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The central task of ethics is to ask: what is it for a human life to go well? The answer, I believe, is that living well means meeting the challenge set by three things: your capacities, the circumstances into which you were born, and the projects you yourself decide are important. Making a life, my friend the philosopher and legal scholar Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is "a performance that demands skill," and "is the most comprehensive and important challenge we face." But because each of us comes equipped with different talents and is born into different circumstances, and because people choose their own projects, each of us faces his or her own challenge, one that is, in the end, unique. So there is no sensible answer to the question of whether one person meets her challenge better than another...there is no comparative measure, no single scale of human worth. As a result, a system of selection for jobs and educational opportunities cannot be designed by considering who is most worthy of those opportunities, because,..., there isn't a single scale of merit on which to rank them. Indeed, because each of us faces a distinct challenge, what matters in the end is not how we rank against others at all. We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best. Each of us...has his own measure...to have a character is to be a "person whose desires and impulses are his own-are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture...'" And if you have a character, if you have your own measure, the most important stands you have to meet are distinctively yours.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind, pp. 177-8
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Whitehead famously remarked, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." However, it might be more fitting to say that it has assembled an army of foot soldiers, waging battle on Plato's behalf against the Ionian natural philosophy.
Homeostasis as "corrective regulation" is "stability achieved through constancy" whereas allostasis as "predictive regulation" is "stability through change." ...the goal of regulation is not primarily to "defend" all parameters but rather to continuously match them for efficient performance. Allostasis: A clock predicts a cell's individual needs, plus its responsibilities to other cells over the course of the day, and guides metabolism to meet them in a timely fashion. Homeostasis: When needs change on a faster timescale, the clock's predictions may err and require prompt correction by feedback. Allostasis "predicts"; homeostasis "corrects." The key goal of physiological regulation is not rigid constancy, rather, it is flexible variation that anticipates the organism's needs and promptly meets them. The model clarifies why the brain should be in charge: it is simply more efficient to predict a need and satisfy it rather than to wait for an error and correct it. For this model of "predictive regulation" to challenge homeostasis it would need a name...we called it allostasis--meaning "stability through change." Whereas homeostasis tends to define "health" as a list of "appropriate" lab values and "disease" as "inappropriate" values, allostasis defines health as the capacity for adaptive variation and disease as a shrinkage or compression of that capacity. Therapeutically, homeostasis emphasizes drugs to clamp down on pesky glucose, blood lipids, and so on. These drugs tend to reduce the capacity for adaptive variation, whereas allostasis emphasizes the opposite, interventions that enhance the capacity for adaptive variation. The allostasis model defines health as the capacity to respond optimally to fluctuations in demand. The homeostasis model uses pharmacotherapy whereas the allostasis model uses system therapy. Pharmacotherapy typically tries to correct a specific parameter....System therapy tries to change the prediction. The goal is to reduce demand for long enough for the system to "believe" the new prediction and readapt. As responses drift back toward the initial mean, response range is maintained. Circuits that share the same receptors as the target circuit may also benefit. This is a "side effect" of system therapy--and it is a good one. The main elements of allostasis: i. Values are not constant but vary according to need (temperature varies diurnally, with stochastic pulses, with infection, and with exercise). ii. Needs are prioritized for urgency and opportunity (cooling vs. feeding), but flexibly, to be reprioritized as conditions change. iii. Control extends beyond the immediate need to coordinate trade-offs for future needs (cool now vs. conserve water and salt for what may come). iv. Each system serves multiple needs (kidney and its regulatory hormones serve fluid/osmotic balance but also serve thermoregulation). v. Control uses behavior to conserve resources (seek shade vs. sweating). vi. Learning improves prediction (don't eat in the heat; take a jacket to the mountains). vii. Anticipation prevents errors (seek water vs. rise in osmolarity). Peter Sterling, What is Health? MIT 2020 "...Every landscape bears the traces of this continuous and cumulative labour, generation after generation contributing to the whole. So doing, humanity itself has been transformed by what the French historian Jules Michelet called 'the decisive shaping of self by self, or (as Karl Marx put it) 'the production of people by people.'" (p.9)
"The stage on which humanity's endless dramas are played out partly determines their story-line and explains their nature. The cast will alter, but the set remains broadly the same." (p. 11) Regarding collective psychology: "Far more than the accidents or the historical and social circumstances of a period, it [collective psychology, awareness, mental equipment] derives from the distant past, from ancient beliefs, fears and anxieties which are almost unconscious - an immense contamination whose germs are lost to memory but transmitted from generation to generation." (p. 22) Ferdinand Braudel, A History of Civilizations |
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