Poetry

Day 3609, Authenticity.

Daily picture, Definitions
Utrech, 1996

Authenticity (SEP)

The term ‘authentic’ is used either in the strong sense of being “of undisputed origin or authorship”, or in a weaker sense of being “faithful to an original” or a “reliable, accurate representation”. To say that something is authentic is to say that it is what it professes to be, or what it is reputed to be, in origin or authorship. But the distinction between authentic and derivative is more complicated when discussing authenticity as a characteristic attributed to human beings. For in this case, the question arises: What is it to be oneself, at one with oneself, or truly representing one’s self? The multiplicity of puzzles that arise in conjunction with the conception of authenticity connects with metaphysical, epistemological, and moral issues (for recent discussion, see Newman and Smith 2016; Heldke and Thomsen 2014). On the one hand, being oneself is inescapable, since whenever one makes a choice or acts, it is oneself who is doing these things. But on the other hand, we are sometimes inclined to say that some of the thoughts, decisions and actions that we undertake are not really one’s own and are therefore not genuinely expressive of who one is. Here, the issue is no longer of metaphysical nature, but rather about moral-psychology, identity and responsibility.

When used in this latter sense, the characterization describes a person who acts in accordance with desires, motives, ideals or beliefs that are not only hers (as opposed to someone else’s), but that also express who she really is. Bernard Williams captures this when he specifies authenticity as “the idea that some things are in some sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t” (quoted in Guignon 2004: viii).

Besides being a topic in philosophical debates, authenticity is also a pervasive ideal that impacts social and political thinking. In fact, one distinctive feature of recent Western intellectual developments has been a shift to what is called the “age of authenticity” (Taylor 2007; Ferrarra 1998). Therefore, understanding the concept also involves investigating its historical and philosophical sources and on the way it impacts the socio-political outlook of contemporary societies.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/

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Day 3603, Arrow’s Theorem.

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Arrow’s Theorem (SEP)

Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem—the “general possibility” theorem, as he called it—answers a very basic question in the theory of collective decision-making. Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labour requirements or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences among these alternatives will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or “social” ordering of the alternatives from better to worse? The answer is startling. Arrow’s theorem says there are no such procedures at all—none, anyway, that meet certain conditions concerning the autonomy of the people and the rationality of their preferences. The technical framework in which Arrow gave the question of social orderings a precise sense and its rigorous answer is now widely used for studying problems in welfare economics. The impossibility theorem itself set the agenda for contemporary social choice theory. Arrow accomplished this while still a graduate student. In 1972, he received the Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/

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Day 3600, Anomalous monism.

Daily picture, Definitions
Heerderstrand, 1988

I never heard of this theory, but it intrigues me. I spent an hour trying to understand it, and I think I do, but I am hesitant to write it down; I am pretty sure I will have parts of it wrong.

Anomalous Monism (SEP)

Anomalous Monism is a theory about the scientific status of psychology, the physical status of mental events, and the relation between these issues developed by Donald Davidson. It claims that psychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot in principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining human thoughts and actions (mental anomalism). It also holds that thoughts and actions must be physical (monism, or token-identity), contradicting the paradigmatic dualist view of Descartes that mental and physical states are entirely different things. Thus, according to Anomalous Monism, psychology cannot be reduced to physics, but must nonetheless share a physical ontology.

While neither of these claims, on its own, is novel, their relation, according to Anomalous Monism, is. It is precisely because there can be no such strict laws governing mental events that those events must be identical to physical events. Most previous identity theories of mind had held that claims concerning the identity of particular mental and physical events (tokens) depended upon the discovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical properties (types). Empirical evidence for psychophysical laws was thus held to be required for particular token-identity claims. Token-identity claims thus depended upon type-identity (see Johnston, 1985, 408–409). Davidson’s monism is dramatically different – it requires no empirical evidence and depends on there being no lawlike relations between mental and physical properties. It in effect justifies the token-identity of mental and physical events through arguing for the impossibility of type-identities between mental and physical properties. (For detailed discussion of how Davidson’s position relates to David Lewis’s argument for type identity (Lewis 1966), see supplement A.2.1. For discussion of philosophical positions related to Davidson’s version of monism, see supplement A.)

The appeal of Anomalous Monism is owed to these striking and novel features, a fairly straightforward argumentative structure, and its attempt to bring together an intuitively acceptable metaphysics (monism) with a sophisticated understanding of the relation between psychological and physical explanatory schemes (anomalism). Its explicit assumptions are each intended, on their own, to be acceptable to positions opposing monism, but, when taken together, to show that monism is in fact required. Anomalous Monism thus maintains the autonomy of the common sense view of persons as agents acting for reasons while nonetheless acknowledging that persons are part of the physical world.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/

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Day 3598-2, Thinking.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I think, therefore I am is what Descartes famously said. He seems to clarify later that the thinking is undeniable, but that little can yet be concluded about the nature of the thinker. A critique that you can make, and is made, is the “I” in this phrase. How could Descartes concluded thet the “I” he identifies with is the thing that does the thinking?

It is hard to ignore the feeling that there is something in us that does the thinking and that we call I. The reason is that I feel like I think about it. But the I that thinks is also the I that makes bodily sounds, and how much do you control those?

In light of this, “I” seems more like a linguistic tool we use to communicate with others and with ourselves. Our bodies breathe and digest without our intervention, yet we still say that we breathe and digest, just as we say “I think this or that,” even though our control over thinking may not be very different.

But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the “ ego ” of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.

Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Part III, Lecture XVIII (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.278046/page/241/mode/2up)

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Day 3595, foresight in hindsight

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Back in the summer of 2016, we were in America visiting family. We, of course, talked about the upcoming elections and, like any sane person, assumed that Hillary would win. We all know what happened, and back home, I got a spark of inspiration. Over a few weeks, I created many “portraits” of the situation using pictures I took in America and Photoshop.

I’m just a nobody, but for me, it was pretty clear what was going on. I studied history and paid close attention to what happened in Germany between the wars. I had also read several biographies about Trump, which might not tell the whole story, but certainly paint a bright picture.

Back then, many people who should know better took him seriously and maybe questioned him, but not the role he played as president of the most powerful country in the world. I never understood this, and to me, it was clear what kind of person he was. I don’t say he would do what the Nazis did, but I do say that if he had lived in Germany back then, he would definitely have built the concentration camps with “Arbeit macht frei” in neon letters, with an even larger sign on top of it bearing his name.

Sadly, after ten years, we see that he is actually moving closer to becoming a full-blown sadist, much like a typical Nazi who partied just a stone’s throw away from the ovens. And the people are gleefully arresting the hated aliens, smiling behind a mask, while most Americans remain silent, praying to God to protect their savior. All the disbelievers start to realize that the path he’s paving for many of his critics leads straight to Auschwitz, and it doesn’t matter if we might never get there or how you call your concentration camp, enough people with official titles are planning it, and more than enough are willing to look the other way.

Below, you can see what I created and, in a sense, predicted in 2016.

This is a picture I took when we drove into Utah. I got the distinctive feeling that a lot of Americans are not so into the “you”-tah, so I changed the sign into Me-tah. Selfish as they sometimes are, like good Christians.

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Day 3584, ABSURD.

Daily picture, Definitions, Poetry 
Do you lift a roof over your head
or is the lifting
roof enough?

Do any of them keep the rain out?

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSURD, THE. A term used by existentialists to describe that which one might have thought to be amenable to reason but which turns out to be beyond the limits of rationality. For example, in Sartre’s philosophy the ‘original choice’ of one’s fundamental project is said to be ‘absurd’, since, although choices are normally made for reasons, this choice lies beyond reason because all reasons for choice are supposed to be grounded in one’s fundamental
project. Arguably, this case in fact shows that Sartre is mistaken in supposing that reasons for choice are themselves grounded in a choice; and one can argue that other cases which are supposed to involve experience of the ‘absurd’ are in fact a *reductio ad absurdum of the assumptions which produce this conclusion. The ‘absurd’ does not in fact play an essential role within existentialist philosophy; but it is an important aspect of the broader cultural context of existentialism, for example in the ‘theatre of the absurd’, as exemplified by the plays of Samuel Beckett.

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Day 3583, ABSTRACTION.

Daily picture, Definitions
Rørvik, 2019, Huawei P20 Pro

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSTRACTION. A putative psychological process for the acquisition of a concept x either by attending to the features common to all and only xs* or by disregarding just the spatiotemporal locations of xs. The existence of abstraction is endorsed by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (esp. II. xi. 9 and 10 and III. iii. 6 ff.) but rejected by Berkeley in The Principles of Human Knowledge (esp. paras. 6 ff. and paras. 98, 119, and 125). For Locke the capacity to abstract distinguishes human beings from animals. It enables them to think in abstract ideas and hence use language. Berkeley argues that the concept of an abstract *idea is incoherent because it entails both the inclusion and the exclusion of one and the same property. This in turn is because any such putative idea would have to be general enough to subsume all xs yet precise enough to subsume only xs. For example, the abstract idea of triangle ‘is neither oblique nor rectangular, equilateral norscalenon, but all and none of these at once’ (The Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, para. 13).

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Day 3568, not the fault.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

317 The judgment ofthe evening. – He who reflects on the work he has done during the day and during his life, but does so when he has finished it and is tired, usually arrives at a melancholy conclusion: this however is not the fault of his day or his life, but ofhis tiredness.- In the midst of our work we usually have no leisure to pass judgment on life and existence, nor in the midst ofour pleasures: but ifwe should happen to do so, we should no longer agree with him who waited for the seventh day and its repose before he decided that everything was very beautiful – he had let the better moment go by.