Being Without Existing, Composing, 05/02/2018

It’s a basic rule of thinking decently-well that you shouldn’t apply concepts from scientific fields to moral or political thinking, and vice versa. But . . . .

The most famous example of these cross-domain applications gone horribly wrong is social Darwinism. There are plenty of opportunities to read up on how this popular interpolation of a scientific idea to a political imperative caused horrifying human disasters. Please read the links – they’ll open in separate tabs.

Riffing on a hilarious misinterpretation I've heard from too many
old conservative academic philosophers – Deleuze as simulacra.

Aside from the horrifying political consequences of the most notorious example, it’s just bad form epistemically. You can’t make a straight translation of abstract scientific concepts into a moral imperative. Especially when your example gets all the actual principles of the science totally wrong anyway.

Even Gilles Deleuze, well known philosophical weirdo, would say so. One of the major principles of his last book, What Is Philosophy?, was that scientific knowledge was mathematical and referred to specific situations – philosophy operated very differently.

But . . . . there’s a way to carry scientific concepts into other domains of thinking. It’s a process of abstraction.

Identify the most fundamental aspects of a scientific concept, abstract them into a diagram – so hold onto the complexity, but without the specificity – and experiment to see where else that abstract diagram makes sense.

You aren't so much drawing a conclusion – like the social Darwinists did – as you are an investigation. Where else can this concept apply fruitfully?

Where’s an example of this actually working? Then we can see, in specific terms, how that process of thought works. Well, Deleuze developed one – how the abstract structure of the scientific concept of the infinitesimal and the strange attractor can make sense of the existence of impossible ideals.

That’s a weird and dense thing to say. So what do I mean? In Leibniz’s calculus, an infinitesimal is the smallest possible differential relation. No differential – a dynamic relationship of ∆x/∆y – can ever reach zero. That’s just zero. But their smallest possible relationship is an infinitesimally small difference.

The thing is, infinitesimal quantities can’t exist. They definitely can’t exist in experience, because our perceptual powers give out at sizes of objects and movements way bigger than the infinitesimal. They can’t exist in reality either – the smallest any physical fluctuation can be is about 1.6x10^-35 metres. Way longer than infinitesimal.

All you have to do for your dream to become reality is become a
god. That's well beyond the realm of possibility, but sadly, it's an
ideal that all too often guides our actions.

Infinitesimals can’t exist materially, but they exist as asymptotes in reality – you approach it, and can get closer and closer to it, but never actually reach it. It’s infinitely far from you, or infinitely small. An unreachable target that guides the trajectory of your approach.

And that’s what a moral ideal is – an unreachable target that nonetheless guides your real action. An ideal is real without existing – it’s the principle that provides the underlying logic of your action.

Any ethical act or project you work on will always be disappointing and an utter failure if you treat your ideal as achievable – if you think that a practical action plan will actually make an ideal come true.

Best case scenario, you’ll be disappointed when your ambitious plans to make the world a perfect place fall short of what you aimed for. Instead of pride in what you’ve achieved, you’ll feel ashamed that you couldn’t have done more.

Worst case scenario, you’re Mao Zedong leaving tens of millions dead and a nation of a billion horrifically traumatized. Yeah, that’s fine.

The function of the moral or ethical ideal in human thought is to be the asymptotic attractor for our lives – it governs our development without itself ever being a real state of affairs.

Now ask how such an ideal can be used for the betterment of humanity or for brutal destruction. What facilitates its progressive uses? What facilities its destructiveness?

That right there is what Utopias is about. I think I’ll start the introduction this weekend.

If We Can’t Go Back Then We Have to Overcome, Research Time, 19/12/2017

It’s a wistful book, What Is Philosophy?. There aren’t too many philosophy books that you can call wistful. But Gilles has his moments.

There's a moment about halfway through the book when Deleuze wonders whether the uniquely vibrant spirit of Hellenic culture could emerge in human communities again. The Hellenes lived with convivial hearts, where your ambition was to get rich enough to spend it all, leading your society through a jovial parliament of friendly, back-slapping rivals. Can it return?

There was once a young man who was very strong, with a good
heart, but who could not express himself in words. He could dream
about terrors that were coming to his people. Death and terror.
He wanted to warn them – he had to warn them.

Of course it can’t, because we live in a contingent universe where nothing can return exactly as it once was. But you can ask whether a human society can produce a similar cultural balance of brotherhood, ego, and intelligence.

But that spirit can’t return. Deleuze knows it. The question is why. When you ask why, you’re asking for reasons. Now, reasons are different from causes. A cause is a question of how, not why, but that’s a matter for semantics.

The distinction between why and how can help work out the difference between a reason and a cause.

Causes bring new processes about – they’re production processes. The universe being as complex as it is, nothing really has only one cause. That we ever thought causality worked that way was a matter of cultural stupidity – Western culture understood causality with images of billiard balls and clocks.

Compared to our contemporary understanding of complex systems – the sciences of turbulence, chance, and contingency – the West at the beginning of the imperialist era were worse than blind. They were foolish. Especially since the best ancient philosophical tradition that could help Westerners was about to get hit with a shotgun blast of colonialism.

But I’m digressing a little. Causes refer to the field of dynamic material processes whose activity constitutes the universe. Reasons refer to conditions – What about the world has to change to make a particular event more or less likely? Possible or impossible?

They were his friends, his family. He had to warn them, make plans,
do something to protect themselves from the coming horror. But he
could not speak well. He could only speak from his heart, not from
his mind. All he could say was, "The horror! It is coming!"

It’s what Bertrand Russell called the difference that makes a difference. Punny Brit bastard.

But yes, the question why hunts down possibility conditions, what kind of world there has to be for something to happen. So what’s changed possibility conditions so radically that the boisterous friendships of Hellenic culture can’t emerge in a new context?

Capitalism is one. The Hellenes never had to deal with the universal social solvent. Pick your flavour of capitalism. Industrial capitalism is a system whose products include mass manufacturing, revolutions in medical and communication technology, and pollution so thick and omnipresent that it’ll likely kill us all.

But the more relevant aspect of capitalism is the venture finance capitalism that I talked about yesterday – the one that converts the profit motive into billion-dollar piracy. Yet capitalism itself has that spark of freedom at the heart of all its processes – creativity in destruction. You have to raze to build again, even if the fires are horrifying.

No, Deleuze picks a worse fire than capitalism. However terrible the effects of unrestrained capitalist desire are, there remains a liberatory force in the structure of its system.

Held back from piracy and governed with heart, capitalism can lay the conditions for a free society – it’s the liberal vision of freedom. Maybe the liberal vision has become impossible now, but it could still have been – at least in its ideal, conceptual, philosophical form – a flight to freedom on many vectors.

Even for us, who think we're so smart and articulate, we find it tough
to talk about the real horror. We can make films, paint amazing
images of terror and its looming face. But look into the abyss itself
and it will do more than stare back. The abyss will make you as
empty as it is. Unless there's a friend to hold you back from the
ethical solvent of the desire for horror.

No, Deleuze is thinking of the Holocaust. We’ve become a people – humanity, that is – who kills by the millions. Worse than that, we’ve come to find it ordinary. Even worse than that – as if it could get worse – we’ve come to find it fun. It’s something we want, a desire for genocide. Mass murder has become a path to personal and community fulfillment.

Not that this happens very often. Anytime is too often, but there are rarely more than a few active genocides happening at a time. Most of them are slow matters of cultural displacement. This century, things are getting more terrifyingly frequent.

But a crime like the systematic murder and displacement of millions has become a matter of course. An ordinary thing. People run on this as a campaign platform in elections, win, then do it.

Can we be convivial friends in such a world? Deleuze doesn’t think we can, and I don’t think so either. Consider the magnitude of the destruction we bring on each other every day. Friends can’t smile and joke when faced with that kind of knowledge.

Philosophy in a culture where this horrific violence has become so ordinary can’t be so jocular or congenial. Philosophy for humans in the 21st century emerges from the tears of friends consoling each other over terrible losses, wondering how and why such things could happen.

Teaching the Metaphysics of Physics, A History Boy, 08/03/2017

I’m a big nerd and I sometimes read Nietzsche for fun. If you’ve seen any of the archives in my blog or any other writing before, you know I’m a big nerd. So I cracked open my epub of Human, All Too Human a little while ago, and I read something that brought back some sad memories.

Here’s the passage, from among the first aphorisms of the book.

“That is why there is in all philosophies so much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of knowledge for life has to appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further – and does in fact acquire it.”

I don’t want to talk about the context and ideas Nietzsche himself was confronting when he wrote this in 1880. I want to talk about an idea for a course I had a few years ago, because this paragraph set off a bitter memory.

Nietzsche's work has been influential and
inspiring to me, but he can be such a
downer sometimes.

The year after I finished my doctorate, I was still looking for work as a university teacher. My own department at McMaster posted two per-course positions. One was a third-level course in the theory of knowledge that my colleague P landed without a problem – it was literally his exact area of research expertise.

I applied to teach the fourth-level seminar on metaphysics. It had previously been a very doctrinaire course on the problem of freedom and determinism, but the university let that professor go the previous summer. So the department was looking for a new direction.

I applied, and came up with a proposal for a course that challenged students to think about philosophy’s right to get metaphysical in the first place. It combined metaphysical thinking with philosophy of science a little, but in a way that encouraged creativity. And in the fairly small class size of a senior-level seminar, we could have gotten really deep with it.

My course would have revolved around the question of what metaphysics can do for science. Metaphysics debates in academic philosophy journals revolved around questions like what universal terms like ‘blue’ refer to, or whether objects were bundles of universals or had an underlying property-less substrate.

But if you went to a physicist with any of these questions, he’d laugh in your face because they make no sense. The really important questions in physics revolve around things like Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics, which implies that spacetime literally isn't contiguous in some contexts.

I also wanted to talk about ideas in the intensive sciences like hydrodynamics, ecology, and other fields dominated by nonlinear mathematics because of their unintuitive implications about the nature of reality. And I wanted to contrast this with orthodox approaches to metaphysics that relied almost exclusively on intuitive logical reasoning.

We would have read Tim Maudlin’s Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics, Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Alongside short readings from David Hume, Bertrand Russell, contemporary analytic metaphysicians, Aristotle, Lucretius, and McMaster’s own Head of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre Nicolas Griffin.

The experiments that gave Bell's Theorem its real-
world example are complicated, but here's basically
what they mean. An electron doesn't get a specific
spin until it interacts with an energy field that sets
it. If you launch two electrons from the same
source in opposite directions, they'll still end up
with complementary spin – even though
information about each other's spin would have
to travel faster than light to reach the other. Their
states are entangled without local causal interaction.
That's not literally faster-than-light communication.
It's something much weirder: a demonstration that
contiguous local space is our false intuition.

But the department had already hired one of the previous year’s doctoral grads. And a Rochester-based professor with a couple of years’ more teaching experience had applied for the metaphysics seminar.

Later that winter, I saw his course outline from an undergrad friend of mine who was taking the course. He found it hideous, and he was right to. It was literally just a survey course in the standard canon of Western philosophy’s metaphysics. Twelve great philosophers in as many weeks. A week on Plato. On Aristotle. On Hegel. On Bradley.

There was no time to explore any problem in depth. Barely any time to do anything but get the most basic and mainstream account possible of a thinker whose ideas about the nature of reality produced commentary and reflection for literally centuries.

Even the professors who hired him later admitted that he was a mistake, turning a course far below the complexity level the curriculum required. But he had the most teaching experience of anyone who applied. So they hired him.

Since I was sent into these memories from reading Nietzsche, I find it ironic – or maybe fitting – that I still feel a little resentful over these events.

It was a very personal rejection, because I knew everyone who had made the decision. I’d worked with them for the previous five years. It was the start of a year of rejection from entry-level positions across the region – rejections in favour of people who had already been working, who had more seniority – that effectively killed my career in university teaching.

I was never able to build the teaching experience that would have made me competitive in the university teaching market. I haven’t worked in a university since Winter 2013.

Today, I feel like I can achieve more as a professional writer and communicator working on books and films on the side, than I ever could have strapped into the grind of university-based humanities scholarship. But that achievement is still all potential, all in the future.

Because it’s taken me four years to get from my old career bottoming out to my new one finally getting some momentum. Those have been four stressful, painful, difficult years. If I didn’t have my GF with me for most of that time, I honestly can’t say if I’d have had the strength to haul myself out of where I’d fallen. It's taken me quite a while – thanks to depression, bad luck, having to deal with crap bosses or low paying work – to get my shit back together.

And if that academic career had actually worked out, I never would have met her. And I don’t think I’d be able to accept life without her.

Even on a smaller scale of thinking, I still feel a sense of regret. That would have been a fucking great course. And I was a fucking good philosophy teacher.

How Do We Understand Space? Jamming, 13/02/2015

I’m rather notoriously bad at giving directions. When my friend Lobo threw my 30th birthday party at his place in Hamilton, everyone I knew who had never been there before chastised me for my terrible directions to his apartment. It’s at a clear intersection, you just have to use the back door because it’s above a storefront.

Anyway, a recent incident of my giving a friend mediocre directions to get back on a highway to Vaughan (turn right onto the Queensway, then right when you see the highway crossing by East Mall), started me thinking the other day of how we think about space. The McLuhans touched on this in Laws of Media, when they talked about the boundless infinite. But I also remembered a more prosaic conversation with a friend I had a couple of years ago.

Walk with me to the edge of the world.

“If I go to the edge of the universe and throw a baseball out into space,” asked Ballsy, “what am I throwing it into?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You’re just throwing it.”

“But I have to throw it into something!”

“No, you don’t.” Really, you don’t. “Just throw the ball.”

“But where does it go when I throw it?” he asked.

“Farther away.”

I don’t know much about the history of cartography, but I know that we’ve used maps to describe space and give travelling directions for a very long time. The invention of Cartesian coordinate mathematics and accurate clock mechanisms to measure longitude accurately helped us improve our maps considerably. We’re long accustomed to thinking of the universe as a big plane of space, and objects existing in that plane at specific points. 

Space exists, and objects are things that exist in space. But that’s not the way the world really is. It’s only the way maps are, and maps are useful tools for navigating space. Maps simplify directions, positions, and relative distances by assigning specific coordinates to the locations of objects. 

But objects are real. Things that fly around. Most of our maps that we use in daily life represent the Earth, but Earth is an object too. It’s just so huge relative to us that we can represent its surface as a flat space. Distances between points aren’t real, only lines on maps. Real distances are between objects in the world. 

The earliest posts on Vaka Rangi described Polynesian navigators who found their way around the world based on subtle clues of ocean currents and mapping their movements relative to the sky. The modes of knowledge they need for that kind of navigation offer us an alternative to our own popular conception of space. 

I’m always hesitant to discuss indigenous cultures in these terms because of the terrible danger of what I call Magical Red Man syndrome, when a Western person takes a foreign indigenous culture to embody an ideal, or their contingent cultural creation is deified as somehow more in touch with nature or God than the inherently corrupt nature of the Euro-American perspective. 

But one culture’s ways of knowing the world can hit closer to the way things are than others. And I think when it comes to understanding space, the Western perspective makes a serious mistake when we reify our maps, and imagine space as already existing so that objects can have a place.

Really, objects create places, and the relation between those places constitute space. So a more authentically truthful way to understand directions and navigation than absolutely measured distances between points, is to imagine paths from one landmark to another, hopping from place to place on your way to a destination.

Think seriously for a moment about how a Time
Lord would understand spacetime and objects.

When you also consider that places shift their relations, change, and disappear over time, there’s a dynamism to the process that makes it difficult for humans to understand. I sometimes wonder what a species with genuinely superior intelligence would think of us. Superior in the same sense that humans have a superior intelligence to cats or koalas. 

What if they’re able to do dynamic non-linear mathematics as easily as we can add? Most humans will be utterly mystified at how they think. But trippy philosophical investigation can give us a kick toward actually progressing our powers to think. Here's an example, drawn from popular science fiction. 

Another blogging hero of mine, Phil Sandifer, suggested an explanation for why Robert Holmes kept referring to Gallifrey as located in the constellation of Kasterborous. But this didn't really make sense. Constellations aren’t actually astronomical bodies, they’re arrangements of stars as seen from a particular perspective.

But the Doctor is always explaining the location of Gallifrey in a constellation to humans, and in a meta-fictional sense, Doctor Who is a show for human television. The Doctor is saying what arrangement of stars Gallifrey appears in, relative to the Earth’s position. For a creature with the advanced intelligence of a Time Lord, their coordinates wouldn’t be anything like coordinates in our sense, a location on a representative map.

Our representative maps are just abstractions that let us easily navigate. Time Lord level intelligence wouldn’t need these simplifications of the universe. A creature that advanced would think about space and time entirely in terms of relative dynamic locations and paths. 

Time Lord coordinates would be vectors, showing the path from where we are now to the destination. They’d see the universe not as a static space with stuff in it, but as arrangements of objects through which we navigate paths. When we learn to think this way about the world, we'll literally advance as a species.

Boundless ≠ Infinite, Research Time, 08/01/2015

The other day, I discussed only one kind of abstraction that Marshall and Eric McLuhan explore in the first sections of Laws of Media. The second kind of abstraction regards our experience of space, and the epistemic effects of Euclidean and Pythagorean geometry. These are the concepts that I would say are the most trippy so far in their analysis of how thought became abstract.

When I first read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western

Philosophy, his accounts of ancient Greek thought

continually discussed their moral injunction, apparently

an influence of Pythagoras, against eating beans. I don't

know why they hated beans so much, or why Russell

would make such a big deal over it.

“Trippy. Hm. Is that a technical term?”

Yes, actually, it is. 

The son and father describe how people experienced and thought about space before Euclid as acoustic. The primary objects in the world were physical things flying around us, and space was the product of these interactions. Remember, however, that these concepts of space were explained in philosophical poetry, performed testimonials of logos itself that speaker and audience memorized in the act of recitation and listening. There were no mathematics to accompany these concepts. 

Euclid and Pythagoras changed all this when they started constructing geometric figures and investigating their properties on paper. They conceived what MuLuhan calls the visual model of experiencing space, where figures stand in focus on a featureless ground that extends infinitely in all directions. Space exists as infinite extension that is the theatre on which objects appear.

This concept of infinite extension was very different from what amounts to the previous equivalent conception, that of boundlessness. The sages of recitation understood the world as ultimately finite, but having no boundaries. It used to be easily understood, but we've lived with the concept of space as infinitely extended for so long that now boundlessness is hard to get our heads around.

Boundless finitude goes like this. Travel in your spaceship as far away from everything else as you possibly can. Literally everything else in the entire universe is behind you. You’ve only travelled a finite distance, but your position now constitutes the most distant point in the universe. Now throw a baseball in front of you. 

That's what the boundless finite universe is. It's a bunch of stuff scattered around. There’s no limit to that finitude beyond which you can’t go, as if there was a magic fence around the universe. You’re not throwing that baseball into anything. You’re just throwing it farther away from everything else. The size of the universe is just the distance between stuff and there's no principle that sets any limit on how distant stuff can be from each other.

This is actually really hard to conceive today, because as a culture we’re so accustomed to thinking about the universe as a plane of space, the end of which is literally no-space. If you can throw the baseball, you must be able to throw it into something. This idea that there had to be something that underlay the existence and relationships among objects was weird and difficult to understand in Euclid’s day. His ideas were so innovative that they literally made no sense without long periods of complex study.

Of course, Einstein’s revolution in physics has thrown the Euclidean conception of space into the pile of obsolete ontology. Yet we’ve been thinking according to Euclidean presumptions for so long (or so says the McLuhans) that returning to a conception of space that makes it a function of relative distance from the image of a theatre prior to the objects that appear in it is just as difficult as it was to leave that conception behind in the first place 2500 years ago.

I’m not sure where their conceptual story of how we understand space ends, because I’ve been spending most of my philosophical time editing the manuscript of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So I had to put Laws of Media down for a while. Only so many hours in the day.

What Is Life? There Is No Mystery, Jamming, 20/12/2014

I follow quite a few people from the world of Doctor Who on Twitter. In most cases, I get a wonderful glimpse into the thoughts of one of England's crankiest men (mid-1980s Doctor Colin Baker), notices of plucky theatre productions and charitable drives (1960s and 1970s companions Frazer Hines and Louise Jameson), and steadfast promotion for television shows so terrible that it constitutes a model case of entertainment industry professionalism (Karen Gillan's enthusiastic promotion of her absolutely terrible American sitcom, Selfie, which I badly hope doesn't ruin her career, as she's a wonderful actress who just needs material that measures up to her talent).

But Christopher Bidmead is perhaps the most rewarding single Twitter feed among my Doctor Who list. Bidmead is a science writer who was the script editor of the show in its 18th season (succeeding Douglas Adams, the toughest act to follow). He only held the post for that single year, but there was no other year like it in the entire history of Doctor Who. The stories produced in his short tenure skillfully combined thoughtfulness with suspense, adventure with science and philosophy, and some impressively weird imagery.

Saturday morning, Bidmead shared this video, which I thought I would share, even at risk of its being a too-long-didn't-watch at a length of an hour.

It's a lecture by physicist Jeremy England about how to define life according to the terms of physics. It was quite fortuitous for me that Bidmead would link this video after I just wrapped up the most sustained philosophical argument on my own blog. I was quite honoured that SK, one of the regular semi-troll commenters on Phil Sandifer's website visited my old post about the Star Trek episode "The Measure of a Man" from this May after Vaka Rangi linked to it in his discussion of that story.

The Star Trek episode is a cheekily over-dramatized trial, where Starfleet must decide whether Data has any rights, or if, as a machine, he is the institution's property. SK kept hammering me on the old point in philosophy of mind, that because Data is a machine, his entire person is a series of mechanical movements and reactions. And because he is determined entirely by physical causes, he does not truly think and express those thoughts, only precisely reproduce exactly what a creature (who is not a machine, so not subject to strict physical determinism) would say.

This juvenile way of thinking about physics and physical determinism is one of the central reasons why philosophy of mind doesn't get that much respect anymore in the scientific community. The conception of physical determinism as strictly linear A-causes-B-causes-C hasn't held much water in the physics community at least since James Clerk Maxwell. The development of the dynamic branches of physics and their cascading effects on the fundamental concepts of every other science is either forgotten or unknown in the general population, who still think of determinism after the fashion of Isaac Newton and David Hume's billiard ball analogy.

Throughout my time as a university-based philosopher, I regularly interacted with people WITH PHDS who said the scientific concept of emergence was nonsense, or who seriously described in professional contexts the neurological activity that constituted personality as "the mind stuff that brains do." My colleague in Texas, Levi Bryant, still regularly vents his frustrations on Facebook about a trend in philosophy to revive old-school vitalist biology, whose key postulate was that there had to be a fundamental force of nature, vitality, that animated organic bodies to be exemptions from the universe's strictly deterministic causality.

All that said, it is very difficult to use the fundamental concepts of physics to understand life. In their mathematical descriptions, all physical processes are fundamentally reversible. Yet living processes never flow in reverse. England's talk discusses how entropy, one of the fundamental concepts of Maxwell's thermodynamics (the revolutionary field that ultimately crushed the Newtonian model of linear causality) can be used to define what life is.

Living bodies, described in the terms of physics, are bodies whose internal processes tend to maximize the efficiency of entropy production.

Of course, the meaning of life as a whole goes far beyond the principle. Reductionism is a stupid way to think as well. But if you're wondering what physical principle might be held in common between me, you, a tree, a lichen, an ant, a trilobite, a paramecium, a plankton, a bivalve, and a herpes virus, entropy efficiency maximization is a pretty reasonable notion.

Blocked From Freedom, Research Time, 17/09/2013

I haven’t had much of a chance to get things done Monday; that day was rougher and more hectic than I thought it would be. But I did get some more physics reading done.

That piece of physics, or rather philosophy of physics, relates to yesterday’s post about how people’s conceptions of reality can affect their moral beliefs. Consider the block time interpretation of temporality in relativity physics. Here’s basically how it works. Intuitively, people tend to think of time as a continuously becoming present that is calcified into a past as it progresses into a yet-to-be-determined future. The present is all that really exists; the future isn’t here yet and the past is gone.

Whenever relativity theory is discussed, Albert
Einstein is the most obvious choice for a picture.
But I went with Arthur Eddington because he was so
important in advocating special and general
relativity theory to the world. Plus, David Tennant
played him in the movie.

This is all reduced to bollocks in the context of special relativity. When position in time depends on relative motion of one reference frame compared to another, along with position in space, events that are simultaneous in one frame of reference occur at different times in another. A moment in the future of one person can occur in the past of another. Event E occurs in the past of person A, the future of person B, and the present of person C, solely because of how A, B, and C are moving relative to each other and the event E. In order to map these relations properly, we have to represent time mathematically in the same way as space. All points in the dimension of time, all events, all planes of relative simultaneity, can be laid out as a spatial dimension. There is no distinguishing an absolute past from present from future. There is no now, no gone, and no not-yet. There are only the relative order of events and the catalogue of possible relations among those events. The events themselves all exist in their particular order, and frames of references move through this order at varying paces relative to other frames of reference. The universe is a set, four-dimensional block where no divergence from any given path is possible. That’s the ontological element of this perspective.

I sometimes wonder why philosophers continue to think of the naturalistic fallacy as an unquestionable truth when this whole problem speaks to the complex relationship of our ontological and moral philosophies. Because this is just the modern version of the old problem of freedom and causal determinism. The problem used to be phrased in terms of clockwork determination of the mechanisms of the universe. Given that all movements have a cause, there are no uncaused movements. A free action must have no cause but the action itself. Given that a person can only be responsible for actions without external causes, the only free movements must be cause-less. But all movements have causes, therefore there are no free actions. So no one is truly morally responsible for their actions. Mark Chapman and John Lennon carry no reason for blame or praise; they simply move according to the causes that determine them. 

The problem is, of course, more complicated and detailed in its philosophical history than this paragraph, as a problem will when it’s centuries old. But relativity theory’s block time concept changes where the determination of all movement lies. The old clockwork image discussed causation. The new block image discusses the structure of events in spacetime itself. But they amount to the same: all movement is pre-determined. Chapman and Lennon move through their paths in spacetime, divergence from those paths are impossible, and so praise and blame are equally illegitimately applied to both. Moral judgment itself is meaningless in a fully determined universe.

There have been many attempts to solve this problem. I myself don’t think it’s a real problem for several very complex reasons I don’t have time to go into right now, mostly my theories of what are the genuine implications of the fundamental laws of the universe being statistical and probabilistic in nature. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that the problem of freedom and determinism is an ontological issue with clear implications for moral reasoning. Whenever someone cavalierly whips out the naturalistic fallacy as a knock-down argument against someone linking ontological and moral domains of thinking, that person should consider the freedom-determinism problem and what it means for a conception of reality to be morally meaningful.