Philosophy (Part 2 of 3)

#2 Philosophy is needed for good living
What is the meaning of life? This is often posed as an unanswerable question, one that philosophers waste their time discussing. But the reality is that we all have an answer. When we get out of bed and go to school or work, it’s because we’ve answered that question in some way. But did we ever really think about it? For most, the answer is ‘no’. Most people accept the answers given to them by others who have thought about it. This is often unconscious; it diffuses into a person’s mind slowly over years. Hearing a thousand times in a thousand ways, in lecture halls, textbooks, and conversations that “God is dead,” and “Life has only the meaning you give it” you will slowly drift in that direction if unhindered. Of course, you don’t have to choose, but, in the words of Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

We are fiercely individualistic in almost every other way. We like to believe that our thoughts are our own. We dress uniquely. We listen to unique music. And we are our own person. But we all think the same. And we resist any conversation or thought in ourselves that might expose and thus endanger this homogeneity. I often hear, “I don’t spend time talking about philosophy. I’m a practical person.” If that is you, you are an efficient slave to a master not of your choosing. Indeed, we are all slaves to some worldview or other, but why anyone would take pride in his blind obedience is baffling. We value ‘practicality,’ but fail to see that the same trench can be dug for Hitler or for the Allies; the goodness of the digger is not in his speed but in his master. If we asked a Nazi soldier, “Is Fascism a good form of government?” he could respond, “I don’t spend time talking about philosophy. I’m a practical person” as he continues digging. Should we leave our goodness in the hands of the society into which we happened to be born? We can transcend our present time and place with an ancient and mystical art: reading. If every German had challenged the assumptions of their society and read even the first chapter of The Republic, they might have realized that “…it is not the work of the just man to harm either a friend or anyone else…” (335d).

Philosophy deals strongly with living a good life. Of all the time we spend, don’t you think we should figure out what exactly a good life is? If we get that one wrong, then pretty much everything else is in vain. There are things that I would take on authority: unimportant things upon which there is much agreement. The functioning of physics. The existence of a city called Boston. I trust that I’m not being lied to. Even if I was, it wouldn’t matter that much to me (sorry Harvard). But some things are important and there is little agreement on. These are the things I don’t want to have to trust anybody about. What is Justice? What is the Good? Does God exist? How do we think about pirating music? Is the present system of education well-founded? I don’t want to entrust these answers to a social lottery of influences; I want to have reasons that I myself understand.

It is often true that being able to think about the basic elements of a thing help with planning. If one truly understands what a community is, or what a human is, or what education is, then the plans to bring about changes in those things come more easily. For easy things, knowledge of physics helps with building a bridge. But knowledge of what helps with building a government? And what is the process by which such complex things are developed? Philosophy is essential for these questions.

One more thing. If you actually think you have a good answers for important questions, share them. In the Republic, Socrates’ says of a man who wants to leave the discussion without fully sharing his opinion, “…you have no care for us and aren’t a bit concerned whether we shall live worse or better as a result of our ignorance of what you say you know” (344e).

So getting stuff done isn’t good enough to be Good. It’s what you’re doing it for that matters (a good Worldview or bad one). And that decision should be one you make, not one you are assigned. And to make a decision on these matters requires study and discussion.

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3

Philosophy (Part 1 of 3)

I just finished book I of “The Republic” after having a very stimulating conversation on politics over dinner. (Before I go on, and before you go on, read “The Republic.” I know it sounds scary. That’s why I waited. But I was stupid and don’t want you to make the same mistake. It’s a really great book.)

Anyways, the thought I had was on how deep conversation is perceived. I am often asked after I’ve had a particularly good discussion with another person, “So, did you get anywhere?” I’ve always been annoyed by this question, but kept it to myself because I assumed my questioner was right: philosophy doesn’t ‘progress’ in a straight line like most other fields. Often the conclusions of an hour of discussion land the discussants very close to where they started. I was usually embarrassed that we had not made much ‘progress’ towards solving the Problem of Governance in an hour as we would have if we were discussing a crossword puzzle (we might have even finished it).

But I do not think that way anymore. Because, as I have seen them, there are at least three good reasons why studying and discussing philosophy is a good idea. And don’t get tripped up on the word “philosophy” (“phileo” = love; “sophy” = wisdom); I mean discussing hard questions that don’t have easy answers. This covers everything from God’s existence to the wrongness of pirating music. Ultimately, what is the Good that we should pursue and the True that we should believe? These aren’t dry academic discussions about nothing for no end; they’re the essence and motivation of all our decisions. When I say ‘philosophy’ I don’t mean the class you took as a gen-ed requirement.

#1 Philosophy is good exercise
Imagine a race run in a circuit. The gun goes off, and the race begins. The fastest racers stay together, neck and neck, running hard for mile after grueling mile. Two pull ahead of the rest, sweating hard. Finally one of them, in a final exertion, gets ahead and wins the race. And then from the bleachers an onlooker, empty popcorn bag in hand, snipes to the winner, “So, did you get anywhere?” Such a question should be answered by something like, “No, ***hole, I didn’t. I just ran a ****ing race.” [1] This is sometimes how I feel when that question is posed to me after a good discussion. Someone who didn’t do any work presumes that the point of the exertion was to ‘get somewhere,’ and, seeing no ‘progress,’ mocks the waste of time and sweat.

Having a philosophical discussion makes you a stronger person. I got this idea from Francis Bacon who said, “So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt”[2]. He doesn’t see the mind as a muscle; it’s more like a body. There are multiple muscles that need exercising, and so different exercises for each. There is a part of our mind which reasons philosophically, and by exercising it, it gets stronger. Philosophical discussion about topics so big they won’t get solved are like dumbbells: not directly useful (though valuable, see #3), but weights which when lifted repeatedly, make a person strong for other, more useful endeavors (see #2).

[1] *** = ‘ant’ and **** = ‘frak’ above
[2] Francis Bacon's essay "On Studies": “Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast… So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again … So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt.” [As a side note, I love being able to remember three words in an essay I read two years ago that was written five centuries ago, typing them into Google, and then being presented with the entire essay in a matter of seconds.]

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3

Professional Development

I sat on a panel today for premeds for the first time. They asked questions about (see if you can guess) getting into medical school. Would it look bad if I ____? Would doing ____ help me get in?

After about an hour, I got frustrated. They had become slaves; they were living their lives for admissions committees. Every decision they made was made with a committee's opinion in mind. In considering a volunteer opportunity at a hospital, the only end for one of the students was medical school. No thought was put into the impact he could make or the virtue in humble service. The decision was entirely based on how it would look. Eventually my frustration boiled over and I said to them, "Who cares if you get into medical school? Do what is right and what is good. If you get into medical school, great."

I strive to live by my own words, to do things for the goodness of them rather than how it would make me look. But I am a fallen man. I have not consistently maintained this attitude. But I recognize it as sin. I don't think these students see their attitude towards medical school as a problem. And that is frightening.

Though their end is a theoretical good ("Helping people"), it seems that it is achieved by four years of disregard for goodness, efficacy and excellence. Though the best applicants are those who do pursue goodness (it has been my experience that Stanford, being incredibly selective, includes mostly this sort of student), many (perhaps most) who go to medical school are those who were best able to please admissions committees. And these are the men and women who become doctors. Are we surprised that doctors, when they become doctors, are not passionate about the good, are not ruthlessly efficient and cost-controlling, and are not always role models of excellent human beings? Perhaps our selection process is filtering out those who would are Good in favor of those who are good at pleasing others.

Why are so many striving for this end? I think a part of it is power. Doctors command a power and a respect in our society that is rivaled by few. Those who care about 'medical service' rarely even consider DO school (which arguably give better clinical training), because we'd only get DO behind our name and not the coveted MD. MD's have more power than DO's. And Harvard MD's have more social power than UCLA MD's. Even I am guilty of desiring this power. You might ask, "But isn't it power for a good end?" It is. At least at first. The trick is keeping one's focus on the Good; good intentions can quickly devolve. Even if the start is noble, the Good can get lost in the pursuit of power.

There is a great danger in living one's life to please men. This is a warning I need to remember myself. Though my career is a valid consideration, the Good is ever what I ought to strive for. Too often I do not think, "What is the best thing I can do here? What is Right?" and instead think, "How do I make myself look good to those who will evaluate me?" My decisions are too often made with respect to the opinions of others disregarding God. Too often I fear man rather than God. And then I euphemize my sin and call it, "Professional Development."

Pro 29:25

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.

What is International Health?

Before I answer the question, I’ll answer "How did we come to call our work International Health?" I imagine it’s because it was doctors who were the first ones to go abroad and serve the poor. As its field diffused, the people working for the poor abroad probably found that all their colleagues self described their field as “International Health,” so by force of peer pressure, it spread.

Believing “International Health” to be a field, undergraduates with this ambition all change their majors to conform to it. Lacking a particular major, they choose the closest approximation. And so the result is every college now has a major full of bright-eyed global service-minded freshmen leaving other departments drained of such people.

But what is it? Despite high enrollment in Hum Bio, International Health is not a unified by field. It includes people from most disciplines who have very different approaches and roles to play. It’s certainly not just doctors (as much as we, in medicine, like to think of ourselves as it’s lynchpin).

Even in its philosophy it is not unified. Some are involved because they believe that human rights are being violated. These view the matter as a sort of legal violation of people by corrupt governments or corporations. Others are quite moralistic about it; they believe they are morally obligated to work abroad. Still others hold that service to the poor is primarily an opportunity to do good; they focus more on the virtue of the service than on the evil in the situation. Some haven’t even thought through their own motivations.

International Health’s real unification is not in philosophy, skill set, or even field (despite the implications of the phrase “International Health”); we are unified by our common desire to improve the condition of the poor (who happen to mostly live abroad). We have a common and united heart. Humanist Moralists and Christian Virtue-Ethicists can work together for the cause of their poorer brothers. So too can anthropologists and artists join with doctors and dentists in bringing help to those in need. International health is not about externals of career or field, nor is it about a unified way of thinking. International Health is a movement of those who have a common heart to improve the condition of the poor abroad.

It seems that the clunky six-syllable name we have inherited is both imprecise and inaccurate. Other alternatives have been suggested like Social Justice (which is definitely snappy but implies a particular philosophy) and International Development (which can get confused with building tract houses in Saudi Arabia), but none have quite captured what it is that unifies us.

I propose the phrase “Global Compassion.” The focus here is on the heart of those engaged in it, not on the field (this may release people from the implied obligation to major in it). It’s specific enough to talk about the focus being abroad, and ‘compassion’ is broad enough to include work in any field motivated by a good heart. Additionally, compassion demands a relationship; it may help us to remember that, though we may transform corrupt governments and implement stellar public health efforts, our goal in the end is to help individual people.

How would I like to define International Health? “A phrase used in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to describe work in what is now called ‘Global Compassion.’” And I would define Global Compassion as: “A movement characterized by a heart to improve the wellbeing of the poor in all dimensions through the application of various disciplines.”

A Far Cry From Communities

We have forgotten the community. We think of problems as either being solvable by governments (through public policy and politics) or by the individual (microfinance, ‘grassroots’). We don’t think much about the community, but it is the location and society where most of humanity has its existence. What is a community? Many a debate can be had on this, but I’ll give a practical definition. I mean the people you will reasonably run into at the grocery store or pass on a sidewalk. This is your community. Sure you live in Los Angeles, but the 10,000 or so people in your immediate vicinity have a bigger impact on your life than the 3.8 million others.

Sure you’re an American, but there’s vastly more variation from West LA to East LA than there is between “America” and “Britain.” Your community, not your country and not even your race, is more predictive as to whether you’ll get diabetes, graduate from high school, or get killed by gang violence.

In light of that, how many of us vote in our local elections? We think about changing America or the world, but how many have thought changing the community a valid ambition?

When we think about Global problems, we think of it in terms of governments and individuals. I can’t name you a single village or town in Africa. But I know that Zimbabwe is suffering from Cholera, and that Malawi is dealing with HIV. I know that DRC has unstable governance and that Sudan has a refugee problem. We pass laws and give aid to governments and countries. We don’t care about communities.

Also, I’ve seen pictures of a starving child, or an AIDS patient, but I can’t tell you a thing about the community from which they came. We give microloans to individuals and sponsor individual children. But what about their communities?

But what has been shown to be effective? In banking, much expert opinion is suggesting locally administered financial institutions (not the huge mega-global banks). Centralized administration in education, government and even taxation has been shown to be far less effective than local administration, closer to the community. Why have we ignored so crucial a part of our human experience? Why do we think solutions lie in a single individual (the Republican ideal) or in governments (the Democratic ideal), when we live and work in communities?

I propose we bring back the community. We, as a community, work with others in communities to change the world. Let us remember how we, humans, operate. Let us hear the call of our community, far away and faint, and let think rightly about what kind of creatures we are.

Nightmares and Eternity

It’s right behind you. You’re running as fast as you can. But not fast enough. It sinks its foul teeth into your neck. You scream, but you cannot. You wake up. It was only a nightmare.

“What do you mean only a nightmare,” you should ask. Wasn’t the horror real? Surely the cold sweat proves that at least some part of you was in terrible torment moments before waking. But as soon as you see that it isn’t real, it’s better. The memory may linger, but the suffering is gone.

I’m not quite sure why it’s better when you wake up. For other things where the ‘suffering is gone,’ like a past trauma, it’s certainly possible for it not to be better. But nightmares, where you have experienced horrific losses, embarrassments, and died many times over, don’t often have the same sort of power.

I don’t know the mechanism, but I know the effect. In the presence of reality, that which is ethereal passes away as unimportant. Perhaps this is what happens in Eternity. Suffering really happened, as nightmares did, but it doesn’t matter anymore.

In the Lord of the Rings, Sam has this feeling at the end of the book; when he sees Gandalf he asks, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” I think the answer is, “Yes.”

The Self and Its Brain

We had a lecture today on “Neuroethics,” and the topic of dualism was briefly touched on, but in a manner which was rather disturbing.

Dualism, as described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is, “…the theory that the mental and the physical — or mind and body or mind and brain — are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing.” This is the view that has been traditionally held by the majority of people, and the view that most easily allows one to believe in an immortal soul (so obviously favored by religious folks through the ages). At least it’s a valid theory, right?

Well, not according to what we learned today in lecture.

"The whole universe of your perceptions, your thoughts, your actions, your intentions, your motives your purposes, it's neurons giving off and taking up packets of neurotransmitters, and that's pretty much all there is...The “I” that they experience is really just dopamine and serotonin and other stuff being given off and picked up, and ions going in and ions coming out.... There's certainly no scientific evidence for dualism, for the idea that there's a little homunculus someplace, incorporeal, not physical, that somehow through some magical method connects to your brain, but that it is you and your brain isn't. Your mind, as far as we can tell, is what your brain does."

The strength of the rejection was jarring. I thought it was a legitimate theory. Nope. It’s “some magical method.” But because of the strength of rejection, I was forced to second-guess myself. So I did a bit of research. Who supported it?

I did not expect what I found. Beyond the usual suspects who are way too smart to count for anything (people like Aristotle, Augustine, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes), dualism found support among a very impressive list of scientists and philosophers in the twentieth century. There are strong supporters even in Neuroscience itself.

And I’m not talking about fringe characters. I’m talking about people who laid the foundations of neuroscience. A dualist (Sherrington) won the Nobel Prize for "discoveries regarding the functions of neurons” in 1932. I’d say neurons are pretty important to neuroscience. A decade later, Sherrington wrote a book called “Man on his Nature” expressing dualism. Another dualist named Eccles got the Nobel Prize in 1963 for figuring out how synapses worked and then went on to defend dualism the rest of his life. Later in his life, he worked with a famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Popper was hugely influential in our modern understanding of science (he introduced the idea of science having to be ‘falsifiable’). Popper and Eccles published, “The Self and its Brain” in 1977 defending dualism.

It’s hard for me to imagine a better list of advocates for my position: the most important philosopher of science last century, the guy who discovered neurons, and the guy who figured out synapses. Of course there are others. Jeffry Schwartz, a Psychiatrist at UCLA is treating people with OCD according to the philosophy that the mind is not just the brain. Roger Penrose, a giant in mathematical physics, argues for the inadequacy of physics to explain consciousness. Daniel Robinson, a brilliant scholar trained both in philosophy and neuroscience (and who co-authored a book with Eccles), speaks and writes extensively on this topic.

If such brilliant people support it, why is there such opposition? Robinson offers one possible reason, “It would be naive to ignore one fundamental difference between that world [of Sherrington] and the present: the gargantuan monetary stakes and associated perquisites on offer to those who can make and keep the brain sciences big science. There is so much of all this to go round that even philosophers of the right sort stand to gain.” In other words, you can get huge grants to investigate ‘the neurological cause of crime,’ only so long as crime is a brain state. If human responsibility exists beyond the brain, you can’t study it with expensive fMRI machines.

Are all modern philosophers against dualism? According to SEP, the answer is ‘No’: “Amongst mainstream philosophers, discontent with physicalism led to a modest revival of property dualism in the last decade of the twentieth century.” So I am satisfied. If I looked around on my side and saw nobody (as was suggested was the case by our lecturer today), I would be concerned. But indeed the case is reversed. On this philosophical question, I have all on my side but most modern scientists and some philosophers, whose views are severely biased by preexisting commitments to Materialism and money. Even the agnostic founders of neuroscience agree with me. Indeed, as the SEP entry on dualism describes, “although dualism has been out of fashion … the argument is by no means over.”

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/ - Most of my references come from here.