After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre, book notes

AFTER VIRTUE, all words and ideas are MacIntyre's unless otherwise attributed.

Hypothesis: in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in a state of grave disorder. What we possess are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have -- very largely, if not entirely -- lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality.

There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture. Disagreements share three salient characteristics.
1) conceptual incommensurability of the rival arguments -- every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises; but the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another; thus, moral arguments are necessarily interminable; first premises a matter of pure assertiona and counter assertion; further, it seems that underlying my own position there must be some non-rational decision to adopt that position.
2) nonetheless, these arguments purport to be impersonal rational arguments and as such are usually presented in a mode appropriate to that impersonality.
3) the incommensurable premises deployed in the rival arguments have a wide variety of historical origins

In the transition from the variety of contexts in which they were originally at home to our own contemporary culture 'virtue' and 'justice' and 'piety' and 'duty' and even 'ought' have become other than they once were.

Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rational interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.

GE Moore's threefold discovery:
1) 'good' is the name of a simple, indefinable property, a property different from that named by 'pleasant' or 'conducive to evolutionary survival' or any other natural property; 'good' is a "non-natural property", propositions declaring this or that 'good' are what Moore called 'intuitions'; they are incapable of proof or disproof.
2) 'right' is that action which of all the available alternatives is the one which does or did as a matter of fact produce the most good.
3) personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine; this is the ultimate truth of Moral Philosophy. The achievement of friendship and the contemplation of what is beautiful in nature or in art become certainly almost the sole and perhaps the sole justifiable ends of all human action.

Moore's three central positions are logically independent of each other. There would be no breach of consistency if one were to affirm any one of the three and deny the other two. The second crucial fact is that the first part of what Moore says is plainly false and the second and third parts are at the very least highly contentious. Moore's arguments at times are, it must seem now, highly defective; a great deal is asserted rather than argued. And yet it is this to us plainly false, badly argued position which Keynes treated as 'the beginning of a renaissance', which Lytton Strachey declared to have 'shattered all writers on ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr Bradley' and which Leonard Woolf described as 'substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations in which Jehovah, Christ, and St Paul, Plato, Kant and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of commonsense.'

This is great silliness of course; but it is the great silliness of highly intelligent and perceptive people.

If two observers disagree: according to Keynes, either the two were focusing on different subject matters, without recognising this, or one had perceptions superior to the other. But of course, as Keynes tells us, what was really happening was something quite other: 'In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accounts of infallibility' and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore's gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey's grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson's shrugs.

There is evident here precisely that gap between the meaning and purport of what was being said and the use to which utterance was being put to which our reinterpretation of emotivism drew attention.

It is no accident that the acutest of the modern founders of emotivism, philosophers such as F.P. Ramsey, Austin Duncan-Jones and C.L. Stevenson, were pupils of Moore; it is not implausible that they did in fact confuse moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 with moral utterance as such, and that they therefore presented what was in essentials a correct account of the former as though it were an account of the latter.

What makes emotivism convincing as a thesis about a certain kind of moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 are certain features specific to that historical period. Those whose evaluative utterances embodied Moore's interpretations of those utterances could not have been doing what they took themselves to be doing because of the falsity of Moore's thesis. But nothing whatsoever seems to follow about moral utterances in general. Emotivism on this account turns out to be an empirical thesis, or rather a preliminary sketch of an empirical thesis, presumably to be filled out later by psychological and sociological and historical observations, about those who continue to use moral and other evaluative expressions, as if they were governed by objective and impersonal criteria, when all grasp of any such criterion has been lost.

Carnap's version fo emotivism, for example -- in which the characterization of moral utterances as expressions of feeling or attitude is a desperate attempt to find some status for them after his theory of meaning and his theory of science have expelled them from the realm of the factual and the descriptive -- was based on the most meagre attention to their specific character.

A presupposition of the scheme of development [MacIntyre] sketches is that genuine objective and impersonal moral standards can in some way or other be rationally justified, even if in some cultures at some stages the possibility of such rational justification is no longer available. This is what emotivism denies.

Emotivism rests upon a claim that every attempt, whether past or present, to provide a rational justification for an objective morality has in fact failed. What emotivism however did fail to reckon with is the difference that it would make to morality if emotivism were not only true but also widely believed to be true. That is, if and insofar as emotivism is true, moral language is seriously misleading and, if and insofar as emotivism is justifiably believed, presumably the use of traditional and inherited moral language ought to be abandoned. This conclusion none of the emotivists drew; and it is clear that, like Stevenson, they failed to draw it because the misconstrued their own theory as a theory of meaning.

Analytical philosophers had defined the central task of philosophy as that of deciphering the meaning of key expressions in both everyday and scientific language; and since emotivism fails precisely as a theory of the meaning of moral expressions, analytical philosophers by and large rejected emotivism. The resistance to emotivism has arisen from the perception that moral reasoning does occur, that there can be logical linkages between various moral judgments of a kind that emotivism itself could not allow. Yet the most influential account of moral reasoning that emerged in response to this critique of emotivism was one according to which an agent can only justifiy a particular judgment by referring to some universal rule from which it may be logically derived, and can only justify the rule in turn by deriving it from some more general rule or principle; but on this view since every chain of reasoning must be finite, such a process of justificatory reasoning must always terminate with the assertion of some rule of principle for which no further reason can be given.

The terminus of justification is thus always, on this view, a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria. Each individual implicitly or explicitly has to adopt his or her own first principles on the basis of such choice.

To this is replied: rationality itself might supply morality with a basis and a basis such that we have adequate grounds for rejecting emotivist and subjectivist accounts. [Me: basis located in positive, functional knowledge].

It would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.

The key to the social content of emotivism: it entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others.

Portrait of a Lady turns out to be, in the words of William Gass, an investigation 'of what it means to be a consumer of persons, and of what it means to be a person consumed.' The metaphor of consumption acquires its appropriateness from the milieu; James is concerned with rich aesthetes whose interest is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites. The last enemy is boredom. These are environments in which the problem of enjoyment arises in the context of leisure, in which large sums of money have created some social distnce from the necessity of work.

Weber: Bureaucratic rationality is the rationality of matching means to ends economically and efficiently. Questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. Instead one must simply choose -- between parties, classes, nations, causes, ideals. 'Values', says Raymond Aron in his exposition of Weber's view, 'are created by human decisions...' and again he ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable' and that values rest on 'a choice whose justification is purely subjective.' An agent may be more or less rational in acting consistent with his values, but the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. In Weber, the contrast between power and authority is effective obliterated. As Philip Rieff noted, 'Weber's ends, the causes to be served, are means of acting; they cannot escape service to power' (Rieff 1975, p. 22). No type of authority can appeal to rational criteria to vindicate itself except that type of bureaucratic authority which appeals precisely to its own effectiveness. And what this appeal reveals is that bureacratic authority is nothing other than successful power. [Me: authority can only appeal to consensus criteria, values may not be rationally got, but they can be rationally unconcealed (articulated) and ordered.]

Characters are the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in whch moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world. Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies.

It is by way of their intentions that individuals express bodies of moral belief in their actions. For all intentions presuppose more or less complex, more or less coherent, more or less explicit bodies of belief, sometimes of moral belief. [Me: thus our moral instinct to judge agents by their intended actions; see Hauser.]

The manager represents in his character the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations; the therapist represents the same obliteration in the sphere of personal life. Both treat ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness. Rieff has documented the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.

The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set to that on which it may pass judgment for such limits could only derive from rational criteria for evaluation and, as we have seen, the emotivist self lacks any such criteria. Everything may be criticised from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt. To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract pont of view that is totally detached from all social particularity. Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located. The contrast between this democratisation of moral agency and the elitist monopolies of managerial and therapeutic expertise could not be sharper. Any minimally rational agent is to be account a moral agent; but managers and therapists enjoy their status in virtue of their membership within hierarchies of imputed skill and knowledge. In the domain of fact there are procedures for eliminating disagreement; in that of morals the ultimacy of disagreement is dignified by the title of 'pluralism'. [Me: There is a distinction between 'the fact of pluralism' and 'the ultimacy of pluralism'.]

This democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing. [Me: some roles are heavier to carry than others, some are impossible to lift, for very long or at all -- preparation has her say.]

Sartre's self-discovery is characterized as the discovery that the self is 'nothing', is not a substance but a set of perpetually open possibilities. [Me: for the self the past is closed, the future uncertain, the present constrained.]

Inner conflicts are for it necessary au fond the confrontation of one contingent arbitrariness by another. It is a self of no given continuities, save those of the body which is its bearer and of the memory which to the best of its ability gathers in its past.

The self is now thought of as lacking any necessary social identity, because the kind of social identity that it once enjoyed is no longer available; the self is now thought of as criterionless, because the kind of telos in terms of which it once judged and acted is no longer thought to be credible. [Me: social identity is too fluid and fuzzy; the solution is to establish a floor of identity, that of citizen, and define its telos; can only do this after unanimity in the original position, after a Myworld and Ourworld agreement reached during reflective room temperature.]

In pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership of a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress -- or to fail to make progress -- toward a given end. Thus a completed and fulfilled life is an achievement and death is the point at which someone can be judged happy or unhappy. Hence the old Greek proverb: 'Call no man happy until he is dead.' [Me: Myworldline, Kahneman's prospect theory, Pynchon's 'last delta-t' -- Myworldline and the 'shadow of the future' is cast on Myworld.]

The concept of a whole human life is the primary subject of objective and impersonal evaluation, of a type of evaluation which provides the content for judgment upon the particular actions or projects of a given individual.

Nowadays: these appear to be the superstitions of teleology.

Northern European enlightenment culture: it was a musical culture and there is perhaps a closer relationship between this fact and the central philosophical problems of the culture than has usually been recognized. For the relationship of our beliefs to sentences that we only or primarily sing, let alone to the music which accompanies those sentences, is not at all the same as the relationship of our beliefs to the sentences that we primarily say and say in an assertive mode. When the Catholic mass becomes a genre available for concert performance by Protestants, when we listen to the scripture because of what Bach wrote rather than because of what St Matthew wrote, then sacred texts are being preserved in a form in which the traditional links with belief have been broken, even in some measure for those who still count themselves believers. It is not of course that there is no link with belief; you cannot simply detach the music of Bach or even of Handel from Christian religion. But a traditional distinction between the religious and the aesthetic has bee blurred.

In Latin, as in ancient Greek, there is no word correctly translated by our word 'moral'; or rather there is no such word until our word 'moral' is translated back into Latin. Certainly 'moral' is the etymological descendant of 'moralis'. But 'moralis', like its Greek predecessor ethikos -- Cicero invented 'moralis' to translate the Greek word in the De Fato -- means 'pertaining to character' where a man's character is nothing other than his set dispositions to behave systematically in one way rather than another, to lead one particular kind of life. [Me: when matched with the discoveries of Hauser and Stanovich, yet further evidence that the ancients/unsophisticated are purer, less conceptually modified, less diluted examples of human nature; a higher molarity of human nature exists in their smaller set of words; the prehistoric peoples even more so, I would imagine; this is the value-neutral observation]

The early uses of 'moral' in English translate the Latin and move to its use as a noun where 'the moral' of any literary passage is the practical lesson that it teaches. In these early uses 'moral' contrasts neither with such expressions as 'prudential' or 'self-interested' nor with such expressions as 'legal' or 'religious'. The word to which it is closest in meaning is perhaps simply 'practical'. Its subsequent history is one in which it is first perhaps most usually part of the expression 'moral virtue' and then becomes a predicate in its own right with a continual tendency to narrow its meaning, especially as it applies to sexual behavior.

From 1630 - 1850, 'morality' became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own. [Me: the question is the machinery; what neurological regions are activated during moral judgments versus other kind of judgments? -- you'll find that many things are neurologically similar to 'moral judgment' in their patterned activity.]

In Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller, the choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. At the heart of the aesthetic way of life, as Kierkegaard characterises it, is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present experience. [Me: not a complete description; the aesthetic encompasses both Myworld and Myworldline.] By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time, in whch the present is bound by the past and to the future. No reason can be offered for preferring one to the other. [Me: the real distinction is between Lebensanschauung and Weltanschauung; between the self-centering (Myworld) and the self-objectifying (Ourworld) standpoints; it is important to be clear which perspective one is arguing from; the void between the two can be bridged by contract only.]

[Me: no reason is necessary for why 'I' prefer the self-centering standpoint. I exist. By definition I am the center of my world. Neither right nor duty compels me to stand firmly in the center; it is what I am, what I do, and nothing less; the only reason to shift to the Ourworld perspective is if it becomes preferable for me to do so, if it follows from one of my self-elected Myworld premises.]

It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority. By now the doctrine of Enten-Eller is plainly to the effect that the principles which depect the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason.

In our own culture the influence of the notion of radical choice appears in our dilemmas over which ethical principles to choose. We are almost intolerably conscious of rival moral alternatives.

Central to Kant's moral philosophy are two deceptively simple theses: if the rules of morality are rational, they must be the same for all rational beings, in just the way that the rules of arithmetic are; and if the rules of morality are binding on all rational beings, then the contingent ability of such beings to carry them out must be unimportant -- what is important is their will to carry them out. The project of discovering a rational justification of morality therefore simply is the project of discovering a rational test which will discriminate those maxims which are a genuine expression of the moral law when they determine the will from those maxims which are not such an expression. [Me: rational Myworld test -- last maxim standing?, stable over time, positive externalities, competitive success, practitioner satisfaction; also, the brain's "moral judgment" algorithm is logical; the horizontal relationships between discrete outputs are not; moral philosophy has been focused on the latter; what of the 'V'-relationships? -- the angular relationships.]

On Kant's view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such.

Kant: I may propose a course of action to someone either by offering him reasons for so acting or by trying to influence him in non-rational ways. If I do the former I treat him as a rational will, worthy of the same respect as is due to myself. By contrast an attempt at non-rational suasion embodies an attempt to make the agen a mere instrument of my will, without any regard for his rationality.

The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture -- and subsequently of our own -- lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.

The Pursuit of Truth, Quine

Quine on Evidence:

"From impacts on our sensory surfaces, we in our collective and cumulative creativity down the generations have projected our systematic theory of the external world. Our system is proving successful in predicting subsequent sensory input. How have we done it?" Pg. 1

"Not that prediction is the main purpose of science. One major purpose is understanding. Another is control and modification of the environment. Prediction can be purpose too, but my present point is that it is the test of a theory, whatever the purpose." Pg. 2

Quine on "Observation Sentences":

It should "command the subject's assent or dissent outright", and it should have "intersubjectivity: unlike a report of a feeling, the sentence must command the same verdict from all linguistically competent witnesses of the occassion." Otherwise, an observation sentence cannot provide evidential support for science. They are "occasion sentences: true on some occasions, false on others." "The requirement that it command a verdict outright is what makes it a final checkpoint. The requirement of intersubjectivity is what makes science objective." Pg. 3 -5

These sentences provide "the link between language, scientific or not, and the real world that language is all about." Pg. 5

"It is precisely [the] sharing of words, by observation sentences and theoretical sentences, that provides the logical connections between the two kinds of sentences and makes observation relevant to scientific theory. Retrospectively those once innocent observation sentences are theory-laden indeed...Seen holophrastically, as conditioned to stimulatory situations, the [observation] sentence is theory-free; seen analytically, word by word, it is theory-laden. Insofar as observation sentences bear on science at all, affording evidence and tests, there has to be this retrospective theory-lading along with the pristine holophrastic freedom from theory. To impugn their observationality thus retrospectively is to commit what Firth (p. 100) called the fallacy of conceptual retrojection." Pg. 7

"The scientist has a backlog of accepted theory, and is considering a hypothesis for possible incorporation into it." Pg. 9

"A generality that is compounded of observables in this way -- 'whenever this, that' -- is what I call an observation categorical...It is a generality to the effect that the circumstances described in the one observation sentence are invariably accompanied by those described in the other." Pg. 10

"Pure observation lends only negative evidence, by refuting an observation categorical that a proposed theory implies." Pg. 13 It can never provide proof of the truth asserted.

On Consistency with Backlog Theory:

The maxim of minimum mutilation: "the maxim constrains us, in our choice of what sentences of S [a set of purported truths] to rescind [after we are confronted with a failed observational categorical], to safeguard any purely mathematical truth; for mathematics infiltrates all branches of our system of the world, and its disruption would reverberate intolerably...[We have an] unstated policy of shielding mathematics by exercising freedom to reject other beliefs instead." Pg. 15

"Call an observation categorical analytic for a given speaker if, as in 'Robins are birds', the affirmative stimulus meaning for him of the one component is included in that of the other. Otherwise synthetic. Call a sentence or set of sentences testable if it implies some synthetic observation categoricals...Then the empirical content of a testable sentence or set of sentences for that speaker is the set of all the synthetic observation categoricals that it implies, plus all synonymous ones. I add the synonymous ones so that merely verbal variation will not obstruct sameness of content." Pg. 16-17

"I am of that large minority or small majority who repudiate the Cartesian dream of a foundation for scientific certainty firmer than the scientific method itself...I approach it as an input-output relation within flesh-and-blood denizens of an antecedently acknowledged external world, a relation open to inquiry as a chapter of the science of that world...I call the pursuit naturalized epistemology." Pg. 19

"Insofar as theoretical epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of theoretical science, so normative epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of engineering: the technology of anticipating sensory stimulation." Pg. 19

The watchword of empiricism: nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu. [me: this is not entirely true, insofar as Genes also record information about the world. A more precise watchword: information about the external world must be received to be got.]

Five virtues of hypothesis: conservatism, generality, simplicity, refutability, and modesty.

"A sentence's claim to scientific status rests on what in contributes to a theory whose checkpoints are in prediction." Pg. 20

On the possible collapse of empiricism if extra input by telepathy or revelation was discovered to be possible: "It is idle to bulwark definitions against implausible contingencies." Pg. 21

"True sentences, observational and theoretical, are the alpha and omega of the scientific enterprise." Pg. 31

"When we move beyond sensible bodies and proceed to posit atoms, electrons, quarks, numbers, classes, and relations, our imagination is bolstered by analogies in varying degrees. The insensible particles were easily taken in stride, as resembling sensible bodies except in size; but physics has been progressively sapping that analogy. Light waves rest on a tenuous analogy; unlike water waves, they are not waves on or in anything. The more tenuous these aids to the imagination, the less odd ontological relativity may seem. When we get to the positing of numbers and other abstract objects...we are indebted to some fruitful confusions along the way. Language and science are rooted in what good scientific language eschews. In Wittgenstein's figure, we climb the ladder and kick it away." Pg. 34-5.

"[W]ords can still be said to owe their meaning to their roles in sentences." pg. 37

"The quest for a clear and substantial notion of meaning should begin with an examination of sentences." Pg. 37

"Predicted utterances convey no news." Pg. 38

"In 'perceives that p' and 'believes that p' we have two among many idioms of propositional attitude." Pg. 67

"A neurological rendering of 'Tom perceives that it is raining', applicable to all such occasions merely on Tom's part, would already be formidable even if Tom's neural make-up were known in detail...further...a neurological rendering of 'perceives that it is raining', applicable to all comers, would be out of the question...Yet each perception is a single occurrence in a particular brain, and is fully specifiable in neurological terms once details are known. We cannot say the same for a belief, which can be publicly shared, but we can say somewhat the same for the instance of the belief in a single believer. The period during which I go on believing that the earth rotates is distinguished from my earlier stages by at least some verbal dispositions, which must reside in some distinctive quirks in my nervous system." Pg. 70-1

"Perceptions are neural realities, and so are the individual instances of beliefs and other propositional attitudes insofar as these do not fade out into irreality altogether...I acquiesce in what Davidson calls anomalous monism, also known as token physicalism: there is no mental substance, but there are irreducibly mental ways of grouping physical states and events. The keynote of the mental is not the mind; it is the content-clause syntax, the idiom 'that p'. Pg. 71

"Its irreducibility is all the more reason for treasuring it: we have no substitute. At the same time there is a good reason not to try to weave it into our scientific theory of the world to make a more comprehensive system. Without it science can enjoy the crystalline purity of extensionality: that is, the substitutivity of identiy and more generally the interchangeability of all coextensive terms and clauses, salva veritate...As long as extensional science can proceed autonomously and self-contained, with no gaps of causality that intensional intrusions could serve to close, the sound strategy is the linguistic dualism of anomalous monism." Pg. 71-2

He nonetheless encourages efforts "to reclaim territory from the intentional side...Whatever is thus reclaimed is better understood for the reclaiming." Pg. 72

"The sublimity of necessary truths turns thus not quite to dust, but to pretty common clay." Pg. 73

"Champions of modal logic mean necessity to have an objective sense, as if to say metaphysical necessity or physical necessity. But then it must make sense to think of a thing's essence, comprising those properties that it has necessarily." Pg. 74

"A similar second-order role is cut out, then, for 'possibly'. Since it simply means 'not necessarily not', 'possibly' marks its sentence as one that the beliefs or working assumptions of concerned parties do not exclude as false. Thanks to our overwhelming ignorance, the realm of possibility thus conceived is vaster far than that of necessity. It is the domain of all our plans and conjectures, all our hopes and fears." Pg. 74

"We see the archaic dominance of mentalism in a preference for final cause over efficient cause as a mode of explanation...This predilection for explanation by final cause is evident still today in people who seek the meaning of life. They want to explain life by finding its purpose." Pg. 75

"Necessity, then, would be a projection of the subjective sense of constraint, or abridgment of capability [possibility]." Pg. 75

Darwin reduced final cause in biology to efficient cause through his theory of natural selection. [me: unless there is, in the natural history (ontogeny) of selective outcomes, a common thread that characterizes and sorts the set of "biological entities", or even better, the set of "A-theoretical biological successes" -- something algorithmic.]

"'Fragile' and 'soluble' are physical predicates on a par with others, and the dispositional form of the words is just a laconic encoding of a relatively dependable test or symptom. Breaking on impact and dissolving on immersion are symptomatic of fragility and solubility." pg. 76

"What are true or false...are propositions."

Commenting on the Truth as Disquotation:

'Snow is white' is true if an only if snow is white.
To ascribe truth to the sentence is to ascribe whiteness to snow; such is the correspondence, in this example. Ascription of truth just cancels out the quotation marks. Truth is disquotation. Pg. 80

"Semantic ascent serves also outside of logic. When Einstein propounded relativity, disrupting our basic conceptions of distance and time, it was hard to assess it without leaning on our basic conceptions and thus begging the question. But by semantic ascent one could compare the new and old theories as symbolic structures, and so appreciate that the new theory organized the pertinent data more simply than the old. Simplicity of symbolic structures can be appreciated independently of those basic conceptions." Pg. 81

"The truth predicate is an intermediary between words and world. What is true is the sentence, but its truth consists in the world's being as the sentence says." Pg. 81

"One might accordingly relinquish the law of the excluded middle and opt rather for a three-valued logic, recognizing a limbo between truth and falsity as a third truth value...But a price is paid in the cumbersomeness of three-valued logic. Alongside 'not', which sends truths into falsehoods, falsehoods into truths, and now limbo into limbo, there would be a truth function that sends truths into limbo, limbo into falsehoods, and falsehoods into truths; also three more such one-place truth functions, playing out the combinations -- as contrasted with a single one, negation, in two-valued logic. When we move out to two-place truth functions (conjunction, alternation, and their derivatives), proliferation runs amok. It can still be handled, but there is an evident premium on our simple streamlined two-valued logic." Pg. 92

"The question that motivates the quest beyond disquotation can perhaps be phrased thus: if to call a sentence true is simply to affirm it, then how can we tell whether to affirm it?...The more sympathetic answer is a general analysis of the grounds of warranted belief, hence scientific method." pg. 93

"What the empirical under-determination of global science [i.e., there is insufficient possible evidence to clinch the system] shows is that there are various defensible ways of conceiving the world." Pg. 102

Moral Minds, Hauser, notes

Everything henceforth is verbatim from the book, except for the comments in brackets. Those, happily or otherwise, are from me.
__________________________________________
Notes:

Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds, HarperCollins Publishers, New York (2006).

Quotes Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), Chapter IV: "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh*(2) remarks, "has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action"; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause."

Quotes David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: "Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in ths particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of reason."

Quotes Noam Chomsky: "Why does everyone take for granted that we don't learn to grow arms, but rather, are designed to grow arms? Similarly, we should conclude that in the case of the development of moral systems, there's a biological endowment which in effect requires us to develop a system of moral judgment and a theory of justice, if you like, that in fact has detailed applicability over an enormous range."

"The central idea of this book is simple: we evolved a moral instinct, a capacity that naturally grows within each child, designed to generate rapid judgments about what is morally right or wrong based on an unconscious grammar of action."

"Facts alone don't motivate us into action."

"The only way to develop stable prescriptive principles, through either formal law or religion, is to understand how they will break down in the face of biases that Mother Nature equipped us with." pg 4

"Authority figures cannot mandate moral transgressions." pg 5 [me: but they can manipulate the operative parameters of particular situations to accomplish this result.]

"In our past, we were only presented with opportunities to help those in our immediate path: a hunter gored by a buffalo, a starving family member, an aging grandfather, or a woman with pregancy complications. There were no opportunities for altruism at a distance...Although there is no guarantee that we will help others in close proximity, the principles that guide our actions and omissions are more readily explained by proximity and probability." pg 10

"As the psychologist Jonathan Baron explains, intuition can lead to unfortunate or even detrimental outcomes...Once intuitions are elevated to rules, mind blindness turns to confabulation, as we engage in mental somersaults to justify our beliefs." Pg. 11, citing Baron's guidebook to intuition blindness (1994; 1998)

"Reasoning and emotion play some role in our moral behavior, but neither can do complete justice to the process leading up to moral judgment." Pg. 11

"[Lawrence] Kohlberg was right in thinking that conflict fuels the moral machinery." Pg. 19

"Hume's theory gets off the ground by looking at moral judgments through the lens of a three-party interaction: agent, receiver, and spectatory." Pg. 23

Quoting Hume: "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

"Conscious moral reasoning often plays no role in our moral judgments, and in many cases reflects a post-hoc justification or rationalization of previously held biases or beliefs." Pg. 25

Quoting developmental psychologist Martin Hoffman: "[Empathy is] the spark of human concern for others, the glue that makes social life possible." Pg. 28

"We are like chameleons, designed to try out different colors to match our social partner's substrate." Pg. 29

"But rather than playing a role in generating a moral judgment, our emotions may function like wieghts, moving us to lean in one direction rather than another." Pg. 31

"We can unify and explain these ideas by appealing to the principle that it is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of achieving a greater good, but it is impermissible to use harm as a means to a greater good...the principle of double effect." Pg. 33 [me: this principle speaks to the fact that as spectators we are really judging the agent rather than the action-effect -- a sound discerning strategy that will, in the long run, make us the spectators better off, insofar as we must have future dealings with the agent.]

"It is not until about four years of age that children can maintain two different beliefs in mind and spontaneously flip between them." Pg. 34

"When it comes to language...what we express as our knowledge pales in relationship to the knowledge that is operative but unavailable to expression." Pg. 38

"The language faculty maintains a repository of principles for growing a language, any language...The problem of language acquisition is therefore like setting switches. Each child starts out with all possible switches, but with no particular settings; the environment thn sets them according to the child's native language." Pg. 38 [me: to ensure the "overlapping consensus", the centripetal 'unitary language", we must concern ourselves with setting switches.]

"When we speak about the language faculty, therefore, we are speaking about the normal, mature individual's competence with the principles that underlie their native language. What this individual chooses to say is a matter of performance, which will be influenced by whether she is tired, happy, in a fight with her lover, or addressing an audience of five hundred at a political rally." Pg. 39 [Me: radically local contingencies.]

"This boils down to a question of the child's initial state -- of her unconscious knowledge of linguistic principles prior to exposure to a spoken or signed language -- and the extent to which this state constrains not only what she learns and when, but what she can learn from listening or watching." Pg. 40 [Me: Initial boundary conditions, conditional algorithm, degrees of freedom.]

"To answer "How did it evolve?", we look to our history and recognize two distinctive parts: phylogeny and adaptation. A phylogeny analysis provides a depiction of the evolutionary relationships between species, yielding twiggy branches of the tree of life...To address the question of adaptation, we can look to the relationship between functional design and genetic success." [Me: the latter asks the question, what in fact did the moral faculty do for our selfish genes?]

Quoting Rawls: "There is no reason to assume that our sense of justice can be adequately characterized by familiar common sense precepts, or derived from the more obvious learning principles. A correct account of moral capacities will certainly involve principles and theoretical constructions which go beyond the norms and standards cited in every day life." Pg. 43, citing to (Rawls, 1971; pg. 46-47) [Me: the principles must derive from the "what for" -- i.e. they must be outside "morality".]

"Once an individual acquires his specific moral grammar, other moral grammars may be as incomprehensible to him as Chinese is to a native English speaker." Pg. 44 [all acquired moral languages come with opportunity costs: a decrease from the original degrees of freedom].

"Analyses of the motivation or intentions underlying an action, together with analyses of intended and foreseen consequences, provide the relevant material for our moral faculty. Emotions may only function to modulate what we actually do as distinct from what we comprehend or perceive as morally permissible." Pg. 46. [the importance of judgment not immediately acted upon: judgments can combine over time; they can amplify or dampen doubts and certitudes about specific agents or agent-types -- in essence coloring a person or role with an emotional prefix].

"Like phonemes, many actions lack meaning. When combined, actions are often meaningful. Like phonemes, when actions are combined, they do not blend; individual actions maintain their integrity. When actions are combine, they can represent an agent's goals, his means, and the consequences of his action or the omission of an action." Pg. 47 [me: meaning = distinguishability]

"To attain its limitless range of expressive power, the principles of our moral faculty must take a finite set of elements and recombine them into new, meaningful expressions of principles." Pg. 47

Citing Jonathan Haidt, "who proposes that we are equipped with four families of moral emotions: 1) other-condemning: contempt, anger, and disgust; 2) self-conscious: shame, embarrassment, guilt; 3) other-suffering: compassion; 4) other-praising: gratitude and elevation." Pg. 52

"Because the moral faculty relies on specialized brain systems, damage to these systems can lead to selective deficits in moral judgments. Damage to areas involved in supporting the moral faculty (e.g., emotions, memory) can lead to deficits in moral action - -of what individuals actually do, as distinct from what they think someone else should or would do." Pg. 54

"Morality regulates social interactions." Pg. 54

Quoting Thomas Henry Huxley (1860): "A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man -- a man of restless and versatile intellect -- who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice." Pg. 60

"What has allowed us to live in large groups of unrelated individuals that often come and go is an evolved faculty of the mind that generates universal and unconscious judgments concerning justice and harm." Pg. 60 [Me: not exactly true. what has allowed this are expressed norms called Laws -- their relative harmony with contemporaneous morality, and their regular enforcement by authority.]

"Action at a distance generates a weaker altruistic pull, because we lacked the evolved psycholgoy. Helping individuals that are out of arm's reach, sometimes out of sight, is a newly developed pattern of action and interaction." Pg. 64 [me: manipulable by new media.]

"From a finite and often limited set of experiences, we project our intuitions to novel cases." Pg. 65 [me: problem of projection]

"Rawls's suggestion, building on the linguistic analogy, was that many of our morally relevant judgments emerge rapidly, often without reflection, in the absence of heated emotion, and typically, without access to a clear justification or explanation. Moreover, these judgments tend to be robust, as evidenced by the vehemence with which individuals stick to their intuitions in the face of reasonable alternative judgments." Pg. 67

"When people give explanations for their moral behavior, they may have little or nothing to do with the underlying principles. Their sense of conscious reasoning from specific principles is illusory. And even when someone becomes aware of an underlying principle, it is not obvious that this kind of understanding will alter their judgments in day-to-day interactions." Pg. 67 [me: thus, the goal is to use the empirical knowledge of the moral faculty to supplement it's raison d'etre: i.e., use it to inform Law.]

"If we reject [our innate moral principles], deciding that other principles are more consistent with our sense of justice, we must be prepared for conflict and instability." Pg. 70 [me: is this not the "ultimate cause" of our moral faculty -- i.e., the moderation of intragroup instability?]

"Once parameters are set, judgments of fairness may seem as incomprehensible across cultures as judgments of grammaticality for word order." Pg. 72 [me: if the psychology of justice exists because it is a successful environmental stabilizer, dissonant conceptions of justice are bastard mutations that do exactly the opposite.]

"As the mathematical biologists Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund put it, 'The fiction of a rational "homo economicus" relentlessly optimizing material utility is giving way to "bounded rational" decision-makers governed by instincts and emotions.'" Pg. 79

"Mathematical models of this problem reveal that fairness evolves as a stable solution to the ultimatum game if proposers have access to information about a receiver's past behavior. When it comes to group level activity, reputation fuels cooperation and provides a shield against defection." Pg. 79

"In the fourteenth century, British villages repeatedly fell victim to the logic of the commons [Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons"]. Each village was associated with a common pasture for their cattle and sheep. The pasture represented a shared resource. But since household wealth increased with the number of animals grazing on the pasture, the temptation to acquire more emerged. More animals meant more use of the pasture. More use of the pasture, less pasture. Less pasture, more competition. More competition, more strife. More strife, less village cohesion. Eventually, village after village dissolved." Pg. 81

"One way to maintain cooperative use of the land is to make resource use public knowledge. An individual's image or reputation can thus play a critical role in cooperation." Pg. 81 [me: thus, true cooperation is limited by group size, since the larger the group, the more diluted the impact of reputation regulation.]

"That individuals will pay to punish cheaters shows that moral indignation can fuel actions that are of immediate personal cost but of ultimate personal benefit as public goods accrue." Pg. 81

"The only way to guarantee stable, cooperative societies is by ensuring open inspection of reputation and providing opportunities for punishing cheaters." Pg. 81 [Me: communities, rather than "societies".]

"Although strong reciprocity is not selfish, it is strategic: only cooperate with those you can trust and nail those who are untrustworthy because they have cheated." Pg. 82

"The punisher's intent is not to convert. It is to make cheaters pay by excluding them from the circle of cooperators. It is to make explicit the difference between the in-group and out-group." Pg. 82

"Those who punish most are also those who contribute most in public goods games, which suggests that they have the most at stake, and have the greatest interest in maintaining the circle of cooperators; as expected, cheaters both contribute and punish least." Pg. 82 [me: calls to mind the international arena.]

Citing the studies of Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer: "Just as Rawls predicted, subjects readily settled on a principle of fairness. But the winning principle was not quite as Rawls predicted. No group selected the difference principle, where distribution is anchored by the worst off. Instead, groups settled on a principle that maximized the overall resources of the group while preventing the worst off from dropping below some preestablished level of income. This principle provides a safety net for those who are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, while allowing for extra benefits to flow toward those who contribute more to society." Pg. 88

"Attitudes toward these principles were high, and showed little change over the course of the experiment. However, when subjects had the freedom to choose, and vote unanimously, their satisfaction and confidence in the principle were significantly higher than when the same principle was imposed on them. The average-income [maximizing] -and-floor principle emerged as the clear winner. As a principle, it was stable after multiple iterations of the work-pay-redistribution cycle, but functioned to insill confidence in people, both those at the top and those on the floor. Contrary to many current political analyses, an income-distribution principle that allows for inequalities while taking care of those who are most in need does not reduce incentives to work hard, nor does it create a sink of free riders...Those who received from other players, and who actively participated in deciding the best principle, almost doubled their efforsts in order to contribute to the overall income. In contrast, those working under the same regime, but with the principle imposed, cheated and decreased their efforts, because they perceived redistribution through taxes as their right." Pg. 89 [Me: confidence, morale, increases stability and productivity.]

Referencing Daniel Kahneman's "prospect theory"-- i.e. the "anchoring effects of a reference point in our perception of fairness": "When we consider the value or utility of a resource, we do so in reference to our current state and the extent to which obtaining the resouce will significantly change this reference state...Fairness can therefore be assessed in terms of gains and losses relative to the individual's subjective experience of how good and bad things are right now...[this fact] mandates an understanding of current subjective experience in order to predict the utility of changing this state." Pg. 91-2

"Following Kahneman's lead, you consider the peak and end experience...We therefore make our judgments based on peak and end experiences, blind to overall duration." Pg. 94

"As Kahneman explains, 'Duration neglect remains a cognitive error...built deep into the structure of our tastes and is probably impossible to prevent...Intuition alone would not persuade us of the pitfalls of an evaluative memroy that each of us has trusted for a lifetime. and the intuitions evoked by carefully crafted thought experiments will not reliably yield correct predictions of the responses to cases seen in between-subjects designs. In short, I have tried to convince you that it could occasionally be useful to supplement philosophical intuition by the sometimes non-intuitive results of empirical psychological research.'" Pg. 94-5 [Me: on duration neglect: a bad situation that has a duration twice as long as another, equally bad situation will, due to this "cognitive error", be deemed "better" than the shorter equally bad situation if the end of the longer experience is better than the end of the shorter.]

"[The effectiveness of social norms] lies in their unconscious operation, and their power to create conformity." Pg. 97 [Me: consonant behavior rather than dissonant -- moderation of entropy.]

"An emotion's effectiveness relies upon two design features: automaticity and shielding from the meddling influences of our conscious, reflective, and contemplative thoughts about what ought to be." Pg. 98

Quoting Eric Posner: "In a world with no law and rudimentary government, order of some sort would exist. So much is clear from anthropological studies. The order woudl appear as routine compliance with social norms and collective infliction of sanctions on those who violate them, including stigmatization of the deviant and ostracism of the incorrigible. People would make symbolic commitments to the community in order to avoid suspicions about their loyalty. Also, people would cooperate frequently. They would keep and rely on promises, refrain from injuring their neighbors, contribute effort to public-spirited projects, make gifts to the poor, render assistance to those in danger, and join marches and rallies. But it is also the case that people would sometimes breach promises and cause injury. They would discriminate against people who, through no fault of their own, have become walking symbols of practices that a group rejects. They would have disputes, sometimes violent disputes. Feuds would arise and might never end. The community might split into factions. The order, with all its benefits, would come at a cost. Robust in times of peace, it would reveal its precariousness at moments of crisis." [Me: on the last, this is classic behavior of a self-organized dissipative system at criticality. dissolution and recombination.]

"When formal laws intervene, it is typically because the operative principles underlying a social norm cause harm to individuals." Pg. 99

"Once group size exceeds that of a typical hunter-gatherer group -- about 150 -- punishment is necessary, in one form or another, to preserve stable cooperation." Pg. 101

"[In the Ju/'hoansi], when the strong are punished, through mockery, pantomime, or criticism, they usually resort to self-mockery, which helps their reputation and maintains the egalitarian nature of the society." Pg. 102

"Scarlet-letter punishments -- as they are now called -- potentially solve two problems. They provide safety for the community by flagging its criminals and they deter future offenses by instilling shame, guilt, or fear." Pg. 105

"As philosopher Alvin Goldman points out, 'When punishment does not at least approximate giving satisfaction to the victims of crime and to those in the community who wish to demonstrate their moral outrage, these individuals will take it upon themselves to extract punishment instead of, or in addition to, that officially imposed. This would be likely to lead to an escalation of private vendettas, substituting the reigns of private terror for law and relative tranquility.'" Pg. 107 [Me: The amplification of entropy when the conceptions of justice become dissonant.]

"We must recognize the seductive power of seeing punishment in light of principles of fairness, and to design legal systems that indicate the pitfalls of this intuition, case by case. Legal systems, in turn, must recongize that if they go against people's tastes for punishment, they may create more problems, as individuals seek revenge and take the law into their own hands." Pg. 107 [Me: the psychology of justice is a first-order constraint on the general problem of social cohesion, and social cohesion is a first-order imperative of Law and the art of system-maintenance. All theories of punishment must be sublimated into this first-order imperative of the Self-Regarding Ourworld.]

"When Petrinovich's scenarios revealed information about identity, then subjects saved kin over non-kin, friends over strangers, humans over nonhumans, and politically safe or neutral individuals over politically abhorrent monsters." Pg. 122-3

"Killing is wrong if it is intended as a means to some end. Killing is permissible if it is an unintended but a foreseen by-product of a greater good." Pg. 125

"Our experience with these dilemmas influences our judgments, the impact on judgment does not translate into our justifications and ability to access the underlying principles, and there appear to be people who for unknown reasons are more likely to judge certain situations as permissible or impermissible." Pg. 131 [Me: the heteroglossia, not only of judgments but also of preparednesses, is a clear signal that the moral instinct is an imprecise instrument with which to pursue the precisely defined goals of living-system maintenance: indefinite cohesion, covalence, and complexity.]

"The best predictor of violence is the number of unmarried young men!" Pg. 132

"Our violence imposes constraints on the pattern of violence, allowing for some options but not others; which options are available and selected depends upon prior history and current conditions. As...Margo Wilson and Martin Daly suggest, 'dangerous competitive violence reflects the activation of a risk-prone mindset that is modiulated by present and past cues of one's social and material success, and by some sort of mental model of the current local utility of competitive success both in general and in view of one's personal situation...[such as] ecological factors that affect resource flow stability and expected life span." Pg. 132

"Cultures of honor also showcase the economic notion of discounting...they discount the future, and the temptation for immediate gratification rules them." Pg. 136

[Stanley] Milgram's studies show [that] obedience to authority is universal, but the degree to which authority rules varies between cultures." Pg. 140

"[A]ttitudes can...force a shift from the descriptive level of what is to a prescriptive level of what ought to be. Southerners not only respond with violence to insult. They think this is what people ought to do." Pg. 141

"[Alan] Gibbard's intuition is that there are also emotional norms--apt feelings--that lead to particularly relevant and appropriate actions--wise choices." Pg. 153Citing to Wise Choices and Apt Feelings, and the biological notion of norm of reaction.

[A]cknowledging...observed variation does not constitute a rejection of constraints." Pg. 166

"When an action violates expectation, a negative emotion often ensues. Negative emotions are aversive. I propose that one branch of the root of our moral judgments can be found in the nature of expectation concerning action." Pg. 168 [me: paradigmatic crisis, aversion to uncertainty.]

"What adults say is the morally right or wrong thing to do may be different from what they would actually do in the same situation. And for both their judgment and their actions, they may have little understanding of the underlying principles." Pg. 171

"[H]ow we divide an event into pieces depends on our familiarity with the event." pg. 181

"Self-knowledge is a prophylactic." Pg. 183

"Emotions work like well-designed engines, propelling us in different directions depending upon the task at hand...Our emotions are thus biasing agents that work together with our perceptions of planned or perceived action." Pg. 188

"Empathy is...a matching up of emotions in the displayer and observer." Pg. 194

"Disgust carries two other features that make it a particularly effective social emotion: It enjoys a certain level of immunity from conscious reflection, and it is contagious like yawning and laughter." Pg. 198

"Like visual illusions, when our sensory systems detect something disgusting, we avoid it even if we consciously know that this is irrational and absurd. Disgust engages an automated sequence of actions that leads to tactical evasion." Pg. 199

"To engage with any moral dilemma, it is necessary to imagine one world in which an action is take and consequences follow, and a second world, where no action is taken and a different set of consequences follow." Pg. 203

"The capacity to wait, exert patience, and fend off temptation is a core part of the support team associated with our moral faculty." Pg. 214

"The child's genome generaly creates a style of engaging with the world that either internalizes or externalizes actions. Children presenting the internalist signature take greater responsibility for what happens...The signature of an externalist is exactly opposite. When someone offers ice cream, it is because the person offering is nice [rather than the ice cream was deserved]." Pg. 215

"Self-control predicts the tendency to trangress the unstated rule." Pg. 216

"The number of seconds a two-year-old waits is like a crystal ball that predicts her future moral behavior; her ethical style, if you will. Watch how long she delays gratification, and you can extrapolate what she will be like as an adolescent and even a thirtysomething...These studies suggest that impatience or impulsivity on the delayed-gratification task is an excellent predictor of who will trangress the mores of the culture." Pg. 216

"These results show that a child's capacity to wait for something good sets boundaries or constraints on her capacity to be nice to others." Pg. 217

"This variability [between control and impulsivity] doesn't influence our moral judgments, but it does influence our moral behavior." Pg. 218

"Unambiguously, when people confront certain kinds of moral dilemmas, they activate a vast network of brain regions, including areas involved in emotion, decision-making, conflict, social relations, and memory." Pg. 222

"For a full-fledged utilitarian, Frank-on-the-footbridge isn't a moral dilemma at all. There is no conflict (anterior cingulate isn't engaged), no competing duties (no voice from the limbic system), simply one and only one choice: push the heavy man and save five people. Solving Frank's dilemma is like judging whether the inequality 1< 5 is true." Pg. 222-3

"Unambiguously, all of the imaging studies to date show that the areas involved in emotional processing are engaged when we deliver a moral judgment, especially cases that are personally charged." Pg. 223

On the mirror neuron system: "Neurons in the premotor crotex show the same level of activity when the individual reaches for an object as when he watches someone else do the same, or when the individual hears a sound associated with an action or performs the same action himself...[R]ecent studies suggest that part of this system turns on when we directly experience a disgusting event or observe someone else experiencing the disgust, with parallel findings for the experience of pain and empathy toward others in pain." Pg. 224-5

"Patients with damage to the frontal lobes...fail to integrate their emotions into their rational deliberations, [in fact], they appear to operate without ever consulting their emotion." Pg. 227 See Antonio Damasio's tests on "emotional temperature" by reading skin sweat.

"When everything is working properly, our emotions function like hunch generators, a flittering of unconscious expectations that guide long-term decisions." Pg. 228

"If the frontal lobes malfunction, an inappropriate decision is likely to follow due to a general insensitivity to consequences." Pg. 229

"Social conventions are relatively flat emotionally, whereas moral conventions--and especially their trangressions--are emotionally charged." Pg. 238

"This suggests that moral rules consist of two ingredients: a prescriptive theory or body of knowledge about what one ought to do, and an anchoring set of emotions." Pg. 238

"[T]here is evidence that emotions can shift events from conventional to moral." Pg. 240

"[Shaun] Nichols's study raises the interesting possibility that norms acquire their robustness when they are tied to strong emotions. Upholding such norms makes people feel good, while violations make them feel bad, ridden with guild, shame, or embarrassment." Pg. 240e can immediately see why emotions are nature's best strategy for behavioral regulation.]

"Amotz Zahavi argued that signals are honest if and only if they are costly to produce, if the costs are proportional to the signaler's current condition (e.g., the same signal is costlier to produce fro an individual in poor rather than good condition), and if signaling ability is heritable, passed on genetically from parents to offspring." Pg. 247

"Crying, especially with tears, qualifies as a "handicap". It is difficult to produce on command, costly in terms of energy and the blurring of vision, and is the only emotional expression to leave an enduring physical trace after the initial incident." Pg. 247

Quoting Rawls: "Therefore one might conjecture that the capacity to act from the more universal forms of rational benevolence is likely to be eliminated, whereas the capacity to follow the principles of justice and natural duty in relations between groups and individuals other than kin would be favored." Pg. 252

Me: Moralizing the rule of law is an excellent strategy of Ourworld.

"s a species, we are born with two quantificational systems, innate machinery that enables infants to compute small numbers precisely and large numbers approximately." Pg. 256

"Thus, infants discriminated four from eight, and eight from sixteen objects, but not four from six, or eight from twelve." Pg. 256

"The development of a large precise number system does not dependon language in general. It depends on words for numbers specifically." Pg. 257 [Me: if we are interested in more precise constraints, rather than approximate and diverse judgments, where do we look to for "moral words"? Law, in its prescriptive and punishment capacity, gives us the precise normative vocabulary.]

"Results showed that for the individual receiving fewer stickers, even the youngest children immediately stated that the distribution was unfair...For children receiving more stickers, a different pattern of response emerged: they seemed perfectly content with the situation. Of considerable interest, especially in terms of the competence of chldren's intuitions about fairness as opposed to their performance or what they would do if they had been in charge of distribution, is the observation that children raarely gve coherent explanations or justifications." Pg. 258-9

Quoting Richard Alexander: "Indirect reciprocity involves reputation and status, and results in everyone in a social group continually being assesed and reassessed by interactants, past and potential, on the basis of their interactions with others." Pg. 259

"[O]ur moral facultyis sensitive to contingencies, if-then rules, that allow for exceptions to moral rules about what is or isn't forbidden. These competencies emerge early, presumably in every child, and without the help of teachers, parents, and other sages." Pg. 266

"The path from competence--recognizing a trangression--to performance--doing something about it--may not line up as parallel or integrated paths. Other faculties may intervene..." Pg. 269

"Once again, a rigid deontological stance is problematic, because it is sometimes permissible to lie, breaking a promise to keep a secret. The intention of the liar and promise-breaker is essential." Pg. 270 [Me: again, the judgment is of the social value of the agent.]

"Cosmides and Tooby's insight was that our minds evolved the capacity to solve socially relevant problems, such as detecting cheaters who violate rules." Pg. 274

[They] have mounted an impressive amount of evidence to support their claim that problems involving social contracts tap a specialization that is present in all human beings...Social contracts, whether stated over a beer or written in legalese, are commitments. They engage trust. Violating them engages distrust and a cascade of emotions designed to enhance vigilance and catalyze retribution." pg. 276 [Me: trust is a therefore a key indicator of cohesion. How do you augment social trust?]

"Dan Sperber and... Vittorio Girotto argue that people's performance greatly improves when there is some kind of payoff to finding the violation, and where the context's relevance depends on understanding the speaker's intent--what he or she wishes to convey." Pg. 277

"[The] brain is running different reasoning software for social contracts and precautions." Pg. 279

Quoting Dorothy Sayers: "Envy is the great leveler: if it cannot level things up, it will level them down...rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will se us all miserable together." Pg. 282

"Envy is useful, serving a key role in survival, motivating achievement, serving the conscience of self and other, and alterting us to inequities that, if fueled, can lead to escalated violence." Pg. 283

Quoting Shakespeare's Henry VI: "When Envy breeds unkind division, there comes the ruin, there begins confusion." Pg. 283

Quoting Oscar Wilde: "Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."

"[Many] have stressed the importance of emotions in stabilizing cooperative relationships and anchoring commitment. Emotions provide an involuntary mechanism for creating the equivalent of a binding contract." Pg. 285

"Guilt is often triggered when we cheat and recognize the consequences of the act. But guilt may also play a stabilizing role, reversing an instability caused by deception...those who admittedly feel guilty are more likely to cooperate in future rounds [of the ultimatum game]." Pg. 286

"When reciprocity fails or the offer is unfair, imaging studies reveal significant activation of the anterior insula, an address of the brain known to play a role in negative emotions such as pain, distress, anger, and especially disgust. How interesting that cheaters might be considered disgusting. Equally interesting is the fact that wehn subjects engage in altruistic punishment, paying a personal cost in order to impose a larger cost on someone else, the punisher experiences relief and satisfaction, evidenced by activation of the caudate nucleus, a key center for processing rewarding experiences. When we punish, our brains secretly relish the experience." Pg. 287

Quoting Helena Antipoff: "What we have is an affective perception of justice."

"The universal moral grammar is a theory about the suite of principles and parameters that enable humans to build moral systems." Pg. 300

"One signature of an innate faculty is a narrow time window for expressing a skill that is relatively immune to differences in experience." Pg. 303

Quoting Rousseau: "Nature lays her commands on every animal, and the brute obeys her voice. Man receives the same impulsion, but at the same time knows himself at liberty to acquiesce or resist."

"From the gene's-eye view, the way to think about the evolution of moral behavior is to think selfishly." Pg. 311

"Natural selection builds organisms with complex design features based on nonrandom but directionless process." [Me: the non-random comes about because computational prowess is the difference between success and failure.]

"Conflict is associated with stress, reconciliation with the reduction of stress...when conflict is followed by a peace offering, heart rate and cortisol levels drop, as do accompanying behavioral correlates of stress." Pg. 330

References John Conway's program of Life.

"Yawning is generally contagious. But it is really contagious if you have a big heart, unable to turn off your compassion for others." Pg. 352

"We are the only animal that cooperates on a large scale with genetically unrelated individuals and that consistently shows stable reciprocity, exchanging within the same market currencies or different ones." Pg. 378

"By-product mutualism arises when the outcome of an act benefits both participants." Pg. 380 [Me: covalence]

Timing of benefits can be the difference between stable and unstable systems of cooperation.

Quoting Rawls: "Social cooperation is distinct from merely socially coordinated activity--for example, activity coordinated by orders issued by an absolute central authority. Rather, social cooperation is guided by publicly recognized rules and procedures which those cooperating accept as appropriate to regulate their conduct." [Me: coordination speaks to cohesion, while cooperation speaks to covalence.]

"[T]he significant variation between human groups creates an opportunity for group selection." Pg. 416 [me: with the same universal standard of success: relative computational prowess, useful complexity.]

The utilitarian takes as his "central tenet that we evaluate moral dilemmas in terms of consequences." Pg. 418 [Me: In fact, we evaluate moral dilemmas because it's necessary for a social being, who derives evolutionary advantage from group integrity and functionality, to be able to compute the value of agents; moral judgments are our way of branding informative prefixes on agents, agent-types, and meaningful circumstance.]

"The systems that generate intuitive moral judgments are often in conflict with the systems that generate principled reasons for our actions, because the landscape of today only dimly resembles our original state." Pg. 418

Positivism

Richard von Mises, Positivism notes:

"Presumably the reader knows what he would regard as a reasonable or judicious attitude in most situations of life. No doubt a major component of such an attitude is, in the first place, to judge on the grounds of experience, that is, the rememberance of the contingencies of one's own life and the knowledge of those of others. Furthermore, such an attitude requires a continual readiness to give up a judgment once made or to change it if new experiences require. It also implies a lack of prejudice, superstition, obstinacy, blind trust in authority, mystical thinking, fanaticism."

"As a first tentative and quite rough approach to the definition of positivism, we may say that whoever, when confronted with any practical or theoretical problem, acts as we have just described it, is a positivist."

"No procedure based on systematic observations from which conclusions may be drawn is declined to positivism . . . Even less than the method are the subject matter and the aim of research subject to limitations from the standpoint of positivism."

On things antipositivistic: "First of all is the idea that there exists an area of problems in which the intellect is not 'competent,' in which one cannot think or must not think. Next is the conception that there exists a realm of 'truth' which cannot be shaken by any experience, previous or future." [Cf. Wittgenstein: "Things which cannot be said we must pass over in silence."]

"It is the aim of positivistic theory to review and to sum up the stock of experience acquired by men in a uniform picture so that mutually consistent judgments are possible in all situations in life." [Me: Positivism is the correct approach to the intersubjective Weltanschauung, the shared theory of Ourworld.]

"The first and greatest difficulty in striving for reasonable judgments and in constructing a consistent world picture lies in language."

"All school philosophers from Plato through Kant and Hegel to Jusserl and Heidegger have tried to solve the unsolvable problem of deriving a consistent world image by using (and slightly modifying) the stock of ready-made expressions in their language. Present-day logical positivism (which has had rather early predecessors, too) starts from the fact that the 'logic' stored in our language represents a primitive stage of science. The positivist, like everybody else, has to use colloquial language in order to make himself understood; but he uses it critically. He knows that all terms in use are conventions which refer to a limited area of experience and beyond that mean nothing."

"For the positivist, ever word, every phrase, of colloquial language means a dissection of the world into three classes. The first class consists of things or situations to which the word, according to the existing linguistic conventions, applies without any doubt. The second class comprises those things for which the word in question is definitely not meant; and the third is formed by all those phenomena for which the linguistic conventions are not sufficient to enable one to decide whether or not the given expression applies." [Me: Core + Periphery]"

"The metaphysicians attitude toward language is entirely different. He thinks that a word, e.g., the word 'justice,' corresponds, independently of all conventions, to some specific entity, and he seeks to discover this entity, i.e., to find the 'true' and correct definition of justice. To the positivist the question 'What is justice?' can mean only one of two things. Either one wants to find out what in the course of time was denoted by this word within different cultural areas (historical semantics), or one seeks, with a specific aim in mind, to fix a new concept of justice, that is to say, to suggest a new linguistic convention for use within some limited field of action or of science."

"Wittgenstein shows that the theorems of pure mathematics or of logic say absolutely nothing about reality (about the experienceable, observable world), but are, in a specific sense of the word, tautologies . . . Theorems of logic or pure mathematics are said to be 'correct' if they are in agreement with the system of accepted definitions and rules, just as in chess only those moves are accepted which are in accordance with the rules of the game."

"The symbols and transformation rules of logic correspond as an approximation to certain facts and relations of everyday life." [Me: Their appearance of accuracy is scale-dependent. See also "Detection and Emergence": "Emergence can then be defined with respect to the same tools used to define the complexity of a system. It occurs when an object or phenomenon cannot be detected or understood with a given set of tools but can be detected or understood by allowing some additional tools. For some reason (dynamic evolution of the system or changes in the set of observational tools) a new apprehension of the system becomes possible that offers a shorter overall description, and hence a smaller relative complexity. Emergence is thus associated with a decrease of the relative complexity.]

"Our answer to the Kantian problem of epistemology is therefore this: One can construct in many ways tautological systems in which there exist -- according to fixed rules -- absolutely correct statements; but if one wants to state anything about relations between observable phenomena, e.g., in astronomy, then one is subject to control by future experiences. The application of mathematical methods can never guarantee the correctness of a nonmathematical proposition."

"But we [positivists] also observe that metaphysicians make propositions which are framed in such a way that they neither form parts of an established tautological system nor are testable in experience."

"We do not claim that a scientific theory, either in physics, or in economics, or in any other field, is uniquely determined by the observable facts. Theories are inventions, constructions. A theory is useful if it predicts the phenomena correctly. Different theories may make the same predictions with respect to large areas of facts. Under otherwise equal circumstances one will prefer that theory which covers a larger field of phenomena or which from some point of view appears to be 'simpler.'" [me: prefer one whose terms are definitionally connected to all other theories.]

"Experience teaches that all theories are constantly subject to larger or smaller modifications and that, as Ernst Mach expressed it, science consists of a continually progressing adaptation of ideas to facts."

"Since the time of Ernst Mach, natural scientists have known that the explanation or the theory of a group of phenomena is only a description of the facts on a higher level."

"It is always the search for, and the exposition of, typical and recurring elements within the unique course of the world that is the subject of science."

"The aim of intellectual endeavor of man may in the last analysis consist in the attempt to arrive, for all phenomena that are of some interest, at a description that is connectible across the boundaries of all fields . . . In the meantime, the gaps are filled by nonscientific theories, i.e., theories that are not connectible with the language of science. They appear in the form of metaphysics or of religious systems or of poetry."

"If an engineer computes the relation between the dimensions of the girders of a bridge and the load that the bridge can stand, he can phrase the result in the form: The bridge must have these dimensions . . . the connection between statements of fact and the ought-sentences derived from them is evident. We can formulate it thus: Ought-sentences are elliptic statements; they suppress one part of the implication."

"A justification of a prescription can only consist of statements that express the relation between the prescribed conduct and certain consequences . . . no useful purpose is served if one tries to mislead oneself or others about the fact that all moral systems, including their justifications, are creations of the human intellect of a similar kind to scientific theories."

"Positivism does not claim that all questions can be answered rationally, just as medicine is not based on the premise that all diseases are curable, or physics does not start out with the postulate that all phenomena are explicable. But the mere possibility that there may be no answers to some questions is no sufficient reason for not looking for answers or for not using those that are attainable."

Charles Bennett, Definition of Organization and Complexity

Bennett: there is a difference between dissipation (irreversible net increase in entropy) and reversible transfers of entropy.
: "it is usually more practical to stop a moving car with breaks than by saving its kinetic energy in a flywheel."
: Neurons have poor efficiency, dissipating about 10^11 kT per discharge, explained by macroscopic size.
: On the other hand, the molecular apparatus of DNA replication, transcription and protein synthesis, whose components are truly microscopic, has a realatively high energy efficiency, dissipating 20-100 kT per nucleotide or amino acid inserted under physiological conditions.


: In the modern world view, thermodynamic driving forces, such as the temperature difference between the hot sun and the cold night sky, have taken over one of the functions of God: they make matter transcend its clod-like nature and behave instead in dramatic and unforseen ways, for example molding itself into thunderstorms, people, and umbrellas.
: Organization defined as "logical depth", a notion based on algorithmic information and computational time complexity.
: Logical depth is the number of steps in the deductive or causal path connecting a thing with its plausible origin.
: Candidates for definitions of "organization" and "complexity" can be divided into those based on function and those based on structure.


: In spite of the well-known ability of dissipative systems to lower their entropy at the expense of their surroundings, flouting the spirit of the second law while they obey its letter, organization cannot be directly identified with thermodynamic potentials such as entropy or free energy: the human body is intermediate in entropy between a crystal and a gas...
: Subjective organization seems to obey a "slow growth law" which states that, except by a lucky accident, organization cannot increase quickly in any deterministic or probabilistic process, but it can increase slowly...This in turn, means that subjective organization is not additive: 1 bacterium contains much more organization than 0 bacteria, but 2 sibling bacteria contain about the same as 1.
: an object's information content is the number of bits required to specify it uniquely -- as distinction, as a "self-contained unity" (Rosenzweig, pg. 11)
FN (on "The new world Nietzsche unlocked to reason, beyond the orbit described by ethics."): "Now a self-contained unity rebelled against this totality which encloses the All as a unity, and extorted its withdrawal as a singularity, as the singular life of the singular person. The All can thus no longer claim to be all: it has forfeited its uniqueness." Pg. 11
FN (Lebensanschauung vs. Weltanschauung): "One must acknowledge the otherworldliness of the new inquiry as against everything which the concept of ethics hitherto solely meant and solely was meant to mean, the more so if one wants the spiritual achievement of the past to count for everything which it accomplishd rather than to destroy it in a riot of blind destructiveness. A way of looking at life (Lebensanschauung) confronts a way of looking at the world (Weltanschauung). Ethics is and remains a part of the Weltanschauung. Its special relationship with a life-focused point of view is only that of a particularly intimate contradiction, just because both seem to touch each other, indeed repeatedly claim mutually to solve the problems of the other together with their own. It remains to be shown in what sense this is actually the case. But the contrast of the life-centered and the world-centered points of view comes down so sharply to a contrast with the ethical portion of the world-centered view that one is inclined to designate questions of the life view as veritably meta-ethical." pg. 11
[Me: Lebensanschauung = Myworld, Weltanschauung = Ourworld]

Rosenzweig, Introduction to Star of Redemption

Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, Translated by William Hallo.

"Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting, and Hades of its pestilential breath." p.3
Me: Philosophy seeks to find, perceive, conceive something, anything, eternal; something immutable, immovable, unassailable. It then seeks to unconceal our relationship to this eternality, and, belatedly, my relationship to it and to us. Philosophy seeks a cosmically atomic aletheia. Whether this "bears us over the grave which yawns at our feet with every step" is besides the point, a secondary effect, a consequence, if that, of the search for safe harbor and dry land -- i.e., the search for certainty.

"Let man creep like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the fast approaching volleys of a blind death from which there is no appeal; let him sense there, forcibly, inexorably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would be but an It if it died; let him therefore cry his very I out with every cry that is still in his throat against Him from whom there is no appeal, from whom such unthinkable annihilation threatens -- for all this dire necessity philosophy has only its vacuous smile." p. 3
Me: True. Philosophy's embarrassment is that it can do nothing to alleviate the fact and fear of my ultimate annihilation; the fact and fear of eternal Nothingness before and after, of noise and noiselessness, of life well- or ill-spent but spent, of presence dissipating and diluting into past, to be ultimately lost and forgotten by a mindless, purposeless, unavailing and unobliging universe.

"For man does not really want to escape any kind of fetters; he wants to remain, he wants to -- live." p. 3

"It is presumably necessary for man to disengage once in his life. Like Faust, he must for once bring the precious vial down with reverence; he must for once have felt himself in his fearful poverty, loneliness, and dissociation from all the world, have stood a whole night face to face with the Nought." p. 4

"A way out of the bottleneck of the Nought has been determined for him, another way than this precipitate fall into the yawning abyss. Man is not to throw off the fear of the earthly; he is to remain in the fear of death -- but he is to remain." p. 4

"He is to remain. He shall do none other than what he already wills: to remain. The terror of the earthly is to be taken from him only with the earthly itself." p. 4
Me: A poor trade only if there is more to life than terror and pain.

"Only the singular can die and everything mortal is solitary. Philosophy has to rid the world of what is singular, and this undoing of the Aught is also the reason why it has to be idealistic...And it is the ultimate conclusion of this doctrine that death is -- Nought. But in truth this is no ultimate conclusion, but a first beginning, and truthfully death is not what it seems, not Nought, but a something from which there is no appeal, which is not to be done away with. Its hard summons sounds unbroken even out of the mist with which philosophy envelops it...And man's terror as he trembles before this sting ever condemns the compassionate lie of philosophy as cruel lying." p. 4-5

"Philosophy plugs up its ears before the cry of terrorized humanity. Were it otherwise, it would have to start from the premise, the conscious premise, that the Nought of death is an Aught, that the Nought of every new death is a new Aught, ever newly fearsome, which neither talk nor silence can dispose of. It would need the courage to listen to the cry of mortal terror and not to shut its eyes to gruesome reality...A thousand deaths stand in the somber background of the world as its inexhaustible premise..." p. 5

"We want no philosophy which joins death's retinue and deceives and diverts us about its enduring sovereignty by the one-and-all music of its dance. We want no deception at all." p. 5

On Kierkegaard: "This consciousness neither needed a blending into the cosmos nor admitted of it, for even if everything about it could be translated into universal terms, there remained the being saddled with first and last name, with what was his own in the strictest and narrowest sense of the word. And this 'own' was just what mattered, as the bearers of such experience asserted." p. 7
Me: What do I care if my 'energy' rejoins some cosmic stream? Or if my 'soul' gets reincarnated memorylessly. The silt, the 'detritus' left behind, will be "me", will be just what mattered to me.

"Schopenhauer was the first of the great thinkers to inquire, not into the essence but into the value of the world...This man no longer philosophized in the context of, and so to say as if commissioned by, the history of philosophy, nor as heir to whatever might be the current status of its problems, but 'had taken it upon himself to reflect on life' because it -- life -- 'is a precarious matter.' ... He declares the content of philosophy to be the idea with which an individual mind reacts to the impression which the world has made on him....Man, 'life,' had become the problem, and he had 'taken it upon himself' to solve it in the form of philosophy." p. 8

On Nietzsche: "Poets had always dealt with life and their own souls. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived life and for their own soul. But again -- not the philosophers. Here, however, was one man who knew his own life and his own soul like a poet, and obeyed their voice like a holy man, and who was for all that a philosopher." p. 9
Me: A pointed, and almost certainly intended, irony; Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo, "I have a terrible fear that some day one will pronounce me holy."

More: "For the great thinkers of the past, the soul had been allowed to play the role of, say, wet nurse, or at any rate of tutor of Mind. But one day the pupil grew up and went his own way, enjoying his freedom and unlimited prospects. He recalled the four narrow walls in which he had grown up only with horror. Thus mind enjoyed precisely its being free of the soulful dullness in whch nonmind spends its day...For Nietzsche this dichotomy between height and plain did not exist in his own self: he was of a piece, soul and mind a unity, man and thinker a unity to the last." p. 9

"Philosophy ceased to be a negligible quantity for his philosophy. Philosophy had promised to give him compensation in the form of mind in return for selling it his soul, and he no longer took this compensation seriously. Man as philosophizer had become master of philosophy...philosophy had to acknowledge him, acknowledge him as something which it could not comprehend but which, because powerful over against it, it could not deny. Man in the utter singularity of his individuality, in his prosopographically determined being, stepped out of the world which knew itself as the conceivable world, out of the All of philosophy." p. 10
Me: Heidegger, in his lecture "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics", writes: "Insofar as a thinker sets out to experience the ground of metaphysics...his thinking has in a sense left metaphysics. From the point of view of metaphysics, such thinking goes back into the ground of metaphysics. But what still appears as ground from this point of view is presumably something else, once it is experienced in its own terms -- something as yet unsaid, according to which the essence of metaphysics, too, is something else and not metaphysics."
Me: This relates to Godel's essay "What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem?", where he writes: "But despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense percpetion, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them." This is a weak claim; there is no reason why we should have "less" confidence, rather than the strong claim that confidence in either is justified by and after a finer-grained resolution of the problem.
Me: Thus, underlying the systematic reasoning of Heidegger's animal rationale (which is inseparable in fact from the animal metaphysicum) are truths that can only be intuited, perceived, experienced as truths which force themselves upon us; logically ineffable, formally irreducible, describable only indirectly, metaphorically, sensationally, if at all.
Me: This also tracks Quine and his "blending of analytic and synthetic, empirical and metaphysical [intuitional] knowledge" into a type of epistemic pragmatism. As Godel writes:
"Evidently, the 'given' underlying mathematics is closely related to the abstract elements contained in our empirical ideas (e.g., the idea of object itself). It by no means follows, however, that the data of this second kind, because they cannot be associated with actions of certain things upon our sense organs, are something purely subjective, as Kant asserted. Rather they, too, may represent an aspect of objective reality, but, as opposed to the sensations, their presence may be due to another kind of relationship between ourselves and reality."

"One has always realized the 'contingency of the world,' its state of 'that's the way it is.' But the point is that this contingency had to be mastered. In fact, this was precisely the function of philosophy. In the process of being thought about, the contingent changes itself into something necessary...There is, to put it very crudely, a nonidentity of being and reasoning which has to show itself in being and reasoning themselves. It cannot be harmonized by a third party, will, stepping in as a deus ex machina which is neither being nor reasoning." p. 12

"Reason is entitled to a home in the world, but the world is just that: a home; it is not totality...Thus the world is beyond as against what is intrinsically logical, as against unity. The world is not alogical; on the contrary, logic is an essential component of the world, rather literally, as we shall see, its 'essential' component. It is not alogical, but, to use the term coined by Ehrenberg, metalogical." p. 13-14

"For the world, truth is not law but content. It is not that truth validates [bewahrt] reality, but reality preserves [bewahrt] truth. The essence of the world is this preservation (not validation) of truth. "Outwardly" the world thus lacks the protection which truth had accorded to the All from Parmenides to Hegel. Since it shelters its truth in its lap, it does not present such a Gorgon's shield of untouchability to the outside. It has to expose its body to whatever may have happened to it, even if that should be its--creation. Yes, we might well grasp the concept of the world in this new metalogical sense rather completely if we would venture to address the world as creature." p.14-15

"Logic and ethics had once, it seemed, been locked in ceaseless combat for pre-eminence: metalogic, however, left room beside itself for metaethics. The world as a multiplicity united into an individual unicum and man, by nature an individual unicum, now confronted each other and they could breathe side by side." p.15

"Metaethical man is the leaven which causes the logico-physical unity of the cosmos to fall apart into the metalogical world and the metaphysical God." p.16: The science of God is called metaphysics.

"That the metalogical concept of the world succumbed to, say, confusion with the concept of nature was equally unavoidable...For if metaethical man, in spite of that designation, could be equated with the moral personality, then there remained for the metalogical cosmos only the equation with the critical concept of nature." p.16

"We sought to distinguish...our concept of the world from the critical concept of nature...[encompassing] on principle all the possible contents of a philosophical system, provided only they meet one condition: they are to appear as elements not of 'the' but only of 'an' All." p.17

"The metaethical in man makes man the free master of his ethos so that he might possess it and not vice versa. The metalogical in the world makes the logos a 'component' of the world entirely emptied into the world, so that it might possess the logos and not vice versa. Just so, the metaphysical in God makes physis a 'component' of God." p.17

"Philosophy fed theology on the identity of reasoning and being as a nurse might prop a pacifier into the mouth of a babe to keep him from crying." p.17

"The history of philosophy had not yet beheld an atheism like Nietzsche's. Nietzsche may not negate God, but he is the first thinker who, in the theological sense of the word, vey definitely 'denies' him or who, more precisely still, curses him. For that famous proposition: 'If God existed, how could I bear not to be God?' is as mighty a curse as the curse with which Kierkegaard's experience of God began. Never before had a philosopher thus stood, as it were, eye to eye before the living God." p.18

"Plato already discovered that mathematics does not lead beyond the Aught and the any; it does not touch the real itself, the chaos of This. At most it touches upon it...This thus-far-and-no-further was already ordained for mathematics at its birth." p.20

"The differential combines in itself the characteristics of the Nought and the Aught. It is a Nought which points to an Aught, its Aught; at the same time it is an Aught that still slumbers in the lap of the Nought. It is on the one hand the dimension as this loses itself in the immeasurable, and then again it borrows, as the 'infinitesimal,' all the characteristics of finite magnitude with the sole exception of finite magnitude itself...Thus it draws its power to establish reality on the one hand from the forcible negation with which it breaks the lap of the Nought, and on the other hand equally from the calm affirmation of whatever borders on the Nought to which, as itself infinitesimal, it still and all remains attached." p.20-21

"Thus it opens two paths from the Nought to the Aught -- the path of affirmation of what is not Nought, and the path of the negation of the Nought. Mathematics is the guide for the sake of these two paths. It teaches us to recognize the origin of the Aught in the Nought." p.21

"[Kant] undermined those three 'rational' sciences with which he was confronted without himself by any means returning from this undermining to a one-and-universal despair over cognition. Rather he ventured on the great step -- albeit hesitantly -- and formulated the Nought of knowledge as no longer uniform but triform. At the very least, two discrete Noughts of knowledge are designated by the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich and the 'intelligible character,' the metalogical and the metaethical in our terminology. And the dark terms in which he occasionally speaks of the mysterious 'root' of both are presumably attempts to grope for a fixed point for the metaphysical Nought of knowledge too." p.21
Me: The "intelligible character" is the open ended set of possible meanings each "thing-in-itself" might register on an observer.

"The Nought of our knowledge is not a simple but a triple Nought. Thereby it contains within itself the promise of definability." p.22
Me: Algorithms, via reification, compartmentalization and logical operation, elide these three fundamental Noughts in favor of threshold functionality, in favor, i.e., of technique.

Iran

On the idea of bombing Iran to stop them from acquiring nuclear weapons:

One of the most elusive questions in global strategy is "How far into the future should we look?" 1 year, 5 years, 20 years...100 years? Surely not 1000, and surely not 1 month.

Of course, limits in knowledge cause uncertainty to exponentially increase as you broaden your sights; thus, a more closely circumscribed strategy is oftentimes most practical. And yet, overall advantage accrues to the player whose paradigm enables over-the-horizon clarity in vision. A player who can accurately foresee the probability matrices that define the future is best positioned to make correct decisions now, so long as his topographical understanding of the causal landscape is relatively precise. If, somehow, one is lucky enough to understand the world well enough to forecast beyond the capacity of one's opponents, all one needs to win THE GAME are a set of fundamental, clearly defined objectives and a compass.

One way of describing a 5 year strategic window is "modesty in the face of an uncertain world." The idea here is to hedge against marginal risks, husband resources, and pursue near-term objectives that, because our sight is diminished, must be defined as "goods-in-themselves." Let me give an example of how this might shake out. A pinched strategic window led us to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan by proxy. Had we, in 1979, had a 25 year understanding of the world thereafter, we might have thought twice about coopting jihad to accomplish our near-term goal. Afghanistan was probably going to be a poisoned pill for the Soviets no matter what we did. Perhaps, then, we should have abstained from shoving jihad into modernity. Maybe we could have avoided 9/11 and all this mess after.

Or maybe not. I suppose the point is that there are always externalities, unknown unknowns, that, given enough time, can mature into substantial system deviations. Any big move in a complex system is dangerous, especially a big move without a powerful flashlight to point into the darkness of the future. The upshot is that you may eliminate the near-term problem only to find yourself drowning in a causal riptide later on -- a causal riptide of your own making.

What I find increasingly frustrating is the refusal of both sides of the "war on terror" debate to contemplate past the near-term in their analyses. One side sees War With Iran as Justice, forgetting that in this GAME the moral instinct can oftentimes lead astray. Another side, overlapping but not coextensive with the first, sees Precluding Iranian Nukes as a good-in-itself, or, alternatively, as a means to an end which is a good-in-itself. The cadres of the Left have even less-well-supported positions, and equally large blind-spots.

Overall Objectives: Preconditions of Strategy

Question: What should our goals be as individuals, as groups, as nations and as human beings?

Short Answer: Our goals toward which we strive should be 1) indefinite survival (robustness vis-a-vis the set of all possible environments, fecundity, adaptability, etc.), 2) optimal independence (in action and from fate), 3) prosperity on these terms (vitality, health), and 4) happiness in the world (too complicated to define here).

As with a journey -- which is not an inapt way of describing it -- the better you understand the landscape the more likely you are to reach your destination. Whereas on a real journey we have useful metrics to describe the realities we might face -- time and space measures, caloric intake, etc. -- we seem to be at a loss when it comes to describing the human landscape. Because we don't have the measurements, we oftentimes can't discern a mountain from a hill, or a stream from an ocean. Thus we sometimes find ourselves climbing the highest peaks or wading across bottomless seas, when a better topographical map would have steered us toward more modest inclines and shallower waters. A good example of this is, perhaps, Iraq. Like the Mongol fleets in 1274 and 1281, we set sail in Iraq unaware of the stormy chaos brewing over the horizon. Unlike the Mongols, we may still make it across. However, if we do succeed in making it to the other side it's only because of the ingenuity, tenacity and honor of the American military -- a deus ex machina our politicians won't deserve, a lifeline on which we can't always depend.

And now we have Iran, and you have an opinion. Therefore, I need to ask:

1) How well do you understand the landscape?

2) What happens to the ecosystem of states when the dominant player eschews all fig leaves which give modesty to power -- not once, but twice. How might that change the behaviors of the other players? What kind of nested feedback mechanisms will activate in response to the centrifugal actions of the hyperpower, and how will these emergent dynamics affect the pursuit of our Overall Strategic Objectives?

3) Are there not easier paths through the mountains? Knowing everything there is to know about how humans process information in general, knowing everything we know about how specific groups process the world in particular, mightn't there be a more elegant way to overcome obstacles when they arise?

4) What incentive structures might emerge if we do nothing? What incentive structures might emerge if we do something?

5) How accurate is our understanding of the Set of Plausible Alternatives? How comprehensive is our Set of Possible Consequences, how well do we understand their probabilities, etc.?

6) How much do you trust our leaders to carry out Big Moves in the complex world of geo-political strategy?

7) Where should our red-lines be?

8) Are we ever going to be able to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle?

9) If not, how do we work toward the softest landing possible? What will that look like?

A collection of quotes to think about:

"The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed." Gibbon, Decline and Fall...

"Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude." Id.

"[In biology] you can look at a signal and infer its honesty based on the cost of expression." Marc Hauser, Harvard.

"Fools! They know not how much more the half is than the whole, nor what great advantage there is in mallow and asphodel." Hesiod, Works and Days.

"The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others'. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more." T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

"As one commentator has observed, 'Certainly had Saddam Hussein been possessed of a working nuclear arsenal, the United States would have been far less willing to station half a million troops, a sizable fraction of its air forces, and a large naval armada within easy reach of Iraq's borders,' an observation that will not be lost on most world leaders. The consequence of this development for the projection of conventional forces is profound. It's not so much that nuclear weapons render the promise of security to the citizens of the nation-state unbelievable per se; rather it is that only the possession of weapons of mass-destruction can hope to validate that promise, with the unavoidable result that no nation-state can afford to be without the protection of such weapons, because their conventional forces are utterly vulnerable to threats from the states that do possess these weapons. With the Long War ended, once the nuclear umbrella of the United States ceases to be extended to cover Japan, Germany, and other states against attack, the drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction will become irresistible." Philip Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles.

"Law develops out of society's need to minimize the collateral consequences of taking revenge." Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Pensees

Observation: had we deposited knowledgeable "advisor units", who spoke Arabic, along the way into Baghdad during Op I.F. -- while increasing our routes of entry by an order of magnitude -- we would have gained the optimal {space-time-notional} position to see our objectives reached once the next phase materialized.

(Also: had that really been "our next-phase plan", Turkey's back-stab would have been particularly insufferable).

For instance, watch On Demand, Military Channel: Delta Company, first episode (attack into Iraq from Kuwait). See how limited our push was, how much better it would have been had we had Petraeus's plan back then, and the soldiers to see it done.

(Note: I think we should also demand to define the term 'population protection. It should be defined as an adequate force with which to consistently, knowledgeably enforce the principles of objective justice (which is an entropy-lowering psychological point), and by 'objective justice' I mean an attractor of local equilibrium, which is a more complicated point.)

The Abbreviated Version: we should devote an awful lot of energy to trumpeting the following idea:

With 20/20 hindsight, this was the best available Pre-War Strategy, with which to accomplish our goals (which were worthy of us). This was the best way to pacify, persuade, and evolve Iraqi "culture" toward something resembling a stable lowercase-s state.