Intuitions as prejudices

Philosophical insights and conclusions are often founded on intuitions, at least partially; even in that degree that some – or maybe many – philosophers think that intuition is one of the main instruments of philosophy, next to conceptual analysis and argumentation. However, as we have seen in my blog dated June 22, 2009, Weinberg, Nichols & Stich have shown in an experiment that epistemic intuitions are not as objective as they were supposed to be, since they differ according to culture and within a culture according to social group (see also my blog last week). Must we not conclude then that at least epistemic intuitions are nothing but a special kind of prejudices? And isn’t it likely then that the same is true for other intuitions? By stating this (for I do state this, because I think that these questions have to be answered affirmatively), I do not want to say that intuitions have to be rejected and that they are of no use in philosophy. I do not say that. It is a prejudice that prejudices are fundamentally false. Prejudices are sometimes false but often they are true. Even more, prejudices can be and often are important and useful guides that lead our actions. Without them we wouldn’t survive, for investigating every new situation we encounter in order to have a founded opinion how to act is simply impossible. And then I ignore that often we just do not have the time to do that, since we have to act now in many cases. Then our prejudices are our action guides and usually they are reliable guides. It is the same for our intuitions. As prejudices they are important and useful in leading our reasoning and often they bring us to the right conclusions. However, this does not need to be so: intuitions are as prejudicial as prejudices are. And if all intuitions were right, how could we explain that they can differ according to social background?

Philosophical and experimental investigation

The way I developed the idea of intention in my last blog is typically philosophical. I formed an intuitive idea of intention in my head and tried to apply it to a certain case: the case of a runner (me) trying to break a world record. Then I applied the idea of intention to another case: me trying to hit the bull’s-eye. Next I concluded that my original conception of intention couldn’t be right. Intention had a wider meaning on a sliding scale. The whole argumentation took place in my head. This is the way many people, including philosophers, think what philosophizing is: a kind of argumentation that is founded exclusively on intuition and conceptual reasoning. But is that true? Is that all that philosophy is? Is there no place for empirical investigation in philosophy?

In fact, my last blog undermines already the view that philosophy is merely conceptual analysis and intuition: There I referred to an article by Sousa and Holbrook, whose conclusion that intention is a multiple concept was founded on empirical investigation. Moreover, what do we mean when we say that we have the intuition that something is true? Does something like intuition exist? As I have once discussed in a blog (dated June 22, 2009) intuitions are not as universal as they are supposed to be. In an experiment Weinberg, Nichols & Stich have shown that epistemic intuitions are not as objective as they were thought to be; they differ according to culture and within a culture according to social group. Philosophical conclusions may be different when drawn by people with different backgrounds. Generally, the so-called “experimental philosophy” has shown that experimental investigations can give interesting and important philosophical insights (see for instance my blog dated Feb. 23, 2009). As a third example I want to mention the present debate on the free will, one of the leading topics in philosophy today. It is just the experimental research by Libet and others that have led to new insights and questions in philosophy about what we mean and what it is about when we talk about free will.

These are only a few cases that show how experimental investigation can be relevant for philosophy. It can be useful in conceptual analysis (the case of intention); it can present valuable insights to be interpreted philosophically (for example that people are blamed for the negative side effects of what they do but not praised for the positive side effects, discussed in my blogs dated Feb. 23, 2009 and later); it can undermine philosophical views (the Cartesian dualism of brain and mind); and so on. The particular field of investigation for philosophy is non-experimental and especially conceptual-analytical. Intuitive insights can also be helpful, indeed. However, this does not imply that there is no role here for experimentation.

Can I intend to break a world record if I cannot break it?

Suppose that I love running. Initially, I ran twice a week. But after some time I did it effortlessly and I started to do it three times a week, then four times a week, and in the end I did it almost every day. I joined an athletics club, I trained a lot and I participated in races and I ran faster and fast. My personal bests became much better through the years and after four years of training I had a personal best of 14'37.8" on the 5,000 m. Not bad but on the other hand only of regional importance and just good enough for participating in the national championships, although I had absolutely no chance to win. Nevertheless I begun to dream: How would it feel to break a world record? I knew, of course, that the present 5,000 m record was about two minutes under my personal best. No chance to beat that time. Yet I continued dreaming and then I decided to start my next 5,000 m in a world record tempo and try to keep this pace up as long as possible and see where I would end. My chances were not bad, I thought: I was in top form and the other runners on the starting list could give me good competition. Can we say now that I had the intention to break the 5,000 m world record?

Once I reasoned that the answer was “no”. The argument was that it was simply impossible for me to break the record, because I should have to break my personal best with more than two minutes. Since I had already a rather long running history, such a thing would be impossible. But why cannot I have the intention to do it despite that?

I became aware of the problem again, when I read Sousa and Holbrook’s article “Folk Concepts of Intentional Action in the Contexts of Amoral and Immoral Luck” (Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2010) 1:351–370). I cannot summarize the article here, but the essence is that they argue that “intention” is a multiple concept that has more than one meaning. A current view says that intention implies the ability to do what one intends; it involves skill. Without having the skill to perform a certain action, one cannot seriously maintain that one has the intention to do it. If one succeeds nevertheless when trying to do the action, it’s by a fluke. For instance, if I take a gun for the first time in my life, point to the bull’s-eye and shoot, it should be mere luck if it is a hit, not because of my intention. Just this example raises doubt to the idea that one cannot say that I had the intention to hit the bull’s-eye, I think. Even if I had never had a gun in my hands before, this does not exclude that I can try to hit the bull’s-eye, and it seems not unreasonably to say then that I had the intention to do that, even though I did not have the skill. The question is solved if one realizes that “intention” may mean here not the same as the skill involving concept.

Now I go back to the case that I tried to break the 5,000 m world record. Cannot I say then that I had the intention to break the world record? It may be weird for me, but how about a person whose personal best is only one second above the world record? Or two seconds? Or 15 seconds? Or half a minute....? Where is the limit? And how about a young gifted runner who just took up running and who may have a good chance of bridging the two minutes gap within a few years? Once I met a runner who seriously though that he could bridge such gaps in a race. Must we say that he did not have the intention to do that, since we cannot imagine having such an intention in his case, because such an intention is unrealistic?

In view of this one can say that “intention” is a multiple concept. It can contain the idea of skill but it does not need to be so. But if this is right, it is a multiple concept on a sliding scale.

Travelling for books

The trip my wife and I made to Nancy had nothing philosophical. Actually we did not go there for the town but for seeing Rossini’s opera “L’Italiana in Algeri”. In terms of the famous Michelin travel guides, the performance was not only worth a detour; it was worth the travel. Once we were there, we did other things, as well; that’s clear. We admired the famous golden gates that give entrance to the central Stanislas Square and we did also some other sightseeing. I must say that we failed to see most of the Art Nouveau, a trend in art that had its origin in Nancy. We saw much of it, of course, but we didn’t give it special attention. Instead we went to the Aquarium Museum. No, not for looking at the strange creatures that live under the level of the sea, although we did do that once we were there. We went there for an exposition of the beautiful pictures that the French photographer Vincent Munier had made of nature and wildlife. But in the end, I couldn’t also refrain from entering a few bookshops. It’s a thing I always do on a holiday abroad. Today you can order books from everywhere in the world on the Internet, but still the best way to buy a book is going to a real shop. Losing your awareness of the world around you when walking along the tables and cases full of interesting (and also not so interesting) books. Looking for stimulants of your mind and for food for new ideas. Seeing and feeling the paper before buying, and reading a bit in the books for judging whether they are really what you are looking for. And for seeing what themes and subjects people elsewhere are interested in.

In fact, it wasn’t so that I started to look for bookshops only after my arrival in Nancy. At home I had already googled where I had to go and where I had the best chances for finding books I would like. When preparing a trip and looking for interesting things in a region or town I am going to visit, bookshops are among the latter. And during the years, I have gathered a range of addresses of bookshops I simply must visit if I am happen to be there, both in the Netherlands and in many towns abroad that I may pass on my trips, on the journey out or on the journey home. Bookshops that are worth a detour and sometimes even the travel. And now I can also add one in Nancy to my list. Does I have to say yet that I didn’t leave the town with empty hands?

The intuition of responsibility

A central theme in the free will debate is the question whether responsibility exists. The idea is that a free will cannot exist, if responsibility does not exist. Therefore it has to be proved that responsibility exists. This is often done with the help of so-called Frankfurt-style cases: a kind of exemplary argumentations first presented by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. A typical case is this:

“Jones is in a voting booth deliberating whether to vote for the Democratic or for the Republican presidential candidate. Unbeknownst to Jones, a neurosurgeon, Black, has implanted a mechanism in Jones’s brain that allows Black to monitor Jones’s neural states and alter them if need be. Black is a diehard Democrat, and should Black detect neural activity indicating that a Republican choice is forthcoming, Black is prepared to activate his mechanism to ensure that Jones instead votes Democratic. As a matter of fact, Jones chooses on his own to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, so Black never intervenes.” (adapted from Eric Funkhouser, “Frankfurt Cases and Overdetermination”, http://comp.uark.edu/~efunkho/frankfurt.pdf, p. 3)

In this case, Jones has in fact only one option: to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. If Jones had wanted to vote Republican, Black would have forced him to vote Democratic. Then it would not have been Jones’s responsibility that he had voted for the Democratic candidate. However, it was Jones’s own choice to vote Democratic; Black did not intervene and so the vote was Jones’s own responsibility. This shows then, so the reasoning is, that responsibility exists in the sense that there are situations in which it is possible. At least that’s what the intuitive argument of Frankfurt and other free will advocates maintains. Now I do not want to doubt that free will exists, but does it follow from this case that responsibility exists? My intuition says no.

Much has already been said about these Frankfurt type cases, so it would suffice for me to refer to the literature. However, as a “good philosopher” I, too, want to give my contribution to the discussion, so take this case: Under international pressure a dictator organizes free elections according to the accepted democratic rules: everybody can stand up, the candidates have free entrance to the media, they can present their programs freely, and so on. The elections are as free as elections can be. However, when the counting of votes starts, the president gives the following instruction to the counters: in case I get the majority and become re-elected, it’s okay, but if one of the other candidates will win, manipulate the votes then that way that I’ll be the winner. And just like Black in the first case succeeded to implant a mechanism in Jones’s brain unbeknownst to Jones, the dictator succeeds to have the instructions applied and to be kept secret. In case the dictator was beaten by another candidate but was re-elected by his manipulation, then we, the onlookers for whom nothing can be kept secret, would call the regime still a dictatorship. However, as it happened, the dictator was re-elected with 90 percent of the votes. Would we conclude now that democracy exists just as some concluded in the Jones-Black case that responsibility exists? Must we call the re-election of the dictator with an overwhelming majority a case of democracy? I don’t think so. My intuition says that it is a cunning way of manipulation by a dictator, just like so many dictators in this world try to govern with a varnish of democracy. And what makes this case fundamentally different from the Jones-Black case for responsibility? If we want to show that responsibility exists, we’ll have to choose for another, if possible less intuitive, explanation. At least, that’s the way I see it.

Free will as a structuring cause of our actions

The definitions and examples of causation in my last blog were an arbitrary selection just for showing that one has to define what cause means in order to be able to answer the question whether there is a free will. Although the selection was not systematic, I think that it makes sense to have a closer look at the chosen instances.

Hempel defined cause as the relevant set of circumstances and events of the phenomenon to be explained. This definition is generally used in the natural sciences. In our case of the free will, we have an action (the phenomenon to be explained), which has to be an effect of one or more natural laws (according to Hempel’s theory) and a relevant set of circumstances and events. The place of the free will will be then among the latter. However, also the free will is a phenomenon to be explained. In a Hempelian approach we have to show then that the free will (= a supposedly free decision) follows from one or more general laws and a set of relevant circumstances and events. In this approach the free will debate must evolve around the question whether there are such laws and if so what the relevant circumstances are that lead to the allegedly free decision. Without further argumentation, I guess it’s not the right approach.

Let me take now the three concrete cases in my last blog. I presented them in order to show that the answer to the question “what causes what?” is often a matter of perspective and, as in the cases presented, often also a matter of social rules. In one case a dog caused an accident because it suddenly crossed the street. However, in the other case it is not the woman crossing the street who caused the accident but the motorist. The difference is in the rule that says that motorists need not to give priority to street crossing dogs but has to do so to people crossing the street on pedestrian crossings. The last instance (the ship that runs onto a rock) is even more complicated since it presents a mixture of social rules (a ship has to follow the prescribed safe channel) and natural facts (unexpected obstacles) and both together (sea maps are supposed to be correct). The upshot to be drawn from these cases is that it is not only important to employ an appropriate definition of “cause”, but also to say what “free will” actually means. Moreover, it is possible that a free will exists from one viewpoint and doesn’t from another one. Or maybe it is so that the free will is not a one-dimensional phenomenon.

How about the idea that a cause is the phenomenon that tipped the balance to produce a certain effect? This type of cause is the same as what Dretske called the triggering cause. In fact, it needs a structuring cause as a background in order to be effective. I think that this combination of triggering cause and structuring cause – so Dretske’s approach – is the best option for explaining what it means to say that we have a free will and for explaining how it works (probably in combination with the idea that the free will is a multidimensional or multifacetal phenomenon). This is so because the combination of triggering and structuring cause fits best the way the human body works. In this blog I can substantiate my point only with an example. I am skating on a lake and the ice is good. It allows me to make perfect gliding strikes: to the left, to the right, and so on. Is it my free will that I make perfect strikes? Yes and no. I have learned how to skate and I know how to make perfect gliding strikes and I can show them to you. But when I am skating there, I look at the landscape, enjoy the skating and give no attention to my strikes. It’s an automatism. But, as said, it’s a learned automatism. It was my free will to learn ice-skating well and to learn to make perfect gliding strikes. Then one can say that by learning to skate I structured my body that way that I can make perfect strikes, on purpose and automatically. It is my free will to skate there on the lake and to make there perfect gliding strikes, if possible. My free will functions sometimes as a structuring cause of my skating perfectly and sometimes as a triggering cause of it, and sometimes it’s a mixture of both. This is just an example, but I guess that if we want to solve the free will problem, we must not only look for a free will that somehow tips the balance of what we do, but we have to realize also that the free will can be and often is something that intentionally structured our body that way that at the right moment the body acts automatically and unconsciously as if we didn’t have such a will.

What makes the free will happen?

Thanks to the recent progress in neuroscience, the question whether man has a free will has become one of the most important philosophical topics. Also here in my blogs, I have talked about it. As so often, philosophers do not agree about the answer nor do they agree about what “free will” means. However, I think that the definition by the Belgian philosopher Jan Verplaetse gives a good description of what it is about, at least for this blog: “The free will is the capacity to decide freely what we do and why and how. With a free will you choose which action you do” (Verplaetse, Zonder vrije wil, 2011, p. 30; italics omitted). What is implicit in this definition – and in other definitions as well – is that the free will can make you something to happen: you can cause something. No wonder then that words like cause, causation and causality are central in the free will discussion. But what do we mean by cause? There is hardly any philosopher in this discussion who will tell you.

Here I do not want to say how we can best define “cause” in relation to the question of the free will. At the moment I have no idea which definition is to be preferred. But not defining “cause” is problematical, for different definitions may lead to different philosophical answers of the free will question. In this blog I want to show only what it means that “cause” can be defined in different ways. I simply give a few definitions and illustrations. I hope that it will be clear then to the reader what my point is.

– According to Carl Hempel, a scientific explanation consists of a set of universal laws of nature, a set of statements that describe a more or less complex relevant set of circumstances and events and a phenomenon that need to be explained. If the explanation is true, we can call the relevant set of circumstances and events the cause of the phenomenon to be explained, so Hempel. Note that the cause need not to be a single event or phenomenon but that it can be quite complex. (Hempel, Aspects of explanation…, 1965, pp. 348-9)

– Roy Bhaskar defines “cause”, following Scriven, as “that factor which, in the circumstances that actually prevailed … ‘tipped the balance of events as to produce the known outcome’ ”. Why did the tower fall down? Because of the gale (but actually it was already about to collapse). (Bhaskar, The possibility of naturalism, 1989, p. 83)

– Fred Dretske distinguishes between structuring causes and triggering causes. For instance, take a thermostat. When the temperature drops the thermostat turns the furnace on. Then we call the drop of temperature the triggering cause of turning the furnace on. The whole mechanism of the thermostat that is constructed that way that it can turn the furnace on is the structuring cause. (Dretske, Explaining Behavior, 1988).

– A dog crosses suddenly a street because it sees another dog at the other side. In order not to hit the dog, a motorist has to brake hard, goes into a skid and collides with another car. Then we say that the dog caused the accident (and the owner of the dog is responsible for the accident, because he did not hold the dog on the lead).

– A woman crosses a road on a pedestrian crossing. A motorist sees her too late and in order not to hit the woman, he has to brake hard, goes into a skid and collides with another car. Then we say that the motorist caused the accident (and he will be held responsible for it, too).

– A captain of a ship gives order to hug the shore for the pleasure of the passengers, outside the normal and safe course along the coast. The ship runs onto a rock and sinks. What was the cause of the accident? The captain? The steersman? The inaccurate sea map? The rock? … ?

These definitions and cases have been arbitrarily chosen. They are just illustrations of the problem. Nothing more than that. The instances make clear that we cannot simply say that there is or isn’t a free will that (sometimes) causes or makes what we do without saying what this causing or making means.

The inevitability of thinking

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

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

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

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

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 !

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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- 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

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?

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

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.