Philosophical Authoring Adventures

Woolf and the Meaning of Life

2011-05-31T17:16:00.001+07:00

‘I very rarely think either of my past or my future, but the moment that one contemplates writing an autobiography - and I am sitting down with that intention today - one is forced to regard oneself as an entity carried along for a brief period in the stream of time, emerging suddenly at a particular moment from darkness and nothingness and shortly to disappear at a particular moment into nothingness and darkness. The moment at which officially I emerged from non-existence was the early morning of November 25th, 1880, though in fact I did not personally become aware of my existence until some two or three years later. In the interval between 1880 and today I have lived my life on the assumption that sooner or later I shall pass by annihilation into the same state of non-existence from which I suddenly emerged that winter morning in West Cromwell Road, Kensington, so many years ago. This passage from non-existence to non-existence seems to me a strange and, on the whole, an enjoyable experience. Since the age of sixteen, when for a short time, like all intelligent adolescents, I took the universe too seriously, I have rarely worried myself about its meaning or meaninglessness. But I resent the fact that, as seems to be practically certain, I shall be as non-existent after my death as I was before my birth. Nothing can be done about it and I cannot truthfully say that my future extinction causes me much fear or pain, but I should like to record my protest against it and against the universe which enacts it.
‘The adulation of the deity as creator of the universe in Jewish and Christian psalms and hymns, and indeed by most religions, seems to me ridiculous. No doubt in the course of millions of millions of years, he has contrived to create some good things. I agree that 'my heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky', or 'the golden daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze', or 'the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way'. I admit that every now and again I am amazed and profoundly moved by the beauty and affection of my cat and my dog. But at what a cost of senseless pain and misery, of wasteful and prodigal cruelty, does he manage to produce a daffodil, a Siamese cat, a sheepdog, a housefly, or a sardine. I resent the wasteful stupidity of a system which tolerates the spawning herring or the seeding groundsel or the statistics of infantile mortality wherever God has not been civilized by man. And I resent the stupid wastefulness of a system which requires that human beings with great labour and pain should spend years in acquiring knowledge, experience, and skill, and then just when at last they might use all this in the service of mankind and for their own happiness, they lose their teeth and their hair and their wits, and are hurriedly bundled, together with all that they have learnt, into the grave and nothingness.
It is clear that, if there is a purpose in the universe and a creator, both are unintelligible to us. But that does not provide them with an excuse or a defence.’
Are these views reasonable?

In this essay I shall be considering Woolf’s claims. I shall firstly unpack what it is he is really saying and try to identify his view in as succinct a form as possible. I shall then consider the arguments he puts forward, both explicitly and implicitly, and the extent to which they are reasonable, and whether they are supported in the philosophical tradition. I shall also consider directly contrasting views and discuss their validity as arguments against Woolf’s assertions.
It is clear that Woolf rejects a traditional dualist vision of humanity. He clearly states that he anticipates non-existence after death to be akin to his non-existence before his birth, and though he stops short, in this passage, of denying a creator deity, he does refer to its adulation as being ridiculous. Woolf’s is a materialist world view - there is what there is - but he goes further, lamenting the unfairness of life which deserts us just as we begin to get to grips with it. He doesn’t subscribe to the axial notion – the perhaps intuitive feeling that there must be something more, some other world or perhaps other way of interacting which would make more sense, be more fulfilling or more liberating than the seemingly deficient and incomplete existence we have been saddled with. Woolf acknowledges nature’s beauty and power to awe, but registers also his frustration that nature is wasteful and necessarily painful. He concludes that if there is purpose in the universe or a creator, whilst we are unable to comprehend it, our inability to do so provides neither excuse nor defence.
One can certainly infer that Woolf considers life to be absurd, in a philosophical sense, or meaningless. He raises the question as to whether life is intrinsically ‘good’, or otherwise. He admits to being both amazed and moved by affection from pets, yet talks of senseless pain and wasteful cruelty in relation to the evolutionary processes of life. He proclaims that just as man is reaching the emotional and intellectual maturity sufficient to grasp life fully, so life degenerates, as if some cruel joke; this is very much the metaphorical shrug of the shoulders in existential angst, “What’s the point?”
In what follows, I shall consider the reasonableness of the claim that life is meaningless or absurd. I shall look at some of Woolf’s specific points in more detail and reflect on the implicit arguments he offers in their defence. In particular, I shall look at his underlying assumption that life is good – that is, that life is intrinsically worthwhile, necessarily of value, as opposed to non-life. I shall also consider his argument that nature is unnecessarily cruel and wasteful, and that this in itself is reason to resent the ‘stupid wastefulness’ of life.
In the first instance, to declare life meaningless, I think we need to consider what we mean by ‘mean’. In purely linguistic terms, meaning can be an ethereal concept. As an example, the French word ‘putain’ literally means prostitute, or in a more derogatory sense, whore. However, in common usage, the French might employ this word in striking a thumb with a hammer or suddenly recalling something terribly important one had forgotten to do – in short it ‘means’ the same thing as the English expletive ‘fuck’ utilised in the same situations. What we mean by a word can become its meaning. Could this be the case with life? Can what we mean by our actions and the way in which we live our lives be the very meaning of life? This idea – that we may give life meaning through our actions – is one to which I shall return.
I might say something such as, ‘I’m starving’ which, whilst it might not ‘mean’ the literal sense of the words used, in that I am near death from malnourishment, it does carry a meaning, that is, it is something I intended to say, a message I intentionally put across, that of my being hungry. Life cannot mean anything, in this sense. It seems to me obvious that life – if one accepts a secular version, that is - cannot ‘mean’ anything in the sense of ‘intend’ something or have a purpose in mind. In this sense, Woolf’s view is perhaps not reasonable. He talks a lot of resentment, directing his feelings towards a universe whose purpose is unknown, a system requiring untold cruelty and ‘unfairness’. In doing so, Woolf seems to be making the assumption that there is a culpable entity to whom to apportion blame. It seems to me that anger or resentment directed at something essentially neutral is far from sensible or reasonable. If life just ‘is’, in the sense that being is simply a fact, then to rail against the unfairness of it would appear to be rather pointless – rather like resenting the cliff as one falls from it, or resenting gravity.
But ‘mean’ can mean ‘signify’, or destiny – as in something that is meant to be - or value –as in ‘you mean a lot to me’. It strikes me that my life can mean a lot to me, that indeed my life can mean something quite specific, whilst the notion that life in general is meaningless might still be acceptable. We talk about acts of violence being meaningless, when actually the act – for example an act of terrorism – may have very strong meaning, in terms of intentionality, as an expression of the will of the perpetrator. Whilst the act itself cannot mean something, in and of itself, it can have meaning, both from intentionality of the facilitator of the act, and from those affected by the act. Perhaps, in this way, life can have meaning whilst simultaneously being meaningless. Whilst this might appear paradoxical, it really isn’t. Some attributions of meaning are simply more valid, more convincing perhaps, than others. This would be Paul Edward’s ‘cosmic’ and ‘terrestrial’ meaning - in a cosmic sense our lives find meaning in the grand scheme of things, an overall purpose, often associated with God, or spirituality, whilst in the terrestrial sense one’s life is imbued with the meaning one subjectively gives it.
‘It is clear that, if there is a purpose in the universe and a creator, both are unintelligible to us,’ Woolf bemoans. Kant would perhaps agree with Woolf in one respect: the real purpose of life cannot be known to us. Whilst one implication of this might be that the ‘bigger picture’ is therefore irrelevant to our own individual search for meaning, I think that individual quests for meaning are necessarily shaped by the nature of reality – just as the heliocentric world view represented a paradigm shift for humanity, so too would concrete evidence of life on other planets, for example, and this would necessarily impact on the individual’s perspective on life and her own search for meaning. However, Kant’s views in this area are intriguingly paradoxical. Kant had reduced humanity to reason alone, refusing other means of knowing. At the same time, however, he claimed that reason was limited by our very nature. Things-as-they-are, or noumena, could never be known through reason, which itself belonged to the realm of things-as-they-seem. For Kant, human life, however, was only worth living in contemplation of deeper, fundamental metaphysical questions, even though these very questions are unattainable to our reason. It is the quest which informs us. In many ways, this is Kant’s legacy to mankind. The superstition of Religion supposedly exposed yet the scope of reason restrained, what is left to us to discover our true nature, our raison d’être?
Kant argued that there were three questions we could – and indeed should – ask: What can I know? Given the limits of my reason, what ought I to do? For what can I hope? Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ famously concludes with, ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ For Kant, meaning was found in moral duty, in attaining the highest good. Our lives have meaning in so far as we have choices, we can act autonomously, and meaning can brought into our lives when we act appropriately. John Cottingham supports this view, suggesting that ‘We need to cultivate in ourselves the moral and spiritual basis for being able to live in the face of absurdity and contingency and failure.’ He suggests that the problem of human existence is essentially its fragility, and that to come to terms with this, we must embrace our dependency and lack of autonomy whilst cultivating a moral dimension; he argues that a life of viciousness and selfishness cannot be considered meaningful. Most of us do not have the heroic character of a Sisyphus, shrugging off failure and starting again as each contingency thwarts our plans, and so we must turn to a more spiritual approach which fosters hope.
Does this offer consolation to Woolf? It is hard to see how. Cottingham’s appeal to hope in the face of disaster could be interpreted trivially as a return to other-worldly optimism. His elevation of praxis over faith might be an appealing watering down of religious rhetoric, but it sails close to the axial wind. Kant outlines a battle between moral duty and natural inclinations, or passions – which he famously refers to as cancers of human reason. If we are to accept Kant’s view, of life being a battle between our desires and our rational acceptance of a moral higher good, then is not the individual subsumed? Is not the individual life more meaningless than ever? And it is the individual’s life – the meaninglessness of Woolf’s own life – that Woolf decries, along with the wider disapproval of the wastefulness of the entire process.
Hegel might offer a degree of support to Woolf’s position, but perhaps only in that there is nothing left of worth for us to do. History is dead and there is but a cyclical repetition of events. Meaning, if there is any to be had in life, comes from history. However, Hegel saw life as an unfolding autobiography of the Spirit – a postulated successor to God. In this view, whilst it may be that individual events, or even entire individual lives, are meaningless, with the power of hindsight everything does fall into place as part of some larger, grand scheme. This is perhaps scant consolation for modern secular man in his search for meaning in his own strivings. The idea that an individual life is meaningless, but on a massive scale life is evolving into something meaningful would do little to console Woolf – it is exactly the lack of individual meaning that he contests, and the high price life pays along its evolutionary development.
Hegel, however, did have a concept of selfhood to offer. A person has three dimensions, each constitutive of that person—or selfhood. Firstly, people have notions of themselves, which are intrinsic to who they are. This notion, or conception, is a real part of the person; the person is rooted in the conception they have of themselves. This conception is the first aspect of self. Oddly though, even when self-conception does not fit the actual self it conceives, it is still part of that person - it is not in some way an extra, or a minor characteristic. The second aspect of self then, for Hegel, is this self image or notion, be it accurate or not. Even if that conception we have of ourselves alters to another “mistaken” conception, this would mean that the person would have become a different person, to a substantial degree. The third dimension of self is the historical context in which we find ourselves, and this is where Hegel attempts to offer solace to the existentially challenged. Whilst the influence comes from outside of ourselves, one can imagine that being born into a different family, a different culture or a different economic class could radically alter the person we have become. This is reflected in the view ‘historicism’ – which would give meaning to life in terms of the historical events surrounding us. For Hegel, meaning is to found in society and history, in our citizenship and culture. It is not clear, though, despite its apparent optimism, that this view has much to offer Woolf as he reflects upon his own transitory passage through time. Is his life to be deemed meaningful by the chance fall of the historical dice, by his living in ‘interesting times’ as opposed to a life in the relative calm and easy luxury of political and social stability? The very proposition that meaning can stem from chance is perhaps not a reassuring one.
To address Woolf’s concerns about the fleeting passage of life, and its relative hardships, we need to turn to another philosopher, who clearly lends his approval to Woolf’s misgivings about life: Schopenhauer.
‘To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it…what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure? Nourishment and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course.’
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of life is more than just rhetoric, however. He argues fairly convincingly that the negative far outweighs the positive in life; that life is, in fact, more unhappy than happy. Uncomfortable periods – be they through boredom, dread or pain – seem to last longer than comfortable ones. When pleasures disappear we can disagreeably feel their loss, whilst there is no corresponding direct pleasure gained from the absence of pain, save for a fleeting sense of relief. To this last, I can concur – a chronic back condition for over a decade receded with a successful operation and the relief one would expect was felt tangibly for perhaps day or so – I can now reflect upon this condition, but not feel the absence of pain, in the same way as I can physically feel the absence of a loved one. Schopenhauer also identifies that the regret over happiness that has either been lost or will never be attained has no equivalent in the form of a positive sensation of a painful experience we will not have. He exclaims that health, youth and freedom, though often perceived as blessings, are in fact negations. One is only healthy in terms of not suffering from disease, one is only young in terms of not being old and one is only free in terms of not being restrained. Painlessness is not something we can feel, though pain is. Freedom from care is not something we can feel, but caring is. Freedom for fear, similarly, is not an actual feeling, whilst fear is. Even in our moments of pleasure, says Schopenhauer, we are negatively affected. Receiving what it is we desired is always a transitory pleasure, replaced soon enough with boredom and lack of satisfaction, followed by a new desire – a lack of something, the attainment of which will only repeat the cycle of dissatisfaction. If Schopenhauer is correct, then Woolf is indeed reasonable to protest that the suffering within life is too great, and its benefits too few. Great suffering may well imbue a life with great meaning, but perhaps the price is too high.
It is no surprise, given the similarity of the views, that Schopenhauer turned to Buddhism as a possible answer to the absurdity of life. Samsara – the Buddhist wheel of life – describes just this cycle of unsatisfied desire, craving, unsatisfactory attainment, new desires leading to the creation of karma which in turn leads to re-birth and the beginning again of the whole cycle. Only by breaking free of the cycle can peace, or nirvana, be achieved. Schopenhauer thought that the possibility of intellectual escape from life’s viciousness was reserved for only a few superior minds , and the rest of humanity was hopelessly entrapped. Schopenhauer might have misconstrued the idea of nirvana – he equated it with non-existence, or non-birth – but his thoughts on the subject were influential. The ultimate emancipation from wanting, nirvana -enlightenment and dispassionate disinterest - was that attained by the Buddha and sought after by his followers. Schopenhauer’s interpretation led him to believe that death was the only reasonable way out, a belief echoed by German composer Gustav Wagner, a staunch follower of Schopenhauer:
‘…I have yet found a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night: it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreams - the only ultimate redemption!’
I think it is fair to call this an inaccurate interpretation of the Buddhist ideal – as evidenced by the fact the Buddhists do not commit suicide by the thousands in an attempt to cheat samsara. Camus, with his story of Sisyphus and the never-ending futile task of pushing the bolder up the hill, rejects suicide also – indeed any attempt of escape - recommending instead defiance. ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’
Such a pessimistic view is not, however, universally accepted. Schopenhauer has been accused of caricaturing the human condition , and ignoring some more positive takes on emotions and events – for example, anticipation of something might be exciting and rewarding, rather than a painful acknowledgement of want, and the attainment of some things – my children in my own case, as an example - is not always greeted by instant dissatisfaction.
Thomas Nagel succinctly identifies Woolf’s implicit argument thus: ‘because we are going to die, all chains of justification must leave off in mid-air: one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertainment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a career - but to what final end?’ Nagel goes on to offer fairly strong arguments against such affected helplessness. To complain as Woolf does of the tiny space we occupy – and the infinity before and beyond it – is to miss the point. Woolf is not alone, of course, in his view that our allotted time here is, in itself, cause for complaint. It is a fairly intuitive malaise. Blaise Pascal wrote in a similar vein:
‘When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened, and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there. Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have been ascribed to me?’
As Nagel reposts, if we were to live forever, would our lives not be infinitely more absurd than a life which lasts only 70 years? To pose the question, as does Woolf, ‘To what end?’ is to assume that life needs an ultimate justification, as opposed to a series of justifications, some of which are self-contained in the moment. Many acts are justified, and hence have meaning, in and of themselves. Nagel gives the example of calling out to a child to stop him walking out into the path of an oncoming car. It seems obvious that the meaning of the act is self-contained – one need not search for further justification. All justifications, he argues, have to end somewhere; otherwise we would always seek further evidence of meaning outside of itself, leading to an infinite regress.
Our sense of the absurdity of life, after Nagel, comes from a basic incompatibility between our recognising that there are serious concerns about the value of life, and yet our continuing to take our own lives so seriously. ‘We can not only ask why we should believe there is a floor under us, but also why we should trust our sense at all – and at some point the frameable questions will have outlasted the answers.’ David Hume also recognised the inherent contradiction between sceptical doubt and practical life:
"Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.’
Perhaps there is, then, an innate absurdity which Woolf is right to question – we take our own lives and projects so seriously, as if in fact they do indeed have meaning, whilst at the same time recognising and accepting that there is a certain arbitrariness and gratuitousness which renders the whole project meaningless. I would suggest that this can indeed be seen to be the case – the subjective meaningfulness of life juxtaposed with the objective meaninglessness of the scheme of life in general. Nagel concludes his own arguments with the suggestion that if sub specie aeternitatis life is meaningless and nothing really matters, then this fact itself doesn’t matter either, and we need take recourse neither in heroism (á la Camus) nor in despair (á la Schopenhauer) but can pursue our lives in contented irony.
Woolf makes a huge assumption is his view that when he returns to the state of non-existence which was ‘his’ lot pre-birth he is necessarily the victim of something ‘bad’. This raises a very important question: Why is life valued over non-life, and a related though not identical question: is death necessarily bad? It seems an oft posited thesis that life is inherently valuable, and that the willing creation of life has little ethical grey area, whilst terminating life is, in most cases, thought to be ‘bad’. R.M. Hare, for example, is a proponent of this take on the issue – abortion is wrong, as it terminates a potential life, whilst euthanasia is wrong as it takes life away – even in cases where the entity itself is consciously able and willing to choose that option. It seems far from obvious to me that either is necessarily the case. There are numerous examples to illustrate this, but I do not want to enter into the debate about whether abortion or euthanasia are ethically acceptable, I merely wish to question the underlying assumption that life is intrinsically of value. In creating life – by which I mean consciously deciding to have a child and acting upon that decision – one is also creating the necessary conditions for the death of a person. Furthermore, it is impossible at conception for us to be aware of the role of the life we create. We can illustrate this with a simple thought experiment. Suppose Mary and Joseph (for wont of better names) have decided not to have a child, and that not having this child will in fact create a negative impact, some catastrophic or evil event. In this instance, they have not contributed to the forthcoming bad event – they have committed no action to precipitate events. Now assume the opposite scenario where they have the child and the act of having the child leads directly to the negative event, a bigger ‘bad’, if you will, than not having had the child. It seems beyond doubt that their actions are responsible for the bad that pursued, and that the existence of life, in this example, is worse than its non-existence.
Similar conclusions might be drawn from lives spent in incarceration or with painful diseases or emotional experiences. Many people have chosen death over life in many situations, and whilst there clearly are heroic exceptions, it seems clear that in choosing death, some people have valued non-existence over existence, given their particular circumstances. I think it is clear that we should not assume that life, of itself, has more value than non-life. Even without pessimistic thought-experiments, it is undeniable that in creating life the whole gamut of failure, disillusion, lost love, insecurity and impotence in the face of historical circumstances and natural events is unleashed upon a conscious mind. I do not think there is an open-and-shut case for life in this respect. There is, for example, significant debate over the value of longer lives – it is not even clear that more life would be desirable. There are issues about the concentration of power in the world related to longevity , but also to the very meaning of our lives. ‘…one may infer that what we basically seek as human beings is not more time to live, but meaningful experiences. These are found by decentring activities, through which the quality of life is expanded and the desire for self-preservation and life extension vanishes.’
Woolf’s other underlying assumption – and another very intuitive one – is that death is bad. However, one has to ask if this is necessarily so. Clearly, one normally hopes that one’s own will be a long way off and relatively painless, but it is not obvious that death is intrinsically bad or to be feared. As Epicurus claimed, we cannot experience our own death, since when death is there, we are not, and when we are, then clearly death cannot be. Wittgenstein wrote similarly that death was not an experience we could have. One cannot say that someone who has been dead for a year is luckier than someone who has been dead for two hundred years – one has not experienced more death than the other. Since death cannot be experienced, if it is bad, it must be in terms of what it deprives us of, that it to say, potential experiences.
Nagel identifies three distinct issues. If death is not positively bad for someone, in that they cannot experience it, than how can one say that death deprives someone of life, since there is no-one to mind the deprivation? Secondly, who is the subject of death? If I am declared dead, then I do not exist, in which case I cannot be anything, including dead. Thirdly, there is a problem with the analogy, as employed by Woolf and others, of prenatal nonexistence and of posthumous nonexistence. If it is bad to be dead after having lived, why is this not obviously the case before life? I think there are problems with each of these issues. Firstly, I do mind my being deprived of my life, though that deprivation has not yet come. I would also mind the deprivation of the life of someone close to me, whose death, in a purely selfish sense, deprives me of their role in my life. Secondly, whilst I accept that I cannot experience death, this is a purely semantic argument. I can anticipate my death, and to me, my death is purely representative of a removal of my life, in other words, loss of something I have and which I value. Whilst one cannot mourn the loss of a million pounds one doesn’t have, once given a million pounds, one can regret its being frittered away once it has been spent. As Nagel says, ‘The trouble is that life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us.’ The same argument can be made in relation to the third issue Nagel identifies. Before one was born, one was unaware of the ‘goods’ of life. Unlike death, birth cannot be envisaged as being moved back in time – ruling out premature birth, being born much earlier than we actually were would simply make us a different person. Once having lived, though, the prospect of a longer life is real. Also, the loss of that life deprives us of time which we might have had alive. This is why we view a child’s death as tragic, and an octogenarian’s life as ‘a fair innings’.
On balance, I think Woolf is reasonable to protest that death robs us of life, which is worth having. However, I think his analogy with prenatal non-existence is not valid, for the reasons cited, and I think his trying to identify an entity to blame is equally misguided. In the search for good and bad in life, we are guilty of a personifying life metaphorically, and then taking our own metaphor literally. ‘This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.’ Woolf states, quite possibly rhetorically, that if there is purpose, then it must be hidden to us; from his ‘if’ one can perhaps infer the opposite – that there is indeed no purpose. Returning to the cosmic sense of there being meaning in life, Richard Dawkins is clear that there is none. He describes our universe as exactly what one would expect, given no purpose or creator:
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
I think there are parallels to usefully draw between Schopenhauer’s Will and Dawkins’ selfish gene. In Schopenhauer’s view, everything that happens is simply a by product of the Will, a pitiless and relentless force which has as its only intentional purpose its own reproduction. For Schopenhauer, this is despicable, a thing to be abhorred. We are tricked by the Will into believing that we have freedom, purpose and meaning. The reality is, however, that we are being used as a means to an end, that end being the blind and pointless reproduction of the Will. We are simply hoodwinked by our evolved consciousness into believing that we have any kind of free will, or ends or values of our own. Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene very neatly fits into this notion of the Will. ‘We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.’ I am not convinced, however, that this is a problem. Evolution has given rise to me as one of its best mechanisms for perpetuating my genes, and, in that sense, I would agree that I am being used. However, in another sense, the consciousness which this has bestowed upon me is a wondrous gift, an opportunity to experience this thing called life. It is not because there is no mystical purpose behind the existence of life in general, or even my own in particular, that I cannot rise to the challenge of endowing my own life with meaning through my actions, aspirations and values. As Wittgenstein remarked in his early writings, ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ Richard Dawkins agrees, in one of the most telling passages he has written about the unimaginable chance we have to even be alive:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
In conclusion, I feel that Woolf has identified some very real concerns about the meaningfulness of life. He raises questions which have been, and will continue to be, struggled with since we first asked the question, ‘Why am I here?’ It is likely that there is no answer to this question. There is no cosmic meaning to life. All along, we ought to have been asking, ‘Now that I’m here, what am I going to do?’ Ultimately, our own actions, our own intentions and our own subjective self-appraisal create all the meaning we require. I think the original quotation from Woolf suggests a certain desperation and angst. It appears that he is writing off ‘life’ as potentially meaningful and that he is giving up. However, the very fact that this is a precursor to his setting about to write an autobiography suggests something quite different. It suggest to me that he is attempting to find meaning, that he believes that it is there to be found (or created in the looking for it), despite protestations to the contrary. Our actions speak louder than our words, and it is through our actions that we can each give meaning to our lives.

Bibliography
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Cottingham, John The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value Cambridge University Press (2005)
Dawkins, Richard Unweaving the Rainbow Mariner Books (2000)
Dawkins, Richard A River ran out of Eden, Weidenfield & Nicholson, London. (1995)
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, (2002)
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INTERNET SOURCES AND ARTICLES:
Cottingham, John interviewed on Philosophy Bites
http://www.philosophybites.com/past_programmes.html
http://hw.libsyn.com/p/7/1/d/71d0bd6aebd3ac65/CottinghamMix.mp3?sid=6c31e2f49dd7f258908904bc643154d8&l_sid=18828&l_eid=&l_mid=1729847
Dawkins, Richard ‘God's Utility Function’ Scientific American, November, 1995
Gems, David ‘Is More Life Always Better?’ The New Biology of Aging and the Meaning of Life
The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2003) http://www.jstor.org/stable/3528378.
21/02/2011
Levine, Michael P. ‘What Does Death Have to Do with the Meaning of Life?’ Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 457-465 Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20019241 Accessed: 21/02/2011
Metz, Thaddeus ‘The Meaning of Life’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/ 12/03/2011

Nagel, Thomas ‘Death’ Source: Noûs, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1970), pp. 73-80
Blackwell Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214297 Accessed: 04/04/2011

Nagel, Thomas ‘The Absurd’ The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 20, Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Oct. 21, 1971), pp. 716-727 Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024942 21/02/2011

Pijnenburg, Martien A. M. and Leget,Carlo ‘Who Wants to Live Forever? Three Arguments against Extending the Human Lifespan’ Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 33, No. 10 (Oct., 2007), pp. 585-587 BMJ Publishing Group http://www.jstor.org/stable/27719955 21/02/2011

VIDEO LECTURES:

Erickson, Stephen “Philosophy as a Guide to Living” TTC Lectures 2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

58%

2011-02-04T15:17:00.000+07:00

Mmm - 58% they gave me for that last essay. I thought it was better. I'm sure I could have written something less time-consuming and more run of the mill to achieve a similar grade.

Anyway, Descartes and Wittgenstein behind me for now and a new unit, 'The Meaning of Life' looms on the horizon. Which will mean more of Kant, for sure, and Hegel and Schopenhauer, I guess. Getting the reading out here is tough...

Happy Year of the Rabbit, by the way.

Can a machine think?

2011-01-20T10:36:00.000+07:00

In this essay, I shall explore the question of whether such a thing as a thinking machine is a possibility. This will involve a discussion of definitions, both of ‘machine’ and of ‘thought’.

One cannot begin such a discussion without an account of Cartesian dualism, the intuitively sensible view which separates mind and body, thought and physical process. Descartes proposed that human beings were unique in that they had a spiritual soul, or mind, which was non-extended and without motion, existing in some ‘other’ realm. The body was an advanced mechanism, which was somehow moved by the soul. This thinking survived and evolved as vitalism.

‘Vitalism holds that life results not from biochemical reactions but from a vital force unique to living things. Whereas modern science sees life as resulting from the complex interactions of mechanistic parts forming an organic whole, vitalism sees life as suffused with a substance not found in non-living nature,’

such as ‘The Force’ of the Star Wars concept.This conceptualisation has persisted in many forms to the present day. Descartes further suggested that animals, lacking the divine soul, were machines. He would argue against their ability to ‘think’ in the way that humans do. Whilst there is now a significant body of evidence supporting thought in higher mammals, another of Descartes suggestions pertains and persists. Descartes insisted that could a machine be created to look indistinguishable from a human, it could not pass itself off as human for two important reasons. First, a machine could never master language in a realistic and meaningful way and secondly it could never act appropriately in all possible contingencies. In other words, a machine would give itself away through poor choice of language or inappropriate actions.

Descartes’ comments do seem to be a direct foreshadowing of the seminal work of Turing in 1950. Turing suggested that, whilst it was meaningless to ask whether machines can think, it can be profitable to consider whether a machine can act in such as way as to convince a human interlocutor that it was actually human. The Turing Test was devised expressly to test such a proposition. Turing himself believed strongly that it was only a matter of time before machines – specifically digital computers – could pass his test. Turing describes an imitation game where there is an interrogator, a person and a machine. The interrogator is separated from the other person and the machine. Whilst the interrogator knows that there is both a machine and a person, she does not know which is which. A machine, therefore, is said to have passed the Turing Test if it is able to respond appropriately to questions posed by the interrogator in such a way as to convince the interrogator that it is in fact the person. Specifically, Turing stipulated that for a machine to be judged to have passed the test, an average interrogator should have more than a 70% chance of making the correct identification after just five minutes of questioning.

Turing rather optimistically believed that machine intelligence would become acceptable in short order: “I believe that at the end of the century the use of the words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted .” In fact, the Loebner Prize Competition, specifically set up for the task of running the Turing Test on hopeful machines, has become something of an AI embarrassment – in terms of how far we are from creating such thinking machines. Churchland (1995), as one of the observers of the test in 1993, admitted, ‘The truth is, none of the entrants was worth a damn, at least in terms of Artificial Intelligence.’ However, the fact that we are so far from the goal does not of itself negate Turing’s Test as being a good one. Churchland, in fact, does argue that the test is not a good one, and suggests that the Loebner Prize Competition only encourages programmers to fake intelligence in a very narrow range in order to ‘run off with the …prize’ .
Many objections have been raised to the validity of the Turing Test. One such is that the test is in some way chauvinistic; there is an inherent assumption that a thinking machine must in some way be like us. As Matt Carter (2007) points out, ‘The idea that we might one day be able to construct some artefact which has a mind in the same sense that we have minds is not a new one. It has featured in entertaining and frightening fictions since Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein’s monster.’ This theme is well-explored in the science fiction genre relating to Artificial Intelligence; be it Commander Data in the Star Trek series or Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, time and again artificially created beings fail to accord their behaviour and language with the intricate and largely unwritten expectations of human behaviour. But herein lies a distinction crucial to our discussion. Does a thinking being need to be human-like? In our drive to create intelligence, are we guilty of an ‘after-our-own-image’ pre-conception of what a thinking thing must ‘look’ like, in terms of its functioning? Whilst these are good questions, they do not adversely affect the Turing Test – Turing merely asserted that a machine passing the test could be described as having intelligence, not that only such machines could be thus described.

Other objections to Turing have rested on increasingly ‘clever’ programming which, in a five minute period, could indeed dupe the man in the street. These objections miss the point that the Turing Test is specifically a situation in which the interrogator knows that one of her two subjects is a machine and is still unable to discover the true identity of the participants. Turing himself identified a variety of possible objections to his own test. He recognised that substance dualists would have a hard time accepting that a ‘body’ designed by humans could possibly be imbued with the ‘soul’ or ‘thinking thing’ which exists non-extended in another realm to the physical; they would necessarily contest that a machine passing the test was indeed ‘thinking’ in the way that humans do. However, the dualist camp has many difficulties to overcome, not least the question of why God couldn’t put consciousness into a machine if He saw fit. Turing also identified what Oppy terms ‘the head-in-the-sand’ objection: the implications of thinking machines – that we become inferior, that we have real concerns about being usurped or dominated – are so worrying that we ought not to pursue the goal. The objections, however, are not valid arguments against the possibility of thinking machines, simply an expression of fear of the result.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a label loosely applied to a range of possible entities. It would be helpful here to explore a definition. Perhaps the most persistent definitions have been suggested by Professor John Searle, of the University of California. He suggests that two interpretations of AI exist. Firstly, he identifies what he calls Strong AI. This is achieved when a machine achieves or supersedes human intellectual ability. Specifically, Searle proposes this definition to deal with the belief that computer programming – software – can cause a machine to become conscious, or indeed be conscious in its own right. Searle suggests that proponents of Strong AI believe that ‘by designing the right programmes with the right inputs and outputs, they are literally creating minds’. He specifically refers his arguments to the computer, having given a wider definition to the term ‘machine’. Searle argues that if by ‘machine’ we mean a physical system capable of performing certain functions – which surely we do – then humans are a very special kind of biological machine, and given that humans can think, machines can think, QED. In Strong AI, Searle is identifying the belief that a computer – this very specific type of machine – can not only act intelligently, but can have actual states of mind. ‘According to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states.’ We are all digital computers. This is more than analogy. Our brains are digital computers and our minds are computer programmes – the software to the hardware of our brain. This is known as Strong AI.

Weak AI is more of a specific intelligence, not at all encompassing the range of human cognisant abilities. Weak AI is a system designed to do a narrowly defined task exceedingly well. It is a system which simulates a conscious mind in a specific respect. This presents us with the issue of defining what it is we mean by ‘intelligence’ or ‘thinking’, and whether we mean the same thing by both terms.
Does a thinking thing have to be intelligent or vice versa? When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many were heralding an AI success. Others, determining that Deep Blue was ‘merely’ making computational choices, without any conscious awareness that it was doing so, meant that it wasn’t truly thinking or truly intelligent. Journalist Robert Wright commented on the match that whilst Kasparov felt down after losing the first game, it was improbable that Deep Blue could feel blue. He also reported the views of those against the whole notion of computers vs. humans in chess by citing the fact that fork-lift trucks were never invited to weight-lifting competitions: perhaps not a perfect analogy. As Drew McDermott put it, ‘Deep Blue is unintelligent because it is so narrow. It can win a chess game, but it can't recognize, much less pick up, a chess piece. It can't even carry on a conversation about the game it just won. Since the essence of intelligence would seem to be breadth, or the ability to react creatively to a wide variety of situations, it's hard to credit Deep Blue with much intelligence.’ Whilst this sounds pretty damning for the AI camp, McDermott however concludes, ‘Saying Deep Blue doesn't really think about chess is like saying an airplane doesn't really fly because it doesn't flap its wings.’ Computers such as Deep Blue can indeed help us to understand some of the processes of thought and this version - Weak AI - is what Turing referred to when he suggested in 1950 that it would soon be unremarkable to suggest that machine could think.

Searle tracks changes in philosophical thought about the mind. He traces the development from Descartes’ substance dualism, to the more palatable property dualism still defended today. He progresses through monism’s idealism, behavourism and physicalism, and showing where such arguments fail to account for causal relationships in the mind and paving the way for today’s more accepted viewpoint, that of functionalism. It is the functionalist viewpoint – that what makes something a desire or a thought or a feeling depends purely on its function, not at all on its internal makeup or engineering - which led to the computational model of the mind. Searle’s purpose in providing these definitions was to focus research on a realistic area, whilst being able to relatively easily dismiss the unrealistic, as he saw it, proposal of Strong AI. However, his refutation of Strong AI proved to be anything but easy. Searle proposed a basic thought experiment in order to debunk the idea – The Chinese Room.

The analogy is deceptively simple. A man inside a closed room receives input in the form of Chinese symbols. He has no knowledge of what the symbols mean, but does have a comprehensive set of instructions about how to select further Chinese symbols to output in response. Searle suggests that the instructions could be so clear and comprehensive that the ‘room’ could output appropriate responses to questions in Chinese. However, he argues pointedly, there is no point at which the man in the room understands Chinese. He neither understands the questions being put – indeed not even that they are questions – nor does he understand the answers he is providing; there is no understanding of Chinese. Searle here has provided an example of a machine that can pass the Turing Test. It could fool Chinese speakers, even if they knew one of two interlocutors was a machine. The output from the Chinese Room would be identical to that of a genuine, conscious Chinese speaker. However, there is nothing intelligently conscious about the Chinese Room, in terms of understanding Chinese. Searle’s thought experiment, then, asserts that the Turing Test is, in fact, no test at all for intelligence.

Searle’s argument goes further than this though. He sought to show that true AI is not possible, that representations and simulations of intelligence would always be shadowy ‘Platonic Cave’ reflections of the real thing. His arguments are intended to show ‘that while suitable programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principal.’ More specifically, Searle is saying that formal computational systems, systems using the manipulations of symbols as a means of generating ‘intelligent’ output, can never think. This is a very strong claim, given that we don’t know how our own thinking comes about. Whilst it has intuitive appeal, there are many who have been unconvinced. I am inclined to accept Searle’s argument that computational shuffling of symbols to given rules cannot create a mind, that something else, quite possibly biological or emotional in form, is required. For now, there are many replies to the Chinese Room argument and some popular antecedents of the original thought experiment too. Some of these are worth considering in more detail as we evaluate what the implications are for allowing that machines can think.
The systems reply is one of the most basic replies to the Chinese Room. Whilst it may be true that the Searle in the room – the homunculus – has no understanding of Chinese, the room itself, as a whole system, does have understanding. This objection misses the point. As Searle was quick to point out, he could memorise the complex symbol-shuffling instruction manual, leave the room and operate from the middle of a field and still not understand Chinese, whilst performing equally well. He would still be taking the input, meaningless to him, running it through a complex system of programmed responses to squiggles and squaggles , and producing an output which although meaningful by virtue of the outside world, would still be meaningless to him. Searle further suggests that the systems reply entails absurd consequences, such as identifying sub-systems of ‘mind’ in things like stomachs, thermostats and telephones: ‘If we are to conclude that there must be cognition in me on the grounds that I have a certain sort of input and output and a program in between, then it looks like all sorts of noncognitive subsystems are going to turn out to be cognitive.’ What Searle is saying in response to the systems reply is quite simply that as long as the software is thought of in terms of manipulating symbols, no amount of playing with definitions will change that fact that symbols are being manipulated according to a set of instructions which do not in any way lead to actual understanding of what those symbols may mean. This in turn supports the position that computers cannot think. This position seems to me to be a tenable one.

Another related response to the Chinese room argument is the Virtual Mind reply. This suggests that whilst understanding might not be attributable directly to the computer, or to the system, it is possible that a virtual mind is created, separate to the original computer or system, which does understand Chinese. As Cole states, ‘The claim at issue should be “the computer creates a mind that understands Chinese”. A familiar model is characters in computer or video games. These characters have various abilities and personalities, and the characters are not identical with the hardware or program that creates them.’ Objections to the systems reply are valid here also. Penrose (2002) drew the analogy further through his consideration of The Chinese Gym variation – a room the size of India with Indians, suitably enough, doing the processing part of the equation. Penrose concluded that it was highly implausible that such a system could generate an independently existing mind capable of understanding in its own right.
Searle also makes short shrift of the Robot reply, in which the Chinese Room apparatus is put into a robot which has sensory input from cameras, microphones and tactile sensors. In such a case, goes the reply, the ‘room’ would learn through a causal connection between things it receives and what they represent. Searle simply tweaks the Chinese Room, having the input some from such devices instead of somebody physically putting pieces of paper into the room. He even adds an elaborate system of motion dampeners so that the man in the room is unaware that he is negotiating physical space. The notion remains unchanged – the man in the room is manipulating meaningless (to him) symbols according to instructions. He doesn’t understand what he is doing, in terms of attaching semantics to the input or output. The extra input he received in terms of ocular or auditory information would be equally meaningless and there would be nothing to attach meaning to – just extra work for the processor. Searle insists that ‘by instantiating the program I have no intentional states of the relevant type. All I do is follow formal instructions about manipulating formal symbols.’ There is no understanding created, neither for the homunculus within nor for the robot system.

The Brain Simulator reply to Searle’s thought experiment suggests that a computer which simulates every last firing of neurons and every last synapse of a real Chinese speaker’s brain would have to understand Chinese in the same way that the Chinese speaker does. Not so, claims Searle. His argument boils down to the fact that a simulation is just that, an image of the real thing. In the same way as a computer simulation of digestion cannot be mistaken for actual digestion, nor should a computer simulation of understanding Chinese – or thinking in general – be mistaken for actual understanding of Chinese, or actual thinking. Searle remains convinced that the phenomena of human thought – of mental states and consciousness - is directly related to the chemical and biological make-up of actual human brains. No amount of simulating will produce anything other than a simulation.
Other detractors have resorted to the Other Minds reply – an extrapolation of the old chestnut of the other minds problem. In much the same way that I cannot be sure that you are conscious in the same way that I am, nor could I be sure that a computer is, irrespective of its behaviours. However, I judge from your behaviour that it is highly probable that your mind functions largely as mine does; you do think and understand. Turing made this assumption thirty years before Searle came up with the Chinese Room. ‘Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.’ It is therefore possible to make the same case for the observable behaviour of a computer. If a computer acts as though it thinks, I should accord it that role. The Turing Test effectively does this, by extending the protocol to computers exhibiting thinking-like behaviour. Searle’s response to this is that we know the workings of a computer to be syntactical and not semantical. We know the computer is not thinking, because we know it is doing exactly what we told it to do – to manipulate symbols according to a set of instructions. He also objects in more general terms to this argument from analogy, suggesting that actually the argument in the case of other minds is not from pure analogy, but from recognising similar causal relationships on similar systems. Experience A on a body of type B will have a similar effect, C. Given this view, an argument from analogy falls down with reference to computers displaying ‘thinking-like’ behaviour, since the body, B, is of an entirely different nature – the causal-consequential relationship cannot be compared.

Many commentators upon the Chinese Room have declared that the argument is based on an intuition that the man in the room – and so a computer – cannot possibly understand; the Intuition reply. Ned Block (1980) suggested as much directly in his original response to the Chinese Room, that it depended upon an intuitive feeling that machines do not think. Pinker (1997) goes so far as to say, “You can almost hear {Searle} saying ‘Aw, c’mon! You mean that the guy understands Chinese?!!! Geddadahere! He doesn’t understand a word!!’” He makes the convincing point that Searle has so slowed down the thought process – a man in a room with paper instructions would take millions of years to process convincing replies to questions in Chinese – that he has falsely concluded that understanding is not present. If, continues Pinker, the process were speeded up to real time, we would not be so quick to dismiss the behavioural evidence before us. Pinker also suggests that the whole Chinese Room debate is merely a discussion about how we use the word ‘understand’ – perhaps reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s assertion that all of philosophy was language. He suggests using another, less-loaded word to escape the problem. In any event, argues Pinker (1988), the Turing Test is not a sufficient test for a thinking machine, and he suggests a harsher test for intelligence: ‘Could a mechanical device ever duplicate human intelligence, the ultimate test being whether it could cause a real human to fall in love with it?’ referring to an old episode of The Twilight Zone.

Some opponents to Searle’s case take the view that newer advances in computer sciences render his objections invalid. The example of parallel computing and neural networks, termed ‘connectionism’ is one of these. Arguing that modelling computers on the brain and arranging layers of neuron-like processing units which interact with one another, connectionism promises a closer analogy to the human brain than traditional von Neumann computers. Connectionism has moved a long way since original experiments were buried by the ‘exclusive or’ and neural nets now produce fascinating results. In terms of facial recognition, for example, Garrison W. Cottrell has been able to programme such a machine to be 100% accurate in recognising something as a face and 81% accurate in gender recognition on new samples which the net had not been trained on. This would certainly suggest that the machine has ‘learnt’. But despite optimism from some quarters and a conviction that Searle’s Chinese Room doesn’t impinge on the success of such machines , Searle dismisses the distinction – ‘The parallel ‘brain-like’ character of the processing…is irrelevant to the purely computational aspects of the process.’ Whilst these machines appear to learn – even to the extent of having ‘teacher computers’ to regulate connections strengths between layers – that fact that anything done on them can also be done, albeit more slowly, on a series machine (or a universal Turing machine) shows that there is no advance here other than that of speed. This would seem to me to be a very strong case – if it is true that speed alone is the advantage of such a system, it would be hard to argue that the system therefore can understand, simply by virtue of that quality.

Other responses – not specific to Searle’s arguments, but attempts to advance strong AI - include the CYC programme – an attempt to load a massive database with all the accumulated ‘common sense’ of humanity, in an effort to overcome the classic ‘frame problem’ in which an intelligent agent can sift relevant from non-relevant information. It is a controversial project, with many feeling that no matter how large the database, this wealth of common sense ‘knowledge’ is not what consciousness stems from. The advent of defeasible reasoning – the ability to override default assumptions in the light of new experiences or extra information - also suggests, to some, that progress is being made towards actual thought and learning.

It is important here to backtrack. My original question was whether machines could think. Searle has never argued that they cannot. His arguments are a refutation of strong AI – that software programmes in and of themselves could create a mind. His argument is basically as follows. He establishes three axioms: i) computers are syntactic formal systems (they manipulate abstract symbols devoid of any intention or meaning), ii) human minds have semantic content (meaning and intentionality) and iii) syntax alone cannot produce semantics. His conclusion is that ‘programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.’ The whole Chinese Room debate was sparked by an attempt to illustrate the third axiom of this argument.
For us to be able to assess whether a machine can think – can have conscious experiences – we need to define what that is – and the problem here is that there is no easy answer to this issue. In trying to establish if machines – in theory at least – can be conscious, we find that we actually don’t know a great deal about what it is it is to be conscious. Stuart Sutherland writes, "Consciousness: the having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means... Nothing worth reading has been written about it." Searle gives a more pragmatic definition - "'Consciousness' refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become 'unconscious'." – and Dennet concurs, "The improvements we install in our brain when we learn our languages permit us to review, recall, rehearse, redesign our own activities, turning our brains into echo chambers of sorts, in which otherwise evanescent processes can hang around and become objects in their own right. Those that persist the longest, acquiring influence as they persist, we call our conscious thoughts."

If we are to ascertain whether man-made mechanisms can attain conscious thought, we need first to be sure of what it is we are looking for. Searle makes the strong case that it is not computational symbol manipulation. Neuroscientists now work with a wide definition of consciousness, which basically incorporates all of our “‘experience’ – of Life, subjectively understood. Experiences, it is widely held, have a special qualitative character” , thus giving rise to the notion of qualia. A quale is held to be the qualitative character of experience. Damasio (2000) describes qualia as ‘simple sensory qualities to be found in the blueness of the sky or the tone of a cello’ . It is widely thought that the ability to define qualia, to explain them as phenomenal qualities, is to define consciousness.
Damasio puts forth some ideas about how the brain operates, and how, in particular, emotion plays an essential role in aiding and complementing our ability to understand and to function the real world. He cites examples of patients with impaired emotional areas of the brain and their corresponding dysfunction as rational thinking beings. He outlines the interactive processes of the biological and chemical systems of the human body, involving far more than ‘just’ the brain, which seems to suggest that modelling the brain alone could not hope to reproduce consciousness. This has huge implications for the world of artificial intelligence. If consciousness and reactive thought are dependant to some extent upon emotional feedback, then the computational theory of mind is in serious trouble, and the notion of building minds through software advances seems more doubtful than ever. Dreyfus was a forerunner to such thoughts and presented a related argument, that the body was necessary for the global interaction necessary to create understanding. It seems to me that there are two, possibly distinct, points here: (i) the emotions are involved, (ii) more than just the brain is involved.

Aleksander (2007) describes a machine designed by Stan Franklin of Memphis University – the Intelligent Distribution Agent, or IDA. The purpose of the machine was to organise billeting for US seamen via e-mail. ‘The key feature is that the seaman using the system should not feel that there has been a change from human billeters to a machine in terms of the sensitivity and concern with which their case is handled.’ The machine receives a sailor’s preferences, current postings and skill set and matches this information to available billets before making a suggestion. The analogy here to the Turing Test is unmistakable, but Aleksander suggests that such a connection would be too superficial. Franklin’s machine, he says, has not passed the Turing Test since it has no phenomenological consciousness as such. Whilst it is not clear to me that such phenomenological conscious was suggested by Turing, Aleksander says that it merely has ‘a functional stance that is sufficiently effective to leave users satisfied that they are interacting with a system that is ‘conscious’ of their needs.’ This example though, introduces a very significant issue – the more recent versions of IDA include emotional input – ‘guilt’ for not meeting the needs of the sailor. The process of inputs interacting with various forms of computational memory, including the marriage of both internal and external stimuli suggests what Franklin terms a ‘consciousness area’ which directs the process until ‘the “thought” is sufficiently well formed to activate an action-selection mechanism that communicates with the sailor and initiates a new set of internal and external inputs for further consideration.’ Franklin would certainly seem to be suggesting that his IDA can think, and it would seem the programmed ‘guilt’, as a rudimentary nodding to human emotion, might be a very important factor in the illusion of a concerned and compassionate thinking machine.

It seems to me that to really get into the notion of a thinking machine, we need to get into the notion of how our own thinking is possible. Why is there anything, rather than nothing, in terms of our consciousness? Dennet (2007) suggests that this is the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness, explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences – as opposed to the ‘Easy’ problems, which involve simply identifying the mechanisms by which we perform various functions, such as smelling a flower or recognising an old friend; it can, he says, be dismissed. Dennet offers a new take on the Simulated Brain discussion, proposing a situation where Steven Pinker’s brain is being destroyed by a progressive brain disease. Following huge successes in the Easy Problems of consciousness, scientists are able to replace damaged sections, neuron by neuron, in such a way as neither he nor observers can tell any difference. Ultimately his entire brain is replaced. Steve thinks he is alive and well and continues to write and joke and feel pain. Dennet suggests that the problem is that there can be no test to dismiss or prove that Steve is experiencing reality consciously – we are back with the other minds problem. ‘There could not be an objective test that distinguished a clever robot from a really conscious person.’ Dennet thinks we should just move on and accept this.

Can a machine think? Trivially, yes. We are machines – biological and chemical machines as opposed to silicon – but machines none the less. Evidently, we can think. Ironically, we may end up with a machine that can do what we do, that has a level of intelligence equal to our own, but still have no idea how it achieves this. It will not be clear, from opening up a neural network and looking at the strings of syntactical numbers and symbols therein, just how such semantic awareness was generated. Grim clearly states, ‘At the neuron level, your brain works in terms of syntactic-like impulses, not semantic-like meanings. We don’t know how semantics is produced from syntax – but we know that it is.’ To the question of whether we can build an artificial machine that thinks as we do, Searle is content to reply that there is no logical reason in principal as to why not, but for now it is still within the realms of science fiction. Brains raise consciousness by operating causally, and any machine that could produce consciousness or intentionality would have to do so by duplicating the presently inexplicable causal powers of the brain. If the neuron-by-neuron replication of a human brain – with emotional feedback and sensory apparatus – does one day produce a machine that can think, perhaps we’ll find that we were asking the wrong question. Perhaps the question is, “How come we think?’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Searle, J. ‘Minds Brains and Programs’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417-57 1980 http://pami.uwaterloo.ca/tizhoosh/docs/Searle.pdf
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460. http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html accessed 22nd December 2010
Wright, Robert, ‘Can machines think?’ Time Online Monday 25th march 1996 http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,984304,00.html accessed 10 October 2010

Other

Churchland, Paul and Patricia Smith, ‘Could a machine think?’ Scientific American 1990 p 32 – 37
Dennet, Daniel ‘The Brain: A Clever Robot’ Time Magazine January 18th 2007
Grim, Patrick SUNY Lecture 15 Artificial intelligence and Lecture 17 Attacks on AI TTC Video 2008
Hacker ‘Is there anything it is like to be a bat?’ Philosophy 77 (300):157-174. 2002
Searle, John, ‘The Philosophy of Mind’ Lecture Series The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1996
Searle, John, ‘Is the brain’s mind a computer programme?’ Scientific American 1990 p26-31

Am I a machine?

2010-11-07T13:55:00.002+07:00

Am I a machine?
In true philosophical fashion, I shall answer ‘yes’ with a qualified ‘no’. Should it bother me that I am? Probably not.
Such a simple question belies a complex and inter-related web of philosophical, ethical, neurological and linguistic concerns, to mention but a few. One needs to consider the whole mind-body debate, dualism and monism, Artificial Intelligence, various theories of mind, other minds and what it means to be conscious, to be human and what it is to be alive. In this short essay, however, I shall be focussing on Descartes’ notion of dualism and subsequent refutations, with reference principally to Ryle and Wittgenstein. I shall look at some mind-body theories, as attempts to solve the mind-body problem, which is perhaps best and most simply stated as the problem of defining or describing the relationship between the body and the mind, or perhaps more accurately and possibly more controversially between the brain and the mind.
The notion of biological life as mechanical harks back to Descartes and his rigid mind-body dualism. Animals, famously and rather callously, some might add, he relegated to the ranks of machines, having no feelings. His analogies with clockwork and simplistic machinery of his time were intuitively comforting, in terms of explaining physical operations (though ran counter to that intuition when dismissing animals’ ability to feel pain). Descartes, as a product of his time, was clear that the human being consisted of two separate but related parts – a mechanically functioning body, and a soul. ‘I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth’ he declares.
Descartes sought to build a firm foundation of knowledge which could resist the challenges of the skeptics. In doing so, he arrived at the conclusion that he existed as ‘a thinking thing’. His famous cogito is essentially this: ‘I am then, in a strict sense, only a thing that thinks, that is I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason…’ Descartes argued that losing parts of his body did not entail losing ‘self’ and that it followed from this that the self was not in the body per se, but bound with the body. The conceivability argument which Descartes uses to assert dualism suggests that as he is able to conceive of himself without a body, then the body is not essential to ‘who he is’. And hence the body is a tool, a thing which he uses. Whilst the body had material properties, such as extension and motion, and was subject to the laws of physics, the mind – or soul – was a non-material thing, lacking extension and motion, and not subject to the laws of physics, thus existing independently of body. This mechanistic view of the body suggests also that the body could exist independently of mind. Steven Wagner refers to this as the separability argument. The body is variously described as a machine or an automaton and its various functions likened to mechanical devices of the day, such as clocks and fountains. He goes so far as to posit a machine built and put together along the schema of a human body which, though lacking a soul, or a will to drive it, could still move mechanically. ‘I made special efforts to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that lacks reason, we should have no means of knowing that they do not possess entirely the same nature as these animals.’ Interestingly, Descartes thought that an automaton in the form of a human could be easily detected since it could never appropriately master language nor act rationally in all contingencies.
Descartes also cites another reason for believing mind and body to be separate, commonly known as the divisibility argument.
‘…there is a great difference between the mind and the body, in so much as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider my mind, or myself insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete.’
Descartes recognized a close connection between body and mind, but he denied that this was the mind as the programmer entirely separate to the body as the machine. In his own terminology, Descartes claimed, ‘…I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but very closely joined, and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.’ Copleston (1963) suggests that Descartes faces a dilemma in wanting to affirm body and soul as separate entities, because ‘he does not want to accept the conclusion which appears to follow, namely, that the soul is simply lodged in a body which it uses as a kind of extrinsic vehicle or instrument.’ Descartes also never really put forward an adequate explanation for the causal relationship which would have to operate between mind and body. The immediate problem here is the interaction between a material thing – the body – and a ghostly one with no extension and no interaction with normal physical laws – the mind. In attempting to explain this, Descartes suggested a seat of interaction in the pineal gland, which he understood, wrongly from a modern biological viewpoint, to be specific to humans only, and hence an ideal candidate for the intervention of the soul.
Thus dualism would indeed suggest that the body is a machine. However, that I am a machine, as opposed to my body being a machine, is quite another argument. Descartes never suggested that human beings were machines. He would have been happy with the notion that our bodies are machines , but the entire drive of his thinking was that the divine soul separated us from other animals, that our reason or soul was unique to us and ensured that we were not purely mechanical. There was a twofold influence at work – the tradition of religious doctrine, an influence paramount to Descartes, and the way our very language is shaped. And it is to this latter, the role of language, that many critics of Descartes in particular, and dualism in general, have since addressed themselves.
Whilst I may baulk at the idea that I am a machine, I am likely to accept that my body is, even if I do not accept the dualist notion of a separate and everlasting soul. The body is the ultimate tool. Accepting ‘my body is a machine’, however, implies fairly strongly that my body is not all that I am, that there is something else, not-my-body, which one would not accept was a machine. What is it, after all, that does the accepting? This takes us back to Descartes and dualism. In fact the very notion ‘my body’, setting apart the body as a thing which is a possession of mine, poses the question, ‘Where or what am I, if not my body?’ Our very language not only exacerbates the situation, but may be seen to be a root cause.
This was certainly the argument put forward by Gilbert Ryle in his book, ‘The Concept of Mind’. An attack on dualist thought, Ryle posited that the whole notion of a separate entity which could be construed of as mind, or soul, was a simple category mistake. Language was at fault. Having outlined the official theory of the Cartesian dualism, Ryle remarks ‘I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the ghost in the machine’. Ryle sets out to dismiss the idea that there is a ‘ghost’ dwelling in the human body, somehow operating the machinery, as entirely unnecessary, following Ockham, but also as patently false. ‘Nothing is known of how it [the mind] governs the bodily engine,’ he states. He gives his classic example of a category mistake – the visitor to a University, having been shown the individual buildings of which it is composed, asks where the actual university is, failing to grasp that it is the organisation of the separate buildings which makes up the concept of University. Ryle goes on to make his telling point, referring to this and other examples he has given, saying that ‘Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.’ Descartes, he argues, was simply wrong in thinking that there were separate entities of body and mind. There was no separate entity of mind for which to search.
Ryle perhaps sympathised with Descartes – recognising that he was a product of his time, so influenced by the scientific claims of his times that whilst he had to endorse the claims of mechanics vis-a-vis the body, he could not accept what necessarily followed, ‘namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical’ . Ryle would contest that the body was a machine, seeing the entity as a whole and that minds, specifically are ‘not bits of clockwork, they are bits of non-clockwork’. Further, in a comment upon biological thought, he wrote:
“The Newtonian system is no longer the sole paradigm of natural science. Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.”
For Ryle, the category-mistake made by Descartes was that there were both bodies and minds, both physical processes and mental processes. Mechanical processes caused bodily movement and mental processes caused bodily movement. Ryle suggests that the conjoining or disjoining of these two processes, which are very different, is linguistically absurd. ‘The belief that there is a polar opposition between mind and matter is the belief that they are terms of the same logical type,’ argues Ryle, likening the illegitimate comparison to the comparison between ‘she came home in a flood of tears’ and ‘she came home in a sedan chair’, clearly a case of identical language meaning very different things. A more recent description from Baggini (2010) explains,
‘...the mistake made by Descartes, and countless others after him, was to think of mind as if it were a kind of object, rather like a brain, table or flower....Mind is not an object at all. Rather, it is a set of capacities and dispositions, all of which can be explained without any reference to ghostly substances’.
If, as Descartes suggests, the mind is non-material and not subject to the laws of physics, then it is essentially unknowable – at least my mind is to someone else, and vice versa. Hence mind can strictly only mean ‘what it is like to be me’, since it cannot be known about anyone else. Ryle suggests that looking for such a substance as separate from the body and observable behaviour is simply an error. He contests Descartes’ notion that the mental is private and unknowable – even the most private emotion is, he posits, observable and hence public. If he is right, and the mind can be explained in causal, mechanical terms, then I am, perhaps, a machine. Clearly, this is dependent upon a definition of machine devoid of Ryle’s negative interpretations of the mechanical – a much wider conceptual model including a multitude of mechanical/biological and chemical interactive processes.
Taking up this theme, Ludwig Wittgenstein also objected strongly to the Cartesian notion of duality. He offered, as part of his private language argument, the analogy of a beetle in a box. If everybody had a beetle in a box, but each person could only ever look inside her own box, the word beetle, he suggested, would only ever mean ‘what is in everyone’s box’. There would be no way of checking to see if my box contained something identical to yours, but we could assume that there was something at least similar in everyone else’s box. ‘But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? If so, it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.’ The analogy is clear – ‘mind’ means simply ‘what is in your head’. (Though Wittgenstein was referring to mental states, in particular his example of ‘fear’, the argument is still valid, I think.) For Wittgenstein, given that language is a public function, ‘mind’ (and indeed language as a whole) simply cannot refer to something intrinsically private and unknowable, hence not to Descartes’ non-extended ‘ghostly’ substance.
Wittgenstein asserts that ‘there is no such thing as the soul – the subject etc…’ and that ‘there is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas" His argument is that our language creates the false impression that “I" refers to ‘something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body….In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, 'Cogito, ergo sum.'’ Wittgenstein argues in his Private Language Argument in Philosophical Investigations (1953) that there have to be public third-person criteria for ascribing sensations. Mental concepts cannot mean anything by reference to “I”, a private labelling of one's own feelings. If this were the case, there would be no criterion for the correctness of a ascribing a state: there would be no way of knowing if a particular labeling of an instance of a feeling were true or false. It follows, for Wittgenstein, that there are no logically private psychological ascriptions, and so mental terms cannot be purely personal. This can be interpreted as a direct attack on the soul.
Along with Ryle, Wittgenstein seemed to think that humans were not comparable to machines and did not need a hidden concept to explain their supra-mechanical capacities. It is perhaps this notion of machine as clockwork, as pre-programmed and determined, which leads to a natural aversion to likening ourselves to machines. Perhaps this is then purely a definitions and perceptions issue, and that our very concept of ‘machine’ needs expanding to include the wondrously complex and intriguing mechanisms of neural circuitry and the potentially undiscoverable systems of consciousness.
This may be seen to lead to the more mechanistic explanation of body, brain and consciousness which is currently favoured. I am indeed a machine, though infinitely more sophisticated than Descartes’ clockwork analogies. Searle (1986) says that the brain is a machine and that the brain can think, by logical extraction, he posits that machines can think. And if the brain is the ‘thinking thing’ then it is the mind. In total, therefore, body and mind make the mechanistic system that is ‘me’. Body, then, includes mind. As Friedrich Nietzsche states in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
"Body am I, and soul"- so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: "Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body… Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage - it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body."
The Cartesian Theatre, that comic book image of the little man in our heads watching the images we see on a screen, was a derisive term coined by Daniel Dennet to describe what is left over once dualism has been debunked . The lingering intuitive appeal of Cartesian thinking has plagued philosophical thought ever since however, as Dennet acknowledges: "Scientists and philosophers may have achieved a consensus of sorts in favor of materialism, [but] getting rid of the old dualistic visions is harder than contemporary materialists have thought.”
Dennet paints a picture of a mechanical human being – no shame, he says, in being a machine, far from it. In a review of Damasio’s ‘Descartes’ Error’, Dennet writes:
“[Damasio] is providing a model of the mechanisms - and barring miracles, there have to be mechanisms - that subserve and implement those precious human activities and propensities. There is still as much room as ever (perhaps more, now that the mists have parted a little) for praise and blame, for desert and self-criticism and wonder. These gifts never could be made to reside in some precious pearl of Cartesian mind-stuff, so the sooner we find out how our bodies make room for them, the better.”
Bibliography
Books
Baggini and Fosl The Philosopher’s Toolkit Wiley-Blackwell 2nd edition 2010
Cottingham, J. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol I CUP 1985
Cottingham, J. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol II CUP 1984
Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
Descartes, René Meditations on First Philosophy, revised, edited, and translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Descartes, René The World and Other Writings (1633), trans. and ed. Stephen Gaukroger (1998), Cambridge University Press 2004 edition
Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949.
Searle, John Minds, Brains and Science Harvard University Press, 1986
Sluga, Hans and Stern, David The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein CUP 1996
Stich, Stephen and Warfield, Ted (Ed) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind 2003 Blackwell
Leiber, Justin Can animals and machines be persons? A Dialogue Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; New Ed edition (1 Jan 1985)
Wittgenstien Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974
Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (1953) Hacker and Schulte (ed) revised 4th Edition Wiley-Blackwell 2009
Articles and Internet Sources
Cottingham John (1978). ‘A Brute to the Brutes?’: Descartes' Treatment of Animals. Philosophy, 53, pp 551-559 doi:10.1017/S0031819100026371
Dennet, Daniel C. ‘Review of ANTONIO R. DAMASIO, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994 in the Times Literary Supplement, August 25, 1995, pp. 3-4.
Elton, Matthew ‘Persons, Animals, and Machines’ Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 23, No. 4, Special Issue: Humans, Animals, and Machines (Autumn, 1998), pp. 384-398 Sage Publications Inc.
Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra translation Thomas Common Section 4, Despisers of the Body http://philosophy.eserver.org/nietzsche-zarathustra.txt Accessed 20 September 2010
Tanney, Julia ‘Gilbert Ryle’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle Revised November 2009 Accessed February 2010

Wagner, S.J. ‘Descartes’ Arguments for Mind-Body Distinctness’ in Philosophy and Phemomenological Research, Vol. 43, No. 4 (June 1983) PP499-517 (Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107644 13.02.10)

Sobottka, Stanley ‘A Course in Consciousness’ http://faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness 8 Octob

Athiest

2010-11-06T16:51:00.000+07:00

The following quotation from Stephen F Roberts is worth a few moments of anyone's contemplation:

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Is Descartes misinterpreted or a simply a brute?

2010-06-18T10:33:00.000+07:00

Descartes is often attributed with the coarsest of opinions about animals. Malebranche, one of Descartes’ staunch followers, certainly emphasised this view, “They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”[1] A weak, or uncharitable, reading of his work can certainly lead one to such assumptions. The conventional view is summed up by David Sztybel, who writes of Descartes, “A dualist, he believed that only two kinds of substance exist in the universe: mental substance and corporeal, or bodily, substance. Human beings, he thought, are composed of mind (which he equated with the soul) and body. Nonhuman animals, however, he saw as mindless automata or machines. The traditional interpretation is that he even denied that animals have feelings.”[2] Non-human animals, according to Descartes, are nothing but complex automata: they have no souls linking them to the mind of God as do humans, no minds and no ability to reason. They can see, hear, and touch, he concedes, but they are in no sense conscious; they can neither suffer nor feel pain.[3] So goes the argument which elicited such fury from contemporary and subsequent philosophers.

In this essay, I shall attempt to re-assess Descartes’ writings about animals, and show that, in fact, he held no such barbaric and monstrous views. Although not always entirely consistent in his writings on “animal consciousness”, as we would now call it, one can discern a more measured and wholly more “humane” view of our nonhuman relations.

Voltaire (1694-1778), incensed perhaps by the counter-intuitive claim Descartes seems to posit in much of his writing regarding animal feelings, wrote with undisguised disdain, “Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? [H]as it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.”[4] Criticism has been strong and consistent, and somewhat besmirches an otherwise impeccable philosophical pedigree. Norman Kemp Smith went so far as to call Descartes’ position ‘monstrous’.[5] Indeed, in the century after Descartes, “Cartesian anatomists could blandly claim that the screams of vivisected animals nailed to their work benches were of no more significance than the chimes of a clock, or the piping of a church organ when certain keys were pressed.”[6]

To take the approach explicit in the ‘principal of charity’[7], one needs first to appreciate Descartes’ writing both within its historical context, and in relation to his stated or perceived aims. Descartes was writing in an era when direct observations of nature and behaviour led naturally to mechanistic interpretations. Descartes posited a designer God who had set in motion the processes of nature and was now content to sit and watch the Universe unfold. He makes frequent and detailed comparisons to ‘automata or moving machines’, the following being representative: “they regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hands of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any such machine.”[8] Descartes was also writing with a clear purpose in mind – he was at pains to deny to animals the idea of a soul. The divine nature of humankind was unique and he had to be able to explain animal movement and appearance of will, sense and intelligence in mechanistic terms which could avert the necessity for a soul – and hence immortality, since “...it is less probable that worms, gnats, caterpillars and the rest of the animals should possess an immortal soul, than that they should move in the way machines move”.[9]

This view would appear to exclude non-human animals, not only from having consciousness, reason or thought, but also from having any sort of sensation. If animals are simply moving machines, they can have no sense of self, a concept of ‘I’, for sensations to occur to. Thus no pain is felt, no fear, no joy, no hunger, no anything. This seems intuitively ridiculous. Indeed, it is this traditional reading of Descartes which Cottingham (1978) refers to when he describes the notion that “animals are totally without feeling” as a “monstrous thesis”.[10]

There is good reason for looking for a more charitable reading of Descartes in this regard. His conclusions seem to open the door to a moral-free zone on animal welfare. Many have indeed directly cited Descartes in defence of practices such as vivisection (which he may or may not have performed himself). Any theory which can be so interpreted needs carefully looking at, given the huge implications not just for the moral status of animals but also for human actions in general. Kant, although never conceding consciousness to animals, was quite ardent about the fact that they ought not to be tortured or harmed unnecessarily, due to the effect this behaviour might ultimately have on our actions towards other humans, desensitizing us to brutality and sadism[11]. This is more recently echoed by Carruthers (1992) when he states that such acts as torturing an animal “...betray an indifference to suffering that may manifest itself...with that person’s dealing with other rational agents.”[12]

Cottingham argues that much of the recognised response to Descartes Is based upon a misunderstanding of his position. Harrison (1992) outlines Cottingham’s position by listing assertions as follows:

(1) “Animals are machines.

(2) Animals are automata.

(3) Animals do not think.

(4) Animals have no language.

(5) Animals have no self-consciousness.

(6) Animals have no consciousness.

(7) Animals are totally without feeling.

No-one disputes the Descartes held (1)-(5). The mistake many commentators have made, in Cottingham’s view, is the assumption that in holding to these weaker assertions, in particular (2) and (3), Descartes was thereby committed to (7).”[13]

The argument hinges on the fact that there is no direct and necessary relationship between the label of ‘automata’ and the notion of a lack of feeling. There is indeed precedent for considering human beings as conscious automata, totally negating the corollary that automata are without feelings.[14] That animals do not think, have no language and are not self-conscious would all be areas of uncertainty today. Research not available to Descartes – indeed unthinkable to him – proves animal thought exists[15], shows that language is utilised[16] and suggests self-consciousness.[17] However, in assessing Descartes’ own position, it is necessary to go back to his own assertions about thought and language. Descartes essentially had two arguments against thought and reason in animals, his Language-Test argument and his Action-Test argument.

For Descartes, occurrent thought and declarative speech were inextricably bound. They are propositional, independent of stimuli and independent of action.[18] Indeed, Descartes assumed that declarative speech was directly indicative of reason: “...it has never been observed that any brute animal has attained the perfection of using real speech, that it to say, of indicating by word or sign something relating to thought alone and not to natural impulse. Such speech is the only certain sign of thought hidden in a body.”[19] Descartes thought that the only explanation for lack of speech (in which he included sign language) in animals was the concomitant lack of thought. His later writing seems to conclude that all forms of thinking and consciousness depend upon thought in this sense, which is the reason many commentators conclude that Descartes hence intended that animals be viewed as mindless machines. One response to the Language-Test is that Descartes failed to consider that dispositional thinking is not dependent upon occurrent thought – the fact that a cat is unable to entertain the thought the bird is in the cage is no reason to doubt that the cat thinks the bird is in the cage.[20]

The Action-Test argument attempted to prove that animals lack reason. Descartes saw reason as “a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations”.[21] So for Descartes, reason is the acting on general principles which can be transferred to a range of novel situations. Descartes thought that although some animals act in agreement with such principals, they do not act for them. Descartes thought that “many animals show more skill than we do in some of their actions, yet the same animals show none at all in many others”[22] constituted evidence that they lacked intelligence – rather than what more recent thought would probably identify as being domain-specific intelligence.[23]

One must remember the context of Descartes’ philosophy. As already stated, he was in the business of denying immortal, non-corporeal souls to animals, as well as using the bête-machine concept to support his cogito argument. Descartes needed to prove that animals operated on a different level to humans. Humanity needed to have an intimate connection to God, in the guise of an immortal soul. Any suggestion that animals also had such a soul would denigrate man. Returning to Cottingham’s list of assertions, we see that Descartes indeed held to (3) and (4), but it is still not clear that he directly supports either (6) or (7).

Whilst Descartes clearly states in his Second Meditation that “what is called ‘having sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking,” he is often harshly translated as having said to feel is to think. But Descartes also states, in a letter to Mersenne, that “in my view, the feeling of pain exists only in the understanding”, and in denying thought and understanding to animals, it is perhaps a logical conclusion that they therefore cannot experience pain. However, this quotation from that letter continues: “What I do explain is all the external movements which accompany this feeling in us; in animals it is these movements alone which occur, and not pain in the strict sense.”[24] What Descartes is alluding to is that an animal cannot feel pain in the sense that it is aware that it exists and that it is ‘it’, the specific animal itself, which is feeling pain. He is also making the argument that we cannot assume cause from observations of effects (Russell’s argument from analogy used in support of the existence of other human minds): in a later letter to Gibieuf in 1642, he states, “We observe in animals movements similar to those which result from our imaginations and sensations; but that does not mean we observe imaginations and sensations in them.”[25] This argument, that an assumption of animal feeling based on analogy is untenable, does not amount to a declaration that animals have no feeling whatsoever. He writes clearly in the Sixth Set of Replies: “My critics...say they do not believe that the ways in which the beasts operate can be explained ‘by means of mechanics without invoking any sensation, life or soul’ (I take this to mean ‘without invoking thought’; for I accept that the brutes have what is commonly called ‘life’ and a corporeal soul and organic sensation [my italics])”[26] In his February 1649 letter to More, Descartes again stresses that in denying thought to the animals, he is denying neither life nor sensation: “I do not deny life to animals, since I regard it as consisting simply in the heat of the heart; and I do not even deny bodily sensation, in so far as it depends on a bodily organ.”[27] So Descartes is describing animal sensations as a mechanical process, not something occurring in a spiritual soul, and something which can occur outside of consciousness. Descartes’ apparent ambivalence in this regard might in part be explained by the difference in meaning between passions and feelings. It is only the latter he seeks to deny animals, accepting that they can have physical sensations – passions – without being necessarily aware of them in the sense that we are aware of ourselves when we consciously ‘feel’.

In seeking to deny animal souls, Descartes was operating within the context of few alternatives. He needed to make animals different from humans, and sought to do this at the level of thought. To the suggestion that animals might think as we do, he wrote in a letter to the Marquis of Newcastle that, “This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of all animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.”[28] Descartes was perhaps guilty of lack of vision, failure to recognise the possibility of a continuum of consciousness, rather than a black and white dividing line, but almost certainly was not suggesting, for example, that vivisected animals felt no pain at all. The passage oft cited to suggest this, referring to the cries of an animal as being akin to the sound from a church organ, was a direct reference to self-consciousness. Writing to More, Descartes state that, ‘though I regard it as established that we cannot prove there is any thought in animals, I do not think that it is thereby proved that there is not, since the human mind does not reach into their hearts.”[29] Descartes, then, lays out his case – he has attempted to show that animals cannot think as we do, in order that they can have no claim to equality under God, but feels it cannot be proven one way or the other. Harrison (1992) concludes that “Perhaps the most accurate way to characterise Descartes’ view is to say that he was cautiously agnostic on the whole question. He did not adamantly insist that animals could not feel ...but rather showed that there are no irresistible reasons for asserting that they do.”[30]

Descartes wrote about animal consciousness in the context of his religious beliefs and the prevailing dualistic view of his time. He wrote about automata and machines as a direct response to observations of nature, and from the necessity to defend human divinity. Even so, he was no brute. He questioned the grounds for attributing consciousness to animals. He never claimed that they could feel, but that their feeling somehow did not matter, which would have been a crueller thesis. Perhaps Descartes had become so obsessed with the idea of consciousness, that he was guilty of missing a more important point, one famously and eloquently put by Bentham: “The question is not, can they reason? nor can they talk? but, can they suffer?”[31]

Bibliography

Bentham, Jeremy Selected Writings on Utilitariansim Wordsworth Classics 2000

Cavalieri, Paola and Singer, Peter (Ed) The Great Ape Project St. Martin’s Griffin Edition 1996

Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 1 CUP 1985

Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 2 CUP 1985

Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 3 CUP 1985

Cottingham, John Descartes Blackwell Publishing 1986

De Fontenay, Elisabeth Le silence des bêtes Fayard 1998

DeWaal, Franz Primates and Philosophers Princeton University Press 2006

Gaukroger, Stephen, Schuster, John and Sutton, John (Ed) Descartes’ Natural Philosophy Routledge 2000

Hursthouse, R. ‘Ethics, Humans and Other Animals’ Routledge 2000

Sunstein, C.R. and Nussbaum, M.C. (Ed) Animal Rights OEP, 2004

Williams, B. Descartes – The Project of Pure Enquiry Routledge 1978 (This edition 2005)

Website resources:

Dawkins, Marian Stamp, “Animal Minds and Animal Emotions” American Zoologist, Vol. 40, No. 6 (Dec., 2000), pp. 883-888 Oxford University Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/3884335 Accessed: 08/03/10

Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), pp. 219-227. Blackwell Publishing for The Philosophical Quarterly http://www.jstor.org/stable/2220217 Accessed: 27/02/10

Lurz, Robert, “Animal minds” IEP 2009 http://www/iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/

Murray, Michael J. and Ross Glenn “Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering” Faith and Philosophy Journal, University of Notre Dame 2006, VOL 23; NUMB 2, pages 169-190 http://edisk.fandm.edu/michael.murray/Animal.pdf Accessed 01/03/10

Southwell, Gareth “Talking clocks and Deranged Springs” PhilosophyOnline.co.uk 2008 http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/philosophy-study-resources/descartes-meditations/further-reading/#philosophical

Steiner, Gary “Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals” published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Volume 80, Issue 3, Pages 268–291, ISSN (Online) 1613-0650, ISSN http://www.referenceglobal.com/doi/abs/10.1515/agph.1998.80.3.268 (Print 0003-9101, 1998)

Thomas, Marion “Are Animal Just Noisy Machines?” Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn 2005) pp425-460 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4331965 Accessed 08/03/2010

Walter, Sven “Epiphenomenalism” 2007 http://www.iep.utm.edu/epipheno/ Accessed 12/04/2010

Wilson, Scott – “Animals and Ethics” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010 http://www.iep.utm.edu/anim-eth/ Accessed 09/03/10

[1] Nicholas Malebranche, Œuvres complets Ed Rodis-Lewis Paris J. Vrin 1958 2, p. 394 quoted in Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), pp. 219-227.

[2] Sztybel, David Descartes,Rene http://sztybel.tripod.com/Descartes.html March 13^th 2010

[3] Midgley, Mary “Descartes' Prisoners” Newstateman 24 May 1999 http://www.newstatesman.com/199905240041.htm March 13th 2010

[4] Woolf, H.I. “Voltaire – Animals” The Philosophical Dictionary 1995 (capital [H] mine) http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volanima.html

[5] Steiner, Gary “Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals” published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Volume 80, Issue 3, Pages 268–291

[6] Cottingham, John Descartes 1986 p108

[7] see Hursthouse, R. ‘Ethics, Humans and Other Animals’ Routledge 2000 p4

[8] Cottingham, J et al (trans) Descartes - The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 1 CUP 1985

Discourse on the Method V p139 NB All quotes from Descartes are taken from Vol 1 or 2 of this work.

[9] From correspondence to More 1649, quoted in Williams, B. Descartes 1978 Routledge p273

[10] Cottingham, J. “A Brute to the Brutes?: Descartes’ Treatment of Animals Philosophy 53 (1978) p551 quoted in Murray m.J. and Ross G. “Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering” Faith and Philosophy Journal, University of Notre Dame 2006, VOL 23

[11] see Wilson, S. “Animals and Ethics” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010

[12] Curruthers, P. The Animals Issue: Morality in Practice (CUP – 1992) quoted in Wilson, S 2010 ibid

[13] Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), p221.

[14] “Huxley agreed with Descartes that animals are automata, but he was unwilling to accept that they are devoid of mentality: “Sleeping dogs frequently appear to dream. If they do, it must be admitted that ideation goes on in them while they are asleep; and, in that case, there is no reason to doubt that they are conscious” (Huxley 1898, 125). Huxley therefore segregated the question of consciousness from the question of the status of an automaton: animals do experience pain, but that pain is, like their bodily movements, just a result of neurophysiological processes. Animals are conscious automata. In contrast to Descartes, Huxley argued that considerations similar to those about reflex actions in frogs also suggest that we are conscious automata.” Walter, Sven “Epiphenomenalism” 2007 http://www.iep.utm.edu/epipheno/

[15] see, for example, the research of Boutan in Thomas, Marion ‘Are Animals Just Noisy Machines?’ especially p451

[16] see, for example, Fouts, R.S. and Fouts D.H. ‘Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language’ pp 28-39 in Cavalieri, Paola and Singer, Peter (Ed) The Great Ape Project St. Martin’s Griffin Edition 1996

[17] see, for example, DeWaal, Franz Primates and Philosophers p69 appendix B – Do apes have a theory of mind? 2006

[18] Lurz, Robert, “Animal minds” IEP 2009 http://www/iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/

[19] Letter to More, 5 February 1649, in Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 3 CUP 1985 p366

[20] Lurz, op cit

[21] in Cottingham (ed) Vol 1 op cit Part Five 57 p 140

[22] in Cottingham (ed) Vol 1 op cit Part Five 59 p 141

[23] Lurz, op cit

[24]Letter to Mersenne, 11 June 1640, in Cottingham (ed) Vol III op cit p148

[25] Letter to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642, In Cottingham ibid p 203

[26] in Cottingham (ed) Vol II 426 p288

[27] Letter to More, February 1649, in Cottingham (ed) Vol III op cit p 366

[28] Letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, 23 November 1646 in Cottingham Vol III op cit p 304

[29] Letter to More, 5 February 1649 op cit

[30] Harrison, Peter 1992 op cit

[31] Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1780, in Selected Writings on Utilitariansim, chapter XVII, footnote p284

Wittgenstein

2010-06-15T19:21:00.005+07:00

Next essay - Wittgenstein, and something to do with mind/body duality. I know next to nothing about him and have read nothing of him, so the essay is a while away. Plan for this summer in France - FNAC and Amazon, and lots of chilled reading time in the garden, interrupted suitably often with a run or cycle ride. By August, I should have the glimmerings of an idea to start writing about....

I'll post my Descartes essay - on his view of non-human animals - when I get around to it...

Kant’s transcendental idealism scepticism....

2010-05-30T18:27:00.001+07:00

5000 words

Does Kant’s transcendental idealism fare any better than the naive idealism he attempts to distance himself from in terms of escaping radical scepticism?

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an inquiry into knowledge and what constitutes the real world and any justification we have for claiming to understand any part of it. In attempting to reconcile the seemingly disparate, but equally inconclusive, schools of thought represented by empiricism and rationalism, he claimed to be revolutionising philosophy, a revolution akin to that brought about by Copernicus in the field of astronomy. Kant’s Critique begins from the premise that all knowledge derives of experience, but, vitally, some knowledge is both a priori and synthetic. This assertion is central to Kant’s transcendental argument (the process by which he arrives at transcendental idealism) as he claims that this was over-looked by both rationalist and empiricist camps. For Kant, an active knowing subject, in order to understand knowledge, must understand the role of its own activity – its reasoning. Analogous to Copernicus’s overthrowing of Ptolemaic cosmology, Kant’s revolution highlights that the mind, with its activities, structures and principles, cannot be separate from the phenomena which appear to it. “Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition…” [1]

Kant declared that the empiricists’ position – the naïve idealism of Berkeley in particular – is open to hard sceptical attack. If the real world is a construct of the human mind, then what happens when the human mind is not around to do the constructing? Can we actually deny the real world’s existing? The position is vulnerable to the whole gambit of Descartes’ deceiving evil demon, Nozick’s ‘experience machine’ and Dancy/Putnam’s ‘brain-in-vat’.

In this essay, I shall explore the claim that Kant does not escape the same fate. Strawson (1966) suggested that Kant was far closer to Berkeley than he would have liked to admit[2] and Russell commented that those following in Kant’s footsteps – Fichte, Hegel and Schelling – also “fell into something very like solipsism”.[3] Even if Kant has proven his synthetic a priori ‘pure intuitions’ of time and space, and his categories of intuition, his relying upon unknowable things-as-they-are, as the objects which give rise to the real world (which we see represented as phenomena and our intellectual conceptualization of them) is a problem. Can it be argued (despite Kant’s recourse to Transcendental or regulative ideas) that the very existence of noumena is subject to reasonable sceptical doubt, and hence the remaining existence of reality in the mind of thinker, after Kant, is no more solid a proposition than Berkeley’s before him? Or is this an empiricist misconception? I shall begin by looking at Kant’s transcendental idealism and then discuss some of the criticism levelled against Kant’s philosophical thought by later commentators. I shall discuss criticisms of Kant’s position on two fronts. Firstly, I shall explore the synthetic a priori. This falls into two discrete arguments, the first of which is criticism levelled fundamentally at Kant’s division of analytic and synthetic, whilst the second focuses on Kant’s supposition that synthetic a priori judgements are possible. Secondly, I shall explore the notion that noumena, despite some salvation attempts by modern thinkers, might well undermine the whole case put by Kant in establishing his transcendental idealism.

Kant’s transcendental idealism

Kant’s philosophy is grounded in empiricism. He is clear that our sensory experiences give us our knowledge. However, we are not simply seeing the world ‘as it is’, a direct correlation between the reality ‘out there’ and our recording of it internally. Firstly, we become aware of intuitions through our sensory perceptions, or our faculty of sensibility. These intuitions, however, are random and nonsensical in their raw form – they are mere sensations. Our knowledge, that is our understanding of the perceived object, comes about only through our faculty of thinking, through our ability to conceptualise in the mind and organise what we have received into something ‘knowable’ - phenomena. Thus for Kant, a combination of the faculties of sensibility and conception is essential to understanding. On their own, neither faculty is able to attain knowledge. “The faculty for thinking of objects of sensible intuition… is the understanding. Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”[4] For Kant then, seeing an object, a car in a street for example, is a synthesis. Seeing the red shape against a darker background is my sensory awareness of the phenomena, whereas it is my conception of ‘car’ as a category, as distinct from its background, which gives meaning to the image. Without the conception, my image would be little more than abstract art, and without the phenomena, my conception of ‘car’, would be ungrounded and empty.

Kant held that a conception is above and beyond the individual instance of something – it is true irrespective of state of mind or perspective. As Strawson (1966) affirms, “Judgements about objects, if valid, are objectively valid, valid independently of the occurrence of the particular state of awareness, of the particular experience, which issues the judgement.”[5] It is this ‘something fixed and unalterable’ which lies behind the specific impression we have of a singular instance which gives Kant his objective world, existing beyond our experience of it. What we see is real, its reality a product of our reception of phenomena and our conceptions. To investigate appearances is to investigate the empirically real.[6] By explaining reality in terms of its being objectively valid, Kant can make a claim to empirical reality.

In the first instance, it is central to Kant’s transcendental idealism that he establishes the existence of synthetic, a priori truths, or judgements, something which, for the rationalist camp is something of a logical contradiction. If these cannot be shown to exist, philosophy in general is left only with the analytic a priori, which Kant argues tells us nothing we didn’t already know, being by its very nature tautological, and the synthetic a posteriori which relies upon strict sensory verification. (The notion of an analytic a posteriori would seem to be a clear contradiction[7].)This will not do, and so Kant needs to show a third option which avoids both difficulties. Hospers (1967) says that Kant “explained the possibility of synthetic a priori truths by the nature of the human mind. It is because the human mind is structured the way it is that certain truths are both synthetic and a priori.”[8] Hospers goes on to give the example of fishing with a one inch net in the sea. From the evidence the net presents to the fisherman, he might induce that the sea contains only fish bigger than one inch long. However, what is not always easy to see is that what the fisherman has is a fact about the net, not a fact about the sea. Kant’s structure of the mind is like the net, and what we know of the world is actually our knowledge of the mind, not the actual noumenal world, which for Kant is unknowable.

Kant postulates ‘pure forms of the intuition’ (space and time) and ‘forms of the understanding’ (his ‘categories’, including causality and necessity) as being special cases of understanding. These intuitions are known about the-world-as-it-appears-to-us: the phenomenal world. Time and space, for Kant, are crucial to our notion of phenomena. They are a priori because they are the essential way in which our minds register and make sense of the world – no further sensory experience is required to separate two objects spatially or to differentiate two events temporally – this is simply how our mind works. They are also synthetic, though, in that they are informative – they provide information in the predicate which did not exist in the subject. (For Kant, the analytic is a tautology – the subject is restated in the predicate.) If Kant is right, and notions such as time and space are within us inextricably, then he has made a case for the synthetic a priori. Gardner(1999) explains thus: “Consider ‘every event has a cause’. Because it is necessary, it must be a priori. But it’s not analytic, for the concept of the predicate is not contained in the concept of the subject: the concept of an event...does not contain that of being an effect. That is why the judgement is informative, and that makes it synthetic. Metaphysical judgements are therefore a priori and synthetic. Which means they cannot be derived either from logic (since they are synthetic) or from experience (since they are a priori)”[9]

Problems with the synthetic a priori

Kant’s most basic assumption - that of an analytic/synthetic divide - is open to controversy. I pursue this since, without recourse to this distinction, Kant is already in trouble asserting a synthetic a priori. Jason S. Baehr (2006) expresses the analytic/synthetic divide thus: “[One] way of drawing the distinction is to say that a proposition is analytic if its truth depends entirely on the definition of its terms (that is, it is true by definition), while the truth of a synthetic proposition depends not on mere linguistic convention, but on how the world actually is in some respect.”[10] In other words, an analytic proposition is to do with how we construct language and cannot, by definition, provide us with any information about the world, whereas a synthetic proposition is giving information beyond the subject of its proposition.

Kant gives the examples of analytic and synthetic propositions as ‘all bodies are extended’ and ‘all bodies have weight’ respectively. In the first example, a body, by virtue of its definition, must have shape and occupy space; in the second the notion of weight is extra information about a ‘body’ not necessarily part of the definition of ‘body’.

Quine (1951), in his paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, rejects Kant’s argument about analytic statements being necessarily true by virtue of definitions. More accurately, whilst he accepts that they are true, he rejects Kant’s argument as circular, and thus untenable. Quine defines two types of analytical statement, exemplified by (i) all unmarried men are unmarried and (ii) all bachelors are unmarried. Simply put, Quine argues that analytic statements in the second category rely upon replacing words with synonyms, and that our notion of synonyms is also dependent upon analyticity, hence the argument cannot be resolved. After a rather complex investigation of the meaning of synonyms, Quine says, “Analyticity at first seemed most naturally definable by appeal to a realm of meanings. On refinement, the appeal to meanings gave way to an appeal to synonymy or definition. But definition turned out to be a will-o'-the-wisp, and synonymy turned out to be best understood only by dint of a prior appeal to analyticity itself. So we are back at the problem of analyticity.”[11] Quine concludes that, “for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statement simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.”[12] It might, however, be reasonable to argue that this in itself has no real effect in any phenomenological sense on Kant’s notion of the a priori.

Leibniz had asserted that, in deference to natural order, all subjects contained all of their predicates necessarily, hence arriving at the conclusion that all truths are analytic[13]. Hume disagreed, and starting from a different point logically arrives at a conflicting conclusion. Arthur Sullivan states that, “It seems Quine is most justified in asserting that the distinction has never been well made; each philosopher's view on the subject simply reflects his or her metaphysical standpoint. This standpoint tells us something about their particular predispositions and approaches to logic, but nothing about the world.”[14] In conclusion, Sullivan states somewhat devastatingly for Kant’s transcendental idealism, “The terms of Kant's transcendentalist model, intended to explain the conditions of possible experience rather than ontologically commit, are at best metaphorical when viewed through Quine's microscope.”[15] This conclusion is echoed by Scott Soames (2005) in his article ‘Philosophical Analysis’[16] where he describes Quine’s attack as ‘a telling one’ since it produced two conclusions (if logical knowledge is a priori then it cannot always be explained linguistically and if it is not, then it is hard to see that any knowledge can be a priori) neither of which was acceptable to Kant’s notion of a priori. For Quine, the view that “all a priori knowledge is knowledge of analytic truths”[17] necessarily led to this conclusion, further undermining Kant’s distinction. More recent investigations, such as Boghossian (1996), seem to contest Quine’s conclusions. Boghossian proposes a division of analyticity into two strands, the second of which, epistemic analyticity, appears to escape Quine’s rejections. [18]

I move now to the synthetic a priori itself as being one of the major vulnerabilities of Kant’s transcendental idealism, for some a fatal weakness. Kant gives mathematics and geometry as examples of the synthetic a priori. The claim that mathematics is synthetic is the stronger claim, but Frege notably suggests that all mathematical truths could be shown to be analytic. [19] He felt that Kant had been misguided by outdated Aristotelian logic, and that his premise for synthetic a priori mathematics was based on a fundamental misunderstanding, a view shared by Russell.[20] The claim that geometry is a priori can also be doubted. Pure geometry is founded upon axioms for which no claim of truth is made – and is therefore not synthetic - and applied geometry, as a part of physics, relies upon additional empirical verification – and hence is not a priori. Kant argues that propositions in geometry were inextricably linked with an awareness of their absolute necessity[21] and laid significant weight on these claims in the Introduction: if they are rejected, this has a knock-on effect for the whole of his argument in the First Critique. It is possible to read the Critique as advancing metaphysical conclusions based upon suppositions about the truths of mathematics and geometry. This would lend the former, metaphysics, a dependence on the latter, which if the latter is revealed as a false claim renders Kant’s entire project epistemologically suspect. Russell (1946) is compellingly dismissive: “Thus of the two kinds of geometry one is a priori but not synthetic, while the other is synthetic but not a priori. This disposes of the transcendental argument.”[22]

Kant, however, foresaw this line of attack. He clearly states in the Critique of Practical Reason that he accepts that mathematics and geometry could still be the victims of sceptical doubt.

“...even Hume did not make his empiricism so universal as to include mathematics. He holds the principles of mathematics to be analytical; and if his were correct, they would certainly be apodictic also: but we could not infer from this that reason has the faculty of forming apodictic judgements in philosophy also - that is to say, those which are synthetical judgements, like the judgement of causality. But if we adopt a universal empiricism, then mathematics will be included.” [23]

In fairness, it would seem that, in drawing attention to the possibility that mathematics and geometry, as synthetic, are open to sceptical doubt, Kant was not intending to rest the entire transcendental project upon the unassailability of these disciplines.

There are, however, other issues with the a priori synthetic. Notably, Kant puts forward time and space as being the two ‘pure’ forms of intuition. His notion of time and space is a halfway house between Newton’s space and time as extant, as a substantive container of our spatiotemporal experiences, and the German rationalist view that they are nothing in themselves, only existing as relationships between substantial objects. Kant’s view is that in order to identify objects as being separate/next to/behind etc., (in relation to myself or to other objects), I must already have the concept of space. The idea, therefore, that something outside of me can have an effect on me – i.e. it is located in space – must be a synthetic a priori judgment. On time, Kant states that intuitions themselves cannot address change[24]. Only time can allow for contradictory propositions about things (the glass is full, the glass is empty) by allowing for the sequential (I have drunk the contents of the glass, thus the state of ‘full’ came before the state of ‘empty’). Kant goes on to say that if it is given that all outer experiences occur in space, then all inner experiences, “i.e. all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in relations of time.”[25] So no object can appear to us which is not time bound, since time is a part of our natural conceptual processes.

Salomon Maimon was respected as a critic by Kant himself. His principal objections were fundamentally to do with Kant’s notions of experience and cognition, but he also had issues with Kant’s ascription of space and time. Maimon did not accept that space and time were forms of human intuition, but posited rather that they are the ways in which we represent differences conceptually between thoughts.[26] “The fact that we represent content spatially and temporally indicates only that there is some incompleteness in our conception of the world, and not that this content is provided by a realm of wholly independent objects.”[27] Guyer (2006) also questions the necessary a priori nature of time and space, suggesting that our empirical acquisition of these concepts could occur at a developmental stage in infants which precludes our memory of having acquired them.[28]

If space and time are substances, there is a problem in that they are causally inert and inaccessible – their nature is not changed through interaction with other substances. If they are properties of another substance – God perhaps – then they could potentially cease to be (as contingent upon the substance of which they are properties) and, perhaps worse, this would restrict God to a spatiotemporal existence. For Kant, space does not represent a property of things-in-themselves, nor does time. Space and time are pure intuitions (a priori) and subjective criteria of our sensibility, enabling the postulation of all our other intuitions.[29] Allison defends Kant’s notion of time as an a priori intuition through interpreting Kant’s arguments (at A23-4/ B38-9) as “two distinct arguments concerned with two distinct conceptions of apriority[.]”[30] The first is that space as a representation must be presupposed if I am to represent objects as outside of me and as apart from each other. The second is that as a necessary a priori representation, space grounds all outer intuitions and that whilst one can imagine empty space, one cannot image no space. Similarly, Kant’s ‘...argument for the permanence of substance essentially hinges on the thought that since time cannot be perceived without the experience of change, it must follow that there can be no such thing as empty time.’[31] For Kant, pre-existence and ceasing to exist both pose the problem of postulating empty time, and are thus untenable: leading to permanence of substance. And as he states clearly in the Transcendental Exposition, “...space and time, as the necessary conditions of all outer and inner experience, are merely subjective conditions of all our intuition, and that in relation to these conditions all objects are therefore mere appearances, and not given to us as things in themselves...”[32]

The idea that time is an a priori synthetic truth leads us, however, to a peculiar circular notion of appearance. Strawson (1966) identifies this issue in his essay ‘The Bounds of Sense’: if we appear to ourselves only as how we appear to ourselves, not as how we really are – as noumenal things in ourselves – do we really appear to ourselves thus, or only appear to ourselves to appear to ourselves thus? Strawson is claiming that this leaves us appearing to ourselves temporally but not really temporally appearing to ourselves. For Strawson, this idea, along with what ‘really appearing’ means in this context, goes beyond intelligibility and is unanswerable. “It is not a defence of an unintelligible doctrine that its unintelligibility is certified by a principle derived from it”, he concludes.[33]

It seems furthermore that Kant’s Critique really does suggest that we are aware of objects the very existence of which are logically (and therefore causally to some thinkers) dependent upon our awareness of them? If so, how can he extricate himself from this chicken-and-egg conundrum? Does the object exist before our awareness of it? Noumena become appearances of which I become aware at the point of my sensibility of them and my intuitions acting upon those sensibilities. It is the representation of the thing-in-itself which becomes empirically real as a result of my awareness. But the objection remains: the object – even in representation - only appears to me following my awareness of it and my awareness of it creates its appearance. There would seem to be no escape. This is perhaps, one interpretation. It is arguable, though, that this is a simple, if excusable, empiricist misunderstanding of Kant.

Scruton (2006) refers to another interpretation, which he calls an ‘objective’ view. Kant, he claims, meant the transcendental idealism to be a form of realism – the world of which we have knowledge does exist independently.[34] Kant’s references to the ‘world of appearance’ are only intended in so far as it exists in time and is made up of objects ‘perceived by us, or else causally related to our perception.’[35]

At this point, it is essential to consider Kant’s postulation of transcendental, or regulative, ideas. “Kant believed that there was a New World waiting to be discovered if Reason was only strong enough to resist the lazy postulation of a “constitutive” God and consider the purpose and unity of the world to be instead an “ideal” that “regulated” scientific inquiry.”[36] For Kant, the world is real insofar as it is the object of possible experience. The transcendental, or regulative, ideas of God, ultimate reality and the soul, serve to regulate our understanding – these ideas are pure concepts of reason, not constitutive principals of an empirical world. They can, however, be applied to the empirical world to guide our understanding. Allison (2004) suggests that the placing of these arguments in an Appendix goes some way to explaining not only the misunderstandings of the empiricist camp, but also the insufficient attention paid to them in post-Kantian attempts to grasp the full meaning of the First Critique.[37] These regulative ideas place before the intellect the whole spectrum of knowledge ‘since they make possible a priori the concepts without which there is no experience’.[38] Kant goes on at length to refute rational theology, rational psychology and rational cosmology – these can only be transcendental ideas, and are not objectively given.

Strawson, however, was confident as he sounded what he considered a death-knell for Kant’s transcendental project: “since nothing whatever really is, or could be, explained by this model – for it is incoherent – it must be concluded that Kant has no clear and general conception of the synthetic a priori at all.”[39]

Problems with the noumenal world

I wish to turn now to Kant’s beguiling introduction of the unknowable realm of noumena, as a means of explanation of experience. Hopsers (1967) poses some basic questions about the noumena. “We seem to be left with total scepticism as to the nature of the real (noumenal) world... How do we know there is a real world and that it is unknowable? ...If the phenomenal world is a result of the structure of the human mind, how do we know this structure won’t change?”[40]

Kant sets out a transcendental proof that the real word exists outside of ourselves. Firstly, he states that experience itself, and accordingly the object of experience, would be impossible without a connection between a given concept of phenomena and the concept of causation. Ritter (2009) makes the distinction between an apagogic proof, which is a refutation of an opposite, and Kant’s ostensive proof, which establishes truth directly, “ideally by affirmative premises.”[41] Kant is clear about the value of this type of proof: “that for each transcendental proof only a single proof can be found,” and “that [transcendental proofs] must never be apagogic but always ostensive.”[42] Kant thus claims to have logically[43] (and ostensively) proven that the external world exists:

“The proof that is demanded must therefore establish that we have experience and not merely imagination of outer things, which cannot be accomplished unless one can prove that even our inner experience, undoubted by Descartes, is possible only under the presupposition of outer experience. ….Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only by means of the existence of actual things that I perceive outside myself. Now consciousness in time is necessarily combined with the consciousness of the possibility of this time-determination: Therefore it is also necessarily combined with the existence of the things outside me, as the condition of time-determination; i.e., the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me.”[44]

This proof, for Kant, moves him away from the realism and idealism of his predecessors. Interestingly, Cassam (2007) suggests that Kant was mistaken in thinking his rejection of Hume had to be a rejection of Realism, and shows how Realism can allow for a priori knowledge, and that “its explanation doesn’t require the positing of an intrinsic harmony between mind and world.”[45]

However, Kant’s premise that understanding of the world arises in our mind, above and beyond experience, can be seen as problematic. Kant’s idealism hinges on his idea of things-in-themselves. He argues, as we have seen, that space and time are not external to us, independently existing, but are in fact within us as conceptualisations we use to understand the world. Furthermore, we can only understand our perceptual inputs, our sensory experiences – we can know nothing of things-in-themselves. We similarly do not know the relationship between things-in-themselves and phenomena (or appearances) – they cannot be causal, because causality is only an intuitive conception we have, and things-in-themselves are outside of our intuition.

The issue, then, is the noumena – given that we can know nothing at all about them, in what way does it make sense even to discuss their existence? It seems that there is no sense at all in discussing the nature of something which is defined as being something with a nature which we cannot know. How is it possible to posit that the noumena exist, that they somehow relate – but in a non-causal way – to our perception of the appearances of them? Can we justify a belief in them? Kant’s argument is that they must exist, because phenomena are appearances of something – therefore the ‘something’ must exist. Yet it exists in such a way as we can know nothing of its existence – which would necessarily include the supposition that it does exist. Kant seems to be saying both that “we are aware of bodies in space as distinct from our perceptions” and that “bodies in space have no existence apart from our perceptions”[46]. But just as scepticism can upturn Berkeley’s empiricism – how do we know the external reality exists? – so it can upturn Kant’s transcendental idealism – how do we know noumena exist if we can know nothing about them?

Kant would hold that noumena are objectively existent – they require no thinking subject. They are ontologically objective. He also, in the Second Critique, attempts to suggest that the noumena of freedom might actually be knowable, as it revealed through moral law. Others, such as God and immortality, whilst unknowable can be the objects of faith, since practical reason demands belief in them.[47] Allison (2004) defends the notion of noumena by arguing for a ‘one world-two aspect’ reading of the First Critique, as opposed to the ‘two world-two object’ reading, as espoused by Strawson and Guyer, which he dismisses as a dead-end interpretation. Allison argues that Kant introduces two standpoints about things – one where spatiotemporal considerations apply, as in our everyday experience, and another, where these epistemic conditions are not present, and hence can be considered a possible view of things-in-themselves. Thing-in-themselves, in this reading, would not be some postulated objects lacking in spatial or temporal qualities, but rather, spatiotemporal properties are omitted from one account of our conception of things. Guyer rejects this reading, pointing first to Kant’s historical background and the universality of a two-world view, and also to the fact that “a domain of objects that are not spatial and temporal has to be numerically distinct from a domain of object that are.”[48]

If the thing-in-itself is unknowable, we are justified in doubting its existence, as nothing is offered by way of proof of existence. Another interpretation of noumena might be that they are simply a symbol of the limits of our understanding. Again though, the very act of interpreting that which is by nature unknowable is doomed. Kant, however, was quite explicit about the noumena actually existing, albeit outside of time and space, and hence outside of our comprehension. Rae Langton (2001) sets out the problem thus:

“K1 Things in themselves exist. K2 Things in themselves are the causes of phenomenal appearances. And it attributes to Kant an epistemological thesis. K3 We can have no knowledge of things-in-themselves. Trouble comes with the conjunction of the three. For the epistemological thesis appears to imply these corollaries: C1 We cannot know that things in themselves exist. C2 We cannot know that things in themselves are the causes of phenomenal appearances. We cannot know K1 and K2. Kant's story makes itself untellable.”[49]

For Kant, the world can only be understood in the context of noumenal reality, without which the world and everything in it is really only in my mind. Transcendental idealism would reduce to abstract intellectual sophistry if Kant’s noumena are not viable, bringing the whole Critique close to Berkley’s idealism – that which Kant struggled so tirelessly to distance himself from.

Indeed, it seems likely that scepticism can throw its classic taunt at Kant’s transcendentalism, despite Kant’s Refutation of Idealism. What of Putnam’s brain-in-a-vat? Ritter discusses Putnam’s thought experiment as well as the evil demon of Descartes’ radical scepticism. He is compelled to conclude that in the case where everybody is deceived – such as the scenario more recently depicted in the film ‘The Matrix’ – “the nature of unity collapses...As a result, Putnam’s sceptical scenario remains in the field. The Refutation of Idealism is inappropriate for proving that we are not in fact brains-in-vats or in similar distress. That question...does not lie in the scope of the transcendental approach.”[50]

A further problem in relation to the conceptual framework espoused by Kant is raised by the question, ‘If I cease to exist, what becomes of the external world?’ If the world – by which I now mean the ‘real’ empirical world of Kant’s representations and phenomena – exists insofar as my intuitions and cognitions act upon one another, what happens when they don’t? How do infants, the intellectually handicapped and non-human animals, for that matter, have a role in reality? Surely Kant must accept that they too have experiences? If humanity were to disappear, and only animals remain, would that therefore alter the nature of reality? With no minds capable of actioning the second phase of Kant’s dual notion of cognition, what becomes of reality? In a world of only infant brains, would time stop and space cease to exist? The implications of this seem to bring into question the logic for attempting to assert that our conceptual cognitive makeup somehow shapes the world. Our cognition, for Kant, comprises an awareness which comes from an unknowable source. Strawson rejects “the senseless dogma that our conceptual scheme corresponds at no point with reality”[51], and argues that noumena must in some sense be knowable. Thielke (2007) offers that “Maimon holds that the thing-in-itself stands only as an object of inquiry, rather than an independent noumenal entity...[and the fact that the thing-in-itself is not possible for us to experience] does not imply that the thing in itself cannot in principle be an object of cognition.”[52]

Later philosophers such as Fitche and Hegel removed ‘things-in-themselves’ as simply too problematic. Fichte regarded the thing-in-itself as little more than left-over dogmatism, and a weakness that could open the floodgates to traditional scepticism. He replaced the noumena with his concept of Ego, consciousness grounded in itself. He states (1868) “In the Science of Knowledge, the Ego is represented; but from this it does not follow that the Ego is represented as merely representing...the Ego as object of philosophizing may be something more.”[53]

As Frederick Beiser (1949) stated, “The consequence of Kant’s philosophy, if it were to drop its inconsistent postulate of the thing-in-itself, was solipsism...”[54] Jacobi famously declared that in removing the thing-in-itself from Kant’s philosophy, Fichte had revealed that what was left was nihilism.[55]

In conclusion, crucial elements of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism rely upon distinctions and definitions which are flawed. The possibility of synthetic a priori – the basis for Kant’s understanding of space, time and categories of intuition – cannot be proven. The ethereal noumena, crucial also in being the mysterious source of all experience, cannot, paradoxically, be experienced and therefore cannot realistically be held to exist. If these elements of Transcendental Idealism after Kant are unproven – and they are at the very least highly dubious – then scepticism claims the entire project. Even Descartes’ ‘cogito’ can only be a construct of phenomenal reality – my consciousness as it appears, not as it actually is. The world exists only in and is created by the mind, and the mind is open to deception and illusion. The Lockean school of philosophers, in particular Feder, accused Kant of being no different from Berkeley in this respect.[56]

Bibliography

All quotes from Kant are taken from:

Kant, Immanuel – Critique of Pure Reason CUP 1998

Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood

Kant, Immanuel - Critique of Practical Reason

The Project Gutenberg EBook Release Date: May, 2004 Version 10

Kant, Immanuel – Critique of Judgement Dover Philosophical Classics 2005

Books and Articles

Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Rev. and Enl. Ed. Yale University Press 2004

Beiser, Frederick The Fate of Reason Harvard University Press 1949

Bird, Graham (Ed) A Companion to Kant Blackwell 2005

Burham, Douglas and Young, Harvey – Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Edinburgh Philosophical Guides 2007

Boghossian (1996) “Analyticity” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, Macmillan (Thompson and Gale) 2006 Vol.1

Dickers, Georges Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Analytical introduction OEP 2004

Fichte, J.G. The Science of Knowledge J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1868

Gardner, Sebastian Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason Routledge 1999

Guyer, Paul Kant Routledge 2006

Hospers, John – An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1967 Scruton, Roger - A Short History of Modern Philosophy Routeledge Classics 2002

Strawson, PF - The Bounds of Sense Metheun and Co Ltd., 1966

Soames, S. ‘Philosophical Analysis’ (2005) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, Macmillan (Thompson and Gale) 2006 Vol. 1

Ward, Andrew Kant: The Three Critiques Polity Press 2006

Websites

Bellotti, T. ‘Does Kant’s Theory of Knowledge lead to solipsism?’ www.philososphypathways.com/essays/bellotti3.htmFebruary 1st 2010

Baehr, J., ‘A Priori and A Posteriori’ 2006

http://www.iep.utm.edu/apriori/#H2 January 29^th 2010

Cassam, Quassim. The Possibility of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford University Press. 25 January 2010
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208319.001.0001

Janiak, Andrew ‘Kant's Views on Space and Time’

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/ January 2010

Langton, Rae. Kantian Humility - Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Scholarship Online. 10 February 2010 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0199243174.001.0001

Quine, V. W. ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ 1951

http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html January 29^th 2010

Rey, Georges ‘The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction’

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/#IntDis January 29^th 2010

Sullivan, A. ‘The Verification Theory and Reductionism’ http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/sullivan.htm February 1^st2010

Thielke, Peter ‘Salomon Maimon’ 2007

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimon

Other

Ritter, Bernard – ‘What is Kant’s refutation of idealism designed to refute?’ Abtracta Special Issue IV, 2009 p66

Behuniak, James Jr., ‘The “Regulative” Idea from Kant to William James’

University of Hawaii, USA www.phil.pku.edu.cn/zxm/pdf/spec16.pdf accessed February 2010

[1] (Preface to second edition – Bxvi – p 110)

[2] PF Strawson The Bounds of Sense Metheun and Co Ltd., 1966 p22

[3]Russell, Bertrand A History of Western Philosophy Book 3 Chapter XX Simon and Schuster 1946 p718. Russell’s account is controversial however and many other commentators refute this conclusion, in particular with regard to Hegel and Schelling. For example, see Cassirer Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics In M. Gram, ed. Kant: Disputed Questions. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967

[4] A50-51/B74-76

[5] Strawson, PF – The Bounds of Sense p73

[6] A45-46/B62-63

[7] See Burnham and Young – Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p29-30, for a brief discussion of the possibility of analytic a posteri truths, such as, for example, ‘all mammals are warm-blooded’.

[8] Hospers, J – An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis p184

[9] Gardner, Sebastian Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason p 56

[10] Baehr J., ‘A Priori and A Posteri’ 2006 http://www.iep.utm.edu/apriori/#H2 Jan 29^th 2010

[11] Quine ‘Two dogmas of Empiricism’ 1951 http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html January 29^th 2010

[12] Ibid. Quine

[13] Russell op. cit. p 591

[14] Sullivan, A. ‘W. V. Quine on the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction’

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/sullivan.htm February 1^st2010

[15] Ibid. Sullivan

[16] Soames, S. ‘Philosophical Analysis’ (2005) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, Macmillan (Thompson and Gale) 2006 Vol. 1 p150

[17] Ibid. Soames

[18] See Boghossian (1996) “Analyticity” Encyclopedia of Philosophy p165

[19] Rey, Georges ‘The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/ Jan 29^th 2010

[20] Scruton, Roger - A Short History of Modern Philosophy Routeledge Classics 2002 p250-251

[21] B41

[22] Russell op. cit. p 716

[23] CPracR Preface, paragraph XXX

[24] B48

[25] B51

[26] Thielke, Peter ‘Salomon Maimon’ 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimon 8th February 2010

[27] Thielke, Peter op cit

[28] Guyer, Paul Kant 2006 Routledge p 66

[29] Janiak, Andrew ‘Kant's Views on Space and Time’ 2009 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/

[30] Allison 2004, op cit p100

[31] Wade, Andrew Kant – The Three Critiques 2006 Polity Press p72

[32] CPR A48-9/B66

[33] Strawson, PF op. cit. p39

[34] Scruton, Roger - A Short History of Modern Philosophy Routledge Classics 2002 p147

[35] Scruton ibid

[36] Behuniak, James Jr., The “Regulative” Idea from Kant to William James

[37] Allison, op cit p423

[38] CPR (A644-5/ B692-3)

[39] Strawson, op cit p 43

[40] Hospers, op.cit. p 185

[41] Ritter, Bernard – ‘What is Kant’s refutation of idealism designed to refute?’ Abtracta Special Issue IV, 2009 p66

[42] A787/B815; A789/B817

[43] Ritter, Bernard op cit p66

[44] B275 - B276

[45] Cassam, Quassim. The Possibility of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford University Press. 25 January 2010 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208319.001.0001

[46] Strawson op. cit. p260

[47] Paragraph IV Preface, CPracR op cit

[48] Guyer op cit p68

[49] Langton, Rae. Kantian Humility - Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Scholarship Online. 10/02/2010 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0199243174.001.0001

[50] Ritter op. cit. p82

[51] Strawson op.cit. p42

[52] Thielke op cit p

[53] J.G. Fichte The Science of Knowledge J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1868 p60

[54] Frederick Beiser The Fate of Reason Harvard University Press 1949 p2

[55] Beiser, ibid p 124

[56] Beiser, ibid p 171

Delays

2010-05-23T17:55:00.002+07:00

Another batch of marking - or rather re-marking (someone else's I hasten to add, not my own) - has arrived from the IBO so I'm again and unexpectedly up to my neck in TOK essays, which has delayed progress on my latest foray into the world of philosophising. I am writing an essay on Descartes' view of animals. Was he really a brute - vivisectionist and deaf to the cries of 'automata' who he believed could feel no pain - or is he misunderstood and misrepresented?

I keep meaning to post my Kant essay here too... will do soon.

Can we trust our senses in terms of their furnishing us with knowledge of the world?

2010-05-15T08:18:00.002+07:00

We perceive our world through our senses. They are our input devices, our means of gathering information about the world we live in. They provide us with perceptual experiences. In attempting to refute scepticism, Descartes, and much more recently Putnam, extensively investigated the extent to which our sense perception is trustworthy in terms of providing us with knowledge. In seeking unshakable foundations for knowledge and discarding beliefs which were open to question, they hoped to be able to build a structure of knowledge beyond sceptical doubt. In this essay, I shall argue that the sceptics’ position is in fact made stronger through such thought experiments and that, in fact, there is no escape from the ‘brain in the vat’. One need not consciously believe that one is a disembodied brain at the whim of a malicious scientist and her super-computer, but one is compelled to accept the possibility of such a scenario. This acceptance, I suggest, undermines the value of perceptual experiences and therefore our claims to knowledge. I shall briefly define what I mean by ‘knowledge’. I shall be considering some of the arguments traditionally put forward by philosophers suggesting that our senses are open to deception and cannot therefore be a reliable knowledge source. I shall look at arguments which posit that our perception does reflect reality and as such provides us with knowledge. I will show why it is that I believe these objections to be invalid.

There are, I think, three basic ways in which we utilise the word ‘know’ and I wish to be very clear about which of these this essay is about. Firstly, propositional knowledge is that knowledge which follows from a proposition. For example, I know that my son is four years old. This is knowledge based upon the true proposition that he was born four years ago, and is hence four years old as I write. So propositional knowledge is based upon a relationship between an individual – or a subject - and a true proposition. (I think it fair to establish that ‘knowledge’ based upon a false proposition – i.e. that my son is ten years old – is in fact not knowledge, but mistaken belief.) The second use of the word ‘know’ might be referred to as acquaintance knowledge – as in the case where we claim to know someone, as a friend or acquaintance. This type of knowledge implies, rather strongly, direct personal experience; I know my son: his character and his moods are an everyday familiarity. Other people might know that I have a son, that he is four years old, that he is French – but unless they have actually met him, they can only claim propositional knowledge of him. This distinction is an important one. The third usage of ‘know’ applies to skills and abilities – a ‘how-to’ knowledge. I know how to drive and to use my computer (mostly). The focus of this essay is on the first of these uses of the word ‘know’ – propositional knowledge.

Propositional knowledge requires that the proposition (p) be true. This is rather self evident. Rather less self-evident, but vitally important, is the second requirement of propositional knowledge, that one believes p to be true. For me to claim that I have knowledge about something it must both be true and I must believe it to be so. There are many instances where a proposition is true, but I might not believe it to be so – in which case I cannot claim to have knowledge of it. Similarly, I might not believe a proposition, whilst it is in fact true. Other possibilities, such as claiming that something is true but at the same time claiming not to believe it, would seem to be self –contradictory. There is, though, a third requirement here. It might be possible for proposition to be true (for example that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life) and I may believe it to be true. However, until I know it to be true, I cannot claim this as knowledge. When we are visited by such life-forms, my belief will be justified, and then I shall have the grounds for knowledge. Before such a momentous visitation, I simply have an opinion, even if a strongly held one, which just happens to be true. Knowledge, therefore, for the purposes of the following discussion, can be summarised as justified, true belief.

Descartes was looking to answer the question, ‘did a reliable method exist, at least in principal, for getting knowledge and accumulating knowledge?’ He was looking for propositional knowledge of which he could be certain. So he sought to reject all experience that was open to question. ‘All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to any thing by which we have once been deceived.’ He put forward a scenario where he is being deliberately and continuously deceived by an evil demon, and where nothing his senses have led him to believe can be considered true. In doing so, he found himself at his famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ which is probably best translated as ‘I am consciously aware, therefore I know I must exist.’ Whatever the demon is doing to me, I am still aware of me. To escape the seeming fact that this was all he could be sure of, Descartes resorted to what is at best a dubious proof of the existence of a benevolent God in order to permit that our senses are not being deceived by the ‘malin génie’. It is hard to see that Descartes escaped his own conundrum. He appears, conversely, to have provided fuel for the sceptics – in this case Idealists – in rather soundly removing sense perception as a means to knowledge.

Descartes’ idea was not original to him. To some extent, it can be traced back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. There, shackled prisoners experienced a watered-down version of reality (the shadows cast on the wall of a cave by puppeteers using a fire as a light source) which they took to be real. Such was the extent of their deception, that an escaped prisoner returning to them, having seen for herself the truth (symbolised nicely by the sun outside the cave) is ridiculed, even threatened. We tend to resist the notion that our senses are mistaken, or being deceived. This is powerfully demonstrated in the film ‘The Matrix’, a modern extension of Putnam’s ‘brain in a vat’ re-positing of Descartes’ evil demon. In the film, Neo is ‘freed’ from the Matrix, much as is the prisoner in Plato’s cave. Morpheus explains to him, ‘It [the Matrix] is the world that has been pulled over your eyes, to blind you to the truth...that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.’ When Neo hears this he is physically sick, he rejects the idea and his first impulse is to return to the Matrix. (This is a feat successfully accomplished later in the film by another character, Cypher, who concludes that ‘ignorance is bliss’ when he makes a deal to be re-inserted into the Matrix, opting for simulated sensory experience over reality, with the proviso he remembers nothing.)

The power of Descartes’ demon, magnificently dramatised in ‘The Matrix’, is not that one is expected to genuinely believe that one is in fact a human battery, a disembodied brain or even shackled prisoner in a cave. A person exhibiting this belief in day to day life would be considered paranoid at the very least. The power is in the word ‘possibility’. That ‘The Matrix Possibility’ exists is enough to rock our knowledge foundations. I have to admit that I might be in the Matrix. This is unavoidable and hence things which I currently claim to know cannot be true. I have no way of knowing, through perception, reason or emotion, that I am not, in fact, currently in a pod of pink goo.

An obvious objection to this line of reasoning is that in the real world, we tend to think more of probability than of possibility. Whilst the Matrix is possible, it is intuitively highly improbable. Outside of philosophical papers, probable is more important. Show me that my idea is possibly false and I will seek to defend it, show me that it is probably false and I ought really to re-think it. On the improbability of the Matrix, one could look, however, to the work of Nick Bostrom. He suggests that it is highly likely that civilisation reaches a point where technology can simulate human minds effectively. Once this happens, the experiences of biological minds and computerised minds will be identical and both will think themselves not simulated. Simulated minds will far outnumber biological ones, since the technological capacity for storage is increasing so rapidly. We posit this in terms of a futuristic world, but cannot be sure that this future world has not already happened. Maybe it has, and we are simulated minds, programmed, of course, to think that we are not. The logic appears sound. And the Matrix thus becomes probable, not just possible.

Other objections exist. The idea that the world is just as it appears to us is often called naive realism. (One would be excused for inferring, from popular usage of the word, that this means that if one considers that one is actually sitting at a desk, tapping grey keys on an Acer laptop, listening to the English Chamber Orchestra’s rendition of ‘Silent Night’, one simply hasn’t really thought about it. Common-sense realism might be a better term.) Basically, four beliefs prevail. Firstly, there is an external physical world. Secondly, through our senses we can know propositions about it to be true: the sky is blue, fire is hot. Thirdly, these things are permanent – they don’t disappear when I do not perceive them (the tree in my garden is still there when I close my curtains). Finally, and crucially, we perceive the world much as it is and our claims to knowledge about it are, on the whole, justified and true.

One common objection to realism is that we cannot know things as they really are, only as they seem to us. If our eyes were differently constructed, fewer rods and more cones for example, or we used sonar instead of light vision, our perception of the world would be unimaginably different. All of our senses could be differently constructed, and hence our world view would be different. Illusions provide another fertile ground for objecting to realism. The stick half immersed in water is in fact straight, though it appears to me to be bent. The physical pain felt in an amputated limb also questions the validity of our senses.

Can a simple instance show that our senses can deliver knowledge? If I see an apple, ripe and red, do I not know it is an apple? I think that clearly if I have never had experience of apples, then I could not claim to know this. Could I at least claim to know that it was fruit, or food, or just red? Equally, I would suggest, without the previous experience of these concepts, our senses merely show us a scene – one which could be unintelligible and meaningless. Only when we apply understanding, use reason and appeal to previous experience can we begin to have knowledge. Kant wrote, in Critique of Pure Reason, ‘All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding and ends with reason.’ Kant proposed that there must be a mind-independent world existing outside of our sense experience since we can only make sense of perceptual experiences as responses to an external world. Hence, our senses give us the certain knowledge of the existence of an outside world. Kant’s transcendental idealism was a development of Berkeley’s idealism, that there is no external world independent of our experience of it. ‘To be is to be perceived,’ Berkeley wrote. This, however, begs the age-old question, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Berkeley was aware of this but his solution, to my mind, is no solution. He posits an omnipresent God, observing everything all the time, on our behalf. In other words, whilst Berkeley suggests that the world outside of our experiencing it doesn’t exist, it at the same time does exist, because God experiences it. I think that proposing something even more incredible as a means of explaining something incredible is intrinsically flawed.

The problem of the external world – do I have knowledge of how the world is, or only of how the world appears to be? – seems immutable. From the fact that there are dreams, hallucinations, perceptual errors and illusions, it seems clear that sensory experiences cannot present the actuality of the outside world. At best, they convey how it appears to us. The very possibility of The Matrix – that in some way we are being deceived and manipulated – is enough to make us doubt all. Much in the same way as Plato’s prisoner goes through a painful and gradual correction to the world outside the cave, ‘Neo’s rehab [in The Matrix] is painful. “Why do my eyes hurt? Neo asks. “Because you’ve never used them,” Morpheus replies.’ In a very real sense, none of us has. There is no escape from the ‘brain in the vat’.

Bibliography
Descartes – ‘Key Philosophical Writings’ (Translated: Haldane and Ross, edited: Chavez-Arvizo) Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997
Dupré, Ben, ’50 Philosophy Ideas you really need to know’ Quercus Publishing, 2007
Hospers, John – ‘An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis’
Routledge and Kegan Paul, Second Edition 1985
Irwin, William (ed) – ‘The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the desert of the real’
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2002
Lemos, Noah – ‘An Introduction to the theory of Knowledge’
Cambridge University Press, 2007
Pritchard, Duncan – ‘What is this thing called Knowledge?’ Routledge, 2006
Warburton Nigel (ed) - ‘Philosophy- Basic Readings’ Routledge, 2005

A new title

2010-05-15T08:07:00.002+07:00

Yes, a new title for the blog, reflecting new interests.... I'm now on my third module in my Philosophy Masters, and hope to use this blog as a sounding board of sorts. I'll also be posting essays and questions, so feel free to respond. My first completed essay - no great shakes, but interesting I thought - coming up today after this post.

One year on...

2010-05-02T20:35:00.001+07:00

It is almost a year since I last posted here. YOTM is dead I fear. I'm now tackling an MA in Philosophy, which is taking up all of my reading time and most of my writing time. I shall post on it here. My current battle is with Kant and his regulative ideas... Nice to be back.

Yeah, right, OK, I know...

2009-05-26T19:35:00.000+07:00

Still working on it. Honestly.

ok

2009-04-22T15:33:00.001+07:00

Okay, okay, I'm still working on it. Congratulations if you are actually following this blog. The long wait is about to pay off...

There's life in it yet...

2009-03-16T09:03:00.001+07:00

I sat at my computer last night and re-read the entire text of ‘The Year of the Monkey’. It’s significantly better than I remembered it. I moved chapters around and discarded the ‘jumping around’ notion to make it read chronologically. It’s easier for me to work on and will be an easier read. I realize now that I have wasted an inordinate amount of time playing with structure, instead of ‘just writing’. Something has clicked, and though I’ve said this before, I now see YOTM progressing.

Therapy

2009-02-28T09:43:00.001+07:00

Just finished reading 'Therapy', David Lodge. Not the most cheerful comedy ever, but insightful. And leading me to a re-write of YOTM. Or possibly, I realise as I write this, abandoning it in it's present form altogether, and taking half the idea to work it up into a full novel. I can't escape the fact, or course, that the endless questions and self-analysis are futile attempts at procrastination, and nothing is going to write itself.

Coming off!

2008-11-19T09:49:00.006+07:00

Having read 'The God Delusion', 2006, by Richard Dawkins, and, perhaps more powerfully having watched a series of programmes called 'Root of all Evil?', I have decided that I must take a stand against religion, that it would be morally wrong to remain 'sitting on the fence'. Here goes:

Throughout the world, we standardly make certain evidential requirements before we accept the truth of some statement: whether some experiment supports or disproves a scientific hypothesis does not depend on the country where the experiment was performed, and whether I am guilty of some crime or not should be decided regardless of my wealth and views, solely on the basis of the evidence before the court.

But there is one area in which societies usually don't make the same requirements, and that is in the area of people's religious beliefs, where we allow them to hold and express beliefs – and even act on them – that run counter to the best shared evidence we have, or that are at least not supported by generally-accepted evidence. In certain conversations we all step very carefully, don't we, worried we might offend?

It is because we feel we cannot challenge religious beliefs in the same way that we challenge other beliefs, that religion is liable to be exploited for other, political ends, and that it plays a role in much of the violence in the world, and not only large-scale violence – despite the fact that all major religions ostensibly preach peace, (at least when they are presented to outsiders.)

We therefore have to accept that all the 'nice' religious people, by claiming for themselves a certain area where the beliefs they hold are not to be subjected to the usual scrutiny and measured by the same standards of evidence that we, and they too, expect in all other areas of our lives, are giving cover to the 'fundamentalists' and 'extremists'.

It had always felt wrong that the 'nice' religious people so easily disowned violence perpetrated by their fellow-believers, in the name of the same god they believed in. I have now come to think that not only can they not disown it, they are implicated; and not only in the violence of their fellow-believers but in all religiously justified violence, in the name of any god.

This is not me, by the way, but Kai Arste, Atlantic College. (http://www.kahome.co.uk/index.php). However, I could now quite happily write and claim this as my own. I'm coming off the fence.

Still nothing...

2008-10-26T08:54:00.001+07:00

Some ideas, nothing concrete. For now, enjoying living. Have some copies of 'Alpha to Omega' on their way, so will make an effort to sell some more... No longer annoyed with myself for not writing; just not writing.

Another school year comes to an end...

2008-06-27T14:15:00.002+07:00

...and that's about it really.

It's been a while. I'm teaching. Preparing for big changes next year as Drama develops and IB CAS and TOK take all my time in preparation. TOK promises to be interesting - teaching Theory of Knowledge to 16-18 year olds. Revisiting philosophy. An idea for a novel is brewing, based upon the 'Henry Porter and the Stone Philosopher' parody which never really got off the ground. The debunking of religion could feature strongly - citing academic and philosophical components of the debate, but leaving Henry to make up his own mind. Possibilities. It needs a powerful twist though.

And YOTM has advanced not a jot. It deserves better than this. Perhaps this summer will see some progress. I seem to remember postulating the same thing about a year ago...

More food for thought

2008-04-29T10:42:00.000+07:00

1. How would it be to see snow for the first time?

Incomprehensible, assuming one were already an adult and had no conception of it from TV or similar exposure. That’s hard to imagine in this day and age though. Maybe it would even be frightening. Children see new things all the time, and would be completely unfazed.

2. Which would you choose if you had to: to be deaf or blind? Why?

I have always thought that being blind would be more frightening. Having considered it seriously in the light of a friend who is deaf and now going blind, however, I think I’d prefer (tough choice, I know) to be blind. If you are deaf you are truly cut off from other people, unable to communicate effectively, to appreciate music, to listen to speech. I think this form of isolation would, in the final analysis, scare me more.

3. Which job could you never do? Why?

Work in an abattoir. I’m a vegetarian.

4. Is there a book you have read and would actively persuade others NOT to read?

’Testament of Youth’ by Vera Brittain. I was supposed to read as part of my A-level English course and could never got more than half-way. It was just plain self-absorbed diatribe about the Second World War. Technically, it doesn’t count then, since I haven’t read it all. Now I never leave a book unfinished, however bad it may be. Having written a couple, I know the time and effort it takes, and as a reader, I owe at least that to the author.

5. ‘In 1990, compared to the two previous decades, The US saw the highest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes ever; teen arrests for forcible rape had doubled; teen murder rates quadrupled, mostly due to an increase in shooting. During those same decades, the suicide rate for teenagers tripled as did the number of children under fourteen who are murder victims.’

( ‘Emotional Intelligence’ Daniel Goleman Bloomsbury 1996.)

Why would anyone want to bring children into this world?

Because of sunsets and sunrises. Because of the ocean. Because of the smell of the air after a storm. Because of a grandparent’s smile. Because of humanity’s inherent optimism. Because of the sound of laughter. Because of the dew on a rose on a spring morning. Because even if they fall in love just once, just fleetingly, just momentarily and have that feeling returned, then it is worthwhile.

Chapter One, maybe...

2008-04-04T10:24:00.000+07:00

Chapter One: Paris 2003

Airports, by the very nature of their existence, are not places we want to be. Or so she thought. This was dead time. A transition from A to B which could only be waited out, be endured. A milling swarm, an ant nest without the purpose or direction. That was her first impression. Observing now, she could make out patterns in their movements, sense, almost, in their randomness. There was a steady stream to the bank of video screens announcing departures. There was a rapid discussion, sometimes heated, often confused, as voyagers disputed the meaning of the information thus presented. Typically someone, and usually a man, she noted somewhat glumly, would cut short such discussions and lead his tribe off in one direction with impressive confidence. Surveying the scene, she was playfully satisfied to note that it was more than once that such a group returned only to set of in a new direction, their guide reduced to trailing the rear, protesting the logic of his error. She considered the airport as an analogy of her own life: on hold, between destinations, waiting, in fact, to live. One stage finished, another to begin. And now, until something happened, something as yet unknown and buried beyond herself, she was in limbo. She liked the image, content to be blown as an autumnal leaf. Then she saw that it wasn’t such an apt image after all. She wasn’t allowing life to direct her arbitrarily; she was taking charge, choosing her destination, setting the ground rules. It was more a leap of faith, stepping out over the water, and trusting to luck, love and life to break her fall, envelop her and lead her home.

She amused herself with trying to recognize different nationalities as they passed, differing in their roaming, traipsing and prowling according to a benign melding of social programming and DNA. The Japanese were easy, preceded by their ubiquitous shutter-click stereotype. A stereotype, after all, she mused, has its foundations somewhere in reality. She recalled with a wry smile her arrival in London, and her new found friends’ jibes about onion sellers and stripy T-shirts. She had been at a loss to understand their references, far less their hysterical teenage guffaws. In turn she had been mildly disenchanted by her failure to find a plethora of pin-striped, pasty-faced bowler-hatted gents a la Magritte. But these Japanese were indeed photographing each other at customs, in the arrivals hall, saying their goodbyes, even buying their coffee and croissants. The Dutch were too easy, head and shoulders above the crowd. She was cheating now, she admitted to herself, slyly casting glances at the flights around which people were gathering. Near the departure point for a flight to Athens, a small group of Mediterraneans was arguing heatedly with a tired looking BA official, who was attempting to enforce the airports No Smoking policy. Their flight was two hours overdue, she saw. She recognized the mannerisms and general belligerence from her two weeks last summer on Kefalonia. She had been enamoured of what she saw of Greece, but to a similar degree, less than persuaded by what she had encountered in the Greek male.

It was this train of thought from which she was aroused by a persistent tug at her sleeve. Looking down, her eyes were met by others, older then her own, rheumy and kind. In contrast to the calm and compassionate face before her, she was then attacked by a barrage of sounds in a high pitched shriek. Already her past was catching up with her. ‘Xin loi,’ she managed to recall, and then dried up, embarrassed, adding unnecessarily, ‘I don’t speak Vietnamese.’

‘Ah, bon. Vous etes Viet-kieu hein?’ Vous. Always the politeness of form from elderly Vietnamese. Ridiculous considering that this grandmother must be three times her own age. Adopted already, she made her way to the check-in counter, pulling the suitcase of Ba Huong, as she had introduced herself, an early and unwelcome coincidence to tease at her mind.

Diving in the Far Islands

2008-02-19T09:58:00.003+07:00

A day's diving off the Far Islands in Thailand. Actually, the video is fairly naff, but I did get one or two good stills...

The last one is unexploded ordinance from Navy Exercises - gives one pause for thought at 15 metres...

I progresseth not...

2008-01-24T09:23:00.000+07:00

Nothing to note. I'm writing this, and it's the first thing I've written for weeks. Work, ill kids, house moves... all occupying stuff but basically excuses, albeit reasonable ones. I feel it coming though. I'm almost ready...

Publicity

2008-01-14T14:58:00.000+07:00

One of my books, 'Is', has received some internet publicity. Follow the links for a look...

Is - in detail, an author interview

Is - opening chapter

I'm not sure what kind of readership these blogs have, but almost certainly more than my own would be a good guess!

'the alpha to omega' should be available through Amazon and B&N very soon; watch this space...

Fifteen minutes?

2008-01-10T08:59:00.000+07:00

Do you have fifteen minutes to respond to these questions in a comment below?

1. How does an ice-cube feel as it melts?

2. If you were a day of the week, which day would you be and why?

3. Whom do you most admire in the public sphere?

4. What was the last book you read? Would you recommend it to others? Why?

5. The Muslim poet and mystic Rumi once wrote, ‘No sound of clapping comes from one hand without the other.’ Can you relate this to a personal experience?

Monday

2008-01-02T07:46:00.000+07:00

Monday morning apparently has more than it’s fair share of cardiac arrests. Studies have shown that more people die at 9.00am on a Monday morning than at any other time. Shocking, isn’t it?

Surprised? We really shouldn’t be. We spend most of our waking adult hours at work. Doing something in exchange for bits of paper which we can then use to exchange for ‘stuff’ that we want or need. Or stuff that we think we want or need. Not the same at all.

Why do we accept this? Most people, for a fact, choose to spend this significant portion of their lives doing something which they invest no thrill in, or that brings them no fulfilment, or that bores them, or, plainly, that they hate.

From within the rat-race, within the ‘job’, the things we worry about on a day-to-day basis seem important. Vital even. The 9-5 seeps into our real lives, into our sleep, robs us of vitality and hope. Take a couple of days off, however, and that emergency meeting and that urgent report take on a lesser significance. Step away further and they become funny, meaningless concerns.

Finally, step away for good, and one can find oneself feeling compassion for those who still attach importance to these things. Days take on new shapes. Important becomes a whole new concept. Urgent fades away. Obligation is only unto yourself. And life seems incalculably richer. Because it is.

And Monday mornings are just another opportunity to ask, ‘What shall I be today?’

I will never again accept the sick-in-the-stomach feeling of a Monday morning, obliged by someone else to do something I have no desire to be doing in order to have bartering power in a market place that disgusts me.

One, two, three!

2007-12-08T10:35:00.000+07:00

All three now available online.

I am now free of the 'burden' of revising and updating and formatting earlier works. I technically have no adequate reason for avoiding 'The Year of the Monkey'. We shall see what 2008 brings...

Convention of those wounded in love

2007-12-06T09:01:00.000+07:00

General provisions:

A – Whereas the saying “all is fair in love and war” is absolutely correct;

B – Whereas for war we have the Geneva Convention, approved on 22 August 1864, which provides for those wounded in the battle field, but until now no convention has been signed concerning those wounded in love, who are far greater in number;

It is hereby decreed that:

Article 1 – All lovers, of any sex, are alerted that love, besides being a blessing, is also something extremely dangerous, unpredictable and capable of causing serious damage. Consequently, anyone planning to love should be aware that they are exposing their body and soul to various types of wounds, and that they shall not be able to blame their partner at any moment, since the risk is the same for both.

Article 2 – Once struck by a stray arrow fired from Cupid’s bow, they should immediately ask the archer to shoot the same arrow in the opposite direction, so as not to be afflicted by the wound known as “unrequited love”. Should Cupid refuse to perform such a gesture, the Convention now being promulgated demands that the wounded partner remove the arrow from his/her heart and throw it in the garbage. In order to guarantee this, those concerned should avoid telephone calls, messages over the Internet, sending flowers that are always returned, or each and every means of seduction, since these may yield results in the short run but always end up wrong after a while. The Convention decrees that the wounded person should immediately seek the company of other people and try to control the obsessive thought: “this person is worth fighting for”.

Article 3 – If the wound is caused by third parties, in other words if the loved one has become interested in someone not in the script previously drafted, vengeance is expressly forbidden. In this case, it is allowed to use tears until the eyes dry up, to punch walls or pillows, to insult the ex-partner in conversations with friends, to allege his/her complete lack of taste, but without offending their honor. The Convention determines that the rule contained in Article 2 be applied: seek the company of other persons, preferably in places different from those frequented by the other party.

Article 4 – In the case of light wounds, herein classified as small treacheries, fulminating passions that are short-lived, passing sexual disinterest, the medicine called Pardon should be applied generously and quickly. Once this medicine has been applied, one should never reconsider one's decision, not even once, and the theme must be completely forgotten and never used as an argument in a fight or in a moment of hatred.

Article 5 – In all definitive wounds, also known as “breaking up”, the only medicine capable of having an effect is called Time. It is no use seeking consolation from fortune-tellers (who always say that the lost lover will return), romantic books (which always have a happy ending), soap-operas on the television or other such things. One should suffer intensely, completely avoiding drugs, tranquilizers and praying to saints. Alcohol is only tolerated if kept to a maximum of two glasses of wine a day.

Final determination: Those wounded in love, unlike those wounded in armed conflict, are neither victims nor torturers. They chose something that is part of life, and so they have to accept both the agony and the ecstasy of their choice.

And those who have never been wounded in love will never be able to say: “I have lived”. Because they haven’t.

Reproduced without pemission from Paulo Coelho's 'Warrior of the Light' newsletter. Visit his site at www.warriorofthelight.com

'the alpha to the omega' is published

2007-12-04T19:56:00.000+07:00

At long last, I can announce the publication of my second novel, "the alpha to omega".

You can order your copy now direct from Lulu Marketplace on the following link. If you can stand to wait four weeks, you will be able to order through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com...

http://www.lulu.com/content/1340659

"the alpha to omega" by Scott Langston www.scottlangston.org

What if?

Have you ever felt like just getting away from it all? Have you ever envisaged an exotic life abroad? An eternal holiday? Have you ever stopped to consider how your life would turn out if you took such a step? And which demons would you take with you?

Escaping a humdrum future and striking out for a new life in Greece may not be the answer. Sun, sea and copious amounts of alcohol serve as a backdrop for a journey of self-discovery and for romance.