Rational Philosophy

In what was perhaps a slip-up, perhaps not, the picture that accompanies the NY Times article “House Panel Raises Furor on Armenian Genocide” comes with the caption “Survivors of the Armenian Genocide.”

Although perhaps the matter is not whether the Turks committed genocide, but whether America now officially uses the genocide label.

Parsing the furor I’m left wondering how to sift through the sea of conflicting emotions and motives to reach some kind of reasoned analysis. Modern Turkey seems attached to the idea that labeling the killings genocide offends Turkey. The motives of the house panel seem to be perhaps politically reactive (responding to the press from the Armenian community,) perhaps genuinely well-intentioned (aiming to let the world know that genocide won’t be swept under the mass killings rug,) perhaps a little of both. And the motives of the White House and other home-grown opponents of the genocide label seem to be strategic — to avoid risking the loss of Turkey’s support in Iraq.

On Tuesday, the Science Times section of the NY Times published a fascinating piece on the thinking processes of baboons. One aspect of the story pointed to the terrible statistic that more infant baboons die from infanticide than from anything else. The reason being that the dominant male in the troop changes every seven or eight months. The new alpha male (usually from another troop) kills the infant baboons in an effort to force the females back into a new reproductive cycle so that he can mate with them before he is ousted.

What do these two disjointed stories have to do with one another?

I expect that if one were to be able to ask a baboon whether killing rival offspring is infanticide, he would balk at the label. I think the Turks don’t want the genocide label in part because they are attached to the idea that the killing of Armenians necessarily furthered the Turkish cause. Just as America balks at the label of aggressor or warmonger in the invasion of Iraq.

Whether it is expedient for America to apply to events that began in 1915 the genocide label is mostly, if not entirely, a matter of politics. The furor over the issue has done more to raise consciousness about the events themselves than a quiet and emphatic resolution. But, ultimately, there is an excellent reason to worry about the label and to be sure that we apply the appropriate label.

The Times quotes Rep. Brad Sherman as saying “if we hope to stop future genocides we need to admit to those horrific acts of the past.”

The right label is important not for America, nor for the Armenian survivors, but for modern Turkey and for others who would cling to the idea that killing to secure ethnic goals contradicts human goals. Contrasting genocide in humans with infanticide in baboons, humans have a critically important conceptual capacity — to distill and apply abstract concepts such as genocide. Male alpha baboons have evolved to feel a natural impulse to kill the weaning offspring of their rivals. Human beings evolved to feel fear of and protectiveness against other groups and tribes — for as long as humans have existed, they have killed one another in alarming numbers. But, unlike baboons, we have the capacity to understand that ultimately we do not want to continue to kill one another en mass, and, with the right will, we have the capacity to stop it, and to prevent one another from committing such crimes. We can have the will to be human and respect the rights of all people to share the world. If we refuse to apply the concept and shape the will, we will fail.

(Charles Darwin, as the Science Times article mentions, wrote this in his notebook of 1838 - “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”)

My daughter just started high school and has a course called physics. Her grandmother made the comment: “Oh, how wonderful, physics is the best; you’ll learn how everything works.” Which is true. Physics pursues an ever more sophisticated explanation for the way things work. Philosophy seems sometimes to give ground as physics rolls on, but I prefer to think that physics provides a great tool for the philosopher.

Fundamental physics can be a particularly fine-pointed tool. The more we know about the most original and smallest parts of existence, the more we can build up a fully consistent picture of the whole.

Physicists pursue evidence to support their hypotheses, but the best physicists expect to have to refine or throw out their hypotheses. Good physics is a process. A never-ending process.

The title of this blog is misleading for that reason. What’s fundamental today won’t be fundamental tomorrow. Before we knew about atoms, solid matter was considered just that, solid. And the atomic view was replaced by a perspective that included electrons, protons, and neutrons. Which in turn was replaced by a view that allowed for whole families of hadrons and baryons.

Fundamental physics is always in transition. But the philosophy of fundamental physics, the way we use the tool of physics, is a well established conceptual process. Philosophy seeks to know “what can this new insight tell me about our condition.”

Unfortunately, whereas philosophers and physicists were once indivisible (Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and many more were both philosophers and physicists) these days, philosophy and physics have moved ever more deeply into the deep grass at the ends of their respective fields. They no longer speak the same language. They no longer understand one another.

What we end up with is pop philosophy based on some apparently trendy new scientific premise or discovery. (Superstrings, for instance.) Or random conjecture on meaning from the brilliant scientists of the day. To continue to make philosophical progress, the two fields need to be brought back together.

Even some of the now more established scientific findings of recent years can produce quite revealing insight into the philosophy of our existence. One particularly compelling example of this caused me to spend three years analyzing and writing about its implications (the product of which is LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive). It’s this:

What can we discern about the fundamental principles of space and time by observing the evolution of the material universe?

To answer this question we must know enough about the physics of the early universe and the development of particles and star systems over time to be able to discern the pattern. If I hadn’t had a grounding in physics (my original field of study) this pattern probably would have eluded me.

The pattern or principle itself is quite simple. As a thing (particle, particle cluster, dust cloud, etc.) comes into being, it will be more likely to remain in existence if it is stable.

This very humble observation explains why, even though there are dozens of particles that can exist in the material universe, all of the matter in the universe consists of electrons, protons and neutrons clustered together as atoms. The atomic form is the only stable material form and therefore the only one that persisted.

Here is an excerpt from LIFE!

[T]he form of existence we have taken, and the form of existence that predominates in the world we know and interact with (our world: our solar system and the rest of the visible universe, every rock and tree, every cereal box on the supermarket shelf), consists not of lambda or omega nuclei orbited by neutrinos, but of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons. But we need to answer why this is so. It is not, as was once thought, that these are the only possible types of particles. Although they have cornered the market on atomic existence, electrons, protons, and neutrons come from quite large families of particles known as leptons and hadrons. And although leptons seem to be truly fundamental particles, hadrons result from combinations of still smaller particles known as quarks. The electron (which is a lepton) has six brothers and sisters—the muon, the tau, the neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tau neutrino. (Each lepton also has an antimatter twin, known as an antilepton.) Quarks, which come in six types, don’t exist as free particles but combine in pairs or triplets to form mesons and baryons, collectively known as hadrons. (The proton and the neutron each consist of three quarks.) There are dozens of hadrons.We begin to understand why atoms are ubiquitous when we look at the properties of the members of these particle families: the electron and the proton are the lightest and therefore the most stable of the lepton and hadron families. The more massive leptons and quark combinations don’t last very long before breaking up into lighter particles. Of the leptons and quark combinations that do remain stable, only electrons, protons, and neutrons group together into naturally stable structures. In an atom, electromagnetism keeps the negatively charged electrons tightly bound to the positively charged protons. Nuclear forces bind protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.

Although the neutrino (a lepton quite similar to an electron but with no electromagnetic charge) is also a stable particle, and although the universe produces neutrinos in great numbers, their lack of an electromagnetic charge means that neutrinos can’t bind electromagnetically with protons as electrons do, and therefore they don’t form atomlike structures. Instead, neutrons fly through space, unbound and disconnected from the physical structures of stars and planets.

The proton has an effectively infinite life span. It is the only hadron that doesn’t spontaneously degenerate into another hadron plus radiation. By comparison, the neutron, when not bound, has an expected life span of less than eleven minutes. But when bound with a proton in an atom’s nucleus, the neutron can last indefinitely. Therefore, despite the dozens of fundamental particles and the many ways in which they could (statistically) be combined with one another in atomlike structures, atoms consist entirely of electrons, protons, and neutrons because other particles either quickly decompose or can’t combine into stable structures.

From this straightforward analysis of the particles that make up the universe and why these particles and not other particles give rise to material existence, we suddenly have an insight into a principle that guides the development of everything that exists in space and time…

In naming this site, I chose the term rational philosophy (even though philosophy should always be rational) because I want the posts to contribute to our understanding of the world around us using reason. I firmly believe that we all philosophize. Any reflection on our state of being is philosophy. Whether my reflection and analysis holds more weight or is more relevant or accurate than anyone else’s I will leave to the reader to decide. But as I begin these postings I commit that I will strive to be reasonable and fair. I have prejudices, and hobbyhorses, and weaknesses, but I will guard against them, root them out before I press “publish.”

I aim to post two kinds of content: That which is general and timeless, and that which is specific and of immediate interest. It seems to me that this captures the best of philosophy—to seek universal truth, and to try to use that truth to shed light on the the moment in which we live. When Socrates met with his fellow Greeks at the forum and engaged them in discussion, he held forth on some big subjects but at the same time urged his companions to think more sharply, to question more deeply.

In my second post, I hope to produce a broad sketch of my original philosophy that proposes some general ideas about our existence.

Thank you for reading,
Martin G. Walker