Leon on Everything

Every Lebanese is an economist these days. At home and abroad, they are all proposing solutions to what has become the gravest economic crisis since the civil war’s devaluation of the Lira. The problem has lied dormant for years with the dollar peg which had been artificially maintained at 1500 Liras for 1 dollar. As most Lebanese have come to understand now, the peg was maintained by Lebanese and foreigners depositing their money in local banks for high-interest rates. In return for these, banks would buy high-interest bonds from the central bank (La Banque Du Liban). The latter would use the funds to perform forex operations to maintain the peg. All was well as long as the depositors thought that their money was safe in Lebanon and they kept pouring more money. But the same as a Ponzi scheme it was eventually going to collapse. I remember back in 2001 as a Sophomore at the American University of Beirut, taking my first ever economics class, the teacher – who only had a mas...

The crucible of an adult is how they deal with adversity. Life throws all sorts of disappointments and challenges our way. We should accept that as the nature of reality. No one is shielded from trauma. No one is shielded from sadness. We are introduced early on to death and understand that life will end in tragedy, whether we like it or not. We sometimes look at people from the other side of the fence and think, “Wow, they have got it made. They have a better job. They have more money. They have a better-looking girlfriend. They have healthy smart children”. And then look at ourselves and think we have so much less. Yet, we don’t see the adversity that those neighbors might face: death, disease, divorce, losing a job.   A Christian saying is that we should always be thankful for what we have, lest we anger God and see our lives take a turn for the worse. Some might ascribe this Christian thinking to the slave mentality that Nietzsche so railed ab...

A few weeks ago (or more) on a Thursday, a friend of mine who is also a colleague at work calls me up to hang out with him at night. Friday was going to be his last day at the firm, and as I was in Toronto, and so was he. He wanted to hang out and have a beer and talk about the good times and the not so good times. What the friend did not know was that I expected his call. The logical part of my brain knew that Friday was going to be his last day and that he would want to hang out before. But the illogical part was interpreting a dream I had the night before where I saw him talking to me about going out for a drink at night. This latter case is an example of what psychologist Carl Jung had called Synchronicity.  At some point in his career studying and curing mental illness, Carl Jung would succumb to insanity for a period. It might have been during this period or after it that he wrote about “synchronicity an acausal connecting principle.” He starts this short volume by reca...

Brutus orchestrated a plot to assassinate Caesar. One might think that he could have done otherwise - he could have had a change of heart; he could have remained loyal to Caesar, etc. But, according to Peter Van Inwagen (a twentieth-century Philosopher), if the laws of nature that govern our world are deterministic, then Brutus could not have done otherwise. First, let’s define our terms. Determinism is the idea that the universe unfolded in a completely predictable manner to some observer who is outside the universe. In other words, the initial state of the universe made sure that all subsequent states will occur. If you were to replay the tape of the universe, it would unfold in the same way. And this is due to the laws of physics that make sure that whatever happens will follow then and happen in the same way. We note that the predictability is to an outsider of the universe, as an agent in the universe would be able to predict its own actions and not take them, thus producing...

A stunning conclusion of 20 th -century philosophy is that there are properties in the world that are not amenable to scientific exploration. This conclusion sprang from the study of consciousness. We are all conscious, or so we believe. But this consciousness, this experience of being each one of us has so far escaped science. In fact, from a scientific perspective, it is just easy to imagine a functional human being without consciousness. The latter notion of a nonconscious functional human being is known as a Philosophical Zombie or P-Zombie. Such a P-Zombie as the thought experiment goes, acts just like a functional human being but doesn’t have consciousness. And from the perspective of science, it is impossible to tell the difference with a conscious human being. But what is consciousness? Frank Jackson, a 20 th -century philosopher, in one of his seminal papers, introduces this notion of Qualia. Qualia is the feeling that we humans (and probably animals) have of...