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.

Philosophy IS sexy (or it simply attracts the insane)

There have been numerous examples in history of dangerous liaisons occurring within the greater philosophy community. A primary example would be what went on between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger when she was a student of his. Heidegger had controversially backed National Socialism (the Nazi movement), once describing it after its disintegration as 'a grand social experiment gone horribly wrong'. Arendt, on the other hand, was a German Jew, so the liaison was dangerous indeed, culminating in the need for Heidegger to send Arendt to do her PhD under Karl Jaspers. I dont know all the details, but from what I know, Arendt's relationship to Heidegger blew very hot and cold and her philosophy during her time with Heidegger (after which she was heavily influenced by Jaspers and Aristotle to conceive of the notion of 'political action' and take a strong stand against the so-called 'totalitarian' regimes of the day) at times reflects Heidegger's own phenomenological musings, and at times challenges them directly. Moreover, her acceptance of not only Heidegger's themes and ideas but their relationship in general more than likely became more strained and possibly estranged by Jaspers' estrangement from Heidegger over Heidegger's support of National Socialism.

The most famous example would probably be one of the real 'Don Juans' of modern philosophy: Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was not an overly attractive individual physically (the fact that he suffered from strabismus would have put a damper on this) but his numerous liaisons—not only the 'main' polyamorous one with de Beauvoir, but with numerous students of his, some many decades younger—is legendary. The book 'Hearts and minds: The common journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre' by Axel Madsen is a beautifully written and very complex book about what can only be described as 'existential love'. I recall a story that was put to me by the boyfriend (now husband) of a friend of mine who studied philosophy under Robert Birch. Birch was a student of Gadamer and, as I was told, once went to Paris and rented a flat along a road that was apparently frequented by Sartre at the time (Sartre died in 1980). So the story goes (if I remember correctly) there was no sign of Sartre until the last day when Birch happened to look out the window and see Sartre slowly walking by on the arm of a very young woman. At that moment, a taxi pulled up along side him and Simone de Beauvoir got out and began accosting and (apparently) attacking him with her purse. Perhaps an urban myth, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

The final story is one of the strangest in the history of philosophy. It involves a fairly little-known philosopher by the name of Moritz Schlick. Schlick was in charge of putting together and chairing the 'Vienna Circle', which was a group of logical positivist philosophers who based their approach to philosophy on 'Wittgenstein I' and the Tractatus (see the entry 'Luki'). It included such individuals as Carnap, Neurath, Gödel, and others. But if Schlick was not so well-known, what sets him apart?

The wikipedia article on Schlick states:
"With the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, many of the Vienna Circle's members left for America and the United Kingdom. Schlick, however, stayed on at the University of Vienna. When visited by Herbert Feigl in 1935, he expressed dismay at events in Germany. On June 22, 1936, Schlick was ascending the steps of the University for a class when he was confronted by a former student, Johann Nelböck, who drew a pistol and shot him in the chest. Nelbock claimed that Schlick's philosophy had "interfered with his moral restraint" - by which he probably meant that under the encouragement of Schlick's philosophy he had indulged himself homosexually, and in a paranoid displacement blamed Schlick for his "defilement". Schlick died very soon afterward. The student was tried and sentenced, but he became a cause célèbre for the growing anti-Jewish sentiments in the city. (That Schlick was not Jewish tended to be overlooked.) Nelböck was paroled after serving 2 years of a 10 year sentence & shortly afterward became a member of the Austrian Nazi Party after the Anschluss."

However, in the book 'Wittgenstein's Poker', other theories have been put forward for Nelbock's actions. One such theory is based on the fact that apparently Nelbock regularly attended Schlick's lectures, often sitting alone at the back of the room. It is said that he became incredibly infatuated with one of Schlick's female students, who often sat in the front row of Schlick's lectures. The theory goes that Nelbock believed that there was something going on between Schlick and this woman and the assassination was the result of jealous rage in a deranged individual.

That explanation is so much more interesting.

'Luki'

I felt there was only one topic for my first post. By request: Wittgenstein.

My interest in philosophy began when I returned to Canada after spending a bit of time off and on living in England. I had heard of this thing called ‘philosophy’ that had ‘all questions and no answers’ and, cocky as I was, I thought ‘how is this possible? Let me at it and I’ll put these issues to bed.” Not knowing where to start, and worrying that a turgid slog through a random philosophical treatise might put me off (books had not really appealed to me much since I had got out of school), I went to the local library and began collecting all of the possible books in the ‘Great Philosophers’ series that I could find. Basically, these were pocketbooks of between 50 and 70 pages giving a quick summary of their major philosophical points. Since I was new to philosophy at the time, I had only heard a few names here and there, and of books I found with names I knew: Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, I found it a bit difficult to get a good picture of just what was going on. I had not really done much critical thinking or testing of my understanding of the world at the time; it simply was what it was. Two philosophers in the series changed everything for me and put me on the path to having a genuine interest in philosophy and all that it deals with. One of those was Wittgenstein (the other was Schopenhauer, but more on that some other time).

Many historians and ‘Wittgensteinians’ refer to ‘Wittgenstein I’ and ‘Wittgenstein II’. Wittgenstein I was the man who had claimed to have ‘solved all philosophical problems’ in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in which the final and most important point is

‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’

The meaning of which was simply that for Wittgenstein (at that time), there was no such thing as a philosophical ‘problem’. What were actually being debated in philosophical circles were ‘puzzles’ that arose because our use of language and our attempts to understand each other’s meaning are imperfect. And so we disagree about things not because there are ‘realities’ to disagree about, but rather because we are not able to properly define terms and communicate ideas. It is only language and meaning that could properly be debated. After a hiatus that he spent teaching schoolchildren in the mountains somewhere in Scandinavia (if I remember correctly) Wittgenstein II then went back on this rather bold summary of philosophy, and wrote his ‘Philosophical Investigations’, which, in my opinion is both a brilliantly ‘playful’ and a brilliantly profound exploration of language (in contrast to the rigorous formality of the Tractatus). The Investigations is famous for, amongst other things, the ‘private language argument’ (he argued that one cannot have a ‘private’ language, that is, a language limited entirely to oneself).

If anyone reading this is interested, I recommend ‘Wittgenstein’s Poker’ for a brilliantly entertaining synopsis of Wittgenstein the man and Wittgenstein the philosopher based around a ‘legendary’ meeting (and the only one ever) between Wittgenstein and another very ‘self-assured’ (i.e. cocky) philosopher, Karl Popper.

At the time of reading this 60-odd-page intro to Wittgenstein, I knew none of this, and a lot of the finer details were lost on me. What struck me as so radical (and still does today) is that all of a sudden language went from a tool to communicate to a thing that can be analyzed in and of itself (and it is especially radical when it is presented in such a way as to lead one to believe it could possibly be a metaphysical basis of reality). I had never really had a reason to ponder over the fact that we call the white liquid that comes from cows ‘milk’ on no other pretense than that a bunch of people once upon a time agreed that it should be so (of course, etymology enters the picture, but one can apply the same argument to the etymological roots of any word). It is nothing more than custom that we use the term ‘milk’ as opposed to, say, ‘rabagooba’ to denote this item in English.

And this idea can be useful to try to make mathematics less intimidating. Of course, we usually take mathematics as the ‘everyday’ mathematics that is grounded in arithmetic and such, and this is entirely justified. We have utilized both language and mathematics for thousands of years, and it has only been within the past 150 years with Frege and Cantor that each of language and mathematics have been seen as an ‘item’ to be analyzed in and of itself. However, if one looks at mathematics itself, one sees that as opposed to all of the other ‘sciences’, which are based on understanding and interpreting reality to some extent, mathematics is a self-contained axiomatic system. Thus it is, in a sense, a ‘language’ as well (and therefore, from a certain point of view, it is entirely a ‘human invention’ not wholly grounded in reality), though one based on the rules of logic. Gödel’s Incompleteness Proof established that there is no such thing as a logical system that can prove itself. Basically, if one begins with different axioms, one can get an entirely different system of mathematics, so long as the axioms are not, in some way, self-contradictory. Hence, there is no ‘true’ mathematics, like one may say there is a ‘true’ chemistry, physics, or biology that accurately describes the secrets of Mother Nature, just like there is no objective reason why one should call milk ‘milk’ rather than ‘rabagooba’. The only difference is that the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of mathematics is based on rules of logic in contrast to language, which is based on custom and the systematization of grammar. That is, in terms of mathematics as a ‘system’; the manner in which mathematics is actually applied and 'done' is based on custom. Once students understand that ‘x’ is simply a 'placeholder' and its use to designate an unknown is based entirely on custom (and ‘ease’, since mathematicians are lazy)—there is nothing to stop one designating said unknown by drawing a map of Indonesia, making a chicken noise, or dancing a jig—they stop making silly mistakes, like using x to designate different unknowns that are not equal. The main problem with the other three options is one’s ability to duplicate it when needed: dancing can get pretty tiring, and making a chicken noise? That's just stupid.

Gauss once called mathematics ‘the queen of the sciences’. I forget his justification for this statement, but I always think that maybe his intention was to say that mathematics is such that although it doesn’t rule, you cannot do anything without it. Maybe this is a somewhat sexist (and, along the same vein, overly ‘biological’) interpretation, but one must remember that it was said about 300 years ago, and the human race and its approach to gender equality and human rights has come a long way since. Supposedly.