Confirmation of Platonic Recollection?

A recent New York Times article finds that people with no formal training in geometry can answer questions about geometry. The psychologist who performed the study does not attempt to explain why this is the case.

But Plato does. In the Meno dialogue he has Socrates perform a similar experiment, and suggests that all learning is really recollection of what we knew in our disembodied state before birth.

These findings do seem to suggest that we have innate ideas, and the Platonic idea of recollection would certainly explain them. Is this the best explanation? If not, what would be a better one?

Rupert Read on the Absurdity of Time Travel

Greetings,

To celebrate the 101th post on Arete, it seems appropriate to discuss time travel. After all, if we could travel back in time to view the first post being written, would that not be an exciting event?

This post will largely be responding to a paper by Rupert Read found here. I would highly suggest reading it, although you should be able to get the gist without doing so.

I have several concerns about Read's arguments, and will address them here.

1. He asserts that "there seems no good reason to withhold the term
“time-travel” from healthy, body-renewing sleep, especially perhaps
if it is relatively dreamless. You really can travel to the future. You
can see the future.You can be there. Just by going to bed; just by
living long enough" (Part I, Section 8). I agree with this proposition-- we are, in fact, traveling through time. However, as you'll see, I believe his argument about the "why" is wrong.

2. Read asserts that what "in sleep is missing from time-travel is the essential element of any travel worthy of the name, of tourism and holidaying for instance: the ability, at least, to go there and back again" (Part I, Section 10). This is absolutely incorrect. It would be a radical sort of time travel to go far into the past without a method of return. This may be correct for future-oriented time travel (as the act of sleep would seem to imply), but this fails to account for the novelty of past-oriented time travel.

3. Read establishes a straw man in order to attack past-oriented time travel: he asserts as an axiomatic premise that "you already know that there is no record in the past of you having been there, nor of anyone else from the future, no matter how distant or technologically-sophisticated that future becomes" (Part II, Section 4). There is no need to assume this. Suppose that, in the present, you find clear signs that the time traveler changed nothing; they had already (and always) traveled back in time. Many fictional works, such as 12 Monkeys and Doctor Who, take this as essential.

4. Read asserts that, "in order not to have changed the past, and made it something other than the very thing that you wanted to voyage into, you cannot have had any impact at all, not even one so slight that it evaded all records and notice" (Part II, Section 6). This is a false dichotomy, as explored in my third argument. It's possible to have changed nothing in the past, and yet not evaded notice.

5. Read asserts that "travel back into the past is only possible if the “you” that does the travelling is entirely ethereal. Nonphysical. For the slightest impact upon the past will generate a 'causal loop,' and thus a familiar paradox of time-travel" (Part II, Section 7). The real substance of this paper should have consisted in explaining the "causal loop" and how it results in an absurdity. To hinge arguments upon this assumption is to assume something essential to the outcome.

6. Read's criterion of falsifiability seems to be as follows: "For what was necessary in order for us to be willing to call something “time-travel” (namely, its being meaningful to speak of travel “back into the past”) is just not available. Our relation to the past is necessarily spectatorial, in a doubled sense: We cannot interfere with it, and we cannot even observe it except from a temporal distance" (Part II, Section 15). This unintentionally raises a huge problem for Read. He states that we cannot call travel "time travel" that which we cannot interfere with, unless we can interfere with it directly. However, we cannot directly interfere with the future; we must wait for it to become the present. Thus, we do not travel through time into the future. This directly contradicts Part I, Sections 5-10, and limits the significance of his arguments against future-oriented time travel.

7. Read oversimplifies the complex issue of the indeterminacy of the future: "The past is very largely determinate, fixed, just by virtue of its being past: and “travelling back into it” requires that it not be fixed. The future is to a considerable extent open just by virtue of its being future" (Part III, Section d). This raises a host of issues, problems, and questions; if this is to be treated as an axiomatic assumption, it should be addressed at the outset, and the validity of his findings should noted to be contingent upon it.

So, what do you think? Am I being too hard on Professor Read, or are my critiques legitimate? Thanks for your comments!

This post has been edited to resolve potential formatting issues.

Violence, Justification, and Pain-Sensing Dandelions

Greetings,

Tonight's Philosophy Society meeting will cover the "Philosophy of Violence", and pose questions about possible justifications for acts of violence, including war. This post will touch on an element of the topic: why does violence need justification?

Princeton University's Wordnet offers three definitions for violence:

1. An act of aggression.
2. The property of being wild or turbulent.
3. A turbulent state resulting in injuries and destruction etc.

If we assume that violence can potentially need ethical justification, I think we should reject the second definition's utility to our discussion, as properties necessarily do not require ethical justification (feel free to disagree with this, or call for an argument, in the comments). We might, therefore, consolidate the definition into the following:

"An act or state of aggression that results in injuries and/or destruction".

Per this definition, we can expound a bit on the nature of violence:

1. Violence requires an aggressor-- there cannot be aggression without an aggressor. Thus, it is incorrect to speak of violence where there is no aggressor to be found.

2. An act is not violent unless it has certain consequences (injuries and/or destruction). Thus, it is incorrect to describe an entity as violent (video games, movies, et cetera) as violent, unless they themselves actually cause (rather than merely depict violence.

So, working from this definition, let's talk about justification. When we say that an action needs ethical justification, we implicitly argue that it should be taken to be ethically improper unless a sufficient argument can be made to the contrary. It's not enough to say that ethical justification is required for potentially (ethically) bad actions. Moriarty need give no justification for mowing his lawn, even though it is a potentially (ethically) bad action-- if, for instance, he were cutting his lawn to cause pain to the Pain-Sensing Dandelions that he believe live in it. If, however, you knew for a fact that Moriarty's goal was to cause pain to the Pain-Sensing Dandelions (a great evil, indeed; poor dandelions!), he would most certainly need an ethical justification to mow he lawn.

So, then: if violence needs (ethical) justification, it must be supposed to be by default an ethically bad action or state. Why, however, need violence be considered as such? Consider: if Moriarty were to spray a nerve-numbing concoction upon the Pain-Sensing Dandelions that prevented them from feeling pain, it would still (by definition) be an act of violence to chop them into tiny bits and pieces. The action would still be performed by an aggressor (Moriarty still hates and desires the genocide of Pain-Sensing Dandelions), and it would cause injury or destruction. However, is it unethical?

I don't think we would say so-- but then, this is an absurd example. You may find it outlandish. Let me resort to one that's a bit more easy to follow.

Let's say that you discover an army of ants living outside your home. It is not harming you, and they aren't violating any laws I am aware of, but you nevertheless wish them exterminated. You commit an act of violence by killing as many of them as possible with insecticides. Would this act of violence require ethical justification? I anticipate you would say, absolutely not!

This should be sufficient, I believe, to show that violence in and of itself is not an ethically inappropriate state or action. To say that Moriarty performed an act of violence is not sufficient to say that Moriarty must justify his action.

Therefore, I challenge those who attach ethical judgments to claims about violence: what is sufficient to make an act of violence one that requires ethical justification? Violence in and of itself is clearly not sufficient; therefore, there must be an external element that makes it need justification. If that is the case, why should this external element not be evaluated for its own sake, not with regard to its relation to violence?

Philosophy and Football at Berry

Berry's football team has never lost a game!

If you took my Critical Thinking class, you may remember that Aristotle and most modern logicians disagree on whether it's true that Berry's football team has never lost a game. Aristotle thinks it's false because there is no such thing as a Berry College football team, but the moderns think it's true because there is no such thing as a Berry College football team that has lost a game.

But the important question is: Should Berry change all this by getting a football team? I think Plato suggests a good way to frame the discussion, so in this post I'll try to pose the question of a Berry College football team his way. Note that I'm not out to answer the question here; I'll leave that to you!

Plato's Republic presents the theory that the soul has three parts. The first part, the rational part, desires wisdom, knowledge, and justice. The second part, called thumos, desires honor and victory. The third part, the appetitive part, desires physical pleasure. In order for us to have a good life, the rational part of the soul must make an alliance with thumos in order to keep the appetitive part from getting out of hand. For example, thumos must be persuaded that it is honorable to seek wisdom and dishonorable to live solely for physical pleasures.

In other words, a properly ordered soul is one that doesn't seek victory for its own sake; it seeks to honor wisdom and knowledge and justice and to see them victorious.

What does this have to do with football? Like rugby, the only team sport I ever played, football is a struggle resulting in a victory for some and a loss for others. It is a field on which thumos asserts itself.

But we aren't supposed to fight for the sake of victory. We are supposed to fight for the victory of something, specifically something noble. For example, I think the movie Remember the Titans handles football very well, because the struggle on the football field symbolizes the struggle for racial justice. The football player's or fan's passion for victory becomes a passion for the victory of justice.

So here is the Platonic question I wish to pose: Would a football team at Berry encourage a love of struggle and victory for its own sake, or a love of struggle and victory for the sake of something noble?

To elaborate just a little. At Berry College several appropriately noble things are already present: knowledge, the love of wisdom, a respect for our cultural and religious heritage. Would a football team here distract us from these noble things, or would football encourage a stronger school spirit and a stronger love for these noble things, which are after all the main reason we're here?

My philosophy movies

In case anyone is interested, I made two Socrates cartoons and one Boethius cartoon, available here.

Philosophical problem solved by neuroscientists

According to an article appearing today in the New York Times, the Molyneux problem has been answered by neuroscientists. What's the Molyneux problem? It's a question first posed by an Irish politician and scientist, William Molyneux. His question concerns what would happen if a blind person were suddenly given the ability to see. Presented with two objects, a sphere and a cube, would the blind person be able to tell which was which just by looking? He already had tactile experience of these objects. Is that experience sufficient to allow him to make the distinction on the basis of visual perception? Locke famously said that the blind man would not. The recent finding vindicates Locke. Five children from northern India who had been blind from birth but whose vision was restored through surgery were not able to match objects they had touched with one they had seen, they did no better than would be expected if they were just guessing.

This result raised broader questions. Does it show that the Molyneux problem was not a philosophical problem to begin with? Can a philosophical problem be answered empirically? Maybe some can and some can't. What implications, if any, should we draw, then, for the nature of philosophy and philosophical problems?