Philosophy by the Way

The inevitability of thinking

2012-01-30T01:26:00.002+01:00

In my last blog I talked about an adage on the ceiling of Montaigne’s study in the tower of his castle. It said that actually thinking is painful and so unpleasant, and it suggested that it is better to avoid it. One can wonder what brought the thinker Montaigne to have an adage there that is so contradictory to his person. One can only guess about his reasons, but there are some indications in his Essays that can help to get an idea why it appealed to him.

That thinking is painful and so unpleasant is not obvious. Everybody does it most of the time and what would man be without thinking? What supposedly Sophocles wanted to express with the statement, and apparently Montaigne with him, is that it is consciously thinking or rather consciously thinking about a certain problem that is painful and so unpleasant, and it is so because of the effort it takes. If this is right, the adage raises many questions. Why, for instance, should something that takes much effort be painful and therefore be unpleasant? Many people enjoy running as a sport, and although it can hurt in a certain sense they do not stop with it but they just consider it a pleasant activity. And so it is with consciously thinking about problems, too. Not always, of course, but in many cases, especially when it is thinking about philosophical puzzles (which are often not only puzzles but usually have a clear relevance for society). Thinking can be an effort and it can cause headaches, but we are looking forward to the possible solution and to the joy it will give to us. As I concluded in my last blog: Maybe thinking sometimes hurts, but often it’s a pleasure, too.

However, the problem with problem solving is that it often has no end. When we think to have solved one, we discover new problems that follow, and which we want to solve, too. Or we think to have found a good solution but then we start to doubt. Or, otherwise, we are contented with it, but then we want more. We are never satisfied with what we have. Maybe that’s why Montaigne had Sophocles’ remark written on his ceiling. Anyway, he agrees with Lucretius who says: “While that which we desire is wanting, it seems to surpass all the rest; then, when we have got it, we want something else; ‘tis ever the same thirst” (Lucretius, iii. 1095). Our thinking never stops, for once we think it will stop, it leads to new thinking. It’s like a relay race without an end: once a thought comes to an end, it has to pass the baton of thinking to the next thought. “Whatever it is that falls into our knowledge and possession, we find that it satisfies not, and we still pant after things to come and unknown, inasmuch as those present do not suffice for us; not that, in my judgment, they have not in them wherewith to do it, but because we seize them with an unruly and immoderate haste”. (Montaigne, Essays I, 53). And this endlessly and restlessly going on can be hurting; it’s true.

Montaigne was aware of this, and it seems that it caused in him (and in us, too) a longing for a simple life where everything is uncomplicated. As if simple is better. Actually it is a looking for a kind of Arcadia, a kind of paradise where everything goes smoothly and where real problems are absent. But is that the solution of our problems of life? I think it’s not. In the end people will become bored when they have no problems to solve. It will be quite annoying and it will lead to psychological stress. Then there is only one solution: do something; create problems or at least puzzles in the philosophical sense and start thinking how to solve them.

The pain of thinking

2012-01-23T00:47:00.000+01:00

Montaigne is famous for his Essays. One of the striking things in this work is that it is full of quotations, mainly from classical authors. What not so many people know is that Montaigne had collected such quotations on the ceiling of the room in the tower of his castle where he wrote his essays. I was reminded of this when I saw a little booklet on the Internet, titled Montaigne’s Adages, compiled and translated by the Dutch historian René Willemsen (Rotterdam: Ad. Donker, 2011). Some years ago, I had visited Montaigne’s study, and I had seen the adages on the beams of the ceiling. Then I could cast only a quick look at them, but the visit had made me curious to know more about the maxims, so I could not resist buying the book.

Immediatedly after having received it through the post, I glanced a bit through the book and one of the first adages that caught my attention was this one: “Nothing is more pleasant in life than thinking about nothing, for not thinking doesn’t hurt”. According to Willemsen’s explanation it was from Sophocles’ tragedy “Ajax”. Because Montaigne had had put this adage on his ceiling, I suppose that he endorsed what it wants to express, although that doesn’t need to be so, of course. Anyway, when I read the quotation, I thought there was much truth in it and that I could agree with it. But I continued thinking and I began to doubt. Gradually my doubts increased. It was not so much that the adage said “Nothing is more pleasant in life…” that was the problem. Even after I had changed it into “One of the most pleasant things in life is thinking about nothing, for not thinking doesn’t hurt”, and then into “The more one’s thinking is reduced, the better it is, for the less one will be hurt by one’s thinking”, my doubts could not be stopped. It’s true, I remembered my tours on my race bike and my running in the wood, and that I had told my readers that these activities make me forget my day-to-day worries. And surely, cycling like a zombie (in the philosophical sense) on the roads around my little town makes me high in a certain sense (but my regular readers will certainly not have forgotten that it also increases the chance of getting an accident). But what made me reject Sophocles’ thought in the end was the question whether it was really so unpleasant for Montaigne to write his essays. Did he really write them à contrecoeur, so reluctantly, and with pain in his heart? Did Montaigne really shut himself in his tower in order to spend hours of hurting himself there by thinking what to write? I do not belief so. And even if it’s true, it will certainly be impossible to fool my readers that I wrote all my blogs of this website while I suffered doing so; that almost each Monday I spend two or three hours voluntarily, without any compulsion by others, in my study and behave like a self-punisher. Nobody would believe that and moreover it’s not true. What is true is that writing my blogs can require much effort (and the same will certainly have been true for Montaigne and his Essays). For some people that may be the same as pain, but for the thinker self it seldom is. I do not want to say that thinking never hurts, but at most we can maintain this: Maybe thinking sometimes hurts, but often it’s a pleasure, too.

The illusion of authenticity

2012-01-16T01:22:00.000+01:00

We are our customs, at least in a certain sense and at least for a part. We have seen it in my blog last week. Customs belong to those things that make us the persons we are. It is not only so that the customs we encounter already immediately after our birth “force” us to follow them. Usually we have the feeling that they really belong to us and that they are right. We support them so that they continue to exist. We have interiorized these customs and we believe in them. Once this is so, we can say that our following certain customs is authentic.

Customs (especially those we call “traditions”) are often typical for certain cultures. Maybe we understand why certain customs in other cultures exist and what they mean, but they are not part of us; we haven’t interiorized them. For instance, I, as a Dutchman, believe in St. Nicholas but not in Santa Claus. For me, St. Nicholas needs to be respected; Santa Claus is just a man in special clothes.

Many people in Western countries have a feeling that they miss authenticity. They have a feeling or they think that what they do does not come from themselves, but that many things they do are enforced on them by the circumstances or by other people around them; that they do what they do because they are expected to do so, although they do not want to do it; or because they are in the rat race; and for a lot of other reasons. I do not want to say that they are unhappy, but there is a feeling of superficiality and a feeling of missing something that is described as authenticity. So, what do they do, if they have the money for it? Travelling, and especially travelling to other cultures, looking for something that is “real”. Therefore more and more “corners of the world” are discovered and uncovered by them [For those living in these “corners of the world”: forgive me the expression, for in fact, it is quite colonial; but so Western people often think]. Or do more and more “corners of the world” lose their “innocence” in this modern age?

One of the “corners of the world” flooded by Western tourists is the Dogon Valley in Mali and one of the authentic traditions there is a dance of death, which is performed every twelve years. What is more to be wished for a Western authenticity seeker? Especially if s/he can order the dance for 60 euros from the village chief, three times a day, if s/he likes. And as soon as the tourist and his/her group have left, the chief calls the next village with his cell phone: “Take your masks, they are coming!” And what do they do with the money earned? Buying what they need to live and investing, of course, and making holidays to Europe for feeling the culture of their customers.

(Source: One World, Dec. 2011; pp. 16-17)

The customs we are

2012-01-09T00:42:00.005+01:00

Customs play an important role in life. They are not simply like branches on a path that we throw away, when we think that someone can stumble over them. Or like cars we stop for, when we want to cross a road. Customs are not accidental but they guide our lives, they can give our stream of activities a certain rhythm and function as reasons for what we do. They are threads in life and help us get hold of what we do. So the Christian holidays, a kind of social customs, are for many people reasons to go church and for them they are highlights of the year. For others the vacations around these feast-days are reasons for making short trips or longer travels. Together with the yearly summer vacation – in fact also a kind of custom – these fixed points of attention guide or maybe even determine the recurrent cycle of life. For some this cycle may have a spiritual meaning, for others the meaning may be worldly when it determines, for instance, the planning of their outings and trips.

Customs as such can be reasons for what we do that need no further explanation. A Christian does not need to explain why s/he attends church on Christmas Day. Just the fact that it is Christmas is a sufficient reason. Or once we know that a person loves playing tennis, s/he doesn’t need to explain that s/he is going to play with friends every Sunday morning. It’s enough to say: on Sunday mornings I cannot visit you, for then I play with my tennis friends. For many things we do there is no need to explain them, when they are customs or even habits. It is a sufficient reason for acting, which does not imply, of course, that customs or habits cannot change.

However, customs, and habits, too, are not simply things we regularly do, nor are they only reasons for our actions, like branches that we throw away because someone might stumble over them (with the implication that we are free to do it or not, as we like). In a certain sense we are our customs and habits. Once we have them, they are part of our identities, not only in the sense that we can remember how we followed them during a big part of our lives but also that they continuously make us act in a certain way and that we become quite annoyed, to say the least, or even mentally disordered in the worst case, if we are obstructed doing them. And the same so for “passive customs”: things people are supposed to do to us and ideas and thoughts that automatically pop up in us, because they are related to our habits and customs, although they may seem ridiculous to others. So, I feel a bit annoyed when guests on the birthday party of my wife forget to congratulate me, for in the Netherlands it is a custom to congratulate not only the person whose birthday it is but also her or his partner and relatives. And when, during the weeks before St. Nicholas’ Eve (December 5) I see a man dressed like a bishop, I – unlike foreigners – do not see someone who plays St. Nicholas but someone who is St. Nicholas, since I – as a Dutchman – have been educated in this tradition. And so it could happen that last month somewhere here in the Netherlands, a man dressed and made up as St. Nicholas stopped his car, walked to the middle of the crossing and begun to regulate the traffic like a police man, just for fun. And everybody obeyed, and probably nobody got the idea that the man was a joker. For the Dutch he was St. Nicholas and what this saintly man says or does is right, anyhow, for so this tradition has made him.

Of old customs

2012-01-02T00:25:00.000+01:00

Somewhere in the beginning of his essay “Of ancient customs” Montaigne says that sometimes customs rapidly change and that what once was a custom often is ridiculed some time later. Especially in fashion this is the case: “When they wore the busk of their doublets up as high as their breasts, they stiffly maintained that they were in their proper place; some years after it was slipped down betwixt their thighs, and then they could laugh at the former fashion as uneasy and intolerable.” Therefore Montaigne wants to show that some customs are already old, while others aren’t “to the end that, bearing in mind this continual variation of human things, we may have our judgment more clearly and firmly settled.” Then Montaigne gives a range of customs in antiquity, some of them different, some of them the same as in his days.

I do not want to list here, like Montaigne, old customs and compare them with modern ones in order to put what we do into perspective. What actually surprises me is that some things we do are already so old, albeit that they may have got other coats during the years. When I write this, it is just after Christmas, a feast full of traditions. On this day we remember the birth of Christ. But is Christmas really on the 25th of December because Christ was born on this day? In fact the day was chosen, because the adherents of the Mithras religion commemorated the birth of their god on this date. Moreover, many other peoples in the world had (and still have) midwinter celebrations about this time of the year. A lot of Christmas customs apparently go back to such much older pre-Christian traditions. And, although it is not typically a midwinter tradition, didn’t the Romans already give presents on the Saturnalia (Dec. 17)?

Not only such more or less “official” customs, so traditions, have a long history. Also many of our habitual actions that actually everybody does have a long past. I mean just the normal daily routines. Montaigne mentions, for instance, a simple thing like “to eat fruit ... after dinner” in antiquity; and where I had written “…”, Montaigne wrote “as we do”. “We”, 21st-century wo/men, still often do the same. But in fact, I realized how old some of our daily habits and customs are not just when I read Montaigne’s essay, but when I encountered lately a newspaper article about a recent archeological discovery that showed that “when Europe still was inhabited by Neanderthal man, in Africa people had already completely equipped bedrooms”. And it is not Neanderthal man, but this homo sapiens in Africa who is our ancestor. Already our forbears in Southern Africa 77.000 years ago had bedrooms and beds. Of course, their beds were not the same as ours with mattresses, sheets and blankets but they were made of saw sedge, which is still used for making beds here and there today, though. But what made this article made me aware of is that one of the things I do every day is already very, very old, at least 77.000 years: making up my bed. Many things we do have changed through the ages, but some seem to stay forever.

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Michel de Montaigne, “Of ancient customs”, Essays, Book I, essay 49. I use the Gutenberg translation: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#2HCH0049

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !

2011-12-23T15:06:00.001+01:00

Languages need not to divide us for in all languages we can express the same thoughts.

Thank you for reading my blogs and meet you again in 2012!

False knowledge and wrong knowledge

2011-12-19T00:35:00.000+01:00

Knowledge can become out of date, because what we thought to know appeared not to be true. The case of Galileo that I described two weeks ago is an instance of this: the sun does not turn around the earth, as people thought in his days, but it is the other way round, as Galileo showed. So what we thought to know has never been the case. Actually, it has never been knowledge: it was false knowledge. But is it so that all supposed knowledge that later appeared to be false knowledge always has been false knowledge? Take the so-called bystander effect, the phenomenon that most persons do not help a victim in an emergency situation (for instance a drowning person), when other people are present, while they would help, if they were there alone. However, now I read in an article that it has become difficult to replicate the bystander effect in an experimental setting. Apparently people have changed – maybe because the phenomenon got much attention in the media and in publications – and the bystander effect does no longer exist: people do help now in emergency situations, even when they are in a group. What once was true has now become false and has been replaced by new knowledge.

On the face of it, it seems here that a piece of knowledge simply has become out of date and has been replaced because we know better now. However, there is an important difference with the Galileo case. There the original idea that the sun turns around the earth has always been false, but the bearers of this supposed knowledge were not acquainted with this. However, the bystander effect has not become out of date because it never has been true, for once it was. It has become superseded because reality has changed. This is typical for the social sciences: people get knowledge of certain social facts, which are true at the moment they hear about it. However, for one reason or another, people are not satisfied with the facts and they change them. Then old knowledge becomes the foundation of new knowledge instead of being falsified. By the way, it can also happen that what once was false is made true: a teacher undeservedly thinks that some students in his class are better than other students and just because of his – often unconscious – behaviour the allegedly better students also become better, as psychological research has shown: false knowledge has turned into true knowledge. And in fact, the reversal of the bystander effect is also a case in point: the false knowledge that people tend to help in emergency situations even in case others are present, has become true when people became conscious of their behaviour.

This interpretative effect (called “double hermeneutics”) does not exist in the natural sciences. However, also there it can happen that knowledge becomes outdated and has to be replaced by new knowledge without being falsified. Old medical knowledge is often replaced by new knowledge, not because it has been falsified, but because now we know better. But in a certain sense the medical science is a social science. The latter is not the case for biology and for the biological world, for instance. Nature is in continuous development and what once was true about it, is not valid anymore many years or ages later. Even if our knowledge isn’t true, it needn’t be false. There are many ways that it can appear to be wrong.

What do we know?

2011-12-12T00:49:00.000+01:00

When we know something, or at least think so, do we really know it then? Can it be that we on some occasions know a thing and on other occasions we do not know it, even though we haven’t forgotten it and can tell exactly what it is that we are supposed to know? When browsing on the Internet, I found this interesting case by Keith DeRose, which I quote from Nestor Ángel Pinillos “Some Recent Work in Experimental Epistemology” (Philosophy Compass 6/10 (2011): 679):

[1] My wife and I are driving home on a Friday afternoon. We plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit our paychecks. But as we drive past the bank, we notice that the lines inside are very long, as they often are on Friday afternoons. Although we generally like to deposit our paychecks as soon as possible, it is not especially important in this case that they be deposited right away, so I suggest that we drive straight home and deposit our paychecks on Saturday morning. My wife says, “Maybe the bank won’t be open tomorrow. Lots of banks are closed on Saturdays.” I reply, “No, I know it’ll be open. I was just there two weeks ago on Saturday. It’s open until noon.”

[2] My wife and I drive past the bank on a Friday afternoon, as in [1], and notice the long lines. I again suggest that we deposit our paychecks on Saturday morning, explaining that I was at the bank on Saturday morning only two weeks ago and discovered that it was open until noon. But in this case, we have just written a very large and very important check. If our paychecks are not deposited into our checking account before Monday morning, the important check we wrote will bounce, leaving us in a very bad situation. And, of course, the bank is not open on Sunday. My wife reminds me of these facts. She then says, “Banks do change their hours. Do you know the bank will be open tomorrow?” Remaining as confident as I was before that the bank will be open then, still, I reply, “Well, no. I’d better go in and make sure.”

The first case is clear: I know that the bank is open on Saturday morning and I behave like that. But how about the second case? If I am sure and know that the bank is open on Saturday morning, there is no need to check it. However, although I am confident to know it, nevertheless I check it. But there can be only reason to check whether the bank is open, if I do not know it or when I am not sure enough about it so that I can say “I know it”. Pinillos discusses then two possibilities: either knowledge is dependent on the context or, although knowledge as such is true, it is sensitive to stakes, i.e. “the idea that whether an agent who believes P also knows P may depend on the practical costs (for that agent) of being wrong about P: when the stakes are high, the epistemic standards for attaining knowledge may be higher.”(676) Pinillos rejects the first possibility. However, I think that there is at least one other possibility, namely that there are degrees of knowledge, an alternative that Pinillos does not discuss. Also then, just as Pinillos says, whether we are going to check our knowledge depends on what the consequences are when we are wrong. But we don’t check when we are for 100% sure. If that were so, we should have to continue checking and checking after each check, for the consequences in case we are wrong haven’t changed after each check. So why would we stop checking? But after the first one our knowledge has increased and we feel sure and that’s why we stop and say: we know it.

Fabricated knowledge

2011-12-05T00:58:00.000+01:00

I do not know whether you are acquainted with what is happening in the academic worlds in other countries, but recently in the Netherlands social psychology professor Diederik Stapel was dismissed because he had fabricated research data; not only once but so often that his university decided to report it to the police. In Germany, defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Gutenberg had to resign because it came out that his PhD thesis was full of plagiarisms. Since then more such cases have been discovered both in Germany and in the Netherlands. So, inside and outside our ivory tower of science and the humanities not everybody appears to be as original as s/he pretends.

I do not think that I am original in most of my blogs here, but I do not pretend to be so and at least I mention my sources, as every reader can check, and lack of originality is not a crime. But when I considered my recent blogs on knowledge again today, I had to think of the case of this Dutch ex-Prof. Stapel. Let’s suppose that looking for inspiration for my blogs I read an article by Stapel and, since his falsifications had not yet come to light, I had good reasons to think that the research in the article was real and that the data were correct. Also the argumentation in the article was okay, so that I could endorse his conclusion that A was the case. Therefore, given my definition of knowledge as methodically justified interpreted belief (see my blog dated Nov. 14, 2011), one could say that I knew then that A was the case. But, in view of what we know now about Stapel, can we still say that I then knew it? I think so, for then the conclusion was methodologically justified for me, and for many other people too, although not for ex-Prof. Stapel. However, now it is no knowledge any longer. Does this now mean that afterwards I have to change the idea that then I knew it?

One can defend that the “knowledge” in Stapel’s article has never been any knowledge at all, but in a certain sense what happens here is not so different from what normally happens in science, apart from that normally knowledge is not fabricated. For instance, we have an idea about something in reality, like that on average poplars are higher than oaks. We gather data in order to test the idea, for example by measuring 100 mature poplars and 100 mature oaks around here where I live and comparing the average lengths of both. Then we can say that we know now that on average poplars are higher than oaks. But usually things are often not as simple as that. In the days of Galileo most people thought that the sun turned around the earth, but Galileo showed that it was the other way around. So, did we get a change in knowledge? However, before Galileo people had good and sincere reasons to think that they knew that the sun turned around the earth, and this knowledge hadn’t been fabricated, so if you asked someone what s/he knew about the earth and the sun, you got the answer “the sun turns around the earth”. And today we are in the same situation: We think that we know a lot and probably we do, but for every piece of knowledge it is quite well possible that sooner or later someone will say: well, I developed a new research method which is better than the old ones (just as Galileo used a telescope for studying the sky, which was new in his days) and I have applied it and my conclusions are different. The upshot is: fabricated knowledge is false, it’s true (unless by chance the fabrication happens to correspond to reality), but it is not so that what we sincerely and in a methodically justified way think to know is true, even not for us, as the Galileo case shows. Only the chance it is is bigger. And to enhance this chance, that’s what science and the humanities are about.

Is making a mistake a mistake?

2011-11-28T01:21:00.000+01:00

Mistake

When we make a mistake, we regret it and we try to correct it or, what often and maybe more often happens, we try to conceal it (which is as human as human is). That’s okay – I mean the regret, of course – and that you want to do it better is inherent in the meaning of the word. But are mistakes really so bad? Everybody knows the expression “We can learn from our mistakes” and so, mistakes have a positive side, too. However, there is more, for according to Stanford University psychologist Carol Deck – and I hope that he doesn’t blame me for the shortcut – people who make mistakes are more flexible than those who do not. Basically, so Deck, one can distinguish between people who have a fixed mindset and people with a growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, people believe that their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. The first type of people tries to gather stuff that supports their ideas, while the second type tries to develop their insights. But just the later kind of people has to try new things and by doing so they have to take chances. And then, you guess it, they run the risk of making mistakes. But this type of people has also a better awareness of their mistakes and what to do with them. Therefore they advance more than those with fixed mindsets (who, alas, often just are the persons with the biggest talents). Thus, open your mind, don’t fear mistakes and in the end you’ll profit by it. A bit like “reculer pour mieux sauter”, as they say in French.

See http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-work and http://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/about/index.html .

Counting knowledge

2011-11-21T01:15:00.002+01:00

In my last blog I characterized knowledge as methodically justified interpreted belief in order to make clear that it is impossible to say that there is a certain quantity of knowledge (be it measured in bytes or otherwise). I am not alone in characterizing knowledge that way. I want to mention here only Günter Abel, who has a related view (see his “Forms of Knowledge: Problems, Projects, Perspectives”, in Peter Meusberger, Michael Welker, Edgar Wunder (eds.), Clashes of Knowledge, Springer, 2008; pp. 10-33). However, that knowledge cannot be quantified is not only so because it is perspectival. Basically, the question “what is knowledge?” has no unequivocal answer, and what cannot be defined clearly cannot be measured. Take my own characterization of knowledge. Assuming that it is correct, even then it refers only to intellectual knowledge or “knowledge that”, as Ryle has called it, a type of knowledge that has to be distinguished from practical knowledge or “knowledge how” (see my blog dated June 9, 2008). Supposing that we could measure knowledge-that, we would measure only a part of what we know. Maybe all our knowledge-that, our theoretical knowledge, might be caught in books, articles and computer files (which I doubt), but how should we catch and measure all the things that we practically know how to do but that we cannot put into words? For how should we measure the knowledge how to skate or to drive a car, activities that can perhaps be theoretically explained but that we know to do only when we are successfully able to do it? Moreover, for everybody the knowledge how to do it is a bit different: my knowing how to skate is not exactly the same as your knowledge how to skate (for instance because our physical capacities are a bit different). Or what do you think of doing research? The main lines may be listed in handbooks, but many of the choices you have to make are simply a matter of your experience and intuition.

All this becomes even more complicated, when we look at other possible distinctions of knowledge. For besides the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge how, other classifications can be made. Let me quote Abel just by way of illustration: We can “distinguish … between (a) everyday knowledge (knowing where the letterbox is), (b) theoretical knowledge (knowing that 2+2=4 or, within classical geometry, knowing that within a triangle the sum of the angles equals 180^o), (c) action knowledge (knowing how to open a window), and (d) moral or orientational knowledge (knowing what ought to be done in a given situation). Across these [types] of knowledge … the following important distinctions and pairs of concepts have to be taken into account: (a) explicit and implicit (tacit) knowledge, (b) verbal and nonverbal knowledge, (c) propositional knowledge (that which can be articulated in a linguistic proposition) and nonpropositional knowledge (that which is not articulable within a that-clause), (d) knowledge relating to matters of fact and knowledge based on skills and abilities.” (Abel, id: 13).

Should we measure all these different types of knowledge, add them, subtract what we counted more than once and then say: this is the amount of knowledge in the world? But how could we count or estimate everyday knowledge or implicit knowledge, for instance? And how could we say, which is a precondition for the counting task, that there is at least theoretically a fixed quantity of everyday knowledge or implicit knowledge in the world at a certain moment, for instance at 18.56h on November 14, 2011? I think that nobody would endorse the view that we can. But then the idea that there is a total amount knowledge is not realistic.

The attitude towards science

2011-11-14T01:37:00.002+01:00

There is no fixed amount of knowledge, even not at a certain moment. I have asserted this in my last blog and I have explained it in previous blogs. But besides that, I think that the idea there is shows a wrong attitude towards knowledge. It’s a bit like: that’s what we have already. Although it is true that today we “know” a lot more than in the past and that there are good reasons to value it, I think that for a scientist it is the wrong attitude. This becomes clear when we consider what knowledge is: justified true belief, as a standard definition runs. But already this rough definition, which goes back to Plato and which since then has been the starting point for any discussion on what knowledge is (albeit often in the background), raises a lot of questions, such as: When is a belief justified? What is true? What is a belief? For whom does this belief exist? And for each answer, many new questions can be raised. It is not without reason that Karl R. Popper came to the conclusion that “we can never rationally justify a theory … but we can, if we are lucky, rationally justify a preference for one theory out of a set of competing theories, for the time being”. The presently accepted theory is nothing more than the best approximation to the truth we have. (Popper, Objective Knowledge, p. 82) In other words, the right attitude towards knowledge is not: that’s what we have but, as once a Dutch electronics company said, “Let’s make things better”. This can be reached only by not taking the “facts”, the knowledge we have gathered, as a starting point but by starting from the method to come to the facts: Popper’s method of conjectures and refutations, or rather any method that leads to a critical attitude towards the facts. It is the scientific skepticism of Descartes (and before him already Montaigne). That’s one pillar of knowledge. The other pillar or at least another pillar is, of course, man, the one who makes knowledge and for whom knowledge is made. But man as such does not exist; only individual men and women do, and this is the other reason that there is no knowledge as such but only knowledge for someone (or for a community of kindred spirits at most), as Karl-Otto Apel explained. Therefore a characterization of knowledge as methodically justified interpreted belief would better fit with what scientists actually do.

Finding our way in the field of knowledge

2011-11-07T01:49:00.000+01:00

Lucca, Italy: 2000 years old Roman theatre, now in use as an apartment building

Once I discussed here Popper’s rejection of what he called the “commonsense theory of knowledge” or “bucket theory of mind” (see my blog dated April 5, 2010). According this theory, so Popper, there is a fixed quantity of knowledge that we can gather in some way. However, the theory is false for several reasons; in short one can say because knowledge is perspectival. Basically, knowledge is a special way of interpreting the world around us. Of course, it is changing through the ages and we get also new knowledge. But this changing and renewing of knowledge must be compared with the restoration and reconstruction of an old building, not with constructing new buildings instead. The building gets a new painting every odd years; stone walls are restored and get new bricks; wooden beams are maybe replaced by iron beams; new extensions are added and old parts are pulled down; also the interior may change a lot through the years; and after 500 years we have a completely different building with original and modern parts and another appearance; not three or four new buildings. Moreover, the building looks different, depending on whether we are in front of it or look at the rear side and on whether the sun is shining, or whether it is dark. So it is with knowledge, too.

Therefore I was a bit surprised to read in a lecture by Prof. Robert Dijkgraaf, president of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences – summarized in the Dutch daily De Volkskrant of the 29th ult. – an estimate of how much knowledge presently exists, namely one zeta byte, or 10²¹ bytes (I pass over here that in the lecture no difference was made between knowledge, information and data). It gives the suggestion that the existing knowledge is something fixed, albeit continuously growing. It is as if one could say: if we would distribute all knowledge there is among all the people in the world, each person would receive about 143.000.000.000 bytes of knowledge. The problem would be then how to coordinate them.

Actually, the lecture was not about how much knowledge there is but about how to find one’s way through it, which is a problem, indeed, whether one sees knowledge as perspectival or as quantitatively measurable. But I guess that just this distinction makes a big difference in the solution of the way finding problem. From the point of view of the bucket theory, ideally one would try to learn as much knowledge as there is, but alas, this is impossible, so Dijkgraaf proposes a strategic approach: learn those pieces of knowledge (at school, at the university) that have a strategic position in the sense that they are central by having relevant connections with those parts of knowledge that we do not learn and that are also important to know for some reason. The learned pieces of knowledge must give as best an entrance to the not learned pieces as possible. I think it is a conservative approach. It takes the old idea of pumping knowledge into one’s head as a starting point for science and maybe also for being intellectual. On the background (not so much in Dijkgraaf’s lecture but generally in such approaches) often the fear is present that people will lose the old values of learning and in the end certain valued capacities of the brain: the capacities to store facts. The latter is not impossible, for learning values simply do change and brains adapt themselves genetically to new circumstances.

Now, I do not want to deny that knowing facts can be useful and can also be an enrichment of one’s life. But is learning strategic facts really the solution to the problem how to find one’s way in the field of knowledge? I think that from the perspectival view of knowledge a methodological approach is more obvious: learning methods how to find knowledge rather than learning strategic points from where to start. If knowledge is perspectival, and when the perspectives are continuously changing in addition, I think that it is more important to know the right questions to ask in order to find your way than knowing the right places to start. For the appearances of these places are continuously changing. In other words: learn how to find your way, not from where to find your way.

The strategic facts approach and the methodological approach do not completely exclude each other, of course. For one thing, the methodological approach is not possible without a basic knowledge of facts. For another, once one knows the strategic facts, one must know how to find one’s way to the not learned facts. However, the differences between both approaches are fundamental: they are based on a different view what knowledge is.

The methodological approach asks for another mental attitude and in view of what is known about the development of the brain, it is not unlikely that it will lead to a genetic change of the brain, if it will become the leading approach to the world of knowledge. But should that be regretted? I don’t think so. Genetic changes of the brain are normal. They have taken place as long as man exists and they have led to a better adaption to the world around us. This does not imply that this will also be the case in future, no more than that it implies that our present genetic constitution is the best one for a changing world. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but we simply cannot deny what happens to be.

Montaigne’s mirror

2011-10-31T00:31:00.002+01:00

The Essays by Montaigne, but also his report of his journey through Europe, keep holding your interest, how often you read them. And not only is it interesting to read what Montaigne wrote himself, it is also interesting to read what others have written about him and his books. Therefore, not only you can find Montaigne’s Essays always on the table in my study, ready to be opened (instead of somewhere hidden between the books in my book cases), but now and then I read also one of those comments on Montaigne that I happen to come accross, and I do not find it annoying when someone tells me about Montaigne what I had read already in one of the other comments. So, no wonder that I have a little library of Montaigne commentaries. The latest one I added was Saul Frampton’s When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing with Me?, and this quotation – for the title is a quotation from the Essays – says already a lot about the man Montaigne was: A man who was looking at the daily things of the world around him and who asked surprising questions about it. Moreover he was a man with an eye for cultural differences, which becomes especially clear from his travel journey (which was written for personal use, however, not for publication). My remarks about Montaigne are not original, I know it, but it is always nice to discover things anew, even when “everybody” knows them, and to be pointed to facts that many other people know already but just you don’t. It is way of developing your mind. In order to show richness of Montaigne’s thoughts, I give here a few quotations from the Essays. I have no pretention that they are the most important ones or are a kind of summary of the work. The Essays simply cannot be summarized. I took just a few passages that I had underlined in the book, and I did not underline many other passages which are by far more worth to be stressed. Just read them, enjoy them and think about them.

***

- Of course, you know this one already, but in case you don’t: When seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech.

- Many faults escape our eye, but the infirmity of judgment consists in not being able to discern them, when by another laid open to us.

- Things most unknowne are fittest to be deified.

- He that should fardle-up a bundle or huddle of the fooleries of mans wisdome, might recount wonders.

- Why, in giving your estimate of a man, do you prize him wrapped and muffled up in clothes? He then discovers nothing to you but such parts as are not in the least his own, and conceals those by which alone one may rightly judge of his value.

- Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature, and not according to the essence of nature.

- In truth, custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.

- In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice.

- Of all the follies of the world, that which is most universally received is the solicitude of reputation and glory.

- The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.

Mind reading and our future

2011-10-14T01:21:00.000+02:00

Well, of course, it’s my fault, for I am a simple philosopher sitting in his room in his private ivory tower. But now and then I come down, as my dear readers may have noticed, in order to look for stuff for my blogs, either live by travelling, or virtually by surfing on the Internet or reading printed stuff. And so I discovered a few days ago that the technological developments have already progressed more than what I had thought. In my blog last week I saw mind reading as something far away in the future, but what did I discover? It’s already among us. No, I do not mean the mirror neurons in our head that read for instance, as my readers may remember, the feelings, emotions, intentions and so on of other persons. I mean an artificial device that really can read what is going on in our brains. The gadget I found on the Internet is a kind of head set. You have to connect it with a television, which interprets then your brain waves. Or use your brain waves for controlling computer games or other software programs. The Australian engineer Adam Wilson made such an application known to the world by using it for sending a Twitter message. But people suffering from brain disabilities and paralysis will be able to use it for controlling their wheelchairs. I did not find it yet in the stories and messages on the Internet (but it may be my fault) but what to think of using such a head set as a kind of mobile telephone? Just set a mind reading set on your head and let your partner do the same, and you can communicate just by thinking! You do not need to say a word any longer. Just think. One problem to be solved, of course, is that probably there will be also other thoughts in your head, so the mind reading set must learn to select the right ones. But it will make communication much easier. So you’ll be able to tell to your partner what you cannot put into words.

Communication will be more direct then. But be careful, for maybe your partner hears also what you want to keep secret. One step further will be to read your thoughts, even when you do not have a mind reading set on your head. You enter a building and a mind scanner in the doorpost reads whether you want to make an attempt or whether you are there for decent reason. Even better, place such scanners on every street corner, like it is done now with surveillance cameras. The uses will be infinite (as will be its misuses). From a philosophical point of view all these developments are very interesting and they will certainly make that concepts like freedom and personal identity will be given a new meaning.

See CBS News and the NewScientist and follow the links there.

Are our thoughts free?

2011-10-10T01:11:00.001+02:00

Big Brother is watching us. I have discussed this theme already several times. Facebook wants to have our data for commercial reasons. State authorities want to have our data and follow what we do because we might be possible criminals. We find cameras everywhere for controlling our behaviour. But at least our thoughts are free, as a famous German song composed about 200 years ago says. The idea is much older, though. It had already been expressed by Cicero in Antiquity and then later, for instance, by the German mediaeval poet Walther von der Vogelweide. We still think so today, but how long yet?

The idea that our thoughts are free wants to express that we can think what we like because our thoughts are hidden for others. Even prison cannot limit them. And although our thoughts tend to be directed to what is socially and culturally acceptable and by what we have learned, everybody who wants to develop his or her own thoughts is free to do that.

It is to be hoped that thoughts will remain free in the sense that we can think what we want to think, but there are signs that the time is near that they’ll not be hidden any longer. Once I wrote a blog about a research that showed that a brain scanner can reveal our intentions better than we can. Now they can scan our brain also in order to see what we have done. At least the first steps have been taken. Researchers presented film fragments to three test subjects and while these persons were watching them their brains were scanned. Then the researchers begun to search video clips on YouTube, and with the help of the scanner data, a special computer program and some other computer work they succeeded to reconstruct the film fragments the tests subjects had seen (see http://gallantlab.org/). Of course, these reconstructions were possible because the researchers knew already what film fragments they were looking for, but the next step will certainly be that they can also reconstruct what we have seen without such reference material. The whole procedure is still very complicated and time-consuming, but I guess that the time will come that it will be a matter of seconds and with a much higher quality of the results. One step more and it will be possible to “read” not only what we are doing at the moment that our brain is scanned but also to find back what we did in the past, so to read our memories. Then, the uses will be legion. It will be easier to solve crimes but also to repress unwanted behaviour (just have every citizen scanned his or her brain once a month).

All this sounds like science fiction, but wasn’t the myth of Icarus flying through the air also a kind of science fiction in Antiquity? And now we can fly, albeit it in a different way than Icarus did. Fiction often becomes fact, and it is to be expected that this will also occur for brain reading. Thoughts are not representations of what we do or have done, but they’ll certainly be influenced by the idea that the present representations in our brain and our memories can easily be read. And once these can be read, it is not unlikely that our thoughts can be read as well. Then they’ll no longer be free.

Our stored free will

2011-10-03T01:40:00.000+02:00

I think that one reason why it is often thought that we do not have a free will is that it has come out that most of the processes in our brain are unconscious. And then the conclusion is easily drawn that what happens unconsciously happens without our will. As I have explained in other blogs, this conclusion does not follow. One simply needs more evidence for it. (see for instance my blog dated September 13, 2010) This does not mean, of course, that all things we do occur with our will. What I do maintain, however, is that fundamentally we have a free will and that within the limits of our body and the situation we have choices. We can plan actions long before they take place, and even at the last moment we can often choose what to do, too. But in fact, most of these free chosen actions are worked out unconsciously. How else could it be in view of the limited capacity for conscious processes in our mind?

Then it is an interesting question how the unconscious part within us works. In their article “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being” the psychologists John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand shed some light on it. In this blog I can only touch their analysis, but in short they see three processes at work that determine our unconscious reactions or forms of automatic self-regulation, as they call them. The first one is an “automatic effect of perception on action”: We see other people doing things and when it fits the ideas that were stored before in our head – if nor our prejudices –, we are going to act in the same way. Although Bargh and Chartrand do not mention it, it makes me think of what the recently discovered mirrors neurons make us do (see my blogs of June 27, 2011 and later). In other words: we act automatically in a certain way because we see others doing it that way.

The second automatism is “automatic goal pursuit”: For one reason or another we have developed certain goals in our mind and they are automatically activated when we happen to meet the right circumstances where we can pursuit them. However, in order to acquire these automatisms we often need first a conscious learning process that gives us the right behaviour. Once we have internalized the learned behaviour it becomes automatic, like driving a car, for instance. We can call these automatisms skill, experience, practice or routine. They can also be acquired by unconscious processes that are different from explicit learning. Once in a situation where we need to apply our skill we behave automatically in the right way.

Bargh and Chartrand describe the third automatism as “continual automatic evaluation of one’s experience”. Evaluating whether an object or event is good or bad is often seen as a conscious process, but in many cases it does not happen so freely, as the authors point out. Our evaluations are often (if not usually) activated directly without needing to think about it and even without being aware that we classified a person or event as good or bad. They just happen. When they happen they can influence our mood and even our emotions or they can influence our behaviour like avoiding places that arouse unpleasant feelings.

Actually, all these processes are not so different from what we freely and consciously do, for we can see them as stored free will, or at least a big part of our reactions can be seen that way, namely to the extent that they are the result of learning and of handling the experiences of life.

Freedom of the will and your career

2011-09-26T15:31:00.000+02:00

In the Netherlands (and not only there) a lively debate is going on about the question whether man does or doesn’t have a free will. On the one hand there are those like the brain researchers Dick Swaab and Victor Lamme who deny that we have a free will; on the other hand there are philosophers like Daan Evers, Niels van Miltenburg and others who reply that present research does not substantiate that view. I have discussed the views of Swaab and Lamme before in my blogs and rejected them with about the same arguments as used by Evers and Miltenburg. However, whichever side may be right, both views lead to intriguing questions. Suppose that there is no free will, does this mean then that our will is determined in the sense that if I know the present state of the body and the world around us that we can deduce what this person wants after ten years? If such a “deterministic” determination does not exist (as is defended by some philosophers), what determines then our choices and our criteria for choosing? And “who” applies them? (of course, we can ask the same questions for the birds and other animals in my garden).

But if the will is free, how far does this freedom go? It certainly is not without limits for we are bound by our bodily constitution and the world around us. Freedom of the will can only be a freedom within borders, or, more positively formulated, it is the freedom to choose from a certain number of possibilities according to a certain number of criteria.

The most intriguing question is, of course, whether all this has sense. I mean: either there is a free will and the view that there isn’t cannot change that; or there isn’t a free will and this determines that some people think there is although there isn’t. For would any philosophical idea have an influence on “real life”? Aren’t philosophical ideas just epiphenomena like the other products of our mind, as many neuroscientists and philosophers (Churchland, for instance) tend to think? Maybe they are, but even so, there are indications that the function of the mind is a bit more complicated than just this and that the mind has an important function in steering what we do.

It is not a proof, but that it can be so is suggested in a study by Roy F. Baumeister and others that suggests that certain beliefs can be advantageous for you. For what did they find: “possessing a belief in free will predicted better career attitudes and actual job performance. The effect of free will beliefs on job performance indicators were over and above well-established predictors such as conscientiousness, locus of control, and Protestant work ethic.” (quoted from the abstract on http://spp.sagepub.com/content/1/1/43.abstract). In other words, actually it is not so important whether the will is free or not. Even if it is not free, you can better believe it is, for it is good for your career (and who knows, maybe for other important facts of life as well). And it is better not consider the question of the free will as an interesting academic question, for if you deny that there is a free will, you are less well off than your colleagues who think that there is. So you, readers of my blog, be warned: now that I know this I do no longer defend the idea that the will is free because I believe in it but because it is better for me (supposing that I am free to choose this position, of course). And the already excellent careers of Swaab and Lamme would still have been even more excellent if they had used this information.

Some thoughts on evil in war

2011-09-19T01:31:00.000+02:00

Evil is in the eye of the beholder and if we do not see it we create it in our mind, in order to justify why we took action. These are two lessons that one can learn from Roy F. Baumeister’s book Evil. Inside human violence and cruelty. Of course, the second part of this thesis is not true under all circumstances and Baumeister does not say that. Moreover, there are some kinds of behaviour that objectively can be qualified as evil, even when the perpetrator may have a different view. Intentionally murdering innocent people like passersby; the Holocaust... But here I do not want to discuss that. What I do want to discuss is that it often happens that what is evil is constructed in the mind. This can be seen in war, for instance. Wars are fought for many reasons, but it is often difficult to make these reasons clear to the people who have to fight them, whether your reasons are good or whether they aren’t (and whether your reasons are really good is often a point of discussion). But you need the support of your people for you need soldiers. Then there is a simple solution: Depict the enemy as evil. If your enemy is seen as pure evil, you do not need further justification for your war. Success is guaranteed. Undecided loyalties are won over to your advantage.

“Perhaps the most famous example of this in the twentieth century”, as Baumeister calls it, was the British propaganda for getting soldiers in the First World War. And the same approach appeared to be effective in Australia and the USA, for instance. The Germans were depicted as cruel Huns and the allied forces got their troops. That most atrocities ascribed to the “Huns” were extreme exaggerations or simply false seems then an irrelevant footnote for post-war historians, as long as those who became soldiers believed in it. In view of this, it is striking that this image of the Germans as devils almost disappeared, as soon as the soldiers were there, at the front. This is at least the impression, when one reads autobiographic novels and soldiers’ diaries about the First World War. The Germans are often called “Huns”, it is true, but the picture one gets from the novels and diaries (and I have read dozens of them) is not that the French, British, Americans and so on shoot at the Germans because they are evil but because they are the enemy and because, once you are there, you have to defend yourself and kill those on the other side in order to survive. Only German soldiers operating machine-guns and snipers are seen as evil, because they kill so many people and because of the way they do (forgetting that there are also machine-gun operators and snipers on the allied side). Enemy soldiers that flee are not shot down because they are evil but because they can become a future danger, because they are the enemy, and because it is your task to do so (again a case that shows that the situation influences to a large extent what you do). Snow, the soldier in my last blog who killed his first opponent, did it only because he was there to do that, and he got remorse. Reflecting on the incident, Lynch, who describes the situation and who stood next to Snow, calls him even the murderer and the German soldier the victim. Later in the book (and not only in this book) German soldiers killed on the battle field are often called “poor guys”. “Is that civilization?”, one of Lynch’s comrades sighs when seeing all the victims of both sides. Was such a remark to be expected if the enemy was really seen as evil?

All this shows, I think, that evil in a complex situation has different levels of construction. What is considered or presented as evil on one level (in my example: the level of the government) may be reversed on another level (here: the level of the soldiers). Evildoer and victim change positions, so it seems sometimes. “C’est la guerre” (That’s war), Lynch concludes. But is that a sufficient justification?

The banality of war

2011-09-12T01:06:00.003+02:00

Australian Memorial, Pozières, Somme region, commemorating the heavy
battle fought by the Australian soldiers when conquering the hill here.

I just finished reading Somme Mud by E.P.F. Lynch. It is an autobiographic novel about the author’s experiences as a soldier on the Western Front of the First World War (so in France and Belgium), although Lynch denied that the novel was about himself. Lynch, an Australian, served voluntarily as a member of Anzac, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. His penetrating descriptions of the fights and the battle fields can be compared with those by Ernst Jünger in his Storm of Steel. You feel yourself in the skin of Lynch, to the extent that such a thing is possible, of course, for you miss the stench and the noise, for instance.

We follow Lynch from his departure from Australia to his first battle on the Somme and then to the other battles he participated in – including the heaviest ones like the battles on the Messines Ridge and near Passendale – till the end of the war, when the front begun to move, the armistice and Lynch’s return to Australia. Lynch became five times wounded but surprisingly, in view of the many very dangerous situations he got through, he survived it, as did his little inner group of comrades, with the exception of one.

I can write a lot about the book, and I can compare it also with other novels of the First World war and with other soldier’s autobiographies, but here I want to bring forward one thing that is related to what I wrote already about in these blogs. The more I came to the end of the book, the more it made me think of what Arendt wrote on the banality of evil and of what Zimbardo wrote on the being situated of what we do: that it is the situation that makes you a devil or a hero. You can see this also in this book, although the situated behaviour did not develop as quickly as it did in Zimbardo’s prison experiment (Zimbardo had to break off his experiment already after six days; see my blog dated March 14, 2011). Here it was a matter of months and years. I read the book in a Dutch translation, so I cannot give verbal quotations, but somewhere at the end, Lynch makes a comparison between civil life and army life: A man does not enter a pub, so he says, in order to become drunk, but once he is there, he does the same as the others do and in the end he becomes smashed. In the army it is not different. A man does not come into action with the intention to kill his fellow man, but with a grenade or a bayonet in his hands he will do exactly the same as his comrades do and he will use them fully. Isn’t there a better description of the fact that the situation makes us do what we do? Of Zimbardo’s conclusion that it are not psychological dispositions that make people behave in an evil (or heroic) way but that it is the situation that brings people that far? Of the banality of evil in Arendt’s sense? (Arendt stressed the wrong side of what we do, but as Zimbardo made clear and as can be seen in Lynch’s book, too, the same is true for heroism).

To take another example, in the beginning of the book, Snow, one of Lynch’s comrades of the inner group, sees a German soldier walking to his line with a pack on his back. It is the first enemy they see. Snow shoots him down but gets pangs of conscience. Later in the book, and especially at the end, all feelings of remorse for killing have gone. Every German who has not surrendered is killed, if possible, including Germans who have left their positions and flee; who want to surrender but haven’t done it quickly enough, and so on. It is no problem to shoot them down. Seeing the killings and the heavy mutilated bodies on the battlefield, one of Lynch’s comrades says: “Is that civilization?”

Yet, most soldiers were conscripts or volunteers – some very young, some older, some already relatively old. They were ordinary civilians, before they went to this war; people who before the war probably never would have thought that they would be able to participate in such mass killings, or, on the other hand, to run forward into the bullets of the machine guns of the enemy, just because they “had to”. Apparently the situation is stronger than your will, at least often, and Lynche’s book is a good illustration of it.

Our identity and our future

2011-09-05T01:34:00.000+02:00

The mainstream of the philosophers who discuss the question what makes up our personal identity defend the so-called “psychological view”, which states that our identity is in our memory and our psychological characteristics: a person’s identity remains the same as long as s/he can still remember past facts of his or her life or as long as s/he remained unchanged in other psychological respects between some point of time in the past and the present. In short, what makes who we are, our identity, is fundamentally in our past. I have talked about this before in my blogs and I have also criticized this view, putting forward that our bodily characteristics are as much important as our psychological characteristics are (and why else give many people so much attention to their body and their physical appearance?). Others point to the relevance of factors like the group you belong to, your profession and work, and so on that have a more sociological character and that refer rather to what makes you here and now than to what you were, as the factors mentioned in the psychological view do.

But how about our future? This may seem an odd question, and I do not want to say that what happens with you, say, ten years after today is important for your identity now. Nevertheless, it may be that the future has a role in making you. An indication of this is given in a study by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, which was mentioned by Richard Sorabji in his Self (here I make use of Sorabji for a part). Luria followed for some 25 years a soldier, Zasetsky, who had lost a big part of his memory through a shot in his brain during the Second World War. His amnesia regarded both parts of his episodic memory and abilities like reading and writing. Since he got the injury Zasetsky, spent all his time to regain his life and what he had lost, to rediscover who he was, and to write his efforts down in a diary. This had become his life’s project.

Does this tell us something about our personal identity? Your memory is important for you, that’s clear, but probably more important for you is what to make of your future. Anyway, as Luria comments here, those of his patients that had lost their ability to plan their future disintegrated far more than those who had lost their memories. At least in order to keep your identity intact, apparently more important for you is making plans for the time to come than preserving what you lived through. An orientation to the future may be more relevant for our identity than being conscious of our past, as the psychological view states.

On the meaning of interpretation for science

2011-08-29T01:17:00.000+02:00

A discussion is going on in the philosophy of science on the question whether understanding phenomena is relevant for science and, if so, how it takes place. This is to such an extent remarkable that the main stream of science has always propagated the view that it is the aim of science to explain phenomena and that there is no room for understanding because it is considered subjective and in science there should be no place for subjectivity. Since Carl G. Hempel developed his famous deductive-nomological model of explanation the main stream view maintained that for explaining in science only the relation between the phenomena, other phenomena and an explaining theory was relevant. This theory was supposed to be valid at any place and at any time. In this view there was no room for an investigating subject that did the research and for whom the relation investigated had to be true, not to speak of a wider research community and a wider public. This idea of science was supposed to be valid for all kinds of investigation that bore the label “scientific” in some way, from sociology and psychology to physics and biology. Of course, opposition to this view did exist, but from the side of the main stream it was often disparagingly called “metaphysical”.

But times are changing and so here, too. Influenced by proposals by the Dutch philosopher Henk de Regt and others more and more it is accepted that the investigator (and with him or her the whole scientific community) is important in the explanation process. More exactly, they say that science is not only about the relation “x explains y” (whereby x is a theory, while y is what is to be explained”, but it is about the relation “x explains y for (the knowing subject) z” (Karl-Otto Apel, Die Erklären-Verstehen Kontroverse in transzendental pragmatischer Sicht, 1979; p. 267; there is also an English translation of this book). In this view there is not only room for understanding, but it is an essential part of it. What I find annoying in the present discussion about the place of the knowing subject and the interpretative part in the scientific process is that there is hardly any reference to the “old” opponents against the two-dimensional view of the scientific process, so to Apel in the first place.

What does the “new” interpretative part of science involve? How must we imagine it? In a blog like this I can give only a few hints. In my dissertation about understanding human actions, I have defended the view that interpretation is placing a phenomenon in a kind of mental scheme of the type as developed by Schank and Abelson, which I have mentioned already several times in my blogs. Maybe this can be related to the idea of the significance of model construction for understanding in the way as it has been proposed by de Regt. In my dissertation I have also developed the view that in order to understand human actions we have to answer three questions, namely the questions 1) what an action is; 2) what an action is for; and 3) why an action is performed. The first question asks for a description of an action, the second one for its intention and purpose and the third one for the reasons behind the action: what made the agent to perform this act. By extension (and of course adapted to the object of investigation) these questions apply for understanding in the social sciences in general. Do these questions also apply for science in general? If we forget for a moment that they are about understanding actions in a narrow sense and not for the scientific process in general, maybe they apply not exactly as they stand here. However, I think that they are a good starting point for thinking about what understanding involves when we say that an investigator not only explains a phenomenon but also that the resulting explanation is understood.

What makes us happy?

2011-08-22T01:44:00.000+02:00

I am not so happy now, for I am using my computer. At least, that is what I have to conclude from a study by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University. Actually it is not using my home computer as such that makes me unhappy but that it makes my mind wandering. As the title of their study indicates, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind”, so a mind that does not concentrate on the task that it is supposed to do is not happy.

I’ll skip the methodological details, but the researchers asked 2250 people what they were doing, what they were feeling then and whether they were thinking about something else. The surprising result was that most of the time we do not think about what we do: our mind “wanders” and is full of other thoughts. No less than 30% and up to nearly half of the time we spend on an activity we are thinking about something else: about what we did yesterday, about the meal we have to prepare this evening, about our next holiday, and so on. And what turned out, too: this mind wandering makes us unhappy. What we need for being happy is concentration. Do what you do, and nothing else. But as everybody knows, the mind tends to be easily distracted. And so we are unhappiest when we are using our home computer, when we are working and when we are resting. The two latter activities are a bit contradictory, for if both working and resting makes us unhappy, what else can we do in order to feel well? Apparently there are activities that are seen as neither the first nor the second, and it is these that make us happy. Therefore, make love! There is no other activity that requires more concentration. But there are also good alternatives: exercise, or engaging in conservation. They make us happy, too.

Mind wandering has also a positive side: the more you day dream, the more creative you are. It is also important in evaluating how you behaved towards other people and how you’ll behave in future. So, it brings you benefits, but not without emotional costs.

The upshot is that for being happy, you have to concentrate on what you do, on the here and now, something that some religions tell you, too. But should I stop writing my blogs, because using my computer makes me unhappy? I have my doubts, for when I let my mind now wander over the blog that I have just written, I realize that writing it required much concentration. Maybe it is true on the average that using your home computer makes you unhappy; according to me it cannot be taken as a general rule. Anyway, I feel well by writing these sentences. However, after an hour or so, my blog is finished and I am longing for a rest. Then the study by Killingsworth and Gilbert explains to me that it is no good idea. Happily, there is something else I can do so that my state of happiness will continue: to take my bike and make a ride.

The meaning of what we make

2011-08-15T01:49:00.003+02:00

Staphorst, the Netherlands: typical farm house

When interpreters analyse a text, they tend to see more in it than the author originally had put into it: they often think to find a meaning behind the text that the writer was unaware of. This textual interpretation, which originally goes back to the exegesis of the Bible, led later – under the influence of Dilthey – to the thought that other forms of human life could be considered as texts as well. So, the idea developed that also actions can be interpreted as texts. A recent form of this, which I have discussed in other blogs, is the view that an action can have different descriptions, which actually is the same as the idea that it can have different interpretations. For instance, opening the door of your house can be interpreted as it is, but sometimes it can also be described as warning the thief who is upstairs, because he hears the noise. Interpreting human life need not be limited to human activities as such, like actions, but can also be extended to the material products of what men do: the tools they make, the houses they build, their art, and much more. These human products get often a symbolic meaning that exceeds by far what the makers of these products had laid in it when they made it.

A recent critic of the symbolic interpretation of material culture is Nicole Boivin, especially in her Material cultures, material minds. Boivin does not deny that material cultural expressions can have symbolic meanings, but what is problematic in this approach in cultural anthropology and archaeology is according to her that the symbolic meanings are often so much seen as the only correct interpretation of these material expressions that plain interpretations are rejected, even when both types of interpretations could be equally true or the plain interpretation may be better. Boivin uses an example of her own, but take this. In the Dutch villages Staphorst and Rouveen, traditionally the window frames and doors have the colours green, white and blue; green symbolizing young life in nature, white symbolizing purity and blue being used because it averts calamities. But need it really be so that a modern farmer painting his farm, or a city-dweller who has bought a farm there as a second house give these meanings to the colours? Of course not. When we ask the city-dweller, for instance, why she paints her farmhouse with these colours, there is a good chance that she knows nothing about their original meanings. Probably she’ll answer that she wants to maintain the traditional view of the village; that she wants to have the appearance of her house in agreement with the neighbouring farms; or simply that she likes the colours. Or maybe it is so that the local acts prescribe these colours. In other words, it is quite well possible that there is no symbolic meaning behind the present material expression of the painting; that the original meaning of the colours has been lost; and that nowadays the colours are used for quite banal reasons.

This makes me think of the explanation of the Japanese tea ceremony which I once received during the “Japanese week” in the town where I live. The woman performing the tea ceremony told about its religious meaning and the special feelings it arouses in the participants. I did not doubt it, but I had a good pen friend in Japan that performed the tea ceremony now and then, so I asked her what she thought of it. Well, she said, I’ll not deny this explanation and it is true that some tea ceremony performers get a special feeling by doing it, but for many Japanese it is simply a thing they sometimes do and for me it is just a hobby…

Does a young life count more than an old life?

2011-08-08T01:17:00.000+02:00

Most people outside Japan do not realize that the Fukushima calamity is still a part of the daily reality for many Japanese. One thing that actually hasn’t been solved so far is the threatening “meltdown” of the power plant, which can be stopped only, as a website explains, by “suppress[ing] the nuclear chain reaction by inserting control rods into the reactor core and … gradually cool[ing] the fuel rods with constantly circulating water.” However, the cooling system of the Fukushima nuclear plant has been destroyed, too. A temporary solution has been found by hosing the nuclear reaction system with water, but it is only a short-term solution. Moreover it can lead to nuclear pollution of the environment. So a more permanent solution has to be found, like repairing the damaged cooling system or replacing it by a new one. But as the same website says: “Repair or installation of the cooling system will unavoidably be conducted in an environment highly contaminated with radioactive elements with serious risk of future health complications.” Since apparently this cannot be done by robots, the question arises then: who should do the job? According to Yastel Yamada, a business consultant who manages the website just mentioned, it is not expedient to take younger people for it: “Young people with a long future should not have to be placed in a position of having to undertake such a task. Radiation exposure of a generation which may reproduce the next generation should be avoided, regardless of the amount.” Besides, it is not they who are responsible for the construction of nuclear power plants but it is the older generation that is and this generation has also benefitted most of them. Therefore a “Skilled Veterans Corps” should be formed consisting of “volunteers of veteran technicians and engineers who are much more qualified to carry out the work with much better on-site judgment.”

At first sight this argument sounds reasonable but is it really so? There may be nothing against using volunteers for doing the job, but what I am annoyed about in the argument are the implicit (and partly explicit) suppositions that the older generation is guilty, anyhow, of the construction of the Fukushima power plant and that a younger life has more value than an older life. I think that there are good reasons to question both suppositions. Here I do not have the space for an extensive discussion of the arguments, so I want to limit myself to a few remarks. First, a dichotomy between a younger and older generation does not exist. A generation is a sociological category but in fact age differences are on a continuum. Should we then introduce degrees of responsibility and degrees of eligibility for the Volunteer Corps? Second, the “younger generation” may not be responsible for the construction of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, but did it protest against it? And didn’t it profit by the plant as well? Third, “generation” is a sociological category and generations do not exist as such, as I just explained; only individuals exist. How can we make then the “older generation” as a whole responsible for the Fukushima power plant, despite the attitude of its individual members to the plant and despite the degree they have profited by it? Fourth, how to weigh a younger person of say 40 years old who becomes ill after 30 years because of exposure to radiation by repairing the Fukushima power plant against a person of 69 years old who becomes ill after one year, as may happen? Fifth, that the still to be born must not be exposed to radiation is a strong point, but many young people have already children and do not want to have more or they can choose not to have children. Sixth, how to value a life? Hasn’t life a value as such? How to weigh a 70 years old person (who might become 100 years old) against a younger person (who might die young?). Since the length of life can be statistically indicated (but only for a “generation”, not for individuals), is statistics then, for example, a good foundation to value the worth of a life? Or the kind of education a person has received? Or what else? What matters in what the value of a person is and who values?

These are only a few comments that occurred to me when I read the proposal for a Skilled Veterans Corps for repairing the cooling system of the Fukushima power plant, and certainly more can be added, against it and in support of it.

See http://bouhatsusoshi.jp/english

Trip to Wittgenstein

2011-07-29T01:31:00.001+02:00

When my wife and I arrived in Skjolden, I did not recognize the little town. Many years ago I had been there with friends, on a tour through Norway. Then I knew about Wittgenstein, of course, although I was not yet very interested in philosophy in those days. However, I did not know that he had built a log cabin there, on the other side of the lake and that he had lived and worked there now and then between 1913 and 1951.

We put up our tent on a camping site a few kilometres from Skjolden, almost under a waterfall. An information board described a path to the place where Wittgenstein’s cabin had been. It was a walk of about 45 minutes, but the last part was steep and dangerous over the rocks.

The next day I felt a bit sick. But okay, I was there for “visiting” Wittgenstein. I took the bag with my cameras, a bit to drink, too, and there we went, my wife and I. First along a tractor path, then through a meadow. We entered a little wood and the path became rocky. It became steeper and steeper, too, and heavy going. I stopped for a moment. My wife, who was some 20 metres ahead of me, said: “I’ll take a look whether it is still far to go”, and gone was she.

When she came back ten minutes later, she had already been “there”. The path had become even steeper, and also a bit slippery. “Not much to see”, my wife said. “Some stone foundations of the log cabin and an Austrian flag”. I am a bad climber and did not feel well, so I decided not to go on.

Back in our tent, my wife showed me the photos she had taken. Next we drove again to Skjolden. Now we knew exactly the place where the log cabin had been. It was on a slope some 30 metres above the surface of the lake. Through my binoculars the foundation and the flag were clearly visible. I wondered how Wittgenstein did the dangerous climb a few times a week for collecting his mail, in summer and in winter. And how he had got the building material there. Elsewhere in Skjolden we saw the house where Wittgenstein had lived during his first stay.

Mirror neurons and the other mind problem

2011-07-10T14:16:00.002+02:00

In my last blog I suggested that the existence of mirror neurons may be the solution of the sociological problem of the tuning of individual behaviour to group behaviour; so why people behave as a group animal. Psychologically mirror neurons make that we can feel empathy, easily can learn behaviour and actions and much more. I think that mirror neurons may also offer a solution to an old problem in philosophy: the other mind problem. Or at least they may put the problem in a different light.

The essence of the other minds problem is the question: How can we know that others have minds? So, how can we know that they are not zombies (zombies in the philosophical sense, so mere automata)? Formulated this way the other minds problem is an epistemological problem, a problem about knowing. Thomas Nagel replaces it by the conceptual problem of “how I can understand the attribution of mental states to others” (The view from nowhere, p. 19; italics Nagel), which brings us a step nearer to the mirror neurons. However, if we see the solution of the other minds problem in these neurons, the solution is in the way man is constructed, so then it is ontological.

Of course, one can always remain skeptical and say that the problem cannot be solved, but I think that the essential flaw so far is the intrinsically individualistic approach of the problem. Nagel says: “… to understand that there are other people in the world as well, one must be able to conceive of experiences of which one is not the subject: experiences that are not present to oneself. To do this it is necessary to have a general conception of subjects of experience and to place oneself under it as an instance. It cannot be done by extending to the idea of what is immediately felt into other people’s bodies …’ And a few sentences further: “The problem is that other people seem to be part of the external world…” (p. 20; italics mine). What’s wrong with this is that the conception of man in this quotation implicates that we have an individual and another one (and another one and another and another one….) and that these individuals are external to each other and that it is actually not possible to bridge the gap.

There is no space here to follow Nagel’s approach (which he sees in taking different perspectives or views), but that the portrayal of man presented here is wrong becomes clear once one knows about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons do just what cannot be done according to Nagel: extending the idea of what is immediately felt into other people’s bodies. For it is this what mirror neurons do: reflecting the inner world of others in yourself. It is true, this cannot happen in a 100% reliable way, but it is what they fundamentally do and it is also this what fundamentally makes man the group animal s/he is. Individual man grows up by imitating and simulating what other people do and by internalizing and creatively adapting their forms of behaviour. In a certain sense man mirrors other men. This is only possible if the other men have the same kind of mind as the mirroring man has. For if this weren’t so, the latter couldn’t become the mind possessing group being that s/he is, for what is mirrored in his or her inner self would then not be the other men’s minds, but the zombies who they are, and the mirroring man would become a zombie, too. So if you have a mind, other people have minds, too.

Mirror neurons and the social sciences

2011-07-04T01:20:00.000+02:00

At first sight mirror neurons look relevant only for sciences that study the individual, like psychology where they can help explain and understand many phenomena. But how about the social sciences, for example sociology? Social sciences have collective phenomena as their objects, explaining why many people together behave or act in a certain way. This can be group behaviour, for example when a sociologist studies organisations; it can be aggregated individual behaviour, for example when a sociologist studies voting patterns related to the sociological background characteristics of the voters; or it can be a mixture of both, for example when a sociologist studies social movements. And there are many other themes, too, in which collective behaviour plays a part in some way play (peace research, for instance). But how could such an individual phenomenon as mirror neurons be useful here? Isn’t it a well-known fallacy to see collective phenomena, social phenomena, just as individual phenomena packed together?

If I would plead for a reduction of collective phenomena to a mere piling up of individual actions and pieces of behavior without interactions, I would walk into that fallacy, indeed. Moreover, I do not want to say that mirror neurons are relevant for every theme in the social sciences. Despite that, there is a place for them, I think. There are several sociological approaches, but wasn’t it Max Weber who in a famous definition of sociology founded social action on individual actions? For he defined sociology as: “the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By ‘action’ in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract.” (Economy and Society, § 1; italics mine; translation Wikipedia). Seen this way, for instance, I think there is room for mirror neurons in order to understand and explain social phenomena. Mirror neurons can help us make clear for what reasons and from what causes people react to other people, to people around them, anyhow, and why they react in a certain way. They help us understand and explain why people don’t ignore other people but why they pay attention to them and why they react to them. As I see it, mirror neurons are the “missing link” between individual and group, between individual and society. It is a bit as if mirror neurons glue individuals watching each other together.

My mirror neurons trigger my feelings

2011-06-27T03:15:00.000+02:00

One of the recent discoveries in neuroscience is the existence of mirror neurones. Mirror neurons are neurons in your brain that fire when you act. But they fire also when you see someone else performing an action and by doing so these neurons reflect or “mirror” the other person’s action in your own mind. Therefore it is as if you place yourself in the other person’s position and as if you are doing his or her action yourself. The importance of mirror neurons is still a matter of much speculation for actually the research is yet in its early stages, but some neuroscientists consider it one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience and I think they are right.

Anyway, if it is really true that by means of mirror neurons it is possible to place yourself mentally in the position of the other, mirror neurons may be important for explaining some significant human phenomena, especially those that require imitative behaviour or imitative imagination. We can think of understanding someone’s intentions (s/he does what I would do in the same situation), empathy (feeling what s/he feels), language learning, gender differences, understanding why people imitate other people or follow them, and much more. Autism may be explained or partially explained by a defect in the mirror neurons.

I had heard several times about mirror neurons and I found them intriguing. So I read a book about it (Mirroring People by Marco Iacoboni) and much of the functioning of human behaviour and feelings became clearer to me: how and why we react to other people (in some circumstances) and the like. Two weeks ago I went to a performance of Puccini’s opera La Bohème, an opera that I saw live for the first time. The production and the singers were very good and the death scene at the end was very well brought and it was very emotional, so that I became emotional, too. Suddenly I thought: my mirror neurons are firing! In case I have such a thought that transcends my feeling or thinking, usually it is so that the feeling or thinking stops immediately and that emotionally I distance myself more or less from what I see or are participating in (which does not need to imply, however, that the event or scene I see or participate in becomes less meaningful or that it gets less value for me). But nothing like that happened now. Apparently my mirror neurons continued firing full out. I couldn’t stop the feeling in any way as if I was nothing but a robot.

The feeling of willing

2011-06-20T00:24:00.000+02:00

In his interesting The Illusion of the Conscious Will Daniel M. Wegner defends the thesis that the conscious will is a kind of emotion, namely the emotion that we are the owner of our actions. “Conscious will is the somatic marker of personal authorship, an emotion that authenticates the action’s owner as the self” (p. 327). In short, the conscious will is an authenticy emotion. According to Wegner this makes it the basis of our idea of responsibility. “Moral judgements are based not just on what people do but on what they consciously will” (p. 335). And we feel being responsible for what we consciously do, even though in fact it may be so that the feeling may have nothing to do with the reasons and causes why we actually act, namely that there is a robot in us, as Wegner calls it, or a zombie, as I have called it in other blogs, that takes the decisions and that determines what the right actions are in the circumstances given. Then the feeling of authorship that the conscious will is has nothing to do with the steering of our actions, although the will thinks that it controls them. However, “illusionary or not, conscious will is the person’s guide to his or her own responsibility for action. If you think you willed an act, your ownership of the act is established in your mind. ... We come to think that we are good or bad on the basis of our authorship emotion” (p. 341).

Although Wegner's theory sounds plausible, I want to make two critical remarks. The first one is that Wegner’s theory of the conscious will (but many other theories of the will as well) treats the will as a short term phenomenon: the will to do an act now. However, the conscious will is more than that. It involves also planning: willing something later, in the future. I want to have good places for an opera next February and therefore I have to buy my tickets next week when the advance sale starts. This is another kind of conscious will than the feeling that it is me who wanted to write a note for it in my diary just a few seconds ago.

The other remark is this. According to Wegner, moral judgements are based on what we consciously do (see above). As Wegner had said just before: “a person is morally responsible only for actions that are consciously willed” (p. 334, italics mine). This is the foundation of Wegner’s theory of morality and responsibility. Happily for Wegner it does not have consequences for his theory that the conscious will is an authencity emotion, for what he says here is simply not true. If we were responsible only for our conscious actions, many trials and lawsuits could be skipped. However, we are often also responsible for what we did not consciously do and did not want to happen. Negligence, undesired consequences of our actions, not doing what we supposed to do ... All these things are often considered as happenings that we are held responsible for (and that we are responsible for) but that we did not consciously do. I have talked about it already before. One instance: You cause an accident with your car because you failed to give way to a car coming from the right. Did you consciously drive on without wanting to give way to the right? Of course not. Are you responsible for the accident? Of course you are. And I guess that you feel so, too.

The upshot is that the feeling of authorship of what I do is not limited to what I consciously do. This makes that I can be responsible for I what I did not consciously wanted to do. But the feeling of authorship is also not limited to what I do now or what I did just a moment before. It ranges also over what I did after deliberate planning and preparation. We simply need a wider perspective on what consciously willing is, certainly if we want to relate it to responsibility.

View on the world

2011-06-13T01:31:00.004+02:00

In one of my first blogs, more than four years, ago I wrote: “Just the idea: A photo of me in front of the Eiffel Tower with Bourdieu’s Un art moyen in my hand. So sorry that you cannot read the title of the book then...”, and that was it.

I had to think of this blog when I visited the biennial Photo Festival in Naarden last week. I had yet to find a style for my blogs and often I wrote short remarks without any further explanations. This was one of them, and I think not many readers will have understood it. It is already rather long ago that I read Bourdieu’s contribution to this book, so I must recall from memory what it was about. However, what I was referring to was what I call since then a “Bourdieu photo”. When Tom, Dick and Harry or their female counterparts are going to make a picture of someone they know (and they often make pictures of that kind), the persons are often so far away that you can hardly see who they are, not to speak of what they hold in their hands. And in case the persons photographed haven been taken from nearby it is still often so that much remains on the picture that distracts from what is supposed to be its central theme: the person or persons on it. It is as if the photographer does not want to say: “Look John and Jenny” but “Look John and Jenny have been there” (in Paris, London, or wherever it may be). Or the picture says “Look Jenny in the garden”, while there is actually no relation between Jenny and the garden (she isn’t working in the garden; she isn’t looking at the garden or at a single plant; no, she stands there and there is also a garden). A professional photographer or an advanced amateur photographer would make such a photo in a different way. S/he would concentrate on a theme and would fill the photo with it; and everything else has a place in the picture, too: Jenny looking at the garden or a flower. John looking at or climbing the Eiffel Tower. And so on. That’s why we tend to call the first type of pictures just a shot and the second type portraits. But in the end, what the worth of a picture is depends on what you want to say with it, and from that point of view “just a shot” can do as well as a “real” portrait. It is not without reason that the book by Bourdieu and others has the subtitle “Essay on the social uses of photography”. Photos of the first type simply have another social function than second type photos: They give different views on the world.

I have not a picture at hand like the one described in the old blog, but I wonder whether the reader of this blog would judge the picture above as a “Bourdieu photo” or as something else, when s/he knows that I am one of the persons on it and that I called it “Self-portrait at distance”.

P.S. This year’s Naarden Photo Festival is dedicated to portraits: http://www.fotofestivalnaarden.nl/

Why do we act?

2011-06-06T01:22:00.000+02:00

Taking the train

In our daily life we do a lot of actions and when we act we do it for a reason. For instance, I need a book for a project I am working on and I know that they have it in a bookshop in Utrecht. Therefore I take the train to Utrecht, walk to the bookshop and buy the book. For this – rather complicated – action I had first a desire (having the book) and a reason (the project) and some relevant knowledge (how to get the book) and then I performed the action (taking the train etc.). This is how I think that many actions, so intentional doings, take place and many other people think like me. It’s common sense. There is also a special branch of philosophy that analyses actions: action theory. Even more, I got my PhD by writing a dissertation on how to investigate actions. However, does it really work that way?

The answer of neuroscience and neurophilosophy is no. According to these fields of study it has become clear that the way we really act is different. We have two systems in our head. One regulates our actions; let me call it our action controller. The other system is informed about what the action controller does and about the actions we perform, and it tells the world stories that fit the actions: the brain interpreter. I talked already about it in older blogs. How does it work in practice? This can happen in several ways and much more can be said about it, but – and here I follow Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of the Conscious Will, ch. 5 – the two main methods that we use for rationalizing what we do are cognitive dissonance reduction and postbehavioural intention construction. Cognitive dissonance reduction has become well-known by the research by Leon Festinger and his team. In essence it is this: We have good reasons for thinking that doing A is the right way to act, but when it comes to act we actually do B. After the action we construct reasons why doing B was better than A, and we do not only construct such reasons, but we really believe them and maybe even deny that we ever thought differently. However, in many cases we do not have strict attitudes about what we prefer to do and why; maybe we have no advance attitudes at all for acting the way we do. We simply act. Then we construct our reasons and intentions afterwards, and we seriously believe them, too.

Now the nice thing is that one of the points I stressed in my dissertation is that the method I developed there for investigating actions can apply only when an action has already taken place. It can only afterwards reconstruct the reasons, intentions and so on why the agent acted as s/he did and in view of what I just said it is then a reconstruction of the agent’s rationalizations. But the reader of this blog will certainly see this defence of my dissertation as a case of cognitive dissonance reduction, and s/he may be right. Be that as it is, all these insights explaining how we rationalize what we do are very interesting, and they are intriguing, too. For if it isn’t so that we think that we consciously decide what we do on account of relevant reasons and if our explanations afterwards are nothing more than “postaction confabulation[s] of intention” (Wegner), then one question remains for me: why is it then that we act as we do when it is not for reasons? Why then is it that we do just this and not that and what determines what we do?

Did my dopamine do it?

2011-05-30T01:02:00.000+02:00

(Background music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYlQ6rs9uZ8)

When I wrote my last week’s blog, I did not expect that soon it would become so relevant. Not the main theme but a little example in it, the case of the influence of dopamine on risk taking and sexual behaviour. More and more it has become clear that a higher dopamine level in your brain stimulates both. The level can be increased by taking the drug for pleasure or for medical reasons, but also when one doesn’t take it there are differences in the dopamine levels in the brains of individual persons resulting, as is to be expected, in different levels of risk taking and sexuality. Since such a connection exists it is likely that both kinds of behaviour tend to go together.

The next cases are not meant for proving this theory and they cannot be more than tentative and suggestive, but take for instance Casanova, an adventurer from the 18th century known by his love affairs who succeeded to get important positions and to gain huge capitals but also lost them again and again. In Mozart’s version of Don Giovanni he had 1003 sweethearts in Spain and many in other countries, too, as we hear in the background music, but when admonished to improve his behaviour, he took the risk to turn a deaf ear to the warning and in the end he went to hell. Often we see that also men in high political power positions show risky sexual behaviour; risky not only because it can mean the end of marriage but also because they stake their high positions. There seems to be a relation: men at the top are sexual attractive (by the way, it seems that this is also true for women, although there are some differences), although it needs not automatically to be so that this leads to risky behaviour. Yet it often happens. Everybody knows the case of former US president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The French ex-president François Mitterand had a daughter in an extramarital relation and the Dutch prince Bernhard, father of the present Queen of the Netherlands, too. Examples abound actually on all levels of power. Now, maybe a new affair can be added, the case of DSK, former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and possible presidential candidate in France, who has been accused of sexual assault of a chambermaid. The case is still sub judice, under judgement, so I leave it open whether he is guilty or not, but what is the point here is that cases like this do happen. If they all can be ascribed to high levels of dopamine in the brain (or to another drug, or to a genetic factor) then a question presents itself that I have asked already several times: who is responsible for the behaviour? Are we simply executors of our physical mechanism? In a certain sense we are, but that does not make a person not responsible or less responsible for what he (or she) does in a bigger degree than for what he does, for instance, as the president of a country or as the managing director of an important financial institution.

Your criminal genes and your passport

2011-05-23T01:09:00.002+02:00

The present methods for checking people on airfields on departure and on arrival are sometimes quite time-consuming. Look at the long rows during rush hours. You have to be there up to three hours before your plane leaves. And for some countries you have to fill in a long list of questions before your arrival, too, in order to prevent that criminals are admitted, which takes again much time (and annoyance) and requires an extensive data base for the border control authorities as well. It would be much easier when there would be a reliable method to select possible dangerous people in advance and preferably so that they simply do not take a flight, since they know that they have no chance to enter. At present such a method does not exist but there is hope for Big Brother that it can be developed in future. Everybody knows that generally crimes are not done by Tom, Dick and Harry (it’s true, most perpetrators are men) but by people with a certain personality type. How nice would it be if a fail-proof way could be found for establishing the personality type of the possible (or even better the effective) criminal if not terrorist.

It has become known that decisions are not simply taken by free thinking and acting men but that it is our brains that take the decisions for us. If we may believe a still growing group of neuroscientists, our decisions are taken by our hormones, and our conscious I is simply a kind of brain interpreter that functions like a political commentator (see my blogs dated August 23, 2010, and later). But what steers my hormones? Decisions can be influenced by taking drugs (either for your pleasure or for medical reasons) but recently it has been discovered that there is also an inherent bodily mechanism that influences them: your genes. Genes do not only determine the colour of your skin, the shape of your nose and your other physical characteristics, they do not only determine your predispositions to certain illnesses, but, as research has shown, they affect also the availability of certain hormones that play a part in decision making. So we learned, for instance, that dopamine influences your risk taking behaviour in gambling. In Parkinson patients it can lead to hypersexuality. And now it has come out that your genetic structure determines also how much dopamine (and other drugs) is available. In this way, your genes have an important influence on your – possible – behaviour. Okay, the research in this field has just started and it is still a long way to go until we are that far that we can say that a person with these or those genetic structure has a strong disposition to criminal behaviour or even to bomb throwing. But is this really science fiction? Hasn’t come much what was considered science fiction in the past the facts of today? George Orwell’s Big Brother will sooner be possible than many people thought when he wrote his novel. And so it may be with our genetic criminal passport as well. Then you’ll find in your passport not only a chip with a finger print (as the European Union wants to have it) but also one with your DNA in order to simplify the task of the border patrol to decide whether the holder can be admitted or not. Or we write simply in his (or maybe her) passport “possible criminal”, as a warning that this person can better be refused the access of the country. Then a possible criminal will simply avoid entering in the legal way, and it will save the decent traveller much time at the border, too.

See “Do genes make up my mind?”, http://brainethics.org/?p=738

Being guilty of what one hasn’t done

2011-05-16T01:35:00.000+02:00

In my last blog I said that the time will not be far away that we can “read” the minds of other people and see what their intentions are. As we have seen, scanners may be able to guess even better what we want to do than we, the bearers of these intentions, can. But what does it mean to say that someone has the intention to perform an action like blowing up an aeroplane? Fundamentally it says that the person concerned (let’s call him or her the agent) has the serious will to perform the action that s/he intends to do and that under normal circumstances this agent will not not perform the action. When an agent has an objective intention (an intention as registered by a scanner), we suppose that this agent will sooner or later also develop the subjective intention to act according to it. But what if this is not the case? Scanners show only correlations, not causal relations, so it is quite well possible that a scanner registers a certain intention and that this intention is related to an action by those who operate the scanner, while actually the scanned intention needs to be related to another action.

This still imaginary case reminds me of a real case that happened not so long ago somewhere in the Netherlands. Most Dutch municipalities have bye-laws that say that it is forbidden to transport equipment like rope ladders, chisels and other such tools in your car between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., for they might be used for breaking in. Now it happened that a man who had done some odd jobs in a friend’s house was stopped by the police late at night, when he returned home. The police found an almost complete set of “forbidden” tools in his car (but not a rope ladder) and despite the explanation of the man why these tools were there, he was fined. The man decided not to pay, so he had to appear in court but there he was condemned (actually because the judge did not listen to his arguments).

I think that this case is basically not different from my scanner case and that it clearly shows what can happen if we ascribe an objective intention to a person on account of “objective” facts, although this intention does not agree with the person’s subjective intention. It makes clear that scanning a person’s brains in order to register his or her intentions does not have only practical consequences (like preventing a bomb attack), but that it can have ethical consequences as well: someone can be considered guilty on account of an objective intention that s/he has according to a brain scanner, while in fact s/he did not had the related subjective intention to act and although s/hewould never subjectively develop the intention ascribed to him or her for the simple reason that, for instance, an intention as registered objectively can have multiple meanings or because the circumstances are such that the agent would never get the idea to develop the ascribed intention: One is guilty of what one hasn’t done and did not want to do. I think that the consequences reach also further, for what remains of our idea of the free will, when it can happen that we ascribe objectively an intention to an agent (and maybe condemn him or her because of it), while s/he did not have the related subjective intention nor did perform the action concerned?

Dangerous ideas (2)

2011-04-29T03:09:00.001+02:00

Once I wrote in a blog “On an airport, they can scan your material luggage but not your dangerous thoughts.” At least we hope so, but is it true? Not so long ago a research group led by Prof. Matthew Lieberman of the University of California Los Angeles tried to find out whether it is really not possible to read the minds of other people. I will not go into the details of the research, but the essence is this. The members of a test group of twenty volunteers got – mixed with other messages – information about the safe use of sunscreen. After the test they received a bag with several things including sunscreen towelettes. They were also asked whether they were going to use the sunscreen in the week to come. During the time that the test subjects got the information about the sunscreen, their brains were scanned with a fMRI scanner, which registrates brain activity. A week later the test subjects were asked in a surprise follow up whether they did use the sunscreen. Their answers were compared with the data of the fMRI scans made during the experiment. This showed that the fMRI data predicted better what the test subjects actually would do than their stated intentions.

Today, we are not yet that far that we can place a brain scanner on an airport and scan the brains of all passengers before boarding. However, when I read such research reports, I think that the time that this will happen is not far away and that sooner or later they can read your dangerous thoughts. If such a scanner would pick out only and only those persons who intended to blow up an aeroplane and if it would do nothing else, I think we could live with it. However, besides that it will probably not be possible to make a scanner that is 100% reliable in doing this, history shows that the practice will be different. Scanners will be used not only for scanning your factual bomb throwing intentions but your other possible dangerous ideas as well. But what is dangerous? Who determines what is dangerous? Some people thought that Mahatma Gandhi and M.L. King had dangerous ideas. Today websites propagating nonviolent methods for toppling repressive regimes are blocked by these regimes because they are “dangerous” (at least for them). The practice will be, of course, that the authorities will think that every person can be a criminal. Therefore they want to collect your most private data, so your thoughts (although they will say that this is done for your own safety). Big brother will be watching you, even more.

For a short description of the experiment see http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/lifestyle/06/23/10/now-scientists-read-your-mind-better-you-can

The Internet and our brain

2011-04-25T01:02:00.000+02:00

One of the most important inventions at the end of the 20th has been the Internet. It broadens our environment by giving us entry to a world that before its existence was hardly known to us, and when it was it was difficult for us to reach, at least in practice. This extension of our view is not only passive in the sense that the Internet gives us merely entrance to a world made by others but it is also active because it gives us the possibility to send our own contributions to the world by making our own websites, by blogging, e-mailing, twittering, YouTube and so on. Seen in this way, the Internet looks simply a continuation of things we have always done, especially in the field of communication, but with a wider range. But is the Internet merely more of the same or does it also shape us in some way?

The British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has pointed out that it is quite well possible that this happens. 50% of our communication with other people, she says, consists of body language and eye contact. Yet another 30% is done by our voice. And the importance of direct body contact like hugging or shaking hands is still unknown. Just such from-person-to-person contacts do not exist when we communicate on the Internet, by Facebook, by chatting or in another virtual way. Then this bodily communication is absent, which does not only limit our assessment of how other people react on us, but which restricts also our own reactions. We do not see whether our words hurt our conversation partner; we do not learn to look into someone’s eyes on the Internet; we do not need to blush when we say something stupid, so Greenfield. This can hardly be without consequences for the persons we are. As the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger points out: in the end practice changes our brain, the way we look at the world. The difference between the structure of the brain and its contents is not as clear as often thought. Meaning can change the brain structure. Conversely, this structure determines how we experience the world. And this is what Greenfield is afraid of: that we can become less empathic; that we do not recognize the suffering we do to others; and in case we do, that we ignore it and shrug our shoulders. It is not only a supposition, for we see it already in the phenomenon of happy slapping: knock someone down, record it with your mobile camera and upload it to YouTube. For fun. Until now it is maybe “not more” than a kind of excess, but, in view of what Metzinger says, who knows whether once, this insensitivity, this lack of a still normal empathy, will become structured in our brain.

How long does an action last?

2011-04-18T01:17:00.002+02:00

Recently the Hungarian psychologist Emese Nagy reconfirmed older research saying that the length of an action is about three seconds. Nagy studied video images of hugs by athletes, their coaches and their opponents on the Olympic Games in Beijing. On the average a hug lasted three seconds, independent of the nationality and sex of the hugger. Only when an athlete embraced his or her coach, it lasted a bit longer. Already in 1911 it had been discovered that much what people do lasts about three seconds and some 15 years ago it came out that it is also the case for animals.

Although I do not want to doubt the research as such, I think that as it stands it cannot be true. Besides that the body has other rhythms and cycles as well, like the biological clock, the result raises important philosophical questions, for instance the question “what is an action?”

Why do we call a three seconds lasting hug an action? What about if it lasts much longer or shorter? After having won unexpectedly the Paris-Roubaix cycle race Sunday a week ago, Johan Vansummeren embraced his girl friend clearly much longer than three seconds. Does this imply that actually it wasn’t a hug or, if it was, that it wasn’t an action? If it wasn’t an action, what makes a piece of behaviour an action or something else? If it was an action, what sense does it have to say that an action lasts on the average three seconds?

Actions do not stand alone. They are placed in a setting and belong to the stream of our doings. We can isolate a part of this stream and call it an action if it has a clear aim and the actor intentionally does something in order to reach that aim. However, to take an example, when I am “going to dine”, this is more than only the act of putting the food in my mouth but it comprises also taking my coat, walking downtown, choosing a restaurant, ordering the dinner, up to paying and leaving the restaurant… From a wide perspective, all this together is the action “going to dine”. From the same perspective we can call “taking my coat”, “ordering the meal”, etc. sub-actions. And we could distinguish sub-sub-actions as well. It is the same for participating in a race, say a 5K on a track. From a wide perspective it includes everything from registering a week before the race, to going to the track, running, taking a shower afterwards, receiving my prize and going home; and much more. Actually these are sub-actions (and sub-sub-actions) of the long action “participating in a 5K”. And if I have won, hugging my coach belongs to it, too. It is clear that seen this way the whole action lasts longer than three seconds and most sub-actions do as well. Does this imply that both the running as such (which lasts at least 15 minutes for most runners) and the hugging of my coach cannot be called actions any longer but only sub-actions at most? Of course, we can call them actions. But does that make sense? Running a race is only running a race if many preconditions have been fulfilled: there must be a kind of registration, there must be preparations so that one runs at one’s best, and so on. And it is the same for hugging my coach. One can call it “hugging the coach” only in the setting of the race. This is also true for what one sees as the beginning and the end of this “action”. All this depends on our perspective and on our interpretation of what happens. It may be so that all action-pieces take place in three second units, but it does not follow that this split up is meaningful. This depends on how it can be put in a wider setting: whether the hug is a gesture of joy or an attempt of murder.

Send me a postcard

2011-04-11T01:54:00.001+02:00

In the second half of the 19th century it has become a custom that travellers send picture postcards to family and friends at home. The cards give a view of a landscape, village or town; they show an image of a building or a monument that is worth seeing; they show a local tradition, and so on. By sending the card the sender wants to tell the addressee what a beautiful place s/he is visiting and what a happy time s/he has there. The card seldom shows persons, unless it is relevant, and it gives always an exaggerated image of what is on it: colours are made brighter, the sky is usually blue and cloudless, ugly details have sometimes been removed. A picture postcard is also a kind of cultural manipulation insofar only what is considered beautiful is shown: mountains, “romantic” landscapes with cows, old buildings, traditions… You do not find on postcards what is deemed ugly, like industry or people working “in the sweat of their faces”. They present an ideal world, a kind of paradise. In this sense the cards contain an ideology and they are a kind of propaganda.

The possible propagandistic value of picture postcards has been well estimated during the First World War. Just like other people far away from home and in difficult circumstances, the soldiers fighting at the front wanted to stay in contact with their families and friends, and because modern means of communication like telephone were hardly in use by the common people then, or did not yet exist, people wrote letters, many letters. And they sent postcards. However, the soldiers were not free to tell about the misery at the front and all the mail was censured. It is true, the circumstances there were often so bad that many soldiers simply did not want to write about it, but some did. And some wanted to show pictures as well. In order to lead the mail in the “right” direction, the military authorities provided for postcards with preprinted texts and with acceptable images, which had often a kind of propagandistic content. For instance, everybody knew that soldiers got often seriously wounded; therefore the official postcards did show images of wounded soldiers but it were images where they clearly received the highest possible standard of care; where the wounded were smiling; where they thanked the nurses and where they were treated as heroes. This was often far from reality. Other cards showed that, even at the front, a decent burial was possible. Or there is a postcard with soldiers lying in shell holes in the ground, containing the message: British soldiers can adapt to any circumstances to make themselves comfortable and to sleep. Or cards expressed comradeship and traditional virtues. In short, these postcards were used as propaganda intended to boost support for the war at the home front. However, from that point of view, who could ever have got the idea to have printed this picture on a postcard (see above), and, even more, who would have been prepared to send it?

Responsibility for what happens

2011-04-04T01:21:00.000+02:00

Sooner or later the problems with the Fukushima power plant will come to an end and let’s hope that it will not be with an explosion of one of the reactors. Then it will be asked whether someone can be held responsible for what happened. In the past I have written already a bit on this theme. People can be held responsible for what they do and sometimes also for what other people do. But can they be held responsible for things that happen to them, like an earthquake? In a certain way they can, I think. Of course, nobody can be blamed for an earthquake as such and, in the light of our present knowledge, also nobody can be blamed for the absence of previous warnings. However, often one or more persons can be called to account for the consequences of what happened, for most natural events do not occur completely unexpectedly. Maybe it is unknown when they will happen and with what force but usually it is known that they’ll happen. Therefore in many cases preventive measures can be taken or measures that will soften the consequences. And it is here that one’s responsibility comes in.

On October 4th last I wrote in my blog: “Responsibility refers to a person and an action done by that person, to something a person did with an intention or intentionally. Only then I call … a person responsible for what s/he did or for the consequences of what s/he did. But … it is not enough that s/he was acting with an intention or intentionally. The action or its consequences must also imply a moral obligation”. In view of this it seems useful to ask whether someone is responsible for the Fukushima catastrophe in some way. To begin with the end, it was the moral obligation of the people involved that the power plant functioned safely. The earthquake was not man-made, of course, but it could have been foreseen that sooner or later a very strong seism would take place, together with a tsunami. Nevertheless a nuclear power plant had been built there with all the risks of a nuclear catastrophe, and, as it came out, the nuclear power plant did not withstand the natural disaster. Why not? And why were the safety rules often so poorly observed and why were violations kept secret? Were the safety regulations as such sufficient? And so on. In this way people can be held responsible for a natural disaster even if nobody can help that it took place. However, in my last blog I argued that a nuclear catastrophe would happen anyway, if it were not in Fukushima, as a consequence of an earthquake, then elsewhere in the world on a site safe for natural disasters. And that’s why those building nuclear power plants are responsible or at least co-responsible for a nuclear catastrophe anyhow, whatever it is that made that it happened.

Our technical limits are human

2011-03-28T01:28:00.001+02:00

In a comment on the nuclear calamity in Fukushima, Japan, the German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski states that this event shows that we have reached the limits of what we can make. After Harrisburg and Chernobyl, we see that nuclear power cannot be controlled. We behave like the sorcerer’s apprentice who did not know how to stop the forces that he had evoked. This means that we have to learn what we can and what we cannot do, so Safranski (http://www.videowired.com/video/3979556601/).

On the face of it, it seems that not much needs to be added to this comment and that it clearly words what went wrong and how we can prevent such mistakes in future. Safranski says that the Fukushima calamity and other catastrophes of this kind show that the human capacity to discover and control the secrets of nature has its limits. Therefore it is better to stop with this kind of energy production and to look for other approaches. In my words: we can never grasp and control the technique of nuclear energy production.

I think that Safranski is right; there is a fundamental technical problem here. However, I think that the problem of controlling nuclear energy would also happen when we would be able to build a 100% safe nuclear power plant. For in my opinion the actual problem is not in our technical possibilities but it is elsewhere: the real problem is intrinsically human. This becomes clear, for instance, when we look at the history of the Fukushima power plant. As it has come out, this major calamity has been preceded through the years by some 200 minor calamities and technical problems. Most of them have been kept secret for a long time, and, what is important here, most of them have been caused because the safety rules had not been observed. So, the real cause of calamities of the Fukushima type is not that we do not know our technical limits but that we do not know our human limits. Men are not like robots: you program them and they do what you want them to do. Instead men are individuals who have their own reasons to act and not to follow safety rules. Men are also beings who continuously unintentionally fail to follow safety rules simply by human mistakes. In this sense man is not a reliable being. Moreover, human problems do not exist only on this individual level, but they are also social. As social beings men cooperate with other men, but within this cooperation process they develop their personal interests, which not always correspond with the common interest, whatever this may be. Or there are conflicting common interests and there is not enough money and man power or technical capacity to solve them all. A choice has to be made or the fulfilment of some interests has to be temporarily postponed. In case of lack of money it can be decided, for instance, to postpone the maintenance of a nuclear power plant, for is it really necessary that it needs to take place now and not next year? In short, our most fundamental problem in this nuclear age is not that we need to know our technical limits, but it is that we need to realize that man is a human and that we are as human as humans are. Our most fundamental limits are human and as long as we do not bear this in mind, calamities of the Fukushima type will happen.

How to enjoy my bike rides

2011-03-21T01:19:00.001+01:00

Last week I made my first bike tour after the winter. The winter had been long and also the week before the ride had been quite cold. But in the end the temperature rose, the night frosts went away, and the weather forecast promised nice weather for the days to come. So time to start a new bike season. On my first ride I was relaxed, I did not overstrain myself on the hills, and back home after a bit more than an hour, I could be satisfied with my average speed, thanks to my winter training on my bike trainer and by running in the wood. The average speed is always important for me and when it fits with how I felt during the ride, it is even better. By why should it be so important for me?

The Belgian philosopher Marc Van den Bossche has recently published a book about sport as a way of living. Van den Bossche is an academic philosopher and also a very active sportsman. Like me he is a runner and a cyclist, his distances are often double of what I do, if not more, and it is not exceptional that he trains twice a day, which I never do. Just as for me, times and records are important for him. However, somewhere in his book he writes: “I’d stake a few pints that after having run a half or a whole marathon or after having climbed the entire Mont Ventoux [on your bike], you’ll get this question: ‘In what time did you do it?’ It will be very exceptional when someone will ask you in a first reaction what your subjective experiences were, a question you could answer by saying: ‘Man, I have enjoyed it sooo much. It wasn’t sex but you can compare it with it”. What Van den Bossche questions here is whether times for a sportsman not training for competition (so one like me) are really important. Why needs our joy to have a measure? Isn’t our subjective feeling by far more important than an objective measure? So Van den Bossche says, although he likes to improve his results as much as I do.

When reading Van den Bossche’s arguments and explanations, in my heart I feel he is right. What’s the worth of all this competing with yourself, when you know that the real reason that you do sports is different? That you do sports simply because you want to run or make a ride, that it is a way for you to be in the wood, and that as such it is a pleasure to feel fit? That you would do it despite the measurable results? That at your age you run behind the facts, because you have passed your top already long ago and that fundamentally every next run and ride will be a bit slower than the last one, just because at a certain age you can only go backwards? Yes, Van den Bossche is right! I must stop measuring and I must enjoy my efforts as they are. It is not that it is not pleasant to measure my results, but for me it has no sense to make a fetish of them.

Actually, I had decided already to practice this new way of enjoying my runs and rides before I read the book. And yet, when I’ll take my bike tomorrow, I know that I’ll check my bike computer when I am back home, and I’ll be satisfied if my average speed was a good one.

The hero in your mind

2011-03-14T01:22:00.002+01:00

More than two years ago I wrote a blog titled “The devil in your mind”. I explained there that Hannah Arendt attributed the evil done by people like Eichmann to their thoughtlessness and not to a diabolic attitude within them. This is in keeping with studies by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo insofar as they have shown that in most cases behaviour that causes harm to other people (which can go as far as torture) is not the consequence of a certain evil trait in the perpetrator but that basically everybody is able to do it. Most people are simply lucky that the devil doesn’t come out. But what is it then that makes that the devil comes out?

Some fifty years ago Zimbardo organized a prison experiment for which he selected about twenty test subjects. All of them had the same background characteristics. Zimbardo assigned them at random to two groups, one group being the prisoners, the other group being the prison warders. Although there was no initial fundamental difference between the test subjects in both groups, after one-two days both the prisoners and the prison warders acted very differently in a way that went beyond their particular roles. After already such a short time the warders begun to torture the prisoners, psychologically as well as physically (within limits, for outright physical violence was not allowed). For this reason Zimbardo had to break off the experiment after six days, although it had been planned to last two weeks. Since the differences between the test subjects were negligible and since all of them were psychologically healthy, Zimbardo concluded after a thorough analysis that it are not psychological dispositions that make people behave in an evil way but that it is the situation that brings people that far. Only very few people are able to resist the pressure of the situation that “leads” them into a certain direction and also only very few display evil behaviour because of a disposition.

However, Zimbardo’s conclusion has two sides, for it is not only true for the evil we do. In the same degree it is true for the good we do as well. Most people do good because, by way of speaking, the situation they happen to be in “forces” them to do so. There is not only a “banality of evil” (Arendt) but also a “banality of heroism” (Zimbardo). People are not inherently, genetically, bad or good (with the exception of the few who are apparently mental ill). Most people can do well and can do bad, and what they’ll do depends on the situation they are in and on the pressure exerted there on them that makes that they cannot stay passive but have to act (here I have paraphrased Zimbardo; see his The Lucifer Effect ch. 16). Admittedly, it is not only the circumstances that make who you are and what you do. Zimbardo doesn’t say that, but at least they have an important influence on how you think and act. They can make you both a devil and a hero. And isn’t it this what we see now in the Middle East where so many people have behaved and behave like heroes despite themselves? Who of them would have thought before that s/he had a hero in the mind?

Ethics and nonviolence

2011-03-07T01:00:00.002+01:00

There are a lot of surprising developments taking place in the Middle East these days. People rise and protest against their suppression and dictators cannot sit down safely in their seats any longer. Several rulers have already fallen or are about to fall, others try to secure their position by doing concessions, but whether that will be enough is not sure. Who would have predicted that only two months ago?

These uprisings look spontaneous. What many people do not know is that there is much organization and thinking behind them, at least in a number of cases. Already for several years Egyptian activists had been preparing nonviolent action against Mubarak. They used Facebook and Twitter but also the handbooks by Gene Sharp, an American researcher of nonviolence. Moreover they asked advice from Otpor, the Serbian student movement that toppled president Milosevic in 2000.

Since already more than 30 years Gene Sharp is one of my favourite authors. He is famous for his list of 198 nonviolent action methods and he wrote also a guide with directions how to bring down a dictator. He wrote quite a bit of other books and articles as well. In all his work he has an important point of departure: all action and resistance must be nonviolent. When hearing the word “nonviolence” many people think of something soft, vague and not very practical. Or they think of high moral principles that are actually far-away from reality. Sharp’s idea of nonviolence has nothing to do with that. Sharp talks never about ethics but only about application. His idea is: conflicts cannot be avoided but in order to prevent that they are solved in a violent way, one has to look for nonviolent alternatives with the same functions as violence. And that’s what he has done during his whole life: Looking for alternatives for violence and looking for ways to put them into practice. And he found them by analyzing historical and contemporary cases, by making use of sociological theories and by employing organizational principles. What he did not incorporate in his work were ethical and moral principles. Sharp does have his reasons for advocating nonviolence, but you do not find them back in his writings. Only the practical applicability of nonviolence counts there, not moral reasons why it has to applied, as long as it works. And it does work. Insiders know that already since many years. They have seen the fall of Milosevic, as said; the people’s movements in Georgia (2003) and in the Ukraine (2004); and they have seen lots of other cases, often successful and, indeed, sometimes also not successful. Now it works also in the Middle East and the world has discovered it, for since a recent interview with Gene Sharp in the New York Times, he doesn’t have a quiet moment any longer. For thanks to him the world knows that nonviolence works also when it is not fundamentally based on ethical and moral principles but simply on well-thought-out practice and organization.

Superstitious like a pigeon

2011-02-28T00:54:00.000+01:00

Suppose you are a runner and tomorrow you will take part in the cross country championship of your province. You have a good chance to win but you are not the only possible winner. You have done everything that is reasonable to be in good shape, so you cannot do more. Or rather there is still one thing you can do: Do not forget to put the necklace on that you always take with you when you have a race. Always? Two weeks ago you forgot it and you had a bad race.

We know all such kinds of behaviour, which are actually a kind of rituals. In order to improve the chance to win a lottery, one has a favourite number. One does not want to have room number 13 in a hotel in order to avoid accidents. One keeps one’s fingers crossed during the exam of a friend. And so on. The essence of all this behaviour is that there is no direct relation between the ritual and its purpose (although you may think there is).

Burrhus F. Skinner, who is known for his research of behaviour, put a hungry pigeon in a so-called Skinner box, a simple box with a food dispenser and a response lever structured that way that, if the pigeon presses the lever, food may come from the dispenser (whether this really happens depends on the research plan). Then food was presented at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behaviour, so whether the pigeon pressed the lever or didn’t made no difference (I follow the description by Chris Frith, Making up the mind, p. 91; but it is easy to find other descriptions of the experiment on the Internet). After a short time the pigeons were seen repeatedly performing arbitrary actions, like making two or three turns clockwise between the appearances of the food, thrusting the head into one of the upper corners of the box, and the like. Each pigeon developed its own typical pattern of behaviour. The pigeons had learned to repeat whatever action they happened to be performing just before the food appeared. Skinner called this behaviour “superstitious” because the pigeons acted as if they believed that their behaviour caused the food to appear when this was not the case. He suggested, so Frith, that human superstitious behaviour can arise in the same way. Men are used to look for causes of the effects they see but in doing so they are often not smarter than pigeons.

Running with my mind

2011-02-21T01:26:00.001+01:00

G.H. Yue and K.J. Cole took eight volunteers and asked them to exercise the muscle that controls the little finger of the left hand for four weeks, five sessions a week. They asked eight other volunteers to do the same but now only in their mind, so by imagining that they were training the muscle. A control group of eight volunteers had to do nothing. In the first group the average force of the muscle increased with 30%, in the second group with 22% and in the control group with a trivial 3.7%. The results were substantiated by other research, also for other muscles. The upshot is that we can train muscles by imagining the training in our mind.

Physical exercise is important for many people, also for me. I like to run in the wood behind my house or to go for a bike ride. But I like also a lot of other things and, actually, sometimes working out takes me too much time. For it does not only involve the exercise itself, but there are also many things around it that belong to it. I have to put my training clothes on; I have to take extra showers; I have to maintain my bike; and so there’s a lot more. In the end, a workout takes twice as much time as the exercise itself. But now I discovered a time-saving alternative: take a comfortable chair and start dreaming. Then I have simply to visualize how I move my legs, think how I jump over a tree fallen on my path, imagine how I climb a hill on my bike, simulate how I pass other joggers or do a little sprint now and then. I can train as I like it and I do not have to look for the right hill, the right flat track, or how I want to have it, for it comes to me. And I’ll not be stiff with my last training, for I need simply to imagine how smooth my legs move. And when I have finished my mental training, I can immediately go on with the other things that are waiting for me, like writing this blog, without taking off my training clothes, taking a shower, and so on. Maybe the training effect is a bit smaller than by training physically, but it is still big enough and its advantages are legion.

But shall I not miss the birds singing in the wood, the roes crossing my path, the tailwind that makes me ride faster? Will mental exercise be as relaxing as moving through real fields and through a real wood? I am afraid that I am going to miss it when I would switch from a physical to a mental training of my muscles. And I’ll still see my books around me when training in my chair and it will be difficult to distance myself from my other mental activities. Maybe it is not as relaxing as real running and riding a real bike. Maybe it will be better to keep it for special occasions; for when I am busy; for – let it not happen – when I am injured and cannot go; or for the days that the rain is pouring down. But in case this happens, I have an alternative now: running or riding with my mind.

Writing scientifically

2011-02-14T00:45:00.001+01:00

“Writing scientific papers is rather like writing in an ancient verse form. Everything you want to say has to be forced into predetermined sections: introduction, method, results, discussion. You must never say “I,” and the passive tense is preferred. Inevitable all interesting things get left out.” Chris Frith, Making up the mind, p. 74.

At school I had to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These works have been written in a strict verse form that is characteristic for epic prose: the dactylic hexameter. Each line of this prose has six foots: five dactyls (– u u) and then a spondee (– –) (“–” means a long syllable and “u” a short one). Although some stylistic variation was possible, generally the author had not much freedom. Dutch Renaissance authors tried to copy the style but the dactylic hexameter is not very suitable for the Dutch language. It makes Dutch poems written with these verse form sound rather stiff and unnatural. Therefore it is used only in translations of ancient epic prose nowadays.

When Descartes wrote his Regulae ad directionem ingenii [Rules for the direction of the mind; published posthumously in 1684] he laid the foundation of modern scientific method. Only research that applied these rules or their improved versions could bear the name “scientific” since then. This did not only have its reflection on research as such but also in the way it was presented. Despite Feyerabend’s famous statement in 1975 that “anything goes” in methodology, implying that not so much the form of research is important but its results, scientists have stuck to their rules, at least in word. In order to show that their methods and results have to be taken seriously the strict presentation of scientific research did not change either, despite Feyerabend’s analysis. This makes that everything that influenced the results in an important way but that is not strictly “scientific” is left out in the presentation, even if the results would not have come about without these influences. The changing moods of the researcher; that she thought out the basic idea when taking a shower; that she had no budget to buy just those apparatuses she needed most; that a machine broke down and had to be repaired so that she had some time for extra theoretical study; and so on. All these things are omitted in the final report. Frith mentions the case that a test subject had got a clip in her brain in an operation. It took him much time to find out what metal it was made of in order to know whether it was safe to use his scanner. Although such facts are relevant for the outcome, they are supposed to be ignored in a scientific article. Even the researcher is absent: The “I” who did the research and wrote the article is left out as well in the text. The article is strictly limited to method, results, relation to other research and why the results are important; all this in a strict order: introduction, method, results, discussion. It is even better, if the sections are numbered and if as much mathematics as possible is used. Deviations of form are frowned on and reduce the chance of being published unless they are corrected, as if the writer is a mediocre ancient poet who does not know well how to apply the dactylic hexameter.

“All things have their season”

2011-02-07T00:48:00.000+01:00

On the table here in front of me I have a copy of Montaigne’s Essays. It’s a thick book. My Dutch edition has 1321 pages. I bought it nine years ago and I have read all 107 essays since then. I did it in random order and also at random places. I read them in my study, in the train, on holiday, and so on, until I had read all essays. Montaigne makes you think, tells you about his life and time. He tells you about the past, too, for often he uses examples from classical antiquity. I read also a lot about Montaigne and his book and I visited the castle in France where he once lived. One could fill a lifetime with studying the man and his book, which I’ll not do, however, for my priorities are elsewhere. Nevertheless, I found the essays intriguing and interesting enough to reread them, now in the order presented in the book.

When I wanted to write my blog today, I had not yet a theme, and as a warming up for my brain and mind I took the Essays in order to read the next one, number XXVIII of Book II, titled “All things have their season”. What a coincidence. Hardly any of the essays could apply better to what is happening in the world at the moment. Here Montaigne explains that things have to be done at the right time, even good ones. Some things can better be done when you are young, other things when you are old: “Our studies and desires should sometime be sensible of age; yet we have one foot in the grave and still our appetites and pursuits spring every day anew within us”. For Montaigne himself this had the implication that “the only comfort I find in my old age, [is] that it mortifies in me several cares and desires wherewith my life has been disturbed; the care how the world goes, the care of riches, of grandeur, of knowledge, of health, of myself.” How different it often is for many of us, not only for the average citizen, who may stick to his or her habits, but also for the person on the top, whom we might have thought to be wiser. But as Montaigne quoted Terentius (II, II): “Humani a se nihil alienum putet” [Let him not think that anything that is human is alien to him]. So it is also for dictators, whether they are called Ben Ali, Mubarak or what their name is. They stick to their place and do not leave until they are forced to, by the people or by the army. As we say in Dutch, “There is a time of coming and there is a time of going”. But power is addictive and so many dictators forget this essential lesson of life. Montaigne did not. So he left his job as a judge in Bordeaux already quite young. He did not strive for high positions, and when he was appointed as mayor of Bordeaux, he accepted it à contre coeur, and it was not his choice that he got a second term (a great honour, for it rarely happened) but of the people around him. Montaigne knew the lessons of life, not only this one, so a wise dictator, and not only he, should read the Essays of Montaigne. But isn’t it a contradiction in terms: a wise dictator?

Human maps

2011-01-31T14:39:00.000+01:00

Damasio’s book Self comes to mind that I mentioned in my last blog is interesting in many respects. It gives a good idea of the way the mind works and how it produces consciousness and self. Unlike neuroscientists like Swaab or Lamme, discussed here in my blogs before, he does not simply reduce the mind to the biology of the brain. Maybe we can explain by such a reduction that I write a blog and why I do, but I do not see how, saying it plainly, my hormones can explain why I write this blog with this exact content and these wordings. Even more questionable is that the biological approach might explain the phenomenon of culture, which is, indeed, a product of man, but which is an interhuman and suprahuman phenomenon that exists independent of its individual contributors.

One of the most interesting contributions in Damasio’s book to the discussion how the mind works is his idea of maps. The idea is interesting not only because it is useful for explaining consciousness and self and other creations of the brain but also because it can be related to insights of other branches of knowledge. Maps in the brain are, so Damasio, patterns of neurons formed for representing what happens in the body and in the world around us. Like geographic maps they are used to inform the brain how things look like and for planning actions. These maps are continuously adapted according to new information that reaches the brain. One could say that the brain works like a land registry office that constantly receives information from its surveyors and that delivers information to other authorities that use it in their planning.

Seen this way, the idea of maps made me think of the cognitive schema theory developed in psychology some 40 years ago by Schank, Abelson and others. This theory says that we have a scheme in our head that organizes the way we see the world and that we use for interpreting the world. It is a kind of abstract knowledge structure that helps to explain what we perceive and that guides our actions. But it made me also think of the idea of theory as developed in methodology: a structure of concepts and sentences about how a certain part of the world looks like. Isn’t it so that such a theory is a kind of abstract representation that is adapted continuously on the base of further research and that can serve as a guide for policy just like a map?

I think that this analogy between what we do on the methodological level, the theoretical level of a science of man and on the biological level of the brain is not accidental. It says something about how man is structured. It says also that actually there is not one level of analysis that basically can explain everything we do by reducing all phenomena to its basic phenomena, but that there are different levels of explanation that all treat different aspects of what man does in its own irreducible way without saying that one level has priority.

Nonviolence and power

2011-01-28T16:14:00.001+01:00

It is very relevant these days: the relation between nonviolent action and resistance and power processes. See what is happening in Tunisia and Egypt and in other countries in the Middle East. By chance I have just finished an article on this theme. It is different from most of the philosophical blogs that I usually publish here, but for the interested readers of my blog, here is a summary. You can find the full text on http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/Nonviolence%20and%20Power.html

Nonviolence and Power. A study about the importance of power relations for nonviolent action and resistance: Summary

When a repressive regime is challenged by a nonviolent opponent, power relations play a central part. In this article I analyse how they are important for the choice of nonviolent methods.

In the classical Weberian view power is the possibility to impose one’s will. This is called “power over”. Against this Arendt put her idea of power as concerted action for pursuing a common aim: “power to”. It is the idea that underlies nonviolent action and resistance. However, these concepts of power give only a partial understanding of the dynamics between a repressive regime and nonviolent resisters. Moreover, they give hardly any insight when to choose which nonviolent methods and why. What we need is a concept of power that distinguishes between different political situations in order to understand better which nonviolent methods are most effective. Such a concept has been developed by Lukes.

The approaches just mentioned, so Lukes, describe only the overt dimension of power, namely power as it is exercised openly. Following Bachrach and Baratz, he explains that many people are excluded from the arena where the power play takes place so that they cannot legally defend their interests. Then power is used in order to deny others entrance to the power arena: the covert dimension. Moreover, as Lukes shows, power has also a third dimension. Many people just do not see that they have interests that they might defend in the power arena. They are culturally and linguistically manipulated in the way that they consider their powerless position as normal. So power is also the possibility to manipulate culture, language and other relevant factors that way that people do not realize that they ever might have entrance to the power arena. This is the latent dimension of power.

Returning to the possibility of nonviolent resistance, I explain that the way power is exercised is important for the way a regime has to be opposed. A democratic regime that exercises power overtly has to be approached differently than a regime that excludes people openly from defending their interests and that excludes people fundamentally from power positions, not to speak of a regime that keeps people unconscious of their rights. In the last part of my article I give a first analysis of what kind of nonviolent methods are to be used against different regime types.

Full text on http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/Nonviolence%20and%20Power.html

Culture and the person we are

2011-01-24T00:45:00.002+01:00

In these blogs I have defended the view that our personal identity is not only in our psychological characteristics but also in what we physically are. It is both in our mind and in our body. This is in line with the idea that mind and body are not two separate entities but that they are integrated. But are psychological and physical components all that makes up our identity? As a sociologist by education I should have had the idea that there is more before. However, I needed the newest book by Antonio Damasio, Self comes to mind, to see that there really is. In this book Damasio presents an original idea of how self, mind and consciousness result from the physical processes in our brain. They are not epiphenomena, so Damasio, but play an important part in guiding what we do. Some products of what we do are shared with other people (a phenomenon that does not happen in that degree in the animal world) and survive our death. This has become the origin of what we call culture. Unlike our self, mind and consciousness, culture does not die when one of its bearers dies. On the contrary, it continues to exist despite the death of its individual bearers and remains to exist as long as there are bearers who share it and take it up when they come new into this world. As Damasio says in a recent interview in the Dutch Filosofie Magazine: “… through the cooperation of many brains [there is] a network that goes beyond our individual biological origin. We are born in a culture that has already been made by others before our birth. And while we grow up, we learn to integrate that culture into our own body ... All our moral values and our knowledge of literature, music, film, law or economics come from outside our brain, from the social space in which we are born. And at the same time, this knowledge has first to go into our brain, before we can do something with it, so that it can exist for us. That knowledge has adapted our brain and has formed it culturally.” This integration of culture in our body can probably go as far that cultural developments lead to changes in the human genome.

In this way culture constitutes us insofar as we absorb it and we form it insofar as we take part in it; just like our psychological characteristics, but also our physical characteristics, develop, at least for a part, in exchange with the world around us. Is it then too bold to think that not only our psychological (so individual) characteristics and our bodily characteristics but also our cultural (so social) characteristics make up what we are as a person? Think of the phenomenon of a culture shock, for instance. Just this is outstanding example how integrated culture and person are.

Ethics as a neuroscience

2011-01-17T00:51:00.000+01:00

Last week I argued that the field of philosophy has shrunk a lot through the ages. Themes once studied by philosophers are now the subject of another branch of knowledge. How far will this shrinking go? Will philosophy as a special discipline disappear or will something be left of it? I guess that there’ll always remain purely philosophical questions. But let’s take ethics, for instance. Nothing seems further from a scientific intrusion than the study of what is morally right and wrong in our actions; the study of what we can and cannot do in our relationships with other people and society as a whole. Just here we see a variety of approaches, clustered in and also within cultures. However, when reading about the brain, one gets the impression that much of what we consider good and bad is based on the working of neurones and hormones. Neuroscientists can point out the places in the brain where you find moral conscience and even some of our moral feelings, and they can explain how the brain brings about moral behaviour. If one studies the brain long enough, in the end it will be possible to show the sites of our ethical principles, one might think then.

I am the last one to deny the truth of scientific results (unless I have scientific reasons for doing so). It is clear to me that much of what we morally do has a foundation in the physical structure of the brain and that defects of this structure can lead to amoral behaviour (psychopaths are a case in point). So, if brain research makes progress, this may have serious consequences for the status of ethics. Will it make ethics to no more than a comment on the workings of our brain or a practical explanation of it at most? Will it not happen that ethics can do no more than applying what we have to do in view of what is programmed in our brain to the situation in which we are, resulting in rules of moral behaviour? If so, ethics would change from a branch of philosophy into a natural science of moral prescriptions.

Maybe this thought is too pessimistic, if this word still has meaning in a merely physically conceived world (for in such a world pessimism is no longer a point of view that can be substantiated but merely a physically based feeling that something goes in the wrong direction). However, I think that there are good reasons that the relation between ideas and matter, and actually between mind and brain, is not that simple. What is wrong here is the idea is that science and thinking about what science means for us are actually the same. It is something what Ryle called a category mistake or what I, interpreting Habermas, called a distinction between level 1 and level 0 (see my blog dated Dec. 13, 2010). The same idea was expressed by Wittgenstein when he wrote at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (6.54): “He [the reader] must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” Or in other words: One has to distance oneself from science, for only then one can see it in the right way. That is, one has to philosophize. This does not imply, of course, that philosophy has nothing to do with what our brain physically does.

The Ivory Tower of philosophy

2011-01-10T00:25:00.000+01:00

I think that the world is greatly indebted to philosophy. I do not say that because I am a philosopher, for originally I am a sociologist and I turned to philosophy, just because it gave me important insights. But I think that the world would be different without philosophy, for the worse and for the better. This is not such an arrogant remark as one might think, if one realizes that philosophy developed together with the world and that what was called philosophy many centuries ago is not exactly the same as what is called philosophy today. Man’s political views of the world, ethics, mathematics, theology, astrology, science, and much more: all this was headed together under the name of philosophy. However, through the ages, one after another split off and became independent ways to approach the world or a part of it, until what remained is what we call philosophy today: a wordly way of thinking about themes that are not empirical.

When the philosophical field shrunk its character changed, too. Philosophy developed into a service organization for the sciences, for instance, and into a way to interpret scientific results. One of the tasks of philosophy today is thinking about what science is and about its methodological rules. By doing so, philosophy founds what science is and how it is done. But once science has done its work and presents its results, it is not so that these results have an unequivocal meaning. Far from that. As such scientific facts do not exist, for they are dependent on the type of instruments used to discover them and on presuppositions that are basic for these instruments. Facts are also dependent on the theories in which they are framed and these theories are continuously changing and being improved. In other words, scientific results are interpretations. To make clear what this implies is a philosophical task. Actually, this explanatory task is a continuation of the methodological task of philosophy before practical scientific work starts.

Moreover, scientific results are embedded in a social world, they have a meaning for this world and they have consequences for this world. Just think of the effects of medical discoveries on the way we live and the way we think about death and life. Scientific results can influence and change what we find important and what we value.

In view of this narrow relation between philosophy and science I am a bit surprised how often it happens that philosophers ignore scientific results. For instance, in the discussions on personal identity, one of my fields of interest as the readers of these blogs will know, it is often as if we still are in the days that Locke introduced the subject, more than 300 years ago. As if, since then, research of our body and mind hasn’t made clear that they are inextricably interwoven, which makes that our psychological identity cannot be separated from what we are physically are. Or taking another example that is not a hobbyhorse of mine, I was really amazed to see a recent publication that still took naïve realism seriously (happily it was an argument against it). This conception of the way we perceive the world says that we perceive things directly and in an unmediated way, as they “really” are, although it is clear from neurological and psychological research that it is a naïve view indeed that only is worth to be discussed in philosophical history books. When reading such stuff, it is as if philosophy has missed the developments elsewhere in the world and thinks that it can live in an Ivory Tower.

The experience of whiteness

2011-01-03T00:29:00.002+01:00

Recently we had very much snow in the Netherlands, which does not happen often. Years can pass by with hardly any snow at all. But now it had fallen in big quantities. Moreover, also a bit unusual, a few days later it was still there on the roads and the trees as if it had just snowed.

One thing I like to do then is making an endurance run in the wood behind my house. There is hardly anything that I like to do more, but in most winters I can do it only once or twice. So I took my running shoes, put on my jogging suit and closed the door. Two minutes later I was in the wood. I was overwhelmed: So much whiteness around me, so much beauty. I was like wrapped in a white blanket. It was more beautiful than in any winter before.

When talking about the free will, we always think of things we can do. Swaab, Mele and others who discuss the problem see the essence of free will in the possibility to decide or choose related to action: whether we can act freely or not. For instance, the debate about the experiment by Libet that showed that an action precedes our conscious decision to perform it with a fraction of a second is about that: about our freedom to act; about whether we take the factual decision or whether our zombie does.

Although I do not want to deny that acting is fundamental for us, isn’t there more that makes up our freedom (or its absence)? For example, how about our experiences? Experiences are given to us. Our senses are selective, indeed, and they, too, influence what we see, feel, and so on. Nevertheless, we cannot help that the world is around us and that we have to experience it. But what determines how these experiences are for us? To a certain extent we can be trained to perceive better and to perceive more details and even what we consider beautiful. We can learn to enjoy symphonic music or opera, for instance. On the other hand, training can also make us lose the feeling for integral beauty, as I once heard about professional musicians. However, everybody enjoys music in some way. So, here, too, the question may apply: Are we free to enjoy the beautifulness of music? Are we free to enjoy beautifulness as such? Does the problem of freedom of decision apply also to how something is like for us, to what we like and in what way we like? Was the overwhelming beauty of the snow covered wood something I had freely decided to enjoy or was it something that just happened to me (“decided” not in the sense that I freely went to the wood but that I freely experienced its beauty)?

Maybe I would rather skip these words and simply write “Wow!”

Our future piggish identity

2010-12-27T01:54:00.002+01:00

aIn his We are our brain the Dutch brain researcher Dick Swaab makes us think not only about the free will (see my blog two weeks ago), but also about our personal identity. His discussion of the subject is especially relevant for the question whether this identity is determined by psychological factors, by bodily factors or by both. One of the weak points of the pure psychological approach is that it denies that our personal identity is at least partially dependent on our physical constitution. Its adherents reject not only the importance of our bodily characteristics for our identity but they ignore also the way psychological characteristics are fixed in our body. They do accept that our psychological characteristics are physically fixed in our body in some way, indeed, for what sense would a brain swap have, if it weren’t? But they do not see that many psychological characteristics are not fixed to our body like a painting on a canvass (which makes that we can replace the canvass and keep the painting, albeit with much effort), but that they are inextricably tied to our material structure and are dependent on the individual features of our brain and in the end on the structure of our DNA.

The foregoing is not a pure philosophical problem. It may get a practical meaning as soon as it will become possible to transplant brain tissue from a foetus for repairing defects in another brain, as Swaab explains. For since “many of our characteristics, including our character, are determined in the structure of our brain during our foetal development … which characteristics could you get then from your donor?”, Swaab asks. These characteristics are dependent on what part of the foetus brain is used for the transplantation and where it will be placed in the donor’s brain. When this technique can be realized, especially in the higher brain structure, “it is to be wondered to what extent a new person is being composed, and how much transplanted tissue makes that the receiver should actually use the name of the donor as his second family name”. The issue of personal identity will become even more interesting, Swaab adds, when we are going to use tissues from other creatures for our brain transplantations. Until now these operations were hardly successful, “[b]ut if such xenotransplantations should ever become effective, would these transplants provide man then [for instance] with a bit of the friendliness and intelligence of the pigs?” If that is so, maybe it would not be a bad idea to improve our identity as a person in this way. (See Swaab, Wij zijn ons brein, pp. 170-1, also for the quotations).

The irremovable difference between presence and absence

2010-12-20T00:57:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I think that I am a stupid philosopher. One who is too simple-minded to see the value of complicated thoughts and the truth of certain philosophical statements which are clear for many of my confrères. I faced this fact again when I started to read an article about Heidegger, or rather about his philosophical method, in a journal I am subscribed to. I knew that reading it would be quite an effort for me because of Heidegger’s obscure style. And many comments on his texts are not much better. Indeed, I had only just read one page when there was talk of “a thorough and irremovable difference between presence and absence” that formed the background of a long-lasting philosophical debate. I was baffled. I must admit that I had missed the debate, to which, according to the author of the article, outstanding philosophers like Heidegger (you guess it), Levinas and Derrida had contributed. But, of course, it is no wonder that I had missed it, for just such statements make me drop out. For what does this quotation mean when I look at it with a down-to-earth mind, forgetting for a moment that I am a philosopher? Or maybe when I look at it from the viewpoint of an analytical philosopher? Frankly speaking, it is nonsense. For the thoroughness and irremovability of the difference between presence and absence is already in the meaning of the words. It is analytical. It is as if you say: “If I am here I am not there”. Nothing is clearer and more analytical than this. Of course, it is thorough and irremovable, so what are we talking about then?

I continued reading the article but you’ll not be surprised that I put it aside after a few sentences. Actually I was a bit disappointed that I did not have the perseverance to read it to its end, since it is obvious now that I’ll never become a great thinker. For, so Heidegger, all great thinkers think the same because they all know themselves being bound by the question of Being. But it’s Heidegger’s Being and that’s not mine. For me this Being is nothing, and as Heidegger told us, the nothing nothings. Oh, help, let me stop here, before I do become a Heideggerian philosopher.

P.S. I know that this is a caricature but sometimes a caricature tells the truth better than telling the truth. In Heideggerian terms, it unhides the hidden better, than the unhidden itself.

Do my hormones make my choices?

2010-12-13T01:31:00.001+01:00

In We are our brain the Dutch brain researcher Dick Swaab, defends the thesis that in the end everything we do is determined by the biology of our brain. Our brain steers our development, mainly with the help of hormones. Sexuality, juvenile behaviour, depressions, aggression, psychological diseases … This is just a random choice of our hormone guided behaviour. Therefore it is no surprise that Swaab concludes that there is no “complete ‘Free Will’ ”.

If one sees the free will as the possibility to take decisions independent of internal or external limitations, so Swaab, our present neurobiological knowledge makes clear that there can be no complete freedom. Conceived this way, I think there’ll be hardly any person who thinks that there is. The limits of our body, but also of our social and cultural environment, are widely accepted as the limits of our freedom. However, Swaab does not make clear what our freedom then is, but I guess that he doesn’t see much space for the free will.

Yet, despite himself, he gives a hint where our freedom has to be sought. One of our characteristics determined by hormones during our prenatal development is the meaning of eye contact. In Western cultures, so Swaab, women use eye contact in order to understand other women better, and they enjoy it. For Western men, however, eye contact means testing their place in the hierarchy, which can be very menacing. In business negotiations, eye contact between women leads to more creative solutions, while eye contact between men has a negative effect on the results. “You can take advantage of this practical tip”, so Swaab concludes.

I think that just this remark says a lot about the limits of the determinism of our brain. In order to explain this I want to refer to a distinction by Jürgen Habermas between two levels of meaning, level 1 and level 0. The former is the level all sciences are faced with when they theoretically interpret their objects of research. The latter level is typical of those sciences that have to deal with objects that have been given meaning by the investigated people themselves. This made me distinguish two kinds of meaning: meaning 1 and meaning 0 (see here). The former is the kind of meaning used on the first level. It is the meaning a scientist gives to an object, either physical or social in character; it is the scientist’s theoretical interpretation of reality. Meaning 0 is the concept of meaning for the underlying level 0. It is the meaning people who make up social reality give to this social reality or to parts of it themselves; it is their interpretation of their own lived reality.

When we return to Swaab’s description of the meaning of eye contact and his conclusion, we can apply the distinction of two levels of meaning here, too. When a researcher studies the effects of hormones on the meaning of eye contact, she is on level 1. When Swaab says, however, “You can take advantage of this practical tip”, he is no longer on the level of the biological mechanism. In fact, he says then what this mechanism can mean for us, the appliers of the eye contact, and also that the mechanism needs no longer be an automatism but that we can use it for the benefit of ourselves. By interpreting the biological mechanism this way we have arrived at level 0. It is the level where we can reflect on our biological constitution and where we can take advantage of it, if we are conscious of it. Just this conclusion by Swaab shows that our determinism has its limits. Therefore I think that there is room for a free will on level 0. Swaab gives also another hint that points in this direction, when he describes the meaning eye contacts have for Western women and men. For doesn’t this refer to the idea that our biological functioning can have another interpretation in another culture and so lead to other choices in other cultures?

“I cannot hand over the eyes”

2010-12-06T00:59:00.005+01:00

Look at this: “It’s pitch dark. I can not hand over the eyes. Do you view please?” What would it mean? I think that you cannot make any sense of it. I have translated it from Dutch with a translation tool from the Internet. If I would translate it myself it would be something like “It is pitch-dark here. I can’t see anything at all (verbally: I cannot see a hand before my eyes; it’s a Dutch expression). Do you put the light on?” It’s a simple situation. The sentences are simple. Nothing special. The Dutch expression that I used for “I cannot see anything at all” is common. Nevertheless the translation tool made a mess of it. Moreover, it didn’t translate the word “here” in the first sentence of the example.

Or take this: “Do you have fits”? In this case I had translated the English sentence “Do you have matches?” (implying that I wanted to light a cigarette) into Dutch with the same language tool. Then I retranslated it myself into English, as verbally as possible, in order to show also what a mess you can get when you translate in the other direction.

I have the impression that Internet translation tools are increasingly used. It seems so easy: You want to translate something into another language, for instance because you want to send a message to another person and you do not share a common language with her. So, take a translation tool and translate it. What many people do not realize (and let’s hope that the constructors of the translation tools do realize it) is that translating is more than simply replacing words by other words plus the application of the right rules of grammar. For using a language takes place in a context, and words get their meanings only in a context. This is already important when a word or a sentence has apparently only a single meaning. “He took the knife and made a cut in the body” implies something very different whether it is done by a murderer or by a surgeon. Context becomes even more important when words have several unrelated meanings, like “match”, which can have such different meanings as an organized game, a small wooden stick for producing fire, making the same or equal, and many more. We have seen this in the scene where I wanted to light a cigarette and asked someone for matches. The translation tool misses the context and thinks of the verb “to match” instead of the small wooden sticks I need (it could also have mistakenly thought that I asked for games). This, combined with the problem that translation tools tend to take words verbally (see the first example where it did not take “I cannot see a hand before my eyes” as a Dutch expression), makes that translation tools are still an unreliable means for transferring meanings from one language to another. And one can wonder whether they’ll ever become reliable in future. For a language is not simply an instrument of communication, a language expresses also a way of life. And when you doubt about what I have written here, just pick a translation tool from the Internet and render this blog in another language.

What are we voting for?

2010-11-29T01:19:00.006+01:00

Dutch national symbols

Some blogs ago I discussed that much of what I do is not steered by my conscious I but by my unconscious part, so by my zombie. My conscious I is often not more than an interpreter in my brain that tells me what the zombie has decided and my zombie is the actual steersman. But who steers my zombie? Or is it so that my zombie steers itself by an unconscious process of deliberation and reasoning that in the end decides what “I” want to do, actually not different from the way I would do it, when I would perform the process consciously?

Some distressing light on this question has been shed by experiments concerning political thought and behaviour by a group of Israeli researchers. The normative perspective suggests, they say, “that one’s political agenda should be driven by two factors: one’s ideology and the facts of the matter. These should form the input for an intentional reasoning process, wherein the goal is carefully thought-through political activity.” And indeed, psychological research has substantiated that one’s ideology and current events do influence political behaviour and thought, but in view of recent developments in cognitive psychology it is to be expected that unconscious processes play an important part as well. In order to investigate this the researchers tried to find out in a series of experiments whether subliminal presentation of national symbols influences one’s stance on political opinions and political behaviour. In these experiments the participants were confronted with several political issues. However, just before the presentation of the issues a national flag (which stood for the national symbol) was shown for such a short time that the participants were not aware of it. Both before and after the experiments the participants were asked their opinions on certain political themes. In one experiment the voting intention in coming elections was asked and then after the elections what they had really voted. All experiments showed the same result: On the average the participants had before the experiments more extreme views than after them. Therefore the researchers concluded: “the subliminal presentation of a national flag can bring about significant changes not only in a citizen’s expressed political opinions within an experimental setting but also in their ‘real-life’ overt political behavior”.

What makes this result so interesting for answering my question “who steers my zombie?” but also so worrying is not only that it tells us something about how we form our political opinions and behaviour but also that they can easily be manipulated by others, while we are not aware of it. This is the more worrying, while there is no reason to believe that such manipulation will move us only to the political centre. It is also possible, as the researchers point out, that priming of national symbols can activate extremist ideologies in those who have them already. In other words, what my zombie does for me unconsciously for me can easily be manipulated by not all too honest politicians. Then it may happen that we vote no longer for what we think right, for what we stand for, but simply for our national flag, rightly or wrongly.

Source http://www.pnas.org/content/104/50/19757.full . The quotations are also from this article.

The economic benefits of transgenic maize and the free rider problem

2010-11-22T01:02:00.004+01:00

Maize field after harvest

Recently I read in a Dutch newspaper an article about the economic effects of the cultivation of genetically manipulated maize, in this case Bt corn. Bt corn produces a toxin that is poisonous to the European corn borer, one of the pests of corn. According to the article, a study on the effects of Bt corn in the Midwest of the USA published in Science showed that also on fields where non-manipulated corn was grown the population of the European corn borer decreased with 28 till even 73 percent. The introduction of Bt corn in the region has led to an economic benefit of 6.9 milliard dollars since 1996. However, almost two third of the benefit falls to farmers who do not cultivate Bt corn, but they do not have to pay for the license.

Coen van Wagenberg from Wageningen University speaks here of a free rider effect. Usually a free rider is defined as a person who profits by a public resource without paying a fair share in its costs. You live in an area protected by dikes but don’t want to pay the land draining rates from which the dikes are paid. You take the train but don’t buy a ticket. When there are too many free riders, dikes will not be constructed, public transport will not ride any longer for lack of money and everybody suffers, including the free rider. Therefore the state forces everybody to pay his share and tries to catch fare dodgers. In van Wagenberg’s view, also farmers who do not cultivate Bt corn in a region where other farmers do: The former take advantage of what the latter do, but they do not pay for the costs. The free market, so van Wagenberg, does not work here. Therefore the state must interfere and make that everybody in a region where transgenic maize is grown pays his share in the costs.

At first thoughts the argument seems reasonable: everybody profits by transgenic maize, so everybody has to pay for it. But is this really a case of free riding? I think it is not. Actually the arguments turns the world upside down and it limits freedom in the name of freedom. For does a person have to pay for his neighbour’s decisions?

I live in a terraced house. In winter I set the thermostat of my central heating on 19^oC, while my neighbours left and right prefer 21^oC. Then warmth flows through the walls to my house and my heating costs are reduced a bit. I profit by what they pay for their heating. Must I pay my neighbours then in order to equalize my benefit? I guess that nobody would get the idea. Everybody is free to choose how warm or cold his house will be and if a neighbour will have it warmer, she must accept that some warmth goes to the neighbour next-door.

I see here no fundamental difference with the case of growing transgenic maize. It involves as little a free rider problem as the case of me warming my house. In fact it is not the “free riding” farmer who undermines the free market as suggested in the article but the farmer growing transgenic maize and those on his side. Maybe some farmers try to profit by what their neighbours grow, but other farmers are simply against growing transgenic plants because of the harmful effects for nature and men’s health of genetic manipulation. It is a matter of private choice that is not comparable to profiting by the protection of dikes or not buying a train ticket. You cannot help that your neighbour chooses to grow Bt maize, like that you cannot help that your next-door neighbour will have her house warmer. The core of the problem whether or not the state must interfere here is not the functioning of the free market, but whether one can force a private person to pay a share in the costs that other private persons have because of their private decisions, so that the costs are fairly shared by all who have the benefits. Growing Bt corn is not a public good, just as making cars isn’t. The problem is an ethical one about freedom of choice and not about unfair competition in a supposedly free market. And it is also about the ethically acceptability to manipulate plants genetically and having persons pay for it who are against it.

Trust

2010-11-15T01:12:00.004+01:00

Someone gives you money for an investment project. He says that it would be nice to give it back in case you make good gains but you do not need to do so. Your investment is successful and the amount doubles. What will you do? Experiments show that you’ll give it back. Suppose now that your financier says that you have to pay back at least a part, say 20%. It is your choice to pay back more. Again you succeed to double the amount received. What will you do? Experiments show now that the chance that you’ll pay back the whole amount diminishes. Fewer people are prepared to pack back the whole amount now than in the first case.

This is only one instance of what we call trust. Trust is a kind of promise. It says that you will not let your interests prevail at the cost of the interests of the person who trusts you. Trust can be expressed in words, for example by saying “You can trust me” or by behaviour that shows that you can be trusted. Although past behaviour is not a guarantee for what you will do in future, behaviour in the past that undermined that you were trustworthy tends to undermine that you can be trusted in the future.

As these and other experiments show, trust can also be undermined otherwise. Being a kind of promise, trust involves a moral obligation and it relies on an intrinsic motivation. Everything that undermines this intrinsic motivation undermines also trust. People tend to become calculating and to give preference to their own interests at the cost of interests of other people, when rules and regulations prescribe what they have to do and when, and what is allowed and what is not. When money stimulates or sanctions their behaviour trust is undermined, too. However, rules and regulations and monetary relations can never completely replace trust. Not everything can be prescribed and ways to avoid rules remain. Not all interpersonal relations can be steered by prescriptions and money. And then trust plays its part. Or rather we must say that trust comes first and that, when need arises, it is replaced by prescriptive relations (rules and regulations) and money. But this replacement is a double-edged sword. While it helps society function better where trust fails, it undermines trust as well so that the chance that trust will fail grows. Therefore, one must be very careful not to make more rules and regulations than necessary. The same effect can be seen when society becomes too money-based. Then personal relations, relations based on trust, tend to become relations guided by the question: what can I gain from it, what will it bring to me? One of the most extreme forms of this is corruption, and corruption has a disruptive effect on societies. Whichever way you look at it, trust is the foundation of society. Or alternatively: Trust is a lubricant for society and the better quality the lubricant is, the smoother society runs.

The group a person belongs to

2010-11-08T01:54:00.001+01:00

A few years ago Mark Rutte, the new Dutch prime minister but then the leader of his parliamentary party, objected to the fact that one of the state secretaries in the government had a double nationality: she had both a Dutch and a Turkish passport. However, when he presented his new cabinet two weeks ago, it turned out that also one of the state secretaries in this cabinet had two passports: a Dutch one and a Swedish one. When asked how this was defensible in view of his former opinion, the prime minister answered that he did not mind that the state secretary had a Swedish passport but when she had had a Turkish passport, it would have been a point of discussion. No wonder that some accused him of discrimination. Apparently a minister or state secretary (and many other people) is not judged here by his or her personal loyalty to the government and the Netherlands but by the group s/he officially belongs to.

But why is just having a certain nationality so important? In the end a person belongs to many different groups and they can all have influence on one’s loyalty to the state. One can think of groups related to gender, class, language, profession, community, race and so on. And isn’t it so that in the past class belongingness was said to be international and that labour leaders often have stressed that workers from different countries would not fight against each other? (So sad, that this did not really happen). Doesn’t this imply that class membership can be by far more important than one’s passport? Or what to think of the language group one belongs to and the many separation movements in this world based on language? And isn’t it so that through the ages the belongingness to a religious group has also been important in determining loyalty to the state? And, to take another example, who cares about the international loyalties (and the loyalties to their own pockets!) of the fraudulent bankers, despite the recent bank crisis?

Amartya Sen argued in his The Idea of Justice that seeing a person “merely as a member of just one particular group would be a major denial of the freedom of each person to decide how exactly to see himself or herself. The increasing tendency seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ … is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups …” (pp. 246-247). And that is what often happens. The case of the Dutch prime minister is only one instance. He did not doubt at all about the loyalty of the state secretary with the Turkish passport. It was just that she had a Turkish passport (and apparently not a Swedish one) that counted. So we often do: we judge people not by what they say and do, but by their belongings, even if they cannot help that they have them and even if they cannot change them (like gender, race, but often also the passport). Actually people are then judged by mere formal qualities. We see it, as Sen warns, “particularly … in the present intellectual [and I want to add: political] climate in which individuals tend to be identified as belonging to one social category to the exclusion of all others …, such as being a Muslim or a Christian or a Hindu, an Arab or a Jew, a Hutu or a Tutsi, or a member of Western civilization … Individual human beings with their various plural identities, multiple affiliations and diverse associations are quintessentially social creatures with different types of societal interactions. Proposals to see a person merely as a member of one social group tend to be based on an inadequate understanding of the breadth and complexity of any society in the world” (p. 247). And isn’t it so that in this time of globalization there is a tendency to get international and supranational group belongings? That it has become more likely that one has several nationalities, maybe not formally but actually in the sense of having different national roots? In this age of globalization having other-national group belongings is just an asset. It helps giving a person a wider view of what is happening around him or her. Seen this way, membership of a big number of groups, especially those crossing the national borders and those on the other side of the national border should have to be praised, including having a double nationality.

On being selective when travelling around

2010-11-01T01:02:00.001+01:00

When travelling around, on holiday, I used to visit many of the buildings and sites recommended in my travel guide. See this! See that! Do not fail to visit this church, you must go to that museum, my guide said, and although I do not want to say that I visited all these places (in the end I wanted to keep some time for visiting the places I liked and for doing the things I preferred), I went to a lot of the sites advised to visit, anyhow.

Since a few years I do less so. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty and think it is stupid not to see the highlights of the local, national or international culture I pass, but often I had the feeling that they do not really appeal to me. Of course, the master pieces of art and intelligence are beautiful, but each time most of what I see appears fundamentally new to me. It is as if through the years I haven’t developed a mental frame that helps me to compare a new church and its ornaments, the next mediaeval town hall and the next painting or sculputure with those that I had seen a day before, not to speak of what I had seen months or years ago. Often the things I see do not fall in a slot, by way of speaking. Of course, there are exceptions. I remember that when I went into a church in Florence, my eye was immediately caught by a beautiful statue. It appeared to be one by Donatello. And Dutch painters, not only the big names like Rembrandt or van Gogh, have by far more meaning for me than foreign painters. But let’s say that 95% of those “musts” for tourists do not really fit a scheme in my mind, and I forget most of it very soon. This doesn’t mean that I do not visit those highlights of art and intelligence any longer, but gradually I have changed my strategy. I have become very selective and I look only at those things which probably will fit my mental scheme. So when I was in the Escorial near Madrid I gave only attention to what was related to Dutch history (and I visited the Escorial because I expected to find such things there). The LVR-LandesMuseum in Bonn was interesting for me because of it prehistoric objects and I ignored all other departments. And so on.

I hardly dared to tell other people about my “disinterest” for the highlights of culture till I read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. In this book de Botton shows us ways of travelling but he also put these them into perspective, especially the more “traditional” way of visiting famous places. When de Botton was in Madrid and stood there amidst of a crowd of tourists, he wondered “what am I doing here?” And a few pages further he points to the terror of the travel guides, which praise certain places as interesting, force you to visit them and to show enthusiasm, and implicitly belittle those people who do not agree or prefer to ignore these places. Besides that, so de Botton, it happens often that we see these things on the wrong moment, when we are not yet ripe for appreciating them. This can make that the new information has no value for us (compare what I told about my mental scheme). Or if it has, maybe it would be better after our visit to the Notre Dame in Paris, not to go to the next tourist attraction nearby but take a train and compare it with the cathedral in Reims. That makes more sense than just keeping looking around where you are, with a travel guide in your hands, for by doing so your curiosity is deformed by a superficial geographic logic, by what happens to be placed together – things that may have no intrinsic relations – and by what is only recommended by our travel guide. It is the same, so de Botton, as letting your choice of books be determined by their sizes and not by their contents.

When I had read The Art of Travel I felt very relieved and now I dare to tell everyone: I did not see that famous sculpture, that church and that painting and I avoided them with intention. And I need not be ashamed for doing so and telling it to you, for being selective when travelling around does not only fit better my idea of what makes travelling around pleasant, it has also a philosophical foundation! See what de Botton wrote about it!

Making a reader think

2010-10-15T14:38:00.004+02:00

“Il ne faut pas toujours tellement épuiser un sujet qu'on ne laisse rien à faire au lecteur; il ne s'agit pas de faire lire, mais de faire penser” (We must not always exhaust a subject, so as to leave no work at all for the reader. My business is not to make people read, but to make them think.) - Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws, Book 14, ch.XX)

By chance, when thinking about my next blog, I met this quotation on the Philosophy Calendar, which hangs here somewhere on a wall in my house. I looked it up on the Internet in Montesquieu’s work (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27573/27573-h/27573-h.htm) in order to see in what context it had been placed. Montesquieu, so he said there, originially had the intention to investigate for all kinds of moderate governments known how the three powers are distributed and what the relations with the degrees of freedom are, but he wouldn’t do that for something had to be left to the reader: one must not only make him or her read but also make him/her think.

The comment added to the quotation by the Dutch journalist and philosopher Vanno Jobse related it to the difference between what a good book is and what is just a book: Some authors write a book where the whole thread and all thoughts are completely spun out. Then, you read the book and that’s it. Good books, however, have been developed well, everything is thought-out but, despite that, not everything that can be said about the main theme is said, and it gives the reader handles to make him or her think.

When I look back to how I wrote in the past, I must say that I was the type of author and thinker who tried to be complete. My attitude was: try to be as complete as possible. And when I discovered yet a little loose thread in my thoughts I tried to fasten it. I must say, I was also stimulated to do so by others. In case I had sent a paper to a journal, I usually got comments like: “How about this?” “How about that?” “There you can be criticized”. And so on, forgetting the main line of the thought. In the end I was fed up with it. What sense does it have to try to be as precise as possible? So I gradually changed my way of writing, I loosened my style and let the loose threads hang down. Or I intentionally left some points open without discussion. I started a blog website, too, which is exactly a place where you can have your thoughts run freely without thinking whether each thought can be substantiated. It is not that I hoped that I could make other people think, although that would be nice, of course. I write my blogs for myself, often as a reflection on what I have just read. But when I read later an old blog again, I often discover failures or imperfect thoughts that make me think again. And I enjoy it.

Liberty of conscience

2010-10-11T01:11:00.003+02:00

At the moment I am reading a philosophical book which is very different from those I have recently discussed here in my blogs: Amartya Sen’s The idea of Justice. Although one can wonder whether it is that different, for there is not a real gap between a concept like responsibility and a concept like justice.

Sen is not new to me. I “met” him already when I was studying sociology with economics as a minor and I became intrigued then by his Choice of Techniques, which discusses an aspect of a planned economy. Sen’s ideas and points of interest and mine developed through the years, although in different directions, but now and then I read some of his newest works like Identity and Violence, which is important for me because of my interest in (personal) identity and nonviolence. His present book is mainly a discussion with Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and his idea of justice as fairness.

Although I have read only less than a third of the book till now, I met already many stimulating ideas. One of the things that permeates the book is Sen’s multicultural education. Most people tend to become prejudiced in favour of their own cultures, also because as an outsider it is difficult to get to know the huge achievements of other cultures. Sen, living in several countries through the years, got the chance to become acquainted with many cultures and he used it. He tells for instance about the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great, who lived from 1542-1605 in what now is more or less Pakistan, Northern India and Bangladesh. Akbar, a Muslim, an enlightened ruler, “ not only did insist”, so Sen, “that the duty of the state included making sure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of his religion, and any one was to be allowed to go over to any religion he pleased’, he also arranged systematic dialogues in his capital city of Agas between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews and others, even including agnostics and atheists” (The Idea of Justice, 37). This happened in a time that religious wars reigned in Europe and people were sent to the stake because of their faith. This quotation makes us think. In a time that right-wing extremism flares up in many European countries (including in my own country, the Netherlands), it shows us another face of Islam than the one presented by this political ideology, which also forgets the zealotry with which Christianity was spread over the world during the ages, including in Islamic regions. When thinking of this zealotry and especially of the religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots in France in his days, Montaigne reacted in this way: “ ‘Tis usual to see good intentions, if carried on without moderation, push men on to very vicious effects.” The essay that starts with this sentence bears the title “Of liberty of conscience”. It tells us to be tolerant for other views, even when we do not like them. Although written more than 400 years ago, we can still learn a lot of it, just as we can from the words and practice of the Muslim ruler Akbar.

What does being responsible mean?

2010-10-04T01:15:00.003+02:00

In these blogs I have often talked about our responsibility for doing things, but what does being responsible mean? I do not want to give an extensive analysis of the concept. Many philosophers have done that before and I don’t expect to be able to give an original contribution. However, in view of all what I have written about it here, I think that it is time to clarify what the concept in my opinion involves. “Responsible” or “responsibility” is a bit, what I would call, a “bucket concept”: we throw a lot in it which is hardly related. For instance, responsible can mean being in charge with a task, or behaving properly and sensibly, and the like. That is not what I mean with it. As used here, responsibility refers to a person and an action done by that person, to something a person did with an intention or intentionally. Only then I call here a person responsible for what s/he did or for the consequences of what s/he did. But for calling a person responsible for what s/he did it is not enough that s/he was acting with an intention or intentionally. The action or its consequences must also imply a moral obligation.
These are only minimum criteria. If they haven’t been fulfilled in some way, we cannot say that the agent has a responsibility for an action in my sense. And just this “in some way” makes the concept so difficult to catch. For who determines in which way? For example, was running into the car an action of mine? (See my blog last week) Cycling near Breukelen was, for I had the intention to cycle there, it’s true. However, when I saw the car I tried to avoid it. Nevertheless, the collision was a consequence of my action cycling there, and it can be defended that this makes that I am responsible for the accident: It was my choice to become a road-user and I need to know then that I run risks to make mistakes and to cause an accident. In this sense I am responsible for the accident caused by my mistake and it is this which gives me an obligation to pay for the damaged caused by me. But does it give me a moral obligation? As for me I have the feeling it does, for the car driver couldn’t help that I run into his car. However, the Dutch legislator does not agree. According to him every car driver needs to know that a car can cause serious injuries and heavy damage to a pedestrian or cyclist that can exceed by far the apparent severity of the accident. A car is a dangerous instrument. Therefore, by becoming a road-user, a car driver is responsible for the consequences of a collision with a pedestrian or cyclist, even if s/he did not cause it, and s/he has a moral (and legal) obligation to pay at least a part of the damage caused. That’s what the Dutch legislator thinks.
The upshot is that the concept of responsibility can be given many interpretations and can be fleshed out in many ways. Just when we have determined the minimum criteria of what being responsible is, the discussion really starts.

Am I responsible for my actions or is my zombie? (2)

2010-09-27T15:20:00.004+02:00

The bridge of Breukelen
(photo taken with pinhole camera)

When I wrote my blog last week, where I asked who is responsible for my actions, I did not expect that a few days later this question would become reality for me. Last Saturday, I was cycling along the Vecht, once a former branch of the Rhine, now a quiet river with villas from the 18th century and mediaeval castles left and right. On the other side of the Vecht, Nijenrode Castle loomed up from behind the trees. A bell told me that it was seven o’clock. One or two kilometres further on I saw the characteristic bridge of Breukelen. I am about halfway my trip, I thought, and smiled. I was going easy with a steady speed. Then, suddenly, a blue colossus in front of me. A car! I made a swing to the right. Too late. The car stops me with its side. Happily a bleeding hand and a few bruises were my only injuries. Nothing serious. My bike had no damage at all. The car had more damage than I and my bike together. The chauffeur and his wife were very nice and helpful. They were even prepared to bring me home. But after having returned to myself, some talking and exchanging addresses, I decided to continue my ride, albeit with a lower speed. With still an hour to ride home, I had time enough for thinking over what had happened. I realized that it was a typical instance of the responsibility case in my last week’s blog. One thing seemed certain: As a person I was responsible for the accident, for I hadn’t given priority to the car. But my I as brain interpreter and my zombie started quarrelling about their shares in it. Okay, my I (brain interpreter) is prepared to take the responsibility for the trip and the route, but it reproaches the zombie that it really behaved like a zombie when cycling there. My speed was easy and steady which made that I was almost in trance. However, my zombie reproaches my I that it looked too much to the landscape, the Nijenrode Castle and the beautiful bridge and that it had to be attentive on the crossing. I knew the situation and, although it is a quiet crossing, I knew that cars could come from the right. I should have noticed the car, according to my zombie, and I had had to warn him in time. But is it not so that I was there for enjoying the trip? Can’t I trust my zombie that he does what he is supposed to do: leading me automatically and with flexible reactions along the roads? He had to know that crossings can be dangerous, so it is my zombie that had had to be more attentive, so I said. I am a simple brain interpreter, just reporting afterwards to other people what my zombie has decided. According to some philosophers, like Paul Churchland, I am even not more than an epiphenomenon of my zombie. How can I be held responsible for the collision then? Even if I can be held responsible for the main lines of the trip, it is my zombie who is responsible for filling in the details, I maintained. Only that in the end my person was responsible for the collision was no point of discussion.
When I called my insurance company, the lady on the line made me doubt whether even this was correct. She told me that according to Dutch law cyclists and pedestrians are protected “traffic participants” and that in case of a collision with a car they are not be liable for the damage. She advised me to recover my damage from (the insurance company of) the chauffeur and it was even not yet sure whether my insurance company needed to pay the damage of the car. The reason is that in a collision between a car and a pedestrian or cyclist the chances to get damage are very unequal. But if this is so, it might imply that my person and my brain interpreter and/or my zombie are responsible for the accident but nor for the damage of the accident.

Am I responsible for my actions or is my zombie?

2010-09-20T00:56:00.006+02:00

As we have seen, there are two entities within me that may determine my actions, my zombie and I. Then we can ask: Who is responsible for these actions? Am I, my brain interpreter, responsible for what I do, or is it my zombie, who steers my actions? Here I do not want to discuss the situation that we do things really unconsciously, for example when sleepwalking or in a black out, but I mean the cases that I am completely aware of what I am doing.
We have to consider several possibilities here. The first one is the case that my chauffeur example is a good analogy for: It is I – my brain interpreter – who determines the main lines of what I am doing and it is my zombie who executes them. This sounds quite Cartesian (like all the cases here), but I think that further insight will show that actually I and my zombie are deeply integrated. Anyhow, I think this case is a variant of the assumption that man has a free will and as such is responsible for what s/he is doing.
A second possibility seems more interesting: That it is not I – my brain interpreter – who determines the main lines of my actions, but that my zombie does. My I is really a brain interpreter and it is my zombie who takes the decisions, which are then explained by my brain interpreter, who puts them into words. But does this mean that I (now in the sense of me as a person) am not responsible for what I am doing? However, it can still be so that my actions and the decisions that ground them are my actions and decisions, albeit that my actions are based on my rational unconscious decisions. My brain interpreter is then like the government speaker who tells the press afterwards what the government has decided, informed about what has been decided by the prime minister, because the government speaker herself wasn’t present at the cabinet meeting. But then the cabinet decisions as such are still rational decisions, although the speaker learned about them only afterwards. So, it can be with my zombie, too: my zombie takes his decisions hidden for the brain interpreter but they are based on relevant facts, experiences, feelings and what more it needs for a rational weighing. Basically, this situation is not really different from the first situation described here: I am still a person with a free will.
But what if my zombie is merely a kind of automaton? A kind of machine or computer that processes input and output according to certain rules programmed by nature and past experiences, without any kind of deliberate rational weighing (whatever that might mean)? And that I, in the sense of my brain interpreter, do not more than giving a kind of description of the output? And that I as a person am not more than a sort of executer of these decisions when acting? Then I am really a zombie although a zombie with the appearance of a conscious being.
That I am in fact not more than a zombie in disguise is quite well possible, of course. But does this make any difference with the free will situation? Should we say then: well, because I am actually a zombie who behaves automatically, I cannot help what I do, and it is the same for my fellow men? We are all automatons and we do not know what we do? Should we have to conclude then that we have to skip the idea of responsibility for what we are doing from our vocabulary? Or are we still responsible in some sense? Maybe it is irrational, but I guess that nobody would accept our not being responsible in some sense.

Who steers the body?

2010-09-13T02:16:00.008+02:00

Last week I wondered whether the fact (if it is a fact) that the zombie within me takes his decisions while I am not conscious of them really implies that it is not actually I who steers my body but that it is the zombie who does. “Even when the decisions are taken unconsciously by my zombie … , it is quite well possible that they are ‘my’ rational decisions, albeit that they are my rational unconscious decisions”, so I wrote. I think that this remark needs some further explanation.
Let’s say a manager has a car with chauffeur and orders the chauffeur to drive to 3 Mind Square where he has a meeting. The chauffeur carries out the order and brings the manager to the right address. Who then causes the ride being made: The manager or the chauffeur? For isn’t it so that the chauffeur starts the engine, steers the car, chooses the route, etc.? But in the end it is the manager who decides and determines what is to be done: Going to 3 Mind Square. Isn’t it the same with the zombie within me and my brain interpreter (=I) ? My zombie does a lot which I have no knowledge of and takes many decisions for me and starts to execute them before I know them. Might it not be so that my “mindbrain” functions like a manager with a car with chauffeur? That I am the manager and that the zombie within me is my chauffeur (and that my body is the car)? Then we can explain, for instance, why most I do is not conscious for me (the chauffeur drives the car, while the manager is reading his papers and takes no notice of what the chauffeur does) and why I can explain only afterwards why certain decisions have been taken (why I went through the Brain Street and not though the Zombie Street: because the chauffeur preferred this route, although I did not know that beforehand ), albeit I (the manager) who determines the main lines and plans for the future (going to 3 Mind Square).

Me and my zombie

2010-09-06T16:10:00.001+02:00

The idea that there is both a zombie and an I in me, as I suggested in my last blog, sounds rather weird. However, this is a bit the picture one gets from the insights of neuroscience. On the one hand we have our brain, the “grey matter” in our head (actually it is not grey), which functions like a computer. It gathers and processes the information it receives from the world outside. And if necessary it takes the decisions. All this happens unconsciously. Let me call this part my zombie. On the other hand we have our conscious me, what is often called our brain interpreter. It is the “thing” in me that thinks that I am who I am and that consciously deliberates what I must do. At least, that’s what it seems to me that the brain interpreter does, for according to present insights the decisions are in fact taken by my zombie and not by my brain interpreter. The brain interpreter, so the idea is, comes into action only after a decision has been taken. It only words the decision and gives a motivation for it. However, because my zombie works unconsciously, we think that it is my brain interpreter, or “I”, who takes the decision and who gives the motivation for the decision, although actually it is my zombie who weighs the reasons for the decision and who decides, on the ground of past experiences, its education, its genetic constitution etc. We can see it a bit like this: Let’s say, every week a government has a closed meeting where it discusses the relevant issues and where it takes decisions. After the meeting, the government speaker tells the press what the ministers talked about, what they have decided and what the motivations for the decisions were. Then one can compare the cabinet in session with my zombie and the speaker with my brain interpreter. But it need not be so, of course, that the speaker tells the press what really took place in the meeting and what the real decisions and the real grounds for these decisions were. It is the same with my brain interpreter. I (my brain interpreter) can say that I want to do A for certain reasons, but when the moment is there my zombie makes that I do B (and then, afterwards, it is quite likely that my brain interpreter succeeds to put forward “good reasons” why I did B).
All this sounds quite Cartesian. It is as if I have a homunculus, a little man in my head, that accompanies my decisions and my actions. The difference is, of course, that the Cartesian homunculus is the one who takes the decisions and guides the zombie and then my body, while my brain interpreter follows the decisions taken by my zombie and what my body does because of these decisions. It is as if my consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon that plays no part in what I actually do.
I am not going to undermine this conception. I am not in the position to do that. Moreover, I think it is not unfounded. But in certain respects it is problematical. It looks, as said, as if our consciousness is a kind of epiphenomenon that has no real function in what we do, so why should we have it? Of course, it is possible that our consciousness has really no function, but it is quite exceptional in nature that organisms develop epiphenomenal entities. A second point is that when my zombie processes unconsciously the information it gets and when it decides unconsciously, this does not need to imply that it takes these decisions behind my back in some way as if another person has taken them; i.e. that these decisions are not mine. Even when the decisions are taken unconsciously by my zombie (and there are good reasons to think they are), it is quite well possible that they are “my” rational decisions, albeit that they are my rational unconscious decisions. They could be the same and be rational, just as when they wouldn’t be interpreted afterwards by my brain interpreter, but instead would be conscious at the moment of decision itself. Then my zombie is actually me minus consciousness.
This is just one possibility. And besides that, Victor Lamme, whose book inspired most of what I have written here (see my blog last week), doesn’t say in the end that we have a dualist structure. “Brain and mind are identical”, so Lamme (De vrije wil bestaat niet, 2010, p. 280). What all this shows is how difficult it is to solve Chalmers’s “hard problem”. For even if we know how the brain functions with all its psychological consequences (Chalmers’s “soft problem”), there is a good chance that we still do not know what consciousness and its relation with the brain are.

The zombie within me

2010-08-30T01:26:00.002+02:00

In my blog last week I attacked the argumentations by Nagel and Chalmers that there must be something subjective or conscious in us. I argued that we can at least know what it is like to be a zombie, since we often behave like a zombie and we know that we do. Of course, my reasoning was not serious. What is serious, however, is that we often do behave like a zombie. And this raises substantial questions about who and what we are and why we do what we do. Is it an exception that I sometimes behave like a zombie, for example when I am riding my bike? Maybe we think so, because we can come back to ourselves, by way of speaking, and become conscious of and reflect on that we were behaving like a zombie for a while. But this may be mere illusion.
On July 20, 2009, I published here a blog about free will and a cup of coffee. There I mentioned that Lawrence Williams and John A. Bargh had shown that holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. We think that the stranger is “really” sympathetic, while actually it is the temperature of our hands that makes us think so. Our consciousness of the fact (if it is a fact) that the stranger is sympathetic is apparently merely an epiphenomenon and has no influence on our feelings towards the stranger, at least not in this case. It is as if we first feel a person sympathetic because of an objective cause (the warm cup of coffee) and that only then we think that we feel that the person is sympathetic, namely because of this objectively caused feeling. It is as if our consciousness, our thinking, does not count.
This idea is supported by a case that I just read in a book about the free will by Victor Lamme. Here he describes the case of a woman who was blind because of a brain damage and who could grasp objects on a table just as a person with normal visibility does and not as someone does who is blind because of eye damages. When a person with normal visibility takes an object like a cup or an object with an irregular form like a piece of art, s/he grasps it immediately in the right way, unhesitatingly. A person with eye damage or a person with a blindfold must first feel what the shape of the object is before s/he can get a good grip on it. It was as if the woman concerned could see the object, although she was blind. This and other research brough Goodale to the conclusion that we have two systems in our brain that guide our actions. In addition to the system that makes us consciously do what we do there is one that determines our actions unconsciously. (cf Victor Lamme, De vrije wil bestaat niet, 2010, ch. 2). Or does the former system merely accompany our actions like an epiphenomenon? For what should the function of consciousness be for us if we can act also without being conscious of it? It looks as if there is something in us that is like a zombie. The question remains then, of course: who writes this blog? Do I write it or does my zombie write it?

What it is like to be a zombie

2010-08-23T01:46:00.003+02:00

Me philosophizing

(Background music: David Chalmers sings “The Zombie Blues”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyS4VFh3xOU )
In a famous article, “What is it like to be a bat?”, Thomas Nagel argues that it is impossible to “catch” the inner experiences of a bat, a human being, a Martian or whatever being with an inner subjective life in the objective description of an outsider. What it is like to be or to experience for a bat, for a human being, for a Martian or for any other being with inner experiences is inherently different from how an outsider, for instance an investigator, observes these same inner experiences. Inner experiences as they are for the holder and as they are for an outsider looking at them are fundamentally of a different type. Therefore we have to distinguish between the perspective of the first person and the perspective of the third person when describing them (see http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf ).
Some twenty years later, David Chalmers argued in a similar way that we must make a distinction between the mental and the physical and that a physical reduction of our inner experiences is not possible. In his reasoning he used the so-called Zombie argument. A philosophical zombie is not the terrifying figure we know from films and the like but, in the words of Chalmers, “someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether” (The conscious mind, 1996, 94). However, if we try to describe a zombie, we must conclude that “There is nothing it is like to be a zombie” (id., 95). Arguing from here, Chalmers concludes that consciousness does exist, which makes that reducing conscious inner experiences to physical experiences is not possible. I know that my summary is too oversimplified, and maybe Chalmers will protest, but what I want to discuss is: Is there really nothing it is like to be a zombie?
Once upon a day I made a bike tour on my race bike, as I do so often. I had a strong wind against me and my legs were wheeling round like mad to fight the natural counter forces. The evening sun was dazzling me and I couldn’t see anything. My head had become empty and I felt like in trance. Suddenly I came back to myself and at once I knew it: So it is to feel like a zombie. Zombies do exist! And there is something it is like to be a zombie, for I experienced being a zombie! And we can experience how it is like to be a different creature! How sad for Chalmers and Nagel that such a simple bike ride can topple their theories. The upshot is: Take a bike and philosophize!

The importance of Georg Henrik von Wright

2010-08-16T02:55:00.000+02:00

In my last blog I mentioned the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright. I think that most people who read my blogs do not know him. However, he has been one of the most important analytical philosophers of the second half of the last century. When I had finished my dissertation many years ago I had the intention to write an article about von Wright, but for one reason or another I didn’t. So maybe I can make up for the omission here a bit, although a little blog can never be compared with a long article. In fact I must limit myself here to a short indication of the importance of von Wright for philosophy.
As said, von Wright (1916-2003) was a philosopher in the tradition of the analytical philosophy and. He studied first in Helsinki under the guidance of Eino Kaila, which brought him into touch with logical positivism, which was then in its heyday. Next, von Wright studied at several other universities in Europe including in Cambridge. In 1939, he met there Wittgenstein, but the first contact was disappointing for von Wright, because Wittgenstein was quite annoyed that a young man unknown to him dared to join his lectures while they had already started. Soon they became good friends, though. Later, after the death of Wittgenstein, von Wright became his successor in Cambridge and he edited Wittgenstein’s later works for publication.
Another important contribution by von Wright to philosophy is his development of deontic logic, the logic of ought. Although deontic logic was already known to the Greek, in fact von Wright can be seen as the founder of this branch of logic, because he proposed the first plausible system of deontic logic.
His third main contribution concerns my own field of interest: action theory. In my blog last week I mentioned already von Wright’s book Understanding and Explanation. This book has been influential in the discussion whether the relation between the premises and the conclusion of a practical syllogism for the explanation of actions is logical or causal. There has been a long and heavy debate on this question, which did not lead to a real solution. In my view, the best analysis of the issue, if not the solution of the problem, has come from von Wright, who showed that it is impossible to establish independently of each other which intention an actor had and the action that the same actor did on account of this intention. And this makes that it is impossible to verify the premises and the conclusion of a practical syllogism independently. However, this does not imply that one cannot explain an action, when one is able to establish separately what the intention of an action is and what the actor allegedly did on account of this intention. For me, von Wright’s approach is still the fundamental solution of the explanation-understanding controversy.
Be that as it is, the discussion gradually faded away, but the importance of von Wright’s book may still be judged from the fact that it has been reprinted in 2004, 33 years after its first publication.
It is true, von Wright is not a very well-known philosopher outside academic circles (and outside Finland), but its influence has not been unimportant as I have tried to show.

The influence of books (2)

2010-08-09T01:33:00.001+02:00

I think that most people have read one or more books that have influenced them in a certain way. This influence may have been little, for example because it made one to read another book by the same author or to visit a museum or a town. Or the influence may have been much greater, sometimes even in that degree that it led to a turn in one’s life. I read many books through the years and so it is no wonder that they have influenced me in different ways. Most books I have read are interesting to my mind, but that’s it. It may have happened that I talked about them with someone else, but that did not happen often. Other books were related to one of my main interests and have broadened my knowledge in those fields, or maybe I used them when writing an article or a blog. However, a few books became very important to me in the sense that they had a substantial influence on my life. Maybe it was not a turning point but if I hadn’t read them my life would have been different. Actually there are two of such books and their influence is related. Once I was in a bookshop in Amsterdam and in the philosophy department my eye was caught by a new book by Karl-Otto Apel, one of my favourite authors: Die Erklären-Verstehen Kontroverse in transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht (The controversy between explanation and understanding from a transcendental-pragmatic perspective). Its subject was the methodical discussion about explaining or understanding in the humanities and social sciences. I found the book very interesting and what I found especially interesting was Apel’s discussion of a book by the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, a philosopher who was new to me at the time. I had the feeling that I had to read this book, Explanation and Understanding, anyhow. It took me much effort to buy it and in effect it was too expensive, but it came out that it was worth its money. Von Wright discussed here his solution of the explanation-understanding controversy and presented his methodological model for the social sciences. Basically I agreed with his methodology and the model, but in my view the model could be improved in several respects. Doing this became the leading theme of my PhD thesis and it made that I dedicated most of my time to philosophy for a long period. Actually, there is nothing to wonder at such an influence of books on your life, for isn’t it so that a book is nothing else than solidified human thoughts and relationships?

Man made future (2)

2010-08-02T18:50:00.000+02:00

My blog published two weeks ago says nothing else than what Wittgenstein knew already long ago: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, our problems of life have still not been touched at all.” (Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.52)

Man made future

2010-07-16T15:14:00.001+02:00

When people are thinking about how life will be in future, they are usually thinking of how our life will develop in a technical way. Shall we have houses completely guided by computers where, for instance, our meals are already prepared while we are yet on our way home? Will high speed trains connect the corners of the world? How will the newest telephone look like? Can solar energy solve our present energy problem? And so on. What these let’s call them “technical futurologists” always forget, however, is that our future is not determined by what we technically can and by our technical gadgets. If that were true, the Industrial Revolution would have begun already 2000 years ago. For wasn’t it Heron of Alexandria (10-70 A.D.) who invented the steam engine? No, what our future will be is not in our technical possibilities. Or rather, they are a limiting condition at most. What really makes the future is man him/herself. It is the way man deals with inventions and even more the way men deals with each other. In short: our future will be in our human relations and how we’ll socially manage the new technology. What will count in the first place is how we’ll go along with each other in daily life, whether we’ll continue to defend our personal interests at the expense of others, short-sighted politics, the presence or absence of racism, war and manmade poverty and the way we’ll use our inventions, etc. , so our social inventions. Not what is technically possible will make our future but what we’ll humanly make of it.

Personal identity (24)

2010-07-12T02:55:00.003+02:00

In The Blue and Brown Books Wittgenstein writes: “Now let us ask ourselves what sort of identity of personality it is we are referring to when we say ‘when anything is seen, it is always I who see’ ” (Blackwell, 1969, p. 63). Here I’ll not follow Wittgenstein’s argumentation but I’ll put the quotation within the frame of the current debate on personal identity.
I am walking with wife in a little town and she says: “Look, storks!” Then I ask her (inspired by Wittgenstein): “Do you see the storks or do your eyes see the storks?” Does it make any difference then whether she points to her eyes or to her chest? In case she points to her eyes does that mean that her eyes see the storks but that she does not see them? And in case she points to her chest, does it mean that my wife herself sees the storks but that her eyes don’t see them? And if we think that our personality is made up of our psychological characteristics like our memory and other mental characteristics, as the adherents of the psychological continuity of personal identity do, is it so then that my wife as a person can see the storks with her eyes closed, in case it is so that she as a person sees the storks? Or are our eyes like a pair of binocles that we need when the storks are so far away that we cannot observe them with the naked eye? How weird to suggest that I am not an integrated whole.

(By the way, why do we point to the chest, when asked who did see the storks, if one of us did? Why do we don’t point to our brain? For, if the adherents of the psychological continuity of personal identity are right, isn’t it so then that the person goes where the brain goes, as we swap our brain with another brain in another body, and wouldn’t it be then obvious to point to our brain?)

Old ideas just fade away

2010-07-05T02:33:00.000+02:00

When we think, talk, act we need a frame of reference that gives it a sense. This is one of the insights so clearly formulated by Wittgenstein’s idea of language games. However, these frames are not fixed and unchangeable and we must be glad that this is so. It is true, fixed frames give stability and they make it easier to see the consequences of what we say and do. But on the other hand, this can become problematic when we discover new facts, encounter new experiences or new circumstances. What to do with them, how to deal with them, when they do not fit our frame of interpretation? Then two things are open to us: either to reinterpret the facts etc. or to change the frame. Both choices seem weird, for aren’t facts facts, and aren’t frames actually also a kind of facts? Nevertheless either happens and can have sense. As for changing the facts, we can come to the conclusion that we were wrong and that from a different point of view, things look different: just as we can mistake a marsh tit for a willow tit, or even think, as was done till not so long ago that it is one species. This is the usual thing: Facts are reinterpreted within a frame, sometimes even so that they are forced to fit within that frame of interpretation. Then the facts are distorted. This happens more often than one might think, and often people do not realize it, when they do it.
However, we can change a frame as well. Then we fit it to the facts instead of the facts to the frame. Happily we do not have to do that often, for it can bring much uncertainty leading to much turmoil in our mind if not in society. It is a kind of revolution, a minor one or a big one, but a revolution it is. It was not without reason that Thomas Kuhn, who described the changes of frames in science, called his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
But is it really so that old frames are changed, if there is something basically wrong with them? If Kuhn is to be believed, often it does not happen that way, at least not in science. And I see no reason why what he describes is limited to science. According to Kuhn, it is not so that people change their own frames. New frames and new interpretations are developed, it is true, but they are developed by a new generation of thinkers. Only rarely they are proposed by those few “old thinkers” who have flexible, creative minds. New frames lead always to much opposition, in science as well in society, but gradually the opposition decreases. No, not because of what one might think: that the new ones are better and that those who opposed a new one first, are convinced of its value. That happens, too, but the most important reason that fundamentally new ideas become dominant is simply that the old ones die out, not only in science, as Kuhn pointed out, but in society in general. It is as with the old soldiers in the famous song: Old ideas never die, they just fade away.

Sentence and context

2010-06-28T02:33:00.001+02:00

Many sentences have several interpretations, and even more interpretations when they are divorced from the context. The latter need not be bad, as long as one realizes what one is doing. Interpreting sentences can be a creative act and make the mind open for new ideas. In my blog of April 30 last I explained that a sceptical interpretation of the first part of Wittgenstein’s second aphorism in his On certainty is not correct in view of the context. To remember, Wittgenstein said there: “From its seeming to me - or to everyone - to be so, it doesn't follow that it is so.” He argued that fundamentally we cannot be sceptical because in the end we need a frame of reference (a language game, as he called it) in order to make doubt possible. We need a frame of stable presuppositions, he says, and only within this frame we can doubt. However, as I showed, also such a frame of reference is not beyond doubt, for in the end it is a shared individual frame at most: frames of reference appear to be stable, because many people have them. Then we have dissolved scepticism in a practical way, so it seems.
Nevertheless, a fundamental sceptical interpretation of what we perceive may be useful. Actually it is that what scientists often do when they practise science. One of the problems in science is that a theory might seem to be a good one and still we do not know whether it is true. For how should we know that the theory is true? We only know that it works in the sense that when we apply it, it gives good results. Take a sunset, for instance. For thousands of years people thought that the sun really went down at the end of the day and they lived with it. The idea behind it was that the earth is the centre of the universe and everything in heaven moved around the earth. Okay, a few heavenly objects moved a bit strange and not in circles like the other ones, but who cared? Some people cared, like Galileo and Copernicus, and it was discovered that this problem could only be solved by changing the frame of reference, and putting the earth on a far less important place in universe. Everybody knows this story, but it still teaches us something important: our stable convictions and frames of reference are often not as stable as we might think. It shows also that false thoughts can be stimulating, for the original explanation of the sunset and the central place of the earth was false, but just the fact that it led to some strange phenomena (the apparently strange movements of the planets in the sky) stimulated the development of better ideas. Seen in this way, it need not be bad that sentences are divorced from the context, for Wittgenstein’s anti-sceptical interpretation of the quotation would stop us, where the context ends, but taken as it is its seemingly false sceptical interpretation can be a first step to topple what everybody “knows”. At least so it seems.

The turmoil in my mind

2010-06-21T00:20:00.002+02:00

Thoughts sprout from my mind

(Photo taken at the International Garden Festival, Château Chaumont, 2010)

A reader who commented on my blog “The fluency of reality” (April 26, 2010) reproached me of having “too much turmoil in my mind”. I do not know whether he referred only to what I wrote there or that he thinks that it is generally so, but I suppose that he is right and I am proud of it. Even more, probably I couldn’t have written my blogs and what else that I have written during the years without the turmoil in my mind, sometimes less, sometimes more, sometimes maybe even in that degree that I did not know where to start writing. For I think that some disorder in your mind is necessary for being creative and developing new ideas.
Most creativity does not start from nothing, with a flash and there it is. No, creativity is hard working. You cannot be creative without knowing what you are talking about, so you need thorough background knowledge. Therefore, I spend much time on reading on themes that I find interesting and that are important for what I want to write about. Themes that broaden my mind. From this background I choose my subjects for a blog or for an article or maybe even for a book. But then, I am not yet ready: I need a plan of work. I do not want to say that I have always a well developed plan when I am writing. Far from that. A vague plan is often enough for me to make a start and to come to a good end. Once I have begun writing, my mind produces lots of associations and when I pick them up, it leads me gradually to the development of what I have in my mind and want to express.
Writing in this way is not enough for creative writing, though. For until now it is simply a matter of practice and it does not bring something new. I do not want to say that the result will be unimportant. What is routine knowledge for me may be new for other people and help them a lot. But if I want to bring something really new and want to be really creative, I need something more: everything that I have gathered in my mind for my blog, article, book has to be mixed. That is where the turmoil starts. Unexpected and unlikely associations must be made, associations with themes, events and facts that do not belong to my main theme must be brought in. Thoughts that look foolish at first sight must be considered and developed in their consequences, old thoughts must be reconsidered, and so on, and so on. It is impossible to describe what happens, for much of it is an unconscious process. But one thing is clear: it is turmoil in my mind. And then it suddenly happens. It can be a matter of minutes, a matter of days, or sometimes a matter of years, but then, if everything goes well, all at once new creative thoughts sprout from my mind. It makes me happy and elated: something really new has been born. I am the first to admit that the result may also turn out to be false, and may have to be thrown away later. It may be an idea about which another person would say: “it involves too much turmoil in your … mind”. But is that bad? I don’t think so. For every thought can be the starting point for a new thought. Even a wrong thought, a false thought often is. It is the way creativity works and brings something positive. And in the end that couldn’t have happened without much turmoil in my mind and in the minds of other persons.

Producing and practising

2010-06-14T01:25:00.001+02:00

I shall not give an answer to the question of my blog last week. I simply haven’t one. At least not now; maybe later. However, when I had finished the blog, I had to think of a distinction by Aristotle that may be relevant for the answer on the question whether we die a bit when my action has finished and the result of it no longer exists.
In the blog I mentioned several examples of actions: writing a book, making a garden, shopping, making a bike ride, chasing away a burglar, visiting a friend. Let us look at two of them: writing a book and making a bike ride. Writing a book is a long and complicated action. It can last many years, but in the end there is a result: a book, which you can buy in a shop, for instance. If you find writing a book a too complex example of an action, let’s say that I write a letter to a friend. It takes me half an hour to write it and then it is ready for posting. An action like making a bike ride does not have such a material result. I love cycling and several times a week I make a ride just for pleasure. However, when I am home again, I cannot say: Look, here is my bike ride. I have just finished it. Do you want to have it? Nobody would understand it, for making a bike ride does not lead to a result that you have at the end of it as a ready-made product independent of the action itself. No, the aim of making a bike ride is just the doing itself. Such an action was called “praxis” by Aristotle (from prattein, to act, to practise) and he distinguished it from actions like writing a book or a letter, which he called “poiesis” (from poiein, to make).
In view of the distinction between praxis and poiesis, maybe it is possible to say that one dies a bit when the result of a case of poiesis is destroyed, while praxis is an instance of living. Although this may be a starting point for answering my question, I think that it is not as simple as that. In the first place, we produce many things during the years. Letters, memorandums as an office worker, objects as a production worker or in spare time, meals in the kitchen, and so on. Can we say that I die a bit each time such a result of our productive actions is destroyed? I think that not everything we produce is so important that we can go that far. But secondly, not all actions can be clearly classified as a case of poiesis or praxis. Take making a garden. I have changed the wilderness behind my house into a garden. Must I say now that I have produced a garden? But at which moment was my garden finished? When I have put the last plant in it? And how about garden maintenance? A garden is not something stable but must be kept. Moreover, making a garden as such, the action of gardening, is for many people also a case of praxis. These are only a few of the points that need to be cleared, when one wants to distinguish poiesis and praxis. Nevertheless, I think that the distinction is useful and that it may help a bit to understand better what fundamentally belongs to us.

The destruction of actions

2010-06-07T00:39:00.008+02:00

Let us suppose that I like gardening. I have a large piece of land behind my house and when I bought the house and moved there this piece of land was a wilderness. It was full of weeds. Birds and insects loved to live there and rabbits loved it, too. In short, it was a beautiful piece of nature. However, since I like gardening, I was not satisfied with it. I wanted to cultivate and to civilize it. And so I did. I invested time and money in it, made a garden plan, bought plants, bought seeds, grew plants, planted them out. I did everything a gardener does with such piece of land and after many years I had a beautiful garden. I opened it on Open Garden Days for everybody and my garden attracted always many people. It became famous and it was considered a piece of art. Then, after again many years, I moved. Nobody in the family that bought the house liked gardening, the garden went in decay and in the end it was again a beautiful piece of nature and the birds, the insects and rabbits loved it again and so did the frogs that lived in what remained of the pond. And after some time everybody had forgotten that once there had been a beautiful garden there.

-.-

Let us suppose that I like writing. I always wrote little stories for myself, wrote articles for the school paper. When I went to the university and studied philosophy, I loved writing term papers and then my dissertation. However, as a philosopher it is difficult to get a job and I did something else but in my spare time I managed to write a couple of philosophical books that became rather popular, although it was not enough to live on it. Actually they gave me not more than a bit of pocket money. But I loved it and I had put my heart and soul in these few books, which were actually an extension of my mind. But fashions change. My books were less and less bought and in the end nobody wanted to buy or read them any longer. They were considered boring and outdated, secondhand bookshops did not want to sell them anymore and what remained was snipped. Maybe you still find here and there a copy in an odd corner, and of course, in my bookcase, but I will be sure that after 100 years no copy will be left any longer.

-.-

I ended my last blog with: “When we destroy a book, we destroy not only a bunch of paper, but we destroy a part of a human mind, a part of what we as humans are.” Burning books like the Nazis did is considered uncivilized and a criminal act. It destroys our culture. It destroys what we are. If we see books as an extension, if not a part, of the mind, we can say that I die a bit when my books are destroyed. Many people agree with this idea. Books are holy in a certain sense. But what about when my garden is destroyed? Didn’t I have put my mind in it? Okay, gardens are considered to be a piece of culture by many people. But what about my other actions? I do a lot in my life. Some actions have a material expression, like my books. Other actions do not have such an expression. They fade away at the moment that I have done them and that is it. My shopping, my making a bike ride, my chasing away a burglar in my house, my visiting a friend: What is the difference between all such actions, including writing a book and gardening, and is there a difference? Do I die a bit when my bike ride has ended or when I leave the shop?

Tagging my mind

2010-05-31T01:51:00.007+02:00

Several times I wrote here about or I suggested that our mind is not only in our head. This may sound stupid for isn’t it so that our all our thinking takes place within our brain and that our brain is situated in our head? How can it be then that at least a part of our mind is not in our head but somewhere in the world around us?
A few days ago I met a simple example that clearly illustrates what I mean, which I’ll quote extensively:

Consider the following scenario: You have to remember to buy a case of beer for a party. To jog your memory, you place an empty beer can on your front doormat. When next you leave the house, you trip over the can and recall your mission. You have thus used … a … trick … exploiting some aspect of the real world as a particular substitute for on-board memory. (Andy Clark, Being there, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. etc, 1997; p. 75)

This beer can example is a simple version of something that everybody does: making a note on a piece of paper in order not to forget something we have to do: A shopping list, a note in a diary for an appointment, a list of tasks we have to do. In its simplicity the beer can example shows the essence of what it means that a part of our mind is outside our head. If our mind would be only inside our head, we should have to mark somewhere in our memory that we have to buy beer. But then we have the risk to forget it. Therefore we need something that triggers this marking. If we would make a marking-2 in our memory, again we should have the risk that we forget it. Therefore, we do something else: we make marking-2 outside our head and we make a tag within our head that gets activated as soon as it meets the marking outside our head that belongs to it: the beer can on the mat in our case. We move marking-2 to the outside world, put it on a striking place and replace it in our head by a tag. And so a part of our mind has found its place in the world around us now.
However, this tagging and marking-2 has a significance that is wider than simply being a memory aid. Once we understand it, it makes clear, for instance, why books are such valuable objects: When we destroy a book, we destroy not only a bunch of paper, but we destroy a part of a human mind, a part of what we as humans are.

The smile on my face

2010-05-24T02:22:00.001+02:00

One of the current themes in the analytical philosophy is the relation between body and emotions. On the one hand we have the view, like Antonio Damasio’s, that says that emotions are a kind of knowledge and that they are very important in the process of taking decisions. On the other hand we have the view that emotions are thoughtless bodily reflexes that have no relation to our higher cognitive processes (for example Joseph LeDoux; see the recent article by Rick Anthony Furtak, “Emotion, the Bodily, and the Cognitive” in Philosophical Explorations, 2010/1: 51-64). I tend to support the first view, although Furtak shows in his article that the differences between both views are smaller than one might think.
However this may be, that emotions have a somatic feedback is clear in many ways. Emotions can make us drop tears, can make us laugh, both by changing the expression of our face and by making certain sounds, we can turn pale with fear, or we can blush with shame. But does it work also the other way around? Can we cause emotions within us by moving our muscles in the right way? Experiments have shown that we certainly can. When we make a smile on our face we tend to feel as if we are smiling and it is more likely that we feel amused by a joke or a cartoon. When we make a sad facial expression we tend to feel sad. When we straighten our back we tend to feel pride and when we look to the ground we tend to feel humble. And so on. How this mechanism works is not yet clear. It might be so that a physical expression really causes an emotional expression in a direct way. It is also possible, however, that the physical expression is associated with the emotional expression: We tend to feel cheerful when we make a smile on our face, because we often make a smile on our face when we feel cheerful. Just like that a piece of music may make us think of the first time that we heard it.
Trainers in interpersonal communication and other trainers make use of this relation. They advice to adapt your bodily expression to the right situation. Then you do not only make a better impression on the other people present, you feel yourself also better adapted to the situation and you feel like you are supposed to behave. One can call this manipulation but since I discovered this relation I make use of it to manipulate myself, too, so not in the relation to other people but really towards myself. I simply try to deceive myself by way of speaking. So when I am at the end of a long bike ride with still too many kilometres to go because I feel tired, I simply straighten my back, lift my head, look around and make a smile. It gives me again the right attitude and feeling to go on with a decent speed. I do not want to say that I am less tired then, but at least it feels so.

Body and soul in the garden

2010-05-17T01:25:00.001+02:00

Philosophizing is like travelling in your mind. It is often full of unexpected experiences and often you do not know where it will bring you. And travelling can be a bit like philosophizing and bring you new experiences that make you think. Anyway, so it was for me last week. When my wife and I left for the Pyrenees, we did not expect that our actual roundtrip would end near the border with Belgium in the little town of Béthune near Lille. But so it happened. We had just arrived in the mountains in Southern France or the weather became so bad that we decided to turn back and to go where it was better and at least where it was dry. Thus we arrived in Central France, in the Loire region with its famous castles. After having visited Blois we went to the nearby Château de Chaumont. We had been there already a few years ago, but every year it organizes a garden festival with a new theme on its domain. This year’s theme was quite philosophical, body and soul, and I was curious how garden designers would interpret it. It is true, the distinction body-soul is not exactly the same as the distinction body-mind, one of my favourite fields of interest, but isn’t it so that already in the old days of Plato and Aristotle these concepts were seen as more or less the same?
The gardens were beautiful and interesting and what was striking for me was that the interpretation of the theme was very different from how a philosopher with an interest in analytical philosophy like me would have done it. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they were unphilosophical or nonphilosophical. They simply gave a different view. So no Cartesian gardens that tried to stress that body and soul are separate entities, or, criticizing Descartes, that they are just one, however such ideas might be expressed in a garden. What I saw were mainly gardens that stressed how gardens make you relax, how they influence your feelings and so your body. What was also striking was that most designers interpreted the body-soul relation this way, while there are lots of other ways for seeing the theme, of course, without thinking of a Cartesian or anti-Cartesian interpretation: a theological one, for example, where the soul is a divine essence seated in an earthly frame. To difficult to express in a garden design? Would I be able to that? And so I had a lot to think on my way to Chartres and then to Béthune, my last stop before going home.

The anti-scepticism of Wittgenstein

2010-04-30T02:37:00.001+02:00

Sentences like the one I commented in my last blog might give the impression that Wittgenstein is a sceptic. The quotation from On Certainty there seems to imply that we can doubt everything: each statement that might be true still has some aspects that might make it possible to doubt it. One might think that this is supported by one of the first aphorisms in this book, which I quote now from an edition that I have found on line: “From its seeming to me - or to everyone - to be so, it doesn't follow that it is so.” (aphorism 2; see http://budni.by.ru/oncertainty.html, also for the next quotations) It implies the idea that everything that we might hold true might be different, not only in the sense that it has implications that may make it false (for instance that our statement about an object is only true as long as we look at it; see my last blog). It may also be possible that our statement is false if we look at it from another viewpoint, for instance from the viewpoint of another person. Everything might be different, so it seems, and this is basically the position of a sceptic.
This is not the position of Wittgenstein. It is true, much can be doubted, but already in the second sentence of aphorism 2, right after the quotation just given, Wittgenstein gives a hint that he doubts this endless doubt: “What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it”. As Wittgenstein shows later in his On Certainty, in order to doubt we always need a frame of reference from which it is possible to doubt: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” (115). And here we get to Wittgenstein’s famous language games in the sense of regions of our language with their own rules and grammar, which make talking and discussion possible, anyhow. Even then one can ask: What justifies these languages games? However, there is no endless regress and in the end we simply have to act in order to survive (see my blog of March 3, 2008). And so Wittgenstein’s develops his anti-scepticism.
Basically, I agree with Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, if we look at the present research by Metzinger and Murphy and Brown, a certain degree of scepticism cannot be avoided. For is it not so that they have shown that the truths we hold are actually only representations in our head, which makes them individual truths in the end? The only way to try to avoid such a relativism with sceptical consequences is, I think, to look for as much agreement between as many people as possible about the truth of these individual truths, by a free, unlimited and unrestricted discussion as proposed by Habermas. What we arrive at then is not TRUTH but at least a maximum possible intersubjective consensus.
But however this may be, one thing is without doubt: My next blog will be published a bit later than usual.

The fluency of reality

2010-04-26T01:24:00.005+02:00

Wittgenstein’s books consist of long series of aphorisms and when I took his Über Gewißheit (On Certainty) from my bookcase last Monday, my eye fell immediately on aphorism 215, which I had underlined: “Here we see that the idea of ‘correspondence to reality’ has no clear application” (my translation). It followed an aphorism in which Wittgenstein had said: “What will prevent me to suppose that this table, when nobody looks at it, either disappears or changes its colour or shape and that it turns back to its old state, now when somebody watches it again? …” (214; my translation)
For many readers of this blog these sentences may be obscure. For me they aren’t. Immediately they made me think of a reaction to my blog “The bucket of our mind” (April 5, 2010) and of the so-called correspondence theory of truth. There are several theories in philosophy that formulate what “truth” is and this theory is the one accepted by most philosophers. However, I do not.
This theory looks so simple. On a winter day I sit in my study and I am thinking about snow. “Snow is white”, I think. I look out of my window into the garden and see that the snow there is white, indeed. So, it seems that my little theory about the colour of snow has been confirmed, for there is a correspondence between what I thought and what I see in the garden: That snow is white. However, already as a student I wasn’t convinced, and from my blogs it must be clear that I am still not convinced. I explained here, for instance, that you can compare my eyes and brain with a photo camera and that it depends on the properties of the camera and everything that belongs to it what we see: the lens, the film, the way the film is developed, or today the software in your camera, and so on. In other words: what we see is not a reality as such but an interpretation of reality by the properties of the camera in our head. There is no one-to-one relation between what we think to see in our brain and what there is over there in the world around us. For the colour of snow in our garden this may be difficult to grasp, but when we try to classify a bird in our garden it can be quite difficult to know what we see: is it a marsh tit or a willow tit? Until not so long ago even ornithologists thought that it was one species. If we talk about things still to be discovered as in science, there simply can be no correspondence between what we think to see and what there is in the world: what we see in the world is partially dependent on how we have classified it or how we will classify it with our scientific theory that is still in development (compare the discussion whether Pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet). In short: there are no facts, there are only interpretations. For me, what exists is only the way I “see” it in my head.

And now, when I read these sentences by Wittgenstein, even this may not be true. For what Wittgenstein says is simply this: What guarantees me that what I “see” in my head still exists the way I thought to see it at the moment that I do not look at it? Everything might be fluent and even that might not be so.

P.S. The pictures show a marsh tit (to the left) and a willow tit. Note that the difference in colour between the birds right and left are an artefact of the light circumstances and what the cameras made of it, which just substantiates my thesis. In my garden, I cannot see a difference. (Photos from Wikipedia)

Grasping concepts

2010-04-19T01:33:00.002+02:00

Once some scientists thought that the language we speak determines in a certain degree the way we think and see the world around us. However, this view could not be substantiated by research. Nevertheless I think that our language has some influence on the way we think and observe: Our language is a guide for us, for the way we look at the world and make classifications. It gives us the first categories of what we perceive. But as it is with any guide: we can improve it or we can take a better one. We can use another language with other categories and we can invent new categories. In that sense anything goes.
In science and philosophy we need a language, anyhow, for expressing our thoughts and the results of our investigations. I don’t use the word “express” by chance, for language can be very expressive in its metaphorical way of describing what we think or see and catching the right meaning in a concept. Just the word “concept” is such a beautiful expression that exactly says what it is. “Concept” comes from the past participle of the Latin concipere, which means grasp (capere) together (con-). And if we have brough the parts of our object of thought or research together and caught them in a concept, we have a grip on it and we understand or grasp it. We find this idea of a metaphorical relation between mentally grasping and physically grasping of what we understand also in other languages like German (begreifen=understand; lit. more or less “grasp”), Dutch (begrijpen, as in German) or French (comprendre, which is a literal translation of concipere). It is as if we hold what we understand in a mental embrace or we keep it maybe like something that we carefully enclose in our hand so that it cannot escape. But after some time we usually forget the literal meaning of words. How plastic language can be and how pity it is that it happens so often that the expressive meaning of a word fades into the background and that we do not realize it any longer. And then a concept is no longer something we have grasped but it has become an abstract word drawn away (Latin: abs=away; trahere=draw) from its original meaning.

Hallucinating reality

2010-04-12T01:07:00.001+02:00

As we have seen in my last two blogs, in our brain we have no direct picture of the world around us. Our image of the world is no copy of the world but it is a constructed image that represents mainly what is relevant for us. Rays of light touch our eye. Already in the eye certain types of light are selected. We see no infrared or ultraviolet, while bees do, for example. Then the light impressions are transported to our brain, not as rays but as chemical and electrical signals. There the final image is constructed by a complex mechanism in our head. Information can be lost in this way but can be added, too. I think that many people know the idea of Gestalt. Three separate points arranged in the shape of a triangle are seen as a triangle, although there may be no objective reason for it. We just think that the three points form a triangle. Therefore, we can also say that we simulate a triangle. In this way, what we see is actually a simulation in our head. This simulation needs not to be a real image of the world, but it is one we think that it might be so: It represents a possible world.
The simulations of the world around us, of the “real world”, are not the only possible worlds we have in our heads. We have dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, inner monologues, plans for the future, images of ideal worlds, and so on. All these simulations represent a world as it might be, a possible world constructed by the brain on the basis of information stored there but maybe also based on (or partially based on) false information, or even caused by disturbances of the brain. The only difference between a simulation of the real world and the other simulations is, as Thomas Metzinger says it, that the first one “simulates … a ‘Now’ ” (Metzinger, Being no one, p. 50).
Metzinger points to the fact that idealistic philosophers have seen this clearly. And if representations of the real world are not fundamentally different from the other kinds of simulations and if all simulations are produced by the brain, it is only one step further to see all simulations, including the simulations of the real world, as kinds of hallucinations. However, there is an important difference between the other hallucinations and the hallucination of the world around us: A simulation of the real world is continuously checked and updated with new information, while the other hallucinations are not or only now and then. As Metzinger formulates it (p. 51), our images of the world around us are online hallucinations, while the other kinds of simulations are hallucinations offline.

The bucket of our mind

2010-04-05T01:55:00.001+02:00

Some time ago I met a girl on the Internet who wanted to learn 60 languages. I told her that I wondered whether that is possible, for there are only a few geniuses in this world who are talented enough to learn 20 languages and who do not need much time to keep them up without much practice. Not to speak of learning even 60 languages. She wasn’t convinced.
Then she asked me for advice how “to gather as much knowledge of the world as possible”. Again, I was perplexed by her naivety. It looked as if she thought that there is a fixed quantity of knowledge and that the main barrier to know all there is are the limitations of our brain. It made me think of what Karl R. Popper calls in his Objective Knowledge the “commonsense theory of knowledge” or with a beautiful expression “the bucket theory of mind”. It is true, Popper’s theory is about how to get new knowledge of the world, things that we do not know yet, while the girl thought of things already known, but here the difference is not important.
The bucket theory of mind, as naively believed by many people, supposes, according to Popper, that “our mind is a bucket which is originally empty, or more or less so, and into this bucket material enters through our senses … and accumulates and becomes digested” (p. 61). And a few lines later Popper continues: “The important thesis of the bucket theory is that we learn most, if not all, of what we do learn through the entry of experience into our sense openings; so that all knowledge consists of information received through our senses; that is, by experience (ibid.; italics Popper).
There are many reasons why this theory is not correct, but what is important here is that it supposes that “knowledge is conceived as consisting of things, or thing-like entities in our bucket” (p. 62), and in the case of the girl in the buckets of other people. Knowledge is something that there is in this view. If we want to know, we simply have to collect what there is. However, using the photographic analogy again, light that passes the lens of a camera and touches the film or sensor, does not simply makes an image of the world as it is. How the picture looks like depends on the type of lens, the quality of the lens, the type of film or sensor, whether there is a filter on the lens, how the film is processed or how the settings of our photo program are, and so on. So it is also with our senses and brain. What we see does not only depend on the information that reaches our senses but also on what we want to see, hear or feel and on our selection mechanisms. We often do not hear background noise, for instance, or, when we are concentrating on a point in our field of vision, we do not see a lot of other things there. Moreover, we often interpret what we think to see in the wrong way, we ignore things because they are not relevant for us, we fit new knowledge in what we already know, and when it does not fit, we often change the new knowledge or the old one. In short, knowledge is not something that exists as such but something that is made with the help of the information that reaches our senses and brain. We can even guide this process by asking questions and by systematically looking for answers in the world around us. That’s what a researcher does, for instance. Knowledge is not something that simply fills the bucket of our mind. It is quite the reverse: knowledge does not exist as such, once discovered, but it is constructed and continuously adapted and reconstructed by the processes in our senses and brains.

“Only those who can see can also dream”

2010-03-29T15:45:00.001+02:00

Many people think that dreaming has not much to do with reality. Sometimes people are classified as dreamers or as realists, implying that the former do not have an eye for reality, while the later have their feet firmly on the ground. Maybe there is some truth in it and I do not want to say that all dreamers are actually realists in disguise, but when I think of Martin Luther King Jr. (“I have a dream”) or Bertha von Suttner, the peace activist who dreamt of an International Court of Justice, I guess that dreamers are often as realistic as so-called realists are. For isn’t Barrack Obama in a certain sense the fulfillment of King’s dream and don’t we have several international courts of justice today? Sometimes I think that dreamers have a better eye for reality than realists have.
This idea was sustained when I started to read Thomas Metzinger’s Being no one. The self-model theory of subjectivity. It is a thick work about self and the first person view, about personal experience and consciousness. I still have a long way to go in it, but somewhere in the beginning Metzinger describes how we see the world, namely how we make a representation of what is around us. I know that the analogy is not completely correct, but let me explain it in my own words in photographic terms. If we want to make a photo, we can choose a black-and-white film or a colour film, for instance. We can also use filters on our lens in order to accentuate certain aspects in our picture or to bring about a certain effect and make the picture more dramatic, or softer, or just what we like. Usually we call only the plain colour picture real. This does not mean that we can call the colour picture “better”. For instance, a photo in black-and-white can show drama that a photo in colour cannot do and in this way it can impress us more than the same picture in colour. But we can value the worth of the black-and-white photos or the effect of a filter only if we know how the representation “really” is and then we take the colour picture as a measurement.
Continuing my photographic analogy of Metzinger, so it is also with our dreams and our view of reality. Our camera makes a picture of the world. The standard picture of this is the one in colour. Its function for us “consists in depicting the state of affairs in the real world with a sufficient degree of … precision” (p. 53; italics Metzinger). Only if we have such a basic idea of how the world looks like in our mind (the colour picture), we can accentuate its dramatic aspects (making the colour photo black-and-white), making it romantic (using a soft focus filter) or even change the photo with Photoshop in order to show how to situation on the photo actually should be (replacing houses by trees in a landscape, for instance, when we want to have more nature there). That is, we can express our dreams by changing the plain picture in one how we would like to have it. However, we can do that only if we do have a plain picture, namely the idea of how reality is like. Or, in Metzinger's wording, “Only those who can see can also dream” (p. 54). If we take it this way, I wonder whether dreamers do not have a better view on reality than so-called realists. For while realists take the reality as it is and simply try to live with it, those who have dreams do not only know reality is but they know also some of its weak points. And just that’s what they want to have changed in their dreams.

Running as an art and as a way of life

2010-03-22T01:37:00.001+01:00

In the waiting room of my dentist last Monday, I didn’t read one of the usual magazines on the reading table. I had taken my own book with me, Why we run by Bernd Heinrich. I opened it where I had stopped reading the day before and my eye was caught by a statement of Steve Prefontaine, the late middle and long-distance runner and one of the persons who has made running popular: “A race is like a work of art that people can look at and be affected by in as many ways as they’re capable of understanding”. Being a runner myself, I thought this statement is as true as a statement can be. At least when one interprets it as a sentence about running, although, I suppose, every sport is an art in its own way. I had to think of the joy of seeing a race on a track, in the field or on the road. I had to think of all those graceful African long distance runners. Just seeing them running makes it already worth watching, independently of how the race develops. And I had to think of the wonderful John Ngugi in the first place, who won so many races and who was the best cross country runner in the world for many years.
However, at second glance, I think that this quotation describes only one side of the expressive side of running. Although I do not deny that a runner (and, generally, a sportsman) is an artist, what this statement does is showing how the sport is from the outside, from the third person perspective in philosophical terms. It shows how we see the sport, how we as spectators experience the performance of what is for us, the spectators, actually a kind of show that can move us in many ways, like a piece of art.
From the perspective of the runner, the first person perspective, it is different, I think. Unlike an artist, a runner – or another a sportsman – does not try to make something beautiful, a work of art. If that is what s/he does, it is only a side effect. A runner wants to perform as well as s/he can. S/he wants to win. Or running is done for pleasure, for the joy of doing it, for losing weight, for feeling well, or for another reason. However, one cannot do that only by simply doing it in some way. One has to live for it. Of course, one can go and run just as one goes shopping, takes the train or reads a newspaper. But for many people it is more. It is a part of what they are, maybe a little part, maybe a big part, but it is not something that is done casually. It has become a part of their personality, their personal identity. Without it they would be different persons in a certain sense. Then, from the first person perspective running or sport has become a part of the way of living if not, for some, the way of living itself.