Ahh... free will...

My landlady (who lives in the house) is 81 and regularly drinks whiskey for her 'medicinal needs', but is very intelligent and sharp even at her age, and has many interesting things to speak of. One of her favourite topics is her theory of metaphysics, as she often talks about us being here 'only temporarily', and that Earth is a 'learning planet' and it prepares us for some metaphysical eternity in a spirit world. And this often leads me to believe that perhaps she was one or the other of Schelling or Hegel in a former life.

Hegel because of the manner in which her conception of this spirit world seems to accord with Hegel's notion of 'Spirit'. She told me last night that when she is alone in bed, she sits awake and recalls anecdotes about the many friends that she has lost over the years and says that 'this makes them happy'. So I asked her about how spirits can have any sort of state of emotion. She said that it was impossible for them to have such, so I pushed her on what she meant by 'happy'. And then she said that thoughts create vibrations that connect with these spirits and (I am not sure on details, but perhaps one of these days I will have her dictate a pamphlet that goes into details about her theory) helps to 'right them' in some way. For example, she talks of how addictions pass to the spirit world, so of the many who died in this house: her husband, a few of her friends including Danny, and various other tenants; nearly all had an affinity for whiskey and that is why whiskey is a constant 'problem' in the house (e.g. for her), because the spirits need their fill as well. And these spirits who are still addicts and such are not ready yet to proceed to the next level/dimension/state or what have you. In a sense, it reminded me of the whole notion of Hegel's 'self-realization of Spirit' concept.

But more importantly for the purposes of this topic is the manner in which she is like Schelling, because although she speaks of some form of determinism, it is a 'soft determinism' as it were. She speaks of 'cosmic nudges' being the reason why, instead of reading a book from cover to cover, she opens it to a random page and begins reading, since this is where she was 'meant' to begin. I didn't go into the problems surrounding the ad hoc methodology of this act, though it does (probably not deliberately) open up some rather paradoxical questions... Freedom, she says (just like Schelling) is an UNCONSCIOUS decision that comes about before we are born: we choose the role we wish to play in life and then life is simply our playing out that role (and learning from it on this 'learning planet').

So this is Schelling's notion of free will. Basically, he agrees with Kant's agreement with Hume that there must be some sort of deterministic structure within the phenomenal world, but in attempting to solve the problem of 'Kantian duality', he proposes that solution.

One of the reasons why I thought to explore this topic now (and, by doing so, have put off for the moment continuing/concluding the 'Morals of the Wretched' train of thought, even though I know how I intend to go on with it) is because recent events (call them 'cosmic nudges' if you will) have brought a number of interesting videos to my attention. First was one that was shared on facebook by a friend of mine who I have known almost from the beginning of my school days and is fairly religious. It was called 'The God Within: exposing the false philosophy of modern science'. Now, there are quite a few strikes against it from my point view already: the mention of 'God' in direct contrast to 'modern science', and the fact that it was on a site called 'Natural News', where 'natural' often implies 'unscientific' and, hence, 'religious'. So I went in spoiling for a fight, but what I found that this documentary (part I of it, at least) is completely and utterly correct. It criticizes Hawking's narrow-minded 'scientism' and declaration that 'philosophy is dead' on perfectly legitimate grounds. In fact, it seems that 'The God Within' has a number of possible connotations within the video, referring to, at different times the Higgs boson (the so-called 'God particle), omniscience in the form of a 'theory of everything', the notion of consciousness (i.e. the deus ex machina mind-body duality), and, of course, the manner in which science (albeit very legitimately) always side-steps the notion of the existence of some form of omniscient, omnipotent 'God' as presented in most monotheistic religions.

Because of the effect that this had on me, I passed it on to a close friend (and former philosophy professor) of mine, who replied that she would 'probably show it to her next 102 class' which is the 'Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge' philosophy course at the University of Alberta. In her reply, she also talked about Libet's experiment and sent me a video about mathematician and BBC Correspondent Marcus du Sautoy (who, funnily enough, was the supervisor of my current supervisor) doing an interesting scientific experiment into notions of free will and consciousness in the form of simple decision making. I won't spoil the ending (watch the video), but the results are quite scary and profound.

Another idealist, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote an award-winning 'essay' called 'On the Freedom of the Will'. He concluded that there was no such thing, because, as the above video shows, there is a 'deterministic mechanism' to the manner in which decisions are made (and the notion of 'free will' can be entirely summed up by decision making). BUT, the problem with this 'scientific proof' is that all it does it 'push' the notion of conscious decision making back into the unconscious. Schopenhauer's Will/Representation duality implied that our unconscious acts depend on (i.e. we are enslaved by) 'will', which in turn, is determined by a complicated combination of 'empirical programming' from the world of representations (i.e. the empirical world) and an unconscious development that we cannot know, but is also somehow deterministic. So basically, what the above experiment shows is that yes, there is a deterministic process going on that we are unaware of. However, it does not necessarily follow that the 'origins' of this process, whatever they might be, are also deterministic.

The alternative, then, leads into a sort of 'soft determinism' or 'compatibilism' that allows us to say that we are CONSCIOUSLY deterministic, but UNCONSCIOUSLY free somehow. How are we free? Well, as I mentioned above, Schelling provides one theory in terms of how we are free, and there are many others. From what I know, one of the most interesting and complex ones is the recent compatibilist theory put forward by Daniel Dennett. I have not read any of his stuff, so I cannot go into details about what it implies or how it is different, but if anyone is interested, they can hear some of Dennett's own reflections on both the difficulty of the topic and the manner in which he attempts to circumvent it. (On another note, I came across a further interesting notion of compatibilism while attending a political science conference in Chicago in 2010 as part of my thesis. It that of the post-Marxist Ernst Bloch, who tries to 'unpack' Marxist notions of determinism as they arrive from historical dialecticism. The best summary can be found in his book 'On Karl Marx' as I have heard that his magnum opus 'The Principle of Hope' is very long, complicated, and oftentimes rambling.)

But to get back to 'The God Within' documentary, it also had an effect on me because the manner in which this 'narrow-minded scientism' is attacked based on its unwillingness to engage with notions like consciousness reminded me a lot of Adam Curtis' 'The Trap' (for those interested, there are three sections, 'F*ck You Buddy', 'The Lonely Robot', and 'We Will Force You to Be Free', each divided into six youtube sections) which launches a similar attack at similarly narrow-minded political and economic 'models' that are based on assessments of people as 'rational games players' which, for the most part, they are not.

And with respect to my landlady, although she has some rather unwanted habits (like allowing her dogs to lick the pots of the remnants of what's been cooked in them and then deeming it sufficient 'cook' the pots themselves on the stove to re-sanitize them), her amazing breadth of interesting idiosyncracies make it so that I'm more than willing to make certain sacrifices to stick around.

Cargo Cults, Causality, Capitalism (and Mathematics) (Part I)

It is interesting how the strangest discussions can produce some of the most amazing moments of clarity and insight.

I will always remember the local bus ride from Bhubaneswar to Puri, not so much because of the scenery (which was quite amazing!), but because of the subject matter of the conversation. I was sitting with my traveling cohort in the bus, trying to think of something to pass the time. So I turned to him and asked him 'What do you think the strangest possible name for a city could be?' We threw around a few names and had a few laughs, and then he mentioned one name that I cannot repeat here because the title was so ironic and hilarious in so many ways, that it quickly went from a discussion about random names to analyzing this odd phrase. And from that phrase grew an idea for a novel that could be used as an allegory to produce a rather damning critique of the practices of the rich global elite. As the plot got more and more absurd the more 'accurate' the metaphor was, my friend mentioned that he wanted some place in it for some sort of cargo cult (as he thought that this would be a rather hilariously naive sequence of events to add). At the time, it seemed a bit daunting to know how to fit it all in (and he soon put me in sole charge of any sort of novel that might come of it, so I tried to develop the idea and still believe it can and should be written once I get the time to do so, hence why I would rather not reveal the phrase in question).

But recently I was reminded of this with regard to the situation in Libya and Africa in general. I started using the term 'cargo cult' to describe a lot of American foreign policy because by looking through history, it seems that in the post-WWII era almost every coup, coup attempt, or other such means to usurp power in the third world has some connection to the United States (and, it seems, the World Bank and IMF are not far behind) either as supporting it or helping to defeat it: Chile, Brazil, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Vietnam, Korea, Philippines, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Iraq, Iran, the list goes on.

And in the aftermath of these we see the hypocrisy surrounding American claims for 'freedom', 'democracy', and 'overthrowing of dictators'. Few Chileans, for example, will forget the brutality of Pinochet, few Congolese will forget the personality cult and autocracy of Mobutu, few Egyptians will forget the exploitation by Mubarak. And of course, there is the perpetual eye-sore of Vietnam: when I was in HCMC/Saigon, I did the rounds in the Vietnam War Museum and literally left in tears. Of course, the term cargo cult refers to the ill-conceived beliefs of various tribes of Pacific Islanders throughout history believing that foreign explorers were spirits, etc., but it is also idiomatically used (in the words of wikipedia) "to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance". In other words, for some reason (well... not 'some reason', but mostly due to the overinflated Western media spreading its hegemonic pro-capitalist message) too often people see the United States as some sort of unbiased saviour and morally righteous actor in a Manichean interpretation of the global world. If only they would learn a bit of history.

Anyway, where philosophy really kicks in here is the fact that what underlines cargo cults is an egregious logical flaw: P implies Q is obviously not logically equivalent to Q implies P, and moreover, the association of two events does not necessarily imply logical dependence. So we have that explorers come and bring strange goods to the islands, but that doesnt imply that strange goods on an island implies explorers came (as in, instead of making religious sacrifices, these goods could be scientifically assessed to try to recreate them without 'foreign intervention'), nor does it mean that a certain religious ceremony being performed on the day that said explorers arrive implies that the perpetuation of said ceremony will imply that said explorers will arrive again. The same ideas can be applied to American foreign policy: even if American foreign policy produces 'change' (irrespective of one's assessment of the qualities of said change), this does not mean that some sort of change requires the intervention of a Western power. Moreover, 'change' and 'good' are not always synonymous, and history shows that there are many 'changes' that the US has brought about that really aren't so 'good'.

For example, it is clear from the difference I see in the manner in which some/many South Africans conduct themselves socially versus the ease in which other Africans conduct themselves socially that the apartheid history has had a major effect on South Africa. A brief look into the books of history shows that the Soweto uprisings in 1976 should have spelled the beginning of the end for apartheid in South Africa. By December of 1980, the Carter administration had almost convinced Botha, the leader of the apartheid government, to grant Namibia its independence, and this would likely have had a domino effect on political policies in South Africa in general. A month later, Botha suddenly made an about turn. The reason? Reagan became president and threw his weight behind Botha's racist regime in order to have a staunchly anti-communist ally to undermine socialism in southern Africa and possible give Reagan an upper hand in the Cold War: cue a lengthy civil war in Angola, and a perpetuation of apartheid in South Africa for a further ten years. And, of course, cue the 'sacrifices' for the sake of perpetuating American self-interest. Interestingly, a main reason for Botha relinquishing control of the ruling party was because of a heart attack he experienced two days before Reagan's second term ended. He expected an individual that backed his apartheid approach would come into power, but he guessed wrong and De Klerk gained control of the National Party, the catalyst for the end of apartheid. Although Botha bitterly maintained his hold on the presidency for a further six months, he relinquished control in protest when he realized that he no longer had any power.

If one agrees that the perpetuation of apartheid in South Africa was not 'a good', but one doubts the role that the US played, they can read various letters between Reagan and Botha that are available in the public domain. Reagan's response to Botha includes an opinion that criticisms of South African policy (i.e. apartheid) are “over-simplified or distorted notions and frequently from sources that have little to brag about themselves,” maintaining it was “all the more imperative that pro-democratic blacks join – and be seen to join – [Botha] in building a new South Africa.” On the other hand, he offers the following 'political support': “it will be possible for my administration, our business community and key allies of the United States to play a more constructive role” in backing the South African apartheid government. Of course, this was dependent on various 'conditions' being met, including support for Angolan free-marketer Jonas Savimbi (which resulted in South Africa invading Angola and contributing to a decade-long civil war) in order to "erode Soviet political influence over Angola", and a commitment to the Nkomati Accord, which basically monitored and put pressure on socialist moves in Mozambique and, indirectly, in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

If one STILL does not agree, that individual should note that the passing of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act passed in 1986 by the US administration, which really turned the thumbscrews on the Botha government by isolating South Africa economically, was vetoed by Reagan. It is the only instance in the 20th century when a presidential veto on foreign policy was overturned by the necessary two-thirds majority in Congress.

ANYWAY, after I thought about it in this way, I realized that perhaps a cargo cult really is needed in that novel... if I ever get around to writing it.

Tune in later (maybe tomorrow if I get around to it) for Part II, which, I promise, will include some talk of mathematics (YAY!) and will not include tirades that 'vilify' those involved in enacting and carrying out the policies of Team America World Police.

In the beginning, there was...

The infinite regress crops up more than one might think. Consider the following fairly common theological argument:

A: Where did you come from?
B: My parents.
A: And where did they come?
B: My grandparents?
A: And where did they come?
B: Great grandparents.
A: But you can go back and back and back and back, and eventually you will have a problem, no? So there must be a Creator.

This is, in essence, the 'Cosmological Proof' of Thomas Aquinas. A short version is the following:
1. Every being is either a dependent or a self-existent being.
2. Not every being can be a dependent being.
3. Therefore there must be a self-existent being.

Of course, this does not tell us anything about the nature of this self-existent being. Indeed, a deist can turn around and say "that may be true, but why should this self-existent being care about us at all? If I walk along the beach, I leave footprints in the sand. I don't deny that these footprints cannot be uncaused, and that I am the cause, but it doesn't mean that I care about them after the fact." And indeed, an atheist can go further and say "why not just claim that the universe itself is a self-existent being?" (This would include the 'oscillating universe' cosmological theory.

So although the infinite regress may be a weapon for an argument, one must be careful that it is not turned against oneself!

Another area in which the infinite regress poses problems is with respect to the notion of 'a priori' knowledge. That is, knowledge prior to experience. Descartes, a rationalist, required an a priori justification for existence in his famous 'cogito ergo sum' argument. The clashes between the ideas of contemporaries Leibniz (the same Leibniz whose name arises in mathematics) and Locke with regard to whether or not a priori knowledge was possible is, in some ways, a definitive characterization of the difference between rationalism and empiricism.

Let us consider another major problem that the infinite regress points to: that of determinism. If everything must have a cause, then how is liberty/free will possible? This is a very important question, since its being posed by Hume in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was what 'woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber'. Hume had concluded

"Whatever definition we may give to liberty, we should be careful to observe two requisite circumstances; first, that it be consistent with plain matter of fact; secondly, that it be consistent with itself. If we observe these circumstances, and render our definition intelligible, I am persuaded that all mankind will be found of one opinion with regard to it[:] … liberty, when opposed to necessity, not to constraint, is the same thing with chance; which is universally allowed to have no existence."

In other words, we can be 'free' with respect to constraint (e.g. not in prison), but our actions are necessitated by something else, i.e. according to Hume free will is impossible. One can conceive of it in the following way: consider every second or millisecond or ample 'division of time' as a 'frame' of existence. Then every 'frame' is somehow dependent on the previous 'frame'. If I suddenly 'choose' to go for a walk, it is only because there was something in the previous 'frame' that prompted me to do so, whatever that may have been.

Kant took this problem very seriously, and eventually attempted to argue that sponte (that is, uncaused events) can arise in the realm of thought. This prompted the German idealists after him: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer to name a few, to come up with a way to 'iron out' the problems with regard to Kant's notions of freedom, i.e. the 'uncaused cause', though Schopenhauer broke from this trend and, in his essay 'On the Freedom of the Will', sides with Hume and explains that there cannot be such a thing as free will. Kant is one of the most important philosophers in the history of modern philosophy. His ideas led the way to Hegel who led the way to Marx, et al, and to Schopenhauer who led the way to Nietzsche, et al. Schelling's is often considered to be the first person to coin the term 'unconscious' and his ideas are a major contribution to modern psychology.

So, we have a lot that we owe to the infinite regress, unless, of course, ignorance is, indeed, bliss. For one cannot even begin to ponder a world without Kant.

Where would we be now if Kant had remained asleep?

Let's see... where can I begin...?

It may be seen as the bane of philosophy, and the boon of scepticism. We have all had the experience, especially with young children: an inquiring mind asks for an explanation, and upon giving the explanation, you are again asked a justification for this explanation, and on and on and on, until you have to say something to the effect of 'I don't know' or 'it just is', or you have to give a response akin to 'I don't have time for this'. It is the infinite regress. And it stems from the apparent absurdity of the 'causa incausata', the uncaused cause. In other words, it comes down to the question, how can something result from nothing (and/or itself)?

There are two main areas where this shows itself: in metaphysics, and in epistemology. In metaphysics, it arises because of the nature of time and its connection to causality: if something happens, there seemingly must be something that happened before it to cause it to be so; in epistemology (in which the problem is not so different) it follows the pattern of the above paragraph: if you want to argue for or establish a truth, you must provide a justification, but then this justification must also have a justification, and so on, ad infinitum.

The problem of the infinite regress is used mostly for a sceptical approach. One of the first (over 1500 years before Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and, arguably, the most illuminating summary of this idea is that of Sextus Empiricus (ca. 160-210 AD) in his Outlines of Scepticism. He describes the two situations thus:

I) [Epistemic] [179] They do not concede that anything can be apprehended by means of something else. If that by means of which something is apprehended will itself always need to be apprehended by means of something else, they throw you into the reciprocal or infinite mode; and if you should want to assume that that by means of which another thing is apprehended is itself apprehended by means of itself, then this is countered by the fact that, for the above reasons [which I have excluded], nothing is apprehended by means of itself.

II) [Metaphysical] [185] The [causal] explanation which is offered will either be in agreement with all the philosophical schools as well as with Scepticism and what is apparent or it will not. No doubt it cannot be in agreement; for both what is apparent and what is unclear are all subject to dispute. [186] But if it is subject to dispute, we shall ask for an explanation for this explanation as well; and if he gives an apparent explanation for an apparent explanation or an unclear of an unclear, he will be thrown back ad infinitum, whereas if he gives his explanation crosswise he will fall into the reciprocal mode. If he takes a stand somewhere, then either he will say that the explanation holds so far as what he has said goes, and will introduce something relative, rejecting what is by nature, or else he will assume something as a hypothesis and be led to suspend judgment.


One should note, however, that Sextus is not an absolute sceptic i.e. he is careful to limit this to 'belief', whereas "[Pyrrhonian] Sceptics assent to the feelings forced upon them by appearances—for example, they would not say, when heated or chilled, 'I think I am not heated (or: chilled)'. Rather, we say that they do not hold beliefs in the sense in which some say that belief is assent to some unclear object of investigation in the sciences."

So what is to be done? Must we, when asked for an explanation, however simple, heed the same warning that Dante put above the gates of Hell in The Inferno, namely "Abandon hope all ye who enter here"?