Ozzy asked:

Heraclitus says that everything is changing all the time. List at least two problems with believing this. Do you think that they can be overcome?

Miriam asked:

Could you please tell me what Socrates speech in Plato’s dialogue ‘Parmenides’ is about? in your opinion?

Paula asked:

Explain what it means for Plato to side with Parmenides more than Heraclitus.

Peter asked:

How did Plato resolve the problem of permanence?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

I’m taking these questions together because they all relate in one way or another to Plato’s theory of Forms. Parmenides and Heraclitus were Plato’s great predecessors. I am going to say something controversial here: Plato agreed with Parmenides and he also agreed with Heraclitus. They were both ‘right’ as far as he was concerned.

What are Forms? The common explanations I’ve seen of this are misleading at best. I remember as a school student in Chemistry first hearing about Plato’s belief that there is an ‘Ideal Table’, a heavenly Table that all actual tables more or less closely resemble. And similarly for all other things that we recognize and give a name to. This is complete piffle, as I will explain below.

In answer to each question:

No, Ozzy, there was no real problem for Heraclitus in the notion that ‘everything is changing all the time’ although there seems to be. If everything is changing all the time, how is it that we are able to refer to things, or recognize something as ‘the same again’? If everything is changing all the time how is it that all sorts of things that we see around us don’t seem to change?

The answer isn’t ‘some things change very slowly so it isn’t a problem’ (I’ve actually seen this proposed by a dimwitted commentator) but rather that there is one thing that is universal and can never change: the Logos. The Logos describes the rules by which things appear to change or not change, transform into other things rapidly or over a longer period of time. If you have Logos you don’t need permanent ‘stuff’ as well. All there is, is the Logos and appearances. You can think of the Logos as ‘the laws of nature’ but Heraclitus had something much more abstract in mind then a specific set of rules. Logos is rationality, reason itself. The human soul is part of, or participates in the Logos. That is how you and I are able to reason things out — because of a fundamental ‘fit’ between our minds and reality. Brilliant!

Miriam, I don’t know which ‘speech’ you are referring to specifically but I can guess. In Plato’s late (and arguably greatest) dialogue Parmenides the young Socrates meets the elderly Parmenides (a meeting that so far as we know did not actually take place). In the first part of the dialogue, Parmenides quizzes Socrates on his thoughts about the Forms, then in the second part Socrates turns the tables and gives Parmenides’ theory of the One a thorough working over.

The first question Parmenides puts to Socrates is deceptively simple: what sort of things have Forms? Is there a Form for hair? How about a Form for mud? Oh, no! says Socrates, not that kind of stuff. ‘That is because you are still young,’ remarks Parmenides, condescendingly, ‘When you are older you will learn not to despise such things.’

Why would there be a Form for hair? Human beings have hair, it is one of their constant, universal attributes. Why is that? Why are any attributes of anything universal? Why don’t some ‘human beings’ have metal spikes instead of hair? Why do we find life in general divided into kinds? Mud looks more like a random a mixture of stuff — you can have every kind of mud, and between any two samples of different kinds of mud, you can mix the two together. But if you think of mud as made from water and earth, then you may begin to see that the physical properties of mud are not so random after all.

Paula, you are just plain wrong in saying that Plato ‘sided more with Parmenides than Heraclitus’. Or, rather, your teacher is. (I’m guessing that this was a question you were given.) Parmenides realized that apart from all the things we talk about or perceive around us, the things about which we say, ‘it is’, or ‘it is not’, there has to be something that simply IS, full stop. Things change IN reality, but reality, what IS, cannot change. He called this the One. There are various ways of spelling this out — and much controversy over exactly what Parmenides meant — but I’ll keep things simple. A few days ago, you posted your question on Ask a Philosopher. That’s a fact. It will still be a fact in 1000 years time, or after the human race has become extinct. What IS, is, and can never not be.

As I’ve already explained, Heraclitus is not in fundamental disagreement with the idea that what IS is unchanging. The Logos IS. The notion that the Logos could be different from one day, or millennium, to another is something Heraclitus would never have entertained for one second. Reason just IS reason. ‘Fire’, ‘strife’, ‘war’ describe both metaphorically and literally the result of the continuing and unchanging hand of the Logos that ‘governs all things’.

Finally, Peter. What is the problem of permanence? Reading Plato’s earlier Socratic dialogues, the same question comes up again and again: how is it that we seem to have notions of human virtues, like ‘justice’, ‘courage’, ‘temperance’ — show by the fact that we just know when an offered definition is wrong? His answer was, because these things simply are, and never change. What human beings mistakenly or correctly call ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ is determined by the unchanging fact of Justice itself.

But, as I’ve already explained, concrete reality shows the same features as our abstract ethical concepts. Gold is always gold, horses are always horses. Gold will always have the same density. Search as hard as you like, you won’t find a continuum of animals ranging between a typical horse and a typical lion. Because they fall into ‘natural kinds’. The notion of an underlying explanation of things falling into kinds in terms of the atomist theory of Democritus and Leucippus seemed at the time far fetched or even impossible. By the principle of ‘insufficient reason’ there are atoms of every shape and size, moving randomly. How could that possibly give rise to gold, or horses?

It could be argued the greatest invention of all time was the lens (according to Wikipedia, some time between the 11th and 13th centuries) because it led to the discovery of the ordered world of the microscopic. and eventually the possibility of explanation in terms of microstructure — the laws of physics, chemistry and biochemistry. Take that away, and there’s a massive gap that can only be filled by the notion that natural kinds arise from a Logos, an ultimate classifying principle built in to the very nature of reality itself. In other words, Plato’s Forms.

What about the ideal Table, then? Plato actually uses this as an example in his dialogue Republic to explain the Forms, but he doesn’t mean simply that there is a Form of the table, in the same way as there is a Form of the human. Tables exist in a variety of shapes and sizes, but anything that is literally a ‘table’ that we use as a table (by contrast with Table Mountain, or a doll’s house table) references human need. A table is like the ground, but higher up for convenience. You can deduce the range of constructed items that satisfy the requirements of being a table from the Form of the human. For example, the range of possible lengths of a table leg. Unlike human beings, tables are made by carpenters according to specifications and plans. Folding, not folding, square, round, rectangular, and so on. This is like the way the Form of the human gives rise to the variety of human beings. But only like. It’s an analogy, nothing more.

Raheem asked:

If the universe and everything in it is consisted of matter, are my thoughts consisted of matter also? And if so, is anything and everything really possible? Does everything have a certain equation to make into reality? And if not, what are my thoughts, and why are Numbers infinite?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Materialism is a theory as old as philosophy itself — or at least Western philosophy. The Presocratic philosophers Leucippus and Democritus first proposed a picture of the universe as consisting entirely of ‘atoms and the void’. Human thought and perception are nothing but movements of atoms. (Aristotle in his critique of atomism remarks that thought atoms were held to be quick moving and slippery, like the mercury that Daedalus was fabled to have used to make his statues self-moving. Aristotle thought that was a hoot.)

The true diehard materialist takes the nominalist side in the nominalism-realism debate. In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), nominalism transmogrified into the ‘meaning is use’ theory, giving nominalism a whole new lease of life. Words are no longer just labels we pin on material things — always a rather implausible theory — but rather counters in the ‘language game’, and there are many games besides the ‘label-pinning’ game. Contemporary truth conditional semantics is the heir to Wittgenstein, dovetailing neatly into a worldview where all that exists is ultimately the objects of physics.

‘And if so, is anything and everything really possible?’ If you mean, can materialism account for everything we talk about — not just thought, but meaning, truth, possibility and necessity, numbers and abstract objects — the materialists would say, yes. They would say that, wouldn’t they?

‘And, if not… why are numbers infinite?’ It was the mathematical Intuitionist Brouwer whose 1928 Vienna lecture first provoked Wittgenstein to return to philosophy. Specifically, the problem of grasping propositions about the infinite led the Intuitionists — under the influence of Kant — to deny the validity of the Classical laws of double negation elimination and excluded middle. Numbers and numerical formulae are ‘free creations’ of the finite human mind rather than timeless Platonic entities to which mathematical propositions correspond.

I would have thought that a diehard materialist, on the other hand, ought to have no truck with infinities of any sort. If the material universe is infinite, then you could fit an infinite number of guests into an hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all occupied, just by getting each guest to move from room number x to room number 2x. (The thought experiment is known as Hilbert’s Paradox.)

Then again, if you think of a universal formula as a ‘rule’ which mathematical language users ‘follow’, then it seems you can have your cake and eat it. You can say that a universal formula is ‘true’ for all numbers (i.e. proved, justified) while at the same time denying that the rules we follow are ‘rails stretching to infinity’ as the Platonist believes.

‘And if not, what are my thoughts…?’ You don’t have be able to say what something IS, in order to be pretty sure what it is NOT. So, frankly, I don’t know. However, my present view inclines towards the notion that thought is mental action, and action is prior to everything else in the universe. The ultimate reality. What ultimately IS life, your life, my life, but the things one does, and the things the world does in response? The rest is just things ‘we’ say in our common discourse (as Heraclitus would have remarked). On this view, materialism is as unthinkable as solipsism.

— Raheem, I don’t know if this answers your question or not. (I wasn’t altogether sure what you were getting at.) I hope it helps, at any rate.

Tim asked:

My name is Timothy Fuller. I am a Philosophy and Economics B.A Graduate. I currently run my own business and continue to learn and research and aspire for Graduate Studies. Thank you for taking my question.

I am interested in the question of how physical inanimate objects can create an experience of being and living as something in real time. To take it further, how can the ‘electrical storm’, firing synapses etc, all physical create something it is to be something to be that INDIVIDUAL. To take further what would we say we are as an individual? We are not the cells of our bodies or any individual atom. We are the thing that experiences. What is that ‘thing’?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Well, Tim, as Morpheus says to Neo, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ It’s absurd, ain’t it, the very idea that the person called ‘Tim’, as an ‘individual’, just IS some physical thing, an object in the world, physical processes happening, causes and effects, all building up to make YOU?

It’s good that you took a joint degree. At least you’ve learned something useful. To pass Philosophy, you had to submit to ideological brainwashing, as all undergrads do. You learned what a ‘good argument’ or a ‘bad argument’ is, and how to tell the difference. You were punished (with bad marks) if you wrote essays that didn’t conform to the accepted view of a ‘good’ essay in philosophy, that is to say, an essay developed from, based upon the ‘correct’ assumptions and argued according to the accepted canons of ‘good’ argument.

And one of the things you were taught is that materialism — the materialist view of the self — is a perfectly reasonable theory, and that any arguments based on your subjective sense or intuition that ‘it just can’t be true’ are irrelevant, or just an expression of your mental incapacity. I know how you feel, because I went through this too.

First, let’s get rid of the aura around ‘electricity’. (‘Elastic trickery,’ as I remember it being called in some TV comedy program.) Ever since Galvani succeed in making frog legs twitch when he applied a current, electricity and electrical processes have had an inexpressible mystique. Electricity goes its own way invisibly up and down silver wires and round and round printed circuits. Nothing moves, yet everything is happening.

I was once the proud owner of an original Sony radio with nine transistors. Nine! A marvel of the modern age. That was the 60s. (Wish I’d kept it, it would be worth a fortune on eBay.) Today, an ordinary desktop computer contains hundreds of millions of transistors. The mind boggles.

Get rid of all that. Put it out of your mind. Numbers are just numbers. Imagine instead that the thing you call ‘you’ was made of wooden cogs and pulleys, twisted rubber bands, paper, plasticine et cetera. It’s long been an accepted axiom of AI that the ‘program’ is all that matters.

Neural networks are the latest thing, but they are just a minor variant. It was always suspected that computers could do a better job of programming themselves than we can do, using our limited human knowledge. Hence the remarkable success of AlphaZero. If the supercomputer running AlphaZero was made of wood and rubber, etc. how big would it have to be? How long would it take to calculate a chess move? As I said, numbers are irrelevant.

I am not going to repeat arguments I’ve given in other posts on this topic. (Just do a search through these pages.) There’s no other way to put it: materialists believe in magic. Something magical happens when sufficiently many pulleys and cogs and rubber bands are assembled together. YOU come into existence. How utterly ridiculous!

Joshua asked:

Am always wondering: is every creative book a philosophical work? Since authors think before they write, are they not engaged in philosophy? For example, was Franz Kafka “thinking philosophically” when he decided to write “Metamorphosis”?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Gregor is not a bad man. Like many millions of his fellow citizens, he has taken on the burden of supporting his family financially. His work as a salesman is thankless and hard — like so many millions of hard working men. He wakes up one morning to discover that he has undergone metamorphosis into a giant insect. His just reward?

In a version of ‘Metamorphosis’ made into a play which I saw years ago, the insect in question is a cockroach, which is how I always picture Gregor.

Yes, this is philosophy. But the question to ask is what exactly can philosophy be, if Kafka’s novel is an example of it. Ian Fleming, an author I have enjoyed, ‘thought before he wrote’. He has an eye for pungent detail. But you’d have to work hard to find philosophical ideas in his novels, or in the mind of his character James Bond. Stoicism perhaps. Belief in the absolute priority of serving his country, and the ability to withstand gruesome torture in pursuit of his aim.

(That’s one thing Kafka and Fleming have in common — a talent for describing the gruesome.)

For me, there can be only one answer: philosophy is concerned with the ultimate questions. What is reality? Why are we here? What is the point of living? Is anything really ‘good’ or ‘bad’ except in relation to our likes and dislikes?

Looking around the world of professional philosophy, I see relatively few ‘philosophers’ by this criterion. If the rest were to undergo metamorphosis, I imagine them turning into clouds of bluebottles, looking around for rotting carcasses to gorge themselves on. You can spend your entire professional life mining some narrow topic in philosophical logic. Become the unquestioned authority in three-valued logic, or backwards causation, or whatever.

Who cares?

Joshua, if you want to think about the ultimate questions, then, yes, you’re probably better reading novels. But that’s not the answer, because you really need to go back to when philosophy began, with the Presocratics, to feel, with them, the sense of urgency in trying to make sense of what sort of ‘world’ or ‘cosmos’ we live in, what is the right way to live, what are the capacities and limits of human reason, and so on. Then go forward from there.

I don’t spend all of my time thinking about the ultimate questions, because you have to have a balanced diet. Protein and carbohydrate (complex, preferably). And fat too, for the brain. I can debate the pros and cons of three-valued logic as well as anyone. I also have interests besides philosophy. But the question that really gets me going is, Why I am here? What insect would I be?

Jared asked:

Hello my question is about the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I personally do agree with the premises and the conclusion, however a person on YouTube said that you cannot say that an infinite regress does not make sense but an infinite being does. So my question is what is the difference between an infinite regress and an infinite being, can you say they are both absurd?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

What is ‘infinite’? What does that word mean? Do you know?

It’s relatively easy to say what an ‘infinite series’ is in mathematics. The simplest infinite series is generated by the rule ‘plus one’ — the series of natural numbers. The series of natural numbers is the same ‘size’ (infinite) as the series of even numbers, even though you’d think there would be twice as many. That’s one of the interesting properties of the mathematical infinite.

To talk about ‘infinity’ or ‘infinities’ is to talk about rules. However, the real world, the world of material objects, has a different sort of existence from numbers or sets. The real world isn’t the product of a mathematical rule but the arena of cause and effect, and the sequence of events in time. I don’t know what it would mean to say that THAT was ‘infinite’, do you?

You can say, ‘For every time however long ago, there is an earlier time,’ or ‘For any object however far away, there is an object further away,’ but the question is what it means for those statements to be true. For example, if stars or galaxies go on ‘for ever’ then if half the stars or galaxies were snuffed out of existence there would still be just as many as there were before.

And that’s before we even get to the problem of the ‘infinite’ regress from effects to causes. Imagine a line of falling dominoes going back into the far distance. Just a moment ago, the cascade passed us by. The line of dominoes supposedly goes back for ever. In that case, how do you explain the timing if there was no first falling domino to start the cascade?

On the other hand, if the real world can’t be ‘infinite’ it must be finite — finite in size and finite in duration. It follows that there was a time when the world (we can drop the ‘real’) didn’t exist. Then there was a time when it did. Based on the only notion we have of cause and effect, that doesn’t make any sense either. The Big Bang banged but nothing caused ‘it’ to bang. First, there was nothing, then bang. How? Why?

There is a possible way around this. Say that the laws of physics, such as gravity, are ‘real’ regardless of whether a physical world actually exists or not. Starting with a timeless truth — the truth of the laws of physics — it is held to be logically possible for matter to come into being as a so-called ‘quantum event’. That’s not ‘something’ from ‘nothing’ because the laws of physics are not nothing.

By this point, you may have noticed that the ‘timeless truth of the laws of physics’ plays, or is alleged to play, exactly the same role as the ‘infinite being’ posited by the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Either would be sufficient to generate our spatio-temporal world.

However, there is one huge difference. The laws of physics may be true, but they can at most be contingently true. There is no logical contradiction in supposing that the laws of physics might have been different, in small or large ways. The infinite being, on the other hand, can only be what it is. It’s existence is necessary. It exists in all possible worlds, exactly the same. It is a ’cause of itself’.

From now on, let’s just call it the ‘necessary being’, so that we don’t have to use the questionable term ‘infinite’. An infinite regress and a necessary being might both be absurd as your YouTube commentator claimed, but if they are, it is for different reasons.

Kant argued in Critique of Pure Reason that you can only make sense of the idea of a necessary being — a being that is the cause of itself — if you appeal to the Ontological Argument. If there can be a being sufficiently ‘perfect’ that it is a cause of its own existence, then the existence of a such being is necessary. If such a ‘perfect being’ exists any possible world, then it must exist in all possible worlds.

Because there is a necessary being, our world came into being at some specific time in the past. That’s what the Kalam Cosmological Argument states. The alternative theory, the one that posits the truth of the laws of physics, can get away with asserting that there is a probability that matter will form at one specific time rather than another specific time. That’s an interesting difference. But it leads to a conundrum.

The conundrum was first proposed by the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides two and a half thousand years ago. Speaking of what ‘is’, he asks rhetorically:

“And what need could have impelled it to grow
Later or sooner, if it began from nothing?”

As scholars have noted, what is interesting about this particular argument, is that Parmenides throws it in as an extra point, which isn’t strictly required by his case for One unchanging reality. But the point is devastating to anyone who proposes a beginning for the world in time.

Here’s the alternative: Either we have a ‘necessary being’ or ‘truth of the laws of physics’. The first implies a conscious choice, a selection: the world should be thus-and-so, it should come into existence at such-and-such a time. The other implies an inexplicably contingent throw of the dice — the thing that so annoyed Einstein about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Either way, there is a problem.

A necessary being does everything for a reason, as Leibniz insisted (the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’). But in empty time, there can be no sufficient reason for the world to be created at time t1 rather than time t2. All empty times are the same, there’s nothing to choose between them. On the other hand, if you’re relying on a throw of the dice — an inexplicable quantum contingency — you might as well chuck in the towel and just say that the world just came into existence for no reason at all.

In the case where we are relying on the truth of the laws of physics, one could claim that ‘time as we know it’ only begins with the Big Bang. So the notion of time ‘passing’ while one waits for the Big Bang to bang is meaningless. A similar move occurs with St. Thomas Aquinas’ version of the Cosmological Argument, where the necessary being timelessly ‘creates’ the temporal world from an eternal standpoint outside the temporal series.

However, we are still left with an impossible choice between implacable necessity and inexplicable contingency.

If a necessary being caused the world to come into existence, then it caused me — indirectly, through a massively long chain of causes and effects — to write this answer today. This world is the best of all possible worlds, and all the better for having my answer than not having it, Leibniz would say. If, on the other hand, the world began with a quantum event, then the only way to explain away contingency is to posit that all possible worlds are equally real. But if that’s the line we’re taking, then the problem of how or why the world began disappears altogether.

Aisha asked:

Hey so I am stuck on a Philosophy question that states:

What is Descartes argument for the existence of the soul?

I have looked everywhere online and cannot find a simple yet understandable answer — could you help?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Aisha, I am going to try to give a simple and understandable answer to your question. There is admittedly a problem with this, because what I find ‘simple’ or ‘understandable’ might not be so for you. I have to agree with you that many of the attempts I’ve seen are neither.

If I fail — my bad.

First, we need to explain the idea of identity. Everyone understands the idea of identity. Here’s an example: Batman IS Bruce Wayne. They are one and the same individual. They are identical. (According to Wikipedia, Batman is a fictional character created by Bob Kane and Bill finger. Batman’s first appearance was in Detective Comics #27, cover date May 1939, release date March 1939.) In real life, this kind of deception is pretty rare — that’s the only reason why I’m using a fictional example.

Let’s say that the Joker begins to suspect that Bruce Wayne is actually his hated enemy Batman. One night, the Joker ambushes Bruce Wayne and kills him. Shoots him full of holes, with no possibility of resuscitation. Let’s burn the body to ash, just to be sure.

The next day, ‘Batman’ foils a bank robbery. How do you and I know that the person who foiled the bank robbery isn’t really Batman? Because Batman and Bruce Wayne are the same person. If you kill Bruce Wayne, you kill Batman. If you kill Batman, you kill Bruce Wayne. The person who foiled the bank robbery can only have been someone wearing a ‘Batman’ costume, someone impersonating Batman. Because there IS no Batman. He’s dead.

So this was Descartes’ idea: can we imagine a possible scenario where my soul exists but my body does not exist? If I am just physical, then if my physical body dies then I cannot continue to exist.

Of course, we can always imagine some story about dying and going to heaven, but we’re trying to prove something. The story has got to be one that no-one could argue against. ‘I know I have a soul because when I die I will go to heaven,’ won’t work against an atheist who doesn’t believe in a place called ‘heaven’.

Here is the argument Descartes gave. It’s absolutely brilliant:

I know that I exist. That’s an absolute fact. I can’t think I exist when in fact I don’t exist, that would be nonsense. But I don’t know, not absolutely for sure, that I have a physical body. Maybe my entire life has been a dream. Maybe there is no physical universe. Maybe all there is, is just experiences, like the experiences I am having now, or the experiences you are having now.

You and I believe that we live in a physical world. Physical things exist. But the world might not have been a physical world. It is conceivable that there might not have been any physical things. But the thing I call ‘I’ would still exist in that non-physical world, and the thing you call ‘I’ would still exist in that non-physical world.

It follows that my ‘I’ and my body must be two things, they cannot be identical. Because if they were identical, then the very idea of my ‘I’ existing when my body did not exist would be absurd. It would be as absurd as thinking that Batman can exist even after Bruce Wayne has been murdered. As I have already explained, you and I know that if Bruce Wayne dies, Batman dies, and if ‘Batman’ subsequently appears, it can only be someone else wearing a Batman costume.

What is my ‘I’? We know that it is something that is not physical, because it can exist even in world where no physical things exist. Descartes calls it a ‘soul’.

But there’s a problem: if Descartes’ argument is so brilliant, why is it that most philosophers today aren’t convinced? Why do so many believe in the theory of materialism, according to which ‘I’ can only refer to something physical?

The biggest objection is to Descartes’ idea that it is ‘conceivable’ that the physical universe might not have existed and that all that existed was ‘just experiences’. That just doesn’t make any sense, these philosophers would say. It’s simply impossible. Or, if it isn’t impossible, it’s begging the question, by assuming that experiences can exist without physical bodies, brains, sense organs etc.

However, I still think there is mileage in Descartes’ idea, despite the objections. Because there is another way to run the argument about identity, which is in a way the reverse of what Descartes imagined. But it still relies on the same idea about identity.

Once again, the argument starts with the statement that I exist, and I know that I exist.

This time, instead of imagining that the physical universe might not have existed, I am considering the possibility that I might not have existed. The physical world could be just as it is now, with someone just like me answering this question on ‘Ask a Philosopher’, even though I did not exist and have never existed.

In other words, there’s a difference, an absolute logical difference, between me and someone exactly like me. But the difference isn’t a physical difference, it can’t be, because we are assuming that this person is physically like me in every detail, down to the fundamental constituents of matter. To make ‘someone exactly like me’ ME, something has to be added, something non-physical. In other words, a ‘soul’. Q.E.D.