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Letters
Letters
Humane Responses • A Journey Around Tallis • Capital in the Capitol • Caves, Chambers & Bubbles • Poet’s Corner
Humane Responses
Dear Editor: In response to James R. Robinson’s ‘Empathy & Sympathy’ in Issue 167, I contend that empathy is essential to a moral philosophy, both in theory and practice. For example, it’s implicit in Confucius’s rule of reciprocity, “Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself” and Jesus’s Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you’d have them do to you.” Empathy is a requisite for the implementation of either. And as both a reader and writer of fiction, I know that stories wouldn’t work without empathy. Indeed, one study revealed that reading fiction improves empathy. The tests used ‘letter box’ photos of eyes to assess the subject’s ability to read the emotion of the characters behind the eyes (New Scientist, 25 June 2008).
The dependency between empathy and sympathy is implicit in the examples Robinson provides, like the parent picking up another parent’s child from school out of empathy for the person making the request. In most of these cases there is also the implicit understanding that the favour would be returned if the boot were on the other foot. Having said that, many of us perform small favours for strangers, knowing that one day we could be the stranger.
Robinson also introduces another term, ‘passions’; but based on the examples he gives – like pain – I would call them ‘sensations’ or ‘sensory responses’. Even anger is invariably a response to something. Fiction can also create sensory responses (or passions) of all varieties (except maybe physical pain, hunger, or thirst) – which suggests empathy might play a role there as well. In other words, we can feel someone else’s emotional pain, not to mention anger, or resentment, even if the person we’re empathising with is fictional.
The opposite to compassion is surely cruelty. We have world leaders who indulge in cruelty quite openly, which suggests it’s not an impediment to success, but which also suggests that there’s a cultural element that allows it. Our ability to demonise an outgroup is the cause of most political iniquities we witness, and this would require the conscious denial of sympathy and therefore empathy, because ultimately, it requires treating them as less than human, or as not-one-of-us.
Paul P. Mealing, Melbourne
Dear Editor: A dialogue on empathy:
Elon Musk: “ The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Hannah Arendt: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
Dennis Palumbo, Sherman Oaks, California
Dear Editor: While I seriously doubt there are many people in the PN crowd who would unleash the Kraken on Creigan for his ‘Hope: Blessing or Curse’ in Issue 167, surely there are many out there who would assume that, despite Creigan’s reservations, hope is the only option, and that capitulation to doubt is a surrender to failure, and, therefore, a flaw of character. But yeah, Creigan is right that hope can be an alibi for inaction. It can be even more insidious – oppressive, cruel even. and at its worse, it can be self-destructive. It can be oppressive by making any bad situation, such as that of poor people living in inner cities or developing countries, seem like it can only be the result of their negative attitudes towards producer/consumer capitalism (think the prosperity gospel of Joel Olstein). It gets cruel when, as Barbara Ehrenreich points out in Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, women with breast cancer are trying to explain their struggles and are dismissed with “Well… maybe you’re not being positive enough.” Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014) points to the self-destructive denial at work in hopes of a technology that will magically fix the climate problem, or that Jesus will take the good people away in the Rapture before the consequences of their overconsumption come through.
But let’s not succumb to hopelessness. That only lands us with either the impotence of conceding to bad outcomes (‘Climate change has always occurred and there’s nothing we can do about it anyway’), or the more aggressive approach, that, based on the notion that all politicians are corrupt, leads to a call to tear the whole thing down. It’s always a mixed package, and we need to treat it so, just as Creigan suggests. Sentimentality isn’t just about big-eyed puppies and children, or Helen Rice Steiner’s poetry (an expression of hope); it’s about anything that elicits a response it fails to justify. As Tennyson noted: distrust any poem that blackens the eyes or holds out its lips to be kissed. Our only hope is the sophistication of embracing complexity and nuance.
D.E. Tarkington, Nebraska
A Journey Around Tallis
Dear Editor: I’d drafted a review of Tallis’s new book before I saw your review in PN 167. You may feel another review is not appropriate, but here it is anyway for your consideration:
Prague 22 is remarkable. Not only could I not put it down till I finished it, I immediately began a re-read. It seems to turn the brain into a sort of squeeze-box from which emanate thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and memories in a myriad of combinations, molding the self into a series of dynamic sizes, shapes, and textures in a kaleidoscope of moving colour, with sound of continuing change in pitch, intensity, and harmony! I have never before felt as if I was travelling inside someone else – and not a stranger, but a friend of fairly long acquaintance, with whom I have shared interactions in the past. It’s a journey of exploration, not only of the city of Prague (of which I have fond memories), but of the organic nature of consciousness, perception, and emotion, and it blends the present with the past, and reveals the many ways in which we construct reality and wrestle with the environment and our place in it. The journey is jerky, with its changes in focus and ranges of associations and experience of the host’s many facets and reflections, glimpses of the environment, its inhabitants and their activities, ranging from the capturing of inspiring images, both historical and immediate, and is sprinkled with repeated concerns regarding graffiti, the Zizkov TV tower, and the significance of the lower sphincter and its products (which would keep a psychoanalyst in pocket for a year or two).
In conclusion, although it is difficult knowing where best to place Prague 22 in one’s library, it is an outstanding illustration of existential philosophy as a lived human experience of the world around us, and how we construct it.
Chris J. Main, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology, Keele Uni
Dear Editor: In PN 167, Raymond Tallis remains flummoxed about the ‘mind-brain identity thesis’. Perhaps an analogy will help. Consider these two facts: (1) Put an apple in a bowl already containing one apple, and it will contain two apples. (2) Add one to one and we get two. Is there an ‘identity’ between these facts? In other words, are they really the same fact? There is clearly a close connection between them, as the truth of the first can be predicted from the truth of the second. And yet their subject matters are utterly unalike. In particular, the first is a material, empirically verifiable fact, while the second is an abstract fact deducible from axioms. So it is better to say that (1) and (2) are congruent facts but exemplify different kinds of reality. Likewise, mind-facts and brain-facts can be congruent while being facts in different ways.
How could this happen? One promising approach is explained by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring: that our brains contain two linked but quite different structures capable of modelling aspects of the world that have evolved at different times for different purposes. The evolutionarily much older structure is based around our brain-stem, and models our relationship to our immediate environment, originally in order to identify threats and opportunities. It is thus a model intrinsically oriented to the ‘self’, and gives rise to ‘feelings’. The newer modelling structure, our cortex or grey matter, models everything we have learnt as a huge mesh of associations, in order to be able to make and share predictions about what will or could happen. It’s what gives rise to ‘thinking’.
So is consciousness founded on ‘feeling’, as Solms, Damasio, and a few others claim, or on ‘thinking’, as most investigators, such as Tonini, seem to assume? It seems more useful to me to identify consciousness with the interaction of feeling and thinking, and hence arising from a sort of constant dialogue between the two modelling regions of the brain.
On this account, ‘brain’ facts are examples of facts registered by our grey matter, and are understood by being incorporated in its mesh of associations. By contrast, ‘mind’ facts are incommunicable, but directly registered by our brain-stem before they can be reflected upon or classified by our grey matter.
Roger S. Haines, Ealing, London
Dear Editor: I always enjoy reading Raymond Tallis. However, his article in 167 worries me. When the answer to a philosophical question contains a contradiction, it usually means that the question is meaningless or inappropriate.
Tallis acknowledges that “consciousness is, or seems to be, fundamentally different from the activity of the brain.” He then raises the question of how to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable facts: that brain activity is a necessary condition for consciousness; and that brain activity is totally different from consciousness. He also asks, how do we explain the difference between the material object that is the cerebral cortex being conscious, and other material objects, such as stones, acorns, or the cerebellum, being nonconscious?
The answer is that the material brain itself is not conscious. Brain activity belongs to the material world; but consciousness is specific to human beings and conscious animals. Psychological powers such as perceiving, thinking, feeling, planning, and intending, are attributes of human beings, not of their brains. It makes no sense to replace those psychological explanations with neurological explanations. Our brains aren’t conscious, we are. Ludwig Wittgenstein averred that “Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it sees, is blind; is conscious or unconscious.”
Human beings and conscious animals depend on psychological and environmental factors, and are not defined by brain activity, even though it may be necessary for consciousness. Mental states are instead essentially relational and world-involving. It makes no sense to locate them anywhere, but even more so within the skull, as much of our thinking spreads into our social and physical surroundings, and is engaged in experiences outside our bodies. What makes our experiences the kind they are is not neural activity by itself, then, but its dynamic interaction with our external world.
Dr Lucien Karhausen, Bruxelles
Dear Editor: Raymond Tallis’s column in Issue 166 about how lucky he feels to be alive in this world is honest, sincere, and thoughtful. The luck he feels is our sense of the ‘accidental’ nature of our existence, leaping out of nowhere, as it were. More generally, we might call it a sense of awe and wonder. Many do.
To his credit, Tallis does not explain away our ‘luck’ by attributing some external higher purpose to our existence. Thrown back on his own resources to explain the ‘meta-fact’ of the contingency of his existence: “the luck of being at all that is a condition of having good or bad luck,” he integrates into this an acknowledgement that he has been gifted with an ‘absurdly privileged’ – existentially lucky – life. It is also to his credit that he concludes his column expressing gratitude. That being said, we are tempted to yell, “It’s not enough, Raymond!” Beyond his secular perspective on things, we might say that Tallis is ‘thanking the gods’ for his absurdly privileged life. Who else is there to thank?
Perhaps we do not ‘create’ our own luck, but perhaps we do ‘act out’ our luck. Our ‘absurd privilege’ might be to be an active part of the world, an active component, rather than to be an uncommitted calculator trying to account for the unaccountability of our life.
W. Faulkner, Diamond Valley, Alberta
Capital in the Capitol
Dear Editor: I was disappointed to find that Stephen Martin Fritz and Denise Morel’s examination of the roots of democracy in Issue 166 was really an apology for laissez-faire capitalism. But while capitalism has proven to be compatible with democratic government, and may have helped in some cases to bring it about, allowing our Carnegies and Fords to do exactly what they want has not, in fact, guaranteed ever-increasing wealth, health, independence and security for all. Moreover, the global warming crisis demonstrates the need for governments to regulate the actions of corporations when they are opposed to the public interest.
As a Canadian, I couldn’t help but laugh at one of Fritz and Morel’s more outlandish assertions. They claim that because Americans are ten percent richer than Canadians, they have more choices than Canadians. In fact, Americans need to be richer than Canadians, because they don’t have a comparable government-funded health care system. An American who can’t afford medical care can ‘decide’ not to go to the doctor because they can’t afford it; but is that a free choice?
Peter MacCallum, Toronto
Dear Editor: In Issue 166, Fritz and Morel provide a thorough, practical, and reasonable defense of the fundamental need for free trade and free exchange of ideas within a functioning democracy. They emphasize that what matters more than a broadly educated populace is how easily each person can specialize in trade with others. This is a refreshing, non-partisan take on the current state of democracy in a time of such division, where we are seemingly unable to come together to hear each other’s perspectives. In particular, their concluding paragraph on how democracies die (or rather, are murdered) contains an important line: democracies “are strangled when society changes its focus from production and trade in peace and prosperity to endless war and the redirection of industry to socially-destructive ends.” A timely statement indeed, and something we must not lose sight of in the coming years.
Christina Leach, Alberta, Canada
Dear Editor: I found Fritz and Morel’s article ‘The Material Creation of Freedom’ elucidating precisely because of the emphasis that’s indicated by the title. Their understanding that “the expansion of commerce alters the relations among citizens, and shapes them to match the psychology of the shopkeeper”, and that the tolerance thus engendered by commerce brings choice and possibilities of social mobility in its wake rings true. Nevertheless, I was reminded that freedom bestowed from above can easily morph into freedom allowed, and that even in democratic societies, freedom allowed may not be freedom at all.
Over a hundred years ago John Dewey noted that within any hierarchical society those who exercise power encourage thoughtless routine in others and only “subsidize such thought and learning as are kept remote from affairs.” By praising subjection while reframing it as loyalty, they aim to maintain a status quo while “denouncing as subversive anarchy signs of independent thought.” According to Dewey, societal renewal – “breaking down old rigidities of habit and preparing the way for acts that re-create an environment” – depends on “the personal subjective aspect of morality” evident in resistance to these procrustean forces. Such ‘bottom up’ freedom is much closer to seeing the emperor naked than taking advantage of choices allowed by rulers. It must be worth adverting to in a society such as ours, which not only anaesthetizes discontent, but has an economy dependant on doing just that.
Andrew Perkis
Caves, Chambers & Bubbles
Dear Editor: Sean Radcliffe (PN 165) correctly points out similarities between the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic and social media echo chambers. However, not everything that is similar to an echo chamber is an echo chamber. So as well as internet echo chambers there are what C. Thi Nguyen calls ‘epistemic bubbles’ (in for example, Episteme, 2020), and what Eli Pariser called ‘filter bubbles’ (in for example, The Filter Bubble, 2011). According to Nguyen, an epistemic bubble is what happens when insiders aren’t exposed to people from the opposite side, while an echo chamber is what you get when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside.
A filter bubble is a special type of epistemic bubble. According to Nguyen, you are in a filter bubble when you’re there not as a result of your own decision but a decision by something else. An obvious example of this something else is an algorithm that determines the information sources you’re provided with.
Since the individuals in Plato’s cave are not there by choice, they might be in a filter-type epistemic bubble, or nonvoluntarily in an echo chamber. Which is it? For most of Plato’s description of the cave, it sounds like they’re not in an echo chamber but an epistemic bubble, as they aren’t directly exposed to anyone or anything outside the cave. But what happens at the end of his account perhaps means they’re better counted as being in an echo chamber: One of individuals trapped in the cave escapes, is exposed to the world outside, changes all his beliefs, and then returns to the cave to tell those still in the cave about it. They completely distrust what they’re told.
What difference does the label ‘epistemic bubble’ or ‘echo chamber’ make for the cave situation? Nguyen says that the difference matters when it comes to getting people out. Individuals trapped in an epistemic bubble can get out of it by exposure to people from the opposite side. So if the cave story describes an epistemic bubble, those left in the cave should have been able to get out by being exposed to what the person who left the cave had to say. But for those caught in an echo chamber, something more dramatic is needed – an epistemic reset or reboot to factory settings of the kind that Descartes says he performed in Meditations on First Philosophy. Those left in the cave can only escape by each and every one of them somehow doing the same thing as the individual who escaped and revised all of his ideas about reality.
Leslie Burkholder, Vancouver BC
Poet’s Corner
Existential Food
Jean-Paul Sartre’s morning tea
Pain au raisin d’etre.
Epistemology
We argue with premises stated
That can be agreed or updated;
Deductive conclusions will always look fine,
While inductive samples don’t always align.
Mathematics was totally sorted by Frege –
Helping Bertrand by making the numbers less vaguer.
But for absolute knowledge we really can’t beat
The wisdom of WhatsApp, dark web at our feet.
Stephen Timperley, Carterton, New Zealand