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.

Manjinder asked:

Who invented philosophers and why?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

This is an old story. No-one knows if it’s true. But it’s one of those stories that seems so true, they should be.

About 2500 years ago there was a man called Pythagoras, who had a private school going in Kroton, which is in Italy. In this school he taught mathematics, music and astronomy. Many of the citizens were worried about this difficult curriculum. Why is this fellow teaching these really hard subjects? And also: how come he is so clever and we are so dull? There was quite a bit of jealousy about, you see. In those days all schools were private, so many ordinary people missed out on going to school.

Now at the same time, there were similar schools all over the Mediterranean teaching similar subjects. Many of the uneducated Greeks were suspicious of them as well. Why? Because they did not teach you religion and what the gods are all about, but the sciences.

So they called those people who taught and studied in those school ‘logographoi’. The word means, in English, ‘people who use their brains and write books’.

And so, back to Pythagoras in Kroton. One day a man came up to him in the market place and asked him: ‘Hey, Pythagoras, is it possible that you are one of these logographoi?’

Pythagoras may have thought to himself, this fellow wants to pick a fight with me. So he just smiled and said instead: ‘I am a friend of wisdom!’

In Greek, friend=philo and wisdom=sophia. So the word he used was ‘Philosopher’.

And from then on, people like him — people who think and teach wisdom — have been called philosophers.

Elizabeth asked:

Is God necessary for objective morality? Is he sufficient?

Answer by Peter Jones

By my calculations God would be neither necessary nor sufficient for this purpose. The ethical schemes of Schopenhauer and the Buddha, for two well-known examples of what you may mean by objective moral schemes, do not depend on God, and would fail if there were a God who could interfere with the operations of Nature. So He is not necessary for such a scheme.

And then, even if God told me that some action was right or wrong why should I believe Him? I might prefer my own ethical scheme. So neither is He sufficient. This is not flippancy or disrespect, it is the logic of the situation. You could try googling ‘Hobbes Leviathan’ for a long discussion.

For an ethical scheme that is truly objective, that can be derived directly from Nature, that would function inevitably according to the way the universe simply is, then try also Lao Tsu. For this view the laws of Heaven and Earth would follow ineluctably from Tao being what it is, and there would be no God to have any choice in the matter.

Ben asked:

The philosopher who best represents the idea that we are a bundle of neurons is probably who?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Some preliminary remarks.

I take it that ‘we’ refers to each of us as an individual.

When I speak of ‘you’ or ‘I’ I could be referring to:

* a human being (member of the species Homo sapiens)

* a self (an inner mental presence which every normal adult human feels she is or has at any waking moment)

* a person (mental entity with psychological connectedness through time; however, the word is also sometimes used as a synonym for ‘self’ or for ‘human being’).

Clearly an adult human being is not a bundle of neurons (nerve cells), but does include exactly that (a brain) as part of itself.

Neither a self nor a person, being a mental entity, is a bundle of neurons either, but it’s widely accepted that they,

* arise from or

* equate to or, at very least,

* require

the activity of a brain.

So, whilst nobody quite says we are bundles of neurons, there are those who say a self is a ‘bundle of perceptions’, and those who say a self is the behaviour of ‘a pack of neurons’.

Hume famously wrote that minds or selves or persons (he used these words loosely and interchangeably) are ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions’ (by ‘perceptions’ he meant what we call ‘experiences’). He could find no evident connexion between successive, fleeting bundles of experience ie no evidence of a persisting ‘self’ (obviously if we say the connexion is that each introspected bundle is mine we beg the question as to a persisting self). This Transience View of mental selves was later held by William James and is popular today, a notable advocate being Galen Strawson, and is a view held by some Buddhists. Others, including other Buddhists, think that such fleeting mental entities don’t deserve the status of ‘selves’ (as compared with the robustly substantial, persisting, traditional ‘soul’) and so think the self is an illusion. I prefer to think of them as virtual selves constructed anew, moment by moment, by a brain.

The late great scientist Francis Crick introduces his popular brain science book The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994) as follows:

”You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells… As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons’.’

So Hume, James, Strawson the Younger, Buddha, Crick and Alice in Wonderland are on your case.

Finally, the dualistic view that the ‘self’ is a persisting non-material substance, the ‘res cogitans’ of Descartes, the ‘soul’ of Christianity, distinct from the body, is less popular than it was, especially among philosophers and scientists.

Debra asked:

What is time? Does it exist outside the human experience, and can we prove it exists at all?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

There is no question that time is not a matter of experience. We don’t possess time sensors. People who are locked into solitary confinement lose all sense of time after a while, especially if they can’t see the light outside. For example, Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo marked the wall with the passing of days for 14 years, so as to keep a hold on the time he was locked up. But he had a little hole in his prison to see the light changing.

So you see that time is our creation. Without light, and its constant rhythmical cycle, there is no time.

Another way we observe time is when things age and decay. But this is not time. It is things changing, and we associate those changes with something moving along which we call time. But of course nothing is moving except the processes which cause those changes.

So time does not exist for any object that does not move. We could not measure time except that we can observe things changing. So all our definitions of time refer to the motions of things and their cycling and their ageing.

Time is for us a way of locating ourselves in a present, and we call what went before ‘the past’ and what may still happen ‘the future’. But strictly speaking this is just a convention. When you think about it, there is never a ‘present’. What you experience now has already gone, at least a split second before you experience it.

You might be interested in how philosophers like Parmenides arrived at their paradoxical notion of a block universe, or how religions teach us that all time is one for God. It is a tacit acknowledgement by us that time is a purely human phenomenon. So the Bible and the Greek philosophers (or some of them) knew this. Parmenides made the correct observation that we humans can only experience phenomena. But the gods in their heavens see everything at once.

The gods don’t experience time because there is no time when you take away the phenomena. This explains why they got bored stiff with their unchanging world and decided, every so often, to transform themselves into creatures and cause problems for us humans. Where else could they find their entertainment?

But we humans have more than enough entertainment, and every civilisation that goes beyond the struggle for survival becomes a kindergarten. Everything we do is play, of course some of it not very pleasant. No wonder the gods are jealous of us. Not because we have time, but because we have feelings, and feelings can’t exist in an eternity without time or space to play.