Author: Crowhill Report

A city set on a hill

Ronald Reagan used to speak that way about America. Today, as I’m processing recent news, I’m seeing some problems with America’s evangelical mission.

The two things that stand in stark contrast to me right now are our ideals and our system. In other words, do we intend to be an example to the world because we believe the right things — in freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc., or, for some people, because we follow the demands of wokeness — or do we intend to have and demonstrate a fair and just system?

Of course some people think it’s ridiculous for the United States to see itself as an example of anything except racism and injustice, but there was a time when we held up our system as an example of fairness in practice, as opposed to the raw exercise of power.

What I’m getting at here is a question of ideals vs. procedures. Every dictator has ideals, but he cheats and lies and murders to get the power to enforce them. We’re supposed to be different. We should strive to have good ideals in a good system, but there have been some fault lines between the two.

  • Portland puts the ideals of the protestors above the just administration of law.
  • The Obama administration weaponized the justice department against Trump, and the FBI went along.
  • If it’s true there has been voter fraud, people have compromised fair procedures for the ideals of the left. Or if you look at it the other way, if the right is cynically attacking the voting process just to keep Trump in power, it does the same.

For some people, it’s all about the ideals, and process or procedure is a distraction. Recall Pelosi’s reaction when someone asked her where the constitution allowed the government to do health care reform: “Are you serious?”

As a general rule, it seems the left is more often guilty than the right of pursuing whatever means necessary to attain their ends. “Ideals above rules and procedures” is a defining characteristic of liberals, and “but you have to do it this way” is a defining characteristic of conservatives. But the right can be criticized on this point as well. E.g., Lindsay Graham proposed one set of rules when it came to Merrick Garland and another when it came to Amy Barrett. And Trump has shown a disregard for the truth to press his agenda.

This break between ideas and rules is a fundamental error. Rules and procedures are the instantiation of our values. You can’t believe in free elections and commit voter fraud. You can’t believe in free speech and shut down speech you don’t like. You can’t believe in personal liberty and allow protestors to burn down private property.

Is it just me, or is this a growing problem? Is the connection between ideals and rules falling apart?

Are too many people in jail for minor pot possession?

I hear this repeated all the time, but I have my doubts.

Since almost all cases today involve plea deals, how can we be sure about this alleged problem? For example, let’s say a person is busted for five offenses, two of them violent, but the prosecutor makes a deal and he pleads to simple pot possession. Then the good-hearted liberal comes along and says, “why is this guy in jail for ten years just for having a little pot?”

The current system needs to be reformed, but we’re not going to fix it by making little tweaks without looking at the whole picture.

Panpsychism — too weird, or an important correction?

Yesterday I listened to Michael Shermer interview Philip Goff about his new book on panpsychism.

Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property.

I think about it this way.

If you start with the idea that matter only has the kinds of properties a physicist could measure, then consciousness becomes a very hard thing to explain. Protons have no consciousness. Rocks have no consciousness. A blade of grass has no consciousness. These things are just mechanical systems. So why, when a physical thing gets to a certain level of complexity — e.g., a dog, or a human — does it suddenly take on this additional property? It’s not clear there’s a point to having a subjective experience of the color red, and … actually, that’s beside the point in any event. What is the mechanism, in a purely physical world, for there even to be such a thing as a subjective experience?

It seems that if you start with “purely material” stuff and try to work your way up, consciousness is a difficult thing. That’s the so-called “hard problem of consciousness.”

But what if you go in the other direction? Rather than trying to build a conscious thing from unconscious parts, why not start with consciousness as a given? That’s the reality, after all. I know that I am conscious more surely than I know anything else in the world — more surely, certainly, than I know that a proton is not conscious, or even that a proton exists. (The idea that a proton has something like consciousness is certainly very weird.)

So as long as you can escape solipsism, it’s easy to move from there to the recognition that other humans are also conscious, and then you start to realize that apes have a sense of self, and even some birds (including crows, by the way!). Dogs have a more limited consciousness, etc., and as you work your way down, towards less complexity, you can see that fish have some level of consciousness, and so on. Maybe there’s some sense in which a jellyfish, or a tree, has some weird type of consciousness. And maybe, when a protozoa reacts to stimuli, it’s experiencing something remotely analogous to fear.

We’re raised on the idea that things like protozoa are just biological machines. But that assumption leads to the hard problem of consciousness. If we reject that assumption — if we say that something like consciousness is a fundamental property — does that eliminate the “hard problem”?

And what would it be like to live with that assumption? In the western world, we live with the assumption that things are mechanical. What would it be like to think that the universe, and everything in it, has something like consciousness?

It’s a very weird idea, but it’s possible there’s something to it. I think it needs a lot more work — e.g., if consciousness is a fundamental property, is a planet conscious, or only things that have certain types of complexity? And why would that be so?