Blindsight and blindness blindness

Blindsight is a phenomenon in which people who are perceptually blind - who can't see - are able to respond to visual stimuli. 

In type 1 blindsight there is no awareness of visual stimuli, but subjects are able to 'guess' with high levels of accuracy such things as location, patterns or movement type.

Subjects with type 2 blindsight  have some awareness of, say, movement but there is no visual perception. This seems to be the result of such things as a person's awareness of his or her eye tracking motion which is functioning normally. Blindsight is the result of injury to the visual processing parts of the brain. 

Anton's Syndrome is a rare condition in which people who are blind deny their condition. Often, sufferers will make excuses for their lack of information, for instance by claiming that the light is bad, but they are not lying; they genuinely believe that they can see. 

Another form of the condition occurs when people who are paralyzed claim that they can walk; it is just that they are a little tired at the moment.

These conditions point up some of the problems with representative realism. In the first case people think they can't see but are plainly receiving some form of visual information and in the second two cases evidence from the senses is either ignored, fabricated or radically re-interpreted by the perceiver. 

Voyager

Voyager 1 is just about to leave the solar system. It is currently 10.8bn miles from Earth and has been en route since 1977. It now takes sixteen hours for messages travelling at lightspeed to reach it.

The probe is detecting a change in the particle flow around it and it will soon (in the next four years) be in interstellar space and completely free of the Sun's influence. You can read about it here.

As Douglas Adams said in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Ted Honderich

Ted Honderich advocates strict causality and ‘hard determinism.’

Honderich rejects compatibilism on the grounds that our will is completely caused by prior events. He rejects all forms of incompatibilism that involve non-physical substances, dualist forms of agency, freedom as chance, or quantum mechanical indeterminism leading to the uncaused ‘origination’ of actions and decisions.

Honderich is ‘dismayed’ because the truth of determinism requires that we give up ‘origination’ or the ability to control our ‘life hopes.’ We could been the author of our own actions, we might have acted otherwise, (and thus be held accountable and morally responsible) but as he says:

We have a kind of life-hope which is incompatible with a belief in determinism. An open future, a future we can make for ourselves, is one of which determinism isn't true.

But we can take a ‘tough’ or intransigent attitude to our understanding that free will is incompatible with determinism and resist compromise with ideas like origination.

He argues as follows

• States of the brain are, in the first place, effects, the effects of other physical states.
• Many states of the brain, secondly, are correlates. A particular state accompanying a particular experience
• Some states of the brain, thirdly, are causes, both of other states of the brain and also of certain movements of one's body. The latter are actions. Some are relatively simple while others, are complex
• Simple or complex, however, all actions are movements, or of course stillnesses, caused by states of the brain.
•  It follows from the above  three premisses, about states of the brain as effects, as correlates and as causes, that on every occasion when we act, we can only act as in fact we do.
• It follows too that we are not responsible for our actions, and, what is most fundamental, that we do not possess selves of a certain character.

Adapted from Essays on Freedom of Action, ed. Ted Honderich, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, p.187

In spite of this actions and thoughts being determined it does not follow that we will have no moral feelings. Moral approval and disapproval are affected by lack of free will but we still live in moral societies and may act to establish or maintain our moral standing.

Leopold and Loeb

The Leopold and Loeb case is interesting for two philosophical reasons. The first is that Clarence Darrow, their lawyer, used determinism as an argument in their defence. It was evidently effective as the defendants avoided the death penalty for kidnapping and murder.

The second reason is that Leopold and Loeb were influenced by Nietzsche and as highly intellectual 'super men' they thought they could commit the perfect crime. There is a good account of the case here.

Hume on Free Will

It is important to remember that Hume approached the problem of free will from a moral rather than a scientific point of view. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume establishes that causation in never directly experienced but then goes on to argue that some degree of causation is essential for moral responsibility to have any meaning.

For Hume the key attribute to free will was 'will' or 'desire'. We are morally responsible for those actions which we actively will or desire but we are not responsible for any actions that we are constrained to do. As he says

By liberty, then we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.

Hume argues that we do not need to take moral responsibility for actions that are externally caused but that we do need to be responsible for internally caused (or willed) actions. Thus I am not to blame if I kick a puppy because a madman with a gun tells me to do it, but I am to blame if I spontaneously decide to kick the puppy. There are problems with this distinction however – it is possible to act according to the determination one's will but still be unfree as in the case of the drug addict or the kleptomaniac; which ‘internal’ causes should be regarded as ‘compelling’ in such cases?

Determinism and Relationships

In the following song Tim Minchin discusses the tension between relationships that are 'meant to be' and statistical ideas of likelihood.

Snow

Enjoy the snow day but don't forget the moral philosophy test which will now be on Monday.

Idealism

The two limericks below were composed by the theologian Ronald Knox as comments on one of the problems of Bishop Berkeley's idealism

There was a young man who said, "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

Reply

Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by Yours faithfully, GOD.