Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat.
.. In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.
How to Be a Stoic
Even today, the famous Serenity Prayer recited at Alcoholic Anonymous meetings is an incarnation of a Stoic principle enunciated by Epictetus: “What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens.” (“Discourses”)
.. Stoic meditation consists in rehearsing the challenges of the day ahead, thinking about which of the four cardinal virtues (courage, equanimity, self-control and wisdom) one may be called on to employ and how.
.. I then pass to the “premeditatio malorum,” a type of visualization in which one imagines some sort of catastrophe happening to oneself (such as losing one’s job), and learns to see it as a “dispreferred indifferent,” meaning that it would be better if it didn’t happen, but that it would nonetheless not affect one’s worth and moral value. .. it is very similar to an analogous practice in C.B.T. meant to ally one’s fears of particular objects or events.
.. Take, for instance, the Stoic concept of Logos, the rational principle that governs the universe.
Chinese room
The Chinese room is a thought experiment presented by John Searle (b1932) to challenge the claim that it is possible for a computer running a program to have a “mind” and “consciousness” .. “Suppose that I’m locked in a room and … that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken”. He further supposes that he has a set of rules in English that “enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols”, that is, the Chinese characters. These rules allow him to respond, in written Chinese, to questions, also written in Chinese, in such a way that the posers of the questions – who do understand Chinese – are convinced that Searle can actually understand the Chinese conversation too, even though he cannot. Similarly, he argues that if there is a computer program that allows a computer to carry on an intelligent conversation in a written language, the computer executing the program would not understand the conversation either.
.. Searle argues that without “understanding” (or “intentionality“), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as “thinking” and since it does not think, it does not have a “mind” in anything like the normal sense of the word. Therefore he concludes that “strong AI” is false.
America’s new aristocracy
WHEN the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination line up on stage for their first debate in August, there may be three contenders whose fathers also ran for president. Whoever wins may face the wife of a former president next year. It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties.
.. If Americans suspect that the game is rigged, they may be tempted to vote for demagogues of the right or left—especially if the grown-up alternative is another Clinton or yet another Bush.
.. He claims, quite plausibly, that the only way of limiting a power is by having a greater power. How can you limit a power unless you’re more powerful?
.. Hobbes has set us an interesting intellectual puzzle here, because we’re used to the notion of the separation of powers, the split between the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature. This is a commonplace in modern constitutionalism. Hobbes’s view is that that’s a myth. One of those powers must be the greatest. And, actually, when we see regimes crumble, the military seems to take over. That seems to suggest there is a most powerful power in any country, it’s just it may not be used at any moment.
.. This is a perennial theme in development economics: the poor person’s right to collect fallen wood from the forest, and someone deciding that they have to pay for that now, causing huge problems.
.. And there is also Marx’s own commentary. You see him taking Adam Smith’s writings — and the mythology is that Smith is one of the great defenders of capitalism — and Marx finds, in the Wealth of Nations, a whole range of criticisms of capitalism that sound just like Marx.
.. In much of Marx’s early writings, he was grandstanding. Here he was writing for himself.
.. Ultimately, what he aims to do is deduce all the categories of economics — rent, wages, commodities, exchange — from the concept of alienation, as a way of showing that the capitalist economy has alienation at its roots.
.. Another way of putting it is that Rawls wants you to think about how you would design society if you didn’t know what place you’d play in it. Imagine you didn’t know whether you were going to be a man or a woman, you didn’t know whether you were going to be disabled or able-bodied — Rawls didn’t use these examples but we can extend his method — if you didn’t know whether you were going to be white or black, strong or weak, have film star good looks or be ugly. If you didn’t know any of those things about yourself, how would you like society to be?
.. and in it the editor Peter Laslett, who was an important historian, says that for the moment we can declare political philosophy dead. As a way of advertising the papers and the book that you’ve just edited, this is not a great sales pitch, but political philosophy was in crisis because of, first, the legacy of logical positivism, second, and the upset of World War II which demonstrated the limited impact liberal political philosophy had had on human behaviour, and third the rise of Marxism, which reduced political philosophy to mere ideology.
.. If you go back to, say, how the civil service operated in the UK or elsewhere immediately after World War II, there was great interest in social justice. But I think that gave way to a much more technocratic approach, where policies were looked at from the point of view of cost-benefit analysis. This is essentially a utilitarian approach: what type of policy gives us the greatest net benefit for our limited resources?
.. I think once Rawls was understood in the late ‘70s and in the ‘80s, he certainly affected the way in which civil servants — not necessarily governments themselves, but the people who are thinking about implementation of policy — thought. They began to pay special attention to how policies would affect the worst off.
.. This was Jerry’s tactic: don’t import any premises, use the other person’s premises, and show your view follows from the other person’s premises. This is really remarkable because it’s hard enough showing that your view follows from your own premises, never mind that your view follows from your opponent’s premises! But that’s what Jerry did in his work on Nozick.