Philosophy « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Philosophy ... Spirituality ...

Now that my mother is feeling a bit better, I can get back down to some abstract thinking (on a recreational basis; hey, whatever floats your boat, right?). My topic for today is one I’ve pondered in various ways over the past few years; and that is whether we humans are purely physical phenomenon; or is there an additional ontological dimension to the universe, which somehow weaves its way into us and thus makes us something more? The whole question seems to revolve around “being” and our awareness and love of being (and our usual fear of the opposite). “Being” seems so simple at first; it merely means “in a state of existence”. But then what is “existence”? Ultimately it means . . . . to be. It all gets a bit circular. The only thing that breaks the short circuit is our own awareness of being, and our desire and struggle to maintain and preserve our own being.

The evolutionists (and I generally consider myself an evolutionist; I’m not a fan of so-called “creation science”) say that our “desire to be” (aka “will to live”) isn’t hard to explain. They explain that it couldn’t have been otherwise; by some trial-and-error process over the multi-billion year history of life on earth, living systems with the most propensity to struggle for survival became the ones to propagate the genetic accidents that gave them their zest for life. Creatures born without the drive to fight and survive didn’t contribute much to the genetic pool.

But a problem arises when we humans act in ways that run counter to the “stay alive at all costs” heritage of the simple Darwinian rationale for our “being fetish”. Perhaps it’s just a quirk, but over the centuries, those having perhaps the greatest appreciation and love for “being” (not just self-being, but the being of the community, of society, and of the world) have at times offered up their own being as to protect the “higher” principals of “being”. You wouldn’t think that a purely Darwinian machine would even have the capacity to ponder such a “higher principal”, as it wouldn’t be expected to enhance survival and reproduction. (Unless you argue, as some evolutionists do, that the capacity to think and act socially was “selected” by the process in highly developed species like humans because such cooperation enhances the survival of the species as a whole; much lower life forms, like ants and termites, had also developed extremely social forms. However, such behavioral programming did not carry forward into the mammals and higher primates, for whatever reason).

In my opinion, humans are able to comprehend “being” beyond what a Darwinian machine would be expected to do, even granting that evolution sometimes creates superfluous abilities and interesting side-effects in its products. We are able to appreciate the nature of “being” far more than any other combination of matter, energy and information could. And it is that appreciation that drives us crazy. It makes us depressed, it makes us kill others and kill ourselves, it makes us into artists and musicians. And on rare occasion, it makes us into saints. It makes it equally foreseeable that humankind will eventually wipe itself out, and that humankind will eventually find the key to peace, harmony and balance for everyone.

The game that our species is playing seems well beyond anything that Darwin and his successors described. Evolution certainly did get us this far, but something else kicked-in somewhere along the road. The scientists have no way right now of getting a handle on this with their present means of measurement and analysis, so they deny that it exists. Religious people believe that it does exist, but are too tied up in ancient myths to do any fresh thinking about it. And the philosophers, who traditionally tried to walk the fine line between these two groups, now seem extremely fearful of criticism by the empiricists. So it’s hard to find a good, honest discussion on the subject (and admittedly, it’s harder still to get a grasp on it!).

But hey — ya can’t give up. “The Principal of Being”, in the broad sense of a universal force or fundamental dimension, is a “know it when you see it” proposition. And I recently saw my mother struggle back from a near-deadly medical condition; I have no doubt that I was viewing the power and reality of whatever this “BEING PRINCIPAL” is.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:44 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

◊ Pirsig’s MOQ Muck: The Being of Being

Brain / Mind ... Philosophy ...

Every so many years I start thinking anew about Robert Pirsig, the author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I’ve written about him and his ideas before on this blog; I even mentioned the short letter that I received from Mr. Pirsig in response to my own letter to him. “Zen and the Art” was a big phenomenon in the late 70’s. I finally read it in ’82, and I was really moved by it. It seemed to me and to millions of others like a life-changing book, the kind of book you’re lucky to come across every 20 years or so. (Caveat: Pirsig might well have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I probably have a lite version of it myself. As such, “Zen and the Art” is an Aspie-tinted view of the world, which may help explain why I found it so moving.)

But Pirsig turned out to be a “one-hit wonder”. He wrote another book, Lila, which has mostly been forgotten; and mercifully so. Pirsig tried to contain the power that he somehow mustered in “Zen and the Art” within a body of written philosophy, his “Method of Quality” or MOQ; but he couldn’t do it. There are still a lot of people on the web discussing MOQ, even though the academic philosophical institutions never accepted it. I tried to get interested in MOQ and in the discussion community gathered around it, but I couldn’t maintain my enthusiasm. And yet, the experience of “Zen and the Art” still haunts me from time to time, and I’m in one of those haunted phases right now. A little, anyway; the echos fade as the years go by.

Anyway, over the past few years I’ve become highly interested in “philosophy of mind” and its various issues, especially the connection between human consciousness, i.e. our experiences and feelings, and the physical workings of the brain. How does the equivalent of a slab of meat with a lot of tiny electrical connections within it create a subjective world of love, hate, greed, nobility, faith, despair, hope, beauty, joy, etc.? One of the key concepts in mental philosophy is “qualia”, the conceptual “unit” of mental experience. I, along with a lot of true philosophers, have been pondering the question of what qualia might be (if it really is anything at all). In one of my recent ponderings, I recalled how Pirsig was so mesmerized by the concept of “quality”. Quality, qualia . . . could there be a connection? Was Pirsig saying something profound about the nature of our minds, about the mystery of the mind-brain relationship?

Actually, he wasn’t. In fact, it may be the other way around. The whole mind-brain problem might be saying something about the mystery of Pirsig and his religious devotion to a metaphysical concept that he calls “quality”. Pirsig’s “MOQ” is very interesting and provides a lot of interesting insights and alternate ways of considering various and sundry issues. But in the end it isn’t really a consistent philosophy. It’s an odd assemblage of notions that have attracted Robert Pirsig’s interest over the past 80 some-odd years of his life. MOQ can probably tell us something about almost anything; e.g. what is the rationale for the making of laws, when does human life begin, what is free will, should the rich assume a greater share of the tax burden, etc. But it really can’t get to the true nature of any of those issues. In a way, it’s an attempt to do what Martin Heidegger did with the concept of “being”, i.e. Dasein. Heidegger wrote a very broad philosophy around the idea of “being”, and is recognized as one of the major philosophers of the 20th Century. Pirsig obviously wanted to go that route.

I think that “being” is ultimately the key to human consciousness, the “om” of the universe. It is THE THING which adds an existential dimension to our sense perceptions and makes us “feel alive”. Heidegger ultimately went off the rails in his attempt to “bottle” the concept of “being”. That’s apparent by his support for national socialism in Germany, well after its dark intentions regarding the Jewish population became apparent in the mid 1930s. Pirsig’s MOQ is much more innocent, much less political, but ultimately no more powerful than Heideggerism. But like Heidegger, Pirsig was trying to capture the consciousness butterfly; and fell off the ledge in doing so. He finally did capture something, but it wasn’t the shocking power that he named “quality”. Just as Heidegger, in his books and articles, and in the life that he lived finally captured something much less pure than whatever first inspired him to chase the concept of “being”.

Not that I’m doing any better than either of them in capturing that which gives our lives its pizzazz or quality or “being” or vividness or whatever you want to call it. It may well be a hopeless quest; but it is fun. So, fool that I am, I won’t stop trying. I may not write a memorable book, and hopefully I won’t support a repugnant cause. But if nothing else, the quest for . . . . whatever you want to call it . . . makes life more interesting!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:57 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 18, 2008

◊ The Millenial Monists — Where Are They Going?

Brain / Mind ... Philosophy ... Society ...

Being an old guy, one of those Baby Boomers, I haven’t been very interested in YouTube. But last week I decided to check out a link to YT that I happened to run across during a Google search; it regarded property dualism. Well, I’m definitely interested in the mind versus body debate, so I had to have a look. It turns out that there are a slew of little videos that discuss the dualist versus physicalist issues regarding the mind. Just about all of them were made (and usually narrated) by young people, probably recent college or grad students. I’m pleasantly surprised to see such interest in the question. Most people my age seem pretty brain-dead about it; the prevailing attitude is “conscious, yea, I’m conscious, I’ve got a mind, so what’s the problem?” But the colleges appear to be doing a good job in “raising consciousness” regarding the brain versus soul question; they are getting the Millennium Generation interested in what I think is a really important moral and philosophical question. But, read on . . .

As expected, most of the videos and most of the responding comments sympathize with physicalist monism. That is the ‘flavor of the day’ in academia, and the students are mostly taking the bate. No big surprise there. (There is one intelligent young YouTube contrarian who is actually defending substance dualism and theism! Hang in there,npage85.) I came across a rather cynical and rather enjoyable goof on dualism contributed by one Hurley41, and I recommend it for the humor. It starts out by trashing Descartes (oh, what a new idea!), but then shifts to a mock-religious conversion film, with stories of how dualism miraculously changes lives. Playing in the background is that familiar, cloying piano “Muzak”, the kind we old Boomers hear these days on radio commercials for cancer care centers and nursing homes. Well done, Hurley41! I definitely got a chuckle out of it.

Still, I’m a bit disturbed by this trend. The Millennium Generation is the upcoming wave, the people who will be running this country in another 20 years. The college-educated component of this generation (a significant part of Barack Obama’s wave of support, incidentally) is being taught that we are nothing but machines; cool machines like laptops and ipod’s, but machines nonetheless. They have gained the impression that neuroscience has closed the book on the last refuge of “human mystery”, i.e. the conscious mind. It appears that the Enlightenment and the info tech revolution have finally triumphed. My point is that this is going to have a big effect on American society over the next 30 or 40 years, just as the Baby Boom, with its wacky ideas and hypocrisies (think Bill Clinton), owned the 1980s and 1990s (and is still warping the 00’s).

For one thing, forget about religion and standard theistic beliefs; these kids have been inoculated against it! (Not that the Baby Boom crowd was very big on it either.) The only people who will go to church will be the working class and service industry crowd, i.e. the high school students and community college grads who never took a philosophy or neurobiology course. This split won’t be apparent only in church; it’s going to ripple through all of our social institutions. It’s going to be the techno-Enlightenment crowd versus the old-school class everywhere you look, in the workplace, in our schools, in restaurants and recreation places, in politics, in where and how we live, etc.

In sum, America is going to have a CLASS PROBLEM. There’s going to be less and less common ground between the old-school class and the “Neural Buddhists”, as NY Times columnist David Brooks recently called them (Brooks also calls them “bobo’s”, i.e. bourgeois bohemians; and he admits that he’s talking about himself). See my May 15 blog entry (below) for a cite to his article, and for more YouTube discoveries. The Baby Boomers started this trend, and the Millennium crowd is going to take it all the way. There will be two Americas; they will be interspersed geographically, but worlds apart in thinking, in needs and wants, and in political demands.

The current split between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton supporters is a good clue to the future. But I really shouldn’t call it “good” — actually it’s rather ominous. America is not going to have the kind of unity that got it through the crises of the 20th Century, i.e. two world wars and a cold war. It appeared that America was coming back together after 9-11, but that turned out not to be much more than flag waving. The US is going to face both military and economic challenges from a slew of opponents out there, including Iran, the BRIC alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China), al Qaeda, etc. Then throw in global warming and natural resource depletion (I’m still waiting for market forces to break the rise of oil prices), and — well, something is going to crack. America will survive, but as to whether it can continue to pull off the “Triple Crown” (guess I’m thinking about those horse races going on this time of year) of being the world’s strongest, richest and most free nation in the world — well, that is the million-dollar question.

I’m not sure what the Millennium Generation believes in. They appear to be taught not to believe in anything at all (or too much at once, as Barack Obama with his slick rhetoric has proved). As with most things, the medicine of skepticism can be helpful (e.g., it helps combat superstitions and irrational prejudices), but an overdose can do much harm. Dualism, for all its problems, does leave a wide berth for sanctity and human dignity (when intelligently presented). I’ve cast my lot with those few who argue that mental dualism has not been ruled out by the evidence, and should remain in play as an acceptable line of thought. The academic world today gives dualism a quick nod, but then highlights the glories of quasi-rational, monistic scientism. Sure, this keeps people from thinking about driving 767’s into office towers (mostly the people who weren’t going to think about that anyway). But it is also a huge social experiment that few outside of academia are presently aware of; and I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to backfire.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 12:53 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, May 15, 2008

◊ Having a Brew with John Searle (and not David Brooks)

Brain / Mind ... Philosophy ...

I see that NY Times columnist David Brooks recently took an interest in the problem of mind and matter, i.e. whether we are composed entirely of matter and energy or does our conscious life somehow entail more than just physical forces at work. Brooks concludes, quite rightly, that the outcome of the academic debate regarding this topic will have “big cultural effects”. That’s why I’m interested in this debate, and have a short course about consciousness and its current academic interpretations on this web site.

One of the “big guns” in the consciousness debate is a philosopher named John Searle. I was recently watching a lecture of his that is available on YouTube, which I highly recommend. In part 3 of the lecture, he talks about his famous Chinese Room argument, which goes back to 1980. This thought experiment was meant to specifically counter the “functionalist” notion that the essence of consciousness could be captured by the right kind of algorithm, akin to a computer program. In 1980, Searle was attacking the artificial intelligence movement, specifically the notion that AI could capture and perhaps even create consciousness (well, eventually, once it could reach a sufficient level of complexity). But he was also saying something about the deeper nature of consciousness, about how it is something more than a mixture of physical processes (even though Searle will not go so far as to embrace ontological dualism).

The Chinese Room thing is a bit involved, but it can be summarized by imagining an American citizen who knows no Chinese at all, but gets a job with a Chinese newspaper as an advice columnist. The American columnist gets letters from China, written entirely in Chinese, and has no idea what the writers are asking. This resourceful American has a book, or better yet, a computer program, that tells her what to write back in response to the various Chinese character patterns. This is one big book or program, and it pretty much covers all possibilities. So this American is quite a success with the Chinese, despite having no idea what she’s saying in her columns. Searle maintains that the cognitive (computer-based) paradigm of consciousness is just as ridiculous as saying that this American advice columnist is an expert in Chinese culture and psychology. The columnist is just following instructions, like a cookbook! In effect, Searle is saying: “a computer program can’t be like consciousness, because it doesn’t understand what it’s doing”.

However, given the way that the brain’s “computer program” works, it actually can understand. The brain uses a different type of computation method than the standard computer with its do-loops and its “if-then” statements and its “and / or” gates. In the past 25 years or so, computer scientists have started to construct “neural networks” using a large population of massively connected “decision objects” arranged in layers. Suffice it to say that such computing arrangements can mimic inductive logical processes, even given “fuzzy data input”. They can mimic the way that our brains come up with abstractions like “faster” and “farther” and “injustice” and “inadequate”, etc. With enough connections and layers properly arranged, and with proper input, they can arguably come up with the high-level abstractions like “self” and “other” and “universe” and maybe even “God”.

So, contra Searle, does this mean that machines can be conscious, and that our consciousness happens because of a machine-like brain at work? Instead of answering the question, I am going to challenge Seale’s underlying and unspoken presumption. That presumption was given to us by Descarte in his motto “I think, therefore I am”. According to Descarte, the thing that turns us into conscious humans is our ability to think, to reason, to abstract and conceptualize. And I believe that notion is wrong, and that Searle has followed Descarte down this dead end (as much as Searle would protest the Cartesian dualism). Thinking and reasoning is not what makes us conscious, even if it distinguishes humankind from most of nature’s other creatures. Instead it is feeling, experience, the vivid way that the senses and emotions play within our minds. The truth is a twist on Descarte: “I feel, therefore I am”.

As with Searle’s Chinese Room set-up, the American advice columnist I had spoke of is much like a standard computer program, with its linear logic. But there is no reason why this advice columnist couldn’t gather more data and gain inferences from that data regarding the Chinese people that she writes to. She could come to understand their environment and their ways and their language, much as a massively inter-connected neural network can form inferences from fuzzy input data. She could adapt to changes in the culture, and could learn new social concerns and words as they develop — just as a neural network computer can change its inferences and learn new things with continuing data inputs. So, in the end, Searle is attacking a false problem. (But from what I saw on his video lecture, he still isn’t ready to admit it).

Searle doesn’t like to be called a “mysterian”, but he does appear to be defending the mystery of consciousness with his Chinese Room argument. But it’s a waste of time. He got it right at the start of his lecture when he spoke of the subjective nature of consciousness, of how unique each conscious experience is. I liked one of his examples of experience very much: i.e., the experience of drinking beer. He could have stopped right there! Science can tell you plenty about the experience of drinking beer, about how alcohol content and hop oils and carbonation and specific gravity and temperature will affect the sensations that the lucky beer drinker will experience. But it can’t explain just what that experience is, or just how it relates to matter and energy and their various interactions. Consciousness is something more, and for now it remains a mystery. Ponder that the next time you quaff down the golden malt nectar of the gods. As Searle seems to have done!

(As to David Brooks — he seems to be more of a white wine person. Too bad for his conscious self.)

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:28 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 11, 2008

◊ Beam me up, Scotty, for some dialog . . .

Philosophy ... Society ...

I’m currently reading a book by David Bohm and David Peat (Science, Order and Creativity), which is mostly a collection of interesting thoughts from the 1980’s. One of those interesting thoughts regards the distinction between discussion and dialogue regarding positions on important social issues.

Discussion is mostly what we do here in America today; i.e., we make up our minds and enter into discussions with people having different opinions. Those discussions are meant to either browbeat the other side into giving in and accepting our own ideas, or finding a compromise whereby each side gets something (as much as possible), but also accepts some dissatisfaction. The underlying assumption is that both sides stick by their guns. By contrast, dialogue is to enter into talks with an open mind about why the other side disagrees with you, with a willingness to listen and maybe change your opinion if your opponent has a good point. Unfortunately, that’s not the American way. We have way too much discussion and way too little dialogue here, especially in our politics. But ain’t that America.

Here’s another random thought regarding a philosophic issue stemming from science fiction, i.e. the Star Trek stories. In the various versions of Star Trek, people can be instantly “beamed up” from one point to another using a teletransporter device. This is a few centuries in the future, remember. I was never bothered by this idea, but after reading some philosopher’s comments about it, I now am. Not that it’s a real issue; the actual technology to teletransport people is hardly even imaginable right now. But still, the transporter concept touches on some underlying issues regarding who we are and what our lives and self-identities represent.

The big question about the teletransporter is this: is that really you at the other end after the process is over? Or did you die in the process, with some bogus copy of you being created? And even if the copy was perfect, is that still really you? There are various interpretations about how the teletransporter would work; in one interpretation, all of the sub-atomic particles that make up your body would be transported at near the speed of light to a re-assembly point. So, the re-composed body is made of exactly the same stuff. That sounds comforting. But still, in the scrambling process, you actually stopped living; you were dead for a few instants. But then again, a lot of people have been dead temporarily but revived after some trauma.

It sounds to me as though the human identity would survive the Star Trek transporter process, IF all of your experiences up to the micro-second of transport were captured and conveyed to the reassembled body on the other planet (or where ever); and if your exact stuff went down in the “beam”. Now what if that varied? What if the stuff you were made of prior to teletransport were thrown away, and you were reassembled with identical particles from where you landed? That makes me feel a little more queezy; but OK, so long as the copy on the other side were perfect, no real problem. I mean, we change our atomic composition every day by some percent. No one stays exactly the same in physical makeup.

Next possible problem: what if the transport problem scanned you about a half second or so before you lost consciousness, and then re-assembled you using that scan information? The “you” in the transporter room went on living for another half second or so before you were scrambled out of existence. The copy that was built on the planet Zarcon didn’t catch what you might have thought or felt in that final half-second. So, were you killed? Or was a little bit of you killed? Are you still comfortable that the teletransported copy of you would really be you? And what if the machine had a little stall, and you went on living for a minute or two — would you want to hit a red-button and stop the whole process before being atomically dismembered?

And then of course there are some wacky possibilities that could occur if the machine further malfunctions. What if the machine copies you and reassembles a living copy of you down on Zarcon, but fails to scramble the original you? So now there are two of you, having the same memories, the same identity, the same jobs, the same families, the same wife . . . but who is the real you? Figure that one out.

(And yes, there was a Star Trek TNG episode called “Second Chances” where Riker had been beamed up from a planet years ago but the original on the planet survived. And the planet-refuge was later recovered by the Enterprise, and thus had to deal with the beamed-up version of Riker.)

For now, we have bigger problems to worry about, like $5 a gallon gas and $1.50 a pound rice. But still, for a true geek like me, it’s an interesting little diversion. So beam me up, Scotty. And I’ll see you on the other side.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:55 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, May 1, 2008

◊ METAPHYSICAL BATTLEGROUND

Philosophy ... Spirituality ...

I found an interesting website about God recently. Specifically, it provides a philosophical critique of various theological notions such as God’s all-knowing and all-powerful nature, or God’s ability to relate to mere mortals. It’s called Battleground God. It asks you a series of questions regarding your concept of God, then it sends back a series of questions and challenges, questions that start with “if what you say is true, then how can it be that…” I.e., the usual philosopher’s hyper-logical crap.

The “Battleground” questions are interesting and thought provoking, but they ultimately are bound up within their own assumptions (just as they criticize believers in God to be bound up in theirs). They seem to forget that their logic is ultimately a system of symbols and rules which are subject to the limitations of Godel’s Theorem. So, just as the human mind has the ability to perceive something more than the propositions put forth by our systems of symbolic logic (consider: the only reason we know of Godel’s limitation is because of this inherent ability), then why can’t there be a metaphysical entity that exists beyond the boundaries that our logic systems set?

In other words, don’t take Battleground God too seriously. And another thing: when you click » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:46 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Friday, December 28, 2007

◊ No Self, No Things . . . But Still, Relationship!

Philosophy ... Spirituality ...

I was off from work today and had a chance to catch up on some reading. I was cutting through a book about the relationship between Buddhist thought and cognitive science (The Embodied Mind by Francesco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch). You really have to plow your way through this book; it’s very dense with complex thought, although you can usually stay up with the authors if you go slow. However, it becomes incomprehensible whenever Buddhist doctrines are discussed. The two key Buddhist doctrines being flouted here are 1.) the falsity of “self”, and 2.) the ultimate emptiness and groundlessness of everything.

Well, that certainly covers a lot of ground (except that ‘ground’ ultimately doesn’t exist). We believe that we have stable, if slowly changing, self-identities; and that we live in a world that is “really there”. But certain Buddhists seem to think it’s all an illusion. Or mostly an illusion. Or an illusion in one sense, but not in another. Somehow, this confusion is supposed to break our egos (not unlike what a Zen koan sets out to do), and turn us into wiser, kinder and gentler beings. Once we stop grasping for fixed identities, we can then just experience things “straight up”, open-heartedly, without self-delusions.

Yea right.

The biggest problem with Buddhist thought, in my opinion, is its lack of respect for words. They don’t give much regard to the notion that “words have meaning” (which is consistent with their focus on meditative experience). So they can be sloppy with even the most important words like “truth”. Varela and company talk about “relative truths” and “ultimate truths”, but warn that neither are part of a “theory of truth”. The ultimate of ultimate truths is the emptiness of the world. And that would also include the concept of truth. If so, then truth is an empty concept; it can be whatever anyone wants (thus all truth becomes “relative truth”). That’s not what this book affirms, but its flip-flopping notions of what “truth” means would do nothing to prevent this. I suspect that criminal defense lawyers would love to convince judges and juries to adopt this book’s way of thinking.

As to throwing away our notion of “self” and the overly-inflated ego that often goes with it: I’ll be the first to acknowledge that many, if not most, people could use a good dose of humility. Ego causes a lot of trouble. But to nuke the ego and turn everyone into compassionate, compliant zombies – that scheme would work only if you absolutely guarantee 100% effectiveness. If just one person kept their ego, he or she would then become the ruler of the planet. In the real world, egos are a pretty good defense against power mongering and sales pitches and political speeches. Admittedly, the “self” and its ego are not permanent, and are not always good. In extreme instances (e.g., severe head injuries or traumas), the “self” can be terminated and replaced by a new personality. But self and ego are rough working concepts that make sense in the world such as it is.

Another rough working concept that makes sense, at least here in the West, is that “words have meaning”. Philosophers and scientists can prove that words and language could not and do not perfectly “represent” the world. Reality is always a bit more complex than our concepts. But we do need these concepts to maintain law and order, along with industry and commerce and science and education. We have to respect our words, not devalue them in favor of “enlightenment through sitting”. Hell, even in the Far East, most Buddhists these days seem more interested in making a buck than in folding their legs and slowing their breathing until the inner light of wisdom shines. And to make a buck, you have to assume that words have meaning. When China sells a batch of big-screen TV’s and then buys some US Treasury Bonds, it is not willing to accept “relative truths” about payment schedules.

I will be the first to admit that old-fashioned “objectivism” is on the ropes these days; there’s not much you can be sure of anymore. Nihilism is certainly a problem; radical jihad may well be a nihilist reaction to the failings of the Enlightenment. The USA can show the world how to to get rich (albeit with the side effect of unfair wealth distribution). But it doesn’t offer much else to believe in, other than “free elections” (which are good, but aren’t the stuff that one builds their life around). Nonetheless, I don’t think that Buddhist approaches such as “empty-minded open-heartedness” are the answer. I think that we need to press on in order to find compelling ideas and ideals that everyone can grasp and believe in.

Descartes gave us half an answer – we all know that even if nothing else exists, one thing does – we ourSELVES exist! And we know something else almost as fundamental: i.e., that we crave relationship with something else. Preferably something else having an existence much like our own, with thinking and self-consciousness. I.e., relationship with OTHER PEOPLE. Without such relationship we know that we malfunction and ultimately shut down, even if all of our physiological needs for nutrition and air and heat are met.

If our species, in its search for meaning, could lock-on to the necessity of relationship, to the sacredness of having other self-egos that our own self-ego can relate to (without dominance or force, which ultimately corrodes all relationships) — well, that would surely go a long way towards realizing a better world.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:27 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, December 23, 2007

◊ On the Border of Order and Anarchy

Philosophy ... Science ...

I’ve been reading some books and articles about “emergence”, the scientific and mathematical concept of how complex things or patterns such as traffic jams, living organisms, stock market crashes and bee hives “emerge” from a lot of stupid little things interacting together, following simple rules with no central commander. (Technically, these “little things” are called “cellular automa”; they continually decide what to do based on what those around them are doing). Our minds and our consciousness and intelligence may in fact be just an “emergence” from a lot of neuron cells in our brain acting under simple directives without any central guidance.

These books and articles are very interesting. But you can’t truly understand something unless you can get your hands on it, play around with it. When it comes to nuclear fusion, you obviously can’t fool around with it in your kitchen; so most of us will never really understand nuclear fusion. But emergence does lend itself to simple experiments on one’s home computer. You can set up some simple “emergence generators” using an MS Excel spreadsheet. I’ve been fooling around with one lately.

What I’ve learned from my own little emergence experiments is the importance of randomness and unevenness. Many of us curse randomness and unevenness. They’re just too unpredictable. We can’t control randomness, and unevenness just doesn’t seem right. What good is something that you can’t control and has an uneven mix? I myself tend to favor law and order.

I don’t think you want to hear all the details of my little spreadsheet experiment right now. However, I do sense a lesson from them, which I will try to share here. If the universe really does play by these rules, then randomness and disorder are just as necessary for life as law and order are. Without order, spontaneity would just make a useless mess of things. Without spontaneity, order would never get anything started. Opposites really do need each other to make things happen. Paradoxically, randomness causes intermittent clumps of order (e.g., four “heads” in a row in a series of 100 coin tosses). The “emergence machine” latches on to those clumps and weaves a pattern amidst the background static.

Just as an entertainment, here are some of the patterns that “emerge” on my little spreadsheet, based on slightly different rules. These are indeed mixes of law and randomness, order and anarchy.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:11 pm Read Comments (4) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, December 9, 2007

◊ Cardinal at Sunset — Is Beauty Real?

Philosophy ... Photo ... Science ...

Time for a pic. Here’s a distinguished member of the local wildlife scene, a male cardinal. He’s just hanging around in the bushes, awaiting an early sunset in December. It looks as if he’s filled his belly for the day and is just taking in the scene. In a few minutes he will be heading back to the nest for the night with his mate.

The cardinal brings up some interesting questions about the process of evolution. The male cardinal evolved it’s delightfully colorful plumage so as to better attract females for mating. The red color gave some members of the early cardinal species a reproduction advantage, so the color was “selected” into the male genes. But once the process was completed and every male cardinal was red, was the overall cardinal species any better off? Arguably it was worse off; the female retains its camouflage brown, but the males became sitting ducks for those animals that attack birds for a living. And yet, despite this evolutionary dead-end, the cardinals somehow survived, and lived on to delight us humans (especially on those drab winter days when everything is all brown and gray).

Now I’m as Darwinian as any legitimate scientist. I don’t like those “intelligent design” theories that the Bible-thumping creationists are trying to sneak into the school curricula. I think that those folk should go find better ways to save souls and spread the word of salvation than to corrupt our scientific and educational institutions (like maybe helping the poor and the needy). I know that there’s a good scientific reason that explains why red cardinals still get by in certain environments. BUT. I do have to wonder if there is a deeper layer of reality behind what physics studies, a layer that does allow for things such as beauty and virtue (you know, the Kantian categorical imperatives and such). And also the mental consciousness that allows us to appreciate those things. Perhaps the little evolutionary dead-end that gave our world the cardinal’s beautiful plumage, and the consciousness to enjoy it, are reflections of something more than our science can now (or should now) attest to.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:00 am Read Comments (4) / Leave a Comment

Monday, December 3, 2007

◊ A DUSTY ONTOLOGY

Art & Entertainment ... Philosophy ... Religion ... Society ...

I voluntarily live in a perpetual culture lag; I have no idea what movies, songs, artists, clothes, etc. are going to be talked about 3 months from now. (I once had a girlfriend that made me watch E! with her — arg, bad memories.) So, don’t be surprised that I just found out about “The Golden Compass”, a movie that is now hitting the screens. Or that I’ve just become aware of the theological controversies behind Philip Pullman’s child fantasy novels, on which Golden Compass is based.

Oh good, another child-fantasy movie series. Just what we need. As if Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings weren’t enough (then throw in Naria, although I do very much respect C.S. Lewis). I’m glad that I grew up long before this stuff became required-seeing for every kid. Back when I was young, we walked around by rivers and railroad tracks and factories, and we made up our own fantasy adventures using whatever junk we found lying around. Kids today have their lives completely scheduled and controlled by their parents (admittedly, for their own safety – this is a more perverted world now). Thus, they have to stay indoors and read or watch a movie or DVD about fantasy adventure. Again, I’m glad that I grew up when a kid could still go out by himself after school or on a Saturday and do his own thing. But I digress.

Back to Philip Pullman and the Golden Compass. There’s a bit of controversy going on over Pullman’s “atheistic” message. The big enemy in Pullman’s stories is “The Magesterium”. I believe that God is eventually killed in some meta-cosmic battle. And we’re all the better for it, according to Pullman. With God gone, we can then be natural – and that includes allowing teenagers to satiate their burgeoning lusts without delay. You can see why Pullman would be popular with teens, especially with the guys. But without God and the hovering superego, just what in Pullman’s world keeps our beautiful desires from being sullied by cruelty, power-lust, neurosis and all the other bad tendencies that people actually have? Where would the virtues necessary to sustain our social order come from?

From “Dust”. In Pullman’s imagined world, there are invisible particles of goodness all around us. And they tend to cling to us when we’re in our most honest and natural states. By contrast, dust goes away when the Church and the Authorities start preaching to us in the name of God and Country. If only we’d all just let go, Dust would make it OK. But God and The Magesterium won’t let go, so they have to be done away with by Pullman’s protagonists (which appear to include a polar bear and a 12 year old girl).

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like to be told what to do by established religion and government. Both institutions go overboard too often, limiting freedom when it’s unnecessary and even counter-productive. I still respect the ideas and ideals of liberalism. But as to just throwing the establishment out . . . well, I guess there’s still a bit of Edmund Burke in me.

But one more queer thing about the Pullman idea. I’ve been listening to some Teaching Company lectures by Daniel N. Robinson lately, so I’ve learned a bit about ontology. I.e., “just what is there” in our universe, just what is the nature of everything. It’s a big question, but that’s the fun of ontology (and philosophy in general). The early Greeks got interested in ontology, and came up with various theories. One Greek idea is called “atomism”. Atomism is the idea that at bottom, there is some tiny elementary particle from which everything is made of. That particle is the end of reality; you can’t get any smaller, can’t break it down, can’t change it. You can only combine it in different ways to get different things, e.g. kites and kittens, Caesar salads and Corvettes, neutron stars and nitrogen gas, etc. The trick was to learn about the basic particle; then you’d know the common characteristics of all things.

Once upon a time, this seemed like a good idea. But over the past 2,500 years or so, science has come up with better views. It came up with field theories (e.g. magnetic fields and gravity, seemingly continuous phenomenon), and then had to modify those field concepts with quantum realities (little units almost like the Greek “atom”, but which jump around and change randomly). So now reality is composed of a whole lot of interacting quantum perturbations in a series of fields (or maybe one ultimate field, if and when physics achieves the unification of all basic forces).

Theologians have simultaneously come up with much more sophisticated theories of what God could be like. God, and our own sentience and awareness, are now seen by some theologians in terms of an emergence based upon large volumes of quantum perturbations of some common underlying field. God is not on one end, with us on another. We’re all part of something common, according to the process theologians. We’re all moving towards something. It seems like a good way to think about ontology and metaphysics given what we now know from the physical sciences.

So, Pullman’s “dust” ontology and theology appears to be a throwback to me. It seems immature. Sure, the Vatican and the many other religious authorities on our planet have a long way to go to catch up with the emerging and sophisticated views that their theologians are proposing. But that’s the way it’s always been; the authorities always need a century or two to adopt a good idea. Pullman doesn’t want to wait; he would imagine doing away with the authorities and going back to a very elementary and immature view of where truth and virtue come from.

“Dust” is something to cough and choke on. Pun intended, even if it’s quite lame. The philosophers and scientists long ago figured out that we ultimately are not dust, and ultimately it is not dust to which we return. And even the more progressive churchmen now emphasize that they are only talking about the body, and not about the soul, when they speak of our dusty mortality. I hope that Golden Compass’ audience of young minds will likewise be able to move away from Pullman’s countervailing but still immature way of thinking about the world and where its truths ultimately lie.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:39 pm Read Comments (10) / Leave a Comment

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