fact. It’s about choosing colours and nailing them to a mast. Counter-intuitively, to nail something down is core to freedom.
Secondly, in this particular case, it shows why this kind of Islam – Islamism – is dangerous and unacceptable. The kind that says Islam is above temporal human legal governance arrangements, and that to participate in them is to be apostate, making individual free secret ballot subject to cultural block coercion. That is not just un-democratic, it is anti-democratic. That kind of preaching is unacceptable, though again, difficult to see exactly where legislation would counter this in a free society. It certainly means that individual free voting is part of those national values to be upheld in law, and one of the reasons “private” religious belief and “organised” religion are treated differently. Private beliefs and values are a matter of education and culturally shared values, which are protected by freedom of thought and expression.
Whilst we reject religiously imposed rules, especially those based on superstition or otherwise considered irrational, some values must carry the authority of our established culture. Always open to question, sure, but something to believe in, something more conservative than the next calculation or poll.
[(*) Hat tip to @jeremyr1 Full judgement here and Nick Cohen in The Grauniad. So yes, the original case actively corrupt, and yes, no surprise, political correctness as the passive corruption that drives failure to speak against cases where Islam is part of the problem.]
[Post notes on my secular values point:
Jonathan Hodgson’s AEON Video on what comes after religion.
Rory Fenton’s New Humanist piece on humanist codes for living.
Nat Sec Soc’s piece on UKIP’s call for valuing Christian heritage.
All in one day, 28th April, via Twitter. In rejecting religion,
we need to care what gets thrown out with the bathwater,
what the vacuum might fill with, what the gaps should be filled with.]
Prompted by a recent twitter exchange – where (usual suspect) Alice Roberts blocked someone for their opinion (or being annoying enough to repeat their opinion) That exchange was related to this earlier program Alice did with Michael Mosley, where I now realise Mosley really did disagree with her and hence I agree with him. What follows is to capture my own pre-existing take on “the facts” quite independent of the content of the program or the social media exchanges:
=====
Vive la différence.
Women think differently to men.
And that’s a good thing. (Repeat after me, and that’s a …)
In some sense – Women’s cognitive patterning is different to men’s. [Most recent.]
Left brains do function differently to right brains. [Myth or evidence?]
Women do have different left-right brain connectivity. [Myth or evidence?]
(a) How much is genetically pre-wired and
(b) how much in-utero / bio / hormonally / physiologically developed?
(c) How much is parentally / educationally / formally and
(d) how much socially / culturally / informally re-inforced and re-developed?
Are open questions, but ~[20(20:80):80(20:80)] as a rule of thumb, I’d say (after Pinker).
But anyway, we all have very plastic brains to learn new thinking tricks.
If we are going to actively train future brains to think better,
then we’d better have a good idea of “better”.
The point?
It seems unlikely that having us all thinking the same way is the best thing to aim for.
Variety would seem to be a good input for evolutionary development.
Understanding variety must be a good thing, denial a bad thing. [Recent denial.]
It’s the level playing field.
Equality in the sense of freedom and opportunity, rather than
Equality in the PC sense of believing and ensuring everyone is, and is created, equal.
Therefore : Vive la différence.
======
Coda 1
The reason this topic matters to this particular blogging agenda?
The “western-male” form of linear/objective/scientistic rationality dominates modern life.
This is a bad thing because it destroys a lot of value and retards progress in the world.
Coda 2
How much difference is significant?
I suggested above only 4% male-female genetic cognitive difference [20% of 20%].
Dennett & Baggini – point out that perhaps conscious vs subconscious though processing might operate at 1% vs 99% (or less) but that 1% is still real (free-will) and can be the “most significant bit”. When it comes to difference, scale and significance do not correlate. Difference matters.
[And … “odd at first sight, but the story figures. Women are typically more polymath”.]
[Post Note : And in the post #GE2015 situation with women leaders of ALL parties except the Tories, I can make my 3rd non-PC point. I believe women in general are better at management and governance than men, particularly when dealing with complexity across multiple levels and timescales, where overly-confident action-men can be counter productive. Obviously, not to the point that I want to prejudice men in relation to women – just that level playing field that recognises rather than attempts to bury differences. Again obviously, these are stereotypes I’m using, but stereotypes that disguise real archetypes.]
I’m completing a review of Julian Baggini’s “Freedom Regained” [previous reference] [and another] in which there are quite a few comparative references to Sam Harris and Dan Dennett. I’m a big fan of the latter – philosopher first and foremost with a special interest in evolution and cognitive science. Harris I often defend as a subtle moral philosopher; despite disagreeing with many of his headline conclusions his qualifications are often important. I was slightly thrown by Baggini referring to him as a “scientist” – so I checked him out on wikipedia and his own web pages.
Quaker / Jewish background. It’s not clear what his first Stanford course was in 1986 (*) – when he experimented with psychedelics, dropped-out after two years and travelled in India. (Sounds familiar?) He later gained a Batchelor’s in Philosophy in 2000 and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2009.
(* English apparently – also figures and sounds familiar.)
So perhaps “scientist” as a tag does reflect his most recent & significant field. Interesting.
I mentioned earlier last week looking forward to today’s BBC R4 Something Understood “Deserts“.
Seeing fatally sunned sandy deserts through western, male, blue eyes (Laurie Lee’s Scott in the Desert) as a contrasting preface to the native female story of Hagar and Ishmael, highlighting of course that the sandy kind are not the only deserts.
Poetic thought in old testament literature. We watch the sun set fire to the sea … Neil Hannon … I might add to the thoughtful and thought-provoking selection. The fear of human (rational) arrogance turning our seeming progress back to post-apocalyptic natural wilderness – letting the desert back in.
Great use of radio to paint images with sound, words and music. Also a feature of the series to let the content speak for itself, without an explicit message or agenda – what is understood is something, not any particular thing. Good stuff.
An interesting irony reading Julian Baggini’s 2015 “Freedom Regained“. Baggini was famously underwhelmed when he attempted to interview Robert Pirsig back in 2006 given that Grayson Perry quoted Pirsig in his 2013 Reith Lectures on the creativity of art.
Baggini quotes Perry’s use of the Pirsig passage – creative ideas as small timid furry creatures, easily scared away into the undergrowth – and continues to use the same metaphor over the subsequent paragraphs on artistic freedom as a better model of freedom than consumer choice.
Strong parallel between Perry’s freedom as the rails on which we run, and the John Gray / Heinrich von Kleist metaphor in the freedom of a marionette – not to mention an antidote to the “trolleyology” of moral choice. What are real constraints on freedom – the freedom to run on one’s own tramlines?
For this to be freedom [in the understood sense], there must be some reflection on, control over and endorsement of the desires, beliefs and values you have. But there is no need whatsoever for us to be the originating author of any of these.
Money, resources, practical rather than metaphysical.
“The biggest constraint on any human being is time.”
This is why I say, most recently below, real freedom is about standardisation for efficiency reasons. We can’t spend all our time deciding every decision to act from first principles, although we are “free” to do so.
Struck by two references to E. M. Forster in a couple of days. Reading John Gray, as I was last week, as I was intrigued by reference to E. M. Forster that I clearly need to follow-up. Now I’d previously been no fan of Julian Baggini, having described him as the “darling of British philosophy”, wheeled out for media-friendly quotes, and the book of his I’m currently reading came with blurb I’d already bought. Namely that free will is real, and the tendency of science to accuse it of being “merely” an illusion is a failure of science. Free will is alive and well.
I’m resisting the temptation to skip straight to Baggini’s conclusions in “Freedom Regained” – the varieties of free will worth having, worth believing in and worth striving to defend. Having implicitly maligned him, I’d like to do his writing justice. I’m only into the second chapter, and already we’ve covered mis-interpretations of Libet, having started with Laplace’s demon and looked at why neither determinism nor materialism, nor even reductionism, need be nails in free-will’s coffin.
“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” as E. M. Forster perceptively put it. We should not [never did] need neuroscience to tell us that our conscious minds are often the last to know what we’re thinking.
And referencing Buddhist [mindfulness]:
[We] do have some conscious control over how much we attend to [our thoughts], but we do not control their happening.”
Many more of the usual references, Kant and Hume, Dawkins and Harris, with more Spinoza and Dennett to come, but looking promising for some new avenues of thought. Not entirely an exercise in philosophology.
Sam Harris comes in for some analysis, as I’ve done here before:
Even Sam Harris, the most fervent denier of free-will, says:
“The fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean they don’t matter.”
“Human choice … is as important as fanciers of free will believe.”
Earlier, Baggini points out Harris’ failure to emphasise the second clause here:
“we are not the authors or our thoughts and actions
in the way that people generally suppose.”
Though Harris seems to fit the provocative mould of the worst of the “shrill” scientistic types, I have maintained he wins out because like Dennett, he really is a philosopher first. Though he “denies” free will in simple declarative statements, to fall in line with the crusading anti-superstition armies, he clearly and carefully qualifies what he says, even if what he chooses to emphasise is driven by his personal marketing choices.
Baggini’s suggestion of 99% subconscious vs 1% conscious processing of previous experience is to my mind pure standardisation – with the same efficiency and consistent quality basis as standardisation in any industrial context. If we had to design every chosen solution to every context, we’d never have time to live creatively, or indeed live life.
Well beyond the Forster reference now, so far as I know, I also noticed the Hofstadter “meta” connection in Baggini’s use of the Tom Stoppard “Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead.” Once we raise issues of “fate” to conscious thought, we have changed fate. By slipping side-ways we create new levels, and leave category errors in our wake. Thinking about thinking is something different to thinking, and we’re free to repeat, to pile on the meta-levels ad infinitum. That’s what humans do.
And finally for now, at the end of chapter 3 “The Genticist” in which the nature vs nurture arguments are played out with the natural conclusion that either/or is misguided, I hear the following passages in the context of the most celebrated freedom of will, the freedom of thought and expression. Baggini makes these points in reaction to the emphasis on complete freedom of choices when we assess freedoms:
If we become accustomed to thinking of freedom as completely unfettered, anything more limited will, at first sight, look like an emaciated form of liberty. We might even dismiss it as mere wiggle room: the ability to make limited choices within a framework of great restraint. But that would be a great mistake.Unfettered freedom is not only an illusion; it makes no sense. It would not be desirable even if we could have it. Choices are not meaningful unless they reflect values, and values cannot be meaningfully chosen unless we already have some.
The scientific world view, therefore, destroys only a strawman version of free will, a naive conception that would crumble under rational scrutiny long before scientists could get there hands on it. Quite simply, the commonplace idea of free will we have lost was always wrong. Good riddance to it.
====
[Post Notes : I did finish Baggini and found him entirely positive, if a little restrained in his positive conclusions – cautionary principle at work ? Also saw, after comparing Baggini with Gray at the outset (above), that shortly after this post, Kenan Malik had a review piece on both Baggini and Gray published in New Humanist. Malik emphasises their difference; I have to say despite noting Gray’s overly generically-pessimistic line of warning compared to Baggini’s more conservative cautionary lack-of-specific-optimism, this difference was really one of style, of the politics towards action. Both seems to be highlighting the same current issues – same evidence and logic – with overly arrogant received (scientistic) wisdom. Doubly spooky, now reading Dick Tavern’s “March of Unreason” (2007 paperback edition), I find the same agenda – filled with political warnings from the would-be rational (and cautionary principle) side of the debate, yet another E. M. Forster quote. More later, when I’ve finished Tavern.]
A little microcosm today of why I find myself (as an atheist) arguing in defence of religious theists, particularly more sophisticated theologian types, when they’re confronted with the stereotypical “flying spaghetti monster” or Dawkins / Krauss attack formations.
You know the kind, since god is clearly a ridiculous supernatural invention, everything you believe or say you do based on those values is fair game for criticism – ridicule – because that core assumption is ridiculous, obviously, right?
Sure the values captured and conserved within religions are neither exclusive to either any one religion or even the theistic religions in general, nor are they even invented by those religions, more co-opted from civilised experience – wisdom. (And further co-opted by national cultures as a result – think of the current tiresome “there are no such things as British values” mantra. Zzzzz.)
And obviously, does it even need saying, neither do such beliefs represent “objective truths” to a rationalist, whether hard-core or merely wet-apologist.
Clearly if you come up against some naive believer, simplistic arguments based on the ridiculousness of some literal aspect of their belief – preferably with a little wit, irony and satire if ridicule is your wont – then the potentially offensive risk of the ridiculous is a fair – attention-grabbing maybe even though-provoking – choice of weapon.
If your interlocutor’s attention is already there – say a theologian or scholar who’s studied the topic – then this tactic serves little purpose other than to make the point about yourself – you find the idea ridiculous (yeah, we get that) – and, depending on how well you know your interlocutor and /or how witlessly you deliver the criticism, other than to offend for offense’s sake. There’s a lot of it about.
It would need a separate thread – a book – on how best to conduct constructive criticism with a more sophisticated interlocutor – from which you might both learn something, but today I learned something.
Samira Ahmed tweeted a blog today about her upcoming “Something Understood” (Sunday 19th on BBC R4), and I exchanged a couple of comments with her.
I was hooked at the mention of T E Lawrence and the allure of the desert, Ozymandias too. Lawrence of Arabia was a boyhood favourite, and since acquiring David Lean’s cut on DVD, I do indeed sit in anticipation each time of the dot of Omar Sharif’s approach from the horizon – an expectation extended both musically and visually in that edition. (And as she commented, the effect works even through the musical score alone – Post-note the Sharif entrance is actually done in silence – no musical background – interesting. Anyway.)
Ishmael is a motif I’ve referenced several times, as used by many authors post Melville’s narrator in Moby Dick, seeking to discover the (tiny) leviathan in the vast inhospitable desert of the sea. The story of Ishmael is the core of Ahmed’s piece. The story of Hagar and Ishmael that is, banished to the desert wilderness in the bible story. A story I’d forgotten until Ahmed’s tweet reminded me:
It’s like a whole parallel narrative in Genesis.
Why the OT is such a great literary work.
Worth understanding. Literary value is as real as any. This really struck home back in 2002 when I was reading Dupuy on the original 1976 Macy conference on Cybernetics and Cognitive Science – in the days when these subjects were about evolving human systems of self-governance, before being usurped by the AI & Tech fraternity (*). Dupuy described the problem as:
The schizophrenia between the need for formal models
… and the nevertheless deeply held belief that ….
… literature is a superior form of knowledge to science.
I shall be listening to Samira Ahmed on Something Understood this Sunday.
[(*) Coincidentally (!) I was clearly reading Melville at the time I blogged about Dupuy.]