Discovering the Philosopher in You: Part 9: Mind and Body: How Are They Related?

Continuing the Discovering the Philosopher in you series here with part nine of fourteen.  This lecture's unanswerable  problem is about the differences (if there are any) between the mind and the body/brain.  Like the lecture I'll try to layout the two (main) ideas, without commentary, then comment on the weaknesses and what I think about each side.

First dualism.  Made famous by (though arguably not original to him) Descarte came up with this idea and fleshed out the logical arguments behind how the mind is separate, distinct, and different than the body/brain (for the remainder of this entry when I say 'body' just understand that I'm [more than likely] referring specifically to the brain as the controlling organ of the body).  For one of his main arguments he used for dualism Descartes used identity property laws.  The essence of the mind is in thought, which isn't a measurable substance.  You can't measure the size of an idea or concept.  I am thinking of a white elephant right now (bet you are too) and you cannot tell me how big that thought is.  It cannot be measured in pounds or inches or any other system of measurement.  The human brain (head) is eight pounds (thanks cute kid from Jerry MacGuire) and even the electrochemical impulses in the brain can be measured using electroencephalographs and other tools.  Therefore based on the properties of identity, they cannot be the same thing if they are different essential characteristics.

Now materialism.  This is a much easier to explain idea because the idea of materialism is simple, the brain is all there is.  There is no mind-body problem, there's no such thing as the mind as a distinct thing from the body.  The reason we say 'mind' and other mind-related terms, is simply a difference in terminology.  Saying, 'mind' is the same as saying 'brain' and saying, "I feel angry." is the same as saying, "there's a certain state of chemicals in my brain."  The only dualism is in terminology.

Now, both have their problems, and to be perfectly honest I don't have any answers.  I feel that both sides are intractable and cannot offer all the answers.  For dualism the primary problem is in the interaction between mind and body.  If the mind is intangible then how does or how can it influence the body?  Is it a two-way street?  Is it a one-way?  Is there no interaction?  None of these seem possible.

On the other hand, materialism just kills all conception of the mind.  As hard as one might try, one cannot get rid of the mind, thoughts cannot be simplified to just chemical processes.  Even knowing that one's brain is mainly a complex system of electrochemical reactions to stimuli doesn't make me think of those processes while I'm thinking.  It seems to be obvious that thought is beyond just the chemical processes that go on inside your skull.

Really this discussion boils down to atheism and theism.  Either there is something more than just the material or there isn't.  If you believe there is no such thing as god, then there must be no such thing as the mind/soul/spirit.  If you believe there is something more than just the material, then there is some form of mind distinct from the body.

Here's my personal problem in this question, I think it's indubitable that there must be something more than just our bodies.  I'm a dualist (I'd say that any theist is and must be), but I have absolutely no idea how the two different parts interact.  From theology it's obvious that God is (in some ways) immaterial and spirit, akin to soul or mind, but man isn't God.  Now my theological answer is that God has made man in His image in that our souls can interact and influence the material to a limited extent like his Spirit is active in our lives and world.  I don't have any better answer than that.

Discovering the Philosopher in You: Part 8: Morality and Blame: Are We Free?

Continuing on the topic of morality lecture eight of the fourteen lectures on the big questions of philosophy.  Inherent in the concept of morality are the concepts of praise and blame.  When we say something is good we're assigning praise to that object or action and vice versa.  However, praise or blame only holds if the person that did the good/bad action was free to do it.  If a person were forced to murder (technically that wouldn't be murder so, bad example), say someone was forced to steal.  Would we blame that person?  Presumably no.

The problem is, what does it mean to be free to do something?  Determinism (and to some extent the laws of physics) says that everything has a cause, which makes sense, so if we could freeze a slice of the universe in time we would see the cause(s) behind every decision.  Also, behind even the simplest of decisions there's a physiological component; a genetic predisposition, and there's a sociological component; a way one is raised.  The example Prof McGinn uses is the choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream, which I'll continue to use throughout this entry.

Here's the real kicker though...  You might say, "but everything isn't caused by something else, especially at the sub-atomic level."  There are super tiny particles that are as unpredictable as far as we understand it.  They appear to be random and have no governing principles.  There are two issues with this.  One, there might be some governing principle or law that determines how these sub-atomic particles move/act.  Or two, even if they truly are random, that's still not freedom.  Look at it this way, if you have to choose chocolate, vanilla, both, or none, and you have to roll a die to decide, you don't get a choice in the matter.  You have to randomly choose every time you make a decision, therefore you really don't have any choice in the matter.  So either way, regardless if the universe is deterministic or indeterministic there's no way to have free choice (we'll go more into that later, but that's the way it's looking so far).

Don't worry, I'm not trying to say there's no such thing as free will or freedom of choice.  The problems (at least to some extent) stem from the logical link between the universe being deterministic and that relation to free will.  The logic seems to say that if every instant of the universe is somehow determined by the previous instant, then there's no such thing as free will.  And, as I've said even if it's not determined by the previous instant, that's not truly free will either.  How can we reconcile this issue?  I'll give you a hint, I don't think there will be a resolution.  Prof McGinn doesn't seem to think there will ever be a resolution either.

Some seem to think that free will is somehow compatible with determinism.  I don't see how that can be but I can see that one has to draw a line somewhere.  Let's try to come at this from a different angle.  Let's continue to use the chocolate/vanilla decision, starting at the end and working backwards.  The very last instant is your hand picking up whatever ice cream cone you choose.  In the instant immediately preceding that a signal went from your brain to your arm/hand to reach out and take whatever you've decided.  Is that a decision in itself?  I don't think anyone would say that it is; though it stands to reason that the brain can still be indecisive and change and choose a different option even after the signal has been sent to the arm/hand to pick up the ice cream.  You could even touch one of the cones and then change your mind and pick something different.  Then, just before the signal is sent from the brain to the hand, there's processing in your mind.  Maybe you're weighing the options...  Chocolate, yum, vanilla, yum, both?  I'll get fat.  Neither?  But I really want ice cream.  When I was talking to my wife about this her answer was hilarious, "stop thinking and just take both."  So we're somewhere in the brain making the decision now.  Determinism would say that you're genetically predisposed or raised to make whatever decision you do end up choosing.  But wait, can't you go against that?  Especially now that you've (hopefully) considered all these determining factors?  You know you've got a terrible sweet tooth, but you're trying to cut back so you decide none.  Or, your parents liked to reward you with chocolate sweets for good behavior when you were young, but you know that so you decide to go against the grain and pick vanilla.  So, where did the original decision come from?  Is it from the person who set the ice cream in from of you?  Maybe that was the inciting incident, but that certainly isn't a determining factor or a decision in itself.

The next lecture is going to cover more of this intractable issue when it comes to the mind-body problem.  But here's the question, where do thoughts, in general, come from?  I'm not talking about observations of things within the world, that's mostly self-explanatory.  I'm talking about just thoughts in general.

One important point Prof McGinn says in the lecture that I disagree with on the same grounds I disagreed with him on skepticism and epistemological ignorance.  He says that we cannot just flippantly dismiss the notion that we don't have free will.  I say, why not?  Let me put it to you this way, if we all understand that there exists such notions as free will and praise and blame for actions but we cannot ever follow the rabbit hole all the way down will that change the way we behave?  Not for me.  I believe God gave us free will as incomprehensible as that can be at times I believe God set up the universe with laws and logic and that we fit into that design in an important way, but that we have the free choice to ignore that plan and attempt to go our own way.  There's another thing I'd like to point out...  This concept of determinism is determined (pun intended) by the ability to do things that only God could do anyways.  Things like freeze time and look at one instant, neurons fire so fast it's measured in milliseconds and multiple neurons fire at once, so to be able to see the deterministic characteristics in the human brain, would take a much more accurate accounting of the brain than we have (or every will have, to my estimation).  Then there's a universality to it, one would have to have the power to read genetic code and understand genetic predisposition as well as a thorough understanding of the decider's history of how he/she was raised.  Only God could have such abilities so I would say we need not trouble ourselves (too much) over not being able to completely understand these things.  I would say, we don't know, and we never will so don't get too bent out of shape about not knowing.  Keep calm and eat ice cream.

Discovering the Philosopher in You: Part 7: Happiness and Right Action: How Are Morality and Human Welfare Related?

Continuing the series on discovering the philosopher in yourself.  While the last part of the series was about ethics and moral truth, the fact that there is a right and wrong and that we can know it, this entry goes further down the road of morality and its relation to happiness.

The first three-quarters of the lecture it seems like Prof McGinn is defending the idea of Utilitarianism, and how morality is linked to happiness like a sort of mathematical equation.  It seems like he's defending utilitarianism as the best way to describe right actions, but it seems obvious to me almost immediately that it's not going to work.

Here's how Prof McGinn describes utilitarianism: on the surface it seems like a very fair, no-nonsense system.  Because who doesn't like a system where the sole determination of right action is based on producing the most happiness?  So utilitarianism says that the right action is the one that will produce the greatest amount of happiness.  My first thought is how do we measure an amount of happiness, and  Prof McGinn says he'll discuss that concept later in the lecture.  He really doesn't say much about it, other than asking that same thing, how does one measure happiness?  So, the example Prof McGinn uses relates to choosing one charity over another.  The only criteria for choosing which charity to support is only determined by which charity will produce the most happiness.  This flies in the face of almost all other systems of morality, which is highly controversial.

It's an apparently egalitarian view and quite democratic.  Taxes, this system of morality says that all tax systems must be inherently designed to spread out wealth so that the most people gain the most happiness.  It's also democratic, because the best way to find out what makes the most people happy is to allow people to choose for themselves what makes them happy.  This system is purely mathematical.  There's no room for motivation or character.  It doesn't matter if a person has the worst (or best) of intentions.  It doesn't matter what your motive is, as long as more happiness is produced it's a good action.

There are many implications and arguments that have come out of utilitarianism, including (supposedly) abolishing slavery and arguing against animal cruelty.  The system isn't without it's shortcomings though.  Here's one that Prof McGinn points out: one innocent man knows the location of a billion dollars, and the happiness of ten wicked men can be greatly improved by torturing the one innocent man.  By utilitarian standards, that would be acceptable.  Here's another one, supposedly utilitarian arguments led to the end of slavery (at least in many parts of the world).  Here's my issue with that, if there are fewer people being enslaved and usually that's the case, hence minorities are typically the group(s) being enslaved, then utilitarian ideas say that it's right/good to enslave the few to improve the happiness of the many.  As long as the slaves are outnumbered by the enslavers, and their happiness is increased by the slavery.  Here's another one, murder or even mass murder, like the Nazi genocide attempts, are permissible under utilitarian morality as long as the group being exterminated is fewer in number than the exterminators and the extermination of the minority will lead to the happiness of those doing the killing.

In the end I'm not okay with a system of morality that can excuse mass murder, torture, and slavery.  I've said it before and I'm sure I'll probably say it again, any moral system that excludes God leads to moral relativism.  Utilitarianism cannot be a complete system because it leaves out too many variables that are inherent in morality.

Discovering the Philosopher in You Part 5: Knowledge and Experience: Where Does Knowledge Come From?

Continuing the series on Discovering the Philosopher in You with Prof McGinn, lecture five is on Knowledge and Experience: Where Does Knowledge Come From?  Here Prof McGinn says that we're going to move on from the basic building-blocks of philosophy and getting to the more meat-and-potatoes questions of philosophy.  So here we are and where does what we know come from?  This is a question from epistemology (the theory of knowledge).  In the lecture Prof McGinn talks about two specific sides of this argument, the empiricists and the rationalists.

Before we cover those two sides of this issue, let's first talk about what we mean by knowledge.  It's not what you and I know.  It's more like how people attain knowledge in general.  One of the ideas set forth in different theories of knowledge is that we can and do know certain things without experiencing them.  Keep in mind this is not that you learned something without experiencing it.  Take math, you say you learned it from your teacher, which is a type of experience, but that's not what we are talking about because that teacher learned it from some other teacher.  What we're trying to get at, is where the first person learned math.  That's one way of looking at it; another is the idea that to know that 1+2=3 doesn't take experience.  Think about it.  How do you experience the numbers 1, 2, or 3.  The concepts of plus or equals?  It's not like you can experience these things like this cup of water I'm drinking.

The empiricists, notably all British, claim that knowledge can only be attained experientially.  One of the first things Prof McGinn mentions about the empiricists is one of the main things that makes me doubt their views and neutrality on philosophical questions.  He talks about one of the primary motives behind the empiricists was a desire to depart from religion.  If one starts out with a specific motive it's hard to stay impartial.  I know I'm not, but at least I'm honest about it, and I try to maintain impartiality in most things.  So, in order to get away from the ideas of revelation that religion relies on, which it does at least in some ways it relies on the idea that God reveals knowledge to His followers that is outside the realm of experience for those not involved in the revelation.  So to empiricists all knowledge comes from someone's experience.

The rationalists held an opposing view that at least some knowledge doesn't come from experience.  They don't deny experiential knowledge, that would seem counterintuitive.  However, they held that some knowledge is not derived from experience.  It's commonly referred to as "a priori" knowledge.  As opposed to "a posteriori" knowledge, which is experiential knowledge.  So, as opposed to the empiricists' claim that all knowledge comes from someone's experience, the rationalists claim that at least some knowledge is innate and cannot come from experience.  This other source of knowledge is often called "pure reason" hence Kant's writing The Critique of Pure Reason and a Critique of Practical Reason.

For this discussion I've always liked the example of the dark side of the moon.  Now I know astronauts have landed on and encircled the moon and they have experienced that in a way, but before they did.  Did we know experientially that there was a dark side of the moon?  No.  No one had ever experienced it or seen it or photographed it.  So at that time we knew from logical conclusions that if an object has one side it must also have another side, and even though we may have never seen it, we know it's there.

Photo Courtesy of: Blogs Voice of America News

Others argue that language is an a priori knowledge.  Most notably the famous linguist Noam Chomsky who argued that some form of grammar and linguistic ability is innate/a priori.  I tend to agree with this concept of a priori, except that it doesn't seem like it'd be knowledge as we typically think of knowledge.  More like skills or abilities, or even ways of thinking and pattern recognition, not necessarily knowledge.

One last comment...  The discussion of a priori (about which I had some interesting comments from a Google+ discussion) is NOT exactly like the debate of nature vs. nurture.  Also, genetically hardwired instincts technically don't fit with a priori knowledge either (sort of).  Whatever your view these are all very interesting questions about knowledge and while the debate isn't as heated as in the days of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume (British empiricists) with René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant (not all rationalists but mostly), it is still an interesting discussion in epistemology.

I love sushi!  And getting good sushi is easy here in Japan

Discovering the Philosopher in You Part 1: Intro and Skepticism: What Do You Really Know?

I'm going to try something I've never done in this blog before.  That is, write a series of posts along the same vein.  This idea was sparked by a philosophy podcast from learnoutloud.com entitled "Discovering the Philosopher in You."  Well, the introductory podcast was very interesting, it's a series of lectures from a professor Colin McGinn about all the "big questions" in philosophy.  So, I've decided to write parallel blog entries for each of the lectures.  I downloaded the study guide as well, so I'm referencing that guide as well as the lectures. Without further ado, introduction and lecture one, Skepticism: What Do You Really Know?

By way of introduction I'll mention that these lectures and parallel blog entries are not in chronological order.  That's intentional, as Prof McGinn says, because all of the questions in philosophy are ancient questions that can't be answered.  It's not like we're coming up with new issues for philosophers to ponder over all the time.  Though I would say that doesn't mean that new problems don't come up every so often, but I'd say that these new issues are just new twists of old problems. Some of these questions include, what the ultimate nature of the world is, what the self is, whether we have free will, how our minds relate to our bodies, whether we can really know anything, where ethical truth comes from, what the meaning of life is, and whether or not there is a God.  These are some of the topics that I'll be covering over the next fourteen (or so) entries.

One thing of note in the lecture is how Prof McGinn describes Plato's famous cave parable.  The way it reads in the Republic is pessimistic.  It's like someone has chained the poor people in the cave and are manipulating their perceptions by walking behind them with stick-borne puppets making shadows on the cave walls.  The way Prof McGinn describes it is much more optimistic, that they aren't chained and that the people casting the shadows are just passersby.  I don't know the reason for his oversight, perhaps it's not oversight and that's the way it's described in other platonic writings.  I don't really know, but I thought that minute mistake, if it was one, was interesting.

The skeptical questions of what do I really know, leads down a long path ending with solipsism, and the other minds problem.  If you don't want to read those links, I'll summarize those ideas, solipsism is the idea that nothing else exists other than your own mental state.  There's also a temporal version of solipsism where we cannot know for certain that there was anything in the past or that there will be anything in the future.  All we can know for sure (sort of) is that we are knowing something right now.  The other minds problem is related to solipsism though more specific.  It's the idea that one cannot know that anyone else's mind exists.  We see others' bodies and actions and assume that they are analogous to our own minds but we can't know for sure that they're not just cleverly devised automatons or robots.  The problems that the skeptics, like Descarte raise, are many and there aren't complete answers to all of their questions, and on the surface it may seem like madness that can neither be proven nor disproven.  Prof McGinn talks about an interesting problem that skepticism can bring with its questioning all knowledge.  I'll try to summarize his points.

Suppose you had $10,000 in the bank, then when you check your balance, you suddenly find, without reason or expenditure that you actually only have $.10.  How would that make you feel?  Consider knowledge in the same manner.  We think we know so much, we think we have an intellectual bank account with 10,000 pieces of knowledge and with just a few jabs from skeptics we find that we actually only know 1 thing.  As Descarte argued "I think therefore I am."  Doubting is thinking, which is an action that only something that exists can do, therefore I exist.  But, with solipsism and the skeptical issues that's all we can know for sure.  Prof McGinn seems to say that these skeptical issues are detrimental to a one's intellectual wellbeing.

My personal views on this problem are a bit contradictory.  I love to play around with skepticism, but it's just childish play to me.  Are you reading my blog?  How do you know you're reading my blog?  How do you know you're not dreaming?  (Maybe because in a dream the writing would be better, haha!?)  The Matrix brings a scifi twist to skepticism.  How do you know that you're not plugged into some supercomputer that's feeding you all you think you're sensing?  Can you trust your senses?  Are you sure you're seeing red as I'm seeing red, or are you just calling purple red because that's what you've always been told?  These are fun but silly to me.  On the deeper issue of skepticism intellectually bankrupting people, I don't really see how it changes things or people for that matter.  I mean think about it, what if right now, the only thing that you actually know and can know, is your current thoughts?  So what?  Are you going to behave differently?  I presume not.  Therefore, if not knowing anything that you thought you knew doesn't actually change your life why worry about it?  I certainly don't and I hope you don't either.