Maverick Philosopher

The Obsolete Man

The Twilight Zone marathon is in progress at the SyFy channel. One of the best episodes of the series which ran from 1959-1964 is The Obsolete Man (1961). Rod Serling's opening narration is eerily prescient and eerily  relevant to our present police-state predicament:

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He's a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.

"Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace."

An accurate summation of the Biden regime. The most recent example of illogic: the defense of democracy requires the destruction of democracy  by banning the popular front-runner from the ballot on trumped-up charges when, as is obvious, the physically decrepit, mentally incompetent, morally corrupt, and political destructive Biden is the one who ought to be banned from the ballot  if anyone is to be banned, not that I am saying that any one of the current contenders should be banned from the ballot. For Biden is a traitor in plain dereliction of duty. If the Republicans were not lousy with feckless RINOs, Traitor Joe and his noxious entourage would no longer be befouling the White House. The Republicans' inability, or rather unwillingness, to give as good as they get is exasperating. Trump tried to teach them how to fight, but instead of learning from him and engaging the enemy, too many of them waste their time and energy attacking the only man who can turn things around. The well-fed Christie, flaccid in body and mind, is a USDA prime example.

As for the assault on truth, the main players in the Biden administration are proven serial brazen liars: Biden, Mayorkas, et al.  Liars, plagiarists, Orwellian language-abusers: scumbags all. Is there even one member of that 'team' who does not exhibit one or more of the modes of mendacity? Got an example? Let me hear it.

Serling via the Meredith character puts librarians in a good light. Rod in 1961 was no doubt thinking of Nazi book burnings. A mere 16 years had passed since the collapse of the Third Reich. But times have changed. Librarians are now too often anti-biblic in their banning of books and anti-civilizational in their promotion of pornography and other species of cultural garbage.  Librarians now are mostly leftist termites.  We have our work cut out for us.

 

 

'Nuclear' Thoughts on Dylan's Birthday

We've gotten used to living under the Sword of Damocles:

One of its more famous [invocations] came in 1961 during the Cold War, when President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before the United Nations in which he said that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

We seem not too worried these days. If anything, the threat of nuclear war is greater now than it was in '61 and this, in no small measure, because we now have a doofus for POTUS. I shudder to think what would have become of us had Joey B. been president in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. People were worried back then, but now we have worse threats to worry about such as white supremacy and climate change.  In those days  people were so worried that they built fallout shelters. There was much discussion of their efficacy and of the mentality of their builders. Rod Serling provided memorable commentary in the Twilight Zone episode, The Shelter, that aired on 29 September, 1961.  

Thomas Merton, in his journal entry of 16 August 1961, his former contemptus mundi on the wane and his new-found amor mundi on the rise, writes  

The absurdity of American civil defense propaganda -- for a shelter in the cellar --  "come out in two weeks and resume the American way of life."

. . . I see no reason why I should go out of my way to survive a thermonuclear attack on the U. S. A. It seems to me nobler and simpler to share, with all consent and love, in what is bound to be the lot of the majority . . . . (Vol. 4, 152)

In the entry of 31 May 1962 (Ascension Day), Merton reports that a friend

Sent a clipping about the Fallout shelter the Trappists at O. L. [Our Lady] of the Genesee have built for themselves. It is sickening to to think that my writing against nuclear war is regarded as scandalous, and this folly of building a shelter  for monks is accepted without question as quite fitting. We no longer know what a monk is. (Italics in original. Vol. 4, 222)

Now today is Bob Dylan's birthday. Born in 1941, he turns 82.  As you know, Merton, though born in 1915, was by the mid-'60s a big Dylan fan.  And so in honor of both of these acolytes of the '60s Zeitgeist, I introduce to you young guys  Dylan's Let Me Die in My Footsteps which evokes that far-off and fabulous time with as much authority as do Rod Serling and Tom Merton. A Joan Baez rendition. The Steep Canyon Rangers do an impressive job with it.

Dylan hails from Hibbing, Minnesota hard by the Canadian border near the Mesabi Iron Range. The young Dylan, old beyond his years, tells a tale from a woman's point of view in North Country Blues.

I have often wondered why there are so many Minnesotans where I live. Minnesota, gone 'woke,' is bleeding population. High taxes is one reason. Another is crime:

The second, and even more important reason I'm leaving Minnesota is that crime has destroyed much of what I used to enjoy in the Twin Cities. Up until a few years ago, I thought to avoid being a victim of violent crime all I needed to do was avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But today in the metro area, every place could be the wrong place at any time of every day.

A few weeks ago, a resident of bucolic St. Anthony Park was shot dead outside his home at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. Car thefts are up 95% this year in Minneapolis, and carjackings, a crime seldom heard of before 2020, occur every week throughout the metro. At the recent Art-A-Whirl studio tour in northeast Minneapolis, a 70-year-old woman was sent to the hospital when she was randomly punched in the face as she crossed the street to go to a restaurant on a Friday evening.

Because of high crime, the downtown Minneapolis restaurants I used to enjoy are closing early or permanently. The Basilica Block Party is gone, and you couldn't pay me to attend the new Taste of Minnesota July 4th block party on Nicollet Mall after last year's July 4th mass shooting and private fireworks anarchy. Even the State Fair at night has become a risky proposition.

As Rep. Ilhan Omar asked recently, "What happens if I am killed?" But unlike her, I don't have armed security — instead, I have to rely on the police for protection. Yet Minneapolis remains more than 100 officers short of the minimum required by its charter, and the too-few applicants who do apply should be automatically rejected for bad judgment in wanting the job.

Again, contrast this with Southwest Florida, where the police ranks are full, the restaurants are open, and violent crime is still a rarity. It's a pretty easy decision to live in an area where I don't have to plan my exit from a concert as if I were leaving a Philadelphia Eagles home game wearing a Vikings jersey.

The last reason I'm leaving Minnesota is because of a lack of hope. I'm a realist, and realism tells me there's nothing more I can do to help prevent Minnesota's decline. Not only its declining public safety, but also its declining public schools, its hopelessly irrational light-rail transit system and its eroding future.

I know our current leaders won't solve these problems because they won't even acknowledge they exist. Minneapolis recently unveiled a new multimillion-dollar ad campaign to draw visitors into the city to "see what all the fuss is about" because "negative perceptions" have "overshadowed" the positive. Unfortunately for that campaign's credibility, the "fuss" on the day it was announced was about six people under the age of 18 shot in Brooklyn Center.

Do you like crime? Then vote Democrat early and often.

The Twilight Zone from A to Z

A NYRB review of a book I will have to purchase. In fact, after I post this, I will head to Amazon.com to look it up. Your humble correspondent is a Twilight Zone aficionado from way back. The original series ran from 1959-1964. 

No July 4th Twilight Zone Marathon This Year

This is an outrage! 

The only good thing about it is that I won't have to hear my wife say, "Haven't you seen this episode before?"

I've seen 'em all before, countless times.

My Twilight Zone category.

Philosophy From the Twilight Zone: "The Lonely"

Rod Serling's Twilight Zone was an outstanding TV series that ran from 1959-1964. The episode "The Lonely" aired in November, 1959. I have seen it several times, thanks to the semi-annual Sci Fi channel TZ marathons. There is one in progress as I write.  One can extract quite a bit of philosophical juice from "The Lonely" as from most of the other TZ episodes. I'll begin with a synopsis.

Synopsis

James A. Corry is serving a 50-year term of solitary confinement on an asteroid nine million miles from earth. Supplies are flown in every three months. Captain Allenby, unlike the other two of the supply ship's crew members, feels pity for Corry, and on one of his supply runs brings him a female robot named 'Alicia' to alleviate his terrible loneliness. The robot is to all outer appearances a human female. At first, Corry rejects her as a mere robot, a machine, and thus "a lie." He feels he is being mocked. "Why didn't they build you to look like a machine?" But gradually Corry comes to ascribe personhood to Alicia. His loneliness vanishes. They play chess with a set he has constructed out of nuts and bolts. She takes delight in a Knight move, and Corry shares her delight. They beam at each other. 

But then one day the supply ship returns with news that Corry's sentence has been commuted as part of a general abolition of punishment by banishment to asteroids. Allenby informs Corry that there is room on the ship only for him and 15 lbs of his personal effects. Alicia must be left behind. Corry is deeply distressed. "I'm not lonely any more. She's a woman!" Allenby replies, "She's a robot!" Finally, after some arguing back and forth, Allenby draws his sidearm and shoots Alicia in the face revealing her electronic innards. Corry's illusion of Alicia's personhood — if it is an illusion — dissipates and regretfully he boards the ship. The thirty minute episode ends with Serling's powerful closing narration: 

On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man's life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines he used. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that act upon them; all of Mr. Corry's machines — including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete — in the Twilight Zone.

Philosophical Analysis

The episode raises a number of philosophical questions.  Here are just some of them.

Q1: Does personhood depend on what something is made of? 

Corry is aware that Alicia, 'out of the box,' is a robot, a human artifact, and this knowledge inclines him to regard her at first as incapable of instantiating those attributes we associate with personhood: sentience, the ability to feel and express emotions, the ability to reason, and others. His thought is: She can't be a person because she is not made of flesh and blood. But why should personhood require any particular material constitution? Why couldn't personhood be realized in different sorts of stuff?  Not just any kind of stuff, of course, but sufficiently well-organized stuff.  (You can't make a valve-lifter out of sawdust and spit, or a Phoenix monument out of ice, but the valve-lifter function is realizable in a variety of different materials with the right sorts of properties.) In human beings such as Corry personhood is realized in a biologically human material substratum. But what is to stop personhood from being realized in some other sort of substratum, perhaps even a nonliving substratum?  Is being biologically alive a necessary condition of personhood? (If I am not mistaken, John Searle would answer in the affirmative.)

When Allenby shoots Alicia in the head, revealing the electronic gadgetry inside, Corry's sense that Alicia is or was a person dissipates. But if someone had blown open a whole in Corry's skull, revealing brain matter, no one would take that as proof that Corry was not a person. Why is only one kind of material constitution capable of supporting consciousness, self-consciousness, and the rest of the attributes of personhood? Is personhood perhaps a functional notion?

Q2: If a person can be built, does this show that a person is purely material, or does the mind-body problem exist in this case as well? 

Suppose that by the assembly of the right kind of material parts, one constructs a non-biologically-human but nonetheless full-fledged person. I don't mean what philosophers call a zombie, but a full-fledged person such as Alicia is portrayed as being in the TZ episode we are discussing.  Thus the supposition is that this robotic person does in reality feel sensations and experience emotions. (Don't worry about how we would know this to be the case. After all, how do I know that my wife in reality feels sensations and experiences emotions? Not that doubt it for a second.)

The robotic person has a mind and a body. How then does the mere fact that the robotic person was constructed from material parts, indeed biologically inanimate material parts,  show that she is purely material? Dualism, and perhaps even substance dualism, seems compatible with being constructed from material parts. Or does a person's having a material origin show that dualism is false?

Q3. Is mentality or personhood a matter of ascription? A matter of the taking up of Dennett's "intentional stance?" 

As Corry interacts with Alicia, he gradually comes to accept her as a person and a friend. After pushing her away in one scene, he interprets her verbal report, "You hurt me," and her tears as evidence of personhood. Could it be maintained that personhood is not a matter of some 'inner' reality, but a matter of ascription from the point of view of one who takes up the "intentional stance" with respect to an object of interpretation? Could one say that Alicia is a person, but that her personhood is not intrinsic but ascribed from without? But then you would have to say the same thing about Corry. Is it coherent to think of Alicia and Corry alone on their asteroid ascribing personhood to each other, thereby constituting each other as persons? For more on Dennett's views and my critique of them, see my Dennett category.

Q4. Is personhood and the uniqueness essential to personhood engendered by love? 

Alicia was made in man's image, and "kept alive by love" as Serling intones in his closing comment. Alicia's value to Corry has something to do with his perception of her as unique, as a Thou to his I, as an irreplaceable individual, and not merely as an interchangeable instance of properties. Personhood seems to include such notions as irreducible individuality, ipseity, interiority. These are not empirical attributes. How are they given? How constituted? Are they engendered by love? Josiah Royce had interesting things to say on this topic. Do we first become persons in a loving I-Thou relation? See Royce category; in particular, Royce Revisited: Individuality and Immortality.

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Is a Thinking Person's Afterlife Conceivable?

When Allenby shoots Alicia in the head, revealing the electronic gadgetry inside, Corry's sense that Alicia is or was a person dissipates. But if someone had blown open a whole in Corry's skull, revealing brain matter, no one would take that as proof that Corry was not a person. Why is only one kind of material constitution capable of supporting consciousness, self-consciousness, and the rest of the attributes of personhood? Is personhood perhaps a functional notion?

Q2: If a person can be built, does this show that a person is purely material, or does the mind-body problem exist in this case as well? 

Suppose that by the assembly of the right kind of material parts, one constructs a non-biologically-human but nonetheless full-fledged person. I don't mean what philosophers call a zombie, but a full-fledged person such as Alicia is portrayed as being in the TZ episode we are discussing.  Thus the supposition is that this robotic person does in reality feel sensations and experience emotions. (Don't worry about how we would know this to be the case. After all, how do I know that my wife in reality feels sensations and experiences emotions? Not that doubt it for a second.)

The robotic person has a mind and a body. How then does the mere fact that the robotic person was constructed from material parts, indeed biologically inanimate material parts,  show that she is purely material? Dualism, and perhaps even substance dualism, seems compatible with being constructed from material parts. Or does a person's having a material origin show that dualism is false?

Q3. Is mentality or personhood a matter of ascription? A matter of the taking up of Dennett's "intentional stance?" 

As Corry interacts with Alicia, he gradually comes to accept her as a person and a friend. After pushing her away in one scene, he interprets her verbal report, "You hurt me," and her tears as evidence of personhood. Could it be maintained that personhood is not a matter of some 'inner' reality, but a matter of ascription from the point of view of one who takes up the "intentional stance" with respect to an object of interpretation? Could one say that Alicia is a person, but that her personhood is not intrinsic but ascribed from without? But then you would have to say the same thing about Corry. Is it coherent to think of Alicia and Corry alone on their asteroid ascribing personhood to each other, thereby constituting each other as persons? For more on Dennett's views and my critique of them, see my Dennett category.

Q4. Is personhood and the uniqueness essential to personhood engendered by love? 

Alicia was made in man's image, and "kept alive by love" as Serling intones in his closing comment. Alicia's value to Corry has something to do with his perception of her as unique, as a Thou to his I, as an irreplaceable individual, and not merely as an interchangeable instance of properties. Personhood seems to include such notions as irreducible individuality, ipseity, interiority. These are not empirical attributes. How are they given? How constituted? Are they engendered by love? Josiah Royce had interesting things to say on this topic. Do we first become persons in a loving I-Thou relation? See Royce category; in particular, Royce Revisited: Individuality and Immortality.

Becoming Old and Being Old: A Paradox

Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.

.....................

That's an old thought, not original with me, but I do not know who deserves the attribution.  

Its literary effect trades on equivocation.

In one sense, an old thing is a thing that has been in existence a long time. Now something can be in existence a long time without getting old in the second sense. Consider a Roman coin in pristine condition, preserved out of circulation by numismatists over the centuries. Very old, but not worn out. 

Something analogous is true of humans. There are 90-year-olds who are hale and hearty and compete creditably in foot races. And there are 40-year-olds whose bodies are shot. 

A man who gets old calendrically cannot help but age physiologically.  But the rates of physiological ageing are different for different people.  

It is conceivable that one  get old without getting old. It is even conceivable  that one get old while getting younger. Those are paradoxical sentences that express the following non-paradoxical propositions:  It is conceivable that one get old calendrically without getting old physiologically.  It is conceivable that one get old calendrically whle getting younger physiologically. The conceivability and indeed imaginability of the latter is the theme of the Twilight Zone episode, A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain. I should adde for the aficionados of  modality that conceivability does not entail possibility.

Now return to the opening aphorism: Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.

The expression is paradoxical, but the thought is non-contradictory.  The thought, expressed non-paradoxically is: Most if not all want to live a long time, but few if any want to suffer the decrepitude attendant upon living a long time.

One logic lesson to be drawn is that a paradox is not the same as a contradiction.

It is therefore a mistake to refer to Russell's Antinomy as 'Russell's Paradox.' 

2016 Twilight Zone New Year's Marathon

Could there be a better way to end such a surreal year?

It starts tomorrow, New Year's Eve,  at 6 AM and runs for three and one half days on the SyFy channel. Here is the schedule. Two I won't miss tomorrow morning:

9 am: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine
9:30am: Escape Clause

Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed.  Me, I've seen 'em all, multiple times each.  The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. Back in aught-nine I offered my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.  

The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland.  Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four-pack-a-day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes.  He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary or Obama Yomama or any latter-day leftard to decide.

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Independence Day Twilight Zone Marathon Schedule

It starts tomorrow morning.

Kelley Vlahos:

While it might be difficult to fathom, Independence Day and the 1960s television hit “The Twilight Zone” have become virtually synonymous in the eyes of the show’s multigenerational fandom.

[. . .]

One could argue, however, that beyond a Fourth of July staple, “The Twilight Zone“ is as red, white and blue as the annual BBQ and parades, and this is why: The show, which ran for just five seasons from 1960-1964, is, at the very least, a reflection of our nation and people at a crossroads, between a World War and a New Frontier, the conformist 1950s and a counterculture waiting to explode, the comfort of peacetime and the fear of an atomic age. It’s both a history of our mid-20th century culture, and an X-Ray of humanity.

It is us. 

Well-said except that Vlahos makes a minor mistake: the series ran from 1959-1964.

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Jack Klugman and The Twilight Zone

I almost entitled this post, "Jack Klugman Enters the Twilight Zone," except that this is the vale of twilight.  Be that as it may, Jack Klugman, who died yesterday, starred in four Twilight Zone episodes. The news accounts mention that fact but don't say which.  "A Passage for Trumpet," "In Praise of Pip," "A Game of Pool," and "Death Ship."  Twilight Zone marathon coming up on New Year's Eve. Check it out to see what TV can be.

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A Hitchcock-Serling Coincidence

I've been watching old Alfred Hitchcock re-runs from '63 and '64.  I must have seen some of these as a kid, but I've forgotten them all.  On the night of 10 August I saw "The Magic Shop."  What struck me was how similar in theme this is to the Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life." 

The very next morning  I checked to see if a Twilight Zone episode was airing on the Sci Fi channel.  There was, and it happened to be "It's a Good Life."  So that is the coincidence, and you can make of it what you will.

Hitchcock is good, but he can't hold a candle to Serling. Rod Serling's 1959-1964 series was  and is  TV at its very best.  The best of the episodes are inexhaustibly rich especially 50 years later.  They provide an insight into the speech patterns, the mores, the sartorial habits, the politics, and the cinematography of the day. More importantly, many of them are morality tales that convey important moral truths and life lessons.  Serling was above all a moral teacher.  We have nothing like this on TV today.  What we have are endless quantities of degrading garbage.

Afterlife Again

Yesterday I wrote:

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

As a reader points out, something like this thought is already to be  found in John Henry Cardinal Newman, Heaven is Heaven Only for the Holy.  Excerpt:

If then a man without religion (supposing it possible) were admitted into heaven, doubtless he would sustain a great disappointment. Before, indeed, he fancied that he could be happy there; but when he arrived there, he would find no discourse but that which he had shunned on earth, no pursuits but those he had disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon.

One might even go so far as to say that heaven would be hell for the worldly person.  And what the worldly person imagines heaven to be might reveal itself as hell, as in the Twilight Zone episode, A Nice Place to Visit.

I see that London Ed has some thoughts on the topic.  I agree with him that 'the objection from boredom' is no good.  I'm never bored here, why should I be bored there?  Never bored here, only tired.  But that's due to the bag of bones and guts that makes up my samsaric vehicle.  Free of crass embodiment, things might well be different on the far side.

You say I'm speculating?  True enough, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

December Twilight Zone Schedule

Here.  Marathon starts New Year's Eve morning and runs for two days.  My eyes glued to the set, my wife invariably asks, "Haven't you seen that episode before?"  She doesn't get it.  I've seen 'em all numerous times each.  Hell, I've been watching 'em since 1959 when the series first aired.  But the best are inexhaustibly rich in content, delightful in execution, studded with young actors and actresses who went on to become famous alongside the now forgotten actors of yesteryear, period costumes and lingo, allusions to the politics of the day.  Timeless and yet a nostalgia trip.  A fine way to end one year and begin another.

To see how much philosophical juice can be squeezed out of one of these episodes, see here.

Liberal Dreckmeisters and Their Decadent Drivel

How is that for a polemical title?

The first decades of televison were comparatively wholesome compared to what came later. An example of outstanding TV was Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959-1964.  Comparing a series like TZ with trash like The Sopranos, one sees the extent of the decline.

Serling knew how to entertain while also stimulating thought and teaching moral lessons. Our contemporary dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching.  And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy.  Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world.  See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

Rod Serling Rules: Twilight Time Again

The semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon is under way at the Sci Fi channel and will continue through New Year's Day and into the wee hours of January 2nd. Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed.  The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. I have just given you my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.  I just now viewed the The Dummy for the nth time, and I note that the ascriptivist theory of personhood I mentioned in my analysis of "The Lonely" also figures in "The Dummy."

The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes.  He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide.

Philosophy From the Twilight Zone: "The Lonely"

Rod Serling's Twilight Zone was an outstanding TV series that ran from 1959-1964. The episode "The Lonely" aired in November, 1959. I have seen it several times, thanks to the semi-annual Sci Fi channel TZ marathons. There is one in progress as I write.  One can extract quite a bit of philosophical juice from "The Lonely" as from most of the other TZ episodes. I'll begin with a synopsis.

 

 

Synopsis.James A. Corry is serving a 50 year term of solitary confinement on an asteroid nine million miles from earth. Supplies are flown in every three months. Captain Allenby, unlike the other two of the supply ship's crew members, feels pity for Corry, and on one of his supply runs brings him a female robot named 'Alicia' to alleviate his terrible loneliness. The robot is to all outer appearances a human female. At first, Corry rejects her as a mere robot, a machine, and thus "a lie." He feels he is being mocked. "Why didn't they build you to look like a machine?" But gradually Corry comes to ascribe personhood to Alicia. His loneliness vanishes. They play chess with a set he has constructed out of nuts and bolts. She takes delight in a Knight move, and Corry shares her delight. They beam at each other.

But then one day the supply ship returns with news that Corry's sentence has been commuted as part of a general abolition of punishment by banishment to asteroids. Allenby informs Corry that there is room on the ship only for him and 15 lbs of his personal effects. Alicia must be left behind. Corry is deeply distressed. "I'm not lonely any more. She's a woman!" Allenby replies, "She's a robot!" Finally, after some arguing back and forth, Allenby draws his sidearm and shoots Alicia in the face revealing her electronic innards. Corry's illusion of Alicia's personhood — if it is an illusion — dissipates and regretfully he boards the ship. The thirty minute episode ends with Serling's powerful closing narration:

On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man's life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines he used. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that act upon them; all of Mr. Corry's machines — including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete — in the Twilight Zone.

Philosophical Analysis. The episode raises a number of philosophical questions.  Here are some of them.