What is wrong in the world and what is to be done about it?
What is wrong inside each individual and what is each of us to do about it?
I am not going to give my answers here. This is not a political or spiritual tract! - although we can get into any discussions in the combox.
Poul Anderson's Technic History shows us characters who address at least one of these questions.
The World Question
David Falkayn founds Supermetals which benefits planetary populations left behind by Technic civilization.
Nicholas van Rijn does not understand the question but is persuaded to play along with Supermetals.
Chunderban Desai analyses the causes of civilizational decline in the hope that the decline, when understood, can be reversed.
Dominic Flandry strengthens several planets so that they will survive the post-Imperial Long Night.
The Inner Question
Adzel practices Mahayana Buddhism and spends three years in a monastery after he has retired from trade pioneering.
Some characters believe that "They" will answer both questions for us.
7 comments:
But 'wrong' is a purely subjective judgment -- an electrochemical event in your head, and nothing else. There's no objective reason to define one person's perception of 'wrong' as superior to anyone else's.
This is the mind-body problem again, which I think is the central question of all philosophy.
Consider a value judgement. Someone observes an objective fact like preventable suffering, then subjectively judges that such suffering is "wrong" and "should" be prevented. (Not sneer quotes. Just differentiating the value terms as far as possible.) To give a full account of such a value judgement, we must refer to a person, a self-conscious rational linguistic being with a set of memories, capable of perceiving an environment and individual concepts, applying concepts, formulating judgements, articulating evaluations etc. The value judgement cannot be fully accounted for without referring to something outside the person's head, namely the sights and sounds that he had interpreted as showing that another organism was experiencing pain, discomfort, dissatisfaction etc.
Consider an electrochemical event in your head. Some neurons fire electrically, then interact electrochemically with a lot of other neurons, causing those other neurons also to fire electrically. This entire event can be fully described without referring to a person, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, language, values etc and also without referring to anything outside the head. The neuronic event inside the head is caused by something coming in from outside the head, namely light waves entering the visual centre of the brain via the retina but the event itself can be fully described without also describing its cause.
We have been making value judgements for longer than we can remember having done so, both individually and collectively. In the Bible, the heart was regarded as the organ of understanding. "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" meant that God prevented Pharaoh from understanding, not that He made him unfeeling.
Comparatively recently, it has been learned that neuronic interactions, as far as we can see, cause animal and human consciousness. We do not understand how this happens. An effect is not simply identical with its cause. In this case, the cause and the effect have very different properties and descriptions.
A mental act, unlike a physical act, can have a non-existent object. I can look for the Holy Grail but not drink from it. We can think about the square root of minus one. But such thoughts are surely not simply identical with particular neuronic interactions?
I think that consciousness is an interaction between an entire organism and its entire environment with the central nervous system and the brain playing a key role in transforming organismic sensitivity into conscious sensation which then leads to perception and thought. So the neurons are crucial but not the whole story.
CORRECTION: In the second paragraph above, the phrase, "and individual concepts," should read, "and individual objects."
Of course light waves do not go all the way into the brain. They cause electrical impulses inside the brain. But how does this cause seeing? The seeing is not simply the same thing as a neuronic interaction in the visual centre. When you describe your experience of seeing something outside your head, you do not describe or even known about the electrical state of certain neurons in any particular part of your brain.
Your value judger is working from a utilitarian perspective -- illustrating that you can argue rationally -from- a moral premise, but not -to- one. The response is "I don't give a damn about preventable suffering".
The value judgement remains subjective? A big discussion. But my main point here was to argue that it, the value judgement, is something more and other than just an electrochemical event inside someone's head.
Kaor, to Both!
And I believe many bad acts are indeed bad. E.g., to deliberately kill a human being at any stage of his life can never be anything but murder.
Ad astra! Sean
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