Is the brain
a computer? Philosopher of biology John
Wilkins answers
“No.” And physicist Edward Witten doesn’t think science will explain
consciousness. Scientific
American reports.
Catholic
writer Robert Spencer’s vigorous criticisms of Islam have recently earned him
the ire of a cleric who has accused him of heterodoxy. Nothing surprising about that, or at least it
wouldn’t be surprising if a Muslim cleric were accusing Spencer of contradicting
Muslim doctrine. Turns out, though, that
it is a Catholic priest accusing
Spencer of contradicting Catholic
doctrine.
Cue the
Twilight Zone music. Book that ticket to
Bizarro world while you’re at it.
It must be
Kick-a-Neo-Scholastic week. Thomas
Cothran calls
us Nietzscheans and now my old grad school buddy Dale Tuggy implicitly labels us atheists. More precisely, commenting on the view that “God is not a being, one among others…
[but rather] Being Itself,” Dale opines that “this is not a Christian view
of God, and isn’t even any sort of monotheism. In fact, this type of view has always competed
with the monotheisms.” Indeed, he
indicates that “this type of view – and I say this not to abuse, but
only to describe – is a kind of atheism.” (Emphasis in the
original.)
Atheism?
Really? What is this, The Twilight Zone? No, it’s a bad Ashton Kutcher movie (if
you’ll pardon the redundancy), with metaphysical amnesia replacing the
drug-induced kind -- Heidegger’s “forgetfulness of Being” meets Dude, Where’s My Car?
Robert
Oerter has
now replied to my
most recent post about his criticisms of James Ross’s argument for the
immateriality of the intellect. Let me
begin my rejoinder with a parable. Suppose
you presented someone with the argument: All
men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. He says he is unconvinced. Puzzled, you ask him why. He replies that he is surprised that you
think Socrates is mortal, given that you believe in the immortality of the
soul. He adds that all you’ve done in
any case is to make an epistemological point about what we know about Socrates, and not really given any reason to think that
Socrates is mortal. For though the
conclusion does, he concedes, follow from the premises, and the premises are
supported by the evidence, maybe for all we know there is still somehow more to
men than what the premises tell us.
Suppose
something like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the
Gods?
hypothesis turned out to be true, and the God of the Bible was really an
extraterrestrial who had impressed the Israelites with some high tech. Would you conclude: “A ha! Those atheists sure have
egg on their faces now! Turns out the Bible was right! Well, basically
right, anyway. True, God’s nature isn’t
exactly what we thought it was, but He does exist after all!” Presumably not, no more than if the God of Exodus
turned out to be Moses with an amplifier and some red fizzies he’d dumped into
the Nile. The correct conclusion to draw
in either case would not be “God exists, but He wasn’t what He seemed” but
rather “God does not exist, He only seemed to.”
Or suppose something like Frank Tipler’s Omega Point
theory turned out to be correct and the universe is destined to evolve into a
vastly powerful supercomputer (to which Tipler ascribes a kind of divinity). If you had been inclined toward atheism, do
you think you would now conclude: “Wow, turns out God does exist, or at least will
exist someday!” Or rather only: “Wow, so
this really weird gigantic supercomputer will exist someday! Cool.
But what does that have to do with God?”
One of the downsides of being a philosopher is that it makes it harder to suspend disbelief when watching horror flicks. Plot holes become more glaring and speculations seem wilder when one’s business is looking for fallacies. On the other hand, there is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it; hence there’s no one better placed to find a way to make even the most preposterous yarn seem at least remotely plausible. A case in point, submitted for your approval: My take on a segment from Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, adapted from H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “Cool Air.” (You can find it on Hulu and YouTube.) Watching it for the first time recently, I was annoyed by what at first seemed to me an obviously nonsensical twist ending. On further reflection, there is a way to make sense of it, if one makes the appropriate metaphysical assumptions.
Two or three of my readers have expressed interest in my posts on movies, popular music, and pop culture in general. And I’ll bet at least twice that many are interested. So, for you fans of pretentious pop culture analysis, here’s a roundup of relevant posts and articles. For the most part I’ve included only those that are fairly substantive.
In a recent post, I gave as an example of an obviously wrongheaded conception of God’s relationship to the world the idea that we are literally fictional characters in a story He has authored – though I also allowed that as a mere analogy the idea may have its uses. Vincent Torley wonders whether there might not be something more to the idea, though, citing the use Hugh McCann makes of it in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Divine Providence” (see especially section 6 of the article).
In my recent Twilight Zone post, I mentioned that I intended to read Noël Carroll and Lester Hunt’s Philosophy in the Twilight Zone. I’ve since read some of it and there is indeed some interesting stuff there. Hunt himself provides a fine essay on Rod Serling’s career as a writer, and the story of that career teaches an important philosophical lesson.
Serling was an established television scriptwriter before The Twilight Zone came along, and was well-known for his interest in writing serious and “socially relevant” dramas. He had a series of frustrating experiences with the television censors of the 1950s, who were concerned above all with avoiding controversy that might put off sponsors. Their objections could often be quite silly. To take an example of Hunt’s:
[I]n the original, Playhouse 90 version of “Judgment at Nuremburg,” one of the sponsors, a consortium of gas companies, had every mention of “gassing” and “gas ovens” expunged, evidently for fear that the viewers would unconsciously associate their product with Nazi genocide. (p. 9)
As a consequence, scripts written to reflect and comment upon matters of current controversy were sometimes reduced to bland ineffectiveness by the time the censors got done with them. Serling’s “Noon on Doomsday,” which aired in 1956 for the United States Steel Hour, was inspired by the Emmett Till case. So as not to offend southern viewers, however, the setting of the story was changed to New England, and the victim was made into a nondescript European “foreigner” rather than a black man. Use of the word “lynch” was forbidden, and bottles of Coca Cola were removed from the set, apparently lest viewers associate the action with the state of Georgia, where the Coca Cola Company has its headquarters. The end result had so abstracted the story from the real world events that it lacked all punch. While racial strife certainly existed in American society in the 1950s, serious antagonism between native born Americans and European immigrants did not. Hence the drama, which aimed for “social relevance,” in fact came across as totally irrelevant.
As Hunt recounts, Serling later attempted to rewrite “Noon on Doomsday” as a stage play, and the result, interestingly enough, was a failure in the opposite direction. This time Serling stuck very closely to the actual facts of the Till case, but in such a way that the story lacked universal application, and would not convince anyone of the truth of Serling’s message other than those who already agreed with him. In particular, no one who was not already appalled by the Emmett Till case would have had his mind changed by a story which, more or less, merely dramatized the case.
When Serling finally moved on to do The Twilight Zone, he thought that he was leaving behind serious and “socially relevant” drama, or so he said at the time, anyway. As the series’ viewers know, that is by no means the case, and Serling no doubt realized this, at least eventually. For one of the advantages of the science-fiction and fantasy genres is that they allow for the “middle distance” approach that evaded Serling in the two versions of “Noon on Doomsday” just described. On the one hand, an otherworldly setting allows one to avoid too direct and ham-fisted a reference to contemporary persons and events, which might strip the story of timeless application and put off the very people one is trying to convince. On the other hand, one can at the same time put enough detail into such a setting that the application to current controversies is clear enough for those who know how to look.
The result is that with The Twilight Zone, Serling and his fellow writers were able consistently to produce material of lasting moral and philosophical interest. And Serling was also able thereby to accomplish what he set out to do as a writer – ironically, precisely by abandoning his goal of “seriousness” (or seemingly abandoning it, or pretending to abandon it, anyway, depending on how one interprets Serling’s words at the time). Few remember Serling’s television dramas of the early and mid 1950s. Everyone remembers The Twilight Zone.
Sometimes we get what we want precisely when we stop trying so hard to get it. Everyone knows that the last thing you want to do if you’ve got insomnia is to worry yourself over how you are going to get to sleep. Market economists never tire of reminding us that the best way to generate wealth for all is to let the market take its course, for the most part, anyway, rather than to interfere with it constantly so as to redistribute wealth or otherwise “correct” its outcomes. Rod Serling attained lasting fame and “relevance” precisely when he thought (or said he thought, in an interview with Mike Wallace) that he was (as Wallace put it) “giv[ing] up on writing anything important for television.” There’s a twist ending worthy of The Twilight Zone.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, submitted for your approval, another twist ending, courtesy of the opening sequence from Twilight Zone: The Movie:
Most of the “pop culture and philosophy” books that have flooded the Borders and Barnes and Noble shelves in recent years seem to me to be pretty schlocky. Their purported justification is that they introduce philosophy to people who wouldn’t otherwise read it. But since the “philosophical significance” of the subject matter is usually vastly overstated (30 Rock? Jimmy Buffett? The Atkins Diet?!) and the philosophy dumbed down, it is questionable whether they really do much good on this score.
Still, there are pop culture topics that are worthy of philosophical consideration. As our pal Bill Vallicella has noted, The Twilight Zone is one of them. Naturally, a volume on that subject has appeared, and while I have not yet read Philosophy in the Twilight Zone, it looks interesting and I plan to do so. In any event, anyone who has watched the show can think of examples of episodes which raise serious philosophical questions.
In “The Man in the Bottle,” a genie grants a down-on-their-luck couple four wishes. This turns out, of course, to be less of a blessing than they assume it will be. Watching this episode as a youngster spawned one of the first philosophical thoughts I can recall ever having: Why couldn’t the couple wish for ten or twenty more wishes, as the husband suggests doing at one point? The genie just says that “wishing for more wishes is not permitted,” but this limitation seems arbitrary. It also seems easy to get around, for why couldn’t the husband just respond: “OK, then in that case I wish you hadn’t imposed that arbitrary rule!” And if the genie then said that that was also something that couldn’t be wished for, why couldn’t the husband reply that his wish in that case is that that rule had never been imposed?
The indeterminacy illustrated by this example – the difficulty of “nailing down” the content of a certain rule or statement so that what one wants it to rule out really is ruled out – is in fact part of the larger theme of the episode. Every wish the couple makes – for money, for power – turns out to have unforeseen unhappy implications, and there seems to be no way to add detail to the description of the content of the wish to make absolutely certain that no further iteration of the same basic problems can crop up. Readers of Wittgenstein, Hayek, or Kripke will appreciate the difficulty. There is also moral and political significance to the problem the episode raises. We are often prone to think of personal and social problems in terms of what would happen if only we could “press a button.” In fact this is a very foolish way to think, because human life and human problems are typically far too complicated to boil down to a single factor, the alteration of which would solve everything.
In “A Most Unusual Camera,” a gang of petty criminals acquires a camera that takes pictures of events that have not yet occurred. It turns out that the knowledge of future events that they acquire by means of the camera is one of the factors that lead to the realization of said events. Obvious fodder for those interested in time travel paradoxes and questions about determinism and free will. In “It’s a Good Life,” omnipotent 6-year old Anthony Fremont terrorizes a small town. He is clearly selfish, callous, and willful, and causes unimaginable suffering to those around him. But he is only 6, and arguably lacking in understanding both of the moral law and of the consequences of his actions. So, does he have sufficient moral responsibility for it to be morally permissible to kill him so as to save the town from the horrors he inflicts upon it? Discuss. In “A Kind of a Stopwatch,” a man acquires a watch that can stop time. I’ve used it in the classroom for years to illustrate the question that initiates the Aristotelian argument from motion: Why is the world dynamic rather than static? Why does it undergo change rather than being “frozen in place,” as the episode’s characters are when the stopwatch is pressed?
You get the idea. Of course, The Twilight Zone has other, non-philosophical charms. Perhaps there is some deep epistemological issue raised by the famous “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; but the reason it is so many people’s favorite episode is simply that it gives a good scare. (It made it at least a little harder for my 5-year old daughter to get on the plane to London with her mother last week!)
And then there is the excuse it gives me to link to a classic Manhattan Transfer video. Enjoy:
I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.
