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. 

The Proust Questionnaire

I stumbled across this article a few minutes ago. Why don't I try answering the questions? It could be fun, even though I'm not a famous person or a 19th century French kid.

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
1. Well, ideally it would be living as long as I want, and dying only when I feel it necessary--some kind of willful mortality. I don't see that happening anytime soon, though, so I'd probably go with a nice SO and a couple of kids, and a job that doesn't totally suck and pays enough to feed and house all of us comfortably.
2. What is your greatest fear?
1. Death, or dying fearfully.
3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
1. My selfishness, my fear and my negativity (all of them sort of relate to fear--I aid myself in fear of suffering, I refuse to see the bad in things because I fear I will find it).
4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
1. Chattiness. There are better ways for me to spend my time than hear about how your Aunt Jolene won the World's Biggest Cat contest three years ago. Yes, really. (The advantage of a blog is that no one is required to read it).
5. Which living person do you most admire?
1. Maybe my stepfather. I'm not very good at admiring people.
6. What is your greatest extravagance?
1. Food.
7. What is your current state of mind?
1. Tired, and anxious to finish some school assignments. Also very angsty.
8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
1. Tact.
9. On what occasion do you lie?
1.  Only when I am absolutely certain the lie will really create less total suffering than the truth (it rarely does), or when I feel like it because I am embarrassed or scared.
10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
1.  My big ol' humpy nose. It's like a camel. There could be a family of chipmunks living in there!
11. Which living person do you most despise?
1. I'm not very good at despising people, either. I suppose the go-to answer is Donald Trump these days, but I don't know him personally.
12. What is the quality you most like in a man?
1. A genuine sense of humor.
13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
1. A genuine sense of humor.
14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
1.  Probably, like, "like," when I'm talking. I don't know about writing; I don't keep track.
15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
1. You probably don't know him. I don't love him anymore.
16. When and where were you happiest?
1. At summer camp, when I was much younger.
17. Which talent would you most like to have?
1. Very high emotional intelligence/perception, or telepathy if supernatural talents are allowed.
18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
1.  I'd be happier and less complaining.
19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
1. It probably hasn't happened yet.
20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
1. A butterfly.
21. Where would you most like to live?
1. Assuming global warming isn't an issue, Italy. From what I've heard it's pretty layed-back there, I already know a little Italian, and I hate cold weather.
22. What is your most treasured possession?
1. My self.
23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
1. A tie between complete realization of your own eventual demise, and rejection of love.
24. What is your favorite occupation?
1. Staring mindlessly at the computer screen.
25. What is your most marked characteristic?
1. I'm blunt.
26. What do you most value in your friends?
1. A genuine sense of humor, and also willingness to give and receive sincere attention.
27. Who are your favorite writers?
1. Currently, I don't know. I have a hard time sitting down and reading these days.
28. Who is your hero of fiction?
1. Hazel Grace Lancaster.
29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
1. I don't know very much history.
30. Who are your heroes in real life?
1. My mother and step-father, and all the intelligent, sympathetic and hilarious teachers I've ever had.
31. What are your favorite names?
1. Lyra and Basil.
32. What is it that you most dislike?
1.  Rampant consumerism and similar tragedies.
33. What is your greatest regret?
1.  Waiting too long to tell several different people that I loved them.
34. How would you like to die?
1. Peacefully and unknowingly, in my sleep, or surrounded by family and friends and chugging hot cocoa.
35. What is your motto?
1. Just let it go already.

(my source for the questions.)

Ready Player ViHart

Hello, all.

I just saw something pretty incredible.

It's a video. Generally, I don't embed videos unless they are the main content of the post and/or extremely short, because usually they deserve your full attention. This one definitely deserves your full attention. If you haven't already, click the link above, and watch the entire thing, preferably in full screen mode. It'll be worth it.

You're back?

Great.

Pretty cool, right? I wasn't aware these things existed until today. A few minutes ago, actually. I suppose I am behind the times, as it were.

The video reminded me immediately of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which I finished reading last night. It was a great read, so if you enjoy video games, eighties pop culture, or fast and exciting reads, it's definitely worth a look. Without spoiling anything for those of you who haven't read it, a big feature of the book is the immersive VR widely available to and used by the public, for any and every purpose imaginable (yes, even that one). That video is far cry from what the novel, which takes place a century or so in the future, describes (though in all fairness I view it on my laptop, not on the Oculus Rift which I don't have), but it was kind of mind-blowing. And it's not the first of its kind, either. There's a whole channel devoted to three-hundred-and-sixty degree, VR-compatible vlogs (yes, I found it just after watching ViHart's video linked above). I really can't get over how cool this is.

Of course, it's also a little scary. I have watched my brother, my sister, and myself fall into the grasp of the time-sucky pleasures of TV, the Internet, and video games again and again. What would happen to our rapidly shrinking attention spans if we could project an entire multi-layered world onto our eyelids?

Certainly (and I draw much of my insight from Ernest Cline) more people would retreat into technology more often, and for longer periods of time. There would likely be a rise in hikikomori. An immersive virtual reality such as the one in Cline's futuristic but eerily realistic world could not only divert our attention from the real world, but further spoil and degrade our smartphone-addled attention spans, and increase our hunger for novelty as we built a tolerance.

On the other hand, a (nearly) complete immersion in another reality could result in a stronger focus. With 360-degree photo-realistic sights, sounds, textures, temperatures, and sometimes smells, there might be enough incoming information from a single overall source to satisfy our appetites. The problem with the Internet may be that it is so large, and that from a sensory perspective it is relatively bland and shallow. The rich multi-sensory experience offered by full VR could finally satisfy our hunger for new attractions.

Then again, if a web browser was constantly available within this VR, attention could become even more fragmented. The characters in Cline's book have so much access to information and services while immersed in VR that they might as well be wearing virtual Google Glass.

------------------
Do you have different or unmentioned opinions? Leave them in the comments!

An anecdote

I would like to share today a memory from a few years ago which I like to think is quite relevant to the state of today's society.

In middle school, we had recess on a big turf soccer field surrounded by a track. The track was enclosed by a ring of real, not entirely tamed grass. On the left, in front of the school, was a strip of pavement of the sort people play wallball on. On the right was a second soccer field, which we were forbidden to enter because the high schoolers sometimes had gym there, and between the big soccer field and the school was a small playground (the kind that doesn't even have a swing set) which only a small minority of the student population used regularly. Directly in front of all this was the soccer field, and the track, and the ring of quaintly wild grass, and beyond that, on the far side of the track and the field, the real grass sloped up towards a tall chain link fence, which protected the children from the quiet row of residential houses which lay behind it (or vice versa).

It was in that direction I was generally looking--as it makes sense to do, when one is walking out the door having just finished their lunch--when I saw something. It was barely a flicker, and it would have seemed unlikely to me that it was anything substantial--yet I knew I had seen some sort of movement. I immediately took off running, feet pounding against the pavement, then grass, then rubber track and turf and rubber track and grass again, uphill this time, until I reached the fence, panting, and I saw that I was right in hurrying over.

Now, it's entirely possible that I had simply seen the leaves rustling in the wind, which had alerted me coincidentally to the thing which I gawked at presently, but I was and am very proud of my good eyesight, and I like to think I saw from almost 80 yards what I saw from just several feet: a falcon, peregrine, as I'm fond of remembering it (though I have never known the slightest thing about the identification of birds of prey), pulling the entrails free from a small, grey rodent with its small yellow beak. I was excited, and I watched the falcon, or hawk, or whatever it was (though it did not look pompous enough to be an eagle, I'm certain) eat its just-caught lunch, right in a woodpile in some unaware persons backyard. I stood very still, as not to scare it away, for several minutes. Periodically I looked behind me, to see if anyone else noticed what I was doing. Sometimes I would see a friend or acquaintance, someone I was comfortable talking to, making their way past ten feet below. Each time I would motion frantically with my hands, press my finger to my lips, try to get them to come over quietly. But they didn't get it, or more likely, they didn't see me, and they just walked on past.

Eventually, I got frustrated, and the excitement was boiling over--so I began whispering, very quietly. "Hey guys, psst, look at this!" They didn't hear me. So I resorted to a quiet shout: "HEY GUYS C'MERE! LOOK WHAT I FOUND!"

I ran halfway down the hill to meet my friends and shepherd them to my wonderful secret.

But when I came to the fence again, the hawk was gone.

Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, Part 1

Every few months or so, my local library will have a used book sale. I usually get a pretty good haul, and the books are so cheap I grab anything that looks even vaguely interesting. For this reason, most of the books soon find themselves sitting on my shelves, unread, until they catch my eye and I pick them up again.

Yesterday, I stayed up very late, and when I finally stumbled into bed I couldn't get to sleep, despite being exhausted. So I looked to the bookshelf on my right and there was a big, heavy, boring-looking book--Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett. I am reasonably sure I picked it up only to have it sit impressively on my bookshelf, perhaps half-convincing myself I would read it someday--after which I could, of course, correctly claim that I had in fact read that book, and talk about it with whatever level of pretension I chose.

Speaking of pretension, what a title. Right off that bat, I'm thinking, 'well here's someone with an ego'. Look, I can explain consciousness! No matter that nobody else can! The supposedly legitimizing testimony from The New York Times, quietly set across the top of the front cover--"One of the Ten Best Books of the Year"--did very little to assuage my doubts. However, I was and am confident that this book will be very interesting, if boldly erroneous. Daniel C. Dennett also coauthored The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter, author of my favorite non-fiction book of all time, Godel, Escher, Bach (which, come to think of it, also believes it understands consciousness and can correctly explain it to the unprepared layman). 

The first chapter, "Prelude: How are hallucinations possible?" seems to confirm all these suspicions. Dennett begins harmlessly enough with the famous "brain in a vat" thought experiment. Just a few pages later, he has convinced himself that the scenario is technically impossible, that the world we see must exist on some level, because no computer is powerful enough to fabricate it.

Now, I'm certainly no expert in philosophy, but I know a bit about it, and it seems to me that declaring the scenario "beyond human technology" is a huge cop-out. The problem with Dennett's argument is that all of his evidence relies on science--data humans have obtained from the physical world around us, over generations. Even something as simple as the tactile sensation of your index finger running through sand is "computationally intractable on even the fastest computer". That statement relies on what we know about energy, matter, and logic in our universe. What if a different kind of computer exists in the "outer universe" of which you are not aware, the one in which you are hallucinating your own existence? What if nothing physically exists at all, and you are simply a magical free consciousness, creating a world for itself to live in? Why would a brain in a vat be the only mode of not-existing (in the "real" sense), if there is no guarantee that we even have brains, or anything similar? Furthermore, Dennett argues that a simulation would never be realistic enough to fool us--but how can you know, if you have never experienced the "real" reality?

There is one point I will agree on, however, and that's Descartes' famous declaration: "I think, therefore I am". Clearly something exists with which to do the thinking, doubting and hallucinating--though it might not exist "physically", in our sense of the word; it might not exist on our level of reality. Who says our reality is the "real" one, anyway?

Like I said, I'm no philosopher, so feel free to discuss or correct me in the comments--if you know this stuff, I really appreciate it, and if you don't, well then you have no reason to be intimidated.

Stay tuned for discussion of the following chapters!

Greetings from Northeastern suburbia!

Hello all. This is the first post, so I suppose I will tell you some things about me.

I'm currently 15 years old. I'm a freshman at a private school (which I can only afford because my mom works there) somewhere in the Northeastern United States. I have a lot of interests--music, science, reading, art, math. And I love to write. Which you probably guessed already, because I'm writing right now, of my own volition. School just let out, so I won't have to write anything against my will until September! 

So, for the next few months, I will try to document the things I do with my ample free time. I am going off to camp at some point, but that's not for a while.

Since I don't have much else to say at the moment, here's a low-quality (cell phone) video I shot a few weeks ago.  No, I did not alter or add any sounds to the video. I barely edited it at all. The only things making noise are a bass bow, a ride cymbal, and an amplifier. (No, you don't have to listen to the whole thing. I understand. You have things to do. There are some cool things in the middle and towards the end, but you can get the gist of it after about five seconds).