Mark asked:

‘A philosopher’s words are empty if they do not heal the suffering of mankind. For just as medicine is useless if it does not remove sickness from the body, so philosophy is useless if it does not remove suffering from the soul.’ (Epicurus). Agree, or disagree?

Answer by Massimo Pigliucci

Yes and no. It all depends on how one conceives of philosophy itself — most certainly a philosophical question! Epicurus surely had a point, which was consistent with much of the ancient Greek tradition in philosophy. Socrates, the Cynics, and the Stoics, would certainly have agreed. They all conceived of philosophy as a type of inquiry into the human condition, and one that had to have practical applications. For Socrates the unexamined life was, famously, not worth living; the Cynics flaunted their minimalist lifestyle as a model for how one should live; and the Stoics developed a series of meditative and spiritual practices built into their general philosophy — practices that turned out to be useful to politicians, generals and emperors, as well as the person in the street.

However, philosophy has always (not just in the form of contemporary academic practice) also been a broader quest for understanding and making sense of the world, a quest — let’s not forget — that span off a number of important fields, beginning of course with the natural sciences, but also, more recently, psychology, and economics.

While Socrates had little use for discussions that stranded too far from what today we would call moral and political philosophy, many of the pre-Socratics (e.g., the atomists) belonged very much to the same intellectual lineage that eventually led to modern science. Even the Stoics developed their versions of logic and physics (by which term they meant, more inclusively, all the natural sciences as well as metaphysics), and were not just concerned with ethics.

Moving closer to modern times, Kant is famous for his disquisitions about the moral law, but he was also instrumental in debates about the nature of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. The same goes for Descartes, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, and many, many others.

Contemporary so-called ‘analytic’ philosophy is admittedly fairly remote from any practical application. It started with philosophers who were very much interested in logic and mathematics, such as Bertrand Russell, and is now one of the dominant ‘traditions’ of philosophical inquiry. Interestingly, while Russell’s technical work is rather abstruse and of relevance largely or exclusively to other philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians, he was also very much concerned with the public use of philosophy, as a tool for ethical reasoning and even political activism.

Epicurus’ analogy with medicine is interesting, but, I think, rather misleading. Medicine, unlike philosophy, is by definition a practical pursuit. Philosophy, as I have argued above, has always been both practical and theoretical, as the ancient Greeks themselves clearly recognized.

So perhaps a better analogy is between philosophy and science, or even better philosophy and mathematics. Some science, as well as some math, is most definitely useful to address human problems. Just think of the innumerable technological applications that have had a (not always positive) impact on our lives.

But it is equally clear upon a moment’s reflection that there is a lot of science, and arguably even more mathematics, that doesn’t have, and likely will never have, any practical import whatsoever. Many scientists and mathematicians spend their entire lives going after decidedly non practical problems, such as establishing whether the foundational stuff of the universe is made of particles or strings, or how to prove abstract conjectures such as Fermat’s famous Last Theorem.

Are these efforts — and the parallel ones of theoretical philosophers — not worthy of our attention and support? That would mean that we are adopting a very limited view of human flourishing, one that is concerned only with the practical problems of living one’s life. But very clearly human beings are interested in much more than that. We pursue knowledge for its own sake, just like we do art and music simply because it enriches our existence. So why not theoretical philosophy?

Prof Massimo Pigliucci Graduate Center & Lehman College City University of New York http://platofootnote.org

 

Monica asked:

Could we be wrong about the direction of time?

Answer by Craig Skinner

A good question.

The answer is No, we couldn’t.

We assume the usual view that time is one-dimensional, continuous, unbranching, and has two directions along the timeline, past-to-future and future-to-past.

But neither direction is necessarily the past-to-future one i.e. time has no intrinsic direction.

Whichever direction happens to be the one in which entropy increases is the one that we, as entropy-producing creatures, must experience as past-to-future.

In our universe, the initial state, very shortly after the Big Bang, was very low entropy, so that as the universe expanded (the cosmological arrow of time), entropy could only increase, thereby settling the direction of the entropic (thermodynamic) arrow of time. We, as living, entropy- producing creatures must follow this arrow, so we experience time as flowing (the psychological arrow of time) in the same direction as the cosmological/ entropic arrows. So, we recall the past and act for the future, and as agents, we experience causation (causal arrow of time) as being in the same direction as the other arrows.

In short, the psychological/ causal/ entropic arrows necessarily coincide, and the direction was set as that of the cosmological arrow by the contingent fact that our universe started off with very low entropy.

If the universe ultimately starts to collapse towards a Big Crunch, the arrows would remain as now, creatures would experience the universe contracting to a Crunch. There would be no reversal of the psychological arrow making them think they were in a universe expanding from a Bang rather than towards a Crunch.

If the universe had been a steady-state affair with nothing happening except by quantum fluctuations, eras would have arisen (given enough time) in which gigantic flukes produced low-to-high entropy gradients in either direction of time. Indeed some cosmologists thought we lived in just such a universe, until the Big Bang story became evidence-based in the 20th Century.

Why was our universe in such a low-entropy state at the beginning? Well, shortly after the BB, the universe was a uniform, hot, gas. This sounds like a maximally disordered (high entropy) state, like the air in a room, rather than a well-ordered (low entropy) state like the books on my shelves. But paradoxically, this is not so, because of gravity. Whereas gravity plays virtually no role in a small, not very dense system, like the air in a room, it was crucial in a very, very dense system like the very early universe. In this context, universal gravity makes clumping the high-entropy state, and sure enough, as the universe expanded, gravity produced clumps of gas, ultimately forming galaxies, stars, planets and us, all the while entropy increasing.

As to the mechanism producing this initial state of extraordinarily low-entropy, I understand that cosmic inflation explains it, but my cosmological expertise isn’t up to the fancy footwork of this explanation. As to why there is a universe at all, rather than absolutely nothing, nobody knows.

So keep moving along the entropic gradient. As a living entropy-producing being, you have to, and have to experience it as past-to-future, and have no choice as to which way this direction is.

If you fancy a rigorous philosophical (and scientifically savvy) account of all this, try “Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point” by Huw Price (OUP 1997), but be warned, it isn’t light bedtime reading.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

 

Pearl asked:

I am a 17 year old college student doing a paper on Rene Descartes first meditation. I am totally lost here. I am confused about what question he is asking. I submitted my first draft and the professor said it was not right. I thought Descartes was asking the question ‘Were all his beliefs which were based on his senses’ true and right. Please help me!

Answer by Craig Skinner

You may be confused because Descartes doesn’t actually say, in so many words, what is the question he is asking. Irritatingly, philosophers often don’t directly (or at all) say what question they are trying to answer, why it matters to them, and what arguments they will use in support of their answer. And Descartes is one of the clearer writers — just wait till you tackle the poorer writers among the great philosophers (and I hope you will).

But we can work out his question from the text. I will word it as:

‘Are there any beliefs which I can rely on with absolute certainty as being true?’

He starts (para 1) by saying that many of his former beliefs were false or doubtful. Therefore he must ‘build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences.’

So we learn two things from this.

First he thinks science needs a philosophical foundation. He doesn’t argue for this, just assumes it. These days, most scientists and many philosophers think science can manage just fine on its own. But let’s leave that point.

Secondly, he is convinced that a new foundation is needed. He doesn’t say here what’s wrong with the old foundation (scholastic philosophy, especially Aquinas influenced by Aristotle) but clearly doesn’t think it adequate.

So, if many former beliefs are doubtful, the new foundation must be a belief which can be relied on as absolutely certain. If there is such a belief, then he can start with it as the foundation on which his firm and permanent belief structure is built.

And, of course, in the succeeding Meditations he tells us what he considers that belief to be, and attempts to prove from it that God exists, the material world, including my body, exists, and that we can mostly rely on the evidence of our senses and our reason after all.

However, in the first Meditation, after his preliminary remarks about the need for a foundation of sure belief, he spends the rest of the text describing the method he will use in his search for such a belief — the famous method of doubt. He says he will doubt everything which can conceivably be doubted. This includes all beliefs based on the senses and all beliefs based on reason.

As regards the senses, we can doubt them because

1. They sometimes deceive us, a commonplace observation.

2. When I dream I think I am awake and doing things. So, at any time when I think I am awake, I might really be dreaming, and all the assumed external world an illusion.

3. A malicious god could put ideas in my mind suggesting an external world when no such thing exists.

As regards reason, he feels that although we think we know 2+3=5 with certainty, again a malicious demon could trick our minds so that every time we add these numbers we make a mistake, thinking the sum is 5 when it isn’t; or trick us when we count the sides of a square so that we mistakenly think there are four.

So he concludes by saying he will assume a powerful evil demon deceives him and that the heavens, earth, colours, figures, sound, all external things, and his own body are but illusions.

If then, as per this methodological doubt, we can’t rely on the evidence of our senses or on our powers of reasoning, what is left that can be the foundational belief ? Read on, for he tells us this in the second Meditation.

Good luck with your studies.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

 

Dakota asked:

Does anything matter if nothing’s real?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Yes, it does. Take the proposition by Bishop Berkeley that the world might not be real in the sense of being hard and soft, wet and dry etc., because these are all matters of perception. Then wet and dry, hard and soft are not real – they are ‘stories’ concocted by our perceptive apparatus. But you can’t say they don’t matter. They matter to us as perceiving agents.

Go one step further and look at evil. This is not real either, in the sense that it’s ‘out there in the world’. Rather it is a matter of perception again, yet it matters, because evil is suffered by the perceiving agents.

And now it is the perceiving agent who is crucial to this kind of thinking. If nothing else in the world is real, nonetheless the perceiver is. Descartes demonstrated this in his famous thought experiment of deconstructing the ‘real’ world. He said: let us assume that nothing exists, therefore I don’t exist either. But this lands us in a self-contradiction. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘therefore I exist.’ This sentence can’t be put into the negative, ‘I think, therefore I don’t exist.’ Accordingly ‘I’ (whatever this ‘I’ may be) exists without any possible doubt.

And it is this ‘I’ which, quite apart from having thoughts, also has all those perceptions. This ‘I’ perceives hard and soft, and wet and dry. They matter to the ‘I’, because they affect it. They can make the ‘I’ happy or sad, and they can make the ‘I’ perceive pleasure and pain, and all the other mental and emotional reactions of which an ‘I’ is capable.

You could put all this into a nutshell as follows: I doesn’t matter in the end if the world is real or not real. One way or another, we experience the world as real. Therefore we may as well act as if it was real. Especially so, as we are moral agents and have the ability to influence other human beings in their perceptions (i.e. with pain or pleasure). So that, in the end, real and sham are nothing more substantial than debating points. What matters is what we experience. The risk is only that thereby we oversimplify the complexity of the world, especially of those parts which are too big or too small for us to experience, but also those aspects (such as spiritual ones) which require special attunement to be perceived.

Consider finally, that even if nothing is real, but only perceptions, the greatest curiosity is that just about all human beings have the same perceptions of the same things. So there is a concordance among human perceptions which might at least suggest their source is ‘real’ and external to the perceiving agent. This makes it much more difficult to uphold the notion that these perceptions are all events in the mind of the perceiver. The old adage ‘reality bites’ is useful to remember in all discussions of this issue, especially if one of these bites doesn’t just hurt you, but kills!

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

 

Uncial asked:

I have a question about Craig Skinner’s recent reply to a question about teleportation. I noticed repeated use of the idea of an exact molecular copy of my body.

Thinking about how this might work, it occurred to me that (a) there are so many different velocities going on simultaneously, wouldn’t it cause problems with a half, a third, a quarter, an eighth etc motion being recorded? (b) if on the other hand the time slice is so small as to include them all, the result would surely be a motionless image? (c) but if this is true, how can the copy restart the motion without some information on the direction of every molecule? (d) how could the copy be alive?

It seems to me that at the instant of taking the scan, a lot of information needed to make another living body is just not there. Or am I missing something?

Answer by Craig Skinner

No, you’re not missing something. Contrariwise, you’ve put your finger on something important. In these thought experiments, we talk glibly about scanning/ reconstruction with little thought as to whether it could ever actually be done. It may be that the idea is no more workable than the 19th century fiction of sewing together body parts and animating the whole thing with bolts of electricity.

Consider first how a human is naturally made.

It requires:

* information specifying the form
* assembly of matter into the specified form

Information: this is coded in the DNA sequence (genome) of the starting cell (fertilized egg, zygote). It is transcribed into a similar RNA sequence which is then translated by ribosomes into amino acids (translation from Nucleotidian into Aminoacidean) which join up to make proteins. These proteins provide cell structure and function (enzymes).

Assembly: this happens by growth/ development. The original cell repeatedly divides producing different cell lines expressing different bits of the genome, helped along by environmental cues, positional information, chemical gradients and cell-to-cell signals.

In our scan-and-build fantasy, instead of growing a human from an existing living cell, we seek to capture the information as a database obtained by scanning a living adult human and then assemble a duplicate by some nanotech tour-de-force whereby we build the human, molecule by molecule, using the database information.

Let’s consider each of the two steps.

Information: as your question suggests, no scan could capture the exact location/ momentum of all moving parts (the uncertainty principle disallows this for even one electron). But this wouldn’t be necessary. After all I continuously exchange molecules with the environment so that my exact molecular constitution changes second by second whilst I remain me. So, there is redundancy in the information, which gives us some leeway. However, what would be necessary is exact information for every one of my trillions of cells as to structure of DNA, RNA, ribosomes, proteins including enzymes, chemical messengers, neurotransmitters, cell surface markers and chaperone molecules. Otherwise cells couldn’t function, either in themselves, or cooperatively as a living organism. I doubt this could ever be done. But let’s say it could so that we can consider step two.

Assembly: we have the software (the scan database in our computer). We have the matter to build the hardware (wetware) in vats of the necessary chemicals. But the software and the chemicals are inert. How can we make them interact so as to assemble a human form. If we had some fancy nanotechnology capable of picking up the right molecules and placing them one by one from the soles of the feet upwards say, what would stop them falling in a heap long before a body was made. And, as you suggest, since the database is a static snapshot, how could the right motion be imparted to the molecules of the new body so that we end up with a living breathing human rather than a corpse.

I suspect the only way to make a human is to start with the form in potential i.e. a zygote, or maybe another suitable human cell, and, by growth/ development, in-form dumb matter to make the form actual i.e. a human being. Aristotle said all this a long time ago (but then messed it up by suggesting some lifeforms arise spontaneously from decaying matter, an erroneous notion that persisted into the 19th century).

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

 

Natalie asked:

What is the number one?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I’m going to disappoint you. This question is the sort that everyone should be able to answer – including an untutored child. But as you asked for a philosopher to respond, you must have some inkling about the deep ramifications of identifying just what Number 1 truly identifies. You could look it up in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book Delta, ch. 6. He gives a rational answer that should serve you in all but the most extreme of counterintuitive situations. But if you are really determined to get to the bottom of it, you must read Russell & Whitehead, Principles of Mathematics. But let me warn you that it’s not an easy text to get to grips with. For a start, there is very little English in it; and then the authors felt obliged to construct a foolproof system of presuppositions, which takes them over 300 pages before they actually come to a definition of ‘1’. You will excuse me, I hope, if I refuse to give the ‘gist’ of 300 pages in one paragraph. But these are your choices – or else you stick with everyone’s convenience and take the ‘1’ for granted!

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

 

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

There’s an easier book than Russell and Whitehead’s Principia by the man who invented modern logic, Gottlob Frege: Foundations of Arithmetic, translated by the Oxford ‘ordinary language’ philosopher, J.L. Austin — the last person you’d expect to translate a work full of arcane symbolism.

In fact, Frege’s book is a joy to read and a great introduction to the philosophy of mathematics.

Frege recognized that there are two questions to ask about numbers, generally. The first question is about what we are describing when we say, for example, that there is one can of beans in the cupboard. The second, and more metaphysical question, is what we are referring to when we use the names, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’ etc.

IS the can of beans one? But it is also many (a few thousand). It is also trillions (of molecules). Using his new logic, Frege showed how, when numbers are used to count, the number is a property of a concept, e.g. ‘can of beans’, rather than an object. To say that there is one can of beans, and only one, is to say that there is an object x which has the property ‘can of beans in the cupboard’, and if there is any y with that property, then y=x.

The problem is that we have simply used the concept of identity to explain the concept of one. The only response to this is to admit that the two notions are fundamentally the same. The very possibility of there being ‘objects’ presupposes the idea of identity. That’s a logical point of some significance.

The second, metaphysical question, what objects numbers refer to, led Frege to put forward a theory that numbers are classes. The number one is the class of all classes which have exactly one member. Similarly for two, three etc. Frege’s idea here was that the notion of a class is more fundamental than the notion of number, and so counts as a genuine explanation.

Frege discovered, late in his career, that the definition he had proposed led to an insoluble paradox — named ‘Russell’s paradox’ after the famous philosopher who grappled with it.

A significant portion of the history of 20th century mathematical logic has been concerned with the various responses to Russell’s paradox, offering a theory of what numbers ‘are’. However, there are sceptics who would say that Frege’s first answer, what we are doing when we call something ‘one’, is all one needs to say. The metaphysical question what the number one is, in itself, doesn’t have an answer; or, equally, there are any number of equally valid ‘answers’.

http://www.philosophypathways.com/vita.html