While Darwin has given us a nice metaphor to think of markets, biotech industry has been mostly ignoring the role of evolution in health. Nesse, Williams and others have tried very hard to describe disease in evolutionary terms but have not impacted industry much. Why? Is it because the idea is wrong? The scientists mostly ‘know’ that evolution has shaped human physiology. Why then the mad rush of the industry to push pills to all and sundry? Is it safe to allow market forces to take care of the health-care situation?

In the line of what Kamolika mentioned, ideas are always constrained by parameters in which they operate, either external (law, morality etc) or internal (must form part of a self-consistent system of thought). Since it is not possible to determine with certainty the truth-value of an idea, supporting free expression of all ideas is meaningless (bacause we are leaving the task of finding its truth-value to some forces, name it market if you will, whose truth-values themselves are not known).

Someone said (was it Vico?) and I paraphrase:
science and philosophy might be the high fruits of civilization, but they are poisoned fruits, in that they dissolve the irrational, which helps a society to cohere and remain a society.

It appears that free speech is not any more a priori than law or morality, and I suggest that all of these work not in a hierarchical but cooperative manner, and bootstrap each other.

Firstly thank you for taking the time to post your reply. Appreciate it.

On reading your reply, I would submit to you that the state of an idea being ‘apriori equally probable’ is so infinitesimal that it is all but insignificant in its journey from germination to decline.

An idea is born in my mind and immediately after birth, wars with other ideas in my brain. We weigh the idea against what we know and decide whether it’s a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘brilliant’. How do we decide this? Laws of nature, morality, human experience – there could be a number of things that are weighed in balance before the idea is decided as ‘good enough’ to be voiced.

Before the idea is voiced, again there is an infinitesimal moment where it is ‘apriori equally probable’ with all other ideas about to be voiced – but not so the moment after. The very next second, it is being weighed and balanced against collective ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad.’

So you see, an idea spends much of its life in an ‘aposteriori’ state than an ‘apriori’ state – and that is where the debate with other ideas, concepts, mores, can take sometimes rewarding and sometimes dangerous turns.

So we try manage this as best as our human condition allows – by trying to make sure there’s space for the ‘rewarding’ ideas to be born and some control on the birth of the ‘dangerous’ ones. In this I do agree with what you’ve written in your last paragraph.

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Your post itself expounds an idea – fettering freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is not only an idea. It reflects the need that every idea when born is a priori equally probable. Only after interacting with contemporary ideas does it acquire the qualifiers ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In other words, these qualifiers are a posteriori. Law, morality etc. are yet another set of ideas intended, as you aptly put it, to circumscribe freedom of expression. Unlike freedom of expression they are presumptive – i.e. they make a priori assumptions about the nature of good and bad – and are meant to violate the ‘equally probable’ nature of nascent ideas. That attempt to disrupt the ‘equally probable nature’ is the objection to opposing freedom of expression.

Being a priori equally probable is a requirement of natural selection, and it is this fact that is at the basis of the defence of ‘absolute’ freedom of expression, and is what makes the freedom something more than just an idea . It is possible that an idea may lose in it’s fight with it’s contemporaries, but can come again in future, e.g. heliocentric view of the Universe.

We can either ’structure’ ideas, in which case we need to start with some ideas as ‘absolute’, i.e. have faith in their truth, or we can choose to have an absolutely unstructured set of ideas. The former gives us knowledge and progress, the latter gives us chaos. If we seek progress, then some ideas must form the base of the structure. Ideas that correspond to facts – e.g. equal a priori probability of the rest of the ideas – give us pragmatic faith (as opposed to blind faith). Law or morality (etc.) can be seen as being based on expreience distilled over generations of what are ‘good’ ideas and what are ‘bad’. That they can be circumvented is an evidence of their limitation. In contrast the equal a priori probability idea has withstood the test of time. Every attempt to circumvent it, has not succeeded.

Finally, the discussion is about having freedom of expression as more basic than law or morality, and not about which one should exist. In other words, I am trying to point out the limitations of ideas of law or morality and not advocating their removal or similar ideas. They are just not as fundamental as freedom of expression. They are useful to make freedom of expression ‘less dangerous’, but can never eliminate the danger. The best defence against a ‘dangerous’ idea is another opposing idea – whose birth requires freedom of expression. Freedom of expression as a basic ideas is amenable to change: just have another idea that corresponds to facts better than ‘equal a priori probability’ idea .

The blog in general tries to present the “abstract” ideas above in concrete form.

-Shriram R

However, just as before, I have an objection to the same absolutist approach you bring to it – with very little scope for the shades of gray.

Is freedom of expression a good thing? Yes, of course! But just like perfect beauty or a classless society, it is an ideal that we, in our imperfections, try to achieve amongst the many constraints that face us everyday.

The ease with which you outline the primacy of ‘good’ ideas and the ultimate decline of any ‘bad’ ideas is simplistic, IMHO. It brings to mind a slightly academic environment where a number of armchair worthies sit with piles of journals, debating the finer points of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Or where a copybook ‘earnest inventor’ toils away in his garret and produces the blueprint for the next amazing machine. In the end, all are rational gentlemen who are able to arrive at a civilized agreement over what is the ‘good’ idea.

How does this match with the ideas of Jewish annihilation, which must have seemed like a very ‘good’ idea to sections of the Third Reich? Or even the idea of ‘genocide’ in general which has its adherents in various parts of the world? Or the ideas that cite violence, hatred and ruin, yet have enthusiastic supporters who all think they are ‘good’ and exactly what the world needs?

I’m sure you agree that letting these ideas ‘play in the marketplace’ is dangerous – the world may realize its mistake in the long run, but to quote Keynes, in the long run we’re all dead, and probably quite quickly so, if the crazies have their unfettered way.

So it seems to me, as in my earlier submission, that freedom of speech needs circumscribing – by laws, morality, principles of good behavior, whatever you choose to call it. Of course, the people who prescribe these things are not omniscient, and we will make mistakes on the way, but I think as long as we accept ‘Freedom of Speech’ as the principle we are guided by rather than a edict written in stone (and therefore inflexible and not amenable to newer prespectives:-)), we will be able to achieve a more balanced outcome.

Why is the decision taken by the market the best one? What if the market itself is a flawed conception? What if there is a system better than the market but the market is not letting it surface? Why should something that is decided by consensus (as in the case of a market) necessarily be ‘better’ than an idea which could gather no public support?

Why Free Speech
Confused | Culture & Society

Atanu Dey explains why. Infected with the ideas contained in a hateful book of ignorant rubbish, people [...]

Atanu’s response: Nope. They don’t have to think. They can continue to be un-thinking morons. No skin off my own back. I am just ranting because it amuses me. I am a spectator to the circus. I let the animals do what they please. It is entertaining to watch them. Anytime I wish, I can walk out and do something else.

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