intrinsic value: two perspectives

Utilitarians think that happiness is the only thing that is intrinsically good and others disagree, but one interesting thing is that the perspective we take on our own lives greatly influences what we think is valuable.

In this post, I talked about the philosophical difficulties caused by our ability to view the world from the first person perspective as well as the third person perspective. In the case of value, these two perspectives are relevant. From the first person perspective, it seems plausible that the only thing that is valuable would be our own experience; how we feel when we’re looking out from our own cranium.

But viewed from the third person perspective, it seems like other things might matter like knowledge, achievement, and even things like beauty. Imagine someone who lost the ability to feel pain and pleasure as sensations. This person would be defacto in the third person perspective and might come to regard their life more as a sculpture regards a pot; a canvas for excellence.

This difference also comes up in subtle ways that certain thought experiments are carried out. Sometimes, in trying to determine whether something is intrinsically valuable, someone will create two worlds and ask “which world would you create.” This question is asked from the third perspective, and so makes it easier to see certain things as valuable. For example, if I could create a world of happy sloths, eating fruit that was readily available for their consumption and drinking from pure streams without anything to be afraid or to test them OR a world of hardworking and resolute folk who had to get what they needed through work and overcoming. I would see the second world as far more excellent. However, if I were asked which world I would want to live in, I would of course choose the first, but this is just the difference between addressing questions to the different viewpoints we can inhabit.

Strange Days

Wow. I’m going to try and describe how good the movie Strange Days is.

The movie takes place in 1999 right before the new year and thus the new millenium. The movie was made in 1995, so this was still the future. In this future, there are machines that can record the brain states of its wearer, and so people live out fantasies by playing the tapes that were recorded from someone else’s brain. People put on a mesh helmet, and enter into the viewpoint of another person.

Of course their is a vibrant trade in exotic movies of this type, and the metaphorical connection to the illegal drug trade is present in every scene. The main character is a dealer of these illegal experiences, and after giving a prospective client a taste of one of these memories, he says “and that was just an 18 year old girl taking a shower.”

The great part about this movie is that on its most basic level, it’s just a great thriller. Someone got killed and the main character needs to figure out why and who did it. Just following this basic level of the story is immensely rewarding, and like any good thriller, a brutal murder becomes so much more.

What really makes this movie genius though is that every scene advances at least three other stories simultaneously.

First, there is the MLK like rapper who is murdered, which introduces an element of racial struggle to the movie. Indeed in the end when the main character and his black friend express their love for each other, its all the more meaningful for being interracial.

Also, there is an ongoing point about history and dystopian futures. The movie takes place, as I said, at the turn of the millennium, and each character has a unique spin on what this means. Some people see the millennium as a massive celebration that will burn out of control and break the fragile hold of the police state run by the LAPD. Others who are more optimistic see history as beginning with the millennium. To these people, totalitarianism will be erased by a new era. The final sequences of the movie happen right at the pivot point between two eras and it gives substances to the otherwise trivial point that history can be made in an instant. (All this is even more interesting if you know about our own government’s successful attempts to avert several terrorist attacks planned for the millennium).

Still further, there are many philosophical points. There is talk about mankind’s willingness to buy and sell memories and how this fact marks the end of human creativity and uniqueness. The LA of the future merely recycles its memories again and again, reliving them without being able to create new ones. This mirrors the main character who remains obsessed with a girlfriend who has left him for someone else. The typical love story cliches are made fresh by the fact that the main character, the one who cannot find new love, is an experience junky like everyone else. He just pathetically replays tapes of the time he spent with his ex. The entire society in fact is trapped in its own mediocrity and the millennium is the point where newness can once again enter into the society. The  emphasis on creativity and history is all very Nietzschean.

Finally, there is a point about perception and cinematography. When a character plays someone else’s experience, the camera jitters and swerves to mirror the first person perspective, and if you’ve read any of my other recent posts, you know this is an interesting topic in  its own right.

All told, this movie  is a gritty, futuristic, dystopian, matrix-like, murder mystery, with some surprising plot twists and a completely unorthodox endgame. So much is happening at once and every second is a rich intersection between all these themes.

If you have netflix, you should move this to the front of your queue right now. It…is…awesome.

merging the digital and physical

There is a lot of focus lately on changing how we interact with machines. The iphone and ipad are prime examples. There is just something so sexy about the interface; how it responds to our natural motions rather than the cramped and mechanistic motions of typing.

This video is an unbelievable demonstration of where this technology is going. But also, as this inventor, Pranav Mistry notes, there are philosophical implications. As he puts it, new interface technology will preserve our humanity; we won’t be merely one type of machine manipulating another. Rather, we will take our technological world with us.

On the one hand, I agree. When we look out at the world from the perspective of our internal experience, the world presents itself as filled with a rich number of possibilities, values, and reasons. Computing while preserving this perspective would be a victory. There are costs too. One would be that as we cast our digital net over wider and wider parts of the world, we risk eliminating the beauty and spontaneity of nature. It’s funny because personally, I don’t really care about nature. I don’t have a pet and I don’t take walks outside to enjoy the view (then again I live in Boston). However, if we are projecting our human world onto the natural world, then we risk swallowing up the immovable bits of nature into the mere flow of our desires and interests. As I’ve said in this blog many times before, human excellence sometimes needs collision and dissonance to reveal itself. If the world is just a canvas for us to paint on, then it loses its ability to resist our strivings and to symbolize our limitations.

No doubt there is much more to be said on this issue and my position is not fixed.

Why do people embrace stereotypes?

One thing that has always interested me is how willingly people trade their individuality for a role or a type. The New Jerseyite happily puts on dark glasses, gets a tan, and puts oil in his hair. The ivy league graduate gets a scarf, pointy leather shoes, and cufflinks to go with his law degree. The frat boy gets a north face jacket to go with the family guy collection sitting in a puddle of beer congealing in his black jeep cherokee.

Of course there is the usual explanation, which is, it’s tough living without an identity, and our society has many ready made molds that one can slip into, but I think the story is a little deeper. Namely, because I don’t see all of these ways of life, though I tried my best to parody them above, as devoid of value. I think they all have immense value actually, but the problem is that to embrace one type of life is to foreclose another. It’s not that we all want identities, which are flimsy little constructions, but rather that we all really do want to live our lives according to some guiding compass.

The problem is that it’s scary to live in tension with values; to try to live all values at once is alienating and straining. The fighter pilot who likes interpretive dance, the frat boy who is in favor of animal rights, and the ivy league graduate who works as a police officer for a little while. All of these are rare people, and each one of these person in some sense realizes that no one value in their life is sovereign. The intellectual might realize that the world of ideas is partially frivolous and isolating, while the frat boy might realize that constant partying leaves one empty after a certain point. Of course, to make these choices is to leave oneself doubly isolated. First, other people from a certain group will look on you with suspicion. Other frat boys might say “where’s your family guy collection. Why is Peter Singer’s book about animal liberation next to your computer.” The ivy league graduate turned policy officer might find that his friends wonder why his house isn’t so big or why he has a gun instead of a squash racquet. The athletic professor might get stares for the whey protein that sits where his copy of “Sense and Reference” should be. But second, the person who tries to live all values is always in tension with himself, for he realizes that no one type of life is good enough. As soon as he is satisfied, he realizes what is missing.

Unfortunately, it’s much easier to pick one value and think that it’s superior, than give thought to the conflict among values. The academic thumbs his nose at grunts in Afghanistan because it’s easier than acknowledging that there is something to that life. To do that would be to acknowledge that one’s own life is not complete and that it’s missing something. Few can accept that fact.

Maturity

I titled this post maturity, but only because I really don’t know how you would classify this point, but here it is.

In our society, we are encouraged to learn to discriminate between our feelings, so that they are then applied properly. For example, angst ridden teens realize that they weren’t in love with their high school sweetheart; they were just compatible in some way, or maybe they just lusted after each other. In the same way, people find out that the guy they always went out for drinks with was better thought of as a co-worker than a trusting friend. People, starting at birth, take raw and amorphous “pro” and “con” feelings toward people and divide them into further subcategories. The pro category might become more varied and so come to include pro in the friend sense, pro in the lover sense, and pro in the colleague sense. The important point is that we discover what different internal states are telling us. We make mistakes when we’re younger, but some people (other people stay immature forever) learn to pay attention to the nuances of their experience.

In other parts of the world (and for other people in the U.S.) there is no discovery. Instead, there is only making. What I’m thinking of is a group of studies indicating that the love a husband and wife feel for each other grows with time in cultures with very conservative marriage regimes (i.e., you might ostracized or even physically harmed if you divorce your spouse, or you might not have a choice of who to marry). Under these sorts of cultures, I think the model of maturity is different. As one ages, one does not learn to distinguish love from friendship and mentorship from authority and then pursue relationships properly — such as marrying the on you love and doing things with friends, rather than marrying your friend and hanging out with the one you love.

In these societies, the order is reversed. One is told what certain relationships are by social structures and then learns to sculpt feelings and emotions to fit. For example, in some traditional cultures, family members and religious figures are endowed with all sorts of cultural symbols that given children clues as to how they are approach them. Love, when it comes to marriage, is irrelevant. People are paired together for marriage, not because they love each other, but because they must build a loving relationship.
The interesting point I think is that though I find traditional cultures constraining and subtly coercive in many ways, the lesson of constructing friendships and marriages are largely lost on our culture, and that is a shame. People think that they will just find a loving partner or a close friend like stumbling on an oasis in the desert, but this seems like a recipe for superficiality. Relationships have to be earned, and so, built over time with effort. Anything else, to my jaded mind, is just a self-help book shortcutting.

sudden change

Some economists have recently begun working on why there are sudden changes — sudden changes in markets, sudden changes in politics, and sudden changes in social networks. Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point is a fairly recent (2000) exemplification of the interest in this empirical question.

Of course, my interest in this question mainly has to do with politics. Are sudden changes in the political landscape these days than in the past? I think there might be reason to think so. First, the number of moderates in congress has been pretty steadily shrinking, and the increase in the use of the fillibuster makes it rarer to have partisan control over congress and thus more likely that periods of partisan control will involve more radical policy changes.

There are two reasons this question interests me. One, can the growing cynicism people feel toward politics possibly be explained by the replacement of incremental change with sudden more radical change. Total policy change might be constant, but people might perceive it to be changing less if policy change requires long wait times punctuated by broad swings in policy. Second, if incremental change is self reinforcing, then political change might be stifled by a shift toward sudden policy changes. What I mean is a given political goal might be able to attract more support if progress can be made regularly on it. On the other hand, if progress requires a long wait time, then supporters may become frustrated and abandon the issue or cause.

mental energy

Economics has long studied the tradeoffs of physical objects. How many objects of this type could I trade for that, or, given my skills, what objects should I make and which should I purchase from others?

Quickly, the dismal science realized that time had an economy to it as well. I will pay more to have something now and I will discount utility if I get it in the future. People will also of course pay for leisure time.

Just recently though, I think economics is starting to grapple with the idea that there might be an economy of mental power. Maybe this is philosophical prejudice, but during my day, my ability to process information effectively and to keep up with the ideas rushing through my brain (this is not supposed to be an elitist point about my enormous brain, but rather about my hyperactive tendency to overanalyze things) becomes severely taxed. In fact, when I thought of this post, it would almost erased forever by a succeeding thought, but I wrote a quick note to myself; a note that I almost didn’t even understand.

This is related to the information revolution. I think iphones (and of course, ipads too) are a symptom of a realization that quickly, the biggest constraint on human development is our own ability to remember what the hell we’re doing from second to second. Multi-tasking is a trite self help phrase, but it’s also an expression of a new direction in human needs.

a parable

Today I came to the intersection of Boston ave and College ave on the Tufts campus. The “do not walk” sign was flashing, but the light for my side of the street was red, so I crossed. In fact, this is usually the case. The “do not walk” sign is usually active, but 9 times out of 10, the cars where I want to cross have a red light.

Sometimes, timid people wait for other people to make the first cross against the “don’t walk” sign, and some people run because they think the light will change soon.

But today, I saw something new. A girl was waiting to cross. I crossed in contravention of the “do not walk” sign. She did not follow, but continued to stare blankly at the pedestrian signal. I walked further. I turned back. Still waiting. I walked on. Finally, the “walk” sign flashed, and the girl cross.

To me, this is a political parable. Why do we have rules? We don’t merely have them to just to have them. We have them (if they are just) for reasons. Political philosophy is valuable because it tells us the reasons for certain institutions and rules, so that we know when following such rules is just rule fetishism.

Mill and public voting

One part of democracy involves adding up numbers. More people on my side means my policy gets enacted. This is a good way to resolve disputes because it makes the most people happy and is predictable, easily enforceable, along with treating everyone equally.

However, this is no the whole story. Democracy is more than just numbers ; it also involves the claims of reasons. J.S. Mill proposed that people should give their reasons for voting publicly before casting their ballot so that badly reasoned decisions could be heckled and shamed.

The reason this is a bad procedure is that employers could see for example who was voting for pro-union laws, and then could single out the socially less powerful for retribution. Other examples abound. The general point is that if certain groups know about votes cast against their interest, they can go after them.

However, what about a system in which one had to write a down a reason for voting on the ballot, and then read this system of reasons behind a screen. No one would know who was behind the screen, but the ridicule could still be directed at them. Or, more technologically, people’s voting rationales could be put on the internet, anonymously of course. This would let our society know what sort of things people were focusing on and possibly, get ridicule directed at bad or reasonless decision-making.

the third person and first person perspective

I think one of the most interesting conflicts in philosophy is the conflict between the third person and first person perspective.

The conflict basically spans all of philosophy and it may not be solvable.

Here is the general idea. People can abstract away from their particular circumstances and think about their own actions from a detached or scientific perspective. I may not feel hungry right now, but perhaps I’m diabetic and so know that I need to have sugar or put myself in danger. I know something about my body by viewing my situation externally. It makes no difference that I don’t want to eat right now; I see that I need to from the perspective of the biologist or a watchful third party viewing my situation but not feeling my apathy toward eating.

However, the third person perspective on life is not the whole story. One philosophical way to see it is to take Frank Jackson’s case of “What Mary didn’t know.” Imagine Mary in a room where everything is black and white. She is then given a book with a flawless theory of the universe in it. Every physical fact and causal relationship is explained. Mary is so smart that she reads this book in a short time and then begins to operate with this theory. She can predict all events and explain every phenomenon. However, the idea is that when Mary walks out of the room and sees a red apple, something happens. She has a WOW! moment, and the reason for this is that a third person account of the world is incomplete; it leaves something out –  namely, what its like to have the experience of redness. Such an experience is only available from the first person perspective. We cannot become neutral scientists to investigate it, rather, we have to plunge into our subjectivity.

Free will is another example. From a scientific perspective, there is no possibility of humans having free will. However, from the inside, from the perspective of me typing this post, its obvious that I do have free will, or at least, free will is just a natural feeling of my first person view on the world. Of course, the rejoinder here is just to fall back on science. If we don’t have free will then we don’t, end of story. But that’s just the problem. If fall back totally on science, there isn’t anything at all about human life that is interesting. We are just molecules and atoms arranged in certain patterns. What about the actions we take, the responsibility we assume, and our very consciousness. These things resist scientific explanation, and yet they are there nonetheless.

There are other examples from ethics and epistemology, but the point is that these two viewpoints (first the third person) may be irreconcilable, and we may have to start trying to live with both rather than show how science or the objective perspective is all there is.