Results for 2006-12
Grein úr The Economist:
Free to choose?
Dec 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition
IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?
His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?
Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also one of the most important. Without it, the idea of responsibility for one's actions flies out of the window, along with much of the glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together. If businessmen were no longer responsible for their contracts, criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no longer responsible for their children, even though contract, crime and conception were freely entered into, then social relations would be very different.
We, the willing
For millennia the question of free will was the province of philosophers and theologians, but it actually turns on how the brain works. Only in the past decade and a half, however, has it been possible to watch the living human brain in action in a way that begins to show in detail what happens while it is happening (see survey). This ability is doing more than merely adding to science's knowledge of the brain's mechanism. It is also emphasising to a wider public that the brain really is a just mechanism, rather than a magician's box that is somehow outside the normal laws of cause and effect.
Science is not yet threatening free will's existence: for the moment there seems little prospect of anybody being able to answer definitively the question of whether it really exists or not. But science will shrink the space in which free will can operate by slowly exposing the mechanism of decision making.
At that point, the old French proverb to understand all is to forgive all will start to have a new resonance, though forgiveness may not always be the consequence. Indeed, that may already be happening. At the moment, the criminal lawin the West, at leastis based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.
The coming battle
Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. How soon before those people are subject to special surveillance? And if the state chose to carry out such surveillance, recognising that the people in question may pose particular risks merely because of their biology, it could hardly then argue that they were wholly responsible for any crime that they did go on to commit.
Nor is it only the criminal law where free will matters. Markets also depend on the idea that personal choice is free choice. Mostly, that is not a problem. Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing. But not always. Fatty, sugary foods subvert evolved instincts, as do addictive drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Pornography does as well. Liberals say that individuals should be free to consume these, or not. Erode free will, and you erode that argument.
In fact, you begin to erode all freedom. Without a belief in free will, an ideology of freedom is bizarre. Though it will not happen quickly, shrinking the space in which free will can operate could have some uncomfortable repercussions.
(Gunni)
Eftir ad Giovanni de Medici, sem síðar varð Leo X páfi, var sendur til Rómarborgar nám, barst honum bréf frá föður sínum Lorenzo þar sem hann er varaður við: "I know only too well that in going to live in Rome, which is a sink of iniquity, you will find it hard to follow my advice because there are many there who will try to corrupt you and incite you to vice". Hibbert hefur eftirfarandi að segja um þetta (áherslur eru mínar):
Lorenzo's reference to Rome as a sink of iniquity was not unjust. There were reckoned to be almost seven thousand prostitutes in a population of less than 50,000, most of them working in brothels licensed by the papal authorities and many of them suffering from syphilis, 'a kind of illness very common among priests', according to Benvenuto Cellini, who caught the disease himself. There were almost as many professional criminals as there were prostitutes, many if not most of whom avoided punishment by paying bribes to the papal authorities.
Stórfurðulegt að kaþólska kirkjan, og þá sérstaklega páfastóll, skuli hafa eitthvað "moral credibility" í ljósi sögunnar. Smá bútur úr bók sem ég er að lesa um Medici ættina (áherslur eru mínar):
But Giovanni's success as a banker was not so much due to the prosperity of the Florentine wool trade as to his friendship with the Pope. It seemed a most improbable friendship, for Baldassare Cossa, who was elected Pope in 1410, was not at all the sort of man with whom a rather staid and provident banker might be expected to associate. Sensual, adventurous, unscrupulous and highly superstitious, Baldassare Cossa came of an old Neapolitan family and had once been a pirate.
Jahá. Þar höfum við það. Páfinn var eitt sinn sjóræningi.
Það er kannski ekkert furðulegt -- Ratzinger var nú í Hitler Jugend.
(Sindri)
Annað textabrot úr ritum Maistre sem er hreint út sagt rosalegt:
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable... has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour others: thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself; he kills to adorn himself; he kills in order to attack and he kills in order to defend himself; he kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself; he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him ... from the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound ... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for a child -- his table is covered with corpses ... And who in this general carnage will exterminate him who exterminates all the others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man ... So it is accomplished ... the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
(Gunni)
Eru meira að segja jólin orðin ultra-politically-correct?
Ég var að keyra í sund áðan og í útvarpinu var spilað lag sem hét "Kona Jólsveinsins". Skv. textanum í laginu, þá er kvenkyns maki jólasveinka bara meginliðurinn í jólahátíðinni og ekkert gerist án þess að hún hafi puttana í því -- hún pakkar gjöfunum og hreinsar rauða og hvíta búninginn og sér til þess að vagninn með hreindýrunum virki, etc. etc. Er það bara ég, eða er of langt gengið þegar meira að segja jólasveinninn skuldar kvenkyninu þakkir, og er lítið annað en cringing, miserable aumingi án konu?
Stinkar af feminist agenda.
Ég er kominn aftur heim til Íslands og verð hér í tvær vikur, þ.e.a.s. til 28. desembers. Það verður hægt að ná í mig í gamla númerinu mínu.
Isaiah Berlin er hreint út sagt framúrskarandi stílisti. Hér er smá textabrot úr kafla um Enlightenment-aðalsmanninn Joseph de Maistre.
"Joseph de Maistre was a frightening figure to many of his contemporaries -- frightening because of what he wrote rather than because of what he was. [...] because of the violence, the intransigence and the extremely uncompromising and hard-headed dogmatism with which he wished to strike down the doctrines of which he disapproved
"The normal view of him is fairly stated by Émile Faguet, perhaps the most accurate and the fairest-minded critic of Maistre in France in the nineteenth century. He calls Maistre 'a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner'. And again, 'his Christianity is terror, passive obedience and the religion of the State'; his faith is merely 'a slightly touched-up paganism'; he is a 'Praetorian of the Vatican'. Edgar Quinet, a Protestant under the influence of the German romantic, writes of Maistre's 'inexorable God aided by the hangman' [...]
Maistre is painted, always, as a fanatical monarchist and a still more fanatical supporter of papal authority; proud, bigoted, inflexible, with a strong will and an unbelievable power of rigid reasoning from dogmatic premisses to extreme and unpalatable conclusions; brilliant, embittered, a medieval doctor born out of his time, vainly seeking to arrest the current of history; a distinguished anomaly, formidable, hostile, solitary and ultimately pathetic; at best a tragic patrician figure, defying and denouncing a shifty and vulgar world into which he had been incongruously born; at worst an unbending, self-blinded die-hard pouring curses upon the marvellous new age whose benefits he was too wilful to see, and too callous to feel. His works [...] the last despairing effort of feudalism in the dark ages to resist the march of progress.[...] the only way to get people to live in societies at all is to stop them from questioning, and the only way in which you can stop them from questioning is by terror. Only if the heart of things is dark and mysterious, impenetrable, will people obey. Once they have penetrated the heart of things [...] they will not be afraid of it. They will not be in awe of it, they will not revere it, and so it will collapse. What we need, Maistre maintains, is something dark and unintelligible."
Mér finnst Maistre hreint út sagt fascinating. Berlin heldur áfram:
"What then does society rest upon? Society is part of the vale of tears where we cannot understand the sources of things, where God governs us in an inscrutable way. It rests upon terror; it rests upon obedience, blind obedience to authority. Without it institutions become chaotic and restless, and go down in a welter of disaster. What represents this element of terror? Here Maistre makes a most paradoxical observation, and writes the most famous page in all his writings. He says that the person who stands in the centre of it all is none other than that hated figure, the executioner. Let me quote the famous passage in which he speaks of him:
Who is this inexplicable being?...He is like a world in himself...Hardly has he been assigned to his proper dwelling-place...when others remove their homes elsewhere...In the midst of this desolation...he lives alone with his mate and his young, who acquaint him with the sound of the human voice. But for them he would hear nothing but shrieks of agony...One of the lowest menials of justice knocks at his door and tells him that his services are wanted. He goes. He arrives in a public square where people are crowded together with faces of expectancy. A prisoner, a parricide, a man who has committed a sacrilege is flung to his feet. He seizes the man, stretches him, ties him to a cross is lying on the ground, raises his arms, and there is a terrible silence. It is broken only by the sound of the crushing of bones under the blows of the iron mace, and the screams of the victim. He unbinds the man, he carries him to the wheel; the broken limbs are wtined round the spokes and the head hangs down; the hair stands on end and from the mouth -- open like the door of a glowing furnace -- there comes at intervals only a few broken syllables of entreaty for death. The executioner has finished his task; his heart is beating, but it is with pleasure; he is satisfied with his wrok. He says in his heart, "No man breaks on the wheel better than I." He comes down from the scaffold and holds out his bloody hand, into which, from a distance, an official flings a few gold pieces. The executioner carries them off between two rows of human beings who shrink from him with horror. He sits down to table and eats, he goes to bed and sleeps, but when he awakes next morning his thoughts run on everything but his occupation of the day before. Is he a man? yes, God allows him to enter his shrines and accepts his prayers. He is no criminal, and yet no human language dares to call him, for instance, virtuous, honourable or estimable...Nevertheless all greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner; he is the terror of human society and the tie that holds it together. Take away this incomprehensible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears. God, who is the source of the power of the ruler, is also the source of punishment. He has suspended our world upon these two poles 'for the Lord is the lord of the twin poles, and round them he sets the world revolving'.
Þetta er einn rosalegasti textabútur sem ég hef lesið í langan tíma.
(Arnaldur)
Eru þessi orð skyld? Það hlýtur eiginlega að vera, það væri sniðugt.
(Dagur)
Ég var að uppgötva snilldarhöfund -- hugmyndasagnfræðinginn Isaiah Berlin. Ég hafði áður lesið greinina Two Concepts of Liberty í BA náminu mínu við HÍ -- en síðan pantaði ég um daginn nokkrar bækur eftir karlinn. Er núna að lesa Freedom and its Betrayal, en þar fjallar Berlin um hugmyndir Helvetíusar, Rousseaus, Fichtes, Hegels o.fl. um mannlegt frelsi, og meinta skaðsemi þeirra.
Ítalski vinur okkar hann Hjalti sendi mér tölvupóst og bað mig um lag fyrir stuttu. Ég hef ekki orðið að beiðni hans enn, né haft fyrir því að læra að spila umrætt lag. Til þess að bæta upp fyrir þessa svívirðingu býð ég því upp á napólíska tarantellu honum til uppbótar.
(Hjalti)
Jæja, þar fór allur möguleiki á að ég læri eitthvað næstu vikuna. Axis and Allies tölvuleikur.
(Sveinbjörn)