Author: geoff

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

In one of my recent pieces on Dennett and Wright, Steve Esser offered the following interesting comment; with his permission, I’m repeating it:
On Wright’s notion of subjective awareness as a kind of extra epiphenomenal stuff, I’ve come to agree this is wrong. But I am also one of those who read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained a number of years ago and came away thinking “no, not quite”. First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus, is a different beast than the other things we explain scientifically (i.e. from an “objective” stance). The fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know — there is no reality without it. So, I don’t think we have the whole story solved yet.
I agree with the first and last sentences, and while I too have reservations about some of Consciousness Explained, I suspect that my issues are different from Steve’s.
“First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus”… OK, stop right there. I don’t believe that there is any such thing. It is that cognitive apparatus which converts raw sensory stimuli into experience. No cognitive apparatus, no experience. Here I use the word experience in the sense of “the apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind”, with the emphasis on apprehension. Some people use experience as an opposite of thinking; for example one dictionary defines it as “the feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking”. I deny the distinction implied here: for me, all experience involves the processing by cognitive apparatus of internal and external stimuli. To the extent that these stimuli do not involve cognition, they are sub-conscious: inaccessible, and therefore not experienced.
I’m not sure what Steve means by subjective here. The dictionary provides a wealth of possibilities, some of which are essentially question-begging (since they would define the experience as, e.g. “Particular to a given person”). Later he puts objective in quotes and couples it with science, so perhaps subjective is intended to mean unscientific – but that, too, seems to beg the question. I tend to use first person, as Steve does too, because I view the objective/subjective dichotomy as a (mostly) social construct.
Ultimately Steve’s assertion that “First-person experience is a different beast” seems to rest on his view that “the fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know — there is no reality without it”. What does prior mean here? A precondition? I can perhaps understand an instrumental relationship between experience and knowing – thought experiments about sensory deprivation and brains-in-vats seem pertinent – but how does this justify the claim that experience is a “different beast”? Eating is “prior” to digestion, but both are amenable to scientific inquiry. (I’m afraid I don’t understand the “no reality” comment at all.)
Ultimately I think Steve seems to be arguing for the familiar “uniquely privileged” viewpoint: that there is something about first-person experience that is real – accessible to the individual concerned – but is intrinsically inaccessible to scientific, “objective” inquiry. It seems to me that such a radical claim must be either a matter of faith (mysterian), or must be explicable in terms of the known properties of individuals and brains. If one backs off from the claim of intrinsic inaccessibility, first-person experience presumably moves into the realm of the empirical – which is how I view it.

Does anyone remember Abu Ghraib?

Andrew Sullivan just blogged a comment that is so perfectly expressed that all I can do is reproduce it verbatim.
THE MISSING ISSUE: It does strike me as astounding that in four debates lasting six hours, the horrors of Abu Ghraib were never mentioned. Remember when we were reeling from the images? They remain the most spectacular public relations debacle for this country at war since Vietnam. And we know the underlying reasons for the abuse and torture: the prison was drastically under-manned and incompetently managed, the Pentagon had given mixed signals on what constituted torture, the CPA had no idea that it might be dealing with an insurgency and was dragging in all sorts of innocents to extract intelligence in a ham-handed manner. Although the administration has clearly done all it can to stymie Congressional investigations, it has become clear that responsibility for the chaos ultimately stops at Rumsfeld’s desk. No, it wasn’t a systematic policy. It was a function of what wasn’t done, rather than what was done – and, in that, it remains a symbol of everything that has gone so wrong in Iraq. Bush, of course, barely mentioned it at the time. He has no ability to stare harsh reality in the face – especially if it means reflection on himself and his administration. As with everything else on his watch, he was not responsible. In fact, no one was responsible except for those literally caught on camera raping, murdering and abusing prisoners in the care of the United States. And so his silence in the debates is not surprising. But Kerry’s is – and reveals a worrying lack of courage. Kerry is afraid that criticizing Abu Ghraib will make him look like a war critic, or anti-American, or somehow responsible for weakening morale. Vietnam hovers over him. It shouldn’t. What happened was unforgivable negligence and evil, a horrendous blow to American moral standing – as well as simply an outrage on a human and moral level. It didn’t affect Iraqis’ views: they tragically already believed we were as bad as these images portrayed. But it was a fatal blow to domestic morale. I haven’t fully recovered from it in my pro-war heart. I couldn’t believe America could do this. I still wince at the memory. But what I still remember was Dick Cheney’s response to criticism of Rumsfeld at the time. “Get off his case,” he harrumphed. Even after such a blow to the very core of the meaning of America, Cheney was contemptuous of holding anyone in his circle accountable. It says it all, doesn’t it?

The "reality-based community"

There’s an excellent – and sobering – analysis of Bush’s faith and certainty, by Ron Suskind in today’s NYT Magazine: Without A Doubt. (Registration required.)
Two quotes. First, what do we mean by “reality-based”?:
In the summer of 2002 […] I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Second quote, on why Bush’s crew isn’t worried about the opinions of people who think that reality matters:
We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final ”you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
Read the whole thing. To this reality-based individual, it was an eye-opener.

Alternative histories of 2001-2004

During this presidential campaign, one consistent Republican mantra has been that “if Kerry had been President, Saddam would still be in power and blah, blah, blah….” And this got me thinking about counterfactuals, about alternative histories – what might have plausibly happened if the initial conditions had been different.
Naturally I turned to the web, but I was disappointed with what I’d found. For example, Ed Driscoll links to several pre-9/11 alternative scenarios, all of which are equally implausible to anyone that has read Richard Clarke’s book. Most of the other uses of the term (or its cognate “alternate history”) seem to involve alternative accounts or interpretations of what actually happened. (The works of Seymour Hersh and Michael Moore are often described in this way.)
So what kind of alternative am I thinking about? Well, consider a world in which two little things are changed. First, in the summer of 2001, Tony Blair has a heart attack. This is plausible; we know today of his heart problems. His doctors advise him to retire, and he hands over to Gordon Brown. Second, imagine that Project Anaconda had been blown open in the press with Rumsfeld’s fingerprints all over it. (Anaconda really happened; it was a horribly botched operation in Afghanistan in which the military chain of command broke down completely, resulting in dozens of US Army fatalities. See Hersh’s Chain of Command.)
With these changes, let’s run the movie forward. 9/11 happens, and coalition forces hit Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Anaconda blows up, and although Rumsfeld doesn’t resign, his relationship with the military leadership is fatally poisoned.
Now Bush and his team begin to plan for Iraq, as described in Woodward’s Plan of Attack. But there’s a hitch. Unlike Blair, Gordon Brown understands the caveats and codicils to the various intelligence reports, and he asks the hard questions. Hearing only unsatisfactory answers, he declines to offer Bush his unconditional support. Bush and Rumsfeld are willing to push ahead without Britain, but now Powell reaches his limit. A coalition without a single permanent member of the UN Security Council other than the USA has no credibility, he says; the damage to America’s standing in the world from unilateral action would be irreparable. It’s a resigning matter. Meanwhile Rumsfeld is challenged from another quarter: the Joint Chiefs refuse to sign off on a plan for military operations without adequate supplies, body armor, and training.
Faced with these obstacles, Bush realizes that he can no longer push for an early invasion of Iraq… [to be continued]
This feels like an interesting counterfactual. Would Bush have taken the time to build a coalition? What if Blix had had a year to demonstrate that there were no WMDs? How might Bush have approached the questions of Iran, of the Palestinians? Would Saddam have resigned and fled in the face of an inexorable build-up with full UN support? Fascinating to speculate…..

That poetry thing

Per Terry, when you read this, post a poem.
Adlestrop station nameboard
Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
It’s by Edward Thomas (1878-1917). I learned it by heart when I was about 9. A couple of years later I actually visited Adlestrop Station (long since closed) while on holiday near Stratford-on-Avon. It was a hot summer’s day, much as Thomas described in his notebook on June 23, 1914.
For years I remembered the poem almost perfectly (though I sometimes stumbled in the third verse). It was not until recently, when I was researching my blog entry on First World War music and poetry, that I discovered that Edwards’ vision of a countryside full of life yet devoid of people was a comment on how the War, and the call-up, had affected rural England.
To me this is still a wonderful picture of the beauty of England as I remember it, but there is now a shadow across the sun, and the men who should be gathering the “haycocks dry” are far away….

"al-Qaida a dark illusion"?

OK, so this is really contrarian thinking. In the midst of an election campaign in which one of the main issues is how to prosecute “the War on Terror”, along comes a documentary which argues that al-Qaida may not really exist. In today’s Guardian, Andy Beckett reviews the series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear which begins on BBC2 next Wednesday. In this three-part series, the director Adam Curtis:
… points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.
Curtis also cites the Home Office’s own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.
In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts. “The grand concept of the war has not succeeded,” says Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. “In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war … a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it.”
Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King’s College London, says: “The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There’s no real evidence that all these groups are connected.”
Good heavens – maybe Bush was right to dismiss Osama bin Laden as he did. But in that case, who are we supposed to be fighting? Iraqi patriots insurgents? Or perhaps – and even more terrifying – it’s….

"The United States of Fighting Terrorism"

Thomas Friedman’s op-ed Addicted to 9/11 today was right on the money. He addresses Kerry’s hope that America can get back to a state where “terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance”, and says, “The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don’t know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives.”
I would certainly like that, and having lived in England through the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign I can remember what it felt like. I can still recall the moment when I caught myself looking at a package in the sidewalk and, for the first time in years, didn’t immediately think panic “Bomb…?”. It’s a good feeling. Naive? I don’t think so; just getting things into proportion and being careful rather than obsessive.
Friedman concludes, “Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team has turned this country into The United States of Fighting Terrorism. […] I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them – the bad guys – not about us. We’re about the Fourth of July. Just so.