What's WITH minds anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.