Towards a New Ecological Paradigm

The medieval world was oriented to devotion as creatures of God and, in a parallel hierarchy, to submission to kings.

By Andrew Porter 

At crucial junctures in human life, old ways of thinking become inadequate or even intolerable and new models are needed to guide the possibilities of human life. Plato’s Republic, which advances the rule of experts, was partly written in reaction to the failures blamed on Athens’ partial democracy after the Peloponnesian War. Rousseau’s Emile sought a new framing of education completely in contrast to the norms of the eighteenth century. Today, to develop a new sweeping paradigm may seem presumptuous or unrealistic, but fresh ideas are vital – and increasingly imperative.

The validity of a well-crafted and well-articulated paradigm acts like the sun in late spring, leaving little room for rational opposition. There is not, of course, only one possible winning paradigm; however, one envisioned by, say, the writers Wendell Berry or Andreas Malm, seems to offer the kind that underpins a viable and non-dystopian future.

But, as the American historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn warned, ruling ideas refuse to budge even when they should since many of their adherents are highly invested in their predominance. And yet, if ever there were a time both ripe and desperate for a new paradigm, this current juncture would seem to be it. Various looming catastrophes – climate change, regional conflict, rainforest loss, and political upheaval – threaten us like ever higher waves behind the already dismaying ones.

Each era has its own ruling paradigm. The medieval world was oriented to devotion as creatures of God and, in a parallel hierarchy, to submission to kings. The Renaissance advanced humanism and secularism with a flourish. The Enlightenment sprouted recognition of natural rights and democratic principles as the basis of society. Post-Enlightenment centuries have seemed convoluted and fragmented, unsure about humankind’s relation either to nature or to itself. A sound and successful paradigm, in acting as a clarion call, both taps and inspires human capacity. It continues to deliver on its promise of fulfilling human potential. We are rapidly learning that this potential is interdependent, with one another and with the natural world.

Today, the ruling paradigms of scientific materialism and growing income disparity capitalism tend to work off a strange set of ideas that tolerate social injustice, large-scale damage to the planet, and the growing wealth and influence of oligarchs. At the same time, counter to this, it seems that an undermining of too-long-held worldviews is also taking place in many novel forms, whether in physics, culture, politics, and understandings of nature. One fresh approach that seems most propitious is human ecology, an approach long shelved but in certain key areas making significant inroads. This might be called the Natural Life Paradigm.

The key component of a ‘natural life’ or ‘human ecology’ paradigm is an acceptance of and eagerness for integration with the limits and opportunities of whatever bioregion a community is in. The need for limits is obvious; less obvious is the opportunities for well-being and long-term sustainability this entails. The pursuit of happiness tends to reside in these ways of being, whether recognised or not.

The Natural Life Paradigm could solve many problems at once. What would an outline of such a paradigm look like? One way to approach this is to let ecological thinking engage in dialogue with social justice and metaphysics. Efforts and vision to improve anti-racism, human rights, climate change melioration, and gun control benefit as they enter into conversation with novel conceptualising about the nature of reality – to underpin the direction of betterment.

For instance, if education were oriented towards deep ecology, then it would have a real possibility of transforming economics and societal systems around a sustainable future. Education could be the springboard that develops new mindsets that value sanity, longevity, justice, and simplicity.

Such an ecological framework for human life nationally and globally would likely start by defining the optimal ways of being for individual and communal life. This might include abolishing industry other than small-scale manufacturing and reining in the excesses of agribusiness. Tribal communities worldwide have had a harmonious relationship with their natural environments and it is to be hoped that they will outlive industrialised humankind. Were citizens and leaders of other societal types to view nature, not as a larder of resources, but as fitting limits and opportunities, their core philosophies would have legitimacy. Such a revamped world would have a seven-generations mentality, acting with care for those seven generations ahead because they strive for the sanction of ecosystems and the Earth as a whole.

Such a world would have its own problems, but that is the nature of human existence. The future of humankind depends on the quality and accuracy of the theories we choose.

Above all, this new way of viewing things would need to be buttressed by a growing comprehension that the physical world is not material; rather, it would be understood as a mode of something that has variously been called Consciousness, Mind, Spirit, or more recently, ‘Non-physicality’. Quantum physics suggests something tending toward this in its reconstruction of matter into energy and fields. A new understanding of natural reality spurs a conception of ecology, including human ecology, as offspring of a larger ‘purpose’.

Likewise, social justice solutions could go beyond current wrangling and instead ground themselves in ecological principles that controvert overexploitation, unfairness, imbalance, and power used wrongly. Think of what might happen to industries, guns, cars, marginalised people, and corporations in light of Natural Life as a common value. There are, of course, downward and upward societal forces in any age, but crossing the threshold into sustainability holds the promise of a world that has fairness and integration as its watchwords.

Such new paradigm-development is all the more pressing in a world with higher and higher stakes. Some thinkers are eager to retool governing ideas and develop more conscious systems to frame human life, however diverse. Lance Newey, of the University of Queensland in Australia, says: “A number of countries are moving to the adoption of a wellbeing governance and performance framework….Many of these frameworks aim to measure the economic, social, environmental, and cultural wellbeing of the country.” He defines wellbeing as “the capacity of an entity (an individual, a community, an organisation, a society, the globe) to resiliently flourish”. 

Likewise, the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States presents human ecology as the pursuit that “touches us and everything that we touch to improve the quality of life”.  This is an approach that draws on science and the humanities equally.

Imagination is the first step to betterment. We need not be victims of unworkable, entrenched paradigms whose only claim to fame is that they cling on with a death-grip. A thorough and carefully conceived ecological paradigm can serve as the basis for a better quality of life, individually and societally. All the past models for how to govern or institute or act have had philosophical underpinnings. Today, it is time we refresh our perspective to prioritise human ecology – a strategy more worthy both of our intellect and our situation.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: And the Deception of Perception

By Keith Tidman

 

It is a tribute to the timelessness of Plato’s ideas that his philosophical stories still echo powerfully in the contemporary world. People still do live in the flickering shadows of Plato’s cave, mistaking myths for reality and surmising evidence. We are metaphorically bound, for example, to watch and assent to the shadows cast by social media, influencing our notions of reality. An increasingly subjective and debatable reality, shaped by the passing of gossamer shadows flung onto the wall (today the computer screen) by puppeteers. Today, there’s clearly a risk of deception by partial perception, of information exploited for political ends.

It was in his most-read work, The Republic, written about 380 BCE, that Plato recounted an exchange between Glaucon and Socrates, sometimes called the Allegory of the Cave. Socrates describes how in this cave, seated in a line, are prisoners who have been there since birth, entirely cut off from the outside world. Tightly restrained by chains such that they cannot move, their lived experience is limited to staring at the cave wall in front of them. 

 

What they cannot know is that just behind where they sit is a parapet and fire, in front of which other people carry variously shaped objects, and it is these that cast the strange shadows. The shadows on the wall, and not the fire or the objects themselves, are the prisoners’ only visible reality — the only world they can know. Of the causes of the moving shadows, of the distinction between the abstract and the real, they can know nothing. 

 

Plato asks us to consider what might happen if one of the prisoners is then unchained and forced reluctantly to leave the cave, into the glaring light of the sun. At first, he says, the brightness must obscure the freed prisoner’s vision,  so that he can see only shadows and reflections, similar to being in the cave. However, after a while, his eyes would grow accustomed to the light, and eventually he would be able to see other people and objects themselves, not just their shadows. As the former prisoner adjusts, he begins to believe the outside world offers what he construes as a very different, even better reality than the shadows in the dusky cave.

 

But now suppose, Plato asks, that this prisoner decides to return to the cave to share his experience — to try to convince the prisoners to follow his lead to the sunlight and the ‘forms’ of the outside world. Would they willingly seize the chance? But no, quite the contrary, Plato warns. Far from seizing the opportunity to see more clearly, he thinks the other prisoners would defiantly resist, believing the outside world to be harmful and dangerous and not wanting to leave the security of their cave with the shadows they have become so familiar with, even so expert at interpreting. 

 

The allegory of the cave is part of Plato’s larger theory of knowledge — of ideals and forms. The cave and shadows are representative of how people usually live, often ensconced within the one reality they’re comfortable with and assume to be of greatest good. All the while, they are confronted by having to interpret, adjust to, and live in a wholly dissimilar world. The so-called truth that people meet up with is shaped by contextual circumstances they happened to have been exposed to (their upbringing, education, and experiences, for example), in turn swaying their interpretations, judgments, beliefs, and norms. All often cherished. Change requires overcoming inertia and myopia, which proves arduous, given prevailing human nature.

 

People may wonder which is in fact the most authentic reality. And they may wonder how they might ultimately overcome trepidation, choosing whether or not to turn their backs to their former reality, and understanding and embracing the alternative truth. A process that perhaps happens again and again. The undertaking, or journey, from one state of consciousness to another entails conflict and requires parsing the differences in awareness of one truth over another, to be edified of the supposed higher levels of reality and to overcome what one might call the deception of perception: the unreal world of blurry appearances..

 

Some two and a half millennia after Plato crafted his allegory of the cave, popular culture has borrowed the core storyline, in both literature as well as movies. For example, the pilots of both Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, and Country of the Blind, by H.G. Wells, concern eventual enlightened awareness, where key characters come to grips with the shallowness of the world with which they’re familiar every day. 

Similarly, in the movie The Matrix, the lead character, Neo, is asked to make a difficult choice: to either take a blue pill and continue living his current existence of comfort but obscurity and ignorance, or take a red pill and learn the hard truth. He opts for the red pill, and in doing so becomes aware that the world he has been living in is merely a contrivance, a computer-generated simulation of reality intended to pacify people.

 

Or take the movie The Truman Show. In this, the lead character, Truman Burbank, lives a suburban, family life as an insurance agent for some thirty years, before the illusion starts to crumble and he suspects his family is made up of actors and everything else is counterfeit. It even turns out that he is living on a set that comprises several thousand hidden cameras producing a TV show for the entertainment of spectators worldwide. It is all a duplicitous manipulation of reality — a deception of perception, again — creating a struggle for freedom. And in this movie, after increasingly questioning the unfathomable goings-on around him, Truman (like the prisoner who leaves Plato’s cave) manages to escape the TV set and to enter the real world.

 

Perhaps, then, what is most remarkable about the Allegory of the Cave is there is nothing about it that anchors it exclusively to the ancient world in which it was first imagined. Instead, Plato’s cave is, if anything, even more pertinent in the technological world of today, split as it is between spectral appearances and physical reality. Being surrounded today with the illusory shadows of digital technology, with our attention guided by algorithm-steering, belief-reinforcing social media, strikes a warning note. That today, more than ever, it is our responsibility to continually question our assumptions.

 

The Distressed Spider and Intervention: A Thought Experiment

By Keith Tidman

To intervene, or not to intervene?

 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel set the stage for a curious thought experiment. Nagel described how, while a university professor, he noticed what he considered a puzzling scene play out. It was a spider trapped in … let us say, a sink ... in the building housing the philosophy department. The spider, despite defensively scurrying around its tightly limited terrain, seemed condemned throughout the day to becoming doused with water, incapable of altering its fate — if altering its fate was what it even wanted to do. Weeks passed.

 

As Nagel portrayed the scene, the spider’s “life seemed miserable and exhausting,” which led him to conclude he should “liberate” it, in a dash to freedom and a better life. Seemingly the morally right thing to do, despite the relative insignificance of a single spider. Nagel finally justified intervention on the presumption that the spider could readily find its way back to its spot in the sink if it “didn’t like it on the outside.”

 

That is, could Nagel’s well-intentioned rescue afford the spider a more meaningful, happier life — assuming, for the sake of argument, the spider could think in such abstract terms? Or was such interventionism haughty and presumptuous? Nagel, pondering higher-level causes and effects, humbly confessed that his emancipation of the spider was therefore done with “much uncertainty and hesitation.”

 

Regardless, Nagel went ahead and reached out with a paper towel in the spider’s direction, which the spider, intentionally or instinctively, grabbed on to with its gangly legs, to be hoisted onto the floor. Thus carefully deposited, however, the spider remained still, even while prodded gently with the paper towel. “Playing dead,” perhaps — and afraid of carelessly being stomped on by people walking around? The next day, Nagel “found it in the same place, his legs shriveled in that way characteristic of dead spiders.”

 

Nagel’s experience, and the thought experiment derived from it, tees up at least two inferences regarding the ground rules governing intervention in others’ lives. On the one hand, no matter how benevolently intended our deeds, intervention might exact unanticipated outcomes. Some ugly. On the other hand, indecisiveness and inaction might likewise result in harm — as the renowned “trolley problem” demonstrates, in which choices, including the option not to redirect the trolley, still lead to some loss of life. In short, indecision is a decision — with repercussions.

 

We therefore have to parse the circumstances and priorities as best we can, deciding to intercede or stay removed from the scene. Either choice is swayed by our conspicuous biases as to meaningfulness in life, despite the choices’ innate subjectivity. Both choices — intervene or leave alone — are entrapped in the unavoidable moral morass and practical implications of their respective consequences.

 

Nagel’s spider incident was, of course, also metaphorical of the lives of people — and whether we should judge the merits or demerits of someone’s stage-managed life circumstances, going so far as to urge change. We might perceive such advice as prudent and empowering, even morally right; but maybe in reality the advice is none of those things, and instead is tantamount to the wrong-headed extraction of the “ailing” spider. The next two paragraphs provide examples of everyday, real-world circumstances that might spur intervention. That is, let's ask this: In these and other real-world cases, of which the count is endless, does the proverbial spider warrant extrication?

 

For instance, do we regard someone’s work life as mundane, a dead-end, as beneath the person’s talents? Do we regard someone’s choices regarding nutrition and exercise and other behavioral habits as impairing the person’s health? Or what if we see someone’s level of education as too scant and misfocused relative to modern society’s fast-paced, high-tech needs? Do we fault-findingly regard someone’s choice of a partner to be unfavorable and not life enhancing? Do we consider someone’s activities as embodying calculable risks, to be evaded? Do we deem someone’s financial decisions to be imprudently impulsive?

 

Maybe those “someones,” in being judged, begrudge what they view as the superciliousness of such intercession. Who has the right (the moral authority) to arbitrate, after all, people’s definition of happiness and the meaningfulness of life, and thus choices to make, where there may be few universal truths? Where do resolute biases contaminate decision-making? One possible answer is that we ought to leave the proverbial spider to its fate — to its natural course.

 

But let’s also look at possible, real-world interventionism on a more expansive scale. Do we properly consider both the pragmatic and moral consequences of interceding in matters of the environment, biodiversity, and ecosystems, where life in general has inherent value and decisions are morally freighted? How about, in international relations, the promotion of humanitarian standards, the maintenance of security, and cultural, civilizational affairs? And what about in other nations’ domestic and foreign policy decision-making that bear ubiquitously across the interconnected, globalised planet?

 

Even the sunniest of intentions, instilled with empathy and wistful introspection, may turn out ill-informed — absent a full understanding of someone else’s situation, where the setting is key to the person’s happiness and sense of meaningfulness. Perhaps that particular someone did not need to be removed from the fabled appliance, so to speak, in order that he might scurry off toward safety.

 

Nagel assumed the spider might feel forlorn; but perhaps it didn’t. Maybe it was a case of infelicitous projection or a desire simply to assuage raw instincts. Let’s not forget, the spider died — and did so as the consequence of intervention. Lessons applicable to all frames of reference, from the globe to the community and individual, whom we might assume needs rescuing.

 

The thought experiment prods us to go beyond shallow, short-term consequentialism — beyond what happens right off the bat as the result of intervention — instead to dig into primary principles guiding the verdicts we render. Foundational moral values, personal and societal — even  universal — matter greatly in these presumptive decisions.

 

Are We Alone in the Universe, or Not? And Does It Matter?

Peering through Saturn’s rings, the Cassini probe caught a glimpse of a faraway planet and its moon. At a distance of just under 900 million miles, Earth shines bright among the many stars in the sky, distinguished by its bluish tint.

By Keith Tidman

The writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote: “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” 

But are the two alternatives really terrifying? And even if they were, then what might be the upshot?

 

In exploring the possible consequences of Clarke’s thought experiment, I’ll avoid enmeshing us in a discussion of whether extraterrestrials have already visited Earth, or whether we will get to visit their planets in the near term. For the foreseeable future, the distances are too large for that to happen, where suspected extraterrestrial civilisations are thousands, millions, or billions of light-years away. Those distances hamper hunts for signals engaged in by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, which metaphorically dips only an infinitesimally small scoop into the vast cosmic ocean. And such distances hamper interstellar travel.

 

Accordingly, we are currently in no position to respond definitively to the challenge Enrico Fermi, also known as “the architect of the nuclear age,” raised with his lunchtime colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1950, referring to extraterrestrials: “Where is everybody?”

 

One piece of crucial context for our conversation here is that of scale: the known universe is currently thought to be some 93 billion light-years in diameter. Recall that a light-year is a measurement of distance, not time, so that in Earthly ‘miles,’ the cosmic diameter is an easy, but boggling, calculation: 93 billion multiplied by 5.8 trillion miles. Add that, in the case of travel or electromagnetic communications (beamed signals) between us and extraterrestrials, the velocity of light is the fixed upper limit — as far as current science is concerned, anyway. All of which is problematic for detecting aliens and their biomarkers or technomarkers, quite apart from anyone engaging in neighbourly interstellar space visitation.

 

Yet, in a universe kickstarted some 13.8 billion years ago — with hundreds of billions of galaxies, and trillions of stars and planets (many of those exoplanets conceivably habitable, even if not twins of our world) — it’s surely arguable that extraterrestrial civilisations, carbon-based or differently constituted physically, are out there, similarly staring toward the skies, quizzically pondering. Alien cosmologists asking, “Where is everybody?,” making great strides developing their own technology, and calculating probabilities for sundry constants and variables assumed necessary for technologically advanced life to prosper elsewhere.

 

There are two key assumption in asking whether we are alone in the universe or we are among teeming alien life strewn throughout the universe. The first assumption, of a general nature, is to define ourselves as a conscious, intelligent, sophisticated species; the second is to assume the extraterrestrials we envision in our discussion are likewise conscious and intelligent and sophisticated — at least equally or maybe considerably more so, options we’ll explore.

 

A third assumption is an evolutionary process, transitioning from physics to chemistry to biology to consciousness. Higher-order consciousness is presumed to be the evolutionary apex both for our species — what it is like to be us — and for extraterrestrials — what it is like to be them. Consciousness may end up the evolutionary apex for our and their machine technology, too. Given that higher-order consciousness is central, we need a baseline for what we mean by the term. Taking a physicalist or materialist point of view, the mind and consciousness are rooted in the neurophysiological activity of the brain, reducible to one and the same. This, rather than existing dualistically in some ethereal, transcendental state separate from the brain, as has sometimes been mythologized.

 

As a placeholder here, consciousness is assumed to be fundamentally similar in its range of domains both for our species and for extraterrestrials, comprising variations of these features: experience, awareness, perception, identity, sentience, thought experimentation, emotion, imagination, innovation, curiosity, memory, chronicled past, projected future, executive function, curation, normative idealism, knowledge, understanding, cognition, metacognition — among others. On these important fronts, the features’ levels of development between us and extraterrestrials may well differ in form and magnitude.

 

As for one of Arthur C. Clarke’s alternative scenarios — that our species is alone in the universe — I can’t help but wonder why, then, the universe is so old, big, and still rapidly growing, if the cosmic carnival is experienced by us alone. We might scratch our heads over the seeming lack of sense in that, whereby the imposing panorama captured by space-based telescopes dwarfs us. We might, therefore, construe that particular scenario as favouring an exceptional place for our species in the otherwise unoccupied cosmic wonderment, or in a different (and more terrifying?) vein suggesting our presence is inconsequential.

 

That is, neither aloneness nor uniqueness necessarily equates to the specialness of a species, but to the contrary a trifling one-off situation. Where we have to come to grips with the indeterminacy of why this majestic display of light-years-sized star nurseries, galaxies rushing toward or away from one another, the insatiability of hungry supermassive black holes, supernovas sending ripples through the faraway reaches of spacetime, and so much more.

 

As for the possibility of sophisticated other life in the universe, we might turn to the so-called anthropic principle for the possible how and why of such occurrences. The principle posits that many constants of the Earth, of the solar system, of the Milky Way, and of the universe are so extraordinarily fine-tuned that only in those ways might conscious, intelligent, advanced life like ours ever to have evolutionarily come into being.

 

The universe would be unstable, as the anthropic principle says, if any of those parameters would shift even a minuscule amount, the cosmos being like a pencil balanced precariously on its pointed tip. It’s likely, therefore, that our species is not floating alone in an unimaginably vast, roiling but barren cosmic sea; according to a more expansive view of the error-less anthropic principle, the latter makes the creation and sustenance of extraterrestrial life possible, too, as fellow players in the cosmic froth. Fine-tuned, after all, doesn't necessarily equate to rare. 

 

We might thus wonder about the consequences for our self-identity and image if some among these teeming numbers of higher-order intelligent extraterrestrials inhabiting the universe got a developmental jumpstart on our species’ civilisation of a million or more years. It’s reasonable to assume that those species would have experienced many-orders-of-magnitude advances biologically, scientifically, technologically, culturally, and institutionally, fundamentally skewing how humanity perceives itself.

 

The impact of these realities on human self-perception might lead some to worry over the glaring inequality and possibly perceived menace, resulting in dents in the armour of our persistent self-exceptionalism, raising larger questions about our purpose. These are profoundly philosophical considerations. We might thereby opt to capitulate, grasping at straws of self-indulgent excuses. Yet, extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel might choose — whether for benign purposes (e.g., development, enlightenment, resource sharing), or for malign ones (e.g., hegemonism, hubris, manifest destiny, self-exceptionalism, colonisation), or for a hybrid of reasons — that interventionism, with its mix of calculated and unpremeditated consequences, might seem the natural course.

 

Our reactions to gargantuan inter-species differences might range from giddy exceptionalism at one end to dimmed significance at the other. On a religious front, a crisis might ensue in the presence of remarkably advanced extraterrestrials, influencing factors surrounding faith, creeds, dicta, values, patriarchy. Some of our religious constructs — scriptures, symbology, philosophies — might collapse as shallow affectations. For example, in light of hyper-advanced extraterrestrials, our history of expressing religious imagery in anthropomorphic terms (our species described doctrinally as being “in God’s image,” for example) may no longer make sense, fundamentally altering belief systems.

 

We would have to revisit the principles of ethics, including the degree that ethics are culturally and societally contingent. Or the impact might lead to our being elated that life has advanced to such a remarkable degree, covetous for what it might mean for benefits for our species — to model what seems to have worked magnificently for a cutting-edge alien civilisation. The potential for learning vastly advanced natural science and technology and societal paradigms would be immense, where, for instance, extraterrestrials might be hybrids of the best of biology and the best of machines.

 

As potentially confounding either of Clarke’s scenarios might prove, neither need be terrifying; instead, both scenarios have the potential of being exhilarating. But let me toss one last unavoidable constant into the cosmic cauldron. And this is the concept of entropy — the irreversibly increasing (net) disorder within a closed, isolated system like the universe, with its expanding galactic and stellar separation accelerating toward a thermodynamic demise. Entropy is a fact of life of the universe: providing an expiry date, and eventually rendering everything extinct. The end of history, the end of physics — and the end of metaphysics.

 

America’s Polarised Public Square and the Case of the 2024 Presidential Campaign

Plato’s tale of shadows being misinterpreted in the cave
can be taken as a warning about the dangers of propaganda and misinformation

By Keith Tidman 

There’s a thinking error, sometimes called the Dunning-Kruger effect that warns us that cognitive biases can lead people to overvalue their own knowledge and understanding, amplified by tilted campaign narratives that confound voters. Sometimes voters fail to recognize their patchy ability to referee the truth of what they see and hear from the presidential campaigns and various other sources, including both social media and mainstream media. The effect skews public debate, as the electorate cloisters around hardened policy affecting America’s future. It is a tendency that has prompted many thinkers, from among the ancient Athenians to some of America’s founders, to be wary of democracy.

So, perhaps today more than ever, the manner of political discourse profoundly matters. Disinformation from dubious sources and the razor-edged negative branding of the other candidate’s political positions abound, leading to distrust, rifts, confusion, and polarised partisanship within society. The bursts of incivility and brickbats are infectious, sapping many among the electorate. Witness today’s presidential campaign in the United States.

 

Even before the conventions of this summer, the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are a lock; yet, any expectations of orderliness are an illusion. President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, with candid campaign devotees deployed alongside, are immersed in spirited political tussles. The limited-government mindset of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke might well stoke the hurrahs of libertarians, but not of the mainstream political parties thriving on the nectar of activism and adversarial politics.

 

We’re left asking, then, what facts can the electorate trust as they make political choices? With what degree of certainty should the public approach the information they’re served by the campaigns and legions of doctrinaire pundits talking at cross purposes? And is it possible to cut through the diffusion of doctrine and immoderate conviction? 

 

Facts are indispensable to describing what’s happening inside the political arena, as well as to arbitrate policy changes. Despite the sometimes-uncertain provenance and pertinence of facts, they serve as tinder to fuel policy choices. The cautious expectation is that verifiable facts can translate to the meeting of minds. The web of relationships that gives rise to ideas creates an understanding of the tapestry that the public stitches together from the many fragments. The idealised objective is a Rousseau-like social contract, where the public and elected representatives intend to collaborate in pursuit of the common good — a squishy concept, at best.

 

Today, anyway, the reality is very different: discourse in the public square often gets trampled, as camps stake out ownership of the politically littered battleground. The combustibility of political back-and-forth makes the exchanges harder, as prickly disputants amplify their differences rather than constructively bridge divides. In the process, facts get shaded by politically motivated groups metaphorically wielding high-decibel bullhorns, reflecting one set or another of political, societal, and cultural norms. Hyperpartisanship displaces bipartisanship. 

 

Consider the case of refugees and migrants arriving cross-border in the United States. The political atmosphere has been heavy with opposing points of view. One camp, described by some as nativist, contends that porous borders threaten the fabric of the nation. They fear marginalisation, believing “fortress America” is the solution. Another, progressive camp contends that the migrants add to the nation’s economy, enrich our already-dynamic multiculturalism, and on humanitarian grounds merit assistance. Yet, the cantankerous rhetorical parrying between the camps continues to enlarge, not narrow, the political gap.

 

Disputes over book bans, racial discrimination, reproductive rights, tax policy, inequality, role of religion, public demonstrations, gun safety, rules of democracy, and other normative and transactional wedge issues are equally fraught among intransigent politicians of diametrically contrasting views and immune to persuasion. Such flashpoints are made worse by intra-party, not just cross-party, hubs at boisterous variance with one another — leaving one wondering how best to arrive at a collective of settled norms.

 

Instead of being the anchors of social discourse, real or disputed facts may be used to propagate discord or to disadvantage the “other.” Facts fuel jaundiced competition over political power and control: and as historian and politician Lord Acton said, such “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Many people complain that this “other” is rooted in systemic bias and ranges across race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, language, religion, education, familial pedigree, and socioeconomics. The view is that marginalisation and disenfranchisement result from the polemical fray, which may have been the underlying aim all along.

 

Unfortunately, while the world democratises access to information through the ubiquity of technology, individuals with manipulative purposes may take advantage of those consumers of information who are disinclined or unprepared to thoughtfully question the messaging. That is, what do political narratives really say, who’s formulating the narratives, what are their benign or malign purposes, and who’s entrusted with curating and vetting? Both leftwing and rightwing populism roams freely. It recalls Thomas Paine’s advice in The Rights of Man that “moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” Shrewd advice too often left unheeded in the presidential campaign, and in the churn of events has itself become the tinder of the dissent mentioned above.

 

Today, dubious facts are scattered across the communications landscape, steering beliefs, driving confirmation bias, stoking messianic zeal, stirring identity warfare, and fueling ill-informed voting. As Thomas Jefferson observed, the resulting uncertainty short-circuits the capacity of ordinary people to subscribe to the notion “That government is the strongest of which every [citizen] feels himself a part.” A notion foundational to democracy, one might say. Accordingly, the public has to grapple with discerning which politicians are honest brokers, or which might beguile. Nor can the public readily know the workings of social media’s opaque algorithms, which compete for the inside track on the content of candidates’ messaging. Communication skirmishes are underway for political leverage between the Biden and Trump campaigns. 

 

Jettisoning political stridency and hardened positions proves difficult, of course, especially among political evangelists at loggerheads. But it’s doable: The aim of sincere conciliation is to moderate the rancorous political discourse, while not fearing but rather accommodating the unbridled sharing of diverse ideas, which is foundational for democracy operating at its best.  

On the Trail of Human Consciousness

By Keith Tidman 

Daniel Dennett once called consciousness the “last surviving mystery” humankind faces. That may be premature and even a bit hyperbolic, but not by much. At the very least, consciousness ranks among the biggest of the remaining mysteries. Two questions central to this are: Does the source of conscious experience rest solely in the neurophysiology of the brain, reducible to myriad sets of mechanical functions that necessarily conform to physical laws? Or, as some have contended, is consciousness somehow airily, dualistically separate from the brain, existing in some sort of undefinably ethereal dimension? 

Consciousness is an empirical, bridge-like connection to things, events, and conditions, boiling down to external stimuli that require vetting within the brain. Conscious states entail a wide range of human experiences, such as awareness, identity, cognition, wakefulness, sentience, imagination, presence in time and space, perception, enthrallment, emotion, visions of alternative futures, anchors to history, ideation, attention, volition, sense of agency, thought experimentation, self-optimisation, memories, opinions — and much more. Not to forget higher-order states of reality, able to include the social, political, legal, familial, educational, environmental, scientific, and ethical norms of the community. The process includes the brain's ability to orchestrate how the states of consciousness play their roles in harmony. As philosopher Thomas Nagel therefore concluded, “there is something it is like to be [us]” — that something being our sense of identity, acquired through individual awareness, perception, and experience.

The conscious mind empirically, subjectively edits objective reality. In the phrase of David Chalmers, philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist, “there is a whir of information processing” as all that complexly happens. The presence of such states makes it hard, if not impossible, to disbelieve our own existence as just an illusion, even if we have hesitancy about the accuracy of our perception of the presumed objective reality encircling us. Thought, introspection, sensing, knowing, belief, the arrow of perpetual change — as well as the spatial and temporal discernments of the world — contribute to confirming what we are about. It’s us, in an inexorable abundance of curiosity, wondering as we gaze upon the micro to the macro dimensions of the universe.

 

None of these states, however, requires the presence of mysterious goings-on — an “ethereal mind,” operating on a level separate from the neuronal, synaptic activity of the brain. Accordingly, “consciousness is real and irreducible,” as Dennett’s fellow philosopher, John Searle, observed while pointing out that the seat of consciousness is the brain; “you can’t get rid of it.” True enough. The centuries-old Cartesian mind-body distinction, with its suspicious otherworldly spiritual, even religious, underpinnings and motive, has long been displaced by today’s neuroscience, physics, and biology. Today, philosophers of mind cheerfully weigh in on the what-if modeling aspects of human consciousness. But it must be said that the baton for elucidating consciousness, two and a half millennia after the ancient world’s musings on the subject, has been handed off to the natural sciences. And there is every reason to trust the latter will eventually triumph, filling the current explanatory gap — whether the path to ultimate understanding follows a straight line or, perhaps more likely, zigs and zags. A mix of dusky and well-lit alleys.

 

Sensations, like the taste of silky chocolate, the sight of northern lights, the sound of a violin concerto, the smell of a petunia, hunger before an aromatic meal, pleasure from being touched, pain from an accident, fear of dark spaces, roughness of volcanic rock, or happiness while watching children play on the beach, are sometimes called qualia. These are the subjective, qualitative properties of experience, which purportedly differ from one person to another. Each person interpreting, or editing, reality differently, whether only marginally so or perhaps to significant extents — all the while getting close enough to external reality for us to get on with everyday life in workably practical ways. 

So, for example, my experience of an icy breeze might be different from yours because of differences — even microscopically — between our respective neurobiological reactions. This being the subjective nature of experience of the same thing, at the same time and in the same place. And yet, qualia might well be, in the words of Chalmers, the “hard problem” in understanding consciousness; but they aren’t an insoluble problem. The individualisation of these experiences, or something that seems like them, will likely prove traceable to brain circuitry and activity, requiring us to penetrate the finer-coarse granularity of the bustling mind. Consciousness can thus be defined as a blend of what our senses absorb and process, as well as how we resultantly act. Put another way, decisions and behaviours matter.

 

The point is, all this neurophysiological activity doesn’t merely represent the surfacing or emergence or groundswell of consciousness, it is consciousness — both necessary and sufficient. That is, mind and consciousness don’t hover separate from the brain, in oddly spectral form. It steadfastly remains a fundamentally materialist framework, containing the very nucleus of human nature. The promise is that in the process of developing an increasingly better understanding of the complexity — of the nuance and richness — of consciousness, humanity will be provided with a vital key for unlocking what makes us, us. 

 

Models, Metaphysics and Reality: How Philosophy keeps science on track

By Rob Hamilton

Does God exist? What is consciousness? How can we know what is real?

Questions such as these have always perplexed humanity and despite the great advances made over recent centuries in understanding the behaviour of the world around us, we seem to be no closer to answering these core questions about the nature of existence.

In my new book Anything Goes – A Philosophical Approach to Answering the God Question, I argue that, paradoxically, answers to these questions can be obtained – but only once we recognise that no knowledge of the true structure of reality is possible. What do I mean by this? Well, essentially that claims about the structure of reality are models that describe the way our experience of how the world behaves. It is these models that then become our reality.

Put short, all the world is models

The popular notion of how science progresses is that we are steadily, if slowly, getting closer to the truth about the nature of the world around us. Indubitably, as time has gone on, scientific advances have been made and, yes, we have reached the stage where two great theories, Einstein’s General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, provide us with a nearly complete description of the universe. We just need some clever physicists to iron out a few wrinkles like dark matter and dark energy in a Theory of Everything, and then we will have arrived at the Truth of how reality is structured.

The naivety of this belief is striking, a point highlighted by 20th century philosopher of science, Karl Popper, when he pointed out that scientific theories can never be proven to be true. Rather, they are working assumptions about the way the world is, that are supported by the evidence. Until they aren’t. 

Take Newton’s theory of gravity: this was thought to be true until anomalies like the precession of the perihelion of the planet Mercury were discovered. Nowadays, it is Einstein’s theory that provides the correct answer. But this raises the possibility that if we manage to come up with a Theory of Everything, who is to say that one day we will not conduct an experiment or make an observation that contradicts this theory too? For this reason, even if physicists were to discover the true structure of reality, they could never know it! 

“Okay”, some might say. “Although we can never know that we have reached the truth, at least we can say that our current theories are ‘more true’ than the previous ones”. This view is known as Convergent Realism and was powerfully critiqued in a 1981 paper by the philosopher Larry Laudan. 

At the everyday level, Einstein’s theory actually provides only very slightly different results to Newton’s, but the way it characterises the universe is completely different. Newton’s theory is set in the common-sense world of three-dimensional space plus a separate conception of time. Einstein’s is based on the notion of curved four-dimensional spacetime. Who can say what the universe will look like according to the next theory? As Schrödinger quipped, quantum mechanics tells us that cats can be alive and dead at the same time and that the building blocks of our universe can be both waves and particles. Weird, yes, but might it be that the true nature of the universe is just as weird and perhaps even beyond our ability to comprehend? 

Ultimately, scientific theories are models of the way the universe works. They allow us to understand the universe in terms of its behaviour, and we can use them to predict how the macroscopic objects of our experience, such as tables, stars and light bulbs behave. They do this by characterising the universe in a certain way that helps us get to grips with it. Because, as humans, we just do not have the tools to find out what the universe is ‘really like’.

The Map is the territory

Now comes the plot twist. The surprising but unavoidable consequence of this conceptual speed limit, is that the structure or make-up of this reality that we are modelling is irrelevant! It is only reality’s behaviour that matters. It is reality’s behaviour that we are modelling and a good model will predict its behaviour well. But if reality’s structure is unknowable and elusive, then it will forever remain a shadowy mysterious thing lying behind the veil. It is only the structure and objects of our models that can be known to us. These are the things that we live by and that give our lives meaning. And so these are the only objects that can be considered ‘real’ in any meaningful sense – if the objects of our models are not real, then nothing is real.

And so, what we have here, I would argue, is a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Many scientists and physicists are aware that all of our understanding is in terms of our models, but avoid engaging with the implications of this, because it is unnecessary for day to day work and raises difficult questions. They cling to the idea that there must be a ‘right answer’ out there, because if there isn’t, then well doesn’t everything fall apart? Where are the standards of correctness? What is to stop us from just claiming that whatever we like is true? In my book, I argue that these worries are unfounded. Although the structure of reality is unknowable, the good news is that it does behave in a certain way. And so not all models are created equal.

Anything Goes

I like to call this way of thinking the ‘Anything Goes’ method, because with no knowable reality to assess our models against, the only standard of correctness is a consideration of whether your model produces sensible results. And there is more to modelling reality than just the laws of physics. Even the idea that there is some kind of external reality, that is the source of our experiences, is part of this model that gives us an explanation for why our experiences behave in the way they do. Ultimately, each of us needs to find a way of making sense of our experiences in a way that works for us. In that sense, Anything Goes.

I think that this way of thinking is revolutionary! Once we recognise that it’s all a matter of perspective – that there are no disembodied facts about the universe in any useful sense, we can make progress in all sorts of areas that have previously proved intractable. Does God exist? It depends on your model. Is Schrödinger’s Cat alive or dead? Well, from whose perspective? Schrödinger’s or the cat’s? How would we tell if an Artificial Intelligence model attained consciousness? 

In my book, in order to find answers to questions like this last one, I ask what it means to say that an entity that only exists as part of your model of reality has a mind of its own as well as whether solipsism could be true, what it’s like to be a bat and whether you could be a brain in a vat!

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All these questions and more are addressed in Anything Goes – A Philosophical Approach to Answering the God Question, due to be released on Amazon on 3 June 2024.

Visit http://www.anythinggoesmetaphysics.com/  to find out more as well as for details of how to get a free advance copy.

Picture Post #43 The Importance of Empathy

 

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

 

I remember reading about Nazi Germany, which is truly the only comparison that makes sense when looking at Israel's genocidal hatred of all things Palestinian. The ordinary German people used to line the streets and toss bread to Jews in the wagons as they went past on their way to concentration camps.  They did this for AMUSEMENT - they laughed at the people scrabbling for the scraps, like animals. 

The point is, ordinary Germans felt their Jewish neighbours were not "people'. Something of the same cruel indifference governs the behaviour of Israelis to their Palestinian neighbours today. The picture is powerful because it reveals what happens where common humanity has disappeared.

AP photographer Tsafrir Abayov, who has been covering the border between Israel and Gaza for almost 20 years commented in the Independent:

“I grew up in Ashkelon about 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of Gaza, and I’ve been covering the Israel-Gaza border for almost 20 years, so I know this border from end to end. I have a lot of spots where I know I can get a good shot. On this day, I was driving by and I saw a group of female soldiers who had gone up to a tank position on the Israeli side, about 50 meters (164 feet) from the border. I don’t think these soldiers are normally stationed there. They just went up to take a look. From this position you can see right into Gaza — and all the destruction.”

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Bittersweet Ballads

Children playing amidst the rubble of damaged buildings in a camp for Palestinian refugees

By Martin Cohen

Palestine Wail and Other Bittersweet Ballads is a collection of poems by Yahia Lababidi. Yahia, as he recalls, has a personal connection to the conflict in Palestine, because his grandmother, Rabiha Dajani, was, seventy-five years ago, forced to flee her ancestral home in Palestine at gunpoint. She went on to become a remarkable educator, activist and social worker.

The collection starts with an apt quotation. Mahmoud Darwish’s aphorism that:

 

«Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.»

These are poems like ‘We Were Playing with the Clouds’ by the Palestinian artist and activist, Ghassan Kanafani (1936 – 1972), which runs:

I wish children didn’t die.

I wish they would be temporarily elevated

to the skies until the war ends.

Then they would return home safe,

And when their parents would ask them,

where were you? They would say,

we were playing in the clouds.

Yahia himself writes, by way of an introduction to the collection:

‘The death of one child, due to natural causes, is nearly unbearable. The systematic, cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent children, in the name of so-called ‘self-defense’, is an unjustifiable moral obscenity. Yet, this is what the Israeli government continues to do and it is appalling that there remain democratic nations as well as civilized individuals who find it difficult to unequivocally condemn such depravity and call for a ceasefire. Who will honor these blameless, anonymous martyrs? How can we remain silent in the face of such atrocities?’

‘Words matter, since narratives shape realities and, in turn, how history is told and who is deemed worthy of our sympathies. That’s why artists are deemed dangerous, for daring to speak truth to power. It is, especially, significant for example that since October 7th, more than 70 Palestinian journalists have been killed, in Gaza, in the line of duty while Israel has murdered at least thirteen Palestinian poets and writers in Gaza.’

‘Our understanding of the human condition is diminished without the emotionally imaginative and spiritually-enriching witness of storytellers and artists. We know from watching the news that narratives are grossly distorted when high-jacked by corrupt politicians and compromised media. As a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Malcom X, succinctly put it: “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.’

As a case in point, just over a month ago, young Palestinian poet, scholar and activist, Dr Refaat Alareer, was assassinated by a targeted Israeli airstrike, along with his brother, sister and her four children. Anticipating his own death, Alareer shared this heart-rending poem, just one month prior to his murder by Israeli forces:

If I must die

 

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself–

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.

But this is a collection of new poetry by Yahia Lababidi so let us include now this one – by way of a taster. The reader is sincerely encouraged to seek out the rest in the collection.

The Light-keepers

Hope is a lighthouse

(or, at least, a lamppost) 

someone must keep vigil

to illumine this possibility

In the dark, a poet will climb 

narrow, unsteady stairs

to gaze past crashing waves 

and sing to us new horizons

Others, less far-sighted, might 

be deceived by the encroaching night

mistake the black for lasting, but 

not those entrusted with trimming wicks

Their tasks are more pressing —

winding clockworks, replenishing oil –

there is no time for despair

when tending to the Light.

Commenting on the collection, James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion, writes: 

‘These are necessary and truthful poems. Yahia Lababidi powerfully illuminates this heartbreaking time and terrible season in the history of our world. This book, like a lantern in darkness, brings to light the truth of lives we must learn to honor and remember.’

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And do check out Yahia’s YouTube channel where he regularly includes readings of his poems.

https://www.youtube.com/@Yahia.Lababidi

What's in a name?

By Shoidur Rahman

French Martinique: no marionette martinet then, or nightingale. Thus begins this tail, as all tails do, quietly and decently, but rising to prenominal elaboration. The jackdaw may crakkajack alone, but listens to the earth call of toucan.

Now the toucan’s brow is so heavily, crossly drawn, a look of ineffable concentration is there like beetlebrow. But it's also endearingly light and playful as well. Wait, my bird, ‘til I get to the bottom of this tail. Wait, ‘til I end my song.

His crumpled orange beak is sharp, not yet for this world – nor so flash that he could start to work it like a hip-hop hopeful, complicity, asininely imitatio - but as a scimitar he might use it as a dagger, instead. - Fan that tail! But only just so – modestly! 

Don't grauble or grumble or grovel in the dirt, like a turkey. Be glossy, a high shine, be as polishedly black as any upperclass British person of high decorum wearing bowler hat and clipped moustache and suit. Be as black as the polished wood veneer of the effigies of a certain yesteryear, a toucan squat be on my windowsill bookshelf. 

But if in your boots you see reflected your own face, have a care you don't remember poor Indian shoe shine boys, who wore the big turbans, who daily pushed the brush, shovelling hay and other shit stuff, but never grovelled, earned only a rupee a day, or exchanged it so that their brother could eat. Only let it be, so that it live.

He’s quite fine, toucan, complete within these sheaves of leaf and shade, his tropical retreat. The black men come and go, toiling in the blazing sun. But his eye is gimleted, and he’s quick to scuttle, two at a time, on clawed feet, breathing respiration in a big billowing sky, which descends to our planet like the calmest bluest sheet you've ever seen…

POETRY: Oh, AI!

The ancient Chinese poet Qu Yuan to in conversation with the contemporary novelist Mo Yan, Courtesy AI.

By Chengde Chen

Oh, AI, are you the Southern Gate between the known and unknown

Or the Monkey King of humanoid capabilities, unparalleled and bold?

You, on my behalf, think, write, design, and program,

Responding effortlessly, seeking widely, and chatting with ease.

Your literary prowess is like galloping from Qu Yuan* to Mo Yan**,

Your profound knowledge spans from Thales’ to Musk’s domain.

Your ‘deep learning’ leaves me trailing in the dust,

While your ‘algorithmic’ space unifies man and God!



I know you’re a machine, yet I envy your intelligence,

You're clearly my invention, yet exposing my incompetence.

I should celebrate your arrival, yet fear self-destruction,

I want to reject you, yet dread delaying the theory of evolution.

Ah, please tell me, how should I truly treat you?

Is it really your insidious duty to replace us?

I wish I could transform into your ‘artificial intelligence’,

Let you taste the mixed flavours humans experience facing AI!

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*Qu Yuan (300 BC) is regarded as the greatest poet in early Chinese history—the first author of verse in China to have his name associated with his work.

**Mo Yan is a Chinese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012.