Hello Philosophy Society!
Discussion 1: Grief
One of our members expressed how someone very close to them just recently died. They were having trouble sleeping and were wondering what they could do.
We compose a narrative of our life, including ourselves, other people and events that are within it. We have a story of the past, a present interpretation of what is going on which gets encoded as past, and a prediction of our future. Everyone has the cliche moment, ‘when I grow up I will be an X.’ When we do not fulfill these expectations, we get cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we get when our beliefs contradict with each other or reality. If we form some expectation and it turns out not to be true, the upsetness resulted is cognitive dissonance.
In the context of grief, we experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance related to how integrated that person was in our lives and narrative. It is in these moments we can ease our pain by being compassionate with ourselves that we are going through a process of acceptance. Our brains are neurologically re-wiring themselves to adjust to the new events that are to be integrated in an updated narrative. Sleeping will help in the transfer of information in the present to long term memory. But what if we can’t sleep?
It is important to do an evaluation of the relationship that has changed. What did you gain from this person in your life? A relationship is a connection between two entities. The relationship within water is one of hydrogen and oxygen. The relationship between person A and person B was that person B was very loving and supportive to person A. Person A valued person B because of how loving they were. It is the function of love, in this example, that was the valued factor in the relationship.
The person brought the element of love to you. If you lose this person, it is up to you to find love elsewhere. If you tell yourself that they were the only one you could have gotten love from or do not engage in socializing to find new healthy relationships, it is not only the loss of this specific individual that you are upset about. You are also missing a need and not allowing yourself to meet that need. If the person truly loved you, they would not want you to unnecessarily suffer by not being loved by others. They would want you to find the love you need from the world.
Sometimes it can be difficult to determine what it was about this specific person that was valuable. We can take time to write down how we feel in our Reflective Journals to identify what it was that we lost that the person brought to our lives. Once we determine what it was that we can no longer attain, we can now accurately and objectively identify what it was we are grateful for. It may be the case that the person is no longer here, but the fact that we are grieving means we at one time had something of value and that experience is worth being grateful for. The difficulty usually lies in adjusting our expectations towards reality and accepting that things have changed.
If you are only focusing on the fact that they are not here anymore that is a distorted perspective. The event of the person dying is not the only aspect of the experience. There was more time spent creating value, which is the reason why we are upset they are gone at all. It is important to acknowledge that they are no longer with us but appreciate that if they never made an impact in your life, you wouldn't care if they were here or not. You being upset that they are gone is contingent on the fact that you valued or loved them before.
Grief can be difficult because we isolate what we got from them to that person specifically. So if you find those things from others then you will have at least grown by developing new relationships to meet your social needs. How do we meet new people?
Prompt: They loved me a lot but now they are gone
Response: search the cosmos for someone who loves you a lot
1) Go do things you love
2) while doing those things, notice if anyone else is appreciating their experience too
3) start talking and see if you get along.
4) repeat and learn from each encounter until you establish a network of friends.
Developing an action plan on how to socialize can help put us to bed by reducing our anxiety. We can also focus on the good things from our past relationship and look forward or dream about the new ones we will create.
Discussion 2: Boundaries
In socializing we may end up being around people that make us uncomfortable. It is in these moments where developing boundaries with ourselves and them is important to maintain healthy experiences. When creating boundaries, it is important not to be extreme or be distorted in how we create them, like all or nothing thinking or should statements. We can develop conditional boundaries that allow others to make mistakes and grow from them. It is important for us to accept responsibility for our own behaviour as well and not impose unrealistic expectations on others.
Discussion 3: Existential Anxiety
At some point we may be anxious about our own death. As a self-aware being, this is an inevitable situation. Non-existence is something we cannot experience. The solution here is to divert any attention or anxiety towards living a healthy lifestyle. Every day your body has needs like exercise, regulating stress, and a conscious diet. This is a practice.
Currently, we do not have a technology to transfer a human consciousness from our animal body to a synthetic form where we could, maybe, extend our lives beyond the average of 75+ years. The best you can do is live a healthy lifestyle so that you can extend the conscious time that you have.
Terror management theory proposed by social and evolutionary psychology is focused on how humans deal with end of life anxiety. Religions have been a large contributor to dealing with this anxiety by promising an afterlife despite any sound evidence of such a thing. Believers have to accept this premise on ‘faith.’
Some people have reported an afterlife from the near death experience phenomena. Here, people whose brains suffered a lack of oxygen or some traumatic experience that brought them close to dying gives similar reports. These experiences include a sense of being calm and serene, the vision of a white light or tunnel, out of body experiences where they can ‘perceive’ themselves in the third person, and the voice of god. Susan Blackmore has researched this phenomena and tested it in various ways determining that certain factors, that are not related to any after life, explain the experiences. The lack of oxygen and similar visions to being birthed out of the birth canal explain these phenomena.
Discussion 4: Explanation
When we observe phenomena in the cosmos and our experiences, we can create diverse explanations for these occurrences. When we appeal to the occurrence by reference to god, it reduces our understanding and inquiry of the phenomena. There are no more questions that can be answered if we appeal to some fictional, faith based character as the cause of what we experience. Our understanding of the cosmos and ourselves becomes limited to an overgeneralization in God as the answer for everything. If we explain our experiences as god as the answer for everything we end up understanding nothing.
Humans developed a method beyond philosophizing to account for what happens in our experiences and the cosmos we live in. Science is the means by which we use a method to rule out our biases to determine the truth in our words corresponding to the reality we live in. It is not the case that science is necessary for our judgment to be correct, but it is a tool of measurement to check our judgments just in case our biases have led us astray.
There is a difference between philosophy and theology. When you are trying to understand the world and experiences through the lens of religious dogma, you are doing theology. Philosophy is when we are critical and give us premises or beliefs that are unreasonable. This means that doing the philosophy of religion would be to disregard many of the unfounded claims made by religious scripture or institutions. Philosophy is the meta analysis of everything, including itself. Theology is a means to fit everything into a predetermined set of beliefs.
Discussion 5: Evidence
There are certain principles that we use when philosophizing. One is called Occam's Razor by William of Ockham in the 12-13th century. The principles stated, ‘do not plausit plurality without necessity’ meaning do not make unnecessary assumptions in one’s explanation. This principle falls within the scope of simplicity by the philosophy of science thinker, Thomas Kuhn. He discussed the principle of simplicity, that everything being equal, the simpler explanation is preferred.
Every assumption we make reduces the integrity of the belief or argument. We want to proportion our beliefs to the evidence. There are different kinds of evidence, for example:
1) personal observations limited by biases, optical illusions,
2) testimony from others limited by lying, being wrong, misperception
3) reproducible experiment or study (fact) limited by coherence, predictability
It is important that we understand the limitations of the different kinds of evidence we are citing. Not all proposed evidence is legitimate.
Philosophy Academy: Critical Thinking - Deductive Reasoning
This week we took a break from the Feeling Good text and learned about deductive reasoning. See link: https://www.achillesjustice.com/post/critical-thinking
Academic Reflections 1: Design Ethics
Ethics in design: What exactly does that mean?
In the article What are “Ethics in Design” by Victoria Sgarro, she gives several examples of products or services that have unethical consequences from their designs. From a hand sanitizer dispenser that does not detect black hands to Airbnb not preventing discrimination of gests from hosts based on race and gender identity. Her solution to the problem is for designers to follow similar industries like medicine and law where ethics training is necessary. Each designer would be required to pass an ethics test before being given a degree.
Sgarro does not define what she means by ethics in her article and it seems that many of the issues that she is identifying are social or psychological biases that all people have a tendency towards. For example, it is not necessarily the case that the hand sanitizer production designers intended for the product to not respond to darker pigmentation in skin. They could have not thought of it or had a poor representative sample when testing the product. We cannot conclude that they indented discrimination when creating the product even if there was a discriminatory effect after its production.
In the Airbnb case, the problem was that hosts would be engaged in their own biases, like ingroup/outgroup bias, where we have a tendency to favour perceived members of our own group. This kind of bias can lead to social issues like stereotyping, discrimination and racism. It is not the case that the company intended this effect however. It would be fallacious to impose these kinds of attributions to the designer.
What is design ethics then? In some ways there is an element of paternalism in preventing the public from engaging in psychological or social biases that lead to different forms of discrimination as in the airbnb case. For the design flaw of the optic lense not detecting darker pigment of skin, ethics fell on having a representative sample to test the product in early development phases that would not unintentionally discriminate against darker skinned people. Design ethics seems to be an awareness of the public and ensuring that products and services are not excluding members of the population.
However, it is important not to attribute intentionality to unintended consequences. It would take different kinds of evidence to prove that these designers were, for example, racist. Sometimes people do things relevant to how they live and see the world and are not mindful that there are other kinds of people in the same world. Design ethics also includes an element of awareness of the public on behalf of the designer.
Academic Reflections 2: Deplatforming and Censorship
It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech | WIRED
In class we were discussing deplatforming as a form of censorship. Censorship is understood as a violation of individual free speech from the state. In the context of social media platforms, because they are private companies, it would not be considered a violation of the rights of free speech and an act of censorship. If the definition of censorship is limited to a state imposing on the rights of the individual, the case where private social media companies deplatforming is not accounted for.
Censorship is defined as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.” (Dictionary.com) The definition of censorship as something that is done by the state is not large enough of a category to include the issue of social media censorship. There needs to be a broadening of the concept of censorship to include deplatforming or even cancel culture. Removal of someone from a social media platform in most cases prevents them from what has become the standard means of public communication. Most people cannot afford to create their own social media platform like Trump.
There is a fine line between freedom of speech and harmful communication like hate speech. It is important that companies and governments have some form of objective regulation of these values so that people have access to the public forum. It is also important to regulate how information is being disseminated so that people with influence do not propagate harmful information because of a lack of critical thinking in society.
It is not the case that everyone has critical thinking skills or the capacity for. A governing body would have to take this into account when determining what information is safe for the public. Not all members of the public are able to discern false from true information or be mindful of their own biases. What this objective measure is, is still to be determined. It is important to broaden the understanding and concept of censorship so that social media platforms have some standards to follow in the context of our human rights.
Human rights being protected from governments is largely due to the power that the government has over individuals. It can be argued that companies like social media platforms have enough power to require similar regulation as a government and qualify for breaching human rights.
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