IDEAS / Bill Meacham : The Human Virtue

Image from The Planning Notepad.
The human virtue

We humans have an ability that goes well beyond what any other animal can do: we can turn our attention to ourselves.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2012

So far we have seen that humans are like other animals, but amplified significantly. We have greater intelligence and hence greater technology, greater culture, and greater ability to keep track of and get along with others of our species.

We’ve seen how cognition and emotion work, and what intelligence consists of; and it is certainly plausible to think that other animals have rudimentary forms of the same. Our primate cousins, chimps and bonobos, resemble us in many ways. But we are more than just super-apes.

We humans have an ability that goes well beyond what any other animal can do: we can turn our attention to ourselves. Even more than our vast intelligence, the capacity for self-reflection -- that we are able to turn our attention to our own experience, to take ourselves as an object of thought and perception -- is what makes us uniquely human.

We have seen that humans have far greater intelligence than other animals, that we are the species that makes plans, that imagines states of affairs not immediately present, and targets our behavior to reach envisaged goals.

When this intelligence is directed at affairs in the world, I call it first-order mentation. This can range from the very simple, such as jotting down a grocery list, to the very complex, such as planning a multi-year project encompassing thousands of interrelated tasks. Not only do we make plans, we execute them and accomplish our goals, making corrections along the way to overcome obstacles and take into account changing circumstances.

When this kind of observation, planning, and execution is directed at ourselves, I call it second-order mentation. Others have called it self-consciousness, self-knowledge, or self-reflection (as one examines one’s reflected image in a mirror).

By “mentation” I mean mental -- that is, private or subjective -- acts of all kinds: thought, imagination, desire, aversion, volition (planning and acting on your plans), direct perception, and so forth. Second-order mentation occurs when we direct these activities toward ourselves. This and previous blog posts are an example: human beings thinking about being human.

Another example is self-knowledge, for example knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Another is paying attention to yourself, whether that be in the awkwardness of social embarrassment or in the focus of learning a new skill. Another is remembering how you interacted with others or mentally rehearsing how you will interact with them in the future.

In these and many other ways we take ourselves as objects of our own cognition.

These forms of self-reflection enable self-transcendence. By this I mean that in “seeing” ourselves as an object, we take a position, as it were, outside of ourselves, and that enables us to alter the self that is “seen.”(1) Of course the self that is “seen” is not different from the self that “sees,” in that both are the interior of the same physical body.

But in another sense, the self that “sees” is different. It has a larger vantage point and is not caught up, or at least not entirely caught up, in the life of the self that is “seen.” By taking a position outside yourself, you can alter yourself.

Harry Frankfurt describes this self-reflective structure of the self in his essay “Freedom of the Will.”(2) Humans, along with all other living beings, have first-order desires, desires to do or to have something. Some animals -- chimps and bonobos are good examples, and possibly dolphins and whales -- even appear to have the rudimentary ability to anticipate the future and make decisions based on prior thought. But only humans have “the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires,”(3) desires to have certain desires.

The second-order self wants the first-order self to want something, typically something different from what the first-order self actually wants. For example, suppose you have a craving for a certain food -- something sweet and sugary, say, or full of fat and salt -- that tastes good but is not healthy. Realizing that, you may feel bad about the craving and want to want something else to eat. That is a second-order desire.

An even stronger form is second order volition, where you want a certain desire to be your will. By will Frankfurt means a desire that is strong enough to move you to action.(4) In this example, you would not only want to eat something healthy and want not to want the unhealthy food, but would also want the desire to eat healthily to overrule the craving, to be the desire that actually results in action so that you end up eating the healthy food.

Frankfurt regards the capacity for second-order volition to be the essential characteristic of being a person.(5) I regard it as an aspect of the second-order mentation that is uniquely human.(6) For Frankfurt, freedom of the will consists in being able to make second-order volitions effective; that is, to have the second-order volition actually govern the first order such that the preferred first-order desire is what results in action. When that happens we judge that our will is free. “It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions... that a person exercises freedom of the will... The unwilling addict’s will is not free.”(7)

Having a free will in this sense is an example of our second-order mentation functioning well. Like any human activity, second-order mentation can be done poorly or skillfully. When we are unable to see the whole picture, when we have false ideas about ourselves, distorted by ignorance or painful emotion, we are doing it poorly. When we are able to observe ourselves carefully over time, identifying and removing preconceptions, we are doing it better.

When we have true ideas about ourselves but are unable to act on them, we are doing it poorly. (This is Frankfurt’s unfree will.) When we are able to use what we find out about ourselves to change for the better how we behave and hence what kind of person we become, we are doing it excellently.

Our capacity for second-order mentation is subject to excess and deficiency. It is excessive when we are too embarrassed to function well socially or too self-conscious to be able to, for instance, swing a golf club properly or do some other task that takes physical skill. It is deficient when we fail to learn from experience. It is deficient when we lose ourselves in what Heidegger calls “the publicness of the ‘they,’”(8) when we just go along with the crowd without thinking about what we are doing. It is deficient in quite a brutal way when we see that we are caught in a repetitive and painful pattern of behavior but lack the skill to get out of it.

But we always have the possibility of doing better. A failure of second-order mentation is a case of failure of intelligence generally, and there are ways to overcome such failures. That, however, is a topic for another time.

What I am suggesting is this: Second-order mentation is the peculiarly human virtue, what we do that other beings don’t. We are all capable of it, and when we do it well we function optimally and are most fulfilled. It is what enables us to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. Second-order mentation gives us mastery, because it enables us to tune the instrument, so to speak, by means of which we exert first-order influence on the world.

Second-order mentation gives us the peculiar sense of self that is expressed in the poem Invictus: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”(9) The I to which the poet refers is the coherence of interiority of second-order mentation, the ongoing inner life of how it feels to be operating at that second-order level.

We each (unless we are damaged) have a first-order sense of ourselves as continuous and ongoing entities, as being the same person through time, which comes from familiarity with a point of view, from being within that point of view and seeing the world from it. Within our interior landscape, so to speak, there are certain familiar features -- habitual thoughts, feelings, emotions, attitudes, and ways of behaving -- that are present all or most of the time. These comprise a sense of how it feels to be oneself.

Much of the self-sense no doubt comes from the experience of being in our body, a particular body that has a particular vantage point on the world. The body changes over time, but gradually enough that we have a sense of continuity. The sense of self is the unity over time of interior background feeling tone; and the sense of self arising from second-order mentation is the same, except it seems more vivid, somehow more real or efficacious. That is because it is more efficacious: you exert control not only over your world but over yourself as well.

And the point of philosophical inquiry to be able to do exactly that: command yourself so as to live well.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
(1) “See” and its variants are in quotes because the experience is not entirely and not merely visual. We experience ourselves in many modalities.
(2) Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 11-25.
(3) Ibid., p. 12.
(4) Ibid., p. 14.
(5) Ibid., p. 16.
(6) The distinction between “human” and “person” is just terminological at this point, but if we discover that some non-humans -- whales, say, or beings from another planet -- have the same capacity for second-order mentation that we do, then, with Frankfurt, we should speak of persons rather than humans.
(7) Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 20-21.
(8) Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 220.
(9) Henley, Invictus.

References
Frankfurt, Harry. The Importance of What We Care About. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tr. Macquarrie, John, and Robinson, Edward. New York: Harper and Row HarperSanFrancisco, 1962.
Henley, William Ernest. Invictus. Available online, URL = http://www.bartleby.com/103/7.html as of 12 March 2010.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Fellow Primates / 2

Bonobos, like chimps, show empathy, theory of mind, and targeted helping. Photo by Dan Caspersz / Bush Warriors.
Fellow primates / 2

Being related genetically to both chimps, who settle sexual issues through conflict, and bonobos, who settle conflict issues through sex, we have the capacity for both.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / August 28, 2012

Last time we talked about chimps, who can be pretty nasty. But we are genetically related to bonobos just as much as to chimps.

Among bonobos females dominate, not males; there is no deadly warfare; and they enjoy enormous amounts of sex. This may well have to do with their richer supply of food; there is far less need for competition for it. Bonobos have lots of sexual contact with each other, in all combinations of genders.

There is more of it in captivity, but frequent sexual activity has been observed in the wild as well. Females are sexually receptive for long periods of time, much longer than female chimpanzees. When different bands meet there is initial tension, but no vicious fighting; instead, individuals have sex with each other.(1)

Sex seems to be a way to defuse tension in advance of potential conflict, particularly over food. But anything, not just food, that arouses the interest of more than one bonobo at a time tends to result in sexual contact. After a flurry of sex, the apes settle down to eat or investigate whatever has piqued their interest. Bonobos are not “sex-crazed apes” as the popular press would have it. For bonobos, sex is just a natural and common part of life.

Bonobo bands are hierarchical, but the hierarchies are dominated by females, who enforce their status non-aggressively by cultivating alliances. High rank provides food for the females and their families, males included. Males derive status from their mothers. There is no competition among males for sex, as it is plentifully available.

Bonobos, like chimps, show empathy, theory of mind, and targeted helping. Once, when the two-meter moat in front of the bonobo enclosure in the San Diego zoo had been drained for cleaning, several youngsters climbed down into it. When the keepers went to turn on the valve to refill the moat with water, an old male, Kakowet, came to their window screaming and frantically waving his arms.

He knew the routine, and knew that the children were in danger (bonobos cannot swim). The keepers went to see what was wrong and rescued the youngsters.(2) Clearly, Kakowet had envisioned what was about to happen and cared enough to try to stop it. Fortunately, he succeeded.


Apart from the obvious superiority of human intellect, including language and culture, humans differ from both chimps and bonobos in reproductive strategy. Only the dominant chimp males get to reproduce, and the male sometimes enforces his own lineage through infanticide. Among bonobos all males reproduce, but there is no way to tell who is the father of any given child. Infanticide is unknown, probably for that very reason. Children are enjoyed and cared for by the whole tribe.

Humans have quite a different strategy for reproduction. We bond in pairs, creating a nuclear family that ensures resources for children, and the father is very much involved in child care: humans have high male parental investment. Sexual exclusivity ensures that every man has the potential to reproduce and that he knows which children are his.

This arrangement allows males to cooperate in groups away from the females without fear of being cuckolded. There is some plausible speculation that this arrangement is fairly recent, arising only when humans adopted the technology of agriculture.(3) Quite possibly our pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer ancestors were more like bonobos, having multiple sexual partners.


Bonobos were recognized as a separate species less than 100 years ago and began to be fully documented less than 50 years ago. Before that time, many ethologists and anthropologists believed that humans were innately violent and aggressive. Morality, it was thought, was a veneer of cooperative sociality on an underlying bestial nature.

Now that we know about bonobos, the range of human behavioral potential seems to have expanded. We recognize that we too have the capacity to live in peace and to defuse conflict proactively with pleasure. In addition, male dominance seemed a natural part of things until the discovery of bonobos; now we see that dominance by females may be equally natural.


Two things stand out from this comparison of species. First, our difference from chimps and bonobos is a matter of degree, not kind. There are few, if any, uniquely human traits that chimps or bonobos do not have to a lesser degree. We are embedded in nature and are not a species unique and special.

The one trait that seems most unique is the cultural, not biological, innovation of nuclear family pair bonding. If we think of concern for others as a fundamental building block of morality (another is a sense of fairness in reciprocity), it is clear that even morality is not a unique feature of our species but an outgrowth of capabilities that have far older evolutionary roots.

So when we observe our fellow humans jockeying and posing to gain status, or consoling each other when they are in trouble, or forgiving each other after a dispute, or throwing a party, or sharing food to build bonds and defuse tension, or being suspicious of those who are different, or vilifying an enemy, or generously giving aid to the unfortunate, or hundreds of other hominin behaviors, we should realize that these are not uniquely human practices but are instead embedded in a great chain of life that stretches back many millions of years.

Second, humans have the capacity to amplify the characteristics found in our sibling species. Humans have greater brain size and intelligence, so we can do more effectively all the things our siblings can.

Our use of tools and technologies enables us to produce food in more variety and abundance. In fact, there is some plausible speculation that learning to cook was a turning point in our evolution, as cooked food provides more calories than raw, calories that could support the growth of larger brains.(4)

Our use of language enables us to communicate more effectively and to perpetuate what we learn through culture and art. Chimps and bonobos seem to be able to conceptualize that something not happening in the present will happen later, but humans have a greatly enhanced ability to visualize and anticipate the future.

Disputes among humans often take the form of wars and feuds, but we are capable of sophisticated negotiation and diplomacy as well. And we can avoid conflict through pro-active peacemaking and compassionate communication. We are better able to cooperate with others outside our own group than chimps or bonobos.

Says Frans de Waal, “[H]umans share intergroup behavior with both chimps and bonobos. When relations between human societies are bad, they are worse than between chimps, but when they are good, they are better than between bonobos.”(5)

We humans can be more aggressive but also more peaceful, more competitive but also more cooperative. We are more flexible and have more options than our fellow creatures. We have a great variety of possible behaviors, possible ways of being. And, through our ability to anticipate the future, we have a choice as to which of these we will actualize.

Being related genetically to both chimps, who settle sexual issues through conflict, and bonobos, who settle conflict issues through sex, we have the capacity for both. Being humans, with bigger brains, much richer culture and much wider repertoire of behavior, we get to choose our strategies.

(To be continued...)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
(1) de Waal, Our Inner Ape, pp. 139-141.
(2) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 71.
(3) Ryan and Jetha, Sex At Dawn, pp. 1-15.
(4) Wrangham, Catching Fire, pp. 14, 112-114.
(5) de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 141.

References
de Waal, Frans. Our Inner Ape. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
de Waal, Frans, and Lanting, Frans. Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Ryan, Christopher, and Jetha, Cacilda. Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. New York: Harper, 2010.
Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Fellow Primates / 1

Tanzanian chimp. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Fellow primates / 1

Chimps and humans are a lot alike, except that humans, being more intelligent, do what chimps do even better.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2012

Last time I made some remarks about chimps and bonobos. That’s because if you want to master your life, it helps to know your material. Think of yourself as an artist or a designer or a builder whose goal is to make of your life something both highly functional and aesthetically pleasing. You need to know what you have to work with.

A good place for us to start is by comparing ourselves with our fellow hominins, the great apes, specifically chimpanzees and bonobos. These two form a sort of caricature in which we see aspects of ourselves in sharp relief, aspects which in some cases may give us cause for fear and in others may give us cause for hope.

The biological order Primates is a rather large one, comprising lemurs, monkeys and apes as well as humans. Within it humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are all members of the family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae. (The word means, somewhat unhelpfully, human-like.)

Hominins have 97% of their DNA in common. DNA research indicates that humans diverged from the line of primates to become a separate species about 5.5 million years ago. More recently, about 2.5 million years ago, chimps and bonobos diverged from each other; they are our closest genetic relatives.

Chimps are found in Central and West Africa, north of the Congo River, where the habitat is relatively dry and open. Bonobos are found only south of the Congo River, in dense, humid forests. Bonobo territory is much richer in food -- large, fruiting trees and high-quality herbs – than that of the chimps.(1)

Since neither can swim, the river seems to have served as a barrier that enabled the bonobo to evolve into a separate species. Or perhaps it is chimps and humans that evolved away from the ancient species from which all three are descended, and bonobos, having stayed in the ancestral habitat, are closest to that ancient precursor.

In any case, the bonobo habitat seems like a primeval paradise: a pleasant forest environment with lots of food in which the inhabitants find congenial sociality. The chimp habitat, by contrast, is outside the gates of Eden; those who live there have to work much harder for their sustenance.

Chimps, bonobos, and humans exhibit many similarities. All are social and inquisitive; all use tools; all exhibit cooperation, empathy, and altruism (helping others at some cost to oneself) within their groups. There are many significant differences as well. The most obvious is that humans are far more intelligent and exhibit a much broader range of behavior than the others. The most notorious difference between chimps and bonobos is that chimps are patriarchal, violent, and aggressive, and bonobos are matriarchal, peaceful, and sexual.

Chimps have the reputation of being “killer apes.” Their society is extremely hierarchical, with much jockeying among males for the top position, and frequent scuffles, a few quite bloody, among them. Political machinations are incessant because high rank provides sexual mates and food for males; females forage for themselves but sometimes trade sex for food. The dominance hierarchy is male. Female chimps form networks of affiliative friendships.(2)

Conflicts among males are solved through violence and aggression. The hair of a male chimp stands on end at the slightest provocation. He will pick up a stick and challenge anyone perceived as weaker. Chimps in the wild are highly territorial. Chimp males patrol their borders and murder intruders from other bands. Bands of males engage in lethal aggression against their neighbors. Brutal violence is part of the chimp’s natural makeup.

Interestingly, shrewd skill at social manipulation is also part of the chimp’s natural makeup. Frans de Waal’s classic Chimpanzee Politics relates a tale worthy of a Machiavelli. Old Yeroen, the alpha male, is deposed over the course of several months by the younger Luit. Luit engages in battle with Yeroen several times and eventually wins, but his victory is due as much to his campaigning and currying favor among the rest of the tribe, particularly the females, as to his physical prowess.

Yeroen is defeated, but allies himself with Nikkie, another youngster on his way up. Eventually Nikkie, backed by Yeroen, deposes Luit, again not through physical combat alone but by gaining the support of others as well. Luit reigns supreme. But Yeroen gets more sex than either of the other two!(3) “It was almost impossible,” says de Waal, “not to think of Yeroen as the brain and Nikkie as the brawn of the coalition between them.”(4)

Chimps exhibit gentleness, play, and cooperation among the in-group, but in-group conflicts are resolved through domination. Sometimes a dominant male will step in and break up a fight, and sometimes a dominant female or group of females will; in all cases, it is a matter of threatening violence.

After a fight, however, the parties reconcile with each other, by hugging, kissing and grooming. Reconciliation is as important as conflict, because without it the group would disband. Like humans, chimps require group living for survival; and like most mammals, they are soothed by physical touch.

Sexual contact is sporadic among chimps, because it happens only when the female is in heat and her genitals swell visibly. Dominant males get to mate far more often than subordinates, and the male will sometimes kill infants which are clearly not his offspring, for instance when taking in a female from a different tribe. Once the infants are born, the male spends little time and energy nurturing them; chimps show low male parental investment.

We humans tend to think of ourselves as special, but chimps have some decidedly human-like capabilities: empathy and theory of mind. By “empathy” I mean the ability to be affected by the emotional state of another individual. “Theory of mind” refers to the ability to recognize the mental states of others. It means that one individual has an idea, a theory, about what another individual believes, perceives or intends to accomplish. In order to do that, of course, the individual has to have some sense of himself or herself as a separate entity.

Chimps have all these traits. They console others in distress; they know what others know and can take another’s viewpoint; they recognize themselves in a mirror; and they give aid tailored to another’s needs, a behavior called “targeted helping,” which requires a distinction between self and other, a recognition of the other’s need, and sympathy for the other’s distress.

Here is an example: In the Arnhem zoo the keepers had hosed out all the rubber tires in the enclosure and left them hanging on a horizontal pole. When the apes were released into the enclosure one of them, Krom, tried to get a tire that still had some water in it, but it was several tires back and was blocked by the ones hanging in front of it. She could not figure out how to get to it.

After Krom gave up, Jakie, an adolescent whom Krom had cared for as an infant, came up and pushed the tires off the pole one by one. When he reached the one with water in it, he carefully removed it so no water was spilled and carried it to his “auntie” and placed it upright in front of her so she could reach in and get the water. Clearly, he knew what she wanted and came to her aid.(5)

Chimps have a primitive sense of time. They are focused on the present, but can remember past grievances and favors and avenge the former and reward the latter. They are able to anticipate the future and make plans as well. For instance:

"An adult male may spend minutes searching for the heaviest stone on his side of the island, far away from the rest of the group... He then carries the stone he has selected to the island’s other side, where he begins --  with all his hair on end -- an intimidation display in front of his rival. Since stones serve as weapons (chimpanzees throw fairly accurately), we may assume that the male knew all along that he was going to challenge the other. This is the impression chimpanzees give in almost everything they do: they are thinking beings just as we are.”(6)

Given this picture, it seems that chimps and humans are a lot alike, except that humans, being more intelligent, do what chimps do even better. We can plan farther into the future and remember and document a greater range of the past. We have a much more ample capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling and to understand ourselves. And, of course, we have much greater language abilities as well, giving us the ability to learn through history and culture. We have much better tools. And we can use them to kill each other much more effectively.

Some say that we are fundamentally aggressive and warlike, just like chimps, and the reason we have not killed each other off is that we have somehow managed to acquire a veneer of morality that holds these primitive urges in check.(7) That would seem plausible if all we knew about our genetic relatives were the chimps. But chimps are not the whole story. We are genetically related to bonobos as well.

(To be continued...)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes

(1) Hare, p. 92.
(2) de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 51.
(3) de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 164. de Waal backs his conclusions with an impressive amount of observational data. He and his team recorded every instance of each type of interaction -- submissive greeting, dominance display, fighting, reconciling, grooming, entreating, copulating, and more -- among more than 20 apes over five years, and then correlated the data on computers. He graphs the relative percentage of submissive greetings, of mating activity, and of group support among the various males and the data clearly show that during the first year of Luit’s reign, Yeroen got as much sex as the other two combined.
(4) de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 141.
(5) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 33.
(6) de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, pp 38-39.
(7) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, pp. 7-12.

References

de Waal, Frans. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, 25th Anniversary Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
de Waal, Frans. Peacemaking Among Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Hare, Brian. “What is the effect of affect on bonobo and chimpanzee problem solving?” In A. Berthoz & Y. Christen, ed., The Neurobiology of the Umwelt: how living beings perceive the world. New York: Springer Press, 2009 pp. 89-102. Also available as an on-line publication, Hare, B_ 2009_ What is the effect of affect on bonobo and chimpanzee problem solving_.pdf as of 3 October 2011. Available from http://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/research/3chimps/publications as of 3 October 2011.
Wikipedia. Primate. Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate as of 23 July 2012.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Intelligence

Image from A Blog for English Lovers.
Intelligence

Cognition is how we acquire knowledge. Intelligence is what we do with it.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2012

Cognition, which I talked about last time, is how we acquire knowledge. Intelligence is what we do with it. Human intelligence -- and, I assume, the intelligence of some other species such as apes, dolphins and whales -- consists in the ability to entertain in thought something that is not happening at the moment and consequently to tailor behavior to the specific features and nuances of a particular situation. Less intelligent animals have far less flexibility.

A gazelle on the plains of Africa has, we can imagine, quite a vivid appreciation of its surroundings. What looks to us like uniform grasslands is to it a rich tapestry of differentiated food patches. In this sense its visual cognition is rich. But it has only a limited repertoire of what to do with that richness, a repertoire evolved to be universal to the species and applicable uniformly across the environment in which it lives.

By contrast a bushman hunting the gazelle uses arrows that are tipped with a poison found only on the larvae of a certain beetle. Cosmides and Tooby say, “Whatever the neural adaptations that underlie this behavior, they were not designed specifically for beetles and arrows, but exploit these local, contingent facts as part of a computational structure that treats them as instances of a more general class.”(1)

In contrast to non-human animals, we have the ability to improvise our behavior in response to local, contingent facts, facts most likely not true for all humans and in all the environments in which humans find themselves. Eskimos hunting seals have no knowledge of poisonous beetles.

The capacity of other animals to process information is limited. It has evolved to handle features of the world that were true across the species’ range and throughout many generations, enough that they selected for the adaptations we find in such animals today. “These constraints narrowly limit the kinds of information that such adaptations can be designed to use: the set of properties that had a predictable relationship to features of the species’ world that held widely in space and time is a very restricted one.”(2)

We humans, in contrast, can recognize and respond to a far greater set of environmental cues. We can envision far more possibilities and are far more flexible in our behavior. In short, humans can plan. Humans, say Tooby and Cosmides, are “intelligent, cultural, conscious, planning animals.”(3)

By planning, we mean creating cognitive representations of past, present and future states of the world, evaluating alternative courses of action by representing consequences and matching these against goals...(4)

More succinctly, psychologist Steven Pinker gives this definition of intelligence:

...the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth-obeying) rules.(5)

Intelligence requires three things:

• A goal or goals to be obtained.
• Knowledge about how the world works, beliefs that turn out to be true and workable in practice. These provide rules of inference that guide thinking.
• The ability to apply the knowledge in flexible ways, depending on circumstances, to reach the goals.

Planning -- the application of intelligence -- is an evolved adaptation for improvising novel sequences of behavior to reach targeted goals. Human intelligence widens the range of environments in which we can survive and reproduce.


The scope problem

Planning involves imagining different scenarios and, importantly, the ability to distinguish imagined, remembered, and anticipated scenarios from what is actually happening in the present situation. Cosmides and Tooby call this the “scope problem,” how to distinguish facts and valid inferences that are true within a certain imagined scenario from those that are true in other scenarios or in the actual world.(6) In the language of computation, this means

the capacity to carry out inferential operations on... suppositions or propositions of conditionally unevaluated truth value, while keeping their computational products isolated from other knowledge stores until the truth or utility of the suppositions is decided, and the outputs are either integrated or discarded.(7)

Our ability to keep things separate in this way enables all sorts of advanced behavior:

This capacity is essential to planning, interpreting communication, employing the information communication brings, evaluating others’ claims, mind-reading [the ability to understand others’ beliefs, intentions and desires], pretence, detecting or perpetrating deception, using inference to triangulate information about past or hidden causal relations, and much else that makes the human mind so distinctive.(8)

Cosmides and Tooby postulate a capacity they call “scope representation,” the ability to identify under what conditions information can be treated as accurate and inferences as valid.(9) Because we can represent their scope independently, we do not confuse our considerations of possible strategies, memories of past situations, anticipations of the future, imaginings of possible scenarios and the actual conditions we find ourselves in.

Those who do confuse these things we readily identify as aberrant. Schizophrenia can be interpreted as a failure of mental boundaries in which, for example, a person experiences their desire to do something as a command to do it.(10)

The capacity to represent the scope of our plans, perceptions and imaginations separately is at the foundation of literature, and story-telling generally. Humans in all cultures love stories. In stories we can mentally rehearse or represent various social situations without having to actually encounter them. We can find out how others -- the characters in the stories -- handle these situations and hence learn successful and unsuccessful strategies for ourselves.

As Cosmides and Tooby put it, “individuals are no longer limited by the slow and erratic flow of actual experience compared to the rapid rate of vicarious, contrived, or imagined experience.”(11)

This ability to decouple various scope representations enables quite a number of human faculties, including the following:

• Theory of mind [see below] and prediction of behavior, the ability to guess with some accuracy what another person is thinking or feeling and to anticipate correctly what they will do. Motives, feelings, beliefs and perceptions imputed to the other are decoupled from our own.(12)
• Representation of goals. The goal state is decoupled from the present state of affairs.(13)
• Making plans to accomplish goals. Plans for the future are decoupled from the present.(14)
• Simulating the physical world. Simulations are decoupled from the actual world.(15)
• Creating and enjoying fiction. The fictional world is decoupled from the real world.(16)
• Remembering episodes of our own past and maintaining a sense of our identity through time. Memories are decoupled from our present experience of the actual world, and personal memories are decoupled from general knowledge gained through other means.(17)

Theory of Mind

Of these, theory of mind is one of the most interesting, because it entails much that is strikingly human. Humans have been called “ultrasocial”(18) and “obligatorily gregarious.”(19) We live in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of people enjoy the benefits of division of labor. We must have ongoing and extensive contact with our fellows in order to survive and thrive.

To succeed at this we must understand our fellow humans as having subjectivity like our own. The term “Theory of Mind” refers to the ability to attribute mental states -- beliefs, intentions, desires, pretense, knowledge, etc. -- to ourselves and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from our own.(20)

We do this all the time. We see someone striding purposefully and assume they are going somewhere to do something they consider important. We see a smile and assume the person is pleased, or a scowl and assume they are displeased. We see someone cross the street to avoid a barking dog, and we understand that they do so precisely in order to avoid the dog.

We assume that the salesperson in the store will sell us the goods we want, and that other people walking on the sidewalk with us will generally stay on the sidewalk. Depending on context, we view the offer of candy as friendly or a threat.

Philosophers may ponder how we can have knowledge of other people’s mental states, to which we have no direct access, but in fact we assume such knowledge all the time and life together would be impossible without it. Of course we can be mistaken or deceived, but mistakes and deception would not be possible without familiar assumptions that most often turn out to be correct.

Researchers have found several stages in the development of theory of mind in infants and young children as well as animals.(21)

• If something appears to move on its own, our minds interpret it as an agent.
• If it appears to move toward something, we take that thing to be its goal.
• If it changes direction flexibly in response to what is happening in its environment, we take it to have some degree of rationality or intention (in the sense of intending to accomplish something).
• If its action is followed closely in time by another object’s action, we take the second action to be a socially-contingent response to the first.
• And if something is a goal-directed agent that shows some degree of flexible response, then we know that it can cause harm or comfort to other agents and possibly to ourselves.

These judgments are automatic, a form of hot cognition, not something we stop to think about. They form the basis of our well-developed ability to get along in groups of others like us. We, like all social animals, have the skills to detect who cooperates and who cheats, who is kind and who is dangerous, who is dominant and who is submissive. Humans have these skills to a greater degree and have the ability to fine-tune them with greater precision than other animals.

Where chimps and bonobos can understand that individual A knows where some food is hidden and individual B doesn’t and consequently expect different behavior from the two,(22) humans can easily grasp much more complicated scenarios. We quite understand that when Hermia loves Lysander but has been commanded to wed Demetrius; and Demetrius wants Hermia; and Helena, Hermia’s friend, wants Demetrius; but a magic potion causes Lysander to fall in love with Helena rather than Hermia, then much hilarious confusion can ensue.(23) No ape could possibly keep up.

(To be continued …)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
1) Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the source,” pp. 53-54.
(2) Ibid., p. 54
(3) Tooby and Cosmides, “The Past Explains the Present”, p. 420.
(4) Ibid. p. 406.
(5) Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 62.
(6) Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the source,” pp. 57-58.
(7) Ibid., pp. 59-60.
(8) Idem.
(9) Ibid., p. 64.
(10) Ibid., p. 80.
(11) Ibid., p. 74.
(12) Ibid., pp. 74 ff.
(13) Ibid., pp. 79 ff.
(14) Ibid., pp. 82 ff.
(15) Ibid., pp. 85 ff.
(16) Ibid., pp. 89 ff.
(17) Ibid., pp. 93 ff.
(18) Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, pp. 47 ff.
(19) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 4.
(20) Wikipedia, “Theory of Mind.”
(21) Hauser, Moral Minds, pp. 313-322. Also Steen, “Theory of Mind."
(22) Hauser, Moral Minds, pp. 337-341.
(23) Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Plot summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night’s_Dream as of 30 Nov. 2010.

References
Cosmides, Leda, and Tooby, John. “Consider the source: The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentation” in Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, pp. 53-115, ed. Sperber, Dan. New York: Oxford Press, 2000. Also available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/metarep.html as of 25 May 2009.
de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Hauser, Marc D. Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Steen, Francis F. “Theory of Mind: A Model of Mental-state Attribution”. On-line publication, URL = http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/ToMM.html as of 25 August 2009.
Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda. “The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments.” In Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375-424. New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Co., 1990. Available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/publist.htm as of 26 May 2009.
Wikipedia. “Theory of Mind.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind as of 25 August 2009.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Scientists : Dolphins are 'Non-Human Persons'

Bottlenose dolphin Delphin and her baby Dolly at a zoo in Duisburg, western Germany. Photo by AP.
Behavior studies:
Dolphins are second smartest animal

'The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions.' -- Lori Marino, zoologist

By Jonathan Leake / January 10, 2010

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons."

Studies into dolphin behavior have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.

Dolphins have long been recognized as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioral studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognize themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.

After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learned it from the former captive.

There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.

Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.

Size is only one factor. Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.

When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.

What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.

Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.

Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.

“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.

[This article was first published in The Sunday Times of London, on January 3, 2110. Additional reporting by Helen Brooks.]

Source / Times Online

Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

National Intelligence Council : Sun Setting on The American Century

The report said that global warming will aggravate the scarcity of water, food and energy resources. Graphic: 20th Century Fox.
'The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons.'
By Tim Reid / November 21, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The next two decades will see a world living with the daily threat of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe and the decline of America as the dominant global power, according to a frighteningly bleak assessment by the US intelligence community.

“The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons,” said the report by the National Intelligence Council, a body of analysts from across the US intelligence community.

The analysts said that the report had been prepared in time for Barack Obama’s entry into the Oval office on January 20, where he will be faced with some of the greatest challenges of any newly elected US president.

“The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes,” the 121-page assessment said.

The analysts draw attention to an already escalating nuclear arms race in the Middle East and anticipate that a growing number of rogue states will be prepared to share their destructive technology with terror groups. “Over the next 15-20 years reactions to the decisions Iran makes about its nuclear programme could cause a number of regional states to intensify these efforts and consider actively pursuing nuclear weapons,” the report Global Trends 2025 said. “This will add a new and more dangerous dimension to what is likely to be increasing competition for influence within the region,” it said.

The spread of nuclear capabilities will raise questions about the ability of weak states to safeguard them, it added. “If the number of nuclear-capable states increases, so will the number of countries potentially willing to provide nuclear assistance to other countries or to terrorists.”

The report said that global warming will aggravate the scarcity of water, food and energy resources. Citing a British study, it said that climate change could force up to 200 million people to migrate to more temperate zones. “Widening gaps in birth rates and wealth-to-poverty ratios, and the impact of climate change, could further exacerbate tensions,” it said.

“The international system will be almost unrecognisable by 2025, owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalising economy, a transfer of wealth from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors. Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, the United States’ relative strength – even in the military realm – will decline and US leverage will become more strained.”

Global power will be multipolar with the rise of India and China, and the Korean peninsula will be unified in some form. Turning to the current financial situation, the analysts say that the financial crisis on Wall Street is the beginning of a global economic rebalancing.

The US dollar’s role as the major world currency will weaken to the point where it becomes a “first among equals”.

“Strategic rivalries are most likely to revolve around trade, investments and technological innovation, but we cannot rule out a 19th-century-like scenario of arms races, territorial expansion and military rivalries.” The report, based on a global survey of experts and trends, was more pessimistic about America’s global status than previous outlooks prepared every four years. It said that outcomes will depend in part on the actions of political leaders. “The next 20 years of transition to a new system are fraught with risks,” it said.

The analysts also give warning that the kind of organised crime plaguing Russia could eventually take over the government of an Eastern or Central European country, and that countries in Africa and South Asia may find themselves ungoverned, as states wither away under pressure from security threats and diminishing resources..

The US intelligence community expects that terrorism would survive until 2025, but in slightly different form, suggesting that alQaeda’s “terrorist wave” might be breaking up. “AlQaeda’s inability to attract broad-based support might cause it to decay sooner than people think,” it said.

On a positive note it added that an alternative to oil might be in place by 2025.

Source / The Times, U.K.

Read the report in full.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

There's A Man Going 'Round Taking Names

ACLU: Million on terrorist watch list
by Michael Grabell / July 14, 2008

There won’t be any balloons dropping from the ceiling to mark this milestone. And if there are any bells and whistles, it will only be from the metal detector.

The American Civil Liberties Union held a news conference this morning to commemorate what it says is the addition of the millionth name to the nation’s terrorist watch list. The number is a calculation based on a 2007 Justice Department inspector general report, which said the database had 700,000 records and was growing by an average of 20,000 a month.

Since then, the ACLU has dutifully kept a tally on its Web site. The event and the counter are mostly symbolic -- a theatrical way for the ACLU to call attention to "bloated watch lists" that have caused traveling trouble for Nelson Mandela, Sen. Ted Kennedy, federal air marshals and lots of people named Robert Johnson.

“Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape,” Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement.

But are there really a million people on the terrorist watch list?

“No,” says Chad Kolton, spokesman for the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which manages the list.

There are only 400,000 on it, and 95 percent are not U.S. “persons.” (Persons = citizens plus others with a legal right to be in the U.S.)

The “million” number refers to records. The difference is a result of listing several different aliases or spellings for a suspected terrorist.

“That is not the same as 1 million names or 1 million individuals,” Mr. Kolton said. “It’s a little bit frustrating because I feel like they are getting away with muddying up the terms.”

The ACLU’s focus on the number clouds the success of the program, he added. Screening and law enforcement agencies encountered the actual people on the watch list (not false matches) more than 53,000 times from December 2003 to May 2007, according to a Government Accountability Office report last fall.

“The watch list has enhanced the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts by (1) helping frontline screening agencies obtain information to determine the level of threat a person poses and the appropriate action to take, if any, and (2) providing the opportunity to collect and share information on known or appropriately suspected terrorists with law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community,” the auditors wrote.

The addition of 20,000 names a month is a sign of increased military and intelligence efforts in the Middle East and Southeast Asia in the past few years, Mr. Kolton said. He noted that with 6.7 billion people in the world, “the small fraction of a fraction that are involved in terrorist activities still yield very large numbers.”

Still, 400,000 names. That’s one terrorist for every 16,775 people in the world.

That large net ensnares many innocent travelers, leading to an erosion of civil liberties, the ACLU argues. People flagged by the watch list have reported having to go through extra screening or having to answer numerous questions to prove they are who they say they are. Others have been prevented from getting on planes.

Akif Rahman, a computer consultant who spoke at the press conference, said he has been repeatedly detained at airports and border crossings when trying to re-enter the country, according to a copy of his comments provided by the ACLU.

Once, after visiting relatives in Canada, “I was detained for more than five hours – extensively questioned, physically manhandled by a federal officer and shackled to a chair,” he said. “I was afraid, angry and humiliated. I simply could not believe this – I was born a U.S. citizen, simply re-entering my own country.”

The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration, which handles security at airport checkpoints, say they recognize passengers’ frustration and are doing what they can to stem false hits.

Frequently-stopped passengers who want to clear up the confusion about their identity can log on to a Department of Homeland Security Web site, where they can provide more information about themselves.

In addition, after three false matches, the Terrorist Screening Center checks the record in the watch list to see if the information is correct, if there’s any new information and if the person needs to be on the list at all, Mr. Kolton said.

Source. / ProPublica

Go here to see ACLU Watch List terrorist counter.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Russ Feingold Stands Alone

Why Can't Dems Be Tough On
Security And Civil Liberties?
By Seth Colter Walls / June 24, 2008

If you are a hardcore civil libertarian -- the kind of citizen whose heart rate goes up at the mention of obscure legislative acronyms like FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) or PAA (the Protect America Act) -- then Sen. Russ Feingold is one of your heroes. His unwavering commitment to first principles has left him on the solitary end of many a vote in the Senate, where he was the lone voice of opposition to the Patriot Act's debut incarnation.

But even as his national constituency thrills to Feingold's gadfly voting record, the important question to ask is why, with Democrats now in control of Congress, he still finds himself alone so frequently. Or, more accurately, why the Democratic caucus is so often split on national security votes.

As FISA returns to the Senate this week -- now with a near-certain immunity clause for the telephone companies that aided President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program -- Feingold himself said Monday that he expects to lose "too many Democrats" to the Republican block in the Senate.

"I'm blue in the face already," he told a gathering at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C on Monday. "We're gonna fall over on this and I'm very unhappy about that."

The cynic's explanation for the "falling over" phenomenon holds that, on any national security issue, there are enough Democrats who are nervous about being painted as weak -- or who actually are not conflicted in the slightest about valuing security over civil liberties -- that they can be easily peeled away from their caucus in order to give united Republicans a filibuster-proof majority, despite the fact that the GOP no longer controls the Senate.

That intellectual state of affairs in the Democratic Party amounts to an either-or choice between viability on matters of civil liberties or national defense. In the post 9/11 era, it's a decision that has appeared to be a slam dunk in favor of the latter. Instead of trying to make the argument in reverse, it's clear that Sen. Feingold is now trying to do away with that unappealing dichotomy once and for all by staking out new ground on the security frontier.

To demonstrate how the two priorities are not mutually exclusive, Feingold has picked this week to roll out new legislation, co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, to create an independent commission to investigate and improve the nation's intelligence gathering operation. The significance of the timing is unmistakable, as Feingold is virtually certain to kick up a stink in the Senate over FISA at the same time he's rolling out his new proposal.

The implicit message: you can stick up for civil liberties and national security simultaneously.

Should the Feingold-Hagel commission on intelligence ever come into being, the Wisconsin Democrat believes it will note how the Bush-era view of foreign intelligence as principally derived from clandestine operations has short-changed America's ability to exploit non-covert diplomatic reporting and what Feingold calls "open source information" available by simply having a presence in any given country.

Describing a 2001 congressional trip to Nigeria, Sen. Feingold recounted seeing postcards of Libyan leader (and then official terrorist) Moammar Ghaddafi and Osama bin Laden selling briskly on the Muslim street (literally). "'I want to get briefed on this,'" Feingold said he told his staff at the time, adding that the northern town was an important city in Islamic history, sitting on a major trade route, but had no U.S. consulate with "ears on the ground."

Feingold's briefing on regional sympathy for bin Laden was scheduled for Sept. 13, 2001.

But by simultaneously invoking the specter of America's unpreparedness before 9/11 and what he calls its "distraction" in Iraq starting in 2003, Feingold is hoping that a critique of the Republicans' handling of security issues will not block out from the public's mind his own proposals for making America stronger in the fight against terrorism.

As The Huffington Post has previously reported, many progressive scholars and foreign policy analysts are hoping that more Democrats will stop running from the fight with Republicans over national security -- no less an authority than Gen. Wesley Clark said he saw Democrats creating a more "full-service party" on security issues -- but while these figures may all hope for this change or sense some ground shifting, as yet there's little empirical evidence to validate those positions.

Indeed, two recent polls conducted by Gallup reveal the strange position that Democrats still find themselves in on security issues. In mid-May, the firm found that a majority of Democrats and Independents (as well as nearly half of Republicans) thought it would be "a good idea for the president of the United States to meet with the president of Iran" -- an idea that sounds very close to a plank in Barack Obama's national security platform.


Given that the issue of diplomacy with Iran has been one of John McCain's favored bludgeons over the past few weeks, you might expect Gallup's polling to show that the same Americans who support Obama's policies might view McCain as less well equipped to handle the threat of terrorism overall. Not so. In a June Gallup survey, McCain's only issue area of dominance was on the question of which candidate would do a "better job" on terrorism, on which he beat Obama to the tune of 19 points.


What this suggests is that while the Democrats' hoped-for resurgence on national security could possibly be underway, it has thus far failed to materialize in the electorate.

Still, the maverick Feingold is set to chip away at the existing stereotypes Democrats face on national security. Just because he's trying to gain traction as a thoughtful proponent of stronger intelligence gathering doesn't mean he'll hang up his spurs on the FISA bill when it passes back through the Senate. Asked after his Monday address whether he and others might mount a filibuster on FISA, Feingold ducked the issue deftly by saying "I'm not in a position to talk about exactly what's going on with that in the committee."

Still, he noted that both he and Senator Chris Dodd met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last Friday and indicated their joint desire that "this thing not just be jammed through." According to Feingold, "we will be requiring key procedural votes," he said, "and also be taking some time on the floor this week to indicate the problems with this legislation. We're not just going to let it quickly pass."

Source. / The Huffington Post

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...