Aristotle and Aquinas' Third Way

Aristotle seems to have thought that the earth and the species inhabiting it are eternal. This seems extremely implausible for reasons that should have been available to Aristotle.

It is difficult to wipe out a species, but surely not possible: all it takes is to kill each of the finitely many individuals. Given a species s that cannot have more than n members, and given a long enough time, we would expect there to be a very high probability that all the members of s would have died out during some hour due to random events. Given any finite number of species each with a bound on how many members it can have, and given a long enough time, we would expect with very high probability that all the members would die off.

Now there is a finite limit on how many species there are on earth (as Aristotle knew, the earth is finite), and a finite limit on how many members the species can have (again, the earth is finite). So we should have expected all the species that existed some long amount of time ago to have died out.

The above provides an argument that if the world is eternal, new species can arise. For if new species can’t arise and the world is eternal, then by now there should have been no species left.

How could Aristotle have gotten out of this worry without rejecting his thesis about the eternity of the earth?

One way be to suppose a powerful protector of our ecosystem that would make sure that the species-destroying random events never happen. This protector would either itself have to be sufficiently powerful that it would not be subject to the vicissitudes of chance, or there would have to be an infinite (probably uncountably infinite!) number of such protectors.

Another option would be for Aristotle to reject his thesis that there is only one earth (which was based on theory of gravitation as attraction to the center of the universe: if there were more than one earth they would have both collapsed into the center of the universe by now).

If there were infinitely many earths, then it’s perhaps not so crazy to think that some earth would have lucked out and not had its species die out. Of course, this would not only require Aristotle to reject his thesis that there is only one earth, but also the finitist thesis that there cannot be an infinite number of co-actual things. (Interestingly, given the plausibility that any given species has probability one of dying out given infinite time, and given the countable additivity of probabilities, this way out would require not merely infinitely many earths, but an uncountable infinity of earths. Assuming an Archimedean spacetime for our universe, it would require a multiverse.)

In any case, Aristotle’s commitment to new species not coming into existence (or at least new species of interesting critters; he may be OK with worms coming into existence) is in tension with what he says about the earth’s eternity.

Change and matter

Aristotle’s positing matter is driven by trying to respond to the Parmenidean idea that things can’t come from nothing, and hence we must posit something that persists in change, and that is matter.

But there two senses of “x comes from nothing”:

1. x is uncaused

2. x is not made out of pre-existing materials.

If “x comes from nothing” in the argument means (1), the argument for matter fails. All we need is a pre-existing efficient cause, which need not be the matter of x.

Thus, for the argument to work, “x comes from nothing” must mean (2). But now here is a curious thing. From the middle ages to our time, many Aristotelians are theists, and yet still seem to be pulled by Aristotle’s argument for matter. But if “x comes from nothing” means (2), then theism implies that it is quite possible for something to come from nothing: God can create it ex nihilo.

There are at least two possible responses from a theistic Aristotelian who likes the argument for matter. The first response is that only God can make things come from nothing in sense (2), and hence things caused to exist by finite causes (even if with God’s cooperation) cannot come from nothing in sense (2). But there plainly are such things all around us. So there is matter.

Now, at least one theistic Aristotelian, Aquinas, does explicitly argue that only God can create ex nihilo. But the argument is pretty controversial and depends on heavy-duty metaphysics, about finite and infinite causes. It is not just the assertion of a seemingly obvious Parmenidean “nothing comes from nothing” principle. Thus at least on this response, the argument for matter becomes a lot more controversial. (And, to be honest, I am not convinced by it.)

The second and simpler response is to say that it’s just an empirical fact that there are things in the world that don’t come from nothing in sense (2): oak trees, for example. Thus there in fact is matter. This response is pretty plausible, but can be questioned: one might say that we have continuity of causal powers rather than any matter that survives the generation.

Finally, it’s worth noting that I suspect Aristotle misunderstands the Parmenidean argument, which is actually a very simple reductio ad absurdum:

3. x came into existence.
4. If x came into existence, then x did not exist.
5. So, x did not exist.
6. But non-existence is absurd.

The crucial step here is (6): the Parmenidean thinks the very concept of something not existing is absurd (presumably because of the Parmenidean’s acceptance of a strong truthmaker principle). The argument is very simple: becoming presupposes the truth of some past-tensed non-existence statements, while non-existence statements are always false. Aristotle’s positing matter does nothing to refute this Parmenidean argument. Even if we grant that x’s matter pre-existed, it’s still true that x did not exist, and that’s all Parmenides needs. Likewise, Aristotle’s famous actuality/potentiality distinction doesn’t solve the problem. Even if x was pre-existed by a potentiality for existence, it’s still true that x wasn’t pre-existed by x—that would be a contradiction.

To solve Parmenides’ problem, however, we do not need to posit matter or potentiality or anything like that. We just need to reject the idea that negative existential statements are nonsensical. And Aristotle expressly does reject this idea: he says that a statement is true provided it says of what is that it is or of what is not that it is not. Having done that, Aristotle should take himself as done with Parmenides’ problem of change.

More on the centrality of morality

I think we can imagine a species which have moral agency, but moral agency is a minor part of their flourishing. I assume wolves don’t have moral agency. But now imagine a species of canids that live much like wolves, but every couple of months get to make a very minor moral choice whether to inconvenience the pack in the slightest way—the rest is instinct. It seems to me that these canids are moral agents, but morality is a relatively minor part of their flourishing. The bulk of the flourishing of these canids would be the same as that of ordinary wolves.

Aristotle argued that the fact that rationality is how we differ from other species tells us that rationality is what is central to our flourishing. The above thought experiment shows that the argument is implausible. Our imaginary canids could, in fact, be the only rational species in the universe, and their moral agency or rationality (with Aristotle and Kant, I am inclined to equate the two) is the one thing that makes them different from other canids, but yet what is more important to their flourishing is what they have in common with other canids.

At the same time, it would be easy for an Aristotelian theorist to accommodate my canids. One needs to say that the form of a species defines what is central to the flourishing, and in my canids, unlike in humans, morality is not so central. And one can somehow observe this: rationality just is clearly important to the lives of humans in a way in which it’s not so much these canids.

In this way, I think, the Aristotelian may have a significant advantage over a Kantian. For a Kantian may have to prioritize rationality in all possible species.

In any case, we should not take it as a defining feature of morality that it is central to our flourishing.

One might wonder how this works in a theistic context. For humans, moral wrongdoing is also sin, an offense against a loving infinite Creator. As I’ve described the canids, they may have no concept of God and sin, and so moral wrongdoing isn’t seen as sin by them. Could you have a species which does have a concept of God and sin, but where morality (and hence sin) isn’t central to flourishing? Or does bringing God in automatically elevate morality to a higher plane? Anselm thought so. He might have been right. If so, then the discomfort that one is liable to feel at the idea of a species of moral agents where morality is not very important could be an inchoate grasp of the connection between God and morality.

The overridingness of morality and Double Effect

You’ve been imprisoned in a cell with a torture robot. The cell is locked by a combination lock, and your estimate is that you will be able to open it in a week. If the torture robot is left running, it will stimulate your pain center, causing horrible pain but no lasting damage, and not slowing down your escaping at all. An infallible oracle reveals to you that if you disable the robot, through a random confluence of events this will affect your character in such a way that in a year you will be 0.1% less patient for the rest of your life than you would otherwise be.

Now, sometimes, a small difference in the degree of a virtue could make a big difference. For instance, perhaps, you will one day be in a position where an extremely arduous task will need to be done to save someone’s life, and you just barely have enough patience for it, so that if you were 0.1% less patient, you wouldn’t do it. You ask the oracle whether something like this will happen if you turn off the robot. The oracle replies: “No, it’s just that you will be 0.1% more annoyed whenever you engage in an arduous task, but that’s never going to push you past any significant threshold—you’re not going to blow up in a big way at your child, or neglect a duty, or anything like that.”

It seems obviously reasonable to disable the robot. Thus, enormous short-term hedonic considerations can win out over tiny long-term virtue considerations. It is thus not the case that considerations of virtue always beat hedonic considerations.

What are we to make, then, of the deep insight—perhaps the most important insight in the history of Western philosophy—about the primacy of morality over other considerations?

Two things. First, moral considerations tend to be much more important than non-moral considerations.

Second, we should never do what is morally wrong, no matter what the price for avoiding it, and no matter how small the wrong. But there is a difference between doing what is morally wrong and doing something morally permissible that makes one less virtuous.

Here is a second case. You and an innocent stranger are in the cell. The robot is set to torture the stranger. The oracle now reveals to you that right after the escape, you will forget the last two weeks of your life, and your life will go the same way whether you disabled the robot or not, with exactly one morally relevant exception: if you have chosen to disable the robot, then one day, feeling peckish and having forgotten your wallet, you will culpably steal a candybar from a cornerstore.

It seems obvious that you should disable the robot, despite the fact that doing so leads to your doing a minor moral wrong. The point isn’t that disabling the robot justifies stealing the candybar—at the time that you steal it, you will have forgotten all about the robot, so there is no justification. The point is that even though you should never do wrong that a good might come of it, nonetheless sometimes for the sake of a great good it is permissible to do something that you know will lead to your later doing something impermissible.

Sometimes theologians have incautiously said things like that the smallest sin outweighs the greatest evil that is not a sin. I think this is incorrect. But what is correct is that you shouldn’t commit the smallest sin for the sake of the greatest good. However, the Principle of Double Effect applies to future sins: you can foresee but not intend that if you perform a certain action—turning off the robot, say—you will commit a future sin.

The badness of non-intentional harming

Consider a trolley problem where on both tracks there is exactly one innocent stranger. Alice is driving the trolley. If she does nothing, the trolley will head down the left track. But the right track will get Alice to her destination three minutes sooner. Alice redirects.

It seems that Alice did something wrong. Yet, why? We can say that she intended to save the person on the left track and get to her destination faster, and did not intend to kill the person on the right track. What went wrong?

One option is this. In the proportionality condition on Double Effect, we need that the outcome chosen have a significantly better consequence than the alternative, and three minutes (normally) is not significant.

But that’s probably not right. There are times when it is permissible to redirect a trolley even when the outcome is a bit worse. For instance, suppose that we have a trolley setup with one person on each track, but things are such that if the trolley hits the person on the right track, the death will be a bit more painful. The trolley is controlled by the person on the right track. It seems obvious that the person on the right track is permitted to redirect the trolley to the right even though the outcome is a bit worse.

Maybe the issue is this. Even though it’s not always wrong to become the non-intentional cause of a grave harm to someone, we have moral reason to avoid becoming such a cause. This fits with our intuitions: we feel really bad when we become such a cause. Murray Leinster’s first novel Murder Madness is all about the horror of a drug that makes one involuntarily kill people (I won’t recommend the novel because of a number of pieces of outrageous racism).

This makes sense from an Aristotelian point of view. For a social organism, helping members of the group is a part of flourishing. This is true for animals that are not moral agents. A meerkat sentinel that saves the group by warning of a danger is thereby flourishing. This is even true in the case of non-intentional cooperative activity. A slime mold that, as part of a stalk, enables reproduction by slime molds that are part of the fruiting body is thereby flourishing. It makes sense, thus, to think that for social organisms harming members of the group is contrary to flourishing whether or not one is morally responsible for the harm, and even when the harm is one that one is not intending.

Scientific realism about mass

While I’ve grown up as a scientific realist, and been trained as one as a philosophy graduate student, and I suppose I still identify as one, I’ve been finding it more difficult to say what scientific realism claims.

For instance, what does it mean to be a realist about mass in a Newtonian context? A naive thought is that for each physical object, there is a positive real number, the mass of the object, which mathematically enters into the laws of nature such as F = ma and F = Gm₁m₂/r². But that seems to commit one to there being some odd objective facts, such as to which objects have the property that the square of their masses is less than their mass—a property that barely seems to make any sense, since normally in physics, we don’t compare masses with squares of masses, as they are measured in different units.

A more sophisticated thought is that there is a determinable mass, and a family of determinates, with various mathematical relations between them, with the family isomorphic with the positive real numbers with respect to the relations, but without necessarily a single isomorphism being privileged. But this more sophisticated thought is much more philosophy than physics: physicists hypothesize entities like forces and particles and the like, but not such entities like determinables and determinates. Indeed, this approach commits one to the denial of nominalism, and surely realism about mass in a Newtonian context shouldn’t commit one to such a controversial metaphysical thesis.

Is there some alternative? Maybe, but I don’t know.

Hyperreal worlds

In a number of papers, I argued against using hyperreal-valued probabilities to account for zero probability but nonetheless possible events, such as a randomly thrown dart hitting the exact center of the target, by assigning such phenomena non-zero but infinitesimal probability.

But it is possible to accept all my critiques, and nonetheless hold that there is room for hyperreal-valued probabilities.

Typically, physicists model our world’s physics with a calculus centered on real numbers. Masses are real numbers, wavefunctions are functions whose values are pairs of real numbers (or, equivalently, complex numbers), and so on. This naturally fits with real-valued probabilities, for instance via the Born rule in quantum mechanics.

However, even if our world is modeled by the real numbers, perhaps there could be a world with similar laws to ours, but where hyperreal numbers figure in place of our world’s real ones. If so, then in such a world, we would expect to have hyperreal-valued probabilities. We could, then, say that whether chances are rightly modeled with real-valued probabilities or hyperreal-valued probabilities depends on the laws of nature.

This doesn’t solve the problems with zero probability issues. In fact, in such a world we would expect to have the same issues coming up for the hyperreal probabilities. In that world, a dartboard would have a richer space of possible places for the dart to hit—a space with a coordinate system defined by pairs of hyperreal numbers instead of pairs of real numbers—and the probability of hitting a single point could still be zero. And in our world, the probabilities would still be real numbers. And my published critiques of hyperreal probabilities would not apply, because they are meant to be critiques of the application of such probabilities to our world.

There is, however, a potential critique available, on the basis of causal finitism. Plausibly, our world has an infinite number of future days, but a finite past, so on any day, our world’s past has only finitely many days. The set of future days in our world can be modeled with the natural numbers. An analogous hyperreal-based world would have a set of future days that would be modeled with the hypernatural numbers. But because the hypernatural numbers include infinite numbers, that world would have days that were preceded by infinitely (though hyperfinitely) many days. And that seems to violate causal finitism. More generally, any hyperreal world will either have a future that includes a finite number of days or one that includes days that have infinitely many days prior to them.

If causal finitism is correct, then “hyperreal worlds”, ones similar to ours but where hyperreals figure where in our our world we have reals, must have a finite future, unlike our world. This is an interesting result, that for worlds like ours, having real numbers as coordinates is required in order to have both causal finitism true and yet an infinite future.

Causation and contingency

A correspondent yesterday reminded me of a classic objection to the “inductive” approach to the causal principle that all contingent things have causes in the context of cosmological arguments. As I understand the objection, it goes like this:

1. Granted, we have good reason to think that all the contingent things we observe do have causes. However, all these causes are contingent causes, and so we have equally good inductive support to think that all contingent things have contingent causes. Thus, to extend this reasoning to conclude that the cosmos—the sum total of all contingent things—has a cause is illegitimate, since the cosmos cannot have a contingent cause on pain of circularity.

An initial response is that (1) as it stands appears to rely on a false principle of inductive reasoning:

2. Suppose that all observed Fs are Gs, and that all observed Fs are also Hs. Then we have equally good inductive support for the hypothesis that all Fs are Hs as that all Fs are Gs.

But (2) is false. All observed emeralds are green and all observed emeralds are grue, where an emerald is grue if it is green and observed before 2100 or it is blue and not observed before 2100. It is reasonable to conclude that all emeralds are green but not that they are all grue. Or even more simply, from the facts that all observed electrons are charged and all observed electrons are observed, it is reasonable to conclude that all electrons are charged but not that all electrons are observed.

Nonetheless, this response to (1) does not seem entirely satisfying. The predicate “has a contingent cause” seems to be projectible, i.e., friendly to induction, in a way in which “is grue” or “is observed” are not.

Still, I think there is something more to be said for this response to (1). While “has a contingent cause” is not as obviously non-projectible as “is observed”, it has something in common with it. We are more suspicious of inductive inferences from all observed Fs being Gs to all Fs being Gs when being G includes features that are known prior to these observations to be concommitants of observation. For instance, consider the following variant of the germ theory of disease:

3. All infectious diseases are caused by germs that are at least 500 nm in size.

Until the advent of electron microscopy, all the infectious diseases whose causes were known were indeed caused by germs at least 500 nm in size, as that is the lower limit of what can be seen with visible light. But it would not be very reasonable to have concluded at the time that 500 nm is the lower limit on the size of a disease-causing germ. Now, something similar is happening in the contingent cause case. All observable things are physical. All physical things are contingent. So being contingent is a concommitant of being observed.

Finally, there is another epistemological problem with (1). The fact that some evidence gives as good support for q as for p does not mean that q is as likely to be true as p given the evidence. For the prior probability of q might be lower than that of p. And indeed that is the case in the reasoning in (1). The prior probability that everything contingent has a contingent cause is zero, precisely for the reason stated in (1): it is impossible that everything contingent have a contingent cause! But the prior probability that everything contingent has a cause is not zero.

Two more counterexamples to utilitarianism

It’s an innocent and pleasant pastime to multiply counterexamples to utilitarianism even if they don’t add much to what others have said. Thus, if utilitarianism is true, I have to do so. :-)

Suppose you capture Hitler. Torturing him to death would appal many but, given fallen human nature, likely significantly please hundreds of millions more. This pleasure to hundreds of millions could far outweigh the pain to one. Moreover, even of those appalled by the torture, primarily only Nazis and a handful of moral saints would actually feel significant displeasure at the torture. For being appalled by an immoral action is not always unpleasant except to someone with saintly compassion—indeed there is a kind of pleasure one takes in being appalled. Normally in the case of counterexamples to utilitarianism one worries about making people more callous, the breakdown of law and order, giving a bad example to others, and so on. But the case of Hitler is so exceptional that likely the negative effects from a utilitarian point of view would be minimal if any.

One might think that an even better thing to do from the utilitarian point of view would be to kill Hitler painlessly, and then mark up his body so it looks like he was tortured to death, and publically lie about it.

Yet it is wrong to torture even Hitler, and it is wrong to lie that one has done so (especially if only for public pleasure).

Bailey's Priority Principle

Andrew Bailey formulated and defended the Priority Principle (PP), that we think our thoughts in a primary rather than inherited way. His main argument for PP is a two-thinkers argument: if I think my thoughts in an inherited way, then something else—the thing I inherit the thoughts from—thinks them as well, but there aren’t two thinkers of my thoughts. While this argument is plausible, I think it skirts around the main intuition behind the PP. That intuition is that there is something implausible about us being thinkers in a derivative way. This intuition, however, is quite compatible with there being something that derives its thoughts from us, but not so Bailey’s argument, which (unless I am missing something) equally rules out the hypothesis that we inherit our thoughts and the hypothesis that our thoughts are inherited by something else.

Is there a way to argue for PP in concert with this intuition, namely to argue that whether or not there are two thinkers of my thoughts, I am their primary thinker? Such an argument would also escape the following apparent counterexample. Social organizations can have thoughts, derivative in a complex way from their members’ thoughts. But now suppose I join a club, and everyone else resigns membership. Then the club’s opinion on matters relavant to the club’s subject matter comes to be inherited from me. So now there are two thinkers, the club and me, though I am the primary one. This case (which to be fair I am not completely sure of) is a counterexample to Bailey’s argument but not to its conclusion.

My students came up with two closely related arguments, which we might put something like this. First, among our thoughts are intentions. If these are derivative, we are puppets of the primary intender, contrary to our freedom. Second, some of our thoughts are deliberate. It is a contradiction in terms that we think deliberately and yet our deliberate thought is inherited from a prior deliberate thinker—puppetry is incompatible with deliberativeness.

These arguments do not directly show that we are always primary thinkers, so they immediately imply only a weaker version of the PP (WPP), namely that sometimes we think non-derivatively. WPP is still interesting. For instance, it rules out standard perdurantist theories on which we inherit all our thoughts from our temporal parts. Furthermore, WPP makes PP moderately likely: for it is plausible that if there is any thought-inheritance it always goes in the same direction.

That said, maybe there is some reason to accept WPP without PP. Here is one kind of case. Possessing a concept is, perhaps, a way of thinking. But given some moderate semantic externalism, sometimes we possess a concept—say, of a quark—by inheriting it from an expert. Or suppose that the extended mind thesis is true, so that we count as knowing some things because they recorded on our devices. Maybe electronic devices don’t have knowledge, so this isn’t exactly knowledge inheritance. But imagine that you train a parrot to remember all your credit card numbers (a foolish idea) and you carry the parrot with you always. Now you inherit the knowledge of the numbers (under some description common between you and the parrot, definitely not “credit card number”) from the parrot. I am dubious of the extended mind thesis, but there is no need to stick one’s neck out. WPP does justice to many of our intuitions.

Correction to "Goodman and Quine's nominalism and infinity"

In an old post, I said that Goodman and Quine can’t define the concept of an infinite number of objects using their logical resources. Allen Hazen corrected me in a comment in the specific context of defining infinite sentences. But it turns out that I wasn’t just wrong about the specific context of defining infinite sentences: I was almost entirely wrong.

To see this, let’s restrict ourselves to non-gunky worlds, where all objects are made of simples. Suppose, further, that we have a predicate F(x) that says that an object x is finite. This is nominalistically and physicalistically acceptable by Goodman and Quine’s standards: it states a physical feature of a physical object, namely its size qua made of simples. (If the simples all have some finite amount of energy with some positive minimum, F(x) will be equivalent to saying x has a finite energy.)

Now, this doesn’t solve the problem by itself. To say that an object x is finite is not the same as saying that the number of objects with some property is finite. But I came across a cute little trick to go from one to the other in the proof of Proposition 7 of this paper. The trick transposed to the non-gunky mereological setting is this. Then following two statements are equivalent in non-gunky worlds satisfying appropriate mereological axioms:

1. The number of objects x satisfying G(x) is finite.

2. There is a finite object z such that for any objects x and y with G(x) and G(y), if x ≠ y, then x and y differ inside z (i.e., there is a part of z that is a part of one object but not of the other).

To see the equivalence, suppose (2) is true. Then if z has n simples, and if x is any object satisfying G(x), then all objects y satisfying G(x) differ from x within these n simples, so there are at most 2ⁿ objects satisfying G(x). Conversely, if there are finitely many satisfiers of G, there will be a finite object z that contains a simple of difference between x and y for every pair of satisfiers x and y of G (where a simple of difference is a simple that is a part of one but not the other), and any two distinct satisfiers of G will differ inside z.

I said initially that I was almost entirely wrong. In thoroughly gunky worlds, all objects are infinite in the sense of having infinitely many parts, so a mereologically-based finiteness predicate won’t help. Nor will a volume or energy-based one, because we can suppose a gunky world with finite total volume and finite total energy. So Goodman and Quine had better hope that the world isn’t thoroughly gunky.

Property inheritance

There seems to be such a thing as property inheritance, where x inherits a property F from y which has F in a non-derivative way. Here are some examples of this phenomenon on various theories:

1. I inherit mass from my molecules.

2. A person inherits some of their thoughts from the animal that constitutes the person.

3. A four-dimensional whole inherits its temporary properties from its temporal parts.

These are all cases of upward inheritance: a thing inheriting a property from parts or constituent. There can, however, be downward inheritance.

4. When a whole has the property of belonging to you, so do its parts, and often the parts inherit the property of being owned from the whole, though not always (you can buy a famous chess set piece by piece).

There may also be cases of sideways inheritance.

5. A layperson possesses the concept of a quark by inheritance from an expert to whom they defer with respect to the concept.

There seems to be some kind of a logical connection between property inheritance and property grounding, but the two concepts are not the same, since x’s possession of a property can be grounded in y’s possession of a different property—say, a president’s being elected is grounded in voters’ electing—while inheritance is always of the same property.

It is tempting to say:

6. An object x inherits a property F from an object y if and only if x’s having F is grounded in y’s having the same property F.

That’s not quite right. For if p grounds q, then p entails q. But this bundle of molecules’ having mass may not not entail my having mass, since it might be a contingent feature of the bundle that they are my molecules, so there is a possible world where the bundle exists and has mass, but I don’t (if only because I don’t exist). It seems that what we need in (6) is something weaker than grounding. But partial grounding seems too weak to plug into an account of property inheritance. Consider my property of knowing something. One of my pieces of knowledge is that you know something. So my knowing something is partially grounded in your knowing something, but I do not think that this counts as property inheritance. (Suppose one bites the bullet and says that my knowing something is inherited from you. Then, oddly, I have the property of knowing something both by inheritance and not by inheritance—inherited and non-inherited property possession are now compatible. I don’t know if that’s right, but at least it’s odd.)

I think we can at least say:

7. An object x inherits a property F from an object y only if x’s having F is grounded in y’s having the same property F.

But I don’t know how to turn this into a necessary and sufficient condition.

Dualism, humans and galaxies

Here is a mildly interesting thing I just noticed: given dualism, we cannot say that we are a part of the Milky Way galaxy. For galaxies, if they exist at all, are material objects that do not have souls as parts.

Hachette v. Internet Archive

I am not a lawyer, but I love constructing counterexamples. I’ve been thinking about the Hachette v. Internet Archive. The Archive scanned a bunch of books they owned, and then lent the scans to users on the Internet, making sure that for each physical book, only one scan was lent at a time. The courts ruled that this was copyright infringement.

I imagine a sequence of cases for a library (the Internet Archive is officially a library in California):

1. A user comes to the library and reads a book in the ordinary way.

2. The book is delicate and valuable, so the library puts the book in a metal box with a window, with delicate robotically controlled page flippers controlled by buttons outside the box. The user reads the book through the window while flipping pages with the buttons.

3. Same as 2, but the user wears glasses.

4. Same as 2, but the user lives across the street from the library, and the librarian has placed the box in the library window so pointed that the user, and the user alone, can read the book via an ordinary refracting telescope, with the user having buttons connected to the page flippers via long wires.

5. Same as 4, but the telescope is digital: it has an optical sensor connected electronically to a screen (basically, a CCTV system).

6. Same as 5, but the optical sensor is inside the library while the digital telescope’s screen is in the user’s home.

7. Same as 6, but the user can be arbitrarily far away, because wires are very long.

8. Same as 7, but instead of custom wiring for the connection between the sensor and the screen and the user’s button’s and the page flippers, a TCP/IP protocol over the Internet is employed.

9. Same as 8, but to reduce wear and tear on the book, the sensor caches the images, so that if the user chooses to jump to a page that has already been viewed, the flippers do not need to operate. The cache is deleted at the end of the session.

10. Same as 9, but the cache is not deleted at the end of the session, but is kept for the next session with the same user.

11. Same as 10, but the cache is kept for the next user. Only one user can access the book at once.

12. Same as 10, but a full cache is generated for all the pages once and for all users. Only one user can operate the system at once.

13. Same as 11, but the whole cache is copied to the user’s device and removed once the loan period expires.

Here, 12 is pretty much what the Archive was doing when it was letting users download books for a period, and 11 was what they were doing when it was letting users view the books via a browser.

If 11 and 12 are not allowed, at what point do things become impermissible?

If the worry is about there being copying, then there is already copying at 5: the electrical data from the sensor is copied to the screen. If the user flips through the book, the copying is of the book as a whole, though the copies are constantly deleted. But it seems to me (who am not a lawyer) that we shouldn’t make a significant distinction between a digital and an analogue telescope. Moreover, even viewing by eye involves copying. As soon as a page of a book is exposed to light, a large stream of copies of the data in the book appear in the air as patterns of light. Whether these copies are in the air or in glass (as in the case where glasses or an analogue telescope is used) does not seem significant. Is it significant if the data is in electrons rather than photons, as in 5?

Perhaps the worry is about non-evanescent copies. That sounds reasonable. When a book is exposed to light, the copies that are immediately made are evanescent (though very large in quantity), and likewise if a sensor and a screen arrangement (e.g., CCTV) is used. Thus, 1-8 might be distinguished from 9-12, and maybe the caching introduced at 9 is the problem.

However, the Internet and other electronic devices already have caching built in at various levels, so there is already some “hidden” caching introduced at 9, so the existence of caching doesn’t seem that significant. It seems like caching is just an efficiency improvement that does not significantly affect the normative issues.

Dignity, ecosystems and artifacts

1. If a part of x has dignity, x has dignity.

2. Only persons have dignity.

3. So, a person cannot be a proper part of a non-person. (1–2)

4. A person cannot be a proper part of a person.

5. So, a person cannot be a proper part of anything. (3–4)

6. If any nation or galaxy or ecosystem exists, some nation, galaxy or ecosystem has a person as a proper part.

7. So, no nation, galaxy or ecosystem exists. (5–6)

Less confidently, I go on.

8. If tables and chairs exist, so do chess sets.

9. If chess sets exist, so do living chess sets.

10. A living chess set has persons as proper parts. (Definition)

11. So, living chess sets do not exist. (4,10)

12. So, tables and chairs don’t exist. (8–9,11)

All that said, I suppose (1) could be denied. But it would be hard to deny if one thought of dignity as a form of trumping value, since a value in a part transfers to the whole, and if it’s a trumping value, it isn’t canceled by the disvalue of other parts. (That said, I myself don’t quite think of dignity as a form of value.)