Big Think: You don’t see objective reality objectively: neuroscience catches up to philosophy

 Professor of neuroscience Beau Lotto explained to Big Think that the world you see is not necessarily the world that is, because we evolved to view the world in a way that is useful rather than accurate: [...]

This tendency for our minds to bend sensory data in ways that are useful can be seen in a number of instances. One of them is the well-known Thatcher Effect, in which an image of a face (originally one of former British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher) is flipped upside-down and has some features, such as the eyes and mouth, inverted as well. While the switched features are clear to us when the face is made right way up again, it is often impossible to tell when the face is upside-down. [...]

A middle route might be to view science as the systematic collection of subjective information in a way that allows for intersubjective agreement between people. Under this understanding, even if we cannot see the world as it is, we could get universal or near-universal intersubjective agreement about something like how fast light travels in a vacuum. This might be as good as it gets, or it could be a way to narrow down what we can know objectively. Or maybe it is something else entirely.

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Rationally Speaking Podcast: Understanding moral disagreements (Jonathan Haidt)

 Julia and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) discuss his moral foundations theory and argue about whether liberals should “expand their moral horizons” by learning to think like conservatives. Julia solicits Jon’s help in understanding her disagreement with philosopher Michael Sandel, in episode 247, over the morality of consensual cannibalism. (February 17, 2020)

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Philosophy Tube: Social Constructs

 What are social constructs, and why do some people get so upset about them?

Nautilus Magazine: Existential Comfort Without God

 Research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion offers some answers, but they’re not without nuance. For example, there’s evidence that scientific beliefs can deliver some of the benefits of religion,2 but there’s also evidence that some scientific beliefs—such as human evolution—are widely seen as a threat to human values.3 There’s evidence that people use language differently when reporting religious beliefs versus other commitments about the world4 (e.g., people believe in God, but think there are atoms, with analogs in other languages5), but there’s also evidence that religious and scientific beliefs reflect common psychological mechanisms.6 [...]

But the most striking results emerged when participants were asked to generate existential explanations that offered comfort and peace of mind. These instructions made participants most likely to generate explicitly religious or spiritual explanations—the proportion of such explanations jumped from 34 percent in the baseline condition to over 56 percent in the comfort condition. Yet participants without explicit religious commitments readily constructed “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) explanations that offered comfort, as well. In fact, natural sources of existential comfort were offered almost as often (about 36 percent of the time) as their explicitly supernatural counterparts (about 42 percent of the time). [...]

Just because people could generate natural sources of existential comfort, it doesn’t follow that those sources were just as comforting as their religious and supernatural counterparts. We also asked our participants to rate how successfully their explanations fostered positive emotions and buffered against negative ones, and we found that the explanations with only natural sources of comfort were judged significantly less successful than those that included only supernatural sources of comfort. Living on in people’s memories wasn’t quite as good as eternal life—at least when it came to emotional comfort, which is admittedly only one aspect of a valuable and meaningful system of beliefs.

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History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Shklar on Hypocrisy

 Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other authors in this series – including Bentham and Nietzsche – and asks what price we should be willing to pay for putting cruelty first among the vices.

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Nautilus Magazine: Do We Have Free Will? Maybe It Doesn't Matter

This isn’t an idle theoretical or academic question—beliefs about free will, Genschow says, seem to affect many “societally relevant” behaviors, like cheating. They also lie at the foundation of our criminal justice system, helping to justify retributive forms of punishment (the idea that people deserve to be locked up, for example, for committing certain crimes) as opposed to rehabilitative ones (confining and reforming people until they can safely re-enter society). Some philosophers, like Saul Smilansky, have argued that if we were to give up on free will, the consequences would be catastrophic. [...]

This gist of the meta-analysis from Genschow and his colleagues suggests that free will’s proponents and detractors may be putting too much store in what people believe. The belief, or disbelief, doesn’t seem to affect individual behavior in any way we might care about. Manipulating people’s ideas about free will, at least in experimental conditions, has only a small and temporary effect. In other words, a persuasive anti-free will essay (the most effective method found) doesn’t change people’s core beliefs about free will—it only puts them in a temporary, slight anti-free will mindset. (Most people naturally believe in free will, so most of the manipulations studied try to reduce belief in it, though it can work both ways). There is no evidence that this induced change in free will beliefs has any effect on morality, such as antisocial behavior, cheating, conformity, or willingness to punish. There is also no definitive evidence against such effects. So for now, it appears that people’s beliefs in free will don’t really matter. [...]

The way these two thinkers have talked passed each other reminds us that it’s hard to change people’s beliefs about free will. So, it can feel like a relief to realize, at least according to Genschow’s meta-analysis, that even when you can change people’s beliefs, it seems to make no moral difference anyway.

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History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: De Beauvoir on the Other

 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is one of the founding texts of modern feminism and one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It covers everything from ancient myth to modern psychoanalysis to ask what the relations between men and women have in common with other kinds of oppression, from slavery to colonialism. It also offers some radical suggestions for how both women and men can be liberated from their condition.

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Philosophy Tube: Jordan Peterson's Ideology

 

BBC4 In Our Time: Marcus Aurelius

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the man who, according to Machiavelli, was the last of the Five Good Emperors. Marcus Aurelius, 121 to 180 AD, has long been known as a model of the philosopher king, a Stoic who, while on military campaigns, compiled ideas on how best to live his life, and how best to rule. These ideas became known as his Meditations, and they have been treasured by many as an insight into the mind of a Roman emperor, and an example of how to avoid the corruption of power in turbulent times.

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History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Nietzsche on Morality | The Genealogy of Morality (1887)

 Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece sets out to explain where ideas of good and evil come from and why they have left human beings worse off. He traces their origins in what he calls the slave revolt in morality. David examines the ways Nietzsche’s story unsettles almost everything about modern social conventions and leaves us with the troubling question: what can possibly come next?

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History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Rousseau on Inequality

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (also known as the Second Discourse) tells the story of all human history to answer one simple question: how did we end up in such an unequal world? David explores the steps Rousseau traces in the fall of humankind and asks whether this is a radical alternative to the vision offered by Hobbes or just a variant on it. Is Rousseau really such a nice philosopher?

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History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Douglass on Slavery

 My Bondage and My Freedom’ by the former slave Frederick Douglass was the second of his three autobiographies and the one that contained his most radical ideas. In this episode David explores how Douglass used his life story not only to expose the horror of slavery but to champion a new approach to abolishing it. The name for this approach: politics.

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Ministry Of Ideas: Progressive Souls

 Religious people have played an important role in progressive politics in the US for its entire history. Contemporary leftists should look to build bridges and include religious voices in the pursuit of a more just and sustainable society.

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UnHerd: Why architecture is political

 Architecture is an inherently political act, which is precisely why it is so contested. It is the grandest and most permanent marker of a civilisation, and the clearest and most dramatic expression of a society’s relationship to power. Consider, on the one hand, Trump’s executive order, one of the last of his administration, mandating neoclassicism as the house architectural style of the US federal government; on the other hand, see the New Statesman’s neurotic fear of classical architecture as a form of fascism wrought in stone. Architecture is not just the expression of our positive political values, but also of the pathologies and debilitating culture wars enfeebling our civilisation. [...]

Yet leading up to the Acropolis, winding its way around the ancient hills of Athens, was an alternative vision of modernity, neglected, under-appreciated but far better suited to our current political moment. In the middle of the 20th century, the Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis was tasked with replacing the ugly asphalt road that led to the Acropolis. Hiring provincial stonemasons, accustomed to working in a vernacular style, and using as his materials marble blocks from 19th century buildings recently levelled to create the concrete cityscape of modern Athens, Pikionis fused his aesthetic interest in Modernist art with his appreciation of the old, the worn and characterful. [...]

Yet Critical Regionalism, as outlined by Frampton, is not a retreat into the vernacular, which he expressly warns against as lazily reactionary, and carrying within it the incipient threat of totalitarianism. Frampton cautions against the “demagogic tendencies of Populism” in architecture, “the simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.” Instead, he argues, the task for architects is to achieve a “self-conscious synthesis between universal civilisation and world culture.”

In practice, this means marrying the best of the vernacular tradition — a sensitive appreciation of place, climate and culture, the tactility and warmth of natural materials, a rootedness in the specifics of the local and a suspicion of the bland totalitarianism of modernism — with an awareness that we cannot undo the Modernist moment; we are moderns, and any attempt to undo this basic fact will result only in a feeble and debilitating pastiche. [...]

Critical Regionalism is inherently post-liberal in its vision of the good; it is open to the world, not narrow and exclusive, yet rooted in the specifics of place and culture. Instead of defining itself by what it is not, and locking itself into a futile and mutually destructive cycle of opposition to liberalism, perhaps post-liberalism can be profitably reimagined as a form of political Critical Regionalism: alive and responsive to the values of community, tradition and localism, yet at the same time willing to take what is good from liberalism, what is genuinely superior to what came before it, and to reshape it to its own ends.

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BBC4 In Our Time: John Wesley and Methodism

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Wesley (1703 - 1791) and the movement he was to lead and inspire. As a student, he was mocked for approaching religion too methodically and this jibe gave a name to the movement: Methodism. Wesley took his ideas out across Britain wherever there was an appetite for Christian revival, preaching in the open, especially the new industrial areas. Others spread Methodism too, such as George Whitefield, and the sheer energy of the movement led to splits within it, but it soon became a major force.

WithStephen PlantDean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall at the University of CambridgeEryn WhiteReader in Early Modern History at Aberystwyth UniversityAndWilliam GibsonProfessor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History

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Nautilus Magazine: The Joys of Being a Stoic

So it goes for Stoicism: The stiff-upper-lip stereotype finds its root in the fact that Stoics practice endurance. It arose in ancient Greece and Rome, established around 300 B.C. by Zeno of Citium in Athens. People spanning the social gamut practiced it, from slaves such as the early second-century Epictetus to emperors like Marcus Aurelius. They took to heart the idea that if there is nothing you can do about a particular situation, why beat yourself up about it? Work toward as serene a degree of acceptance as you can muster instead. This doesn’t mean suppressing emotions. Rather, it means shifting your emotional spectrum—away from unhealthy emotions like anger and toward the mindful embracing of healthy ones like joy—by working on consciously altering the way you think about yourself and the world. [...]

Well, thank Zeus I’ve never been attracted by a “naive endorsement of stoic ideology.” That’s because I practice upper-case Stoicism, not lower-case stoicism. I’m into the philosophy, in other words, not the macho attitude. Not only are the two unrelated, but in fact research from practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy shows that the philosophy promotes eudaimonic well-being as well as engagement in life. The goal of Stoicism, after all, is to make us into the best human beings we can be, and it does so through the constant applications of two cardinal principles: the dichotomy of control and the four virtues.[...]

In essence, the idea is to internalize our goals: Instead of focusing, as it comes natural, on outcomes, let’s pay attention to our intentions and efforts. The Stoics think that the only truly good thing for us is our own character, and that therefore the only truly bad things are whatever may undermine our character. Everything else (including health, wealth, reputation, etc.) has value, but does not define who we are. [...]

It turns out that practicing Stoics experience a statistically significant increase in measures of their well-being, with fewer episodes of negative emotions (like anger) and more episodes of positive emotions (like joy). Moreover, such reduction of anger does not take place by way of suppression (which is impossible), but because Stoic practitioners reframe what happens to them in terms that simply do not trigger angry reactions in them. “We stop having ethically misguided and intense or conflicted emotions (sometimes called ‘passions’) and we move toward having ‘good emotions,’” as the handbook for the 2020 edition of Stoic Week states. “The passions are misguided because the passionate person supposes that happiness depends on acquiring or retaining ‘preferred indifferents,’ such as wealth or fame (rather than on exercising the virtues).” This folly leads to anger, fear, or overwhelming lust, emotions often marked “by intensity of feeling, instability and inner conflict.”

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BBC4 In Our Time: Deism

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that God created the universe and then left it for humans to understand by reason not revelation. Edward Herbert, 1583-1648 (pictured above) held that there were five religious truths: belief in a Supreme Being, the need to worship him, the pursuit of a virtuous life as the best form of worship, repentance, and reward or punishment after death. Others developed these ideas in different ways, yet their opponents in England's established Church collected them under the label of Deists, called Herbert the Father of Deism and attacked them as a movement, and Deist books were burned. Over time, reason and revelation found a new balance in the Church in England, while Voltaire and Thomas Paine explored the ideas further, leading to their re-emergence in the French and American Revolutions.

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UnHerd: Hypocrisy is not the worst thing on earth

 Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing. [...]

Another weakness with charges of hypocrisy is that using someone’s failure to uphold their standards as a means of discrediting those standards is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy, or, in British English terms, playing the man and not the ball. I don’t want to be too much of a debate nerd. Such accusations can reveal some things about those standards — not least that they are hard to keep. But it does not prove that they are wrong to hold. [...]

Again, this does not mean that charges of hypocrisy are worthless. For example, the enthusiasm with which many leftists greeted Black Lives Matter protests in the midst of lockdowns they had tended to ferociously support might not have proven anything about coronavirus but it was a powerful indictment of their priorities. Yet the Right should recognise their limits, since their opponents use charges of hypocrisy too. Long before the #metoo’d male feminist, the Christian moralist with a colourful sex life, for example, has been a classic archetype, as Jerry Falwell Jr. recently reminded us.

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Aeon: The semi-satisfied life

 Schopenhauer’s pessimism is based on two kinds of observation. The first is an inward-looking observation that we aren’t simply rational beings who seek to know and understand the world, but also desiring beings who strive to obtain things from the world. Behind every striving is a painful lack of something, Schopenhauer claims, yet obtaining this thing rarely makes us happy. For, even if we do manage to satisfy one desire, there are always several more unsatisfied ones ready to take its place. Or else we become bored, aware that a life with nothing to desire is dull and empty. If we are lucky enough to satisfy our basic needs, such as hunger and thirst, then in order to escape boredom we develop new needs for luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco or fashionable clothing. At no point, Schopenhauer says, do we arrive at final and lasting satisfaction. Hence one of his well-known lines: ‘life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom’. [...]

The second kind of observation is outward-looking. According to Schopenhauer, a glance at the world around us disproves the defining thesis of Gottfried Leibniz’s optimism that ours is the best of all possible worlds. On the contrary, Schopenhauer claims, if our world is ordered in any way, it is ordered to maximise pain and suffering. He gives the example of predatory animals that cannot but devour other animals in order to survive and so become ‘the living grave of thousands of others’. Nature as a whole is ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson later put it, pitting one creature against another, either as the devourer or the devoured, in a deadly fight for survival. [...]

None of this is to say that no one ever feels happy. Again, this would fly in the face of the personal experience of countless people who have felt happy at some point in their lives. It does tell us, however, that happiness differs from pain and suffering in the way that it’s felt. Pain and suffering announce themselves whether we like it or not. They highlight that something is wrong and needs fixing. However small and trivial the problem might be, pain and suffering will make it our number-one priority. Happy feelings, on the other hand, don’t always announce themselves. We can have all the things that should make us feel happy and yet fail to feel happy. It could be because pain and suffering are tirelessly flagging up things not to feel happy about, but it could just be that – like the mouthful of food after it’s swallowed – we have forgotten all the things that are doing us good. [...]

The last thing we should do is believe the opposite: that we are destined to find happiness in life rather than encounter suffering. If we believe the world owes us happiness, we are bound to be sorely disappointed, not least because, when we do achieve whatever we think will make us happy, we will have new unfulfilled desires that will supersede the old ones. We are also bound to feel resentment towards the obstacles that stand between us and the happiness we feel entitled to. Some people, Schopenhauer observes, concentrate and externalise this resentment by setting a goal for a happy life that on some level they know is unachievable. Then, when it never materialises, they always have something other than themselves to point to and blame for why they aren’t happy. ‘In this respect,’ Schopenhauer says, ‘the external motive for sadness plays the same role that a blister remedy does on the body, drawing together all the bad humours that would have otherwise been scattered.’

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Wisecrack Edition: REALITY TV: An Idiot's Guide to Dating

 Even if you're not a fan of reality tv, you probably know that their depictions of love are, at first glance, pretty bananas. But what if there's actually a lot to be learned from the way these shows construct stories about love? Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition on Reality TV: An Idiot's Guide to Dating.