Nate asked:

The fundamental objection to materialism is that sense perception is unreliable, so our empirical knowledge of the world is faulty. true or false?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Your premise is false, because you adopt a false perspective on the matter. Sense perception is, on the contrary, highly efficient. If it were not the case, you would not be alive to ask the question. The fact that hallucinations are possible does not negate it. Being human means making mistakes. We only realise when we make mistakes that there are such things as mistakes. Otherwise humans would be gods.

So our knowledge of the empirical world is perfectly reliable. It is survival knowledge. It does not necessarily mean that the world is exactly as we perceive it. But once you familiarise yourself with the miracle of sense perception, you will clap your hands in wonder, instead of making such feeble assumptions as your question presupposes. For example, our senses, in addition to being very competent, also produce phenomena in our mind which enable us to make good images of our empirical surroundings which are meaningful. There are certain types of radiation that are not coloured; but your senses and mind collude in making you see colours to help your orientation.

So it would much better for you to learn some astonishment at the richness of the empirical world which, for example, a deaf and blind person cannot experience. Try imagining what kind of a life you would have living in permanent silence and blackness!

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Elaine asked:

So… I’m a regular high school student who has run across the problem of not knowing what a monad is try so hard to understand what Leibniz what trying to explain but it seems like monads are just a substance of everything. They’re described as if they are alive yet they don’t exist and at the same time they already know what they’re suppose to do yet still nonexistent…*sigh* I’m trying to understand it all but in a way I can’t please help!

Answer by Martin Jenkins

‘Monads’ or ‘Monadology’ is Leibniz’s response to the philosophical debate started by Descartes. As Descartes had established the existence of two substances Extension (my body, your body, bodies generally, objects in the world, the world itself) and Mind (Thinking, unextended), one immediate problem arose as to how the two could interact as Descartes had argued they did.

Descartes never arrived at a satisfactory solution to this problem and it served to occupy thinkers such as Spinoza and Leibniz in their ponderings on the nature of Substance

The Problem of Substance

Following the influence of Aristotle, the nature of reality, of what is (Ontos Greek) was deemed to be that of Substance – the building block(s) of reality. Substances could be defined by their characteristics or Attributes. So the attribute of Mind was that it Thinks. Attribute of Body is that it is extended – has length, breadth, heights, can be measured and it occupies space.

If there are a plurality of Substances and not just one, then they will interact with each other – as Descartes had proposed Mind and Body do. This led to problems as to how to define, categorise and understand them. For if substance A causally interacts with substance B, – causes changes or effects in it – B will be affected by A and vice versa. Hence the clear water of substance definition becomes very muddied and it is hard to understand what part of a substance comes from another to the point where a pure substance and a corresponding definition of it becomes impossible.

The solution Spinoza proffered for this problem was that it was logically impossible for there to be more than one substance. Substance was self-generating and sustaining, it did not interact with any other substance and did not owe its existence to any other. In short, a single substance ruled out and problems associated with the causal relation of one substance to another. Spinoza deemed this single, all inclusive substance to be God or Nature (Deus sive Natura). Mountains, human beings, the computer screen before me are modifications of this single substance.

Why the detour with Spinoza? Because it contrasts and therefore provides an insight into the solution to substance interaction by Leibniz.

Leibniz

Each spirit [human being] is a substance. Leibniz calls them Monads. Like each human being, each monad has its own perspectives at any given time just as a building will appear differently from different perspectives. As they are created by God. God knows everything the monad will or will not do a-priori as God possesses true knowledge. In other words, God eternally knows the ‘what-ness’ and ‘is-ness’ (Haicceity) of each monad. This is stated in the example of Alexander the Great (#8 Discourse on Metaphysics. DM). That is, each Monad has an ‘individual notion’, its Idea which contains all it is, ever will be, ever will do.

As God knows the individual notion or idea of each Monad will do, the Monads cannot deviate from this as God knowing would be wrong – which as God is perfection, is impossible. So each monad is, so to speak, like clock-work: it is wound up by God and in unwinding, it lives its life: everything the monad does in its life is contained in and determined by the ‘winding-up’. (#13. DM)

As so ‘wound-up’ by God, each Monad will do its own thing, regardless of any other Monad. This is what is meant by the term ‘windowless monad’, there is no influence from outside the monad, it is enclosed in itself and executes its own life as determined by God’s knowledge. Hence as Leibniz writes that each monad expresses the universe in its own way. (#9. DM)
So the problem of substance interaction and knowing the nature/identity of each substance or monad is solved by Leibniz.

There is no influence from any other monad into/onto another. It may appear so as when two people bump into each other for example, but again; God has already anticipated this as he knows it by knowing our individual notion. As he knows it, the interaction of one monad with another is pre-established by God and everything occurs according to this divine knowing and not by our individual will. Hence, it is all a matter of ‘pre-established harmony’. (#15. DM)

Monads do exist! They are created by God and depend upon it for their existence (emanation). They can also be called ‘souls’. Only God can create and end the existence of a Monad. As there are millions of monads, there are millions of corresponding views or perspectives of the Universe by each monads. This is in actuality, the view each of us has from the standpoint of our own, individual lives.

Hope this is of use regular high school student Elaine.

Martin Jenkins received the ISFP Fellowship for his dissertation ‘Aristocratic Radicalism or Anarchy? An Examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Will to Power’. He is a Pathways Mentor and an Editors of Philosophy Pathways

Alex asked:

What exactly is a moral dilemma? Is it just a difficult moral decision? What is it about dilemmas that prevents them from being resolved by appeal to a moral theory like utilitarianism?

Answer by Craig Skinner

In the strict sense, there is no such things as a moral dilemma. Only moral conflicts.

Loosely, moral conflicts are sometimes called dilemmas, but I find this confusing and prefer simply to refer to conflicts.

Conflicts cant always be resolved on utilitarian grounds because the utilities (value, welfare) attaching to the different options sometimes have no common metric.

Let me explain.

1. No moral dilemmas, just conflicts

This is a bit technical, but it cant be helped.

According to standard formulation, a moral dilemma requires:

(a) each of two actions is morally required
(b) neither requirement overrides the other
(c) I can do either action but not both
(d) there is inevitable moral failure

When you measure actual conflicts against these standards, none is a dilemma. Two standard examples will illustrate.

In Sophie’s choice there is a moral requirement that she protect both her children. But this is denied her by the cruel prison guard. Her choice to save one child (rather than, say, spit in the guard’s face and tell him he can do his worst) is a moral one. But the choice of which child to save, though heartbreaking, is not a moral choice, she may as well toss a coin to decide. And if she does save one child, she is not guilty of a moral failure (though she would feel she was all her life).

In Sartre’s example of the young man torn between joining the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers who had killed his brother, and staying with his old mother whose only consolation he was, neither option is morally required (obligatory), only morally desirable.

Formally, there is a proof that a moral dilemma, as defined above, plus The Principle of Deontic Consistency (the same action cant be both obligatory and forbidden) and the Principle of Deontic Logic (if, necessarily, doing A yields B, then if A is obligatory, B is obligatory), yields a contradiction. So, to hold on to moral dilemma, you must give up one of these Principles (unpalatable), or change the definition of a dilemma. But doing the latter blurs any distinction between dilemma and conflict, which is why I find it simplest and least confusing just to refer to moral conflicts.

2, Conflicts not always resolvable

Typically, the moral principle is a different one for each option, and you cant compare them, only plump for one or other as right for you. So, in the Sartre case, the relative utility or value of contributing to the happiness of a mother who has already lost one son, and showing solidarity with friends risking their lives as Resistance fighters, cant be measured, it’s comparing chalk and cheese, and the young man must just choose. Indeed Sartre emphasizes the now-familiar existentialist points that we have radical freedom to make choices, the need to make some or other choice, the absence of any person, god or principle that can decide for us, the total responsibility we have for the effects of our choices, the loneliness of the situation, and the fact that our choices make us the persons we are and will become.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Elaine asked:

So… I’m a regular high school student who has run across the problem of not knowing what a monad is i try so hard to understand what Leibniz what trying to explain but it seems like monads are just a substance of everything. They’re described as if they are alive yet they don’t exist and at the same time they already know what they’re suppose to do yet still nonexistent… *sigh* I’m trying to understand it all but in a way i can’t please help!

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I sympathise with your predicament. Unfortunately it is difficult to overcome if, like most students, you read only the Monadology, which is not the work where Leibniz explains everything. The complete theory of the monads is spread across several writings and has to be pieced together from them. You might wonder why this is the case; and the answer is that Leibniz wrote not just for professional philosophers, but also tried to explain the monads to interested amateurs who were mainly interested in how it might solve their religious problems. These papers usually give a predigested account with the readers’ understanding of Christian doctrines in mind and skate over some of the deeper issues. The Monadology is one of these papers, written for perusal by a French Minister of State. A companion piece (‘Principles of Nature and Grace’) was written for Prince Eugene, a soldier.

Now if you are really serious about it, there is an excellent book by Nicholas Rescher: ‘Monadology, A Student Edition’, which does exactly what I’ve just said by collecting all the papers concerning the monadology in one volume. It explains every one of the numbered paragraphs and adds relevant texts from others of Leibniz’ writings, including some of his philosophical letters.

On the other hand, if you just wish to have a simple explanation to remove your confusion, I’ll give you the gist of it.

Leibniz was attempting to give a philosophical account of the smallest possible particle; and how all the matter, dead and alive, could be derived from this particle as the final building block. To this extent it is clearly a ‘substance metaphysics’. But the underlying idea is more familiar to us today as a scientific proposition. Leibniz would have wondered why we make this distinction!

He finally arrived at the notion that force is this final building block. But he gave it the name ‘monad’. Obviously this is not alive! He never claims it is alive; this is just a misunderstanding of his occasional remark (to religious people) that they should think of the monad like ‘a little soul’.

Now everything in the universe exhibits force, but you never see force ‘by itself’. We see it when it plays a role in the motions and collisions of objects. So he conceived of force as an infinity of points of energy that are spread throughout the universe. Evidently so small that we cannot perceive them as points, but only as an all-pervasive field.

The point is now, that both matter and life draw their energy from this force. There are several kinds of force corresponding to the four basic kinds of matter. The totally dead stuff, like rock or iron, which is inert. The absolutely alive stuff, like minds and souls. And all the gradations in between, such as our animal bodies that integrate matter and force.

Evidently this entails that force is itself transformed when it creates a condition of existence. Leibniz explains it this way: That innumerable monads congregate to make an existent. If it is alive, then animation results from a predominance of active force. If it is dead, then inert force is responsible. So there is a stepladder upward from mere matter to almost pure mind. But every existent has some passive force in it (matter), and every piece of matter has some little quantity of live force in it.

I hope this clears up a little of the picture. You will of course have observed that Leibniz brings God into the picture almost obsessively. It was evidently important to him to be perceived as a pious thinker, and it can make matters difficult for us. But as I hinted earlier, Leibniz was both a philosopher and a scientist. His first published paper was a New Theory of Physics! Bear this in mind, and try not to read his works in an exclusively philosophical mode.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Nicholas asked:

Is one of the reasons there are no time travellers visiting us (the general public) in the past because time travel is never seriously researched, given the stigma attached to the subject, and thus is never invented ? Could there be other reasons, such as future government regulation/monitoring or limited use as another reason for no time travelling tourists in the past or present so to speak ? Thank you for your time.

Answer by Craig Skinner

Why indeed no time tourists from the future. No record of hordes of oddly-dressed strangers in the crowd in contemporary accounts of Christ’s crucifixion or Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, although both events would be enduring favourites on the must-see list of future time tourists.

Possible reasons are:

1. Time travel (TT) to the past is logically impossible.

2. TT to the past is metaphysically impossible.

3. TT to the past is nomologically impossible.

4. TT to the past is physically impossible.

5. TT to the past is possible, but no further back than the date of invention of the time machine.

6. TT to the past is possible but prevented/limited by future government or by lack of research (your suggestions).

Of these, I favour 4. and 5.

I will deal briefly with each.

1. Logically impossible: TT to the future presents no in-principle problem. First, we all do it, albeit at the same rate of one hour per hour. Secondly, time dilatation predictions of Special Relativity are well-confirmed: thus, were I to go on a space flight reaching near-light speeds, returning 10 years older, I would find the Earth thousands of years older. But I could never return to the earlier time. This effect has been confirmed for particles in accelerators, and the expected very tiny effect for big objects in ordinary flight.

But TT to the past allegedly yields logical impossibilities (grandfather paradox; free-knowledge paradox). I don’t think this is so. Remember that the actions of future time tourists are already built-in to the past, there is only one past, not different versions, the past can’t be changed, although TTs might have had a hand in bringing it about in the first place. Thus, you didn’t kill your grandfather when he was a boy, so no matter how often you go back in time intending to kill him, you always fail to pull it off.

So, in my view, TT is logically possible.

2. Metaphysically impossible: if the past doesn’t exist, there is no destination, so TT impossible. So argue ‘presentists’. But I favour the ‘block’ view of past/present/future all existing, and will assume this. In fact, even on a presentist view, a coherent story about TT can be told, but it is more complicated and I will leave it out.

So, TT is metaphysically possible.

3. Nomologically impossible: this means contrary to the laws of nature (as they happen to be in our universe). Most scientists believe that this is not the case. And I will go along with that.

So, TT is nomologically possible.

4. Physically impossible: although allowed by natural law, there may be insufficient resources in the universe to actually do it. Thus current suggestions as to how TT could be engineered (spacetime wormhole; colossal rotating cylinder) need incredible amounts of energy or large amounts of exotic matter, maybe more than a whole galaxy (or more) could provide.

So TT might remain forever a practical impossibility.

5. TT but no further back than time-machine invention: current schemes entail this, and of course it explains why no time tourists so far.

6. Government controls/ lack of research: I doubt the former would stop determined groups with the technical knowhow and resources. But it would be a lot of resources for little gain. After all, nothing would change, the actions of any visitors from the future have already been built in to all past events. I don’t think any stigma attaches to TT, or that research is or will be limited by apathy. It’s perennially popular with scientists, philosophers, writers and the public, and will remain so unless it’s shown to be impossible, and I doubt this will happen.

It’s amusing to speculate that in the distant future we, or our successors, whether biological or machines, might discover how to create universes with desired laws of nature, travel back to the singularity 14 billion years ago and destabilize it resulting in the Big Bang which starts off our universe.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Jovain asked:

The knowledge of the truth, does it necessarily entails the dispersion of illusion?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

You cannot speak of truth as something unrelated to human beings. Truth is a concept; it does not exist all by itself. So it is meaningful only in a human context. Accordingly the same applies to illusion. Knowing the difference between them relies on common human experience.

Illusions are generally speaking false interpretations of certain states of affairs. They can also result from defects in perception. Both we know about both only because, on the whole, we make correct interpretations and inferences of the states of affairs that rule of our life. To say, for example, that our senses are fallible, is saying precisely nothing. They are fallible in a limited degree. Instead of drawing the conclusion that ‘therefore’ we can’t trust our senses, we should be astonished how reliable they are. Most illusions are indeed not mistakes by our senses, but of our judgement on the report of the senses. Knowing this throws a different complexion on the matter!

I suspect, however, that your word ‘illusion’ should really be ‘delusion’. Illusion has very little to do with truth–rather with mistakes. Whereas delusion is a more direct counterpart to truth. We humans have been beset by delusions of many kinds throughout human history. Sometimes, after a long period of believing them to be the truth, we decide that they did not conform to the truth, since we found a better truth in the interim.

That’s typical. Our deepest desire is for a meaning of life; and since we cannot find it in the empirical world, we hope to find it in the spiritual world. And so we become vulnerable to what our authority figures claim to be truths that confer meaning on our existence. Most religions fall into this class, which is why there is a constant stream of different faiths and why many end when they are replaced by new ones which offer a more needful or convincing truth. But this does not solve the problem of delusion, because ultimately there is no objective yardstick to either the truth or to delusion.

Accordingly there is no single truth to remove every trace of delusion. We can be cured of many illusions by knowledge of truthful facts; but we cannot be cured of delusions unless we actually wish to abandon them.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org