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An earthquake produces the strangest sensations. First you just feel a bit odd, and wonder what's going on, then your stomach starts to churn, your heart-rate goes up, and your balance goes a bit wobbly. I suppose the shaking also shakes up your semi-circular canals. It's also hard to think straight.
My first experience of an earthquake was on Friday, the second big earthquake to hit Turkey this year, but I was in Ankara, well away from the epicentre in the North-West of the country. If such a mild tremor made me feel this weird, God knows what it felt like there, with a full 7.2 on the Richter scale. In fact I only felt it at all because I was on the fifth floor, and could actually see the building sway - friends at ground level hardly noticed. What I was doing on the fifth floor was attending a seminar on philosophy and artificial intelligence given by my friend John Bolender (the "real philosopher" I mentioned in last month's diary). The title was "Are computers real?", though, as someone suggested, "Are earthquakes real?" might have been more appropriate.
Actually, this was more about John Searle, he of the Chinese Room experiment which had me puzzled for most of last month. What John S. was claiming (and John B. was arguing against) was that computation cannot exist without a human subject. Put simply, all that clever stuff "in" your computer doesn't exist unless you're there to watch it. This sounds rather like the old thing about a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it, but Searle was no idealist - quite the opposite, in fact. For him, trees are real, but computers aren't, or rather, computers are real physical objects, but they don't actually compute. Computation requires an algorithm, which is a series of operations on data to obtain a particular kind of result. In other words, every algorithm is a procedure with a purpose, and only conscious beings like humans have purpose. A computer does things which, from our point of view, carry out an algorithm, like finding the sum of two numbers or running a video game, but the algorithm is not in the computer, any more than it would really exist on a piece of paper if you wrote it out by hand. It's a similar argument to the Chinese Room, only more radical.
This argument also means that nothing in the natural world has function. Hearts pump blood, but we cannot say that the function of a heart is to pump blood, any more than we could say that its function was to make thumping noises. According to John S., when we say "The function of the heart is to pump blood," we really mean "The heart pumps blood, and I think this is a good thing." A statement about a function is also a statement of value. What John B. was arguing when we were shaken up by the earthquake was that John S. ignores the fact that the heart evolved to pump blood, and not to make thumping noises or whatever. No blood, no heart. If a heart can have a "purpose" in this sense, then so can a computer. This doesn't necessarily mean that computers can think or be aware, but that they do not need to be aware in order to compute. At this point, the building started wobbling, and most people left, including our speaker. The tremor stopped pretty quickly, and John was hauled back inside to finish his talk for the hardcore philosophers who had stayed. To his credit, when the aftershock came, he didn't even pause in mid-sentence. Of course, it's pretty silly to sit around talking philosophy in a building that is swaying from side to side, but you feel this kind of obligation to carry on. It reminded me of a passage in Neal Ascherson's Black Sea about the philosopher Dio Chrysostom's arrival at the backwater colony of Olbia:
By now a small crowd of citizens had gathered round Dio and Callistratus. Dio suggested that they could talk more easily if they went back inside the walls. Olbia was being raided almost daily by small Scythian war-parties, who had murdered or abducted several sentries on outpost duty only the day before. Dio, who had a normal sense of self-preservation, had noticed not only that the gates were being shut but that the alarm flag had been hoisted onto the battlements. But the Olbians seemed indifferent to danger, and wanted to start a philosophical discourse with their guest on the spot.
(Ascherson, 1996: 71)
It's nice to see that this kind of bloody-minded spirit is still alive and well (though of course if the epicentre had been closer, we might not have been).
Getting back to this business of function, purpose and value, I find Searle's philosophy quite in tune with my own in some ways, and not at all in others. People who've looked at the other parts of this website may have noticed that my personal philosophy has two parts which don't quite meet up. One part, the "bottom-up" approach, starts with language and moves up into practical psychology and ethics (How to get an 'ought' from an 'is', Yet more thoughts on 'the Good' and "Male logic" and "women's intuition" ). This part is quite in tune with the idea that function is related to value, or, in my version, desire. Things are not "good" in themselves, they are good for some person, for some purpose. Similarly, we can only say that we "ought" to do something if we have some purpose in mind which is desirable and will be achieved by doing this thing. Following the same logic, we could perhaps say that function, too, is an aspect of desire (though with a possible alternative meaning as described by John B. ).
The "top-down" part ( Pattern, Awareness, Process) is totally different, starting with metaphysics and working its way down through philosophy of mind to ethics. In this system the universe is viewed as a fusion of awareness and pattern (which includes what we regard as matter and energy, but also a lot of what we call thought). Patterns have what I call "intrinsic tendencies", which is the way they will develop if nothing else stops them (a bit like Aristotle's telos). Mind is simply awareness of certain types of pattern, so there is no radical difference between the intrinsic tendency of a person and that of a molecule. From this I try to get to a basis for ethics, but to be honest, it doesn't really work yet, and the last section of Pattern, Awareness, Process is pretty weak. What I end up doing is, like Humpty Dumpty, redefining words to mean exactly what I want to mean.
Well, they say that two heads are better than one, but not on the same pair of shoulders, perhaps. Trying to synthesise opposing beliefs can be fun, but walking around with two different philosophies which are both your own has a disorienting effect not that different from what I was feeling when the room starting moving from side to side - a bit like being in two places at once.
On the other hand, things hot up after midnight, as the prime time zone moves east. Thais, Malays, Indonesians and especially Filipinos seem to have better taste in Western music, and their own products, though rarely shown, are pretty wacky. In particular I loved the Malaysian piss-takes of Lou Vega and Boyzone. And then there is Donita, a VJ of South-East Asian origin, who evokes feelings of devotion in me exceeded only by a few goddesses like Juliette Binoche. I don't know what it is in me that makes me want to offer my body and soul to women I've never met, but I'm sure it's politically incorrect, and probably pathological into the bargain.
Hopping back to the other side of the bridge, I tuned into BBC World and noted to my pleasure that the opening ceremony of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle had been cancelled because of massive street protests. Before this I had only known Seattle as the site of a famous fire (which left an underground city below the new Seattle) and the home of a large number of alternative (and usually bad) rock groups. But it seems the good citizens of Seattle have got their act together in opposing unbridled capitalism. The WTO seems to be composed of a group of lizards who skimmed through Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and concluded that anything that makes a buck must be good for humanity - or at least for reptiles. An example given by the BBC is that recent British legislation banning the sale of asbestos could be overturned by the Canadians, who are a major exporter of this lethal substance. By this logic, the WTO should intervene to stop such ugly scenes as the mass graves on the Mexican border by forcing America to repeal its anti-market laws on drugs. Similarly, it should support the terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan in the European Court of Human Rights, since whatever political aims the PKK may have, it is supporting the passage of heroin into Europe, which can only be good for free trade. And while we're at it, what about the arms trade? Nuclear non-proliferation treaties simply have to go. If some countries want to sell enriched uranium, and other countries want to buy it, why should we stamp on their rights because some woolly lefties think it might cause a nuclear war? I think it was Bakunin who defined a capitalist as someone who would finance a revolution for the following Monday so long as he could turn in a profit on Tuesday ... even if it meant that he'd be shot on the Wednesday. Way to go, WTO.
Ramadan has not been commercialised in the way Christmas has. It's hard to make money out of people not consuming, although restaurants do a thriving trade once the sun has set. The degeneration of Ramadan is more subtle. Ten or twenty years ago, fewer Turks observed Ramadan, but those who did, I hear, did it much more in the original spirit; that is, quietly and without show. Now, however, with the increase in nouveaux-pious types, it has turned into a bit of a show. At work, people who don't fast are isolated by the conversations about what everyone's going to eat when the sun sets. Tradition has it that you break your fast with pitta bread, olives and a little cheese, and have a proper meal later when your stomach's settled, but now, with Ramadan in Winter, the opportunity to guzzle in front of your workmates is too tempting to be missed - "Hey you, I'm eating all this yummy food, and it's OK because I'm a good Muslim, so don't even think about asking me to mind the shop." Conspicuous consumption indeed.
Going without food also makes your breath smell - if I'm even a couple of hours late for a meal my insides produce a foul miasma which can only be kept within the bounds of the Geneva Convention by liberal application of mouth-spray. Unfortunately, current orthodoxy outlaws even this, on the grounds that nothing is supposed to pass your lips (which on the positive side, makes people cut down on cigarettes). More traditional Muslims are therefore careful not to breath in your face, but again some people seem to be either oblivious to this fact of biology, or even take a perverse pleasure in blasting you with wicked organic molecules.
Finally, there's the traffic problem. When Ramadan falls in Winter and co-incides with the rush-hour, the normally dangerous Turkish traffic starts to resemble a demolition derby as people rush home to eat. Again, this defeats the whole point, which is to teach a little patience and self-denial.
Further problems are caused by the fact that this year, like last year, New Year comes in the middle of Ramadan. Christmas is not a problem, since Muslims don't celebrate it but have no objections to Christians doing so, and if Christians want to get drunk, that's their problem. New Year is trickier, since it's a popular celebration in Turkey (which uses the Western, not the Arabic calendar). Even Turks, who are renowned for their consumption of alcohol, usually lay off the booze during Ramadan (unless they're atheists) so this will detract somewhat from the millenium festivities. Worse, some fundamentalists are against the idea of New Year's celebrations altogether, since they view it as a Christian custom. Of course, it isn't. Christmas may be a Christianised pagan festival, but no one has ever tried to interpret New Year's Eve this way - it's as secular and hedonistic as they come. There again, one fundamentalist politician also denounced democracy, saying that the word comes from the Greek daimonos kratos, or rule by a demon, which shows an ignorance of etymology matched only by radical feminists.
People might get the impression from all this that I'm against the whole idea of Ramadan, but in fact I think it's a wonderful tradition, iff it is observed in its original spirit. I won't be fasting, since, aside from the fact that I'm horrendously self-indulgent, the only time I fasted, I lost consciousness, but I wish all my fasting friends the best. Just remember the Turkish saying: "Sins should be secret, and so should virtues."
On the subject of silly news, some time back, New Scientist asked its readers to submit the headlines they would most like to see in the year 2000. Since I missed the deadline for that, here I my own choices: