Puzzle of the self-torturer?

Look at this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on dynamic choice.

Suppose someone — who, for reasons that will become apparent, Quinn calls the self-torturer — has a special electric device attached to him. The device has 1001 settings: 0, 1, 2, 3, …, 1000 and works as follows: moving up a setting raises, by a tiny increment, the amount of electric current applied to the self-torturer's body. The increments in current are so small that the self-torturer cannot tell the difference between adjacent settings. He can, however, tell the difference between settings that are far apart. And, in fact, there are settings at which the self-torturer would experience excruciating pain. Once a week, the self-torturer can compare all the different settings. He must then go back to the setting he was at and decide if he wants to move up a setting. If he does so, he gets $10,000, but he can never permanently return to a lower setting. Like most of us, the self-torturer would like to increase his fortune but also cares about feeling well. Since the self-torturer cannot feel any difference in comfort between adjacent settings but gets $10,000 at each advance, he prefers, for any two consecutive settings s and s+1, stopping at s+1 to stopping at s. But, since he does not want to live in excruciating pain, even for a great fortune, he also prefers stopping at a low setting, such as 0, over stopping at a high setting, such as 1000

This passage as stated states that the increments to be increased are of the devices settings (i.e. amount of electric current). But the "puzzle" seem to arise when we consider increments of degrees of pain.

But pain is dependent not simply on one factor such as external stimulation from electric currents. It is a function also of psychological factors. Psychological experiments over the years have shown that individual's pain tolerance and subjective evaluation of the degree of pain vary considerably based on the individual's state of mind at the time. People may experience more pain and tolerate more pain such as electric shocks or having their hand immersed in ice water simply by changing a state of mind either self-induced or by the experimenter or through some uninduced capricious change of the state of the mind. Thus the agent may experience two shocks with very small differences in electric current as drastically different in subjective pain.

So the agent may not be able to predict when his state of mind changes for the worse making him vulnerable to experience an intransitive and unbearable rise in pain in that incremental series of electric current. When it does happen it will be experienced as a pain that is noticeably greater than the pain resulting from the shock administered immediately before.

I think that many philosophical puzzles of rational choice such as Slote's "Satisficing maximizer" can also be solved by appealing to principles of unpredictability and context instability like I have here.

Ubiquitous fictionalism

In a previous post, I talked about the possibility of moral fictionalism and the skepticism this possibility may justify. But fictionalism is not restricted to the moral realm. All kinds of metaphysical fictionalism is possible and the live possibility that there is much truth to them is the history of philosophy itself which has always butted heads against our most common notions of what exists, even the most commonly acknowledged objects are not safe from the existence of good reasons against their existence. Many metaphysicians are monists, many are atomists, and some are even nihilists. All these positions often deny the existence of chairs, basketballs, cars, and even people and claim that they are mere fictions we conjure to make sense of our world. They often claim that normal objects we encounter daily are begotten through abstraction and are not really there, objectively, mind independently, in the sense we may think or assume they are.

Take monists. They believe that there is just one thing that really exist and usually that one thing they believe is just the whole cosmos or "blobject" (some priority monists believe that only one thing exists concretely while everything else is abstract while existence monists believe that nothing else exists exist for that one thing, whatever it is). Now monists give very good reasons for why they believe what they believe. They can show contradictions and inconsistencies in positing normal everyday objects such as chairs, basketballs, cars, persons, molecules, etc. Monists have summoned arguments from mereology and modern physics (Jonathan Schaffer's argument from quantum field theory e.g.) among other resources to argue their case.

Now take atomists. Many of these folks only believe in the existence of atoms, whatever they may be (quarks or maybe strings or something even more fundamental). All other objects are collections of atoms with some relationship holding among them and obtained through arbitrary abstractions and thus there existence is mind-dependent in a sense. Atomists also have good reason to argue their case.

(Pure) Nihilists don't believe in the existence of any object. Many of them believe that there is gunk all the way down and all the way up. Again, nihilists have good reasons for their beliefs and their beliefs are conflicting much like the other positions with pluralism, the common sense view that all everyday objects like chairs, cars, basketballs, persons, etc exist. They often point to contradictions and inconsistencies in the belief in common objects or in the belief in any object qua object in the way philosophers think of them as existing with their internal properties mind independently, etc.

So it might be the case that our belief that everyday objects like chairs, cars, basketballs, and people are mere fictions. And furthermore, our belief in atoms and the cosmos might be fictions. Furthermore, any belief that assumes, posits, and is built on such beliefs may be in turn fictions. Fictions multiply on other fictions and we would need to invent more and more fictions in ever more ingenious ways familiar to philosophical construction to make sense of our world in ad hoc ways just to keep things coherent. That ad hoc constructionism only to run into further problems down the road sounds like the history of philosophy! This would entail, if true, that we live in a world of our own creation in a profound sense, a world of our fictions with reality far different and weirder than we can imagine. This induces a very Taoist sensibility in me. Something exists, that it is The One, but we cannot know its exact nature except in very general, abstract and ineffable terms, and all conceptualizations on this The One goes wrong from the start seems like a Taoist's skepticist view.

Poem

Love of Wisdom

Often homes are built

Over an abyss

The structural supports of lies and fallacy

The philosopher, never remiss

In demolishing false security

With a wrecking ball of analysis

Watch the house of cards as it falls

Upon sounder base shall be built

The Chamber of hallowed halls

Copy and Original

Jarrod Brown has a couple of posts on what copies and original mean in art and technology. I posted my alternate definition and some objections to his in the comments section. His criteria for copy-hood are as follows.

1. They are materially distinct from originals

2. They are the formal effects of originals (or originals are formal causes of copies)

3. They are logically associated

4. They resemble each other

I disagree with all of these criteria because I think there are counter examples to all. Let's start with the first. There are many ways to understand this. If I understand this first criteria correctly, it means something like a copy cannot be made of the same stuff or material as the original. Or it could just mean that they are not numerically identical meaning they just have to be at least two different things instead of one. I agree with the last interpretation but I think the first faces serious problems. For example, a statue made of clay can be destroyed by crushing it into a ball and then the ball may be fashioned back into the form of the statue. It seems to me that the statue was destroyed when it was crushed and that the subsequent sculpting of a statue from that same piece of clay is a copy even though it is made of the same piece of clay and may resemble it in form.

The second criterion faces the counter example I gave of causal loops showing that a painting e.g., may be the copy of another painting which in turn was a copy of it. I also gave the example of Eternal Recurrence which is supposed to show that there can be originals "all the way down" a causal line. These example also show that 3 cannot be true (if I understand 3 to mean that they are conceptually analytical of each other) because it shows that copies can exists independently of any original and an original can be caused by some earlier work which is also an original and that the two works are similar in resemblance to each other and materially distinct (either in the numerical or the made-of-the-same-stuff sense.

Finally the last criterion of resemblance "to a high degree" is problematic for the reason that there can be bad copies. I think most people have had the experience of using a copy machine only to have the copy turn out looking nothing like the original in that there were distortions, color changes, missing parts, etc. We can either call these copies "failed copies" or "bad copies." If they are bad copies as I think they are and not failed copies, it would be problematic for that criterion. The vagueness of "resemblance to a high degree" is also not desirable for the definition. Things may resemble on indefinite number and degree of criteria to something else. Resemblance is also perspective sensitive. For example, two photos may look very similar to one individual A and very different to another person B because the photos may have different saliently colored regions and if A is color blind, she will only see different shades of gray in those regions while A will see completely different colors and thus think the two photos not resemble.

I gave an alternative definition of copy as follows:

Object A is a copy iff its creation was intended as a copy of some object B (or maybe even an idea of such an object) and A does not (numerically) equal B.

I don't think this definition is susceptible to the counter examples but it may have its own problems. Consider DNA. DNA are copies of other DNA molecules and yet there was no intention in nature to copy (despite what IDers like to think).

Are DNA copies? Well yes. But I think there is an ambiguity in the word copy. Copy, as it is used for art and technology and writing etc, mean something different than copy in nature perhaps. The definition I gave is for copy in the former context while the later for copy in nature is more of a metaphorical usage of copy. I think paying attention to this difference in usage will not render my intentional definition problematic.

Dispositions and Vices and Virtues

(In this post I will be assuming for the dispositional account of virtues. Some dispositions are virtues, other are vices and some are prima facie neither)

Some dispositions (or collection of dispositions) may manifest itself either as a virtue or a vice depending on external circumstances out of the control of an agent. Take for example Aristotle's example of intelligence and courage. Being smart or brave can sometimes improve one's moral character but in other situations, make one worse as a person. You don't want your dictators to be smart nor courageous as that would magnify their evil. These are obvious and neutral examples of dispositions that can manifest in different morally relevant ways.

However, examples exist of people who had dispositions of what appeared under normal contexts to be clearly considered vices but used them to further good. Consider Oscar Schindler. This individual displayed profound greed, mendacity, cunning, hubris, and ruthlessness in his business dealings. However, his one character trait of being sympathetic to the children in concentration camps compelled him to eventually save more than a thousand of them. What is morally interesting is how he managed this.

He used his mendacity, cunning and ruthlessness, dispositions that normally are vices, to great effect in saving the children. He would have likely saved very few if any individuals had he not been as arrogant and condescending of his fellow Nazis as he was because he wouldn't have had the confidence in himself to pull off such a stunt. All of his vices were turned around by the circumstances into making his single virtue more efficacious. If Schindler had lived in the present time, he would perhaps have been a greedy business executive and fit the immoral mold common to that type. He might have been like an Eron executive or Madoff like person and (rightfully) despised. But due to circumstances outside of his control, he was given a golden opportunity to display his humanity. But such is a grace of god or pure luck and can't be to his credit.

My question is, If many of these dispositions normally considered vices Schindler had can be used to further good in certain contexts, then are all vices qua vices relative to contexts and are all virtues similarly contextually relative? Perhaps there are no absolute virtues and vices but all dispositions can be manifested either in a good way or not depending on what moral context is given. Some dispositions may simply be analytic virtues. Doubting their virtuous quality may simply be a matter of not understanding the concept, etc. But why is that? I happen to think there is at least a few absolute virtues that are always good to have (epistemic integrity being one).

There is a deeper problem with virtues. Perhaps some virtues are really collections of lower level dispositions interacting in a certain way together and not single dispositions and none of the lower level dispositions are obviously virtues themselves, or even worse, some of them may be commonly thought as vices. In other words, virtues are emergent properties of lower order properties which may themselves be amoral or even immoral. What if, for example, it is found out that integrity, generally recognized as a virtue, is really a particular combination of things like emotional intelligence and recalcitrance?

The value of philosophy

The best response I have heard to the question of why study philosophy, why study questions that have not been adequately answered for thousands of years matter, is given by Michael Sandel. "Because we live the answers everyday."

There are many values to studying the subject. I think the most important on are ethical reasons. But the common objections given include the "fact" that philosophy has not contributed to human knowledge and or human society's development. This is clearly wrong. Here's a list of all that philosophy has contributed in terms of knowledge both directly and indirectly (through methodology developed) and through social change.

Philosophy's contribution to our knowledge:

-Modern economics was first developed by the moral philosopher Adam Smith.

-Psychology, sociology political science all originated from the minds of philosophers.

-Modern work in logic was heavily influenced by philosophers. The truth table in logic e.g. was first seen in the work of a philosopher (1919 by Wittgenstein) which eventually lead to the electronic revolution of the 60s. The earliest development of modal logic is by Aristotle, C.I. Lewis, Ruth Marcus and Saul Kripke, all philosophers.

-Cybernetics, the science of regulatory systems was started by someone with a philosophy PhD (Norbert Weiner).

-Modern linguistics bases much of its work on formal semantics almost exclusively on the works of philosophers of language such as Frege, Russell, Kaplan, Montage, David Lewis and many others.

-The 2005 Nobel Prize for economics went to mathematician Robert Aumann who based his work on economic conventions on the work of David Lewis's notion of "common knowledge".

-The development of modern cognitive science, both its inception and developments within to this day to philosophers.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_scientistsAnd much of decision theory have been developed by philosophers as well.ser.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-are-some-physicists-so-bad-at.html?commentPage=2

This is not mentioning all the knowledge developed in more traditionally understood philosophical areas.

To the shape of society and course of human history:

-Development of democratic theory

-Development of legal theory

-Various economic theories (capitalism, communism etc)

And so forth.

It's not only a myth that philosophy has not contributed to society, it seems to be one of those myths that's the opposite from the truth. Philosophy has had massive influence as my examples show.

More pessimistic ethics and political philosophy

In an earlier post I gave some examples of when a hopeless situation in which internecine violence may likely result from seemingly innocuous situations (at least concerning the violation of rights and duties) such as mere intentions or avaricious use and abuse of the public commons. The realization of these situations seem to be a moral no man's land where morality fails to guide us and the situations may be seen as situations where all sides are permitted to destroy each other. There are no moral facts of the matter as to who is in the right and wrong etc.

But the examples I used was where there was an original sin, that is, either forming a credible intention to enslave others or the avaricious use and abuse of public commons. But the point may be generalized to include other kinds that have no original sin such as policies and institutions (either formal or informal) that are formed with good intentions and that have good reasons for their existence. Because all such public policies and institutions are imperfect, there are bound to be those who fall through the cracks and are unfairly hurt by even the best intentioned and reasonable policies.

Take the legal system itself. No matter how well intentioned and well constructed any legal system is, due to inherent epistemic and pragmatic limitations in any system, some will likely be unfairly treated (such as receive unfair sentences or even falsely convicted, etc). Some of those unfairly getting the shit end of the stick will be harmed worse than others.

From a contractarian perspective, in some sense these people may be seen as treated fairly if they would agree to the scheme of things in an original position; that is, they may voluntarily agree to the policies and institutions in place (and hence their results) because the benefits of such a system outweigh the small probability that they will be unfairly treated. When in fact they have been unfairly treated by the system, they have no right to complain if the system was operating as it was meant because they had tacitly agreed to the conception from that original position and must accept their fate if all means to vindicate them within the system has been exhausted even if they were still unfairly treated in the end.

However the damage done to someone who has been unfairly treated is relative and cannot be appreciated from an original position because the original position is by its nature blind to that plurality in perspective. I really don't know how to fix this fundamental problem with any political system.