‘What do you do when you have no policy, but want to appear as if you do? In the case of Barack Obama, the answer is simple: you go around the world making speeches about your “personal journey”.

The latest example came last Thursday, when Mr Obama presented his address to the Muslim world to an invited audience of 2,500 officials at Cairo University. The exercise was a masterpiece of equivocation and naivety. The President said he was seeking “a new beginning between the US and Muslims around the world”. This implied that “Muslims around the world” represent a single monolithic bloc – precisely the claim made by people like Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who believe that all Muslims belong to a single community, the “ummah”, set apart from, and in conflict with, the rest of humanity.

Mr Obama ignored the fact that what he calls the “Muslim world” consists of 57 countries with Muslim majorities and a further 60 countries – including America and Europe – where Muslims represent substantial minorities. Trying to press a fifth of humanity into a single “ghetto” based on their religion is an exercise worthy of ideologues, not the leader of a major democracy.

Mr Obama’s mea culpa extended beyond the short span of US history. He appropriated the guilt for ancient wars between Islam and Christendom, Western colonialism and America’s support for despotic regimes during the Cold War. Then came the flattering narrative about Islam’s place in history: ignoring the role of Greece, China, India and pre-Islamic Persia, he credited Islam with having invented modern medicine, algebra, navigation and even the use of pens and printing. Believing that flattery will get you anywhere, he put the number of Muslim Americans at seven million, when the total is not even half that number, promoting Islam to America’s largest religion after Christianity.

The President promised to help change the US tax system to allow Muslims to pay zakat, the sharia tax, and threatened to prosecute those who do not allow Muslim women to cover their hair, despite the fact that this “hijab” is a political prop invented by radicals in the 1970s. As if he did not have enough on his plate, Mr Obama insisted that fighting “negative stereotypes of Islam” was “one of my duties as President of the United States”. However, there was no threat to prosecute those who force the hijab on Muslim women through intimidation, blackmail and physical violence, nor any mention of the abominable treatment of Muslim women, including such horrors as “honour-killing”. The best he could do was this platitude: “Our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons.”

Having abandoned President Bush’s support for democratic movements in the Middle East, Mr Obama said: “No system of government can or should be imposed on one nation by another.” He made no mention of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Muslim countries, and offered no support to those fighting for gender equality, independent trade unions and ethnic and religious minorities.

Buried within the text, possibly in the hope that few would notice, was an effective acceptance of Iran’s nuclear ambitions: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations should hold nuclear weapons.” Mr Obama did warn that an Iranian bomb could trigger a nuclear arms race in the region. However, the Cairo speech did not include the threat of action against the Islamic Republic – not even sanctions. The message was clear: the US was distancing itself from the resolutions passed against Iran by the UN Security Council.

As if all that weren’t enough, Mr Obama dropped words such as “terror” and “terrorism” from his vocabulary. The killers of September 11 were “violent extremists”, not “Islamist terrorists”. In this respect, he is more politically correct than the Saudis and Egyptians, who have no qualms about describing those who kill in the name of Islam as terrorists.

Mr Obama may not know it, but his “Muslim world” is experiencing a civil war of ideas, in which movements for freedom and human rights are fighting despotic, fanatical and terrorist groups that use Islam as a fascist ideology. The President refused to acknowledge the existence of the two camps, let alone take sides. It was not surprising that the Muslim Brotherhood lauds him for “acknowledging the justice of our case” – nor that his speech was boycotted by the Egyptian democratic movement “Kifayah!” (”Enough!”), which said it could not endorse “a policy of support for despots in the name of fostering stability”.

In other words, the President may find that by trying to turn everyone into a friend, he has merely added to his list of enemies.’

]]> http://boltonian.edublogs.org/2009/06/08/an-alternative-view/feed/ 3 http://boltonian.edublogs.org/2009/05/27/review-of-the-wire/ http://boltonian.edublogs.org/2009/05/27/review-of-the-wire/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 03:57:34 +0000 gordy http://boltonian.edublogs.org/?p=40

The Wire is about life in Baltimore. In particular it is about the issue of drugs in Baltimore and how that trade affects different aspects of the city’s life – law and order, social and economic, education, politics and journalism.

I bought a dvd of Season One of The Wire on the strength of a review in The Guardian in 2007. It claimed that The Wire was the best thing on television in the last twenty years.  Is it? Yes – because apart from anything else this allows The World At War, Fawlty Towers and, most importantly, The Phil Silvers Show their rightful place in the TV Pantheon.

What about The Sopranos? First allow me to explain why The Sopranos is not quite as good as The Wire. The Sopranos is great television, moving, funny, shocking but rarely meaningful. It’s derivative which is not necessarily a bad thing but it depends on a comprehension of references to The Godfather.The way in whichTony Soprano the vicious crime boss is sometimes depicted as Homer Simpson is, however, a touch of genius. But there’s no moment when you say to yourself, ‘That’s just like my life!’ Now I’m not ‘police’ and despite the fact I taught in an urban comprehensive in South London does not really make my life like Prez’s school in season four – but the way in which public service jobs have been reduced to target setting so that the targets are ends in themselves speaks to a very wide audience. All of the characters have their good and bad points there’s moral ambiguity all around which makes everything seem more realistic. Towards the end of Season Three where a prominent public servant is spotted in a gay bar his hypocrisy and duplicity is not dwelt upon and preached about it’s just noted – all of this resonates with our everyday experience of people. As has been pointed out already by somebody else The Wire is like a novel -you cannot skip chapters – it demands effort but rewards the viewer not just with TV entertainment but the the same reward that great literature brings. The characters are so strong and the acting is simply phenomenal – especially that of the school children.
What about The Shield? Well it too is great television brilliantly acted and superbly written – it too creates all sorts of moral dilemmas that test our consciences but for me it does not transcend the genre of a cop programme – and it is very much from a police perspective – which is fine in itself but it lacks the depth of The Wire. The viewer is given less perspective of the LA politician and little insight into gang members despite it being about much of the same subject matter. Consider what the viewer has learnt about Baltimore drug dealing or teaching or municipal politics with what we learn from The Shield.

I have never felt so evangelical about anything as I do about The Wire. I have recommended it various members of my family and numerous friends and without exception they have either enjoyed it as much as I did or pretended that they did so extremely convincingly. The five seasons are available for purchase or rent from Amazon or can be watched online.

Recently banned from CiF. I stumbled across the identity of this well known commentator in a museum on the south coast…

His is a purely materialistic determinism. He dismisses dualism in one phrase, as ‘a desperate vision which richly deserves its current disfavour’. He makes no mention at all of non-dualistic idealism in the Eastern tradition, that of spirit subtending matter. I rather feel his thoughts on that would scorch the paper. However he quotes lengthily Paul Jennings’ ‘Resistentialism’ in a footnote, and charmingly refers to Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’, so he must be a Good Thing.

He is something of a compatibilist, with the limitation that the free will he proposes as compatible with determinism is not absolute.

In style he likens his approach to that of the sculptor he once thought to be : circling his material, chipping here and there, roughing out the overall shape from all sides, rather than going in a straight line from A to B. This can make him a bit repetitive, and a second reading is sometimes necessary to see where he was going in any particular passage. For Dennett the role of philosophy is to enlarge our vision of the possible, and to break bad habits of thought. A last general comment : throughout this book Dennett dances round the question of what determinism means in a world having quantum indeterminacy, without realy facing it, IMO. He does however, make use of the concept of determined chaotic pseudo-randomness to get him out of tight determined corners once or twice. ‘With one bound, Dan was free !’.

He starts with an entertaining section on all the bugbears and bogeymen that have been created by philosophical thought experiments or metaphors, all intending to illustrate our plight in having the illusion of free will if the world is deterministic ‘and so we don’t in fact have any free will at all’, but by their construction and orientation all tending to frighten us into wanting absolute free will or nothing. These include such terrors as :

• The Invisible Jailor (the illusion of free will, when in fact we don’t have any, likened to being in a prison which prevents our freedom, only we can’t see the bars. Shudder and beat your heads against the wall)
• The Nefarious Neurosurgeon (we think we have free will, but imagine an entity which seizes control of your physical, and perhaps mental, activities without you knowing it, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.. Wouldn’t that be awful ?)
• The Cosmic Child whose Toy We Are (if we don’t have free will we’re the playthings of the Universe. How diminished and undignified, how cruel a fate would that be..)
• ‘Sphexishness’ : Sphex ichneumoneus is a wasp which seems to behave very intelligently in some respects, until you alter its surroundings, when all its thoughtfulness is shown up as mere non-adapting mechanical behaviour. How would we feel if at some superior level it were as laughably evident that all our efforts are mere automatisms ?
• The Dread Secret : OK, so we don’t have free will. Wouldn’t it be terrible if people found out ? Moral responsibility goes down the drain and life reverts to being Hobbesian, nasty, British, and short. (PS, the typo is dredged up from my memory of a perhaps apocryphal journalistic howler).

All these bugbears are highly emotional, and a constant concern of the book is to dedramatise.

The real question for Dennett is :

Free will is usually defined in terms of ‘might have done otherwise’. Why should anyone care about the ‘might have’ ?

His next section looks at reason and meaning.

In the beginning, there were only ’causes’. The first ‘reasons’ were created with the first self replicationg proto-organisms, which came to respond to stimuli to preserve their entropy-decreasing replicative behaviour. These were genetically controlled reasons. Now read on.

Reason, it is said, is not a physical property of the world. Therefore a rational will must be exempt from physical causality (the major currents of thinking on free will suppose it to be rational). A decision moved by reason cannot be a decision moved by causes.

A related argument concerns meaning. Meaning is not a physical property of the world. Therefore a physical mind can only be a syntactic engine (concerned with the structure of information) and not a semantic engine (concerned with meaning).

Dennett proposes to bridge the gap between the syntactic engine and the semantic engine by introducing the first of his proposed ‘very good approximations’ The brain only approximates the behaviour of a semantic engine, in fact, we are super-sphexish. He then proceeds to soften the blow and sugar the pill. Most of the descriptions of our state under determinism suffer from drastic oversimplification. They ignore our sophisticated sensory array and our ability to notice things. This is what distinguishes our ’caused’ behaviour from the simpler kind. Having a ‘reason’ presented to your understanding is, however, no different in kind from any other cause, just different in level.

He gives a lengthy review of his ideas on consciousness, including a convincing ‘just so story’ of how consciousness can arise deterministically. For him consciousness is ‘at the reachable top of the pyramid of natural, physical, processes’. No ‘Chalmers Hard Problem’ for Dennett.

He subscribes to a form of Hobbes ’social contract’ theory of morality.

Finally, self-reflective consciousness plus a Hobbesian, deterministic morality permit the acquiring of non-genetically determined reasons (including e.g. altruism, or the desire to do something crazy just because you can, or any other test case you can come up with to demonstrate your absolute existential freedom).

His third section is on control and self-control. If we don’t have free will, we’re not in control. We’re not free agents or unmoved movers. That could mean (shock horror) that we are, in fact controlled (he notes the semantic slide from ‘determined’ to ‘controlled’).

He discusses different types of control, from the rigid control of a thermostat over a heater, through the limited autonomy of a robot space probe, where the external controlling agent just sets the overall goals and parameters, but is precluded by communication lags from having total hands-on control, to the example of the pilot of an airplane and the control he exercises. The pilot is warned of a thunderstorm ahead. He decides to change course to avoid it. Why ? Because in doing so he recognises the limitations of those aspects of the plane’s behaviour he actually can control, and the limitations of his skill to control them. The two elements, forewarning of a random event coming up, and self-knowledge, combine to lead him to conclude that to maintain his margin for manouevre, his ‘elbow room’, he’d do better to steer round. None of that is incompatible with the behaviour of a multi-level , self reflecting, deliberation engine. And who could ask for more ? As for the emotional content, the pilot’s emotions at hearing of the storm are a real and important part of the causal chain.

Dennett also rather cheekily reviews the gradation between (a) brute force control of one’s actions by an external agent, through (b) influence by sweet reason causing a change in one’s actions, to (c) influence by pure provision of correct forecasting data affecting one’s actions. Hey, it’s all an external agent modifying one’s behaviour.

He concludes that under determinism we are not controlled by the past, as there is no feedback loop to the past reporting on our behaviour. Determination is not control.

My first reaction was indignation : this is just sleight of hand, begging the question of in what way is it better to be determined than to be controlled ? However, more thought failed to come up with an answer to the question : who could ask for more ?

Dennett’s fourth section is on the Self, and its relationship to moral responsibility. For me the latter element, on moral responsibility, is the least convincing part of the book..

First he notes the extreme position that the self is absolute agent, and unmoved mover. Its actions are not caused by anything external. He counters with the suggestion that this is an illusion, caused by :

• the amplifying effect of minute neural triggers causing massive action effects
• the inscrutability of neural causal paths
• preoccupations with responsibility, moral, artistic, and intellectual.

He casts doubt on the reality of willed choice, citing the difficulty of pinning down the ‘moment of decision’ by introspection, and instances when we will one thing and do another.

Dennett notes that the self develops, it is not inborn. It develops through social interactions, from genetic dispositions. There is no ‘tabula rasa’, which for us is obvious, but which for the absolutist philosophers was unthinkable. The absolutist position is roughly « unless one is absolutely responsible for oneself, one is not responsible at all ». On the other extreme, hard determinists negate responsibility.

Dennett claims a middle ground. He claims a responsible self can develop for the individual, deterministically, from non-responsible beginnings « like mammals can evolve from non-mammals ». He notes that it is silly to claim that one is not responsible for something unless one is completely responsible for it, as no-one is ever completely responsible for anything.

Reverting to self-creation, he believes it to be largely heuristic. The essence of heuristic processing is to involve ‘leaps in the dark’, and arbitrary cut-off of deliberation, in situations where rational processing of all the data would be impractical. Such an approach is required for a sophisticated self-controlling agent faced with meta-level questions to which there are no obvious answers. Heuristic processing is time efficient but imperfect.

The shortcuts our minds take to arrive at solutions faced with time pressure will be a central theme for the rest of the book.

Finally, the complex and multi-layered process by which we arrive at self-formation, while being caused and determined, is just an awful lot grander than your simple formation process, such as crystal formation. Isn’t it ?

Dennett here goes through a lengthy, and IMO odd and flawed, development on the concept of luck as it relates to moral responsibility. He points out the difference between the concept of luck as in : I just flipped a coin 30 times and it came down heads all 30 (luck-a), and as in : I’m lucky to be here typing on this computer, ‘cos it means that none of my forebears died before the relevant reproductive act, and the transmitted intelligence level cumulated in my ability to handle Windows XP(tm) (luck-b). Coin tosses don’t have a memory, genes do. He refers to the argument that it’s ‘just luck’ if Yer Honour the Judge had the predispositions to be on one side of the bench and Crestfallen Criminal had the predisposition to be on the other side, which, if it were true, would be an argument against moral responsibility. Having very succinctly outlined it, he doesn’t refute it, deferring that to later chapters, just calling it ‘a petulant little argument’. He continues by claiming that we are all genetically endowed with such a high skill level in the cognitive areas enabling the deliberative processes relating to moral responsibility, compared to say a cat, that we all reach the same plateau of awareness of moral responsibility sooner or later. (purely false, IMO, and the only reference he quotes is another philosopher, not an evolutionary or genetic psychologist). Finally he concludes that the ‘just luck’ evens out, so we’re left with skill, and so we can be held responsible for our acts, citing the example of the NBA player who is held responsible for missing an easy shot, whereas for an amateur we’d have said that make it or miss it, it was just luck. My reaction : having created the distinction between luck-a and luck-b (my terms), he’s then completely failed to use them consistently, and in fact our ‘moral responsibility’ depends on luck-b, which only evens out after we’re all dead. Case for moral responsibility under determinism not proven, m’lud.

Chapter 5 is on action under the idea of freedom, and the idea of ‘opportunity’.

Dennett makes what for him is a vital distinction between determinism and fatalism. Fatalism supposes you go through foreseeably predetermined hoops. Determinism, given the chaotic pseudo-randomness around us, gives us hoops that are not foreseeable. See bottom of the discussion of Chap.5 for an example. Dennett has a beautiful phrase for the believer in absolute free will, speaking of ‘the now, zipping up the spreading future into the thin line of the past’. Well, no, he says. From the god’s eye view, the timeline is singular. The singular timeline the hypothetical god would see is exactly that which we determine by our actions in the present. There is no ‘meta-time’ (my words) in which to say with Freddie Mercury ‘it’s all (already) decided for us’.

Coming back to the comparison between a conscious human being and a designed deliberation engine, he points out that the deliberation engine would have some pseudo-random process for cutting short to deliberation, to be able to act in useful time. In starting its deliberations, it would have whole classes of possible outcomes not foreseeable to it. This is what gives us the illusion that things are ‘up to us’.

He notes, however, that as self reflecting deliberators, we can perceive our heuristics, and if required modify the cut off points, giving another dimension to the illusion.

He considers : Is it rational to maintain the illusion that the future contains real ‘opportunities’ ? It depends what you mean by opportunity.

Here Dennett goes off into the continuation of his unsatisfactory development on chance, introducing the notions of real randomness (quantum indeterminacy) and determined pseudo-randomness (chaotic processes) as determinants of the outcome of a heuristic process. Does the one mean it ‘had a chance’ and the other, being deterministic, mean it never did ? He posits that ‘opportunity’ under determinism is comparable to a lottery, for which the winning stub had been drawn and kept in a sealed envelope before the tickets were sold, which most people think is just fine. He seems to slide from the idea that it is determined that someone will win such a lottery, to the idea that it is determined that a particular individual will win it. Then, Dennett indulges in some heavy moralising about the socio-political necessity for believing in opportunity, and the importance of keeping one’s options open. Great language for talking to one’s teenage children, but moralising is something of an admission of defeat for a philosopher.

Finally, he tackles ‘avoidance’, as the opposite of ‘opportunity’, noting that in the god’s eye view nothing is avoidable. The ideas of ‘making a difference’, or ‘changing the course of history’ are illusions coming from false expectations. He uses the question ‘Why do you put a lock on your door, if whether or not someone will break in is already determined ?’ as an illustration of the absurdity of using fatalistic arguments instead of deterministic ones. ‘Unavoidable’, or ‘inevitable’, correctly understood, mean ‘outside the influence of our deliberations’.

Chapter 6 finally addresses the central question of ‘could have done otherwise’, or in technical language, the ‘counterfactuals’. Moral responsibility depends on ‘could I have done otherwise ?’, which is also the touchstone of free will.

Dennett distinguishes between ‘could have done otherwise’ in ‘exactly the same circumstances’ and in ’slightly different circumstances’. He points out that ‘could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances’ has no useful meaning : the same set of micro-states, ignoring quantum fluctuations, will always give the same outcome. Including for arbitrary or mad acts. Further, given quantum indeterminacy, ‘exactly the same circumstances’ can never hold, so if moral responsibility rests on our asking could we have done differently, the question is unanswerable, so no-one would be able to determine moral responsibility. Thus, what we mean when we talk about ‘could have done otherwise’ is typically : « if the same general set of circumstances arose in the future, would my experience of the past situation prompt me to behave differently ? »

Finally he discusses the words ‘I can’. He concludes that ‘I can’ refers to the combination of two elements : my general potentials, skills, abilities, and possible states on the one hand, and epistemic possibility (i.e. what is possible as far as I know, given the limits of my knowledge in a chaotic pseudo-random environment) on the other. It does not refer to my hypothetical absolute freedom of action in a particular situation, nor to absolute logical or physical possibility.

Bottom line, the perceived importance of the question ‘Could I have done otherwise ?’ results from mistaking a practical question about my future behaviour for a metaphysical one about my past. The interface with moral responsibility is where you learn from the past to influence your future behaviour or you don’t (can the programming of the deliberation engine be improved or can’t it ?).

Dennett concludes his book by considering why it seems so important for (some of) us to have free will. He centres his thinking around the notion of moral responsibility, and asks, with false naiveté, why on Earth would we want all that responsibility ? He answers that the only useful notion of morality is social usefulness. The complex, sophisticated, multi-layered, reflexive, deliberating engine Mark III that we are takes in as one of its inputs that act (A) will have a probability (P) of consequence (C), and takes its heuristic, sub-optimised decisions appropriately. Acting morally becomes a bet on the consequences, whether they be the satisfaction of love or the expectation of punishment. Finally, to have free will, you must believe in it. The alternative is your (freely chosen) nihilism, apathy, and inaction, always assuming that our genetic makeup would ever let us get that far.

The book is dense, and the above does desperately little justice to it. My hope would be that I’ve made you curious to read Dennett. Despite my disappointment at some aspects of the book, I’m much the richer for having read it. All I have to do now is reconcile the aspects of his thinking which do convince me with the set of beliefs I brought to the party, those of non-dualistic Idealism !

Eeyore.

What do we mean?

How determined is the world?

What evidence is there?