Toomas Karmo

Monday, 4 September 2017

Toomas Karmo: Part M: Perception, Action, and "Subjectivity"

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time to write out the necessary points to reasonable length.

Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.

20170905T0237Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converting his point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
20170905T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a moderately polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish converting this into full-sentences prose by 20170905T0401Z.

[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]

To begin with, we recall the tightness of the parallels between perception and action. However novel the idea of V-ing-in-W-ing may perhaps seem in its application to perception, the idea is at any rate familiar, within at any rate Departments of Philosophy, in its application to action. The familiarity is due to several respected 1950s-through-1980s Anglo-Saxon philosophical authorities, from whose ranks I at the moment think (mindful, for once, of "Igominy and Humiligation") that I dimly recall two - something like (say I, for once circumspectly) "Elizabeth Honeycombe" and "Arthur C. Dango". I illustrate the "perhaps Honeycombe-Dango" idea by recapitulating an old example, in the process making, for reasons of (slight) authorial convenience a few (inconsequential) changes in its details:

You are startling a crow in jumping from veranda to lawn.
You are jumping from veranda to lawn in flexing leg muscles.
You are flexing leg muscles in firing various spinal neurons.
You are firing spinal neurons in firing motor-cortex neurons.

I also reiterate another point from past weeks, namely that just as you could report, in a neurophysiology lab in which electrodes are stimulating your cortex, "Now I am starting to green," so you could be asked in a different kind of neurophysiology lab, in which electrodes are reading out from your cortex, and in which your body is left free to gesticulate and walk and jump, "Please fire some different motor-cortex neurons for our anatomy team now - now those neurons which you use for jumping." (You do this, of course, by performing a jump, right there in the lab - not merely by pretending to yourself that you are jumping.)

****

How does action relate to "greening", "hurting", and the like? That hurting is outside our immediate control is a medical contingency lacking philosophical significance. We could have nervous systems that do bring our hurting under our unmediated control, in the sense in which our gesticulating, walking, and jumping already are. In that case, "I am hurting" would be less like "I am falling" than "I am jumping." (This would be helpful in Opus Dei, replacing the need for the awkward, perhaps even expensive, Opus Dei cilice - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cilice3.jpg - as an instrument of private bodily penance. "I ought," says my imagined Opus Dei penitent, "to reprimand myself, and yet only moderately, for complicity with Hollywood in viewing Borat last Sunday. So let me now do some hurting, while I recite just Psalm 51. And let me confine my small act of mortification to just the left half of my face, and to one toe.")

We could likewise, with a different neuro-anatomy, ring at will - that is, to be sure, to "ring" in the sense in which tinnitus sufferers are said to ring, rather than in the sense in which bells are said to ring. Similarly, we could with a different neuro-anatomy "sick" and thirst and "green" at will. The situation would differ in degree, and not in kind, from what we already encounter when we are hurting (in the active sense) in doing something a little elaborate. (That something might, for instance, be what real-world penitents do in pressing cilice barbs into contrite flesh . - I do have to confess here to myself having viewed Borat last Sunday, and to having approached outright helplessness in my consequent laughter, and to lack today any deep remorse (let alone contrition) over my various Sunday actions, and to have no cilice in my present toolkit.)

Likewise, the situation would differ in degree, not in kind, from what we already encounter in greening, in the active sense, through ("in") doing something a little elaborate:

I would like to green. How can I, given the limitations of my Homo sapiens anatomy, pull off that particular performance? The sole tactic available to me is elaborate. In Homo sapiens, the performance proves not as easy as singing a Middle C, not as easy as moving a foot. But I can pull it off in a cumbersome way. I do it by directing my corneas away from my book page, raising them toward a sunlit lawn. This redirecting of my corneas I achieve in contracting some neck muscles, and that I achieve in firing motor neurons outside the motor cortex, and that I achieve in firing neurons within the motor cortex. For an animal with a different anatomy, the performance might prove easier, bypassing the motor cortex, and requiring no redirecting of corneas, and perhaps being describable in starkly simple autobiographical terms, along the following lines: "I green, in the active sense, in firing neurons in that special glory of my species, absent from Homo sapiens, namely my Voluntary-Colour cortex."

****

Next, we ask how action relates to the Kaila-Strawson "sound universe", as developed in "Part I" and "Part J", on 2017-07-24/2017-04-25 and 2017-07-31/2017-08-01. Here is a biographical fragment for a Kaila-Strawson subject who has not only a perceptual life (I copy this verbatim from "Part J") but also a life of agency (this part I now add):

In the minutes leading up to 4:00 pm today, you have been "greening", and have been seeing a chain of ordinary physical things, among them a sunlit lawn, in greening. In your right hand has been a glass with some ice-chilled drink. This glass, at a temperature only a little above 0oC, is one of a chain of ordinary physical things - among them are also events in your nerves, starting with nerves in some correspondingly cold finger flesh, and continuing with neurons within the right arm, the spinal cord, and ultimately the skull - which you have been feeling in "being-chilled". Now, at 4:00 p.m., comes the Great Change.

Suddenly you see nothing at all. You do not experience even an expanse of neutral black, as when you clap a hand over closed eyelids. Your visual life becomes suddenly a Nothing, even as the visual life "behind your head" is in your present circumstances a Nothing. (It is not that the human visual field is bounded by an expanse of neutral white or neutral black. No: outside the limited visual field, with its angular width of maybe just 170 or 190 degrees, nothing at all appears.)

Gone also is the "right-handed being-chilled". Now you have no awareness of cold, or for that matter of warmth, or for that matter of wetness, dryness, or pressure. You likewise have now no feeling of falling, rising, or spinning. Further, you now cease to have sensation-within-the-human-body, such as nausea, or thirst, or the pins-and-needles prickling in some injudiciously immobilized foot.

What you do have is auditory experience, and this you have in astonishing abundance. In your altered state, you note an ensemble of sounds - ringings, buzzings, whistlings, ululations, rumblings, in a variety of pitches and timbres - at times in either soloes or choral plainsong, at other times in harmonies and dissonances, and often with many a diminuendo or crescendo.

Up to 4:00 pm today, you considered various things - prominent among them a pair of Homo sapiens feet and a pair of Homo sapiens hands - to be "under your control". Now, in place of hands and feet, you notice a pair of treble notes in a violin timbre, sounding rather pleasantly at F-above-Middle-C and C-above-Middle-C. You notice also a pair of baritone notes in a rather rough viola timbre - accompanied by a rather insistent, polished, basso profundo, the latter perhaps mildly reminiscent of the "romanssi" interpreter Boris Timofeyevich Shtokolov (1930-2005).

You discovered many years ago - perhaps a mere day or mere week after the date recorded on your birth certificate - that you were able to exercise agency over a certain pair of Homo sapiens hands and a certain pair of Homo sapiens feet, and to some extent also over the Homo sapiens torso to which these four appendages were attached. As you acquired the use of language, you began to call the appendages "my hands" and "my feet", and to refer the torso to which they were attached as "my torso".

"What," you now ask, "might be analogous to the situation I found myself in so many years ago, and with which I so soon learned to cope?"

To your gratification, you find that you seem to possess fine control over the F-above-Middle-C - making it louder and softer "just like that" - just as before 4:00 p.m. you seemed able, "just like that", to make your right hand approach or recede from the small bit of cartilage you have come to call your nose. You find also that you seem to enjoy some degree of control, although less fine, over the C-above-Middle-C. Further, it now seems to you that you enjoy a still different, still less finegrained, control over the two viola notes - with their timbre, pitch, and volume amenable to modification, in ways that are sometimes pleasantly predictable, at other times disconcertingly unpredictable. You admit to yourself that getting the two viola tones to behave just as you desire will require a diligence akin to the diligence you exercised years ago - in fact in the months immediately following the month entered on your birth certificate - as you mastered your legs in crawling and walking.

And there seems also some modest degree of control available to you on the basso profundo.

So you think to yourself: "Well, the high F and the high C are respectively like my right hand - I manipulate it readily - and my left hand - for with my left, I am clumsy. Further, the two viola notes are like my two legs, and the basso profundo is like my torso. So I have now been somehow metamorphosed."

A moment later, a fresh, still happier, thought suggests itself: "Perhaps there is no physical metamorphosis here at all. Perhaps I am continuing to move Homo sapiens arms, legs and torso, while continuing to sit by a sunlit lawn. It could be that these physical things have endured the Great Change, and have only changed their appearance - so that all the agency (to take one example, a hand-wave agency) I used to have I still have."

Further investigations will perhaps confirm that happier thought, and perhaps will instead lead more in the direction of Kafka (with, perhaps, the eventual postulation of metamorphosis not even into a baryonic-matter Kafka Cockroach, but, vexingly enough, into Something Exotic and Non-Baryonic).

****

With blogging time exhausted for this evening, I shall leave a piece of homework. Readers will be helped most at this point not by my respecting my Igominy and Humiligation Precept, with its prohibition on the detailed citing of literature, but by my once again flouting it. So, shamelessly pleading in my defence the best interests of a segment within my readership, I cite some material appearing on the Web a few months ago, and since removed. In his now-discontinued "Archdruid Report" blog, back on 2017-03-08, American analyst John Michael Greer commented sympathetically on Schopenhauer:

Let's review the basic elements of Schopenhauer's thinking. First, the only things we can experience are our own representations. There's probably a real world out there—certainly that hypothesis explains the consistency of our representations with one another, and with those reported by (representations of) other people, with less handwaving than any other theory—but all the data we get from the world out there amounts to a thin trickle of sensory data, which we then assemble into representations of things using a set of prefab templates provided partly by our species' evolutionary history and partly by habits we picked up in early childhood. How much those representations have to do with what's actually out there is a really good question that's probably insoluble in principle.

Second, if we pay attention to our experience, we encounter one thing that isn't a representation—the will. You don't experience the will /.../

Although there is more in Mr Greer (and I presume, without having attempted the reading, in Schopenhauer), it is for tonight's homework-assignment purposes expedient to cut things off here. I choose to treat most of Mr Greer's passage as helpful, stage-setting, context for his portentous final pronouncement, "You don't experience the will."

In past weeks, I have been rejecting, and indeed have at points even been ridiculing, the Schopenhauer-Kant, Descartes-Locke-Berkeley-Hume, Bertie-1912 idea of "sense data" or "representations" (the "Vorstellungen"). But Schopenhauer's celebrated book did get entitled Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung - "The World as Will and Representation". Here, then, is my homework question: having ridiculed those old Teutonic Vorstellungen, should we, or should we not, now also reject this old Teutonic "Wille"? In other words, is it inaccurate, or is it accurate, for Schopenhauer and his expositor Mr Greer to write, "You don't experience the will?"

[This is the end of the present, "Part M", blog posting.]

Toomas Karmo: Part L: Perception, Action, and "Subjectivity"

20170905T1709Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo expanded the paragraph which begins The finding-it-yucky which will assail many /.../, adding two sentences to make his argument clearer. - Kmo added an admission of fault to the paragraph starting As in "Part J", so again tonight I stress that intersubjective comparisons /.../ - stating that he has been guilty in a "Part J" throw-away remark (tersely envisaging some intersubjective comparisons) of naive language that will later require partial retraction. - Kmo reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours as here-undocumented versions 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, ... .
20170905T0143Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converting his point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
20170905T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a moderately polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish converting this into coherent full-sentences prose by 20170905T0401Z.

I ended last week by setting a piece of homework:

/.../ tonight's posting will have to end with a homework problem. Consider a distant parallel to the Sick and the Pain, respectively at the intersection of First Avenue with A Street and the intersection of First Avenue with B Street (as set up in "Part C", from 2017-05-29 or 2017-05-30). Suppose we find emotional disturbances to sweep through the human population of Europe, in ways that can be plotted on a map, even as the weather can be. For some reason or other - the natural thing will be to postulate underlying causal mechanisms, and to hope eventually to uncover them - everyone in the Loire Valley this week is strongly depressed. Next week, the "Depression" moves over to Alsace, and from there out to Germany. The week after that, it has migrated to Poland - now somewhat less intense, and with scattered "Patches of Mellowness" forming near the High Tatras, and with a "Mild Euphoria" now appearing over Switzerland, evidently on its way down to Italy.

The homework comprises two questions:

To what extent is it appropriate to "objectify" the Depression, the Patches of Mellowness, and the Euphoria Wave, as I already in Part C, on 2017-05-29/2017-05-30 (following a Wittgenstein suggestion) have discussed the "objectifying" of the Pain at First Avenue and A Street and the Sick at First Avenue and B Street?
To what particular aspect of a previous installment from this present essay is scrutiny of the "Depression", the "Localized Mellows", and the "Southward-Drifting Alpine Euphoria" specially relevant?

My answer to the first of last week's two questions is that there is no logico-semantic obstacle to "objectification", or as we might also call it, "projection" - however alien such objectification or projection might be to current speech habits. Current speech habits are not sacrosanct. Many extensions or modifications to them turn out to deliver clear meanings, and so prove legitimate. We have already noted the admissible neologism "greening", paralleling "hurting" (as when we say, "We see that sunlit grass in greening; we feel the toxic secretions on this leaf in hurting"). We have already, with Wittgenstein, noted the admissible neologism "pain patch", logically paralleling "green patch". (One possible form of speech, from a multitude of legitimate forms, is the following: "As there is a 'Green', a green patch, on this plot of garden soil - chemical analysis reveals it to be chlorophyll, held in chloroplasts within grass stalks - so also there is a Hurt, a pain patch, on this stinging nettle. Chemical analysis reveals the Hurt to be a histamine, held in cunningly fragile hair-like trichomes.")

Last week's envisaged language of a "Depression" leaving the Loire Valley for Alsace (perhaps, I might add this week, via Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine) and of "Localized Mellows" forming in the High Tatras, and of a southward-drifting "Euphoria" forming in the Alps, is (I now say, answering the homework question) no different. A projected, or so-to-speak objectified, "Pain" or "Hurt" might turn out to be something familiar in current physical chemistry. In the case of a leaf, it might be a histamine, cunningly dispensed by the rupturing of trichomes. In the case of the Hurt which we have imagined at First Avenue and A Street, it might (as I pointed out in "Part C", from 2017-05-29 or 2017-05-30) be something like a subsonic vibration in the local atmosphere, cunningly generated by a high-volume infrasound loudspeaker horn. Or, alternatively (we explored this in "Part C") the "Hurt" might prove to lack any evident basis in ordinary, baryonic, matter - perhaps therewith impelling people to speculate, in the style of the missing-mass astrophysicists, that some exotic "nonbaryonic entity" inhabits the intersection of First Avenue and A Street. Parallel possibilities arise in the homework problem. It might be the case (1) that last week's "Depression" is some readily ascertained baryonic-matter entity or process (involving, perhaps, a drifting cloud of one of the psychiatrically interesting toxins, such as benzene or xylene). And it might alternatively be the case (2) that the "Depression" gets consigned by its future investigators, in a frustration akin to the current frustration of Dark-Matter astrophysicists, to an exotic realm of nonbaryonic matter.

We do, admittedly, have to be careful in our labelling, once we "objectify" or "project" onto the European landscape. Suppose that only the physically taller half of the Val-de-Loire population at this moment feels depressed (and only the physically taller half of Champagne-Ardenne a bit later, and so on eastward into Germany and Poland, as the days pass). Suppose that, by contrast, the shorter-stature half feels thirsty, without reporting any significant emotional colouring - or alternatively that they feel some emotion quite different from depression (say, a pleasurable excitement, resembling the nervous inrush from tobacco or black coffee). There then will be no answer to the question "To which segment of the population does this eastward-moving physical reality appear in the way it ought to appear, and to which segment does it appear wrongly?" - no content, in other words, to the question "Which segment of the population is feeling 'ce Truc Bizarre qui se Promène Peu-à-Peu vers l'Est' in the right way, and which segment is feeling it in a distorted way?"

But nothing here (I continue, now wrapping up my answer to the first of the two homework questions) constitutes an objection to projection, in other words to "objectification". From the standpoint of conceptual architecture, the situation is no different from what was already noted for colours and shapes in "Part G" and "Part H", on 2017-07-10/2017-07-11 and 2017-07-17/2017-07-18.

As for the second of the two homework questions, my answer is that our present discussion is relevant to my inspection of the "Darren Gloom"/"Dagwood Spume"/"DEFGH" Philosophy-of Causation, and of the "Havid Dume"/"HGFED" Philosophy-of-Other-Minds (in "Part C" and "Part D", on 2017-05-29/2017-05-30 and 2017-06-05/2017-06-06).

Back on those dates, I wrote that I reject the DEFGH and HGFED analyses. Was I right to reject them? The anti-realist DEFGH regards the idea of one event's "making or not making" another event occur as a mere projection or abstaining-from-projection of a feeling of expectation. In a parallel way, the anti-realist HGFED regards the idea that the robot or animal (for instance, the gesticulating and vocalizing specimen of Homo sapiens currently sitting across the table from us, or again the vinyl-and-solenoids hailed in some Pennsylvania ecclesial circles as Groccor Buastoniensis Loquacissiuimus) is "aware or unaware", is "sentient or nonsentient", is "conscious or somnanbulist", to be a mere projection or abstaining-from-projection. For DEFGH and HGFED, I wrote, "Causal Links" and "Other Minds" are, where asserted-rather-than-denied, "merely projected" from within the observer, as tasting-bad might be projected onto Charlie Chaplin's Reichskanzlei buffet dish.

Is there perhaps, we must now ask, some inconsistency, when we juxtapose what I wrote back then regarding DEFGH and HGFED and what I am writing at present? For (I proceed, answering, and commenting on, my second homework question) am I not combining a rejection of DEFGH and HGFED with a repeated endorsement of "projection" (now, notably, in introducing the Depression, the Patches of Mellow, and the Euphoria Wave)?

But as far as I can see, my position is consistent.

The finding-it-yucky which will assail many, upon finding the Reichskanzlei to be inadvertently daubing strawberries with mustard, can itself, I concede, legitimately be "projected". We can say, in particular, that there is Yuckiness on the Tomanian leader's dessert plate. (The Yuckiness on that particular plate will on a rather straightforward chemical and physiological investigation prove to be something like a combination of acids, sugars, and essential oils.) Any who find strawberries with mustard delectable will be perceiving, via tastebuds, gustatory nerves, and cerebral cortex, that same combination of acids, sugars, and essential oils - even while, I admit, preferring in their own (legitimate) projection-language to say not that Adenoid Hynkel's dessert plate harbours a "Yuck", but instead that it harbours a "Yum". I can deny content to the question "Is it we normal gourmands or, rather, the culinary revisionists, who are right about the taste of the acids, sugars, and essential oils in those mustard-daubed strawberries?" and yet continue affirming, in dissent from DEFGH and HGFED, realism as regards both Causal Connections and Other Minds. The denial of content to the just-posed question is consistent with a realist stance regarding the composition of the colloidal mixture on the dessert plate. I embrace realism regarding the contents of the mixture; I embrace realism in opposition to DEFGH and HGFED; I take the same view in all the subject-matters I have brought up: if anyone at all is in conceptual trouble here, it is DEFGH and HGFED, who oppose realism, rather than those (like me) who endorse it.

Could I be missing something here? Is my position internally inconsistent, in some to-me-elusive way? I am pretty confident that all is well. Nevertheless, I do urge anyone who uncovers, somehow, some problem lurking here to compose an e-mail for Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com, using an appropriate attention-grabbing subject line such as I have some thoughts about your blog.

****

Tonight's remarks about the two halves of the Val-de-Loire population, and about the objective-reality-that-some-call-a-Yuck-and-others-a-Yum, parallel a remark about intersubjective comparisons which I hastily threw out in "Part J" (2017-07-31 or 2017-08-01):

You (the Gentle Reader) and I, as two fellow specimens of Homo sapiens, are together seated at the edge of a sunlit lawn. You have no way of knowing whether my greening is the same as your greening, or on the contrary is the same as your, so to speak, "redding". But suppose (I write tonight briefly, almost as a throw-away) that your greening is indeed like my redding, and your redding indeed like my greening. Then there is no content to the question which of us has "accurate colour vision", and which of us has "systematically distorted colour vision".

As in "Part J", so again tonight I stress that intersubjective comparisons raise delicate questions, best postponed until some weeks from now, when we finally approach the end of this (already dauntingly long) multi-part essay. Indeed I have to confess now that my throw-away remark was worded recklessly, in naive terms that are in due course going to require a partial retraction. However, some readers will be helped in orienting themselves this week by my this week repeating (admittedly, in yet another breach of my "Igominy and Humiligation Precept") that my upcoming, official, correctly careful, I-now-presume-late-autumn, discussion of intersubjectivity will constitute an attempt to extract a clear kernel of truth from that opaque oracle who is Wittgenstein - specifically, from Wittgenstein's "Private Language Argument". I believe that some background on this can be had by Googling on the string (with its five words, and its judiciously deployed pair of internal question marks) Wittgenstein "beetle in a box".

****

This finishes what I have to write about perception, as a multi-installment amplification of the first of my three philosophical fragments from "Part B" (2017-05-22/2017-05-23). Now it is time to start fleshing out the second fragment. I will do so in a manner suggestive of a clean break, by finishing off this present "Part L", and on this very same evening uploading "Part M".

[This is the end of the present, "Part L", blog posting.]

Monday, 28 August 2017

Toomas Karmo: Part K: Perception, Action, and "Subjectivity"

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time to write out the necessary points to reasonable length.

Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.

20170829T0257Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converting his point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
20170829T0110Z/version 1.1.0: Kmo finished polishing his point-form outline. His hope was now that he would complete much of the task of converting this to full-sentences prose by bed time, i.e., by UTC=20170829T0330Z, and that he would be able to finish off the rest of the conversion - interleaving that task with another task, outside the blogosphere - by UTC=20170829T1800Z.
20170829T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a moderately polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish converting this to full-sentences prose over the coming 3 hours.

For adequately serious reasons, I have spent three blogging weeks away from the analytical philosophy of perception and action. Tonight I ease my way back into philosophy. Contrary to what I had been hoping when bracing myself in recent days for tonight's spate of once-again-philosophical blogging, I shall not yet prove able to finish off the philosophy of perception, so as to embark on something refreshingly different, the philosophy of action. Tonight I can only add some supplementary material on perception, and write a digression on the education system (making some reference to contemporary Oxford), and set a piece of homework.

****

I start by recapitulating, but now in moderately fresh language, my principal conclusions so far:

Two logical features of perception have to be kept in view simultaneously. (a) Perceiving involves perceiving-in (as when we feel the piglet, concealed in a blanket, in feeling the blanket, and feel the blanket in feeling pressure on that part of our skin which is in contact with the blanket, and feel pressure on the skin in feeling events in the nerves running from our hand up to our cortex, and feel those events in feeling neuronal events in the cortex itself, and feel those cortical events in "being-pressured" - where "being-pressured" is a neologism parallel to "being-in-pain" ("hurting"), or again parallel to "being-nauseated" ("sicking"). (Or again, it is as when we see that sunlit lawn in seeing the patch of retinal light, which we see in seeing various neuronal events, which we in turn see "in greening" - where "I green, thou greenest, he-she-it greeneth" are neologisms paralleling "I hurt, thou hurtest, he-she-it hurteth," or again paralleling "I thirst, thou thirstest, he-she-it thirsteth.") (b) It is a coherent use of language to "project", or "objectify", moving with Wittgenstein from "I hurt whenever I touch this leaf, with its dangerous chemical secretions" to "There is a pain-patch on this leaf."
Once we keep this pair of points in view, and additionally adopt a realist conception of causation (as opposed to a reductionist, "philosopher-DEFGH"/"Darren Gloom"/"Dagwood Spume", conception of causation) we seem to have to reject the post-mediaeval philosophers' notion of "sense data" ("sense impressions", "Vorstellungen"). In making the rejection, we seem to have to throw out the post-mediaeval attempts at "phenomenalism" (on which sunlit grass, crows, red tablecloths, and the like are held to be mere "logical constructions out of sense data"). In making this rejection of "sense data", we also seem to have to throw out the alternative post-mediaeval attempt to exhibit the grass in the lawn, the crow on the grass, and so on as "precariously known realities behind sense data". We have in particular to reject an idea from Bertrand Russell back in 1912, as I quoted it in "Part A" on 2017-05-15/2017-05-16 - what we directly see and feel is merely an "appearance", which we believe to be a sign of some "reality" behind. (Well, here I really am guilty of criticizing the recently dead, with explicit quotation, contrary to my Igominy and Humiligation Precept, from "Part B", back on 2017-05-22 or 2017-05-23. But a direct reference to the recently dead, by way of an outright quotation accompanied by a prompt and rather brusque rejection of the material quoted, seems to be what is at this point most likely to be helpful to that (sizeable minority?) of my readership who have undertaken some university-level coursework in philosophy. - And I may as well note also, leaving the realm of the recently dead for the long dead (once again trying to help the just-mentioned philosophically erudite segment of my readership), that not only do we end up rejecting Bertie's 1912 formulation - we also end up rejecting the dreaded "Ding and Sich", forever concealed behind its dreaded dense screen of "Vorstellungen", as advocated by "Prof. Immanual Tank", or somebody, out in 1781 Königsberg.

****

It will now be objected: Are you not falling into circular reasoning? In accepting the physiologists' account of sunlit lawn, crystalline lens, retina, optic nerve, and visual cortex, with the corresponding neurophysiological accounts for hearing, touch, and the other senses, are you not assuming something which ought instead to be argued for - namely, the existence of such straightforward physical things as grass, sunlight, corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and cortices?

This is a delicate objection. I hope that my readers will ponder my reply with duly neutral, duly nonpartisan, diligence, to see if I am perhaps somewhere in need of correction. As always, I am to be reached via e-mail to Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com - in this instance, perhaps with some suitably attention-grabbing subject line, such as I have some thoughts about your blog. My reply is that either the textbook physiological theories are straightforwardly true or they are straightforwardly false. What physiology claims, for good or ill, is to be taken as an assertion (true or false) of fact, no different in principle from the assertions that (e.g.) light takes more than a million years to travel from the galaxy M31 to our eyes at the eyepieces of our binoculars, or that the age of the cosmos is a spectacular number of times greater than the few thousand years inferred from a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, or that the Earth is to a good approximation spherical. I say, bluntly, that either the Flat Earth hypothesis is true or it is untrue. If you like the Flat Earth, well fine - but then you have to reply, as a working geophysicist and not as a mere armchair speculator, to the various arguments advanced in many a respectable science classroom for a Round Earth. (There is, for instance, the argument that sailing vessels close to the visual horizon have their mast tops visible, their hulls invisible. With a Flat Earth, we would indeed get a visual horizon, and yet we would not get the vanishing hulls.) So likewise, say I, for physiology. If some people do not like my account of perception, wanting instead to rescue Phenomenalism, or to rescue Bertie-in-1912, or to rescue the circa-1781 dreaded Königsberg Ding an Sich, they have to establish a factual inaccuracy in current physiology. That basically means their forsaking the speculative armchair for the lab or the dissecting room, and attempting some physiology researches of their own.

****

This leads me into a digression which will (I regret) burn up the bulk of what blogging time remains available tonight, but is nevertheless advisable, as being potentially helpful to some readers. (My digression resembles in this respect my not-quite-friendly verbatim quoting of the long-suffering 1912 Bertie.) It has been asserted that philosophy is the "Queen of the Sciences". The Gentle Reader can imagine how the sparks rise from my scalp when I hear such unhumble claims. Fuming, I recall the cruel old joke. If, contrary to what I think tonight, I have already used it at some point in my past months of blogging, then I beg the Gentle Reader's indulgence:

As every Dean knows, a physicist is vexatiously expensive. The main problem lurks in the equipment grant - running into easily tens of millions - allowing those superconducting magnets to get bathed in liquid helium, those plasmas to attain solar-interior temperatures, those vast steel vessels to get pumped down (with roughing pump, diffusion pump, and the application of much exotic grease, from Dow Corning or suchlike) to their requisite high-grade working vacua.

Every Dean also knows how cheap, in happy contrast, is a mathematician. Here you need supply only a desk, a chair, blank paper, and a wastepaper basket.

And every Dean knows that a philosopher is cheaper still. For the philosopher, you still have to supply desk, chair, and paper, but you can omit the wastepaper basket.

So "Queen" indeed, sniff I.

Trying to be nice, however, I realize that Philosophy does deserve a role as a Constitutional Monarch, keeping things steady without getting in the way. Here is Philosophy - with her sensible shoes, her handbag, her television Message around lunch time in dozens of loyal countries on each and every Christmas day. Here is Philosophy using the Received Pronunciation with her bevy of snuffling corgis. What is it she does? As in a Westminster-style constitutional monarchy, the real power gets wielded by Prime Minister and Cabinet, so in the scientific world the real power gets wielded by physics (and, I suppose, also by chemistry and the life sciences, to the considerable extent to which they may prove able to model themselves on physics - striving for rigour in their defining of terms; deploying their mathematics with due clarity and due parsimony; and remaining poised to reject one conceptual framework for another, in a "revolutionary overturning of established paradigms", should their hitherto-accepted conceptual framework prove inadequate, for instance in the light of fresh laboratory developments or fresh observatory developments).

In a constitutional monarchy, the Crown is in Walter Bagehot's formulation entitled to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn. Analogously, in the intellectual world, philosophy is entitled to attempt some steadying tasks for physics, without trespassing into armchair physical speculations. Where potential conceptual difficulties lurk, it is the privilege of philosophy to probe. So, for instance, philosophy is encouraged to examine whether the concept of entropy in thermodynamics, or again of wave-particle dualism in quantics, is correctly clear. (I rather gather that the professional philosophers-of-physics do say "yes" for entropy, and I rather suspect - but here it is particularly important that I some day find time for further reading - that they again do say "yes" for wave-particle duality.)

It is not, on the other hand, the job of philosophy to query matters of fact. Either we altogether give up on the study of deep physical reality, or we get our information on such deep physical factual things as Big-Bang-versus-Fred-Hoyle's-Steady-State from the best available source. That source is admittedly the Department of Physics, humiliating though the admission may on occasion feel.

In so elevating physics, and in so lowering philosophy, I do not mean to imply that physics (along with whatever empirical disciplines may now or in future succeed in taking on the rigour of physics) is in any sense humanity's sole source of insight - even outside (I write here as a Catholic) the conceivable domain of contingent, empirical, event-within-human-history divine revelation. Outside physics, and left rather untouched by the various revolutions physics undergoes in its unavoidably tumultuous historical development, are aesthetics and ethics. It has been well said by a Catholic mathematician-philosopher that "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not grasp." Literature, in particular, communicates deep truths from outside physics. (Here I take "literature" in the broadest sense, to encompass many of the Old Testament narratives, such as the pair of Genesis creation stories; and in a different way the modern novelists and modern dramatists; and in a different way again humanity's corpus of high poetry, from Gilgamesh and the Book of Psalms to the present day; and in yet different ways again parts of popular culture, for instance the more morally serious of the detective novels, or those often deeply moralizing, not always silly, productions known to the Anglo world as "Country and Western" - "The crystal chandeliers light up/ The paintings on yer walls/ Wah-wah-wah.") Physics can have nothing to say on such central questions as "What is a good human life?", central though those questions are to literature, from Gilgamesh and the Old Testament right up to the kitchen-radio guitar-plonking "Wah-wah-wah." On these questions philosophy, on the other hand, does have a duty to speak. Philosophy has perhaps in some instances even a duty to try speaking authoritatively.

****

Before quite ending this digression, I may as well add some remarks on the proper organization of education, both in physics and in philosophy.

I make no attempt here to pronounce on the organization of education in a wider sense - as discussed by, for instance, English literary critic F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) (I understand he believed in the centrality, on any properly run Anglo-Saxon campus purporting to be a true university, of the Department of English), or in John Henry Cardinal Newman's 1850s Idea of a University. But so far as the special domain of physics and philosophy goes, I would point the reader to my blogging from 2016-07-04/2016-07-05, as "Part E" of the essay "Is Science Doomed?" In that blog posting, I left to the Leavises and the John Henry Cardinal Newmans the task of articulating goals for a humanities-centred school. I took as my model for such a school a real-life institution, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College (OLSW, here in Ontario; their Web outreach both was in 2016 and is now in 2017 at https://www.seatofwisdom.ca/; when I blogged on this topic back in 2016, OLSW had not yet attained its 2017 level of institutional development, and was therefore styled more reticently as "Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy").

But in that same blog posting, I imagined a science-centred school, which I called "the Other Place", operating "just down the road from" OLSW in 2070 or 2100 or 2120 or so.

Readers interested in the organization of higher education might now want to revisit that posting of 2016-07-04/2016-07-05. I stand by what I wrote back in 2016, except that now I would recommend the incorporation of some modest philosophy component (consistent with the idea of philosophy as a mere Constitutional Monarch - handbag, corgis, and all) right within my Other-Place curriculum. I see it like this, that everyone at the Other Place should be asked to do a little bit of philosophy, if only to be able to navigate the conceptual chokepoints prominent in thermodynamics and quantics. I would imagine tonight that each student is asked to allocate a minimum of (say) 20% of his or her workload to philosophy. (Tonight I would take philosophy to include classical first-order mathematical logic, up to the canonical-model completeness proofs, in at least a semantic-tableaux proof-theory setting.) I would imagine that although nobody would be greatly encouraged by the "Other Place" Deans to do very much philosophy, some few students, having demonstrated unusual formal-logic and conceptual-analysis proclivities, might be allowed or encouraged to give philosophy significantly more of their time - in extreme cases, even as much as, say, 60% or 65% of their time.

On preparing for tonight's writing, I recalled to myself that back in the 1970s, Oxford offered undergraduates something like a "Joint Honours School in Physics and Philosophy" - or was it "Philosophy and Physics"? (Oxford used, and perhaps still uses, "Honours School" as the University of Toronto administration uses "Specialist Programme", or as I suppose many American schools have traditionally used the phrase "Major Program".) I cannot recall ever meeting anyone, in my time in 1970s Oxford, in that particular School. The usual thing was, rather, for the undergraduates I knew to be working either in "Greats" (this combined philosophy with Greek and Latin literature-and-history) or - what seemed more common than "Greats" - in "Philosophy, Politics, and Economics".

But Oxford kept that old Honours school, whether popular or not, on its books. So what, I asked myself this afternoon, as I prepared to blog, has become of it? To my surprise and happiness, I found the old School alive and well, and now operating under the gratifyingly ambitious styling "4 year MPhysPhil".

The explanation at https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/study-here/undergraduates/the-courses/4-year-mphysphil runs as follows: Physics and Philosophy has been offered as a degree course at Oxford since 1968, and since then the course has developed and changed greatly, in response to changes [in] physics and current issues in the philosophy of physics over that period.

On this same Web page is an explanation of the ideas guiding this "P&P" programme, at any rate in its current phase of development. It is encouraging to see how consistent Oxford's current thinking is with what I have in the past few days been passing through my own mind, as a possible appropriate philosophy-honouring curriculum for the imaginary deep-future "Other Place": This course will be of interest to those who seek a deeper philosophical understanding of the basis of physics and who want a degree comparable in level with advanced European degrees. In the physics and philosophy course some of the physics subjects in each year are replaced by topics in philosophy. The Joint Honours degree in Physics and Philosophy is intended to restore the long-standing connection between natural science on the one hand and the study of its foundations in metaphysics and the theory of knowledge on the other hand. The course is also intended to equip those who take it with the ability to think scientifically, to handle difficult concepts and to present their conclusions incisively and effectively. It is a course which aims to bridge the Arts/Science divide.

That last reference, to a "divide", is perhaps an intentionally low-key, intentionally back-handed, intentionally polite, gesture toward the acrimonious Snow-Leavis debate, which I mentioned here in my "Part A" (on 2017-05-15 or 2017-05-16).

****

With blogging time now running out, tonight's posting will have to end with a homework problem. Consider a distant parallel to the Sick and the Pain, respectively at the intersection of First Avenue with A Street and the intersection of First Avenue with B Street (as set up in "Part C", from 2017-05-29 or 2017-05-30). Suppose we find emotional disturbances to sweep through the human population of Europe, in ways that can be plotted on a map, even as the weather can be. For some reason or other - the natural thing will be to postulate underlying causal mechanisms, and to hope eventually to uncover them - everyone in the Loire Valley this week is strongly depressed. Next week, the "Depression" moves over to Alsace, and from there out to Germany. The week after that, it has migrated to Poland - now somewhat less intense, and with scattered "Patches of Mellowness" forming near the High Tatras, and with a "Mild Euphoria" now appearing over Switzerland, evidently on its way down to Italy.

The homework comprises two questions:

To what extent is it appropriate to "objectify" the Depression, the Patches of Mellowness, and the Euphoria Wave, as I already in Part C, on 2017-05-29/2017-05-30 (following a Wittgenstein suggestion) have discussed the "objectifying" of the Pain at First Avenue and A Street and the Sick at First Avenue and B Street?
To what particular aspect of a previous installment from this present essay is scrutiny of the "Depression", the "Localized Mellows", and the "Southward-Drifting Alpine Euphoria" specially relevant?

[This is the end of the present blog posting.]

Monday, 21 August 2017

Toomas Karmo: Open Letter, on DDO&P and the New $15m De Gasperis-Muzzo Hospital Donation

Quality assessment:
On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time to write out the necessary points to reasonable length.

Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.

20170822T1624Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo fine-tuned his question to Ms Ingrid Perry (and expected to be e-mailing her, via foundation@mackenziehealth.ca, at some point in the coming 6 hours). He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, ... .
20170822T1558Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converrting his point-form outline in coherent, full-sentences, prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
20170822T0203Z/version 1.1.0: Kmo finished polishing the point-form outline. He was now ready to start converting this into a coherent full-sentences essay. He hoped to finish the process of conversion (after getting a night's sleep) by 20170822T1600Z.
20170822T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a semi-polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish, or at least partly finish, converting this into a full-sentences essay over the coming 3 or 4 hours.

1. Thursday's Problematic News

A problematic story, pertinent to the David Dunlap Observatory and Park (DDO&P) heritage-conservation case, hit the Ontario newsdesks on 2017-08-17. Here is some of the coverage, from http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/family-of-marco-muzzo-donates-millions-to-new-ontario-hospital-1.3551420:

/.../

On Thursday, it was revealed that the Muzzo family, along with the De Gasperis family have made a joint donation of $15 million to help build the Mackenzie Vaughan Hospital, which is slated to open in 2020. It is the largest single donation in the hospital's history. In an interview with CTV Toronto, Mackenzie Health Foundation CEO and president Ingrid Perry said that the hospital is "absolutely delighted with the generosity of the De Gasperis and Muzzo families."

The Muzzo and De Gasperis families have a long and honourable record of philanthropy in the York Region upper-tier municipality that encompasses the lower-tier municipalities of Vaughan, Richmond Hill (including DDO&P), and such neighbouring lower-tier municipalities as Aurora, Newmarket, and Markham:

The De Gasperis family, along with other property developers not known to me, supported the construction of the St Clare of Assisi church in Vaughan. Three bells, in particular, are named for the three brothers who came to the Greater Toronto Area from 1950s Italy, to found in due course the Canadian De Gasperis billionaire property-developer fortune - named whimsically, as "Saint Alfredo", "Saint Anthony", and "Saint Angelo".
At the Villa Colombo Senior Centre in Vaughan is a "Piazza De Gasperis", as one tangible testimonial to the De Gasperis support for Villa Charities (http://www.villacharities.com/).
Construction of the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Hill_Centre_for_the_Performing_Arts) was facilitated by a 1,000,000 CAD donation from the late Alfredo De Gasperis.
De Gasperis philanthropy has created, under the aegis of the Toronto General Hospital, the "Alfredo and Theresa De Gasperis Chair in Heart Failure Surgery".
According to https://chimp.net/charities/the-muzzo-family-charitable-foundation, the Muzzo Family Charitable Foundation expended 385,992 CAD in 2015 - almost all of it for its charitable objectives in medicine, rather than for mere overheads.
Thanks to the combined generosity of the two families, as directed to the William Osler Health Centre Foundation, a three-storey feature within the Brampton Civic Hospital has been named the "De Gasperis and Muzzo Atrium".

With this honourable record, what could be negative in Thursday's story? But a negative side is present, even to the point of public outrage. Unless special steps are now taken (and I am using tonight's blog to facilitate such steps), last week's philanthropy risks being perceived, in our outraged York Region, as an attempt to rehabilitate the Muzzo family name in the teeth of a criminal conviction.

I did not quote the CTV coverage from the beginning. I left the first two sentences out. Here they are:

Two prominent Ontario families, including the one of a man convicted in a horrific drunk driving crash that killed three children and their grandfather, have donated millions of dollars to a new hospital in Vaughan, Ont.

In March 2016, 30-year-old Marco Muzzo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for impaired driving causing death and bodily harm over the 2015 crash.

Many readers or viewers of CTV will remember that young Marco Muzzo had a previous history of dealings with the traffic police, falling short of a criminal trial; that on the day of his 2015 offence, he had by media reports returned on a private corporate jet from a stag party in Florida; and that he had climbed into his Jeep Cherokee at Pearson International Airport in a state of intoxication so severe that he had been said in the media to have urinated on himself at the accident scene, and to have had difficulty in standing upright at the accident scene.

Many CTV readers or viewers will also remember that his Jeep Cherokee, seized as evidence and therefore supposedly safe in police custody, burst into flame some hours or days after his crash. The combustion-within-cop-shop is duly reported at http://globalnews.ca/news/2251015/jeep-driven-by-marco-muzzo-in-fatal-vaughan-crash-caught-fire-in-police-custody/. I, for one, listened carefully to the professional crime reporters analyzing that development, as one person among the many persons queuing outside a Newmarket courtroom on the morning of the sentencing day that was 2016-03-29.

Further, many CTV readers or viewers will have noted, for instance from https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2017/01/08/marco-muzzo-wants-damages-reduced-in-lawsuit-over-drunk-driving-deaths.html, not only that Marco Muzzo's victims have brought a 25,000,000 CAD civil suit, but that lawyers on the Muzzo side of the ongoing civil case are arguing for a reduction in damages, to at most one-third of the sum which the plaintiff seeks.

The public outrage can be seen in a couple of places, notably in the comments section of https://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/7507378-mackenzie-vaughan-hospital-wing-will-bear-de-gasperis-muzzo-family-names/. Admittedly, the language of the public in its many comments is inappropriately insensitive to the (perfectly real) suffering of the convict and the convict's own family, however fervent such language becomes in addressing the (still intense) suffering of the victims. And to write, as "Jill" did under the timestamp "Aug 18 2017 6:30PM", Vaughan Hospital Tower to be armed [she surely means 'named'] after a murderer. Nice. is to overlook the legal and ethical distinction between murder and manslaughter.

In all this torrent of abuse directed at the Muzzo clan, I found just one kindly voice when I scrolled downward. Under timestamp "Aug 17 2017 9:53PM", someone styled "Bal" had written, reasonably enough, We cannot be mad at the whole family for one person''s mistake. The rest of them don't deserve to sufree [the meaning is surely 'suffer] because one was crazy.

We cannot condone lynch-mob rhetoric, whether directed at the Muzzo clan or at any other. And yet it is clear that the De Gasperis-Muzzo philanthropy generates a public problem, which last week's torrent of comments, however inappropriately abusive, was correct in highlighting.

****

Before leaving the media coverage, I would like to draw attention also to sane commentary by radio host Scott Thompson of "900 CHML", headed "Why not name Vaughan hospital after Neville-Lake family?" Mr Thompson writes in part as follows, at http://globalnews.ca/news/3678898/commentary-why-not-name-vaughan-hospital-after-neville-lake-family/:

/.../

The donation - from a family that is known for their philanthropy - is very generous, and I'm sure locals are more than happy for it.

But why not just cut the cheque and enjoy the gala? People will know where the money came from.

Again, the funds are surely welcome, but there are many who give anonymously, or without seeking credit for their contributions.

It's almost as if this donation is a distraction from the reality of what happened, as much as it is in a way making good for it.

As a statement against impaired driving and a tribute to the late Daniel, Harrison, Milly and their granddad Gary, why not name the hospital wing after the Neville-Lake family instead?

A Ms Reesha Grewal and I both replied to this (sane) opinion piece, via Facebook, both of us in positive terms. I would urge my readers to inspect Ms Grewal's comment. For fear of possible copyright infringement, I cannot reproduce it here. I am surely legally able to reproduce my own comment, on the other hand, in full or in part, as I may choose. Here I choose to reproduce just the core part:

Exactly, Ms Reesha Grewal /.../. You've nailed it. The right time to reach out to the community was a year ago /.../ [At this point in my Facebook comment, I discuss the 2016-08-14 public memorial event, to whose speakers I had listened attentively - to my disappointment finding no Muzzo-family representatives present.] /.../ The Muzzo family did not take this opportunity /.../. It is particularly distressing that the names of BOTH families (the Muzzos AND the DeGasperises) should be coupled to the hospital, since the two families have combined forces, under the corporate banner "DG Group [former 'Metrus']/Corsica", to destroy 32 hectares of greenspace, and thereby undercut a conceivable UNESCO World Heritage List application, at the David Dunlap Observatory. /.../

It is appropriate tonight to amplify and expand that just-cited online comment

2. Background to Thursday's Problem

(A) Here is essential background regarding the David Dunlap Observatory and Park (DDO&P):

DDO&P harbours three telescopes, one of them still the largest on Canadian soil (and the world's second-largest when it was brought into service in 1935). With this instrument, in the 1970s, was made one of the half-dozen key discoveries in all of 20th-century observational astrophysics - the discovery, namely, of a plausible candidate stellar-mass black hole. Subsequent work around the world has led to a general acceptance of DDO's 1970s black-hole interpretation of the pertinent data.
DDO&P comprised 72 hectares of greenspace from its 1935 inception until the 1950s. At that point the terrain was enlarged through a supplementary donation, to its final 77-hectare extent.
All 77 hectares were sold in 2008 on the commercial market for about 70,000,000 CAD by the University of Toronto, on the theory (never tested in court) that a 1930s original-donor Deed of Indenture proviso, blocking such a sale, was legally void. The purchaser was a subsidiary, Corsica, of a De Gasperis so-to-speak-flagship firm, Metrus (a flagship more recently, however, operating as "DG Group").
Corsica later sold 5 hectares to the Town of Richmond Hill for just under 20,000,000 CAD, leaving (77 minus 5 equals) 72 hectares.
Corsica eventually donated 40 of these 72 hectares to the Town of Richmond Hill, along with the key heritage buildings on the land. In this same transaction, Corsica undertook to assist financially with reforestation on some of the donated 40 hectares (including reforestation on a savanna which Corsica had taken down, triggering municipal-court proceedings in which Corsica had entered a guilty plea).
The (72 minus 40 equals) 32 hectares remaining in the possession of Corsica were approved by the Town of Richmond Hill for development as a subdivision, to contain a lane, 14 streets, a stormwater sump (in planning language, euphemistically, a "stormwater management pond") and 520 or 530 units of housing - with, however, the possibility of some tens of additional units, as above-garage granny-flat add-ons, in a planning application submitted in 2017, and I think remaining under consideration as I write.
The young convict Mr Marco M. Muzzo is not a Corsica director, but the son of a brother of a Corsica director, Mr Marc A. Muzzo. The board, when I checked its composition a few years ago, was (if I recall accurately) drawn entirely from the De Gasperis and Muzzo families.

In this mix of the positive and the negative, it is the negative that predominates. The central point is the loss of a 32-hectare urban greenspace (very roughly half of it, or perhaps a bit less than half of it, under field or meadow, and correspondingly very roughly half of it, or perhaps a bit more than half of it, under forest), in defiance of the very principles of conservation that DG Group showcases with a haunting wetland photo and the motto "Bringing Life to Land", at http://dggroup.ca/. (The wetland photo is something of an irony, given the ongoing battle over wetland conservation lately being waged by citizenry in the chambers of the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority against DG Group: http://www.savengforest.org/.)

I have blogged on the entailed DDO&P conservationist casework here at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com every few weeks since 2016 April. I hope in due course to index my blogspot work, so that a single click in the browser right margin, on some such heading as DDO&P conservation, generates a browser display of all and only my DDO&P-pertinent postings. For the moment, however, people wanting to delve into my past blog postings will have to scroll patiently, inspecting my postings one by one, in what is unfortunately a most heterogeneous collection of essays.

Two of my various postings may as well be noted here, as being particularly DDO&P conservation-relevant:

"Essay on Sorrow - Its Anatomy and Its Remedies", from 2016-04-25 or 2016-04-26, at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.ca/2016/04/toomas-karmo-essay-on-sorrow-its.html
"DDO&P: Handcuffs I Have Known", from 2017-06-12 or 2017-06-13, at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.ca/2017/06/toomas-karmo-ddo-handcuffs-i-have-known_12.html

Also relevant to conservation are two postings that touch on the Muzzo family involvement at DDO&P, in the context of Marco Muzzo's conviction:

"Muzzo-family/Toomas Conciliation Project (DDO&P and Convict)", from 2016-08-08 or 2016-08-09, at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.ca/2016/08/toomas-karmo-muzzo-familytoomas.html
"Failure of 2016-08-14 Muzzo-Outreach Effort (Pertinent to DDO&P Conservation)", from 2016-08-15 or 2016-08-16, at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.ca/2016/08/toomas-karmo-failure-of-2016-08-14.html

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(B) Here is the essential background regarding the Mackenzie Health Foundation:

Its mandate comprises two hospitals, in a pair of adjacent lower-tier municipalities in the Great Toronto Area's northern suburbs, within York Region - the long-operational Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital, and additionally the soon-to-be-opened Mackenzie Vaughan Hospital.
According to https://www.charityintelligence.ca/charity-details/813-mackenzie-health-foundation, in the 2016 financial year 56 cents of every dollar donated to the Mackenzie Health Foundation went to its cause, with 32 cents out of the dollar instead covering fundraising overheads, and 12 cents out of the dollar instead covering administrative overheads. The same source indicates that of the full-time staff of 22, one received 350,000 CAD or more in compensation, one received compensation in the range 200,000 CAD - 250,000 CAD, one received compensation in the range 160,000 CAD - 200,000 CAD, and seven received compensation in the range 80,000 CAD - 200,000 CAD.

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I was employed at DDO from 2006 mid-November until the end of 2008 June, on two concurrent part-time contracts (as a research assistant and as a telescope operator).
I financed the unsuccessful 2012-through-2015 greenspace-conservation efforts of the Richmond Hill Naturalists (http://www.rhnaturalists.ca/) at the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) and Divisional Court. I expended on this aspect of the conservation case, and on smaller related points, and on the Karen Cilevitz lawsuit mentioned below, a total of some 500,000 CAD or 550,000 CAD. (Earlier tribunal work, namely the broadly conservation-successful 2009 Conservation Review Board hearing, had been mostly financed not by me but by a bequest to the Richmond Hill Naturalists, amounting to around 200,000 CAD.) I have left outstanding some Richmond Hill Naturalists legal bills, for which nobody has pressed me, totalling possibly 30,000 CAD. Of this, around 20,000 CAD is in ethical terms - so it has been argued to me, I think cogently - covered by an undertaking-to-raise-funds made to me by the RH Naturalists, signed and witnessed. Around 10,000 CAD, on the other hand, is owed by the Naturalists to lawyer Virginia MacLean (http://www.virginiamaclean.com/), and is not covered by this undertaking. Ms MacLean, although retained by the Naturalists, unexpectedly argued in support of a part of the Corsica case on the OMB Summation Day which was 2012-09-10. (I repeat tonight, as in essence both previously on this blog and in private e-mails to Ms MacLean, that I propose to settle with her when she explains to me and the public (including, notably, via me my readers here), and to the much-suffering Naturalists, what moved her to argue on 2012-09-10 for the erection of some Corsica units of housing at DDO&P. Was it blackmail? Was it some more subtle fear, of some origin untainted by blackmail? Was it illness? Was it some type of infirmity other than outright illness, such as fatigue at the 2012-09-10 podium, at the end of many gruelling days in our OMB hearing? Some details of the 2012-09-10 surprise Ms MacLean sprang for us, as subdivision opponents, are in my "Essay on Sorrow" blogspot posting, to which I refer again below.) The 500,000 CAD or 550,000 CAD was the bulk of my life savings. Once the dust had largely cleared, I found to my surprise that I had accidentally left myself a cushion sufficient to cover medical and similar contingencies, and additionally my anticipated 2018 move to Estonia. I considered myself at that point, however, no longer able to address large fresh legal contingencies, in other words no longer justified in embarking on fresh large law-firm retainers. If sued, I will have to self-represent, at any rate in any court work triggering a legal bill of over 1,000 CAD or so.
In 2015, OMB awarded costs of 100,000 CAD to Corsica against the Richmond Hill Naturalists. I could, both then and now, safely afford to pay 1,000 CAD toward that bill. But I decline to do so on grounds of ethics. (And indeed I am in legal terms a mere donor to the Naturalists, and therefore am not in legal terms liable for their bill. They for their part, in their always-tolerant way, evidently choose not to press me on it. My last little chat with an executive from their ranks - at which the opportunity to press me was present without being mentioned, in a conversational context in which I mentioned the 100,000 CAD problem - occurred at a Richmond Hill Mill Pond Park public event this summer.)
I settled a 2014 lawsuit brought by pro-development political candidate Ms Karen Cilevitz (after the 2014-10-27 Richmond Hill municipal election, Town Councillor Karen Cilevitz). Particulars on this particularly painful side of the DDO&P casework, central to which was a 2011 rupture between the pro-development Karen and the anti-development Naturalists (with their staunch allies in Ontario First Nations and Ontario heritage-conservation circles, including me; Karen's change in conservationist philosophy sowed communal division) may be inspected at http://www.karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca/ and http://www.karen-vs-toomas-legaldocs.ca/. Here I note only, without in any way commenting on the terms of my out-of-court settlement with Karen, that out of my own overall anti-development outlay of 500,000 CAD or 550,000 CAD, I spent about 50,000 CAD on Karen, almost all of it on fees to my then counsel - the duly efficient, duly clear-headed, and duly tenacious, and yet far from cheap, Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP (http://www.blakes.com/English/Locations/Toronto/Pages/default.aspx).
I am connected with the Mackenzie Health Foundation in no financial way, but only as a patient in the Mackenzie Richmond Hill hospital, having undergone a successful 2014 transurethral resection of prostate, under the usual publicly-funded Ontario Health Insurance Plan (and therefore at no directly billable expense to me, beyond a mere few tens of dollars at the pharmacy).

3. Working toward a Solution

Once money is allowed to develop a mind of its own, it destroys, like a parasite, even key institutions in the civilization that created it. I do not wish to belabour this point. But we may consider, momentarily, how much poorer in quality - thanks in part to predator capitalism, notably including overseas capitalism, where trade unions are weak or absent - are our Canadian consumer goods now than 50 years ago; and how much less secure (thanks in part to the ongoing concentration of wealth by the powerful) is our middle class now; and how much less stable is our climate now (under loading from greenhouse gases - themselves the product of inadequately regulated commerce, both in Canada and abroad). We may also consider, momentarily, how likely it is that if present trends continue for another 50 years, Ontario will divide, Detroit-like, into two mutually warring social extremes - on one side the fabulously wealthy (such as the De Gasperises and the Muzzos) in their gated and guarded communities, and on the other side the mortgaged, or rent-paying, insecure poor, accompanied on their flank by a growing army of homeless poor.

Most people in Canada at some level know, and can agree on, the solution to these social ills. Most Canadians know the solution to lie not in Marxism, but in the revival of the small farm and the small business, in a Canada where everyone owns something (if only, in the most humble cases, some share in a neighbourhood self-help co-op), and where government subsidy and outside capital (even in the form of a bank loan, such as a mortgage) is socially frowned on. But how to get from Here to There? Money has made all Canadians its victims, exercising on everyone here - the small, like me and the majority of my Canadian readers; but also the great, like Ontario's billionaire developers - all the slowly enervating power of hookworm, leprosy, or HIV.

Part of the mindset that is weakening Canadian communities is the idea that cash by itself, tossed out like largess by governments and their powerful commercial partners, solves community problems.

The De Gasperis-Muzzo hospital donation has been in the works for a long time. At http://globalnews.ca/news/3677574/marco-muzzo-family-hospital-donation/ Ms Perry writes or speaks, delicately, of a donation "long in development":

"We are very grateful for this generosity, which will benefit the people of Vaughan and neighbouring communities for decades to come – providing exceptional health care for patients and families close to home,” Ingrid Perry, President and CEO of the Mackenzie Health Foundation, said in a statement.

"This gift has been in development for more than three years, and we are extremely pleased to see it come to fruition."

We are unlikely to know the details unless the donor families at some point, possibly under friendly journalistic probing, choose to discuss them publicly. It might be, for all the public can now know, that the talks had reached the stage of an outright commitment months, or even a year or two or three, before young Marco Muzzo was offered liquor on that private jet. There is therefore no adequate ground for speculating that the Muzzos are now trying to buy a rehabilitated reputation. It is, on the other hand, a safe bet that their insensitivity to public opinion last week stemmed from some naive, untutored, belief that throwing money at the community automatically makes the community better - that this is somehow Just What the Small Folk Need.

Accompanying their insensitivity to their overall community is a special, localized insensitivity regarding the inevitable pain they rekindle in the Muzzo victims, the Neville-Lakes (who spoke out, clearly, when interviewed last week at Global News, in language documented at http://globalnews.ca/news/3677574/marco-muzzo-family-hospital-donation/).

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I would like to help in some small way, as one of the last public things I can undertake in my impoverished and Asperger-fumbling way before my envisaged 2018 departure from Canada for Estonia. As a first step in facilitating a remediation, I make the present blog posting an open letter to the Mackenzie Foundation CEO, Ms Ingrid Perry. Ms Perry could answer it directly here over the coming week, using the blogger, in other words blogspot.com or blogger.ca, comment-writing interface. If she chooses that direct route, she can conform to my toomaskarmo.blogspot.com or toomaskarmo.blogspot.ca commenting rules, as promulgated on these servers at 2016-04-14 under the heading "Background FAQ regarding purpose and conduct of this blog" (at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.ca/2016/04/background-faq-regarding-purpose-and.html) by putting into her body text three easy pieces of information:

her true first name and true surname (consequently, "Ingrid", plus "Perry")
her municipality (it would suffice to specify "York Region, Ontario" as her upper-tier municipality of employment, without venturing into finer geographic details)
a contact e-mail address, either known to be genuine or easily verified (her general team inbox identifier, foundation@mackenziehealth.ca - an address already known to be genuine - would suffice)

Alternatively, Ms Perry could answer over the coming week by sending private e-mail to me, over her signature, for reporting by me here in my envisaged upload of 2017-08-28/2071-08-29, or again by phoning me on my private line (647-267-9566), likewise for reporting in my envisaged upload of 2017-08-28/2017-08-29.

Here is my question:

Can Ms Perry confirm, for the public record

as I shall put it onto my blogspot.com/blogspot.ca blog,

that it is in principle possible

for York Region persons to make large donations,

on the order of 15,000,000 CAD, to her Foundation

without thereby causing any family name

(whether De Gasperis, or Muzzo, or other)

to become affixed to any particular building?