Doubt Rests

The Power of Flexibility

2011-04-17T22:05:00.000-07:00

All doctrines which rely upon ancient authority are doomed to obsolescence.

As an example, one of the most important advantages that a scientific outlook has over a religion-based one is its ability to admit it was wrong; that is, science has the ability to self-correct over time.* A venerable, successful religious tradition may have the weight of centuries behind it to speak in its favor; but that weight simultaneously forever hinders it, keeping it chained or rooted, as it were, in one spot. New scientific discoveries, however, can upset essentially any scientific knowledge that had preceded them, as long as the new theories and frameworks are compelling enough. It's hardly an overnight process--see the 20th century's resistance to quantum mechanics as an example--but science can "afford" to throw out anything as long as it has a suitable, stronger replacement. (It tends to be a further requirement that new discoveries explain old observations and show why old theoretical laws worked, of course.) Christianity, by contrast, cannot afford to throw out the belief that Jesus Christ was God's son, that he spoke God's words, that God's words are trustworthy, that our present texts are accurate reproductions of the originals, and all that. If one removes Christ from Christianity, the belief system reverts to Judaism. (Probably, that is; I'm sure this oversimplifies matters, but I think that's okay for my purposes. On the other hand, if they're fine leaving a large chunk of things unexplained, Christians could probably throw out most of the Old Testament without a problem; I personally suspect they'd be better off if they did so, but that's a discussion for another time.)

However, religious views don't have to be static, in a sense. Thanks to the exquisitely ambiguous nature of language and humanity's marvelous propensity for inventing alternative explanations, a faith's interpretations may change, while their holy sources remain unchanged. As science continues to undermine religious claims, this will more and more become the refuge of believers--that is, unless the public at large continues to ignore scientific knowledge whenever and wherever it pleases. As evolution attains greater and greater acceptance, Judeo-Christians turn toward interpreting Genesis in some kind of metaphoric or allegorical sense. (The future may yet hold some revision for the specifics of evolution, maybe even a somewhat drastic reconceptualization of it; but at the least, I'm very confident that there is no way a literal reading of the story of Creation can be true. Even if evolution is somehow radically undermined, it will be replaced by a theory very similar to it, and regardless, this theory will never accord with Genesis in a literal way.)

This illustrates the necessity of fluidity and open-mindedness in a world-view, even where non-scientific projects are concerned.** Science, philosophy, and flexible religious interpretations have the advantage over immutable fundamentalist faith because, well, all human knowledge is pretty fragile and subject to revision.‡ The times they are a-changin', and blind, continual adherence to any systems or traditions means being left in the dust.

This post isn't about religion, really; it's about one's ability and willingness to adapt to that which is new and unfamiliar. Faith's resistance to scientific (and social/moral, for that matter) developments is only a conspicuous example of failing to do so that's been strung out through history. In this post, I don't think I've covered very well just why adapting to new changes is desirable, but I hope that's intuitively obvious/self-evident to the reader.

The lesson to take away from this is a reminder not to get stuck in your ways, especially as the rate of social and technological change accelerates in today's world. This comic, though humorous, points out what could be a genuinely serious issue, as medical science extends the human lifespan.

{

Zach Weiner's "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal", #2184. Transcript:

NARRATOR: Good thing: someday, longevity will be discovered.

MAN: I'm gonna live forever!

NARRATOR: Bad thing: imagine having to deal with an ancestor from the 13th century.

13TH CENTURY MAN, TO IRRITATED MODERN WOMAN: We need to put a sticker in every astronomy text! The Copernican view is just a theory!

NARRATOR: Good thing: if it's discovered in your lifetime, you get to be the crazy ancestor.

FUTURISTIC MAN W/ WIFE: Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandpa! Stop using your ultraglasses to stare at my wife's boobs!

OLD MAN W/ FUTURISTIC GLASSES: That's how we did in the 21st century and I'm too old to change!

}

It is a sad fact that change happens most quickly and easily when an older generation dies out, and a newer generations's views become dominant. I think we want to avoid the "old racist/sexist/homophobe syndrome" at all costs; so it will be imperative that, if we do ever extend the human lifespan to much longer lengths, we do so with a society (a species, really) that is willing to be flexible and to adapt. (A global, or even nation-wide, shift in human thought is far too optimistic to hope for in reality, unfortunately, but we should strive toward that ideal nonetheless.)

Finally, let me supply a quote from Charles S. Peirce (I forget from where, exactly: it's in one of the Collected Papers):

When doubt ceases, mental action on [a] subject comes to an end; and, if it did go on, it would be without purpose.

---

* Forgive me for encouraging unnecessary dichotomies by pitting a "scientific" mindset against a "religious" one as though they were mutually exclusive, but I'm talking specifically about religious views that look to ancient texts and doctrines as sources of unchanging truth, in defiance of modern scientific discoveries.

** It amuses me that I follow dogmatic tendentious assertions about the falsity of Genesis with urgings toward "fluid" and "open minded" beliefs. There's some tension here: I will admit, yeah, it's possible something new could shake that ardent disbelief of mine. I just believe that possibility so unlikely as to be not worth discussing or considering as a serious option.

‡ Mathematical and logical truths may be an exception, but we must keep in mind that we can still be wrong about those truths due to misunderstanding them. At least, the more complicated ones. Furthermore, I'm sort of a formalist/constructivist hybrid, and I think that logical and mathematical necessity is necessary simply because we define it that way, except perhaps at the barest level. (Is it possible for a thing to not be itself? No, that's merely playing a game with semantics. I don't think all philosophical problems can be explained as nonsense-disguised-as-something-intelligible a la early Wittgenstein and the positivists; but for the most fundamental of logical questions, I do.)

Punishment and Justice

2011-02-26T20:41:00.001-08:00

What should we do with those who commit heinous crimes? What about those who commit minor crimes?

Punishment as a deterrent--like any overt deterrent, I suppose--functions as a threat. If you misbehave, you will be hurt or slain, or something will be taken from you. Yet that isn't where punishment ends, psychologically: people feel a rage towards particularly vile criminals, a rage that is more of a bloodlust or "righteous" fury than anything else. In these moments, the thinking is not, "We must make a warning to keep others from doing this", but rather, "That bastard must pay!"

Someone who hurts others deserves to be hurt themselves. When paired with the view that those who do good deserve good themselves, this sentence is a very near relative to the Golden Rule. We see the sentiment naturally manifested in the Judeo-Christian punishment of sinners and reward of believers, and indeed, in Jesus's famous explicit formulation of the Golden Rule. Hinduism's principle of karma is another example; even if it's not seen as a "punishment" per se by the Hindus, clearly it stems from the same sort of thinking. More recently, the neo-Pagan/Wiccan Rule of Three tells us that our decisions, beneficent or maleficent, will be visited upon us again, with threefold consequences.

Nietzsche described the general punishment urge in depressingly incisive terms:

... to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering—a real celebration, something that, as I’ve said, was valued all the more, the greater it contradicted the rank and social position of the creditor. [1]

I would quibble with him here about harming others being "the highest degree of pleasure" for most people, but I think the general gist of this passage is right. Causing others to suffer, in certain contexts, brings pleasure which is supposed to "make up" for wrongs perpetrated against oneself. (If "pleasure" is too strong a word, then "satisfaction" may be substituted, though mayhap that sugarcoats the situation too much.)

Considered less aesthetically and more economically, as it were, one gets the impression that there exists some metaphysical balance or scale, upon which doing wrong tilts the scale; and this tilting must be accounted for. "Harm" or "hurt" is the currency being weighed here, and so a person (or, more usually, a government) does what would normally be "wrong" to a criminal, and thus the upset scale is righted.

When generalized and made normative, we call this meting out of harm for harm "justice". For Western culture, Lady Justice (Justitia) symbolizes the concept quite plainly: she carries a scale of judgment and a sword, the first for determining where and how much harm to dole out, and the second for applying it. In "civilized" societies, now that we feel a conflict between wanting wrongdoers to suffer and squeemishness about the dirty work that that entails, we do not directly apply punishments ourselves; instead, we license a certain body of people--viz., the government and its police force--to enact the tenets of justice, which is to say, the tenets of reciprocity. Not literal reciprocity in the sense of an eye for an eye, of course; we are sufficiently advanced that we can invent substitutes and equivalents such as fines and imprisonment. Or, in some dire cases, the punishment probably exceeds the crime quite excessively.

Actually, the vast majority of crimes don't incite much ire (bloodlust) in the average citizen, because the vast majority of crimes are misdemeanors that do not directly harm individuals.[2] Jay walking; smoking cigarettes in a non-smoking area; smoking marijuana; downloading and sharing copyrighted material illegally on the internet; most other forms of copyright infringement; violating the terms of agreement in a competition or an online game by cheating; minor speeding or another small traffic offence; violating a zoning ordinance, that sort of thing. While opponents of drug use agree abstractly that smoking marijuana deserves punishment, I do not think they actively feel rage when they see or hear of such use, as long as it is not, say, "contributing to their children's delinquency". Players of an online game may feel that cheaters should be banned from the game--and in a fit of passion, perhaps more than that--but they typically do not believe that cheaters should be fined or locked up. (Indeed, perhaps these aren't even "misdemeanors" or "infractions", although most of the time legal agreements have clearly been broken.)

Along the continuum of wrongdoing, two things influence a bloodthirsty emotional reaction: personal impact, which is to say, how much an individual is personally affected by it, and severity or depravity of the crime. The former is more of a selfish thing, perhaps, insofar as we tend to care less about vandalism when it is not our very own property or part of a public space we care about. The latter is more universal or normative insofar as we can be riled up by hearing about child molesters, serial killers, or any perpetrator who inspires serious revulsion in us in spite of our own lack of personal investment in the matter.

[1] The Genealogy of Morals, more specifically the online edition here, because I'm lazy. Second essay, §6.

[2] "Misdemeanor" may not be the appropriate legal term here. "Infraction" or "regulatory offence" might be better. I should also add that whether another person is directly harmed or not can be argued in each of the following examples, but hopefully you can put that aside or mentally substitute your preferred examples as necessary.

That Initial Impulse

2011-02-12T02:27:00.000-08:00

A common focus among my posts on this blog is that of the need for a ground (or substrate), broadly construed, upon which other concepts or items may be "built". Indeed, the name of this blog itself indicates as much; part of its meaning comes from a statement of Wittgenstein's in On Certainty: "Doubt rests upon that which is beyond doubt."

In epistemology, we want a fundamental, solid basis for knowledge: the indubitable, or the undoubtable. Analogously, in metaphysics, we have the need for something that sit in the spot of "prime mover": an uncaused cause (causa sui), the First Cause, God. In ethics, we need to know what can possibly justify objective moral imperatives when every value judgment is, apparently, subjective. (To refer to this notion of a "first thing" in general, I will use the general term "ultimate ground".)

In a digression, I note that these problems are not what typically occupy philosophers as professionals. I don't mean that the whole of each field in philosophy drives only toward finding an ultimate ground. Rather, while a philosopher's personal sense of ultimate grounds or justifications may be upset when she first begins studying skepticism and/or thinking critically about her own experience, usually this problem is eventually settled or ignored in favor of "higher level" concerns later on. There may be good reason for that: once you cover the basics, is there a lot else to say? And there is certainly no shortage of richer philosophical veins to mine elsewhere, once you accept something as given, like, "We do have knowledge of some sort, even if it is not and cannot be 'perfect'", or "Ethical systems can be evaluated in some kind of objective way", etc. Yes, maybe the skeptics are right that nothing meets their impeccably high standards, but that doesn't suddenly render thought, learning, and acting useless.

My main point--which may end up taking less time to say than the above digression--is that there is an analogous apparent absence within our psyches with respect to personal agency. At least, within my psyche: perhaps the rest of you are different. Anyhow, when I introspect, I notice a distinction between mental activity that feels constitutive of me as an individual person, and that which seems more incidental (or "accidental", if you like). For example, the thoughts I hold now, the ones inspiring these very words, fit the former category. The sensations from external (and some internal) stimuli that I experience at every moment fit the latter category, e.g., my experience of a glowing screen upon which words appear.

Now, the thing that strikes me as highly peculiar is the palpable lack of an ultimate ground in all of this. For incidental experiences, that makes sense: most or all of them originate from outside of me, so I can safely presume that any such ground lies "out there" as well. But when it comes to constitutive (we might also say integral) mental activity, I have a very strong sense of personal agency and thus responsibility; that is to say, I subjectively feel like "I" am the origin of such things. When I make a decision, any kind of conscious decision, I feel like I am a mini prime mover (c.f. Chisholm on free will and unmoved movers). But, in fact, under scrutiny, I can find no ultimate ground within me for decision nor motivation. Even though I feel in control of myself, even though I feel that I am the "first" in a chain of causality or what-have-you, closer inspection reveals no such basis within me.

And that strikes me as unusual.

Hunting Contradictions

2011-01-13T15:55:00.000-08:00

In the context of time (temporality), change may be characterized by a fact or state of affairs holding at some time t which does not hold at some other time t'. That is to say, at t=0, proposition P is true; but at t+1, P is not true. From this, we may say time "allows" a contradiction (P&~P) to exist by spreading it out: the conflicting natures of P and ~P may coexist as long as they are "side by side" and not in the "same place", temporally.

With the above scare-quotes, I meant to emphasize the use of spatial metaphor in characterizing time; and this leads directly to the other pathway toward contradiction. A proposition and its contrary may exist simultaneously if they are separated from one another spatially; and this is such a natural part of existence that we hardly ever think of it. Expressed more intuitively, this simply means that things are different, when you look around yourself. The universe is not 100% homogeneous. Expressed a bit more formally, we say that (P&~P) can obtain at one and the same time t, if P and ~P occur respectively in different spatial regions.

In short, I am saying that contradictions are apparently possible when they are separated by space or time; that is, when they do not share identical space-time coordinates.

A counter question, however, is whether these are really "contradictions" if specified precisely enough. Suppose one says, "The space-time point (x,y,z,t) is [tense-lessly] filled (by some entity)".* If one pose against it the statement, "The space-time point (x,y,z,t) is empty", there is nowhere left "to go" in order to escape contradiction. To allow contradictions, according to my foregoing claims, one proposition must vary in time or space from another; but since we have exactly specified identical space-time coordinates, the contradiction is impossible. (This follows, at least in spirit, Quine's comments on temporal logic.)

* I seem to recall that some philosopher or other popularized the use of several tense-less terms and syntaxes, but I have no idea who it was or what the details of it are, now. I would be much obliged if anyone could point me in the right direction.

So, in response to the above question, I actually must agree: if we prevent them from "colliding", contradictions aren't really contradictions after all. This is trivially true, and hardly new information, but I like to think I have presented a slightly different framework for thinking about the matter.

A more interesting question might be, "Does this apply to all propositions?" I think the answer must be an assured "No", because not all propositions have to do with space-time per se, and thus this avenue of approach is not available. For example, "1=1" seems to be a general claim, without reference to any particulars, and it is hard to see how we could situate such a claim in the above schemes.

I think we can fairly safely conclude that a "robust" or fully specified contradiction is impossible, simply by definition; but we may be led to wonder whether there aren't other "channels" beyond the four of space-time which one might slide along to allow apparent contradictions. It strikes me that, should we ever somehow encounter a "real life contradiction" or paradox (whatever that would be like), we could, and likely would, posit a new channel of metaphorical space in which the contradictory elements could be separated. (We may speak of these as "dimensions", but I am cautious of using that word thanks to its abuse by overly enthusiastic New Age sorts and science fiction writers.)

A Somewhat Angsty Phenomenological Take on Reality

2010-07-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

What is real? "Real" is that which imposes metaphysical order on all of our capacities (faculties) without our consent; and it is that which, furthermore, has the power to end our consciousness permanently.

I admit, it's not a terribly clear characterization.

Perhaps a simpler way to say it is, "From the personal perspective, the bare minimum of identifiably objective reality consists of that which is not amenable to change through our actions."

Still a problematic assertion. After all, I can never control another being's thoughts the way I can control my own--do we say that those thoughts are part of objective reality? Are their personal sensations a part as well?

I would say not, although the fact of their having those sensations is obviously an objective fact. It is the representational content of their sensations that may not map perfectly onto reality, e.g. when they are dreaming, imagining, or hallucinating. (That is to say, their experiences at a given moment may not be veridical.)

More confusingly, it might seem that we can change many things that we normally think of as objective. E.g., it is an objective fact that the brick wall over there is red (which we may translate to language that makes less use of second-order properties: "the wall over there reflects a majority of light with such and such a wavelength", for example). But, I can change that fact through my personal actions, by painting it green. So was it never an objective fact that the wall was red, after all?

Not exactly. I'm trying to get at something a little more fundamental. While it is true that you can change an object's color by painting it, you nevertheless cannot violate the laws of physics nor logic in doing so. With that in mind, what I'm saying seems to be this: the fundamental "building blocks" of reality, from a personal perspective, are impossibilities, which is to say, invariants.

Hmmm....

This is still a very problematic description.

More About People Misjudging Themselves

2010-06-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

The Philosopher's Eye reports:

Chances are, you will be a less reliable indicator of your own behavior than a brain scan will...

... [A] research team, led by Matthew Lieberman, a psychology professor at UCLA, had subjects watch a public service announcement about the benefits of sunscreen while in an fMRI machine. The researchers looked for an increase in activity of the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with values, preferences, and self-reflection. Then, the researchers asked the subjects how likely they were to use more sunscreen during the upcoming week. After one week, the subjects were asked how often they ended up using sunscreen.

What the researchers found was that the subjects who showed an increase in medial prefrontal cortex activity were 75% more likely to use sunscreen, whereas the subjects who self-reported the intention to use more sunscreen were only about 50% more likely to do so. Thus, the researchers had better information about how the subjects would behave during the upcoming weeks than the subjects themselves.

Here is a link to the original research (also found in the Philosopher's Eye page, of course.)

Thinking vs Acting

2010-05-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

I still don't understand exactly the "internal" difference between doing and just..... thinking about doing. Imagining it.

If I now intend to make a physical action, such as wiggle one of my toes, there's something happening in my mind that precedes that action--an anticipatory "planning" or intention stage. (If I remember correctly, studies by Benjamin Libet suggest that we don't even become conscious of our brain's decision to initiate an action until some 200-500ms after our brain starts setting it in motion.) But I can think about wiggling a toe without actually doing it--in fact, that's what I'm doing now as I make these observations, and what you the reader will likely be doing as these words call forth involuntary recollections in your mind. I can imagine wiggling a toe, even. Since most of us are such visual creatures, this will probably be first and foremost a mentally created image of my own toe wiggling (somehow); as I add detail to the imagining, I can recall the other sensations that accompany such a feat: the quale of my toe shifting position, the accompanying movement of my skin, the small shifts in texture or whatever that my skin will register if my movement causes it to encounter new surfaces/objects, etc.

I can even try to mentally re-create (simulate) the very willing, or whatever it is, that causes genuine movement. I can do this at a somewhat intuitive level, I think, but I feel I have a very poor grasp on what is actually happening.

Now, the curious thing about my imaginings here, is that imagining itself is another type of action; so, while I'm tinkering with how my mind translates thought into action, I am meanwhile doing just that in order to "experiment" at all. (Proper scientists will be horrified to here such phenomenological investigation referred to as "experimentation", but hey, I'm not talking about proper scientific experiments in this context.)

It seems that there is always some kind of buffer or gap that I cannot quite cross here.

Probably makes me laugh more than it ought to have

2010-02-06T18:36:00.001-08:00

A parenthetical comment in a recent blog post from Ben Burgis:

Some friends of mine have this very nerdy running joke about starting a bar called "The Two Dogmas Of Alcoholism." We'd serve a shot called "The Analytic" and a shot called "The Synthetic" and both of them would be Jose Cuervo. When patrons had one of each and then asked what the difference was, the bar-tenders would all be trained to respond with, "ex-actly!"

I'd be a fan.

Opaque Introspection

2009-11-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, Psyblog posted a series called "What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds". Appropriately enough, it covers different ways in which humans typically completely misunderstand (or misjudge) components of their own behavior such as motivations, reasons, and predictions about their own responses. Sometimes this involves resolving cognitive dissonance, where a subject changes some of her beliefs in order to better match other beliefs they had been opposing; other times the explanation is less clear.

The whole subject is a curious one, since, subjectively, most of us feel like we have pretty transparent access to the inside of our own heads. For example, if asked to give reasons why we find one face more attractive than another, we usually think we can do so so; and we feel moreover that the reasons we come up with will be true to whatever processes actually go on inside our heads. Not so, as one of the Psyblog posts reports; at least not with the accuracy that we'd think we would have.

My impression is that we are sometimes alien to our own minds, insofar as we don't understand most of our inner machinations. Yet, strangely, we have this need to "tell stories", even to ourselves, about why we've done things a particular way: a need for explanation or justification of our inner landscape, much in the fashion of the need that we have to explain (and understand) the outer world. This isn't such a bad thing, since seeking explanations is the heart of science (and rational inquiry). But it does emphasize the necessity of being relentlessly critical and skeptical if your aim is truth -- skeptical even about your own thought processes -- lest you settle too firmly on the first story that seems plausible to you.

A downside of the above skeptical strategy, in my own experience, is that it tends to drive you a little bit crazy. Constantly doubting your own motivations, values, judgments, and ostensible motivations is not a very enjoyable way to go about your day. After a certain point, if you lose too much faith in your own understanding with regard to the contents of your own head, you may end up impeding your own progress, due to constantly looking for nonexistent solid ground. From a practical "getting things done" standpoint, it may be better to be wrong about a few little details here and there if you're still able to function well in the main.

We may suppose, perhaps, that this was why we did not evolve to be more naturally self-critical and self-reflective creatures. Don't get me wrong, compared to any other form of intelligence that we know about, we still go pretty far toward it -- even the least reflective of individuals tries to purge logical inconsistencies from her thoughts, though the amount of tolerance for inconsistency obviously varies from person to person. But, based on experiments like those linked above, plausible-seeming beliefs about your own motivations were evolutionarily much more relevant to fitness than numerous safeguard mechanisms to ensure internal accuracy. Apparently.

Markram Speaks On Simulating the Brain

2009-11-11T14:04:00.000-08:00

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project, (relatively recently) gave a speech at TED about simulating neuron activity of the entire brain. This will require a supercomputer, in this case supplied by IBM, since the brain has some 10¹¹ neurons. So far, they've replicated a rat's neocortical column, which comprises some 10⁴ neurons, and Markram anticipates being able to fully model the human brain within 10 years.

One of the curious things that I found in the early part of his talk was how he kept saying "decisions" to refer to activity over which we have no direct control, such as the processing that goes into scaling object size based on distance. I'm not fond of that choice of words, since it seems to suggest that we, as conscious entities, could actually decide to perceive things differently from how we do -- something which should appeal to fans of neo-mystical idealism. For that reason, I think it would be better to avoid that kind of terminology to avoid a similar confusion as that which resulted from physicists' choice of the term "observe" to describe a particular type of interaction in quantum mechanics. They (physicists) also started the use of "God particle" to refer to the Higgs boson, which is again misleading to the general public, although I think the media has been more responsible for propagating that usage than any actual scientists.

Curious things, words.

Inquiry Into Impossibility

2009-11-10T04:22:00.000-08:00

(Briefly).

I am a being with desires. Roughly, this means that I, as a sentient system, feel impelled to relieve an urge. So, I create a mental simulation of some thing, some state of affairs that differs from the current state of the world, that I expect (or hope) will alleviate that urge.

A simple example: Debra is hungry. Instinct and memory tell her that moving her body so as to bring comestibles to her mouth and chew (+ swallow, etc.) will make her less hungry. Thus, her object of desire is a state where she has eaten food, or where her stomach is full, or something to that effect.

The fundamental principle, as everyone already knows, is that actions modify our environment, and our bodies consequently reward us – with dopamine and the diminishment of urge – through modifying the environment in particular ways.

What happens, now, if I desire something impossible?

Let me sit and contemplate a bowl of fruit. My desire is for one of the fruit – a mango, perhaps – to be in my hand. I have, then, a clearly defined goal (a simulated aspect of the environment which will sate my want), and all that remains is to use the power of action to translate object of desire into actuality. Common sense says I should move myself within range of the bowl (if I'm not there already), extend an arm, and pick it up. However, my desire is slightly more complex than that: I want to achieve my goal without going through those steps. Part of my envisioned goal includes the condition that I collect the mango in the absence of gross physical movement.

There might be other options: maybe I have a friend (or servant) nearby who will interpret a very slight gesture on my part as a request for the mango. Or maybe there's a mechanical hand and conveyor belt set up that leads directly to my own biological hand, and it is activated through some minute action – moving my eyes or blinking in a particular pattern, for example.

But let's say none of these things have been arranged: the most likely situation is that I'm sitting in place alone, unaided, merely willing the mango to somehow appear in my hand through no great effort of my own.

That this should happen is improbable to the point of impossibility.

So, I review my options: supposing that I stubbornly stick to my original constraints (no gross physical movement), there is little to nothing that I can do to change the situation. To effect change, action is required; and only a particular subset of available actions leads to particular (desired) outcomes. If the set of actions-available-to-me happens to be disjoint to the set of actions-leading-to-my-goal, it seems I am utterly powerless. There must be overlap between those categories, otherwise it is logically impossible for me to achieve my goal through action.

Is there any other way to achieve a goal than through action? By the very nature of the word "achieve", I think the answer is no. Is it possible for me to accomplish something while doing nothing? Pace Laozi, the very idea reeks of contradiction. "But," I protest, "I am doing something – I'm thinking and simulating." The problem is that, apparently, thinking and simulating exert no influence on the universe if they are not accompanied by physical forces to realize their aims. Alone, they do not overlap with very many sets of actions-that-lead-to-goals at all.

How can I shape the universe to match my desires? Only through the channels that the universe allows me. And so the question becomes, how can I change those channels?

Science/Philosophy discussion on PF

2009-11-04T05:11:00.001-08:00

Looks to be a very fascinating discussion about science and philosophy shaping up on the Philosophy Forums. At least, fascinating for my tastes, since I'm perennially interested in the question of what use philosophy really is these days compared to science.

Anyway, the thread starts out by directing several questions to John Searle (who is actually a member of the forums, although I suspect far too busy to be very active). Searle himself did give one response, but since then the thread's been drawing other participants; nonetheless, so far it has been a high caliber and well-reasoned discussion, by my estimation.

Here's a sample to whet your appetite, from the original poster (HamishMacSporran)'s response to Searle's own response:

... [M]any scientists take the view that the scientific revolution was made possible not by an accumulation of philosophical analysis, but instead by a rejection of the existing philosophical systems in favour of a new experimental method. From this point of view, scientists don't need philsophers [sic] to do their groundwork for them, but should instead ignore their clever arguments and focus on doing experiments. Hence the motto of the Royal Society, "Take nobody's word for it".

...

You [Searle] also raise the issue of computationalism within cognitive science, and your arguments against it. Whatever their merits, these arguments have not led to a conclusive rejection of computationalism. Dennett, for example, continues to deny your conclusions are valid, and the mind as a computer program metaphor continues to be common currency among cognitive scientists.

To many scientists this is just another symptom of philosophy's malaise: nothing ever gets resolved. That's why, instead of arguing for another thousand years about whether universals exist, they believe they need to focus on questions that can be definitively answered by experiment, with some even claiming that questions outside this domain are meaningless.

Does the computationalist hypothesis really have any experimental implications for cognitive scientists? What effects would you expect your arguments to have on a cognitive scientists research program? Are there benefits of philosophical dispute even in the case that no definite conclusion is reached?

Philosophy as counter-productive in a therapeutic sense?

2009-10-23T05:41:00.001-07:00

From Irvin D. Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy:

As nature abhors a vacuum, we humans abhor uncertainty. One of the tasks of the therapist is to increase the patient's sense of certainty and mastery. It is a matter of no small importance that one be able to explain and order the events in our lives into some coherent and predictable pattern. To name something, to locate its place in a causal sequence, is to begin to experience it as under our control. No longer, then, is our internal experience or behavior frightening, alien or out of control; instead, we behave (or have a particular inner experience) because of something we can name or identify. The '"because" offers one mastery (or a sense of mastery that phenomenologically is tantamount to mastery). [pp. 189-190]

Does the study of philosophy, I wonder, run counter to that need we have for certainty? Or on the contrary, does it perhaps assist it? After all, though philosophy does not provide us with cut-and-dry answers, and its study exacerbates our awareness of the human's dismal epistemic and existential plight, nonetheless any sort of rational investigation (of which philosophy purports to be the discipline par excellance) will invariably encompass the latter part of Yalom's quote, viz., the bit about "naming" and explaining/ordering events.

The Ancients make for a good example here: reducing the physical world's phenomena to a limited number of substances--e.g. fire/change for Heraclitus, water for Thales, air for Anaximenes, all four elements for Empedocles--allows the more succinct and manageable comprehension of that world. Rational reductionism of all shades and hues affords a better sense of psychological certainty, and consequently an increased feeling of "mastery". Science, as the eventual granddaughter of this impulse, performs the same function, although our methods have since grown much more mathematical and empirical.

But by no means ought we think this strategy unique to science and philosophy. Human mythology is cross-culturally rife with proposed explanations for phenomena ("just so" stories). Tellingly, many of them explicitly exalt the importance of words and naming in the development of humanity. For current Euro-American culture, most obviously we see Adam's naming of the beasts in Genesis. Sigmund Freud asserted that religion attempts to reconcile our needs for control against the volatile chaos of nature: if the natural world is controlled utterly by a superior being who acts as a father for us, we are thus assured that there is order lurking behind ostensible chaos; and, more importantly, it is an order with our own best interests in mind (eventually, that is. Because God's will is inscrutable and ineffable, we must accept that bad things will happen to us in the now). Finally, it is an order which is not set forever in stone, but an order which may be bargained with and appealed to, since it is ruled fundamentally by a person of sorts, not by a blind, unintelligent, and uncaring force. (The "Communication/Negotiation" section of my post "The Immutability of Vicissitudes, Part 1" addresses this too.)

It may in fact be fruitful to analyze the scientific thirst for knowledge in light of psychoanalytical need for control, and I am positive that I'm not the first to suggest this. We might say that science-lust is an extension of Freud's interpretation of religion: science serves similar psychological needs, although it requires a deep paradigm shift as well. The scientific Weltanschauung does not privilege humanity by pretending that the universe operates in humanity's best interest, nor does it offer us a kindly father-figure. However, it does give us an explanation--an understanding of order inherent behind the horrible confusions nature presents us with; and it supplies us, through understanding, with a means to combat our own helplessness.

Thus, science may be seen nearly as an outgrowth of religion (more properly, the religious impulse); but it is one that replaces an anthropomorphic epistemology with a mechanical epistemology. As Quine said of physical objects and gods,

Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. ["Two Dogmas of Empiricism"]

That is to say, we put forth the common understanding of physical objects (as opposed to the skeptic's or the idealist's) as an explanation for our collected observations in the same way that, and for similar reasons as, our ancestors put forth gods. However, gods are not very good explanations and they do not enable us to do things the way that believing in the reality of physical objects do; hence their (physical objects') epistemic superiority.

Though we cannot appeal to a God anymore, science does furnish us with a means to control nature ourselves, which is something that religion and mythology could never adequately supply. From this we get the term "playing God" and our species' tradition of shunning technological progress for the power it takes away from God. Now, the contemporary existentially-minded human finds herself sitting down in God's throne after having killed Him, and she finds herself terrified by the loneliness, the lack of direction, and the growing awareness that, if God had ever existed, He wouldn't have been any better off than she is now.

So, all respect due to Boethius, is philosophy actually a consolation? Cautiously, I say that it can be; but I hasten to add that stopping there is woefully (and willfully?) near-sighted. Rational inquiry enables us to satisfy some of the needs Yalom detailed above in a similar capacity that religion has served past-ly. Unfortunately, we no sooner find a good reason to believe something than we recognize that there can be no absolute certainty (in a broad sense). Naming (and, these days, quantifying) the surrounding world is a valuable ability, but the relentless and open-eyed pursuit of exhaustive naming schemes leads one to the conclusion that such things are impossible--and that certainty is more so.

(It seems to me that Mark Z. Danielewski deals with these themes among others in his novel House of Leaves, although I may not be able to say exactly how.)

Link Dump

2009-09-28T22:07:00.001-07:00

So here are some blog entries (or whatever) I have recently found interesting.

At Theoretical Atlas, Jeffrey Morton recounts a talk given by Gregory Chaitin where Chaitin urges us to create a more rigorous "theoretical biology". Something where we could prove interesting theorems about evolutionary models, for example.

At (Blog&~Blog), Ben Burgis writes a bit about Graham Priest's Sylvan's Box story and the (im)plausibility of drawing conclusions about "real life" logic from the logic that exists in fiction.

Alan Rhoda discusses the Law of Excluded Middle in the context of propositions about the future, responding to an example supplied by David Hunt.

This is a somewhat older paper (1997) by Allen F. Randall entitled "Quantum Phenomenology". He attempts something of an updated version of Descartes' cogito (maybe mixed with Kant's transcendental project), attempting to logically derive the principles of quantum mechanics from the basic awareness of experiential existence (my phrase, not Randall's). Randall claims, "Far from being "bizarre" and "weird", as is usually thought, the strangest paradoxes of quantum theory turn out to be just what one ought to expect of a rational universe." I admit, I've only read the first part of this paper, but it's still a very fascinating idea.

At Mixing Memory, Chris reports on several studies where unpleasant stimuli (such as foul odors, messy/sloppy workspaces, disgusting video footage) harshen the severity of people's moral judgments.

Why we're here

2009-07-04T04:34:00.000-07:00

It doesn't seem as though the universe should exist. It is common to think there should be a reason--a truthmaker--for why the universe exists as opposed to not existing.

Which is a mighty peculiar thing, since we've certainly never had any observations of a non-existent universe, nor can we even properly imagine it (in my opinion). All we have is the assumption that the pre-natal and natural state of anything is non-existence, or absence; accordingly, there must be something else, some kind of metaphysical mechanism, that causes that non-existence to become existence.

This stems from our observations about causality, perhaps coupled with innate physical intuitions. Maybe it isn't so peculiar to have this belief, then, since every time that we witness an effect in everyday life, it is preceded (anteceded) by a cause. Hence cosmological arguments; hence the conclusion that there must have been either a single "unmoved mover" or an infinite chain of antecedent causes to explain the universe's existence. Well, that or the universe shouldn't exist at all, being causeless.

I wonder if we're really justified in this conclusion. We have never witnessed something come from nothing (which is presumably what must have happened when a pure void became material substance?) but then... we have truthfully never witnessed "nothing". As our scientific instruments grow more and more powerful, we end up discovering that even that which has appeared empty before--vacuums, space--is nonetheless filled with a frothing mass of virtual particles and other bizarre fauna of the micro-universe. (See, e.g., this Wikipedia article on the vacuum state).

And if there is always something there materially... I guess then we have to suppose that those minute, practically non-existent material bits must be able to exert causal influence on other bits of matter. In that case, how can we be sure that it's even physically possible for the universe (or at least matter) not to exist? Maybe it is logically possible, infosofar as we can imagine it (which I have my doubts about, as I said before). Metaphysically possible? Hmmm....

Consider another Easter egg laid by the goose of science: the first law of thermodynamics. The total amount of energy in an isolated system must remain constant, though it may change form. (Similarly so with physical information, as came up in the black hole information paradox. I believe the conservation of one quantitiy--information or energy--may be derived from the other.) If the universe is an isolated system, and if we presume that this law holds invariably, then we must conclude that the universe has always existed--or rather that the energy within it has always existed, which is close enough for our purposes, since energy may be converted to matter.

Thus, the laws of physics do not allow the energy of the universe to come into or out of existence--thus, we must presume it has always existed.

But then, all I'm doing is shifting the question back a step. Now we ask instead, "Why is it that the total energy in the universe equals a positive value, not a zero or negative value?"

I don't know. Should we expect there to be a reason that gravity exists? That time exists? Some physicists do look for causes there, I suppose. And to a certain degree, we may get explanations about gravity and other forces as they (we think) split off from a single unified source in the very early universe. Still, if we accept that laws or forces need no justification for their existence, maybe we shouldn't expect a justification for the existence of energy either?

Edit as of 07-05-2009: I should clarify that under some theories, the total energy of the universe actually does add up to zero; it just that the way it's distributed gives us the material and energy formations we're used to. (I think gravity is typically suggested as the negative counterpart for the energy released during the Big Bang. Here's a handy and relevant (though brief) link for further reading).

Controlling oneself

2009-06-26T19:02:00.001-07:00

Fascinating post over at Less Wrong about the influence of control systems on human behavior, and the role they seem to play in the brain. A control system here basically means a feedback device that catalyzes or inhibits some variable in order to maintain it within an accepted range. (Thermostat, homeostasis, etc.)

Here's a lengthy quote that seems most pertinent to me:

In a primitive, tribal culture, being seen as useless to the tribe could easily be a death sentence, so we [likely] evolved mechanisms to avoid giving the impression of being useless. A good way to avoid showing your incompetence is to simply not do the things you're incompetent at, or things which you suspect you might be incompetent at and that have a great associated cost for failure. If it's important for your image within the tribe that you do not fail at something, then you attempt to avoid doing that.

You might already be seeing where this is leading. The things many of us procrastinate on are exactly the kinds of things that are important to us. We're deathly afraid of the consequences of what might happen if we fail at them, so there are powerful forces in play trying to make us not work on them at all. Unfortunately, for beings living in modern society, this behavior is maladaptive and buggy. It leads to us having control circuits which try to keep us unproductive, and when they pick up on things that might make us more productive, they start suppressing our use of those techniques.

Furthermore, the control circuits are stupid. They are occasionally capable of being somewhat predictive, but they are fundamentally just doing some simple pattern-matching, oblivious to deeper subtleties. They may end up reacting to wholly wrong inputs. Consider the example of developing a phobia for a particular place, or a particular kind of environment. Something very bad happens to you in that place once, and as a result, a circuit is formed in your brain that's designed to keep you out of such situations in the future. Whenever it detects that you are in a place resembling the one where the incident happened, it starts sending error signals to get you away from there. Only that this is a very crude and unoptimal way of keeping you out of trouble - if a car hit you while you were crossing the road, you might develop a phobia for crossing the road. Needless to say, this is more trouble than it's worth.

(P.S., I should note that the author of the quoted blog post, Kaj_Sotala, draws this conceptual material largely from a self-help article by PJ Eby).

Fascinating stuff. Maybe not without its problems though, as commenter Silas Barta notes:

The explanations here for behavioral phenomena look like commonsense reasoning that is being shoehorned into controls terminology by clever relabeling. (ETA: Why do you need the concept of a "feedback control system" to think of the idea of running through the reasons you're afraid of something, for example?)

The thought concerns me a bit too. Are we really getting any benefit from describing these aspects of behavior as control mechanisms? Are we getting a more accurate model of behavior? At an individual, practical level, does it help us to conceive of our thought processes in this way?

"Following From" Addendum

2009-06-18T02:03:00.000-07:00

Ah, this is a perfect example of why I should actually read philosophical work that has already been done on subjects that I wonder about.

My last post, Following From, concerned itself (loosely, and among other things) with the nature of metaphysical laws. However, I uncritically assumed a view analogous to the regularity theory of laws of nature--as opposed to the necessitarian theory. That is, I took it for granted that laws (though of course I have in mind metaphysical laws, not just those in the physical world) are simply descriptions of behavior rather than forces which "govern" or "command" objects to act in particular ways.

Yet, while I took the regularity view for granted, I speculated about what it is that "causes" or "makes" things behave the way they do, while at the same time rejecting the necessitarian view which would--we hope--give just that kind of explanation. Now, this isn't really a solution to whatever problem I had in mind, because I would still be inclined to ask of necessitarians, "But what, in turn, makes necessitarian laws hold the sway they do?", thus leading us obnoxiously into a typical infinite regress. But my point is that if I'd already been aware of these existing philosophical positions, and read at least a modicum about them, I would have had a basis from which to work when asking my own questions--it may not have furnished me with answers right off the bat, but I believe that marking this distinction has helped to clarify the matter in my mind.

Following From

2009-06-17T07:18:00.000-07:00

[I wish that I had the interest/dedication to actually pursue these thoughts more rigorously by studying existent philosophical work on the topic, but alas.]

Consider a state governed by absolutely no physical or metaphysical laws. Does this mean anything can happen? Or for "something to happen", does that require that there be something to guide or direct "happenings"?

Natural laws, of course, probably don't "guide" action by any means. They're simply descriptions of how phenomena behave. But... how do phenomena "know" how to behave? What makes them behave in a particular way versus some other way?

I suppose I'm inquiring about how causation works in general--what exactly goes on when some observed or postulated event (which we call the antecedent) is supposed to cause, or in some way be responsible for, another event (the consequent). (As a side note, "event" is too loose of a term. Really, I suppose I mean "states of affairs" or "sets of circumstances" that obtain at a certain point in time. But event is a bit quicker to write, and most of the discussion examples that I can think of are events in the more standard sense too.)

If nothing else, we can at least say that human minds (and thus what we call rational thought) work best thinking under the following paradigm: to understand how/why a circumstance came to be, the circumstance must have followed from, or been enabled by, a pre-existing framework. {{And it is this necessity of thought unchecked that Kant rebukes in his Critique. The search for the unconditioned condition--a final explanation--the prime mover--God--is an attempt to step outside of the infinite regress that otherwise results, and thus to give us a circumstance which needs no further explanation. Kant (perhaps rightfully) claims that reason oversteps its justifiable boundaries when it tries to make this move.}} This paradigm seems to have served us fairly faithfully so far, but we cannot nonetheless discount the possibility that this fundamental "strategy" of thought might be flawed. {{As you will notice, the current topic is regrettably plagued by difficulty (impossibility?) of discussion. Like many other areas of philosophy, we are trying to grapple with notions that extend into the core of our most basic assumptions, and even trying to think about them will be difficult, much less to question their "accuracy".}}

What, however, does any of this mean? The ideas I suggest now may be completely nonsensical, possibly incoherent as well. And surely there is nothing to be gained by indulging nonsense.

I believe the question ties into (is enrooted in?) regress and the problem of finding first causes. Which in its own way mirrors the confusing interrelationship between objectivity and subjectivity.

Systemic Therapy

2009-06-05T00:05:00.001-07:00

Holy cripes, there's a form of psychotherapy based off of cybernetics / systems theory?

Crazy. I doubt it's as cool as it sounds to me, and really I don't even know that much about the aforementioned subjects, but I really like the idea of understanding a psychosocial situation in terms of interacting systems.

Want? Choice?

2009-05-21T03:45:00.000-07:00

Why is it so hard to be a particular way by choice?

Why is it that I cannot simply decide one day, hey, I want to accomplish X--and then pursue it?

Nothing prevents me.

Akrasia...?

Probability - BAH!

2009-05-16T18:10:00.000-07:00

Yes.

Something vaguely bothers me about probability and the overall use of statistics as means for projecting and collecting data. And not just the fact that I find it harder to understand them than I believe I should, considering how comparatively simple their application and execution is.

I can't quite articulate what it is yet, and in any case it's likely that my worries here are pretty groundless, as with the concerns I've felt about other aspects of science and mathematics. But hey, the investigation is the fun part, right? And I truly seem to learn the most easily when I'm mentally "assailing" a position: hunting for weak points, discrepancies, internal conflicts, etc.

Cats and the Qualia of Happiness

2009-05-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

My cat, having satisfied himself with the food available indoors, ambles back to the door and sits expectantly. He'll look up at the portal, look around, look at me occasionally. If I draw close, he'll rise up and paw the side of the door, possibly rub himself against me, make movements that seem to express a readiness to go forth. He meows on occasion, if the exit remains barred for too long.

As near as I can tell, he experiences a desire to go outside.

Would he feel pleasure from his desire being fulfilled, or would he simply feel relief from the pressing urge?

Why Do People Do Bad Things?

2009-04-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

A question that has troubled humankind for as long as we've been able to formulate it, no doubt.

Let us consider a moral agent, Agent Q. (Not 007, no.)
Q commits an immoral act B (B for bad. Or maybe for /b/.).

Possibilities:

Q performs B because she doesn't know any better. She may have no conception or understanding of morality, or at least not the required kind of morality at hand here. Perhaps she is an animal or mindless drone and not a moral agent at all.
Q performs B but does not believe it is wrong. This is basically a variation of 2, only now I assume Q does understand why other people might think B is wrong, yet she disagrees. Maybe she's Nietzsche.
Q believes that B is wrong, yet she wants to benefit from B (in whatever way she does) badly enough to overcome any moral hestitations. She could be Judas, I suppose.
Q believes that B is wrong and does not think that B's selfish good will outweigh the evil it entails. Somehow, Q performs B nonetheless. Q now seems to be conflicted – was this a lapse of will (akrasia?) How do we account for what has happened? Did Q choose to do B? Why, when she knows that it's wrong?
Q had no genuine control over her actions.

The real one we're concerned with is naturally number 4. Why do I do (or does anyone) do that which disagrees with her own judgment?

Are we simply animals? Do we have impossible standards?
What gives here.

Reading A New Kind of Science

2009-04-29T12:22:00.001-07:00

Recently checked out the gargantuan tome (1197 textbook sized pages), A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram. Not that I expect to get through the entire thing, or even a significant portion of it. But I've been wanting to take a look at it for ages.

Loosely, Wolfram intends to present some kind alternative framework for conceptualizing science (and, if I understand him correctly, practically every other field--philosophy, art, etc.) building from the principles of cellular automata. The main theme in the intro thus far is that simple systems can yield very complex results.

That's all well and good, a fascinating project. I have to say, however, that I'm a bit irritated by his style of prose. From what I've read so far, Mr. Wolfram has repeated that same basic idea--"complexity can arise from simplicity"--about 400 times more than he has actually needed to. He changes the words he uses, but essentially he keeps repeating the same idea without really adding anything to it. For the span of several pages he talks about how his new framework will benefit specific disciplines (biology, physics, mathematics, etc.) running through a list with a paragraph for each. And each paragraph essentially states the same basic idea, generically adapted to the subject at hand.

Seriously, Stephen. Your book is already an ungodly length without you adding what feels to me very much like pointless filler. I'm getting the impression that he likes to "hear himself write", so to speak.

I also take issue with a seeming arrogance Wolfram displays: he can't quite emphasize enough that this is all due to his discoveries and ideas, and this is the first time anyone has approached these problems from this particular angle, etc.

Which may be true to some degree. Certainly Wolfram's earlier work with cellular automata introduced the world to new classes of automata that had not been previous examined. But I feel that he relishes telling us about the magnitude of his own accomplishments a little much.

All that said, I'm just being picky here. I still intend to read more of the book, and I hope it will improve as it gets more into the heart of the matter.

Writers Block and the Overcoming Thereof

2009-04-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

The solution to writer's block for any endeavor (music, essays, blog posts, fiction, art) is simple.

Just write anyway, no matter how terrible it's going to be. No more excuses, no more worrying about the final product, no more stopping yourself in the middle of a sentence (melody, line stroke, bit of dialog) because it isn't good enough, no more getting sidetracked by picayune concerns. Just write.

Create in spite of yourself, if necessary.

I'll let y'all know how it goes as I attempt to put words to practice.

Update as of 04-16-09: Eh. Not sure how well that worked. It's still very discouraging.

The Ability to Repeat (Certain)

2009-04-09T13:09:00.000-07:00

...Against The Ability to Grow (Uncertain)

From an article on Carol Dweck and motivation (incidentally, I've mentioned her research before in a post from last year):

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.) The model was nearly complete...

Motivation

2009-04-02T16:42:00.001-07:00

How can we (or I?) motivate ourselves to do things that we do not want to do?

Seems to me that "instrumental" and "punitive" approaches have been most popular over the years. Which is to say, under the instrumental approach we think, "X is unpleasant, but I need to accomplish/tolerate X in order to achieve Y, which I do desire", and thence derives motivation to do X.

The punitive approach--maybe it should be called the "threat of punishment" approach, but that just sounds long and awkward--is more along the lines of, "Q is unpleasant; but Z is even more unpleasant than Q, and Z will happen if I do not do Q".

Actually, these are analogous (although not perfectly so) to modus ponens and modus tollens, like so:

X->Y
X
Y

Z->~Q
Q
~Z

From a motivational standpoint, one looks toward the conclusion for a desired outcome. In the first case, we want Y to happen, and we know that one of the ways to effect Y is to do X. That is, if we do X, unpleasant though it may be, we will be rewarded with Y.

Similarly, in the second case Z is even more odious than Q, but we know that if Z is going to happen, it must be in Q's absence. Thus, we can prevent Z from happening (effect ~Z) by doing Q.

These also (unsurprisingly) map pretty handily onto the psychological principles of operant conditioning: what I've called the "instrumental approach" (modus ponens) is analogous to positive reinforcement and positive punishment, and the "punitive approach" (modus tollens) to negative reinforcement and negative punishment.

All four approaches are logically equivalent, depending on how we choose our premises. It is worthwhile to note, however, that they are not psychologically equivalent--and that people may react better to what they understand as a positive stimulus versus a negative stimulus, etc.

Living in the Past

2009-04-01T18:30:00.000-07:00

Apparently David Eagleman and Terrence Sejnowski hold that the human conscious awareness of certain events--such as visual events--actually occurs a substantial period after the event has occurred (~80 ms).

See "Motion, Integration and Postdiction in Visual Awareness". I don't actually have access to the full article, so I'm just basing this off the abstract and some secondary news reports, but anyway.

Other studies, such as those by Benjamin Libet (yes, I'm too lazy to dig out a proper citation), suggest that conscious decisions may begin up to ~350ms (give or take a few hundred milliseconds) before we become aware of them. Or at least that the brain begins to make neural preparations that correlate with decisions that far in advance of our awareness.

I need to look into these and related studies more thoroughly, but, prima facie, what the hell does this imply about our perception of time? Is our awareness for pretty much any event constantly lagging behind the actual occurence of that event?

How does that work when we're consciously trying to sync ourselves up to events, as with playing musical rhythms in time? To a human, a latency of > 15 ms (or even lower for sensitive musicians) becomes very noticeable very quickly when playing on an electronic instrument; but how is that........ how does that fit with the rest of our consciousness experiencing such a time delay?

What about computer games and real life activities need to happen need to happen on the scale of around ~250 - ~300ms? Does our awareness delay factor into that too?

Does that have any implications about free will during these and other activities? Would that make a sort of delayed epiphenomenalism seem the most logical position for the philosophy of mind?

Questions, question, questions that I should seek out answers to. But I'm too lazy, so questions they shall remain.

Review of "Two Dogmas"

2009-03-02T00:52:00.000-08:00

(Gasp, who could have imagined I'd ever do something that approximates real philosophy on this blog?)

Quine's paper on the analytic/synthetic divide, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", has always bugged me--chiefly because it feels very important to me, yet I have a bloody devil of a time understanding it. And it certainly is a seminal work for the twentieth century, so it can't hurt to improve my understanding of it a little.

To that end, I'm making a rough outline for what I understand Quine to be doing in the darned piece. That is, I'm going to peruse "Two Dogmas" on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis and try to give a feel for how the pieces fit together in his overall argument. It seems to me that the hardest parts of this essay are keeping track of where you are and identifying how his specific strategies function, so I'll endeavor to make that clear. Critiquing may also occur at a few points.

Anyway, tally ho! Onward!

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"

Quine formally divides his paper into six sections, but I think of the big picture as dividing into three larger "macro sections": first, the preface where Quine gives context and explains what he means by analyticity (intro remarks and §1); second, the parts where he considers methods for understanding analytic statements but rejects them as inadequate (§§2, 3, and 4); and finally, the remaining parts where he studies the ramifications for empiricism (§§5 and 6). For my purposes, I'm most interested in §§1-4 (the first two "macro sections"), and I'm going to completely ignore the remainder.

1. Background for Analyticity
Here, Quine paints a basic backdrop for the concept "analytic" and "synthetic": Kant's characterization, the Humean and Aristotelian precursors, intension/extension, Carnap's take on analyticity, blah blah blah. As I see it, a lot of this may be dismissed as irrelevant to his actual argument except insofar as it makes sure we're all on the same page when he uses these terms. (Much like the beginning of any other philosophical paper). Quine considers a few different interpretations or conceptions of these things I don't care to describe, then rejects a few for reasons I don't care to get into. The important points to take away from this section are

Analytic statements are true either by virtue of their being simple logical truths or by virtue of their using synonyms. (Example of logical truth: "All unmarried men are unmarried"; example of synonymous truth: "All bachelors are unmarried").
Logical analytic truths are unproblematic; Quine's got no beef with them. This "synonymy" business, however, needs further explication.
Synonymy cannot be explained away by referring to analogous logically true analytic statements, because any such account presupposes the notion of synonymy itself.

A further note on point 1: the key way to recognize logically true analytic statements, as opposed to synonymously true ones, is that the former may be directly formulated as tautologies which truth relies on their syntactic form, while the latter may not. To wit, "All unmarried men are unmarried" may be translated to ∀x:(Ux & Mx)->Ux, where U means "is unmarried" and M means "is a man"; this proposition is tautologically true no matter what we substitute for U, M, or x. However, to formulate "All bachelors are unmarried", we would have to write ∀x:Bx->Ux, where B means "is a bachelor", which is not a tautological truth. (Quine does not state this in precisely the same manner, but this is my construal of "a statement which is true and remains true under all reinterpretations of its components other than the logical particles" (pp.22-23)).

An obvious reply might be, "What if we add a premise which states that "Bx <-> (Ux & Mx)"? Quine seems to think that this move presupposes synonymy itself, and thus we cannot use it. I'm a bit skeptical about that response, and I wish he would give more argument against it, but we'll see what he says in later sections.

Anyway, Quine's basic strategy from now 'till §5 is to investigate possible explanations for synonymy, but then to reject each, more or less because they always rely on an unclear or circular definition.

§§2, 3, AND 4 TO COME LATER. ...Possibly in separate posts.

---------------------
Reference:

Quine, W.V.O. 1961. "Two dogmas of empiricism". In From A Logical Point of View, 20-46. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

(Also available online for free.)

Will, Belief, Experience

2009-02-24T02:29:00.000-08:00

Do we consciously choose what to believe?

It seems to me that I cannot choose to disbelieve that the world exists, in the same way that I cannot disbelieve that my throat is sore (at this moment, it actually is sore). There's something about the immediate presence of certain stimuli and observations that seems to force states of mind upon me, states which dictate that "things are a particular way".

Now, I can sort of construct an artificial barrier between myself and the belief. I can do some dialectical footwork to maybe convince myself that what I'm thinking of as "being sore" really isn't. Or maybe my throat (or my conscious self at all) doesn't exist, so there's nothing to be sore. Or, maybe, I can detach myself slightly from the experience: focus on other things or meditate on the painful sensation in such a way as to attenuate its sting.

But I can't seem to rid myself of this persistent belief that there is something painful I am experiencing. I can't simply decide, "I no longer believe that it hurts when I swallow"--because somehow all that I feel at a given moment conspires to reject that belief as untenable? ... Or something?

Maybe it's not "belief" that I'm talking about. Maybe it's a primal awareness, and I'm simply attributing implicit "beliefs" to any states of awareness at all. But okay then, does that mean when I decide, "My throat no longer hurts", I really do now believe that my throat doesn't hurt, in spite of the continued discomfort I feel? That seems obviously wrong, somehow.

Probably, I can't convince myself that there is no table in front of me (unless I have good reason to believe that it's an illusion). I can try, and I can reach forward as though to swipe my hand clear through the illusory table without resistance. But I will be lying to myself as I do so, because I will know (or at least strongly believe), in some sense, that my hand will in fact meet resistance.

Really, all I'm doing is convincing the conversational (logical?) part of my mind, whereas the neuro-hardware that processes these things remains unconvinced. Probably it needs other triggers.

Can I look down at a patch of grass and convince myself that I'm looking at trees and vegetation from two miles up, thus inducing vertigo?

How is it that being told "X was just in this room" can elicit such an emotional response in me, whereas simply thinking "X was just in this room" in isolation, when I have no good reason to actually believe it was true, elicits nothing? Why can't I manufacture conviction artificially?

{Is there a connection between sanity and "proper" beliefs?}

Beliefs like, "The world is round/flat" and "God does (not) exist". For these propositions, I don't see anything which sticks out so obviously as a barrier toward changing belief; they're much too abstract. Maybe I really can change these through will alone. But in these cases, there's still a corpus of other beliefs and actions which conflict with my supposed espousal of a contrary belief: I can declare "I was an atheist just one moment, but now I fervently believe in the Judeo-Christian God", yet I won't really accept or embrace that conclusion. I won't feel the truth of it, yet I will feel like a duplicitous moron when praying or trying to act as though God really did exist.

Is, then, a vital component of belief feeling? The experience of certainty?

Fallibility vs Infallibility

2009-02-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

And binary.

This is another variant of the same old theme I keep rehashing.

If we have no perfect (infallible) knowledge, then we cannot know with certainty that we have no perfect/infallible knowledge. Even as fallible beings, we must know at least that--but then, we're not completely fallible after all. Just, mostly.

Maybe 99.99%.

...

In the mystical traditions, "one" is unity, "two" is a division (from a whole to distinct things). Dualistic thinking. If we had no powers of discrimination whatsoever, presumably we would experience all things as one giant homogeneous, indistinguishable conglomerate.

That is, assuming it is possible to "experience" at all without discriminating in some way or another. Don't our senses detect contrast best? When exposed to a single, unwavering stimulus, that stimulus loses its edge, its flavor, its ability to be sensed at all?

From the concept of "two"--of one thing distinct from another--we can build up, perhaps, the entirety of mathematics (and thus, we think, physics, nature, human thought) through binary; binary being a meaningful alternation between two distinguishable states (represented in computers as "0" and "1").

If we can reduce any piece of information to "yes" or "no" questions--true or false statements--then we can represent it as a series of bits. Just as, even before George Boole came along, logic traditionally separated all propositions into those which are the case and those which are not, knowing that some thing cannot both be the case and not be the case simultaneously. Presumably, a mind simply needs to know, from the list of infinite propositions, which are true, which false. (Perhaps we would need to know which propositions are senseless or lacking truth/false values too; but then we shouldn't have included them in the list to begin with.)

This would be sufficient for omniscience...? Leibniz thought so, or at least that God comprehended the universe through such eyes.

Infinity does seem to present a problem, among many other obstacles. Recursion, describing oneself while describing the universe.

And what about the infinity of imaginary possibilities? Are conditional/subjunctive statements "true" or "false"?

Leibnizesque Proclivities

2009-01-29T23:00:00.000-08:00

I recently borrowed Bertrand Russell's A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, and I'm rather enjoying what little I've read of it so far.

One thing that struck me is the description (in the beginning) of Leibniz's disinclination toward publishing a fully developed system. Rather, it seems Leibniz tended to craft arguments in response to private correspondence, or to issues which he bore some personal connection to. Unfortunately, this makes giving a comprehensive take on his views a bit difficult, since most if it is fragmentary.

The amusing thing is that I think I find myself doing something similar. I rarely write for the sake of writing--I will always be most motivated to give an in-depth argument when it's directly in response to someone else, peculiarly enough.

Maybe I should work on that.

Creation

2009-01-25T23:08:00.000-08:00

Is it satisfying to create a world in which your creatures achieve their desires, so that you may vicariously effect wish fulfillment? To craft a fantasy where your own dreams (and perhaps others') come true?

Is it satisfying to create a world in which your creatures suffer through a morass of confusion, despair, and ever-frustrated longing, so that you spitefully ensure they are never happier than yourself? To craft a fantasy where no one's dreams come true?

Vacuous Truth

2009-01-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

From my post in a topic in the xkcd forums:

"Every woman currently living on Pluto is male."

"Every true falsity is false."
"Every false truth is true."

"Every circular square is neither circular nor square." (This one almost makes an intuitive sense... but then, it really doesn't, when we consider that every circular square is also circular and square.)

"Every present King of France is simultaneously bald and not bald."

By the mathematical/logical principle that propositions are vacuously true when their subject does not exist, no matter what is predicated of that subject, the above statements should be considered true.

This relates to the problem of negative existentials in the philosophy of language, but I don't have more to say about it at the moment. May investigate further.

Must Perfection Equal Stagnation?

2009-01-22T01:28:00.001-08:00

At various times I have encountered or myself espoused the view that anything which is perfect must be, in some sense, static. Religious critics might apply it to the idea of heaven, to show that any possible heaven must be a boring/stagnant place; similarly, we might argue that we're better off not being able to reach a state of complete perfection, because perfection would require no change, and therefore what would we do?

The reasoning goes something like this: for change to occur, an entity or circumstance must become other than it is currently. That is to say, at one time we may say of x that Px, while at another time we may say ~Px. So, if x is currently in a state of perfection but that state changes, surely that change now negates the previous, perfect state of x, thus rendering x imperfect.

An analogy with which we should all be familiar is grades: suppose a student has the perfect grade of 100% in the first week of a course. Suppose further that the teacher never allows extra credit, so at this moment the student possesses the highest grade attainable. From here on out, the only possible change to her grade would be to a lower value; so if at any point during the remainder of the semester, her grade experiences any form of change, it must be to a state of imperfection (< s100%).

So far, so good. If perfection be defined as having a grade equal to 100%, this is all true. Any change to that number necessarily yields an imperfect grade. The problem comes when we assume that, because the state of being perfect must not change, therefore nothing else pertaining to the object or circumstance in question can change. And that assumption is simply unwarranted.

To continue with the grade analogy, we should recognize that even while the total grade percentage does not change, a number of other factors do: as the school term progresses, the student continues to do assignments and turn them in. The teacher then grades these new assignments, sums the student's earned points so far, and divides that number into the highest possible point total. So while the grade percentage does not change, the student's earned sum continually rises. And of course, throughout the term, the course progresses, the student strives and sweats over homework, studies for tests, etc.

To me, this makes an obvious case that perfection can occur even while the qualities being judged for perfection change. In my example, the percentage remains at 100% even while the sums increase. This suggests the more general point that "perfection" can describe processes, not merely singular, unchanging states. Which really ought to be obvious, since, after all, we can easily set up (artificial) criteria for a perfect performance or the perfect execution of a technique in music, dance, etc. Yet clearly change does occur in these cases, for they are activities, not frozen states, after all.

Now, the point about lack of change is still true insofar as a perfect performance or process must never deviate from its perfect criteria on pain of falling from perfection. That is to say, the perfect student must continue to score 100% for as long as we judge her, and in this way her score will be predictable and therefore stagnant. However, we can hardly say that the student's homework and grade as a whole are stagnant, since she continues to accumulate new points and produce new work.

Similarly, I say that heaven would be static only insofar as its residents and contents would not deviate from a particular type of perfection; but their behavior could easily be a process or performance, or at least analogous to such. In simplistic terms, if perfection in heaven could be gauged as a percentage of points achieved out of points possible, the points could rise (or hey, they could fall too) without becoming imperfect so long as the total points possible matches them. It could be like a series of games in which one continually succeeds.

It is also important to note that, every time we talk about "perfection," we must qualify ourselves by answering the question, "Perfect according to what criteria?" Would it not be possible to have a constantly changing criteria set for perfection? And could there not easily be criteria which require change of some sort, as perhaps to run a perfect marathon requires that one change one's location and move one's limbs?

Gödelizing Gödel (and random thoughts)

2009-01-19T22:22:00.000-08:00

It strikes me that Gödel's incompleteness theorem bears a bit of a resemblance to the types of skepticism I keep criticizing, insofar as it makes a universal statement about formal systems which seems to limit or hinder their power. Yet I wonder--could it be that to make this kind of statement successfully requires an implicit perspective subject to the same critique the incoimpletness theorem makes in the first place?

This is an idle thought, and it does not seem to me that Gödel's theorem could be undermined or subverted by its own conclusion, and nor am I qualified to investigate much further.

Analogously, that might have implications for the halting problem.

Just wondering.

And on a completely (?) unrelated note, I feel obliged to mention how Jorge Luis Borges' story "Funes the Memorious" features a man with complete eidetic/photographic memory, who experiences and recalls the "sensory manifold" in toto, rather than as we do in bits and pieces. (Here roughly meaning Kant's "sensory manifold", or whatever modern analogy there is). As a consequence, the man sees little point in abstraction and in fact has difficulty recognizing the similarities behind different species of dogs, or even different objects seen from different angles. I'm reminded next (through reading Gregory Chaitin) of information theory and Kolmogorov Complexity, where we judge the complexity of algorithms or objects based on the smallest instruction set necessary to recreate them.

...

On the other hand

2009-01-19T18:37:00.001-08:00

Just when you think there's hope...

And sometimes...

2009-01-18T02:46:00.000-08:00

[And sometimes, perhaps, desires can be trusted. Or, miraculously and all the more mysteriously, they can shape.]

I wonder then, were perfection nearly within grasp, how terrifying might that be? And too, how exhilarating, giddying! For Tantalus's hand to brush the grapes, his lips to graze the waters.

Imagine the moment following this unprecedented anomaly: his pulse races, a hitherto dulled and pessimistic mind comes alight, afire! Certainty (and its incumbent predictability) had blunted and wearied his existence. For surely Tantalus had realized – real-ized! – the despotic futility that ruled and overruled his every action, that denied him possibility of relief. Surely, he at last reached a point where unrelenting failure wore away the last of his persistence, leaving him stupefied, resigned, and stultified.

Imagine the moment prior: the cusp of despair, his head bows, and he begs penitently to the gods, as he has done countless times before. He knows well the gesture's uselessness: they will not heed him--and is it that they do not hear or do not care? Or is there anyone to hear? So long has been his imprisonment, that who can say which beings existed, or did fancy alone conjure up his divine imprisoners? Did he really host that profane and awful banquet? Or did he imagine his feat of hubris merely as to justify his own torment? But watch now, as his head bows, his parched and broken lips touch for one instant the inconceivable--the impossible, the unreal--and shatter his dreadful certainty.

How this moisture? How this incomprehensible moisture, there long enough to shock yet gone before it can be tasted? What does it mean, what can it mean? That the gods have heard, relented? Or their powers wane and may now be circumvented?

Imagine his reckless rejuvenation as thoughts careen throughout his jolted mind. An intoxicating force invigorates his ailing hopes and catapults him beyond Reason; and with that same resurgence comes a creeping, dawning horror: he is poised now at the brink of lunatic conclusions, and if he stretches just a little further, will his lips find long-sought respite? Or will the conscious act of striving revoke his supposed progress and rebuke him all the more?

Be this redemption, or a god's mocking laughter?

Is it chance that furnishes him with hope, or insidious design?

Is this opportunity, or is it a desire's wishful mirage? Is there any action he can possibly take to sway the outcome either way? If he chooses wrongly, will he ever get this chance again? And so horrible, if not, to live on knowing that he'd once come so near perfection, but failed and damned himself.

Hegelian Precursor to Derrida

2009-01-17T04:18:00.000-08:00

If we cannot indeed make true statements about the whole (because they inevitably lead to an incomplete thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, which in turn becomes a leg of a new triad...), then yes, I think Derrida's theory of deconstruction--wherein all statements undermine themselves--follows more naturally.

Note, by the way, that I know next to nothing about both Hegel and Derrida here. But anyway.

My objection to deconstructionism hitherto has been similar to my complaints about extreme skepticism generally: by attempting to demolish all foundations, one must necessarily presuppose a new foundation from which to do that demolishing. In other words, the statement "all propositions undermine themselves" necessarily undermines itself, rendering it false. Discussing that with a lit-theory friend of mine, he laughed and called that a beautiful part of the theory; to him, it "shows" the theory in operation on itself. It bothers me, however, since it leaves us left with a paradox and/or a jumble of contradiction.

Parallels

We can view the deconstruction of "All propositions undermine themselves" as analogous to the eternal war between a skeptic and a dogmatist, or an unraveling of the Liar's paradox. To wit, each valid step may be succeeded by a contradictory, equally valid step in the argument. E.g.,

(1) All propositions undermine themselves.

(2) "All propositions undermine themselves" undermines itself, by (1). Ergo, (1) is false.

(3) If (1) is false, then there can be propositions which do not undermine themselves after all. In which case, (2)'s reasoning is incorrect, because (1) might be one of those propositions, and so (1) might be true. Since (1) was given as an initial premise, we should then consider (1) true.

(4) (3)'s conclusion is a proposition which, by (1), undermines itself. Hence (3) must be false, and if (3) is false, then (1) is not true after all.

...etc, etc. This may be argued back and forth as long as we like without resolution.

[Note again: as said before, I know crap-all about Derrida. I have no idea if genuine deconstructions follow the form I just gave, and at the moment am too lazy to verify. Hooray, I'm a bad scholar. You caught me, want a prize?]

Just as with the Liar's Paradox,

(5) This statement (5) is false.

(6) Because (5) is false, (5)'s negation, "This statement (5) is true", must be true. Hence (5) is true.

(7) Since (5) is true, we know that the proposition "(5) is false" is true. Thus, (6)'s conclusion is false, because (5) is not true after all.

(8) Yet, if (5) is false, then its proposition "(5) is false" is false itself, meaning that (5) is really true. That means (7)'s conclusion is falses.

... etc. Clearly, an infinite succession of licitly derived contradictions. I'm trying to make a point about steps directly contradicting the directly previous step, but that's probably confusing, and under an ordinary analysis it is not necessary, so let me show a more intuitive route which is equivalent:

(9) (9) is false.

(10) Because (9) is false, "(9) is false" is false. Thus (9) is true.

(11) But if (9) is true, then "(9) is false" is true. And that means (9) is really false.

(12) If (9) is false, the same reasoning as from (10) shows that (9) is true.

(13) But if (9) is true, then the same reasoning as from (11) shows that (9) is false.

(14) The same reasoning from (10) and (12) shows that (9) is true.

(15) The same reasoning from (11) and (13) shows that...

The main difference is that I'm not spelling out the contradiction of the last step so much as just reasserting either (10) or (11) to refute the last conclusion. Which is really the same thing, so why am I making a fuss about it? The Lord only knows. Really, the smart thing to do is to stop as soon as you've found a contradiction in the argument (since otherwise we run into problems with explosion), but I'm trying to make the analogy to Hegel more explicit.

And speaking of whom, back to Hegel.

Suppose we call the assertion that "The Liar's Paradox statement is true" our thesis, and "The Liar's Paradox statement is false" our antithesis. Clearly, we can always reason toward thesis or antithesis, successfully proving or disproving each conclusion however many times we like, without ever reaching a final resolution. To Hegel, I believe, we should then realize the futility of this exercise, at which point we need to step outside of the system and create a synthesis between thesis and antithesis. Being a Hegelian neophyte, I don't know what the synthesis should be in this case, but it might be something like, "The Liar's paradox is both true and false" or it is"partially true, partially false," or "true at one time, false at another," or some other means of effecting reconciliation.

Now, the fun part about Hegel is that he says the new synthesis, whatever it is, now becomes the thesis or antithesis of a new thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, which will need its own extra-dichotomous resolution. And we approach (but never reach?) truth through an infinite chain of these triads--reminiscent of Kant's moral progression, where practical reason must postulate an infinity of time (or lifespans?) through which we imperfect beings aspire toward perfection.

Now, where this is relevant more specifically to my thoughts, is that an infinite chain of dialectical syntheses reminds me very strongly of the warring double-helix Ouruborus I mentioned earlier. It seems to me wishful thinking on Hegel's part to claim that the addition of a synthesis makes a new kind of "progression" or development. Rather, the chain of triads fighting with each other is precisely ismorphic to the chain of contradicting (10)s and (11)s I outlined above, the simply unending contradiction. So, either the Liar's Paradox and Derrida's deconstruction already exemplify Hegel's described growth, or there exists simply no progression to speak of either way.

Hegel's syntheses are attempts to establish a new "groundless ground" or self-supporting justification in each controversy. By my thinking, however, this is not progression, since the new synthesis remains just as much a part of the very system it attempted to escape. This is just like trying to defuse Gödel's incompleteness theorem by adding axioms to a formal system; it doesn't matter how many or what axioms you introduce: by the very nature of the system at hand, you will leave yourself open to a new version of the incompleteness theorem. (Unless you reduce your system's axioms to a point where they express less than you originally wanted.)

Now, we might be able to argue that there's a kind of progression/development/growth/whatever here anyway, but I'm not going to investigate further at this point. It may explain (in part) the impossibility of halting philosophical inquiry.

By now, it's beginning to seem to me, naively, that the history of thought is little more than a horribly convoluted deception, an intriciate illusion, contrived to hide the fact that all we've been doing is saying "Nuh-uh!" and "Yeah-huh!" to each other for the last two thousand years.

Silly children.

Volition

2009-01-16T21:32:00.000-08:00

Why is it that dreams do not permit free manipulation to suit our own ends (save in the case of the comparatively rare lucid dreams)? Since they are created entirely by our minds, and since we can exert some measure of control over them through thought and will, what is it that prevents a more thorough control/influence?

How does action differ from willing...?

Skepticism and the Root of All Things

2009-01-15T14:43:00.000-08:00

Vancouver Philosopher at The Chasm makes the following point about Heidegger:

Heidegger's denial about a fundamental unifying characteristic to philosophy is foolish. When we employ such skepticism about the reality of the ground/central concept, we only wind up grounding such skepticism in denial. The very act of denial becomes its own ground, and this strategy winds up being self-defeating in the end. Instead, we shouldn't think of various philosophical systems as themselves foolhardy in establishing a ground or framework. We should interrogate the framework or ground on its own merits.

This follows my own thoughts about skepticism regarding truth: we cannot sensibly make a statement like "There is no truth" without simultaneously undermining that statement by implying that it itself is true. For skepticism to assert a meaningful proposition (that is, a proposition which supplies us with genuine information), the skepticism itself must be grounded in something. And if the brand of skepticism at hand denies the existence or reliability of all grounds, it necessarily denies its own conclusions. Hence, as Vancouver Philosopher says, denial becomes its own ground, and it invariably ends up defeating itself.

Similarly, skepticism about our epistemic relation to truth undermines itself as well. Suppose our skeptic offers us "an irrefutable argument" that, whether there exist truths or not, we simply cannot possess knowledge of them. E.g., all claims must be justified by other claims, and there are no unjustified, self-supported claims; ergo all claims are unjustified/unacceptable. And yet, if we accept the skeptic's conclusion, we (presumably) have now acquired a new bit of knowledge, viz., the knowledge that "All knowledge is impossible", or "We possess no knowledge"! Wait, how did that happen? How do we know this when we can't know anything? Again the skeptical conclusion undermines itself; it presupposes its own new ground from which to criticize the whole of another position, yet in doing so creates and relies upon that which it seeks to demolish.

Similar arguments apply to skepticism toward the legitimacy of reason generally.

Roots

The essential problem, as I see it, is that the skeptic must engage the opponent on her own territory, so to speak, and using her own tools. This makes strategic sense, since otherwise why should the anti-skeptic (let's say "dogmatist") accept whatever point the skeptic tries to make? Unfortunately, this is a rigged game for the extreme skeptic: when playing by the dogmatist's rules, there is simply no way to "win" or "break outside" the system, because every attempt to do so places you right back into a new system. (This all ties into the Liar's Paradox, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and the Halting Problem; I don't know how to make this more explicit yet, but see Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter for related discussion).

Now, life isn't exactly a bed of roses for the dogmatist, either, since she can never really answer the skeptic's demands for an "unmoved mover" in the realm of logic, so to speak. But it's fascinating to imagine the two positions, intertwined together as an infinity of recursive, dialectic contradiction. The skeptic asserts, "You know nothing"; the dogmatist responds, "Then I must know that I know nothing"; the skeptic rejoins, "But to know that, you must presuppose other principles for which you have no justification either!"; and the dogmatist counters, "But in order to know that I need those principles, surely I must know that I need them, so I do know something after all!", and so on ad infinitum. Or ad nauseam, take your pick. The two warring sides endlessly wrap around each other, neither overcoming the other--perhaps like twin strands of intertwined DNA which end up consuming their own tails as an involuted Ouroborus?

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, nor lost in mystical/metaphorical speculation. The key here is that we could apparently resolve the tension if we could ever find a groundless ground. What I call a "groundless ground" shows up in many places: as Aristotle's "prime mover," as Aquinas' "uncaused cause," as the idea of a necessary entity or fact in general, as a self-caused being, as that which needs no justification, as a "primitive fact," as Kant's description of "the unconditioned." To find such a ground and look out from it would yield the fabled view from nowhere, the view sub specie aeternitatis, the God's-eye view. This perspective, and none other, would be satisfactorily "outside of the system" to satisfy both skeptic and dogmatist. (Hopefully.)

It's no surprise, then, that my description of the clash above mirrors Kant's Antinomies of Pure Reason, where my "dogmatism" would map on to the rationalist understanding of metaphysics, and skepticism to the empiricist understanding. Roughly, anyhow. To be more precise, Kant thought that both rationalist and empiricist sought a "groundless ground" (the "unconditioned"), but they sought it from different starting premises; whereas my dogmatist/skeptic divide does not show both sides seeking an unconditioned ground so much as the denial that there is such a thing on the skeptical side. So take the comparison with a grain of salt--I'd have more to say about justifying my analogy/mapping, but I'm running out of motivation at this point.

...

2009-01-13T22:56:00.001-08:00

.. to desire a thing so much that one is paralyzed by the very possibility of it being unattainable...

Silly details about numbers

2009-01-02T14:59:00.000-08:00

The ancient Greeks found numbers fascinating in an unprecedented way (or so Morris Kline's Mathematics for the Nonmathematician informs me). Rather than adopting the more practical attitude of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians toward numbers, the Greeks recognized a conceptual beauty in the ability use the self-same methods on any possible collection of objects. That is to say, abstraction, and the universality thereof.

To assign a single, unique label to every quantity, and then to perform mental operations upon them which, amazingly, correctly modeled comparable situations in reality--astonishing. And I do mean that without irony.

Take a pie or any appropriately divisible object. Cut it into halves, then cut each half into thirds. We take it for granted today that the answer may be computed easily through a mechanical procedure: (1 * 1/2) * 1/3 = 1/6. This is to say that, without having made any cuts or further measurements, we already know with certainty what size the smaller pieces will be! (Or the size that they will approximate, because it is not an ideal world.)

But this is a fantastic discovery, for by beginning from only a few known facts, we discover what must be the case for physical objects after manipulating them--all without having left our armchairs.

Another Note Regarding Content

2008-12-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

I've realized I still want to keep this blog alive, or at least in a feeble state of existence that approximates life. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I don't have the interest or motivation to write out posts with the thought and research I'd originally planned. In fact, at this time (judging from my last post), I can't even assemble together posts that reach a definitive point backed by argument, or that are structured in a coherent manner.

But hey, then, why not just go with that? Basically, I am now relaxing the standards for my posts (wait, what? I had standards before?). Until further notice, Doubt Rests shall be a repository for half-formed thoughts, quotes, or whatever vaguely interesting factoids I come across. Don't expect explanation or justification for everything I write (although if you ask nicely I might elaborate), and certainly don't expect fully developed ideas. The contents will likely be of a more personal nature than previously. All will be fragmentary, but fragments put forth in the hope that failed attempts to progress are better than none at all.

And maybe someone, somewhere, some time might find a fragment here which fits well into his/her own thoughts.

Fallibility

2008-12-27T23:43:00.000-08:00

Quantum mechanics tells us that the universe operates in very, very unusual ways. It is natural to want to dismiss some of the interpretations of QM (such as that natural laws are inherently probabilistic) as problems with our understanding, not as genuine features of reality. This is essentially a knee-jerk reaction to the oddness of QM and how it does not "mesh" with our everyday understanding of the world. However, science also informs us that we are the products of many years of evolution--and this evolution process equipped us to deal with one thing, and one thing only: survival. Our senses and reasoning faculties were not "designed" to help us humans apprehend truths about the world; rather, they were selected to enable humans qua systems to manipulate information in such a way that the systems preserve and replicate themselves. Luckily, knowing the truth--or approximating it--proved beneficial to the survival of these systems (these information processing patterns).

In simpler terms, more proto-humans who were able to correctly judge that there really is a savage tiger hiding in the grass over there successfully passed on their genes than those who hallucinated constantly. Or than those who had no knowledge whatsoever, who were not able to act on their knowledge, who had faulty reasoning processes, whatever.

Thus evolution tells us.

Unfortunately, to say "there really is a tiger over there" and leave it at that drastically oversimplifies the state of human existence. Because really, we don't know that there is or is not a tiger over there. All we know is that some collection of sights, sounds, scents, or inferences has caused us to believe that something over there can cause damage to us if we do not act accordingly. (Assume it's a hungry tiger and that we are defenseless in a savanna.) We may think to ourselves "There is a tiger," and we may believe "There is a tiger," and there is probably even a sense in which it is true that there is a tiger. But what we call a tiger is a convenient abstraction--a shorthand tag which bundles together a collection of concepts, memories, and/or feelings. So too, presumably, with our notion of existence--we have a certain understanding of what it means for something "to be" and "to be there." and we predicate this notion upon the abstraction "tiger."

[Edit as of 04-05-2009: I should mention that yes, Kant (and other philosophers) claim that existence is not a predicate. I do recognize that it's a contested notion and I disagree with the mainstream opinion; but I shan't defend it now.]

"Well, what of it?" I hear you say. "You're not telling us anything that the pioneering philosophers of the 17th-18th century didn't when they first speculated about our psychological workings; and you're barely even consistent with today's psychological theories."

Fair enough. But, if we can suppose that the tenets of natural selection are true, then we should firmly keep in mind that our knowledge...

....Something...

This post is dissolving into incoherency. And as usual I don't have the patience to fix it. I shouldn't even post it. But whatever.

Fancy

2008-12-03T21:37:00.000-08:00

[Please forgive this amateur flight of fanciful, mystical indulgence. This comes from a diary entry I wrote over the summer. I decided I needed to post it somewhere. I can't say I believe these sentiments, but I have sometimes taken comfort in them.]

Maybe I am starting to feel... that somewhere, somehow, in a realm outside of conceivability, our essences intermingle. And our essences love each other, they love each other so much that it almost tears them apart, yet simultaneously unites them all the more gloriously for it. Our essences love and understand why all this tragedy is necessary, why the struggle is necessary for growth, why all is truly joy and not sorrow. Our beings love each other because they created each other, because they dreamed themselves into being, and they chose each other out of all the other possible existences because this way was right. We love each other eternally, devoutly, devotedly, passionately, irrepressibly.

We love each other and are each other. We love each other because we are each other--because of that sympathetic resonance from one core to another--a unification in rhythm that reveals our inherent, underlying unity. Our oneness.

... You and I are one, just as everything else is one. Yet somehow you are special, and I am special, and our love is special.

So we play this game--because it is the unmasking, the revealing, the unraveling, the development, the exploration, the uncertainty, the discovery--these things give us more meaning than jumping straight toward the answer.

Because It's So True

2008-11-13T01:46:00.000-08:00

A quote from www.friesian.com:

In the Twentieth Century, philosophy was like a confused and clumsy person who repeatedly tries to commit suicide, but keeps failing, though with the addition of debilitating damage at each attempt.

Mrrem

2008-10-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so this blog is suffering from a definite lack of attention.

I don't have any particularly meaningful, worked-out content to post now, so I'll just mention some of the things I've been thinking about lately.

I recently started learning about Alonzo Church's lambda calculus (via Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind), and I'm very impressed. It's so cool that logicians were able to construct systems like this (and like Turing's work) before the advent of computers – indeed, these logical systems led directly to and facilitated the advent of computers. They start from such simplicity, but possess incredible power.

The lambda calculus reminds me of the programming language LISP (unsurprisingly, of course, since LISP was based on this very calculus), and reading about it makes me want to get back into programming again. I dabbled with Haskell a bit at the start of this summer, and I found it oddly fascinating. There is something quite elegant about these functional* languages that more practical languages (C/C++, Python, Perl) don't quite capture.

* Apparently only certain variants of LISP (like Scheme) are fully functional, but anyway.

Still, it is difficult for me to remain interested in these things for their own sake. I think I would need some kind of projects to work toward if I were to take up programming again seriously. Ah, motivation, that state which so often eludes me...

There are so many things I would love to learn, but somehow actually sitting down and doing the work required bores me terribly. Sometimes it doesn't; sometimes I go through brief periods where I feel a great deal of enthusiasm toward some subject (say, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, or some aspect of symbolic logic), but then I end up dropping it again, feeling utterly bored with it for months.

I would like to have a very extensive knowledge of mathematics, physics, philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, music, and (select aspects of) history. It would be swell to know Greek, Latin, German, and French. It is so difficult to care about, though; sometimes my mind just seems to shut off, and whatever I'm currently trying to study becomes excruciatingly dull; suddenly I can't remember why I wanted to learn about it in the first place. I value knowledge generally, but to actually feel something for it, to care – somehow that is different from merely saying "I value it"?

The Impossibility of Halting Philosophical Inquiry

2008-09-24T05:42:00.000-07:00

[This post was largely inspired by a hypothetical scenario and ensuing discussion at Philosophy, et cetera.]

Suppose that we have a magic device--a little black box with a screen and keyboard--which supplies us with true answers to every philosophical question we can possibly pose to it.

We can ask, e.g., "What is the true nature of the mind-body relation?" And the box might tell us, "Functionalism," (or whatever the "correct" answer is). Hurrah! In one fell swoop, we have settled a major dispute in the philosophy of mind. So, we proceed through the various fields: "Which understanding of ethics is correct?"; "What is the nature of ultimate reality?"; "What is the nature of knowledge?"; "Does God exist?". Ping! Ping! Ping! Perfectly formulated and accurate answers to each question spew out from the box. Academics everywhere can both rejoice that their long, bloody dialectical battles are over, but also mourn that now they're out of a job. Their passion--speculating about and debating abstruse philosophical topics--has lost its point, since there remains nothing further to be said.

Or does there?

The sagacious box in of itself would generate a slew of new philosophical questions to replace the old ones. In fact, it might not be adequate to answer even those traditional questions at all! Witness the following.

If there really existed such an oracular apparatus, before we even begin to think about taking it seriously, I would want to know one thing (and I think this is a very reasonable request): how can we trust the veracity of its answers in the first place? Now, this being a philosophical question, we could pose said question to the little black box itself in the hopes of receiving a satisfactory answer. But this presents a circularity problem, for no matter how the box answers, we would have no a priori reason to trust the accuracy of its answers (here a priori means less the traditional "knowable independent of experience," and more "given prior to the examination/subject at hand"). The box obviously cannot tell us, "My answers are true by virtue of their being outputted by a box that always outputs true answers." For indeed, now we are inclined to respond, "But how do we know you are one of those boxes? My dear black box, that is begging the question, plain and simple. You'll have to do better than that." In short, to answer this epistemological question, the box cannot appeal to its own authority as an infallible agent, for to do so would be circular.

In order to escape this trap, the box could try to appeal to an external, time-honored authority: reasoned arguments. Perhaps it could supply us with an airtight, incontrovertible argument to the effect that its answers are always correct. Indeed, perhaps all its answers might take this form of undeniably true premises leading irrefutably to a conclusion that no rational being could reject.

However, two things. First, is it really possible for there to be such irrefutable arguments? It seems that we can always doubt even the most basic of things, including the apparently incontestable. As Lewis Caroll pointed out in "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles," (Mind 4, No. 14 (April 1895): 278-280. Also freely available a number of places online, such as here, here, and here), nothing will force an interlocutor to accept a logical inference as valid. And we all know this, don't we? All reasoning must begin with axioms, and axioms by definition are unsupported or unjustified. So when we call something an irrefutable argument, it can only be irrefutable to some one person, or irrefutuable as considered from some one perspective (which means, starting from from a particular set of axioms and/or rules of inference). Is there such a thing as an "undeniably true premise"? Or can we reject an axiom that consists of something like, "For all A, A = A"? From what I understand, efforts have been made in the realm of dialetheism to investigate what happens if we reject such an obvious rule as the principle of non-contradiction and/or principle of excluded middle. Perhaps it is the case that there just is no such thing as an uncontroversial premise? (I realize that I am conflating premises and rules of inference a little bit in the above discussion, but the gist should be clear. I am too lazy at the moment to go back and fix things.)

Second, there might still be disagreement about understanding the logic employed by the black box. What if it spewed out proofs millions of lines long, with such convoluted chains of logic that it takes teams of experts just to have the barest idea of what is supposed to be going on, much less whether the steps are all valid or not?

To sum up, if we were unable to accept the black box's arguments at face value (and there is good reason to think that we would not be able to), we would have to resort to philosophical investigation in order to provide justification for why we should trust it in the first place. Hence, philosophical inquiry would continue, even with a magical device which, for all intents and purposes, should have ended it.

Curiously, we find ourselves in the same situation even when we replace the black box with the idea of a God.

Maybe I'll Actually Finish Reading This One

2008-08-03T22:48:00.000-07:00

Axioms is an online book (a draft of a book, rather) by Robert G. Brown about human knowledge and the human condition. Brown is a physicist, not a philosopher, and he writes here for the lay-audience, so his manner of discussing philosophical concepts may not be as sophisticated as one might hope: e.g., he marks a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge without using the terms a priori or a posteriori, and moreover does not write about them as one well-acquainted with the philosophical literature. Nonetheless, so far I am finding the content very relevant to my life and current thoughts, and I thought I should mention it here. He writes humorously and engagingly, making it easier to stay interested than so many other dry texts I've encountered.

Maybe, then, I'll actually get through more of this book instead of just recommending it and then losing interest, as I did with Motion Mountain in an earlier post.

The Immutability of Vicissitudes, part 1

2008-07-24T02:22:00.000-07:00

Life contains many unpleasant, disagreeable, and painful things.

The human question is, how do we deal with this constant unpleasantness in our lives?

Flight...?

The first solution we might conceive is almost trivial: when something is unpleasant or painful, you move away from it. This is a tried and true survival mechanism inherited from our primeval ancestors, a mechanism which we possess simply because organisms who historically responded to a certain class of sensations – viz., sensations which appeared threatening to the organisms' integrity – tended to survive more often than those who did not. (Or so the evolutionary story goes). Biologically speaking, this manifests as the "flight" half of the fight-or-flight response.

Being the complex, intelligent, reflective creatures that we are, we humans can recognize a general pattern behind the individual instances of pain and suffering that we encounter from moment to moment. That is, we start to conceive of suffering as a class of things, not just as a collection of unrelated particulars – just as with any abstraction from particulars to a universal. Further experience, observation, and cogitation yields the conclusion that suffering, considered as a whole, cannot be escaped by any of our standard evolutionarily-supplied abilities: you cannot outrun it, you cannot outmaneuver it, you cannot hide from it, you cannot climb into a tree where it cannot follow, you cannot take refuge in your family/herd/pack/tribe. In short, there is simply no place in the physical universe to which you can flee to escape The Suffering. While we can escape individual instances of suffering, we cannot run from Suffering in its entirety. We are cornered with our backs against the wall.

...Or Fight.

Well, since we cannot escape such a nebulous nemesis, what of our other most primitive response? Perhaps we can posture aggressively, puff out our chests, howl ferociously, and appear larger than The Suffering – perhaps we can scare it off, thus avoiding a potentially costly physical confrontation. But no, this foe cannot be frightened, and in fact we cannot even locate it tangibly in a concrete form! We cannot see it, we cannot touch it, we do not know of any way we could conceivably harm it. This means that our next best aggressive strategy – pummeling the enemy with a rock or fist until it submits, flees, or dies itself – is equally useless.

Manipulation

So much, then, for our basal instincts. Yet, being human, we have keener minds than most other animals; as such, we have also developed keener methods for dealing with problems beyond hitting or running from them. Notably, we are able to 1) communicate/negotiate, and 2) manipulate our environment in subtle ways to effect desired outcomes. As it turns out, the second method encompasses the first, since, from a cynical point of view, communication is nothing but manipulating one specific environment – namely, the social environment. After all, intelligent communication primarily developed in order to nonviolently resolve tensions between tribe members and to facilitate group efforts. Or so one must suppose.

So far as this relates to suffering, notice how I anthropomorphized it above, calling it "The Suffering" and treating it like an animal foe (even as I claimed to deny it corporality). In doing so, I behaved much like primitive peoples that personified natural forces in the form of deities and spirits in order to understand and exert some measure of control over them. This strategy is actually quite forgivable: to a species that had developed such massively complex social abilities, attempting to appease hostile forces through social means comes naturally. What do you do if you are a scrawny weakling when faced with a furious, ferocious, muscled, invincible fellow human? You try to defuse the situation any way you can while preserving your own health; often this takes the form of trying to imagine something your antagonist wants so that you might offer it to him/her as a distraction or appeasement.

Communication/Negotiation

We thrive in social hierarchies. Paying respect to our betters is a way of life for us, so much that we do it unthinkingly: think of the biggest wolf in the pack getting first dibs on a kill; think of a tribal chieftain accumulating wealth; think of royalty and aristocrats receiving taxes and deferential treatment; consider how celebrities today are revered by the masses; consider how the American President is addressed so formally and with such respect. Reflect on how (some) individuals behave around a venerated religious leader, or the way that you must defer to your boss at work. Even at a more personal level, think of how children are taught to obey their parents ("honor your father and mother"...), and think of your own social networks – isn't there always a subtle awareness about who the "top dog" or leader-figure is? He or she may lead because of any number of reasons, be it physical aptitude, intelligence, beauty or social dexterity; but this "leading" factor is nearly always present and noticeable, should you take the time to see it.

At some point in our history, we must have looked at ourselves – and our place in the world – and seen that there are no visible rulers or leaders above humanity. Nonetheless, mysterious and powerful forces directly impacted our lives, often incomprehensibly. Sometimes there were droughts or long winters. Sometimes there was illness and death. Sometimes there were wildfires, earthquakes, and other traumatic natural disasters – floods apparently left a particular mark on our species, judging by the many and varied ancient diluvian myths.

How did ancient humankind cope with all this confusing horror? By giving the mysterious and powerful forces human faces (figuratively, if not literally). Imagining natural forces under the control of sentient beings with thoughts, desires, and motivations like their own allowed primitive humankind to "understand" misfortunes ("The gods are punishing us because they are angry!") and, more importantly, to "bargain with" them ("Let us give the gods a gift to appease them.").

(Should we think it a chance that Prometheus is said to have stolen fire from the gods? No – for fire was at one point the sole property and providence of deities, just as, presumably, all other non-human forces must have been: lightning controlled by Zeus, harvest and fertility controlled by Demeter, etc., etc.)

It is almost tragically amusing: we offered things that we considered precious, valuable, or attractive (bright, shiny rocks; young virgins; cooked meats) to these celestial divinities. In a typically human fashion, we assumed that all other beings would have similar values as ourselves; or, perhaps, we treated subjective values as though they were objective properties of objects, leading us to conclude that all intelligent beings would agree with our tastes. Of course Yahweh would find the scent of burning animal-flesh sweet (Gen 8:20-21), just as humans do! Of course the "sons of God" would find the "daughters of men" attractive, and want to mate with them (Gen 6:1-4)! Human men find human women attractive, so why should not God's other creations find them attractive as well? (In a yet-more-typically-human fashion, we still do this today: see Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts on the Mind Projection Fallacy and 2-Place and 1-Place Words). Above all, of course we would be created in God's own image, since it only makes sense that God would be like us, would think like us, feel like us (remember His fits of temper and jealousy in the Old Testament), etc.

Right?

Now, after that digressive historical exegesis, let us resume our inquiry into Suffering. I think by this point in the human saga, it is pretty obvious that attempting to negotiate with Suffering as though it were a sentient being is not going to fare any better than attempting to run from it or attempting to bash it. After all, prayer has a long, long history of being fantastically unreliable. Simply put, we have had much better success in changing the world when we learn to do so on its own terms (in accordance with its natural laws) rather than pleading with anthropomorphized forces. In spite of many claims by the religious, there remains no way to reliably effect change through divine aid. To put it succinctly, technology works a lot lot better than prayer under all verifiable circumstances, and it has done so ever since we first began bringing water to planted seeds rather than crossing our fingers and wishing for rain.

Let us abandon, then, all hope of attempting to reason with or appease Suffering as though it were a conscious entity.

Technology

Is technology our final hope? If it has been so wonderfully efficacious in the past, maybe we can dare to believe that Suffering as a whole could be outsmarted through a particularly clever manipulation of materials and energies, as enabled through the proper understanding of natural laws.

Transhumanists (Nick Bostrum, Ray Kurzweil, FM-2030 and the like) may believe something like this. They dream, after all, of conquering death, illness, and starvation. Yet surely these are not our only problems. Let us pretend that it is possible to thoroughly eliminate our physical woes. (Something like a heaven as promised by the Abrahamic religions, yet without God, and in our current world.) Yet, it seems that there would still be hordes upon hordes of other problems still in existence.

For would there not be jealousy and rivalry? Betrayal? Boredom? Ennui? Existential angst? Hatred? Wars? Cruelty? Rebellion? It seems fundamentally misguided to me to suppose that these problems would simply vanish if the playing field were leveled through technology. I do not think, then, that the transhumanist dream suits what I'm looking for here.

-----
In the preceding discussion, I have attempted to cover the general methods through which we might deal with the problem of suffering externally. In the forthcoming follow up to this post, I shall consider what we have done (and what we can do) to deal with the problem internally, or psychologically.
-----

And Now For Something Completely Different

2008-07-03T02:49:00.001-07:00

... After that ridiculously long post on Buddhism, here's something both hilarious and depressing! Sarah Haskins (not to be confused with the Olympics competitor by the same name) is a comedian who has appeared on a few brief segments of the show infoMania, pointing out how specific types of television advertising is geared specifically toward women. Her segment is called "Target Women," appropriately enough.

I consolidated the few clips I could find here in this post, because of course you'll want to see them all! I like her a lot, and I hope to see more of her in the future. With luck she'll rally some more fans - She's already receiving a lot of positive comments from the feminist blog-o-sphere in general (e.g., Salon, Feministing.) .

***EDITED as of 08-30-08 to remove links to videos, since the server changed their content. ***

My Problems With Buddhism

2008-07-03T02:07:00.000-07:00

[Disclaimer: I have not studied Buddhism as much as I would have liked. It may be that I am falsely representing certain Buddhist doctrines (and yes, I realize that they vary from sect to sect), but this is all to the best of my knowledge, and I believe it corresponds to the common grounds of the different sects.]

Problem One: Unwarranted Claims

My first complaint about Buddhism is that it makes unsubstantiated claims about the nature of the universe: karma as a force exists and influences us (e.g., what form our next life will take is dictated by our karma); there is an endless cycle of birth and rebirth for an individual soul; there are six states of existence (Gods, demigods/Asura, humans, animals, ghosts, beings in hell), and then three higher realms of existence (the Realm of Desire, the Realm of Pure Form, the Realm of Formlessness); in some sense, the soul persists throughout its rebirths, even while the individual dies; and so on and so forth.

There is a wealth of these metaphysical assertions. Yet for all that, the Buddha never provides us with evidence or any good reason to support the above claims! What do we have instead? Mystic revelation. The Buddha, as he sat and meditated under the bodhi tree, apparently tapped into a deeper source of knowledge - a source inaccessible to the rest of us - at which point he discovered The Truth. Presumably, then, we must trust the Buddha's word that things really are as he claimed. We cannot experience The Truth As Revealed To The Buddha ourselves until we achieve a similar state of enlightenment (if we ever manage to), and there is no way to either vindicate or falsify his "Truth" otherwise.

If you are like me, that alone will not feel particularly satisfying. When they are of such an extraordinary nature, I find it difficult to take anyone's claims on faith alone. I imagine most Buddhists would adopt an "If you don't believe it, try it yourself" attitude, saying that I too would eventually experience The Truth if I got to that point myself. But, attaining nirvana is supposed to be incredibly difficult; and, there is no way to know that one is doing the right thing until one actually reaches the end (nirvana). We are told that one can spend one's entire lifetime (and more! So many more lifetimes) seeking enlightenment unsuccessfully. If we could conceivably waste the rest of our lives pursuing nirvana without success, should we not want a little more assurance than "You will see it once you reach enlightenment ourself"? Since we cannot prove that the soul exists or that reincarnation works as advertised, then for all we know we only have one life to live. Would it not be more worthwhile to spend this one life in other pursuits, striving for things we are reasonably likely to achieve in one lifetime?

Many or all religions suffer from this problem of unverifiability. So this is not anything particularly special by itself. At any rate, the Buddha himself discouraged speculation and arguments about metaphysical issues beyond what he laid out himself. So let me move on to reveal the more grievous problem with Buddhistic doctrines.

Problem Two: Self-Undermining Beliefs

The four noble truths of Buddhism are as follows:
1. Existence is suffering.
2. Suffering is caused by desire/attachment.
3. It is possible to escape desire (and hence suffering).
4. The way to escape desire is through the Eightfold Path.

The the first truth - to exist is to suffer constantly - is pretty uncontroversial (isn't it?), but the second - suffering is caused by desire and/or attachment - might be less obvious. Is it really the case that all suffering results from desire? Well, when we look at examples of suffering, they are invariably accompanied by a desire to relieve that suffering in some way or another. Moreover, the ostensible "cause" of suffering (as understood by the sufferer) always stems from desire or attachment itself. For example, I may feel upset that a friend snubs me - this is because I wanted her to treat me otherwise than she did. I may feel hurt that my son dies, and this hurt derived from my feelings of love and care - my attachment - that I experienced toward him.

So, to cut to the chase, Buddha's strategy is pretty simple. We just found out what causes suffering: desire and attachment. So, let us rid ourselves of those things. The fourth noble truth points us toward the Eightfold Path, and we are told that practicing the Eightfold Path will lead to a gradual lessening of our fixation on transient things. The eventual aim of Buddhism is to realize that we are all nothing (or "no thing" - nothing we can comprehend); Buddha advocated the belief of anatman - that there is no self. Furthermore, everything changes and fluctuates, and so it is folly to become attached to anything and treat it as permanent. Permanence, for the Buddha, is an illusion.

What is so wrong with all of the above?

If there is no self (since my "I" changes from moment to moment), how can I really do anything, much less seek enlightenment? If there is no self, what precisely is being deluded and subject to suffering?

If all desires lead to suffering, what is the worth of compassion? Buddhism emphasizes compassion frequently, and Buddha himself remained in our plane in order to spread his words and alleviate our suffering. But how could he have been motivated to do so? At the point of enlightenment, he would have seen that all desires are pointless or harmful, including the desire to help others. In essence, I deny that Bodhisattvas (those who attain freedom from desire/attachment yet remain in the world anyway to help others) are possible.

Finally, let us suppose for an instant that the Buddha is wrong, that reincarnation is false, and in fact, there is no afterlife whatsoever. If so, should not death be the easiest way to achieve this sort of state - where one has no more desires or attachments, where one is free from suffering? Why do Buddhists not kill themselves, but for the threat of incurring bad karma?

And, on that note, is it even possible for a sentient, conscious being to still exist without desire? I would think such a being must want to remain free from desires and attachments in order to continually effect that state. The want to remain aloof from desires is still a want.

That is the true problem here: Buddhism entices us to accept its tenants in order to be free of suffering. Yet, that desire to be free from suffering was itself an attachment, an attachment to our own egos. At the least, some desires seem to lead us away from suffering - such as the desire to know The Truth. If so, it is not actually true that all desires or attachments cause suffering. Hence, Buddhist beliefs undermine themselves.

What's WITH minds anyway?

2008-06-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt a musical--well, at least one song from it, anyhow. It was rather amusing: in the manner typical of musicals, after some key event had occurred, abruptly music came from nowhere and everyone present engaged in singing or dancing. In the manner typical of dreams, of course this made perfect sense, and I participated just as willingly as everyone else. (I did think it was marvelous that everyone present somehow either knew the words and melody, or they were adroit enough at following by ear.)

Now, the peculiar thing to note is that this was music (complete with orchestration and lyrics) I'd never hard before--it was the product of my unconscious mind. I can't guarantee that the music would win any awards, but it made harmonic sense, had convincing melodic content, and it flowed pleasingly. The lyrics were probably pretty nonsensical but I can't remember a thing about them.

(Also notable was the fact that I myself sung along, I was very deft at picking out various ways to harmonize with the other singers, something I've sometimes had trouble doing by ear. But this was easy--so very easy--and it felt natural.)

So my question: why is it so much easier to create music while I'm asleep? Why does it flow out so effortlessly, without thought or conscious guidance? I'm not saying that conscious guidance is necessarily a bad thing, but it's kind of frustrating that I can't simply choose to let this same thing happen to me while I'm awake. Again, I don't have any guarantees that the music produced would be any good, but I'd at least like to experiment and see what comes out.

I know that this ability is in my head somewhere: the ability to simply let musical works flow out, as Mozart was allegedly able to do. But I remain frustratingly unable to tap it--just as, for a highly relevant analogy, I know that the other events from that dream are in my head somewhere, but I can't remember them. Just as with any other memory one has difficulty recalling. The knowledge is there somewhere, encoded in an obscure part of one's neural circuitry. But how does one access it?

This leads me to ponder again the difference between the waking state and the dreaming state. I feel as though inhibition must be a large part of it. In dreams, while I do retain a modicum of reasoning ability, I am often so much more willing to simply embrace the absurd, the inconsistent, and the unusual without pausing to think, "Hey wait--this doesn't make sense."

Would I be better able to let music flow forth from within me if I stopped being so critical of it, then?

But if I am not critical, how can I trust that it will be any good?

Perhaps a strategy like the following is needed: relax the constraints of one's mind ("Free your mind," as Morpheus advised Neo), and let whatever wants to come forth, come forth. Do not seek to consciously guide it, do not judge it, do not think about impact this will have on others, about what it means--try not to think at all, really. After you have let this outflowing run its course, then--and only then!--do you reactivate your critical faculties in order to evaluate the products of your creativity. Only then ought to occur assessment, judgement, and revision.

Neo-Mystical Idealism: the Interrelationship Between Belief, Truth, and Action

2008-06-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

Preamble.
This post is concerned with what I will call Neo-Mystical Idealism (NMI) of the sort often hinted at - or even explicitly endorsed - in pop-spirituality/self-help books (e.g. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior), movies (ranging from fiction like The Matrix and The Waking Life to allegedly "factual" films like The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know), fantasy and sci-fi books (Philip K. Dick), video games, various other popular sources (the Planescape expansion for the game Dungeons & Dragons), new age spirituality, ancient mystical traditions, certain idiosyncratic philosophers (Anaxagoras, perhaps), literary figures (Jorge Luis Borges, on some interpretations?), and a few fringe theories of modern physics.

Definition.
What I call NMI, broadly construed, is the belief that our thoughts, desires, beliefs, and/or intentions exert a direct, significant, formative influence on reality (and our ability to interact with it). Depending on the variant of NMI, this may be as subtle as influencing a random number generator toward a particular bias simply by willing it so, or it may be as drastic as the belief that reality simply is a dream constructed wholly by our own minds. I say "neo-mystical" due to its overwhelmingly mystical nature and its current prevalence in pop-culture, and I say "idealism" in reference to philosophical idealism where the world consists of mind-objects rather than "real" objects.

Notes:
+ "Idealism" may be a bit of a misnomer, since it is not necessary to believe that nothing exists beyond what the mind perceives in order to accept NMI; but, it's the most relevant term I can think of.
+ Accepting the efficacy of prayer or magic rituals could be seen as embracing NMI, since they both consist in effecting results through extra-physical means. But I would prefer to exclude them from NMI-hood since both prayer and magic rituals seem to be an appeal toward an external power, whereas proponents of NMI seem to focus very much on the personal mind's power.

Example.
In The Matrix, those who have been awakened - that is, those who have been taken from out of the computer simulation and shown the real world - realize a fundamental truth about what they thought was reality. Reality does not actually work the way they had learned and placidly accepted all their live. Rather, there is an underlying substratum - in this case, a digital reality designed and maintained by artificial intelligences - which governs phenomenal appearances. This means that what were thought to be unbreakable rules of reality are actually subordinate to the rules of the simulation. If one is in the know, one can "hack" the system to do things which aren't supposed to be allowed: as Morpheus puts it, "Some rules can be bent. Others can be broken."

This all pertains to Neo-Mystical Idealism in that belief is inextricably intertwined with overcoming the rules of the fake reality. Time and time again, The Matrix stresses the power of the mind and the power of belief. One of the most memorable scenes occurs during a training program where Neo, the recently-awakened hero, receives his first genuine test: he must leap a vast distance from the roof of one building to another, in defiance of his firmly entrenched beliefs about the laws of gravity. Notably, Morpheus tells Neo the following just before he jumps across the gap himself: "You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind. " Morpheus sails across the humongous distance practically without effort, but when Neo jumps, he plummets like a rock; he did not successfully follow Morpheus' advice, but clung to his old beliefs and preconceptions about the functioning of the world. Hence, he failed.

From this and many other instances that emphasize belief, The Matrix conveys a pretty clear message: your beliefs are intensely related to your abilities (at least when one is in a computer simulation, at any rate). This message is, indeed, essentially the same as that handed down from so many other sources. Transcend the world of illusion (realize The Truth), and you will be able to do the previously unimaginable. This is one of the key components of NMI - it always requires a sort of "awakening" or "enlightenment" process.

Reality?
There is a grain of truth in the lesson taught by NMI: false beliefs can easily inhibit our full potential. Certainly history abounds with examples where the "impossible" later turned out to be quite possible, and there resulted a dramatic shift in outlook to accommodate that change. In quite a few cases, it seems as though a belief (or lack of belief) hindered progress, as when it was thought (prior to 1954) that humans could not run a mile in less than four minutes. Yet, after an initial pioneering spirit showed that it was possible, suddenly many others followed suit, and improved upon his time.

So that seems pretty uncontroversial. However, there is a very big difference between being limited by a false belief and a belief creating or affecting reality. Beliefs do not and cannot create reality They can only accord or disaccord with it. Hence, while we should take from The Matrix the lesson that we should not grow complacent in our beliefs, this does not mean that NMI generally is true. If NMI were true, we ought to be able to find confirmation of it beyond the shaky pseudoscientific studies published in disreputable journals.

On the other hand, perhaps my belief that "Beliefs do not and cannot create reality" is itself a false belief? And perhaps I am limiting myself when I latch onto it so ferociously? And perhaps others do the same?

Three Cheers for Angst

2008-05-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

When I ask, "Is life worth living," what does that really mean?

The very notion entails that there is a "worth" to be evaluated here. Normally, when we ask something like, "Is X worth doing," it suggests that we ought to examine whatever activity "X" represents, then determine whether its expected return will compensate for the expected investment.

So, is life worth living?

Living, under all meanings of the word, requires quite a bit of an investment--it involves suffering, tedium, labor, constant maintenance of and vigilance toward a physical shell. In fact, simply by choosing to continue to live, we open ourselves up to the possibility of undergoing every torment that could possibly be experienced by a human in a similar situation.

On the other hand, living also yields the possibility of every greatest joy that we could conceive. On the more mundane level, it is normal to experience pleasures, happiness at friends and family, food, bits of luck, enjoyment of love and sex, etc.

So, to evaluate whether "life is worth living" for a particular individual, she should determine whether her expected benefits will outweigh her expected detriments. Often, when someone reaches the point of suicide, it is because life no longer seems worth living: to the severely depressed individual, the expected suffering far outweighs the expected pleasure--and, perhaps, at some point it seems impossible for there ever to be any future pleasure again.

When I consider this post--I think, implicitly, is it worth it to try and keep working and rewriting until I come up with something more coherent? Something that others will be able to appreciate, that I will be able to look back at with pride (or something resembling pride)? Apparently the answer is no--or at least, it's not worth the extensive reworking that calls out to me--the post almost has a life of its own, in how it shouts to me, "There are parts of me that are wrong! Fix them!"--but sometimes--as now--it does not seem worth the revision and editing process. The striving. I mean, don't get me wrong--I'm doing some minimal reworking as I go, of course--but I keep needing to sort of grit my teeth and continue on past the glaring errors in order to make progress at a ll--because I lack the perseverance, dedication, and motivation required to bring it up to the standards it should be. For example, as I write, I am conscious that this paragraph (nor the post as a whole) does not flow particularly well; it skips from one subject to another without preamble or continuity, and it contains long, ill-formed sentences--often broken with m-dashes, because that's easier than figuring out how to make it into something elegant.

(I wonder how much my need to be free of errors stems from a fear that others will mock me or think less of me for them?)

But yes. That calling-- that anthropomorphization of error. Maybe it's not so much an anthropomorphization as--I don't know. But it's nearly tangible sometimes--the wrongness of a given object (compared to its ideal standards). I feel thus when I compose music, when I write a paper, when I long to be perfect in any way. In fact, too often the world as a whole seems this way to me.

And when I don't have the energy or ability to make it right--or at least to put forth a good solid effort, if nothing else--it doesn't seem worth continuing with.

Hence, perhaps, why I have no motivation?

I don't know. Is the problem that I lack motivation or that I lack competence?

Lack of Content

2008-05-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

Well, as was probably inevitable, I seem to have run out of steam with this blog. That tends to happen. I guess I just haven't been quite as enthused about writing out my own thoughts on various issues, or something. This blog should probably be considered "dying."

It's not as though I really blog about anything that's genuinely philosophical, in the academic sense. I seem to excel at pseudo-philosophy more than anything else. Mreh. Writing papers for class is quite a drudgery too. For whatever reason, genuine philosophical issues seem to have soured for me.

I can't seem to make myself care about what various commentators think Kant really meant in the Transcendental Dialectic, or how his principles can be applied to field X for fascinating result Y. Do I care about the Ship of Theseus, the nature of time, or the fundamental nature of the reality? Not really, no. Not at the moment. If ever, to some degree.

What am I interested in?

I'm interested in how we as a species apply logic to the world. I'm interested in whether there's something wrong with how we conceptualize the world, generally. Could it be possible that our fundamental assumptions and frameworks are holding us back? What if there's a better way?

And yet, I don't want to do any studying that would aid me to find that out.

=/

Well-known philosophers who did not start out with philosophy

2008-05-07T03:39:00.000-07:00

A while ago I noticed that quite a number of recent-ish philosophers did not actually receive B.A.s in philosophy--or whatever their equivalent undergraduate study was. So, I scoured Wikipedia (and the related internet) to compile a list of all the eminent philosophers who fit this criteria. The number is surprisingly high--or, perhaps I should say, the number of very influential philosophers on this list is quite high. I am certain that there are many, many more philosophers in general who did take philosophy as their first college degree, but if we only count only those philosophers with a very dramatic influence, I think we would find comparable numbers between those who began with philosophy and those who began with something else.

This list is unfortunately quite biased in favor of analytic philosophy, since that is the area I am most familiar with, although I did try to include some philosophers from other fields. I looked for philosophers from the end of the 19th century on--Nietzsche may be stretching it a little, but oh well. I also included a few notes about later/higher education, when it deviated from philosophy.

All sources are from Wikipedia unless noted otherwise. The list is in no particular order, although I did clump some names together based loosely on association or contemporaneity.

What was their focus as an undergrad?
---
Friedrich Nietzsche: philology (he later received a doctorate in this same subject)
Gottlob Frege: mathematics and physics
Bertrand Russell: mathematics (although he did study philosophy as an undergrad too)
Alfred North Whitehead: mathematics (also taught as a professor of mathematics for some time, before eventually becoming a professor in philosophy)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: mechanical engineering (until he came across Frege and Russell)
Karl Jaspers: medicine (received an M.D. and studied psychology. Did not study philosophy until he was 40)
Edmund Husserl: mathematics (followed by a PhD in the same subject)
Karl Popper: medicine? (I can't find anything that talks about his undergrad education, but he he received a PhD in Psychology, and this was early enough that he probably went to med school)
William James: another M.D. (Also did not study philosophy until he was older)
Thomas Kuhn: physics
Rudolph Carnap: physics (although he also studied logic and Kant's Critique). He originally intended to write a physics thesis--but both the philosophy and physics departments reputedly rejected his it as being too much like the other subject. He eventually wrote a more philosophically oriented thesis, so he ended up with a degree in philosophy.
Charles Sanders Peirce: chemistry (followed by an M.A. in chemistry too; source: SEP). In all fairness, it seems he also studied philosophy on his own time, and the reason he continued with chemistry was largely to support himself while he pursued logic.
Keith Donnellan: math education (source: biography on his site)
Max Black: mathematics. (I think, anyway. The only source I could find is a little unclear about it--and it does say that he talked much with many other budding philosophers of mathematics; source)
Saul Kripke: mathematics
David Chalmers: mathematics and computer science (afterwards studied for his PhD under Douglas Hofstadter (who is something of a computer scientist or cognitive psychologist--not a philosopher per se, but he is a very philosophically-minded polymath))
Otto Neurath: mathematics
Nancy Cartwright: B.Sc. in mathematics (source: cv from her site)
R.M. Hare: Classics (source)
Martha Nussbaum: theater and Classics
Jean Baudrillard: German (and later received a doctoral degree in sociology)
Arthur Danto: art and history
Hartry Field: mathematics (source)
---

Very interesting, is it not? What I find particularly fascinating is that there seem to be many more "crossovers" from non-philosophical fields among those philosophers who wrote on metaphysics or the philosophies of science, mind, logic, or math--rather than, say, philosophers who are known principally for their work in ethics. And that's not all. Observe the following list of double (and more) undergrad majors:

W.V.O. Quine: mathematics and philosophy
Frank Jackson: mathematics and philosophy
Hilary Putnam: mathematics and philosophy
Jaegwon Kim: French, mathematics, and philosophy
Ernst Mach: philosophy, mathematics, and physics (followed by a doctorate in physics).
Imre Lakatos: philosophy, mathematics, and physics
Carl Hempel: philosophy, mathematics, physics (source: IEP)
Paul Churchland: philosophy, mathematics, and physics (Source: c.v. from his website)
Philip Kitcher: mathematics and history & philosophy of science (source: c.v. from his website)
Nick Bostrom: philosophy, mathematics, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence (source: cv from website)

Timothy Williamson: Philosophy and mathematics.

Notice any, ah, glaringly obvious trends there? So, if you're an analytic philosopher interested in something beyond ethics--why aren't you brushing up your math skills right now? Some physics surely couldn't hurt either.

(I should note that a few other relatively frequent double majors showed up--such as law, economics, political science, and the Classics--but these were largely dwarfed by the majors in mathematics. This may be due to my afore-mentioned analytical philosophy bias, but I find it very noteworthy nonetheless.)

Motion Mountain

2008-04-27T03:57:00.000-07:00

Motion Mountain - The Free Physics Textbook (by Christopher Schiller) is positively amazing. It is a freely available online physics textbook aimed at attracting a wide variety of personality and thinking types (image/verbally oriented; male/female; composer/competitor; experimentally/theoretically inclined; scientific/humanity minded). I am not very far into it yet, but it has succeeded very well with me. I am really enjoying that it approaches physics from a very philosophically-minded standpoint--for example, Schiller describes time as that which allows contradictions to inhere within the same entity--provided that said contradictions occur at different times, of course. He talks about the notions of measurement, observation, and distinguishing objects from their environment (and how this relates to permanence versus variability).

Furthermore, it contains challenges at the end of each chapter to get you thinking more in-depth about the subject, and many of them are very conceptual rather than mathematical. Not that it's a bad thing at all to develop mathematical facility, but the mathematical detail happens to be (unfortunately) the area of physics I enjoy least. Throughout the chapters, Schiller asks us to ponder such questions as, do events exist? Do clocks even exist, really? What are the necessary conditions for velocity to be a part of the world? He also includes pleasant little historical details and social contexts. And he quotes from Wittgenstein's Tractatus often at the beginnings of sections, which is kinda fun =P.

I think he's done an admirable job making the book appealing to those from the humanities (such as myself--although I do have a bit of a computer science background in my distant past, and I'm very fond of logic). I can tell that I am going to enjoy the rest of this book immensely. It is astounding to me that someone took the effort to put this incredible resource together for free. Thank you so much, Christopher Schiller: I deeply appreciate your work.

Conflicting Sensations

2008-04-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I wondered what a world which allowed simultaneous contradictions would look like.

Earlier this morning I had a very fascinating experience – shortly before I woke up, I became aware that I was simultaneously dreaming and yet in my bed at the same time. That is to say, I received two mutually exclusive sets of sensations, one informing me that I was lying on my back underneath sheets and covers with my eyes closed, the other that I was walking through some dreamscape with my eyes open.

I can hardly remember the details of the dream now, but still, the memory of that dual experience is striking. It makes me wonder – perhaps the brain is better equipped to deal with simultaneous contradictions than I'd thought, since I was apparently making sense of feeling that I was in two places at once. Both sensations felt as though they were centered on me, my brain, my consciousness/awareness/etc. It was as though I temporarily had two perspectives on "life" (even though, of course, only one of these was a veridical perspective), and I was able to feel both simultaneously.

So perhaps experiencing a contradiction would be a little like that, somehow.

Making Sense

2008-04-13T03:48:00.000-07:00

Why should the world "make sense?"
Why should we expect that logic ought to apply to the real world?
It does not seem possible for it to be otherwise—but I wonder.

Perhaps logic is not applicable to the world. If that were so, we would abandon it, right? But, if we have to investigate the world to determine whether logic is useful or not, surely that revokes its a priori status.

Or, perhaps, the internal consistency of logic may retain apriority, while the applicability-to-the-real-world is what requires a posteriori verification. That is, suppose it is a necessary truth that is true within a given system, but perhaps we need to then go out and examine the world to tell whether the world agrees with that statement. Here is another way to think of it is: necessarily, logic is consistent within itself; contingently, the universe is such that logic may be fruitfully applied to it.

Could there be a world where the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM) does not hold? What would that be like? I cannot even imagine how something can be at once true and false.

(1) It is true that at this moment, at that location, there is an apple.
(2) It is false that at this moment, at that location, there is an apple.

Presumably these statements mean something like, "There is (is not) a spatiotemporal region constituted in such a way that it accords with an instantiation of our concept 'apple'." Could there be a world where a spatial region could be arranged in two substantially different ways simultaneously? If we try to imagine such a region, do we automatically start thinking of two separate spatial regions, and thus defeat ourselves by splitting into two an entity that ought to have stayed as one?

(3) The square is exhaustively red.
(4) The square is exhaustively blue.

If we accept (3), have we not already denied any possibility of it being otherwise? How could there be a world in which a square is both red all over and blue all over?

There is the occasional speculation that perhaps quantum mechanics has shown that contradictions inhere in reality—that particles really can occupy two places at once, or whatever. But this needs to be looked in to more before I say more on the subject.

A Unique Movie: Rocket Science

2008-04-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

As I started watching Rocket Science, I began to feel irritated—it appeared exactly as though it was going to be one of those formulaic, feel-good, competitive, "the unlikely underdog triumphs over adversary" films that are so popular for sports and dance movies. This style can and often is adapted for intellectual pursuits too, as was the case with Rocket Science, which takes high school debate as its premise.

However, as the movie wore on, and the unlikely hero tries increasingly more and more desperate schemes to overcome his disability (he has a speech impediment which makes debate basically impossible for him) without any progress, I began to wonder: could it be that he won't finally have one of those euphoric epiphanies/breakthroughs that will eventually lead to his success? That maybe, just maybe, justice won't be served, and he won't get the girl in the end? (WARNING: If you haven't seen the movie yet and you're concerned about spoilers, now might be a good time to stop reading.)

I wasn't disappointed. Enlisting the help of a more experienced debater (who dropped out from high school earlier on in the movie), together they sign on as a "homeschooled" team. Our hero does manage some modicum of success through half-singing a debate presentation—but a minute into his speech, he and his partner are interrupted by school officials, who promptly and pitilessly disqualify them from competing (since neither of them really does homeschool). No special pleas accepted, no special exception granted, no brilliant plans or loopholes to get around the system. They're just simply kicked out. The hero has one more dramatic tiff with his love interest (who betrayed him) before leaving.

In the final scene, he's talking with his dad in a car, and he asks, "When does it all [life] start to make sense?" And his dad answers something to the effect of, "It doesn't. After a while, you just stop trying to make sense of it, and live your life."
Protagonist: "So, what, everyone just grows out of it? Is there ever anyone who that never happens to?"
Dad: "Tell you what, if you turn out to be one of those people, you let me know."
The car backs out from where it's parked and starts driving away. Music plays, credits.

No success, no girl. No final resolution, no heroic overcoming, no deus ex machina, no convenient wrapping up of loose ends. This makes it possibly one of the most realistic movies I've ever seen, in some ways. The protagonist tried, he suffered, he failed, he had to move on. Things don't just suddenly "snap into place." It did have a somewhat positive message, I guess—don't keep struggling to speak with someone else's voice, learn to speak with your own voice. And it presumably offers us the consolation that everyone has to deal with these questions at some point in their life (usually around college age, I believe, which is what makes this such a perfect movie for that demographic).

I can't quite help thinking that I may be doomed to be one of those people that never gets over the fact that life doesn't make sense, even if they're not supposed to exist.

Spiffy LaTeX script for Blogger!

2008-03-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

I love the internet these days! A quick Google search can provide you with all sorts of nifty (although probably in the long run not so useful) information and tools. In this particular case (that inspired this blog post), I suddenly developed a hankering for the ability to use LaTeX notation for mathematical and logical notation on Blogger--not that I'll probably ever use it, mind you, and not that I'm even that familiar with LaTeX--but I digress. Blogger doesn't support LaTeX natively, but one swift search later and I'd discovered this Greasemonkey script which, after a very painless installation, sticks a nice friendly button on to the Blogger post editor. This button converts LaTeX notation into images and automatically uploads them into your post for manipulation. (This is all providing that you use Firefox. But of course you use FireFox! Just like any other self-respecting net citizen these days.)

Multipurpose example (to prove that it's working; to see how it looks with my blog colors; to increase my familiarity with LaTeX... or should I say, ):

Or something. Loosely a formulation of Leibniz' Indiscernibility of Identicals. This isn't an ideal solution to notational problems (for example, if you want to make a change in a really lengthy expression, you'd better have copied the text version somewhere because it doesn't convert from images back to text. Also, perhaps not so useful when writing away from my home computer, at least not if I want to see how the results turn out). But man, it's still pretty awesome to have something this convenient. Trés cool!

As a thanks to the author, here's a link to his/her blog (linking there is what he/she recommends by way of thanks): http://servalx02.blogspot.com/

So, what, it's just a fractal after all?

2008-03-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

Click the above picture for a larger version with more details about what's actually being shown. Still, you should be able to make out the words labeling the left image "Brain cell" and the right image "The Universe," and you should be immediately struck by the startling similarity between the two. The brain cell is from a stained slide of a mouse brain, and the universe picture is from a computer simulation portraying how we think the universe developed (it must be a simulation, of course, since we can't very well photograph the universe from outside, nor travel back in time to witness its formation—or so we think).

These two pics were apparently put together by a David Constantine for a New York Times article (or something? that's where the image is hosted, at any rate), although I cannot find the article itself. The "universe" screenshot is from the Millennium Simulation, an international project meant to visually model the universe's development at an unprecedented level of detail and realism. The aforementioned site includes download links for the simulation video, but here's a YouTube link for those who want it.

What do we make of this striking resemblance betwixt neuron and universe? Well, part of me wants to immediately go off on an excited rant about how this confirms all these things I keep noticing about looping/circularity/recursion/self-reference/things-building-upon-themselves, and perhaps there's some sort of mystic significance to be drawn from it all.

But my more cautious side—which, generally speaking, holds more sway for me in these matters—has a few things to say. First and foremost, this is just a simulation; we have no genuine fact of the matter about what the universe, taken as a whole, looked like then or looks like now. Second, this was a simulation designed by humans, creatures who thrive on centralized, hierarchical methods of understanding nature. Seeking out (and, for that matter, imposing) structured hierarchies in nature is one of our most revered conceptual tools, sometimes to the hindrance of our own knowledge—for example, we spent the longest time trying to identify "pacemaker" or leading/guiding cells to account for the slime-mold's self-organizational abilities before Evelyn Fox Keller and Lee Segal showed how they (slime-molds) group together without centralized direction (see Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software for a very readable description of this and many related topics). I find it very likely that, assuming the universe simulation is not perfectly accurate, the simulator designers will tend to incorporate their own biological biases into their work, meaning that human simulation designers will favor simulations that mimic centralization and hierarchies.

Now, for all that, I still grant that the universe demonstrates this kind of arrangement in a number of different non-biological places as well: atoms have nuclei around which electrons orbit, planets and stars form from molecules accumulating around one point, planets orbit about stars, stars orbit about black holes—or whatever-the-hell is in the center of our galaxy. (Note that it pays to be cautious with these analogies: thinking of an atom in terms of planets revolving around a sun can lead to a number of unfortunate misconceptions).

Yes, systematized and centralized thinking is often very helpful.

The problem is, much like the search for theoretical unification and the willful employment of Occam's razor, perhaps it causes us to overlook other things, and see hierarchies where they may not necessarily exist.

(As a final point, there are quite a few images from the universe simulation one can select; given that there are probably thousands of neuron images out there too and given the, ahem, nebulous nature of the astronomical simulations, it can't be that hard to find a few that coincide fairly well.)

Discouraging Thoughts

2008-03-19T22:20:00.000-07:00

I recently began reading Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. It's a very fascinating book that covers (directly, tangentially, or in passing) many of the topics that I'm interested in these days: artificial intelligence, Turing Machines, Gödel's theorem, formalism in mathematics, quantum mechanics, fractals, complexity, predictability, etc., etc. In fact, it's a lot like another excellent book that I'm trying to get through at the moment, Douglas Hoftstader's Gödel, Escher, Bach, both in terms of related topics and in how the author draws from many different sources to drive toward an eventual point about the mind (the impossibility of strong AI and/or the irreducibility of the mental to the physical in the case of Penrose, and the self-referential nature of consciousness in the case of Hofstadter. Or so I believe, since I haven't gotten too terribly far in either of them yet, and I'm only dimly aware of what their conclusions will be).

Anyway, the problem: I was skimming through the latter parts of The Emperor's New Mind to see what lies ahead, and for a pop-science book, it contains a bewildering number of frightening equations (aghh! Look at all the ψ's, ω's, and other intimidating esoterica!) . Now, I'm not as put off by this as the average reader might be, but still, I'm worried about my ability to adequately grasp this kind of thing, particularly given my currently less-than-pleasing math knowledge. And, moreover, I'd genuinely like to be able to understand these sorts of things. But do I have the patience? Do I even care enough? How can I learn these things outside of a classroom environment?

I'm also slightly concerned that the math-heavy sections of the book will be like roadblocks for my reading: that is, I will procrastinate getting through them since I'll keep thinking, "I want to understand this, so I'll just come back to it when I'm not feeling so tired, when I'm more in the mood to concentrate, etc., etc." And then, six months later, I still won't have made any progress in the book. Just some things for me to watch out for.

Etymological fact of the day: the word 'rapt'—to be engrossed or enraptured—derived from the past participle of 'rape,' which originally denoted 'seizing' or 'carrying off' without necessarily denoting non-consensual sex acts. Indeed, 'rapt' was occasionally used to indicate being carried from Earth to Heaven (as, perhaps, a prophet or mystic might be taken by God; or as one might be struck rapt in the midst of a vision). 'Rapture,' unsurprisingly, shares a very similar derivation, and this, I presume, is why the modern Christian doctrine of The Rapture has the name it does. The word 'ravish' also derives from the same distant root (Latin rapere); it has a near-identical meaning—to carry off forcibly, particularly in the case of a woman. But, 'ravish' has also been used in the sense of transport from Earth to Heaven, much the way 'rapt' has been, and so 'ravishing' is a complimentary term because it means something like 'enchanting' or 'entrancing.'

The frightening thing is that 'ravish' is still a synonym for our modern sense of 'rape' today. And so, telling a woman that she looking 'ravishing' seems to indicate that she looks rape-able. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does not list anything like this in its usage history of the word, and I generally consider the OED the final authority on all things language related, but still... kinda makes you think.

Another note about content

2008-03-17T02:40:00.000-07:00

Even my more in-depth posts do not spend a lot of time directly addressing specific scientific or philosophical issues. General trends are great fun to write about, but I would like to write at least a few essays that focus on some particular problem, or that respond directly to some contemporary writer. Also, my posts still wander all over the place--this is good in that I see connections between disparate subjects, but it must be frustrating for the reader to follow.

I find it vastly amusing that I am currently thoroughly uninterested and unmotivated in my classes, yet I have such an interest in writing my own academic-quality work. Or something.

I'll see what I can do.

The Aftermath of Absurdity: H?

2008-03-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

The title of this post ("The Aftermath of Absurdity: H?") contains an oblique reference to the futurist philosophy known as transhumanism. Transhumanism, as the Wiki link shows at the time of this writing, is occasionally represented/symbolized by the characters >H or H+ to indicate progressing beyond humanity in its current form (which is presumably symbolized by H). I will use H?, then, to indicate a curiosity or uncertainty about what exactly a human is in the first place, before we go about augmenting it.

What does it mean to be human?

It means to be a finite being {limited to subjectivity; prey to irrational impulses; hampered by the physical world} with aspirations toward divinity {sub species aeternitatis; pure rationality; transcending physicality}. Even those of an atheistic persuasion frequently seek this divinity in one way or another--and, in fact, the atheist strives to see through God's eyes much more often than the theist, since the theist normally considers the very thought blasphemous {Lucifer went astray when he desired God's position; humanity was punished when it built a tower meaning to ascend to the heavens; and, of course, original sin is the very product of seeing through God's eyes--the serpent tells Eve that knowledge of Good and Evil will make her godlike, and this is indeed what condemns humanity}. When the scientist desires to understand the operations of the universe beyond our immediate ability to perceive {knowledge of particles; the constituents of stars; DNA; functioning of the body}, when she desires a simple system of laws from which everything else may be derived {Grand Unified Theory}, she is desiring to transcend her senses (and all that which is given immediately and simply) to discover the true nature of reality--something which, presumably, only a god would have direct access to. What was the pre-human world like? How was it formed? What "makes" a plant grow? Does the universe exhibit counterfactual definiteness? If not, is Laplace's demon an impossibility? Would a god be subject to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, or to the observer effect?

The aspiration to know this, coupled with the apparent impossibility of truly knowing, is one of the things that makes the human absurd. So many humans for so long have wanted to know what goes on "behind the scenes," and wanted to transcend this paltry, unreliable chunk of biological flesh and bones. Science/technology is presumably our best bet to facilitate this transcendence: it allows us to cleverly sneak around the limitations placed upon us by Nature, augmenting our vision through microscopy and telescopy, detecting and analyzing electromagnetic waves beyond our senses' ability to register, measuring quantities which we could never observe unaided. And, with the deepening of our knowledge, the greater becomes our ability to construct devices which manipulate nature for our own ends. This is the transhumanist goal, and, to a lesser extreme, the intention of nearly every technological endeavor since the dawn of time: harness natural forces so that we may prolong our life, ease our suffering, enable our own enjoyment.

Ever since we first realized that we could more regularly and readily find food if we planted seeds in the right kind of earth, that we can use sticks and rocks and other things to help us hunt and defend ourselves, that we can warm ourselves with animal skins and leaves, we have been on this path. The path which will make us God, perhaps? The path toward perfection?

Perhaps not. Perhaps I again assume too much about the rest of humanity, and I ascribe lofty, grandiose ambitions where they may not be entertained. Perhaps most people want simple, material/social comforts; they are not concerned with knowledge, or even with "transcending" the physical body through virtual reality and cybernetic augmentation. But I think they must be, otherwise why would the promise of heaven be so enticing? Why else would television and computer/console games enjoy the intense, sometimes addicting popularity that they have?

But then, perhaps it is only philosophers who dream this way.

What does it mean to be a philosopher ("What does 'P?' mean")?

Among other things, the philosopher examines presuppositions which underly our most fundamental beliefs. She makes the implicit explicit. She wanders the borders of human thought, heroically grappling with those speculative concepts which are on the outer limits of our ability to reason about, attempting to "make sense" of it all. ("Make sense" is an appropriate way to describe the process: humans often rely on metaphors derived from our senses when attempting to apprehend an abstract concept. See Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff and Raphael E. Núñez for some fascinating examples of how humans tend to map abstract mathematical concepts onto familiar experiential concepts.)

Now, the curious thing about philosophizing is its notorious "arm-chair" method of inquiry. In contrast with the empirical sciences, philosophy presumes to discover knowledge in a peculiar manner: reasoning built off of common intuitions, supplemented and refined by 1) the arguments of other philosophers, both those from the past and those contemporaneous; and 2) the discoveries handed down from the sciences. Rather than going out into the world and poking about, setting up controlled environments and acquiring measurements to discover regularities, the philosopher sits atop a mountain of academia, arguing vociferously about the ultimate truths of possibility and necessity. Truths applicable, presumably, to all modes of knowledge and all realms of inquiry--that is to say, truths applicable universally.

Early science - natural philosophy

This has not always been the case: during the Modern Era, "natural philosophy" gained prominence with its new-fangled focus on experimentation. A number of noteworthy philosophers either contributed directly to what we now call science or influenced it strongly with their theories, such as Descartes, Kant, Sir Francis Bacon, and Leibniz. Isaac Newton's legendary tome that lay the groundwork for classical physics was titled Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or "mathematical principles of natural philosophy." Newton and the other members of the Royal Society certainly considered their work to be "natural philosophy," and the continued use of "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society" as a name for the longest running science journal in existence is a testament to that attitude. This was by no means exclusive to the Modern period: Aristotle may have been one of the world's first biologists, for all that his conclusions were rife with what we now know are accuracies. Copernicus and Galileo no doubt considered themselves philosophers, etc. etc.

However, with the rise of natural philosophy and its subsequent successes came a devaluation of regular philosophy. By the 19^th century (or perhaps the early 20^th at the latest), "natural philosophy" had separated even farther from traditional philosophy; it was hereafter known as "science." Strong borders began to appear between the two, spurred on by the anti-metaphysical, pro-empirical agenda of the logical positivists. Since then, science, along with every other field in academia, has undergone a radical process of specialization: we have the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, then the social sciences of psychology and sociology (and perhaps economics and political science, depending on where ones draws the line). Finally, we have mathematics and computer science, which are hardly empirical, yet they are of such a systematic nature and of such relevance to science proper that they often fall under the general category "science." This segregation of subject matter seems to have arisen as a method of shared labor, or divide-and-conquer strategy: as scientific knowledge accumulates, it becomes inefficient--perhaps impossible--for one person to stay abreast of the current research, and impossible furthermore to devote one's own time to experimentation and theorizing toward the many facets of science at once. Specialization in academia, not surprisingly, mirrored the socio-economic specialization that sprung forth during the Industrial Revolution in the form of division of labor, mechanization, and streamlined factory assembly. Not that it was a new concept: Plato's Republic, Hume's Treatise, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (and no doubt other sources) advocated specialization as the key to efficiency; and, indeed, natural selection itself preceded every thinker through the specialization of cells within an organism and the specialization of individuals within a pack or colony. However, the exponential, near-simultaneous growth of technology, population, science, and the humanities in the last two hundred years exquisitely highlights the role specialization has played, and it is doubtful we would have made the progress we have without it.

Specialization, in conjunction with cooperation, is a wonderful thing which enables synergy--a mysterious emergent property resulting from the pooling and interaction of individual components. Unfortunately, specialization has its drawbacks too: namely, the walls which develop between the expert and the non-expert. Mathematics is a perfect example; from what I hear, mathematics is perhaps the most inaccessible field even to expert mathematicians: at the highest levels of specialization, there might be some ten or fifteen people in the world capable of fully understanding what a given paper tries to prove. A mathematician who studies one niche branch of mathematics may be completely lost when faced with another.

So what does this have to do with philosophy? Well, philosophy was the mother of all inquiry--rational speculation began here, but academic subjects splintered off into child fields that have since then gained their own prominence. In the case of the sciences, that prominence now dwarfs philosophy such that philosophy is the "handmaiden of science," at best, and useless dialectical gobbledygook at worst. And, the inaccessibility that is a byproduct of specialization exacerbates the divide by making it difficult for science to communicate with non-scientific disciplines (see C.P. Snow's Two Cultures for a notorious take on the gulf between the science culture and non-science culture).

So, I suppose I am interested in what relevance philosophy has to non-moral matters. Is there any point to philosophers talking about science and mathematics when many scientists and mathematicians pretty much ignore us? If we have ascertained that philosophy does not give results the way that science has, what role does it play for us? I am interested in science and mathematics, but I do not have the training nor time required to get a full grasp on what the experts are doing. Should this concern me? Is there anything that can be done about it?

Is there a way to be a better/improved/augmented philosopher ('P+'), and what is the relationship between 'P?' and 'H?'?

New Site Banner

2008-03-14T19:38:00.000-07:00

For some reason I thought it would be a grand idea to make a new banner for this blog, even though I've got all the design ability (and sensibility) of an orangutan. Or maybe less. Maybe orangutans would actually make fabulous web designers, who knows? Anyway, I'll probably keep tweaking it a bit (and the site's background colors) since they're a bit less than perfect at the moment. It looks kinda amateur right now, but at least it's more original than a default Blogger template, right?

I always marvel at this peculiarity: when I evaluate something for aesthetic cohesion, I'm quite adept at making judgments about (what are for my tastes) good or bad color choices, good or bad fonts, relative spacing, clarity, composition, etc. However, when I'm actually making a new piece of design (or visual art), I find it so difficult to get things to cohere properly. I can't quite find that right set of colors which will make everything gorgeous, I can't quite find the right shapes, etc., etc. Same problem as any artistic endeavor, I suppose--lacking the necessary experience, I'm simply bad at it until I get a chance to develop more.

Anyway, the painting on the left side is from the talented Stella Im Hultberg, used without permission... because I'm too lazy to email and ask, and I don't know that it matters that much on a blog that no one visits.

Also, about the site in general: I'm concerned at the growing number of "frivolous" posts I'm making here. I really intend for this blog to stay on topic (whatever that topic happens to be), so I promise I'll get out some new posts soon that make serious efforts to be worthwhile.

A Completely Irrelevant Obsevation

2008-03-12T01:54:00.000-07:00

From the on-campus coffee/convenience store, I just bought a bottle of Guayaki Yerba Mate mint flavored tea, a pint of Ben & Jerry's oh-so-maddeningly-delicious Mint Chocolate Cookie, and a few bags of Moroccan mint tea.

Apparently, I'm experiencing some kind of intense need for mint lately, and I hadn't even realized it. Mostly I was amused that these were the only items I bought, and I didn't even notice their prominent theme until a few hours later.

I also keep buying these little honey sticks with added mint flavor that the store sells.

Something About Pride

2008-03-10T04:44:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons that I think adults often find it more challenging to learn new things than children is that adults generally possess quite a number of expectations about what should be easy for them. There are certainly other factors: adults already have a solidified framework for their preexisting knowledge; so, any new information must be fit into this framework somehow, and sometimes the fit may not be perfect. There are also brain growth and adaptation differences between the age groups—the brain culls unused neurons as a child develops, so certain capacities get cut if they are never utilized. Consequently, an adult who never, say, learned to speak as a child may lose that ability forever (there are numerous cases of so-called feral child who suffer severe language and social impairments when returned to society.) ¹ Today, however, I'm interested in pride and how pride interferes with learning.

My own experience: I am currently taking a statistics class, and I am very aware that the mathematics and reasoning involved are quite rudimentary—the prerequisite is just one semester of calculus, and there have been only one or two places where knowledge about, say, integrals has been helpful. It's not as though basic calculus is a very difficult subject anyway, compared to God-knows-what-else that higher level mathematicians study (hyperbolic geometry? Abstract and linear algebra? Combinatorics?). Now, most of the time I do find it easy to understand and use the concepts in statistics, but every once in a while I get stuck on a particular problem or issue. And, at these points, my venomous pride comes into play: knowing that the material is simple, I berate myself all the more for not picking it up easily. I have to wonder though, is this ever helpful? Such self-castigation is counterproductive: I feel more frustrated and upset with myself, which in turn makes it more difficult to focus on the work, which again makes me upset and frustrated — and before you know it, we have a vicious cycle and/or positive feedback loop spiraling out of control.

Now, I began this post by speaking as though it is a bigger hindrance for adults than children (and it no doubt is). But, as it turns out, children are not always free from the detrimental effects of pride either.

Studies by Claudia M. Mueller and Carol S. Dweck indicate that complimenting children on their intelligence can actually have damaging rather than beneficial effects on their self-esteem and willingness to address difficult problems. This happens if the praise emphasizes ability rather than effort put forth.

From their article's abstract:

Contrary to this popular belief, six studies demonstrated that praise for intelligence had more negative consequences for students' achievement motivation than praise for effort. Fifth graders praised for intelligence were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort. After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more low-ability attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort. Finally, children praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praise for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement.²

Part of the very real problem is that children (and, of course, adults too) want to feel and look smart, particularly if they have been led to believe that they are smart. Sometimes this will incline a child to favor those activities which are easiest in order to maintain their smart image. After all, surely only ungifted plebians have to actually struggle in order to learn things — not like those brainiacs who breeze through the most abstruse material with the greatest of ease. Here's another quote from article's prepatory discussion:

For example, Dweck and her associates have demonstrated that children who hold performance goals are likely to sacrifice potentially valuable learning opportunities if these opportunities hold the risk of making errors and do not ensure immediate good performance (Elliott & Dweck, 1988). That is, "being challenged" and "learning a lot" are rejected in favor of "seeming smart" by children who subscribe to a performance orientation (Mueller & Dweck, 1997).

In other words, children who are overly focused on doing well (rather than trying hard) are reluctant to try new things, particularly if failure might compromise their image as "intelligent." Unfortunately, opening oneself to the possibility of failure is a very necessary part of trying any new activity: closing oneself off from potentially valuable but unfamiliar experiences may wind up stunting one's intellectual growth. (I plan to write more on this subject in the near future.)

Another fascinating point that Mueller and Dweck bring up is how the way children are praised can affect how they conceptualize intelligence. Children praised for their good performance (rather than their hard work) tend to see intelligence as a fixed, static trait rather than something which can be developed and improved. Something along the lines of, "either you're born with it or you ain't" — which seems to be an unfortunately all-too-common view for the average person. Failure and success are then seen in the light of ability rather than effort.

Society really doesn't help with this. We venerate the myth of genius, the prodigy, the wonder-child who's "always right" through some innate, Nature-given powers. However, I think the reality is that these cases (if they can even be said to exist) are very, very, very rare. So rare, in fact, that I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who are thought of as "geniuses" really did not possess much more in the way of "raw brainpower" or "talent" than the average person. Thomas Edison said, "Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration" — and if you don't believe a prolific inventor of his caliber, who can you believe? Vincent van Gogh worked like a fanatic at honing his painting skills: he may have been talented to begin with, but his brilliance may have been moreover due to his hard work and perseverance. If one examines Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton's lives, one does not necessarily find early displays of talent so much as early displays of intense, self-motivated interest in understanding the world.

To return to my own problems with my statistics course: clearly it does not benefit me to get worked up over my own failings. High standards can be very helpful at times as something to aim towards, but I do not see any compelling reason to allow rampant self-flagellation in the process. The key is to dedicate energy and thought toward growth; be aware when you fall short of your target, but why be cruel to yourself if you don't meet it? Does needless criticism help you to grow more? I doubt it. When I worry that I am dense for not comprehending a subject easily, I am distracting myself from what is really important — namely, that I engage the material, attempt to absorb it with an open mind, and enjoy the experience.

The same ought to apply for children: maintain high expectations, but only if you can present these expectations in a friendly, encouraging manner. Teach them to enjoy struggling — putting forth effort — rather than gold stars and A+'s. Teach them not to fret so much about intellectual pride.

¹ Actually, feral children are sometimes able to develop language skills later in life, but the process can be slow and difficult. Children returned to society before the age of about 7 seem to have the best chances of recovery. http://www.feralchildren.com provides more information, with a number of references to published sources.

² "Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, No. 1 (1998) : 33-52.

This Is Beauty

2008-03-03T02:52:00.000-08:00

Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures:

Here's a clip of a talk he gave for TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design).

Theo Jansen is an engineer who produces the most astonishingly beautiful "creatures": ambulatory and wholly wind-powered, they possess the most rudimentary self-preservation abilities. Through ingenious design and cunning craftsmanship, they glide about on many cycling limbs and are able to respond (in a limited way) to changes in their environment — such as the encroaching high tide or an approaching storm. All this without the use of electronics or a guiding computer. Well, no "computer" in the popular sense of the word. Actually, any device which exhibits the proper computational functionality should indeed be considered a computer; so it is perfectly accurate to say that Jansen's automata are guided by computers, albeit very simple ones. See, for example, the latter of the above videos, where he describes a mechanism which monitors the automaton's distance from the sea — the device counts in binary, just as an electronic computer does.

I must confess to feeling some perhaps foolish sentiments regarding these automata. I want them to "live" as though they were cells, somehow. Perhaps not fulfilling the ten biological criteria for life, but I want to see them developed so that they can better guide themselves, perhaps repair and sustain themselves. I find their spindly-yet-graceful movements so wondrously, eerily beautiful — perhaps all the more so knowing that it is the wind which propels them.

They consume so little and they are more or less harmless; they are gently mesmeric and captivating in their geometric splendor.

I want to see colonies of them deployed onto an otherwise barren planet, where they could simply exist and wander about, free from potential biological scavengers/predators. They would still have to contend with the corrosion of the elements — perhaps it would be possible for them to reproduce, to some degree? I don't even need to see them there, I just want to know that they are out there, exhibiting life-like behavior while powered so clearly by a non-living source. Perhaps extraterrestrials or some distant descendants of the human race would eventually find, marvel at, and speculate about them in curious awe.

Forgive me, for I am but an uneducated philistine in the realm of art; yet I cannot help but pronounce that Theo Jansen must be one of the great artists of our time.

Cyanosarchina Sp.
from Cyanosite Image Gallery

Imperfection and the Absurd

2008-02-24T18:50:00.001-08:00

(Warning: this post meanders around a bit. It's mostly some musings that I've tried to develop a little. The ending could use more clarification and development.)

Life is imperfect.

What does that mean?

That "the whole business of life" does not meet whatever criteria or standards constitute perfection.

What do we mean by "the whole the business of life"? Something about "how things are." Presumably, the phrase denotes the fundamental circumstances underlying existence. It indicates something about the universe as it appears to us, specifically as it relates to our lives as sentient, feeling beings.

What does it mean to fall short of perfection?

It means we possess some notion of perfection--however ill-defined it may be--yet the world does not accord with this notion. It means that I, the speaker, assert that things would be better if they were more like my notion of perfection. As it turns out, we can group all desires which employ the imagination under this rubric: the impoverished person asserts that her life would be better were she only to win the lottery, the hungering person imagines himself better off in a scenario where his belly is full, etc. The difference, then, between an ordinary desire and a statement about the universe (or life as a whole) is one of scope; I assert that life is imperfect because of something fundamental to how reality is structured. (Usually the imperfections in question pertain directly to how reality affects humans, since, of course, it is humans who make the assertion). However, these kinds of universal assertions suggest a further meaning beyond those of ordinary desires: when I say, "The universe would be better if _____," I imply that it would better for all people and all things, not just for myself. Clearly, it is nothing more than a single thinker's opinion, and no doubt I only propose changes that would benefit myself. Nonetheless, I give the impression of espousing an opinion something like the following: in some deep sense, all of life would be ameliorated by the perfection I wish upon it.

How can this thought be justified? How could I possibly entertain a hubris to the degree that I believe a lowly, imperfect, epistemologically impoverished mortal could hope to prescribe a state of affairs that would benefit the entire universe?

Well, perhaps I don't believe anything that grandiose. Perhaps I merely assert that things would be better for me (and probably those I care about, whether that ends up being just my family, friends, peers, or all sentient beings) if the universe were as I wished it. Still, it is a remarkable claim, given the extensive complexity of the universe and the so very limited extent of human comprehension.

Nonetheless, we pass beyond these concerns for now. Let us allow the finite-yet-hubristic, imaginative being to keep her notion of perfection; let us allow her envisioned state of affairs to accurately depict a "better" world. We pass too beyond how it is possible to evaluate "better" from an objective standpoint (since it may, indeed, be impossible). At present, we are concerned only with the following: to the individual, what does it mean to exist in a universe which does not agree with her desired, imagined universe?

The Absurd

Thomas Nagel and Albert Camus (in "The Absurd," and The Myth of Sisyphus, respectively) characterize absurdity in similar ways. Both writers describe the absurd as a particular kind of discrepancy between what one expects, desires, or seeks in a situation, and what actually obtains.

To loosely sum it up:
Reality ≠ pretense.

To use Nagel's examples, it is an absurd situation when a philanthropic committee elects a heinous criminal as its chairman. It is absurd when a situation requires solemnity--say, a respectable person is being knighted--but the prospective knights' pants fall down.

(Side note: irony is a similar concept to absurdity, in that it is a discrepancy between the image or sentiments one expresses and the reality or beliefs one actually entertains. So, irony might too be described as a mismatch between reality and pretense, only it is an intentional and deceptive mismatch.)

Nagel, Camus, and I differ slightly on the specifics of what makes the human condition absurd. Camus holds that our incessant need for meaning in the face of a wholly meaningless universe creates absurdity. Nagel focuses on the fact that we take our lives seriously, but unjustifiably so, since it is always possible to adopt an external viewpoint (sub specie aeternitatis) where none of our aims or goals are important. Camus and Nagel's viewpoints are closely related, since Camus' "meaning" is arguably similar to Nagel's "importance" (although there are a few other subtle differences). My particular take on the matter is as follows.

The life of a human is absurd because we dream, but more so because we are aware that we dream. That is to say, absurdity as a pervasive, ineliminable aspect of the human condition inheres because we possess the ability to mentally simulate counterfactual circumstances; the absurdity is exacerbated by our awareness of that ability. It is only because we can imagine and desire a perfect world, only because we imagine it with some sense of "should" or "ought" that relevantly applies; but, we are incapable of ever actualizing that world.

Note: I have not delved very deeply into secondary literature to see what else has already been said on absurdity. I have noticed that Jeffrey Gordon ("Nagel or Camus on the Absurd?", Phil. and Phenom. Research, Vol. 45, No. 1. (Sep., 1984)), for one, might be relevant, but I am frankly too lazy to treat it in adequate detail at the moment.

Introductory Post

2008-02-15T23:25:00.000-08:00

The main purpose of this blog is to clarify my own thoughts by forcing myself to set them out in a more precise manner. Second, perhaps some of my thoughts/ruminations might be entertaining or edifying to others. Further, I would be happy to receive some helpful feedback/correction wherever it is warranted.

Please forgive me if I am not the most rigorous of writers--this is another thing which, I hope, writing things out in a blog will help to improve.

Expect: metaphysics, plus the philosophies of logic, language, and math, respectively (although I cannot claim to be very well versed in the latter fields). Also, an occasional bout of existential angst or angry rant about gender. Or whatever else strikes me as interesting.