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Four Simple Questions

Entry 895, on 2008-11-21 at 21:02:05 (Rating 1, Philosophy)

Today I read a fascinating article on the BBC news web site which was titled "Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt". They were really interesting questions and I had to try to answer them, of course. So here they are...

Question 1. Should we kill healthy people for their organs?

This is really a reformulation of the classic questions which have been around for years which probe how people are prepared to apply moral judgements to gain benefit for the maximum number of people. Its really the old "the end justifies the means" argument.

Here's an example from the article: Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be OK painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not? Or how about this: You're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

Most people would steer the tram to kill one and save 5 but the end result is exactly the same as killing Bill to harvest his organs to save 5 others, yet very few people would justify this option. What is the difference? Logically there isn't a difference except the degree of personal intervention and the immediacy of the fate of the 5 who are initially threatened.

But I still think the answer here is "no". I don't get that answer for a logical or moral reason, I get it because it fits in with our societal conventions and traditions. Maybe the answer will change in the future because I don't believe there are any absolute morals, just rules which almost everyone agrees with at a certain point of time.

Question 2. Are you the same person who started reading this article?

This is a version of the old question of what is consciousness. We are aware of ourselves but what is it about ourselves which creates this awareness?

The article puts it like this: Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years.

So it doesn't seem to be anything simple like particular material and we might be tempted to theorise an immaterial soul of some sort. But research clearly shows self awareness is created by the brain so maybe we are the patterns of information on our brains. So if we copied that and put it in another brain which one would we be?

I think I have an answer to this question and its "yes". I am the same person because I am the same core collection of information. There is some change in this information but the core (which is me) stays the same.

Question 3. Is that really a computer screen in front of you?

It might seem obvious that it is, but that doesn't necessarily follow just because I can see, touch, and perceive the screen in other ways; and it superficially must logically exist since I am using it to read this article and write this blog entry. All of that could be a self-consistent but false illusion. How would I know?

This gets back Descartes famous "cogito ergo sum". The fact that I am here thinking means I exist but everything else could be an illusion. Since then, other philosophers have contended that we can't even take our own existence as a fact so what can we ever know for sure? The answer is nothing. Descartes thought we could assume that god exists is a fact but that seems pathetically naive today!

The article points out that we can check the accuracy of an instrument like a barometer by checking the conditions outside. After a certain number of times of finding it reliable we could conclude the barometer is making a real measurement. But we can't move outside our senses to check them. Even if we find an instrument which measures something that we can't sense directly we must use our senses to check the instrument so the initial problem remains.

But my answer here is still "yes". While I agree that there is no absolute way to prove the existence of anything I think that way of thinking leads nowhere. We must make some initial assumptions that if an object can be shown to exist through our senses and its existence makes sense logically then it is reasonable (at least as an approximation to the more uncertain state of of the real world) to say that it really exists.

Question 4. Did you really choose to read this article?

This is the old question of determinism. Newton's laws seems to imply the Universe was entirely deterministic and that the laws of physics could predict every action ahead of time, including the actions of the components of our brain.

The article gives this example: Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

So if it was always known that I would read the article did I have the choice? Apparently not. Most people now seem to say that we don't actually have free will but for all practical purposes it seems as if we have and we act that way.

Quantum physics has introduced a certain unavoidable random factor which might provide some escape but predictions can still be made to a high degree of accuracy so the original problem still stands.

So my answer to this one is "yes". I did choose to read the article. Maybe I don't have genuinely free will but from a practical perspective me must pretend that we do. Maybe someone could theoretically make accurate predictions of what I will do before I do it but that just means my free will is predictable! And those predictions could probably never be made in fact rather than theory because an effectively infinite amount of information would be needed.

So those are the four questions. They have been around in various forms for many years and they are still being debated by philosophers but I thought they were presented in a very fresh and clear way in the article. One problem with philosophy is that it often chooses to examine questions which aren't real questions because they have no definite answers.

The answers I gave (which are all very pragmatic) could just as easily be reversed so I don't pretend my answers have any special relevance. And I haven't yet decided whether the answers don't exist because the questions are badly formed and can never be answered or that we just aren't smart enough yet! Maybe that's another question to consider: how do we tell which questions should have an answer and which shouldn't!

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