Maverick Philosopher

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.