Legitimate and illegitimate authority

It is tempting to think that legitimate and illegitimate authorities are both types of a single thing. One might not want to call that single thing “authority”. After all, one doesn’t want to say that real and fake money are both types of money. But it sure seems like there is something X that legitimate and illegitimate authorities have in common with each other, and with nothing else. One imagines that a dictator and a lawfully elected president are in some way both doing the same kind of thing, “ruling” or whatever.

But this now seems to me to be mistaken. Or at least I can’t think what X could be. The only candidate I can think of is the trivial disjunctive property of being a legitimate authority or an illegitimate authority.

To a first approximation, one might think that the legitimate and illegitimate authorities both engage in the speech act of commanding. One might here try to object that “commanding” has the same problem as “authority” does: that it is not clear that legitimate and illegitimate commands have anything in common. This criticism seems to me to be mistaken: the two may not have any normative commonality, but they seem to be the same speech act.

However, imagine that Alice is the legitimate elected ruler of Elbonia, but Bob has put Alice in solitary confinement and set himself up as a dictator. Alice is not crazy: when she is in solitary confinement she isn’t commanding anyone as there is no one for her to command. Alice is a legitimate authority and Bob is an illegitimate authority, yet they do not have commanding, or ruling, or running the country in common. (Similarly, even without imprisonment, we could suppose Alice is a small government conservative who ran on a platform of not issuing any orders except in an emergency, and no emergency came up and she kept her promise.)

One might think that they have some kind of dispositional property in common. Alice surely would command if she were to get out of prison, after all. Well, maybe, but we need to specify the conditions quite carefully. Suppose she got out of prison but thought that no one would follow her commands, because she was still surrounded by Bob’s flunkies. Then she might not bother to command. It makes one look bad if one issues commands and they are ignored. Perhaps, though, we can say: Alice would issue commands if she thought they were needed and likely to be obeyed. But that can’t be the disposition that defines a legitimate or illegitimate authority. For many quite ordinary people in the country presumably have the exact same disposition: they too would issue commands if they thought they were needed and likely to be obeyed! But we don’t want to say that these people are either legitimate or illegitimate authorities.

We might argue that Alice isn’t a legitimate authority while imprisoned, because she is incapacited, and incapacitation removes legitimate authority. One reason to be dubious of this answer is that on a plausible account of incapacitation, insanity is a form of incapacitation. But an insane illegitimate dictator is still an illegitimate authority, and so incapacitation does not remove the disjunctive property legimate or illegitimate authority, but at most it removes legitimacy. Thus, Alice might still be an authority, but not an illegitimate one. Another reason is this: we could imagine that in order to discourage people from incapacitating the legitimate ruler, the laws insist that one remains in charge if one’s incapacitation is due to an act of rebellion. Moreover, we might suppose that Bob hasn’t actually incapacitated Alice. He lets her walk around and give orders freely, but his minions kill anybody who obeys, so Alice doesn’t bother to issue any orders, because either they will be disobeyed or the obeyers will be killed.

Perhaps we might try to find a disposition in the citizenry, however. Maybe what makes Alice and Bob be the same kind of thing is that the citizens have a disposition to obey them. One worry about this is this: Suppose the citizens after electing Alice become unruly, and lose the disposition to obey. It seems that Alice could still be the legitimate authority. I suppose someone could think, however, that some principles of democracy would imply that if there is no social disposition to obey someone, they are no longer an authority, legitimate or not. I am dubious. But there is another objection to finding a common disposition in the citizenry. The citizenry’s disposition to obey Bob could easily be conditional on them being unable to escape the harsh treatment he imposes on the disobedient and on him actually issuing orders. So the proposal now is something like this: z is a legitimate authority or an illegitimate authority if the citizenry would be disposed to obey z if z were to issue orders backed up credible threats of harsh treatment. But it could easily be that a perfectly ordinary person z satisfies this definition: people would obey z if z were to issue orders backed up by credible threats!

Let’s try one more thing. What fake and real money have in common is that they are both objects made to appear to be real money. Could we say that both Alice and Bob claim have this in common: They both claim to (“pretend to”, in the old sense of “pretend” that does not imply “falsely” as it does now) be the legitimate authority? Again, that may not be true. Alice is in solitary confinement. She has no one to make such claims to. Again, we can try to find some dispositional formulation, such as that she would claim it if she thought it beneficial to do so. But again many quite ordinary people would claim to be the legitimate authority if they thought it beneficial to do so. Moreover, Bob can be an illegitimate authority without any pretence to legitimacy! He need not claim, for instance, that people have a duty to obey him, backing up his orders by threat rather than by claimed authority. (It is common in our time that dictators pretend to a legitimacy that they do not have. But this is not a necessary condition for being an illegitimate authority.) Finally, if Carl is a crazy guy who claims to have been elected and no one, not even Carl’s friends and family, pays any attention to his raving, it does not seem that Carl is an illegitimate authority.

None of this denies the thesis that there is a similarity between illegitimate authority and legitimate authority. But it does not seem possible to turn that similarity into a non-disjunctive property that both of these share. Though maybe I am just insufficiently clever.

Of snakes and cerebra

Suppose that you very quickly crush the head of a very long stretched-out serpent. Specifically, suppose your crushing takes less time than it takes for light to travel to the snake’s tail.

Let t be a time just after the crushing of the head.

Now causal influences propagate at most at the speed of light or less, the crushing of the head is the cause of death, and at t there wasn’t yet time for the effects of the crushing to have propagated to the tip of the tail. Furthermore, assume an Aristotelian account of life where a living thing is everywhere joined with its form or soul and death is the separation of the form from the matter. Then at t, because the effects of crushing haven’t propagated to the tail, the tail is joined with the snake’s form, even though the head is crushed and hence presumably no longer a part of the snake. (Imagine the head being annihilated for greater clarity.)

Now as long as any matter is joined to the form, the critter is alive. It follows that at time t, the snake is alive despite lacking a head. The argument generalizes. If we crush everything but the snake’s tail, including crushing all the major organs of the snake, the snake is alive despite lacking all the major organs, and having but a tail (or part of a tail).

So what? Well, one of the most compelling arguments against animalism—the view that people are animals—is that:

1. People can survive as just a cerebrum (in a vat).

2. No animal can survive as just a cerebrum.

3. So, people are not animals.

But presumably the reason for thinking that an animal can’t survive as just a cerebrum is that a cerebrum makes an insufficient contribution to the animal functions. But the tail of a snake makes an even less significant contribution to the animal functions. Hence:

4. If a snake can survive as just a tail, a mammal can survive as just a cerebrum.

5. A snake can survive as just a tail.

6. So, a mammal can survive as just a cerebrum.

Objection: Only physical effects are limited to the speed of light in their propagation, and the separation of form from matter is not a physical effect, so that instantly when the head is crushed, the form leaves the snake, all at once at t.

Response: Let z be the spacetime location of the tip of the snake’s tail at t. According to the object, at z the form is no longer present. Now, given my assumption that crushing takes less time than it takes for light to travel to the snake’s tail, and that in one reference frame w is just after the crushing, there will also be a reference frame according to which z is before the crushing has even started. If at z the form is no longer present, then the form has left the tip of the tail before the crushing.

In other words, if we try to get out of the initial argument by supposing that loss of form proceeds faster than light, then we have to admit that in some reference frames, loss of form goes backwards in time. And that seems rather implausible.

Absolute reference frame

Some philosophers think that notwithstanding Special Relativity, there is a True Absolute Reference Frame. Suppose this is so. This reference frame, surely, is not our reference frame. We are on a spinning planet rotating around a sun orbiting the center of our galaxy. It seems pretty likely that if there is an absolute reference frame, then we are moving with respect to it at least at the speed of the flow of the Local Group of galaxies due to the mass of the Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies, i.e., at around 600 km/s.

Given this, our measurements of distance and time are actually going to be a little bit objectively off the true values, which are the ones that we would measure if we were in the absolute reference frame. The things we actually measure here in our solar system will be objectively off due to time dilation and space contraction by about two parts per million, if my calculations are right. That means that our best possible clocks will be objectively about a minute(!) off per year, and our best meter sticks will be about two microns off. Not that we would notice these things, since the absolute reference frame is not observable, so we can’t compare our measurements to it.

As a result, we have a choice between two counterintuitive claims. Either we say that duration and distance are relative, or we have to say that our best machining and time measuring is necessarily off, and we don’t know by how much, since we don’t know what the True Absolute Reference Frame is.

Eclipse

The day started off all cloudy, but the clouds got less dense, and then when the eclipse in our front yard reached totality, we had a big break in the clouds.

The first picture has a sunspot in the middle. In the totality picture, slightly to the right of the bottom of the sun in the totality picture there is a hint of a reddish prominence which in my 8" telescope had lovely structure. A quick measurement from the photo shows that the prominence is about seven times the size of the earth.

Plastic belt buckle

Quite a while back, I came across a discarded belt with a broken buckle. I kept it in my "long stringy things" box in the garage until I could figure out what to do with it. Finally, today, I designed and 3D printed a new buckle for it, along with plastic rivets. I replaced all the metal, and now I have a no-metal belt that hopefully can clear airline security without being removed (not tested yet).

A weaker epiphenomenalism

A prominent objection to epiphenomenalist theories of qualia, on which qualia have no causal efficacy, is that then we have no way of knowing that we had a quale of red. For a redness-zombie, who has no quale of red, would have the very same “I am having a quale of red” thought as me, since my “I am having a quale of red” thought is not caused by the quale of red.

There is a slight tweak to epiphenomanalism that escapes this objection, and the tweaked theory seems worth some consideration. Instead of saying that qualia have no causal efficacy, on our weaker epiphenomenalism we say that qualia have no physical effects. We can then say that my “I am having a quale of red” thought is composed of two components: one of these components is a physical state ϕ₂ and the other is a quale q₂ constituting the subjective feeling of thinking that I am having a quale of red. After all, conscious thoughts plainly have qualia, just as perceptions do, if there are qualia at all. We can now say that the physical state ϕ₂ is caused by the physical correlate ϕ₁ of the quale of red, while the quale q₂ is wholly or partly caused by the quale q₁ of red.

As a result, my conscious thought “I am having a quale of red” would not have occurred if I lacked the quale of red. All that would have occurred would be the physical part of the conscious thought, ϕ₂, which physical part is what is responsible for further physical effects (such as my saying that I am having a quale of red).

If this is right, then the induced skepticism about qualia will be limited to skepticism with respect to unconscious thoughts about qualia. And that’s not much of a skepticism!

Divine thought simplicity

One of the motivations for denying divine simplicity is the plausibility of the claim that:

1. There is a multiplicity of divine thoughts, which are a proper part of God.

But it turns out there are reasons to reject (1) independent of divine simplicity.

Here is one reductio of the distinctness of God and God’s thoughts.

2. God is distinct from his thoughts.

3. If x’s thoughts are distinct from x, then x causes x’s thoughts.

4. Everything caused by God is a creature.

5. So, God’s thoughts are creatures.

6. Every creature explanatorily depends on a divine rational decision to create it.

7. A rational decision explanatorily depends on thoughts.

8. So, we have an ungrounded infinite explanatory regress of thoughts.

9. Ungrounded infinite explanatory regresses are impossible.

10. Contradiction!

Here is another that also starts with 2–5 but now continues:

11. God’s omniscience is identical with or dependent on God’s thoughts.

12. None of God’s essential attributes are identical with or dependent on any creatures.

13. Omniscience is one of God’s essential attributes.

14. Contradiction!

Intending the bad as such

Here is a plausible thesis:

1. You should never intend to produce a bad effect qua bad.

Now, even the most hardnosed deontologist (like me!) will admit that there are minor bads which it is permissible to intentionally produce for instrumental reasons. If a gun is held to your head, and you are told that you will die unless you come up to a stranger and give them a moderate slap with a dead fish, then the slap is the right thing to do. And if the only way for you to survive a bear attack is to wake up your fellow camper who is much more handy with a rifle than you are, and the only way to wake them up is to poke them with a sharp stick, then the poke is the right thing. But these cases are not counterexamples to (1), since while the slap and poke are bad, one is not intending them qua bad.

However, there are more contrived cases where it seems that you should intend to produce a bad effect qua bad. For instance, suppose that you are informed that you will die unless you do something clearly bad to a stranger, but it is left entirely up to you what the bad thing is. Then it seems obvious that the right thing to do is to choose the least bad thing you can think of—the lightest slap with a dead fish, perhaps, that still clearly counts as bad—and do that. But if you do that, then you are intending the bad qua bad.

Yet I find (1) plausible. I feel a pull towards thinking that you shouldn’t set your will on the bad qua bad, no matter what. However it seems weird to think that it would be right to give a stranger a moderate slap with a dead fish if that was specifically what you were required to do to save your life, but it would be wrong to give them a mild slap if it were left up to you what bad thing to do. So, very cautiously, I am inclined to deny (1) in the case of minor bads.

Abstaining from goods

There are many times when we refrain from pursuing an intrinsic good G. We can classify these cases into two types:

1. we refrain despite G being good, and

2. we refrain because G is good.

The “despite” cases are straightforward, such as when one refrains from from reading a novel for the sake of grading exams, despite the value of reading the novel.

The “because” cases are rather more interesting. St Augustine gives the example of celibacy for the sake of Christ: it is because marriage is good that giving it up for the sake of Christ is better. Cases of religious fasting are often like this, too. Or one might refrain from something of value in order to punish oneself, again precisely because the thing is of value. These are self-sacrificial cases.

One might think another type of example of a “because” case is where one refrains from pursuing G now in order to obtain it by a better means, or in better circumstances, in the future. For instance, one might refrain from eating a cake on one day in order to have the cake on the next day which is a special occasion. Here the value of the cake is part of the reason for refraining from pursuit. On reflection, however, I think this is a “because” case. For we should distinguish between the good G₁ of having the cake now and the good G₂ of having the cake tomorrow. Then in delaying one does so despite the good of G₁ and because of the good of G₂. The good of G₁ is not relevant, unless this becomes sacrificial.

I don’t know if all the “because” cases are self-sacrificial in the way celibacy is. I suspect so, but I would not be surprised if a counterexample turned up.

Aristotelian functionalism

Rob Koons and I have argued that the best functionalist theory of mind is one where the proper function of a system is defined in an Aristotelian way, in terms of innate teleology.

When I was teaching on this today, it occured to me (it should have been obvious earlier) that this Aristotelian functionalism has the intuitive consequence that only organisms are minded. For although innate teleology may be had by substances other than organisms, inorganic Aristotelian material substances do not have the kind of teleology that would make for mindedness on any plausible functionalism. Here I am relying on Aristotle’s view that (maybe with some weird exceptions, like van Inwagen’s snake-hammock) artifacts—presumably including computers—are not substances.

If this is right, then the main counterexamples to functionalism disappear:

• the Chinese Room (and relatives)

• rocks (on computational reinterpretation arguments)

• organizational consciousness.

Next recall Leibniz’s mill argument: if a machine can be conscious, a mill full of giant gears could be conscious, and yet as we walked through such mill, it would be clear that there is no consciousness anywhere. But now suppose we were told that the mill has an innate function (not derived from the purposes of the architect) which governed the computational behavior of the gears. We would then realize that the mill is more than just what we can see, and that would undercut the force of the Leibnizian intuition. In other words, it is not so hard to believe that a mill with innate purpose is conscious.

Further, note that perhaps the best physicalist account of qualia is that qualia are grounded in the otherwise unknowable categorical features of the matter making up our brains. This, however, has a somewhat anti-realist consequence: the way our experiences feel has nothing to do with the way the objects we are experiencing are. But an Aristotelian functionalist can tell this story. If I have a state whose function is to represent red light, then I have an innate teleology that makes reference to red light. This innate teleology could itself encode the categorical features of red light, and since this innate teleology, via functionalism, grounds our perception of red light, our perception of red light is “colored” by the categorical features not just by our brains, but by the categorical features of red light (even if we are hallucinating the red light). This makes for a more realist theory of qualia, on which there is a non-coincidental connection between the external objects and how they seem to us.

Observe, also, how the Aristotelian story has advantages of panpsychism without the disadvantages. The advantage of panpsychism is that the mysterious gap between us and electrons is bridged. The disadvantages are two-fold: (a) it is highly counterintuitive that electrons are conscious (the gap is bridged too well) and (b) we don’t have a plausible story about how the consciousness of the parts gives rise to a consciousness of the whole. But on Aristotelian functionalism, it is teleology that we have in common with electrons, so we do not need to say that electrons are conscious—but because mind reduces to teleological function, though not of the kind electrons have, we still have bridging. And we can tell exactly the kind of story that non-Aristotelians do about how the function of the parts gives rise to the consciousness of the whole.

There is, however, a serious downside to this Aristotelian functionalism. It cannot work for the simple God of classical theism. But perhaps we can put a lot of stress on the idea that “mind” is only said analogously between creatures and God. I don’t know if that will work.

Functionalism and organizations

I am quite convinced that if standard (non-evolutionary, non-Aristotelian) functionalism is true, then complex organizations such as universities and nations have minds and are conscious. For it is clear to me that dogs are conscious, and the functioning of complex organizations is more intellectually sophisticated than that of dogs, and has the kind of desire-satisfaction drivers that dogs and maybe even humans have.

(I am pretty sure I posted something like this before, but I can’t find it.)

Knowledge of qualia

Suppose epiphenomenalism is true about qualia, so qualia are nonphysical properties that have no causal impact on anything. Let w₀ be the actual world and let w₁ be a world which is exactly like the actual world, except that (a) there are no qualia (so it’s a zombie world) and (b) instead of qualia, there are causally inefficacious nonphysical properties that have a logical structure isomorphic to the qualia of our world, and that occur in the corresponding places in the spatiotemporal and causal nexuses. Call these properties “epis”.

The following seems pretty obvious to me:

1. In w₁, nobody knows about the epis.

But the relationship of our beliefs about qualia to the qualia themselves seems to be exactly like the relationship of the denizens of w₁ to the epis. In particular, neither are any of their beliefs caused by the obtaining of epis, nor are any of our beliefs caused by the obtaining of qualia, since both are epiphenomenal. So, plausibly:

2. If in w₁, nobody knows about the epis, then in w₀, nobody knows about the qualia.

Conclusion:

3. Nobody knows about the qualia.

But of course we do! So epiphenomenalism is false.

Today's sunspots

Today I was testing the solar filter I got for the eclipse. (300mm f/5.6, cropped).

Brains, bodies and souls

There are four main families of views of who we are:

1. Bodies (or organisms)

2. Brains (or at least cerebra)

3. Body-soul composites

4. Souls.

For the sake of filling out logical space, and maybe getting some insight, it’s worth thinking a bit about what other options there might be. Here is one that occurred to me:

5. Brain-soul (or cerebrum-soul) composites.

I suppose the reason this is not much (if at all) talked about is that if one believes in a soul, the body-soul composite or soul-only views seem more natural. Why might one accept a brain-soul composite view? (For simplicity, I won’t worry about the brain-cerebrum distinction.)

Here is one line of thought. Suppose we accept some of the standard arguments for dualism, such as that matter can’t be conscious or that matter cannot think abstract thoughts. This leads us to think the mind cannot be entirely material. But at the same time, there is some reason to think the mind is at least partly material: the brain’s activity sure seems like an integral part of our discoursive thought. Thus, the dualist might have reason to say that the mind is a brain-soul composite. At the same time, there is a Cartesian line of thought that we should be identified with the minimal entity hosting our thoughts, namely the mind. Putting all these lines of thought together, we conclude that we are minds, and hence brain-soul composites.

Now I don’t endorse (5). The main ethical arguments against (2) and (4), namely that they don’t do justice to the deep ethical significance of the human body, apply against (5) as well. But if one is not impressed by these arguments, there really is some reason to accept (5).

Furthermore, exploring new options, like the brain-soul composite option, sometimes may give new insights into old options. I am now pretty much convinced that the mind is something like the brain plus soul (or maybe cerebrum plus intellectual part of soul or some other similar combination). Since it is extremely plausible that all of my mind is a part of me, this gives me a new reason to reject (4), the view that I am just a soul. At the same time, I do not think it is necessary to hold that I am just a mind, so I can continue to accept view (3).

The view that the mind is the brain plus soul has an interesting consequence for the interim state, the state of the human being between death and the resurrection of the body. I previously thought that the human being in the interim state is in an unfortunately amputated state, having lost all of the body. But if we see the brain as a part of the mind, the amputated nature of the human being in the interim state is even more vivid: a part of the human mind is missing in the interim state. This gives a better explanation of why Paul was right to insist on the importance of the physical resurrection—we cannot be fully in our mind without at least some of our physical components.

Walking

Unfortunately, most of the forms of exercise I do are too intense for me to think hard while exercising, though perhaps my subconscious is doing something. The main exception is that when swimming, I can do some thinking, but I am also counting lengths, and I can’t do both at once very well. (I have a project that I keep on putting off where I’d interface a BLE beacon on my person with a phone out of the water and use that to count lengths, but I haven’t done it yet. I suppose I could also get a watch that counts lengths.) Occasionally, I can also do some less deep thinking—say, preparing for class—while biking on flat pavement. But I can’t do serious thinking while rock climbing (however, there is good down time for thinking and writing between climbs), or playing badminton, or kayaking.

Last week, Baylor had a step challenge, so I ended up taking some longer brisk walks, alone. (I walk a fair amount with family.) It reminded me of how it is possible to do a lot of thinking while walking. That’s really nice! Though there is the danger that my achievement-oriented personality will push me to keep on increasing my walking speed, to the point where I won't be able to do deep thinking any more.