Philosophical Methods

Science has a method. A method is a general procedure for approaching questions in a systematic way. Important philosophers in history have used unique and powerful methods too, for example Kant used the critical method of thinking about what can be thought, and Plato used the method of dialogues. I suppose, in order to make any real progress on reducing problems to theories, one must use some sort of method, even if it’s intuitive and ad hoc. I don’t mean to imply that philosophy has to be as exact as solving an algebraic problem; the simplicity of the algebraic method restricts it to a very limited set of problems, and philosophy has to confront a wide range of subtle and often poorly-defined questions. So what we need might perhaps better be described as a strategy rather than a method.

Daniel Dennett, as you can note when reading his “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” and other papers, had an interesting method he sometimes used that I call the “as-if” method. The idea is to take some phenomenon and analyze it in terms strictly limited to appearances, or an analogy or simile. Then, as pragmatists like to do, you can say that the difference between what seems to the case, and what actually is the case, is splitting hairs that don’t really matter. Pragmatists don’t like to split hairs, and besides, in life we often have to deal with the appearances of things anyway, and the inner facts of the situation don’t matter that much. You may not like the method, and it’s certainly not a scientific method, but it is an interesting approach which can produce results when other approaches fail.

A method I’ve found that appeals to me is the binary distinction, the opposition, the dichotomy. Sometimes people object that all dichotomies are false, or that a distinction I’m making is a “false” dichotomy, so-called because of the classical logical fallacy by that name. And it’s certainly the case that not all dichotomies we might make are necessary dichotomies, leading to the “fallacy of the excluded middle,” but I think, as a philosophical method, it has to be allowed, at least as a starting point.

The mathematician G. Spencer Brown wrote a book on logic called “Laws of Form” which has since become a classic. In it, he developed a complete calculus of logic by starting from one simple element: the distinction, which he represented as a vertical mark on the page separating the white space it cleaved into two parts. That is, he made a binary distinction, a distinction that has only two choices. This is the fundamental element of arithmetic also, the 0 and 1 counters from which all the integers, and all of arithmetic, can be generated. As we in the modern era know very well, the binary number system is the basis of all modern computers and all digital technology.

One of the interesting things computer technicians have learned is that the simple binary distinction, the 0 and 1 of binary computer representation, is capable of building up a virtual world that looks virtually identical to the real one. Photographs can be scanned and stored as sequences of binary numbers that encode both the color and intensity of every pixel (dot) in the picture. By increasing the density of the dots, the binary picture can be made arbitrarily accurate, reproducing the original scene to any desired degree of faithfulness. Some software today creates entire virtual worlds of images and sounds that the viewer can move through and manipulate. It’s all based on binary distinctions, the starting point of all thought.

A typical example where we might make a binary distinction is with temperature, breaking it into two possibilities, hot and cold. To insist that all temperatures are hot or cold will meet some resistance. We know that some temperatures are hotter than others. We know that there is a mid-range of temperatures that don’t seem particularly hot or cold. Generally we would prefer a sliding scale, a continuum of temperatures, in order to describe the full range and subtlety of variation that can occur. But the distinction of hot and cold is useful. The first thing we need to know when touching an object is if it’s so hot that can cause damage, and so the body makes a very quick sorting of the temperature and makes a painful classification if it’s too high. It should be obvious that we can do a sorting, given any two objects, of whether one is hotter than the other, so we can always break the continuum of temperatures down into binary distinctions. In other words, the continuum of temperatures can be digitized.

Another case where we might make a binary distinction is between mental and physical objects. This basic move has an ancient origin. Today it’s considered mainly a Cartesian sorting, and often considered a fallacy. Supposedly, everything mental has a physical reduction, so the entire class of mental objects is unnecessary and illusive.

Unfortunately, discarding the binary distinction of mental and physical removes a discrimination from our cognitive domain. It’s intended to be a simplifying step by the proponents of the reduction, but it in fact limits our ability to meaningfully categorize some types of phenomena, namely the things that happen inside our own head such as emotions and memories. Whether they have a physical reduction or not, they still have an experiential role to play as emotions and memories; losing sight of this fact doesn’t help at all.

Whether or not we’re happy with the categories of mental and physical, there are two general conclusions we can reach from these observations. The first is that the classical fallacies should not be taken as hard and fast rules; sometimes dichotomies are not false, and sometimes, argumentum ad populum is just what you want (in popular elections). The second is that philosophical methods are not rigorous; you can’t rely on them to produce valid results automatically. Even so, some sort of method is going to be necessary when trying to work problems. You should work out what methods work for you, and be open to allowing other philosophers their approach to working a problem.

 

To Thaddeus Dombrowski: Is God a Part of the Brain

It has been a while since this comment was made to my “Why I Believe In God” article, but it is worth making a small note, even though I don’t intend to get into a debate about whether God exists. I don’t think either philosophy or science can decide this question : at our current stage of evolution. But since most people do think about it, the question probably deserves some philosophical attention.

Of course Thaddeus is right, very early on in any personal choice whether to believe in God, as a thinking, analytical person, we have to ask if the whole notion is just an illusion, a construct of our minds. As he puts it in his question, since I see God as the Logos, does that not mean it’s an invention of my thinking apparatus.

I’ve tried to convey in several articles in this blog that there is a fundamental order in the universe itself, an order that transcends the observer and is not just a creation of his imagintion. This means the order exists outside our minds, as well as inside. Which is not to say we may not add something to the scenery. Sherlock Holmes is certainly an embroidery, a construct of the imagination that has no reality (beyond being a part of an actual story). But I don’t think we can reasonably contend that all of the order in the world is a product of our imaginations.

My favorite argument that external order is not entirely a brain construction is an observation about cows: they don’t float away and get stuck in trees. If gravity were a fanciful mental construction and nothing more, there should be companies that specialize in collecting wayward farm animals that have drifted off, got stuck against buildings, caught in trees, or are just obscuring the view as they float over Mt. Rushmore. But as far as I can tell, cows are a verifiable part of the world, they have mass, they take up space, they have to be fed, and they regularly produce manure. And they stay on the ground, due to the action of gravity. We may be in doubt as to the exact nature of gravity, but that there is such a force is not to be questioned. Not if you’re sitting as you read this. If you’re floating in a corner of the room, you may have a point.

No. Wrapping up the fact that the universe has external order, in some kind of entity, force, or power that manifests that order may have relative merits and difficulties of support, but that it exists only as a feature of our brain-thingies is not a tenable hypothesis. It doesn’t worry me in the slightest.

Dombrowski’s question might also be taken in this form: An external order (Logos) exists in the world apart from our speculations as to its detailed form and content, but to suppose there is an agency that is the cause of that order is making an unjustified leap. If that’s the point of the question, it’s good, but it’s not the same as supposing that we create all the order we see. And if we suppose there is an external order, then it’s also reasonable to ask why there is an external order, and how is it made manifest.

Mostly science evades the question entirely and takes it that external order exists, without asking how or why. The scientific question is just a determination of what the rules are.

—

There are other comments on the God question that I would like to give front-page space to, but all in due time. Thank you for your question, Mr. Dombrowski.

 

On Putnam’s Alternate Earth Hypothesis

Hilary Putnam proposed a thought experiment called “Alternate Earth” that was, apparently, intended to suggest that the definitions of some language terms lodge in the real world, and not in the mind — not as merely objects of human intention. I don’t intend to repeat his alternate earth scenario here, only to suggest why such theories are difficult to credit.

Let’s take the typical example of gold. To fully understand the nature of gold, the argument goes, you have to do a scientific examination of the material. It is first reduced to a chemical element. It has a slot in the periodic table. This reduction leads to the definition of gold as one specific type of atom, with so many protons and so many neutrons in its nucleus. Gold, then, is an atom with a certain atomic number and a certain atomic weight. And from this understanding, it follows that the full definition of gold is to be found not by looking in a dictionary, but by examining the material itself.

The problem with this view is really very simple: How does the scientist choose a sample to study, if he doesn’t already know what gold is?

Obviously it’s a recursive problem. The ordinary knowledge of gold lacks scientific detail, which can only be acquired through careful scientific study of a real sample. Yet without that ordinary knowledge, it’s impossible to select an appropriate sample to study. In fact, there’s no way out. The first scientist to study gold on a chemical and atomic level had to start with his ordinary knowledge of what gold is. From there, the scientific research provided an elaboration, but it was not the effective defintion. It was only an explanation.

Thus the conclusion is that language is defined mentally and intentionally, and not by any external, objective entities.

 

Why I Believe in God

Bertrand Russell wrote a little essay some years ago (before he died) which he playfully called “Why I am not a Christian.” This thought-provoking document (which I have never actually read all the way through) is available for your perusal elsewhere on the internet. A quick Google search led me to an edition on ClassicReader.com. I encourage everyone who is sympathetic to atheism to read it, since they will be bound to give it a fair hearing and probably enjoy the thing. I, myself, don’t need it, as I have already given thought to the question and come to my conclusions.

It is not my point here to argue with Russell. Nor to convince you to believe in some sort of God. Nor to make apologetics for the Christian faith. What I do want to do is to look at the philosophical question of the existence of deities, since such entities do have their intellectual uses, and to make a few quick comments by way of explanation for my own belief.

First, a definition. By God, here, I mean an entity of some sort, and not just a force or a universal principle. This entity can manifest forces, of course, by being the origin of them, but it is related to forces it manifests by being the cause of them. And it may embody universal principles, or be the reason universal principles exist — but it is not just the principles. So at once, I have made a distinction between my God and the type of thing Einstein was talking about, or pantheists.

I could continue with an overview of the Nature of God, but that might best be left to another post. In the interest of Brevity (a universal principle and fundamental property of Wit), I’ll limit my further comments here to the Uses of God, just to focus on why we want such a thing hanging about.

There are three Uses of God.

The first use is Creator. Science, which works by the method of causes, worked its way back to the Big Bang, which is rather gratifying to us as believe in a Creative Principle, but stopped short at trying to say where the Big Bang came from. That’s eminantly praiseworthy, because science has no way of knowing why or how it happened. Some people think invoking a creator involves one in an infinite recursion, since the next question is, How was God created? But if we suppose God is the Foundation of Being (I love capitalized words), which is what we are really implying by proposing a Creator, then no such recursion occurs, because God isn’t created. God exists. At time t, t-1, t-1-1, etc. I wasn’t going to speak on the Nature of God, but one must take a moment to point out that Being itself has no reduction, no parts, no simpler form, and no precursor. So we are left with a being which is either eternal, or outside of time. Either way, it isn’t created. It isn’t even its own creator. Existence is the one proposition which has no negation.

The second use is Logos. We assume the universe is logical, well-ordered, and that it can be described by mathematics. Whether or not we believe mathematics exists, we find that th e universe gives rise to some sorts of mathematics but not to others, as if the logic of the mind is built into the very fabric of space-time. Kant would have argued that it’s only built into the fabric of our mind, but since we have no way to know the universe other than through its use and application, there is no way to tell the difference, and we might as well assume the necessity of logic is an Actual property of the world. So when we ask why there are natural laws (something science assumes without question), the answer is, it was made that way.

The Logos, by the way, expands into all non-physical qualities of being. Logos encompasses not only math, but also thought, meanings, symbolism and semantics, art, music, everything that we could list under the heading of patterns. Mind itself, such as we have and use in reading this, is an aspect of the spiritual Logos which complements the physical reality of the Universe.

The third use of God is Love. Now, this is a very difficult proposition to propose, because at first sight, it’s obvious that God has ordained an ending for everything. Far from being that which Saves us from the Shadow of Death, God has created the Shadow of Death to hound us all. Even atheists have to come to terms with the bleak cruelty of nature, with its volcanos and earthquakes, supernovas and entropy. Every creature which can feel pleasure can feel pain. We are all equipped, from humans to plants, with all the necessary faculties for suffering. So what is loving about God’s Nature?

It could take whole books to fully explore the answer to such a question, but one thing is clear at the outset. The universe is such a place that brings us into being. Starting from a cloud of hydrogen gas, progressively more complex things have evolved, leading eventually to us, and to other intelligences in the universe, and ultimately we have to recognize that the universe is of the kind where this happens, and not of the kind where it doesn’t. So ultimately, we are wanted. We are supposed to be here. The entire history of the world is a path of destiny which leads directly — yes, directly — to you and me. And I think this has some profound implications.

I will have to cut this short. I’ve put off writing this article for a long time, mainly because there is so much to say. Having touched briefly on some of the reasons for and uses of God, I think I can get away with a brief remark that, having arrived at this basic conclusion, I thought it was a very short path to arrive at Christianity.

One final comment. I don’t dispute that the phenomena I’ve talked about can be accepted without proposing any deities to explain them. The position of atheism seems to be one of accepting a deep and unresolvable mystery about the nature of the universe, anyway, and if you’re comfortble with that, then erecting a barrier with the sign “Go No Further” around the questions we find disturbing is understandable. What I have not done, here, is to explain what this notion of God I’ve proposed does for us. What problems does it solve. Why do we need the idea. And on some level we don’t.

But, I think. And there is a reason why things are as they are. What do you think?

 

On Doing Philosophy

There is, and always has been, some question about the scope and content of philosophy. What is it, and what does it talk about? Not to speak of the often-asked question, what is it good for? And of course, anybody who spends time playing at philosophy will develop some sort of notion about the answers to those questions. Not being an authority, the final answer cannot be given in this column, but clearly it would be appropriate to say what my intentions are.

The most basic answer is probably to be found in the origins of the study: The greeks began a discussion of philosophy over 2500 years ago, in an attempt to escape the eternal dogmatic squabbles of prophets, teachers, and masters–the traditional way people developed their beliefs. Their idea was simple: try to figure out the answers to our questions using logic and reason, rather than looking to revelation, divination, and unsupported claims. It was really that simple. They didn’t say there were no gods, and they didn’t refuse to listen to Homer’s poetry, but they set that all over in one corner called tradition and opened up the questions anew, to be answered a different way.

Now, of course, in the centuries that have passed, numerous specialized disciplines have emerged to address specific classes of questions. Many of these are sciences of some sort. Others, like astrology, have fallen into folklore and superstition, and are no longer given serious credence. Philosophy remains as the odd man out, without a clearly defined question, yet clearly distinct from all these other knowledge disciplines.

There is an apocryphal story about one philosopher who, when asked what philosophy was about, pointed to the shelves of books behind his desk and said, “It’s what these books are about.” That’s a good start,  but it leaves wanting the question of how do you tell when a new book belongs on his shelf?

There is another approach, preferred by pragmatists, that answers the question this way: Philosophy is what philosophers do. Not very good either, is it, because it begs the question of who are the philosophers, and while we might go by one’s academic title, it isn’t clear that only academics with the title “Philosopher” qualify for the post. In fact, to be a bit of a scamp, we might wonder if some of the people professionally considered to be philosophers aren’t something else, when instead of advancing the cause of philosophy, they advance the cachet of some other discipline, like physics, or psychology, or evolution science.

But let’s not get into that now.

When I do philosophy, there are two main issues. One is the sorting of social categories, and by this I mean sorting out the sciences, deciding what they entail, and describing what they do. This sort of classification began with Aristotle’s work, but Aristotle cannot be the last word on the subject since new ideas, new methods, new fields are always emerging. And clearly it isn’t exclusively the job of the mathematician to say what mathematics is, or of the poet to delimit the field of poetry. There are cross-disciplinary issues, and ultimately, it’s a social question, since we are social beings who do these things. At such a high level of disquisition, many people are qualified to speak, not least the people who intend to be in the field, but certainly philosophy, acting as the General Science, has to assist in the effort. This is not one of my major themes, but I see it as a basic function of philosophy.

The second is the questioning of Man’s relationship to the Universe. Philosophy is a very homocentric concern.  We’re not interested, as the physicist is, in the color of electrons for its own sake. We want to know why we should care, and we want to take some concern for how this knowledge, and its pursuit, improves or impairs the welfare of mankind. Philosophy is ethics, among other things, and it seeks to distinguish the Good from the Evil, and surely this is not something the dispassionate, objective, fact-based sciences can do with any clear confidence.

Philosophy is interested in the nature of society, both what it is doing, and what it should be doing. How we organize ourselves and how we pursue our lives is a choice, and philosophy is the field where we analyze the choices and prioritize them. Philosophy is concerned with social architecture, and we can see some of its products in the social contract theory of J. J. Rousseau, or the natural ethics of John Locke, people who laid the foundations for our modern political state.

Philosophy has always included the study of how we think, that is, what methods can we use, and what are their strengths? So the study of logic is part of mathematics, but it’s also a part of philosophy. The philosophical approach is different from the mathematical approach, for, in mathematics, we create a formal method, such as boolean logic, and define its primitive notions, and set it out on the table as a tool ready to use; but there is no justification for it, no arguments that say why you should use it, or whether it’s any good. It exists as a construct, shorn of the philosophy that justifies its very existence. Philosophy provides that justification, and suggests what kind of criteria might be applied for judging methods.

Philosophy is ultimately concerned with the nature of Man himself. And if, someday, we meet intelligent aliens, it will be concerned with their nature too, not in the biological sense, but as Beings. We want to know who we are, why we’re here, what we should do, and what our purpose is. There is no final answer to these questions because the way we measure the answers is always subject to change and growth, but the building of the answers, for today, for ourselves, this is what we have to do as philosophers.

It has often been said that Science answers questions like How, When, Where, and we no longer respect Why. Why calls for purposes, motives, and teleology, and so it garners no respect. If a Why question is answered at all, it’s answered by saying how. The sky is blue, because molecules of air refract different frequencies of light in different degrees, etc etc. The sky is blue because various phyusical mechanisms cause this. But this isn’t why the sky is blue. The sky is blue because it looks blue to us, and the explanation for this is shrouded deep in questions confronting both neuroscience and philosophy today. Some people don’t even believe in qualia. “Why is the sky blue” is a question without end.

So when I do philosophy, I”m really trying to understand my nature, and my relationship to others– other people, other things, and the universe as a whole. When science studies the observer, it becomes confused because science is empirical; it has to trust the observer to do its work, yet in making the study, it undermines the observer as an authority. Philosophy doesn’t have to be empirical. We can study the observer. And we must.

 

Just an Update

Work has been slow here in the philosophy corner. The situation has not been helped by the “intransigency” of the philosophy channel of late—philosophical discussion has been as rare as mathematics in a brothel. Perhaps philosophy channels are not for philosophy. If so, I don’t know what they’re for.

But on to business. I was reminded this morning that I have an as yet unfinished project to find out more about this Theory of Enformed Systems (read more here) that Gnomon brought to my attention. It’s rare that we see anybody in the business of philosophy go anywhere beyond the limits of materialism, but this seems to have promise. Who knows, we might even discover that we exist       … as unlikely as that is.

I have been thinking more about the problem of social cadaveration (the process by which each instance of a society cadaverizes itself). It seems evident that cadaveration has been the chief attribute of western civilization since the onslaught of the middle ages, which began right after the terminus of the so-called Dark Ages (which immediately followed the fall of the Roman Empire-thingy). The mediaeval ages, often looked down on by moderns as a hopelessly primitive era, was in fact a time of invention, social experimentation, the emergence of freemen, itinerant traders, and corporations. Say around 1100 A.D. and the emergence of the french nation under the leadership of Charlemagne, and the creation of the West Indian Trading Company in the Netherlands, things were set for rapid change—and change it has. Things haven’t been stable since.

At this point, it looks like society has three main mechanisms for coping with the difficulties of trying to communicate itself to the next generation. (“Education” is not the answer, since it begs the question of teaching what to whom, and how). The first is specialization, perhaps a more specific form than the general notion that is presumed to have begun with the earliest civilizations. We separate people into groups, each of which is to be taught a different area of practice, whether music, engineering, carpet weaving, or what have you, it’s just not feasible because of the sheer volume of the material involved, to pass on the technical knowledge of our society to everyone. This potentially crippling situation where most of the society wanders around ignorant of the crafts and techniques needed to sustain their society, is balanced against the advantages gained from a special cadre devoted to the study of their one subject, to the point of becoming experts.

A second element of the strategy is fragmentation. We simply don’t expect our societies to be made up of the same kind of people. Instead we have competing minorities, some of whom want to advance gay rights, some of whom want to be burghers and fight for the right of free trade, others who believe the best society is rigidly organized under strong leadership, while yet others brandish pitch forks and flags and sing “Long Live the Revolution!” This isn’t a peculiar state of affairs at random junctures of history; this is the constant state in which we live, and have lived for hundreds of years. And yet it isn’t natural. In ancient history, societies were much quieter. Revolution came from without, and only rarely from within. The biggest threat to the Chinese was the mongols, not other Chinese. Akhenaten brought discord into the egyptian kingdom with his preaching of monotheism, but his revolution died when he died.

A third element of the strategy is fashion. We have simply taken the fact of continually rebuilding our society, for the sheer fact that we just don’t know how the old one worked (don’t know or don’t care), and turned it into a business. Kids who have failed to absorb their parents’ way of life, busy themselves with inventing new clothes, new ways of speaking, new music, new technologies, and hail this change as progress, revoution, and freedom.

More on this later.

 

Reductionism: No. TES: Yes.

Some time ago, in a response to my post, Is the observer essential, my friend Gnomon recommended I take a look at an idea called TES: Theory of Enformed Systems, where enformy refers to “the fundamental, conserved capacity to organize.”

After reading the introductory paper, and realizing that there is more to the idea than I have read yet, I nevertheless have some intial reactions that I’d like to capture in print before they get away from me.

Firstly, I’ve talked about the dangers of reductionism for years. To explain something as a collection of parts, you first have to introduce boundaries that divide the object into the parts you want to identify. These divisions are artificial. For example, there is no clear point where the mountain begins and the surrounding plain ends; they merge together seemelessly, such that, while you can definitely note some points as being on the mountain, and other points as definitely being of the plain, there are many points which could be either. Similarly, it is conventional when discussing human anatomy to make a distinction between the circulatory system and the nervous system, but we all know that the two are inextricably intertwined, and the heart cannot function without the brain to regulate it, nor the blood vessels establish the correct blood pressure without the brain’s assistance. There isn’t really two systems there. There is only one, which we’ve divided for the sake of easing the job of description and understanding.

This artificial division of the objects leads to a problem trying to reconstitute the whole from the parts. It should be pretty obvious that there is no part of the gun which has the function, “to fire,” and yet somehow it becomes an inherent (and critical) function of the gun to fire. Which part gives rise to this functionality? The answer is that no single part does; it arises from all of them put together. Ultimately, this inability of the process of deconstruction to support the reconstruction of the object leads to what we call “emergent properties.” Emergent properties seem by their nature to be mysterious and magical, but in fact, they are nothing but the artifacts of the way the object is distorted by reductionism.

In other words, while it’s true that reductionism (analysis into parts) can be a helpful strategy for studying something, the symptoms of its errors are manifested as emergent properties.

Secondly, I like the way this theory of enformed systems makes the point that the object’s organization is non-physical — and they even dare to use the word “spiritual.” I don’t think we ought to confuse the spirituality being alluded to here has to do with angels and gods. It’s the kind of spirituality where we distinguish, in Aristotle’s very ancient way, between form and substance. The importance of form in our study of the world is as easy to see as the ubiquitous employment of mathematics: mathematics, especially geometry, but in fact all forms of mathematics, are a study of the forms of relationships, and these have nothing to do with the substances that exhibit the forms.

This is nowhere clearer than in our treatment of music. Originally, music was generated by simple instruments such as drums, flutes, and guitars, all of which operated by vibrating, and thus creating atmospheric pressure waves that we could hear. But the interesting thing about the music is the form of its tonality; not the use of pressure waves. So in more modern times, music was first recorded as written notations on paper (“sheet music”) and later by vinyl records, magnetic tape, and DVD disks. The type of the recording medium is irrelevant. What matters is the pattern itself that the medium encodes; and that pattern is a form.

An inability to distinguish form and substance leads to monist philosophies, and eventually to a distortion of our picture of the world, because the most important thing about the world is not the absolute meausres of its implementations, but the patterns it makes to our perceptions as distributed over time and space. And this is the kind of spirituality we have to grasp in our mathematics and our “enformy.”

Third and lastly, we have to understand that reductionism is not the only way we can understand things; in fact, it’s probably not even the most basic way. After all, think of this: before you can study how something is constructed in terms of parts and their connections, you first have to identify the thing you want to study. That is, you have to know what it is and be able to pick it out of a field of things before you’ve submitted it to your reductivist analysis. Otherwise you’re standing there in your lab with nothing to put on the table. My usual example of this is to object that science does not tell us what Gold is. We know what gold is. We give the scientist a sample of it, and then he knows what he’s studying. From a reductionist study, we can learn that gold is made of atoms, each with 79 protons and electrons, and on average 118 neutrons. But this isn’t how we identify gold. We determined it has those properties after first identifying that it is gold.

This observation leads to a statement of the basic method we use to understand objects: description. A description addresses the whole, and clarifies the inherent properties it has in a static way, and may also discuss behaviors and dynamic properties attendant to the object. For a discussion of the object at this level, we have no need to make a reduction. Indeed, we start out recognizing a gun by its form and design, and most of all by its dynamic property: that it fires. Trying to figure out which part provides the firing function isn’t something we need to do in order to understand that a gun fires, but by virtue of having started with this level of understanding, we can then attribute the firing both to the action of the hammer and the explosive properties of gunpowder; but you first have to know that the whole thing fires.

In summary, then, the theory of knowledge being presented in the papers on enformy seem to be taking an approach to the whole question that is easy to support.

I will have to read more, to see how this story unfolds. Thanks, Gnomon, for putting me on to this.

 

Ambiguous Causality

I suppose it’s natural for scientistic philosophers (those who are dedicated to shaping a view of the world that is limited to scientific concepts — what would you call such a willingly adopted style of self-blindered philosophy? I don’t know. Maybe “normal”) — to think of causal descriptions of phenomena as very accurate kinds of statements. Maybe Newton’s law of inertia would serve as a typical example: An object in motion tends to continue in motion; an object at rest tends to stay at rest; and f = ma. We can use mathematics to make our description of physical processes as accurate as we like.

However, this truth is completely overshadowed by a careless application of the concept of causality itself. This dawned on me one day as I was thinking about a simple example of causes. Suppose a man suddenly finds himself outside a thirteenth story window of a high-rise building. This is a peculiar, and as we might say, unstable situation. The force of gravity creates a force that accelerates his body vertically toward the center of the earth, but his path, unfortunately, is blocked by the street below, and the collision of his material self with the concrete leads to what in ordinary language we would call “death.”

Now, this event has to be explained. It starts with the coroner, who examines the body carefully to determine the cause of death, and he writes in, internal injuries sustained in a fall. Not exactly physics, but we know what he means, don’t we.

The physicist explains the whole thing easily, using the theory of gravity. The man’s fall is the direct result of the action of Gravity, where F, the force of acceleration, is calculated by G times Mf (the mass of the faller) times Me (the mass of the earth) divided by the square of the distance between them. As coincidence would have it, this acceleration comes out to be “g”, or, colloquially, one “g” of acceleration. And thus gravity has caused the man’s death.

But there is a police detective examining the case as well, and he cannot help but be aware of the fact that, despite the ordinariness of the action of gravity, it is not ordinary for people to fall out of thirteenth story windows. This invites his curiosity, and on investigation, the hypothesis emerges that another man (hereinafter called “the murderer”) did wantonly and with full intention push (“shove”) the victim (“George”) out the window, to his death.

The interesting thing is the way these three different types of people, one a coroner, one a physicist, and one a police detective, build a causal theory to explain the same result: a corpse lying on the street. In the first case, the corpse (why is he dead?) is explained by internal injuries. In the second, the corpse is explained by gravity. In the third, the corpse is explained by a murderer’s push. So which is the actual cause of this event? It would appear that the cause depends entirely on how the observer wants to contextualize (“frame”) the event.

I’m not trying to say there is no cause. In fact, we seem to have too many causes. Eventually some philosopher will stand up, armed with a theory of determinism, and argue that the cause of the man’s death is the Big Bang, and all the other causal views are just shortsightedness.  What I am trying to say is that apparently Hume’s note, that there is no physical cause present over and above the objects and actions themselves, is supported by our ability to name several different causes of extremely different types all as the cause of the same event. Each causal explanation supports a different theoretical framework, namely medicine, physics, and forensics. It’s also interesting to note that the detective will collaborate with the coroner, and assume the physicists’ theories are true and relevant, so nobody gets left out of the story making.

It all reminds me of the shell game, where the man behind the table shuffles the shells and then asks you under which shell is the pea. What is going on here?

 

Where are all these young people coming from?

I have been mulling some things over in my mind recently. It’s been over a month since I made any significant post here, and I have felt guilty about ignoring my audience. However, as always happens, the wheels keep turning, and where they get to is always bound to cause somebody somewhere some consternation. I hope to further the grounds for consternation a bit more with this post.

Actually there are two main subjects which concern me. The first is some recent thoughts about the ambiguous nature of the concept of causality. The second is a video music thingy on YouTube, which is called “Alex Gaudino feat. Crystal Waters – Destination Calabria”. If YouTube hasn’t completely destroyed the link yet, it can probably be reached here  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVi-KtBCes0 ). I’ll save the comments on causality for next post — it’s one of those analytic, metaphysical, fancy dandy issues that would only concern philosophers like you and I, and doesn’t have too much real-world impact.

But this song concerns me, and explaining how and why is going to be very difficult. First of all, let’s understand that by “concern” I mean raises a question for me. I like the piece, and I don’t find it objectionable or in bad taste — it’s not that kind of concern.

I mentioned earlier in this blog that social evolution arises from the sheer inability of the current generation to pass on its knowledge and beliefs (its culture) to the next generation. I still believe this is true. In fact, it helps explain why older societies and civilizations were relatively stable in comparison to ours. Prior to 1000 B.C., countries and cultures tended to survive on the scale of thousands of years. I’m thinking of First Kingdom Egypt, or Kung Fu’tze’s China as examples. The Roman civilization (culture; society; techno/politico/linguistic intellectural organizing principles) didn’t survive beyond, what — 500? 800 years? And after that, in our modern era, we find an increasing shortness of longevity. (heh, sorry) But how do we explain this? I think the older cultures were very simple, both in the technologies they used and relied on to function, and in the cultural organizing principles they used to sustain their everyday life. Entraining younger people in the entire set of skills and knowledge they had to have in order to carry on the society would have been relatively easy, and relatively successful, but as the culture becomes progressively more intricate and covers more and more distinct technologies and customs, the methods of education and conditioning we use to create replicas of ourselves begins to break down. It simply cannot handle the load. Children, and newer generations, not only are freer to innovate, but also have to innovate — provide new solutions for problems their parents either did not have or never taught them to how to solve.

Looking at this music video makes the point very clearly. Note the headdress the dancer is wearing. The design dates from the Napoleonic era, unless I miss my guess. The cymbals used in some of the scenes are the product of modern technology and manufacturing techniques– elegant, smoothly crafted instruments which could not have been made with the same mass-manufactured similarity from copy to copy just a hundred years ago. The cymbal as a type of instrument dates from ancient times, certainly the classical greeks used them, so here we have an interesting example of an old, traditional type of tool made with modern techniques and modern materials. The dance steps were certainly not the sort seen on the dance floors of eighteenth century Europe: where did they come from? I make it out to be the modern dance styles of Marsha Graham or Dick Fosse, mid twentieth century, simplified into a familiar and colloquial dance style.

Every aspect of the presentation shows signs of both archaic and traditional forms in combination with new technology and new styles, but in no case more vividly than the video streaming artifact itself: the YouTube video.

None of this is particularly surprising, I suppose. We all know progress has been transofmring our culture for two hundred years now; it’s the Industrial Revolution, followed by the Information Revolution (nice buzzwords to have in your toolkit). But at a deeper level, I think some of the young womens’ behaviors in the video must be based on genetically encoded, inherited patterns of behavior. She couldn’t possibly have learned all the skills and all the things she apparently knows in the brief span of her life thus far. Some of it must be innate. The rest of it is culture, inherited and passed on, and technology, taught carefully in classrooms to the volunteer acolyte seeking to master its secrets.

This raises questions of to what degree people are self-guiding, with free choice and a will. It begins to look more and more, as it is even portrayed in the video, that we are very similar copies of genotypes stamped out in the millions and billions, fingers twitching in the coordinated play of social movements, with very little ability to think for themselves.

And yet, the video I’m showing you exists as an original piece of art, created by one particular artist, and acted by some young women with very specific skills and abilities.

I guess what I’m asking (and I’m not even sure myself what the question is), how much of what we see in this video is the equivalent of termites busily scurrying about their nest, doing exactly what their genes have prepared them to do? I don’t know, but I doubt the young people shown in the video can take very much personal credit for it.

Does this make sense to anybody?

 

Some Additional Comments on the Problem of Free Will

There is a friend of mine online who reads this column occasionally, puddleglum by nick, who has an interest in the issue of free wll. Elsewhere, I’ve commented that Free Will, or the ability to choose an alternative on the basis of logic and reasoning, or preference, as opposed to proximal causality, is fundamentally justified by Levels of Abstraction. I suppose a careful treatment of the subject would take a book, and I don’t have the mental organization (yet) to put together a whole book on it. But a few additional comments here may serve as a few notes.

Just by way of clarification (and not argument), we have to note that free will involves making choices. It isn’t, as some argue, the ability to “do anything you want.” Free will operates within the universe as we know it, where all things are subject to context and limitations. The occasion to make a free will choice (willed choice) begins when a person is made aware of two or more alternative actions, and some action is necessary. Whether need or desire makes the choosing necessary is beside the point; the point is, a cognitive intention to make an action arises, and this intention requires choosing the specific action from among the possibilities. The collection of choices, as they are known to the chooser, comprises the “list” of alternative possibilities, from which he has to select one.

A “proximal cause” of a choice means some condition which makes the choice without cognitive involvement. From Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” we have an entertaining sample of proximal causes of mental behavior, where, on hearing the noises of the ghost of Jacob Marley entering his bedroom, he dismisses it all as hallucinations which are caused by indigestion, a “bit of uncooked beef, or an underdone potato.” More conventional arguments against free will and for proximal causes of choices are: the nature vs. nurture debate. We are caused to do what we do because of genetic predisposition; we have sex because it is human nature, programmed in our genes, and we need only for the opportunity to arise, and then, robot-like, automatically, the human system will launch its characteristic sexual behaviors. Or, from the nurture side, upbringing and prior experience condition us to particular behaviors, so that, once again, we don’t need to choose how to act, we merely react. These types of causal explanations of behavior were launched in the nineteenth century by biologists, trying to explain the apparently intelligent behaviors of birds building nests by supposing there was an instinct that told the bird when and how to build the nest; and conditioning was an idea put forward by Pavlov and B F Skinner, proponents of behaviorism.

Proximal causes are not accepted as the explanations of all human action, today, because science has progressed to the point where cognitive activity is recognized as an actual phenomenon of the brain; i.e., we think. The problem now is to determine to what extent this thinking is the sort a computer does, which includes no reflection or self-awarenes, or the type we think we do, which involves no prior commitment to the outcome of the choosing. In other words, is the choice guided by something other than material causes? Alternative reasons to make a choice are logic, where the choice is made according to reasoning based on the meanings of the facts and circumstances of the choice, or wants and desires, where we have to balance competing desires that may lead to conflicts between the alternatives. Neither of these last two epxlanations of choice are causal, because reasoning is non-biological; it is not concerned with the state of your stomach or secretions of the gall bladder.

There is an alternative approach to understanding how people make choices, which is, randomly. The only conceivable alternative to causal necessitation, some argue, is that a choice is made from a set of alternatives by just random tossing of a metaphorical coin. We guess.

The theory of random choice is not particularly well recieved either, because it doesn’t seem that all choices are random. Choices are sometimes hard decisions to make which involve much weighing of alternatives, their possible consequences, pros and cons, in a lengthy calculation which only seems eventually to settle on some summation. Which isn’t to say that sometimes the problem seems insoluble and the hapless chooser makes a stab in the dark, or maybe even literally tosses a coin. But a subjective and introspective review of the process of choice suggests we spend time and energy on it. And so it isn’t random.

These problems and conjectures — that choice is either motivated by some immediate and external cause, or that it involves a random decision, whether literally or figuratively arrived at by flipping a coin — stems from our beliefs that the physical world is causally determined. We have borrowed some of the conventions of ancient physics and carried them into our philosophy of mind. The randomness theory is a doff of the hat in the direction of quantum theory, a slightly more modern idea that has percolated into the heads of materialistic philosophers. However, it may be that physics theories have precious little connection to what people think about. I think of it this way: the design of a pocket calculator is completely encompassed by the facts of electronics and electronics design. You know there are little chips in there, with transistors and capacitors and other circuit elements incorporated into them, and the electronics explains exactly what the calculator does when you press a button on its keyboard, but problems of arithmetic have nothing to do with electronics. The entire device is just a simulation of an abstract field of arithmetic, where the electronics is incidental to the simulation — one way among many to do the arithmetic. Thinking is like that.

Which brings us to a review of the ways we might explain choice and decisions, or, in other words, what free will is and how it works. I have set out one idea at some length elsewhere in this blog, to wit that free will involves a set of abstract objects and actions taking place on a semantic level, and as such, the rules of this activity are no more defined or limited by the physical structures that support it than arithmetic is defined by the calculator’s innards or the laws of electronics. In other words, free will in cognitive decision making is a feature of an abstract “game,” and as such can be implemented in an entirely deterministic universe. All that would mean (if the universe is really deterministic) is that the same free will choices get made every time the universe is “played,” but the explanations of those choices are not in the physics, they’re in the configurations of the abstract cognitive activity.

Of course, the universe only gets played once, so the supposition that we would make the same choice on each iteration is unsupportable. The universe still happens only once.

Which brings us to another aspect of cognition. No doubt the brain is a very complex thing. Even thoughts sometimes seem to be rather complex, if not individually, then at least the composite outlays of human cognition historically, from architecture and math to politics and government, seems to be more than enough to fill millions of books. Mainly because it has filled millions of books. So given this complexity, how does causality play through a computationally intractable network of causal linkages? I mean, from our computer science study of computatibility theory, we know there are problems which cannot be analyzed, where only ad hoc and heuristic methods of approach are possible.

I am suggesting that a definition of a brain — or for that matter, a living thing — may rest on its having a complexity sufficiently great as to confuse the traceability of causality through its network. This leads to an ambiguity of result; the outputs of the system cannot be directly attributed to current inputs. And although this theory remains to be worked out in any detail, it certainly addresses the instinctive sense we have that living entities, and cognitive agents, originate actions and results. And it is worth noting that living objects and minds both are systems that have internal memory states, such that something about its condition is unrelated to the current inputs of the system. To what extent is the internal state of a complex system deterministically linked to ambiguous history?

In summary, then, there are two principle objections to a theory of deterministic human behavior. The first is that this behavior obtains on an abstract level which is not directly linked to the lower physical substrates that support it. On that abstract level, there are such things as “intentions” which are the explanations of human thought, speech and actions. On the lower physical levels, there are no such things as intentions, and the problem with trying to explain intentions by a theory of neurons is like the problem of explaining addition by studying calculator design: the former is not derived from the latter, and such relations as exist between arithmetic and the calculator are the fortuitious coincidences of good design. And secondly, any claim of causal determination for such complex organisms and entities faces a considerable challenge of demonstrating the causal connections. We suspect such claims can be supported only by the use of highly vague and ambiguous objects. So, for example, a psychologist might say an older boy still sucks his thumb because of weaning — but how do you prove this, not in general, but for this particular child? The causal linkages from the event to the behavior can’t even be examined.

Really, the problem of explaining free will is an activity we undertake for the pleasure of its intellectual exercise, and only that, because the real problem would be to support the counterclaim: that mental actions are simply causal.