Racism

Nowadays racism seems a big mistake. Anthropologists will tell you that there are no races. And even if there are races (in the sense of colours of skin differences certainly exist), they are, like beauty, merely skin deep. So the racists of the past: slave-owners, Nazis, managers of exclusive clubs seem not just cruel criminals, but people of crass stupidity.
But the situation is slightly artificial. We are the only intelligent race to speak about. All other beings are not just inferior, they are in a completely different league. Nobody would claim that apes could even touch us in any intellectual effort. Certainly not Chomsky.
But this has not always been so. We had to share the earth with other human animals, probably inferior, but only just. There were our younger brethren, the Neanderthals, but also from a different race. If our apelike ancestors could have done philosophy, the discussion on racism would have been more interesting. It would not be on whether racism was scientifically wrong, because it was not back then. The Neanderthals were family, but not our equals. The discussion would be how to treat people who were genuinely racially inferior. Members of our family they might have been, albeit a little slow. Should we protect them, because they were a little foolish, or exploit them for the same reason, or put them out of their misery as soon as possible.
I think that that the third alternative was finally chosen.

Mind, God and immortality

On my Polish blog I wrote about the difference between the old philosophising about the soul and modern mind/body problem. The concept of the soul appears in inquiries about human immortality, while the concept of more or less non-material mind is to explain an equally puzzling miracle of private access to our minds, introspection, etc. Our minds need not be immortal, while the concept of soul more often than not implies immortality. While we have direct access to our minds, Cicero thinks that we do not have direct access to our souls. We can learn about them indirectly, the same as we learn about God.

That our inquiries about the human mind bear few consequences for the issue of our immortality is shown by the following quotation from Hume. Hume starts with the panpsychism of the stoics (which nowadays seems to be restored by David Chalmers, who thinks that consciousness is more dispersed in the world than usually expected).

“…admitting a spiritual substance to be dispersed throughout the universe, like ethereal fire or the Stoics and to be the only inherent subject of the thought, we have reason to conclude from analogy that nature uses it after the manner she does the other substance, matter. She employs it as a kind or paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms and existences; dissolves after a time each modification and from its substance erects a new form. As the same material substance may successively compose the bodies of all animals, the same spiritual substance may compose their minds. Their consciousness or the system of thought, which they form during life, may be continually dissolved by death. And nothing interests them in the new modification. The most positive asserters of mortality of the soul never denied the immortality of its substance. And that an immaterial substance, as well as material may lose its memory or consciousness appears, in part, from experience, if the soul be immaterial”.

David Hume Of the Immortality of the Soul (page one or two)


Let me put very simply: you do not need to believe in God or immortality to be a dualist.