The trolley and the psychopath

Sally Adee in The Last Word on Nothing:

Shutterstock_159768710-475x317Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A trolley carrying five school children is headed for a cliff. You happen to be standing at the switch, and you could save their lives by diverting the trolley to another track. But there he is – an innocent fat man, picking daisies on that second track, oblivious to the rolling thunder (potentially) hurtling his way. Divert the trolley, and you save the kids and kill a person. Do nothing, and you have killed no one but five children are dead. Which is the greater moral good?

This kind of thought experiment is known as a sacrificial dilemma, and it’s useful for teaching college freshmen about moral philosophy. What you maybe shouldn’t do is ask a guy on the street to answer these questions in an fMRI machine, and then use his answers to draw grand conclusions about the neurophysiological correlates of moral reasoning. But that’s exactly what some neuroscientists are doing. The trouble is, their growing body of research is built on a philosophical house of cards: sacrificial dilemmas are turning out to be exactly the opposite of what we thought they were. Guy Kahane wants to divert this trolley before it drives off a cliff.

Kahane, deputy director of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, has never been a big fan of the sacrificial dilemma. The main problem, he says, is that it has been misapplied to situations it was never intended for.

More here.

Physicists engage in a strange debate about whether time really passes

Sean Carroll in Smithsonian Magazine:

ScreenHunter_1121 Apr. 05 18.32When Albert Einstein’s good friend Michele Besso died in 1955, just a few weeks before Einstein’s own death, Einstein wrote a letter to Besso’s family in which he put forward a scientist’s consolation: “This is not important. For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”

The idea that time is an illusion is an old one, predating any Times Square ball drop or champagne celebrations. It reaches back to the days of Heraclitus and Parmenides, pre-Socratic thinkers who are staples of introductory philosophy courses. Heraclitus argued that the primary feature of the universe is that it is always changing. Parmenides, foreshadowing Einstein, countered by suggesting that there was no such thing as change. Put into modern language, Parmenides believed the universe is the set of all moments at once. The entire history of the universe simply is.

Today we would call this the “eternalist” or “block universe” view—thinking of space and time together as a single four-dimensional collection of events, rather than a three-dimensional world that evolves over time. Besides Parmenides and Einstein, this picture is shared by the Tralfamadorians, an alien race who appear in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. To a being from Tralfamadore, visiting the past is no harder than walking down the street.

This “timeless” view of the universe goes against our usual thinking. We perceive our lives as unfolding. But it has adherents even in contemporary physics. The laws of nature, as we currently understand them, treat all moments as equally real. No one is picked out as special; the laws simply say how any moment relates to the previous one and to the next.

More here.

What Did Jesus Do? Reading and unreading the Gospels

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Jesus

Verhoeven, citing Crossan, offers an opening scene for a Jesus bio-pic which neatly underlines this point. He imagines a man being nailed to a cross, cries of agony, two companion crosses in view, and then we crane out to see two hundred crosses and two hundred victims: we are at the beginning of the story, the mass execution of Jewish rebels in 4 B.C., not the end. This was the Roman death waiting for rebels from the outset, and Jesus knew it. Jesus’ cry of desolation—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—though primly edited out or explained as an apropos quotation from the Psalms by later evangelists, pierces us even now from the pages of Mark, across all the centuries and Church comforts. The shock and pity of failure still resonates.

One thing, at least, the cry assures: the Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and the promise wasn’t kept. “Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,” Jesus announced; but none of them did. Jesus, and Paul following him, says unambiguously that whatever is coming is coming soon—that the end is very, very near. It wasn’t, and the whole of what follows is built on an apology for what went wrong. The seemingly modern waiver, “Well, I know he said that, but he didn’t really mean it quite the way it sounded,” is built right into the foundation of the cult. The sublime symbolic turn—or the retreat to metaphor, if you prefer—begins with the first words of the faith. If the Kingdom of God proved elusive, he must have meant that the Kingdom of God was inside, or outside, or above, or yet to come, anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.

More here.

The Executioner We Can’t Live Without: special molecules that kill rotten proteins

Pamela Weintraub in Nautilus:

AaronLast summer, as I interviewed Aaron Ciechanover, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004, his country was at war. Three Israeli boys had just been murdered in the West Bank by Palestinians, then a Palestinian boy had been burned to death in retribution by Israelis. While we sat in his lab at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, to the north of the bombs, missiles were flying over Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and a Gaza invasion loomed. The mounting conflict troubled but didn’t ruffle Ciechanover, one of Israel’s greatest scientists and statesmen, who patiently and colorfully explained to me one of biology’s most remarkable processes, how a molecular Pac-Man races through our bodies and devours damaged proteins.For over 40 years, Ciechanover has worked to understand these molecular machines, called shredders. Built around a core molecule called ubiquitin, shredders destroy ruined proteins so that our bodies can replace them with fresh parts and not, says Ciechanover, rot like a side of meat, “brownish-greenish and stinking,” in the sun. Ciechanover shared the Nobel Prize with Avram Hershko, his mentor at Technion, and Irwin Rose, a biochemist at the University of California, Irvine. Scientists already understood the genetic code, how genes coded for the creation of proteins. But the shredder helped control the overall process: the degradation of damaged goods, DNA repair, cell division, and immune defense. The shredder enabled biologists to see the wizard behind the screen.

In your Nobel notes, you said that you learned “to become a long books author rather than a short story writer.” What do you mean?

Science is changing, so I don’t blame the current scientists for being short-range thinkers. But I’m a risk taker. I am an adventurist. I was in medicine and I decided that I don’t want to do it. I took a big risk, but I thought that I should go after my gut feeling and after excitement and after what I really want to do. I’m not in science in order to publish. I’m in science in order to be excited by the discovery. In order to do that, you need to be a marathon runner. Mother Nature doesn’t make itself available to us easily. You need to be patient. You need to take a long risk. You need to be in the business for many years. You need to run slowly but fast—slowly in terms of patience, but fast in order to be competitive. It looks contradictory, but it’s not contradictory. And you really want to dig deep into it. You don’t want to scrape the surface and then move to another one and to another one and to another one. People ask me, “OK, so 40 years you work on ubiquitin, what’s next?” I say, “The next 20 years, if I should still survive them, will be devoted to the same very woman.” Because we are still scratching her surface. That’s the beauty of nature. You dig and dig and dig. You’ll never come to an end.

More here.

A General Feeling of Disorder

Oliver Sacks in the New York Review of Books:

Sacks_1-042315_jpg_600x631_q85Nothing is more crucial to the survival and independence of organisms—be they elephants or protozoa—than the maintenance of a constant internal environment. Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist, said everything on this matter when, in the 1850s, he wrote, “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie libre.” Maintaining such constancy is called homeostasis. The basics of homeostasis are relatively simple but miraculously efficient at the cellular level, where ion pumps in cell membranes allow the chemical interior of cells to remain constant, whatever the vicissitudes of the external environment. More complex monitoring systems are demanded when it comes to ensuring homeostasis in multicellular organisms—animals, and human beings, in particular.

Homeostatic regulation is accomplished by the development of special nerve cells and nerve nets (plexuses) scattered throughout our bodies, as well as by direct chemical means (hormones, etc.). These scattered nerve cells and plexuses become organized into a system or confederation that is largely autonomous in its functioning; hence its name, the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS was only recognized and explored in the early part of the twentieth century, whereas many of the functions of the central nervous system (CNS), especially the brain, had already been mapped in detail in the nineteenth century. This is something of a paradox, for the autonomic nervous system evolved long before the central nervous system.

More here.

Sunday Poem

These are the days of miracles and wonder
……………………… —Paul Simon, Graceland

Changing Times

Three minute spaghetti. Boil in the bag fish.
Pot noodle. A mug of Batchelor’s instant soup,

amaze me nearly as much as
microwaves, my new laptop and the

enduring power of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme
and Miles’ Kind of Blue.

It’s not that I have lowered standards
with a too grateful palate

or that much espoused masculine
fascination for new toys and old jazz.

But I am learning to taste my life
without judgement. I think.
.

by Chris Abani
from Kalakuta Republic
publisher: Saqui, 2000

To imagine, to hope, to transcend, to transform

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Jacob-lawrence-library-1I gave a talk at the launch at London’s Institut Français of Libraries without Borders, the charity inspired by Patrick Weil that aims to increase global access to books and libraries. Also speaking were Ian McEwan, Lisa Appignanesi, Barbara Band and Patrick Weil himself. Here is a transcript of my talk:

Let me begin with a story not of a library or a book but of a grand piano. The one grand piano in Gaza, that was discovered still intact in a theatre destroyed by an Israeli missile during last year’s war. A piano that has been restored string by string, hammer by hammer, by Claire Bertrand, a young French music technician who travelled to Gaza specially to bring the piano back to life, in a project financed by Daniel Barenboim.

Last week, the piano formed the centerpiece of a concert, in which 15-year old Sara Aqel, the star pupil in Gaza’s only music school, performed Beethoven’s 19th sonata. Why in a land so devastated by war, in which tens of thousands are homeless, in which hospitals can barely function, in which food is often scarce, and which for many feels like a vast prison, should so much fuss be made of one piano?

Because to be human is more than simply to survive, or to seek food and shelter. It is also to imagine, to hope, to dream, to transcend, to transform.

Music in a place like Gaza, in the words of Lukas Pairon, from Music Fund, the charity that helped restore the grand piano, ‘is a form of rebellion against being narrowly defined as living beings who only want the basic things – food, protection, security – who are only in survival mode.’ Or as Sara Aqel put it, ‘Music might not build you a house or give you your loved-ones back. But it gives you joy.’

More here.

Elon Musk: Burning Fossil Fuels Is the ‘Dumbest Experiment in History, By Far’

Jason Koebler in Motherboard:

ScreenHunter_1119 Apr. 04 16.11​Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and chairman of SolarCity, and the guy who dreamt up the hyper loop, says we shouldn't need an environmentally motivated reason to transition to clean energy. We're probably going to run out of oil sometime; why find out if we can destroy the world while we do it, if an alternative exists?

“If we don't find a solution to burning oil for transport, when we then run out of oil, the economy will collapse and society will come to an end,” Musk said this week during a conversation with astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“If we know we have to get off oil no matter what, we know that is an inescapable outcome, why run this crazy experiment of changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans by adding enormous amounts of CO2 that have been buried since the Precambrian Era?” he added. “That's crazy. That's the dumbest experiment in history, by far.”

Tyson sounded surprised: “Can you think of a dumber experiment?” he asked Musk.

“I honestly cannot. What good could possibly come of [staying on oil],” Musk said.

Musk, with his supercharger stations, SolarCity (his solar energy company), his electric car company that will soon rely on a “Gigafactory” to create its batteries, has a huge financial stake in the future of clean energy. He stands so much to gain from the clean energy boom in part because he's realized that not only are fossil fuels dirty, they're unnecessary—and of finite supply.

More here.

A Book In The Darkness

Charles Simic in NYRB blog:

Vallotton_jpg_250x1111_q85One of the compensations of being an insomniac in a snowbound house full of books is that I can always find something to read and distract myself from whatever mood I’m in. When it gets real bad, I roam the dark house with a flashlight like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, pull books off the shelves, open them at random or thumb the pages until I find something of interest, and after reading it, either go back to bed happy or grope for another book.

…What I need to look at, I told myself another night, is Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, which the respected scholar and statesman wrote while awaiting execution in 524 in Pavia on trumped-up charges. It’s a story of a man, unjustly suffering and bemoaning his fate, having extended conversations with Philosophy, who appears to him as a highborn lady and tells him that wisdom and happiness may be found even in adversity, since it frees us from bondage to transient, earthly things, or something like that. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the book, so I had to console myself with David Hume, the famously obese eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher of whom his admiring contemporaries said that he cracked every chair he sat in. Leafing through hisOn Human Nature and the Understanding, I found this little parable:

Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted, men who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge, who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit, we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies.

Hmm, I thought to myself after I read it, this reminds me a bit of those reports of Soviet Union under Stalin penned by some Parisian intellectual or a description by one of our own politicians of American Exceptionalism. As a sedative, however, it wouldn’t do. I’d get so excited thinking about the various ways Hume’s parable could be rewritten to make it more suitable to our present circumstances and I’d be up for a week.

Read the rest here.

REVIVING ANTAL SZERB

Journey-by-moonlightMalcolm Forbes at The Quarterly Conversation:

Antal Szerb’s lithe, lively, and wholly endearing fiction is peopled by male dreamers on spiritual journeys of self-discovery. Each one sets out on his respective mini-mission with good intentions but knows from the outset that there are only so many harsh truths he can withstand. In this respect, all Szerb’s protagonists seem to have heeded the advice of Greene’s Dr. Hasselbacher at the beginning of Our Man in Havana: “You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

Dr. János Bátky, the narrator of Szerb’s first full-length novel, The Pendragon Legend(1934), is a Hungarian academic on sabbatical in Great Britain. When he is invited to the Welsh castle of the Earl of Gwynedd he is dragged into a world of family intrigue, superstition, treachery, and murder. After enough nocturnal escapades and jangled nerves he yearns to beat a retreat to London, “Back to the British Museum, to the impregnable calmness of books.” “You speak like someone who has no ideals,” the enchanting Cynthia tells him. “True,” Bátky replies, “I am a neo-frivolist.” Bátky appears again in a short story from the same year, “A Dog Called Madelon.” His unwillingness to accept humdrum normality is made clear in the first paragraph.

more here.

In defence of Christianity: Despite a tidal wave of prejudice and negativity, faith remains the foundation of our civilisation

Michael Gove in The Spectator:

Praying? What kind of people are you?

Coverimage-275x413Well, the kind of people who built our civilisation, founded our democracies, developed our modern ideas of rights and justice, ended slavery, established universal education and who are, even as I write, in the forefront of the fight against poverty, prejudice and ignorance. In a word, Christians. But to call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal. In a culture that prizes sophistication, non-judgmentalism, irony and detachment, it is to declare yourself intolerant, naive, superstitious and backward. It was almost 150 years ago that Matthew Arnold wrote of the Sea of Faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ and in our time that current has been replaced by an incoming tide of negativity towards Christianity. In his wonderful book Unapologetic, the author Francis Spufford describes the welter of prejudice the admission of Christian belief tends to unleash. ‘It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. It means that we don’t believe in dinosaurs. It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die… That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of fantasy… That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in young minds…’

And that’s just for starters. If we’re Roman Catholic we’re accessories to child abuse, if we’re Anglo-Catholics we’re homophobic bigots curiously attached to velvet and lace, if we’re liberal Anglicans we’re pointless hand-wringing conscience–hawkers, and if we’re evangelicals we’re creepy obsessives who are uncomfortable with anyone enjoying anything more louche than a slice of Battenberg.

More here.

‘The Sympathizer,’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Philip Caputo in The New York Times:

CAPUTO-master675The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras. That outlook is reflected in the literature — and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction. Among all those volumes, you’ll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler’s “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain” comes to mind) with Vietnamese characters speaking in their own voices.

…But this tragicomic novel reaches beyond its historical context to illuminate more universal themes: the eternal misconceptions and misunderstandings between East and West, and the moral dilemma faced by people forced to choose not between right and wrong, but right and right. The nameless protagonist-­narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Americanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind. ­Nguyen’s skill in portraying this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene and le Carré. Duality is literally in the protagonist’s blood, for he is a half-caste, the illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother (whom he loves) and a French Catholic priest (whom he hates). Widening the split in his nature, he was educated in the United States, where he learned to speak English without an accent and developed another love-hate relationship, this one with the country that he feels has coined too many “super” terms (supermarkets, ­superhighways, the Super Bowl, and so on) “from the federal bank of its ­narcissism.”

More here.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech was more than brilliant rhetorical art

Yesterday was the 47th anniversary of this speech. MLK was killed the next day. Here is Scott Newstok in Chapter 16:

Most of us are familiar with the Mountaintop speech. In the years since, King’s powerful closing words have gotten all the ink because his invocation of Exodus so eerily anticipates his assassination. His opening lines are equally brilliant: in them, King acknowledges that “[s]omething is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world.” He imagines the Almighty offering him a “general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now,” and asking him, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” King replies,

I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across, the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop there.

As the speech unfolds—through the Roman Empire and the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Emancipation Proclamation and up to the New Deal—“I wouldn’t stop there” becomes a rhetorical refrain, building to a crescendo. At last, King tells the Almighty: “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” He admits that his own moment is bleak, that “the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around.” But even in the hatred and the contention all around him, King finds hope in his fellow demonstrators, in the cry for freedom across the globe: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” He’s making a defiant call for optimism in dire times.

More here.

Steven Weinberg: the 13 best science books for the general reader

Steven Weinberg in The Guardian:

Andromeda-007If you had a chance to ask Aristotle what he thought of the idea of writing about physical science for general readers, he would not have understood what you meant. All of his own writing, on physics and astronomy as well as on politics and aesthetics, was accessible to any educated Greek of his time. This is not evidence so much of Aristotle’s skills as a writer, or of the excellence of Greek education, as it is of the primitive state of Hellenic physical science, which made no effective use of mathematics. It is mathematics above all that presents an obstacle to communication between professional scientists and the general educated public. The development of pure mathematics was already well under way in Aristotle’s day, but its use in science by Plato and the Pythagoreans had been childish, and Aristotle himself had little interest in the use of mathematics in science. He perceptively concluded from the appearance of the night sky at different latitudes that the Earth is a sphere, but he did not bother to use these observations (as could have been done) to calculate the size of our planet.

Physical science began seriously to benefit from mathematics only after Aristotle’s death in 322BC, when the vital centre of science moved from Athens to Alexandria. But the indispensable use of mathematics by Hellenistic physicists and astronomers began to get in the way of communication between scientists and the public. Looking over the surviving highly mathematical works of Aristarchus, Archimedes and Ptolemy, we can feel a twinge of sympathy for Greeks or Greek-speaking Romans who tried to keep up with the latest discoveries about light, fluids or the planets.

It was not long before writers called “commentators” began to try to fill this gap.

More here.

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Philosophy Animations on Ethics Narrated by Harry Shearer

Josh Jones over at Open Culture:

The history of moral philosophy in the West hinges principally on a handful of questions: Is there a God of some sort? An afterlife? Free will? And, perhaps most pressingly for humanists, what exactly is the nature of our obligations to others? The latter question has long occupied philosophers like Immanuel Kant, whose extreme formulation—the “categorical imperative”—flatly rules out making ethical decisions dependent upon particular situations. Kant’s famous example, one that generally gets repeated with a nod to Godwin, involves an axe murderer showing up at your door and asking for the whereabouts of a visiting friend. In Kant’s estimation, telling a lie in this case justifies telling a lie at any time, for any reason. Therefore, it is unethical.

In the video at the top of the post, Harry Shearer narrates a script about Kant’s maxim written by philosopher Nigel Warburton, with whimsical illustrations provided by Cognitive. Part of the BBC and Open University’s “A History of Ideas” series, the video—one of four dealing with moral philosophy—also explains how Kant’s approach to ethics differs from those of utilitarianism. In the video above, Shearer describes that most utilitarian of thought experiments, the “Trolley Problem.” As described by philosopher Philippa Foot, this scenario imagines having to sacrifice the life of one for those of many. But there is a twist—the second version, which involves the added crime of physically murdering one person, up close and personal, to save several. An analogous but converse theory is that of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer (below) who proposes that our obligations to people in peril right in front of us equal our obligations to those on the other side of the world.

More here.

George RR Martin, Game of Thrones and the triumph of fantasy fiction

John Mullan in The Guardian:

GameHas fantasy fiction, for decades a thriving literary genre, finally taken its place in the literary mainstream? It hardly needs bien pensant “literary” admirers: the most successful fantasy novelists have not only their sales figures to encourage them, but also the host of companion volumes, analytical websites, conferences and online commentaries that characterise fantasy fandom. It is a genre that has always generated critical expertise, and fantasy novelists have long been in a dialogue with their readers that other novelists must envy (witness the attention given to every tweet made by Neil Gaiman to his 2.2 million followers). Fantasy’s devotees must feel rueful as the critics now rush to declare their addiction to HBO’s Game of Thrones – adapted from George RR Martin’s multi-volume fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, and about to enter series five – or record their admiration of Terry Pratchett, as part of the overwhelming response to his recent death. The debt to fantasy fiction of The Buried Giant, the new novel by one of Britain’s leading literary novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, must seem overdue vindication of the genre.

Ishiguro has spoken in the past few weeks of how the barrier between this once-disdained brand of fiction and “serious” novels is breaking down. If this is true, New Jersey-born George RR Martin has surely led the charge. Martin is the reigning laureate of fantasy fiction. His ongoing sequence of novels A Song of Ice and Fire (the first book of which gives its title to Game of Thrones) began appearing in 1996 and now comprises five long books (with two more promised). He has a host of fans who resent the low status accorded to their favoured genre and some distinguished admirers who rather agree. One proponent of Martin’s merits, accomplished literary novelist John Lanchester, has openly invited literary snobs to cross that apparently “unbridgeable crevasse” between the readership of fantasy and “the wider literate public”. Discussing the delights of Martin’s fantasy roman fleuve, Lanchester has celebrated not only its creation of a richly imagined world, but the prevailing “sense of unsafety and uncertainty” of that world.

More here.