Candisha asked:

What prejudices, habits, and desires might prevent you from finding truth?

Peter Jones

Any and all of our prejudices, habits and desires might stand in our way in the search for truth. Thomas Kuhn famously argues that to some extent physics can only progress because physicists eventually die, taking with them to the grave all their prejudices, habits and desires. If the search for truth is conducted by the more personal method of Socrates, the Buddha, the Oracle at Delphi, and perhaps this is more what you had in mind, then the problem becomes even more immediate, for we would stop making progress entirely when we die, and nobody else can pick up the baton.

As to which of them might be most likely to prevent us finding truth, I doubt there can be a definite answer. It would depend on what sort of truth we are looking for and where we are looking for it. The general solution for prejudices would be to adopt what meditators call ‘beginner’s mind’. For habits the solution is unfortunately a lot less obvious.

It may be that desire is the real issue, for at the very root of things it seems to be desire that sustains our prejudices and habits. Unyielding prejudices and habits may no longer be possible once desire is conquered. At any rate, for Buddhist practitioners the overcoming or transcendence of desire is a central goal. Not this or that desire, but all desires that are not useful and that might create prejudices and habits that cloud our view of truth. Prejudices and habits will wither away without the support of desire, so they say, allowing to see the world as it really is. So the question of which particular prejudices, habits and desires might prevent us finding truth would not really arise. It would be desire itself that is the problem, or our lack of control of it.

Of course, all this is theoretical. It would be wonderful if the problem of prejudices, habits and desires could be solved theoretically.

Abu asked:

Sir, I have been reading trying to understand ‘the concept of mind’ by Gilbert Ryle, but I can’t understand it,, so if you can please help me giving me some brief and basic idea on this topic.

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle is a rebuttal of Descartes ‘res cogitans’, which he calls the ‘The Ghost in the Machine’.

Descartes believed we have such a ‘thinking thing’ in our head. Gilbert says that’s impossible; it has never been found and never will, because it is a ghost.

Instead he refers to our inner private experiences that should be seen as dispositions to behave in a certain way. Ryle took a philosophical view that mental states must always translate into physical actions.

The only way we know what people have on their minds is because they behave in a certain way. In that sense, the ‘mind’ is nothing other than the dispositions of people to behave according to what they know, how they feel, what they desire and so on.

Ryle shows that this view of the mind depends on understanding words in a certain way as well. words such as ‘knowing’ reflect a disposition to learn and then to use knowledge for your purposes-which you do by behaving in an appropriate way.

So the mind’s operations are just as visible and just as evident as jumping, skipping, etc. knowing, and believing are dispositions in this sense; Knowing and believing influence the way people act. But this is not a secret operation of a hidden ghost.

Ryle concludes that mind is not separate from the body. Mind is just the sum of all our dispositions, and we know about it because of the way people behave.

He gives a good illustration. Take a visitor to Oxford and show him all the colleges, labs, libraries, galleries, sporting arenas and administration offices.

The visitor may now ask, ‘But where is the University?’ This is like asking, ‘where is the mind?’ All those colleges etc ARE the university. And so all our dispositions to know, believe, feel and act ARE what we call the ‘The Mind’.

Nathan asked:

In a world of increasing demand on resources (e.g. food, water, medicine), is it ethical to support charities which save human life or prevent death by natural means, if the effect of extending human life is to place more burden upon resources and therefore risk even more lives in the future through sparsity of resources or cause death and suffering through conflict arising as a result of resource shortages?

This arises from a question asked to me by a charity recently, as to whether I would like to sponsor their initiative to provide ‘First Responders’ to preempt arrival of Paramedics and increase the chance of saving lives. Initially it seemed like a good scheme, but subsequent thought on the matter prompted this question, which applies to many other charitable endeavours (e.g. aid to victims of drought, starvation etc).

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Your question has no ethical dimension at all, but turns on an issue of practical morality. In ethical terms the question is answered by the imperative of humanity towards all humans point blank. If people miss out, are exploited or exposed to man-made perils, then ethics is non-negotiable you must help and do what you can.

Once you start arguing the way you do, your attention should be directed elsewhere. Not to the people who are suffering, but to those who create the conditions under which suffering is created. I will put it to you not in philosophical, but crassly materialistic terms. If just a tiny fraction of the earth’s resources which the developed world is squandering on its luxury pursuits were devoted to greening the planet’s huge deserts, then we would not have a starvation problem. If just a tiny fraction of the military budgets of the world’s nations were devoted to ridding the world of the most common evil of humanity, fratricide, then a great deal of the suffering would also cease. So the real answer to your question does not involve any putative ethics of charity, but the morality of greed and evil.

From the point of view of practical morality, therefore, your decision should not be influenced by furphys like ‘should medicine allow nature to rid the world of poor, starving, decrepit, diseased people?’ Consider that in 1348-50, the Black Death claimed 70% of Europe’s population. You would not be around to write to Pathways if people had not, after that event, begun to question the wisdom of letting God decide such matters.

To sum up:

(1) You may feel that helping or not helping is much the same, because the situation is hopeless. But if this is how you feel, then in fact you argue yourself into helping, because once you’ve made yourself aware of it, the other choice is unethical.

(2) If your concern is for the survival of the lucky ones who do not suffer from disease, malnutrition, exploitation etc., but may in future suffer from diminishing resources, such as less motor cars, more expensive food and pharmaceuticals etc., then (as explained above) you have no question.

Much else could be said, but the important issue, I think, was to stress what seems to me an inapplicable pseudo-ethics at the bottom of your question.

Kyle asked:

Nagel says that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism, something it is like for the organism.’ Can you explain what Nagel means by this?

Answer by Peter Jones

As far as I understand him, Nagel means that if someone were to ask an organism with conscious mental states whether it is ‘like’ anything to have those states it would reply ‘yes’. Here ‘like’ should not imply a comparison, as if mental states must always be to like this or like that. They can be like anything at all just as long as they are like something. Is there something it is like to be you? If so, then you are an organism with mental states.

It is a slightly confusing way of using words and it has attracted some criticism in consciousness studies, the phrase ‘something it is like’, but consciousness is a difficult phenomenon to talk about. If we change it to ‘something it feels like’ then this makes more immediate sense, since many philosophers would take feeling as sufficient evidence for consciousness, the latter being necessary for the former. To be consciousness would be to know what it feels like to be conscious. Exactly what it feels like would not matter.

Ashley asked:

Assuming that all knowledge is not just a matter of opinion (because if it were, all philosophy would cease!), how do you account for the persistence of different religions, moralities and political ideals?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

You make too easy for yourself. What is ‘knowledge’? This is what you should ask yourself. When you bite into an apple, you do so on the ‘opinion’ that it is good, wholesome and healthy for yourself. Sometimes you can be wrong; it may be a plastic apple. But on the whole this is knowledge. Much the same applies to the earth rotating around the sun and uranium being available for enrichment to make atom bombs. In these and millions of other cases, knowledge and opinion are the same. They are knowledge because, in principle, everyone can make the appropriate tests and get the same results an can therefore hold the ‘correct opinion’. So knowledge is also a consensus among virtually all people who exist, who have the same experience or can acquire it. However, opinion without this backing of experiment and consensus behind it is not knowledge.

Your opinion that maybe a particular picture or song is beautiful can be contradicted by any other party, because taste is not a matter for generalisation. Religions, morality and political ideas fall into the same class. What kind of spirits might rule the world is a matter for each person to decide, because there are no tests to establish the factuality of these opinions, and pretty much the only way to achieve consensus is to persuade people who are already inclined to such beliefs or, if they are not, to force them. Same with morality. And as far as politics are concerned, they are grounded in the simple psychology that most people wish to be free and pursue their own lives without being slaves to anyone else, or running the risk of being mugged or murdered and of course, that they wish to own something and not have others take it away. Plainly none of these issues can be solved except along the lines of common consent among a group of people, and this may differ from one group to another.

So much for the general aspect of your question. It should suffice by itself, except that you seem to labour under a misimpression that ‘philosophy would cease’ if knowledge was just opinion. What I say to you is: you must move on from Aristotle. Even Aristotle’s take on ‘knowledge’ is not the same as yours. He knew about the limits of knowledge and was, for example, content to acknowledge that infinite regress cannot be defeated and puts up an insurmountable barrier to knowledge. This does not mean that we must rely on mere opinion. Leibniz, for example took this one step further and deduced from phenomena that even in infinite regress, the unknowns must be ordered the same as the knowns. But this must do for now. I would recommend, however, that you set yourself an issue of knowledge and read how a real philosopher struggles with it in order to preserve some kernel of its truth. For example, a good exercise would be to read Bacon on the organisation of knowledge, follow it up with Hume’s critique of induction, then maybe Popper’s attempt to save induction, and ending up with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. That would be wholesome tonic against taking certain issues for granted!

Sam asked:
 
What definitions of the term ‘scientifically impossible’ have been suggested?

Answer by Craig Skinner
 
There are 5 different types of impossibility. Here they are, each with an example:
 
1. Logical impossibility (fixed by logic) eg a ball can’t be red all over and not red all over at the same time.

2. Analytic impossibility (fixed by meanings of words) eg a bachelor can’t be a married man.

3. Physical impossibility (fixed by physical features in our world) eg a man can’t jump 3 miles into the air using only the power of his own body.

4. Nomological impossibility (fixed by laws of nature) e.g. a ray of light can’t reflect off a mirror at any angle other than the incidence angle.

5. Metaphysical impossibility (fixed by the nature of things) eg water can’t be anything but H2O.
 
There is no separate type of ‘scientific’ impossibility. The term usually refers to nomological impossibility (contrary to laws of nature eg it’s scientifically impossible to travel faster than light); sometimes to physical impossibility e.g. it’s physically impossible to build a cube of pure gold with sides 1000 miles long, there’s not enough gold in the whole known universe. I think the term is best reserved for nomological impossibility. Of course scientific laws are only the current best explanation for our observations, are held provisionally, and may change as knowledge advances, so that we shouldn’t be too dogmatic when pronouncing something scientifically (nomologically) impossible.