Peter asked:

How would you finish this sentence?

"To live is......"

============

When we answer the questions set in Pathways with only the web site as silent witness we are in a
similar position to that occupied by a questioner and responder in Alan Turing's famous test for
determining machine intelligence. In this test if the answers sent back to the questioner could not be
distinguished from the answers a human would send then we could conclude that the machine is
responding as intelligently as a human would so that we could not be sure if the sender is a living
human or a non-living machine.

In the game we are playing, we can't be sure if questioner or the answer provider is taking the
position of the machine, or if in fact there are only machines communicating. I am pretty certain that if
I am a machine then I am indistinguishable from every other human machine. Furthermore if I thought
I was responding to a non-human machine the kind of answer I would give would be different to the
kind of answer I would give if I thought the receiver was human and I also had some idea of the
context in which the question was being asked. I could, with no concern for the consequences of the
discussion pursue an analysis of the concept of 'being alive' if the analysis was only a word game.
But if the philosopher-player believes there could be life changing consequences for the
questioner-player there should be constraints on the scope of the answer provided.

What follows from these considerations is that philosophical investigations that take on practical
issues ought to work on a principle of non-indifference with respect to the learning and actions that
may follow from the interchange.

Suppose that 'Peter' is a pseudonym for a woman in the UK who is currently seeking the right to die
because she does not want to continue her life in a severely reduced and dependent form. She is
alive but not independently alive. Should the correct philosophical Turing response be to neutrally
elicit from the questioner what her understanding is of the phrase 'to be alive' as she was before her
present condition, what it is now and what she thinks it will be? Given the questioner's position would
it also for the sake of logical completeness be the correct response to offer interpretations of the key
phrase not included in her perspective and persuade her that she may not choose to reject some of
those meanings? For a person in this position the question we are thinking about is clearly very
heavily weighted with both issues of fact and issues of value. So that a logico-linguistic approach to
the analysis of the question may only provide one approach to unfolding the complexities of the issue
or even changing minds.

If the questioner has full mental competence, as in fact the individual in question does, then
Descartes might try and persuade her that she is no less alive in her present position than she was
before, given the belief that the essence of being is thinking. If thinking though was not a source of
satisfaction either because it was not something she particularly excelled in or practiced very often or
it was not something that she would place in her list of preferences then an approach that would
compliment the previous one mentioned would be to elicit from the questioner what are the
satisfactions and non-satisfactions of being alive.

The Turing P-game has now altered so that it is not simply a matter of discrete question, response,
evaluation, decision and closure but more a continuum of interchange in which information, ideas,
questions, learning and teaching are flowing in both directions. But if the elicitation of knowledge in
the context of a philosophical investigation has the form of a directed interview then the philosopher
should have some idea about the direction the interview can be steered in and those it should not, in
the context of a philosophical and not legal or medical inquiry or any other kind of inquiry. The
practical philosopher should be aware of what has been, in the history of ideas considered to be
sources of satisfaction for individuals in being alive but they can also take an alternative, more
general approach of considering individual satisfaction to be an indivisible part of dualistic
satisfaction. Decisions then relating to being alive or choosing to not be alive then become
inseparable from how the satisfaction and non-satisfaction of others are affected either as classes of
individuals such as relatives, such as husbands, wives, children or parents, others in similar positions
now or in the future or others in the abstract as represented in medicine as the abstract entity, 'the
patient', 'the defendant' in law, the social services 'client', the 'child' in family law, the therapy client.

In answering this question I felt that it was necessary to first talk about the logical delicacy of
philosophical investigations conducted blind and suggested that the philosopher player should work
within the ground rules of non-indifference in such contexts.

Secondly I have suggested that in the context of the questioner-player making life changing decisions
as a consequence of the game then the philosopher-player can use a variety of techniques for
practical philosophy:

*Identifying particular philosopher's approach to the question,

*a logico-linguistic explication of questioner meaning (mind-mapping)

*an explication of questioner related truths and satisfactions,

*question answering as a dual learning experience,

*knowledge of the history of relevant ideas,

*investigation of the question taking separately a monadic view of individuals and secondly a dualistic
view of individuals.

Finally, it also seems to me that given the tendency of most individuals in the position of questioner
producer, answer provider or both, to make two kinds of cognitive mistake of scale at some time due
to stress, material or political circumstances which can be characterised as mistakes of over
generalisation and mistakes of under discrimination then all philosophical investigations should be
conducted within the constraints of non-indifference to consequences.

References:

Turing Test: Alan TuringAndrew Hodges London 1985

Monism & Pluralism: D.W. Hamlyn MetaphysicsCambridge 1984

Modern EpistemologyN Everitt & A Fisher

Neil Buckland