Sam Harris, Meditation, Mental Illness and a Question from British Columbia

Picture from ABC News 

I'm going to preface this post by saying that I like and respect Sam Harris. I think he is one of the preeminent popular intellectuals that is currently active and I am in agreement with him on the majority of issues which he speaks about. I think his takes on identity politics, free speech, religion, and many other topics are largely correct.

In addition to that, one thing I really appreciate about Sam is how thoughtful he is. That thoughtfulness can be heard in his podcast in the respect he has for his guests, in how he wants his guests treated by his audience after they are on the podcast and in what he wants the experience of being on his podcast to be like (https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-limits-of-persuasion) about 28 minutes in.

In addition to that, he shows his thoughtfulness in his approach for donations to his podcasts where he asks for donations, but limits his request to those who can easily afford it. This may seem trivial, as someone who doesn't have the money to donate, probably wouldn't donate anyway, but it shows how he is expressing a feeling for his listeners that often isn't expressed. I respect him making that statement and the thought that went into making it.

Yet, I do have an issue with something Sam said in response to a question asked at The Orpheum Theater in Vancouver that was recorded in his most recent podcast. I think in answering the question he missed the thoughtfulness that he usually gets right.

Question: "Hi my name is Randy. My question is for Sam. I wanted to know what role meditation has played in your mental health, I guess. Have you been more resilient to depression or anxiety? Because it seems like your always kinda being attacked by somebody either Batman or having Charles Murray on your Podcast. Because I'm at a point where I'm kinda done with antidepressants, psychotics and mood stabilizers. I want to try something new, so what's your take on meditation as a mental health treatment?"

Answer: "Well, I think it can be incredibly useful. I think there are certain people who probably shouldn't go on intense silent meditation retreats so I wouldn't recommend the most intense meditation experiences for everybody. There are people who find going into silence for a week or a month destabilizing and that's a tiny percentage of people but you should be aware that it is possible to have a bad experiences doing a lot of meditation. 

The kind of meditation I recommend is just learning to pay much more careful attention to what it is like to be you. When you pay attention, you begin to notice all the ways in which you are suffering unnecessarily. The universe didn't have to be this way, but is just so happens there is a direct connection between seeing more of what is actually happening in your own mind and ceasing to suffer in many of ways that are unnecessary. Honestly, it is the most important thing I've ever learned, but it's not necessary to learn most other things, it's orthogonal to almost everything else we care about intellectually. It's not that I don't suffer in all the ordinary ways that I suffered with before I learned to meditate. The half-life of suffering, the half-life of something like anger or anxiety or embarrassment or fear or whatever the negative mindstate is, it's cut way way down and also behavioral consequences of those negative emotions, the door is closed to those. 

When you think of the difference between being angry 10 seconds and then actually letting it go and being angry for an hour, right, it's an enormous difference, because in that hour you can get up to doing all kinds of life deranging things on the basis of anger and feel good about doing those things, right, because you damn well should be doing those things because you're pissed. Just shorting the time of all these negative states is [an] enormous benefit. Meditation is a great tool for that."

I didn't want to judge Sam's response and write this without looking into the efficacy of meditation as a treatment for depression and there is some pretty solid evidence [1, 2] that meditation may be as effective a treatment as antidepressants for depression, but this is to be taken with some precaution. The general results from different studies tend to point to mindfulness being more successful at dealing with stress than anxiety or depression, which each have smaller effect sizes. There does seem to be an effect for meditation in the treatment of mental illness, what I presume Randy was suffering from, with meditation.

However, there are two larger problems pointed out by Steven Novella.

1.The problem with this research is that it is largely preliminary, as the specifics that makeup mindfulness is not always consistent, and there remain questions about what type of people benefit the most and with what severity of condition mindfulness is most effective at treating. This is fine as the results seem to be trending in the right direction of it being an effective treatment, but there are issues that remain to be settled.

2. The control measures used as opposite of mindfulness are not adequate. Mindfulness is tested against medication and placebo medication, but not against relaxation or sham mindfulness. This is problematic, as it makes it unclear if there is something specific about mindfulness that is helpful or if it is a product of relaxation which isn't specific to mindfulness.

That being the case and my expectation that Sam, who is likely more educated on the subject than I, should have had a more thoughtful response to that question. I am fine with him talking about his experience and how it has affected his life, but I think that his response lost track of the context of the question being that, the person asking the question is someone with serious problems talking about ceasing to take all their medication. Somewhere in that response there needed to be a caveat about talking to a doctor about his decision or getting some kind of medical advice before just stopping his medication.

Sam's response, unfortunately, reminded me of the type of response that is characteristic of proponents of alternative medicine, 'Here is my personal experience of it working and it was good for me.' In that, I expect a higher quality response for Sam Harris and maybe he simply lost track of that part of the question, but I was disappointed that it wasn't there from someone who usually gets those parts correct. Further, he didn't mention the evidence in support of meditation being used to help treat mental illness which is also disappointing, but that bothered me less than not addressing the context of a person threating to stop taking all their medication.

Given that there is some medical evidence for meditation being helpful am I over-reaching in my criticism of Sam's response? Does he, as a proponent of meditation, have an ethical responsibility when someone is asking a question like that?

What Does the Earth Want?

This seems to be the fundamental question of environmentalism and it's often ignored, assumed, or not even asked. I feel like Camus, who first really put the emphasis on whether life was worth living, and put forth a fundamental question that should have been answered or at least defined before people went to work on solving problems. The cart is years ahead of the horse, and people trying to upgrade the cart to see if they can make it work better.

Now it may be argued, correctly even, that any answer given to this question will be anthropomorphizing the earth, but that doesn't diminish the value in asking the question in the first place. How the question is answered is still important because it defines your starting place and the bias's that were applied when asking the question.

Bias isn't a bad thing, its a natural omnipresent condition that affects any judgement and it is best to be aware to keep it in check. Physicists are biased with preconceptions that make it easier to believe that light is the cosmic speed limit, but that doesn't make the fact any less true. 


I've came up with 4 answers to the question of what the Earth wants and will describe them and what they show.


1. The Diversity Argument - Perhaps the best thing for the earth is to be as diverse biologically as possible.  A world built this way would provide for the greatest range of niches being filled and quite possibly the greatest range of the 'enjoyment' of the earth. This is to say that a mole enjoys the earth in a different way than a bat does, but doesn't say anything more than that. 

If that is the goal then all species should be attempted to be saved and the importance of the preservation  of different animals would go up exponentially as the number of the members of a species went down. This again wouldn't have to be limited to animal life and seems readily applicable to plant life as well.


Yet, if the greatest diversity is the core goal than people should also be trying to create new species through genetic modification and separating breeding populations to obtain quick changes in animals so that new species are created. Sure, some of these new species might expand their bounds and compete with the existing species, but than people can manage populations in an attempt to keep the greatest amount of different species alive.

This idea may sound far fetched, but at the heart of the idea that genetic diversity is important and that animals should be saved, even as their habitat disappears or in some cases becomes non-existent.


2. The Most Life - Sheer number of animals and plants could be the most important factor, as it wouldn't matter what species exist, so long as the Earth is supporting the greatest amount of life it could. A maximal mother earth wouldn't be a monoculture that is often criticized,as many more plants are able to live in a untouched forest than one where a single species has been planted, but it wouldn't be against the idea of a monoculture in principle either. 


One life would be just as important as another and there would be no favorites. This would probably mean a vastly more integrated human life where nature would be intertwined with life, and where pests, would be as valuable in principle as pets and it would also be highly unrealistic and unpopular.


3. The Human First - Egoism as expressed by the bible and more recently by Rick Santorum. As the bible said the world was created for man and he got to name all the animals. Than in Genesis 1:26 "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'”   

This is the most popular view of nature, that humans matter and everything else matters as compared to what human value it has, but it's probably popular because of human exceptionalism and ignorance. 


Animals can be seen as stupid or unfeeling and thus can be morally written off to have no consideration, or people can just not think of the problem and act in their own self interest. Either way results in an exclusively human perspective.


4. Earth as an ecosystem - The common solution for environmentalists is that the earth wants to be an ecosystem. The earth only provides life by the inter-dependance of the earth, water, weather system, plants and animals working together to form a cohesive self replenishing system. 

Everything has value because everything functions in an integrated way.


Whats the answer to what the Earth wants? Just to restate is depends totally on what your view is and the question is only a canvas for what you believe. That's about the only thing conservatives get right about the environment, the earth may not have been put here under our dominion, but it surely doesn't care if we use up all the oil, kill all the polar bears (apology's the the bear pictured above), or turn it into a planet like Mercury.


Yet, animals, plants and people all must live here in some sort of balance and what that balance is important. The key is not to think that what exists now is perfect,  that what naturally happens is the best balance or that there is any one solution to the question.

Sam Harris points out that there can be many peaks and valleys in the ethical treatment of people, and this holds for the environment as well. That's why I enjoyed the Skeptical Environmentalist so much, because Bjorn thinks things are good now, but is willing to ask the question, will things be better in the future if we say the course we are on? Whether you agree with him about whether he got the right information or draws the right conclusions isn't as important as starting the conversation and being willing to ask the question. He is a man looking for many peaks.

The point is that there are many environments that work, and the answer isn't the steady state that we need to keep everything as it was found when people first entered the area, or that we need to terraform everything to make this world any particular way.


All the points of view have some value, and although I think it isn't usually the case that everyone see's a different piece of the truth, this time all the views have something important to say.


1. The value of diversity of life and captures the understanding and wonder when we find something new and the shame and feeling of loss when something goes extinct.


2. The amount of life is also important as it lets species overcome tragedies that may happen to any number of the individuals, but this seems like a lesser core value than the other three.


3. The egoist view has ever present importance of humans in ethical considerations. Any environmental philosophy that doesn't take that into account is going to be impossible to follow, as even the people who want to preserve nature for it's own benefit don't want to preserve nature as it was during any of the numerous ice ages the earth has had. Anything calling for mass human death, or your mother to have the value of a tree just is unsupportable.


4. Shows how the earth works as a system and how nothing exists on its own.Yet, this view does have a bias to what exists now against what could exist in the future, which is the topic of another post.


What does the Earth Want? A ecosystem that functions well, values life's diversity/volume, and still keeps a prominent place for human beings. I know that's not really an answer, but what it is a rubric for what the answer should look like.

Thanks for reading,
- the moral skeptic 

Taking Something Away vs. Not Doing Something

 

I while ago I read Sam Harris's book, The Moral Landscape, which I have referenced a couple times in previous posts. Harris, at one point, talks about how taking away something is viewed as worse then not doing something, and gives an example using two people.

The first person is a girl who has an 160 IQ and great musical ability, this person isn't given the correct treatment and because of that her IQ drops to 100 and she looses her musical ability. This is contrasted with a girl who has an IQ of 100 and with a pill given at the right time would have her IQ go up to 160 and gain a great musical talent, but the pill isn't given so she remains the same.

Now the end result is the equal and each girl has lost something, but people view the first girl as suffering much more than the second. It is from answering questions like these that it is learned that an act of taking something away from someone is viewed as much worse then not doing something to help someone.

This I don't really have a problem with, because it is worse to lose something then never get something, because there is a greater appreciation of what was actually lost, the old adage, "You don't know what you have till it's gone."

I do have a problem when this line of thinking is combined with the belief that anything natural good, or is at least acceptable, and this recently came up in a conversation. Somehow the topic came of reincarnation came up and a older woman said that, "If it's true than you should be good or you'd come back as something like a worm."

Now I don't believe in reincarnation, but I wouldn't usually have had a problem with other people believing in it, or someone talking about it, but that statement I do and did take offense too. There are people with the belief that if you have done something bad in a previous life that you are punished in the next life for it, so nothing should be done for people who face a 'natural' problem and thus they should be left in a state of suffering, which is horrible. 

So I interrupted the person and stated exactly what I summarized in  the paragraph above, when another lady, who happened to be very well educated, disagreed with what I said and talked about how living with a problem could be a learning experience and lead to enlightened/diverse perspectives.

Only someone educated could come up with such stupid reasoning to accept the suffering of others, and actually come up with a justification for finding nothing wrong in doing nothing at all for someone in pain.

It's as if because something is natural then it can be said to be alright, so if someone goes blind it might lead natural path, but if I stabbed someone in the eyes then it's a bad thing. The scale has tipped too far in the direction of taking something away being bad and not doing something being thought of as alright.

Not doing something is bad, should someone have to live with ALS, MS, or Cancer because living with them might lead to a different life view, or should people born deaf not have the hearing restored because some deaf people don't see it as a disability.

Ask anyone with hearing if they would go back and make it so they couldn't hear when they young, and it'll be easy to see the ethics in changing somethings natural course. Not doing something may not weight equally with taking something away, but it still has weight.


Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

An Exploration of Speciesism Continued

In my last post I gave a brief overview of speciesism and showed how we are all speciesists. This post will pick up where the last one left off. People treat different species differently, which is fine to an extent, but it can also go too far in either direction. 

1. The first direction that goes to far is the life is equal approach.Taking a page out of difference feminism some might argue the principle of different but equal. Meaning different species deserve to be treated equally well, but that equality obviously doesn't mean they should be treated the same. Yet, this principle would be strong enough to put one animals death, be it coral or an amoeba on equivalent terms with any other animals death (cat, dog or human), and it is unclear to me if it would extend further to carrots or potatoes, but I don't see an reason why it wouldn't if the value is strictly something being living.

While this is a position that can be maintained, at a great cost, it doesn't seem either realistic or ideal. There is a qualitative difference between a chimpanzee and an amoeba, and between a human and any other species. While all life should be valued all life isn't equal and no one, despite their best effort, treats life as it is.  

For instance, take parasites. I don't know of one person who values their life equally to the lives of harmful parasites within their body. Ticks aren't invited and welcomed to peoples body, and neither are intestinal flukes, pin worms or tapeworms. Once infected with such creatures their right to life doesn't ever come up, nor should it, but it would if people really wanted to be non-speciesists.

There also wouldn't be any wind power if the lives of birds and  bats were weighed equivalently with that of humans, as thousands and thousands of birds and bats are killed each year by the silent green killer. The American Bird Conservancy notes that, 


"Recent U.S. studies indicate that bird mortality at wind turbine projects varies from less than one bird/turbine/year to as high as 7.5 birds/per turbine/year. This means that between 10,000 and 40,000 birds may be killed each year at wind farms across the country - about 80% of which are songbirds, and 10% may be birds of prey. While not a large figure, local or regional impacts may be significant, and the rate of increase in turbine construction has conservationists concerned that new generators be built to standards that minimize the potential for bird kills. Bats are also subject to high mortality at wind farms frequently at considerably higher rates than birds."

Could you imagine if wind turbines caused that many human deaths? People would be up in arms, heck even if turbines caused that many deaths in cats or dogs people might take a different stance on wind power.

2. There is another direction that goes to far the other way and doesn't value animal lives, except in how they affect humans.

Immanuel Kant and his theory of ethics is one where animals have no moral value, except in how they can change human behavior, i.e. People shouldn't kick cats because it might get them into the habit of kicking young adults.

Penn and Tell in season 2 of Bullshit! also echo this type of moral reasoning when they say that they, "Would personally strangle every chimpanzee to save one street junkie with aids." I know what your all thinking, isn't there a less labor intensive way to do that, I mean wouldn't your hands get sore?

While the elimination of a species like that seems immoral it seems less so when a little logic is applied. Almost all people would agree that one human life is more valuable then the life of a Chimpanzee, so if they had to kill one Chimpanzee to save a human life, it would be bye bye Chimp. Yet, this question starts to really get interesting when a second chimp is added to the equation.

I don't think that the second Chimpanzee would effect anyone's choice of what to do, if you wouldn't do it in the first place then the second chimp wouldn't have an effect and a person willing to kill one chimp would pass a threshold where a second chimp wouldn't affect the choice very much. What the second chimp really does is create a slippery slope, where if you are willing to kill 2 chimps then why not 3, 30, or 300.

Like the Milgrim Shock Experiment when people are willing to go a certain distance, they end up going the rest of the way.

Yet, I don't think that many people would be willing to eliminate a species to save one human life and human actions support that belief. Lots of different types of animals kill people and no one is seriously trying to eradicate those human killing species from existence. While Penn and Teller would strangle every Chimpanzee, they should also be getting rid of every Lion, Bee, and even possibly peanut, as they kill many more than one junkie with aids a year.

There has to be a middle ground between the two beliefs that really accounts for both how people act and how people think about animals, but finding that ethical middle means wading through a ton of problems to which there is no clear answer.

The first problem that really stands out is something that has been expressed by both Jarred Diamond and Richard Dawkins previously. People value even perceived humanity over reasonable expectation of pain, or consciousness.

Dawkins express this by saying, "Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, that the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection."

While Diamond says with less venom that, "...it's considered acceptable to exhibit caged apes in zoos, but it's not acceptable to do the same with humans. I wonder how the public will feel when the identifying label on the chimp cage in the zoo reads 'Homo troglogytes'"(page 29 of The Third Chimpanzee).

The perception of being human or even close to human is what seems to have ethical value, not the ability to feel pain or be conscious. As Sam Harris would say, there are many peaks and valleys in morality. The perception of humanness is a valley we have yet to fully climb, while other summits are still just being looked at.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic