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<item rdf:about="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-we-fail-and-how/#!">
    <title>Why We Fail and How - Los Angeles Review of Books</title>
    <dc:date>2017-09-28T07:47:27+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-we-fail-and-how/#!</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>diogenes philosophy</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://thepointmag.com/2017/examined-life/punching-down">
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<item rdf:about="https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/final-fantasy-neoreactionary-politics-liberal-imagination">
    <title>Final Fantasy Neoreactionary politics and the liberal imagination | The Point Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2017-07-04T23:14:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/final-fantasy-neoreactionary-politics-liberal-imagination</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>neoreaction politics philosophy pathology</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://inference-review.com/article/spheres">
    <title>Spheres | Articles | Inference: International Review of Science</title>
    <dc:date>2017-05-14T08:29:49+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://inference-review.com/article/spheres</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>Sloterdijk culture history philosophy interesting</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul">
    <title>Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul - The New Yorker</title>
    <dc:date>2017-03-23T06:59:52+00:00</dc:date>
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<item rdf:about="http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm">
    <title>Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People</title>
    <dc:date>2016-12-23T08:06:37+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>ai philosophy</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/45998-explaining-norms/">
    <title>Explaining Norms // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame</title>
    <dc:date>2014-02-05T08:49:41+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/45998-explaining-norms/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>norms philosophy politicaltheory</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://sociological-eye.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/goffman-and-garfinkel-in-intellectual.html">
    <title>The Sociological Eye: GOFFMAN AND GARFINKEL IN THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE 20th CENTURY</title>
    <dc:date>2013-11-28T03:42:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://sociological-eye.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/goffman-and-garfinkel-in-intellectual.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>history sociology intellectual_history garfinkel goffman philosophy ethnomethodology</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/soviet-philosophy-education-and-thinking-about-reasons/">
    <title>Soviet Philosophy and then some » 3:AM Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2013-06-17T02:46:41+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/soviet-philosophy-education-and-thinking-about-reasons/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>philosophy soviet+union bakhurst_david vygotsky</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/38159-anarchy-and-legal-order-law-and-politics-for-a-stateless-society/">
    <title>Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame</title>
    <dc:date>2013-03-10T03:05:01+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/38159-anarchy-and-legal-order-law-and-politics-for-a-stateless-society/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>anarchy law philosophy</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.jehsmith.com/philosophy/2012/12/the-criminal-trial-of-animals-a-case-study-in-shame-and-necessity.html">
    <title>Justin E. H. Smith: The Criminal Trial of Animals: A Case Study in Shame and Necessity</title>
    <dc:date>2012-12-17T19:59:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.jehsmith.com/philosophy/2012/12/the-criminal-trial-of-animals-a-case-study-in-shame-and-necessity.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>philosophy to_read</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.juliansanchez.com/an-interview-with-robert-nozick-july-26-2001/">
    <title>An Interview with Robert Nozick (July 26, 2001)</title>
    <dc:date>2012-10-05T00:25:23+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.juliansanchez.com/an-interview-with-robert-nozick-july-26-2001/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>nozick interview philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/imagining-god-creating-poppies/">
    <title>Imagining god creating poppies » 3:AM Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2012-09-16T00:51:38+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/imagining-god-creating-poppies/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>kripke philosophy burgess_alexis</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="http://faslanyc.blogspot.de/2012/07/on-landscape-ontology-interview-with.html">
    <title>faslanyc: On Landscape Ontology: An Interview with Graham Harman</title>
    <dc:date>2012-07-05T11:15:27+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://faslanyc.blogspot.de/2012/07/on-landscape-ontology-interview-with.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>interesting metaphysics philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=992">
    <title>Dissent Magazine - Winter 2008 Issue - Who’s Afraid of Friedr...</title>
    <dc:date>2012-02-21T03:26:54+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=992</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>hayek democracy libertarianism philosophy socialism</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php">
    <title>CABINET // Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai</title>
    <dc:date>2012-01-26T03:23:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>aesthetics philosophy theory</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-ambiguous-utopia-of-iain-m-banks">
    <title>The New Atlantis » The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks</title>
    <dc:date>2012-01-23T03:36:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-ambiguous-utopia-of-iain-m-banks</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>books philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:53fd9a558d81/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27054-the-cambridge-history-of-philosophy-in-late-antiquity/">
    <title>The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame</title>
    <dc:date>2011-11-07T03:58:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27054-the-cambridge-history-of-philosophy-in-late-antiquity/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[These two volumes are the successor to The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, edited by A.H. Armstrong, which appeared in 1967. The difference in titles reflects a fundamental difference in outlook. Armstrong treated this era as an interim period between classical Greek philosophy and the philosophy of the Middle Ages, each of which had its own unity and coherence. The present volume conceives of late ancient philosophy as a field in itself, having its own unity and coherence.

The terminus a quo for this history is roughly 200 CE, or just before the birth of Plotinus. ]]></description>
<dc:subject>platonism philosophy delicious</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.waggish.org/2011/hans-blumenberg-on-heideggers-macguffin/">
    <title>Hans Blumenberg on Heidegger’s MacGuffin</title>
    <dc:date>2011-10-27T05:32:32+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.waggish.org/2011/hans-blumenberg-on-heideggers-macguffin/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Charitable or withering? (See here for supporting evidence.)

The secret of the MacGuffin is that revealing its name only further heightens the suspense about its identity in each situation. This in turn challenges the master to give visual presence to something whose logic is hidden. In other words: something without meaning for the story receives the distinction of optical significance….

In the MacGuffin, distinguished only by its identity, a secret is condensed that justified every expense, every activity, any amount of life, for the suspense of the action. A man is the carrier of material, of a formula, of a sketch, of information that is supposedly terribly important; but it is not important that his secret be revealed in the end – it is not even permissible, if disappointment is to be avoided over the absurdity of letting this thing be a matter of life and death.

It is best that the possessor of the secret goes under with it. The MacGuffin is an unfathomable dimension that determines the suspense of the action. Hitchcock can also convey this without his story, through his experience with the production of suspense: “the main thing I’ve learned over the years is that the MacGuffin is nothing. I’m convinced of this, but I find i very difficult to prove it to others. My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean my emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in ‘North by Northwest.’” In that 1959 spy film, the all-encompassing question of what the spies are seeking begins with the declaration that it is the object of trade of an imaginary import-export agency. The spectator learns nothing more than that it consists of “government secrets.” “Here, you see,” Hitchcock concludes, “the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing.” Thus it can come to the identity of Being and Nothing. One realizes that philosophers had and must have their MacGuffins in order to preserve the work of thinking, as well as interest in its result.

The legendary second part of Being and Time was never written, because it dared not be written. Anyone who has ever let himself be influenced by the preparations for the expedition into the center of Being as it is understood by Dasein, shudders before the banality of that which could be brought to light at the end of all existential analyses and in the middle of the enchanting “horizon of time” circle.

The author of what is still the most significant philosophical work of this century must have realized that he risked all significance if he did not decide to let it remain a fragment. To do that, it was of course necessary to attribute the breaking off of the fundamental-ontological expedition to the compulsion of higher powers. They demanded with overpowering urgency that he do something else: surrender himself to the fate of thinking.

Companions were quickly found in antiquity. Tradition had turned them into a fragment that alone still darkly transmitted an intuition of origin. So the pre-Socratics, Parmenides and Heraclitus in particular, became obligatory hermeneutic companions; they shared the fate of thought broken off from its ambitious aims.

The MacGuffin of Being did its duty. The effect did not fail – the public followed breathlessly. A few who have not heard anything about the MacGuffin are still spun around by it.

Is this game forbidden? Hardly. The disappearance of MacGuffins from the world would bring its movement to a standstill. The means justify the end; the secrets revealed along the way justify the unrevealed remainder. The answer never given to the question of the meaning of Being induced the effort to question human Dasein about the unity of its statements and behavior. On the way there was a delay, and delay proved itself to be the meaning of the way.

Curiosity is the disturbance of boredom. The MacGuffin is its epiphany.

Hans Blumenberg, Being as MacGuffin: How to Preserve the Desire to Think

The MacGuffin: the promises of transcendence, secret knowledge, a final purpose, total harmony.



Related posts:Hans Blumenberg on Heidegger, Freud, and Others
Hans Blumenberg: Former Reflections Enduring Doubt
Hans Blumenberg: Work on Myth, ch. 1
Hans Blumenberg and His Myth Science Arkestra
Hans Blumenberg’s Dichotomies

]]></description>
<dc:subject>Miscellania Quotations alfred_hitchcock hans_blumenberg heidegger philosophy</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/capitalist-kibbutz-or-from-marx-to-rawls.html">
    <title>Capitalist Kibbutz or from Marx to Rawls</title>
    <dc:date>2011-10-26T11:38:23+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/capitalist-kibbutz-or-from-marx-to-rawls.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[
The Israeli kibbutzim are surprisingly successful examples of voluntary socialism. Even today about 2% of the Israeli population lives on a kibbutz and they account for a significant share of output; about 4% overall (using data from 2004 from here and here) and much higher in some industries such as agriculture where the kibbutzim account for some 40% of Israeli output.

Nevertheless, the kibbutzim aren’t growing and, under economic and social pressure, many are privatizing in various ways. Most notably, beginning in 1998 many kibbutzim lowered the marginal tax rate from 100% (!) to about the same level as in the rest of Israel, 20-50%. The reduction in taxes meant that for the first time there were large wage differences for members of a kibbutz and, most importantly, there were large potential wage differences for those who increased their productivity.

In How Responsive is Investment in Schooling to Changes in Redistribution Policies and in Returns (free here) Ran Abramitzky and Victor Lavy look at the acquisition of human capital for high school students living on kibbutzim before and after the reduction in taxes (using a dif and dif strategy on early and late adopters). The authors find (from an NBER summary):

…The effects of the reforms were relatively small for students from highly educated families, in contrast to relatively large effects for students from families with lower parental education who had been covered by the pay reform for all of their years in high school. This group’s high school completion rates increased by 4.4 percent, their mean exam score went up by 8.3 points, their qualification rate for the Bagrut diploma increased by 19.6 percent, and the fraction of students with university qualifying scores increased by 16.8 percent….boys were most strongly influenced by the change.

The pay reform produced larger increases in educational outcomes than monetary bonuses for Bagrut diploma qualifying scores, a school choice program that allowed students to choose their high school in seventh grade, or a teacher bonus program that paid teachers of math, English, and Hebrew bonuses when their students did well on the Bagrut.

The authors argue that there are general lessons to be learnt:

Our findings have important implications beyond the Israeli context. First, they shed light on the educational responses that could result from a decrease in the income tax rate, thus are informative on the long-run labor supply responses to tax changes. Second, they shed light on the educational responses expected when the return to education increases. For example, such changes might be occurring in many countries as technology-oriented growth increases the return to skills.

I am less confident that the numerical results can be generalized, although of course the general point that incentives matter is well-taken.

The results, however, raise another issue. The original kibbutz were inspired by a combination of Marxism, socialism and Zionism. In the capitalist kibbutz, there is an opportunity for a new principle. Taxes can be set not according to Marx but according to Rawls and his second principle of justice: inequalities are to be allowed so long as they benefit  the least-advantaged members of the society/kibbutz.

Thus, it would be interesting to know if any of the kibbutz have tried to adjust taxes so as to implement a Rawlsian approach to inequality (if not, perhaps Israeli taxes are already above Rawlsian levels.)

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<dc:subject>Economics History Philosophy Religion</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-the-mind/">
    <title>Benny Shanon: The Antipodes of the Mind</title>
    <dc:date>2011-10-21T19:38:32+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-the-mind/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Benny Shanon is an Israeli cognitive psychologist who has taken the psychoactive hallucinogen ayahuasca well over one hundred times. His book The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience is a scholarly attempt to describe its effects both through a survey of participants and through descriptions of his own extensive experiences.

The book is a mine of information about how the mind processes information, sense data, and concepts under abnormal conditions. Shanon does not disguise his enthusiasm for ayahuasca, but he attempts to maintain a disinterested and naturalistic stance. (Psychiatrist Charles Grob talks more about the specific neurological effects of DMT, ayahuasca’s active ingredient, in this interview.)

I have not taken ayahuasca. It does not sound terribly appealing. The one extensive description of an ayahuasca experience I’d previously read was by Kira Salak, who claimed that it cured her lifelong suicidal depression overnight. Her description of the experience, however, is enough to scare you off the stuff for life.

Shanon, however, comes off as a remarkably equanimous guy of good humor and patience, so his accounts do not dwell so much on the dark side of ayahuasca. (He attributes much of his poise to ayahuasca, but I suspect he was fairly upbeat and fearless going in.) We are 60 pages in before we come to this blithe passage:

Usually, the harshest symptoms of the Ayahuasca inebriation occur during the first 90 minutes following the onset of the effect. During this time, visions can be very strong and the entire experience may be tough and even frightening. Often the feeling is that the drinker has little or no control over what is happening. Thus, the initial phase of the inebriation is likely to present drinkers with moments of intense struggle. At times, the person who partakes of Ayahuasca feels he or she is losing his or her senses and even going mad. Quite commonly, people feel that they are about to die. Furthermore, it often seems that what is happening is irreversible and that one will never return to one’s normal self. With this, thoughts like ‘Why, for heaven’s sake, did I make the mistake of partaking of this drink?’ often cross drinkers’ minds. Naturally, all this is likely to generate great trepidation. With experience, however, the fear can be better managed and the Ayahuasca drinker learns to gain more control over the intoxication.

Fortunately, Shanon’s enviable nonchalance allowed him to continue chronicling ayahuasca’s effects despite the occasional remarks that ayahuasca frequently produces experiences I would consider horrifying and unbearable. Most of the visions he describes are generally rather benevolent, possibly because people who have repeatedly horrific ones stop drinking ayahuasca rather quickly. Grob, who also seems rather enthusiastic about ayahuasca’s possibilities, still remarks, “It can be an eternity in a Hell-realm.”

I will quote and comment on passages that struck me as particularly interesting philosophically. A good chunk of the experiences fall in line with what’s expected from corrupted sensory modalities: distorted vision, time-dilation, dream-like visions, etc. The exceptions, however, are fascinating, and Shanon’s dutiful chronicling makes the material worthwhile.

Shanon divides the material by subject matter and thematic analysis. I’ve sorted the excerpts into my own set of broad categories.

 

Confusion of the Sensuous and the Conceptual

Many of the hallucinations involve confusions of the (supposed) duality of concept and sense data, and make more intuitive sense if thought of as conceptual manipulation rather than raw internal experience, whatever that may be, as in these two examples:

In still another Daime session the madrinha stepped aside and a man passed a vessel of incense back and forth in front of her. The smoke lifted up and it became perfectly clear to me: It was an act of cleansing, of protecting the woman from potential dangers that may be inflicted by evil spirits. There were no visual hallucinations as such, yet, I would not say that the act was merely symbolic. What I experienced was literally this—seeing the casting of a shield against evil powers. It all seemed to have a very serious and sombre allure, and manifestly, it was all invested with magic. If I were to define what made it all so mysterious I would say that it was the fact that on the one hand everything pertained to another reality, while yet at the very same time it was all real. Again, no hallucination as such was experienced—technically what I was seeing was real, and none the less it was all utterly non-ordinary, and enchanted.

Another pattern of interpreting-as is one I shall characterize as seeing the particular as generic, or rather, seeing the generic in the particular. I have experi­ enced this on a number of occasions. The first, which for me was very striking, occurred during the daytime. It was in a village and I, intoxicated, was sitting on a small verandah overlooking the meadows. A farmer (a real one) was passing by, and I saw The Farmer, the universal prototype of all farmers. Again, as in the previous example, the standard perception and the non-ordinary one are related. After all, I saw The Farmer, not The Fisherman or The King. Yet, while normally I would have seen just a farmer, this time I saw The Farmer. While semantically linked, experientially these two perceptions are totally different. I have heard accounts of the very same phenomenon from my informants.

In both these cases, ordinary sense data is framed by conceptual interpretation that ordinarily kicks in only at a layer of remove from seemingly immanent experience, revealing that conceptual interpretation was there all along.

Similarly, invocation of Platonic forms occurs repeatedly:

The real figure (the trees) and the visualized one (the people) were related, but not by means of any overlapping of lines. In other words, the relationship was primarily semantic. Other instances of this kind I have experienced were seeing an (imaginary) jaguar resting on the branch of a (real) tree and an (imaginary) cow standing on a (real) truck.

Abstract entities may be seen as well. One informant told me he had a grand vision of perfect geometric bodies. Another reported a scene in which he spontan­eously came to the appreciation that the physical world is harmoniously governed by mathematical laws. Three informants reported grand visions in which the manifold of all forms was seen. Several informants, all with an academic education, explicitly commented that Ayahuasca brought them to the world of Platonic Ideas.

Finally, there are visions in which one feels one is encountering the Supreme Good. A major impression these visions had on me is the (Platonic) conclusion that ultimately, the ethical and the aesthetical as well as the true are the same. I have heard similar assessments made by many other people.

A better way to read these perceptions of universals is to interpret them as the conceptual being applied and/or interpreted at a different level than usual. Even in the perception of a particular instance of an abstract concept, we already have the abstract concept in mind. We just don’t believe ourselves to perceive it.

To put it another way: does Shanon have an experience of seeing The Farmer, or does he merely think that he has had an experience of seeing The Farmer? This is a nonsensical question: there is no difference between the two.

The meaninglessness of this question, I believe, points to the effect that ayahuasca is having on him. There is not some raw layer of true/veridical empirical perception that is then getting corrupted by a process of cognition. Classically Cartesian and empiricist accounts are misleading in this regard. The conceptual objects of perception (what I think of as Husserl’s noemata) are themselves corrupted.

Shanon pretty much agrees on this point:

Should we say that what is seen in Ayahuasca visions is to be divided into two: that which is ‘really’ seen, and that which is the product of interpretation? While there might be instances where interpretation may be relegated to a separate, secondary process, I am reluctant to regard this as the paradigmatic, general case. Because of my previous work in both psychology and semantics, I have difficulty accepting the two-stage analysis dividing perception and interpret­ation. My general theoretical stance in cognition is that there is no demarcation line between ‘raw’ perception, on the one hand, and semantic, meaningful interpret­ation, on the other hand. Following the philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1962) and the psychologist Gibson (1979), I believe that it is impossible to draw a clear-cut line dividing between naked, interpretation-free sensory inputs and interpretative processes that are subsequently applied to them so as to render these inputs into meaningful percepts. In the spirit of Heidegger (1962), I maintain that cognition is always ‘laden with meaning’. Applied to the example cited, this view implies that, from a cognitive-psychological point of view, if the figure seen was identified as being Jesus, then phenomenologically this is indeed who was seen.

Does this deflate the claims that Shanon is making of profound, sublime experience? As long as we maintain that any thought has some phenomenological content, it doesn’t have to. That said, prefacing every ayahuasca experience with “I thought [I saw Jesus, e.g.]” certainly makes things sound less impressive. If I were to take ayahuasca and have an experience in which I knew that 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5, I can’t say that would seem very remarkable in retrospect.

Likewise, Shanon repeatedly has experiences in which he does not hallucinate per se so much as undergo experience that is perceptually impossible by ordinary standards, dealing with the cross-wiring of the “sensuous” with the “conceptual.” A “thought” is not as distinct from a “sensing” as it normally seems. This is not to say that there are no distinctions–there seem to be multiple levels involved–but that concepts play some part at all levels.

Shanon invokes Heidegger, not without reason, as the experience is more or less a fundamental corruption of one’s normal being-in-the-world.

At times, the experience vacillates between one that is primarily visual and one in which the visual is, as ordinary reality, just one facet of one’s being-in-the-world. A scene may begin as one of the former kind, gain strength and reach the characteristics of the latter, and then it may perhaps dissipate and turn into an experience that is again primarily visual. What characterizes very powerful experiences of virtual reality is that they involve no progressive process of immersion.

Except, pace Heidegger, what is produced is not alienation but a sense of integration. I think that this is not because we are being brought down to the level of the world, which normally seems free of conceptual manipulation. It is more because the normally “objective” world is being brought up to our level.

 

Dubious Reactions and Causal Breakage
While the experiential nature of the content still stands, we nonetheless have good reason to question the exact constitution of the experiences. As an example, consider this grand vision Shanon gives:

I had the vision, recounted in Chs. 8 and 9, of an exhibition presenting what appeared to be an entire, unknown culture. I was thinking to myself: ‘If this is not real, if my mind is creating all this, then the human mind must be much more amazing, much more mysterious than standardly assumed by psychologists. Indeed, if my mind is creating all this,’ my thinking went on, ‘then cognitive psychologists just know nothing about the mind.’ Thus, to the suggestion that the effect of psychoactive substances is, as Merkur (1998) claims, just ‘intense fantasying’ I retort: Perhaps, indeed, this is all that is happening, but this should not be taken in a dismissive, half-derogatory fashion. It may very well be that it is the creative ability of the mind but, if so, the mind’s ability to create surpasses anything we cognitive scientists ever think of.

Here I think Shanon slips. It is the old Wittgenstein beetle in the box problem. The mind, while amazing, is also amazingly good at tricking itself. Shanon had some kind of vision, but he also was in a state in which he was clearly disposed to think of his vision experience as amazing. His brain was probably (we don’t know for sure) putting together all sorts of concepts and sense data in bizarre and creative ways, creating the “all this,” but we have no way of establishing how awesome that assemblage was beyond the descriptions he gives. Here is a representative excerpt:

On many occasions I saw corridors, one hall opening into another, marvellous wall-paintings, sculptures, and reliefs. Architectural details that espe­cially impressed me included sculpted marble colonnades in the form of white elephants, staircases adorned with golden lions, and finely carved gilded wooden ceilings. Several times, I saw most beautiful painted tiles. In the reports of my informants mosaics appear frequently; an example was described in Ch. 6 when serial images were discussed.

No doubt these are remarkable things to imagine, but we fall into a fallacy if we think that he “saw” these things in full detail to the extent we would have to imagine them in ordinary life to feel such an expanse of detail. More likely, the details were all that existed as isolated conceptual objects, and his brain drew a vivid but incomplete implication of an entire landscape of awesomeness, generating individual awesome details on demand, not all at once.

In order to have a reaction to an imagined stimulus X, what was required of that imagined stimulus X? I could have a vision in which I had just read a profound book containing the secrets of life and am left awestruck.  The book need not have existed as a conceptual entity in my mind beyond having loose book-like qualities. Since we already know that ayahuasca throws logic out the window, there is no need to think that there was some causal chain in which an actual, fully-fleshed-out conceptual object caused the reactions he was having, or that the reactions were rationally justified.

I am sure that in Shanon’s vision, many details were generated, far more than in the normal course of imagination, and that these details were experienced more vividly, but that there were still nowhere near enough details to qualify as a fleshed-out “world” by everyday standards.

Consider a more prosaic example. I have a decent auditory memory and can “replay” music that I know well in my head and “hear” with the right timbre, sound density, etc. On the other hand, I do not hear it in any sort of complete way (though I can “replay” it and pay attention to one instrument over another, for example), nor do I have any knowledge about the innards of the music. All I have is some pieces of the audio that are what were salient to me. They are fairly vivid, but they are drastically incomplete, and the same would apply to any vision or hallucination I might have. (My visual sense, however, is in fact much poorer and I have a much harder time summoning up vivid images; this seems to be the reverse of the norm.)

Ultimately, one’s reactions in ayahuasca cannot be trusted any more than they can be externally verified through verbal (or other) reports. One case of such verification is described in the Idealistic Holism section below, but obviously, verification is the exception, not the rule, at least until we invent brain-reading machines that depict what we’re thinking…which, given the overlapping of the conceptual and the sensuous, is seemingly impossible.

When Shanon says:

The philosopher of language Austin (1962) claimed that we do not just say things with words— rather we do things with them (saying being one of these things). My work on ordinary consciousness has led me to posit that with the silent mentations in our minds (i.e. thought sequences) we do not entertain thoughts but rather do things and act in the theatre of our minds (see Shanon, 1998*). I have further argued that what consciousness affords is a kind of virtual reality whereby human beings can act even when actual action in the external world is not possible. My claim has been made on the basis of ordinary consciousness. In the case of nonordinary consciousness the case is even more extreme. I would like to propose that with Ayahuasca the human propensity of world creation is increased manifoldly.

I think he is right to a point, but the other side of the coin is that the criteria for world creation may be drastically lowered. As Wittgenstein repeatedly stressed, we have no way of knowing. By invoking the “theatre of our minds,” Shanon has fallen back into a false specator-spectacle dualism, assuming that what he is experiencing has some kind of existence outside of the experience itself. Ironically, it’s quite similar to the cognition/perception dualism he’s trying to break down.

 

Specific Neurological Manipulations
Notably, the manipulations involved seem to map onto forms of cognition that are associated with isolated aspects of cognition. For example, face-related experiences seem to relate rather clearly to the neurological disorder prosopagnosia, which is the failure to be able to remember and recognize people’s faces. (It affects Oliver Sacks, Hubert Dreyfus, and, either aptly or ironically, Chuck Close.)

The first small detail I would like to mention is disembodied eyes. These are eyes seen floating in the visual space without there being either a face or a body of which they are part. The eyes may be those of human beings, of felines, or without any particular identity. Often, a great multitude of such eyes is seen. These are reported very commonly. Notably, they are also encountered in the most spectacu­ lar vision reported in the Bible—the prophet Ezekiel’s encounter with the Divine (see, in particular, Ezekiel 1: 18; for a discussion of the motif of disembodied eyes in the context of pre-Columbian Mexican culture, the reader is referred to Ott, 1986). Also commonly reported are detached faces, that is, faces without bodies; bodies without faces are also reported.

If, as prosopagnosia suggests, facial perception is handled by a specific mechanism in the brain (the fusiform gyrus, also possibly associated with synaesthesia), then the commonality of face-related hallucinations would suggest that ayahuasca is hitting that part quite reliably.

Another mechanism Shanon identifies as being crucially affected is iconic (“flash”) memory:

A specific manifestation of the salience of the medium as it pertains to the temporal dimension is the increase in the time span of iconic memory, which consists of the retaining in memory of information in a quasi-perceptual manner, as if a copy of the external perceptual stimulus is maintained. Normally, the span of iconic memory is very brief—it is estimated to be between 350 and 500 milliseconds (see Coltheart, 1983; Baddeley, 1990). With Ayahuasca, the time-span of iconic memory is sign­ificantly lengthened. One closes one’s eyes and an image of what one has just actually seen is retained. The time of retention is much longer than normal. A related phenomenon is that of afterimages (see Ch. 17). These, too, are very pronounced when, during the inebriation, one closes one’s eyes. Both phenomena result in a lengthening of the time that perceptual stimuli (or their derivatives, such as afterimages) are amenable to mental inspection. As a consequence, the scope of the mental transformations that these stimuli can generate is increased.

This indeed seems to fit with the nature of the mental chaos that ayahuasca generates.

 

Metaphoricity
Since we have eliminated the “rawness” of perception, it follows that we would see metaphors impact the most basic level of perception, and that indeed is what happens. One example of this outside of ayahuasca is synaesthesia, which clearly involves some layer of semantic data.

In a discussion of Thomas Hardy’s synaesthesia four years ago, a synaesthete described an experience of “the concept Wednesday with the experience blue…it’s like my color-seeing bits are being activated but not quite seeing.” Ayahuasca experiences suggest the extension (or derailing) of this kind of process on many levels:

In Shanon (1992) and (1993a) I argue against this common view and suggest that for a metaphor to obtain it is not at all necessary that the semantic features or distinctions encountered in the metaphorical expression be given and fully defined prior to the articulation of that expression. Furthermore, on the basis of both empirical data and conceptual analysis, I claim that rather than being secondary, metaphorical processing is primary and non-derivative. This claim is supported by considerations of speed of processing in normal adults, ontogenetic patterns (it appears that metaphors are very common in the speech of young children), and the so-called primary (sic) processes encountered in dreams (these, note, are highly metaphorical; see Freud, 1900/1953). As I see it, the very essence of metaphoricity is the creation of new features. In other words, when producing or receiving a metaphor, cognitive agents draw new distinctions and induce new ways of looking at things. In this process, features are not selected out of prior, given semantic sets; rather, new semantic differentiations are made and new semantic features are generated. It is precisely this that makes metaphor cognitively so important—it is one of the most important mechanisms for novelty in cognition.

The foregoing observations highlight the intrinsic affinity between synaesthesia and metaphoricity. As indicated above, in cognitive-psychological discourse, the latter is generally linked primarily with language, whereas the former is regarded as sensory. I propose, rather, that they are to be regarded as the two manifestations of what is essentially the same basic cognitive phenomenon, namely, functioning in a mode that does not differentiate between domains that, from the perspective of normal mature adult cognition, are totally distinct. In metaphor these domains are semantic fields, while in synaesthesia they are sensory modalities, but otherwise these two cognitive phenomena are the same. Together, both may be regarded as manifestations of an enhanced degree of latitude with respect to priorly given, standardly established distinctions; this effect may be referred to as ‘nonfixedness’.

This perhaps is the most important point of Shanon’s book, underscoring the integration of the conceptual and the sensuous while emphasizing the collective nature of those metaphors. What Shanon has in mind here does bear some resemblance to Hans Blumenberg‘s idea of absolute metaphors. To underscore this, Shanon invokes one of Blumenberg’s core metaphors–hell, one of society’s core metaphors–light.

Significantly, language reflects (sic) the special status of light. It is no accident that in English—as in many other languages—words such as those ending the previous paragraph but one are derived from the term ‘light’ (cf. ‘enlightened’, ‘illumination’). In Hebrew, a language not at all related to English, the noun V is light, the noun ora is one of the terms for joy, the adjective mu’ar is illuminated, na’or is enlightened, me’or panim denotes happy welcomingness, and so on and so forth.

Since metaphors are shared and most are collectively generated (some may be native, I believe), it does render the social a core aspect of neuropsychology. I heartily endorse Shanon’s statement to this effect, drawing from Vygotsky:

Against dominant views in contem­porary cognitive science, my own is that the basic capability of the human cognitive system is not to process information but rather, to be and act in the world. Even our most private, most subjective experiences attest to this fundamental state of affairs (see Shanon, 1998*). This being the case, the internal and the external are inter­twined and there cannot be a sharp divide between the two. Specifically, the mental is embodied in the corporeal and individual cognition is embedded in the matrix of social interrelationships. As the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky and his disciples argued, mind is in society (see Vygotsky, 1978). Hence, in a very fundamental fashion, even the most individualistic psychologist cannot ignore the societal.

I don’t have much to add here. This seems to be an obvious point but I don’t feel it’s one often considered in lay presentations (or even technical presentations) in cognitive science and psychology. (It seems that Francisco Varela‘s “embodied mind” approach is one well-known, recent move in this direction.) There is a very long tradition here, probably best exemplified by Merleau-Ponty. But I think Shanon’s specific focus on metaphoricity is accurate and merits application in even the most quotidian studies of “being-in-the-world.” This would then constitute a rejection of Heidegger’s ontological approach, which makes these structures of “being-in-the-world” more fundamental than socially-conditioned metaphors.

There remains the issue of shared content across cultures. I don’t think Shanon provides a huge amount of evidence here to suggest too many universal concepts and metaphors genuinely innate to the mind. Light could well be one of them, but when it comes to snakes and cats, both extremely common in ayahuasca visions, I’m more wary. Snakes I think can be explained fairly easily: snakes are a very simple shape (that is, a line), and so if you’re going to see an animal (which may indeed be something more innate to the mind), a snake is a likely one, just like clouds are likely to look like marshmallows. Cats are trickier, but I’m not quite ready to assign them some innate presence in the brain just yet.

 

Idealistic Holism
In some ways it makes sense that the breakdown of our reality-processing software would result in a general feeling of holism:

Overall, Ayahuasca induces a comprehensive metaphysical view of things. I would characterize it as idealistic monism with pantheistic overtones. By this view, reality is conceived as constituted by one, non-material substance which is identified as Cosmic Consciousness, the Godhead, the ground of all Being, or the Fountain of Life. Coupled with this is the assessment that all things are interconnected and that in their totality they constitute one harmonious whole. This, in turn, entails an experienced realization that there is sense and reason to all things and that reality is invested with deep, heretofore unappreciated, meaningfulness. By and large, it seems that the metaphysical perspective induced by Ayahuasca is most similar to views entertained in classical Hindu philosophy (see, for instance, Phillips, 1995) 2 as well as by Plato, Plotinus, and Hegel. Remarkably, this view is essentially the same as that characterized by Huxley as the ‘perennial philosophy’ (Huxley, 1944; see also James, 1882); similar observations were also made in the context of LSD (see Grof, 1972, 1998).

Shanon doesn’t make any metaphysical claims for this experience, though he implies them rather strongly.

Thus, many informants have reported to me that the brew made them appreciate that ‘everything is interconnected’, ‘all is one’, ‘every­thing is spirit’, and ‘all is consciousness’. Other recurring expressions are ‘this world is an illusion’, ‘everything has meaning’, ‘the different levels and aspects of reality exhibit the same essential structure’, and ‘I and the world are united’.

It is difficult to know how to interpret these reports. Semantically, these are not impressive statements, but they reflect what must be a very powerful inner experience.

My question is: what other sort of conceptual experience would one expect to have in such a state other than holistic monism? I do not mean this rhetorically, but I want to ask if there may be a causal implication here in which ayahuasca does only part of the work and traditional cognitive functions do the rest.

To explain: What’s happening in such ayahuasca moments is a shutdown of traditional constraints (or categories) the brain imposes on our experience, accompanied by what is presumably cognitive attempts to produce something resembling coherent experience out of what remains. Broadly speaking, I would expect this to produce a sense of non-differentiation and lack of identity. The specifics of the experience may or may not be baked into the brain. At this point third-person accounts seem less helpful than they did with reports of more sensuous experiences.

Accompanied by such experiences is the collapse of time itself, which seems (a) phenomenologically remarkable, but (b) actually not too unlikely, given the other corruptions that are going on.

In front of me I saw the space of all possibilities, that is, all states of affairs that can possibly happen. They were lying in front of me there like objects in physical space. Choosing, I realized, is tantamount to the taking of a particular path in this space. It does not, however, consist in the generation of intrinsically new states of affairs. All possibilities are already there, I saw, but one has the option of choosing different paths amongst them, just as when travelling through a terrain in real space. Further, while travelling in the space of possibil­ities takes time, the possibilities themselves are there, given in an ever-present atemporal space. Thus, I concluded, there is no contradiction between determinism and free will. With this, for the first time I felt I understood the Jewish sages in the Mishna—’Everything is laid out in advance yet freedom of choice is given.’

Shanon reflects on the afterthoughts many drinkers have:

Ayahuasca causes many drinkers to reflect upon conscious­ness and its nature. This is true also of individuals without any prior intellectual interest in this topic. Moreover, in general, the specific ideas that different drinkers entertain with regard to consciousness fall into one consistent picture. As indicated earlier, consciousness is conceived of as the basic constituent of reality and the ground of all Being. Many further say they experience, and consequently conceive of, consciousness as a supra-human and non-individuated phenomenon of which human consciousness is a derivative. Obviously, that different people have and share these ideas proves nothing. Yet, perhaps this has some bearing on the topic being entertained? In other words, perhaps the similarity of these insights does indicate something with regard to the nature of consciousness? I leave this as an open question.

I think that, indeed, there is a shared set of concepts and experiential data that is cross-cultural, but that it falls under the broadly naturalistic rubric of “being human.” The supra-human, non-individuated state is one that could well naturally emerge from the brain when its moorings are loosened, just like in dreaming or schizophrenia. (Louis Sass describes somewhat analogous experiences in The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind.)

Again, this isn’t to deflate Shanon’s claim, as consciousness is one damn weird creature, and the fact that our normal state of mind allows us to process reality in a more functional way does not mean that our normal state of mind is somehow more essentially reflective of the nature of consciousness.

Given these changes to the nature of experience, one would expect ayahuasca to generate certain questions about consciousness and experience with some uniformity. There is much room for cultural variation, but I think it’s unavoidable that there are certain basic conceptual areas of human experience that really are universal. (Maybe it’s time to revise Kant’s Categories once more.)

Things get trickier but also a bit more verifiable when Shanon describes experiences that overlap with reality that seem to extend consciousness extra-locally outside of his body:

The non-individuation of consciousness may also be manifested in the blurring of the distinction between the individual and his or her fellow human beings. As a consequence, one may feel that one’s identity is defined not individually but rather in group terms. Thus, strong identification with the other persons who participate in the Ayahuasca session is common. One clear manifestation of this is the communal singing in the rituals of the Santo Daime Church. Many times I have observed how sessions begin—the leading persons start to sing and the others in the hall readily join in, as if tied to them by hidden strings. Furthermore, the singing may be extremely co-ordinated, both with respect to tempo and rhythm and as far as immediate adjustments in tune are concerned. On such occasions, the group becomes a kind of a single organism that acts in a precise and highly concentrated fashion. Once I gave a cassette recording I had made of such singing for inspection to a musical laboratory equipped with high-tech measurement instruments. The experts were astonished at the perfect degree of synchrony between the people singing. In a direct, non-technical manner I have felt this many times as well. As recounted earlier, once I also had a vision that made the notion of group-consciousness even more apparent to me. In the vision I found myself in the midst of an ant colony. I felt the relationship between each ant, as a biological organism, and the colony as a whole. Consciousness was the property of the latter, not the former.

The cassette recording is the key piece of evidence here. The explanation, I gather, is a sub-conscious (a term I mean in a general, generic sense, not a specific one) ability of the body to process and act without the general level of conscious awareness that one lends to such activities, an abandonment of “thought” for “instinct,” but an “instinct” laden with much more cognition than is generally thought possible. (Perhaps this is akin to blindsight, in which there is clear conceptual processing going on despite a seeming lack of cognitive awareness.)

This sort of coordination is possible in everyday life between people as well, though it is often not noticed. One example would be the conjoined twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel, who are able to coordinate activities such as typing and driving, clearly without time for conscious reflection, despite each side of the body being controlled by an absolutely discrete brain. It’s not ESP, but it’s still rather remarkable. Presumably there are plenty of other studies of such sub-aware coordination going on.

Thus it is a question of terminology whether one then says that consciousness extends outside of the brain, or that human unconscious behavior is far more sophisticated and capable of coordination with others than we usually think. Shanon’s interpetation seems to go toward the former, as he ultimately denies the existence of the unconscious in any sense. Instead, he thinks of consciousness as having multiple states:

It could be suggested that human beings have the ability to operate, and exist, in two different states. Metaphorically, these may be conceived in terms of the shifting of gears. The first state is the ordinary one, and it is fully grounded in time. The other, non-ordinary state consists in the freeing of the mind from the ordinary temporal constraints. That such freeing is possible is a major feat of the human psyche. The study of the dynamics of the shift between the two states is, I think, a cognitive-psychological topic of utmost significance. A theoretical frame­work that accounts for it will encompass both ordinary consciousness and nonordinary consciousness and view them as specific cases obtained by means of variations in a common, general structure. Thus, the enterprise in question is, in essence, the development of what may be regarded as a general theory of con­sciousness.

Shanon seems to identify temporality as the distinguishing criterion between regular and non-regular consciousness. I’m not sure why this should necessarily be, or why there would only be two states as opposed to many, or a continuum. Most of us have experienced “bullet time,” the slowing down of perceived time when in some sort of crisis situation (I’ve experienced it in auto accident close-calls), and that seems to fall somewhere in between the two poles. But he’s the one who has taken ayahuasca a hundred times, so if his personal experience strongly suggests that there are just two modes, that’s a point to consider.

 

Spiritual Experience
People hypothesize some sort of “God module” in the brain that produces mystical experiences. This seems plausible to a point, but isolating a native spiritual aspect to the ayahuasca proceedings is very difficult. These experiences are obviously heavily culturally conditioned and conditioned by empirical experience, both culturally-dependent and universal. Regardless, the spiritual/mystical aspect of ayahuasca is obviously very strong.

As for the general euphoria, well-being, and sense of peace, it seems to be in some ways a coping mechanism. The spiritual side of the experience may indeed constitute a cognitive aspect of this coping mechanism:

I learn to use dissociation as an advantage[,] as a way of escaping from the horror. I am not the person got at; rather I am the disembodied face-presence calmly peering in and watching this other and unimportant me. I watch my other self, safely now. But then this second me, this objective and detached observer, succumbs too, and I have to dissociate into a third and then a fourth as the relation between my-selves breaks, creating an almost infinite series of fluttering mirrors of watching selves and feeling others.

But at this level of complexity and abstraction, comfort is far from the only thing produced. I don’t have a lot of clear thoughts about these aspects of the visions, as they seem the hardest to pin down and describe. I quote these two experiences of Shanon’s more for their vivid portrayals rather than for any philosophical insight I was able to derive from them.

First, a vision that is perhaps an allegory of ayahuasca itself:

I found myself engulfed in infinite blue. [Later I referred to it as 'the blue place'.] There were beings there. I did not see them but I had communication with them. They offered to reveal the mysteries of the universe to me. There was no question about it, they were benevolent and their offer was genuine and sincere. However, there was a condition involved with it—a payment on my part was to be made. I had to relinquish any further contact with this world. In other words, I would never return. I opened my eyes and I looked around. I saw my living room, my piano, my friend who was supposed to watch over me but who was tucked up in the large armchair sound asleep. I thought of my family and friends, my teaching and writing. I looked through the large window and saw the trees outside. I thought of my sanity. No, I did not want to lose all these! Nor, I reflected, did I wish to lose my regular self, the way I am, the way I think and feel. I sat up straight and spontaneously got my hands moving and energetically slapped my lap. Again and again I slapped so as to break myself free from the spell. Thus, I had forsaken the opportunity to learn the mysteries of the universe.

Afterwards I regretted my decision. Later, I reflected a lot on this episode and have drawn many lessons from it. I shall not dwell further on them here.

Second, a vision about the last king of Judaea, Zedekiah, which Shanon cites as being one of the most significant he ever had:

King Zedekiah was chained and unable to move. He was positioned in front of a large furnace. The fire was ablaze and one by one his sons were consigned to the flames. Then his eyes were plucked out. I was standing on the side, witnessing the scene. What could poor Zedekiah do? He could not help his children and could do nothing to change their awful lot. He could neither resist nor fight. He could, of course, curse and blaspheme but that would have done him no good. The only thing that he could do, really, was praise the Lord. This, I saw, is what he did. The blind man who had just lost both his kingdom and his sons was singing a great Hallelujah. With this, he was both gaining strength to go on living and maintaining his dignity. And as he was singing he also understood. Powerful as the Babylonian tyrant was, he was just a player in a play that was of a still much larger scope. For Nebuchadnezzar was not at the top of the pyramid—still above was the creator of the universe and the ruler of the world. Nebuchadnezzar was playing a role allotted to him and one day his fate too was sure to come.

There is one other, more abstract spiritual experience that Shanon describes many people as having had under ayahuasca, involving visual webs:

Many times, invariably towards the end of sessions and when I was stepping outside into the natural surroundings, there were lines and webs of light that interlaced everything. In time I came to learn that this experience is very common. Indeed, of the many people I have interviewed, only very few have not seen these patterns.

Even more common are visions that reveal what is felt to be the anima mundi—the cosmic energy that permeates all Existence and sustains everything that is. As noted in earlier chapters, this is often associated with the seeing of webs of translucent fibres that embrace the whole of Existence.

Personally, I have come to ideas of the kind just noted in conjunction with seeing the ‘web’ I described in Chs. 5 and 8, that is, a matrix of translucent strings that seem to tie everything together. I have experienced this many times and have heard of the same experience from many of my informants. The description of the visual effect was invariably the same and many persons used the identical phrase—’a web’—to describe it. For instance, one of the independent drinkers told me that the most important teaching she has received from Ayahuasca was the appreciation that the Divine does indeed exist. Asking her how she had arrived at this conclusion she answered by presenting a description of the tran­slucent web that interlinks everything and sustains all existence.

These three passages were striking to me because I’ve had something like this experience twice, years apart, both times fully sober. I was asleep on both occasions, but the force of the experience woke me up. I immediately associated the webs with the Heraclitan logos, but obviously that’s pretty close to the other descriptions Shanon gives.

Upon waking, the “vision” was nothing more than a very strong visual conception of webs in my head; there was no hallucination. But it was also accompanied by an ongoing, immense, unique feeling of ebullience and well-being that I have only experienced on those occasions. I was possessed by the overwhelming, reassuring, and no doubt irrational conviction that the universe as a whole made sense. It was a very visceral experience, unlike any other dream I have ever had or any other state I have ever been in, and bereft of concrete content.

I think of these experiences as having invoked a particular piece of neurological machinery different from those in normal use. I wouldn’t mind invoking it again, but I’m not about to drink ayahuasca to get there.

 

Conclusions
Shanon’s ultimate methodological conclusion in The Antipodes of the Mind seems to be a plea for a psychological functionalism:

But then, if explanation in psychology consists not in the modelling of mind by means of underlying computational operations, what else can it be? The answer I have come up with is that what is left for the psychologist to do is the systematic study of the surface, so to speak, and the establishment of lawful regularities in it. This is tantamount to saying that for me, the domain of the psychological coincides with that of conscious experience. In this domain, the unconscious does not exist. Like William James (1890/1950), I maintain that mental activities and processes are conscious, and they cannot be achieved outside of consciousness. It is in the light of this fundamental theoretical conclusion that I try to understand the Ayahuasca experience.

I agree with this recommendation wholeheartedly, yet it may come as a bit of a disappointment after his explorations of the inner. Alas, reality can be disappointing. Since whatever internal percepts we have must always be translated into the public language and tested against the collective rationality which we share, we are indeed stuck with the world as most of us perceive it. Any possible uplift will have to be collective. At that point, it won’t even seem that special since by definition it will have become ordinary.

Shanon postulates that the states ayahuasca creates are related to fundamental aspects of consciousness not normally in use:

Thus, significantly, the new types of consciousness discovered with Ayahuasca are not just two new types. Rather, they integrate coherently into the system of consciousness that I have constructed independently on the basis of the phenom­enological inspection of ordinary consciousness. The Ayahuasca experience also introduces one new distinction into the system, namely, mental contents of which the cognitive agent is directly aware but which are experienced as being independ­ent of his or her own mental processes. However, the extension pertaining to nonordinary consciousness does not alter the system of consciousness as such.


Any such construction seems highly speculative to me and requires actual neurological explanation in order to see if the model is tenable. What is notable is the ability to bring on an “egoless” or “agentless” state, one in which the division between self and world is greatly corrupted. Evolutionarily speaking, this function seems maladaptive  on the surface.

Yet I could also believe that conviction of purposefulness, at-home-ness, universal empathy, and integration with the world could be a great booster to a sentient organism. If so, it’s rather ironic that such a condition requires entering a mental and physical state in which one is rendered nearly nonfunctional and completely vulnerable. But in that it’s not so different from many of the best moments in life.




Related posts:From A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist
Strawson on Consciousness
Fun with Consciousness
Bruno Schulz and Wittgenstein
Gadamer on Hegel and Language

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<item rdf:about="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/07/on-what-matters-vol-i-review-of-derek-parfit.html">
    <title>*On What Matters, vol. I*, review of Derek Parfit</title>
    <dc:date>2011-07-07T11:26:03+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/07/on-what-matters-vol-i-review-of-derek-parfit.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[
Derek Parfit is one of my favorite philosophers, and favorite writers at that, so for many years I have been looking forward to his next book, which is now out.  The main argument is that rule consequentialism, properly understood Kantianism, and contractualism all can be understood as a broadly consistent moral theory, all climbing up the same mountain from different sides.

The text is recognizably Parfit, but I am not convinced by its major arguments, and I also believe the Parfitian method — any reader of him will understand this reference — does not succeed in all of the new areas under consideration.

The philosophical patron saints of the book are Kant and Sidgwick, and I would suggest also Bloomsbury.  Parfit is an extreme rationalist and he thinks (hopes?) we can find, and agree upon, the right answers to moral questions.  (At the same time he deeply fears that we cannot, and he is a philosophic conservative as Keynes was.)  What’s missing is Hume, not the Hume of is-ought worries but the Hume who came to terms with the tensions between the arguments of philosophy and the experience of everyday human life.

My favorite features of the Parfit book include the early comparison of Kant and Sidgwick  and the general concern with the frequency and intensity of moral disagreement.

Parfit at great length discusses optimific principles, namely which specifications of rule consequentialism and Kantian obligations can succeed, given strategic behavior, collective action problems, non-linearities, and other tricks of the trade.  The Kantian might feel that the turf is already making too many concessions to the consequentialists, but my concern differs.  I am frustrated with this very long and very central part of the book, which cries out for formalization or at the very least citations to formalized game theory.

If you’re analyzing a claim such as — “It is wrong to act in some way unless everyone could rationally will it to be true that everyone believes such acts to  be morally permitted” (p.20)  — words cannot bring you very far, and I  write this as a not-very-mathematically-formal economist.

Parfit is operating in the territory of solution concepts and game-theoretic equilibrium refinements, but with nary a nod in their direction.  By the end of his lengthy and indeed exhausting discussions, I do not feel I am up to where game theory was in 1990.

I read the standard game-theoretic results as implying that ethics is a far more indeterminate enterprise than Parfit might like to see.  Any particular specification of rule consequentialism tends to require increasingly baroque refinements to cover all the different possible kinds of situations.  At the end we’re not left with much in the way of a rule at all, other than a general injunction to tell people to do something good and then to rejigger the rule itself, or complicate it with more contingencies, to cover the required ground.

To pose a simple example: “maximize your marginal impact” won’t as an injunction address a lot of environmental problems.  “Maximize your average impact” fails in cases where you are truly decisive.  What might other more complex rules be, and what are the expectations those rules are making about the behavior of others, what you infer from their behavior, what they infer from your inference, and so on.  The path out of these boxes takes us very far away from a rules concept that say Sidgwick might have found intuitive.

Hume has been locked out of the room and he is not allowed to re-enter in the form of Parfit having a dialogue with Cho and Kreps.

Now maybe, just maybe, that game-theoretic messiness does not have to be fatal for rule-consequentialism.  Still, I propose a rewrite.  Cut or severely limit the hundreds of pages on this topic, start with what game theory already is showing, describe that mess in philosophic, conceptual terms, and then consider whether that mess is compatible with the analogous messes found in Kantianism and contractualism,  Maybe it can be shown that they are (broadly) the same mess.  Nonetheless, such a collection of messes may be surrounding the same mountain but they will not scale it and Parfit would have to gaze once again into the abyss of, what is to him, ethical nihilism.  (Cut back to David Hume for a different attitude.  Perhaps Parfit’s very strong philosophic and personal desire to succeed and solve the whole problem draws him from the path that will get us up the mountain some small degree.)

For these reasons I see the biggest and most central part of the book as a failure, possibly wrong but more worryingly “not even wrong” and simply missing the questions defined by where the frontier — choice theory and not just philosophic ethics — has been for some time.

On other points, the criticisms of subjective and desire-based theories are good, but I view Parfit’s conclusions as already having been established.

The talk of Kantian dignity, and of “treating people as a mere means” I do not think can be well-defined.  I kept on wanting to see the Marginal Revolution (the real one, the 1871 one) inform this discussion.

I very much agree with Parfit’s argument that no one — not even evil people — should deserve to suffer.  I also agree with Parfit’s notion of the irreducibly normative.

Until the material on consequentialism is nailed, I don’t think the integration with contractualism can work.

I would describe the Parfitian method as “the postulation of bold, minimalist claims, explored by the use of brilliant hypotheticals and counterexamples.”  In Reasons and Persons the Parfitian method works because the potential for philosophic vagueness is limited by the vividness of the counterfactual (or real world) examples.  Most readers of that book are still thinking about split brains, the Repugnant Conclusion, and Future Tuesday Indifference, among numerous other examples.  You could question whether all of the terms were pinned down rigorously, but you still knew that the thought experiment was making you rethink some of your priors.  In the subject areas of On What Matters the semantics are too slack, too open to multiple interpretation, and too many of the central concepts cry out for formalization.  There are not compelling new metaphors and examples to pin down the discourse.  Parfit’s greatest strength is as an imaginer, often outside of traditional philosophic dimensions, and yet here he is so concerned with justifying his disagreements with his peers and colleagues.  Their ghosts and comments and discourses are shackling him, and if you visit the best pages of Reasons and Persons you will see they hardly mention the names of other philosophers at all, much less current philosophers.

I do not wish to put you off Parfit.  He is a philosopher of major importance and, non-trivially, one of the most philosophical philosophers, perhaps ever.  He lives, thinks, feels, breathes, and exudes philosophy in a way which is, in and of itself, a major contribution to human thought and being.  Reading him is an unforgettable and illuminating experience.  His best arguments have great real world import.

It is stunning to read the last three pages of the preface, which list everybody who gave him comments.  It’s a long list, but I’m not sure it was the right list to have chosen.

Addendum: Here is Peter Singer’s review.  Here is a review from Constantine Sandis.

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<item rdf:about="http://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/04/thoughts-on-peer-review-and-mongooses/">
    <title>Thoughts on Peer Review and Mongooses</title>
    <dc:date>2011-06-04T08:24:28+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/04/thoughts-on-peer-review-and-mongooses/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[First, let me jot some thoughts about Ingrid’s peer-review post that also relate to Henry’s. Then, mongooses.


The main virtue of the peer-review system is that it’s basically uncorrupt. It’s main vice: it’s weakly accountable and, as a result, intermittently neglectful. Reviewers can’t illegitimately profit from the review process because they can’t profit from it, period. Except in the abstract sense that it’s nice to be part of a healthy field, and to feel the feeling of doing one’s duty. It seems to me there is a simple fix. Publish referee reports with the journal articles themselves. (If that takes too much paper, make the referee reports a standard e-option, at least.) Give referees the option of de-anonymizing themselves, to stand behind their words. If they prefer, they can preserve their anonymity, although their critical verdicts become public. You still hide the author’s name from the refs during the review process. (Obviously referees should also have sensible options for editing reports in light of the final product. You wouldn’t want to publish a blisteringly negative referee report, demanding fixes for problems that were, indeed, fixed in response to that very blistering report.)


Disadvantages: none. No, really. None. No increase in corruption. (Extra paper costs. So make it e-only.)


Advantages: many.


Reviewer who unmasks gets a minor publication, small line on the ol’ CV. This would need to become an acceptable, minor publication form before you could count it, of course, but no time like the present for establishing a healthy new norm. (A solid referee’s report ought to be worth the same as a ‘reply to’ or short critical note.) Being a ‘power referee’ could become a viable professional option. With academics pushed to publish, as things stand, this could balance things out. Get the pipes unclogged.


Reviewer who doesn’t unmask, perhaps because she is worried she is savaging a potentially powerful person in the field, at least gets the satisfaction of having her critique on the record. (If you feel that there are powerful people/influential views in need of getting taken down a peg, you will be in favor of this being done publicly. It would make the process of writing the referee report more satisfactory, if you expected to go this route.)


Reviewer gets first crack. If you labor to lay out a strong objection to a published piece, it’s sort of annoying if, then, someone else is first to publish the objection you already worked out in your referee report.


Reviewer will take the time to write clearly, cogently and considerately, rather than grumpily backhanding a thing she doesn’t like. Because her good name is attached. (I think referees would up their writing game even if they intended to stay anonymous, just knowing their words would be published.)


Transparency of social network is a benefit. It’s interesting to be able to see who agrees and disagrees with whom, about what. Blind peer review mostly aims at preventing self-dealing, cocooning and cronyism. But the enemy relation is just as potentially pernicious as the friend relation, and blind review gives wide scope for unaccountable expressions of intellectual hostility. In a more positive sense, the highest quality signals are given off by friends disagreeing with friends and enemies agreeing with enemies. It would be interesting, then, to know when you face such likely high-quality cases.


Brief referee reports would function like abstracts, which are nice to have. Brief, negative reports would be contrarian abstracts – a genre no one writes about their own work, so it’s a damn shame so many instances are not part of the public record. In general, it can only be helpful to have the option of availing oneself of some ready-made critical frames.


You could publish a wider variety of types of academic ‘results’. This brings us to Henry’s post about Kanazawa. Let me re-quote the editorial apologetics Henry quotes: “I happen to think it is a great thought provoking document, and one of the few in the last ten years that have actually gotten people to talk about issues. … I would rather have an article that causes people to think and talk and yes, argue and criticize than to publish an article that is one more facet of the same old thing.” This is not a deplorable sentiment, in the general scheme of things. But there is a serious problem with publishing work that aspires to qualify under the ‘get people to talk’ standard in the self-same sober-sided manner that you publish stuff that isn’t wild, speculative, bold, blue-sky provocation; that purports to establish results. If you published a piece along with a referee report that says ‘this is not just wrong but irresponsible and, frankly, plain nuts’ and a referee report that says ‘this is wild stuff, but worth talking about’ then you have more truth in advertising. The author of the piece in question will have a slightly harder time pointing to a publication refereed in such a manner as evidence of a ‘solid result’. If the issue really is worth talking about, then the talk can proceed. (There is an ambiguity in our attitudes toward academic ‘results’ hereabouts. On the one hand, we think you should only publish if it’s really solid. On the other hand, we think anything apparently solid could turn out not to be, and probably will, to some degree, at some point. Even solid results are conversation starters, rather than stoppers. But that’s not to say you should consciously set out to publish conversation starters – although you could. That could be a style of journal. Contributors could muse, publicly, in what they take to be a bold and provocative manner, about issues in the field, without pretending to nail anything down. Reviewers could be asked to judge contributions according to this rather vague metric.)


This isn’t a fix for the Kanazawa case. I have no personal opinion about that, above and beyond the distinct, second-hand impression I am coming away with that he is a very seriously bad actor. What I am suggesting wouldn’t make such a case any worse. And it might actually make it somewhat less bad. He seems to have submitted, been rejected, and then just re-submitted elsewhere until he eventually got let in through neglect or editorially non-explicit application of some ‘hey, it’ll stir the pot’ principle. Referees’ serious concerns about plain incompetence were not part of the publication record, and certainly weren’t permanently afixed to the pieces in question. If it’s going to be published eventually anyway, it might as well be tagged as being the kind of thing it probably is. (Obviously saying so is consistent with saying it shouldn’t be published at all.)


Now, mongooses. No lesser a personage than Nakul himself showed up in comments to recommend a mongoose at least as interesting as any jewel-spewing one. Namely, a half-golden one. Click link for truly first rate oh-SNAP! trash-talking from the mongoose in question: “’Ye kings, this great sacrifice is not equal to a prastha of powdered barley given away by a liberal Brahmana of Kurukshetra who was observing the Unccha vow.” If the mongoose were to execute the right sort of uh-uh-UH! side-to-side head movement, while throwing down in this exemplary fashion, truly the virtue of the ritual occasion would be unexceeded. (Also, it just goes to show. Damn liberals.)


Also, more than ever, we need a Kirby-cracklin splash page to honor the mongoose in question. A Hulk-style origin scene. “huge … explosion … of … virtue! Radiation of … goodness … battering my very being! I am becoming … HALF-GOLD!’ (Meanwhile, priests monitoring the scene can see it all. ‘My Vishnu! There was some sort of creature within the blast radius!’) Then the half-gold mongoose goes around, fighting crime, always looking for a ‘cure’. That is, something to turn the rest of him gold. Fighting criminals and demons that want to melt him or eat him.


There is an interesting philosophy of charity implicit in the tale in question. It make the valid point that a lot of ‘charitable giving’ is, basically, a consumption good, for what it’s worth. The mongoose’s philosophy is not consequentialist enough, not by half. But I think Matthew Yglesias would probably be willing to concede that, if some liberal were to give his very last prastha of powdered barley to the Harvard alumni fund, conditional on Harvard changing the name of its sports teams to the Half-Golden Mongooses – ye and verily, that they might, in every subsequent athletic match, serve as an object lesson in the nature of virtue – that this would be not just morally permissible but even an act of charity aimed at ‘social justice’. Even a consequentialist might concede as much.


(post tweaked for clarity, or perhaps just out of a shallow sense of my own cleverness)
]]></description>
<dc:subject>Academia Intellects_vast_and_cool_and_highly_sympathetic Philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:54fa13ba5ea8/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Academia"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Intellects_vast_and_cool_and_highly_sympathetic"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/07/happy-birthday-david-hume/">
    <title>Happy Birthday David Hume</title>
    <dc:date>2011-05-07T21:23:33+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/07/happy-birthday-david-hume/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[David Hume, famous scolder of those who would derive “ought” from “is,” was born 300 years ago today.  In point of fact Hume, while not enjoying the name recognition of Plato/Aristotle/Descartes/Kant, is certainly in the running for greatest philosopher of all time.  He was a careful thinker, resistant to dogmatic answers, and a relatively sprightly writer as philosophers go.  An empiricist who was as persuasive about the temptations of radical epistemological skepticism as anyone, but was still able to resist them.  His tercentenary is well worth celebrating.

Dan Sperber, via Henry Farrell, suggests that we celebrate by posting quotes from Hume.  When I first encountered him as a college freshman, it was in the context of a theology course where we were reading Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.  I was intrigued when our professor pointed out a passage that seemed to prefigure Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which wasn’t going to appear until 82 years later.  My dog-eared copy seems to have gone missing, but I found the quote at The Rough Guide to Evolution.

“And this very consideration too, continued PHILO, which we have stumbled on in the course of the argument, suggests a new hypothesis of cosmogony, that is not absolutely absurd and improbable. Is there a system, an order, an economy of things, by which matter can preserve that perpetual agitation which seems essential to it, and yet maintain a constancy in the forms which it produces? There certainly is such an economy; for this is actually the case with the present world. The continual motion of matter, therefore, in less than infinite transpositions, must produce this economy or order; and by its very nature, that order, when once established, supports itself, for many ages, if not to eternity. 

But wherever matter is so poised, arranged, and adjusted, as to continue in perpetual motion, and yet preserve a constancy in the forms, its situation must, of necessity, have all the same appearance of art and contrivance which we observe at present. All the parts of each form must have a relation to each other, and to the whole; and the whole itself must have a relation to the other parts of the universe; to the element in which the form subsists; to the materials with which it repairs its waste and decay; and to every other form which is hostile or friendly. A defect in any of these particulars destroys the form; and the matter of which it is composed is again set loose, and is thrown into irregular motions and fermentations, till it unite itself to some other regular form.”

To me now, it looks like something of a cross between Darwin — successful forms persevering among the chaos — and the Lucretius/Boltzmann scenario of the universe coming into existence through the random motion of atoms.  (What makes Lucretius and Hume brilliant thinkers but Boltzmann and Darwin influential scientists is that the latter grappled closely with data, not just with ideas.)

The common thread among all these thinkers:  trying to explain the origins of order in the absence of teleology.  The fact that we can do that successfully in biology, and are hot on the trail in cosmology, is a milestone achievement in the history of human thought.


]]></description>
<dc:subject>Philosophy Top_Posts</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:613d77a69df4/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Top_Posts"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/04/philosophy-referee-signals.html">
    <title>Philosophy Referee Signals</title>
    <dc:date>2011-04-18T10:42:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/04/philosophy-referee-signals.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[
Adapt as necessary:

Created by Landon Schurtz. Hat tip: DavidAD and Leiter Reports.
 ]]></description>
<dc:subject>Philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:adc69208b0a9/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://chrisblattman.com/2011/04/06/people-are-not-property-please-stop-saying-that-countries-%e2%80%9csteal%e2%80%9d-doctors-from-africa/">
    <title>People are not property: Please stop saying that countries “steal” doctors from Africa</title>
    <dc:date>2011-04-06T19:52:08+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://chrisblattman.com/2011/04/06/people-are-not-property-please-stop-saying-that-countries-%e2%80%9csteal%e2%80%9d-doctors-from-africa/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[This GUEST POST is written by Michael Clemens
This week, Professor Jonathan Wolff has warned the world that the United States “steals doctors from poorer countries” because it “simply does not train enough doctors to meet its voracious appetite for medical attention.” This is a strong accusation. Professor Wolff, a philosopher, should reconsider several dubious assumptions that his strong claim requires.
First, it is illegitimate to assume that it is possible for anyone to “steal” a human being. The very concept of such an act requires it to be possible for human beings to be owned by others. The notion that health workers may be owned—while presumably Professor Wolff would be offended if any person or group claimed ownership of him—is offensive. It is also illegal where Professor Wolff resides: the United Kingdom outlawed the ownership of people by other people in 1833. People, including health workers, who voluntarily leave their countries are not passive objects of others’ acts of “stealing”; they are active agents exercising a right guaranteed them by Article 13.2 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Second, it is incorrect to assume that the emigration of health workers from a poor country must cause a shortage of health workers at the origin. For decades, more nurses have left the Philippines to work abroad than leave any other country on earth. Yet in the Philippines today there are more Registered Nurses per capita than in the United Kingdom. This happened because so many Filipinos trained up as nurses to take advantage of opportunities abroad that this more than offset the departures. There is no such thing as a fixed stock of health workers in the world; they can be created, and wonderful career opportunities abroad are one of the forces that create them at home. The realities that shape the global health workforce are more complex than the simplistic picture that Professor Wolff paints.
Third, it is simply false for Professor Wolff to assert,
“If a doctor from Ghana is recruited to the US, not only does Ghana lose its doctor, it loses the money paid for the training. It may be that the doctor is likely to send a portion of earnings back home (known in the development business as ‘remittances’). But this is scant compensation.”
In fact, the average African-trained member of the American Medical Association left his or her country of training well over five years after earning the Medical Doctor degree—as I learned when I surveyed them. Thus an African country that has invested in the training of a typical emigrant doctor has already received several years of service from that doctor (without even accounting for care provided during medical school). So it is false to say that the investment in the training of those people is fully “lost”. Furthermore, African-trained members of the American Medical Association send home to Africa, on average, over $6,000 per year, even 20 years after arriving in the United States—including those who send no money. Far from being “scant compensation”, this means that the typical African-trained doctor coming to the United States has sent back much more than the cost of training another doctor in the country he or she came from.
Fourth, Professor Wolff’s argument requires the assumption that a proper policy goal of any country is that of zero immigration. Professor Wolff argues that the U.S. should train as many health workers as it needs. This, logically and inescapably, implies zero migration for health workers. (If every country did this, there logically could be no international movement of health workers as such—unless of course they gave up their professions and cleaned floors.) Zero migration of health workers means that the Ghanaian emigrant doctors Professor Wolff refers to must be forced to live in Ghana against their will—at a small fraction of the living standard of their colleagues in other countries, and of Professor Wolff’s living standard—or give up their profession to live elsewhere. “Self-sufficiency” in doctors at the destination would leave no other options for any of them. The ethical legitimacy of that state of affairs, and the consequent legitimacy of policies designed to bring it about, deserve more pondering than they have apparently received from philosophers. Taking actions that consign others to fates we would not accept for ourselves is something that we should do only with sad reluctance, based on great certainty and overwhelming evidence that directly harming health workers in this fashion will save lives. Professor Wolff has no such evidence.
Too much of the writing on health worker migration appears oblivious to the notion that health workers have agency or rights, and to the idea that the realization of health workers’ ambitions is an inherent good. I would expect philosophers to be the first concerned with such things, not the last. To anyone reading this post, I plead: If you ever say that health workers from poor countries are “stolen” or “poached”, please stop. That small change will mean that you begin to speak of them as human beings rather than owned property. Discussions of their movement must start from that premise, inside or outside our departments of philosophy.
In this paper I offer a non-technical summary of research on the above claims, and on related claims about the effects of skilled-worker migration on poor countries.
 
   
]]></description>
<dc:subject>development ethics health human_rights philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:3ef1d2817a9e/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:development"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:ethics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:health"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:human_rights"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:philosophy"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/04/gender-divides-in-philosophy-and-other-disciplines/">
    <title>Gender divides in Philosophy and other disciplines</title>
    <dc:date>2011-02-04T11:27:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/04/gender-divides-in-philosophy-and-other-disciplines/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Following up on a conversation with a friend in Philosophy, I took a quick look at the Survey of Earned Doctorates to see the breakdown by gender for Ph.Ds awarded in the United States in 2009. Some nice pictures: Percent female by Division (with Philosophy picked out); Percent female for selected disciplines; and a giant percent female for (almost) all disciplines, with Philosophy picked out for emphasis. The links go to PDFs.



]]></description>
<dc:subject>Academia Philosophy Sociology</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:888d75a7cfe9/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Academia"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Sociology"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://crookedtimber.org/2011/01/27/information-feudalism/">
    <title>Information Feudalism</title>
    <dc:date>2011-01-27T05:23:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://crookedtimber.org/2011/01/27/information-feudalism/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Matt Yglesias writes:



A lot of our politics is about symbolism. And symbolically intellectual property represents itself in the contemporary United States as a kind of property—it’s right there in the name. But it’s better thought of as a kind of regulation. Patents and copyrights are modeled, economically, the same as you would model any state-created monopoly.


I think the idea that intellectual property is property is too entrenched, at this point, for this to be an effective rhetorical strategy. Furthermore, rhetoric aside, philosophically the real breakthrough would be for people to realize that defending property rights is not tantamount to defending freedom. What strong IP protection generates is not a free market but something more like information feudalism: a market-unfriendly clusterfuck of fiefdoms and inescapably inefficient lord-vassal terms-of-service arrangements that any friend of freedom, in any ordinary sense, ought to look upon with disgust. The reason why libertarian rhetoric – defend property rights! – can underwrite feudalism, of all things, is that a certain sort of libertarianism, i.e. so-called propertarianism, really just plain is a form of feudalism. I’ve made the case at length.


I don’t see much hope of making a snappy rhetorical case that would break the unhealthy property = freedom link. But I think it might actually be possible to sidestep it by coming up with something like ‘information feudalism’ or ‘cyberfeudalism’ as a catchy term for IP rent-seeking or patent trolling. (Of course, ‘rent-seeking’ and ‘patent trolling’ are already pretty snappy.) To put the point another way, lots of folks are so averse to ‘government regulation’ that you will never get them to trade ‘private property’ talk for ‘regulation’ talk, as Yglesias suggests. But really what these folks are operating with is a kind of centralized = lots of regulation; decentralized = deregulated mental shortcut. The advantage of ‘feudalism’ would be to break that by making vivid the obvious possibility that decentralized stuff can still be too highly regulated, in effect.


UPDATE: turns out someone wrote the book already. Or at least picked a great title already.
]]></description>
<dc:subject>Information_Technology Law Philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:41e091763bf5/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Information_Technology"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Law"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/one-further-note-on-foucault.html">
    <title>One further note on Foucault, concerning methodological individualism</title>
    <dc:date>2011-01-13T12:09:25+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/one-further-note-on-foucault.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[In my previous post, I neglected one point.  Reading Foucault is one useful path out of extreme positions of methodological individualism.  By methodological individualism I mean the view that "method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals," as Wikipedia puts it.

Foucault understood how actual historical explanation relies on the use of broad categories, classes, and exemplars, and in a manner which is not logically reducible to statements about individual beliefs and desires.  The writer (theorist) has nothing close to a complete mental model of how the interacting categories reduce to component individual parts, and so some or most of the moving parts of the explanation retain their autonomy at a partially macro level.  The Austrians will kick and scream on this one, but if you combine imperfect information and the sense/reference distinction, methodological individualism ends up as more of a slogan than anything else.  There is a reflective equilibrium to the explanatory process, and micro relies on some macro foundations, not just vice versa, and individuals rely on the social for some of their cues.  Atomistic reduction to the level of the individual in general will not succeed.

The denier of strict MI is not committed to extreme Hegelian views about the autonomous existence of collectivities and it is debatable how much even Hegel himself made that mistake.

I grant that Foucault takes his own method too far in the anti-individualist direction, as did Hegel.

Foucault is by no means the only or even the best path out of extreme methodological individualism.  See this article by David Levy or late Wittgenstein or William James on pluralism, for instance, or more recently Geoffrey Hodgson, perhaps the best place to start.  Here is a quick overview of some of the debates, though it does not cover the best criticisms.  Neuroeconomics, and modular models of the mind, also can be read as critiques of MI, suggesting, as did Nozick, there is no particular reason to stop at the level of the individual in doing the explanation.

Oddly, for all their talk about methodological individualism, economists hardly ever engage in the medium for which it is most appropriate: biography.

A while ago I wrote a review essay on biography and economics.  Here's a challenge: if economics is so powerful, and MI is so persuasive, try writing a biography of a person, using economic tools, and see how much of that person's life you can explain.  It is a humbling and instructive experience and you can read my attempt here.
]]></description>
<dc:subject>Economics History Philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:9cf047887327/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Economics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:History"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/just-deserts-and-intellectual-property/">
    <title>“Just Deserts” and Intellectual Property</title>
    <dc:date>2011-01-12T22:29:18+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/just-deserts-and-intellectual-property/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[

Via Karl Smith (who raises some good objections of his own), I see that Greg Mankiw is the author of a paper (PDF) proposing that economists stop using an implicitly utilitarian moral theory, and instead embrace “Just Deserts” morality:

Let me propose the following principle: People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his. This perspective is, I believe, what Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, and other classically liberal writers have in mind. We might call it the Just Deserts Theory.

I am drawn to this approach in part by reflecting on some of the public anger that we see over some very high incomes. My sense is that people are rarely outraged when high incomes go to those who obviously earned them. When we see Steven Spielberg make blockbuster movies, Steve Jobs introduce the iPod, David Letterman crack funny jokes, and J.K Rowling excite countless young readers with her Harry Potter books, we don’t object to the many millions of dollars they earn in the process. The high incomes that generate anger are those that come from manipulating the system. The CEO who pads the corporate board with his cronies and the banker whose firm survives only by virtue of a government bailout do not seem to deserve their multimillion dollar bonuses. The public perceives them (correctly or incorrectly) as getting more than they contributed to society. That is, if we take public attitudes as a gauge of our innate moral intuitions, then in evaluating distributive justice, we should focus not on the marginal utility of different individuals but on the congruence between their contributions and their compensation.

This is definitely not Robert Nozick’s view. Not the view espoused in Anarchy, State, And Utopia and not the views he held later in life either. And I’m pretty sure that Milton Friedman—like most classical liberals—was, in fact, a utilitarianish consequentialist. 

And this is for good reason. It’s pretty clear if you read the paper that Mankiw doesn’t intend to be arguing for any really radical changes in the structure of American society. He wants to defend modern industrial capitalism, while bolstering the case for lower taxation of the rich and less generous spending on the non-rich. But think about his examples here. How is it that you can get rich writing books, making movies, designing MP3 players, or making TV shows? Well it’s thanks to statutory definitions of intellectual property. If the copyright on a book only lasted two years, JK Rowling wouldn’t be nearly as rich. If the inventor of the Xerox Alto owned some kind of perpetual right to the concept of a graphical user interface, Steve Jobs’ whole career would be unimaginable. And the firms involved in these industries are constantly “manipulating the system” of intellectual property to try to maximize their own advantage. 

That’s not to say that Rowling just got rich manipulating the system or that she’s contributed nothing of value to society. But this whole system she’s operating in is justified in consequentialist terms (“[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”) rather than desert. You could see that in utilitarian terms or in some kind of Rawlsian prioritarian terms or various other options. But I think a serious effort to try to recreate the economy in desert-based terms would involve a pretty radical rethinking of the way society works, not extension of the Bush tax cuts. 

Mankiw should also consider that peoples intuitions about desert aren’t very conservative economisty. Normal people are always talking about how professional baseball players don’t deserve to get paid more than teachers. 
]]></description>
<dc:subject>uncat Philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:c684a10e94ee/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:uncat"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/economics-and-foucault.html">
    <title>Economics and Michel Foucault</title>
    <dc:date>2011-01-11T20:59:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/economics-and-foucault.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Joshua Miller, a loyal MR reader, asks:

Another cut on local knowledge: what is economics' relationship to Michel Foucault? Often I see folks like you and Hanson making points that the rest of the social sciences and humanities would call Foucauldian, about the role of disciplinary power in knowledge-production, but you don't seem to ever reference or perhaps even read him. Perhaps he is simply not considered very interesting? Given the fact that there is some history of economics in his "Les Mots and les choses," I'd think there'd be more of an attempt to discredit or claim him.

Foucault is interesting, but use him with caution.  Most of his books have not held up very well as history, even if he succeeded in drawing people's attention to some neglected factors.  On top of that, his theoretical framework is incoherent.  Try reading The Archaeology of Knowledge.  I find The Order of Things to be an insightful but skewed account of the seventeenth century; detailed objections aside, it goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or otherwise, that structural categories somehow interact with each other in the world of ideas.  It's much more micro and disaggregated than he lets on, but still I am glad I read the book.  This volume is a good, readable introduction to his work.

Perhaps Foucault is best on prisons and hospitals, though again caveat emptor on the history.  His most valuable insight, both theoretically and historically, is that what appears to be "enlightenment" (or for that matter "Enlightenment") is often anything but.

Foucault is important, and he deserves to be read, but I am not sure he will be much read fifty years from now.  I also view "engaging with him" as a much overdone and much overrated exercise, carried in large part by the less salubrious tendencies in Continental and U.S. humanities scholarly discourse.  It is better to simply work on the topics he cared about, using his books as a reminder to consider some different angles.

Did you know that Foucault -- at least the late Foucault -- appreciated Mises, Hayek, and Friedman?
]]></description>
<dc:subject>Books Economics History Philosophy Political_Science</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:ec1f60261b16/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Books"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Economics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:History"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/t:Political_Science"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/ah-that-universal-reality-almost-the-case-of-categories-and-colors/">
    <title>universal reality (almost): the case of categories and colors</title>
    <dc:date>2011-01-11T19:50:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/ah-that-universal-reality-almost-the-case-of-categories-and-colors/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[I’m interested in the nature of reality and particularly the boundaries and scope of the social construction of reality.  I think social construction clearly plays an important role, but the question is, how “strong” is that role?   For example, I think the performativity argument (and associated “strong programme”) pushes the social construction argument way too far.

But let’s get more specific: what role do categories, language and naming play in the construction of reality?

One empirical setting for actually studying this question is the case of color categories and color naming, an active area of research in linguistics, computer science and psychology.  Scholars in this space have looked at whether the extant categories and names of colors of particular languages impact what individuals actually see and remember.  The famous Sapir-Whorf thesis of course argued, broadly, that language, categories and culture strongly determine perception and reality.  But, the color research shows otherwise.  Languages with highly fine-grained distinctions for individual colors, as well as languages with relatively few (or even no!) distinctions and names for color, lead to the same perceptions and experiences of color.  (Check out the citations below to see the clever way in which this is empirically tested.)

Well, almost. Recent work is making some important qualifications to the argument (articulating a middle ground, of sorts, between universality and strong construction), and there clearly is a very active debate in this space.

Here are some links to this literature:


Berlin & Kay. 1991 (2nd edition).  Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution.  University of California Press.
Lindsey & Brown. 2006.  Universality of color names.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103: 16608-16613.
Terry Regier, Paul Kay, Aubrey Gilbert, and Richard Ivry. 2010. Language and thought: Which side are you on, anyway? In B. Malt and P. Wolff (Eds.), Words and the Mind: Perspectives on the Language-Thought Interface. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ke Zhou, Lei Mo, Paul Kay, Veronica P.Y. Kwok, Tiffany N.M. Ip, & Li Hai Tan. 2010. Newly trained lexical categories produce lateralized categorical perception of color. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107: 9974-9978.
See Paul Kay’s web site.
Also check out the World Color Survey @ Berkeley.

Now, I don’t, by any means, think that the color research necessarily is a knock-down argument against social construction.  But I do think this research definitely questions the “strong” form of construction — I have opportunistically cited and referred to these and other findings to make that point.  And another, perhaps unfair, knockdown argument is that no matter what linguistic categories a color-blind person has, it simply won’t matter in the perception of color.

There is of course much debate in the color literature as well and some of the work points toward a particular, softer form of construction.   And, the color research of course is just one setting, and the findings may not generalize to other settings.  But I do like the fact that the color research actually allows us to more rigorously say some things — with the usual qualifications and questions — about the specific role that language (as well as categories, culture etc) plays in the way we perceive the world.

         ]]></description>
<dc:subject>culture philosophy psychology research teppo</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:xmarquez/b:f47527c23df8/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/egalitarianism-in-a-globalized-world/">
    <title>Egalitarianism in a Globalized World</title>
    <dc:date>2011-01-11T19:31:33+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/egalitarianism-in-a-globalized-world/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[

A Paul Krugman post gives me an excellent excuse to make a point I’ve been sitting on since Saturday. He says his approach is broadly Rawlsian in nature:

My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be. And I believe that this vision leads, in practice, to something like the kind of society Western democracies have constructed since World War II — societies in which the hard-working, talented and/or lucky can get rich, but in which some of their wealth is taxed away to pay for a social safety net, because you could have been one of those who strikes out.

The further away I get from TM Scanlon’s Philosophy 178 course on Equality and Democracy the more I worry that some of Rawls’ modeling assumptions is a bigger deal than is usually made clear in these kind of undergraduate classes. Rawls basically assumes a closed economy with no trade, no immigration, and no emigration. He’s hardly the first person in the universe to do this, and indeed you see a lot of closed economy models in economics since for some circumstances it’s often approximately true and it makes the math easier. In both the philosophical and economic realms, people are of course well aware that this isn’t true. But while Rawls has a separate book on international issues and there’s a very robust controversy as to whether his take gives short slight to rich countries’ obligations to poor ones, this whole line of thought is rarely read back into the basic presentation of Rawls’ views. 

And in the 1970s this was probably right. After all, you can only squeeze so much into one semester. But the mixed economy arose in a kind of odd time when a huge swathe of the world wasn’t really interested in playing host to low-wage export-oriented manufacturing and the West’s relationship to those countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) there were interested in doing so was dominated by considerations of Cold War strategy. The fall of Communism in Europe, the opening of China, the demise of the “license raj” in India, etc. are all good things for the world. But they’re quite problematic in terms of the theory and practice of egalitarian liberalism in the rich world in a way that I think isn’t always appreciated. It’s of course quite possible that teaching practice has changed a lot in the past 10 years, but in terms of my own undergraduate education I think the issues in this neighborhood were under-emphasized compared to what seems important to me in today’s debates. 
]]></description>
<dc:subject>uncat Philosophy</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2010/12/towards-a-real-archaeology-of-knowledge.html">
    <title>Towards a Real Archaeology of Knowledge</title>
    <dc:date>2010-12-09T00:54:35+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2010/12/towards-a-real-archaeology-of-knowledge.html</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The insistence we often hear in recent years that there is no longer any divide between analytic and continental philosophers always sounds to me like a paradigm case of protesting-too-much. There is at the very least something the existence of which it makes sense to deny, call it what you will, even though we agree that the positive research program of analytic philosophy has been dead for at least 40 years, and that 'continental' philosophy is in fact overwhelmingly états-unienne.

Brian Leiter thinks that this something is really just a difference of quality, with 'analytic' standing in for 'high quality' and 'continental' for 'low'. [Note: The irony of writing sous rature at such a moment is not lost on me, but Brian has been in touch to express disagreement with my characterization of his view, so I would like to try again to give a more adequate account of it. What he does believe, I hope I can say, is that the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the principal organization committed to promoting what is generally called 'continental philosophy' in North America, is an organization committed to the promotion of bad philosophy (a relevant quotation from Brian: "There's an  entire professional organization, SPEP, which champions bad work on and  inspired by the Continental traditions in philosophy." However, Brian also holds to the view I mentioned in the first paragraph, that the distinction between the two schools is a meaningless one, and that much good work is done on Continental traditions in philosophy, just not, generally, by those working under the umbrella of SPEP. These views taken together do not seem all that different from the view I initially attributed to Brian: that the people who --rightly or wrongly-- organize themselves under the banner of 'Continental' philosophy tend to be doing bad philosophy, quite apart from any consideration of whether they ought to be organizing themselves in this way or claiming this label for themselves. Whatever they are called, Brian thinks they are doing bad philosophy. Moreover, most people call them 'continental' philosophers. Brian evidently thinks it's regrettable that this is how they are called, and on this we are in agreement.]

Now back to the scheduled programming. At times I've maintained that the distinction is entirely institutional and sociological, and that it is getting things backwards to focus on internal doctrinal differences as the cause of the rift. But on further reflection it now seems to me most just to return to Thomas Nagel's old characterization (and I do not recall precisely where this occurs) of the difference as resulting from the typical orientation of the pre-philosophical educations of analytic and continental philosophers-in-the-making, with analytic philosophers frequently coming from a background in the natural sciences (or at least from a background that inculcated appreciation of the natural sciences), and continental philosophers coming from a background in the more poetic or expressive corners of the humanities.

If this account is correct, it follows that the rift needs to be understood as a symptom of a much more general problem, that it is just one instance of the famous two-cultures problem, rather than an internal affair of philosophy departments alone. If the local rift is to be closed, then, perhaps this might best be brought about not by the definitive triumph of the science-oriented philosophers over the literature-oriented ones (which is to say of the good over the bad, or, which amounts the same, of the high-status over the low-status), but rather by a vastly more significant reconciliation of the natural and the human sciences, one that takes seriously the old conception of the humanities as sciences (or Wissenschaften in the broad sense), and thus that accepts that the humanities and the natural sciences are two different but often overlapping branches of the same general project.

The scientific character of the humanities is something, it seems to me, that remained clear until the middle of the 20th century, at which point numerous factors --from the math-and-physics elitism of scientifically oriented analytic philosophers to the suspicion of 'grand narratives' characteristic of poststructuralism and deconstruction-- began to hasten a split. As a lucid transdepartmental thinker such as Immanuel Wallerstein is able to recognize, this is a split that would not have made any sense not only to Aristotle, but even to Kant, as late as the end of the 18th century. In Wallerstein's view, the split is an artefact of the triumph of classical liberalism, which artificially divides the natural from the human, as well as subdividing the human into the political, the economic, and the socio-cultural. Given that the era of the dominance of liberal thought appears to be drawing to a close, Wallerstein thinks --and I very much concur--, perhaps it is time to hasten a new Streit der Facultäten that will issue in a new way of organizing the study of humanity and its place in nature.

I believe that in setting about this task, we would do well to pay close attention to the way the artificial split between the natural and the human impacts the organization of the various branches of the study of the past. This is not just because I myself am professionally interested in the past, but also because I believe that it is in large part a remnant of skeptical worries about the non-scientific character of the study of any non-repeatable past events or even of any uniformitarian processes, the same skepticism that led Popper to call evolutionary theory a 'metaphysical research programme', that has led to the bracketing as hopelessly non-scientific of the humanities in general, lean heavily on the past, as they do, to the extent that the study of human culture is inescapably the study of human tradition. 

It has been a long time since Popper put forth such a hard line for philosophers of science, and discriminators of non-science, to toe. Since then (and even at that time, to be fair), much work has been done to secure for the study of past, non-repeatable events the status, more than honorary, of science. Mutatis mutandis, much of what has been argued in the case of evolutionary biology applies equally well to the study of deep human history: prehistoric migration patterns and so on. There is a rich consilience of inductions, as well as rigorous models tested both by computer and in real-world case studies, of how, say, the New World was first populated. Yet in matters pertaining to the development of aspects of culture we often find members of the academy taking up the very same position creationists take relative to evolution: dismissing it as 'just a theory' or, to use their slightly more elevated language, dismissing the attempts of people in centers of power to explain this or that aspect of an indigenous culture, even a culture that has been extinct for millennia, as just more of the 'hegemonic discourse'. This is the humanities effectively declining to be taken seriously, the humanities refusing to be the human sciences.

Foucault spoke metaphorically of an 'archaeology of knowledge', but it seems to me that what this misses is that archaeology already was itself the archaeology of knowledge, which consisted in the digging up, analyzing, and interpreting of fragments of material cultures past, some of which had writing on them (e.g., Greek columns) and some of which did not (e.g., Neanderthal burial mounds). Through sophisticated modelling and induction I do not see why from fragments of material culture one should not be able to construct hypotheses about the beliefs, the 'epistemologies', of people far removed in time. Writing makes this task a great deal easier, but even there it is often very hard, and much of what might controversially be described as proto-writing (Babylonian clay tablets, Mayan pictographs, etc.) stands at least as much in need of interpretation as, say, the layout of a village ruin.

No one has done a more thorough job of spelling out the scientific epistemology of archaeology than Alison Wylie (see in particular her Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, University of California Press, 2002). She reveals an endeavor that is  thoroughly scientific, even if it does not conform to all the standards of paradigmatic scientificity set by physics and revered by early analytic philosophers. It studies something non-repeatable (so do evolutionary biology and big-bang cosmology), though it is nonetheless falsifiable in just the same way the other sciences of the past are (as a fossil rabbit from the Pre-Cambrian would have caused J. B. S. Haldane, so he said, to abandon his commitment to evolution), and also built upon countless domains of inquiry whose status as science are perfectly secure (e.g., the chemical analysis of soil).

In its indifference to the distinction between textuality and non-textuality --it digs things up and 'reads' them, whether they have letters written on them or not-- archaeology provides a model of the sort of approach to the human sciences that I believe could greatly help to overcome their estrangement from the natural sciences. Archaeology as traditionally conceived --before post-processualism came in and destroyed its scientific aspirations in exactly the same way that post-structuralism destroyed the aspirations of anthropology, and deconstruction the aspirations of textual studies-- cannot fail to see human culture as a particular kind of natural excrescence, one that eventually sinks back into the earth and intermingles again with the stuff of nature against which it set itself up in opposition for a short while. In this sense, unlike the academic discipline of history as currently conceived, archaeology cannot set up a buffer zone out of the non-textual human past ('prehistory') that preserves a distance between the proper domain of the humanists, on the one hand, and on the other hand the natural world studied by 'scientists'. If we abandon the prejudice that textual traces are a uniquely special sort of vestige of the human past, then palaeography may be conceived in turn as as a particular branch of archaeology: the kind that deals with inscriptions on paper and in similar media.

This sort of palaeography --the study, through weighing, comparing, analyzing, and interpreting of a certain kind of cultural trace, one that requires a special sort of expertise, even if it is not fundamentally different in character from the study of burial mounds or architectural ruins-- should, I think, be the basis of what we call broadly 'textual studies'. In this connection I applaud Franco Moretti, and I see at least glimmers of real reason for optimism in the more popular attempts at bringing natural science to bear on the study of art and literature (e.g., Denis Dutton), as well as in some of the current enthusiasm about a digital revolution in the humanities. Literature should be anchored in quantitative analysis and in palaeography, which should in turn be seen as a branch of archaeology, which should, finally, be seen as a scientific discipline that seeks at bottom to place human culture in the natural world. Scholars in this field should be ever on the look-out for their equivalent of a Pre-Cambrian rabbit fossil: a shred of physical evidence from the past that would disconfirm our received understanding of how some idea or style developed and was transmitted.

The history of philosophy, on this approach, would be the archaeology of  one small subset of one particular kind of material traces left from the  past. This branch of study would require special training in order to develop the  ability to recognize a certain kind of subtle thoughts from a certain sort of traces, but it would not be fundamentally different from the  study of other such traces, and would be no less neglectful of the  holistic and environmental forces that went into shaping them. That  would be a real archaeology of knowledge, and it would take us a long way towards solving the two-cultures problem (of which the analytic-continental rift is a local symptom).
]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/prostitution-externalities/">
    <title>Prostitution Externalities</title>
    <dc:date>2010-11-04T19:28:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/prostitution-externalities/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[I think Adam Ozimek’s post on “The Visceral Externality of Prostitution” nicely illustrates why nobody likes economists:

Say Ray’s friend Lenore wants to purchase Ray’s prostitution services and she values them at $400. But when Lenore does this it bothers Ray’s other friend Tonya. If the negative utility Tonya experiences is worth more than $400, then the market provides a mechanism for Tonya to satisfy her wants: she can pay Ray $401 not to sleep with Lenore. [...]

People will probably object that this is unbelievable, and that even if it happened once in a while, in the real world this would never be enough objectors to affect the quantity of prostitution. I think this is correct. After all, the objectors would have to value preventing prostitution at more than average rate of $300 an hour in order to outbid the existing buyers. But what this tells you is that the marginal utility gained from prostitution by consumers would vastly exceeds the marginal disutility to objectors.

I think objectors know. After all, market based solutions are possible and yet you never hear objectors push for anything but prohibition. This tells me that their willingness to pay is pretty low, and therefore so is their disutility.

This misses the fact that a big part of the point of prostitution prohibition laws is to express social disapproval of prostitutes and prostitution. Indeed, people seem generally quite unconcerned about whether prostitution is occurring someplace out of sight and out of mind. But they want to reserve the right to strongly disapprove of both the prostitution and especially the prostitutes. You can analogize a person who engaged in a form of sexual or commercial conduct of which you disapprove by referring to that person as a “whore.” It’s an insult. Its insult status reflects and upholds a social consensus that whores are bad people, not just that whoring is a kind of undesirable nuisance. Side-payments can’t address this issue.

I think the best way to think about prostitution prohibition is just to observe that we’ve historically done a lot of stuff to bolster the privileged position of heterosexual companionate marriage. This has entailed a lot of avoidable cruelty to gays and lesbians, sexually active women, children of unmarried women, and voluntary prostitutes. But the cruelty isn’t a pointless side-effect that can be reduced through better policy design. The cruelty is integral to obtaining the objective. Over time, counterveiling humane impulses have tended to win out. But that’s the issue. 
]]></description>
<dc:subject>uncat Crime Philosophy</dc:subject>
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    <link>http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm</link>
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    <dc:date>2009-09-28T21:55:54+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23139</link>
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    <title>Sample Chapter for Hardin, R.: How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge.</title>
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    <link>http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8928.html</link>
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<item rdf:about="http://ejpe.org/">
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    <dc:date>2009-04-18T18:45:51+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://ejpe.org/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>economics philosophy</dc:subject>
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    <title>Throwing precaution to the wind - The Boston Globe</title>
    <dc:date>2008-07-26T04:41:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/13/throwing_precaution_to_the_wind?mode=PF</link>
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    <title>Vernor Vinge on the Singularity</title>
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    <title>Jürgen Habermas: Notes on a post-secular society - signandsight</title>
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    <link>http://www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html</link>
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    <title>Reconsiderations: John Rawls and Our Plural Nation - June 11, 2008 - The New York Sun</title>
    <dc:date>2008-06-18T23:30:08+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsiderations-john-rawls-and-our-plural-nation/79738/</link>
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<item rdf:about="http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/abs/0805.1821">
    <title>[0805.1821] Against the Empire</title>
    <dc:date>2008-06-18T22:43:37+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/abs/0805.1821</link>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-05-09-jbarnes-en.html">
    <title>Eurozine - Modes of philosophizing - Jonathan Barnes, Myles Fredric Burnyeat, Raymond Geuss, Barry Stroud A round table debate</title>
    <dc:date>2008-05-21T05:43:42+00:00</dc:date>
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<item rdf:about="http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/fuchs/theory/authors/jacques_monod.htm">
    <title>On Chance and Necessity excerpt</title>
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    <link>http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/fuchs/theory/authors/jacques_monod.htm</link>
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<item rdf:about="http://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/07/rawls-and-liberalism/">
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    <link>http://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/07/rawls-and-liberalism/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>politicaltheory philosophy liberalism justice rawls</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&amp;article_id=204">
    <title>&quot;. . . And to define America, her athletic democracy.&quot; The Philosopher and the Language Shaper: In Memory of Richard Rorty (part 1)</title>
    <dc:date>2007-11-19T04:15:58+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&amp;article_id=204</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>habermas rorty philosophy democracy</dc:subject>
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    <title>Prisoner's Dilemma (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)</title>
    <dc:date>2007-11-06T10:40:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/</link>
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<item rdf:about="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/">
    <title>Episteme and Techne (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)</title>
    <dc:date>2007-11-06T10:37:42+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/</link>
    <dc:creator>xmarquez</dc:creator><dc:subject>philosophy techne plato statesman episteme</dc:subject>
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    <title>Cicero: De Officiis</title>
    <dc:date>2007-10-03T20:29:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.constitution.org/rom/de_officiis.htm</link>
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    <title>Edge: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION: A Talk With Jonathan Haidt</title>
    <dc:date>2007-09-15T10:54:04+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07/haidt07_index.html</link>
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