On the meaning of interpretation for science

A discussion is going on in the philosophy of science on the question whether understanding phenomena is relevant for science and, if so, how it takes place. This is to such an extent remarkable that the main stream of science has always propagated the view that it is the aim of science to explain phenomena and that there is no room for understanding because it is considered subjective and in science there should be no place for subjectivity. Since Carl G. Hempel developed his famous deductive-nomological model of explanation the main stream view maintained that for explaining in science only the relation between the phenomena, other phenomena and an explaining theory was relevant. This theory was supposed to be valid at any place and at any time. In this view there was no room for an investigating subject that did the research and for whom the relation investigated had to be true, not to speak of a wider research community and a wider public. This idea of science was supposed to be valid for all kinds of investigation that bore the label “scientific” in some way, from sociology and psychology to physics and biology. Of course, opposition to this view did exist, but from the side of the main stream it was often disparagingly called “metaphysical”.

But times are changing and so here, too. Influenced by proposals by the Dutch philosopher Henk de Regt and others more and more it is accepted that the investigator (and with him or her the whole scientific community) is important in the explanation process. More exactly, they say that science is not only about the relation “x explains y” (whereby x is a theory, while y is what is to be explained”, but it is about the relation “x explains y for (the knowing subject) z” (Karl-Otto Apel, Die Erklären-Verstehen Kontroverse in transzendental pragmatischer Sicht, 1979; p. 267; there is also an English translation of this book). In this view there is not only room for understanding, but it is an essential part of it. What I find annoying in the present discussion about the place of the knowing subject and the interpretative part in the scientific process is that there is hardly any reference to the “old” opponents against the two-dimensional view of the scientific process, so to Apel in the first place.

What does the “new” interpretative part of science involve? How must we imagine it? In a blog like this I can give only a few hints. In my dissertation about understanding human actions, I have defended the view that interpretation is placing a phenomenon in a kind of mental scheme of the type as developed by Schank and Abelson, which I have mentioned already several times in my blogs. Maybe this can be related to the idea of the significance of model construction for understanding in the way as it has been proposed by de Regt. In my dissertation I have also developed the view that in order to understand human actions we have to answer three questions, namely the questions 1) what an action is; 2) what an action is for; and 3) why an action is performed. The first question asks for a description of an action, the second one for its intention and purpose and the third one for the reasons behind the action: what made the agent to perform this act. By extension (and of course adapted to the object of investigation) these questions apply for understanding in the social sciences in general. Do these questions also apply for science in general? If we forget for a moment that they are about understanding actions in a narrow sense and not for the scientific process in general, maybe they apply not exactly as they stand here. However, I think that they are a good starting point for thinking about what understanding involves when we say that an investigator not only explains a phenomenon but also that the resulting explanation is understood.

What makes us happy?

I am not so happy now, for I am using my computer. At least, that is what I have to conclude from a study by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University. Actually it is not using my home computer as such that makes me unhappy but that it makes my mind wandering. As the title of their study indicates, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind”, so a mind that does not concentrate on the task that it is supposed to do is not happy.

I’ll skip the methodological details, but the researchers asked 2250 people what they were doing, what they were feeling then and whether they were thinking about something else. The surprising result was that most of the time we do not think about what we do: our mind “wanders” and is full of other thoughts. No less than 30% and up to nearly half of the time we spend on an activity we are thinking about something else: about what we did yesterday, about the meal we have to prepare this evening, about our next holiday, and so on. And what turned out, too: this mind wandering makes us unhappy. What we need for being happy is concentration. Do what you do, and nothing else. But as everybody knows, the mind tends to be easily distracted. And so we are unhappiest when we are using our home computer, when we are working and when we are resting. The two latter activities are a bit contradictory, for if both working and resting makes us unhappy, what else can we do in order to feel well? Apparently there are activities that are seen as neither the first nor the second, and it is these that make us happy. Therefore, make love! There is no other activity that requires more concentration. But there are also good alternatives: exercise, or engaging in conservation. They make us happy, too.

Mind wandering has also a positive side: the more you day dream, the more creative you are. It is also important in evaluating how you behaved towards other people and how you’ll behave in future. So, it brings you benefits, but not without emotional costs.

The upshot is that for being happy, you have to concentrate on what you do, on the here and now, something that some religions tell you, too. But should I stop writing my blogs, because using my computer makes me unhappy? I have my doubts, for when I let my mind now wander over the blog that I have just written, I realize that writing it required much concentration. Maybe it is true on the average that using your home computer makes you unhappy; according to me it cannot be taken as a general rule. Anyway, I feel well by writing these sentences. However, after an hour or so, my blog is finished and I am longing for a rest. Then the study by Killingsworth and Gilbert explains to me that it is no good idea. Happily, there is something else I can do so that my state of happiness will continue: to take my bike and make a ride.

The meaning of what we make

Staphorst, the Netherlands: typical farm house

When interpreters analyse a text, they tend to see more in it than the author originally had put into it: they often think to find a meaning behind the text that the writer was unaware of. This textual interpretation, which originally goes back to the exegesis of the Bible, led later – under the influence of Dilthey – to the thought that other forms of human life could be considered as texts as well. So, the idea developed that also actions can be interpreted as texts. A recent form of this, which I have discussed in other blogs, is the view that an action can have different descriptions, which actually is the same as the idea that it can have different interpretations. For instance, opening the door of your house can be interpreted as it is, but sometimes it can also be described as warning the thief who is upstairs, because he hears the noise. Interpreting human life need not be limited to human activities as such, like actions, but can also be extended to the material products of what men do: the tools they make, the houses they build, their art, and much more. These human products get often a symbolic meaning that exceeds by far what the makers of these products had laid in it when they made it.

A recent critic of the symbolic interpretation of material culture is Nicole Boivin, especially in her Material cultures, material minds. Boivin does not deny that material cultural expressions can have symbolic meanings, but what is problematic in this approach in cultural anthropology and archaeology is according to her that the symbolic meanings are often so much seen as the only correct interpretation of these material expressions that plain interpretations are rejected, even when both types of interpretations could be equally true or the plain interpretation may be better. Boivin uses an example of her own, but take this. In the Dutch villages Staphorst and Rouveen, traditionally the window frames and doors have the colours green, white and blue; green symbolizing young life in nature, white symbolizing purity and blue being used because it averts calamities. But need it really be so that a modern farmer painting his farm, or a city-dweller who has bought a farm there as a second house give these meanings to the colours? Of course not. When we ask the city-dweller, for instance, why she paints her farmhouse with these colours, there is a good chance that she knows nothing about their original meanings. Probably she’ll answer that she wants to maintain the traditional view of the village; that she wants to have the appearance of her house in agreement with the neighbouring farms; or simply that she likes the colours. Or maybe it is so that the local acts prescribe these colours. In other words, it is quite well possible that there is no symbolic meaning behind the present material expression of the painting; that the original meaning of the colours has been lost; and that nowadays the colours are used for quite banal reasons.

This makes me think of the explanation of the Japanese tea ceremony which I once received during the “Japanese week” in the town where I live. The woman performing the tea ceremony told about its religious meaning and the special feelings it arouses in the participants. I did not doubt it, but I had a good pen friend in Japan that performed the tea ceremony now and then, so I asked her what she thought of it. Well, she said, I’ll not deny this explanation and it is true that some tea ceremony performers get a special feeling by doing it, but for many Japanese it is simply a thing they sometimes do and for me it is just a hobby…

Does a young life count more than an old life?

Most people outside Japan do not realize that the Fukushima calamity is still a part of the daily reality for many Japanese. One thing that actually hasn’t been solved so far is the threatening “meltdown” of the power plant, which can be stopped only, as a website explains, by “suppress[ing] the nuclear chain reaction by inserting control rods into the reactor core and … gradually cool[ing] the fuel rods with constantly circulating water.” However, the cooling system of the Fukushima nuclear plant has been destroyed, too. A temporary solution has been found by hosing the nuclear reaction system with water, but it is only a short-term solution. Moreover it can lead to nuclear pollution of the environment. So a more permanent solution has to be found, like repairing the damaged cooling system or replacing it by a new one. But as the same website says: “Repair or installation of the cooling system will unavoidably be conducted in an environment highly contaminated with radioactive elements with serious risk of future health complications.” Since apparently this cannot be done by robots, the question arises then: who should do the job? According to Yastel Yamada, a business consultant who manages the website just mentioned, it is not expedient to take younger people for it: “Young people with a long future should not have to be placed in a position of having to undertake such a task. Radiation exposure of a generation which may reproduce the next generation should be avoided, regardless of the amount.” Besides, it is not they who are responsible for the construction of nuclear power plants but it is the older generation that is and this generation has also benefitted most of them. Therefore a “Skilled Veterans Corps” should be formed consisting of “volunteers of veteran technicians and engineers who are much more qualified to carry out the work with much better on-site judgment.”

At first sight this argument sounds reasonable but is it really so? There may be nothing against using volunteers for doing the job, but what I am annoyed about in the argument are the implicit (and partly explicit) suppositions that the older generation is guilty, anyhow, of the construction of the Fukushima power plant and that a younger life has more value than an older life. I think that there are good reasons to question both suppositions. Here I do not have the space for an extensive discussion of the arguments, so I want to limit myself to a few remarks. First, a dichotomy between a younger and older generation does not exist. A generation is a sociological category but in fact age differences are on a continuum. Should we then introduce degrees of responsibility and degrees of eligibility for the Volunteer Corps? Second, the “younger generation” may not be responsible for the construction of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, but did it protest against it? And didn’t it profit by the plant as well? Third, “generation” is a sociological category and generations do not exist as such, as I just explained; only individuals exist. How can we make then the “older generation” as a whole responsible for the Fukushima power plant, despite the attitude of its individual members to the plant and despite the degree they have profited by it? Fourth, how to weigh a younger person of say 40 years old who becomes ill after 30 years because of exposure to radiation by repairing the Fukushima power plant against a person of 69 years old who becomes ill after one year, as may happen? Fifth, that the still to be born must not be exposed to radiation is a strong point, but many young people have already children and do not want to have more or they can choose not to have children. Sixth, how to value a life? Hasn’t life a value as such? How to weigh a 70 years old person (who might become 100 years old) against a younger person (who might die young?). Since the length of life can be statistically indicated (but only for a “generation”, not for individuals), is statistics then, for example, a good foundation to value the worth of a life? Or the kind of education a person has received? Or what else? What matters in what the value of a person is and who values?

These are only a few comments that occurred to me when I read the proposal for a Skilled Veterans Corps for repairing the cooling system of the Fukushima power plant, and certainly more can be added, against it and in support of it.

See http://bouhatsusoshi.jp/english

Trip to Wittgenstein

When my wife and I arrived in Skjolden, I did not recognize the little town. Many years ago I had been there with friends, on a tour through Norway. Then I knew about Wittgenstein, of course, although I was not yet very interested in philosophy in those days. However, I did not know that he had built a log cabin there, on the other side of the lake and that he had lived and worked there now and then between 1913 and 1951.

We put up our tent on a camping site a few kilometres from Skjolden, almost under a waterfall. An information board described a path to the place where Wittgenstein’s cabin had been. It was a walk of about 45 minutes, but the last part was steep and dangerous over the rocks.

The next day I felt a bit sick. But okay, I was there for “visiting” Wittgenstein. I took the bag with my cameras, a bit to drink, too, and there we went, my wife and I. First along a tractor path, then through a meadow. We entered a little wood and the path became rocky. It became steeper and steeper, too, and heavy going. I stopped for a moment. My wife, who was some 20 metres ahead of me, said: “I’ll take a look whether it is still far to go”, and gone was she.

When she came back ten minutes later, she had already been “there”. The path had become even steeper, and also a bit slippery. “Not much to see”, my wife said. “Some stone foundations of the log cabin and an Austrian flag”. I am a bad climber and did not feel well, so I decided not to go on.

Back in our tent, my wife showed me the photos she had taken. Next we drove again to Skjolden. Now we knew exactly the place where the log cabin had been. It was on a slope some 30 metres above the surface of the lake. Through my binoculars the foundation and the flag were clearly visible. I wondered how Wittgenstein did the dangerous climb a few times a week for collecting his mail, in summer and in winter. And how he had got the building material there. Elsewhere in Skjolden we saw the house where Wittgenstein had lived during his first stay.

Mirror neurons and the other mind problem

In my last blog I suggested that the existence of mirror neurons may be the solution of the sociological problem of the tuning of individual behaviour to group behaviour; so why people behave as a group animal. Psychologically mirror neurons make that we can feel empathy, easily can learn behaviour and actions and much more. I think that mirror neurons may also offer a solution to an old problem in philosophy: the other mind problem. Or at least they may put the problem in a different light.

The essence of the other minds problem is the question: How can we know that others have minds? So, how can we know that they are not zombies (zombies in the philosophical sense, so mere automata)? Formulated this way the other minds problem is an epistemological problem, a problem about knowing. Thomas Nagel replaces it by the conceptual problem of “how I can understand the attribution of mental states to others” (The view from nowhere, p. 19; italics Nagel), which brings us a step nearer to the mirror neurons. However, if we see the solution of the other minds problem in these neurons, the solution is in the way man is constructed, so then it is ontological.

Of course, one can always remain skeptical and say that the problem cannot be solved, but I think that the essential flaw so far is the intrinsically individualistic approach of the problem. Nagel says: “… to understand that there are other people in the world as well, one must be able to conceive of experiences of which one is not the subject: experiences that are not present to oneself. To do this it is necessary to have a general conception of subjects of experience and to place oneself under it as an instance. It cannot be done by extending to the idea of what is immediately felt into other people’s bodies …’ And a few sentences further: “The problem is that other people seem to be part of the external world…” (p. 20; italics mine). What’s wrong with this is that the conception of man in this quotation implicates that we have an individual and another one (and another one and another and another one….) and that these individuals are external to each other and that it is actually not possible to bridge the gap.

There is no space here to follow Nagel’s approach (which he sees in taking different perspectives or views), but that the portrayal of man presented here is wrong becomes clear once one knows about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons do just what cannot be done according to Nagel: extending the idea of what is immediately felt into other people’s bodies. For it is this what mirror neurons do: reflecting the inner world of others in yourself. It is true, this cannot happen in a 100% reliable way, but it is what they fundamentally do and it is also this what fundamentally makes man the group animal s/he is. Individual man grows up by imitating and simulating what other people do and by internalizing and creatively adapting their forms of behaviour. In a certain sense man mirrors other men. This is only possible if the other men have the same kind of mind as the mirroring man has. For if this weren’t so, the latter couldn’t become the mind possessing group being that s/he is, for what is mirrored in his or her inner self would then not be the other men’s minds, but the zombies who they are, and the mirroring man would become a zombie, too. So if you have a mind, other people have minds, too.

Mirror neurons and the social sciences

At first sight mirror neurons look relevant only for sciences that study the individual, like psychology where they can help explain and understand many phenomena. But how about the social sciences, for example sociology? Social sciences have collective phenomena as their objects, explaining why many people together behave or act in a certain way. This can be group behaviour, for example when a sociologist studies organisations; it can be aggregated individual behaviour, for example when a sociologist studies voting patterns related to the sociological background characteristics of the voters; or it can be a mixture of both, for example when a sociologist studies social movements. And there are many other themes, too, in which collective behaviour plays a part in some way play (peace research, for instance). But how could such an individual phenomenon as mirror neurons be useful here? Isn’t it a well-known fallacy to see collective phenomena, social phenomena, just as individual phenomena packed together?

If I would plead for a reduction of collective phenomena to a mere piling up of individual actions and pieces of behavior without interactions, I would walk into that fallacy, indeed. Moreover, I do not want to say that mirror neurons are relevant for every theme in the social sciences. Despite that, there is a place for them, I think. There are several sociological approaches, but wasn’t it Max Weber who in a famous definition of sociology founded social action on individual actions? For he defined sociology as: “the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By ‘action’ in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract.” (Economy and Society, § 1; italics mine; translation Wikipedia). Seen this way, for instance, I think there is room for mirror neurons in order to understand and explain social phenomena. Mirror neurons can help us make clear for what reasons and from what causes people react to other people, to people around them, anyhow, and why they react in a certain way. They help us understand and explain why people don’t ignore other people but why they pay attention to them and why they react to them. As I see it, mirror neurons are the “missing link” between individual and group, between individual and society. It is a bit as if mirror neurons glue individuals watching each other together.

My mirror neurons trigger my feelings

One of the recent discoveries in neuroscience is the existence of mirror neurones. Mirror neurons are neurons in your brain that fire when you act. But they fire also when you see someone else performing an action and by doing so these neurons reflect or “mirror” the other person’s action in your own mind. Therefore it is as if you place yourself in the other person’s position and as if you are doing his or her action yourself. The importance of mirror neurons is still a matter of much speculation for actually the research is yet in its early stages, but some neuroscientists consider it one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience and I think they are right.

Anyway, if it is really true that by means of mirror neurons it is possible to place yourself mentally in the position of the other, mirror neurons may be important for explaining some significant human phenomena, especially those that require imitative behaviour or imitative imagination. We can think of understanding someone’s intentions (s/he does what I would do in the same situation), empathy (feeling what s/he feels), language learning, gender differences, understanding why people imitate other people or follow them, and much more. Autism may be explained or partially explained by a defect in the mirror neurons.

I had heard several times about mirror neurons and I found them intriguing. So I read a book about it (Mirroring People by Marco Iacoboni) and much of the functioning of human behaviour and feelings became clearer to me: how and why we react to other people (in some circumstances) and the like. Two weeks ago I went to a performance of Puccini’s opera La Bohème, an opera that I saw live for the first time. The production and the singers were very good and the death scene at the end was very well brought and it was very emotional, so that I became emotional, too. Suddenly I thought: my mirror neurons are firing! In case I have such a thought that transcends my feeling or thinking, usually it is so that the feeling or thinking stops immediately and that emotionally I distance myself more or less from what I see or are participating in (which does not need to imply, however, that the event or scene I see or participate in becomes less meaningful or that it gets less value for me). But nothing like that happened now. Apparently my mirror neurons continued firing full out. I couldn’t stop the feeling in any way as if I was nothing but a robot.

The feeling of willing

In his interesting The Illusion of the Conscious Will Daniel M. Wegner defends the thesis that the conscious will is a kind of emotion, namely the emotion that we are the owner of our actions. “Conscious will is the somatic marker of personal authorship, an emotion that authenticates the action’s owner as the self” (p. 327). In short, the conscious will is an authenticy emotion. According to Wegner this makes it the basis of our idea of responsibility. “Moral judgements are based not just on what people do but on what they consciously will” (p. 335). And we feel being responsible for what we consciously do, even though in fact it may be so that the feeling may have nothing to do with the reasons and causes why we actually act, namely that there is a robot in us, as Wegner calls it, or a zombie, as I have called it in other blogs, that takes the decisions and that determines what the right actions are in the circumstances given. Then the feeling of authorship that the conscious will is has nothing to do with the steering of our actions, although the will thinks that it controls them. However, “illusionary or not, conscious will is the person’s guide to his or her own responsibility for action. If you think you willed an act, your ownership of the act is established in your mind. ... We come to think that we are good or bad on the basis of our authorship emotion” (p. 341).

Although Wegner's theory sounds plausible, I want to make two critical remarks. The first one is that Wegner’s theory of the conscious will (but many other theories of the will as well) treats the will as a short term phenomenon: the will to do an act now. However, the conscious will is more than that. It involves also planning: willing something later, in the future. I want to have good places for an opera next February and therefore I have to buy my tickets next week when the advance sale starts. This is another kind of conscious will than the feeling that it is me who wanted to write a note for it in my diary just a few seconds ago.

The other remark is this. According to Wegner, moral judgements are based on what we consciously do (see above). As Wegner had said just before: “a person is morally responsible only for actions that are consciously willed” (p. 334, italics mine). This is the foundation of Wegner’s theory of morality and responsibility. Happily for Wegner it does not have consequences for his theory that the conscious will is an authencity emotion, for what he says here is simply not true. If we were responsible only for our conscious actions, many trials and lawsuits could be skipped. However, we are often also responsible for what we did not consciously do and did not want to happen. Negligence, undesired consequences of our actions, not doing what we supposed to do ... All these things are often considered as happenings that we are held responsible for (and that we are responsible for) but that we did not consciously do. I have talked about it already before. One instance: You cause an accident with your car because you failed to give way to a car coming from the right. Did you consciously drive on without wanting to give way to the right? Of course not. Are you responsible for the accident? Of course you are. And I guess that you feel so, too.

The upshot is that the feeling of authorship of what I do is not limited to what I consciously do. This makes that I can be responsible for I what I did not consciously wanted to do. But the feeling of authorship is also not limited to what I do now or what I did just a moment before. It ranges also over what I did after deliberate planning and preparation. We simply need a wider perspective on what consciously willing is, certainly if we want to relate it to responsibility.

View on the world

In one of my first blogs, more than four years, ago I wrote: “Just the idea: A photo of me in front of the Eiffel Tower with Bourdieu’s Un art moyen in my hand. So sorry that you cannot read the title of the book then...”, and that was it.

I had to think of this blog when I visited the biennial Photo Festival in Naarden last week. I had yet to find a style for my blogs and often I wrote short remarks without any further explanations. This was one of them, and I think not many readers will have understood it. It is already rather long ago that I read Bourdieu’s contribution to this book, so I must recall from memory what it was about. However, what I was referring to was what I call since then a “Bourdieu photo”.  When Tom, Dick and Harry or their female counterparts are going to make a picture of someone they know (and they often make pictures of that kind), the persons are often so far away that you can hardly see who they are, not to speak of what they hold in their hands. And in case the persons photographed haven been taken from nearby it is still often so that much remains on the picture that distracts from what is supposed to be its central theme: the person or persons on it. It is as if the photographer does not want to say: “Look John and Jenny” but “Look John and Jenny have been there” (in Paris, London, or wherever it may be). Or the picture says “Look Jenny in the garden”, while there is actually no relation between Jenny and the garden (she isn’t working in the garden; she isn’t looking at the garden or at a single plant; no, she stands there and there is also a garden). A professional photographer or an advanced amateur photographer would make such a photo in a different way. S/he would concentrate on a theme and would fill the photo with it; and everything else has a place in the picture, too: Jenny looking at the garden or a flower. John looking at or climbing the Eiffel Tower. And so on. That’s why we tend to call the first type of pictures just a shot and the second type portraits. But in the end, what the worth of a picture is depends on what you want to say with it, and from that point of view “just a shot” can do as well as a “real” portrait. It is not without reason that the book by Bourdieu and others has the subtitle “Essay on the social uses of photography”. Photos of the first type simply have another social function than second type photos: They give different views on the world.

I have not a picture at hand like the one described in the old blog, but I wonder whether the reader of this blog would judge the picture above as a “Bourdieu photo” or as something else, when s/he knows that I am one of the persons on it and that I called it “Self-portrait at distance”.

P.S. This year’s Naarden Photo Festival is dedicated to portraits: http://www.fotofestivalnaarden.nl/

Why do we act?

Taking the train

In our daily life we do a lot of actions and when we act we do it for a reason. For instance, I need a book for a project I am working on and I know that they have it in a bookshop in Utrecht. Therefore I take the train to Utrecht, walk to the bookshop and buy the book. For this – rather complicated – action I had first a desire (having the book) and a reason (the project) and some relevant knowledge (how to get the book) and then I performed the action (taking the train etc.). This is how I think that many actions, so intentional doings, take place and many other people think like me. It’s common sense. There is also a special branch of philosophy that analyses actions: action theory. Even more, I got my PhD by writing a dissertation on how to investigate actions. However, does it really work that way?

The answer of neuroscience and neurophilosophy is no. According to these fields of study it has become clear that the way we really act is different. We have two systems in our head. One regulates our actions; let me call it our action controller. The other system is informed about what the action controller does and about the actions we perform, and it tells the world stories that fit the actions: the brain interpreter. I talked already about it in older blogs. How does it work in practice? This can happen in several ways and much more can be said about it, but – and here I follow Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of the Conscious Will, ch. 5 – the two main methods that we use for rationalizing what we do are cognitive dissonance reduction and postbehavioural intention construction. Cognitive dissonance reduction has become well-known by the research by Leon Festinger and his team. In essence it is this: We have good reasons for thinking that doing A is the right way to act, but when it comes to act we actually do B. After the action we construct reasons why doing B was better than A, and we do not only construct such reasons, but we really believe them and maybe even deny that we ever thought differently. However, in many cases we do not have strict attitudes about what we prefer to do and why; maybe we have no advance attitudes at all for acting the way we do. We simply act. Then we construct our reasons and intentions afterwards, and we seriously believe them, too.

Now the nice thing is that one of the points I stressed in my dissertation is that the method I developed there for investigating actions can apply only when an action has already taken place. It can only afterwards reconstruct the reasons, intentions and so on why the agent acted as s/he did and in view of what I just said it is then a reconstruction of the agent’s rationalizations. But the reader of this blog will certainly see this defence of my dissertation as a case of cognitive dissonance reduction, and s/he may be right. Be that as it is, all these insights explaining how we rationalize what we do are very interesting, and they are intriguing, too. For if it isn’t so that we think that we consciously decide what we do on account of relevant reasons and if our explanations afterwards are nothing more than “postaction confabulation[s] of intention” (Wegner), then one question remains for me: why is it then that we act as we do when it is not for reasons? Why then is it that we do just this and not that and what determines what we do?

Did my dopamine do it?

(Background music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYlQ6rs9uZ8)

When I wrote my last week’s blog, I did not expect that soon it would become so relevant. Not the main theme but a little example in it, the case of the influence of dopamine on risk taking and sexual behaviour. More and more it has become clear that a higher dopamine level in your brain stimulates both. The level can be increased by taking the drug for pleasure or for medical reasons, but also when one doesn’t take it there are differences in the dopamine levels in the brains of individual persons resulting, as is to be expected, in different levels of risk taking and sexuality. Since such a connection exists it is likely that both kinds of behaviour tend to go together.

The next cases are not meant for proving this theory and they cannot be more than tentative and suggestive, but take for instance Casanova, an adventurer from the 18th century known by his love affairs who succeeded to get important positions and to gain huge capitals but also lost them again and again. In Mozart’s version of Don Giovanni he had 1003 sweethearts in Spain and many in other countries, too, as we hear in the background music, but when admonished to improve his behaviour, he took the risk to turn a deaf ear to the warning and in the end he went to hell. Often we see that also men in high political power positions show risky sexual behaviour; risky not only because it can mean the end of marriage but also because they stake their high positions. There seems to be a relation: men at the top are sexual attractive (by the way, it seems that this is also true for women, although there are some differences), although it needs not automatically to be so that this leads to risky behaviour. Yet it often happens. Everybody knows the case of former US president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The French ex-president François Mitterand had a daughter in an extramarital relation and the Dutch prince Bernhard, father of the present Queen of the Netherlands, too. Examples abound actually on all levels of power. Now, maybe a new affair can be added, the case of DSK, former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and possible presidential candidate in France, who has been accused of sexual assault of a chambermaid. The case is still sub judice, under judgement, so I leave it open whether he is guilty or not, but what is the point here is that cases like this do happen. If they all can be ascribed to high levels of dopamine in the brain (or to another drug, or to a genetic factor) then a question presents itself that I have asked already several times: who is responsible for the behaviour? Are we simply executors of our physical mechanism? In a certain sense we are, but that does not make a person not responsible or less responsible for what he (or she) does in a bigger degree  than for what he does, for instance, as the president of a country or as the managing director of an important financial institution.

Your criminal genes and your passport

The present methods for checking people on airfields on departure and on arrival are sometimes quite time-consuming. Look at the long rows during rush hours. You have to be there up to three hours before your plane leaves. And for some countries you have to fill in a long list of questions before your arrival, too, in order to prevent that criminals are admitted, which takes again much time (and annoyance) and requires an extensive data base for the border control authorities as well. It would be much easier when there would be a reliable method to select possible dangerous people in advance and preferably so that they simply do not take a flight, since they know that they have no chance to enter. At present such a method does not exist but there is hope for Big Brother that it can be developed in future. Everybody knows that generally crimes are not done by Tom, Dick and Harry (it’s true, most perpetrators are men) but by people with a certain personality type. How nice would it be if a fail-proof way could be found for establishing the personality type of the possible (or even better the effective) criminal if not terrorist.

It has become known that decisions are not simply taken by free thinking and acting men but that it is our brains that take the decisions for us. If we may believe a still growing group of neuroscientists, our decisions are taken by our hormones, and our conscious I is simply a kind of brain interpreter that functions like a political commentator (see my blogs dated August 23, 2010, and later). But what steers my hormones? Decisions can be influenced by taking drugs (either for your pleasure or for medical reasons) but recently it has been discovered that there is also an inherent bodily mechanism that influences them: your genes. Genes do not only determine the colour of your skin, the shape of your nose and your other physical characteristics, they do not only determine your predispositions to certain illnesses, but, as research has shown, they affect also the availability of certain hormones that play a part in decision making. So we learned, for instance, that dopamine influences your risk taking behaviour in gambling. In Parkinson patients it can lead to hypersexuality. And now it has come out that your genetic structure determines also how much dopamine (and other drugs) is available. In this way, your genes have an important influence on your – possible – behaviour. Okay, the research in this field has just started and it is still a long way to go until we are that far that we can say that a person with these or those genetic structure has a strong disposition to criminal behaviour or even to bomb throwing. But is this really science fiction? Hasn’t come much what was considered science fiction in the past the facts of today? George Orwell’s Big Brother will sooner be possible than many people thought when he wrote his novel. And so it may be with our genetic criminal passport as well. Then you’ll find in your passport not only a chip with a finger print (as the European Union wants to have it) but also one with your DNA in order to simplify the task of the border patrol to decide whether the holder can be admitted or not. Or we write simply in his (or maybe her) passport “possible criminal”, as a warning that this person can better be refused the access of the country. Then a possible criminal will simply avoid entering in the legal way, and it will save the decent traveller much time at the border, too.

See “Do genes make up my mind?”, http://brainethics.org/?p=738

Being guilty of what one hasn’t done

In my last blog I said that the time will not be far away that we can “read” the minds of other people and see what their intentions are. As we have seen, scanners may be able to guess even better what we want to do than we, the bearers of these intentions, can. But what does it mean to say that someone has the intention to perform an action like blowing up an aeroplane? Fundamentally it says that the person concerned (let’s call him or her the agent) has the serious will to perform the action that s/he intends to do and that under normal circumstances this agent will not not perform the action. When an agent has an objective intention (an intention as registered by a scanner), we suppose that this agent will sooner or later also develop the subjective intention to act according to it. But what if this is not the case? Scanners show only correlations, not causal relations, so it is quite well possible that a scanner registers a certain intention and that this intention is related to an action by those who operate the scanner, while actually the scanned intention needs to be related to another action.

This still imaginary case reminds me of a real case that happened not so long ago somewhere in the Netherlands. Most Dutch municipalities have bye-laws that say that it is forbidden to transport equipment like rope ladders, chisels and other such tools in your car between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., for they might be used for breaking in. Now it happened that a man who had done some odd jobs in a friend’s house was stopped by the police late at night, when he returned home. The police found an almost complete set of “forbidden” tools in his car (but not a rope ladder) and despite the explanation of the man why these tools were there, he was fined. The man decided not to pay, so he had to appear in court but there he was condemned (actually because the judge did not listen to his arguments).

I think that this case is basically not different from my scanner case and that it clearly shows what can happen if we ascribe an objective intention to a person on account of “objective” facts, although this intention does not agree with the person’s subjective intention. It makes clear that scanning a person’s brains in order to register his or her intentions does not have only practical consequences (like preventing a bomb attack), but that it can have ethical consequences as well: someone can be considered guilty on account of an objective intention that s/he has according to a brain scanner, while in fact s/he did not had the related subjective intention to act and although s/hewould never subjectively develop the intention ascribed to him or her for the simple reason that, for instance, an intention as registered objectively can have multiple meanings or because the circumstances are such that the agent would never get the idea to develop the ascribed intention: One is guilty of what one hasn’t done and did not want to do. I think that the consequences reach also further, for what remains of our idea of the free will, when it can happen that we ascribe objectively an intention to an agent (and maybe condemn him or her because of it), while s/he did not have the related subjective intention nor did perform the action concerned?

Dangerous ideas (2)

Once I wrote in a blog “On an airport, they can scan your material luggage but not your dangerous thoughts.” At least we hope so, but is it true? Not so long ago a research group led by Prof. Matthew Lieberman of the University of California Los Angeles tried to find out whether it is really not possible to read the minds of other people. I will not go into the details of the research, but the essence is this. The members of a test group of twenty volunteers got – mixed with other messages – information about the safe use of sunscreen. After the test they received a bag with several things including sunscreen towelettes. They were also asked whether they were going to use the sunscreen in the week to come. During the time that the test subjects got the information about the sunscreen, their brains were scanned with a fMRI scanner, which registrates brain activity. A week later the test subjects were asked in a surprise follow up whether they did use the sunscreen. Their answers were compared with the data of the fMRI scans made during the experiment. This showed that the fMRI data predicted better what the test subjects actually would do than their stated intentions.

Today, we are not yet that far that we can place a brain scanner on an airport and scan the brains of all passengers before boarding. However, when I read such research reports, I think that the time that this will happen is not far away and that sooner or later they can read your dangerous thoughts. If such a scanner would pick out only and only those persons who intended to blow up an aeroplane and if it would do nothing else, I think we could live with it. However, besides that it will probably not be possible to make a scanner that is 100% reliable in doing this, history shows that the practice will be different. Scanners will be used not only for scanning your factual bomb throwing intentions but your other possible dangerous ideas as well. But what is dangerous? Who determines what is dangerous? Some people thought that Mahatma Gandhi and M.L. King had dangerous ideas. Today websites propagating nonviolent methods for toppling repressive regimes are blocked by these regimes because they are “dangerous” (at least for them). The practice will be, of course, that the authorities will think that every person can be a criminal. Therefore they want to collect your most private data, so your thoughts (although they will say that this is done for your own safety). Big brother will be watching you, even more.

For a short description of the experiment see http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/lifestyle/06/23/10/now-scientists-read-your-mind-better-you-can

The Internet and our brain

One of the most important inventions at the end of the 20th has been the Internet. It broadens our environment by giving us entry to a world that before its existence was hardly known to us, and when it was it was difficult for us to reach, at least in practice. This extension of our view is not only passive in the sense that the Internet gives us merely entrance to a world made by others but it is also active because it gives us the possibility to send our own contributions to the world by making our own websites, by blogging, e-mailing, twittering, YouTube and so on. Seen in this way, the Internet looks simply a continuation of things we have always done, especially in the field of communication, but with a wider range. But is the Internet merely more of the same or does it also shape us in some way?

The British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has pointed out that it is quite well possible that this happens. 50% of our communication with other people, she says, consists of body language and eye contact. Yet another 30% is done by our voice. And the importance of direct body contact like hugging or shaking hands is still unknown. Just such from-person-to-person contacts do not exist when we communicate on the Internet, by Facebook, by chatting or in another virtual way. Then this bodily communication is absent, which does not only limit our assessment of how other people react on us, but which restricts also our own reactions. We do not see whether our words hurt our conversation partner; we do not learn to look into someone’s eyes on the Internet; we do not need to blush when we say something stupid, so Greenfield. This can hardly be without consequences for the persons we are. As the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger points out: in the end practice changes our brain, the way we look at the world. The difference between the structure of the brain and its contents is not as clear as often thought. Meaning can change the brain structure. Conversely, this structure determines how we experience the world. And this is what Greenfield is afraid of: that we can become less empathic; that we do not recognize the suffering we do to others; and in case we do, that we ignore it and shrug our shoulders. It is not only a supposition, for we see it already in the phenomenon of happy slapping: knock someone down, record it with your mobile camera and upload it to YouTube. For fun. Until now it is maybe “not more” than a kind of excess, but, in view of what Metzinger says, who knows whether once, this insensitivity, this lack of  a still normal empathy, will become structured in our brain.

How long does an action last?

Recently the Hungarian psychologist Emese Nagy reconfirmed older research saying that the length of an action is about three seconds. Nagy studied video images of hugs by athletes, their coaches and their opponents on the Olympic Games in Beijing. On the average a hug lasted three seconds, independent of the nationality and sex of the hugger. Only when an athlete embraced his or her coach, it lasted a bit longer. Already in 1911 it had been discovered that much what people do lasts about three seconds and some 15 years ago it came out that it is also the case for animals.

Although I do not want to doubt the research as such, I think that as it stands it cannot be true. Besides that the body has other rhythms and cycles as well, like the biological clock, the result raises important philosophical questions, for instance the question “what is an action?”

Why do we call a three seconds lasting hug an action? What about if it lasts much longer or shorter? After having won unexpectedly the Paris-Roubaix cycle race Sunday a week ago, Johan Vansummeren embraced his girl friend clearly much longer than three seconds. Does this imply that actually it wasn’t a hug or, if it was, that it wasn’t an action? If it wasn’t an action, what makes a piece of behaviour an action or something else? If it was an action, what sense does it have to say that an action lasts on the average three seconds?

Actions do not stand alone. They are placed in a setting and belong to the stream of our doings. We can isolate a part of this stream and call it an action if it has a clear aim and the actor intentionally does something in order to reach that aim. However, to take an example, when I am “going to dine”, this is more than only the act of putting the food in my mouth but it comprises also taking my coat, walking downtown, choosing a restaurant, ordering the dinner, up to paying and leaving the restaurant… From a wide perspective, all this together is the action “going to dine”. From the same perspective we can call “taking my coat”, “ordering the meal”, etc. sub-actions. And we could distinguish sub-sub-actions as well. It is the same for participating in a race, say a 5K on a track. From a wide perspective it includes everything from registering a week before the race, to going to the track, running, taking a shower afterwards, receiving my prize and going home; and much more. Actually these are sub-actions (and sub-sub-actions) of the long action “participating in a 5K”. And if I have won, hugging my coach belongs to it, too. It is clear that seen this way the whole action lasts longer than three seconds and most sub-actions do as well. Does this imply that both the running as such (which lasts at least 15 minutes for most runners) and the hugging of my coach cannot be called actions any longer but only sub-actions at most? Of course, we can call them actions. But does that make sense? Running a race is only running a race if many preconditions have been fulfilled: there must be a kind of registration, there must be preparations so that one runs at one’s best, and so on. And it is the same for hugging my coach. One can call it “hugging the coach” only in the setting of the race. This is also true for what one sees as the beginning and the end of this “action”. All this depends on our perspective and on our interpretation of what happens. It may be so that all action-pieces take place in three second units, but it does not follow that this split up is meaningful. This depends on how it can be put in a wider setting: whether the hug is a gesture of joy or an attempt of murder.

Send me a postcard

In the second half of the 19th century it has become a custom that travellers send picture postcards to family and friends at home. The cards give a view of a landscape, village or town; they show an image of a building or a monument that is worth seeing; they show a local tradition, and so on. By sending the card the sender wants to tell the addressee what a beautiful place s/he is visiting and what a happy time s/he has there. The card seldom shows persons, unless it is relevant, and it gives always an exaggerated image of what is on it: colours are made brighter, the sky is usually blue and cloudless, ugly details have sometimes been removed. A picture postcard is also a kind of cultural manipulation insofar only what is considered beautiful is shown: mountains, “romantic” landscapes with cows, old buildings, traditions… You do not find on postcards what is deemed ugly, like industry or people working “in the sweat of their faces”. They present an ideal world, a kind of paradise. In this sense the cards contain an ideology and they are a kind of propaganda.

The possible propagandistic value of picture postcards has been well estimated during the First World War. Just like other people far away from home and in difficult circumstances, the soldiers fighting at the front wanted to stay in contact with their families and friends, and because modern means of communication like telephone were hardly in use by the common people then, or did not yet exist, people wrote letters, many letters. And they sent postcards. However, the soldiers were not free to tell about the misery at the front and all the mail was censured. It is true, the circumstances there were often so bad that many soldiers simply did not want to write about it, but some did. And some wanted to show pictures as well. In order to lead the mail in the “right” direction, the military authorities provided for postcards with preprinted texts and with acceptable images, which had often a kind of propagandistic content. For instance, everybody knew that soldiers got often seriously wounded; therefore the official postcards did show images of wounded soldiers but it were images where they clearly received the highest possible standard of care; where the wounded were smiling; where they thanked the nurses and where they were treated as heroes. This was often far from reality. Other cards showed that, even at the front, a decent burial was possible. Or there is a postcard with soldiers lying in shell holes in the ground, containing the message: British soldiers can adapt to any circumstances to make themselves comfortable and to sleep. Or cards expressed comradeship and traditional virtues. In short, these postcards were used as propaganda intended to boost support for the war at the home front. However, from that point of view, who could ever have got the idea to have printed this picture on a postcard (see above), and, even more, who would have been prepared to send it?

Responsibility for what happens

Sooner or later the problems with the Fukushima power plant will come to an end and let’s hope that it will not be with an explosion of one of the reactors. Then it will be asked whether someone can be held responsible for what happened. In the past I have written already a bit on this theme. People can be held responsible for what they do and sometimes also for what other people do. But can they be held responsible for things that happen to them, like an earthquake? In a certain way they can, I think. Of course, nobody can be blamed for an earthquake as such and, in the light of our present knowledge, also nobody can be blamed for the absence of previous warnings. However, often one or more persons can be called to account for the consequences of what happened, for most natural events do not occur completely unexpectedly. Maybe it is unknown when they will happen and with what force but usually it is known that they’ll happen. Therefore in many cases preventive measures can be taken or measures that will soften the consequences. And it is here that one’s responsibility comes in.

On October 4th last I wrote in my blog: “Responsibility refers to a person and an action done by that person, to something a person did with an intention or intentionally. Only then I call … a person responsible for what s/he did or for the consequences of what s/he did. But … it is not enough that s/he was acting with an intention or intentionally. The action or its consequences must also imply a moral obligation”. In view of this it seems useful to ask whether someone is responsible for the Fukushima catastrophe in some way. To begin with the end, it was the moral obligation of the people involved that the power plant functioned safely. The earthquake was not man-made, of course, but it could have been foreseen that sooner or later a very strong seism would take place, together with a tsunami. Nevertheless a nuclear power plant had been built there with all the risks of a nuclear catastrophe, and, as it came out, the nuclear power plant did not withstand the natural disaster. Why not? And why were the safety rules often so poorly observed and why were violations kept secret? Were the safety regulations as such sufficient? And so on. In this way people can be held responsible for a natural disaster even if nobody can help that it took place. However, in my last blog I argued that a nuclear catastrophe would happen anyway, if it were not in Fukushima, as a consequence of an earthquake, then elsewhere in the world on a site safe for natural disasters. And that’s why those building nuclear power plants are responsible or at least co-responsible for a nuclear catastrophe anyhow, whatever it is that made that it happened.

Our technical limits are human

In a comment on the nuclear calamity in Fukushima, Japan, the German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski states that this event shows that we have reached the limits of what we can make. After Harrisburg and Chernobyl, we see that nuclear power cannot be controlled. We behave like the sorcerer’s apprentice who did not know how to stop the forces that he had evoked. This means that we have to learn what we can and what we cannot do, so Safranski (http://www.videowired.com/video/3979556601/).

On the face of it, it seems that not much needs to be added to this comment and that it clearly words what went wrong and how we can prevent such mistakes in future. Safranski says that the Fukushima calamity and other catastrophes of this kind show that the human capacity to discover and control the secrets of nature has its limits. Therefore it is better to stop with this kind of energy production and to look for other approaches. In my words: we can never grasp and control the technique of nuclear energy production.

I think that Safranski is right; there is a fundamental technical problem here. However, I think that the problem of controlling nuclear energy would also happen when we would be able to build a 100% safe nuclear power plant. For in my opinion the actual problem is not in our technical possibilities but it is elsewhere: the real problem is intrinsically human. This becomes clear, for instance, when we look at the history of the Fukushima power plant. As it has come out, this major calamity has been preceded through the years by some 200 minor calamities and technical problems. Most of them have been kept secret for a long time, and, what is important here, most of them have been caused because the safety rules had not been observed. So, the real cause of calamities of the Fukushima type is not that we do not know our technical limits but that we do not know our human limits. Men are not like robots: you program them and they do what you want them to do. Instead men are individuals who have their own reasons to act and not to follow safety rules. Men are also beings who continuously unintentionally fail to follow safety rules simply by human mistakes. In this sense man is not a reliable being. Moreover, human problems do not exist only on this individual level, but they are also social. As social beings men cooperate with other men, but within this cooperation process they develop their personal interests, which not always correspond with the common interest, whatever this may be. Or there are conflicting common interests and there is not enough money and man power or technical capacity to solve them all. A choice has to be made or the fulfilment of some interests has to be temporarily postponed. In case of lack of money it can be decided, for instance, to postpone the maintenance of a nuclear power plant, for is it really necessary that it needs to take place now and not next year? In short, our most fundamental problem in this nuclear age is not that we need to know our technical limits, but it is that we need to realize that man is a human and that we are as human as humans are. Our most fundamental limits are human and as long as we do not bear this in mind, calamities of the Fukushima type will happen.

How to enjoy my bike rides

Last week I made my first bike tour after the winter. The winter had been long and also the week before the ride had been quite cold. But in the end the temperature rose, the night frosts went away, and the weather forecast promised nice weather for the days to come. So time to start a new bike season. On my first ride I was relaxed, I did not overstrain myself on the hills, and back home after a bit more than an hour, I could be satisfied with my average speed, thanks to my winter training on my bike trainer and by running in the wood. The average speed is always important for me and when it fits with how I felt during the ride, it is even better. By why should it be so important for me?

The Belgian philosopher Marc Van den Bossche has recently published a book about sport as a way of living. Van den Bossche is an academic philosopher and also a very active sportsman. Like me he is a runner and a cyclist, his distances are often double of what I do, if not more, and it is not exceptional that he trains twice a day, which I never do. Just as for me, times and records are important for him. However, somewhere in his book he writes: “I’d stake a few pints that after having run a half or a whole marathon or after having climbed the entire Mont Ventoux [on your bike], you’ll get this question: ‘In what time did you do it?’ It will be very exceptional when someone will ask you in a first reaction what your subjective experiences were, a question you could answer by saying: ‘Man, I have enjoyed it sooo much. It wasn’t sex but you can compare it with it”. What Van den Bossche questions here is whether times for a sportsman not training for competition (so one like me) are really important. Why needs our joy to have a measure? Isn’t our subjective feeling by far more important than an objective measure? So Van den Bossche says, although he likes to improve his results as much as I do.

When reading Van den Bossche’s arguments and explanations, in my heart I feel he is right. What’s the worth of all this competing with yourself, when you know that the real reason that you do sports is different? That you do sports simply because you want to run or make a ride, that it is a way for you to be in the wood, and that as such it is a pleasure to feel fit? That you would do it despite the measurable results? That at your age you run behind the facts, because you have passed your top already long ago and that fundamentally every next run and ride will be a bit slower than the last one, just because at a certain age you can only go backwards? Yes, Van den Bossche is right! I must stop measuring and I must enjoy my efforts as they are. It is not that it is not pleasant to measure my results, but for me it has no sense to make a fetish of them.

Actually, I had decided already to practice this new way of enjoying my runs and rides before I read the book. And yet, when I’ll take my bike tomorrow, I know that I’ll check my bike computer when I am back home, and I’ll be satisfied if my average speed was a good one.

The hero in your mind

More than two years ago I wrote a blog titled “The devil in your mind”. I explained there that Hannah Arendt attributed the evil done by people like Eichmann to their thoughtlessness and not to a diabolic attitude within them. This is in keeping with studies by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo insofar as they have shown that in most cases behaviour that causes harm to other people (which can go as far as torture) is not the consequence of a certain evil trait in the perpetrator but that basically everybody is able to do it. Most people are simply lucky that the devil doesn’t come out. But what is it then that makes that the devil comes out?

Some fifty years ago Zimbardo organized a prison experiment for which he selected about twenty test subjects. All of them had the same background characteristics. Zimbardo assigned them at random to two groups, one group being the prisoners, the other group being the prison warders. Although there was no initial fundamental difference between the test subjects in both groups, after one-two days both the prisoners and the prison warders acted very differently in a way that went beyond their particular roles. After already such a short time the warders begun to torture the prisoners, psychologically as well as physically (within limits, for outright physical violence was not allowed). For this reason Zimbardo had to break off the experiment after six days, although it had been planned to last two weeks. Since the differences between the test subjects were negligible and since all of them were psychologically healthy, Zimbardo concluded after a thorough analysis that it are not psychological dispositions that make people behave in an evil way but that it is the situation that brings people that far. Only very few people are able to resist the pressure of the situation that “leads” them into a certain direction and also only very few display evil behaviour because of a disposition.

However, Zimbardo’s conclusion has two sides, for it is not only true for the evil we do. In the same degree it is true for the good we do as well. Most people do good because, by way of speaking, the situation they happen to be in “forces” them to do so. There is not only a “banality of evil” (Arendt) but also a “banality of heroism” (Zimbardo). People are not inherently, genetically, bad or good (with the exception of the few who are apparently mental ill). Most people can do well and can do bad, and what they’ll do depends on the situation they are in and on the pressure exerted there on them that makes that they cannot stay passive but have to act (here I have paraphrased Zimbardo; see his The Lucifer Effect ch. 16). Admittedly, it is not only the circumstances that make who you are and what you do. Zimbardo doesn’t say that, but at least they have an important influence on how you think and act. They can make you both a devil and a hero. And isn’t it this what we see now in the Middle East where so many people have behaved and behave like heroes despite themselves? Who of them would have thought before that s/he had a hero in the mind?

Ethics and nonviolence

There are a lot of surprising developments taking place in the Middle East these days. People rise and protest against their suppression and dictators cannot sit down safely in their seats any longer. Several rulers have already fallen or are about to fall, others try to secure their position by doing concessions, but whether that will be enough is not sure. Who would have predicted that only two months ago?

These uprisings look spontaneous. What many people do not know is that there is much organization and thinking behind them, at least in a number of cases. Already for several years Egyptian activists had been preparing nonviolent action against Mubarak. They used Facebook and Twitter but also the handbooks by Gene Sharp, an American researcher of nonviolence. Moreover they asked advice from Otpor, the Serbian student movement that toppled president Milosevic in 2000.

Since already more than 30 years Gene Sharp is one of my favourite authors. He is famous for his list of 198 nonviolent action methods and he wrote also a guide with directions how to bring down a dictator. He wrote quite a bit of other books and articles as well. In all his work he has an important point of departure: all action and resistance must be nonviolent. When hearing the word “nonviolence” many people think of something soft, vague and not very practical. Or they think of high moral principles that are actually far-away from reality. Sharp’s idea of nonviolence has nothing to do with that. Sharp talks never about ethics but only about application. His idea is: conflicts cannot be avoided but in order to prevent that they are solved in a violent way, one has to look for nonviolent alternatives with the same functions as violence. And that’s what he has done during his whole life: Looking for alternatives for violence and looking for ways to put them into practice. And he found them by analyzing historical and contemporary cases, by making use of sociological theories and by employing organizational principles. What he did not incorporate in his work were ethical and moral principles. Sharp does have his reasons for advocating nonviolence, but you do not find them back in his writings. Only the practical applicability of nonviolence counts there, not moral reasons why it has to applied, as long as it works. And it does work. Insiders know that already since many years. They have seen the fall of Milosevic, as said; the people’s movements in Georgia (2003) and in the Ukraine (2004); and they have seen lots of other cases, often successful and, indeed, sometimes also not successful. Now it works also in the Middle East and the world has discovered it, for since a recent interview with Gene Sharp in the New York Times, he doesn’t have a quiet moment any longer. For thanks to him the world knows that nonviolence works also when it is not fundamentally based on ethical and moral principles but simply on well-thought-out practice and organization.

Superstitious like a pigeon

Suppose you are a runner and tomorrow you will take part in the cross country championship of your province. You have a good chance to win but you are not the only possible winner. You have done everything that is reasonable to be in good shape, so you cannot do more. Or rather there is still one thing you can do: Do not forget to put the necklace on that you always take with you when you have a race. Always? Two weeks ago you forgot it and you had a bad race.

We know all such kinds of behaviour, which are actually a kind of rituals. In order to improve the chance to win a lottery, one has a favourite number. One does not want to have room number 13 in a hotel in order to avoid accidents. One keeps one’s fingers crossed during the exam of a friend. And so on. The essence of all this behaviour is that there is no direct relation between the ritual and its purpose (although you may think there is).

Burrhus F. Skinner, who is known for his research of behaviour, put a hungry pigeon in a so-called Skinner box, a simple box with a food dispenser and a response lever structured that way that, if the pigeon presses the lever, food may come from the dispenser (whether this really happens depends on the research plan). Then food was presented at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behaviour, so whether the pigeon pressed the lever or didn’t made no difference (I follow the description by Chris Frith, Making up the mind, p. 91; but it is easy to find other descriptions of the experiment on the Internet). After a short time the pigeons were seen repeatedly performing arbitrary actions, like making two or three turns clockwise between the appearances of the food, thrusting the head into one of the upper corners of the box, and the like. Each pigeon developed its own typical pattern of behaviour. The pigeons had learned to repeat whatever action they happened to be performing just before the food appeared. Skinner called this behaviour “superstitious” because the pigeons acted as if they believed that their behaviour caused the food to appear when this was not the case. He suggested, so Frith, that human superstitious behaviour can arise in the same way. Men are used to look for causes of the effects they see but in doing so they are often not smarter than pigeons.

Running with my mind

G.H. Yue and K.J. Cole took eight volunteers and asked them to exercise the muscle that controls the little finger of the left hand for four weeks, five sessions a week. They asked eight other volunteers to do the same but now only in their mind, so by imagining that they were training the muscle. A control group of eight volunteers had to do nothing. In the first group the average force of the muscle increased with 30%, in the second group with 22% and in the control group with a trivial 3.7%. The results were substantiated by other research, also for other muscles. The upshot is that we can train muscles by imagining the training in our mind.

Physical exercise is important for many people, also for me. I like to run in the wood behind my house or to go for a bike ride. But I like also a lot of other things and, actually, sometimes working out takes me too much time. For it does not only involve the exercise itself, but there are also many things around it that belong to it. I have to put my training clothes on; I have to take extra showers; I have to maintain my bike; and so there’s a lot more. In the end, a workout takes twice as much time as the exercise itself. But now I discovered a time-saving alternative: take a comfortable chair and start dreaming. Then I have simply to visualize how I move my legs, think how I jump over a tree fallen on my path, imagine how I climb a hill on my bike, simulate how I pass other joggers or do a little sprint now and then. I can train as I like it and I do not have to look for the right hill, the right flat track, or how I want to have it, for it comes to me. And I’ll not be stiff with my last training, for I need simply to imagine how smooth my legs move. And when I have finished my mental training, I can immediately go on with the other things that are waiting for me, like writing this blog, without taking off my training clothes, taking a shower, and so on. Maybe the training effect is a bit smaller than by training physically, but it is still big enough and its advantages are legion.

But shall I not miss the birds singing in the wood, the roes crossing my path, the tailwind that makes me ride faster? Will mental exercise be as relaxing as moving through real fields and through a real wood? I am afraid that I am going to miss it when I would switch from a physical to a mental training of my muscles. And I’ll still see my books around me when training in my chair and it will be difficult to distance myself from my other mental activities. Maybe it is not as relaxing as real running and riding a real bike. Maybe it will be better to keep it for special occasions; for when I am busy; for – let it not happen – when I am injured and cannot go; or for the days that the rain is pouring down. But in case this happens, I have an alternative now: running or riding with my mind.

Writing scientifically

“Writing scientific papers is rather like writing in an ancient verse form. Everything you want to say has to be forced into predetermined sections: introduction, method, results, discussion. You must never say “I,” and the passive tense is preferred. Inevitable all interesting things get left out.” Chris Frith, Making up the mind, p. 74.

At school I had to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These works have been written in a strict verse form that is characteristic for epic prose: the dactylic hexameter. Each line of this prose has six foots: five dactyls (– u u) and then a spondee (–  –) (“–” means a long syllable and “u” a short one). Although some stylistic variation was possible, generally the author had not much freedom. Dutch Renaissance authors tried to copy the style but the dactylic hexameter is not very suitable for the Dutch language. It makes Dutch poems written with these verse form sound rather stiff and unnatural. Therefore it is used only in translations of ancient epic prose nowadays.

When Descartes wrote his Regulae ad directionem ingenii [Rules for the direction of the mind; published posthumously in 1684] he laid the foundation of modern scientific method. Only research that applied these rules or their improved versions could bear the name “scientific” since then. This did not only have its reflection on research as such but also in the way it was presented. Despite Feyerabend’s famous statement in 1975 that “anything goes” in methodology, implying that not so much the form of research is important but its results, scientists have stuck to their rules, at least in word. In order to show that their methods and results have to be taken seriously the strict presentation of scientific research did not change either, despite Feyerabend’s analysis. This makes that everything that influenced the results in an important way but that is not strictly “scientific” is left out in the presentation, even if the results would not have come about without these influences. The changing moods of the researcher; that she thought out the basic idea when taking a shower; that she had no budget to buy just those apparatuses she needed most; that a machine broke down and had to be repaired so that she had some time for extra theoretical study; and so on. All these things are omitted in the final report. Frith mentions the case that a test subject had got a clip in her brain in an operation. It took him much time to find out what metal it was made of in order to know whether it was safe to use his scanner. Although such facts are relevant for the outcome, they are supposed to be ignored in a scientific article. Even the researcher is absent: The “I” who did the research and wrote the article is left out as well in the text. The article is strictly limited to method, results, relation to other research and why the results are important; all this in a strict order: introduction, method, results, discussion. It is even better, if the sections are numbered and if as much mathematics as possible is used. Deviations of form are frowned on and reduce the chance of being published unless they are corrected, as if the writer is a mediocre ancient poet who does not know well how to apply the dactylic hexameter.