The Gun In My Mouth
For the purposes of this thread, let's imagine that I walk around all day everyday with a hair trigger loaded gun in my mouth. You try to talk to me about the gun, but I roll my eyes at your hysteria, and keep changing the subject to a thousand other topics.
Am I rational?
Would you take any philosophy I write about seriously?
Am I rational?
Would you take any philosophy I write about seriously?
Comments (92)
I'd "Red Flag" you as soon as I saw you and the law would deal with you after a 3 day mandatory firearm turn over.
As a logical observation: how are you going to change the subject with the shaft of a pistol in your mouth? :shade:
Yes and No. Yes because you enjoy the time before the trigger gets pulled. No because distracting yourself doesn't take the gun out of your mouth.
You are rational to keep the gun in your mounth, if the gun is superglued to your face, and to only way to remove it, is to cut off your head.
We are not concerned about whether you pull the trigger or not, but where and when. Your demise may cause a highly inconvenient mess if you choose a location like the cafe in Bloomingdales as the site of your demise. Somebody will have to clean up the brains, bones, blood... probably at public expense. And if you elect your demise during the lunch rush, you'll spoil The People's enjoyment of the daily special.
There are easier ways, are there not, to demonstrate Camus adage, “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." You could, for instance, just do a poll on the Philosophy Forum: "Should I kill myself today? Yes / No". The collective wisdom of your steamed colleagues can be relied upon, can they not?
For the purposes of this thread, I might also point out that IF you are going to kill yourself, you could at least take several objectionable persons with you -- I have a little list of people, none of whom would be missed.
The absurdity of your proposal suggests that you may not be rational. Some Thorazine would probably be helpful.
But I don't know why you're behaving that way, and you won't tell me, so...? It's certainly peculiar and alarming behaviour. Possibly irrational. [I]Probably[/I] irrational?
How would you have the time to write about philosophy when you walk around all day, everyday, with a hair trigger loaded gun in your mouth? Or would you somehow manage to write about philosophy whilst walking around with a gun in your mouth, presumably keeping one hand occupied? But, even if you did, whether or not I took your writing seriously would depend on the writing.
As you surely guessed, there is a larger and more serious point here. My proposal is that collectively we are the person described in the opening post.
1) The hair trigger gun aimed down all of our throats is nuclear weapons.
2) We roll our eyes at a person's hysteria if they talk about those weapons more than a bit.
3) If the subject comes up at all, we routinely change the focus to a thousand other topics. Watch, this thread will die in a week or two.
This phenomena is near universal and exists at all levels of society, from the humblest crack addict to the most highly educated intellectual elites, including professional philosophers, supposed experts at reason.
What is the point of philosophy if it can't even guide us to focus on the "gun in our mouth" which could destroy everything in just a few minutes?
Is there any point to philosophy beyond casual nerd entertainment?
Is professional academic philosophy basically just a scam?
There are many such guns. There's climate change, chemical and biological weapons (much worse than nuclear in terms of their effects on us and on our ecosystem), and we mustn't forget humanity, the worst and most threatening weapon around. ... On this planet, at least. Humans are a plague species.
But, should we say that anything and everything could happen on whim and we can't fully expect that day in and day out we'll be protected from nuclear disaster, we could also say the same of world peace and harmony. That is, why aren't we all walking around in jubilation knowing that just like it's possible that a hair trigger could blast smoeones' face off at any moment, world peace and harmony could also just sort of come about in the same way? I mean, if we're going to be irrational, let's at least be optimistically irrational.
Is this what you were really interested in all along? Fine by me if it was.
A word in defense of Philosophy, English Literature, et al: One of the essential functions in society is "reproducing society". Were there no philosophy departments--even as elitist rackets--the knowledge of philosophy would eventually disappear. The same goes for everything that goes on in education K through PhD: the tools and content of civilization, culture, and society have to be reproduced or they will eventually be lost.
So it is around the world, a large number of people are engaged in maintaining and reproducing society.
Look at what happened over a few hundred years of the collapsing Roman Empire: piece by piece chunks of social knowledge were lost. Of course, people made do without it. Life for the ordinary peasant didn't change very much (it was never great to begin with) but for the medieval elite, cultural resources were greatly reduced.
Later on, in the Renaissance, a major effort was undertaken to recover as much classical knowledge and culture as could be recovered. Alas, only a fraction could be brought back. We have rebuilt complex knowledge and culture, but it will not last without continual maintenance.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Academic philosophers are just an extreme example of the phenomena, given that they have advanced training in the use of reason, and that seems to make little difference, they still show little interest in nuclear weapons. Seeing that has me questioning whether there's really any point to philosophy beyond entertainment.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Ok, seems reasonable, but so what? What good is philosophy if it doesn't guide us to focus on threats the scale of nuclear weapons?
Quoting Bitter Crank
It looks like we are scheduled to repeat that pattern. What's remarkable is how entirely casual we are about it. That's what I was trying to get at with the hypothetical in the opening post. I was attempting to make the large reality clearer by bringing it down to the personal level. Whether that succeeded is debatable, but that was the goal.
I have a loaded gun in my mouth. And I'm bored by the situation.
Words like "stupid" and "insane" don't really seem sufficient, and I'm at a loss for what words might describe this situation adequately.
It's not a one-way street, though, is it? Philosophy is nothing without people with an interest in philosophy. It would be unreasonable to expect philosophy to guide us to a solution to the threat of nuclear catastrophe in and of itself. That would be reification. You're blaming philosophy for a failure of humanity. It's not that the right philosophy isn't out there, it's that it's not at the forefront of most people's minds to even begin to find it.
Quoting Jake
Yes, clearly. You only have to take a look back through our history to learn of the impact that philosophy has had.
Quoting Jake
No, that's a silly question. It's no more a scam than any other academic subject. If you've been scammed by someone [i]about[/I] philosophy - if someone has misrepresented it to you - then that's on them, and arguably on you also to some extent, not on philosophy itself. You do seem to have more than a few misconceptions about philosophy. Whence have you gotten these ideas into your head?
Ok, fair enough, but I didn't ask for a solution, just interest.
The question is...
1) If philosophy can't guide us even to having a serious sustained interest in the most imminent threat to modern civilization...
2) If even the most highly educated professional philosophers don't display that level of interest...
3) Is philosophy really just a parlor game?
I'm not disputing the entertainment value of philosophy, that much value at least is proven by all the people engaging in such discussions. I'm asking if there is a value to philosophy beyond entertainment.
I've asked whether academic philosophy is a scam because the many millions of dollars spent on it seems to imply that philosophy is a serious enterprise. If that's not true, if it's just a parlor game for over educated nerds, then a lot of taxpayers would seem to be getting ripped off.
I'm getting these ideas through the processes of reason, and you have yet to show why an intellectual enterprise which can't sustain a focus on the most imminent threat to modern civilization should be taken seriously, other than as a form of entertainment.
Interest from who? There are no doubt academics who are interested in the topic and have written about it.
Quoting Jake
Same reply as before.
Quoting Jake
How do you know that they don't? Have you actually looked into it? How far have you looked into it? Which philosophers have you researched? I think it'd be unlikely that there are none which show any serious interest. Whether that's enough to meet the level of interest you're expecting is another matter.
Quoting Jake
Same reply as before.
Quoting Jake
Same reply as before.
Quoting Jake
Same reply as before.
Quoting Jake
But you haven't actually addressed what I said in my reply. Instead you've basically just repeated yourself. Please address what I've said, in the form of a question, comment, criticism, request for elaboration...
Same post as before.
Let's do some philosophy, and find out.
Why do we have nuclear weapons, or any weapons? We call it defence, and it is aimed at security. We feel insecure and we want to be secure. You want to be secure too, and that is why you are bothered about nuclear weapons. Everyone wants to be secure.
So it turns out that the attempt to be secure fails. Not only does it fail, it makes the insecurity greater. The same thing applies to the environment, as has been mentioned above. The attempt to control the environment leads to the loss of control of the environment. And the same need for security is at work.
So it seems to be that one cannot find security by seeking it in the world. And this is exactly the same as happiness; one will never be happy looking for happiness. Let's stop looking for these things in the world, and find them in ourselves.
I've spent months trying to engage academic philosophers on this topic and have largely failed, thus this thread. As example, consider the APA blog. Do you know what the APA is? Do you know where to find their blog? Or are you just blowing a lot of silly smoke here?
When you find the APA blog, you'll see that they've been publishing daily for a couple years, and have posted only one article on nuclear weapons, and that only after endless badgering from me. If I understand correctly, the APA is the oldest and largest association of American academic philosophers, and as the evidence of their blog clearly shows, they have a very limited interest in nuclear weapons, close to none. As best I can tell from visiting a number of other similar blogs, their lack of interest generally represents the field as a whole.
But, please feel free to prove me wrong by posting hundreds of links to nuclear weapons articles by academic philosophers. Or feel free to sit down and be quiet, that would be fine too.
Books on nuclear disarmament, including [I]Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters[/I] Hans Blix, [I]The Consequences of American Nuclear Disarmament: Strategy and Nuclear Weapons[/I] Christine Leah, [I]Getting to Zero: The Path to Nuclear Disarmament[/I] Catherine M. Kelleher and Judith Reppy, [I]Trust in Nuclear Disarmament Verification[/I] Christopher Hobbs, Hassan Elbahtimy, Matthew Moran, and Wyn Q. Bowen, etc. etc.
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
You search for it.
Look, you're making my point for me. You're not interested in nuclear weapons either. You're interested in playing the role of the Great Debunker. Or you're interested in defending academics, or in defending philosophy in general. Ok, fine, you have every right to do this, but...
Please explain to us why these agendas are more important than the imminent collapse of everything built over the last 500 years. What is your reasoning for choosing to focus your time on these other agendas?
You're making my point for me. Just like the academics and other intellectual elite "experts" you're not capable of using reason to identify the most important life and death subjects. To debunk this, show us the articles YOU have written on nuclear weapons. There are none, right? That's not your personal failing alone, but rather the failing of Western culture at large.
And this is why I am asking if philosophy is really anything more than a parlor game. If even the most intelligent and educated people can not use philosophy to focus on the survival of human civilization, what good is it (other than entertainment)?
Ummm….what? An ad hominem?!?! In a philosophical discussion??!?!? Tsk tsk.
No, do your own research. I'm not your personal assistant.
Yes I am. I'm interested in a lot of things. I'm also interested in climate change, political philosophy, history, and science.
Quoting Jake
Immanent?
Quoting Jake
Why do you expect me to have written articles on the subject of nuclear weapons? Do you expect that of everyone you encounter? Bit weird.
Quoting Jake
I've already answered. Yes, it's obviously more than a parlour game. It deals with many varied important questions on a whole range of subjects. The problem here stems from your evaluation, which is skewed by your peculiar standard of judgement. It's either supposed to be the salvation of humanity or it's nothing more than a parlour game. Bit silly if you ask me.
Show us the articles you've written on the subject of nuclear weapons please.
Quoting Sapientia
I expect that of all philosophers and other intellectual elites I encounter. I expect that because reason should be guiding us to direct our attention to threats of the largest scale.
Please revisit the opening post. If I had a gun in mouth, would it not be rational for me to direct my attention to a situation which could quickly bring upon the end of all other situations? If I was bored by the gun, would you not label me irrational?
The issue I'm attempting to address is that reason and philosophy are not working, even though many of the people who've spent their lives studying these subjects are very intelligent and well educated.
You claimed to be interested in nuclear weapons. But you're not interested in researching the subject. You're only interested in these other agendas, such as butting heads with me. Again, you're making my point for me, because what you're doing well represents the culture at large, including intellectual elites.
We're interested in almost everything.
Except the loaded gun in our mouth.
You're a funny one. No True Scotsman would have an interest in the subject of nuclear weapons without authoring multiple articles on the subject?
Quoting Jake
That's a foolish expectation.
You strike me as an irrational alarmist fixated on a single issue.
The survival of modern civilization is a "peculiar standard of judgement"?
You don't know that. You couldn't possibly know that. And you're wrong. You're making rash judgements about me because I haven't reciprocated your zealousness.
Please explain to us the reasoning which concludes that we shouldn't be alarmed by thousands of hydrogen bombs aimed at our heads.
Please explain to us the reasoning which concludes that if I have a loaded gun in mouth I shouldn't make that the single focus of my attention?
You're doing a very understandable thing, so I apologize for giving you a hard time, even though, um, you deserve it. :smile:
You're referencing the group consensus, led by elevated "experts", which assumes nuclear weapons are just one of a thousand issues. You look around you, and see almost everyone takes this position, and so you believe it must be correct. You understandably want to believe that the group consensus is generally sane and rational.
You're pushing back at me because you're starting to see the group consensus is not sane, not rational, not intelligent, but much like the man in the opening post. Gun in mouth, and bored by it.
This is a quite troubling thing to see, so I don't really blame anyone who doesn't want to see it. So if you don't want to see it, just stop reading, and go back to sleep. I don't object.
Look, you yourself just said you don't want to research it. Look above a couple posts and read your own words.
Again, if you have researched it, prove me wrong, and show us your articles. Or sit down and shut up.
No, don't put words into my mouth.
That's not the whole picture. You know that as much as I do. Give me one good reason why I should humour you if you're going to be dealing in half-truths and exaggeration.
No, I didn't say that I don't want to research it. If I want to research it, and I decide to do so, then it will be in my own time, when I'm good and ready, [i]not[/I] on your demand.
I don't have any articles. I don't write articles. I have never claimed to be the author of any articles whatsoever, let alone on nuclear weapons. If you're interested in the subject, then go ahead and read up on it. You don't need me for that.
And I don't have a gun in my mouth. Although, conversing with you is starting to make me wish that I did.
Jake, if he's wrong about what he replied originally, demonstrate as much. Just because he doesn't have a PhD (mebbe..?), or isn't published, or doesn't wish to/cannot provide written substance authored by him to demonstrate his interest in the topic doesn't mean he's wrong. Hence, and once again, ad hominem. Do you know what an ad hominem is? It's when you attempt to silence your opposition by irrelevant utterings or material. His authorship, or lack thereof, is not a demonstration that he is write or wrong. Your challenging him and pointing to his lack of authorship/unwillingness to produce same, are NOT proof that you have prevailed in your argument.
He's right, as are you, in providing evidence which supports the key claim of my posts in this thread, which is...
Society wide, including the intellectual elites, philosophy and reason has failed to guide us to prioritize our focus. And so, just as we see in this thread, we are so easily distracted from aiming our attention and intelligence at existential threats like nuclear weapons.
We are, just like the hypothetical person in the opening post, people with a huge gun in our mouth, which we can't focus on for more than a few minutes. We find almost any subject more interesting, for example, ego head butting on an Internet forum. Ego head butting seems interesting to us, but the fact that there is machinery in place to crash civilization in almost the blink of an eye, a snooze, not really that interesting.
If this was true only for this or that person, we could place the blame on their personal limitations. But it's true of the whole culture generally speaking, including those most highly educated in the art of reason.
Here, look for yourself...
https://blog.apaonline.org/
That's a leading academic philosophy group blog with a couple years of publishing daily by many different professional philosophers, and there's only ONE article on nuclear weapons, and that ONE article exists only because I demanded it. It's the same everywhere I go, except that most philosophy blogs have zero articles on nuclear weapons.
I know the APA editors a bit, they're nice people, quite intelligent, articulate and very well educated. None of that is the problem.
The problem is that philosophy appears to be inadequate for addressing issues of such great scale. Thus, I'm proposing that philosophy is basically a clever parlor game which some folks are lucky enough to get paid to play.
Once you've accepted that life, all life perhaps, could end in an instant, your own life kind of starts anew. That's a shift of perspective I don't think you want but it's one small part of why philosophy is more than a "clever parlor game".
As you're going about your daily business, reserve a little attention for observing the structure of civilization all around you.
See the streets, the traffic signs, the houses and shops, the hospitals and schools. See the grocery stores, reliable food, a miracle! When a police car goes by take a moment to think of everything that goes in to keeping the bad guys at bay so they're not in your face. Consider the number 911, you dial three digits on the phone in your pocket and highly trained people come rushing to assist you.
Look at all the stuff you have, that almost everybody has. Cars and clothes and computers, too many comforts and conveniences to begin to list. Think of all the millions of scientists working hard every day to make things better for you.
Just observe all this stuff as you pass through your daily life. Give some thought to how much work has gone in to building this miracle we call modern civilization. And think what your life would be without it.
If a reader does this homework, over time they too will become ever more amazed at how casual we are about what we have, and how easily it could all be lost.
You're referring to our personal situation. And of course you're right, we're all going to die one way or another. Just lost a family member here yesterday. We all have to make peace with this, agreed.
We don't have to make peace with many generations to come being denied the opportunity to enjoy what we've enjoyed, because we were too stupid and selfish to protect it for them. What nuclear weapons can teach us is how little we really care about each other, even our own children.
You've not yet made the case why any methodology which allows us to be calmly bored with the gun in our mouth, and the mouths of billions of people to come, should be considered useful and important.
Please observe how everyone is ignoring the logic of the opening post. If I literally had a gun in my mouth, and was too bored by the gun to bother discussing it, would you not consider me nuts?
Now please observe how posters will continue to ignore that specific challenge, or look for some clever way around it. Observe how philosophy is not helping us to be clear minded enough to simply admit that we are all quite literally nuts, almost psychopathic in our lack of concern.
Dude, take the gun out of your mouth, get off your excessively high horse and engage. Yes we are mad, now, moving on, what are we to do? Oh wait, no point asking you, you're as mad as the rest of us.
I wouldn't say "calmly bored" but your experience may differ. As for useful and important, I gave two examples. Understanding others and understanding our own mortality. Or perhaps politics, another rich area of philosophy, could help you persuade the masses to care.
I expect you won't be satisfied with philosophy though unless it immediately address your concern about nuclear weapons.
If you literally had a gun in your mouth, I'd be intrigued. I don't necessarily consider suicidal people nuts though and, yeah, I can imagine numerous reasons you wouldn't want to discuss it. After that acceptance of death I spoke about, discussions on how to avoid it etc become extremely dull.
oh, if only philosophers would show an interest in nuclear weapons! we wouldnt need to fear nuclear annihilation anymore!
We post WWII baby boomers grew up during the tension of the Cold War and the anxiety about nuclear war. Speaking for myself, I remain worried about nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. Since perestroika and glasnost, the threat of imminent use of nuclear weapons has been decreased -- but not eliminated. I am now less immediately worried about Russian or American missiles. I am more worried about India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapons, or North Korea's and Israel's, or Iran's (future) nuclear bombs. Once used, these smaller arsenals could easily result in a much wider nuclear catastrophe.
I haven't stopped worrying about nuclear weapons, but since the height of the cold war, a new threat has appeared: Global Climate Change (aka global warming). The difference between nuclear war and climate change is that the latter is happening, and the former has not (so far). Worse, it appears that global warming will continue to worsen into the future--no matter what.
Giving roughly 7.4 billion people credit, I don't think people are indifferent to either nuclear weapons or global warming. It is the case, however, that no individual, no small group, no large group, no major political party that is not very securely in power can do much about either problem. WHY?
The reason why even large political parties not very securely in power are unable to act is that the essential technologies of nuclear weapons and (for global warming) energy production and use are under the control of elite groups: either elite military control (for nuclear) or elite economic control (for energy). A rather small group (let's use a generous estimate of 1,000,000 people) control critical infrastructure. These 1 million people are very powerful military and economic players. When less than a dozen people have as much wealth as about 3.2 billion people (according to OXFAM-UK), it should be clear that even large political parties are out-matched.
Quoting Jake
I would say philosophy is capable of "addressing issues of great scale" but is unable to conjure up magical solutions which can overcome mundane realities. If one is sufficiently insulated from harsh realities, anything can be turned into a parlor game.
No, you're mistaken. Your "key claim" contains evidence of your own misunderstanding. Neither philosophy nor reason can have "failed" to achieve what is not its goal. Neither philosophy nor reason have[/I] goals. Nor do they [i]have[/I] priorities. That is [i]your[/I] category error. In reality, this is [I]your[/I] goal. It is [i]your priority. It is [I]you[/I], Jake, who is projecting your own goal, and your own priority, [i]on to[/I] philosophy, and [i]on to[/I] reason, in a superficial attempt to distract attention away from the personal nature of this issue of yours. You are scapegoating philosophy and reason for the perceived shortcomings of society when viewed through a perspective which mirrors your own, and which carries with it all of the baggage you're clinging on to.
Your analysis has failed before it has even gotten off the ground. Better luck next time.
Of all the countries which have nukes, nobody wants to use them unless it's absolutely necessary, because any use of nukes runs the risk of provoking counter nukes. Even Iran and North Korea don't want nukes to actually use them, they want them as deterrents.
So if there were suddenly no nukes, is it possible that the world would then have to go to war to establish new power balances?
All rational nations want nukes, if they can afford them, out of healthy fear alone (except maybe nations such as Canada who are comfortably nestled in the sweaty bosom of another nation's blast radius).
Pretend for a moment you're the leader of North Korea. Without nukes you can deliver far less effective retaliatory strikes against South Korea should they try to blitz you. With nukes, and with long range missiles capable of delivering them, you're even able to shake a credible fist at the world's only superpower, America. It's excellent long-term security. If I was the leader of Iran, I would probably consider getting nukes a priority given Iran's rather precarious relationship with western allies. Israel definitely has nukes, but for some reason they don't formally declare them. Normally it would be Dr. Strangelove grade hubris to have nukes and not declare them, else they wouldn't actually be deterrents, but since everyone already assumes Israel has them it doesn't really matter.
I'm not saying that more nations should have nukes or that I want Iran to have them (I would rather there be fewer nukes held by fewer people) but I think the fact that nuclear deterrents held by the world's most powerful nations has actually prevented them from escalating direct conflict and starting a third world war.
In facing a world that has an increased risk of total annihilation because of nukes, we also have a reduced risk of traditional annihilation. Given that nuclear war has not yet occurred, perhaps it has been a good wager overall!
What better solution for a trust issue can there be than mutually assured destruction?
haveing nucular bombs curtainly isnt "defensive" in the tradisional way
I do literally have a gun in my mouth, as do you, as do we all. My hypothetical is a hypothetical only in the sense it referenced a handgun instead of a hydrogen bomb.
I do literally have a "gun" in my mouth, as do you, as do we all, but you're not actually intrigued. The moment I drop out of this thread the rest of you will as well, and the focus will move back to a thousand other things.
And that is my point. Philosophy isn't working at making us rational.
Quoting RainyDay
Ok, so what you're saying is that the prospect that the next many generations of human beings won't get to enjoy modern civilization is an extremely dull topic. Again, you're helping me make my point. You're expressing the group consensus of the society at large generally speaking, including the most highly educated philosophers.
Good point Crank. Perhaps much of what is happening here in the thread is a generation gap problem. I was 10 years old living in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Walter Cronkite was on the TV saying the bombs could start falling at any moment. That's a different experience than younger members of the forum have been through. For them it's the falling of the Berlin Wall and the notion that the cold war is over and thus the problem of nukes is largely resolved.
Quoting Bitter Crank
In a sense yes, but the potential for unintended launches continues. See the last post in this thread for an example.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3728/the-knowledge-explosion
Quoting Bitter Crank
The two issues are related. Climate change threatens to push fragile states over the edge in to chaos, which brings us closer to the conditions in which nukes would be used.
Even without climate change, there is a long pattern in human history of things going along pretty well for awhile and then chaos emerges for a time. We've always survived the chaos periods in the past because the powers available to us were limited. Nuclear weapons change that equation. The next time chaos emerges is likely to be the last, at least for modern civilization.
Quoting Bitter Crank
We can't do much about the problem because 1) we insist we can't do much about the problem and 2) we spend almost all our time focused on other much smaller issues.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Then why are the vast majority of professional philosophers the vast majority of the time not addressing the subject of nuclear weapons?
It's not because they're stupid. It's not because they're poorly educated. It's not because they're heartless monsters. It's not because they lack the relevant facts. We can rule all that out.
And once we do that, we are left with the methodology which they are using, philosophy.
We could propose that what is really needed to address nuclear weapons is not intellectual intelligence, but emotional intelligence. We know the gun is in our mouth, but we don't really care that much, and so we are easily distracted by almost every other topic.
Emotional intelligence would involve the ability to open ourselves up to the horror of nuclear war. Philosophy doesn't really open us emotionally, because it instead focuses on detached objectivity. And so we have a lot of facts, and can write clever articles about those facts, but the facts have little impact upon us and our behavior.
Thus, the process of philosophy, while being beautiful in itself, is proven basically worthless for the issues of largest scale, such as the end of everything everywhere.
You make good points about how nukes have sobered the great powers. But you're not taking important factors in to account.
1) Technical errors leading to unintended launches. See the last post in this thread for a real world example.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3728/the-knowledge-explosion
2) Human History. There is a consistent pattern throughout human history that every so often we go bat shit crazy and have fight to the death conflicts using every tool available. There's really little evidence that this longstanding pattern is now completely over.
3) The Hitler Effect. It was very irrational of Hitler to invade Russia. But rationality had little to do with it. Hitler was a compulsive high stakes gambler who lived for the next role of the dice. Every so often such people come to power and think they are smarter than everyone else and that they can get away with anything.
So, you're right that it's good that nukes have sobered the great powers in our lifetime, but that's not going to last forever.
Good point, that's true, I am as mad as the rest of us. If there is any difference it's only in that I know I'm nuts. And I know most everyone else including the "experts" are nuts too. So I have this awareness of living in an insane asylum. Which as you've seen, tends to make me even more nuts. :smile:
Hi Jake, as i allready suggested in the other thread, philosophy is not politics nor activism... and it better not be.
I don't think there are a lot of philosophers who think having nukes arround is a good idea, but it's another thing to actively campaign for it. As soon as philosophers would start going down that road, they would become suspect as philosophers. Activist and politicans care about achieving some goals, and truth typically becomes subordinate to these goals...
Everybody has a role to play. The role of philosophy is to think clearly and (re)evaluate values... best without some preconcieved ideology or dogma's. Politicians and activist can then use the work philosophers do to inform the goals they want to pursue.
And philosophy has played its role. Nukes are bad, there i said it! It's just not a topic that is of philosophical interest anymore. It's solved... philosophically :-).
Well, if you had actually understood the other thread...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3728/the-knowledge-explosion
... you would realize that nukes open the door to a purely philosophical discussion. What is our relationship with knowledge if not a philosophical topic???
I'm not asking philosophers to be politicians or activists. I'm asking them to address the relationship with knowledge which gave rise to nukes and other products of civilization. I'm asking them to dig below the surface and examine the underlying assumptions which bring all these phenomena in to being. That's philosophy!
Seriously. I've been trying to have such discussions all over the net for years. The best discussions always happen on open to the public forums such as this one. Attempting to engage scientists, philosophers and other intellectual "elites" in our relationship with knowledge has proven to be largely a waste of time.
Yeah well, I think i said my part on that topic in the other thread. Not going to repeat the same thing again...
You don't know what the word "literally" means? Or the word "gun"?
Quoting Jake
Scapegoat!
Exactly! Someone else who understands his misunderstanding. Guiding people to action against nuclear weapons comes under politics and activism, and if people aren't interested enough, yet they should be, then that's a people problem, and it requires people to work on it. It's no use blaming philosophy for that.
So, as I said above, to little effect, the madness is the fear, and it cannot be addressed externally. Ending the madness is a psychological issue, not a political or a philosophical one. Have you read The Ending of Time?
Yes, massively, with Marx. But he famously wrote, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it". He wanted action over and above philosophy. He himself was politically active.
Anyway, it'd do no good to sit on your hands and wait for another Marx to come along. That said, it's not as though this issue has never cropped up in a big way or that well-known and well-respected intellectuals of a time have not addressed the issue or taken any action on it. To give that impression would be misleading. There was, for example, the The Russell–Einstein Manifesto, issued in 1955, the Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963 by John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Harold Macmillan. More recently in 2005, 60 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 40,000 anti-nuclear/anti-war protesters marched past the United Nations in New York.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, I read a LOT of Krishnamurti in my youth and consider him a significant influence on my thinking to this day. While I do appreciate his insightfulness we might note that JK wrote and spoke extensively for almost 80 years, and while his philosophy is indeed interesting and entertaining, nothing much has changed.
Both you and Krishnamurti are helping me make my point. Krishnamurti is yet another example of an intelligent educated person who failed to focus on the gun in our mouth, and you are using Krishnamurti to aim us away from focusing on the gun in our mouth. Everybody is interested in everything, except the gun. That's fundamentally irrational, and demonstrates the weakness of philosophy.
How does it help, to focus on the gun? Why not focus on the mouth and the hand?
Please reference the opening post. Is this what you would say to a friend with a gun in their mouth? Would you try to teach them how to be enlightened, argue for a radical transformation of human psychology etc?
That's why I offered the hypothetical in the opening post, an attempt to make nuclear weapons real, instead of some fancy abstract issue. I attempted to make them real in this thread, because they are real.
Yes. If you try by force to take away the gun, it will go off. So you have to tackle the reason the gun is there.
As rational persons, we agree that nuclear weapons are a threat to all life on earth and should certainly be made as safe as they can be made. There are difficult technical problems in disposing of plutonium, but our larger and much more difficult problems are political. Politics are much more difficult than just about any other human endeavor.
Only a political party [a government] that is very securely in power can carry out the decision to do away with its nuclear weapons. It has to have secure control over its political situation and its military. And then it has to want to do away with its nuclear weapons. Governments are loathe to diminish their international leverage.
Very few governments, if any, are ever so secure that the most rational policies can be pursued, no matter what other political groups, the military, economic players, and the people in general think.
Governments face many huge problems: its climate change, nuclear disarmament, massive debt, huge displaced populations, resource depletion, clean air and water, and so on. Then there is the infinity of small problems. Politics are part of all those problems.
It's taking a while to convince you, though you don't seem to have much of an alternative.
In democracies at least, we are the government. Politicians will say and do whatever it takes to get our votes and stay in office. If we view the pending collapse of modern civilization as just one of a thousand issues, politicians will too. If we make nukes a high priority issue, they will too.
Everybody always wants to pass the buck to politicians and the government, when the real problem is actually their employer.
I don't mean to dismiss your interests, they are my interests too, and I'd welcome the opportunity to discuss them together some time. If you start a thread on such topics and I don't show up, please zip me a reminder.
I do agree that human psychology is the root of the problem. I'm just making the point that we don't have time to fix that first, if it even can be fixed. Such a process would take centuries at least, and we just don't have that kind of time. Imperfect flawed human beings are going to have solve this one, if it is to be solved.
There are philosophies that address mass hysteria and life-threatening potentialities.
Just because I can go and jump out the window beside me does not mean that I must live my life with reference to not accomplishing that potentiality of my being... This is the root of anxiety; a contemplation of potentialities of my being, especially that which would render my being an in-itself. It is precisely my freedom that allows me to not wallow in an imaginary anxiety.
But the solution is trivial; take the gun out of your mouth, get rid of the weapons. One doesn't need to be perfect to understand that, and it needn't take centuries. So one has to ask why such an obviously sensible course is not being followed. Just as one has to ask why people starve when there is enough food for all, and why though we have the understanding and the technology we cannot sort out climate change or stop polluting the oceans, and so on.
Is it not the case that I am waiting for everyone else to be perfect before I start?
From a day-to-day perspective the issue of nuclear warheads is a big picture problem. Big picture problems are the sorts of problems that don't have anything immediately actionable -- Global Warming, Racism, War, Pollution, Poverty, Sexism, Nuclear Armageddon. They are real, but they are larger than life. They are too big for most of us to feel like they fall into the category of things we have control over.
It takes a lot of motivation to look at such problems as something you can do something about. But then you have to direct your energy in a way that breaks such things down into day-to-day actions. A pretty common example is to vote. With respect to the problem you're talking about there have been other concrete actions taken, but they aren't the sort of thing you're going to get many people to do. (edit: There's also a plethora of other things that fall in-between the extremes of the mundane and the heroic)
If all you do is talk about how this is a big problem, then all you do is make the problem appear bigger, and thereby making it even more sensible to just shrug your shoulders. Without concrete action big picture problems appear to be the sort of thing you might agree is a problem, but you give up on because there is nothing to be done. Making a problem concrete doesn't take the course of making an analogy -- like a gun in my mouth -- but rather it takes the course of outlining a plan of action that is something we can actually do.
To keep the gun analogy, the misconception with the argument is that it mistakes the gun for the bullet.
Philosophy is a bullet. Point and shoot. But you can’t say the bullet is inadequate because it is being shot - or aimed - at a direction you don’t like.
So that leads to who holds the gun, why they are pointing it, what they have to gain, and how larger groups of interests are represented and why are they not always for the greater good but for their own benefit? And how to align those desires wth generic benefits and match those up to where and how people want to live?
As with anything it is a black hole - all we can really see is the circumstantial effects.
But to stay at a specific level: I guess psychology and psychiatry are worthless because they aren’t applied to the people who really need help? And financial structures fail because the changes made to them, and their import are not concerned with the greater good? Just because a universal isn’t applied to your specific interest doesn’t mean the universal is a parlour trick. It means you have an agenda and you are rightly voicing an opinion to draw attention to it. Guess what that isn’t new. As I’m sure you are aware. I’m not trying to say anything new here, but just add some perspective to your claims.
Peace
I've been attempting to point to one cause.
Most of us, most of the time, don't really reference reason but authority. To a degree, this makes sense because nobody has the time to think through every issue for themselves. So we look to experts and the community around us, and go with the flow.
The experts and the community have formed a group consensus which assumes that since the end of the cold war nuclear weapons are no longer really something to worry about. So we don't worry. Logically this lack of concern is unsupportable, but we're not using reason, so what is logical is largely irrelevant.
Given that we're not capable of addressing this threat through reason alone, some event is going to be required to engage our emotional energy. As example, imagine how the group consensus might dramatically shift if a terrorist sets off a nuke in some major city.
What can we do? We're doing it now.
Look at the threads on this forum, on any philosophy forum, and look at the articles being written by academic philosophers too. The vast majority of this content can be described as intellectually interesting, but of little importance in comparison to threats to human civilization. That is, it's mostly a parlor game.
What can we do? We can use reason. We can prioritize our attention. We can stop playing the parlor game, and direct our public attention to issues which if unsolved will lead to the end of all other issues.
Imagine that hackers added a button to this forum which would allow every reader to erase the entire forum and the backups too. This issue would immediately go straight to the top of focus for the mods, right? Obviously, that's because if they don't get rid of that button it's only a matter of time until somebody clicks it and then all the other threads vanish. Thus, it's not rational to focus on the other threads until the button is gone.
I don't imagine it would change the consensus at all; if anything, it would demonstrate the need for 'us' to have nuclear weapons - because 'they' have them. Just as every act of gun violence demonstrates the need for guns in America.
Quoting Jake
The mods already have this button, it is the power that confers authority. And without that authority, as you probably know, the site would descend into an ocean of spam and flames. Fortunately, no one dies when a thread is deleted or a poster banned. So there is no question of getting rid of the button, only of preventing it falling into the 'wrong hands'. Alas, your analogy works against you. It is because the mods have this button, that I can afford to focus on other things. The trick, of course is to find mods that are interested in good discussion and communication, rather than in the exercise of authority; who use the button as a sad necessity when some drunk vomits on the thread. The world should be run by cleaners, not leaders.
It would change the group consensus in that the round the clock media coverage (which would dwarf 9/11) would focus everyone on the issue. Whether that focus would have positive or negative results is indeed unknown, agreed.
That said, a terrorist nuke may be our best hope. We're in a race between a limited event like that and The Big One. Every day that we drift along blindly complacent to the threat is another pull on the russian roulette trigger.
Quoting unenlightened
Thanks for playing, but um, you've completely dodged the hypothetical analogy here.
You are insane.
You are now arguing that nuclear weapons are the way to get rid of nuclear weapons.
You really think that the media possesses the power to bring about world peace?
At any rate, the media ought have no agenda. To the extent it does, it comes under legitimate attack. The "fake news" claim, whether justified or not, is a claim that the media has abandoned its role of just reporting the news, but has instead taken on the role of shaping societal values. While it may seem obvious to you that the limitation of nuclear weapons is a good thing and that no reasonable person would disagree, I do think it'd be a legitimate concern if the media acknowledged that their reporting on the horrors of nuclear war was motivated by their political position that there should be nuclear disarmament. Their motivation ought be only in reporting the facts, and once that is done, continued use of the bully pulpit would remove the media from the neutral role it ought occupy.
Quoting Jake
What sells newspapers, gains clicks on websites, and sells magazines is the same thing that sells loaves of bread and yoyos. It's called demand. So, if we decide that the cure to all sadness is yoyos and we require that the market be flooded with yoyos, your sale of yoyos will only rise to the extent people really want yoyos. I would assume that soon after the excitement of the increased yoyo production settled, there's be a whole lot of unbought yoyos on the shelf and people would start looking elsewhere for their diversions.
I believe the demand placed on the media is to report the news so that people will know what's going on, not that the media repeat over and over the same thing because it has an agenda.
What this means is that you're going to have a whole bunch of media outlets going belly up if they decide to flood the market with the story they think is super important while ignoring the fact that he public has bought their product, heard what they've said, and now grown bored and are now looking for a new yoyo.
I'm arguing that what the evidence shows is that little else is likely to earn our attention. Like I keep saying, reason and philosophy have PROVEN that they are insufficient to get our attention.
Look at this forum. How many threads can you find about nuclear weapons? Look at the writings of academic philosophers. How many articles do you find about nuclear weapons? Evidence. Evidence that reason and philosophy are not adequate for getting us to focus on the pending end of everything.
I don't like this evidence, but I'm willing to look at it.
You guys don't like this evidence either, so you're ignoring it.
Media has the power to direct our attention. Every time Donald Trump farts they do a three hour special on the smell. If they can get us all talking about that, they can get us talking about cities that just vanished too.
It also is non-responsive to my prior post, which was whether it was the media's role to effectuate societal change consistent with its values, or whether it was the media's role to simply report the news as objectively and neutrally as possible. If the former, does CNN decide the societal priorities that need to be advocated or does Fox News?
And last, has it been suggested that the media not report on actual nuclear bomb detonations or were we just talking about how the media ought prioritize its reporting on the nuclear threat?
This thread is not about world peace.