Four Philosophical Questions on the BBC

This is a response to a piece on the BBC's website, containing four knotty philosophical questions. I can answer each of them to my satisfaction, so I'd like to put my answers out there.

It would be helpful to read the original piece, as I'm not going to put the whole, lengthy questions here.

1- Should we kill healthy people for their organs?

No. While, in all three cases, the phrase "saving five people by killing one" applies, in the first case, "Bill" is in no jeopardy. It would be wrong to kill someone healthy who is not in danger of death against his will. In the second case it is not immoral to kill the individual, because all six people are already in jeopardy. If you don't kill one of them yourself, that person will die anyway, whereas Bill is in no such danger.

Now, in the third case, while the choice of which track to set the train rolling down seems to be taking someone who is not in danger, the single person tied to the alternate track, and killing him/her, it is not equivalent to Bill's case because Bill isn't tied to any train tracks! So, although in both cases you appear to be making a deliberate choice sacrificing one person (kill Bill for his organs, flip the switch to kill the individual on the tracks) to spare five people, the fact that the individual in the train example is tied to active train tracks places him or her in a danger that Bill is not in. I think this is why most people intuitively answer that it is not okay to kill Bill, but okay to let the train kill the individual tied to the tracks, and okay to kill the one hostage to set the five free.

2- Are you the same person who started reading this article?


The dichotomy between the statements "everything is constantly changing" and "nothing changes" is false, as the two statements of truth are only apparently different. In reality, all of these concepts we think of as being fundamentally opposed (say, motion and stillness, or freewill and fate) are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, "being." Concept and language view separate phenomena, and the mistake is to say that they are separate, and therefore NOT UNIFIED. The paradox in "everything is in constant change" is, of course, that that rule itself is not subject to change, but this paradox doesn't mean there's something wrong with the world, or that this truth itself is wrong, it's pointing to the inability of language to grasp the nature of reality as being constantly changing, continuously unchanging, both constantly changing and unchanging, and neither changing nor unchanging, and all necessarily so. There is no possibility of "being" being anyway other than this, a can of worms for another time.

Similarly, the dichotomy between the subject and the object is conceptual/ perceptual, and built into the structure of reality, but not itself ultimately real. Again, reality is neither subjective nor objective, it is both at the same time. Everything in the phenomenal world is in constant change and only a part of the whole, and also at the same time ultimately the same as what does not change, being itself. The sense of unchanging identity comes from this center of your unchanging being, and this does not change, though everything phenomenal is fluid and changing.

So, what you think you are is totally different from what it was at the beginning of the article, and even from moment to moment. What you actually are, everything, has not changed.

3- Is that really a computer screen in front of you?

Closely related to the above, this question hinges on the belief in some "thing" that is "real," as opposed to "things" that are not real.

There is no "independent" check on your senses because there is no true "independence." There is no "thing" in the universe with any reality separate from the reality of the rest of the universe, a sticking point of materialism. There's no getting outside the system, because everything conceivable in any time point in space or dimension is the system.

But it's not just that it's impossible to verify what's really really real (say, where exactly the buck stops,) it's that the idea of something being really really real independently is mistaken.

Basically, the sentence "There is a computer screen in front of me" loses any meaning if it is meant in an ultimate sense, and not a practical one. Practically, there is a computer screen in front of you, right now. Ultimately, reality doesn't work this way.

4-Did you really choose to read this article?

Again, closely related to the above two questions.

All of these "stickler" questions come at the logical conclusions of two seemingly obvious lines of thought.

Again, we're placing too much emphasis on the "really real, independently real, truly and ultimately real" nature of our concepts and what they refer to. Free will and determinism are not contradictory, they are two ways of looking at determination of process, and are each shortcuts.

All is the Universe, and you are this as well, so, whatever you do is determined, ultimately, by whatever it is that determines everything, and that is also what you are in any real sense, so, really, you have ultimate free will, enough to seriously frighten most people. Saying that all of your choices are pre-determined doesn't rule out that you determined them yourself, but, again, our concept of the free agent of choice is only a shorthand. On the other side of the coin, let's say that the result of a choice is one of two extreme possibilities, either at that moment the universe splits and BOTH happen, ultimately meaning that every infinitely small moment creates an infinite amount of second-moments, and so on (which, though it seems perhaps counter-intuitive that there could be infinite to the infinite worlds out there, is less so if you remember the fact of infinity), or only one thing happens, and all the other possibilities fall back into nothing. Either way is entirely handcuffing the very free will affirmed above. Either every choice is played out in every possible fashion, in which case who "you" are is just an accident of whichever line you happen to be watching, or you can never un-choose what has happened, and can't say whether (since there is only one universe) what happened ever actually had a choice option, both deterministic in their ways. At the end of the day all of this conjecture is meaningless, it all rests on the incorrect assumption that free-will and choice are different possibilities. Things happen. You are a part of what makes them happen, in fact what "you" are is also what this is, so you have free-will, and further, you are not different from what is happening. Even the idea of acting on something different from you is mistaken, it is practical. There is also never any real alternative to what is, so there is no free will. These are both true at the same time, and really, neither of them is true at all, they're only ways of talking, of wrapping words (though not fruitlessly) around something that cannot be corralled. The universe is not what it appears, and, it is. Everything is oneness, everything is nothingness, oneness is nothingness.

Okay, feel free to add your own thoughts.