Rubbish that passes for philosophy these days

[Mish]

Thanks for your replies.

I don't know, I'm not a philosopher but I could see flaws in these questions. I'm very surprised that the philospher who asked them (and the interviewer) weren't able to pick them up. Due to these flaws I think the questions asked were trick questions and not real philosphy.

This is what I think

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

I think there's an obvious confusion here between having a choice and not having a choice. The philosopher assumes that having a choice and not having a choice are the same which is false. If we don't have a choice in a time critical situation, we obvioufly favour reducing casualties which inevitably can lead to choosing the lesser of the two evils. When given a lot more choice and in a non time critical circumstance (there is no runaway out of control train to deal with) however circumstance changes. There is no justification for a person to be killed to save five people when there are a lot of other alternatives and our choices are not limited to swirving to the right or to the left. The philosopher tricks us into thinking the circumstance is exactly the same, when in fact the two are very different.

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?

Are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being. But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once. In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works.

Here the philosopher tricks us into thinking that there are facts to support that not only who we are is a sum of our hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories, but that it's also somehow posible to surgicaly "copy" these onto the brain of another person. There is nothing in our modern science today to support such an outrageous theory. The fact of today is if you tried to do the above it will result in the patient's death, therefore you wouldn't be able to exist in the body of another person.

If in the future the science proves that in fact the above is posible without the clinical death component, then the statement "Yet one person cannot be in two places at once." will be proved as false. The flaw in this question is it relies on unexistant facts which allegedly will be revealed in the future, yet it uses conclusions of the modern day science.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths. Before relying on your sense they must be independantly checked, but you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you.

The main flaw in this question is it assumes there must be reasons to believe. There must be reasons to know, but belief does not require any reasons. There are reasons to know and there are hopes to believe, therefore one can rely on one's senses and hope to believe what they are seeing is true without any inconsitencies in logic.

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?

No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it. Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly.

Once again a question relies on unexistant facts. There are no facts that can predict with 100% accuracy the future. There is a theory of probability, but there is no theory of concise prediction. Too many variables in the equation and too many likelihoods in circumstance eliminate any precision when it comes to prediction. So no, in today's age there are no facts that say the future is predictable therefore all conclusions made from this premise are flawed.

[boobaa]

I would talk more about anal sex if I got some regularly

I am becoming more and more worried about your sexual orientation. Why not go to jail? You'd shure get your ass humped there.

[IndiReloaded]

Hey BooBaa, how's that skinned knee of yours healing? The one you got from tripping in the tank tracks?

[misombra]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaajjahahahaaaaa.

that joke will just never be not funny.

[Only-virgins]

Because the organs belong to Bill and only under his permission. This would be called murder to kill him. You can try and kill him but I am sure Bill will defend himself. On the train though it is different. A 3rd part has the choice to kill either one and save five or kill five and save one. Though the question was posed harder to me in college as the one person is a relative such as a brother..

[DoesntMatter]

I am becoming more and more worried about your sexual orientation. Why not go to jail? You'd shure get your ass humped there.

lol I meant to be on the giving end of anal sex. But hey, if a girl wore a strap on I wouldn't want to discount anything going on between us

But you asked "why not go to jail"? Gee, can't think of any good reasons why not to

[doppelgaenger]

Still I'm interested to see people's answers to these questions:



1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

This one is just ****ing stupid. How does this faggot know I want to send the tram left? It depends on who the people are.

And well why not kill Bill? Because the lives of these 5 people shouldn't be at the expense of another person who is healthy and deserves to live. But if Bill is the writer of this article, then why the hell not.

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?

Are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being. But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once. In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works.

Yes I am really an entire human ****ing being. Why? Because George Bush is much older than me, and also because I have memories of my childhood. If they did a brain swap, George Bush's brain wouldn't even have fit in my ****ing head at the time.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths. Before relying on your sense they must be independantly checked, but you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you.

It's a ****ing computer screen. Don't be a dipshit. Just because you stick a stick in water and it bends doesn't mean you can't trust your senses; a stick bends in water because water refracts light; the same way a lens does, the same way a mirror does, blah blah blah. You can take pictures of it, and it looks like a monitor.

If you are expecting something to fly at you in another dimension, proving that it really is indeed a monitor, don't expect it; it's not going to happen.

The person who wrote this is a complete dipshit; there are logical answers for all of this.

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?

No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it. Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly.

[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7739493.stm[/url]

Free will does exist, because one is able to choose without being constrained. Just because something can be predicted, that doesn't necessarily mean that things happen in a chronological order.

On a more philosophical plane (Oh god, I know.) what does time have to do with free will?