Zach asked:

If evolution is making adaptions to your body to better suit your environment then shouldn’t conscious life i.e. humans be the peak of evolution? Since we can think we don’t have to adapt to the environment anymore we can just change it. Example would be we no longer have to compete with other animals for our food, or compete with weather we have houses and cars and heating and air conditioning.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

You’re making a fundamental mistake here. Evolution does not ‘make’ adaptations. In fact, evolution ‘makes’ nothing. Evolution is the History of Creatures on Earth, just as a book on The History of the English Speaking Peoples is a history of people who speak English. So you must immediately rid yourself of the misconception that there is some ‘power’ active on Earth that did all the evolutioning. It is nothing but a manner of speaking.

Also, you badly misjudge what competition for survival is all about. We have been doing all the things you think will improve our lot on Earth. We’ve already built millions of cars and houses, got rid of thousands of other life forms and changed millions of square miles of the habitat etc. The result is that we are in process of destroying the habitat and if we keep going this way, we will soon become extinct. This is because we are not clever enough to understand that all the other life forms – animal and vegetation – are our life support systems. Take them away and bingo! You can say good bye to humans. I suggest you need some information on evolution to help you understand better what this is all about.

Jürgen Lawrenz at PhiloSophos.com

Answer by Craig Skinner

It’s true that we change the world more than do birds with their nests and bowers, beavers with their dams, or ants and termites with their colonies and mounds.

But it hasn’t been very successful. On two counts. First, huge numbers of people live in abject poverty – try talking about housing, cars, heating, air conditioning and no need to compete with weather to flood victims in Bangladesh, slum dwellers in Mumbai, tsunami survivors or those starving due to drought. Secondly, our efforts at changing the world have led to current unsolved problems with global warming, overpopulation, species extinction, desertification and pollution.

Yes, we occupy the cognitive niche in the world’s ecology. And our direct competitors for that spot, other homo species, are long extinct, to be followed soon I fear by our cousins the gorillas, chimps, bonobos and orang-utans. But in evolutionary terms we have been around for a mere eyeblink (150,000 years, give or take, depending on what counts as homo sapiens sapiens as opposed to an ancestral homo species), so that it is far too soon to know whether the cognitive niche, or at least our occupancy of it, is stable long term.

In evolutionary terms, success is measured by how widespread a species is, and for how long. Among the winners are species of bacteria, ferns and insects which have been around for many millions, even billions, of years. And if humans went extinct tomorrow, these species wouldn’t even notice the difference.

The plight of homo sapiens can be summed up in four words: tribal species, global habitat. And until we can reconcile these two aspects, strife and environmental degradation will continue indefinitely, and our long-term survival is far from assured. It is certainly far too early for talk of humans being the peak of evolution. On the contrary, it may turn out we were a mere blip.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com

Cecile asked:

‘If there are more trees in the world than there are leaves on any one tree, and no trees have no leaves, then there are at least two trees with the same number of leaves.’

Is this statement true or false. Explain in one sentence.

Answer by Craig Skinner

It’s true.

One-sentence explanation:

If every tree has a different, whole-number of leaves, then the trees can be listed in order of leaf number, and there is a one-to-one correspondence between tree number and leaf number so that the number of trees always equals the number of leaves on the leafiest tree.

Elucidation:

Tree 1 has one leaf
Tree 2 has two leaves
…
Tree x has x leaves

Number of trees(x) always equals number of leaves (x) on leafiest tree. To get more trees than leaves, we need at least one tree with no leaves, or at least two trees with the same number of leaves.

I’m not sure whether such puzzles aid philosophical thinking, but they are entertaining. A compendium of maths puzzles, factoids, formulas and more is

Pickover C A (2005) A Passion for Mathematics: numbers, puzzles, madness, religion, and the meaning of life Wiley, New Jersey

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com

Charles asked:

My philosophy teacher says there is no tv in your head. I believe there is because how do we picture past things like my 1st grade teacher vividly.

Answer by Craig Skinner

I’d like to argue, that I’m afraid your philosophy teacher is right.

The inside of your head is cramped and pitch dark. There is nobody in there to look at anything. And no screen to be looked at.

The confusion arises from the sense-datum representational theory of perception. According to this, when I look at, say, a tree, a representation of the tree is formed in my mind. So far, so good, and true in my view. But the next step goes wrong. This representation is regarded as a picture (sense datum), and THAT is what I am looking at. Naturally, to see this picture in my head (on a tv screen if you like), a viewer is needed. So the little viewer in my head looks at the picture and sees the tree. But how does THIS viewer see it. By forming a little picture in his little head, and an even tinier viewer therein looks at that picture. And so on. An infinite regress of ever-tinier little men (homunculi) inside ever-tinier heads looking at ever-tinier pictures. Clearly absurd.

When you look at a tree, it is YOU who sees it, and what you see is the TREE, not some picture in your head. The way you do this is by converting the features of the tree, encoded in the pattern of light reaching your eyes, into patterns of electrical impulses going from eye to brain which result in a pattern of nerve cell activation in the brain corresponding to YOU seeing the tree. There are no non-physical entities in your head which must themselves be viewed. You simply see ‘treely’ as it were. Similarly, when you look at a post box, you don’t look at a red image in your head. You just see ‘redly’.

You can indeed picture your 1st grade teacher vividly. When you experienced her presence live, a particular pattern of brain activity corresponding to your seeing (and hearing) her was set up. This pattern faded as soon as a new one took its place in your consciousness. But not before the pattern was transferred to the hippocampus (the brain area for long-term memory) and laid down long-term partly as continuing activity patterns, partly as molecular changes. You can access these memories, and when you do, the pattern of brain activity you had when seeing the teacher is replicated so that you seem to see her now. Not an exact replication, because, although the recall is vivid, you know she is not really standing before you.

What I am advocating is indirect (representational) realism as an account of perception, but an ‘adverbial’ rather than a ‘sense datum’ view. You should read about these, as well as the direct realism and phenomenological accounts of perception (both incorrect in my view).

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com

Laura asked:

If Nietzsche’s theory was there is no truth as we understand truth to be defined, does that mean that all there is are lies?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

No, it doesn’t. In philosophy words have no context so we invent a (wrong) context for them. You see the word truth and you think of truth vs lies. You could also have thought of truth vs beliefs.

Nietzsche was thinking of truth vs interpretation. I think he said something like 1. There is no such thing as truth, there is only interpretation Now of course if he is right then 1. isn’t true either it is only his interpretation. So we are being asked to found our theory of truth on something which is not true.

I think he was thinking mainly about things like history and literary criticism. He wasn’t thinking about mathematical or logical truth or even scientific truth.

The value in what he said is that he reminds us that often our most important beliefs are just based on the world as we see it and interpret it. We interpret history, literature, art from our 21st century perspective in a particular society and we can never be completely free from our inbuilt preconceptions.

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

Stella asked:

Here is a puzzle that requires some ‘conceptual analysis’. You really need to think about the meaning of the words involved and the way this guy Eugene is described!! Good luck!!

So how does he know that Eugene does not exist? (Hint: It has to do with the concept that supposedly applies to Eugene).

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

The short answer to your question is that the description of Eugene is self-contradictory. Self-contradictory entities (like round squares) cannot exist.

That’s it.

However, there is a longer and more interesting answer. The story of Slick and Eugene is in fact a version of a well known paradox known as the ‘Barber paradox’. There is a Barber in [whichever city you like] who shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself or not? (I suspect that the barber has been changed to a tattoo artist to encourage gender equality!)

The Barber (or Tattoo) paradox isn’t really a paradox. There’s no problem to solve, once we see that it has a solution, albeit one that involves rejecting a question. We reject the question whether the barber shaves himself or whether the tattooist tattoos him/ herself, for the same reason as I would reject the question whether or not I have stopped beating my wife. I haven’t stopped beating her and I haven’t not stopped beating her, because I have never beaten her. The barber does not shave himself and does not not shave himself because, logically, there can be no such barber.

If this is all paradoxes amounted to, then they wouldn’t cause such headaches for philosophers. However, there are other paradoxes which have caused great consternation and for which there is no agreed solution.

One paradox which is very similar in form to the Barber paradox is Russell’s Paradox, originally discovered by Gottlob Frege. Consider classes which are not members of themselves. The class of carrots, for example, isn’t a carrot. On the other hand the class of abstract objects IS an abstract object.

Let’s take the class of ALL the classes, like the class of carrots, which are not members of themselves. Is it a member of itself or not? You already know the answer, if you’ve followed the explanation of the Barber paradox. There is, logically can be, no such class.

But that is genuinely paradoxical. There seems no logical reason why we can’t form a class of all the classes which are not members of themselves! Russell spent years on this — according to his Autobiography it drove him to the brink of despair and ruined his marriage — finally coming up with a solution that he was not fully happy with, because it involves a rule restricting the formation of classes whose only real motivation is that it avoids the paradox. Other mathematicians and philosophers have proposed their own solutions, which are no less arbitrary.

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

BM asked:

How did Descartes prove res extensa basing from his argument cogito ergo sum?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Short answer: he didn’t succeed.

Descartes felt that a new grounding of knowledge was needed for science, the traditional Aristotelian grounding being unsound.

This sure knowledge to be reached by reason alone (not observation) from what remains certain after using the Method of Doubt.

The Method of Doubt is to accept as true only what is presented so clearly and distinctly to the mind as to be certain.

First, then, he must doubt everything learned through the senses (all empirical or a posteriori knowledge as we would say). For the senses can deceive, and also, at any moment, he can’t be certain he is not dreaming, or that his mind is not controlled by an ‘evil genius’ which deceives him about everything.

Secondly, he must doubt all truths of reason (rational or a priori knowledge). He feels that, even if dreaming, he knows that 2+3 = 5, but he considers that an evil genius could deceive him about mathematical truths, interfering with his thought every time he adds 2 and 3 so that he is sure (wrongly) that the sum is 5.

Having done all this doubting, the only certainty remaining, the Archimedean fixed point as he calls it, is ‘ I think therefore I am’ (the cogito).

Unfortunately his arguments back from the cogito to knowledge of a physical world of concrete things, including other people and his own body, are flawed (see details below).

The upshot is that one of his legacies is scepticism, rather than its resolution, and strong philosophical scepticism (about matter, the external world, causation and selves) later emerges, for example in the views of Berkeley and Hume.

His argument from the cogito can fairly be stated as follows:

1. I can’t doubt my existence as a thinking thing, so I know this (the cogito).

2. I know it solely by clear and distinct perception.

3. So, what I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true.

4. I have a clear and distinct idea of God.

5. The idea of God includes necessary existence, so God exists.

6. God, being all good, is no deceiver.

7. So, I can rely on my God-given reason and senses, properly used.

8. Using them I have clear and distinct ideas of extension, size, shape, situation, movement, duration and particulars of an external world.

9. So, the external world, including my body, exists.

Clearly we can challenge the argument at many points. I wont deal with all these challenges, but here are examples:

3. People have perceived all kinds of things clearly and distinctly but which are not true eg:

* sinners suffer eternally in hell.

* the Earth is flat.

* some people (say, women or some ethnic groups) are intellectually and morally inferior.

* flies/rats spontaneously generate in compost heaps/mud respectively.

5. Fine, IF God exists his existence is necessary, but this tells us nothing about WHETHER God does exist.

6. God (or the gods) could be jokers who get a kick out of deceiving us.

Of course Descartes didn’t really doubt that there is a world out there, or that he had a body. His scepticism is a ploy (methodological scepticism) to try to put his views on a rational footing.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com