Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy, Science And Society

A Canine Turing Test

30 Comments

Jonah Goldberg writes about one of his favorite subjects today (no, not that one) — dogs:

Charles Darwin, a true secular saint of the modern age if ever there was one, loved dogs unreservedly. And, in The Descent of Man, he marveled at the ability of dogs to love back. He noted how even “in the agony of death, a dog has been known to caress his master.”

But even Darwin was a sucker, apparently. Eric Zorn, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, recently mocked a local woman, Jess Craigie, who dove into near-freezing waters to save her dog from drowning. Zorn wrote, “Note to Jess Craigie: Your dog still doesn’t love you.”

Zorn’s source for this dog slander is Jon Katz, who despite his name has written mostly wonderful stuff about dogs. Zorn uses an unfortunate quote from Katz to peddle the fashionable notion that dogs are, in the words of science writer Stephen Budiansky and others, “social parasites.” According to this theory, canines are evolutionary grifters that have fooled humans into believing they are our friends. “Dogs develop very strong, instinctive attachments to the people who feed and care for them,” Katz told Zorn. “Over 15,000 years of domestication, they’ve learned to trick us into thinking that they love us.” (In his book Soul of a Dog, Katz is far more nuanced about the nature of canine affection, suggesting a quid pro quo of food for love. Here, Katz is out of the bag.)

Emphasis mine.

It seems like the age-old hubris that man is so unique that other animals can’t think, or have emotions, or even feel pain (Descartes believed that the obvious distress of the animals that he was vivisecting was just reflexes, and had nothing to do with actual sensation). Of course, some take this to the absurd length of believing that human infants are insensate as well, and used this to justify surgery without anesthesia on them even in in recent decades.

But ultimately, we can’t know with any certainty what’s going on in another creature’s head, be it a dog, a baby, or even our closest loved ones. We have to make assumptions based on external behavior. The brilliant computer programming pioneer Alan Turing understood this, and decided to assume that if someone, or something, acted as though it was intelligent, and self aware, that it probably was. Thus he came up with the famous Turing test to judge whether or not a machine entity had achieved sentience and even sapience. Unless we’re sociopaths or extreme autists, we make this assumption every day with people with whom we interact.

I would say that the old saying about ducks contains multitudes of wisdom, and if it walks and quacks like a loving dog, Occam would suggest that we assume that Fido (or in his case, Cosmo) loves us, in his own dog-like way. And while I’m sure that Jonah would be appalled at the notion, I’m sure it applies to cats as well (again, in their own way). Jessica sleeps on us, she nuzzles us, she gently taps my cheek when she wants to be fed, she never deliberately scratches me, even when I’m doing something she doesn’t like (like giving her a bath). While she spends much of the day ignoring us and doing other things, and doesn’t need the constant reassurance and attention that a dog does, she is the most affectionate and adoring cat I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that she has a sense of comfort and completeness when we’re around, and if it’s not love, what is it? I don’t think she’s faking it.

I think that where Katz and his fellow deniers get off track is that the animals didn’t evolve to pretend to love us. That would be a lot of work, evolutionarily speaking, it seems to me. It would require the ability to deliberately deceive, which is a higher cognitive function, and one that apes have but that I’ve never seen cats or dogs exhibit (unless Katz’ theory is true, of course). It makes a lot more sense to think that we have simply bred them over the millennia to love us, selecting the friendlier ones for breeding, and discarding those without affection for us. Just as telling the truth is easier than telling a lie, because you don’t have to keep your stories straight, the easiest way for something with less intelligence to appear to love is to actually love — no act required.

So when someone says that animals don’t love us, they only pretend to, I don’t know what that even means. It sort of reminds me of the old joke that the Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but another ancient Greek poet of the same name. They have evolved to love us, and we have co-evolved to love them, and why question it any further?

Philosophy, Political Commentary

Four Kinds Of Liberty

19 Comments

This isn’t new (Fischer’s book has been out for years), but it may be interesting to those who haven’t encountered it previously:

It’s not hard to pick up echoes of these different “freedom ways” in today’s debates. Probably each of us finds some one of the four more attractive than the others. Very approximately speaking, modern liberalism descends from the first and third of Fischer’s styles, modern conservatism from the second and fourth.

It should also be noted that the War Between The States was a war between the Puritans and Quakers in the north against the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish in the south, though the Cavaliers were more likely to be slaveholders, and the latter were just fighting for their states and pride. Modern “liberals” are indeed descended from the Puritans — they’re just puritanical in a more secular way.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Making Ayn Rand Look Good

3 Comments

Tyler Cowen has a brutal review of what looks to be an idiotic ant-capitalist documentary:

A few months ago I went back and tried to read some Ayn Rand. As Adam Wolfson has suggested recently in these pages, it wasn’t easy.1 I was put off by her lack of intellectual generosity. I read her claim that “collectivist savages” are too “concrete-bound” to realize that wealth must be produced. I read her polemic against the fools who focus on redistributing wealth rather than creating it. I read the claim that Western intellectuals are betraying the very heritage of their tradition because they refuse to think and to use their minds. I read that the very foundations of civilization are under threat. That’s pretty bracing stuff.

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.

In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.

“Narrated by Martin Sheen” would be the first clue.

Philosophy, Political Commentary

A Modest Proposal

25 Comments

Terry Savage has some suggestions for improvements to the Constitution, should there be a convention. I agree with some, disagree with others (mostly around the edges — for example, I see nothing about serving as a US Senator that would qualify one to be president, as the current occupant of the White House demonstrates), but they are all thought provoking and debate provoking.

Of course, my fear is that there were to be a convention, the result would be a document much more dedicated to “positive rights,” and an expansion of the franchise to non-citizens, and possibly the world…

Philosophy, Political Commentary

“A Deadly Race Between Politics And Technology”

31 Comments

Peter Thiel has some thoughts on the future of freedom, and its apparent incompatibility with democracy.

Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second half of the 21st century.

I think he’s a little too pessimistic, but certainly we can’t count on it happening any sooner. But I don’t think that the existing governments will tolerate sea steading, if it appears to become significant.

[Via Brian Doherty, who has links to other voices in the debate]

[Update late morning]

Jonah Goldberg has some related thoughts, in the process of demolishing idiotic “progressive” arguments against the tea parties and “rightwing extremists”:

5. The populist anger out there is the real face of America’s homegrown fascism.

Sigh. While I think Rick Perry’s secession talk is idiotic and unfortunate (even accounting for Texas’ unique history), I am at a loss as to how any of this stuff smacks of fascism. Even Perry is talking in the context of the federal government doing too much, taking away too much liberty, getting too involved in local communities and interfering too much with the individual.

How do I say this so people will understand? Fascism isn’t a libertarian doctrine! It just isn’t, never will be and it can’t be cast as one. Anarchism, secessionism, extreme localism or rampant individualism may be bad, evil, wrong, stupid, selfish and all sorts of other things (though not by my lights). But they have nothing to do with a totalitarian vision of the state where individuals and institutions alike must march in step and take orders from the government.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

Well, actually, subscribing to that ideology is just another form of being grotesquely ignorant. You can expand the state, or you can expand individual liberty, but you cannot do both.

[Bumped]

Philosophy, Political Commentary

Classical Versus Modern Liberals

3 Comments

Alan Wolfe says there’s no distinction between them. Jonah Goldberg says that this is palpable nonsense:

Classical liberalism believed in objective rules constraining and delineating the role of government. Modern liberalism, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, holds that there are no rules rooted outside the prevailing sentiments of liberals themselves. It’s all up to what liberals decide is necessary. Stuart Chase — who reportedly coined the phrase “the New Deal” — argued that it was vital that liberals be put in charge of an “economic dictatorship.” “Why,” he asked, “should the Russians have all the fun remaking the world?” Thurmond Arnold, one of the intellectual titans of the New Deal, defined liberalism as “deuces wild.” Dewey believed there was no such thing as natural rights and argued for things like “social control.” Wilson believed that the U.S. Constitution — a classically liberal document, I think it’s fair to say — needed to be scrapped for a new, living constitution. Call me crazy, but I find these to be contrary, not merely “evolutionary” perspectives.

And he has some interesting thoughts from Albert Jay Nock:

…one never knew what Liberals would do, and their power of self-persuasion is such that only God knows what they would not do. As casuists, they make Gury and St. Alfonso dei Liguori look like bush-leaguers. On every point of conventional morality, all the Liberals I have personally known were very trustworthy. They were great fellows for the Larger Good, but it would have to be pretty large before they would alienate your wife’s affections or steal your watch. But on any point of intellectual integrity, there is not one of them whom I would trust for ten minutes alone in a room with a red-hot stove, unless the stove were comparatively valueless.

Liberals generally,—there may have been exceptions, but I do not know who they were,—joined in the agitation for an income-tax, in utter disregard of the fact that it meant writing the principle of absolutism into the Constitution. Nor did they give a moment’s thought to the appalling social effects of an income-tax; I never once heard this aspect of the matter discussed. Liberals were also active in promoting the “democratic” movement for the popular election of senators. It certainly took no great perspicacity to see that these two measures would straightway ease our political system into collectivism as soon as some Eubulus, some mass-man overgifted with sagacity, should manoeuvre himself into popular leadership; and in the nature of things, this would not be long.

All too prophetic.

[Early evening update]

Another nice find on Nock and liberalism:

The facts are clearly apparent. We now see on all sides the extraordinary spectacle of Liberals doing their best to destroy the cardinal freedoms and immunities which Liberals formerly defended, while all the forces which are historically and traditionally known as Tory or Conservative are arrayed in defense of those freedoms. Furthermore we see Liberals vehemently vilifying those who hold to the original basic principles of Liberalism, denouncing them as enemies of society, and doing all they can to discredit and disable them. These two are probably the strangest anomalies that recent history presents.

Of course, it’s become an old story by now.