Every day lately Maggie's Farm has been posting YouTube clips on aircraft emergencies, usually just audio, with some kind of filler or computer-generated graphics for the video. This morning's is really worth listening to, an 80-year-old newly bereaved widow who manages to put the family plane down after her husband suffers a heart attack at the controls.
She flew all the time with her husband and had had some rudimentary pilot training decades earlier. She sounds remarkably calm. Although there's a little more chaos on the radio than is ideal, and she often doesn't acknowledge and repeat the instructions she gets, everyone (including herself) does a great job getting her down. How I love these rescue stories, with total strangers dropping everything to engage in an act of brotherly love.
Hoping to find an online account told from her point of view, I discovered only her obituary from three years later.
On the Gilets Jaunes
Two interesting articles on the current French revolt by the Yellow Vests, apparently another front in the rural-urban cold war. In some ways, their descriptions remind me of the Tea Party movement here, but in others, not. These are longish articles and I'm just quoting some interesting bits from them below the fold.
Peter Berkowitz: What the New Congress Can Learn from Aristotle
Dr. Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution at Stanford has a good article on the relevance of Aristotle's political philosophy to American government today. It's a good read, I thought. Here's a snippet:
Many on both sides take pride in assuming the worst about the opposition. The left bewails the onset of fascism in America. Yet Republicans have reduced the scope of government by cutting taxes and deregulating the economy. And rather than imposing American rule beyond the nation’s borders, the president and his party have sought to bring immigration under the rule of law.
The right adopts a siege mentality and girds itself for total war against the left even though in 2019 the GOP will still control the presidency, the Senate, 26 governorships, and 62 of 97 state legislative chambers ...
The routine exaggeration, the reflexive resorting to sloganeering and invective, and the determined refusal to countenance alternative opinions leave partisans imprisoned within their cherished clichés and mesmerized by their pet panaceas. What is needed is a larger perspective, a suppler outlook, a more capacious sensibility.
What is needed is a generous dose of Aristotelian political science.
But doesn’t Aristotle, writing in the twilight of classical Athenian greatness, proceed from a discredited conception of nature and human nature? Doesn’t he subscribe to the illiberal and antidemocratic view that the purpose of politics is to cultivate virtue, a task to which only the one best regime is suited? Doesn’t his defense of natural slavery and his subordination of women render his thinking offensive to contemporary sensibilities and irrelevant to contemporary politics?
Such questions provide an excellent introduction to Aristotle’s political science ...
Rendezvous with destiny
We watched "The 15:17 to Paris" this week, Clint Eastwood's movie about three American servicemen who foiled a 2015 terrorist attack on a French train. I'm enjoying remembering watching it more than I did actually experiencing it.
Eastwood made a controversial decision to cast the three servicemen as themselves. The acting, therefore, is a bit amateurish and flat, matched by the screenplay and directorial style. "Lawrence of Arabia" or "A Man for All Seasons," it's not, but the effect is charming nevertheless. The three young men are completely ordinary in an old-fashioned way, fellows of average ability and unremarkable upbringing. The main focus is on the formative experiences of Spencer Stone, the guy who physically tackled the gun- and knife-wielding terrorist, from his mildly disappointing interactions with an unsympathetic education system, to his mother's disgust at the suggestion that he take drugs to keep him from looking out the window during boring classes, his impulsive decision to get into shape in order to qualify for a pararescue career in the military, and his sharp disappointment at failing to qualify for his first choice of service.
In another movie, all these experiences would show how society failed a young man and led him down a path of anomie and drug use, or spurred him to cure cancer in defiance of his small-minded critics. Instead, Spencer fumes over his disappointments, but continues along the military paths that remain open to him, picking up tools and experiences here and there, showing mild sparks of courage and independence, and finally making the fateful decision to board the 15:17 train to Paris with his two childhood friends, now also in the service and also on leave.
The attack itself is not terribly dramatic, considering the potential for horrible injury and death. It's over fairly quickly. The heroes have a bit of luck. The former would-be pararescuer calls on his physical strength, his jiu jitsu training, and a bit of first-aid education to stop the bad guy and help the injured train passenger. All three take care of business briskly; the main character is awarded the Legion of Honor.
Mediocre critical reviews correctly noted the flat tone of the film. What I enjoyed was the non-drama. This was not the "They Jacked with the Wrong Guy" genre, one I particularly enjoy, in which the crisis happens to someone who is fatally underestimated by the villains, like Bruce Willis in "Die Hard." The Everyman hero in "The 15:17 to Paris" made something modest of his modest circumstances, which fitted him to step up and do the right thing in a moment of unexpected crisis. He made few demands on life, concentrating instead on choosing something appropriate from the opportunities that randomly presented themselves to him and putting a reasonable effort into forming himself to meet them, without either whining or self-aggrandizing. He apparently assumed that many of the things he tried to learn in the service had been dead ends or wasted effort, but they all came in handy when he disarmed the bad guy on the train and helped the injured guy until EMTs could arrive.
Spencer remained cheerful and open to both fun and duty while he cast about for a direction to his life. If your neighborhood and your town were stocked with guys like him, maybe no one would be winning a Nobel Prize, but it would be a really good place to live.
Eastwood made a controversial decision to cast the three servicemen as themselves. The acting, therefore, is a bit amateurish and flat, matched by the screenplay and directorial style. "Lawrence of Arabia" or "A Man for All Seasons," it's not, but the effect is charming nevertheless. The three young men are completely ordinary in an old-fashioned way, fellows of average ability and unremarkable upbringing. The main focus is on the formative experiences of Spencer Stone, the guy who physically tackled the gun- and knife-wielding terrorist, from his mildly disappointing interactions with an unsympathetic education system, to his mother's disgust at the suggestion that he take drugs to keep him from looking out the window during boring classes, his impulsive decision to get into shape in order to qualify for a pararescue career in the military, and his sharp disappointment at failing to qualify for his first choice of service.
In another movie, all these experiences would show how society failed a young man and led him down a path of anomie and drug use, or spurred him to cure cancer in defiance of his small-minded critics. Instead, Spencer fumes over his disappointments, but continues along the military paths that remain open to him, picking up tools and experiences here and there, showing mild sparks of courage and independence, and finally making the fateful decision to board the 15:17 train to Paris with his two childhood friends, now also in the service and also on leave.
The attack itself is not terribly dramatic, considering the potential for horrible injury and death. It's over fairly quickly. The heroes have a bit of luck. The former would-be pararescuer calls on his physical strength, his jiu jitsu training, and a bit of first-aid education to stop the bad guy and help the injured train passenger. All three take care of business briskly; the main character is awarded the Legion of Honor.
Mediocre critical reviews correctly noted the flat tone of the film. What I enjoyed was the non-drama. This was not the "They Jacked with the Wrong Guy" genre, one I particularly enjoy, in which the crisis happens to someone who is fatally underestimated by the villains, like Bruce Willis in "Die Hard." The Everyman hero in "The 15:17 to Paris" made something modest of his modest circumstances, which fitted him to step up and do the right thing in a moment of unexpected crisis. He made few demands on life, concentrating instead on choosing something appropriate from the opportunities that randomly presented themselves to him and putting a reasonable effort into forming himself to meet them, without either whining or self-aggrandizing. He apparently assumed that many of the things he tried to learn in the service had been dead ends or wasted effort, but they all came in handy when he disarmed the bad guy on the train and helped the injured guy until EMTs could arrive.
Spencer remained cheerful and open to both fun and duty while he cast about for a direction to his life. If your neighborhood and your town were stocked with guys like him, maybe no one would be winning a Nobel Prize, but it would be a really good place to live.
Notes from the brink
Craftiness obsesses me at most times, but never more than at this season. It's amazing what you can find if you dig into a craft box you haven't opened for 30 years. And the instructions for folding these pretty strips of paper into Moravian stars were still available on the internet! Now I'm in search of a source of much wider and longer strips so I can make stars about 10 inches wide instead of these tiny things. The tiny ones will go on my tree, the big one on my Church's very tall (regrettably artificial) one.
Proof of concept: you can, in fact, tape strips of ordinary typing paper together and make a bigger star. Now I'll have to experiment with a nicer-quality paper with tape joints in different locations. This 1-1/2-inch strip makes a star about six inches wide, almost as big as what I'm aiming at.
And here are the final products. I can get a strip of 2-1/8 inches in width and 11 inches long by cutting an 8.5x11 sheet in quarters and taping four strips end to end to make a strip 2-1/8 by 44 inches long, about the right proportions. Four of those make a star. That's the size of the largest star, on the right. The two tiny stars are made of strips 1/2 inch wide.
Proof of concept: you can, in fact, tape strips of ordinary typing paper together and make a bigger star. Now I'll have to experiment with a nicer-quality paper with tape joints in different locations. This 1-1/2-inch strip makes a star about six inches wide, almost as big as what I'm aiming at.
And here are the final products. I can get a strip of 2-1/8 inches in width and 11 inches long by cutting an 8.5x11 sheet in quarters and taping four strips end to end to make a strip 2-1/8 by 44 inches long, about the right proportions. Four of those make a star. That's the size of the largest star, on the right. The two tiny stars are made of strips 1/2 inch wide.
Yule Tree
The Hall’s tree. It’s not decorated to compete with Tex, but it is twelve feet tall. Second highest tree I’ve ever mounted, but of better quality I think. The other one was 18 feet, but a short needle pine. This one is a spruce.
Hypothesis Affirmed
Shooting the cops in this case is dangerous—they may send a SWAT team to kill you—and in many places it's illegal. But it is nevertheless morally permissible, indeed heroic and admirable.
One... MILLION Dollars!
The state of New York has an idea to reduce gun ownership: make every gun owner carry a million-dollar insurance policy.
Well, it's not a new idea. We've talked about this before, both here and at the now-defunct Winds of Change. Then as now, gun-haters were sure that the expense of such a policy would cripple interest in guns. The truth is, if such policies were widely offered, they'd be pretty cheap.
I have a million dollar liability policy as part of my homeowner's insurance. The cost of this policy is a few tens of dollars a year -- on the order of thirty bucks. I spend more on coffee, monthly, than I do annually on this policy. And that is in spite of the fact that this covers a wide degree of risks, everything from 'slipped on the ice on your walk in the winter' to 'chose to climb a tree on the back 40 and broke my leg.' It covers you if you get burned on my fireplace, or if a roofbeam should fall on your head. Lots of stuff is covered.
The gun policy they're proposing only covers one thing: if I should shoot someone and get sued for it.
Let's run through that in very round numbers to make the math easy. Now there are 300,000,000+ guns in America, owned by around 100,000,000 households. There are just around 100,000 gun injuries or deaths a year. Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. Those that are intentional homicides wouldn't be covered by insurance policies because they are crimes, and you can't insure yourself against the consequences of intentionally committing a crime. Only the rare accidental shooting (489, or about half of one thousand in 2015), or a lawful self-defense that resulted in a successful lawsuit, would be covered.
So we've got around 500 annual accidents in a nation of three hundred million guns; assuming all guns were equally likely to cause that injury, and a 100% probability of the insurance company having to pay a claim over it, then the probability that your insurance company has to pay a claim is about .000016. Add in estimated defensive gun use, and there's another group of guns you'd have to insure, but again it's divided over 300,000,000 guns owned by 100,000,000 households. Estimates for how often guns are used defensively vary widely, but the low side numbers are all from the gun-control side; if they believe their own numbers, it's going to be a vanishingly small number of incidents that need to be paid out.
It's a million-dollar policy, but the average cost of a gunshot wound is only $150,000. Assuming that adding in the defensive uses to the accidental shootings fully doubles the number of payoffs, then we've got $150,000 x 1,000 incidents, or $150,000,000 in annual payouts. Divide that by 300,000,000 guns, and we'll need about fifty cents a gun to cover that.
So, if you own six guns, that's three dollars a year. Of course it'll be a bit higher, because the insurance company would have operating costs. But it's not going to break the backs of the firearms injury, even if it survives constitutional review.
'The Virgin Mary Couldn't Consent'
An argument from a Satan-loving professor in Minnesota.
One of the interesting things about the Bible, then, is just how interested God seems to be in humanity's willful compliance. It's true that God punishes bad behavior sometimes. It's also true that God forgoes punishment where there is reform, sometimes. But the central fact of Jesus' mission in the Bible is the search for individual choice -- consent -- on behalf of each and every soul. Jesus does not compel, he argues in favor and leaves it to his listeners to decide what to do with what he says; ultimately, what to do with him.
It's an unreflective pose, this professor's. One ought to think more deeply when one is supposedly wed to the life of the mind.
“The virgin birth story is about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity impregnating a human teen. There is no definition of consent that would include that scenario. Happy Holidays"The Bible makes a surprisingly large amount of God's desire for human consent, when you consider the power differential. God doesn't need human consent for anything. Like Eru Ilúvatar in the opening act of the Silmarillion, an all-powerful God could readily rework even the most rebellious dissent into a new harmony. So he could respect your free will without cost to himself or his designs. In point of fact, on this model, it's only because of his choice that any of us have free will at all. A god like Ilúvatar could have built mindless machines to execute his designs.
Another Twitter user called the professor’s claim into question, noting that the Bible states that the Virgin Mary did, indeed, agree to God’s plan for her.
“The biblical god regularly punished disobedience,” Sprankle rebutted. “The power difference (deity vs mortal) and the potential for violence for saying ‘no’ negates her ‘yes.’ To put someone in this position is an unethical abuse of power at best and grossly predatory at worst.”...
Sprankle also decorated his Christmas tree with Satanic decor, as shown in another tweet he sent this past weekend.
One of the interesting things about the Bible, then, is just how interested God seems to be in humanity's willful compliance. It's true that God punishes bad behavior sometimes. It's also true that God forgoes punishment where there is reform, sometimes. But the central fact of Jesus' mission in the Bible is the search for individual choice -- consent -- on behalf of each and every soul. Jesus does not compel, he argues in favor and leaves it to his listeners to decide what to do with what he says; ultimately, what to do with him.
It's an unreflective pose, this professor's. One ought to think more deeply when one is supposedly wed to the life of the mind.
Language Like a Free Market
Several of us seem to be interested in language, so I thought I'd post a link to editor and language columnist for The Economist Lane Greene's thoughts on the descriptivist / prescriptivist divide and the ways in which language operates like a free market.
Some quick excerpts:
Read on for a discussion of changes in English in the Great Vowel Shift, the evolution of the word buxom, the loss of Old English case endings, and the ways spontaneous order does its work in a language, much like it does its work in an economy.
Some quick excerpts:
Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language. By and large, it still does. Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances. Either you smugly preen about the mistakes you find abhorrent – this makes you a so-called prescriptivist – or you show off your knowledge of language change, and poke holes in the prescriptivists’ facts – this makes you a descriptivist. Group membership is mandatory, and the two are mutually exclusive.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. I have two roles at my workplace: I am an editor and a language columnist. These two jobs more or less require me to be both a prescriptivist and a descriptivist. When people file me copy that has mistakes of grammar or mechanics, I fix them (as well as applying The Economist’s house style). But when it comes time to write my column, I study the weird mess of real language; rather than being a scold about this or that mistake, I try to teach myself (and so the reader) something new. Is this a split personality, or can the two be reconciled into a coherent philosophy? I believe they can.
...
Descriptivists – that is, virtually all academic linguists – will point out that semantic creep is how languages work. It’s just something words do: look up virtually any nontechnical word in the great historical Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which lists a word’s senses in historical order. You’ll see things such as the extension of decimate happening again and again and again. Words won’t sit still. The prescriptivist position, offered one linguist, is like taking a snapshot of the surface of the ocean and insisting that’s how ocean surfaces must look.
Be that as it may, retort prescriptivists, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. ...
Read on for a discussion of changes in English in the Great Vowel Shift, the evolution of the word buxom, the loss of Old English case endings, and the ways spontaneous order does its work in a language, much like it does its work in an economy.
But Is It Conscious?
And how would you know?
There are some standing answers, such as the Turing test, and Sebastian Rödl's test for self-consciousness. These are 'just to be sure' tests, though; they're arguments that we have reason to treat these as thinking beings, as conscious beings, and no reason not to do so. To be sure we aren't exploiting them, then, we should do so.
But consider the arguments from the Aristotelian discussion below, and think about the problem. Are these things somehow programmed to mimic consciousness, or are they becoming conscious? How could you tell?
There are some standing answers, such as the Turing test, and Sebastian Rödl's test for self-consciousness. These are 'just to be sure' tests, though; they're arguments that we have reason to treat these as thinking beings, as conscious beings, and no reason not to do so. To be sure we aren't exploiting them, then, we should do so.
But consider the arguments from the Aristotelian discussion below, and think about the problem. Are these things somehow programmed to mimic consciousness, or are they becoming conscious? How could you tell?
Different Definitions of Racism
Over at The Federalist, David Marcus writes about the problems America has because of the starkly different definitions of "racism" progressives and conservatives have. He suggests ways we could compromise on action without compromising on principles. I generally agree with his points, but I don't think the left wants to compromise on actions. I could be wrong, of course.
Here are the definitions and some key points about them:
I think he's done a good job in teasing out the definitions and why conservatives and progressives misunderstand each other on this point.
What to do about it is another thing altogether.
Here are the definitions and some key points about them:
There are two basic definitions of racism in the United States, one roughly associated with progressives and one roughly associated with conservatives. The former describes racism as the failure to acknowledge and seek to redress systemic discrimination against select disadvantaged minority groups. It is very broad and captures everything from unconscious bias to white supremacy. The latter views racism as making assumptions about, or taking action towards, an individual or group on the sole basis of their race. It is narrow and generally requires belief, intent, and animosity.
These definitions don’t simply differ; to a great extent they actually contradict each other. Much of the contradiction stems from the fact that the progressive definition of racism requires that an advantaged individual or group must be attacking the less privileged. The more conservative and narrow definition of racism requires no appeal to power structures, only to bias, and can be committed by anyone towards anyone.
...
There is a double standard here that progressives don’t actually deny. It is, in fact, baked into their definition of racism. Under their rubric, the definition of racist has a double standard precisely because society has double standards that they argue overwhelmingly disadvantage the less privileged. It is internally logical and consistent in a way a lot of conservatives don’t quite understand.
On the other hand, those on the left are often shocked when polls show that majorities of white people believe that they are discriminated against in the United States. They will point to economic data, political power, and cultural representation and say, “You people are crazy.” But under the narrower definition of racism, it makes perfect sense. These white people are reacting to the fact that they can be attacked on the basis of their race in ways others can’t. In addition, whites — and increasingly Asians — look at programs like affirmative action as inherently racist.
I think he's done a good job in teasing out the definitions and why conservatives and progressives misunderstand each other on this point.
What to do about it is another thing altogether.
Sign Me Up for Not Signing Up for That
The UN has an idea: give voting rights to migrants. Immediately.
We had a long series many years ago now on the franchise. The universal franchise makes some sense, and ultimately we didn't come up with anything better. But you shouldn't assign votes to children too young to have been educated in the proper way that the system works; nor too young to make dispassionate decisions in the light of reason; nor to people too recently arrived to understand fully what is going on.
These days I'm thinking that means that the 'proper education' requirement might disbar very many US citizens, even natural born ones, and that 'too young to make dispassionate decisions' might require raising the voting age to 35. I'm certainly not inclined to believe, from my observations, that we should be even more eager to enlist first-time voters who don't really understand America, how it works, or what its value might be.
Hidden amongst the 38 jargon-laced pages, the compact affirms the “entitlements” of migrants and refugees; including but not limited to additional job training, diaspora “trade fairs,” assistance sending money to their countries of origin, and a commitment to “educating” native communities on the benefits of multiculturalism and increased immigration.Even if I were in favor of higher levels of immigration, which currently I am not -- I think we need at least a generation to culturally absorb the ones we have already -- I would not be in favor of assigning the franchise to people immediately. You need to be here long enough to learn how we do things, and just why, before you should be voting.
The document insists it is based on “human rights law” and “upholds the principles of non-regression and non-discrimination.”
This means a nation-state is agreeing to not alter its own internal immigration policies after signing up to the compact. What supranational governmental organizations call “pooling sovereignty,” and what the rest of us call “giving up sovereignty.”
The document demands migrants get the same rights as natives, immediately, including but not limited to voting rights and access to welfare.
We had a long series many years ago now on the franchise. The universal franchise makes some sense, and ultimately we didn't come up with anything better. But you shouldn't assign votes to children too young to have been educated in the proper way that the system works; nor too young to make dispassionate decisions in the light of reason; nor to people too recently arrived to understand fully what is going on.
These days I'm thinking that means that the 'proper education' requirement might disbar very many US citizens, even natural born ones, and that 'too young to make dispassionate decisions' might require raising the voting age to 35. I'm certainly not inclined to believe, from my observations, that we should be even more eager to enlist first-time voters who don't really understand America, how it works, or what its value might be.
Things Aren't What They Used To Be
A meditation at The Federalist.
As I write in my new book, “I Used To Be Conservative: Confessions Of A Conservative Who Used To Be A Conservative Who Used To Be A Liberal,” “I could no longer be a conservative, because being a conservative could no longer be an option.” How true that is.
Sometimes you reach a point—usually when you have something to promote—when what you once thought no longer is what you think now. That point has arrived for me. It’s quite painful, as I’ve said on several CNN programs and YouTube interviews.
The conservatism of today is not the conservatism it was when I was younger, nor is it the liberalism it was when I was middle-aged. I can no longer sit idly by and pretend that what I once believed is what I believe now, or that anyone else should believe it. Or not.
Was Mueller Worth It?
Vanity Fair just published a 'Trump-Hater's guide to Mueller skepticism.' Objectively, the fines extracted from Paul Manafort have more than paid for the investigation, so it's certainly been worth it for the government financially.
And, too, it has been enlightening to watch Mueller make a lifelong public servant plead guilty to a charge of which he wasn't even suspected -- Flynn plead to lying to the FBI, in spite of the testimony from the agents who interviewed him that he was truthful and forthcoming. If he's willing to do that, well, we know that nothing he produces can be trusted without substantial supporting evidence. It's good to realize just how corrupt the government is, and Mueller himself in spite of his sterling reputation.
Mueller caught Flynn on a violation of working for Turkey without registering, which required altering the enforcement of the law governing those practices. Until recently, you could register after the fact; now it's a thing that you have to follow the law and register if you're lobbying the government on behalf of a foreign country. I suppose that's good, but it's interesting that the conviction required changing common practice.
Flynn eventually lost his house and his job and his security clearance, but even with the guilty pleas he extorted Mueller didn't have enough to ask for even a day in jail. So far the sentences faced by those he's haunted have ranged from two weeks to a month. Manafort will probably get hit harder, but not for anything he did with Donald Trump; and even there, I notice that Mueller mostly made him plead guilty to the charges that he couldn't convict on in court. Mueller's record of actually proving things is pretty weak.
I think we have learned from this that the Department of Justice is entirely corrupt at the top, and should be disbanded and replaced. That's an important insight, well worth the price of an investigation that -- as mentioned -- paid for itself.
So sure, it was worth it. Or will have been, if we follow through on punishing the corruption that it has revealed.
And, too, it has been enlightening to watch Mueller make a lifelong public servant plead guilty to a charge of which he wasn't even suspected -- Flynn plead to lying to the FBI, in spite of the testimony from the agents who interviewed him that he was truthful and forthcoming. If he's willing to do that, well, we know that nothing he produces can be trusted without substantial supporting evidence. It's good to realize just how corrupt the government is, and Mueller himself in spite of his sterling reputation.
Mueller caught Flynn on a violation of working for Turkey without registering, which required altering the enforcement of the law governing those practices. Until recently, you could register after the fact; now it's a thing that you have to follow the law and register if you're lobbying the government on behalf of a foreign country. I suppose that's good, but it's interesting that the conviction required changing common practice.
Flynn eventually lost his house and his job and his security clearance, but even with the guilty pleas he extorted Mueller didn't have enough to ask for even a day in jail. So far the sentences faced by those he's haunted have ranged from two weeks to a month. Manafort will probably get hit harder, but not for anything he did with Donald Trump; and even there, I notice that Mueller mostly made him plead guilty to the charges that he couldn't convict on in court. Mueller's record of actually proving things is pretty weak.
I think we have learned from this that the Department of Justice is entirely corrupt at the top, and should be disbanded and replaced. That's an important insight, well worth the price of an investigation that -- as mentioned -- paid for itself.
So sure, it was worth it. Or will have been, if we follow through on punishing the corruption that it has revealed.
A Big Day for Aristotelians
A plant 'cyborg' has proven to have the capacity to move itself around to seek better light. We all know that plants can detect light, and can engage in some limited movement of their leaves in order to maximize exposure. Scientists have figured out how to translate that into an ability to let the whole plant move itself, determining where it should sit.
The difference between plants and animals, he thought, was just this capacity to move one's self in order to obtain food. The motive soul was a higher level of soul because it required an ability to distinguish things distant from yourself, rather than simply to absorb things that you came into contact with accidentally. Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life, argues that this capacity requires a self-conscious mind: a hawk must be able to distinguish that it is different from the rabbit. That isn't necessarily clear, though; there needs to be some sort of process by which the hawk finds the rabbit's presence actionable, but it might not be a conscious process. Still, it makes sense to say it is: certainly, in us, we recognize ourselves as different from the hunted animal. There is no special reason to assume it is otherwise for the hawk, there is just no proof that the hawk experiences consciousness.
(Although, speaking of birds, I think it's at least suggestive that crows not only display advanced problem solving in spite of having brains that contain none of the structures we think humans use for it, they also seem to be able to recognize people who have been mean and to communicate that to others in their murder. But we don't know what their experiences are like, or even if they 'have experiences' at all.)
So anyway, it turns out that plants have the ability to process the information they would need to move around; they just don't, naturally, have the capability to move around. For Aristotle, the soul is the perfection of the thing according to its own nature. Wouldn't the plant be more perfect if it could move, just as an animal would be more perfect if it could reason (as, it seems, crows can)?
If the answer is yes, then we come to another Aristotelian dictum, this one from the Physics: it is the role of art to perfect nature. That is to say that the human soul, which is rational in its highest part, can see where the natural has failed to actualize all of its potential. We can, through art, improve nature by bringing it more fully to its complete perfection. The art of medicine is essentially this, or has been up until now: the eye should see, and see well, but does not, and so the doctor works to try to restore or perfect the sight.
So the question to ask is this: are we perfecting the plants' nature, and if so, does that mean that they really do have an animal (motive) soul that has only existed so far in potency? If so, do they have rational souls in potency as well? We have more reason than Aristotle had to think that animals can reason, at least some of them. Perhaps all animals have rational souls that haven't been fully actualized; perhaps, with art, they could be. Plants as well.
That leads to another ancient view, more Plato's than Aristotle's.
The idea is reasonably simple—place sensors that listen to the electrical signals generated by a plant and then convert those signals to commands carried out by the motorized wheels. The result is a plant that can respond to changes in light direction by moving itself closer to the source.If you are an Aristotelian thinker, this is really an interesting development. Aristotle argues (in De Anima) that the human soul has three parts, the rational, the motive (or animal), and the nutrative (or plant-like). Humans, plants, and animals contain the capacity to take nutrition from the world and put it into our own order: to rebuild our cells, say, with proteins taken from outside us. All of us do that, and it is the distinction between living things and things like rocks that are not alive.
The difference between plants and animals, he thought, was just this capacity to move one's self in order to obtain food. The motive soul was a higher level of soul because it required an ability to distinguish things distant from yourself, rather than simply to absorb things that you came into contact with accidentally. Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life, argues that this capacity requires a self-conscious mind: a hawk must be able to distinguish that it is different from the rabbit. That isn't necessarily clear, though; there needs to be some sort of process by which the hawk finds the rabbit's presence actionable, but it might not be a conscious process. Still, it makes sense to say it is: certainly, in us, we recognize ourselves as different from the hunted animal. There is no special reason to assume it is otherwise for the hawk, there is just no proof that the hawk experiences consciousness.
(Although, speaking of birds, I think it's at least suggestive that crows not only display advanced problem solving in spite of having brains that contain none of the structures we think humans use for it, they also seem to be able to recognize people who have been mean and to communicate that to others in their murder. But we don't know what their experiences are like, or even if they 'have experiences' at all.)
So anyway, it turns out that plants have the ability to process the information they would need to move around; they just don't, naturally, have the capability to move around. For Aristotle, the soul is the perfection of the thing according to its own nature. Wouldn't the plant be more perfect if it could move, just as an animal would be more perfect if it could reason (as, it seems, crows can)?
If the answer is yes, then we come to another Aristotelian dictum, this one from the Physics: it is the role of art to perfect nature. That is to say that the human soul, which is rational in its highest part, can see where the natural has failed to actualize all of its potential. We can, through art, improve nature by bringing it more fully to its complete perfection. The art of medicine is essentially this, or has been up until now: the eye should see, and see well, but does not, and so the doctor works to try to restore or perfect the sight.
So the question to ask is this: are we perfecting the plants' nature, and if so, does that mean that they really do have an animal (motive) soul that has only existed so far in potency? If so, do they have rational souls in potency as well? We have more reason than Aristotle had to think that animals can reason, at least some of them. Perhaps all animals have rational souls that haven't been fully actualized; perhaps, with art, they could be. Plants as well.
That leads to another ancient view, more Plato's than Aristotle's.
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