The Big Ideas of Philosophers

I’m so proud and happy to announce that Mini Philosophy is going to become a book! If you would like to see what I’ve been up to, the link is here: 

What if there were a way to work out what was the right thing to do? Wouldn't it be great if you had an easy tool to tell you how to act in any situation? This was exactly what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Hedonic Calculus.

Bentham is the father of the normative (i.e. "how to act") ethical theory known as Utilitarianism. This states that an action is right or wrong based on the consequences it produces; if it creates more utility or pleasure then it is good, if it produces net misery or pain, then it is bad. In his words: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." So...Robin Hood was moral, Butch Cassidy was not. World War 2 was (for the Allies) good, Genghis Khan was not. Put simply: make people happy, and minimise misery. Look to the consequences of your actions.

However, the question is begged... how can we be sure the net plus or negative of our actions? Bentham's answer: the Hedonic Calculus!

Bentham says we should tally up the pleasure and pain of all actions based on 7 different criteria: Intensity, Duration, Likelihood, Proximity, Fecundity (will it create further pleasure), Purity (will the pain create more pain) and Extent.

We then write down then sums, add up the total, and voila! You now know how you ought to act. What could be easier? It's morality for the mathematical age, ethics for the rational. We no more need to worry!

If I offered you a free bet for a fortune, you'd take it, yes? If you only had to say a few words for a chance at eternal paradise, would that seem a good deal? Pascal thought so, and he thought we ought to believe in God for this reason. 

Pascal's Wager is a famous argument that uses Game Theory as a reason to believe in God. It runs like this:

You have two options: believe in God or don't. If we believe in God and he exists we get eternal life and paradise in heaven. If we don't believe in God and he exists we (at best) just rot in mindless eternity (at worst) get eternal torment. 

On the other hand, if we don't believe in God and he doesn't exist (as atheists believe) then nothing happens - the identical outcome if we do believe in God and he doesn't exist too! So what's the harm? It's really a win-win. 

For our purposes, according to Game Theory and probabilistic models, when we multiply the "potential returns" of a bet against the losses we can judge a good or bad bet. So long as there is a not a *zero* chance of God existing (i.e. it is logically impossible) then any potential return of "infinity" multiplied by even a nanoscopic chance would be a great bet!

In brief, Pascal says "you've nothing to lose and infinity to gain" .... It's a free bet for heaven!

What is less known about Pascal's Wager is that he also thinks there are real world benefits religion gcan give you here on earth, such as existential happiness and sense of community. To those who challenge: "this isn't genuine belief" he replied that one can simply "fake it till you make it" - by pretending you're religious enough by e.g. ritual and liturgy, one day you'll not know any different.

Why is it that we message that one person about one thing, and someone else for another? Why are we the "best friends ever!" with someone at one moment, and then they're gone the next? Aristotle, that philosophical over-performer, might have the answer.

Aristotle's greatest work, the Nicomachean Ethics, has a lot of say about friendship because he viewed a good friend as requisite to the perfect human life ("Eudaimonia").He divides friendships into three categories: useful, pleasant, and good. Only the last should we value above all.

*Useful friends* are those that serve a purpose.They might be a work colleague who you lunch with everyday, or it might be a teammate you see at the weekends. When that purpose is removed (you move jobs, or you stop playing that sport) the friendship dies away. 

*Pleasant friends* are the ones who are fun to be around. They're witty and quick to laugh. They share those perfect memes and just get your sense of humour. They scream dance until closing time and they're right beside you eating that 3 a.m. kebab. But, it might be age, or you might change what you like, and they drift further and further away - immortalised in happy memories and nostalgia.

*Good friends* are the ones who want you to be happy and want you to flourish. They are the ones who say "he's not right for you, mate" or "you could totally get that promotion". They're the ones who never tell your secret, and who've seen you cry. The ones who won't put you down, and always want your best. These are the friends Aristotle believes we should aim for and keep. 

Our thoughts and consciousness are unlike anything else in the universe in one simple way: they're private. Everything else in the universe, abstract or tangible, can be written about in a book, it can be examined and can be talked about. This is because they are, in some way, *external* to us. Our consciousness is subjective. It is "first personal" and unique to each of us. The rest is objective, "third personal", and (if Wittgenstein has his way) shareable in communicable language. It is "sui generis" i.e. one of a kind.

David Chalmers in a modern philosopher who has added a mind-bending idea to a raft of philosophies that try grapple with this issue in the form of "Panpsychism" (others examples being Plato's Idealism and Descartes' Dualism)

Panpychism is the view that consciousness, or 'first personhood', is a quality or a state that emerges when a certain composition or coordination of physical processes occur. Chalmers argues that 'subjectivity' is a fundamental force of the universe much like gravity or magnetism are. In the same way gravity is known by the coordination of two objects of different masses, consciousness is known by the particular alignment of information processing particles or atoms.

The theory itself is still in its nascent days, but one idea might be that all particles themselves posses a (metaphysical) degree of "subjectivity" that, when combined with other particles in certain complex structures, then go on to form higher or lower consciousnesses.

What would this mean? Well, anything which involves any organisation of particles would have *a degree* of consciousness. The compound H20 would have its own 'water awareness', as would an amino acid, so would a rat, a dog, all the way up to a human consciousness. A human, having a certain complex structure of interacting particles would then have a unique human consciousness that you call you and I call me (some panpsychists argue there are critical mass or base levels of complexity needed to merit "consciousness" e.g. 50 trillion synaptic connections).

Like its Greek siblings, Epicurianism and Cynicism, the modern use of "Stoic" is a warped and distorted echo of the original idea. Today, we tend to imagine the Stoic as a phlegmatic, stolid, Clint Eastwood character, made of terracotta as much as flesh. When we examine Stoicism's ideas, we might see why this happened...

The "big 3" classical stoics were Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius (in chronological order), and whilst they vary in many respects, they all have at their core what is today known as the 'Stoic Fork'.

Stoicism starts with the basic principle that nothing about the universe, or what we might call 'objective reality' is either good/bad or valuable/valueless in itself. We, as the subject, MAKE this reality good or bad. We make value judgements, and we choose how we respond. As Shakespeare's Hamlet says: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". Two examples: a movie is simply a collection of sounds and sights thrown at you in a darkened room. It is you the subject who then says "God, that was crap!" as you walk to the car. Or, you are given a promotion at work. You place value on extra money, and so you celebrate and party. In both cases there was a 'fact' that happened to you, and in both cases you painted these 'facts' either good or bad.

The Fork comes from this. Given the world is impartial, indifferent and valueless, we as subjects have only two things within our power: our behaviour and our thoughts. Everything else, including other people's Forks, are beyond our power.

Stoics believe that in accepting this, we give up the suffering and pain that comes from trying to change what cannot be changed, and we can focus on those things that we can change. The Stoic Fork is a call to recognise our own limitations, and, with that comes both a freedom and a calming resignation. You might not be able to change the fact your friend was rude to you, but you can change how think and feel about that. "He made me angry" is very different to "I'm letting him make me angry".

As Victor Frankl (who surived Auschwitz) said: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”. This recognition of the Fork is Stoicism through and through.

Nietzsche is often misunderstood as a nihilist - written off as "that bloke who thought 'god is dead' and that all life is valueless". His thought-experiment of Eternal Recurrence shows him as both supremely life-affirming, a pillar of existentialism, and even a very modern therapist.

Nietzsche asks us to imagine a demon who demands ''this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence'

How do you respond to such a question? If the idea terrifies, bores, or repulses you, then, for Nietzsche, you are an object of life, and you are not living your existence. You are watching life happen like a bitter and cynical critic, passively letting life happen to you. Nietzsche pulls no punches: you are stuck in a passive sense of victim hood ("woe is me!").

Nietzsche, then, offers the antidote: amor fati ("love your fate").

The existential peace and human contentment we all desire lies in accepting the cards as they are dealt. We should not 'will backwards' - that is to say, want to change that which has happened. But, more than this, we must LOVE that which has happened in life - the suffering and the pain as much as the good and the happy. We must take pride in our mistakes and our faults as we have overcome them, and we are existing with and because of them.

Hi everyone!

Thanks for being such amazing and loyal supporters of what I do here. I know I’ve been rubbish of late - even by my base rubbish standards. It’s that familiar combination of being very busy and being generally crap.

I have started a Facebook page of this blog (I shall update both as I go along, so fret not those who don’t like Facebook as much as Tumblr). I would really love it if you could join me over there. I’m going to be putting up some of the oldies for a while - just to get it going - and then the new material will be put up both here and over there.

I promise I’ll be getting new stuff out soon. The busier bits of life have got considerably less busy!

Thanks again for being wonderful,

ThinkyT

Kant’s genius could not be bound to any one philosophical discipline. Whilst he is perhaps best known for his ethics or his metaphysics, his work on aesthetics is fascinating in itself.

Kant believed that all aesthetic judgements, which he calls ‘inner feelings’, could be separated into what is beautiful and what is sublime. Humans are responsive to both, but in different measure. 

Broadly, the beautiful can be characterised as being pleasant, pretty and joyful. The sublime, though, is deep, meaningful and profound. The bright rose is beautiful, but the thunderous storm is sublime. Lambs frolicking are beautiful, but the crashing of the tide is sublime. Meadows are beautiful, mountains sublime. And so forth.  Kant, aware these feelings were subjective and hard to qualify, hoped to elucidate by example.

Kant goes further, though, in applying these judgements to human nature, and personal relationships. We perhaps know the beautiful person: the quick witted friend, the centre piece of a good night out. They are silly and fun, but, in excess, we suspect their conversation, their personality, is somehow shallow and facile. We know too, the sublime person: they are dignified and honest, the ones we turn to for advice and “deep and meaningful conversations”. They are reliable and supportive, but in excess, we find them morose, stuffy, perhaps boring.

Kant applies his distinction, as well, to the sexes, not without a bit of sexism. Women are almost entirely beautiful, and are ‘embarrassed’ at how “she does not possess high insights...she captivates, and that is enough...”. Men, though, are noble and dutiful. In marriage, the two sexes are united in a perfect ‘single moral person’. 

But Kant was not finished, because he applied his theory also to nations, and is fairly racist by today’s standards. The French are fascinated mainly by the beautiful: they’re dandies, fops, and of “enamoured dalliance”. The English come off well, as nobly sublime, and concerned with principles. The Spaniard's 'adventurous...[but] terrifying” conquests of the New World made them sublime. The Japanese were the ‘English of the Orient’ (quite a backhanded compliment), whilst, most damningly racist of all, ‘the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous’ . All the nations are so divided (it’s interesting to read the entirety in Section Four). The Germans, of course, are the perfect embodiment of both...

The problem of Inverted Qualia is, as Dennett says: “ one of philosophy’s most virulent memes”. Although many philosophers have espoused variants on it, John Locke’s is perhaps the most popular and enduring example. Put simply it asks: “how can you every be sure that the colour I see is the same colour you see?”. When you see a strawberry as red, I might see it as blue, but by convention and by language, we both call it ‘red’. Most often the problem is phrased using visual examples, but it could be extended to any sensation we have.

Generally, this is a problem in epistemology because it means we can never know what the actual state of affairs are (this belief in ‘actual’ is called ‘realism’). This leads us to scepticism.

Furthermore, we can therefore never rightly attach a truth value to the claim ‘x is red’ without the caveat ‘x only appears red to me’ (this raises all sorts of complicated discussions regarding theories of truth which we cannot explore here).  This would then commit us to a Nietzschean perspectivism (tbc soon...)

In short, inverted qualia is a problem of scepticism - where we must admit we cannot know a whole raft of things - namely what is ever going on in someone else’s ‘mind’s eye’ (the experiences they are having - their qualia).

Finally, though, it is a problem too for physicalist theories of mind. These state that we can completely and sufficiently describe all mental events in physical terms. The problem of inverted qualia, though, maintains that if we posited two identical humans, with an identical physical make up, it is conceivable that they could still have different qualia. Therefore, physicalism cannot give a full account of the mind (see also Chalmer’s Zombies).

Buridan’s Ass, from the 14th Century philosopher of the same name, is a problem of free will, theories of justification, but also in artificial intelligence. 

The classic telling has an ass, torn between a stack of hay and a pail of water. If there is absolutely no reason for the ass to choose one or the other, the story runs that the ass will die of hunger or thirst, unable to sate either. Leibniz, years after Buridan, wrote that “ Nothing happens without a sufficient reason”. If, therefore, no reason is given to choose a) over b), then ‘nothing’ will happen.  The thought experiment is designed to show the limitations of moral determinism (that every action and decision is necessitated by a causal precedent) in that there must be some kind of ‘meta reason’ to action, if there are no other overt reasons available.

The problem for artificial intelligence comes when an AI is presented with two or more options with no deciding way to ‘choose’. Inaction, in this case, might lead to the shutting down of the intelligence or in a useless infinite loop. Therefore, some programming is required to give some reason, even if that be a random number generator.

Simone de Beauvoir’s magnum opus, ‘The Second Sex’ is considered to be one of the pioneering works of modern feminism. De Beauvoir was an existentialist who, like Sartre, believed that we are not born in any mould or ‘essence’ but rather we make ourselves. This could be extended, she argued, to becoming a woman. She famously wrote: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"

She argued that society demands ‘the woman’ to look and behave a certain way, and that she will fulfil this role consciously and unconsciously. Philosophically, this culturally imposed ‘identity’ need not necessarily be immediately discriminatory or negative (the 90s/00s idea of a ‘Supermom’ for instance is just the same kind of ‘identity’) but she argued society does often place the woman as being the ‘second’ sex - inferior and subservient to the male. 

#Camus was a French Existentialist, who was close both personally and philosophically with Sartre and De Beauvoir. Like them, he began with the simple claim that there were no objective laws and rules to life that could guide us. Humans had no ‘purpose’ (as Aristotle argued), there was no Moral Law (Kant), nor was there some afterlife to come. 

In his Myth of Sisyphus, Camus highlights what he sees as the Absurdity of existence. In the Myth, Sisyphus was destined to push a rock up a mountain, only to see it fall to the bottom upon completion. In a similar way humans continue to do things, knowing full well that all our actions will ultimately come to naught: the greatest and the smallest alike will come to dust. Everything is absurd; we might busy ourselves and hide this simple fact (similar to Sartre’s idea of Bad Faith), but at the bottom of all is the simple truth: all things will perish. It’s all a fool’s errand.

Seemingly nihilistic, Camus admitted the greatest philosophical problem was that of suicide, but he did not finish so pessimistically. Absurdity need only be a problem when we rage against it. Sisyphus only despises his task as he compares it to the life he once had. Humans only despair at absurdity so long as they naively cling to the idea that there will one day be a respite, an answer, a cure. The ‘resolution’ to absurdity is not to ignore it, but to embrace it. Once we recognise, openly and honestly, that we only have our choices and our actions (however temporary, impotent and finite) we can really live again. We can even live happily. With this ‘courageous’ mental shift, we recognise life and it’s absurdity, our ‘rock’, as our own, and with this comes a deep existential well-being and comfort.

As we’ve seen, Kierkegaard believed that humans exist in one of three spheres, each superior to the other. At the highest sphere, we would no longer need or want the rules, laws and ‘ethics’ of the Universal Sphere and would instead act by a new and higher law, which was utterly indescribable to others.

Kierkegaard calls these people ‘knights of faith’ and cites Abraham as the prime example. In willingly offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice, he ‘suspends’ the ethics of man (”do not kill your children”), for a higher ‘purpose’ (telos). He seems to encourage, then, the authentic human to transcend the every day rules of society, of the universal, and to follow the faith-‘passion’ of the Religious Sphere.

Stripped of religious connotations, we might want to represent Kierkegaard simply as saying that there are times in our life when our passions simply do away with every day rules. Existentialists (of which Kierkegaard is seen as a forefather) might want to say that we are the sole authors of the rules, and that it is through human passion that we must all ‘start afresh’ in deciding how to live, not follow any entrenched mantra.

Rousseau’s theory of the General Will is framed by his wider Social Contract theory of governance. Here, the individual must deny themselves notions of absolute freedom and ‘rights’ if these are not in accordance with the ‘general will’.

Interpreted one way, this has Rousseau simply as arguing for a kind of democracy - where all laws and state actions must be the voice of the majority. However, he is more commonly interpreted as endorsing a tyranny of the majority over minorities. He argues that the individual, in civilised government, surrenders their rights to the (loosely defined) ‘general will’, represented by the authority. A sovereign, for example, would be the embodiment of the general will, and could therefore decide the fate of any individual.

Although Lewis and Ewing had paved the way, Bonjour developed what is arguably the most sophisticated and comprehensive account of Coherentism.

Coherentism is a Theory of Justification which tries to resolve the question: “what grounds do I have to believe something?”. Under the theory, any belief is justified if and only if that belief coheres, or is logically consistent with one’s other beliefs. For instance, the belief “rabbits are mammals” is justified if I also believe that “mammals give birth to live young” and “rabbits give birth to live young”. It is an internatlist theory, which means to say that a justified belief does not depend on an actual state of affairs e.g. a rabbit existing.

Zimbardo’s famous experiment in 1971 had 75 adult men placed into a prison environment, where 24 were given the tools and instructions to be ‘Guards’ and the others as ‘Prisoners’. The two week experiment was abandoned after only six days as the the guards became increasingly authoritarian, brutal and sadistic.

Philosophers and psychologists have since pointed to this experiment as showing how many of our supposed morals stretch only so far as what is socially permissible. Zimbardo stated “there’s the myth about human dignity and human character” and that individual dispositions have been overestimated at the expense of social context.