Gideon asked:

What is the value of chess to philosophy?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

It is occasionally referred to in philosophical literature, but in most cases by philosophers who don’t play chess with adequate mastery, or else by players with insufficient philosophical background. Moses Mendelssohn once wrote that as a game it is too serious; as a serious pursuit too frivolous. Nevertheless the Soviets put it as one of the cornerstone of their whole culture, and they had some good reasons for this. They saw it as character building, promoting mental toughness, inhibiting lies and hypocrisy, promoting creative engagement with ideas etc. The practical end was that they produced grandmasters by the dozen; but this has no bearing on philosophy.

The sole exception was Emanuel Lasker, a world champion and trained philosopher. In 1907 and 1925 he published work on chess with philosophical merit. His point of departure was that chess is an ideal struggle – a struggle between two minds in the process of generating ideas. Since, however, in the actual struggle at the board, the whole nervous system of the combattants is involved, it is feasible to extract from this form of contest a system of ethics. It is not a socially or politically dominated ethics, as e.g. Aristotle or Hegel, but rather of a Darwinian cast, with the struggle for survival imposing its imperatives. For Lasker this represented a value stronger and more enduring than the artificial systems of school philosophy, which (as even Marx said) tend on the whole to apologise for the states and nations that exist than to pose genuine ethical issues.

If you are interested, the relevant text is accessible in Lasker’s “Manual of Chess”, Section IV, or in his book entitled “Struggle” (Kampf).

However, there is a further relevant aspect not mentioned by him, nor (as far as I know) by any other philosopher. This has to do with the creative aspects. The essence of chess are the ideas that are actualised in the course of the struggle. For aficionados who keep scores of master games the result is usually immaterial; for them the contest of ideas, problems and solutions is an aesthetic experience. There is, so to speak, a highly inventive story being unfolded, not unlike a symphony or sonata; and this consanguinity with music invites us to consider the analogous possibilities of chess. The sense of beauty is entangled; personalities step out of the web of incidents; the choreography of the pieces exhibits a kind of ever-changing mosaic made up of expectations, anticipations and surprises.

I have often had occasion to draw attention to this last-named as a feature chess shares with some works of art. A joke (i.e. a kind of surprise) stales in the repeated telling. A surprising turn in music delights an audience; the surprise never stales, but is sought out by music lovers as the very thing that gives them the greatest pleasure. Likewise with many incidents on the chess board that are called combinations. Lovers of combinations can’t get enough of them, no matter how old they are. But a philosophical treatise on this aspect has not been written. What little there is in the chess literature that bears the name philosophy, is usually mistakenly so called, and nothing other than one or another method of strategic management.

Yet so many university students are passionate chess players. I can’t help wondering why none ever seems to get their philosophical head around the aesthetic component with enough interest to write something about it!

Jürgen Lawrenz at PhiloSophos.org

 

Gideon asked:

What conclusions, if any, can one draw from the inverted spectrum thought experiment?

Answer by Craig Skinner

None of note in my view.

The thought is that, for all you and I know, the sensations you have when looking at colours are the inverse of mine. So, looking at grass, you have the sensation I have when looking at red things, and, looking at a ripe tomato, you have the sensation I have looking at grass. Of course we both call grass green and ripe tomatoes red, having been so taught, so that there is no communication problem.

But what’s the point ?

The point is that this is one of the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism.

Physicalism says that the physical world is all that exists, so that mental states (sensations for example) are just physical brain states, or aspects of these.

A conceivability argument says that we can conceive a brainstate occurring with a mental accompaniment different from usual, or with no mental state at all, so that whatever causes mental states, they are not wholly determined by physical states, hence physicalism is false.

The two best known conceivability arguments are the inverted spectrum argument and the zombie argument. The latter says that we can conceive of an atom-for-atom duplicate of you, with exactly the same brainstates as you, behaving exactly like you, but without any consciousness at all. Hence, whatever causes consciousness, it is not a result of physical brainstates.

I think these are poor arguments. I have two objections.

First, conceivability doesn’t necessarily mean possibility. Our imagination can outrun possibility. Right now, I can conceive my cat jumping up and typing the rest of this answer. But this is metaphysically impossible. There could of course be worlds in which cat-like creatures with superior intelligence do such things, but they would not be cats.

Secondly, advances in our understanding may show that the arguments contain conceptual confusions. Two such conceivability arguments that might have been advanced in the 19th Century illustrate this:

1. We can conceive of a container of gas in which the molecules move faster and faster but the temperature of the gas doesn’t rise. So, whatever temperature is, it’s nothing to do with particle speed, right ? Wrong, temperature just IS mean particle velocity.

2. We can conceive of a world containing tiny, replicating bags of chemicals undergoing complex interactions (let’s call them ‘cells’), but these cells are not alive, just little bags of dead chemicals. So, whatever life is, it’s not explained by complex chemical interactions, right? Again, wrong.

Life just IS complex interaction of dead chemicals in units drawing energy from the outside, maintaining dynamic stability and replicating.

So, I think the spectrum and zombie arguments may likewise fall to advances in cognitive science as we learn how particular brainstates necessarily entail, say, seeing red or being conscious.

Also, I find it completely implausible that healthy members of the same species would see colours differently. But few people hold that we really see colours differently, as opposed to this being merely conceivable. And, of course, colour-blind people with abnormal rods and cones do see colours differently, while birds, with more complex colour vision than primates, see colours we cant imagine and differentiate shades we would judge identical.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.org

 

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

This is an enormously complicated issue on which many people have written. But it is possible to give a simple answer, when broken down into three fairly easy conditions:

1) If everyone has an inverted spectrum, it is undetectable and makes no difference.

2) If a small minority have an inverted spectrum, they will suffer from disablement in respect of social living (maybe with technology it could be remedied with special glasses which invert the inverted spectrum).

3) If an inverted spectrum is very prevalent, communications would break down. This might lead to societies based on the spectra of individuals. Power struggles would ensue between groups who claim to see things the “right” and the “wrong” way. But you understand this is a purely conjectural point. Nothing of the kind is actually known.

Point (1) above refers to the fact that there are no ‘natural’ colours, but only radiant information that is conveyed as colour impressions to our mind. When we associate words with those colours, we are assuming a universal sensitivity of all humans to these forms of radiation and a universal consensus (excepting pathological cases) among all humans as to colours, such that ‘red’, ‘rot’, ‘rosso’ etc. all bear the same meaning in different languages.

There is an evolutionary history behind this, and the rather important fact that our sensory equipment is living tissue. Its importance in the context of the inverted spectrum proposition is that the latter presupposes a form of sensory sensitivity that is derived from computer models. On this score one’s first doubts should arise if the proposition has any bearing on human existence at all.

On the above-mentioned assumption of a universal species characteristic, it is altogether reasonable to assume that all humans (except colour blind or jaundiced people) see the same colours. What we call these subjective impression is quite irrelevant as long as we identify objects in common and call the appearance of blood ‘red’ by any word in any of the languages we employ. If one person refers to blood as ‘red’ and another as ‘green’, there is still no problem, as long as the variance is consistent.

Yet the notion of an inverted spectrum would make some difference in terms of the secondary phenomenon of subjective moods which colours tend elicit. E.g. people vary much in their response to colours, feeling good or bad, aggressive or docile, cosy or uncomfortable, warm or cold depending on the colours in their surroundings. A person who genuinely saw red as green would have some trouble relating psychologically to colours in a way that would be understood by others. Again, however, this is a phenomenon only known to apply to pathological cases (e.g. jaundice).

But the strongest argument in favour of universality is art and design, and especially advertising art. It would be instantly dead if we did not all have the same kind of receptivity to colours.

And in this respect it is interesting that the colouring of many natural features carries information. Some fruits and insects wear colouring that scares off the birds from eating them. Whether these are seen as colours by the birds cannot be ascertained; but the case of ultraviolet vision by bees suggests that the answer is “yes”. This in turn suggests that colour vision is survival equipment. An inverted spectrum that differs from the norm would be very harmful to the survival chances of its owners, and this might be the very simple answer why there seems to be such nearly total agreement on sensory information across all humans and many species of animals.

The last point to deal with (which I mentioned in passing above) relates to the mechanical fallacy. A machine can be tuned to receive particular frequencies of radiation. It can therefore easily be made to output red as green, blue as yellow–which in fact we do routinely with some visual phenomena which contain colour information (e.g. from outer space) that our senses cannot deal with unassisted. But a human sensorium is not an aggregate of antennae. It is a congregation of living cells which receive and pass on the information by which they are physically affected. Mistakes can occur (constantly!); but there are safeguards in place to avoid the inverted colour spectrum possibility. Namely: huge numbers that must agree with each other. This is the way evolving organisms ensure their survival soundness.

On that basis, an inverted spectrum is not a feasible occurrence in any sound genetic pool, since survival fitness is tied to accuracy and stability of sensory information. And now colour blindness is not an inversion, but a genetic defect resulting in deficient production of photopigments, or it can be the result of damage to the retina. Jaundice is also a pathological state without any relation to spectrum inversion. So these two cannot be accepted as reference points for any notions associated with spectrum inversion.

The conclusion to be drawn from the thought experiment of an inversion of the colour spectrum is this: (a) It relies for its cogency on pathological states (i.e. deficiencies). (b) It does not meet with any known facts in the world, and (c) presupposes the applicability of electromechanical machinery as suitable models for its arguments (which in fact are inapplicable to living organisms like humans). Finally (d) it largely ignores the evolutionary trend from which colour vision emerged, i.e. the tuning of biological fibres to radiant information which ends up being inscribed on genes that are shared across a wide variety of life forms for uniform information processing.

For these reasons the thought experiment does not appear to be a coherent proposition. It lacks a sufficient reason for it to be taken seriously. It is a close kin of another game of the same ilk known ‘Mary the blind scientist’. These are nice game to play and eminently suitable for logical exercises – but only as long as the players are aware that they are not dealing with real life, but only with the rules of their game.

Jürgen Lawrenz at PhiloSophos.org

 

Craig asked:

Who is the greatest twentieth century philosopher and why?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

Well my answer would be Wittgenstein but the problem is that Wittgenstein is not a philosopher, he is an anti-philosopher. In his later work his view of philosophy was that there are no philosophical truths (this is not the same as claiming that there cannot be any philosophical truths). He also realised that there are no true philosophical theorems. There are no true solutions to philosophical problems but then there are no real philosophical problems. All we can do in philosophy is dissolve philosophical problems by reminding ourselves of what we already know about our own language.

For Wittgenstein all philosophies are equally false and that is why philosophers can never agree on philosophical truths or the solution to philosophical problems. However he also realised that thinking philosophically is a natural human temptation and that philosophical problems are as deep as the roots of our language.

Favourite quotations:

‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our own language.’

‘You don’t get rid of philosophy by doing more philosophy.’

‘Nothing is hidden, everything is on the surface.’

‘Our language is in order just as it is.’

Many of the people who write about and interpret Wittgenstein are philosophers so they are often in the grip of the the very illusions that he fought against. They try to turn his writings into philosophical arguments that support their own philosophy. A good example of this is the so called ‘Private language argument’. The only later work that he prepared for publication is ‘Philosophical Investigations’ and it is important that is is called Investigations and not ‘Philosophical Arguments’. All of his later work is interesting but keep in mind that the people who have prepared it for publication are philosophers who did not really understand what he was saying.

This means that their interpretations are suspect. You cannot understand Wittgenstein if you think you are in possession of some philosophical truth or you think that you have the solution to a philosophical problem. However if you have a good knowledge of Western philosophy and you find it deeply puzzling then maybe you can approach Wittgenstein with an open mind. This may make him seem like some sort of mystic but Wittgenstein wasn’t vague or mystical. He was a logician who made important contributions to logic. Above all he came to value consistency, completeness and coherency in philosophy.

If you really understand what Wittgenstein was saying then you will no longer feel the need to think philosophically or search for philosophical truths. One writers who understands Wittgenstein is P.M.S. Hacker of St. Johns College Oxford.

Shaun Williamson developed the Ask a Philosopher cgi script question.pl. He did his postgraduate studies on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

 

Gideon asked:

Would you like to be given the ability to remember clearly everything that has happened to you or that you have experienced in your life?

Why? or why not?

Answer by Craig Skinner

A healthy memory, broadly speaking, remembers what is significant and forgets the rest. I have already forgotten the make and colour of the car next to mine in the supermarket car park today although no doubt I noticed it at the time.

There are many examples of normal people who train their memories, using mnemonics, to remember vast amounts of unrelated information, often for entertainment purposes. And of ‘idiot savants’ who can instantly tell you the day of the week for any past date. And of taxi drivers who develop an enlarged hippocampus (the part of the brain storing memories) through learning the exact layout of all the streets in London.

But genuine cases of detailed day-by-day recall going back many years (‘Hyperthymesia’ from Greek thymesis = memory) are very rare. The first case described in a medical journal was in 2006. The subject said she had a ‘movie in my mind that never stops’, and she had difficulty organizing and categorizing information. Typically, it is an exhausting business, disrupting the person’s ability to live in the present and plan for the future.

Many years before any medical description, a perceptive fictional account was written by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story ‘Funes the Memorious’ about a peasant who, after a fall from a horse and ensuing paralysis, developed total recall of his past life. He remembers the exact position and location of every leaf he ever saw, and when he saw it, and the detailed pattern of its veins; the exact size, shape and arrangement of the clouds for every time he looked at the sky, and so on. Sometimes he recalls a whole day in moment-by-moment detail, and of course it takes him a whole day to do this. He had no need of a number system: he gave every individual number, thousands of them, a separate name. But was incapable of ‘ideas of a general, Platonic sort’ – he couldn’t grasp that the symbol ‘dog’ embraced so many unlike individuals, or even that the dog seen from the side at 3:14 had the same name as the dog seen from the front at 3:15. He had no categories, only perceptions (or memories of them).

So, as we struggle to form organized memories to draw upon for, say, answering exam questions, let us be grateful that our brains don’t get clogged up with every detail we perceive.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.org

 

Tiberius asked:

I have developed a point system for philosophers where I give them points for insight varying from 100 to 5000. It is subjective and arbitrary, but it has produced a top ten philosopher list. Confucious, Democratus, Nietzsche, Tzu and Aristotle have all scored well. My highest point getter is Jean Jacques Rousseau by far. I would like Mr. Lawrenz’s opinion of this great man.

This request must pass the ‘moderator’ who throws away 95 per cent of my work. Aristotle said older minds become envious and ‘contemptuous of opinons’. A tottering pride can set in as well. Wrinkles on the face also end up on the mind. The mind reaches it’s prime at 49 according to Aristotle. I am 50 now.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Well, Tiberius, seeing that you ask my opinion, I will not duck your question. In fact, I welcome it, because I’ve often been asked by people who are understandably confused by the fact that there seem to be 10,000 philosophers around today, yet we always go back into history to study writings from 200 to 2000 years old!

Now you didn’t even give me a sample of the insights which determine the ranking order on your list. That makes things difficult. I recall I used to do something much the same when I was young; but over the course of my life I came to understand that my own insight into insights kept changing – let me be bold and claim that it became deeper as I added more years to my enthusiastic beginnings. This suggests that ‘insights’ may be a very unstable basis for judging philosophers when you turn them into point values. But by no means irrelevant; and, incidentally, the same basis one could use to differentiate between great, good and trash novels, poems, dramas, pictures, music etc.

In good time I came around to the understanding that this analogy is not far from the mark – i.e. great art and great philosophy share something (namely insight) despite their incompatible ways of communicating it. Moreover, if you pursue this line further, another analogy comes forward, which could be called authenticity. Once again unstable connotations, yet relevant again because we humans have the capacity of spontaneous recognition. Without this spontaneity, the word itself would have no meaning.

Authenticity is not much different from original creativity, an innovative frame of mind, an inner drive for exploration, and an obsession with the truth about human nature. If I may dwell on this for a moment: A novel by Dostoyevsky is a testament of human truth (insight!), whereas the novel you pick up at the train station is likely to offer nothing other than temporary entertainment, something to while the time away, without the least challenge to your intellect or deeper emotions.

A third criterion arises out of these two. Which is that, in this stringent sense, philosophers are creators of coherent thought systems in the same way as a great novelist offers a coherent image of people and society in their totality of being. Hence the basis of any judgement of depth, relevance, greatness can only be the insight, authenticity and creativity of their work.

As mentioned, these are criteria which appeal to our spontaneous recognition. There is no way of methodically or scientifically adjudging such a performance. Almost the only reliable way we have, is to examine either the degree of creative revelation (which is essentially a synonym for insight) or their impact on society.

Now this brings me to your favourite Rousseau. He did have a huge impact on the world; and some of the brainiest people of his time (Kant!) admired him. But in the long run, one cannot escape the fact that his thinking was very much trapped in his own time and place. Once you get past his purple patches and scrutinise the actual solutions he offers, you soon discover that he promoted the kind of tyrannical systems of which fascism and communism were to be the ultimate expression. But this argues for very little insight into human and social conditions; and when you see that his medicine involves repression, deprivation and compulsion, one’s respect suffers a huge dent!

This is incompatible with an authentically humane, happy, creative life and the freedom that is fundamental to such pursuits.

Now I see Confucius and Aristotle among your top ten. No argument, but contrast their teachings with that of Rousseau! The cornerstone of both their philosophies is precisely the freedom to authenticity that is missing from Rousseau. Freedom entails responsibility (Confucius) and a happy, prosperous life requires the consistent pursuit of excellence in everything you do (Aristotle). So individuals add up to the foundations for the prosperity of his/her society. A healthy society is a collective whose members strive always for the best and seek voluntarily to curtail those aspects of life which are part of our animal estate.

In a word: Confucius and Aristotle ask you to lift up your head and be a full-fledged human being in command of all your best faculties. This is hard, but not unachievable. Rousseau demands we put our head down and cop punishment, with or without crime! This is not compatible with great or deep philosophical thinking!

I obviously cannot go through your list, nor offer an alternative. But you should make yourself aware that well-meaning philosophies, written in inflammable prose, can easily influence society to go off the rails. Consider Marx, who would probably be shocked out of his mind if he knew that his doctrines of a workers’ paradise ended up creating a workers’ hell, as bad as they suffered before Soviet communism was established. Consider in contrast John Locke, who made only small waves, but is the intellectual godfather of western liberal democracies. So we end up having to admit that quality of insight which excludes foresight is not worth much. The kind of foresight I’m speaking of here is nothing other than the hindsight gained from historical precedents, because socially and politically nothing is new under the Sun.

Altogether then, ‘insight’ is a quality, or attribute, that cannot be judged without adding the word deep to it. I offer you a test case: Plato. Many critics over 2 millennia have professed to abhor his ideal society, sometimes for the same reasons I used in castigating Rousseau. But they usually miss the clue at the heart of his thinking. Plato himself admits that his social structure is an unapproachable ideal and recommends that societies should be content with implementing only those of his recommendations that are appropriate to their way of life, customs, traditions etc. However, they should aspire to be better, more humane, more just and fair than they are. And now the crucial issue is, that he wrote about 30 books in examination of a multitude of profound human issues like love, beauty, justice, modesty, temperance etc., with such deep truthfulness that readers are rattled into a profound insight into their own natures.

So if I were to judge philosopher according to your numerical criterion, I would be forced to say: Plato had 30 deep insights into the human condition, Rousseau just one. And then similar criteria would apply to Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Confucius, Augustinus and a few others, in an wholly analogous way to our appreciation of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven and so on. On the face of it, this seems ridiculous; but I’m playing the game along with you and I’m hopeful that you will see now that your numbers game has to be played with the rules modified to reflect a more relevant set of criteria.

Jürgen Lawrenz at PhiloSophos.org

 

Charity asked:

Are all questions philosophical?

Answer by Peter Jones

Hi Charity,

I would say yes. This is for reasons given by Russell. He notes that all our sentences take the form ‘There is an x such that…’ In other words, our sentences require the reification of their subjects. Any such reification is a metaphysical conjecture. It is very difficult to avoid such a reification and it may be impossible. Is London the capital of England? Only if Solipsism is false or we are not being tricked by a demon.

It is the inevitability of the philosophical claims made by even our most prosaic statements that allows Lao Tsu to state ‘True words seem paradoxical’ without the addition of provisos. None are needed, since every statement would be a philosophical claim when analysed in depth.

Many of our questions are not supposed to be philosophical, and in the spirit that they are asked perhaps they are not. But our intention in asking them would not be the point. A philosopher will always be able to be read any question as pertaining to philosophy. Indeed, this is quite often what people find so annoying about them.

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.org