Parableman

In the new season of Lost (stop reading now if you haven't watched through the sixth season premiere yet and don't want to be spoiled), the writers have introduced a new storytelling device. The first three seasons filled out the backstories of the characters by means of alternating between the current story and flashbacks, usually from before the characters were on the island, focusing on a different character each episode. The fourth season changed the device to flashforwards. The main story continued where it had left off the previous season, but in most episodes it alternated with what happens to some of the characters after they leave the island. At the end of the season in the main story, we see the events that lead up to them leaving the island.

The fifth season splits in two pieces. For the first half of the season, we have the continuation of the characters who remain on the island, as their location in time becomes unstable, and they shift from one time period to another across various periods in the history of the island. This is alternated with the characters who left the island, as they move toward returning. Mid-season, we see those characters arriving, and the time-shifts end. The characters who had remained on the online got stuck in 1974, and the characters who returned to the island have arrived, some of them in 2007, three years after they had left, and some in 1977, three years after their compatriots had arrived in the past. At the very end of season five, we see them initiating a plan to try to change the past and prevent themselves from ever having arrived on the island. The fifth season ends as it looks as if they have achieved what they intended, but we see no effects from it.

Now the sixth season has begun, and the new storytelling device is neither time travel, flashbacks, or flashforwards. They're calling it flash-sideways. One storyline involves the original characters in the aftermath of their plan. They seem to be in an unchanged timeline, back in 2007, where they will presumably meet up with the other characters who arrived on the island in 2007 as planned. The new storytelling device adds a story about people who look just like the characters we already know but who have led very different lives, as if the world has been different since 1977. The plane doesn't crash. The island seems to be underwater. We see small differences, some of them attributable to the island's demise in 1977. Hurley is lucky rather than unlucky. John Locke isn't depressed, and he at least seems to indicate that he went on the walkabout. Jack is nervous and Rose calm. Charlie is suicidal rather than just addicted. Desmond is on the plane rather than on the island pushing the button. Some characters who were on the plane are not there now (e.g. Boone couldn't get Shannon to come back with him). I'm guessing that some of the slight differences in personality or life-path are due to Jacob not meeting up with some of the characters (whatever it is he did to them by touching them), and some from other aspects of the island being changed (the numbers not being broadcast for Hurley to encounter them, the island not being there to be found by Desmond or maybe even Charles Widmore not being alive to send him on his trip to begin with).

What seems to have happened (and I'm guessing we might end up being surprised to find out something else is actually going on, judging my the executive producers' cryptic comments about this) is that the time-traveling characters did something in 1977 that didn't change anything in their own timeline but did cause a different timeline to take a different path. This sort of fits with what J.J. Abrams and his associates have done with time travel in another franchise, namely the latest Star Trek film. The time-traveling characters in that movie traveled back to the past and changed it. But the past they changed wasn't their own past. It was the past of a different reality. That's the similarity, but there's a big difference with Lost. The world Nimoy-Spock ends up in is another reality, the changed one. He's there with his alternate-past self. In Lost, the characters don't see any change whatsoever, even though they're present when they presumably cause the change. So the cause of the change is in their reality, and it has an effect in a different reality that they never enter. The Star Trek version involved the time-travelers simply going to an alternate world and causing the different path of history in that other world, while their past remained the same without them in it.

The problem with the Star Trek way of doing it is that all time travel would have to be really just alternate-reality travel in the cases when it seems to be past-changing, but then why would some time travel be that and others be going to your own past (the ones where you don't change anything)? Why would events after you arrive (i.e. whether you change anything) determine whether you went to another world, when you've already been wherever you are the whole time before those events? So it must be that all time travel is alternate-reality travel to avoid such a problem.

The Lost way of doing avoids that problem, because you go to your own past, but anything you do that you might think changes anything has no changing effects in your own reality but does in the other one. The problem now is that something you do in one reality causes a different reality to have a different history, when nothing in its own timeline causes the difference. But if you don't actually do anything different from what had ever occurred all along in your own reality, why does an action you don't even do have an effect that makes the other timeline different? So something's really confused if the story the writers want us to believe is really the explanation for the flash-sideways.

Robert Orci explains the rationale for treating time travel as alternate-universe travel in this interview, which I've commented on previously. He rightly opposed the idea of changing the past. Damon Lindelof, who worked on that film with him, is one of the two executive producers of Lost who run the show (and both projects are under J.J. Abrams' ultimate leadership). Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have said several times that they opposed time travel stories with paradoxes, and presumably they mean the kind caused by changing the past. Here is one instance from Lindelof:

We're not going to tell you that we're against bending the time-space continuum. We are very for it. Carlton and I are PRO time-space continuum bending! But we're ANTI-paradox. Paradox creates issues. In Heroes, Masi Oka's character travels back from the future to say, ''You must prevent New York from being destroyed.'' But if they prevent New York from being destroyed, Masi Oka can never travel back from the future to warn you, because Future Hiro no longer exists. Right? So when we start having those conversations at Lost, we go, ''This show is already confusing enough as it is.'' To actually have characters traveling through time has to be handled very deftly.

Here is what President Obama said:

Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.

The most natural way to read that first sentence is that he's accusing the Supreme Court of doing this in order to give the special interests a chance to spend without limit. It's not just that it has that result but that such a result is the very reason they did it. He said they "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests". I don't know if he really meant to imply that the reasons they gave in the opinion are not their real reasons or if he was just uncareful in what he said, but what he said does seem to me to imply that they didn't really do it because they think the Constitution requires giving corporations and unions free speech rights that don't allow for these limits. Instead, it was because they wanted special interests in particular to have no limits.

That strikes me as a pretty uncharitable reading of their motives, especially given that this isn't all that surprising a decision for most of these justices. Justice Kennedy in particular is a free speech absolutist. He thinks hardly any limits on free speech are constitutionally allowable. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Scalia along with Chief Justice Roberts are more willing to allow exceptions for freedom of speech than Justice Kennedy is, but they've tended to oppose campaign finance restrictions on free speech grounds. The fact that some special interest groups will benefit from this is a mere effect. Accusing the Supreme Court of voting merely to get a political result can make sense if the argument they give in the opinion is extremely out of character for the kind of reasoning the justices in question usually give, but that's no so with this decision. It's extremely unlikely that this was motivated by some tie to special interests (as if special interests are only on one side of the aisle anyway; such a decision would go both ways, and given that Obama got more support from corporations than McCain it's also unlikely that this was motivated by a desire to get the Republican Party more money, as some conspiracy theorists have claimed).

But then this president, not very long ago, was a senator who made some pretty uncharitable comments to both Roberts and Alito when explaining his votes not to confirm them (and his vote to filibuster Alito). I'll quote one of my comments on a previous discussion:

I don't think what he said about Bush's Supreme Court nominees was all that respectful. He basically accused Roberts of having a callous heart toward the weak and being dismissive of attempts to eradicate discrimination. Then two paragraphs later he complained that Democrats were attacking Senator Leahy's motivations for supporting Roberts, as if it's bad to attack people's motives, something he'd just spent a couple paragraphs doing with Roberts.

He did something similar with Alito. He spoke about how civility is a good thing. He did say that Alito is a man of great character, which is at least better than how he treated Roberts. But then he went on to accuse him of siding with the strong, the state, and corporations in every case where he didn't have to follow Supreme Court precedent, as if it weren't about what he viewed the Constitution as requiring but were just about seeking to get certain results that favored the strong, the state, and corporations.

James Sennett's chapter in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy considers several views on the extent of salvation:

Universalism: Everyone will be saved.
Pluralism: There is no one, true religion. Multiple religions are legitimate paths to God.
Inclusivism: There is one, true religion, but some who are technically in other religions are nonetheless on a legitimate path to God by means of the correct religion, even if they don't know it.
Exclusivism: There is one, true religion, and the only path to God is through explicitly following that religion.

Sennett argues, correctly I think, that Lewis was an inclusivist. He allows for Emeth to be saved without any explicit trust in Aslan, but he insists that Emeth was following Aslan while falsely believing he was following Tash. Aslan clearly states that Aslan and Tash are not the same being, and the followers of Tash are evil and do not make it into Aslan's country. Universalism and pluralism are as easily ruled out as exclusivism. I haven't spent an awful lot of time thinking about inclusivism, because it seems so hard to square with Paul's train of thought in Romans 10. But Sennett has helped me see that Lewis' inclusivism makes sense of one puzzling element of the Narnia stories, and he's also helped me think a little more fully about what an inclusivist view should look like.

Sennett argues that inclusivism best explains something that might otherwise be puzzling in the Narnia stories. See The Mouse Trap Theory of Atonement at Green Baggins for a serious discussion of Lewis' theory of the atonement in the Narnia books. After reading Sennett, I'm now wondering if the discussion makes any sense. It's an attempt to get an entire theory of atonement out of an event that isn't really atonement for anyone but Edmund. Sennett has a much better alternative. He insists that the Narnians' following of Aslan is not Christianity. You don't have anything in Narnia like salvation by means of faith in a work of atonement. The stone table was one event for one person that turned the tables in one war against one opponent. It's much better to think of Narnians who follow Aslan in a way more like how Christians generally see faithful Jews before the time of Christ and how Lewis saw Emeth following Aslan without knowing it when he thought he was serving Tash. I think what Sennett is suggesting is that the real atonement for Narnians is the same one for us, namely the cross in our world. The Narnians don't know this to put explicit faith in it, but it's enough that Aslan does when he initiates the work of faith in their lives to guide them along in their progress toward greater understanding, some of which may only come after their death (as was the case with Emeth). I think this makes much better sense of what Lewis is doing with the stone table and how he might say that Narnians are saved.

Anther intriguing statement Sennett makes is that Aslan is not Jesus. I thought it was obvious that Aslan is Jesus. Isn't the stone table supposed to refer to the cross, even if it isn't really salvation for all the Narnians? Well, yes, literarily. But in the world of the fiction, Aslan is a lion. Jesus is a man. The incarnation of the first person of the Trinity as a man in our world is not the same incarnation as his incarnation as a lion in the Narnian world. The incarnation is hard enough to figure out philosophically, but a double incarnation? Fortunately, Prosblogion has already had two discussions of that issue for those who are curious.

Finally, it occurs to me that inclusivism fits best with a Calvinist model of divine sovereignty. Sennett's way of describing who among other religions is genuinely on the path to salvation is that they're the ones God is working in to move them toward the right attitudes and practices, despite not having the right information to know what the gospel even is. Without that, and without the evidence of explicit faith in Jesus Christ, it's very hard for there to be objective criteria for someone to be saved. The easiest way around that is for the criteria to be simply whoever God is genuinely working in, a work that will always be brought to completion, but that requires Calvinist views of divine sovereignty over human salvation. There may be other ways to do it, but that's certainly the easiest answer to the problem. Ironically, Calvinists are probably more likely to be opposed to inclusivism than other groups, and inclusivists rarely want to be Calvinists.

 

 

The 313th Christian Carnival will be hosted this coming Wednesday at Who Am I? The Christian Carnival is a weekly collection of some of the best posts of the Christian blogosphere. It's open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. One of the goals of this carnival is to offer our readers to a broad range of Christian thought. This is a great way to make your writing more well known and perhaps pick up some regular readers. For examples of past carnivals, see the Christian Carnival archive.

If God miraculously modified a chicken to make it lay walnuts instead of eggs, and those walnuts grew into what looked like normal walnut trees, would you think the offspring was a chicken?

Update: It occurs to me that the second question I asked is really a separate issue, so I'll save that for post #6.

Matt Flanagan's Inerrancy and Biblical Authority discussed Glenn Peoples' Inerrantly Assuming Inerrancy in History. There are so many things I disagree with in the latter post that it was very hard to pull myself away from my desire to write a detailed response, but I didn't have the time.

I actually agree with much of what Matt says, if you frame it as a hypothetical, which he does: If Peoples is right that inerrancy as currently held by contemporary interrantists is not the historical doctrine of scripture throughout church history, then it's still possible to claim that the Bible is true in all God intended it to teach us. I think you lose much of what God actually did intend the Bible to teach us, but you can hold a view that God intended it to teach us less than that and still think the Bible teaches all those things.

I've written before about historical figures' attitudes toward scripture, including the biblical authors' own attitudes, and I've concluded that the mainstream Christian attitude toward scripture throughout church history has not been mere inerrancy but the stronger claim that scripture is infallible. [There are those historical revisionists today who claim that they hold to infallibility but not inerrancy, but that's logically impossible without contradiction given what these terms have historically meant. What such people are calling infallibility is not infallibility of scripture but infallibility of certain claims of scripture and not others. Inerrantists hold to the infallibility of all scripture, which entails the inerrancy of all scripture on all matters that it speaks of.]

As I was looking through the text file I keep of things to blog about, I came across a link the Bart Barber's An Errant Bible: The Gateway Heresy (ht: Russell Moore), which I never got around to posting about, but I'm using Matt's recent post as an occasion to do so. Barber's piece is excellent for a number of reasons, but one thing that struck me especially was his response to the first argument he presents from Jim Denison. Denison thinks inerrantists, in responding to objections, have brought inerrancy to the point of death by a thousand qualifications, where the view is so thin that it means hardly anything anymore. In response, Barber says the following:

Actually, Denison's argument works against him, not for him. Yes, many different people have defined "inerrancy" in different ways. And yes, several inerrantists have offered a number of qualifications of the term "inerrancy" in order to forestall misunderstanding regarding the meaning of the term. Denison has suitably demonstrated that people with an impressive array of varied beliefs about the precise nature of the Bible can all claim to be an "inerrantist" in some fashion or another. Denison's suggestion is that this complex state of affairs makes it not very meaningful for one to affirm that he is an inerrantist.

Yet even if this fact makes it mean less when someone affirms that he is an inerrantist, then it necessarily makes it mean more when someone cannot affirm that he is an inerrantist. The denial of inerrancy then means that, out of all the various definitions of inerrancy and with all of the various reasonable qualifications of inerrancy applied, a person still cannot find a way with all of that flexibility to affirm the word in any sense.

Ethan's speech pathologist sent home his report from his evaluation for his upcoming triennial review. Two things about it seem a little strange.

1. One of the tests aimed to discover how well Ethan uses appropriate pronouns. The speech pathologist seems to acknowledge this particular problem. The report says:

On many occasions, Ethan provided an appropriate response to the given sentence, however since it was not the targeted response, credit was not allowed (e.g Ethan was shown a picture of a school choir and given the sentence "the choir has a song to sing -- who will sing a song". Ethan replied with "the choir", however the targeted response was "they will").

In ordinary English, "the choir" is actually a more natural response to that question than "they will". Ethan's response is actually superior to the officially-accepted one, taking just the question in isolation. Only if you know that the rules of the game expect you to respond with a sentence including a pronoun will you prefer "they will". Even then, it sounds sort of artificial, but a student who understands the pragmatics of the conversation might do all right on this question. A student with problems involving the pragmatics of conversation will almost certainly not. Ethan has problems with the pragmatics of conversation, which means this question will not test what it's supposed to be testing, which is the proper use of pronouns, but rather the pragmatic ability to discover the conversational rules of the language game being played. So this seems to be a badly-designed test. I wonder how the rest of the test is. This is the only example she gave.

2. Another test involved recognizing semantic absurdities. Presumably with an eight-year-old kid they won't be asking things on the level of the liar paradox, but I would hope they could do better than the example the speech pathologist gave in her report. She says that he couldn't recognize that the sentence, "The plumber fixed the lights" is silly. I can't either. My uncle was a plumber, and he probably fixed lights at some point in his life. He did own his own house, after all. That sentence is perfectly meaningful, and there's nothing absurd about it. I could see how this would be a nice sentence to test actual understanding of semantic absurdity, because some kids might be fooled into thinking that it's semantically absurd, when it's not. But the test actually has it doing the opposite. The kids who can see that it's a meaningful sentence come out with a lower score for vocabulary recognition.

The speech pathologist concludes, "This indicates that Ethan demonstrated difficulty understanding the target words in the sentences that were used incorrectly." Maybe there were other sentences where that's true, but this example shows nothing of the sort. Ethan knows full well what the word "plumber" means, and that's the most difficult word in the sentence. One of the tests the psychologist gave to him during this process tested his vocabulary at the level of the second half of sixth grade (he's in third). His problem wasn't that he doesn't understand the vocabulary in the sentence but that he knows something the test designers didn't, which is that the sentence in question is perfectly meaningful in English and could easily be used without anything silly going on. Unlike the first example, the speech pathologist didn't seem to recognize this fact.

Update: I should say that I accept that you can derive an absurdity from this second example, if you provide a particular context, e.g. if you're told that the plumber is carrying out a job as a hired plumber and doing only that job. If you say enough that someone who understands English fully competently, together with the pragmatic rules of conversation, will understand all that information, then perhaps such a person would think such information tells against thinking the plumber will be fixing lights. But that's precisely my point. You need a pragmatic context to derive the absurdity, and this isn't a test of pragmatics but of semantic absurdities. There's nothing semantically absurd about that sentence.

What if God created the universe not with the slow development most of us believe to have happened and even without the "memories" of such a slow development? Yet on the surface people look like what they look like in the actual world, and they relate to each other socially in the same ways. They just don't have the long history we have, and they don't have false memories of such a history either.

Would there be any races? If there are, would they be the same groups as or very similar groups to our races (i.e. would the lines of demarcation for races be the same as what they now are)?

I was reading William Klein's review of David Peterson's Acts commentary. It included this strange argument:

In a startling example of eisegesis Peterson states, "... we may assume that wherever resistance to the message is recorded, Luke believed the Lord had not yet acted in grace and power to enable belief" (p. 404). May we? In fact Luke explains that the Jews rejected the word of God and judged themselves unfit for eternal life (13:46). I guess this shows how we all see what we want to see in texts and may wish to ignore other ways of seeing things.

The following two claims are at issue, and Klein seems to think the second claim is supposed to undermine the first. I'm not sure how.

1. Resistance to the gospel only occurs when God hasn't led someone to believe.
2. Jews rejected God and thus became unfit for eternal life.

Earlier in the review, Klein makes it clear that Peterson accepts a standard compatibilist Calvinism, whereby "God determined the players' roles in Jesus' crucifixion (2:23) without diminishing those players' responsibility for their actions". So it isn't as if he thinks Peterson denies human responsibility. But it seems the second claim is merely an affirmation of human responsibility, and somehow that's supposed to undermine the view that resistance occurs only in the absence of saving grace. Only if you took the hyper-Calvinist view that we aren't responsible for our actions would you end up thinking your belief in 1 was incompatible with 2. So I'm completely at a loss as to why Klein thinks this criticism applies to Peterson's view, because he knows that Peterson isn't such a hyper-Calvinist and even said so earlier in this review.

Am I just missing something here?

This is the 53rd post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series, beginning a new subject: personal identity. (The last post on artificial intelligence finished off the Mind and Body topic.)

What are the criteria for what makes someone the person they are? A lot of changes we can go through leave us existing as the same people. We've changed, but we're still there as the people who have changed. Some things that can be done to us leave us no longer around, as much as we don't like to think about that. Most cases of both are uncontroversial. But that doesn't tell us what it is to be us, and philosophers raise lots of puzzles about what changes we might undergo without ceasing to be us.

Philosophers will answer these kinds of questions by talking about essential properties. An essential property is something necessary for a thing to be what it is. An essential property of a triangle is having three angles. If it somehow got a fourth angle, it would no longer be a triangle. The triangle would cease to exist. My having a beard is not an essential property. I can shave my beard, but I would still be around afterward, and I'd be exactly the same person I was beforehand. Which properties are essential is a matter of debate, however.

Some people, following Rene Descartes, hold that we have a part that's not physical at all but an immaterial mind or soul. This view, dualism, would say you need the same soul to be the same person. [Descartes' own view is that the immaterial mind is not just a part of him but is all of him. His body is just a place his mind occupies. Most dualists think rather that the mind and body are both parts of us.] It's not immediately clear with some changes (e.g. if you used a Star Trek transporter) if the same soul would be present afterward according to dualism.

Other people say you need the same body. If so, you die when your body dies, but you continue if your body is still alive, even if other things aren't present (e.g. a functioning brain). Some say you need the same brain. If so, you might end up with a new body if your brain gets moved to a new body.

Some might say you need psychological continuity, e.g. having a continuing set of beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, loves, character traits, and so on (which obviously get somewhat changed over time but only gradually and through a process where most of them continue). Some who hold this view have even suggested we could be converted to computer programs and survive that way. [John Searle questions this, as we've seen in his Chinese Room argument. Behavior as if you think isn't enough for genuine thinking.]

These same criteria come up in John Perry's A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Is it possible to exist after you've died? Lots of people think so, so it must not be obviously absurd. Gretchen Weirob is about to die. She wants the slightest possibility that she'll continue to exist. What if someone in the future has all her characteristics at her death? No - it has to be her, not just someone exactly like her (e.g. an identical twin who somehow also had the same memories and exactly the same personality traits). That's the kind of identity we mean, not just exact similarity but really being Weirob herself. She can anticipate what she will do and look forward to it, because it's not someone else. It's never correct to anticipate doing something that someone else will do. That's just an imposter.

Consider the example of burning a Kleenex box. If you later say of something "this is the very same box of Kleenex", that seems absurd. Even if you reconstructed something exactly like it, it wouldn't be the same box. Consider the same with the Mona Lisa.

So how could I survive death? The next post will begin looking at the different personal identity views, how they answer that question, and the various objections to them.

If God created the universe not with the slow development most of us believe to have happened but pretty much as it is now, with all the "memories" and seeming causes that give signs of the past, would the racial groups we now identify still count as races? Would they be the same groups (i.e. would the lines of demarcation for races be the same as what they now are)?

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has come under fire for some race-related comments he made a while back about President Obama's election that have recently come to light:

He [Reid] was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,'

I wouldn't say that there's no problem with Reid's words, but I'm wondering how it amounts to what a lot of critics have been saying. The comments from a number of politicians make fascinating reading. Republicans want to say that the remarks are racist or at least inappropriate, and they point to a double standard by Democrats, who find little problem with Reid but were calling for Trent Lott's resignation for speaking off-the-cuff at a birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) to say that if he'd been elected president we wouldn't have some of the problems we have. Of course, the same could be said for those who defended Lott but have now attacked Reid.

What Trent Lott said was totally unproblematic in its actual content. It's the context that made people think he meant something more. He was talking about someone who has long been hailed as a stalwart conservative, and if he'd been president we surely would have had more conservative policies than the ones we actually got with President Truman. So a conservative senator could indeed have said what he said and not meant anything even racially-related.

But he was also talking about someone with a history of supporting segregation, who was actually running with a segregationist party on the occasion Lott was referring to. He was speaking at an event in the South, and there were almost certainly people present who fully agreed with Thurmond's former views who would have heard such a statement as support for such views. I doubt Lott was even thinking of that. He was probably just trying to be nice to a very elderly colleague celebrating a birthday, and I find it unlikely that the racial issue was even on his mind. It doesn't amount to racism, but it amounts to racial insensitivity and ignorance, and it perpetuates patterns of such behavior that are worth calling attention to and seeking to undermine. So I do think it was good for people to call attention to it, even if it does seem a bit much to me to insist that he resign from a Senate leadership position over it.

On the other hand, Harry Reid's problem is not in the content of what he said but in his choice of actual words. What he said is actually either true or at least certainly arguably so. He made two claims: (1) that Obama couldn't have been elected as easily if he seemed "more black" to more people and (2) the reason he seems "less black" to some people is that he has lighter skin and doesn't naturally speak the way a lot of black people do.

The second claim is certainly true. Linguists study the language patterns of sub-communities with particular dialects, and one common dialect occurs among black people across the country, with similar traits no matter what part of the country they're in. This isn't another language. It's English. But it has some different grammatical rules and pronunciations from standard American English. It's usually associated with inner city or poor and very rural blacks. A lot of black Americans speak more standard English most of the time and occasionally take on an affect of what some linguists call Black English. The rest of the time their grammar and pronunciation are pretty standard. There is also a southern-like element to some word pronunciations for a lot of black Americans even if they don't ever use the dialectical elements unique to Black English, and this is true no matter what region of the country the person is from. That accent is sometimes detectable over the phone, and people often associate it with race, sometimes looking down on people for speaking that way. This is all just a matter of linguistic and sociological fact. Acknowledging it is neither racist nor succumbing to pressure to cater to racists. Knowing the facts about how race works in this country does not amount to liking those facts or wanting them to be that way. It seems to me to be simply true that President Obama does not speak the way a lot of people who have negative stereotypes about how black people speak would expect a black man to speak, except when he chooses to do so.

As for the first claim, I think it's at least arguable that Obama would have had a harder time getting elected if people with negative stereotypes about black people had seen him as "more black". With a white mother, lighter than average skin for a black man, and speech patterns that are more ambiguous, a lot of people who might hesitate to identify with him could more easily do so. A lot of people who might have a harder time respecting him might more easily do so. I don't want to minimize how far this country has come with race in being able to elect him. Nevertheless, interviews showed that people with racial animus or some resistance to voting for a black candidate were able to pull the lever for Obama. One possible explanation that's certainly not obviously false is that they saw him as "less black". Would someone who looks and talks like Chris Rock have as easy a time getting elected president? I don't think so. Could someone who looks and talks like Chris Rock do it? Maybe. I'm not as sure as Reid. But the claim he was making doesn't seem ridiculous. I've heard a number of black academics make exactly that claim in meetings at the American Philosophical Association where his becoming president has come up.

The only thing I see that's seriously wrong with Reid's statement is the expression "Negro dialect". I haven't encountered that exact expression before ever, but I suspect it's a relic of Reid's growing up with "Negro" as the preferred term for black people, and he's not so heavily involved with the black community or racial issues to have gotten the immediate sense of its inappropriateness the way anyone with any racial sensitivity nowadays would have. So, like Lott, it shows that he's racially out of touch. It's not about referencing a racist or racially-harmful ideology as good, which I think Lott did unintentionally and lots of people claimed he did intentionally. It's about overt language that's usually offensive nowadays but used to be fine. The result is the same, though. He showed some racial insensitivity, even if the Democrats defending him are right that he's voted the right way all along. Voting the right way is compatible with being extremely insensitive. Democrats generally take Ted Kennedy to have voted the right way with women's issues, but there's no arguing that his attitude toward women was always wonderful. The same goes for Bill Clinton.

So that makes me conclude the following two things. First, the nature of the offense is different in the two cases. One involves overt language without ill intent in one case and potential implicatures that probably weren't but could have been meant in the other. Second, the real problem this analysis reveals is that both senators showed serious insensitivity and ignorance about race issues. So I do wonder if calls for Lott to resign should consistently be made against Reid and if those who thought Lott's statement shouldn't require a resignation should apply the same reasoning to Reid. I don't think either requires a resignation, but both should lead us to consider how ignorant and insensitive those who lead us are about race issues, and the most important fact about racial ignorance is that it's an unknown unknown. You don't know you have it until someone points it out. We should use moments like this to raise understanding to a higher level, not for political points or to try to remove someone in an influential position from that position merely because the person's ignorance is now known (as if the ones who haven't happened to reveal it are just fine). I'm therefore much more inclined to direct my criticism to those who don't recognize the parity between these cases than I am to direct it toward the two senators in question.

John Mark Reynolds' response has helped me to clarify where I think he and I are disagreeing on the torture question.

JMR defends his view based on his argument that torture is worse than killing. Of course, I can easily concede that torture can be worse than killing. But I can't accept that it always is. In 8th grade, a fellow student of mine used to give me wet willies at pretty regular intervals throughout the day. I consider that torture of a very weak sort. It was evil for him to do so, and how I responded was also evil. I got so fed up that I kicked him in the family jewels (or maybe I kneed him). I also consider that to be a kind of torture. Neither is worse than killing someone. Both inflicted pain of a particularly excessive sort. Both involve using someone as a mere means to an end, in his case to take delight in someone else's pain, in my case to satisfy my desire for revenge. Both are wrong, but both are less wrong than killing.

A police officer might cause severe psychological pain by lying to someone in a way that leads to a confession. A police officer might cause physical pain, as long as it's not severe and permanent. Both are perfectly legal in law enforcement, although they are not for military interrogators, who aren't allowed to lie or even touch a suspected terrorist, which was why the Bush Administration wanted more allowed for CIA interrogators, since standard military interrogations were ineffective against al Qaeda. I count such things as mild torture, and they don't seem all that wrong to me, even if one might argue that they are wrong. They certainly aren't worse than killing the suspect.

The key issue is that torture comes in degrees. Killing does too but not in the same sense. What makes an act of killing worse is how you do it, why you do it, and so on. But killing is killing. Torture can be fairly weakly torture, or it can
be pretty awful torture. Killing can be worse because it also involves torture, but the killing itself is not worse. It's the torture that adds to the badness of the killing. Killing is all-or-nothing, and torture comes in degrees in a way that
begs for an analysis that's more complex than simple right and wrong. It's at least a spectrum from not as bad to extremely bad, and it may well be a spectrum from morally required to significantly evil.

I think Mark Olson's question is helpful, so I'll repeat here my comment on his post:

If you only consider consequentialist principles, you can't get an absolute prohibition on anything except the principle that we should seek the best consequences. So to get a moral ban on all torture, there better be some deontological principles at stake. The question is whether those deontological principles themselves are absolutist.

I happen to think the only deontological principle that is absolutist is the moral claim that we ought to give due honor to God and follow him in whatever ways are best for doing so. There are many ethical principles beyond that, and most of them apply most of the time. Some of them apply almost all the time and would require crazy hypotheticals to find exceptions (or very weak cases with moral principles about matters that involve vague concepts occurring along a spectrum, such as consent and coercion, harm, or what someone's motivation and desires are in doing an act).

But to answer your question, I think the deontological principle behind JMR's opposition to torture is his principle that it's always wrong to coerce someone, a principle I've questioned. He doesn't think it's always wrong to cause pain or to cause pain that someone remembers. He doesn't think it's always wrong to cause harm, even permanent harm, knowing full well that one is doing so. He does think it's wrong to cause harm for the sake of causing harm without some higher purpose, but he doesn't think such a higher purpose can be merely getting information that will lead to better consequences when the causing of harm is done to violate someone's ability to consent to giving up that information. So it's mainly an issue of consent to choose to speak when one wants to and to refrain from giving information when one doesn't.

As I've said along the way, I think the problem with that argument is that consent and coercion come along a spectrum, and weaker versions of coercion undermining consent can be morally correct under the right sorts of circumstances. When the consequences increase in their badness, avoiding them might require undermining consent to a stronger degree than is normally moral. That's why I think torture isn't in principle wrong. JMR has a more absolutist view about that principle. We both take it to be deontological, because neither of us thinks slightly better consequences for a serious undermining consent are enough to justify it. But he takes it to be absolutist, whereas I think there could be circumstances where undermining someone's consent via coercion to a great degree can be morally all right, as long as those consequences are extremely serious.

So I'm not sure the disagreement is really meta-ethical. It's more on the level of normative ethics, I think.

For ease of reference, here are the posts:

One Bad Argument in Favor of Torture
Cicero not Nero!
On Pacifism and Torture
A Conservative and Pragmatic Argument Against Torture

Arguments Against Torture

Consider the image of God argument. This is the same reasoning used against killing, and yet the scriptures make it very clear that capital punishment is not just allowable but mandated by God, at least in a certain context. (I'll leave it open whether it should be used today. What matters for my point here is that God not just allowed it the way he allowed divocrce in the Mosaic law. He commanded it in the Torah, and Paul seems to affirm the use of the sword in carrying out justice in Romans 13, so there's not even a plausible argument that the new covenant removes this allowance.) So I don't think the fact that we're made in the image of God is going to rule out all torture, since it doesn't rule out all killing and it's the explicit biblical reason not to kill people.

Aristotelian virtue arguments point out how bad it is to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to torture someone. Of course this is right, but it's also bad to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to kill someone. The argument that we ought to find the right mean, that we ought to be moderate, does not imply that we won't sometimes do something that is usually on one of the extremes. Aristotle, for example, saw honesty and truth-telling as virtues between the extremes of lying and betraying confidences. But there might be some occasions when lying to save someone's life is morally necessary (as God instructed Samuel to do when he anointed David) or betraying a confidence is morally necessary (as happens in courts of law all the time in the pursuit of justice, with the only significant exceptions being attorney-client, spousal privilege, and medical/psychological practitioner/client relationships). Just because the mean is the best spot doesn't mean the actions usually on the extremes always will be. Occasionally you'll find actions that are usually on an extreme ending up as the mean. So Aristotelian golden mean arguments will never rule out an action in principle, since that's not how the view works.

The coercion argument strikes me as mistaken, also. There are certainly occasions when it's right to coerce someone. For example, we put criminals in prison. We threaten to imprison or fine people to get them to testify or to serve on a jury. We impose severe penalties to those who won't pay their taxes. We have on occasion drafted people to serve in the military and kill other people, and when that's a just and popular war most people don't think it's as problematic as in wars that are very unpopular or obviously unjust. We require people to work or show progress toward improving employment capability if they're to receive government benefits of various sorts. It strikes me that the case of torture is most analogous to other kinds of coercion to get testimony, and the major difference is in the method of coercion, not in the principle that it's wrong to coerce people to tell the truth.

If someone appeared out of nowhere who was an exact duplicate of Chris Rock, would he be black? Would he be a memer of the same race as Chris Rock? Why or why not?

Would you say the same if it was a duplicate of Britney Spears? Would her duplicate be white? Why or why not?

Would a duplicate of Dwayne Johnson have the same racial status (whatever you think that is) as Dwayne Johnson? Why or why not?

If you answer any of these questions differently, what makes the difference between the different cases and why would that be?

This is the 52nd post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. In my last post, I looked at Frank Jackson's argument for property dualism, concluding the major arguments involving dualism and materialism about the human mind. This last mind-related post covers artificial intelligence, particularly whether a computer program could be enough to generate genuine thinking.

The strongest argument that a computer might think is an argument from analogy. At least some examples of artificial intelligence in science fiction seem to do the same things we do when we think. In Star Trek: the Next Generation, Lt. Commander Data is an android who certainly seems to be a conscious, thinking being. In one episode, Starfleet conducted a trial to determine whether he was the property of Starfleet or whether he has rights enough to refuse to be dismantled for research into artificial intelligence. The argument that won the day is that, though we can't prove Data to have a mind, we also can't prove anyone besides ourselves to be consciously aware. They do the things we do when we're consciously aware, and they have similar brain states according to our best science, but is it absolute proof? So it doesn't seem like Data is in much worse shape than any normal human being, right? We should at least give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to moral issues.

Nevertheless, John Searle's Chinese Room example is designed to show that a computer program that appears to think isn't thereby thinking. You might be able to design a program that follows steps to appear to think, but that doesn't mean it really understands anything.

Put a man in a room and give him instructions about what to do when he sees certain symbols. He is to follow the instructions and write down different symbols as a result. Little does he know that the symbols he receives are actual Chinese questions, and he's giving back actual Chinese answers. From the outside, someone might think someone inside understands Chinese and is answering the questions, but it's all based on rules. This is exactly what people trying to develop artificial intelligence are trying to accomplish. Searle says it's a misguided goal if people think this is genuine thinking and understanding, since the Chinese Room case shows that no one is thinking, even though all the behavioral responses to stimuli indicate that someone must be thinking. This is a problem for functionalism, since all the functional roles are present. It's a problem for the Artificial Intelligence project, since something like this could be developed, but Searle insists that merely accomplishing it doesn't give us anything that thinks.

Searle considers some objections. The Systems Reply admits that the man in the room doesn't understand, and the room itself certainly doesn't, nor does the instruction book. But the whole system - the man, the room, and the instruction book - does understand Chinese. Searle responds that he can make the system disappear by having the man memorize all the rules. The room does little work here. Now give the man Chinese questions, and he can write the proper answers. He acts as if he understands, yet there's no way he does - and he is the system. So the system doesn't understand.

The Robot Reply says what's missing is involvement in the world. Just language isn't enough. Make it interact with the world in more ways by putting the program in a robot that can talk, move around, play catch, etc. In that case, it seems more as if it thinks. A computer doesn't get to hold things in its hand and move around. It has no contact with the things its statements are about. Some have thought that giving it contact with those things would make it easier to see it as understanding what the statements are about.

Searle gives two problems for this reply. First, it concedes a bit much for the artificial intelligence thesis to be true anymore. Thinking is no longer about symbol manipulation but has to be caused in the right way and lead to certain kinds of behavior. It's not all based on just getting the right program. Second, simply getting a machine to move around and interact with the world doesn't make it think. Put a person inside the robot and give her instructions as with the man in the Chinese Room, and you would get the same result - it doesn't seem as if thinking is going on here.

There's an even easier reply that Searle could make (but doesn't). He can go back to his example of the person inside the room becoming the system. This is a person who moves around and can interact with things. This person can even know that these statements are about these things somehow. But that doesn't require the person to know which words mean what. I can know a Chinese statement is about the apple in my hand without knowing what the words mean. So interacting with the world can't be enough for me to understand what my statements are about.

The Brain Simulator Reply says that what's missing in the Chinese Room case is that it's not based enough on the actual human brain. Base it more directly on how neurons cause neurons to do things and such, and then maybe you'd be more inclined to call it genuine thinking. First of all, Searle points out that the whole idea was to get the right program, and then it thinks, regardless of the actual structure of the thing doing the thinking. It no longer fits with this if you model it directly on the human brain. It's no longer discovering the right program but is now just duplicating aspects of human brains. Second, you can do something like this with a person inside. Instead of manipulating symbols in a room, imagine that he has a complex system of water pipes, and he manipulates levers and nozzles so that water moves through pipes the way electrical signals do in the brain. Model it on the human brain. There's still no understanding.

Finally, the Combination Reply says to take aspects of the previous examples and combine them into one, so this would be an interactive robot with a computerized brain modeled directly on a human brain with behavior indistinguishable from human behavior, and then we'd be more inclined to think the whole system thinks. Searle admits that we might find that claim to be more reasonable. The problem is that now we're as far away from stumbling on the right program as we could get. We haven't discovered a program but have simply made something very close to a human. When we say apes think and feel, it's because we can't find any other explanation of their behavior, and they have a similar enough brain to ours. If we say that about this robot, it's for the same reasons. If we discover that it's just a program, we'd be inclined to say there's no thinking going on.

Searle insists that human thinking is based on the human brain, and our minds are just our brains. He resists the idea that thinking might occur apart from actual human brains. Any thinking must be based in something very close to the human brain. Consider the seeming possibility of a human body acting purely according to physical laws but not actually experiencing anything (philosopher David Chalmers has coined a technical term in philosophy for such a being: he calls them Zombies). Or consider someone who experiences things differently from most people even while having the same brain state (philosophers call such people Mutants, again coining a technical term that doesn't coincide with normal usage). Zombies and Mutants, in these senses, are impossible, according to Searle. Something had better be close enough to the normal human brain, or it doesn't have pain, boredom, or thoughts such as the thought that 2 + 2 = 4. Searle just has to deny that Mutants are possible, something David Lewis, who started out with a view similar to Searle's, didn't want to insist on, since there's no real argument for it. Zombies also couldn't exist, since something with a human brain automatically thinks. Maybe this is right (many materialists besides Searle think so, e.g. Simon Blackburn), but it's hard to prove such a thing.

I'm enjoying reading Christopher Wright's commentary on Deuteronomy. He's especially insightful on ethical matters, and he's been excellent at defending against positions that I think have needed some careful argument to address (such as the claim that the Mosaic law treats women as property). But the following quote is puzzling.

It is not surprising, then, conversely, that a whole culture that systematically denies the transcendent by excluding the reality of God from the public domain, as Western societies have been doing for generations, also turns covetous self-interest into a socioeconomic ideology, rationalized, euphemized, and idolized. Knowing full well that you cannot serve God and mammon, we have deliberately chosen mammon and declared that a person's life does consist in the abundance of things possessed. [p.86]

I'm not interested in ignoring the role that covetous self-interest plays among those whose lifestyle is all about accumulating material wealth or the fact that such self-interest might attract someone to political views that they might expect to serve that self-interest. But he's talking about a systematic denial of God that turns covetous self-interest into an ideology, so it's got to be much more thoroughgoing than just the fact that people for self-interested reasons might like views that they see as serving their self-interest. It's as if the ideology itself is caused by self-interest and would have no existence otherwise. So what ideology does he mean? Capitalism? Libertarianism? Mainstream economic conservatism? Randianism?

If any of the first three, I think he's simply mistaken. The arguments in favor of those are not selfish pursuit of mammon, at least not in the ideal case, and the view itself is not the same thing as declaring that a person's life amounts just to the abundance of things possessed. Such views are at work in our culture, but what Wright says here is confusing two separate things. It would be more on the mark if he's targeting Ayn Rand, because she explicitly did ground her view in ethical egoism, but even she wouldn't treat human nature as if it's just about material possessions, and her view isn't exactly the mainstream socioeconomic view on the right.

If some really smart aliens contaminated the world's water supply with some powerful transformative agent so that within three months everyone would come to look just like Chris Rock, would there be any races left (or maybe just one)? Would it still make sense to say that I'm white? Would I be black?

How should you change any of your answers if everyone was made to look like Britney Spears? Dwayne Johnson?