Skywritings

Inadvertently sending bombs near to babies is tragic, indescribably tragic; intentionally sending bombs from near babies is treacherous, psychopathic and unforgivable.

Is this causal chain too complex for the world to apprehend, in its well-meaning but simplistic calculus of “proportionate response”?

If we don’t read the sinister, cynical handwriting on today’s terror-tech wall, no one’s babies will be safe.

SH: “If you mean that my brain is doing an awful lot of work for me.. for which “I” take the credit, I agree. But you are just what you feel; the rest is as opaque as your respiration in deep sleep.

JE (Judith Economos): I don’t think so any more. I embrace a lot more as “me” — all the behavioral stuff my brain does is me. Some things my brain does — secrete stuff, for example, may not be “me” except in the sense in which my whole body is “me” (as in “you are hurting me”, when what you are doing is hurting my arm, or “They kept me in a cell”, etc.).

When it comes to moral responsibilty, for example for things I do when I am not conscious, that becomes another problem, another special sense of “me”. Consider the various acts you perform while driving (bicycling, walking). They are generally not conscious, but you are responsible for them, and if you hit someone, it is no excuse to say “I was absent-minded and it wasn’t I who did that — it was my brain.” Whereas if you have some palsy, say, and your arm flies up and whaps someone, then you really are not to be blamed, even though it was your arm and your brain that caused the offense.

I agree with all that, for the ordinary business of attributing legal or moral responsibility, but not for explaining (how/why) my brain does all it does and can do. In other words, causation is not really decided in a court of law but in a lab. And if the lab data (if/when we ever get it!) were admissible in a court of law, I suppose everyone would get off, whether they did the crime wide awake or while sleep-walking. In fact, probably the Big Bang would be “responsible” for everything.

Is this inconsistent? No. The appearance of cause clearly plays a causal role. To put it bluntly, courts that acquitted everyone blame-free would increase the crime rate as surely as not having and or not enforcing laws would. The prediction can be tested empirically, many times.

Besides, few people are found guilty for doing something that they did not feel like doing at the time. So verdicts even meet the criterion (I’m not sure it’s “cartesian,” really: I think Decartes would probably plead “nolo contendere” on both the metaphysics and the pragmatics of moral culpability) of distinguishing the intentional deed from the somnambulistic (zombic) one.

JE: But long ago when I was a Cartesian and a Rationalist I accepted only my consious awareness as “me”, so I understand your stance.

It is just that that excludes so much, that when you find yourself doing something you never thought you’d do, you are sandbagged. Too much of what holds together and makes sense of my fragmentary consciousness — what makes me me, lies in the not always concious or even never-conscious parts of my mind. Brain. Whatever. —

I think this doesn’t pertain to the courtroom question of whether I pulled the trigger because I felt like it, but to the lab question of whether the feeling came first and was causal, or was caused by something else…

That comes up in the lab already when I press a button, but not in life, or in court.

JE: Why do you think you are the same person when you wake up in the morning? What if you woke up in a quite different place? Even a different time? You knew nobody; nobody knew you; what makes you the same person you used to be? What, for that matter, makes you the same person from moment to moment?

Because it feels like it — in every case. Whether my feelings are correct is partly a court-room question (do I really have amnesia, or am I faking it? did I really commit or receive child abuse long ago, or is it a false-memory syndrome induced by my psychotherapist?) and partly a clinical neurological question (is this person really X, or does he just imagine he is X?). Separate from both is the lab question: how/why is there this feeling of continuity of identity and what, if anything, is its causal role? (Provisional answer: it has no causal role. Don’t raise the inner counterpart of the “appearances” I invoked above in court: it’s a non-starter in the lab.)

JE: So there are a lot of senses of ‘me’. If you render me permanently unconscious, yet quite healthy otherwise, have you murdered me?

You’ve reduced my body to an inert zombie; if you could reduce it to a dynamic zombie, doing all I do without feeling a thing, that would be a more interesting question. I’d say a brain-dead person (if truly brain-dead: we never know) is gone. For that matter, I’d say someone in a deep but temporary coma — maybe even during deep sleep — is gone too, but comes back!

JE: If you (as the sci-fi folks imagine) copy my working awareness onto a conveniently receptive zombie brain, and destroy my consious body; or use a transporter, which scans my living body as information, sends the information somewhere else, reconstructs an identical living body out of available atoms, and zaps the copy standing here, have you murdered me?

I’ve avoided the sci-fi counterfactuals and hypotheticals, partly because I think they are so uncertain and arbitrary as to be indeterminate (beyond their own premises, about which we can’t even know whether they are “implementable).

(But I’d say the real challenge to the continuity of the felt self is not the one you describe, but the one where the sci-fi exercise simply duplicates it: Then it’s not murder but which one’s the real me? The bodily continuity criterion might staisfy the courts, but you, I think, would be pretty miffed to wake up and be told you weren’t you, but just a clone. You might accept it after awhile, because we are compliant and gullible, even malleable, but it would go against the felt grain mightily, and it’s that felt grain that keeps our mental lives rolling.)

JE: I think dumping the Cartesian self as any sort of whole story of me-dom has a lot to recommend it. I don’t trust the bugger.

But trust itself is a feeling, a perfectly cartesian one. Besides, Descartes is not to blame, indeed not even at issue, in these juridical, clinical and sci-fi scenarios. because he never enfranchised feelings against doubts for anything except doubts that feelings were indeed being felt (if/when they were). What was being felt — e.g., that “I” have a headache, or am on the moon, or that I am you — is certainly not sanctioned by Descartes; only that I am feeling (whatever I am feeling) is, and that’s as incorrigible as it is indubitable (as long as I am compos mentis: a precondition for exercises in cartesian rationality, by the way). And that feeling — that res cogitans, whatever it might be — is the only thing I am entitled, beyond any reach of doubt, to call “me”. For the rest, for whatever in particular it might feel-like I am, all bets are off (no cartesian certainty there!).

JE: I understand Descartes pretty well — not that this is anything to brag about: the cogito is easy to understand. What I am insisting upon is that the res cogitans is at best a momentary thing. Nothing gives it coherence or continuity, and it is not any use at all for creating the world, as D hoped it would be. He needs a truthful God for that, who would not give him a clear and distinct idea that was not true.

And I’m not sure I know what Descartes actually meant (since there was so much nonsense in there too, about god, and that sophistical “ontological” proof), but pretty confident of what he ought to have meant, on the strength of his own premises and reasoning, which is nothing more nor less than that, suprisingly, there is not one but two things we can be sure about: unsuprisingly, the provably necessary truths of maths, plus , very surprisingly, the fact that we feel: Not what we feel, but that we feel. That’s all. It feels coherent and continuous, but that’s not certain, any more than it’s certain that there’s an outside world and that tomorrow will be like today. What we feel can be wrong, but that we feel cannot.

“Clear and distinct” is just rhetorical flim-flam: Maths are indubitable because a contradiction’s a contradiction, and a proof short enough so I can grasp it shows something to be true on pain of contradiction. Feeling’s something else, but equally compelling. One might say it is self-contradictory to suppose I’m not feeling when I am in fact feeling. But the cogito is not a formal deduction, it is a felt fact: My feelings can deceive me about everything but the fact that I am feeling (if/when I’m thinking clearly and distinctly: i.e., if/when I’m compos mentis).

The “I” is equivocal. The indubitable proposition is that there is indeed feeling going on, when there is feeling going on, and to ascertain that, one must be the feeler. Nothing about being it across time, or about being it “coherently”. Feelings are felt, and “I” just means feeling the feelings… And it is necessarily a momentary, instantaneous thing. Once it becomes a memory of prior feelings or instants, it’s again open to doubt. (Did I really feel that, then, or does it just feel that way, now? Is there even a “then”? All uncertainties.)

Trying to hedge those uncertainties with a divine fudge-factor, arbitrarily stipulated as its guarantor of validity, is certainly not Descartes’ proudest moment! It goes from the rigorous to the ridiculous… (Some say he only pretended he believed it, to fend of the Inquisitors…)

So the momentary “res cogitans” is just that, a second indubitable kind of fact, but no more — certainly no guarantor of a reliable world-view, or world…

JE: To say this does not in the least deny the momentary awareness. But there we are stuck. I want more. I want the world, I want the past, I want memory and other people. I cannot be certain of any of it, but the one thing I can be certain of is a barren flicker, not a self, nothing that lasts, not a substance (or if a substance, a brief one, since it has no continuity, indeed no temporal extent at all, by definition no spatial extent, and since there is nothing else there in nothing it stands in relation to).

You got it: You can indeed have all the rest (world, people, memories, continuity, etc.) but not as a matter of certainty, like the other two. (So what? Who said truths had to be certain? They just have to be true, and learnable…)

JE: You cannot say you are you from time to time because it feels like it. Doesn’t guarantee a thing. In fact, the glibness of that whole paragraph is breath-taking. I don’t think it will hold up.

Which paragraph? Rene’s or mine? I never said that anything other than logic plus the fact of feeling was certain.

JE: I was less interested in talking about moral and legal problems per se than in using them to bring in one of many important understandings of “me” . There are increasingly comprehensive uses of the concept, and all of them are worth entertaining. The res cogitans is about the least interesting fictions anybody ever came up with, once you stop dressing it in the familiar clothes of reference and relationship to look like a mind. It is not a mind.

I can’t agree. I think it is the one sure fact about the mind (a fortiori, since it is the second of the only two sureties we have, and it is about the mind!). It is also a very useful bottom line — not only on what we cannot know for sure (the causal truths of empirical science), but also on what we cannot know at all (the causal status and role of feeling).

What I say is that feelings feel as if they have an effect, but we have no idea how or why — and there is zero evidence that they have any independent (telekinetic) causal power, and 100% evidence that other things (Newton, neurons) can and do cause everything we do and can do. So (to repeat): no idea of how or why we feel, or could.

And I’ve managed to say it in the ordinary anglo-saxon tongue, with no opaque jargon or weasel words to lose the simple point in — a point (dare I say it?) that thanks to 10+ years in the raincoat business I am at last daring to see and say is not quite as abstruse and complicated as everyone keeps making it out to be…