What is a human?

People have wondered what people are since the very earliest times. Two thousand years ago, a typical answer was, Human beings were originally created as divine beings, similar to God, but sinned, were thrown out of Heaven, and became flawed beings, doomed to mortal life, to constant toil for survival, and eventually to die. In Plato’s view, all materiality was an imperfect and corrupted shadow of the Ideal truth which existed only in our mental understanding.

Today, we have a somewhat different view. Medicine studies our nature as physical bodies, enumerating with ever increasing detail the component structure of that body and the flaws and defects that can arise with it, how to repair it, and how to perfect it. Yet medicine has a primitive idea of consciousness. For a doctor, a patient is conscious when it responds to stimuli, when it speaks, when it can answer questions. This definition of consciousness is little more than “irritability,” or responsiveness.

Psychiatry, developed in the middle of the 19th century, studies the mind, but only in a limited way. Based on the work of Freud and others, the mind is conceived as a pathological organ obsessed with fears and repressed desires. Its proper function is to integrate into society and to serve authority. A healthy mind seeks employment, obeys its boss on the job and in the office, has friends, cooperates with social peers, and is docile to the government. The aims of psychiatry are complete when the patient has given up its existential anxieties and returned to normal function as a cog in society. Psychiatry is anti-philosophical because it would prevent us from questioning the roles and purposes given to us by the extant social context.

Psychology is a science that studies the mind as an object of enquiry. It may be a precursor to developing a science of psychiatry that is based on facts rather than conjectures. The psychologist, though, is ill-equipped to understand the nature of humanity because he does not see himself as part of it. There have been cases of psychological studies which amount to torture. One scientist undertook in the 70’s to find out the limits of brainwashing and launched experiments intended to wipe out his subjects’ memories and replace them with ideas he implanted. He used massive doses of LSD and daily electro-shock treatments to break down the person’s memories and confuse them. Survivors of his experiments are alive today, and cannot remember the experiments nor any part of their lives prior to it. Clearly a so-called scientist who can treat people this way is missing some element of humanity in his own make-up, and is no more able to understand the nature of Man as it has developed into modern civilization, where a sense of rapport, empathy, and compassion for our fellows is a normal practice. If this position seems extreme, the work of Pavlov and B F Skinner are enough to support the view that even commonly accepted psychology has attempted to display man as robot.

Other sciences intending to study Man are sociology, archaeology, anthropology, and history. History especially places the question of Man into a long-term chronological and narrative context, noting what he has done, what he has accomplished, and from the point of view of his practices throughout time, what is important to Man. All sciences, though, fragment our view of man, providing only part of the story and ignoring the rest within its own purview. After reviewing the sciences, one has a scattered and haphazard picture, wih no guidelines for how to re-assemble the real Man out of it.

Religion and philosophy are two other approaches to understanding our nature. Religion introduces the notion of Spirit, or Soul, to go along with body and mind as properties of our Being, but this concept hasn’t been rationalized to fit within the scientific scope, so, while it is important to a great many people, it plays no part in our formal understanding of human nature. Philosophy is the only other study that has the potential ability to put Man in a complete context of Body, Consciousness, and Meaning.

Because our greatest concern as living entities is our own nature — we want to know who we are, what happens when we die, why we are here, what is the purpose of life, how and why we should act — it is to philosophy we have to look, to render a complete and integrated picture, to criticize the answers sciences suggest, and to guide the questions being asked. In that regard, I think the studies of consciousness and the philosophy of mind are among the most important studies being done today.

 

Levels of Abstraction

One of the most important of all concepts philosophers need to understand when trying to apply causal reasoning to explain phenomena is that of Levels of Abstraction. At its simplest, the idea is simply that there is an appropriate system level for each type of phenomena. Causal rules can be identified within a level, which explains the behavior of phenomena discussed on that level. It is generally an error to assume the objects and causes on one level are constructed from, implied by, or reduce to, the objects and causes on a lower or higher level, although sometimes such an idea is not without some validity.

There are a number of metaphysical problems involved in the idea of levels of abstraction (“levels”). One of the first is, how “real” is a level? Since levels are about how we think of a group of related objects and phenomena, one might be justified in supposing that levels don’t really exist, that they’re just metaphors useful to limited minds that can’t deal with the complexity of the actual world, so we clump it in various ways to make it easier to think about it.

I don’t think such a way of thinking about levels is justified. After all, it would not be useful to contruct a theory of some level if it didn’t have some explanatory force, which implies there is something about that theory that is observable.

One sort of level theory is the theory of Electronics. Objects on the level of electronics include, units of force called voltage, volume, called current, and individual elements called resistances, capacitances, inductances, switches (or “gates”), power sources, conduits of conduction (“wires” and “connections”), etc. A casual acquaintance with fundamental physics knows resistors, capacitors, and conductors, are not elementary objects; each is a composite structure made with complex materials consisting of billions of atoms and having aggregate properties which only make sense in relation to these objects. The causal laws of electronics are expressed in terms of these composite abstract objects, such as Ohm’s law (E=IR).

In the case of electronics theory, there is every reason to believe the abstract objects, forces, and relations are reducible to or wholly explainable by the more fundamental objects and forces of particle physics and quantum theory. Nevertheless, no one would seriously suggest deleting electronics theory from our sphere of knowledge, because it describes objects which can be measured and phenomena which can be observed. You might say the electronics level is a “summary” of physical laws at lower levels, which is abstracted in order to focus on a relevant subset of general natural phenomena.

Mundane life contains many examples of highly complex abstract objects which nonetheless appears to be reducible to more elementary objects and forces. Chairs, tables, cars, diamond rings — a host of objects and their concomitant relations are familiar examples. A chair is just an assemblage of atoms, with the peculiar property that the sort of atoms assembled is irrelevant to the nature of the object as chair; it’s only the structure and function of the object as “chair” that matters, and it can be made out of wood, steel, plastic, composite carbon fiber, or cotton candy.

Not all levels of abstraction are as easily reduced, though. Consider economics. Economics consists of objects like dollars and euro’s, and jobs, markets, businesses and corporations. There is nothing physical about a unit of currency. Indeed, more currency is represented by plastic and implemented by computer financial systems than exists as copper and paper. It isn’t the physical material or structural design of the currency that makes it money (what has happened to the paper francs of the pre-euro economy?) Try to analyze “jobs” into physical elements, and remember, it isn’t the employee who defines the “job.”

Even more complex abstract levels exist. What is a society made of? Is it the people who comprise it? The land they occupy? The buildings and cities they construct? The monuments and artifacts they pass on to the archaeologists of the future? Their customs and traditions? Their language? And yet, despite its airy foundation, societies definitely exist, and understanding them is something we have to do.

In the case of the Mind itself, trying to find the decomposition of minds and mental phenomena to the physical world of quarks and photons is probably not completely possible, nor even particularly useful. Here, it becomes important to realize the arbitrary nature of a level theory. A railroad, for example, is not explainable by physics. A pair of tracks are laid from point to point, and locomotives and cars are built of steel and other materials to ride on the tracks, but the level of “trains” includes many more elements. A schedule is a structure in time and isn’t made of steel or paper. Consider that, given tracks from city A to city B, it remains undefined whether the train on those tracks moves west (B -> A) or east (A -> B); it can in fact move either way, and sometimes will run east, and sometimes will run west. The odd thing about building the tracks and a device that can move on them is that a new freedom of action emerges: movement east and movement west. The schedule encompasses this, whereas the tracks do not. (The tracks themselves are static, and lie there connecting the two points in exactly the same manner, no matter what the train does on them.)

Another simple example is the game of chess. The rules of chess are not derived from the nature of the wooden pieces and the board. Chess can be played with those objects, but the idea of chess is in addition to those materials, which serve merely as representations of the ideas of chess. This is exactly the same relationship as the theory of economics has to the pieces with which it is played.

And the ultimate point of this degree of independence that exists between layers, where new possibilities and alternatives arise in the behavior of new objects, is that Free Will, such as it is, consisting of the highly abstract objects of Purposes and Intentions, Choice, and Consequences, is not fully explained by any lower levels of objects and relations that represent these things. Physical causality is no more the explanation of mental behavior than it is an explanation of a train schedule.

Levels of abstraction, in other words, are the vehicles through which “emergent properties” arise (see Wikipedia, Systems Theory).

 

Wraiths and Functions

Last night I was watching one of the commentary disks in the Lord of the Rings DVD set, and this particular segment was discussing the meanings of J. R. R. Tolkien’s story. After dismissing the view of the story as allegory — Tolkien hated allegory, as he himself said several times — the narrative fixed on the importance of relevance, or applicability, to interpretation of the story. It was applicability of the characters, events, and ideas in the story to the problems of our own time and our own world that explains the story’s lasting and widespread popularity. The narrator turned to a discussion of the problem of Evil, which Tolkien confronts directly throughout the story as a constant theme, and in this regard, he mentioned the Ringwraiths. “Let us look at this word,” he said, “since Tolkien is first and foremost a linquist.” He went on to note that the word “wraith” is related to “wroth,” which means angry in archaic English. It is also related to “wreath,” which means twisted, and to “writhe,” which means distorted, as by pain. Thus, he concludes the concept of wraith is a shape applied to the substance which is Man — a contortion of the natural man into something bent and misshapen which no longer knows the difference between good and evil.

This dissertation echoed with my previous ruminations on the duality of matter with its division into the two categories of shape, or form, and substance, or matter. The two kinds are distinct but become joined in any instance of an object. Substance is inherently shapeless. It is a raw material which must have form imposed onto it to become a distinct thing in itself, as raw ores in the earth are without shape, existing in a diffuse vein or deposit. Extracted and worked, some portion of the ore becomes a sword, another portion a candleholder, etc. These forms — sword, candleholder, etc. — are independent of the substance which instantiates them, as we can make many swords, some of bronze, some of iron, some of steel, or even plastic or wood. The form may also be taken as a pattern, such as music, or as a process, such as the four-cycle operation of an internal combustion engine. The form of the music can be represented equally well by pressure waves in the air, or by grooves in a vinyl record, or by magnetic field strengths in the iron oxide of a hard dixk drive’s surface. The substance is irrelevant as long as it allies representation of the pattern of the music, because music is essentially a pattern.

A more interesting version of dualism is to be found in the modern analytic concept of functionalism. Functionalism is the concept in philosophy of mind that mental phenomena are independent of the substrate, so that minds can be constructed equally of brains or of computer circuits. According to this view, the only thing that matters is what they do, not what they’re made of. A functionalist, therefore, is concerned with identifying the function of minds in the most exact terms, so as to facilitate the reproduction of those functions in a manufacturable substance. Without the dualistic relationship of form and function to matter and substance, the functionalist would be unable to support the hypothesis that mental processes can exist in anything but brains. This puts the functionalist philosopher in the unfortunate (and usually unnoted) position of a dualist who begins his entire approach to the question of the nature of minds by sorting out what they do as distinct from their material composition.

Maybe these people would be more forthcoming with their explanations if it weren’t that dualism is also associated, historically, with spirit-matter dualism, and no materialist philosopher wants to be seen as supporting the spiritual component that defines religions, or the “soul.” The functionalist position is not a claim about God, either for or against, but it is an admission that there are important aspects of the world that transcend matter, and honesty requires that we be open about this.

Returning to the discussion about good and evil, it would seem that it would be a mistake to define human beings as either good or evil. Their materiality evinces the possibility of either form, of either functionality, and the choice we have to make is whether to stand straight and true, or to allow ourselves to be bent into the twisted and corrupted form of ringwraiths.

 

Bug

Bug in an Abtract Space facing an uncertain future

 

The Philosophy of Cooking

I’m not sure whether my post on Theory of Hamburgers was entirely clear. It surely wasn’t intended to say that knowledge is useless to people. There are a great many things we can do with knowledge, including printing it on newsprint and wrapping fish in it. However, it does amuse me to realize that, with all the effort poured into research, experimenting, theorizing, teaching and publishing our explanations and theories, when all is said and done, a thing is still what it is, no more and no less for all we might say about it.

A lot of philosophy is highly speculative. Some of it is skeptical, some nihilist, and some of it is downright absurd. However, it is doubtful, to me, that people could possibly mean some of the things they say. When you want to know what people really believe about the world, watch how they act. You can study your own beliefs about the world by taking up cooking. Cooking is a marvelous art and craft, which can only be accomplished succesfully by the application of clear thinking, pertinent (if sometimes vague) knowledge, and a great deal of experience and intuition. One thing is clear: when you slide an omelet out of your pan onto a plate, taste it, and realize what a profoundly good thing you’ve made, there is no doubt at all that you have mastered the art, science, and philosophy of interacting with reality. There is no other way to cook.

From cooking we learn that objects have properties. The properties can be vaguely described (a “dash” of spices, a “pinch” of salt), or highly subjective (you flip a flapjack when the puddle of goo on the griddle starts to turn brown around the edges), but something real is going on. All the epistemological problems in the world, of the relationship of mental models to real things, cannot hide the fact that you’ve distilled something meaningful from your perceptions, and that your mental activity has affected real things, creating something which is more or less exactly what you intended to create. The feedback cycle of theory, action, and result, has confirmed the entire mushy, subjective, qualititative, sloppy process. And it is truly wonderful that our minds can grasp reality so effectively as to produce flapjacks, omelets, and ice cream. I am impressed every time I see it. Even more impressed when I taste it.

So I suppose this is distantly related to pragmatism: reality is known most directly through personal and mundane experience. Although I wouldn’t really call it pragmatism. I might call it good sense, common sense, maybe even realism, but more exactly, I think it’s the heart of rationality. The cook doesn’t worry about his subjective involvement; he takes it for granted, and relies on it. The cook has no business speculating about absolute, objective reality, because it has nothing to do with him. The cook is one with the cooking process, and that’s the way it should be. Neither does the cook worry whether perceptions distort reality. The ingredients and the final product both are known by those perceptions, and we love them. They aren’t distractions or illusions, they are the whole point of the cooking.

What we learn from cooking is that we are real, we can know reality, we can influence it, and the flops and failures show that the reality of cooking is not achieved solely through wishing and imagination. No real cook believes the omelet is a figment of his imagination, because, most of all, beyond seeing it, smelling it, and tasting it, he intends to eat it, and no imagination by itself would be sufficient to accomplish that purpose.

So I say, if you want to be a philosopher, first study cooking. Then we will talk.

 

Beachfront

Beachfront

Another semi-representational portrayal of a beach scene, perhaps viewed from an industrial park. I like working with colors and light.

 

The Ivory Tower receives an award

After persistently posting philosohical comments on obscure subjects, and taking positions people have long-since discredited or abandoned, this blog has the great honor to be the recipient of the Arte y Pico award for noteworthy blogging, conferred by Kevin Grieves at The Modern Historian. I would like to extend my thanks to Kevin, and to the originator of the award at the Arte y Pico blog

The Arte y Pico Award

 

Recipients of the award have the option to pass on the award to other blogs they find worthy of special attention.

Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.

Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.

The recipient and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y Pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award: http://arteypico.blogspot.com/

The following blogs have earned my commendation.

A Brood Comb by Tanasije Gjorgosky. Tanas has built an extensive blog about philosophy and provides an impressive array of philosophy resources on the web including videos and interviews. His work is a credit to amateur philosophy and I constantly refer to his resources page.

Growing Fins by Nin Harris. Nin is studying literature. Her blog offers book reviews and original writing. Visiting the blog is a literary experience in itself.

 

 

The problems of dualism

It’s probably well-known to readers of this blog by now that I maintain a Cartesian dualist position. It takes a certain amount of either sheer, raw stubborness to do this, or an incredible amount of philosophical naiveté. As Searle recently noted, most modern philosophers [trained and working in American and British schools -- he didn't say that, but clearly implied it] reject cartesian mind/body dualism. As Quine explained, it raises many more problems than it solves.

Long ago, I found answers to some of the common complaints about dualism. I just realized yesterday that I’ve never posted any of them. It’s probably time I did. Just for the record, you understand.

The first and foremost issue I’d like to address is the often-repeated criticism that dualism, which involves a non-material mind or spirit, and a material brain or body, raises the question of just how, exactly the non-material component should have causal efficacy on the material part of the system. How can they interact? these materialist thinkers ask, in all seriousness.

Why this question is asked confuses me because we have many familiar examples in both real life and science where non-material things interact with material things. Energy affects matter through forces, and neither energy nor forces are made of little tiny balls of hard stuff. Science is strongly dualistic in its metaphysics, as I’ve mentioned before, in fact it involves the interaction of six kinds of things: matter, energy, forces, space, time, and rules. The laws of nature regulate the behavior of all physical systems at every level — yet no one complains about how this happens. (Okay, I admit it’s somewhat incorrect to say physics is dualistic; it’s sextuplistic, or at least quintuplistic if you ignore the rules part. If you throw in the geometric math of string theory with its eleven dimensions, it might even be hyperplistic.)

A more interesting example of the problem of interaction is computer programs. Computer programs are abstract entities (I think even Quine would agree to that, since he has also gone on record as accepting the existence of abstract entities). So how does it control the computer’s activities? By the application of reduction, you could propose that computers are actually controlled by electronics and the physics of electricity, but that’s inexact. Electrical theory fully explains unprogrammed computers just as well, so you need some additional level of explanation to account for computers that show spreadsheets and play music. Which leads to the question, how do programs control computers?

Ultimately, though, despite these specific kinds of arguments, science itself has long proposed how to deal with questions of this kind. In the scientific world, we don’t ask how something is possible. If observation shows that something happens, then we accept that it happens. The rule books are updated to note that it happens, and the experimentalists and theorists go about the business of describing quantitatively the process that’s involved. No muss, no fuss. So if galaxies are pushed away from each other, and the hubble expansion rate is increasing, we don’t have crazies running through the halls of University screaming that the Universe cannot do this. You just puzzle out how it works.

Same thing with mind and body, or programs and computers. I lift my hand. The thought leads to the action. Simple observation reveals that thoughts influence objects. So you write it down in your book thus: “Thoughts influence objects.” The next step is to describe the form and details of this process. And that’s all you have to do.

Which leads to the more basic question I haven’t touched on yet: What are materialists really proposing with their interaction point? Is it a proposal that all interactions have to involve collisions of little hard things? If so, we’ve abandoned that model of reality long, long ago, and I would be amazed to hear somebody actually propose it today. Or is the model of interaction something else, something more worthy of attention? If so, I have no idea what it is, and I reject the position that all interactions have to be physical (elastic or inelastic) collisions. I think most physicists would agree.

 

 

Waterfall

Painted with Corel Graphics in April, 1998, during my natural phase. Most of my work has been abstracts, playing with colors and patterns, but I like this.

 

Social evolution

The idea that societies evolve is not new. It is, however, newer than Charles Darwin. When it became generally accepted that biological objects evolve, it also became popular to think everything else evolved, too, so we have evolving stars, evolving galaxies, evolving theories, and even, hard to believe as it is, evolving societies. Nothing like a good bandwagon to carry people where they want to go.

But as entertaining as the idea of evolution is, my focus in this piece is not whether societies evolve. Clearly they do. Something, obviously, has happened to classical Greek civilization. It has become extinct. And clearly something has happened to American society. We are no longer a band of pioneers fighting indians, anti-intellectual and without art, literature, or science. America discovered its first storytellers and became read on both sides of the pond; ditto with art, ditto with science. Benjamin Franklin attached a key to a kite and proved that idiots survive by chance.

But how do societies evolve?

Social Darwinism was an early stab at answering the question. In this view, societies were like little creatures, attacking each other, red in tooth and claw, attempting to dominate and destroy. Strong societies ate the little ones and only the fit survive. Despite the fact that wars are plentiful, however, the odd fact is that societies usually survive their wars; it’s only the soldiers who are killed (and the occasional civilian bystander). This theory, therefore, doesn’t explain how a society survives and yet also changes.

The next theory was invented by some great modern scientists, a sort of team effort between Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Their proposal was memes. Societies are expressions of little, invisible concepts that invade peoples’ skull cavities where they take root, multiply, and eventually mutate, spewing out modified memes into their social environment.

It’s difficult to take the meme idea seriously, and it seems, for better or worse, real scientists do not. But perhaps there is some truth to it, in a manner of speaking. The real credit for this idea should go to Socrates, who famously complained that the kids of today never listen; they’re rude, inattentive, disobedient, and rebellious. And after lodging his complaint with the gods, he went back to the serious business of getting himself into trouble with the city fathers, and nobody thought any further about it. Since Socrates’ time, this complaint has been repeated over and over, and nobody has ever taken it seriously. After all, our societies do survive the “new” generation, don’t they. The prophesied destruction of society due to these brats running about on the street never materializes. But in truth, it does. Not all at once, and not wholesale, as the prophecy predicts, but little by little the society’s forms, structures, institutions, and beliefs, drifts away.. abandoned by the sneering disrespect of the young folks who laugh at the innocent naivete of their elders while they take up their new lingo, linguistic affectations, buzzwords and slang, changing the language as if they had the right, and…

Every summer, the campuses of high schools, colleges and universities rings with the sounds of graduation ceremonies, and no graduation cereomony would be complete without the hopeful speech of congratulations by some important and respected figure. In ringing tones of triumph, our lecturer tells the young graduates that it is their turn, now, to “carry the torch” of our society into a grand and hopeful future, and they should  not be afraid. Their education and hard-working virtues will stand them in good stead, and they will do just fine.

It’s all rubbish and horseradish. As technology proliferates, we do not have the time or interest to teach the kids everything we were taught as kids. Our whole theory of education changes over the years, so we never end up passing on to our kids what we started with. And even if we tried, the kids wouldn’t accept it. They innovate. They form new little social groups, entertain fads and fashions, and do everything they can to differentiate themselves from their inferiors. Least of all are they interested in living as their parents did.

It’s a quality of human nature, and it’s a result of certain powers of our mind, the power to invent and innovate, and certain inadequaces — we have limited memories and limited mental capacities. It just isn’t possible to reproduce all the beliefs, opinions, knowledge, objectives and goals in one generation into the next. And that’s the origin of social drift.

When we pat our young children on the back and send them off to run businesses, take government office, and build science, you can rest assured that they are devoted to erasing your world, the world you tried to pass on to them. They have no respect for it, and no desire to reproduce your mistakes and perpetuate your misconceptions. As you watch Billy go out to the door, to school, to work, or back to his home in the suburbs, think a moment on his betrayals, to you, to your society, your country, and your civilization. He has already abandoned it, but it will take you forty years to realize it’s you that has become obsolete. And you will not understand how it happened.