On Thursday I was standing in line at the Pick n' Pay deli waiting to order some food. I had just finished talking to a friend of mine who happened to be at the front of the same line I was in, when I heard something fall onto the floor. I thought I had dropped something, but it turned out that after just over 8 months, the strings of the bracelet I had been given by some random in Chandigarh some time during the second week of September had finally broken.
When I had joined my friend in Chandigarh after a hold-up of an extra night in Bombay when I was told that three weeks after I had booked my flight from Bombay to Chandigarh, Kingfisher had canceled the route due to lack of demand, and now I would have to fly the next morning via Delhi (those this was replacement was provided to me at no charge). Anyway, when I arrived, my friend was hanging with an Aussie gal that he had met in Manali, and we spent a couple of days in Chandigarh before heading back to Himachal Pradesh. During that time, we met a local gal from India who gave us her contact number, and the next day we met up with her she had bought us all little trinkets that were symbols of friendship. I forget what the Aussie gal got, but my friend got a neon rubber wristband, kind of like the Lance Armstrong 'Livestrong' bands, but instead it said 'Be my friend'; and then I get a wristband with five stones of a brown and white mixed colour tied together with strings. At first I thought, 'what am I supposed to do with this? This sort of thing really isn't my thing', but I tied it on anyway, and I hadn't removed it since. Not for sleeping, not for showering, not for playing sports, nothing. But in the last month or so, I saw that the strings had started to really fray and knew that it would be only a matter of time before it snapped off.
But it got me thinking, what is it that I will miss by not having this bracelet on? And then I got to thinking where the whole notion of lucky coins and rabbit's feet and who knows what else endows us with some notion of luck. Is seems like the reality of the situation is something akin to 'the magic feather' in the Disney's Dumbo, which the mouse uses as a psychological trick to convince Dumbo that he can fly. At a later time during one of the stunts, Dumbo loses the magic feather, but the mouse is able to convince him that it actually has nothing to do with the feather at all. It's simply to do with ability.
So how is it that we attribute our good fortune to the possession or lack thereof of some trinket? A lot of it is, of course, simply down to psychology. It is a sort of 'crutch' to give us confidence when we need it, and provide us with a means to exonerate us of responsibility if/when we fail. In a way, it works sort of like a horoscope. If you're horoscope is good, you will face the day with a positive outlook and try to make stuff happen, giving the best chance to get results. If your horoscope is not so good, you may end up approaching it as such and missing opportunities or rejecting them out of a certain amount of pessimism. However, as far as I know, most studies claim that if we lived our lives outside of knowledge of horoscopes, our success/fail rate would be pretty close to the good day/bad day rate that our corresponding horoscopes would give us. But then again, I can't really say for certain that the manner in which the stars interact has some bearing on the manner in which we function. However, given that the night sky is simply a projection of 3-dimensional space onto a 2-dimensional canvas, and the patterns between stars are based on our unique vantage point rather than anything else, and the fact that most forces have no real bearing on such large distances makes me think otherwise.
Let us take the case of the 'Bermuda Triangle', supposedly a place where accidents constantly occurred, and many vessels 'disappeared without a trace', leading people to speak of everything from violent storms to alien abductions. But, according to wiki,
"Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents were inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have stated that the number and nature of disappearances in the region is similar to that in any other area of ocean."
For example,
"When the UK Channel 4 television program "The Bermuda Triangle" (c. 1992) was being produced by John Simmons of Geofilms for the Equinox series, the marine insurer Lloyd's of London was asked if an unusually large number of ships had sunk in the Bermuda Triangle area. Lloyd's of London determined that large numbers of ships had not sunk there. United States Coast Guard records confirm their conclusion. In fact, the number of supposed disappearances is relatively insignificant considering the number of ships and aircraft that pass through on a regular basis."
It is at the basis of a common misconception which is various much related to the placebo effect: too often the events and evidence to back up our claims is more readily available because we are actually making a concerted effort to document them. People will say 'my horoscope says that I should have a good day', and the positives are taken out of it, and when you are supposed to have a bad day, the situation is reversed. In Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap (available in full on youtube), he talks about the number of people who suddenly started to diagnose themselves for psychological trauma when all they were doing was feeling normal emotions. And then it becomes a downward spiral; the anxiety heightens the more we look for evidence that there is indeed something wrong, which further exacerbates the wrong that we see.
For me, I strongly believe that we make our own luck. Of course, fortune and misfortune will always smile (or frown) upon us, but the more opportunities and options we give ourselves to succeed, and the less we rely on superstition to take responsibility from us, the better off we are.
And, ultimately, the luckier we become.
Showing posts with label metaphysics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metaphysics. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
The Morals of the Wretched (Conclusion)
Well, it's nice to wake up for the second straight day to a fire-and-brimstone-free morning. However, there are likely a fair few (including Harold Camping) that are NOT waking up to an egg-on-face-free morning. Though I AM waking up to another been-to-Mzoli's-free day, as the plan for Sunday failed to materialize. Such as it is.
As I mentioned in my previous post, (oh, and by the way, here is the B.I.N. Laden parody I mentioned), we were supposed to experience the end of the world on Saturday. It failed to materialize (as far as I can see, though it seems people continue to justify that there was an apocalypse in SOME domain and the world will, indeed, end on October 21... after what will likely be a disappointingly tame six months of fire and brimstone), and there a fair few articles about the after-effects, but one of the most interesting articles includes a psychologist's assessment:
"It's very hard for us to say, 'Boy, was I stupid!' " says Elliot Aronson, a prominent psychologist and co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, And Hurtful Acts.
"The more committed a person is to their prophecy," he says, "the more likely they are to justify that action, and to try to convince people that their belief was in some way right or good."
I mention that simply because a lot of what I have talked about during this thread has to do with psychology and its 'consequences. So with that in mind, let's move on to the two anecdotes I promised:
The first involves a family I stayed with in Elsiesrivier, one of the more notoriously dangerous 'coloured' suburbs in Cape Town. Because the train ends early and the taxi service ends early, there were more than a few instances where I had to walk about twenty blocks through said 'notorious' neighbourhood to get back to where I was staying, and when I arrived safely, it was always 'a miracle' that I survived. But that's not really the story; it just sets the tone.
This family is devoutly Christian. The father is born-again, or some such, saying that he turned to it as a means to getting his anger and violence in check. And from the stories I've heard he's a pretty crazy mofo telling me about numerous times when he let his fists do the talking with some fairly extreme consequences for others (he kind of has to being a white South African in a coloured neighbourhood) and also about the insane shit that he went through while 'fighting the Cubans in Angola' during the early 80s.
Anyway, during one exchange about religion, I was pressed about whether or not I believed in God. I replied that I had no opinion. I was told that that is not possible. I replied that I don't know enough about it to conclude one way or the other, so I just let it be; at the end of the day, whether God exists or not is beyond my comprehension, and it won't affect the way I live my life, so who cares? Just like I don't know enough about quantum physics or string theory or M-theory or the Higgs Boson or who knows what else to have an opinion. Why is it that the existence of God seems to be the one highly contentious metaphysical issue in the world that you have to have an opinion on??
So anyway, as a demonstration of my apparent 'stupidity', the daughter of 17 called in the 5 to come into the room. And she proceeded to put him on the spot: "Wilfred, does God exist?" He had a very wide-eyed anxious look on his face, and didn't answer. She repeated the question. Still the only response was him searching the eyes of everybody in the room (the sister, the mother, and I, all of whom he knew quite well and was very comfortable around by the time). After a third time, he let out a barely audible, totally unconfident 'yeaaaahhhh'. He was then sent from the room and the daughter triumphantly declared, 'there, you see? A 5-year-old!' I could have gone on and told her how completely ridiculous this 'proof' was, but I decided to save my breath because I knew I wouldn't get anywhere. Whenever I need some sort of religious insight, I always turn to Herr Kierkegaard, and this instance is no exception:
"If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd."
"The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever."
But the inquiries kept coming as to how I could not be religious. So one day, I sat down at my laptop, and composed a brief text file, which was basically an outline of the argument put forward by Nietzsche in 'The Genealogy of Morals' that I've already briefly summarized in Part I. After reading through it, the mother said something to the effect of 'if I didn't know you better, I would think that the Devil was in you'. And I immediately launched my usual counter-attack to these sorts of absurd allegations, namely if the sole purpose of the Devil is to corrupt Christians, then surely he would have been clever enough to write a book, claim it was actually written by God, and have all Christians follow it blindly...
Anyway, perhaps the ending of that was rather anti-climactic. I find most religious debates are, since it usually ends with people agreeing to disagree because neither will budge from their position. But let me speak of another thing that happened to me, the irony of which was so incredibly amusing, and everything set up so incredibly perfectly, if anything would have made me religious it would have been that. But then the way Christians proclaim God as dolefully caring and just, rather than a trickster having a rich sense of humour, the god I would be forced to believe in would be nothing like that. If anything I would have to choose a Loki-esque god. But anyway, here goes (this is a cut-and-paste job I sent to a friend of mine from back in January):
A few days ago I had to invigilate on a math exam. When it ended at 7PM I headed to the train station. There, a man with few teeth and whom age had seemingly not been kind to poked his head around the corner and told me that when he saw me, Jesus came to mind, and, predictably, started launching into a monologue that I have heard many times before wherein people talk about how much they had sinned in the past, then found Jesus and dropped all their bad habits because they had given themselves over to God, God was watching, God would judge, etc. So eventually the train arrived, we went our separate ways and whatever.
Today, I got on the train and found that this same guy was coming towards me trying to sell things to various traingoers (as many in this country do), but he hadnt seen me as he was too busy selling. And even despite the narrow passageway, he didnt look up when he squeezed past me standing in the middle of the aisle, but all the while I was observing him. Then a funny thing happened:
I was standing near the end of the traincar, with only about 4 people on each side in the seats between me and the end of the traincar. And as he got to the very end, he turned to a girl who had apparently asked for what he was selling, but instead of conducting himself in an appropriate manner, he took what he was selling (small sealed packages of razorblades) and made an attempt to place it between the rather massive cleavage that was hanging out the top of her shirt. She appeared very disconcerted about it and he quickly righted himself by jokingly saying 'no sorry let me place it in your hand, all the while sporting the sly grin of an old pervert'.
So of course I started to laugh inside at the irony of it: that he had basically confessed to me as if I was Jesus one day, and then, after walking past me as if I wasnt there, proceeded to 'sin' in front of me, all the while, unbeknownst to him, 'God' was indeed watching.
So after this little episode, he started back, noticed me, asked if i remembered him and what we had talked about. I, still quite amused, said nonchalantly 'dont you think thats a bit hypocritical after that?' and nodded in the direction of the 'incident'. So he murmured some excuse that it was her who had asked him to place it in her breasts and he (gentleman that he was) had declined and placed it in her hand instead ('didn't you see?' he asked). After which he quickly changed the subject to loudly mentioning something about my apparent non-committal to religion and slunk away out of the traincar at the next station.
Maybe next time, he'll take a quick look about to see if 'God' is watching before he decides to 'sin' again, no?
As I mentioned in my previous post, (oh, and by the way, here is the B.I.N. Laden parody I mentioned), we were supposed to experience the end of the world on Saturday. It failed to materialize (as far as I can see, though it seems people continue to justify that there was an apocalypse in SOME domain and the world will, indeed, end on October 21... after what will likely be a disappointingly tame six months of fire and brimstone), and there a fair few articles about the after-effects, but one of the most interesting articles includes a psychologist's assessment:
"It's very hard for us to say, 'Boy, was I stupid!' " says Elliot Aronson, a prominent psychologist and co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, And Hurtful Acts.
"The more committed a person is to their prophecy," he says, "the more likely they are to justify that action, and to try to convince people that their belief was in some way right or good."
I mention that simply because a lot of what I have talked about during this thread has to do with psychology and its 'consequences. So with that in mind, let's move on to the two anecdotes I promised:
The first involves a family I stayed with in Elsiesrivier, one of the more notoriously dangerous 'coloured' suburbs in Cape Town. Because the train ends early and the taxi service ends early, there were more than a few instances where I had to walk about twenty blocks through said 'notorious' neighbourhood to get back to where I was staying, and when I arrived safely, it was always 'a miracle' that I survived. But that's not really the story; it just sets the tone.
This family is devoutly Christian. The father is born-again, or some such, saying that he turned to it as a means to getting his anger and violence in check. And from the stories I've heard he's a pretty crazy mofo telling me about numerous times when he let his fists do the talking with some fairly extreme consequences for others (he kind of has to being a white South African in a coloured neighbourhood) and also about the insane shit that he went through while 'fighting the Cubans in Angola' during the early 80s.
Anyway, during one exchange about religion, I was pressed about whether or not I believed in God. I replied that I had no opinion. I was told that that is not possible. I replied that I don't know enough about it to conclude one way or the other, so I just let it be; at the end of the day, whether God exists or not is beyond my comprehension, and it won't affect the way I live my life, so who cares? Just like I don't know enough about quantum physics or string theory or M-theory or the Higgs Boson or who knows what else to have an opinion. Why is it that the existence of God seems to be the one highly contentious metaphysical issue in the world that you have to have an opinion on??
So anyway, as a demonstration of my apparent 'stupidity', the daughter of 17 called in the 5 to come into the room. And she proceeded to put him on the spot: "Wilfred, does God exist?" He had a very wide-eyed anxious look on his face, and didn't answer. She repeated the question. Still the only response was him searching the eyes of everybody in the room (the sister, the mother, and I, all of whom he knew quite well and was very comfortable around by the time). After a third time, he let out a barely audible, totally unconfident 'yeaaaahhhh'. He was then sent from the room and the daughter triumphantly declared, 'there, you see? A 5-year-old!' I could have gone on and told her how completely ridiculous this 'proof' was, but I decided to save my breath because I knew I wouldn't get anywhere. Whenever I need some sort of religious insight, I always turn to Herr Kierkegaard, and this instance is no exception:
"If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd."
"The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever."
But the inquiries kept coming as to how I could not be religious. So one day, I sat down at my laptop, and composed a brief text file, which was basically an outline of the argument put forward by Nietzsche in 'The Genealogy of Morals' that I've already briefly summarized in Part I. After reading through it, the mother said something to the effect of 'if I didn't know you better, I would think that the Devil was in you'. And I immediately launched my usual counter-attack to these sorts of absurd allegations, namely if the sole purpose of the Devil is to corrupt Christians, then surely he would have been clever enough to write a book, claim it was actually written by God, and have all Christians follow it blindly...
Anyway, perhaps the ending of that was rather anti-climactic. I find most religious debates are, since it usually ends with people agreeing to disagree because neither will budge from their position. But let me speak of another thing that happened to me, the irony of which was so incredibly amusing, and everything set up so incredibly perfectly, if anything would have made me religious it would have been that. But then the way Christians proclaim God as dolefully caring and just, rather than a trickster having a rich sense of humour, the god I would be forced to believe in would be nothing like that. If anything I would have to choose a Loki-esque god. But anyway, here goes (this is a cut-and-paste job I sent to a friend of mine from back in January):
A few days ago I had to invigilate on a math exam. When it ended at 7PM I headed to the train station. There, a man with few teeth and whom age had seemingly not been kind to poked his head around the corner and told me that when he saw me, Jesus came to mind, and, predictably, started launching into a monologue that I have heard many times before wherein people talk about how much they had sinned in the past, then found Jesus and dropped all their bad habits because they had given themselves over to God, God was watching, God would judge, etc. So eventually the train arrived, we went our separate ways and whatever.
Today, I got on the train and found that this same guy was coming towards me trying to sell things to various traingoers (as many in this country do), but he hadnt seen me as he was too busy selling. And even despite the narrow passageway, he didnt look up when he squeezed past me standing in the middle of the aisle, but all the while I was observing him. Then a funny thing happened:
I was standing near the end of the traincar, with only about 4 people on each side in the seats between me and the end of the traincar. And as he got to the very end, he turned to a girl who had apparently asked for what he was selling, but instead of conducting himself in an appropriate manner, he took what he was selling (small sealed packages of razorblades) and made an attempt to place it between the rather massive cleavage that was hanging out the top of her shirt. She appeared very disconcerted about it and he quickly righted himself by jokingly saying 'no sorry let me place it in your hand, all the while sporting the sly grin of an old pervert'.
So of course I started to laugh inside at the irony of it: that he had basically confessed to me as if I was Jesus one day, and then, after walking past me as if I wasnt there, proceeded to 'sin' in front of me, all the while, unbeknownst to him, 'God' was indeed watching.
So after this little episode, he started back, noticed me, asked if i remembered him and what we had talked about. I, still quite amused, said nonchalantly 'dont you think thats a bit hypocritical after that?' and nodded in the direction of the 'incident'. So he murmured some excuse that it was her who had asked him to place it in her breasts and he (gentleman that he was) had declined and placed it in her hand instead ('didn't you see?' he asked). After which he quickly changed the subject to loudly mentioning something about my apparent non-committal to religion and slunk away out of the traincar at the next station.
Maybe next time, he'll take a quick look about to see if 'God' is watching before he decides to 'sin' again, no?
Saturday, May 14, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Philosophy in a Nutshell
Although philosophy has a long legacy, and is arguably responsible for all things academic (the natural sciences coming from Aristotle, psychology and sociology being 'applied philosophy' from the 1800s i.e. Freud on the one hand, and Comte and Durkheim on the other, mathematics coming from the Ancient Greeks).
Basically, philosophy was first summarized to me as an attempt to answer three questions:
1) Who are we?
2) What do we know?
3) What should we do?
The first question is usually dealt with in metaphysics, the second in epistemology, and the third in ethics and political/social philosophy. But of course there is a vast overlap between the two. 'Are we ethical beings?' might be a question put to the first, and this directly affects how the third should be answered, although in all fairness putting such a question to the first is already having 'loaded' it.
But more so, it is amazing that bashing away at these simple questions for millenia has basically made the world how we see it today. We apply (3) in every daily activity whether it be sports or academia. And to the second question, a sceptic might say 'nothing for certain' (or, like Socrates, say 'the only thing that I know is that I know nothing'), and so one could say that we haven't even gotten off the ground and never will.
So why do we worry about these questions? Well surely if we didn't we would still be in our caves.
Basically, philosophy was first summarized to me as an attempt to answer three questions:
1) Who are we?
2) What do we know?
3) What should we do?
The first question is usually dealt with in metaphysics, the second in epistemology, and the third in ethics and political/social philosophy. But of course there is a vast overlap between the two. 'Are we ethical beings?' might be a question put to the first, and this directly affects how the third should be answered, although in all fairness putting such a question to the first is already having 'loaded' it.
But more so, it is amazing that bashing away at these simple questions for millenia has basically made the world how we see it today. We apply (3) in every daily activity whether it be sports or academia. And to the second question, a sceptic might say 'nothing for certain' (or, like Socrates, say 'the only thing that I know is that I know nothing'), and so one could say that we haven't even gotten off the ground and never will.
So why do we worry about these questions? Well surely if we didn't we would still be in our caves.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Pascal's Can of Wagers
Last night I was thinking about Pascal's Wager and toying with making it the topic of today's post. Admittedly, a lot of the direction of the argument stems from various parts of the corresponding wikipedia article, but anyway...
Many know something of Blaise Pascal's famous wager with respect to the existence of God. I would wager (haha) that few have actually read the Pensées, and/or perhaps could not even recognize when it is alluded to, since most have simply seen it in the following simplified 'decision theory' form:
Wager:
(a) Believe in God
(b) Do not believe in God
Possibilities:
(i) God exists
(ii) God does not exist
Consequences:
(a) If (i) is true, then you get infinite bliss, if (ii) is true then you lose nothing.
(b) If (i) is true, you burn in Hell, if (ii) is true, you lose nothing.
One problem is that critics of his wager attack its simplified form. Walter Kaufmann, for example, argues that if God is truly omniscient, then surely he will frown upon (i.e. punish) someone trying to use a simple logical trick to get into Heaven, so surely such a method is bound to fail in the end. This criticism has been used to both satirize the Wager, and justify its false logic, for example:
"Suppose there is a god who is watching us and choosing which souls of the deceased to bring to heaven, and this god really does want only the morally good to populate heaven. He will probably select from only those who made a significant and responsible effort to discover the truth. For all others are untrustworthy, being cognitively or morally inferior, or both. They will also be less likely ever to discover and commit to true beliefs about right and wrong. That is, if they have a significant and trustworthy concern for doing right and avoiding wrong, it follows necessarily that they must have a significant and trustworthy concern for knowing right and wrong. Since this knowledge requires knowledge about many fundamental facts of the universe (such as whether there is a god), it follows necessarily that such people must have a significant and trustworthy concern for always seeking out, testing, and confirming that their beliefs about such things are probably correct. Therefore, only such people can be sufficiently moral and trustworthy to deserve a place in heaven — unless God wishes to fill heaven with the morally lazy, irresponsible, or untrustworthy." (Richard Carrier)
(I believe this sort of argument is sometimes referred to as 'Pascal's Demon', because it essentially tries to show that the Wager could actually be convincing people to take up a logical argument that is bound to fail in the face of God, thus recruiting minions to Hell).
However, in it's original form, Pascal's Wager is actually put forward as an impetus to faith, i.e.:
"Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing."
However, this does not deal with a host of other problems, one of the main being 'Ok, even if we accept Pascal's logic, what's to say whether we should believe in this God or that? Since there are so many possibilities, surely by choosing you are actually putting yourself at the risk of burning in the Hell of whatever God is up there, should it not be your own?'
But even if we put questions within religion to the side for a second, Pascal's Wager has opened up a proverbial can of worms ever since religion became such a controversial subject in the modern age due to many critics questioning, for example, its political motives (recall that during Pascal's time, religion was not often debated openly, and non-Christian religions were not as 'global' as they are now).
This new religious 'scrutiny', especially by those who see things like Pascal's Wager as a tool of 'flawed logic' to recruit people to religious sects, has opened up a proverbial can of worms in the sense that there are now many other versions of Pascal's Wager that attempt to satirize it and thus argue against its validity as a logical tool, as well to put forward alternatives to say that Pascal's 'logic' can be used to argue against believing in God; it all depends on how you put your argument forward. Religious critic Richard Dawkins, for example, puts forward the 'Anti-Pascal Wager' in The God Delusion by revaluing life as what's important (scored with infinite loss if you 'waste' it on kowtowing to God or infinite gain if you 'spend it wisely' on making a genuine effort to make a difference in the world itself) and afterlife as simply a meager 'bonus'. Another is the 'Atheist's Wager', which is akin to the 'Pascal's Demon' criticism above. It alleges that if you maintain scepticism then you may build a 'positive legacy' by doing good things in life, and this you gain, then if there does exist a God in the end, he will reward you for your good deeds as well as your staunch resistance to blind faith.
Whatever the outcome of the Wager or its many versions, Pascal's Wager was the beginning of modern decision theory/game theory (for example, the Prisoner's Dilemma), and thus, irrespective of the validity of its content, his suggestion/approach is definitely useful for philosophy. In true, demonic fashion, however, I must leave the last word to the critics:
"[Pascal's Wager is] indecent and childish... the interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists."
--Voltaire
"By arguing that we should first act and then gain faith Pascal is in fact subjecting us to physical domination through use of ideological power (i.e. we are being forced to physically kneel down, pray, etc.). For this reason Louis Althusser claims that Pascal brings 'like Christ, not peace but strife, and in addition something hardly Christian... scandal itself'."
--Wikipedia
Many know something of Blaise Pascal's famous wager with respect to the existence of God. I would wager (haha) that few have actually read the Pensées, and/or perhaps could not even recognize when it is alluded to, since most have simply seen it in the following simplified 'decision theory' form:
Wager:
(a) Believe in God
(b) Do not believe in God
Possibilities:
(i) God exists
(ii) God does not exist
Consequences:
(a) If (i) is true, then you get infinite bliss, if (ii) is true then you lose nothing.
(b) If (i) is true, you burn in Hell, if (ii) is true, you lose nothing.
One problem is that critics of his wager attack its simplified form. Walter Kaufmann, for example, argues that if God is truly omniscient, then surely he will frown upon (i.e. punish) someone trying to use a simple logical trick to get into Heaven, so surely such a method is bound to fail in the end. This criticism has been used to both satirize the Wager, and justify its false logic, for example:
"Suppose there is a god who is watching us and choosing which souls of the deceased to bring to heaven, and this god really does want only the morally good to populate heaven. He will probably select from only those who made a significant and responsible effort to discover the truth. For all others are untrustworthy, being cognitively or morally inferior, or both. They will also be less likely ever to discover and commit to true beliefs about right and wrong. That is, if they have a significant and trustworthy concern for doing right and avoiding wrong, it follows necessarily that they must have a significant and trustworthy concern for knowing right and wrong. Since this knowledge requires knowledge about many fundamental facts of the universe (such as whether there is a god), it follows necessarily that such people must have a significant and trustworthy concern for always seeking out, testing, and confirming that their beliefs about such things are probably correct. Therefore, only such people can be sufficiently moral and trustworthy to deserve a place in heaven — unless God wishes to fill heaven with the morally lazy, irresponsible, or untrustworthy." (Richard Carrier)
(I believe this sort of argument is sometimes referred to as 'Pascal's Demon', because it essentially tries to show that the Wager could actually be convincing people to take up a logical argument that is bound to fail in the face of God, thus recruiting minions to Hell).
However, in it's original form, Pascal's Wager is actually put forward as an impetus to faith, i.e.:
"Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing."
However, this does not deal with a host of other problems, one of the main being 'Ok, even if we accept Pascal's logic, what's to say whether we should believe in this God or that? Since there are so many possibilities, surely by choosing you are actually putting yourself at the risk of burning in the Hell of whatever God is up there, should it not be your own?'
But even if we put questions within religion to the side for a second, Pascal's Wager has opened up a proverbial can of worms ever since religion became such a controversial subject in the modern age due to many critics questioning, for example, its political motives (recall that during Pascal's time, religion was not often debated openly, and non-Christian religions were not as 'global' as they are now).
This new religious 'scrutiny', especially by those who see things like Pascal's Wager as a tool of 'flawed logic' to recruit people to religious sects, has opened up a proverbial can of worms in the sense that there are now many other versions of Pascal's Wager that attempt to satirize it and thus argue against its validity as a logical tool, as well to put forward alternatives to say that Pascal's 'logic' can be used to argue against believing in God; it all depends on how you put your argument forward. Religious critic Richard Dawkins, for example, puts forward the 'Anti-Pascal Wager' in The God Delusion by revaluing life as what's important (scored with infinite loss if you 'waste' it on kowtowing to God or infinite gain if you 'spend it wisely' on making a genuine effort to make a difference in the world itself) and afterlife as simply a meager 'bonus'. Another is the 'Atheist's Wager', which is akin to the 'Pascal's Demon' criticism above. It alleges that if you maintain scepticism then you may build a 'positive legacy' by doing good things in life, and this you gain, then if there does exist a God in the end, he will reward you for your good deeds as well as your staunch resistance to blind faith.
Whatever the outcome of the Wager or its many versions, Pascal's Wager was the beginning of modern decision theory/game theory (for example, the Prisoner's Dilemma), and thus, irrespective of the validity of its content, his suggestion/approach is definitely useful for philosophy. In true, demonic fashion, however, I must leave the last word to the critics:
"[Pascal's Wager is] indecent and childish... the interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists."
--Voltaire
"By arguing that we should first act and then gain faith Pascal is in fact subjecting us to physical domination through use of ideological power (i.e. we are being forced to physically kneel down, pray, etc.). For this reason Louis Althusser claims that Pascal brings 'like Christ, not peace but strife, and in addition something hardly Christian... scandal itself'."
--Wikipedia
Sunday, January 30, 2011
I Want a New Drug
One that won't make me sick
One that won't make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick
What is philosophy about? Well, I suppose it depends on what you value and how you connect with the world. Simply discovering the sometimes ridiculously strange interpretations of reality arising in philosophy made me turn around and wonder what I really knew or thought I knew. Thus I suppose it depends on the one hand whether you can 'see past' a 'normal' idea of reality, and on the other hand whether you risk taking such a drastic step.
George Berkeley's conception of 'idealism' in the form of the idea that 'to be is to be perceived' made me feel like I was on drugs (or. perhaps, that he was) when I first saw it. How is it possible that absolutely EVERYTHING exists because it is perceived? So the earth I walk on wouldn't be there if my eyes didn't look at and my feet didn't walk on it? Then where does that put me as a human being? Something akin to a holodeck in Star Trek? That we are being fed into some interface that springs up as the world around us? A wisp in a vast astral ocean?
So can I define philosophy as a drug? The BEST drug? Maybe a drug, but maybe not the best. Nietzsche is a fine example of what can happen if you throw your mind into an abyss of thought with no day-to-day life to sober you up: "If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you."
In Gokarna when I had a bit too much bhang lassi, and I was laying in bed in agony trying my utmost to prevent my sanity from escaping into oblivion, I tried to make sense of the reality of the situation: my nervous system somehow changes external phenomena into some internal pattern that is made sense of. So suppose you are a river of perception interpreting patterns constantly floating by, what happens when you tip a small amount of some other substance that upsets the balance? Sometimes (if your lucky or unlucky depending again on what you value), chaos. And this implies that you have some control over what's going on around you. Or, at least, that you can disturb it. Upsetting the balance of how chemicals and synapses transfer information is enough to distort reality. Why? Because suddenly you look at things differently. Since it becomes the case that you cannot properly predict what's going on around you, you must compensate for this by shutting things out, which makes many look within. And introversion leads to dangerous questions: 'what the hell am I doing?' and 'can reality really be so fleeting that a gentle push from a foreign substance flings you into a temporary abyss?' It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.
And how you perceive and react to the Absurd.
Or maybe that's just me.
So, what is philosophy about?
It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.
One that won't make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick
What is philosophy about? Well, I suppose it depends on what you value and how you connect with the world. Simply discovering the sometimes ridiculously strange interpretations of reality arising in philosophy made me turn around and wonder what I really knew or thought I knew. Thus I suppose it depends on the one hand whether you can 'see past' a 'normal' idea of reality, and on the other hand whether you risk taking such a drastic step.
George Berkeley's conception of 'idealism' in the form of the idea that 'to be is to be perceived' made me feel like I was on drugs (or. perhaps, that he was) when I first saw it. How is it possible that absolutely EVERYTHING exists because it is perceived? So the earth I walk on wouldn't be there if my eyes didn't look at and my feet didn't walk on it? Then where does that put me as a human being? Something akin to a holodeck in Star Trek? That we are being fed into some interface that springs up as the world around us? A wisp in a vast astral ocean?
So can I define philosophy as a drug? The BEST drug? Maybe a drug, but maybe not the best. Nietzsche is a fine example of what can happen if you throw your mind into an abyss of thought with no day-to-day life to sober you up: "If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you."
In Gokarna when I had a bit too much bhang lassi, and I was laying in bed in agony trying my utmost to prevent my sanity from escaping into oblivion, I tried to make sense of the reality of the situation: my nervous system somehow changes external phenomena into some internal pattern that is made sense of. So suppose you are a river of perception interpreting patterns constantly floating by, what happens when you tip a small amount of some other substance that upsets the balance? Sometimes (if your lucky or unlucky depending again on what you value), chaos. And this implies that you have some control over what's going on around you. Or, at least, that you can disturb it. Upsetting the balance of how chemicals and synapses transfer information is enough to distort reality. Why? Because suddenly you look at things differently. Since it becomes the case that you cannot properly predict what's going on around you, you must compensate for this by shutting things out, which makes many look within. And introversion leads to dangerous questions: 'what the hell am I doing?' and 'can reality really be so fleeting that a gentle push from a foreign substance flings you into a temporary abyss?' It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.
And how you perceive and react to the Absurd.
Or maybe that's just me.
So, what is philosophy about?
It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)