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Open Letter From A Simple Greek • UninFORMative? • Thought For Food • Wake Up, Beam Up • Dimensions of Reference • Believing, Not Believing, Believing Not • Intrinsically Valuable Letter • A Philosophical Joke

Open Letter From A Simple Greek

Dear Editor: When I was younger, I wanted to travel everywhere. I looked at the stars and I even wanted to visit them. One day I opened a map and put red flags on all the places I wanted to see. People from all around the world were visiting Greece yet I was leaving. Everyone wanted to feel our sun, to swim in our seas, but I had them all the time, so I wanted to see anything else.

Everywhere, when they heard that I was Greek, everyone wanted to talk with me about our ancient civilization, about the Acropolis, and about democracy, but I grew up with this history, so I wanted to meet other worlds, other cultures and new countries. I wanted to know their own stories and not to listen to ours repeated. I wondered why they found our story so interesting; I was getting bored hearing it all the time.

As the years went by I gradually removed the flags and marked the destinations I’d been to with an X – red if it was interesting, yellow if it was boring, and black if it was a horrible place. But there was one country in the world that I hadn’t put any little flags on, and this was my country, Hellas – Greece.

One morning I decided to take a walk in downtown Athens; I couldn’t remember how many years it had been since I had done that. As usual a big sun was in our blue sky; simple old sunny Greece. For a while I walked the streets of Plaka, ascended to the Acropolis and wandered through the old city, but nobody I saw was smiling. The streets that were once full of life, were now empty or full of foreigners, the main shopping streets filled with padlocked stores like ghosts of another era, I looked around me and I wondered, “Am I in Athens?… this isn’t the Athens I knew.” But I was definitely in Athens.

The next day I decided to go to Piraeus, our beautiful port, but I found desperate people coming and going, closed shops and chaos prevailing. I asked a passerby what was happening, but he replied in a language that I didn’t understand. In a café nearby, I learned that a Chinese company had taken a piece of our harbor – in exchange for something of course, but for what? Nobody knew; they had been told that it was for a development, but there was no sign of it.

I went home and looked at my map… I took all the little flags that were left over and put them everywhere around Greece. My first visit was to my village, the village of my ancestors, Yerakion of Laconia.

All my life I was so proud of my roots. The first thing I saw on arriving was that they had closed the post office. When I asked why, I learned that there was no money to keep it going; residents would receive their mail at a coffee shop once a week instead. I climbed to the castle and found it waiting there for me the same as I remember it as a small child; a castle protected by UNESCO. I found it was day by day falling down. And I asked again why in all those years nothing had happened to save something of it. The answer was the same – there were no funds.

After I had returned home, I started getting emails from friends around the world asking me if I was well and safe, asking me what’s happening in Greece… and it was then that I decided to switch on the TV, because until that time it had been the most useless object in my home. On it I heard the Prime Minister of Greece say that we got here because the state and ruling mechanisms were corrupt. Sorry, this particular man and his family were in power over 30 years. What did he mean? Was he talking about another country? Is he Greek? Is he talking about us? I changed channels and saw thousands of resentful people accumulating in Syntagma Square to call for their lost dignity.

Within a few weeks, all my friends and my acquaintances either became unemployed or had such cuts in their wages or pensions that they could no longer easily cope with everyday life. The prime minister resigned, and someone else came and sure many others will follow, but before he resigned he brought us the IMF. Others, strangers, people who didn’t know us, would take decisions for us… like being under foreign occupation again?

And then I heard about the detention camps. “What was that?” I wanted to know, and the TV replied to me: in Greece are over one million illegal immigrants! And now Europe says: Keep them there; don’t let them move elsewhere! In my hometown, concentration camps? What happened and why did we get into this situation? And how did all these people gather in Greece? Why did no one stop them? And if they were living here for so many years, why have the authorities suddenly remembered them now? And again I got the answer from my TV… Because Europe has now called for that! So then I asked: the Greeks are broke, who will pay for detaining these people in the camps? Who will feed them? They answered that Europe will pay, so that the Schengen Treaty can stay safe and Greece maintain its position within this.

Europe will pay for them, but our European partners on the other hand show us what else we must cut from our income, how to be more taxed so Greece raises more money so we can continue to have the euro, the common currency. And then I remembered our Drachma.

Where was I when all this happened? Where were you Greece when you let all this happen to you?

We got lost … I never have loved you as I should. We probably left you and you left us, but I will find you again and I will show the rest that we are not what they show about us, the foreign news agencies and the traitors politicians who wanted to be called Greeks … shame on them. We are the sun, the sea and the smile, the descendants of Socrates and Aristotle, the country that gave birth to Alexander the Great, Homer and The Republic, the place of Elytis and Ritsos. Here is Zeus smiling up from Mount Olympus and he greets with the sun Neptune in the Aegean Sea; here is the Parthenon waiting for its missing daughters, the Caryatids. They took a lot from us, maybe they will take more but… but… no one can take away our smile. Because we have learned from childhood that we Greeks always smile.

Evanthia Magni, Greece

UninFORMative?

Dear Editor: That Plato should have proposed the existence of ideal forms [see Issue 90] is not surprising, as we act as if they exist even when professing disbelief. Like Plato, we believe implicitly that things in the world have certain properties, but what distinguishes these from formless fuzziness? I suggest the answer lies in symmetry, the meta-property that something remains unchanged under transformation. Unlike hypothetical forms, symmetries are real because they can be effected in space and time (though the perfection ends there because space and time themselves are the product of broken symmetries). So what of true knowledge? We tend to think of knowledge as a static assembly of facts, but like a form it actually requires some action. Comprehending the true nature of reality implies first defining the experiment or measurement that can reveal it. This is a problem because things can be measured only in relation to other things, and if reality is a unity there is no external yardstick. This sets a limit on the perception of truth. But if we can conceive the notions of perfect forms and true knowledge, do they not then exist? We should be wary of concepts which are technically meaningless (except possibly within a formal system) but give the illusion of substance because they evoke an emotional response.

Nicholas Taylor, Little Sandhurst

Dear Editor: In the Republic Plato says that to avoid rebellion, the people in his ideal state would have to be brainwashed into believing they were free although they were actually being ruled by a (benign) tyrannical government. This is similar to our situation today. We have been indoctrinated to believe that we live in a democracy when, actually, we live in a media-backed plutocracy. Our ruling class has learned its Plato well.

Ray Sherman, Duarte, CA

Thought For Food

Dear Editor: In your Issue 89 editorial, ‘The Glum Reaper?’ you speculate about a future where our life spans are increased. My first thought was, ‘What makes you think life extension can’t be done now, or hasn’t been done already?’

The knowledge I have gained studying nutritional therapy has taught me that we can already influence life-spans, through food. ‘Nutrigenomics’ is the study of how food effects genetic expression – one of many ‘omics’ that look at how our genes can be manipulated. Others include genomics, proteomics or metabolomics, and more. Research is now revealing that the nutrients we consume can both directly and indirectly influence how genes are expressed. One of the most studied ingredients is resveratrol, found in red grapes, among other things. This can extend the lifespans of mice, although in humans this capability remains controversial. It would not surprise me if among the hundreds of nutrients we are exposed to, others will be found to affect the aging processes going on within us.

How we age is a matter of some debate, with various theories put forward, but I have little doubt healthy food can extend lifespan, since illness tends to shorten it. Other aspects of our lifestyles too can effect how long we live, including the amount of physical activity we undertake, exposure to environmental pollutants, and psychological health (depression is known to increase mortality).

Whilst I doubt we can gain immortality, if you wish to extend your lifespan and healthspan, pay closer attention to what you eat and the life you lead. In my view, the greatest error in the history of medicine was in forgetting this fact.

Richard Collison, Kent

Wake Up, Beam Up

Dear Editor: I appreciated being introduced by Joel Marks’ article ‘The Sleeper Wakes’ in Issue 89 to the ‘transporter problem’. As Joel points out, his thought-experiment about teleportation helps to clarify our understanding of what is meant by the terms ‘personal identity’ and ‘the self’. I was fascinated by this thought-experiment and tried to draw my own conclusions from it. If the person in the transmitter is scanned – including memories – and the information transmitted to Mars and the body reproduced in every respect by materials available on Mars, and if the person on the Earth then ceases to exist, it would be reasonable to conclude that the person on Mars would be the same as the one who had been scanned on Earth, similar to the example used by Joel, of a person waking from a deep sleep only to find himself in a different location.

An interesting problem arises should an accident interfere with the process and the person in the transmitter on Earth emerges at the same time as the other from the receiver on Mars. From that time on they would live separate lives in different situations, developing different memories, etc. Now suppose the Martian returned to Earth and the two met: would we now have duplicates of the same person, or two different people? Like identical twins they would have similar bodies, and both would have the same memories up to the time of the transmission. Yet if we think of the self as memory-dependent, then we must conclude that these two would be different people, because from the time of the transmission they would form different memories. Now let’s take the thought-experiment one step further, and assume they both lose their memories in old age. Would they still be regarded as different people? I think that society would regard them as different because there would be two bodies. Does that itself produce a problem for philosophers in their understanding of ‘the self’?

Ken McLean, Wollongong, NSW

Dimensions of Reference

Dear Editor: In ‘Points of Cosmic Order’ (Letters, Issue 88), your correspondent claims that the time dilation of Special Relativity is not a real effect. But time dilation is perfectly real. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with photons taking longer to reach a receding target. Rather, it is a direct consequence of the fact – surprising, yet confirmed by countless observations – that any measurement of the speed of light always yields the same result irrespective of the relative motion of light source and observer. Time dilation means that if you took a fast enough trip around the galaxy, then despite having recorded only a few days on board your ship, you would return home to find yourself thousands of years in Earth’s future. But the claim in the preceding sentence is no mere theory. In fact, a large proportion of readers of this carry around in their pockets a continuously running experiment that confirms time dilation with incredible precision: the super-accurate signals transmitted by global positioning satellites have to be adjusted for the time-dilating effects of relative motion, acceleration and gravity, or else the positions displayed on your smartphone or on the sat-nav in your car would drift by several kilometres per day.

There are examples of physicists taking mathematical models too seriously – but time dilation isn’t one of them.

Tim Wilkinson, Tyne & Wear

Believing, Not Believing, Believing Not

Dear Editor: In his response to my article ‘The Meaning of Meaning’ in Issue 88, Russell Berg writes in Letters 89, “According to Anderson’s rules, a Supreme Being is incapable of creating its own meaning. So Anderson’s argument either means we are bestowed meaning by a meaningless entity, or it leads to an infinite regress.” Actually, by definition, ‘Supreme Being’ refers to an eternal and uncaused Being, yet an ‘infinite regress’ can only be posited of caused beings. There is no infinite regress in an eternal entity – which, by definition, God is. Let me explain by way of an analogy: one of the few things on which theists and atheists agree is that the only way to eliminate the need for a First Cause [of everything] is to demonstrate an eternally-existing universe. (This is exactly the point of things like Hawking’s Time Theory and the Multiverse Hypothesis.) If either of these could be proven, atheism would triumph, simply because for theists to ask, “What was the First Cause of an uncaused universe?” would be to pose an absurd, self-contradictory question. But Mr Berg’s question, “From where did the Supreme Being get his meaning?” is a nonsense question in much the same way. By definition, the ‘Supreme Being’ means the eternal, uncaused source of all meanings.

However, I would be interested in reading what property of consciousness Mr Berg thinks is capable of making ‘perceived meaning’ objectively true (as opposed to a comforting delusion).

Dr Stephen L. Anderson, London, Ontario

Intrinsically Valuable Letter

Dear Editor: Jim Moran’s article ‘Three Challenges For Environmental Philosophy’ in Issue 88 raised, among other interesting considerations, the concept of ‘intrinsic value’ as applied to the natural world. Now consider that every extinct species, every destroyed ecosystem, represents a real loss of knowledge or information. We go to great length to preserve human knowledge in books, libraries, and now in electronic media. Why? Could it be because we regard knowledge as an intrinsic value? I for one do, and I suggest that the knowledge contained in the natural world is at least as good a candidate for intrinsic value as man-made knowledge, and as worthy of preservation.

Axel Winter, Queensland

Dear Editor: Perhaps it is a coincidence that Karl Popper was included in the issue devoted to environmental sustainability (Issue 88). Popper isn’t usually thought of as an environmental philosopher, but Alistair MacFarlane’s article on him got me thinking that perhaps his fierce anti-totalitarianism makes him one. To get to environmental sustainability, first there has to be an awareness of the degradation and depletion of the environment, then a change in human behavior to improve things. So sustainability is essentially impossible under totalitarianism, because any information about the degradation and depletion of the environment will be controlled by the state, and kept secret. For example, in the Soviet Union, lead contamination was many times higher than in the West. There was also no public scrutiny of hazardous nuclear waste dumps or chemical and oil spills. Had they known, people would have demanded change.

The Soviet regime didn’t share such information because that would’ve compromised it. Similarly, the Soviets never liked to announce major accidents or catastrophes. All this was made worse by the fact that the distrustful society the Soviet Union bred didn’t generate the wherewithal or know-how to motivate people and effectively deal with environmental disasters. Instead, such matters were pushed under the proverbial rug, to the detriment of everybody.

The creation of sustainability needs independent networking and feedback systems which totalitarianism inherently doesn’t tolerate. Also, it takes a certain volunteerism and personal willingness to achieve sustainability – something that is uncommon in totalitarian states since they rarely encouraged any personal stake in the wellbeing of the state.

Popper was probably buoyed up by the glasnost that eventually came to the Soviet Union. But he may have not appreciated the significance of the Open Society he championed as being fundamentally important for sustaining the environment – or any system, for that matter.

David Airth, Toronto

A Philosophical Joke

Dear Editor: One day Zeno of Elea was driving home with little regard for the niceties of the law. A traffic cop pulls him over. Zeno winds down the window and says, “What seems to be the problem, officer?”

The traffic cop gets out his ticket book and says, “Failure to stop at a traffic light when it was red.”

Zeno replies,”But I did slow down considerably, officer.”

“Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. You certainly didn’t stop, and so you’re getting a ticket.”

“Now, officer, let’s not be hasty. We need to apply a little logic to the situation. Before I reached the stop line, I had to arrive at the half-way point, didn’t I? And before I reached the half-way point, I had to arrive at the quarter-way point, and the eighth-way point, and so on. That’s an infinite series. Therefore I could not stop absolutely. Slowing down was the best I could do.”

The officer looks doubtful. “Do you mean there is no such thing as absolute rest, or stopping – that a relative degree of deceleration is all anyone can do?”

Zeno replies with a smile, “That’s exactly the point I am making, officer!”

“Right! Get out of the chariot!”

Grumbling and protesting, Zeno gets out. The traffic cop starts battering him around the head with his truncheon. Zeno gasps, “Wait! Wait! What do you think you’re doing!”

The cop keeps on battering him, and asks, “Sorry, do you want me to stop, or just slow down?”

Les Reid, Edinburgh