Models

Myths are generally defined as false representations of reality. But in a sense all human representations of reality are deficient in some sense (we are not omniscient), therefore all representations of reality are myths.

I have often used myth in this second sense: as a perspective. But it has such negative connotations that I have decided to use MODEL instead.

For instance, science proposes models of reality (like the Bohr model of the atom). Progress in science is often understood as resulting in better models. But this is not always true, or at least, not always verifiable. It's a contentious and debated issue. I am not going to go into that right now.

What I want to say is that we all experience the world through models that we hold. However, the problem as I see it is that the word MODEL is thought to be static. Like the plastic model of the Cutty Sark that I built when I was in seventh grade. This is why Wittgenstein's use of Language Games, and Forms of Life, are closer to what I have in mind. They are more dynamic.

My struggle is that the phrase Forms of Life is obtuse to most people. Only Wittgensteinians understand it, and even we don't really understand it. Like a Form of Life, a model is an interpretive framework, but one that is fluid and changeable like a river. Parts of the river are changing at every second, but there are more stable elements such as the riverbed that usually change very slowly.

I don't like Worldview either, because it seems too monolithic. It also seems more tied to debates about theistic/atheistic worldviews. Whereas models differ depending on the subject. We can hold many models, and which one is relevant depends on what we are talking about. A skeptic can also be a libertarian, but these are two different models. Being a skeptic does not necessitate, or even imply, that one is also a libertarian.

Stoicism 4.5

The following essay is not a complete guide to Stoicism. 

It simply addresses a couple criticisms of Stoicism and offers 

some thoughts on free will and determinism. 

Stoicism, on my account, can probably be divided into four distinct phases:

1. Stoicism starts in Greece with Zeno and his followers, especially Chrysippus. 
1. Ethical theory and practice were part of it, but Greek Stoicism also had heavy doses of:
2. Physics. They were strict materialists and even our souls and god are material beings. They denied the existence of purely incorporeal beings.
3. Fate. They embraced determinism. We are not in control of what happens in the world. But we can accept our fate and change our attitude.
4. Logic. They made some great advances in logic that rivaled Aristotle. 
5. And more: epistemology, categories of being, 
2. Roman Stoicism: Most notably Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius
1. Applied Ethics. Roman stoics were much more interested in applying the ethical theory of the Greeks to everyday living. 
3. Neostoicism of the late Renaissance: Justus Lipsius
1. Applied Ethics: an attempt to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity
2. Christians had always toyed with Stoicism, but neostoicism was a more concerted effort.
4. Contemporary Stoicism
1. More applied ethics. 

Greek Stoicism could be divided into two parts, but I am just treating it as one. The above outline is a bit unfair but, after the Greeks, Stoicism has mostly concentrated on the lived practices of the moral life. There are some lesser known Roman stoics who did work on ethical theory. And Marcus Aurelius does make references to some of the other aspects of stoic thinking, but they are in service to his more practical pursuits. I don't think it would be unfair to say that stoic ethics has certainly had more appeal than other aspects of their philosophy.  Contemporary Stoicism focuses on the lived experience and moral development of it's adherents and mostly deals with stoic physics and fate in order to deal with concerns more than in an attempt to pursue and develop these aspects of Greek thought. The only people really dealing with logic these days are logicians and historians of philosophy. I would be surprised if you went to some stoic retreat and had a lecture on logic. 

Some people see all of this as a problem for contemporary Stoicism. Is it still Stoicism if we eject their views on physics, god, and fate? I see no problem with this. Zeno might not recognize today's Stoicism, but then again, Jesus and the disciples would not recognize modern Christianity either. I don't have to stop eating beans in order to use the Pythagorean theorem, do I? (just kidding, I know this is a category mistake). Anyway, my view is that contemporary Stoicism does not have to conform to the writings of Chrysippus. This is a 21st century version of Stoicism, not a Greek revival.

However, contemporary Stoicism does have to deal with its own internal logic. The real question is, can any moral theory survive under determinism?  Or does Stoicism need to abandon determinism? Maybe it should just not address the question (don't ask: don't tell) and hope nobody notices.

A Couple Theoretical Concerns

I'm not entirely sure where I fall in this whole debate, but I'm going to attempt to express my own thinking (at least as it stands at the moment). I take ethics to be a kind of value judgment: given the premise that I want to live well, how then might I actually live? I use the word might because I do not think there is only one way to live or one course of action that can be judged as the best or optimal course in every situation.

Flourishing (εὐδαιμονία) was also a popular Greek conception of the goal of ethics. This is not the same kind of ethical theory we get with Kant's Categorical Imperative or Utilitarianism. Stoic flourishing is more like learning how to be happy than it is about a theory the ultimate Good. It is grounded in our emotional life. The question is not "What should you do in every situation?" but "Are you suffering?" Then the answer is not some utilitarian calculus, but how can I change my thoughts and beliefs in order to alleviate this suffering. Modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy draws a lot from the Stoics.

Ethics and Determinism

I usually try to stay away from metaphysical speculation. And I take it that the free will/determinism debate is a metaphysical debate. However, it does seem to me that modern physics gives the upper hand to the determinism side of things, but I still withhold assent for a very peculiar reason, which I will attempt to explain.

When people speak about free will they are talking about something that occurs inside the human mind or brain. And more specifically, they are talking about something that occurs within a conscious state of the mind. However, consciousness is very poorly understood. Neuroscientists sometimes talk about neural correlates of consciousness, but this is far from an explanation of the feeling of being conscious and aware. I take it that to understand what it means to will one thing rather than another thing we first need to know what it means to be aware of these two options. Without a proper understanding of conscious awareness I do not think it is possible to understand the human will. It may just be me, but I always get the feeling that our understanding of the human will is confused.  

The word will refers to a power or ability. It's a kind of ability to choose between options. It is control over one's own actions, attitudes, or beliefs. And more specifically, it is an internal control. External constraints might thwart my will, but they are not part of the will itself. The stoic Chrysippus relies heavily on this distinction. For him determinism really only extends to external constraints. He thought that if an action originated within the person then that was free. If my car is stolen then that is fate. Whether or not I get upset about the stolen car, that is internal to me and therefore it is my choice. I retain control of my attitudes. I think this distinction gets lost in modern debates about stoic determinism. The Stoics were not modern physicists who reduced all neuronal activity to prior causes in some kind of reductive manner. Chrysuppus also thought of cause and effect very differently from the way we do, but I will not be addressing this very technical and confusing issue today.

I take it that, today many people think of free will to mean free from all constraints including the constraints of the underlying physical regularities of our universe. In order for something to be free in this sense it would have to break the "laws" of nature. Even appealing to quantum mechanics does not allow for true freedom. Randomness is not the same as freedom because your actions would still be determined by that randomness. Under this view, our brains cannot break out of the constraints of physics and therefore, even internal states of the brain are still determined. 

Theists like Augustine propose a way out of this dilemma. How can we be free to choose anything if all our choices are ultimately determined by physics? Augustine was highly motivated to try to accommodate free will into his theological system because without free will then any punishment by God for any sin would be unjust. If you have an all-powerful, all-knowing, just God, then free will becomes a necessity. Augustine's solution is that God miraculously gives us free will. God can break the laws of physics since he is the one that made those laws. However, this leads to its own problems. God supposedly knows all things so God's foreknowledge can act as its own kind of determinism. Free will implies that there is a genuine possibility that future events could be open but if God knows all future events then there is no possibility of a genuine alternative future. And it seems like the whole idea of free will is that I could have chosen other than I did. There are supposed solutions to this dilemma, but I do not think they work.  

There is one other solution to the problem and that is the one that, more-or-less, Descartes took: an immaterial soul. If we have a soul, and that soul is immaterial, then it could lie outside the physical constraints of our material universe. Theoretically the soul would be free to influence the will without any appeal to causation or sufficient reason. The problem with this position is that then you have the problem of how does an immaterial soul become a mechanism as a physical cause. Sure, the soul would be free from physical causes as it deliberated, but then it would also be free from being a physical cause itself. 

A lot of early modern philosophers, including Descartes (at least on some readings), adopted a position known as compatibilism. The early modern compatibilists basically took the same stance as Chrysippus. When we talk about freedom, what we really mean is freedom from external constraints such as a locked door or gravity. If I had preferred pizza for dinner I would have had pizza for dinner. Instead the pasta appealed to me more and I chose that. This is all it takes to mean that I was free to do otherwise. The laws of physics be damned. 

Actually, the compatibilists do have an argument on their side. One counter argument to compatibilism is that free will is not about the freedom to do what we prefer, but the freedom to will other than what we will. The compatibilist answer to this is that we get into an infinite regress when we go this route. We need to be able will to will pizza instead of pasta. The problem is that then we would also need to be able to will to will to will pizza. The will to will pizza is just another will that determines the first will, but that logically entails another will to will that will or else we are still not free in this sense. Checkmate incompatibilists. 

Well, not really. The compatibilism/incompatibilism debate is far more nuanced and complex that I have outlined it here. And I'm still not convinced by the compatibilist position. My main concern is that free will would entail breaking the laws of physics. But is that true? This is what I would like to briefly explore.

Reductionism and Psychological States

There is a general tendency in all of the sciences toward reductionism. Air, as we now know, is partially made up of a chemical element called oxygen. Oxygen is made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons are made up of two up quarks and one down quark and the forces between those quarks are mediated by gluons, etc, etc. The more basic parts are said to constitute the bigger parts in some mathematically regular way. If it had a different number of quarks it would not be a proton. If it had a different number of protons it would not be oxygen. One hydrogen connected to two oxygen atoms is water, but two hydrogen atoms connected to two oxygen atoms is something else. 

Reductionism has been super successful in various fields of science. But there seems to be limitations. Reductionism might not adequately explain some higher order phenomenon. Why is water wet? How is it that one neuron does not seem to be conscious, but billions of them are conscious? Is consciousness substrate dependent (in other words, are biological carbon based neurons required for consciousness or could consciousness arise in a silicone based substrate)? These are questions that science has not been able to adequately answer. It could be possible that the reductionistic paradigm of modern science might have limitations in answering these types of questions. 

Once possible explanation for consciousness might be that all material substances are conscious at some level and that human consciousness is simply a more fully realized version of this same basic component of the natural world. If this is true then it could be possible that one day something like the Large Hadron Collider will discover a subatomic quantum conscious particle. However, so far we have found nothing that would make us think that this will ever happen. 

Another proposed solution is known as emergentism. Emergentism is a kind of non-reductive proposal for how higher order phenomenon arise out of lower level physical structures. In this view, somehow large groups of water molecules become wet even though a single water molecule does not seem to have wetness as a quality. Something like this could also possibly explain how consciousness arises in the human brain. We could say that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. 

But these possibilities for how we explain consciousness are basically empirical questions whose answers have not been discovered yet. If, for example, emergentism turns out to be correct and scientists someday discover how collections of neurons produce consciousness then maybe something like free will could emerge from consciousness. I'm not sure this is even a valid hypothesis based on our current neuroscience, but if it does turn out to be possible then compatibilism could turn out to be right. 

My feeling is that in a world where compatibilism could be true, it is reasonable for me to leave open the possibility that free will could exist. I am inclined more toward a strict determinism where free will does not exist, but I am currently withholding judgment. Compatibilism, on my account, has not been ruled out, so Stoicism and modern talk therapies based on it like CBT could be effective. In fact, there is evidence that they are effective in treating some kinds of human emotional suffering.

Stoic Denial

Stoicism faces another challenge, even if compatibilism is true. Like Buddhism, Stoicism has a world denying tendency. But to properly understand the Stoic position we have to look more closely at the Greek word pathe (πάθη) which is probably best translated as passions, but in the sense that it is something that happens to you. It can also be translated with the negative sense of suffering. The Stoic goal, like Buddhism and other Greek schools, is to reduce suffering. In a sense, our passions are things that happen to us while our actions are things that we do. In Greek you negate something by adding 'a' to it, so the goal is to become apathetic, which I find kind of funny. But this apathetic is not the English word. It means that our goal is to keep suffering from buffeting us. Instead we should be active and in control of our lives. While bad things happen to us, we act in a kind of self-sufficiency. I think of the metaphor of a ship captain. While the winds and rains buffet the ship, I am in control of my own destiny. 

I take it that the goal of Buddhism is to do away with all emotional attachment to the things of the world, but this is not the goal of Stoicism. Normal impulses and desires are fine, what they want you to get rid of are excesses. They advocate the moderation of the passions, not their elimination. In this sense, they are closer to Aristotle than to Buddhism. 

Stoicism also holds up an ideal for us to strive for: the sage. The sage is an ideal philosopher who has all knowledge and never errs in judgment. Obviously no real human being can live up to this ideal, but it remains a goal that we can strive for. The Stoic sage would be equivalent to the Christian conception of Jesus. In a sense, no one will ever achieve perfection but as long as we have that utopia to steer towards we will not become complacent. 

One of the main criticism of Stoicism stems from a passage where Epictetus says:

So in this matter also: if you kiss your own child, or your brother or friend, never give full license to the appearance ([Greek: phantasian]), and allow not your pleasure to go as far as it chooses; but check it, and curb it as those who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal. Do you also remind yourself in like manner, that he whom you love is mortal, and that what you love is nothing of your own; it has been given to you for the present, not that it should not be taken from you, nor has it been given to you for all time, but as a fig is given to you or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year. But if you wish for these things in winter, you are a fool. So if you wish for your son or friend when it is not allowed to you, you must know that you are wishing for a fig in winter. For such as winter is to a fig, such is every event which happens from the universe to the things which are taken away according to its nature. And further, at the times when you are delighted with a thing, place before yourself the contrary appearances. What harm is it while you are kissing your child to say with a lisping voice: To-morrow you will die;

And yet, Epictetus also says it is fine to be happy with others:

THAT WE OUGHT NOT TO BE MOVED BY A DESIRE OF THOSE THINGS WHICH ARE NOT IN OUR POWER.—Let not that which in another is contrary to nature be an evil to you; for you are not formed by nature to be depressed with others nor to be unhappy with others, but to be happy with them. (Discourses)

It's OK to be happy with others and to have a natural affection for your family. What he is trying to stave off is the debilitating suffering that can occur. Stoic philosophy is not completely world denying. It is seeking an appropriate rational response to the vicissitudes of life. 

I think the primary appeal of Stoicism is that the Stoics have given us a method for achieving happiness. Practicing dealing with our passions will help us in times of need. But like physical exercise, it takes a lot of hard work to get in spiritual shape for the day of calamity. My dad's health was failing and recently passed away. I saw him suffering a lot but it seemed like Stoicism did not have much to offer him. It is not a quick fix. Maybe if he had more time to get in shape with Stoic Spiritual Exercises he may have found more peace. 

I'm not sure, but I do also think that different people have different natural dispositions and that the Stoic Exercises may not help everyone. But I do think it can be worth a shot. Here's one place to start if you want to see what Stoicism might offer you:

The Daily Stoic: 10 Insanely Useful Stoic Exercises

Treating Knowledge Like Public Health Ethics

I've been thinking about virtue epistemology, and more broadly, if it's possible to put knowledge within an ethical framework.

Greg Caruso discusses Free Will and Punishment on Philosophy Bites. In this excellent interview, he says we should treat people who are a threat to public safety in a way that is similar to how we treat people who are a threat to public health. Caruso is a determinist, or at least a free will skeptic, but that doesn't mean we just let people do what they are going to do. Retributive punishment does not make sense in a deterministic universe. Some sort of forwarding looking consequentialism could solve this problem in that punishment could deter personal and wider societal crime.

Caruso's Public Health Quarantine Model posits the quarantining of criminals on the same moral grounds that we quarantine people who have ebola. The person with ebola hasn't done anything that deserves to have their freedom restricted, but for public safety reasons we quarantine them from society. We protect others from harm by limiting that person's freedom. Like Spock said, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one." We don't quarantine people for having a common cold because the cold has a limited negative societal effect. We also have a responsibility to the quarantined person to treat their disease. Likewise, we have a responsibility to treat people we put in jail.

On a broader scale, we have a responsibility to try to keep ebola and other diseases out of the public sphere by trying to eradicate the sources of those diseases. In similar fashion we have a public responsibility to try to eradicate the sources that give rise to criminal behavior. If we could reduce or eliminate the cause we would then reduce the number of people needing to be jailed and rehabilitated.

Source of meme

To me, the implicit message of meme's like the one above is that maybe if we spent more money on our children we would save money spent in the prison system. We have an ethical duty to spend more money on education, just like we have an ethical duty to vaccinate our children.

But I also think we might be able to put epistemology within this larger public health model. Knowledge isn't something you suddenly discover in some college philosophy classroom. As Wittgenstein points out, the way we see the world, the way we use our words, the way we believe, and the way we know, is part of our upbringing. Look at the way we train a child to use words and look at the way we train a child to investigate and come to know the world.

It occurs to me that quarantining people for bad thinking is definitely not something I want to do. It's been tried before. Think of the Chinese who try to re-educate dissidents through labor camps. What I'm thinking of is prevention and addressing systemic causes of poor thinking. There's a social justice element to the thinking of a society. Public health intervenes in a child's life to promote future health and we work on the environments the child encounters.

Creative thinking, thinking for oneself, reasoning skills, developing a love of learning, lateral thinking, these are ways and skills and habits we desire for our children. But we cannot do it alone. We need to think of these things in terms of public goods like public health.

Speaking of Thinking For Oneself. Did you know Arthur Schopenhauer wrote an essay on it?

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter6.html

Virtuous Thinking

I hold to my own, not very well thought through, version of intellectual virtues (technically known as virtue epistemology). The implication here is twofold: thinking is a moral act, and it takes work to develop a style of thinking that is praiseworthy as opposed to blameworthy. Some possible thinking oppositions might include:

• Open vs Closed Minded
• Listening to vs Ignoring Others
• Seeker vs unshakable opinions 
• Creativity vs Inflexibility
• Rigorous Investigation vs Easy Believism
• Honest vs Dishonest Motives 

Other ways we think about thinking include: 

• attitude
• motive
• perseverance
• courage
• humility
• etc.

The performance of thinking is also the performance of self. So people who self-identify as conservatives or liberals might adopt certain thinking habits which conform to community standards. It's rational to think in ways that support your position in a community. And let us not forget about Internet trolls. They play a specific role in the online community. In fact, one might say that trolls exhibit all the negative qualities of our thinking oppositions. 

If one wants to become a better thinker then working on the virtues of the mind would be the way to go.

One way to become a better thinker: 

Keep a Surprise Journal

Here's a great article about 

The Virtue of Scientific Thinking 

(from which I go the picture at the top of this post)

You might also enjoy this article on 

Developing a Teachable Attitude

Thinking in slow motion

Philosophy is thinking in slow motion.  It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed - to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible. (John Campbell)

His definition describes philosophy as a skill rather than a set of facts. As a skill that involves thinking, philosophy is applicable to every area of life. Campbell's definition reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow. 

Kahneman basically says that fast thinking are those heuristics (also called gut instincts) we use automatically when we do things like run from danger. If a bear is charging down the hill in your direction you don't want to spend too much time deliberating about the probability that you will be killed or doing some sort of cost benefit analysis of your various options. You want to decide fast and move fast. Slow thinking, on the other hand, does all those things Campbell points out. It helps us to analyze our situation so we can uncover the biases that lead us astray. 

Overcoming biases in our thinking is also the goal of science. Science, too, is thinking in slow motion. But science is also observation in slow motion -- being careful and writing down what we observe. Scientists need to keep good notes, but they also need to analyze their data carefully (something philosophical training can help with).  

In fact, there is a whole area of study in philosophy called logic which delves quite deeply into uncovering how our thinking works and what are the best ways of making arguments and avoiding mistakes in our thinking. 

How could a baby fall out of a twenty-story building onto the ground and live?

(See #4 for Solution)

Or, if you would rather, here are some

philosophical puzzles 

to slow you down and get you thinking.

No Proof

In his article, Where's the Proof in Science? There is none, Geraint Lewis compares science to a courtroom:

So, science is like an ongoing courtroom drama, with a continual stream of evidence being presented to the jury. But there is no single suspect and new suspects regularly wheeled in. In light of the growing evidence, the jury is constantly updating its view of who is responsible for the data.

Sure, there's evidence, but that is not the same as proof. As the statistical probability grows, we grow more confident in our beliefs, but we never reach that magical 100% certainty that we all desire. 

The one person who was sure that he had reached this state of 100% certainty was Rene Descartes. He is famous for saying, "I think, therefore I am." And yet, his certainty is today an easy target even for Intro to Philosophy students. Descartes sought a sure foundation on which he could built the whole edifice of knowledge. If you build your structure on such shaky ground it's sure to come falling down. 

If you want 100 Proof, you'll probably have to turn to Vodka, not science.

I Don't Know

Voltaire wrote in The Philosophical Dictionary under the entry "Limits of the Human Mind"

"SOMEONE asked Newton one day why he walked when he wanted to, and how his arm and his hand moved at his will. He answered manfully that he had no idea. 'But at least,' his interlocutor said to him, 'you who understand so well the gravitation of the planets will tell me why they turn in one direction rather than in another!' And he again confessed that he had no idea." 

Voltaire's point: we should find where the limits of our knowledge stops and then refuse to go further. Instead of offering some intuitively appealing, but unproven explanation, Newton is willing to just say, "I don't know." 

This is the difference between empirical science and speculative explanations of all sorts from astrology, to ancient aliens, to conspiracy theories.