Our new cycle of serfdom

In the medieval era in Europe most kingdoms employed the system of serfdom. In this, the rights to ownership, movement, and other basic forms of self-determination were severely curtailed by the landowners on whose land people worked and lived. Their state of dependency - that they had no land or means of production - meant that they were exposed to unfair conditions in dealing with the landowners. We are now entering a state of modern capitalism in which a great part of society lives or will live in a state of semi-serfdom. The landowner is today the alliance of the corporations and major governing parties. This is the situation in most of Europe, China, Japan, and the US.

The cycle of serfdom is different from the old one. The recipe now is to instill in people a sense of competition and ambition. All rewards - money, ownership, etc. - are performance tied, and performance is measured relatively to one's competing cohort not absolutely. People are then asked to get in dept or deplete a large amount of their resources to obtain the rights to enter the competition (go to uni, obtain professional training and licenses, etc.). This stage already sees a large number of people becoming indebted, with only a part of them having a chance of repaying those debts within reasonable times, say 4-10 years.

In the next stage more and more institutions raise the levels of entry to all positions. Cleaning and service jobs require now several trainings and previous experience; highly skilled jobs see the graduates of top universities go to to toe even with numerous internships and work experience under their belts. At this stage participants of the workforce who have to rely on wages or a salary get exposed to companies and governments. They are asked to be mobile to an absurd degree, and without adequate compensation. Without willing to enter the race for the mid-management or higher jobs their financial rewards will never be enough to make them truly independent. Already their first purchase of a flat or house will put them into debt and dependence towards both their crediting institution and their workplace.

Take a career in medicine for example. University entrance exams are hard and so is progression. That's a good thing, for quality control reasons. But these institutions are also expensive in most countries, even with scholarships or loans. Then doctors are asked to work a large load of extra hours, night shifts, weekend shifts. They are rewarded to some degree, but comparing with the people owning factories, lands, businesses, shares, or being able to invest in bonds, securities, etc. their income is minuscule, while their work/life balance is abismal.

Take another as another example researchers. Research jobs used to be prestige jobs and a large number of them granted tenure. However this changed in the last 30 years. Business administrators and managers infiltrated the higher levels of higher education everywhere. Their salaries and numbers are rising at never before seen rates (this is what drives up the tuition fees to exorbitant levels), while some of the key reforms they bring is it undermine tenure, offer short-term and term-time only contracts, and dispose of any researchers speaking up on important social issues if they don't fit the ideas of Marketing.

The dirty work part of managing these changes and carrying them out is usually relegated to the throng of mid-level managers now found at almost any institutions. These folks are usually naive, good-willed, and often talented, hard working people. Nevertheless, they are either blind to what they assist in, make themselves believe that the rosy phrases in which marketing dresses things up are the reality (e.g. introducing mandatory extra tasks for job-roles is called 'opportunity to learn new skills', whereas in reality it is simply an additional duty to perform an extra task not included in the original contract without further remuneration for it), or they are corrupt enough not to mind.

It is a sad world, and most us either end up playing the debt game, or shape our lives in ways to accommodate the needs of corporations and public institutions increasingly run by people with a business background, having zero sense of social responsibility and the mission of public institutions.

This trend is horrible in itself. It makes it even more worrying that having to shape our lives around the needs of companies shatters most social networks. Shifting living places repeatedly makes us unable to stay near and take care of our parents and other old relatives. It ruins are chances to have a local identity and properly participate in charities, volunteer, get to know our neigbours and the folks at the local pub, and to participate and understand local and regional politics. That is, it makes us vulnerable to a lack of identity. Our votes are then only informed by what we see on TV, which are usually debates and slogans regarding enormous topics like the economy, war, immigration or healthcare. The dumbed-down and oversimplified choices we are offered aren't real, and our influence and understanding of politics is vanishing, as are our family ties and abilities to shape our local social groups.

It was just a question of time of course how the people will big money - the owners of corporations, land, politicians, business people, etc. of all nations, Americans, Chinese, Swiss, Brit, French, etc. - will come to figure out how to thwart the progress made between 1919 and the 1970s. That era saw a great shift in general welfare, supported by strong labour unions, strong government regulations, corporate social responsibility directives, and activism in politics of middle class and working class people. As we are gradually pushed out from politics and business takes over, the gains we made in equality are also disappearing. We can still stop this, and then move on with equalisation, developing sustainable economies and stopping climate change. Or we can see how for the sake of a few percent of the world's population it all goes to shite.

Defending climate scientists from ridiculous lawsuits

The climate change deniers are in full swing in many places, but most strongly in the U.S.

If you have a few spare bucks ($5, $10, or more) you can support efficient legal defense for scientists who are attacked for political reasons. The goal of many republicans and industry moguls is to slow down or make the work of climate researchers impossible. What we need is to join up and show them that they can't simply shut up the researchers standing up for our needs and goals as a society.

Let's show these greedy jerks. If the state is unwilling to stand up to them and shoot down their stupid actions, we have to get together and push back.

Two types of thinking about action in philosophy

In Philosophy of Action we can differentiate (at least) between two very different ways of thinking about what types of actions there are:
I) One way would be a metaphysically/ontologically minded way. If we approach actions in this way we will try to see how they fit into the larger framework of the basic constituent categories of reality. We are trying to carve reality at the joints. One could then for example defend that all actions are instances of an agents' causing a(n intrinsic) result [e.g. Bach 1980, Alvarez & Hyman 1998]. Or one could defend the view that all actions are events [e.g. Davidson 1980, Goldman 1970, etc.]. Or that they are processes [e.g. Stout 2005]. Of course the plausibility of such views will depend on what one's view of instances of causing, events, or processes is, and how that fits what we know about actions, and what according to the view defended we should think about them. And of course one does not have to be a monist about such matters. One can be a pluralist and think that some actions belong into one of these categories, while others into another, and again further actions into the third one.
II) Another way of thinking about what types of actions there are could be called a moral/ethical/normative way. If one takes this approach it is possible to distinguish between 'voluntary', 'involuntary', 'non-voluntary', and 'intentional' actions [e.g. Anscombe 1963/2000, Bratman 1987, Frankfurt 1988, Hyman 2015].


There are of course more common ways of thinking about types of actions. For example we normally in our everyday lives and proceedings distinguish between drinking, brushing out teeth, and reading the news. These can all be treated as actions, an the differences between them are plenty of practical importance to us. The dentist rarely asks anyone to read the news more frequently and for at least tree minutes every time, nor does drinking help much with being well informed.

Philosophy of Action: websites

I had a quiet afternoon finally, so philosophyofaction.com is up to date again.

Further other nice developments on the internet front of things for phil of action:
- The philosophy of action section of philpapers finally had a much needed expansion. Now it is encompassing many useful categories which makes it a lot easier to search - and for us editors to 'shelve' - the entries.
- Last year a number of good intro books and anthologies came out on phil of action as well as on moral psychology.

And another useful - but not action related - development: The Philosophers' Cocoon is running a helpful series on careers in philosophy.

Al-Kindi on building on the work of those before us

At the moment I'm reading bits and pieces on Arabic philosophy/Philosophy in the Islamic world, and I happened to stumble upon these lines by Al-Kindi:

"The truth requires that we do not reproach anyone who is even one of the causes of small and meagre benefits to us (...) Though deficient in some of the truth, they have been our kindred and associates in that they benefited us by the fruits of their thought, which have become our approaches and instruments, leading to much knowledge of that the real nature of which they fell short of obtaining. (...) When, though, the little which each of them who has acquired the truth is collected, something of great worth is attained." Al-Kindi - 'On First Philosophy'

This is as fine an example of appreciative belittling and/or realistic assesment as it can get. Al-Kindi goes on in similarly entertaining style until he gets down to the real issue, which is that one should take the unity of God seriously, and take a largely Aristotelian, metaphysics-first (and even within that: Aristotelian causation-first) approach. In Al-Kindi's view, others have assumed the title of 'philsoopher' without much justification, and only in order to gain religious infuence. Whatever the truth, it is very entertaining to read.

Here is a nice discussion on Al-Kindi that aired on BBC Radio 4.

Al-Kindi depicted on a Syrian post stamp. Source

What are actions?

I finally have some time to start working on my research papers again. The one I'll tinker around with today is coming out of my phd thesis and is largely based on chapter three, one of the key chapters defending a big idea.

The whole thesis is centered around the question 'What are actions?' Is this a good question? Is there one answer to it? What kind of answers are there to the question? How should we go about finding this out? And what IS the answer really? As you can see this is quite a handful. These are some questions folks working on philosophy of action deal with.

There has been a lot of discussion of what actions are and most answers have been Monistic: they said acton is 'x' and that's the end of it, meaning that all actions fit the same bill. I think this is fairly implausible, but how implausible it is depends of course on what exactly we substitute for x, how broad our definition is. For example claiming that actions are changes is not too narrow and not too implausible. Arguably, there are actions which are the prevention of change. But most actions do involve change probably. Whether the action is the change itself or a bringing about of a change, or something involving both is a further question. You see, these are the kind of difficulties we get even with a simple attempt to pin down actions.

If you offer a narrower definition, say, something like Donald Davidson's the problems become even worse. Davidson characterised actions as events. But not any event of course only ones of which the following is also true:
- all actions are events caused by a pair of mental events which are the onset of a belief and a desire,
- this pair of belief and desire provides a reason for you to act, together they can be cited to explain why you acted,
- the belief and desire cause the event of your action in the right way,
- and only events that can be described as (maybe under among other things) bodily actions are actions.
The last clause goes against the very simple and obvious insight that thinking hard about something is an action agents engage in from time to time. It is also hard to see how an action can be an event which which is caused by two mental states. What is the agent doing while this is happening? Sleeping? Observing? Or is this all that an agents' involvement consists of? What happens after the causation? Is the event of a bodily movement just going on and the belief and desire just sitting around? Or are the sustaining and guiding the action? Or is that up to the agent? Not to mention qualms about Davidson's specific view of what events are which causes further issues for action individuation.

You can see that such a simple and very restrictive definition throws up more questions than it answers. Hence I've proposed a pluralistic framework. More about that in following entries. Plenty more on actions and research on actions can be found here.

The cul-de-sac of debating the identity of the mind and the brain

This post is just toying around with some ideas. I haven't worked mainly on the philosophy of mind or on folk psychology, although I have read a few bits and pieces (Sellars, McDowell, the functionalist folks, Smart, Davidson, etc.). I'm not committed very strongly to the view but it did seem fun to try and write it up quickly as a draft to help me think more on it. Comments are welcome.


There has been a really bad tendency in the last 50 years exemplified by scientists, psychologists - and some philosophers - to debate whether recent discoveries about how the workings of our bodies influence behavior (including hormones, heart and digestive mechanisms, the neural system, etc.) are really discoveries about what our mind is and how it works. This was a bad tendency in my view because it strengthened the idea that the right answer is either 'yes' or 'no'. Whereas in fact the question was misconceived and as such it has no correct answer. The result was fruitless debate in which scientists - not all of them of course only the not-so-smart-ones - were trying to show that a) when they understood how something in the body correlated reliably with some behavior they understood what has been traditionally called the mind, and b) that this showed that the mind is a bodily thing, some even saying that it is identical with the brain. Some even more impatient people added c) that due to these discoveries the job of the philosopher and the psychologist is obsolete now.

Charge c) is of course easily dismissed: besides trying to understand (human) behavior, action, the explanation and motivation of behavior, minds, etc. psychologists and philosophers - who are not the same - study a host of other things. Psychologists study group behavior, social interaction, the development and learning of children, language acquisition, and many-many other topics. Philosophers study the way in which science works, what counts as knowledge and as evidence and whether it should count as such, what is good reasoning, how we can come to know things at all, what exists, what are good rules of living together, what happiness means and what it is, and so on. What the mind is, has not been solved by any disciple yet, and even if the answer to this question would have been uncovered psychologists and philosophers would still be busy.

Of course, the question I'm criticizing was not a bad one for the reason that some people made the jump to c). Rather, it was a bad one because it made the assumption that what was meant by 'mind' was ever exactly identical with what neurology, psychology, and other behavioral sciences are giving us insight into right now. My claim is that we are understanding something new. We are getting genuinely new information, new ideas about what influences (certain specific aspects) of our behavior and how we should think about these influences and our behavior. Claiming that mentalistic terms like 'intention', 'will', 'thinking', and so on, were ever intended to describe the same as what recent research in the sciences is about is confused. Our new insights are not insights about some object which philosophers posited in earlier times. They never posited anything like that.

This confusion is easy to see if we think of the free will problem for a second. Some philosophers and scientists - again: the not-so-smart-ones - are locked in a debate. How can the will be free if there is universal determinism? If the will is not free nothing can be free, not even our will. On the other hand: if the will is not determined then does it just work randomly? That is not what freedom means either. Headache, headache either way. The least careful reasoners not only deny that there is no free will but that there is no will at all.
We have all experienced willing something and doing it. Whether that was free or not, willing is a distinctive capacity that we humans - and maybe other beings - posses. It is also certain that this capacity related to our biology - our evolution and specific material constitution - and it is different from other mechanisms which make us behave in certain ways. Nothing in this picture of having a 'will' makes it incompatible with naturalism, natural science, science in general, or even determinism. Average lawyers and judges, doctors and writers, and even compatibilist philosophers and psychologists have long ago recognized this and made use of the insight. Thanks to their hard work we now understand much more about the intricate maze of connected influences on our behavior which is human motivation, and one part of which is willing something.

Drawing an analogy with the confusions surrounding the will can help clear up the dazed picture some people have about the relation of the mind and the brain.

My hunch is - but this would require good work by historians - that the misguided debates about whether the mind is identical with some part of our body or a distinct thing, are the results of the long crusade on religion by popular scientists, such as Huxley (the older). Theses debates which go back to the 1850's, and even before that, have primarily aimed at undermining the authority and credibility of figures of the church who tried to rely on their position to justify obsolete views, and keep out of employment and influence those who disagreed with them, many of them young and talented researchers in (what became) the natural sciences. This situation resulted in a debate which had many fruitful effects. For example, it led to widespread secularization and the destroying of many harmful religious taboos, as well as a general awareness of knowledge of the natural world.
And it sadly also had a stifling effect on the mind of many scientists, philosophers, and  lay people. Many people thought as a result of these debates that all mistaken, old, obsolete ideas were de facto held by the Church or most Christians. Whenever they get the chance they try to attribute the worst and weakest positions to religion and then go on to show that those are improbable in the light of new scientific discoveries. Of course most of these champions of science don't know much about the actual work or views of either religious people now or earlier, nor about the views philosophers and other scientists hold or held in earlier ages. Some people lead their intellectual lives as if publish or perish also applied to the quality of their thoughts, and hence the more and the faster they go through ideas, the better results they would achieve.

This infatuation with the fight against religion that some science-fans are carrying on can be partly seen to be responsible for trying to adopt some primitive materialism about the mind. This impulse drives views which claim that talk about the mind is always talk about an object - whether bodily or not. This view is as rude folk-materialist-physics can get. (Funnily enough, such views show remarkable similarity to the pre-socratic views according to which everything was just earth, or just water, etc. I doubt that many pop-scientists are happy about this fact, but that's the position they've maneuvered themselves into.)
If one adopts such a view then the mind can be seen as something to be grasped similarly to the way crystals are studied by people interested in their atomic structure. Habermas pointed out a good 50 years ago that there will be a point when science will take over the role of religion. There are fans, who don't understand much actual science, or anything else, and don't like to think, and who, at the same time, love to think that they own the truth, they are the educated, the up-to-date ones, the intellectuals. Such folks have successfully swapped one ideology for the other and would probably have been the most zealous religious bigots 200 years ago. Just as some believers have very simple view about God, picturing him as some sort of caring father sitting among the clouds, many science-fans think of science as one holy method solving all problems and leading always to a single objective view. This has of course not much to do with how science is practiced. Objectivity is aimed at and desirable, but everyone knows that debate, constant advancement, a plethora of practices and methods, and piecemeal arguments and testing is what brings things forward.

Now we are getting to the good bit: there surely was a mistaken folk approach to free will which held that the will's freedom is directly opposed to determinism. And there surely was at least one one view of the mind proposing that the mind is something immaterial floating around and carrying out all the cognitive functions and maybe is the place of emotions, and so on. But being hellbent on showing that such views are wrong only shows that one can't even understand the more interesting alternatives. And vulgar pop-scientists are trying to do exactly that.
What I propose instead is to take the meaning of 'mind' to be more like the meaning of 'will'. We talk about the will when we exercise certain capacities. We also talk about willful actions, acting out of one's free will, and we have a good idea that this means that we acted accordingly to our preferences, to consciously experienced motives, after deliberating, and so on (there are many criteria and some contextual factors also matter).
We can safely venture the claim that we use mentalistic terms like desired, wanted to, intended, aimed at, hoped that, and so on if and when certain features of the situation and what we know about the agent warrant this. We rely on behavior, sometimes on knowledge of the agent or other similar agents under similar circumstances (or knowledge or ourselves), we rely on observation and what we hear about (and maybe from) the agent, and so on. There are many sources that influence whether or not we call an action intentional, deliberate, whether we say someone hoped something, or planned something, or that A believed that p.
An idea that there is some free floating mind that does this thinking and causes the body to move isn't the basis of saying these things. We don't need to postulate any entity - bodily or not - which is the mind to understand how we talk and explain each others' behavior. What we need to understand is that thinking, talking and explaining each others' behavior is a complex system of qualifying specific instances of behavior in specific situations. And this is very much coherent with the natural sciences, with determinism, with advances in sociology, anthropology and psychology and our ordinary practices of holding each other responsible.

The view I propose leads then to the conclusion that the seeming contradiction between holding that people 'have' minds is perfectly coherent with making discoveries about all sorts of bodily processes having influence on the our behavior. These two types of explanation of behavior are not in competition. The bodily explanations can help us understand something entirely new about what is going on before, during, and after our behavior. They are not the same as the brusk but functional and useful everyday explanations that we normally make use of. And their area of application is much more specific in most cases.
The everyday folk explanations use 'reliable' categories because they work and have worked now for thousands of years. We get along, manage to coordinate our behavior - we managed to establish good scientific practice, mass societies, run cities, food and other resource chains, and to confess love and tell jokes. Alone for these reasons it would be surprising to find out that the way we qualify each others' behavior using mentalistic terms is wrong.
It would be equally magical if the mentalistic qualifications that we use - many of them having been around for thousands of years - would capture exactly certain specific bodily states or things. These qualifications are applied to complex instances of behavior in specific settings. If we look at someone while they behave, find that he behaves exactly as we already knew he would, and we also find that something went on in his brain, that does not mean that what went on in his brain was what we have meant all the time by the mental terms we applied to the person. We weren't talking about brain states in medieval Europe. We were talking about behavior in context.We weren't getting right neuroscience in advance, we were engaged in a different practice. It follows, that neuroscience isn't getting right 'what'  the mind is, it is just giving us info of what is going on in the nervous system in situations which we already know how to call and to explain. What neuroscience provides us with is a very deep and valuable information of some processes sustaining what we already know, namely human behavior. The new info we get from the sciences has tremendous clinical and therapeutic potential. But this still doesn't entail that there would be anything - bodily or not - that is 'the' mind.

What we are learning now about our brains, our bodies, our behavior is fascinating and new. It is not an old, crude theory of mind, it is not a different explanation of what the mind is, or whether or not it is material or not. Anyone still thinking in these terms is embedded in an outdated and misguided discussion that was fueled by the war for resources and positions between scientists and the men of church. What is happening now is something much more interesting and stunning: we are acquiring the elements of a new way of seeing what feeds into all the actions we perform from our nervous system and other parts of our bodies. This is not understanding in the sense in which one understand another person when we grasp their motivations for what they did after they explain their reasons to us. After all, learning that a certain hormonal reaction is going on when we fall in love doesn't change the fact that we fall in love. We didn't gain a new explanation of why we fell in love. What we did gain an explanation of is what processes in the body are going on when we fall in love.

Knowing that something in the brain contributed or partially constituted the causing and sustaining of an instance of a behavior - an action of waving goodbye for example - should not come as a surprise. Exactly the opposite. Most of us always knew that our body influences our behavior in many ways. When we are tired we are impatient, when we have a bad stomach we are grumpy, when we are near someone we are attracted to we become excited, and so on. What we did not know were the details, the specific steps of processes going on. We don't learn anything knew in terms of understanding someone else and their mind when we learn that their kissing us was preceded by certain chemical reactions. Still, we learn something about what happens in our bodies when someone who loves us kisses us. And that is also very interesting and a perfectly valid subject of study.

So, one might ask, what about the mind then? How do we learn about it? Well, there is not much to learn. It is our thinking about what to eat, our deciding to go out in the evening with out friends, our focusing on which words to use in the birthday message for granny, our remembering our childhood dog, or our cooking a pasta. These are all our exercising some of our abilities. We know these abilities well. Thinking, concentrating, remembering, feeling, deliberating, weighing up, imagining someone else's reactions and so on are familiar. Science doesn't add to this list or retract from it. It can tell us a lot more about what goes on when we say that these abilities are used by someone, nor when we say that someone acted in a situation freely.
My conclusion is that there is no need for debates about whether the brain is the mind, or whether science is giving us new explanations of our behavior, or whether we have a mind, and so on. We have a mind in as much as some of our behavior and the abilities involved in have mentalistic names, and what is going on when we think these terms apply is what we learn a bit more about with the help of science. Sadly, nothing more, but luckily, this is something enormous and exciting, and this is what we should emphasize. We are learning something new.

Doing research on XY

Whenever I go to a conference, talk or lecture and someone says "I'm doing research on XY" I see them before me as actually sitting/standing on that person/thing and doing research on it. It's one of those terrible jokes one never voices, because he has enough self-critique to know that they aren't funny. Nevertheless, I cannot get it out of my head. So here it goes. One I heard a few weeks ago from a philosopher: "I'm doing research on Wittgenstein".