Week 12

Civil Disobedience

"An unjust law is no law at all"- St. Augustine



There was a school of thought, which still has many adherents, that defended the existence of a link between "justice" and "divinity"; therefore, what is right is what is not against the "natural law". This argument provides the basis to object in conscience to all that, according to the understanding of some people, is unnatural (in this context, euthanasia or abortion would be considered as a rejection of the sovereignty of God). This line of thought has been, and is today, a dangerous assimilation between "justice" and "religion" in which the most fundamentalist doctrines are based.

For the opposite point of view, only what is "legal" is right, and therefore, there is neither disobedience nor conscientious objection to a particular law, although it may seem unnatural.

 In my opinion, we can and must disobey unjust laws, because the health of democracy depends on it. What we have to fear is the day when there not be unjust laws, because it would mean that we all would be under the yoke of the only thought. In addition, disobedience has always played an important role in society, as disobedience to the laws of racial exclusion in the U.S. during the years 40 and 50.

Martin Luther King appealed to the ideas of St. Augustine who said, "An unjust law is no law at all". However, for St. Augustine, all human law derives from natural law, and if in any case a law is contrary to natural law, it is no longer law, but corruption of law. The problem is figure out what does the "natural law" mean, especially for agnostics and atheists. We must be careful when interpreting these concepts because any person could claim the right to disobey a particular law with the excuse of being unfair according to his-her scale of values, his-her personal interest or simply his-her whim.

Civil disobedience, which was applied in many countries and times throughout history, consists in consciously breaking the law, not to gain advantage or personal interest, but to change the transgressed rule into other more in line with general interests.

I was in Peru when the Amazonian indigenous people declared themselves in rebellion and civil disobedience. They started the uprising of the people under the motto "The forest is our mother, our mother is not on sale, we defend our mother" in protest against a government that did not heed their demands. The Government was privatizing and plundering the natural resources in the region putting in danger the Peruvian Amazon and violating the laws and international treaties that protect indigenous people. Through this civil disobedience, there were achieved major changes in national legislation in order to safeguard the rights of indigenous people, while they were recognized as important political actors with the right to be involved in the development of national legislation and measures, especially when they can have social, cultural and environmental consequences for their community.

Week 11

Collectivism and Individualism 
 "I am not a Marxist"

Karl Heinrich Marx (German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. 1818-1883)

  

The ideas of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx have been the basis of the two great economic and social currents of the twentieth century, liberalism and socialism, respectively. Mill's philosophical conception puts particular emphasis on the individual over the interests of the state and the society, and any power can exert actions against the will of the individual, except if it harms to third parties. Freedom proposed by Mill did not put brakes on human development, and politically and economically, it was interpreted as the right to excel without limits. For Karl Marx, this concept of freedom focuses on the individual and personal interest, in the freedom to dominate and exploit others to gain power and wealth, because those who take over the means of production (because their freedom permits to do it) have the ability to command and dominate the weaker.

From Mill's theories comes the idea of ​​free market where private industry has the right to extend its branches without the meddling of government and society. The growth of the individual is a natural human instinct, but Mill made ​​it clear "as long as it does not harm others", and this is not reflected when we see how the wealth-poverty gap is extending around the world. From Marx's theories arises socialism, where social being determines consciousness of men and justifies an egalitarian society in which a dominant group does not undermine the chances of others. It is important the collective consciousness around the individual, while it does not fall into oligarchies that put arbitrary limits.

Although the interpretations that emerged from these conceptions of freedom became antagonists, both Mill and Marx defended the individual freedom, civil rights, religious tolerance, equal rights, the abolition of privileges, free elections, private property, etc. The originating status of liberalism was clearly humanistic, concerned about individual liberties of every human being to carry out their life plan, but the subsequent manipulation placed it dangerously close to its antithesis. Today, liberalism is associated with certain factors which may even endanger those old ideals, because liberalists defend the absurd idea of it is justified, and even it is admirable, a despotic and totalitarian political regime as long as it keeps multi-million dollar trade relationships. Apparently, the only real freedom is market freedom. If there are suppression of civil rights or aberrant Human Rights violations, everyone looks away. This "false liberalism" is merciless with the idea of the state as something bad, like a perverse structure that systematically violates the rights and potential of people. Marx's theories have a great philosophical value, but they were reduced to mere power struggles that led to an economic and political doctrine, naive and unworkable, as communism, which inevitably becomes in a tyrannical and inhuman system where there is no room for non-Communists who have only one option: either compromise or death.

Both Marxism and liberalism destroy human solidarity. The key to the welfare of a country is not class solidarity, but solidarity among all individuals. It is necessary to bring closer as far as possible the interests of all, produce wealth and, above all, make available all necessary means to have a decent life, but respecting aspects of human nature as the desire for improvement, individual distinctions, certain grade of individualism, ambition, competition, etc, while they do not come into conflict with the collective interest.

Week 9

A Noble Truth: Desire causes suffering

“Desire nothing, give up all desires and be happy”.

Swami Sivananda (1854 – 1934)

If we analyze each of our sufferings, we realize that there is always a desire unfulfilled.   From the moment the desire is in our minds, the thirst for satisfaction arises, but this satisfaction is ephemeral and resurfaces to demand more of the same. The consumerist policy creates desires. The commercial strategies and tactics of consumerism are constantly offering something desirable to the people. Sometimes are useful things, but in most cases they are completely useless but associated with social or personal "status" that makes one see himself- herself more important in the eyes of others. We are the product of a society that consumes us while we consume its products, where the identities are exchanged for false needs.

 Simultaneously or alternatively, we want everything but we cannot achieve it. Sometimes when we get something, there is not enough for us, or we lose it, or we suffer the feeling of dissatisfaction because of the end of our craving. Intellectually we know that it is impossible to have it everything but we feel bad because what dominates us is what we want and not the intellectual side. The desire to own things without limits imprisons us in a suffering that makes us vulnerable and kills the desire of being who one is. Then, we desire more things to compensate our emptiness creating a vicious cycle that never ends ...

 However, given the ephemeral nature of life, why we also have to renounce to the ephemeral? Not all the unfulfilled desires crumble us, some affect us more than others depending on the importance we have given them, and this depends much on our psychological structure. Every plan of life can be seen as ephemeral and doomed to suffering, but can we aspire to anything more?

Week 8

Philosophy and Religion

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it".

Andre Gide (French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature-1859-1961)

    The existence of God is an issue that concerns philosophy and religion. Both try to answer the same questions about the meaning of life, death, fate ... etc, but in different ways.

The philosophy addresses these issues from a rational point of view, and it is open to criticism and change through the advancement of human knowledge. God, from the philosophical point of view, is the possible existence of a first principle using the reason to raise the hypothesis of an omnipotent being. Religion simply takes this hypothesis as dogma, there is no debate about the existence of God, and it assumes its true without having reached this conclusion by reason. Religion responds directly to the most important human questions without allowing changes, and faith is all we have as answers to our questions.

Philosophy has doubts, religion asserts.  Philosophy arises from criticism, religion from dogma. The principles accepted by faith do not allow criticism, and philosophical analysis criticizes everything, therefore philosophy and religion are incompatible unless there is reasonable faith.

Week 6

   Artificial Intelligence

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do." 

HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey)

   Can a machine be intelligent? Can we create a complex program enough to "feel" and "think" for itself? Is it possible to "create" mind from the pure matter or is it needed a "something" else?, and above all... How do we define what we would take as evidence that a machine can think or not? The Turing test establishes that we can consider a program "smart" if it can hold a conversation and the interviewer cannot distinguish it from a human being under conditions that he/she cannot see any of the two respondents. John Searle tried to answer the Turing's experiment with the Chinese Room:

   Suppose there is a locked room with a slot as the only communication with the outside. Within this room is someone who cannot speak Chinese. At the same time there is a vast library of Chinese encyclopedias that indicate which ideogram is the response to another. If someone from the outside introduces an envelope with a question in Chinese, the person inside the room will search through the books until he/she finds the corresponding ideogram as a response and returns it to the outside. Can the person who is out and get the answer conclude that the person who is in the room "knows" Chinese? If the door is never opened always left with the doubt, and for practical purposes the answer is "yes, he/she knows Chinese" because we assume that if something works in an intelligent and conscious way is because it is smart and aware.

   How can we determine if a machine is intelligent or not? If we make the comparison with human capabilities, sooner or later we will hit the uncomfortable fact that the machines surpassed us on several fronts long ago. However, for something to become intelligent as a human, it makes sense to bet on emerging behaviors that were not be scheduled, but we would enter into a kind of contradiction because we would not be creating a machine piece by piece, but only certain parts that would open the possibility for new issues to arise. In fact, the intelligence is characterized by the ability of self-perfection on the basis of experience; therefore we could never create something clever at all, only the core for the emergence of that intelligence.

   A machine could be programmed to react to a blow like a human: can scream, move, and hold the place where it was beaten, but without feeling pain, then, although we could implement more features, the machine would lack of the more human feature: the ability to have mental experiences firsthand.

   Qualia would be this, the subjective sensation of pain, and subjective experience of other sensations. They are the most mysterious events of human consciousness. They are somewhat personal, not transferable, and characteristic of the individual. The mystery of qualia, so tied to the human, comes from the fact that they are not explainable from a physicalist reduction. Consciousness or awareness is the capability of experiencing these qualia or feelings, and if these cannot be simulated, we must admit that there is "something" that is specifically human, something intangible and independent of the matter. Almost all philosophical positions, including the psychoanalysis, give to the consciousness of oneself a shade almost magical, but science has quite simple and concrete definitions of consciousness as it is a self-monitoring of unconscious psychological processes, or the view of oneself as an object in the world. If the mind and human emotions are a consequence of the actions of the brain as a complex processor system, why should not happen something similar as a result of other complex processing system?

   According to Roger Penrose, quantum mechanics is involved in the phenomenon of "consciousness" and that's not magic, but it is virtually impossible to replicate it artificially in a current machine, so there will not be artificial beings now, but perhaps in the future. Less than 100 years ago it was unimaginable to think that a machine could play and win at chess to a human...

Week 5

Mind and Matter

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind"

George Berkeley (Anglo-Irish philosopher, 1685-1753)

   Of all the mysteries of the universe, perhaps the most intriguing resides in the center of our being: the mind. Throughout history, dualism has been defended by philosophers like Plato, who believed that an immortal soul survived the body, Aristotle, who believed that the soul was the shape of the body but the two were inseparable and when one disappeared, the other also did, or Descartes, who believed that man consisted of two substances, res extensa (material) and res cogitans (thinking) joined by a gland called the pineal.

   Currently, the dualism of mind and body is defended primarily by religion to explain the immortality of the soul through life after death. Many philosophers and scientists defend the dualism of body and mind, such as cognitive psychology or mentalism, they believe that the mind rules the brain and there is no physical theory to explain consciousness, the mind is like software on the hardware. The physical explanation of the mind and human consciousness is probably the largest and most important scientific challenge of humanity, and maybe quantum biophysics can find the physical basis of consciousness. On the contrary, the evidence for the existence of the mind would allow other intangible realities such as the soul and the spiritual realm.

   However, dualism is unable to explain the interaction that occurs between the body and mind: how the mind, if not physical, can produce a change in a physical domain (violating the principle of conservation of energy). Also, if the mind is immaterial it would be impossible to influence it by physical means.

   Physicalist theories try to answer the mind-body problem by denying the dualism and arguing the lack of mental entities, or the ability to identify entities, attributes and material processes (ontological dimension), or the need to translate our mentalist language into a physical language (semantic dimension) or the possibility of reducing the psychological explanations about mental states into physical and organic explanations (epistemological dimension).

   The root of these physicalist theories are at the same time, in Cartesian philosophy: if the body- according to Descartes- functions as a complex machine, could the mind also be explained by similar mechanical principles? Scientists claim to be able to map the brain and to know where are centered the processes of thinking. The stimulation of a certain point of the brain can cause a sensation or particular reaction. Scientists are working hard to prove this in an effort to show that the life of the immaterial mind can be physically located within the physical object we call the brain. They say there is really no difference between what we call the brain and what we call the mind, and therefore there is no difference between what we call body and what we call soul. In essence, the immaterial world is simply a figment of our imagination. In this universe there are only two things: matter and energy, and both are physical, there is nothing spiritual. The body is subject to physical laws, and memories are recorded in neurons such as the information of a PC is on the hard drive, thus memories are also matter.

Week 4

Knowledge

"All theories are legitimate and none of them are important. What matters is what one does with them"

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentine writer and poet, 1899-1986)

   Knowledge is a way of asking and answering questions that recognize multiple points of view. Throughout the history of epistemology, there have been many ways of understanding knowledge: a theoretical knowledge where there is plenty of reason and logic but very little action taken, a practical knowledge built without any reasoning from the experience, the practice, the day-to-day, or an intuitive knowledge where the logic is out of place and emotional and unconscious elements play an important role. This is sometimes more powerful than any other knowledge built with logic and reasoning.

   Ideally, the reason, heart and action should go together in order to build the knowledge, but this denies the reality: our imperfection to know. However, even though imperfect, there are a thousand ways to learn and build knowledge.

   Knowledge is in the person, not in anywhere else, and is indistinguishable from the person. What I know is the sum of all my life experiences, absolutely all of them which have left a residue at any time. It manifests itself in everything we do, in what we say, in what we do not say, in what we dream...

   There is not knowledge, for example, inside a book. A book can build, contribute, and enrich so much knowledge as different interpretations that its readers make of it. The person who writes it know what every sentence means, but prior knowledge of each reader will make that the words, phrases and ideas are interpreted in one way or another. Sometimes the lack of prior knowledge makes that the reading of the book does not tell us absolutely nothing, in other occasions, a limited prior knowledge makes that the reading of the book tells us little, but often occur that the prior knowledge of the reader creates exciting new interpretations of the text: applications to other fields (perhaps unimagined by the writer), relations with other concepts and ideas, etc.

   In short, everything we do is building our knowledge, which is manifested in all what we do, think, want or feel. In this sense, the knowledge could be defined as an inseparable combination of thought, emotion and action.

   All knowledge, concepts and ideas are built over other knowledge, concepts and ideas, but to get certain types of knowledge, it is required a journey because knowledge is not open to anyone, it is only open to those who want to make a conceptual journey that will lead them to be able to assimilate a new idea. Beyond the considerations of whether the knowledge has to flow or has to be stored, I think we should act and interact from knowledge.

   Knowledge, this that is so hard to define, is perhaps what best defines each one of us (is our identity?), I talk about a knowledge that has an indissoluble combination of thought, action and desire, not about a computer hard disk. We are not machines. My knowledge is how I act, how I think and how I want or feel, and also, what I do, what I think and what I want or feel.