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Letters
Letters
New Irish Thinking • Problems With Hume’s Problem • To Err is Transhuman • Feel Free to Critique Me • Thoughts in Time • Descartes Doing The Dishes
New Irish Thinking
Dear Editor: I enjoyed Cathy Barry’s article charting historical Irish thought (Philosophy Now 160) so I briefly dropped into the Wiki page on Modern Irish Philosophers. Two especially caught my attention. Kieran Egan was a very innovative thinker associated with the development of imagination in young people. In terms of beliefs, Egan was an atheist. Interestingly there does appear to be a growing caucus of atheists in Ireland. But is a non-spiritual agenda a prerequisite for good critical skills? No! Another Irish philosopher, Philip McShane, was part of a large group of scientifically educated people who also have a faith.
According to Barry, philosophy seems to be enjoying a high profile in Irish schools. This however raises the questions ‘Do we teach critical thinking as such? Or do we teach critical thinking through other subjects – principally science?’ Melanie Trecek-King teaches basic science at Azim Prem University. She quotes Carl Sagan: “If we teach only the findings and products of science – no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be – without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?” There does seem to be a move away from purely fact-based teaching in undergraduate biology teaching towards a more critical approach. Hopefully this ethos will percolate down to the schools.
Kevin Chubb, Cadoxton, Barry
Problems With Hume’s Problem
Dear Editor: In Issue 160, Patrick Brissey nicely elucidates Hume’s argument concerning induction, that judgments assume both that the future will resemble the past, and that this assumption is unjustifiable. But is it? Suppose I have a heavy mirror in my lounge, suspended by a cord. If I say that the cord will not break tomorrow because it hasn’t so far, then this is clearly a very weak inductive argument, and here the future may well not resemble the past. But if I gather knowledge about the cord (its tensile strength, physical condition, age etc), then I can greatly increase the strength of the inductive argument If the cord breaks then I have miscalculated, or ignored some information. Inductive reasoning isn’t at fault, it’s my flawed and careless use of it. Given an exhaustive supply of the physical facts, the inductive reasoning that my mirror will be hanging tomorrow is more like a logical deduction. Rather than ‘an unprovable assumption’ it might be a lot better to sharpen the focus and say: if one knows all about X and there’s nothing that could change X on the foreseeable horizon, then X will continue to be X.
Paul Tissier, Brighton
Dear Editor: Prof Brissey, following Hume, considers two ways we might try to found the principle that the future will resemble the past: logical proof, or induction from past experiences. But there is another way of trying to establish such a principle. The idea is that the contents of a situation themselves bring about what occurs. This does not overtly mention the future resembling the past. But if we suppose a situation where something happens, and then another apparently identical situation, then the same thing should happen. and so the new example should resemble the first. They have exactly the same contents, so how could they produce something different?
It seems that we actually do reason like this, although there are enough examples where the reasoning fails, and we have to cope in some other way. The question then seems to raise itself anew as to why we should reason like this? What is still needed, it seems, is some guarantee, or probability, that the new principle is correct. But the view is not founded on a proof or a probability, but on the objective of attempting to see why, and how, what happens happens. If we can understand how the daily rising and setting of the Sun is produced by the continually rotating, orbiting Earth, then as long as there is nothing new introduced the sun should rise again tomorrow. But we won’t know, without any possibility of error, that the Sun will rise again tomorrow, because this isn’t going to prove to us we are right, even if we are.
Justin LeSaux
Dear Editor: Patrick Brissey gave us an excellent exposition of Hume’s problem of induction in Issue 160. The problem certainly is maddening. Perhaps a person living several hundred years ago (like Hume) was not logically justified in supposing that the Sun would rise the next day, as they knew little of the forces at play. But we now know that it would take vast forces to prevent the Sun from rising tomorrow – for example a supernova, the Earth ceasing to spin, a massive asteroid hitting the Earth etc. It surely is fair to say that we can be fairly certain the Sun will rise tomorrow. Unfortunately, though, Hume has an even more fundamental objection: he doubts the causality on which our astromechanics (and general common sense) is based. So what if what Hume regards as the mere ‘repeated incidences’ of planets obeying the laws of gravity suddenly stopped? Then the Earth may go flying off into interstellar space with no hope of the sun ever rising again. The only defence against this would seem to be that the scientific laws we observe are in some sense necessary rather than contingent. To bring in a third area of Hume’s thinking, a miracle could occur at any time and reveal what we think of as necessary causality as a sham. But Hume attacked the very notion of miracles. So is there some contradiction in his thinking?
Peter W Keeble, London
Dear Editor: Patrick Brissey states in his article on Hume’s problem of induction “there seems to be a very good probability that [the sun] will rise.” Not if you live in northern Norway, where the Sun doesn’t rise for three months.
Eva Tyson, Dalgety Bay, Fife
To Err is Transhuman
Dear Editor: I direct comms at the Future of Life Institute, and I wanted to get in touch with you about a correction in your recent article ‘A Philosophical History of Transhumanism’ by John Kennedy Philip in Issue 160. In it the author states, “In 2005, Bostrom, in association with Anders Sandberg and Eric Dressler, established the Future of Life Institute to support and to promote transhumanism.” This is an error. None of these individuals established FLI, nor does FLI support or promote transhumanism. The author is in fact refering to the Future of Humanity Institute.
Ben Cumming, futureoflife.org
Feel Free to Critique Me
Dear Editor: The article by you [Grant Bartley] in Issue 159 regarding free will and determinism makes some valid points. However, I believe the notions of consciousness and will you deploy, and which appear in other articles in the theme, should be further analysed.
Being conscious has two major meanings: being awake; or paying attention – being aware of something. This second sense of consciousness does not apply to most everyday actions, such as walking, opening a door, exchanging peremptory greetings in the street: they are routine, habitual, often done with our thoughts elsewhere. If asked what we’re doing, we can bring them to mind and reply, but this degree of awareness does not usually accompany the actions. So we do not go through a process of conscious decision-making in such activities. Indeed, it was to dispel such a misconception that Gilbert Ryle wrote The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he argued that physical acts are not produced by mental ones, and that such a view of the mind – ‘the ghost in the machine’ – is erroneous. There is no such faculty of will which we exercise when we act; rather, we have different attitudes to what we do. John Searle echoes this in Minds, Brain and Science (1984): “for a great many fundamental skills, such as our ability to see or learn language, there may not be any theoretical mental level underlying those abilities: the brain just does them. Except when engaged in deliberate practice, the brain, unlike a computer, does not follow rules: the rules that we formulate in such instances are a description of what we observe, not productive of it.”
Albert Dijksterhuis in his 2006 article ‘On Making the Right Choice’ states that actions are already initiated before we become aware of them. Even when we engage in evaluation of the pros and cons of a particular course of action, it is to justify what we’ve already decided, after the fact, but these rational procedures are not instrumental in the action itself.
The product of our personal inheritance and life experience is recorded in the unique pattern of synaptic connections in our brain. The configuration of this network produces actions which are typical of us, why we act ‘in character’, so rendering what we do broadly predictable. But this is not to say that our actions are inevitable. Traumas, near-death experiences, sudden revelations or conversions, falling in love, can all cause us to depart from our usual paths, can bring about a re-birth, because at an unconscious level we have been altered. And we often struggle to understand the change that we have undergone.
Colin Sowden, Abergavenny
Dear Editor: In Issue 159 of Philosophy Now, the article ‘What is Free Will?’ by [you] Grant Bartley makes some fairly outrageous claims and poor logical leaps.
Bartley raises some questions that determinists cannot answer, like ‘If conscious causation is not real, why did consciousness evolve?’ He says that because determinists can’t answer these questions, determinism is false. I’m not sure this logic stacks up: cosmologists don’t know why the Big Bang happened, but this doesn’t disprove that it did. As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “the universe is under no obligation to make sense.” I would also raise some counter questions, and according to Bartley’s own logic, if libertarians cannot answer, free will is a lie. Why do libertarians believe that the human brain escapes the laws of physics? [I don’t, Ed.] At what point along the evolutionary train did our brains depart from obeying physical laws? [Never. But minds are not brains – Grant.]
Jonathan Dean, Australia
Dear Editor: As a ‘Hard Determinist’, I enjoyed Grant Bartley’s article, ‘What Is Free Will?’ in Issue 159. Grant writes clearly, which makes it easy to see where what he says is so wrong.
For me, the fascinating question about Free Will and Determinism is why so many people are in thrall to the Free Will Illusion. After all, Free Will is conceptually incoherent, and there’s not a shred of evidence for its existence.
Grant puts his finger firmly on the problem that he will be unable to solve. He writes “free will is conscious causation. The trick is to understand what this means.” He’s right there. But just how do choosers choose our own thoughts? Unfortunately, to explain the operation of free will is to say that free will must abide by the principles of the explanation, which thus undermines its own freedom. Thus is free will inexplicable and conceptually incoherent.
I said to myself ‘Here we go again!’ when Grant moved away from explaining Free Will to attacking Determinism, on the basis that if consciousness doesn’t do anything, it wouldn’t have evolved. But let’s think about evolution. Evolution works to facilitate survival, and, barring a few hermits, human survival involves society. Society needs a system for dealing with misfits whose actions are to its detriment. If society were to take the view that criminals can’t really help themselves, then incarceration or execution would seem unfair. How much easier it is to take the view that their wrongdoing was done ‘of their own free will’, when meting out the necessary punishment. Grant himself puts the matter clearly: “How can we blame a burglar or a murderer if his burgling or murdering is the result only of causes he didn’t himself choose?” Of course, Grant tries to use this to show that Free Will exists, whereas what the idea really shows is the necessity of the Free Will Illusion. Morality is a necessary belief for the functioning of society, and it explains the necessity for the widespread embracing of the Free Will Illusion. So morality is not a big problem for Determinism.
The most amazing thing that Grant writes is “Determinism is also contradicted by every experience of making a choice you’ve ever had.” However, my ‘every experience of making a choice’ has been that the options for the choice just pop into my mind, and then, likewise, the choice itself just pops into my mind. There is no experience of ‘conscious causation’.
Grant also writes “for your will to be free, your choice must be an uncaused cause.” What could that possibly mean? To me it means that the question ‘How do you choose?’ can be met with nothing more eloquent than a shrug of the shoulders: You just choose. [Yes! – Grant.]
I guess I won’t be the only reader who observes that Grant has underlined the case for Determinism rather than destroying it. I look forward to a follow-up article in which he tells us that he has, of his own free will, changed his mind on this topic and is now convinced of the truth of Hard Determinism! [I’m determined not to – Grant.]
Dave Mangnall, Wilmslow, Cheshire
Dear Editor: I enjoyed your issue on Free Will v Determinism. On a trivial level, of course we have free will, within certain bounds. If there is a fruit bowl containing bananas, apples and oranges, that’s what I’m free to choose. However much I may want peaches, they are not available. In other words, we always have a choice, within certain limits, however these limits are defined. And the limits are extensive: environmental, genetic, opportunities, education, to name a few.
As for the tired old deterministic argument about a replay of the universe which would always come out with the same results, how would anybody know that? In a recent edition of New Scientist, it was reported that 12,392 new solutions to the ‘three-body problem’ have been discovered. Good luck with detailing the behavior of the rest of the universe. Also, don’t we have to account for quantum mechanisms when considering whether all is ‘predetermined’? According to quantum theory, it’s impossible to predict when a specific atom will decay, or other quantum phenomena. When this particular stumbling block has been overturned, I will look at the suggestion that free will does not exist with healthy skepticism.
Simon Goodman, Pemberton, BC
Thoughts in Time
Dear Editor: In replying to Raymond Tallis in Issue 160, Paul Mealing states “the ‘role of the observer’ is solely to make the distinction between past and future”; also “All we need is a point of reference… to separate facts from probabilities.” However, as Prof Tallis has pointed out in previous articles, it may be that consciousness itself produces past and future. In other words, outside of experience there’s no division between the past and future, nor any particular ‘now’. Supporting this viewpoint, special relativity tells us that any communication is limited by the speed of light, which in turn denies the possibility of absolute simultaneity – so a ‘universal now’ is impossible. Some physicists have proposed that we live in a ‘block universe’, which in itself involves no tensed time and therefore no dynamics. Here tensed time and so motion can only be supplied by consciousness, so the passage of time is subjective. If time is subjective, an observer is needed to make the distinction between past and future, and so to turn a probabilistic quantum phenomenon into a known result. But a conscious observer is necessary in quantum mechanics not only to produce a known result, but also because something is informative only if it is meaningful to a conscious observer.
Pamela White, Nottingham
Dear Editor: The evolutionary theme of two regular features in Issue 159 caught my attention. For the first time ever, a book review made me buy the book. Ian James Kidd captured well the essence of Adam Kirsch’s The Revolt Against Humanity – “the end of humanity’s reign is imminent, and we should welcome it”, and its twin strategies, anthropocene antihumanism, which embraces the end presaged by environmental and man-made risks, and transhumanism, which explores a technologically evolved ‘post-human’ species. These apparently divergent approaches have surprisingly similar goals to improve life.
I feel the antihumanists, who welcome the Earth returning to its pre-human Eden, have failed to heed Heraclitus’ warning that you cannot step twice into the same river. For good or ill, those times have gone. And during several epochs in Earth’s history, worldwide vulcanism or petrifying cold etc have nearly done for Life; but instead Life bounced back. It could do so again. Conversely, although some of their ideas seem eccentric, transhumanists are at least going with the flow of evolution in anticipating employing technology to maintain a viable Earth, and even explore beyond it.
The second feature was Professor Tallis’s sceptical appraisal of our ability to understand how or why consciousness evolved. It’s difficult to argue with his point that the ‘How’ has never been satisfactorily explained. However, I do (unusually) disagree with his rejection of ‘Why’. His primary point is that, at the dawn of life, awareness provided no evolutionary advantage – rejecting, for example, any survival value for a cell being aware of its light sensitivity. However, in the land of blissfully unaware cellular organisms, a one-eyed conscious organism has a much better chance. Once these evolutionary advantages are unleashed, it’s more consciousness all the way up.
To come full circle, contrary to Professor Tallis’s claim that the most successful organism is the nonconscious cyanobacteria, Kirsch asserts that man, atop the tree of consciousness, has pulled the Earth into the Anthropocene, where “Humanity’s domination of the planet is so extensive that evolution must be redefined” and “nature becomes a reflection of humanity.” Kirsch argues that this looks catastrophic. I think, although the risks are increasing, the transhumanists’ optimism still has a fighting chance.
Brian Johns, Hertfordshire
Dear Editor: Raymond Tallis (Issue 159) uses the fact that cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years without the advantage of consciousness to claim that therefore consciousness confers no evolutionary advantage. But by that same token, every evolutionary development beyond the level of cyanobacteria confers no advantage, which is preposterous.
However, there is an even more fundamental flaw in the article: the assumption that matter is insentient. True, it’s a commonly accepted assumption; but it’s not a given fact. Were we instead to assume that mind is a fundamental aspect of reality, as panpsychism holds, then there is no intractable mystery to consciousness. Rather, from the outside, reality is matter, from the inside, it’s mind.
Carlos Rumbaut, Austin, Texas
Descartes Doing The Dishes
I’m washing dishes at the sink.
I think
that I am done. Then, I see more,
therefore,
I’m not. Dishes feel like a scam –
I am
always washing, drying, but damn,
it’s never done. Wash, dry, repeat,
like an unpleasant dream. I’m beat,
I think, therefore I am.
D.A. Cooper
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