On Super Fine Magazine: “On activism and outrage: The importance of recognizing the Man”

There’s a new piece up that I’ve written for Super Fine Magazine. It’s title is above, in the subject, but here’s the teaser paragraph:

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend, and the TSA came up as a topic. Now, if a topic has ever been hashed over by the internet hype machine echo chamber, it is the Transportation Security Administration. There is a reason for this, of course— most of the time, internet users are firmly ensconced in private or semi-private locations which are arranged for the users’ convenience and comfort. Much of modern American existence is so structured.  Thus, moving through a TSA checkpoint is a jarring experience: everything seems sacrificed for the sake of some arcane and arbitrary rule set that is suddenly imminent in the traveler’s experience. This is the root of all this hullabaloo, right? That Americans are so generally comfortable that endless complaints are issued at any discomfort more sustained than the ten minute wait at a busy Starbucks?

Link.

Super Fine Magazine

To anyone who still looks around this site, or who was directed her for whatever reason, my writing is now going on at Super Fine Magazine. Lots of other talented people are writing over there, too, so I encourage anyone and everyone to go check it out. Cheers!

Bx v -Bx

What if Wittgenstein, who was a known fan of Shakespeare (at least in his later years) thought the central question of metaphysics* was the famous “To be, or not to be? That is the question”? After all, wouldn’t that be schematized as Bx v -Bx? In which case, THE question is a tautology, and really doesn’t have much content at all?

When logically schematizing Shakespeare, everything is lost in translation.

*”Why is there Something instead of Nothing?

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Varieties of Anthropocentrism and Human Exceptionalism

This is the first of a prospective series of posts on anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism; I hope to build on each one and then tie the subject into other recent topics of interest such as functional explanation. As the foundational post, this will mostly be groundwork. I will first attempt to describe a spectrum of anthropocentric attitudes and then add epicycles and observations to the initial scale and definition. So, what are some varieties of anthropocentrism?

Strong anthropocentrism/human exceptionalism is the view that there is a significant ontological difference between humans and much of the material world. A classic and famous example of this in philosophy is Cartesian dualism, with its assertion that humans are of two worlds that seem sufficiently intuitive: the mental and the physical. Much of the rest of the world is far more mechanistic in character; humans are exceptional, then, because we consist of a mental substance somehow connected to the physical. Descartes philosophy is also heavily reliant on the existence of God and various philosophical/theological details that expand on the two distinct, yet connected substances of the world. Similarly, a lot of human exceptionalism is founded on religious beliefs, particularly those religions that describe the special creation of humans and the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul linked to an eternal, omniscent, omnipresent deity.

Moderate anthropocentrism/human exceptionalism is more influenced by modern Western culture and a corresponding attention to science at a popular level. This is an anthropocentrism that acknowledges the continutity of humans with the rest of the world, usually by reference to evolution and common ancestry. However, moderate anthropocentrism remains coherent with a dualistic metaphysics.  One subscribing to moderate anthropocentrism could be a Cartesian-style believer in immaterial characteristics posessed by humans but not necessarily the rest of the world. The difference between moderate and strong anthropocentrism is the acknowledgement of a stronger continuity of humans with the rest of the (physical) world within the moderate attitude.

Weak anthropocentrism/human exceptionalism, then, anchors the other end of the spectrum. Weak anthropocentrism is coherent with a physicalist monism: the view that there are only physical substances in the world. Under this view, humans are not exceptional because they are creatures of two worlds while most beings are restricted to one, but because of other unique charactersitics of humanity. Humans are apparently more intelligent and creative than other beings, as evidenced by the existence of complex human cultures and languages. For all we know humans are the only beings with such cultural, linguistic, and creative complexity. It is this complexity and intelligence, therefore, that set humans apart from other beings (although at least, under this weak variation, humans and the rest of the world consist of the same stuff).

For each strength of anthropocentrism there are, of course, a great deal of variations. For example, in some religious thought, the existence of a soul and of a deity does not imply dualism. Indeed, the existence of a deity implies a strong monism, as everything is unified through the existence and power of the deity. This attitude can go in a multitude of directions, however– one can go from it to a Spinozistic monism, or to panpsychism, or continue to believe that, despite the unity of the world as established by the deity there is nonetheless something more or less exceptional about humans. What is true for my descriptions of the variations of anthropocentrism above is also true when it comes to this viewpoint; a metaphysical attitude leads the way, and attitudes regarding human exceptionalism follow.

With that thought, however, a psychological issue raises its head. Philosophically speaking, I think it seems clear that the metaphysics one accepts influences (if not implies, depending on the metaphysics) ones attitude towards anthropocentrism. Psychologically speaking, though, it may be the other way around. It makes sense to consider that humans are, at default, anthropocentric; we have, more or less, a preference for others of our own species, and even members of that species that bear particular resemblance to ourselves. Depending on the veracity of group selection hypotheses, there may only be so much a human can do to consider anthropocentrism from something approximating an archimedian standpoint. Between the psychological, anthropological, and philosophical, we are left with the questions: Is the anthropocentric attitude justied? Which one(s) are justified or justifiable? And even if evaluation of the justifiability of anthropocentrism is possible, how possible is it to change anthropocentric attitudes?

Natural vs. Organic Functions– Review: Peter McLaughlin, What Functions Explain

In my previous post, I described the importance of a significance criteria for function ascriptions. My primary example was dueling function ascriptions for the Milky Way Galaxy. I argued that a natural function ascription for solid matter in the Milky Way Galaxy was a more significant explanation for the existence of solid matter, and the Galaxy, than an ascribing a biocentric (artifactual) function to the Galaxy. This argument rests on a presupposition that I did not explore however– that it makes sense to explain the functions of natural, but inorganic, entities at all.

Peter McLaughlin, whose What Functions Explain has spurred this series of posts, does not think that this presupposition of mine makes sense. Or at least that is the message I take from his late discussion of inorganic replicators in his book. McLaughlin writes that, “it makes no sense to speak of the function of some molecular substructure of a crystal, but we are not committed to the belief that the crystal somehow ‘benefits’ from being replicated” (2001, p. 181). Partially submerged in both of my previous posts on functional explanation is the idea that the split between natural and artifactual functions is a bit of a misnomer. In fact, the split seems to be much more between artifactual and organic functions, and so discussing functional explanation in terms of natural/artificial instead of natural/organic is a mistake. Merely being natural does not mean that something has a function, according to McLaughlin, but all organic entities do seem to have a function. McLaughlin seems to recognise this problem in his last few chapters, as once he has restricted the possession of functions to self-reproducing systems that have goods he begins to talk more in terms of organic entities that have functions and less in terms of natural entities that have them. To a degree, this problem is about semantics– if you don’t mean to include everything that falls under the category “natural”, use a different category, like “organic”!– but in a more important sense, the semantic problem reveals a real issue. Why don’t inorganic but natural entities have functions?

I think the split has been drawn between natural and artificial not just because it has a nice, dualistic ring to it, but because the terminology actually captures an important topic of metaphysics. There is a real difference between what it means for an artifact to have a function and what it means for a natural entity to have one. And, to add the kicker, that includes inorganic, but natural entities, such as the Milky Way. In my previous two posts, I have borrowed from McLaughlin function definitions that he ascribes to other authors, especially C.G. Hempel. But in the last (and very impressive) chapter, McLaughlin lets loose with a definition of his own. Answering the challenge posed in the book’s title, McLaughlin writes that functions explain “the existence and properties of those parts of a self-reproducing system that contribute to the self-reproduction of that system. What functions explain is systems whose identity conditions consist in the constant replacement, repair, and reproduction of their component parts” (2001, p. 209). This definition is meant to encapsulate organic functions only– artifactual functions are relative to the valuations of valuing agents, and (to repeat) it just makes no sense to think of the parts of inorganic systems as having functions.

I maintain that they do, and with alterations even McLaughlin’s definition of functional explanation can be made to accommodate them. Consider again my example of a system of extremely large scale– the Milky Way Galaxy. Then, expand the scale even further to that of the universe. According to most currently accepted cosmological theory, the universe is expanding, and has been since the Big Bang. Now, take the first half of McLaughlin’s definition of functional explanation– that functions explain “the existence and properties of those parts of a self-reproducing system that contribute to the self-reproduction of that system”– and integrate that thought with the idea that the universe is expanding. The universe is expanding, and (barring a misunderstanding, which, given the subject, seems almost inevitable), this means that there are parts of the universe that contribute to that expansion. These parts are parts of a self-reproducing system (the universe), that by their very existence, contribute to the self-reproduction and expansion of that system. Note that this would not be the case if the universe was in a steady state or in the process of collapsing into a Big Crunch sometime in the future.

There are clearly some enormous, massive difficulties in the details of this example. We don’t know what the stuff is that is causing the universe to expand. Some (a very small amount) of that universe seems to be matter of the kind with which we are used to dealing– solids, liquids, and gases– but most of it is apparently other stuff. Because I am not an expert Cosmologist, I cannot hope to explain these details. The expert cosmologists themselves seem to be at a loss, as well, but at least they have some ideas of how to work on these problems. What is important for my use of this popularly scientific understanding of cosmology is this: the Universe, the largest natural, physical, and (largely) non-living thing that can be conceived, seems to be a system that has parts that have functions. Many of those parts, being the structure of the universe, are just like it– they are natural and non-living. Yet they seem to be function bearers, at least with the first half of McLaughlin’s definition in mind.

At this point, you might be wondering if the universe, as a system, satisfies the second part of McLaughlin’s definition. Is the universe the sort of system “whose identity conditions consist in the constant replacement, repair, and reproduction of [its] component parts”? The rub for non-living systems in the definition seems to be the criteria of “replacement” and “repair”, included by McLaughlin in order to 1) distinguish natural functions from artifactual functions and 2) generalise the causal feedback loop required by functional explanations from requiring natural selection (which itself requires inter-generational reproduction) to intra-generational processes like the gradual maintenance of organs in living creatures (McLaughlin, 2001, pp. 179-190) This itself is an adaptation of a Maynard-Smith’s conditions for life, namely replication, regeneration, metabolism, and growth (Maynard-Smith, 1986). Regeneration, repair, or maintenance– no matter how you formulate the condition, it does not seem as if it is the kind of thing that can be assigned, broadly, to most parts of the universe. Which is why I suggest that we jettison the repair condition.

My motive for this is that parts of natural, non-living systems do seem to have functions. For the most part, except for this one criteria, parts of such systems meet the requirements that must be met by function bearers. The reason that I think natural, non-living entities should be included as possible subjects of functional explanation is that such explanation can be useful in providing more information about the universe. We are paying a heavy explanatory cost by limiting (severely limiting!) functional explanation of natural entities to living entities. Most of the universe is non-living, and we need all the information about it that we can get.

We do have to go about this sort of explanation in the right way. To lower the metaphysical costs of functional explanation, as well as to make the explanation more complete, we should be careful to limit (if not eliminate) intentional teleology, as well as anthro- or bio-centric perspectives, from functional explanations. Appealing to causal feedback loops as a primary ingredient of functions is currently the best way to achieve this goal. It is also important to keep the distinction between natural and artifactual functions, as one has an internal teleology and the other an external teleology, related to that of an external valuing agent. The primary objection to jettisoning the repair condition from a definition of natural functions is that by doing so one not only brings in natural but non-living entities but also artifacts. How do I propose to keep the distinction between natural and artifactual functions while rejecting the repair criteria? By building in a significance criteria. To get the most information out of an explanation, we should employ the variety of functional explanation that has the most significance for the system being explained. For a bicycle, an artifactual explanation is the most significant, and for the universe, a natural explanation is the most significant. It is not necessary to build into our definition of function that there is a distinction between artifacts, living entities, and non-living entities. We lose much by insisting that only one kind of functional explanation is possible for artifacts, another is possible for living entities, and no functional explanation is possible at all for non-living, natural entities. If we are truly motivated to accept a definition of functional explanation with the greatest explanatory range and power, and the lowest metaphysical cost, then we should not require that the subjects of such explanation be living if they are natural.

The Importance of Significance for Artifactual and Natural Functions

Peter McLaughlin provides separate formulations of what qualifies an artifact as having a function and what qualifies something naturally occurring as having a function. Most arguments over functional explanation seem to center around the functions of naturally occurring entities, although the apparent necessity of separate definitions for natural and artificial entities possessing functions is not without controversy. The problem with the split between natural and artifactual functions is usually located at the split, but I think there is also a major difficulty when the two come together.

McLaughlin’s basic summation of natural functions is this:

(1)    X does/enables Y (in or for some S)*
(2)    Y is good for some S; and
(3)    By being good for some S, Y contributes to the (re)production of X (there is a feedback mechanism involving Y’s benefiting S that (re-)produces X). (2001, p. 140)

And for artifactual functions, he provides the following schematization:

(1’) X does Y—or at leas some relevant agent believes it does.
(2’) Y is good for some S—or at least some relevant agent believes it is. (ibid)

Now, to muddy the waters a little bit. It would seem that natural entities and artifacts might be divided along lines of living and non-living things. This is not the natural entities that are living ones, but is to say that “artifact” seems to intuitively include only non-living things. After all, living things cannot be made into artifacts, right? More than that, natural things cannot be artifacts, right?

This being philosophy, the line is not nearly so clear. What about domesticated animals? On the other end, in the non-living but nonetheless natural range, what about the Milky Way Galaxy? There seems to be a large enough class of things that blur natural/artifactual distinctions that there might be a confusing proliferation of function ascriptions, not to mention difficulties in classification.

Let’s look at one of my two examples that blurs the artifactual/natural distinction, the one that is more extreme: the Milky Way Galaxy. How, you might be wondering, might the Milky Way be an artifact? Under the guidelines for artifactual function ascriptions, the Milky Way (and the rest of the Universe, for that matter) might be said to (1) provide a substrate for life and (2) that providing a home for life is good for humans. In fact, this is much of the fine-tuning argument in a nutshell. One immediate problem with this ascription of function is the insignificance of providing a home for life (at least to the best of our knowledge) to the existence of the universe. It is an explanation incredibly small in scope– to say that a function of a galaxy is to provide a home for life is similar to declaring that a function of mine was to touch a particular token at an arcade in 2004. It is to pick out a physically and temporally small occurrence in the history of an entity and hold it to be a function.

Another problem is that one can also cast a functional explanation for the Milky Way as a natural entity. (1) The Milky Way Galaxy fuses particles together in such a way that solid matter exists. (2) Solid matter is essential to maintain the shape and makeup of the Milky Way. (3) The more solid matter there is in the galaxy, the more of the galaxy there is, and without solid matter there would be no Milky Way. This certainly seems to be a more significant function of the Galaxy than providing a home for life, not to mention that solid matter seems to be more important to the actual continued existence of the Milky Way as such than the existence of life in some corner of the Galaxy. Except in a linguistic sense (without language, the Milky Way Galaxy would lose its name), there is not much that the continued existence of life does that maintains the existence of the Galaxy.

Before function ascriptions can be made for natural entities and artifacts, perhaps there first needs to be an additional guideline on how to decide which function ascription to employ. This could take the form of a significance criterion, similar to that described in Philip Kitcher’s The Advancement of Science (1993). There, Kitcher asserts that a goal of science is not simply truth, but significant truth. There are all sorts of trivial truths that are easy to arrive at, but science is after those that are significant. Similarly, to ask for an explanation of an entity’s function one is looking for the most significant of the range of explanations. While life is important to some features of the Milky Way, solid matter is much more so. Focusing on a natural function of the Milky Way explains more– it helps explain more of how the Milky Way exists at all– while an artifactual function ascription explains the Milky Way from a very unrepresentative biocentric perspective. This is not to say that the artifactual function of the Galaxy provides no information, but the natural functions of the galaxy are much more significant and provide explanations with greater depth.