Going to Office Hours is Terrifying

After a lifetime of being ordered around by teachers in in loco parentis roles, visiting a professor during office hours is way more terrifying than it should be.

Sure, the professor determines my grade in the class, and, sure, he's much, much smarter than I currently am or can ever hope to be. But I shouldn't have to leave abruptly after five minutes, insisting I have somewhere to be, carefully avoiding the professor's eyes. I shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable when tells me to sit down across from him at an empty table which seems to have been reserved solely for this purpose.

Not that it's anyone's fault, really. If anything, it's my own. I'm a nervous person. Furthermore, it seems important that one should respect one's professors, since they are invariably way way smarter than their students. And they have all the power. Yet I think there's a difference between respect and fear. Perhaps it's a difference I need to learn.

On science, philosophy, consciousness, and the ethics of belief

Science is the empirical study of nature. It's clear that science doesn't prove. We can say that science has "proved" the law of gravity by experience, but who's to say the ball won't float the five hundredth time we drop it? Are explanations of underlying mechanisms science, or philosophy? They are philosophy.

A scientific theory, like Einstein's relativity or Darwinian evolution, which explains some aspect of reality in simpler terms than we see it--gravity is just the curvature of space, speciation is just the natural outcome of genetic inheritance--can be shown to be almost certainly correct. But we can never prove it. There is no way of knowing that the dinosaur fossils weren't tricks planted by Satan. Occam's razor tells us to believe this is foolish, yet it CAN be believed. The statement "this ball will fall when I drop it" is a result of science, but the rationalization "because the Earth's mass curves the space around it" is a kind of philosophy.

Similarly, positing any kind of object permanence is philosophy. We are only presuming that that table is still there when we are not looking. Predicting that the table will still be there when we turn around is science, but positing, on seeing this, that THE TABLE WAS THERE THE WHOLE TIME--that is philosophy.

Therefor, explaining consciousness at large must always be a project of philosophy. The only consciousness that we can examine directly is our own, and even that is arguable. We can predict the physical manifestations of consciousness--look at neuroscience and psychology--but we cannot predict the habits of consciousness itself, since it cannot be accessed physically. We can of course observe our own consciousnesses, and there may be some value in this, but because of the subjective nature of such observation it will always remain unscientific.

So what should be the goal of an explanation of consciousness? It cannot make predictions for us, the way that the empirical study of behavior can. We will never see a consciousness particle under a microscope; such a particle might be an electron, but if it were we would have no way of knowing. We cannot interface directly with other minds.

So since the goal cannot be to make predictions and the explanation cannot be proveable, our aim should be to find different ways of looking at or explaining consciousness in order to improve the quality of human life.

Would an animistic or panpsychic view increase human mental health? Would believing in free will create more efficacy and confidence? These are things which we could in theory test scientifically, through randomized controlled trials, although methods may be less robust in practice because ethics is a concern.

If philosophy doesn't improve our lives, then what can be its purpose?

College, college, college

Hello, all. It's been a while.

I now attend a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States, just a few hundred miles from my high school. It's been good so far.

I've been writing occasionally, and I'll probably post my musings here. Wish me luck!

stream-of-thought #3.5

(I would read #3 first)

What if we’re already hitching a ride in someone’s head, right now? What if we have no control over our situation? What if we don't have to get hung up over every victory and defeat? There is no reason to be invested in anything--as we will all die eventually. And there is probably no reason to believe that we have free will.

So all in all, our situation is perhaps no different from a baby's in the womb--except that we think it's different.

And our situation, if we take all this to be true, is still crucially different from what I described in stream-of-thought-#3 is that no one is control of the situation for us.

We think something else when we're children. When I was a kid, I remember just assuming that my parents were omniscient and omnipotent; they always seemed to know how to deal with arcane problems like ordering food from restaurants, paying bills, driving, doing taxes, buying Christmas presents, gardening, and so on. I felt like everything was being taken care of. I could relax; I had nothing to worry about. Someone else who was responsible, good, kind, and skillful was making sure everything was okay. I'm sure other people have similar experiences.

Things start going differently sometime around early adolescence, when we begin to become aware that our parents are not omniscient or omnipotent, that their lives are just as broken as our own (if not more so). We begin to feel that our choices can have profound effects on our lives (think college admissions and other career-related issues.) We realize that we are well and truly on our own.

If we can realize further that there is no way we can have any real control over our situation--because we are just biological machines, conspicuously lacking an inner ghost--does this make the situation better?

I have come to realize this intellectually, but I am far from realizing it viscerally. So I often get caught up in the effects of my decisions. I don't think I really believe that I don't have free will--and I'm not sure if I have reason to.

What happens to the fear of death when we let go of (possibly, the illusion of) control?

I'm not sure if it would work. Being "just along for the ride" is great, but is it great when you know that the ride--that everthing--is going to end?

But then again, the ride is only trivial, fun, and "safe" in the first place because of its terminal nature.

It seems I have reached yet another catch-22.

stream-of-thought #3

And this is the truly terrible thing--that we are incapable of anything but absolute aloneness.

For if you exist with other people, you can only communicate with them indirectly--through language, touch, music, etc. And if you could communicate with them directly--if you could directly contact another person's thoughts--well then, you would no longer feel like separate people, just as you feel like one person even though your brain is in two halves, connected by only the corpus callosum. You would be all by yourself again--utterly alone.

Sometimes I think what we truly want is experience without responsibility. Imagine if things just happened, and you had no control over them, little investment in them. Pleasure would be nice; pain would be not so nice but free from guilt and self-pity. You could accomplish this by "hitching a ride" in someone's head, temporarily. I feel like that is the desire underlying some romantic relationships. It is certainly a reason why people play video games.

What would it feel like to die, then?

When I imagine it now, it does not feel so bad. But perhaps I am repressing the fear (as most of us do throughout our everyday lives).

On Yale's open course phil-176, lecture 6

UPDATE: I had to go in and fix some stuff; Blogger's WYSIWYG editor is TERRIBLE. Sorry about the funky formatting.

(I've been listening to the lectures from this series on the philosophy of death. They are rather interesting and seem to be very well-thought out. Below are some thoughts I had on a particular section of Lecture 6, shown above)

Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor at Yale, explains, starting at around the 5:52 in the above video, a interesting and quite illuminating counter to Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul. The Cartesian argument goes something like this:

1. I can imagine my soul (essentially synonymous with mind/subjective experience/stream of consciousness, in this case) existing without my body. (Try it. It shouldn't be too difficult).
2. I can imagine my body existing without my soul. (Give it a try).
3. If I can imagine thing A existing without thing B existing thing A and thing B must be separate and distinct things. Furthermore, if I cannot imagine thing A and thing B existing separate from each other, they must be identical and non-distinct from each other (they must be the same object).

Here it would be helpful to provide an illustrative example: I can imagine my arm existing without my hand, and vice versa, or my left hand existing without my right hand. My arm (excluding the hand) and my hand are two distinct things, as are my two hands. On the other hand (pun intended), I cannot imagine my left hand existing without my left hand existing (can you?). And my left hand is identical and non-distinct from itself.

Now, to tie it all together:

1. I can imagine my soul (essentially synonymous with mind/subjective experience/stream of consciousness, in this case) existing without my body. (Try it. It shouldn't be too difficult).
2. I can imagine my body existing without my soul. (Give it a try).
3. If I can imagine thing A existing without thing B existing thing A and thing B must be separate and distinct things. Furthermore, if I cannot imagine thing A and thing B existing separate from each other, they must be identical and non-distinct from each other (they must be the same object).
4. Because I can imagine my soul existing without my body (or vice versa--whichever happens to be easier for you to imagine), my body and my soul must be two distinct and separate things.

Okay. Now that that's out of the way, we can look at the counterargument. Watch the video from around 5:52 to 19:25. If you're lazy, and want a tl;dr, read the next paragraph. Otherwise, you can skip to the one following.

You may have heard of the two stars called the morning star and the evening star. The evening star appears just after sunset; the morning star just before sunrise. The argument is as follows:

1. It is possible to imagine a world in which the morning star exists and the evening star doesn't
2. [Premise (3) from the earlier argument.]
3. The morning star and the evening star must be two distinct objects.

Now, that argument might look fine--but it just so happens that the evening star and the morning star are the same celestial body! They are--or it is--the planet Venus (not even a star in the first place) appearing at different times of day. (Note that this does not necessarily prove that the soul and the body aren't distinct--just that the Cartesian argument is not sufficient to prove that they are, because premise (3) is false).

You're back from watching the video? Good, now that everyone's on more or less the same page...

Kagan stated in the beginning of the lecture series that he did not believe in a distinct soul, and I think (he might have just implied it--I don't remember) that he also mentioned that he thought the "soul" or "mind" is a manifestation of the body. It is, in other words, something the body does, just as (to use his analogy) a smile is something that a part of your body (your mouth) does, but it is not a separate thing. Furthermore, you can't have a smile without a mouth (this goes back to the existence argument--you can have a mouth without a smile, but you cannot have a smile without a mouth--what does this say about premise (3) from before? I don't know yet...). One can say that a smile is an emergent phenomenon which depends on the mouth for its existence. It is not a part of the mouth. It is something that a mouth does. Similarly, our experience of the evening star (or of the morning star) is a manifestation or emergent property of Venus. The evening star is not a part or component of Venus; it is a particular way that Venus appears to us. Appearing just after sunset (or just before sunrise) to viewers on the planet Earth, is something that Venus does.

So, a major question is, how does this argument match up with the Cartesian argument? There are a few major possibilities:

• The mind is analogous to the evening and morning stars; Venus is analogous to the body (I would guess that this is the analogy Kagan prefers, based on what he has said so far). This would imply that the body is the basic* phenomenon, and that the mind is the emergent phenomenon.
• The mind is analogous to the evening star; the body is analogous to the morning star (or vice versa). This would imply that the mind and the body are both emergent phenomenon of some more basic phenomenon.
• The body is analogous to the evening and morning stars; Venus is analogous to the mind.
• We live in an alternate universe in which the morning star and the evening star are actually two separate celestial bodies (the mind and the body happen to be separate).

*i.e., non-emergent. I use the term in a relative sense, as it is probably possible to have emergent phenomena of emergent phenomena. Higher level programming languages seem to be, with my limited knowledge of computer science, emergent from lower-level languages, which are in turn emergent from the little electrical charges on the computer chip (any of you computer science people know more about this? Leave a comment). If you believe minds are emergent, a society or group is a phenomenon which emerges from several emergent phenomena--human psyches.

I think it is very possible that the first three interpretations are actually indistinguishable if one takes a view of extreme skepticism, which is, ironically, just like the one Descartes held (the fourth interpretation probably deserves its own post, so I'll save it for later). If you're familiar with "Cogito ergo sum" or The Matrix, you know that it is, in principle, possible that the world as we know it does not really "exist"; that there is some deeper reality behind everything we see. The only thing we know is that our consciousness must exist in some sense--otherwise, we could not begin to ask ourselves whether we existed or not!

Similarly, if the mind and the body are not necessarily separate entities, but could in fact be emergent phenomena of each other or of an unknown entity, how would we know? How would be able to tell the difference? Is it not possible that we are metaphysical brains-in-vats; that our sensory experiences of our bodies and the world around us emerge unassisted from our minds (whatever they may be)? What if our minds themselves, in this scenario, emerge from something else altogether? Is it not possible that our minds are simply an illusion created by our bodies? (And that our bodies in turn are created by something else)? Is it not possible, in fact, that both our minds and our bodies are illusory emergent properties of some larger, unknown or unrecognized system? We can't know.

As a final point to round out the above line of inquiry, I think that these possibilities are not only empirically indistinguishable but also can be separated only by semantics. Does the mind emerge from the body? Does the body emerge from the mind? Do they both emerge from something else? You say tomayto, I say tomahto. On the one hand, research like that explained in The Self Illusion

would seem to indicate that our conscious experience, personality, or egos are illusory feelings and thoughts created by the brain. (What does that mean? Are any thoughts illusory? Aren't all thoughts?) On the other hand, we cannot truly be certain that our physical world is not the dream of a giant celestial bug monster, or some future humans' elaborate immersive simulation, or something like that. So the body might be an emergent property of the mind (which is in turn an emergent property of the body, etc.) And whose to say our bodies and our minds are not simply virtual objects in a vast computer network (although we don't have to be virtual to be one of those)? 

Is it really meaningful to ask any of these questions? I think it suffices to realize that, in the world as we are able to experience it, the current empirical science seems to indicate that, at the very least, there is some level of reality on which the mind emerges from the brain. To borrow an analogy from Stephen Hawking (from the beginning of The Grand Design, I believe), our world might as well be a fish tank. We may create very complex laws of physics to explain why objects appear to move in such wonky ways through the curved glass surface of our watery home. And since we can never know the world that lies outside (this is a perfect metaphysical fish tank, not a real one), the best thing for us to do is use our fishy theories to figure out when and how objects outside the tank might move. It makes no difference to us whether there is another world outside the fish bowl or not. It also makes no difference whether the "outside world" is in fact another fish bowl, or whether the entire world is "fishbowls all the way down." By the same token, we might never know the "true" nature of reality--whether there is a deeper reality beyond our own, of which our reality is but a part, or an emergence, or a chain of parts or emergences--but for our purposes it suffices to know the laws of our own world and our own minds.

There is only one realm in which it could possibly matter--and that is in all of our inevitable exits from this world (is Goldy who disappeared last week really gone, or did the owners just flush him down the toilet?). I am going to assume, considering the title of the lecture series, that Kagan is going to touch on this at some point. His thoughts so far bring to mind some Eastern views on reincarnation, which I can't say I believe, but are certainly worth a look as a challenge to the currently fashionable view that materialism must imply the ceasing of conscious experience upon death. 

So tune in next week (ish) for an update!

stream-of-thought #2: The Teenage Liberation Handbook

Hello, all.

It appears I have reach new heights of stereotypical boheme. I am seriously considering leaving school.

I stumbled upon The Teenage Liberation Handbook several years ago but was not smart enough to procure a copy of it. Although I certainly had some good experiences in school the past few years, I believe now that I can take control of my own education.

Let me talk about the book--it begins with a sort of parable or fable about a girl being force-fed fruit. It's a little strange, sure, but it gets the point across in an emotional and powerful way--that school really extinguishes anyone's natural desire to learn. While I agree with her point, school does have some benefits, and I do wish she had not started off by emotionally manipulating the reader into agreeing with her.

That said, the rest of her book has some slightly less reactionary and more rational arguments. The thesis is this: "unschooling" is better for your mind, body, and soul than school is, and also gives you just as good a shot at getting into college. You have a right to learn what you want, when you want; you have a right to explore the worlds external and internal. You have a right to be free. Etc.

You can read the book yourself, if you're so inclined--there may or may not be several free PDFs still lying around (EDIT: there's a free and legal (but kind of hard to read) copy on archive.org)--so I won't enumerate most of her arguments here. Instead I'd like to reflect on how they affected me.

Initially, I became determined and excited to leave school. It was just the solution to all of the problems I was looking for. I am intellectually inclined enough that I would do a lot of learning on my own. I would take creative writing classes and drawing classes and music lessons, and also an online math class and an online chemistry or physics class. I'd read lots of books. I would go for bike rides when the whether was nice. When could I ever hope to have freedom like that? The rest of my life I'll have to work to put food on the table.

And there lies my greatest fear: that in being liberated, so to speak, I will lose an important innocence; and once the liberation has left me I will look back on it in painful nostalgia. Looking back on my life in middle school, which was much freer than my current life in high school, it seems obvious that this will occur to at least some degree. I do not want to pine away for the past until I retire.

But if I could cultivate the right sort of mindset, wouldn't I be able to use these two years fully to gain just the sort of knowledge I'd need to lose some of my perennial neuroticism? And then wouldn't I be happier, less nostalgic and less greedy? I don't know. It's hard to predict the future.

My other two major concerns are college and music. Although I'm sure I could get into a decent state college on my SAT scores, I'd much rather go to a smaller liberal arts school, a nice one with a good music department, and I don't know if any of those will accept me. Many schools I'm interested have statements that say they have accepted homeschoolers in the past, but can I live up to their standards? Do I need to compose three symphonies, win a national baking competition and raise $10,000 for starving children in Somalia? Because if I do, I'm not so confident I'll be able to get in.

And music: I really like being involved in music ensembles, but I worry that I won't have access to this outside of school. I do plan on running a boomwhacker ensemble out of my house, and there appear to be some music schools that have ensembles for private lesson students in my area, but it still makes me nervous, somehow.

So will I be in school, this time next year? I have no idea. Maybe. My mom still doesn't want to let me out so I guess it's pretty likely. In that case, my contingency plan is to just take a bunch of chill electives senior year so I can relax and enjoy the world.