The Subjective Stance

In the last few posts I have talked about the relationship between reason and emotion. What's interesting is how the discovery of how things are, i.e., the domain of IS and the discovery of how we ought to act, the domain of OUGHT are both seen as properly discovered by reason and reason alone. In this picture, the introduction of emotions (a) Prevents us from seeing reality clearly and, (b) Even if see could reality clearly, we might act rashly and commit a wrong under the spell of emotion. For example, everyday we read in the papers about husbands who murder their wives after having discovered them in bed (or just suspected her of doing so!) with another man. According to modern day jurispudence, as well as lay ethical intuitions in the west, murdering your spouse is not the right response to adultery (though not so in Turkey, how dare you apply to the EU with such primitive ethical stances: shame shame. What would we do without the tremendous wisdom of the western world and its ...

Normally, we tend to think of beliefs as psychological states with dubious epistemic properties. Beliefs are conceptualized as unregulated conceptual structures, for the most part hypothetical and often fanciful or deluded. Thinking and reasoning on the other hand are seen as rational activities regulated by rules and governed by norms. Computational theories of the mind have focused on rule governed behaviour, ultimately trying to reduce them to rules of logic. Beliefs are far more fuzzy. When I say, "I Believe in God" what exactly do I mean? It seems that its the very imprecision of beliefs that allows us to share them, even if we do not have the same understanding of a given belief such as "I Believe in God". Furthermore, beliefs have emotional components. For example, I can hate a belief (and I can hate you for having that belief), but it seems strange to hate a logical rule or to hate someone for using a rule. As I had mentioned in my previous post on reason a...

I just finished reading Vikram Chandra's latest, Sacred Games . It took me all of four days, which for a nine hundred page novel, isnt bad. It is a gripping read, with all the trappings of a Bollywood Masala movie, with heroes, villians, beautiful women and international gurus writ large and a delicious terror plot (delicious for its conscious subversion of current religious affiliations of such acts, not because the terror is described in a cynical or sly manner) that threatens India if not the world. I read in the Bangalore Metro section of today's Hindu that Vikram Chandra comes from a filmi family, so the Bollywood connection is understandable. The apocalyptic vein that runs through the book is perhaps more Hollywood than Bollywood, but then again, the Mahabharata was apocalyptic in its portrayal of utter and complete destruction. Talking of which, the book is Mahabharata-ish, for example, in its insistence on stories within stories with each subplot playing a role in tying...

The New York Times reports: " Antiwar demonstrators pushed Buddhist monks from the stage of a peace rally Thursday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where the government and Tamil rebels are fighting. The monks are against talks with the rebels." Hmmmmmmmmmmm, I thought Buddhism was a religion of peace.

Lets continue this line of inquiry into the separation of reason and emotion. Intuitively speaking, whats the difference between rational inquiry and inquiry tainted by emotion? Most people would say something like "If you take a statement like 2+2 = 4, the truth of that statement does not depend on your current state of mind, on whether you believe in God or not etc. " Furthermore, even the process of verification of a statement like 2+2=4 does not depend on your emotional state. Therefore, a rabid racist is willing to trust the arithmetic of a black store owner, even if he thinks that black men shouldn't be owning stores in the first case. Surely this is a good thing, right? Actually, I am not sure. The previous example reminds us that calculative forms of reasoning are like the other great equalizer - you guessed it right- money . The same racist person is also willing to take money from black people, for money is money is money. I would argue that money is an exter...

I was reading a transcript of Arindam Chakrabarti's excellent lecture on the phenomenology of fun and boredom, in which he talks, briefly, about the truth and falsehood of emotions. Suppose you are really, really bored, in fact so bored that the entire world seems without colour. There are two possibilities: (1) The world is actually boring. You could be stuck in a Delhi Public School classroom (as I was for many years) with oppressive teachers who have no conception of learning and who accuse their students of being overimaginative. (2) The world is not boring, but you feel it to be so. You could be watching a really good movie, say Sholay , but all you can do is pick it apart for its various faults. Normally, this feeling is what we term depression, where nothing can ever be good enough for us. So how is this feeling of boredom connected to notions of reason and truth? The connecting factor is that of evaluative judgement: In both cases of boredom, we evaluate the world to be a c...

Many things have changed since the last time I posted - I moved back to the old country (India, and given how much it has changed while I have been away, I should really say, "I moved to a new country"), I have a new job (my first faculty position!) and I have a new daughter (Leela, my firstborn!!). Now that the dust has settled somewhat and I am getting my bearings in all three new situations, its time to start posting once again.