James Cameron’s Avatar is a cousin of some famous thought experiments from the philosophy of personal identity. For example, here’s a product of Daniel Dennett’s imagination circa 1978:

Several years ago I was approached by Pentagon officials who asked me to volunteer for a highly dangerous and secret mission. [They] had succeeded in lodging a warhead about a mile deep under Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they wanted me to retrieve it for them. … The difficulty that brought the Pentagon to my door was that the device I’d been asked to recover was fiercely radioactive, in a new way. According to monitoring instruments, something about the nature of the device and its complex interactions with pockets of material deep in the earth had produced radiation that could cause severe abnormalities in certain tissues of the brain. No way had been found to shield the brain from these deadly rays, which were apparently harmless to other tissues and organs of the body. So it had been decided that the person sent to recover the device should leave his brain behind. It would be kept in a safe place as there it could execute its normal control functions by elaborate radio links. Would I submit to a surgical procedure that would completely remove my brain, which would then be placed in a life-support system at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston? Each input and output pathway, as it was severed, would be restored by a pair of microminiaturized radio transceivers, one attached precisely to the brain, the other to the nerve stumps in the empty cranium. No information would be lost, all the connectivity would be preserved.

Sounds pretty Avatar-like to me! Even the plot devices are similar: In Avatar, one reason why the hero needs to remotely control an alien body is that the alien planet’s atmosphere is toxic to humans but not aliens; in Dennett’s thought experiment, the hero needs to remotely control his own body in order to avoid exposure to toxic radiation. (Of course, there are some differences. Dennett’s essay has a cooler ending whereas Avatar has more dragons.)

Anyway, it looks like Avatar’s implications about race have gotten a little more attention than anything it might have to say about personal identity. I was especially interested by this widely-linked io9 piece by Annalee Newitz accusing Cameron of being motivated by “white guilt,” as if that’s a bad thing. I’ll put a few spoiler-ridden thoughts on this below the fold.

Newitz’s complaint goes like this. In Avatar, (mostly?) white space marines oppress the Na’vi, “blue, catlike versions of native people.” Thus Avatar “revisits the crime scene of white America’s foundational act of genocide,” in which whole civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants. Jake, the hero of Avatar, infiltrates the native Na’vi society, realizes that he’s on the wrong side, and leads the Na’vi in a successful rebellion against the human invaders. This is bad because:

This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

I don’t think Newitz aims to offer a general criticism of fantasies about leaving modern civilization to join a Hollywood-style, nostalgically-reinvented “savage” society. Such stories are not inherently racist and they don’t exclusively appeal to white people. They are appealing to 21st-century people, of any skin color and any ancestry, who feel constrained by their own highly artificial environments. Of course, your typical modern man-turned-savage story is ordinarily misleading; you’d better not watch Dances With Wolves in preparation for your anthropology midterm. But these kinds of stories aren’t supposed to educate you; they’re supposed to help you dream of escape from a world that sometimes feels drab and unnatural.

But it seems Newitz does dislike the particular way these fantasies ordinarily turn out. Newitz’s problem, again, is that the invader retains his ability to control the natives, only from the outside rather than the inside. And I don’t think this worry is completely misguided.  Perhaps it would have made for a better story if Jake would have become just another Na’vi, relinquishing all power over them and simply following their leaders into battle.

But I have difficulty seeing how this makes Avatar a fantasy about a “white” person leading “people of color.” Jake’s whiteness isn’t his defining characteristic. Jake’s most obvious feature is that, among his own people, he is a low-level grunt in a vast, impersonal organization. Whether you’re white or “of color,” you can probably identify with that situation. By contrast, the Na’vi are quite unlike anyone – white, black, or other – who might buy a ticket to see Avatar. Given this, and given that Avatar appears to be an escapist fantasy about leaving everything behind, it’s not too surprising, and perhaps forgivable, that as Jake changes from human to Na’vi, he also stops being a nobody and becomes a great leader — the ultimate somebody.

Relatedly: Newitz links Avatar with District 9, and there are some pretty interesting connections between the two movies. But she writes:

Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

But at the end of Avatar Jake becomes permanently Na’vi and seems pretty happy with that outcome. He’s got good reason to be happy.  For Jake, the allure of being Na’vi has nothing to do with its impermanence and a whole lot to do with the fact that life as a Na’vi is awesome. Riding around on dragons is just where the fun starts, if you’re a Na’vi. On the other hand, being a prawn of District 9 is hellish: prawns are ugly, stupid and selfish; they live miserable lives.

Still, Newitz isn’t wrong to think there’s an important racial theme in movies like Avatar and District 9. These movies depict fictional worlds in which racism is true. Racism, I take it, holds that certain aspects of people’s outward appearance can tell you how they’re put together on the inside. As it happens, we don’t live in a world like that. No matter how much you know about my skin color or my facial dimensions, you still can’t guess my IQ or my moral character. But there’s a long tradition of sci-fi/fantasy stories that involve worlds in which people’s insides line up very neatly with their outsides. Tolkien’s orcs are a famous example of this, and I think Avatar and District 9 are also fairly clear examples of this genre.  (The difference between District 9 and Avatar: in Avatar, a person’s blue skin tells you that they’re good on the inside, whereas in District 9, a person’s lobster-like appearance tells you they’re probably not very nice on the inside.)  Given that racism is false and destructive, can we excuse people like Tolkien and Cameron, who ask us to imagine a world in which it is true?

Race, Colorblindness, and Continental Philosophy
By Michael Monahan, Marquette University
(Vol. 1, September 2006) Philosophy Compass

Anthony Collins on the Emergence of Consciousness and Personal Identity
By William Uzgalis, Oregon State University (March 2009) Philosophy Compass

In this week’s Wired magazine there’s an article on the way scientists think. “We’ve heard this all before,” I hear you savvy-with-the-philosophy-of-science readers say. Right. And the results reported are similar to what we’ve heard before too: scientists interpret anomalies as methodologically generated, and so removable from their data, until that is no longer an option, and a change of how one goes about interpreting the data is required (cf. Kuhn on anomalies). If Popper ever meant to describe what scientists actually do, he would have been quite wrong.

The supposed novelty of the work reported by Wired is, first, that the work is done by a psychologist (Kevin Dunbar), not a philosopher. And second, the work involves observations of scientists at work, rather than very post hoc reminiscences of what life was like when the writer once trained as a scientist.

But though the Wired article presents it as such, the second novelty is not a novelty. It’s true that some of the most famous names in philosophy of science did not engage in “in vivo” research. However, others did. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life and Michael Lynch’s Art and Artefact are both extended studies of life in a lab. And interestingly, each had as its focus an issue that the Wired article omits entirely.

The Wired article paints scientists as dogmatic ignorers of the flaws in their research: the data clearly point to one’s preconceived ideas being wrong, so one ought to change the direction of one’s research. But the scientists fail to do so. But then why does science work? Because they argue it out and come to see the error of their ways. That’s the Wired story (roughly).

Lynch, and Latour and Woolgar, begin their questioning with one less assumption. How is it that when multiple interpretations of the data are always possible, any order is so often found in the data collected? The production of order: how does it happen? These authors treat the processes described by Dunbar as a way of achieving order “out of chaos” as Latour and Woolgar put it. Scientists’ well documented behavior is a solution to a problem one gets if one drops the assumption that seeing any order, getting any agreement on what the data mean, is something that does not require explanation.

One can’t help feeling that the Wired article, if not Dunbar himself, has committed that sin so despised by Kuhn: trying to understand the behavior of scientists as though they knew already what they would only come to know once they had finished their investigations.

Related articles:
The Psychology of Scientific Investigation
By J. D. Trout, Loyola University Chicago
(Vol. 2, April 2007)
Philosophy Compass

The Paradox of Confirmation
By Branden Fitelson, University of California – Berkeley
(Vol. 1, February 2006)
Philosophy Compass

If you are one of those Santa-skeptics (you know–the kind who thinks Mom and Dad are responsible for all those presents under your Christmas tree) then there’s a book written just for you: The Truth About Santa, by Gregory Mone.  This book is for readers who respect science enough to know that the traditional story of Santa Claus faces serious and familiar challenges.  For instance, according to animal physiologists, reindeer can’t fly; a thorough study of satellite images fails to reveal a workshop at the North Pole; and rudimentary mathematical skills are enough to confirm that a journey to two-hundred-million chimneys takes 190 years (not one night) if each stop lasts only thirty seconds.

How, according to Mone, does Santa do it?  Simple: very advanced technology.  By the clever use of robot spies, worm holes, scanners, light-deflecting shields and many other gadgets, Santa can accomplish, without resorting to magic, what seems impossible.  Mone offers cutting-edge scientific research (ranging from RNA inhibitors to gravitational distortions that connect the present to the past) and, refreshingly, employs this research with respect for philosophy (noting that Santa cannot travel to the past to tell himself he can sleep in, since he’s already delivered the presents!).  The book is an entertaining way to explore the limits of what is possible through the most current science and some careful philosophy. Click here for a discussion of the book on NPR.

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Science and Religion: Philosophical Issues

By Alan G. Padgett , Luther Seminary
(Vol. 2, November 2007)
Philosophy Compass

Computer Simulation and the Philosophy of Science

By Eric Winsberg , University of South Florida
(Vol. 4, September 2009)
Philosophy Compass

The climate conference in Copenhagen has ended with an accord brokered by President Obama between China, India, Brazil, and South Africa to do something about climate change. What that something actually is supposed to be remains to be determined as it seems. The accord is non-binding and therefore incredibly weak. World leaders, among them Ban Ki Moon, call the agreement a start and a first step in the right direction. To many people, including me, that does sound somewhat cynical. For years already we are aware that our environment is changing. Science is providing us with evidence about that fact. But Science is not giving us results to use as they are, as apparently some politicians hope. Since the science explaining climate change is so highly complex, it is not only bound to produce errors once in a while, it is also only usable to a certain degree as 100% reliable evidence for action.
Still, in order to deal with the climate change, we do need evidence based politics. Any accord that is potentially bindingly agreed upon in the future will have to take into account all the different parameters of the different countries and regions in order to be successfully implemented. Therefore it is not only about high quality evidence, but about usable evidence that is understandable to the policy maker in order to successfully implement a policy. The steps to achieve a policy like this should have been taken a while ago and one can only hope that the countries on their own already do much more in order to reverse the effects of climate change then the world leaders will ever agree upon to do. Simply because the local government knows the specific needs of its country!

For those interested in timesonline articles about the UN climate conference and its aftermath, go here.

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Global Egalitarianism
By Chris Armstrong, University of Southampton
Vol. 3, December 2008
Philosophy Compass

Decision Making: A Neuroeconomic Perspective
By Benoit Hardy-Vallee, University of Toronto
Vol. 2, November 2007
Philosophy Compass

In 1908, Jack Johnson became the first African American to win the heavyweight title in boxing. In 1912, after marrying a white woman named Lucille Cameron, Johnson was twice charged with, and later convicted of, violating the Mann Act, which banned inter alia the transportation of women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Johnson eventually spent a year in prison for this alleged crime.

Ostensibly, Johnson’s treatment at the hands of the U.S. Government was a miscarriage of justice. Not only was Johnson apparently innocent of the crimes for which he was punished, but the Mann Act itself did not become law until after Johnson had committed the acts that allegedly violated it. The historical record thus supports the conclusion that Johnson was the target of a racist vendetta that grew out of white America’s anger toward Johnson’s athletic ascendancy and romantic relationships with white women.

Prominent members of congress, in addition to Johnson’s descendants, are now requesting that the U.S. Justice Department advise President Obama to rectify this past injustice by issuing a posthumous pardon. As described in a recent Associated Press article, the government’s response has thus far been remarkably tepid. While the Obama Administration has yet to even comment on the matter, the Justice Department has formally refused to consider recommending a presidential pardon for Johnson because, it claims, the resources necessary for making informed recommendations are better used for cases involving people “who can truly benefit” from being pardoned (i.e., the living).

Of course, there are many questions a critic of the Justice Department’s argument might ask; some of them are philosophical. For instance: Is it really true that dead people cannot benefit from being pardoned? And, in any case, how is whether a person will benefit from a pardon relevant to whether he should in fact be pardoned? Should the threshold of evidence sufficient for granting a pardon be equal between the dead and the living? Or might a lower threshold of evidence be warranted in cases involving the dead (say) because we need not worry about mistaken pardons bestowing benefits upon the dead in ways that we might worry about mistaken pardons bestowing benefits upon the living?

Related Articles:

Welfarism
By Simon Keller , University of Melbourne
(Vol. 3, December 2008)
Philosophy Compass

Dworkin’s Theory of Law
By Dale Smith , Faculty of Law, Monash University
(Vol. 2, February 2007)
Philosophy Compass

Recently, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme asked the question: What is lost when a language dies? This question is prompted by the prediction of an (un-named) US linguist that by the year 2100 90% of the world’s 7,000 currently spoken languages will be dead. The progressive march of dominant languages such as English is held to account for such changes in the world’s linguistic geography. Languages, like species, can now be listed as ‘endangered’: US organisation Ethnologue suggests that there are 473 such languages in the present day. Furthermore, it is suggested that 133 of the world’s languages now have less than 10 speakers.

The question, however, is should we care, and if so, why? Some might argue that homogenized linguistic practice enables greater capacity for communication between different peoples. There is a reason, after all, a moral to the Biblical story of Babel. However, French linguist Paul Hagege says:

What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people… It’s also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express.

According to Hagege, languages are reflective, and indeed constitutive, of a cultural heritage: when they die, they take a culture with them. A further casualty of this may be a peoples’ sense of identity.

Philosophers, however, might fear the death of language for other reasons. A wide variety of languages may arguably be a more fertile ground for the evolution of philosophical ideas. Almost every language contains concepts untranslatable, perhaps even inexpressible, in others. It may be argued that the concepts available to us shape the way we think. When a language dies, then, possible ways of thinking may be lost, and with them ways of answering, and even resolving, certain philosophical concerns. The costs of losing languages, then, may well be higher than many appreciate.

Related Articles:

Linguistic Competance Without Knowledge of Language
By John Collins, University of East Anglia
(Vol. 2, November 2007)
Philosophy Compass

Demonstratives in Philosophy and Linguistics
By Lynsey Wolter, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
(Vol. 4, March 2009)
Philosophy Compass

The headline of the talkboard post from BBC news website asked: “Should homosexuals face execution?” We would have to agree that it was not the most appropriate headline, but when contextualized it certainly calls attention to a major problem in the realm of human rights. The article from The Guardian can be read here.
The goal was to promote an open discussion about the anti-homosexuality bill under debate by the Ugandan parliament. Apparently some Ugandans believe that certain homosexual offences are punishable by death. We would immediately think this is an absurd stance, yet even in one of the most liberal states of the most liberal country anti-homosexual regulations have been approved. I am referring to Proposition 8, in California.
The approval of Proposition 8 was a step back in the battle for a world in which human rights are fully respected. Now the anti-homosexual bill under debate in Uganda is a major affront to even a minimum of respect for human rights.
This problem calls our attention to the need of an international agreement about justice principles and of international organizations actually capable of endorsing these principles in every country. Some legislation should be internationally forbidden if we are ever to live in a world where human rights have actual meaning.

Related Article:

Are Human Rights Essentially Triggers for Intervention?
By John Tasioulas , University of Oxford
(Vol. 4, December 2009)
Philosophy Compass

It seems like this should get mentioned on this blog: a major survey of the philosophical views of professional philosophers, philosophy PhDs, grad students, and even undergrads.

The PhilPapers survey raises issues about expertise, consensus, and progress in philosophy.  Among target faculty surveyed, most of the questions proved to be controversial.  81.6% of target faculty accept or lean toward non-skeptical realism about the external world.  But none of the other responses to any of the other questions broke past the 80% mark, and in many cases the target faculty appear to be pretty much evenly split between two or three different responses to various questions.

Does this mean that philosophers aren’t making any progress and aren’t solving any problems?  Not necessarily.

The survey seems designed to find philosophers’ views about some of the currently most interesting and controversial issues.  Maybe you could find large-scale agreement among philosophers if you were looking for it.  For example, it seems to me that most philosophers would agree that the JTB analysis of knowledge is unsatisfactory, and most would agree that ontological arguments for the existence of God are not rationally compelling.  But of course these are just negative results; and I’m not sure whether there are any really interesting positive philosophical assertions that are really widely accepted.  But maybe that’s okay.  Maybe, at least for the moment, the best philosophy (as a whole discipline) can do is to painstakingly eliminate initially plausible possibilities.  Maybe, for the time being, philosophy’s main product is to undermine attractive ideas — and to show that “broken arguments” are broken.  This might not be such a pessimistic view of philosophy.  Exposing misconceptions can clear the way to bigger and better things — and is often worth doing even when it doesn’t lead to anything grander.

Disagreement as Evidence: The Epistemology of Controversy
By David Christensen, Brown University (August 2009)
Philosophy Compass

A recent study by the University of California, San Diego, estimates that the total amount of words “consumed” in the United States – where this consumption is from televisions, computers and other media and does not include people simply talking to one another – has more than doubled from 4,500 trillion in 1980 to 10,845 trillion in 2008. If images are added to the approximately 100,500 words per day we are exposed to, then it is estimated that we are bombarded with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information each day. You can read more about the study here.

Some academics are worrying about the possible adverse effects of this deluge of information. The psychiatrist and author Edward Hallowell, an expert on attention-deficit disorder, has suggested that people who spend too much time on their laptops and Blackberrys “are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to think and to feel… People are sacrificing depth and feeling and becoming cut off and disconnected from other people.” Other researchers, however, dismiss such concerns. According to Amanda Ellison, of Durham University’s neuroscience research unit: “it is quite difficult to actually overload the brain because it can contain a lot more information than was previously thought.” She also points out that: “There is no one memory centre. Visual information is stored in one part of the brain and audio information is stored in another.”

Colin Blakemore, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford and Warwick, speculates that an increased exposure to information might even be beneficial. “One of the things we have learnt over the past 20 years is that the brain does have a capacity to grow and increase in size depending on how it is used. Perhaps the personal experience of having to deal with all of this information will cause new nerve cells to be born and create new nerve connections in the brain.”

Such speculation is not new amongst philosophers. Daniel Dennett is perhaps the most prominent advocate of the idea that with the advent of language a form of natural selection amongst ideas or “memes” was born, and that this competition amongst ideas and words has crucially shaped our mental faculties, rendering our minds radically distinct from other, language-less species. Dennett speaks of our brains being “invaded” and “parasitized” by words and claims that competition amongst memes is “so swift and powerful that a single generation of its design improvements can now dwarf the R-and-D efforts of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.” (A nice introduction to Dennett’s ideas can be read here.)

Related articles: Reviving Whorf: The Return of Linguistic Relativity
By Maria Francisca Reines and Jesse Prinz , University of North CarolinaCity University of New York
(Vol. 4, December 2009)
Philosophy Compass
Related articles: An Overview of Lexical Semantics
By Kent Johnson , University of California, Irvine
(Vol. 2, November 2007)
Philosophy Compass

Besides its surprisingly good action cinematography, ‘Minority Report’ owes its huge success to the deep discomfort it created in viewers. The movie constructs a future world where law enforcement makes use of ‘Pre-Cogs’ — humans who have been given the gift of foresight through genetic modification, so that they can see crimes before they happen. When a crime is predicted, the purported criminal is promptly apprehended and the crime prevented. The movie forces the viewer to confront a host of questions that have troubled philosophers for millennia.

If the future is predetermined, in what sense can we be said to be free? Central to our commonsense conception of freedom is the inherent possibility of doing otherwise. If the future is closed to alternate possibilities, then there is no sense in which a murderer could have acted differently and then it seems that  the act of murder is not a free act. Relatedly, if a person cannot do otherwise, is there a sense in which the person is morally responsible for the action? Hume, most famously, articulated the seemingly essential relationship between the notion of moral responsibility and the possibility of freely choosing your actions. ‘Ought implies can,’ he said. One is morally obligated to act in a certain way only if one can in fact act in such a way. If the future is predetermined, then in a clear sense the murderer could not have failed to murder. But then what sense is there to the claim that the murderer ought not to murder? And if there is no sense to be given in response to this question, there is little reason to hold the murderer morally responsible. The murderer is no different from a person who happens to slip on a banana, land on an innocent bystander, and accidentally snap his neck. The person is causally responsible for the unfortunate killing, but, since the person could not have done otherwise, is not morally responsible for it.

These are deep and disturbing questions mainly because of the centrality of the notion of freedom in our conception of our selves as persons (rather than objects or ‘mere’ animals). (An influential and interesting response to this set of problems was developed by Harry Frankfurt. Well worth a read.)

Though such sci-fi scenarios don’t really need to be considered seriously, the questions that they raise do call for greater attention. This is especially true given recent advances in cognitive psychology and brain imaging technologies. In the last few years, cognitive psychologists using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have discovered a variety of differences between the brain activities of people who are lying and those telling the truth (see for example R. Henig’s article in the NY Times, and G. Stix’s article from Scientific American). fMRI can then be used as a lie detector superseding the traditional polygraph. Even more interesting is a recent study (by T. Baumgartner et al., published in Neuron) reported in NewScientist which suggests that fMRI technology can reveal a person’s intention to break a promise, an intention to cheat at some future time. Such technology, according to the report, could be used to assess the intentions of criminals who are up for parole. It would indicate whether criminals intend to keep their promise to avoid a life of crime, or whether they intend to cheat the system.

Of course, even assuming the adequacy of the technique, ‘reading’ a person’s intentions for future action is not yet to foresee that person’s action. This fact raises many pertinent questions. Most clearly: Should people who aim to cheat the system be held morally (and legally) responsible for acts they have yet to perform? Insofar as an intention is not yet an action, what weight should be assigned to such fMRI data in assessing a criminal’s petition for parole? To penalize people, by denying them parole, for example, on the basis of their current intentions, is to strip them of what is most essential to their being persons. It is to treat them as lacking the freedom to have, and also change, their intentions; to treat them as lacking the freedom of self-determination. On the other hand, it might be argued, the current parole review process assesses petitions in part of the basis of a criminal’s self-report regarding his or her intentions. fMRI data can then serve as supplemental data to assess the veracity of that report, which could then feature as part of the deliberation process.

Though we are still far from the scenarios of ‘Minority Report’, it is clear that as scientists peer deeper into our minds, clarity on the nature of personhood, of freedom, and of moral responsibility, becomes increasingly urgent.

Related articles:

Recent Work on Free Will and Moral Responsibility
By Neil Levy and Michael McKenna, University of Melbourne Florida State University
(Vol. 3, November 2008)
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Legal and Moral Responsibility
By Antony Duff , University of Stirling
(Vol. 4, November 2009)
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Causation and Responsibility
By Carolina Sartorio , University of Wisconsin at Madison
(Vol. 2, November 2007)
Philosophy Compass