Friday office hours, new location

  I just got here and saw that the cafeteria is closed. So I am moving my office hours to Gotham Cafe, which is on the NE corner of 68th and 2nd, right next to a salon.  I'll be there until 7.  Sorry for the last minute change.

Wednesday, Dec. 14th, Cafeteria hours change

FYI: I will be in the cafeteria from 5 until 7 and not 4 until 7, tomorrow, Wednesday, Dec. 14th.  Sorry for the change.  I will still be available on Friday from 4 to 7, in the cafeteria.

HUME COMPATIBILISM

The crucial question would be if everything that happens in the universe is the result of causal necessary relations like the laws of physics, then how one can have a “free” will in the sense of a decision. Hume states there’s a Compatibilism between human free will and determinism by attempting to explain the reason why humankind cannot escape the chain of cause and effect even explained by this idea of determinism understood as Law of nature by the physics; explained by Hume as “matter that is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause.” (54p) On the other hand, the free will, which at first gaze seems the power people have to choose and make their own decisions, it’s for Hume “a power of acting or no acting according to the determination of the will, that our free will would be the ability to act according to our desires”… He would explain like so: “Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity… ; these passions, mixed in various degrees , and distributed through society, have been…the source of all the actions and enterprises, that have been observed in mankind. “ (55p) Based on this, Hume will later say that Liberty and necessity not only are the two compatible, but Liberty requires Necessity. Well, there’s his Compatibilism. But the question keeps still in effect to be solved. How we can reconcile, on one hand, that view of that all events are causally determinated, and the on the other hand, the view that in any given situation, a person could have behaved otherwise in free will.
Everyone always do what they are leaned to do in specific situations and these inclinations come from our cravings and desires. Would it mean we are actually slaves of our feelings?. But essentially, this makes us free because at the end we do what we want. However, if we are slaves to our feelings, and our feelings are results of things that have happened to us in the past, then doesn’t that eliminate the possibility of free will entirely?

Hume on Custom, Probability and the Reason of Animals

In section five, Skeptical Solutions to These Doubts, Hume describes the foundation of inference. “Custom ( habit), then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us…” (29) writes Hume. Reason and reflection are not enough to explain human understanding. I will reflect about a different example than used by Hume. Lets suppose I don’t know coffee is made with ground coffee beans and water. The question is: can I infer the mechanism of brewing if I see water and coffee brought inside a room, and coffee brought out? I would first have to know water can absorb molecules, I would also have to know that that ground coffee is penetrable, and water may travel through unlike rubber for example. It would also help if I knew what happened inside the kitchen, generally speaking. I can imagine water running through coffee and coming out clear. To answer the question I asked, no; I would not be able to infer that the pure water becomes coffee unless had certain experiences. I see why Hume explains custom is the great guide to human life.

In section six, Of Probability, Hume discusses probability and its influence on belief. Clear water will always boil at 100 degrees centigrade at sea level. As many times as I conduct this experiment, it ways be the case. I may not be educated in thermodynamics to be able to explain the phenomena, or even know water is composed of independent water molecules. But, I have a thermometer and the temperature never reaches above 100 degrees. Despite my ignorance of the phenomena, the fact that the water will boil at the same temperature every time will give me a strong confidence in understanding. Suppose a rascal contaminates my water supply with salt. The salt ions will dissolve and pull the water molecules towards them with a stronger force than the water molecules act on each other and thus raise the boiling point. My belief that the boiling temperature is 100 degrees now would be proportionate to the event.

In section nine, Hume extends cause and effect to all animals. I’m sure everyone is familiar with Pavlov’s Dog experiment where the he rings a bell preceding every meal and eventually the dog’s stomach begins releasing digestive juices after the sound of the bell. Furthermore, the intelligence of animals is rather well known today. Dogs can be trained to find bombs, drugs or help the disabled. This is not a surprise after all because animals need to utilize the principle of cause and effect for survival, something exploited in animal trainig. The mental faculties in animals are limited after all. Monkeys are caught by luring them with bananas in containers with opens small to retrieve a hand once it made a fist.

The Problem of Induction

In today’s post for the sexiest philosophy blog online, I’ll take a look at the fourth section of Hume’s Enquiry, and try to make sense of the so-called “problem of induction”. Hume begins by differentiating those things which are possibly true into either “Relations of Ideas” (true logically, by the parts making up the whole; something like a priori truths discoverable by mere thought) and “Matters of Fact” (true conditionally based upon objective reality). Then he explains that “Matters of Fact” are judged true or false through the use of cause and effect, which is where it gets really interesting (perhaps even sexy, some might say), because he says that the relationship of cause and effect cannot be understood outside of experience (it is not a priori given). But why exactly is that so important?

It’s important because most of what expect and “understand” in our daily lives are based upon the notion of induction, which is to say that we expect similar results from similar actions / situations. We have, every single day of our lives, experienced the law of gravity as true, and so we assume that when he drop a dense object from some height, it will fall downwards towards the surface of the earth. People don’t go skydiving and expect to fly up when they leave the plane. However, since induction is not given a priori, we cannot assume that our natural laws will hold at all times. A good way of understanding this which I have come across in my study of philosophy is a hypothetical example:

Imagine, if you will, an infinite (constructed, not absolute) room full of unlabeled boxes. You have been given the unenviable task of cataloging the contents of all the boxes. You open one box, and in it, you find 30 bags of Munchies Cheese Fix, the greatest snack known to mankind. You open a second box, and you find the same thing. And so forth, up to a million boxes, always finding the 30 bags of the delicious snack. You then leave the room and tell your employer that every box in the infinite room contains 30 bags of Munchies. Would you be justified in saying so? Of course not. The millionth-and-one box may have contained 25 bags of Munchies. Or perhaps it was full of venomous snakes. The point is, you can’t assume, no matter how many times the relationship has held true in the past, that it will hold true in the future. This is the problem of induction.

What Hume is pointing out is that, since everything we know about “Matters of Fact” (which is most of our knowledge) is based on cause-and-effect, which suffers from the problem of induction, then we cannot say for certain that many things we take for granted (all of physics, for example) will continue to hold true in the future. We might be able to say that it is probable, or likely, but we can never say it is definite or certain.

Sexy, sexy stuff.

Idea Empiricism in Hume

In the second section of the Enquiry, Hume writes about Idea Empiricism, claiming that "ideas... are copies of our impressions" (11). In particular, I like the phrasing of his example in the second proof that "a blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds" (12). With the exception of the missing shade of blue example that he gives, I think that this is probably how our minds must necessarily work. We are, as John Locke famously said, born a blank slate and we develop ideas based on experience and interactions with the external world. Children do not understand concepts such as “right” and “wrong” without being taught them, and the only thing that really seems to be inherent is our ability to reason and learn and understand ideas. But, as far as the ideas themselves are concerned, it seems reasonable to say that we develop them after experience and not the other way around.

One example of this comes from my own personal life, and one that I have spent a lot of time pondering. I am three different kinds of colorblind, and these three interact in odd ways depending on the lighting in a room, the material that things are made of, how much sleep I’ve gotten, etc. etc. This has the particularly annoying (interesting, some might say) effect that the same object will look like two completely different colors from day to day or even minute to minute. When I first explained this phenomenon to a close friend, he asked me the question, “then what do you think of when you think of the color red?” I had no response for him, and upon further reflection, I came to realize that I have no conception of the color “red” in any abstract sense. I am aware that such a color exists, and I have associated it with different objects from time to time in my life, but the idea of “red” is not one that I can conjure in my mind on its own. Due to the variable / non-fixed nature of colors in my experiences, I have never been able to know for sure what object is what color without asking someone else (someone who is not colorblind). If the same shirt looks purple one day, then burgundy the next, then blue, and so forth, I can never know for sure what color the shirt is, and more importantly for the context of Hume’s empiricism, I also do not know exactly what “purple”, “burgundy”, and “blue” mean. If ideas were inherent, and not derivative of experience, we might expect that this would not be the case. And yet, here I sit, living proof that it is.

Locke on Simple and Complex Ideas

In Book II of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke explains and distinguishes the concepts of simple and complex ideas from which all understanding can be derived. Simple ideas are the source of all knowledge, where everything we understand comes from, and these ideas are respectable to the five senses we possess as human beings: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Because these ideas are only known through the senses we can say that they are only known through experience and Locke describes the two forms of experience as sensation, which is when our senses actually experience the world through our bodily senses, and reflection, which is when our minds look inward to the reaction on our minds. Then there are complex ideas which are the combination or unification of several simple ideas to form one idea based on the various concepts we get from simple ideas, or the various senses through which we understand the simple ideas. Complex ideas can also be formed when we compare and or abstract “general ideas” from the various simple ideas that we have.

The concept of simple ideas being the basis for all that we know and the fact that simple ideas are known through experience can make it seem as though Locke is a materialist, in the fact that he focuses only on the experience that the simple ideas place on us. Which is another crucial part of this concept of simple ideas and that is that the mind is passive because it is being acted upon by these simple ideas through which we experience the world. But that is mostly through the sensation aspect of experiencing simple ideas while the reflection aspect requires us to look inward at the reaction or effect that these simple ideas have on us thus allowing us to truly understand these simple ideas. One of the most crucial aspects of all this is to understand that at no time is there a simple idea ever created, all the simple ideas that we experience, whether through sensation or reflection, already exist in the world and what we are understand is the idea but we are not creating it, which is the main reason that this concept of simple idea is a passive one.

Then there is the concept of complex ideas, which are the combination, comparison, or abstraction of simple ideas in order to create a grander general idea that is composed of the various simple ideas involved the thought process. This concept of complex ideas is the active aspect of this theory in which the mind is now acting for itself as opposed to being acted upon by the experience of simple ideas. In the process of creating complex ideas, whether combination, comparison, or abstraction, the mind must consider all the aspects of the simple ideas and the experiences placed upon them and then form a general idea regarding all these aspects, which will inevitably become the complex idea.

Knowing God, Unknowing Reason

“Our knowledge of our own existence is intuitive.” (pg. 274, 3) For Locke, knowledge is what the mind is able to perceive through reasoning with a connection or lack of a connection between our ideas. This is because knowledge only has to do with relations between ideas which are in our minds not of the world itself. Most of our everyday experience is subject to some opinions or judgments. We base our judgments on the similarities between our own experiences and the experiences described by others. We use reason to obtain judgment and knowledge. When it comes to knowing God, faith is the acceptance of the revelation and has its own truth that reason can’t find. However, reason is always used to determine which revelations are really from God and which are the makings of man. Reason may also include the use of the syllogism. "But God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational." (pg. 315, 4) It is possible and very common for people to be reasonable without having had any instruction in the use of the syllogism.

Locke on Language

No one can deny the huge role language plays in our lives, but at the very same time, a lot of us take it’s basis for granted. We never even consider breaking it down, the different kinds of words, where they come from, why we use them, what they really mean. It’s a whole system we learn as children, take for face value and move on. And ye, language, not just the ability to make noise, is what separates us from animals, it is the most important element we possess as a race. In chapters I though IV of book III, Locke breaks down language to its most simple of forms and builds upon this foundation. Ultimately as he states in chapter II, words mean nothing but the ideas to which we assign them, they are the tools that man use in order to get the invisible ideas floating around out of his head and into the world. It is not the words that have meaning; they mean nothing without the ideas. But his major focus lays in general ideas, because this isn’t as simple as particulars, assigning a certain word to a certain thing, this is giving a whole array of similar things a common identity.

And then there is the particularly interesting part in which he analyzes the difference between real and nominal essences of beings. The idea of “essence” has been a reoccurring theme in the works of Descartes, Spinoza, and now Locke. It was important when trying to prove the existence of God, but Locke brings it down to the world around us. According to him there is both real and nominal essences, Real, being the intrinsic value, and nominal pertaining to its observable properties. And yet, despite what we would assume differentiation to be based off of (the real essence), it is based off nominal essence. He goes on to state “species that are distinguished by their real ideas [are] useless” (Locke, 186). This may seem backwards, but after reading through point seventeen we come to realize that the basis of words is solely what we perceive, this is what he had laid out in his previous chapters. Words, general terms, they rely on the characteristics things posses, and then also privation. Cold is the absence of heat; man is what the particular “Joe” lacks. This is a turn from Descartes who could and would not rely on his senses as a connection to reality.

Locked on Common Sense

In the opening of the Epistle to the Reader, Locke describes how a conversation shared amongst him and his friends sparked an intense and laborious debate and subsequent impasse, on certain philosophical principles. Locke, noticing that the conversation was limited by boundaries of human knowledge, decided to lay out a philosophical framework of understanding that functioned within those boundaries. The complex nature of the metaphysical quest for universal knowledge does not lead to a suitable and functional understanding of knowledge. The design of his framework beginning in Book I immediately reduces some of the heavily debated points covered by other philosophers, to that of speculation. Locke’s method focuses on where conscious ideas come from, what ideas are and their certainty and extent, and the nature and grounds of faith and opinion. Physical considerations of the mind, how essence body and spirit come to have sensation in our organs, ideas in our understanding, and the dependence of ideas on matter, are NOT matters of primary focus in Locke’s platform. What IS of focus, directly counters views that metaphysical philosophers such as Descartes had pertaining to the trusting (or lack thereof) of corporeal senses. Locke places a heavy emphasis of the use of senses as that which establishes knowledge through sensation experience and reflection.

How much we know the extent of our comprehension can be very useful, even considering the limitations of our knowledge capacity. I like the sailor example that Locke uses when tackling the limitations of knowledge- a sailor may never know or fathom the deepness of the ocean, but is capable of using a line of known length to assist in the traversal of unknown waters to his benefit. By experiencing through the senses, our mind processes and operates. We think and reflect to produce ideas, which in turn lead to greater knowledge. Without these experiences to sense and reflect on, we remain in an infant or ‘tabula rasa’ like philosophical state of knowledge. The senses produce repeatable simple ideas which can complex to form an infinite variety of complex ideas. Because the mind can neither make nor destroy these simple ideas, if we do not have the ability to sense something, we do not have the ability to create ideas and in turn extensive knowledge on it. In reflecting on all of this, I tried to come up with some type of sense that I do not recall ever experiencing- namely that the experience of telepathy. Locke would probably conjecture that we are not able to have knowledge of the transferring of thought, if we have never experienced a simple telepathic process sensation to produce the simple ideas. With the pretty sexy stuff running around in the 7 billion minds that inhabit our planet, maybe that’s not so much of a bad thing.

Contra Mind-Body Dualism, G.W. Leibniz

       Within the Monadology, Liebniz attempts to provide his account for the reality of the universe, as based on the simplest substance identified as a monad. One of his main causes for the discourse was to provide a more probable solution to the mind-body problem than the Cartesian idea of dualism.
       He states "..every living body has one dominant entelechy, which in an animal is its soul; but the parts of that living body are full of other living things...which also has its entelechy or dominant soul (p.69)", eventually leading him to say that "there are no spirits without bodies (p.72)". Further supported by the idea of the monad, which in itself has the predetermined mechanism of harmony with all the other monads, Liebniz establishes a system of reality that has less to do with how separate the mind and the body are in their respects to each other, but more with how all the monads are able to exist with those monads that are different based on this harmony. Previously, he also argued that each monad is different from each other in the sense that, when God created the first monad A, he then made other monads that in some qualities are not A, and one of the major ways in which they could be different is that they're either active or passive in respect to each other, aside from the qualitative difference.
       Some questions begin to arise; how is it that a monad of thought, or those exact qualities that for Cartesian followers constitutes the mind, can have substance? And even before that, to say that everything is made up of these tiny substantiated particles that are irreducible seems to imply that the mind is the only true existing thing, whereas matter, or extension, was just accidentally and simultaneously created as a fabric in the universe that only responds with modes in appearance or "perception (p.14)".
       The major goal of this system was to battle dualism with a combination of what seems to be a hybrid of teleology and the view of efficient causes, in that the monads act with bodies to carry out whatever quality it is they have within themselves or composite beings, without being able to influence each other or affect one another; they simply remain qualitatively different. However, I still cannot reconcile that, though this system is adequately logical, the monads are the only true substance, yet matter was just somehow created at the same time so that monads and substance coexist in appearance. Does this view battle dualism effectively, or does it have just as many cracks and flaws?

What is Real and Intelligible

The Treatise on the Emendation of Intellect, is supposed to give insight into how the mind can form ideas that are clear and distinct. However after reading the passages, I found myself asking the question what is real and intelligible? I think that the intended function of the intellect is to assess our immediate environment and communicate the information to our body so it could respond in whatever way appropriate and helps us to form our final decisions. The ideas that we accumulate through our past and present experience are clear and distinct. Our minds are active and associative from one situation to another. If we sit in silence and try to remain that way, thoughts will arise no matter how much we try to block our minds from it. Would these thoughts be considered “real and intelligible” or fiction? “A circle is one thing, the idea of a circle is another. For the idea of a circle is not something having a circumference and a center, as is a circle, nor is the ideas of a body itself a body. And since it is something different from its object, it will also be something intelligible through itself”(p170, 33). So when we know the nature of both the circle and the square it is impossible for us to combine the two, but I’ve seen square donuts. So the folks at the Donut Plant took one idea formed a new one, which in turn can be formed into something else that is both real and intelligible.

Unit of Mind and Body

The first twenty-three propositions of Ethics pt.2 deal with the human mind and its relation to the body. The most important of these, I think, are P11 (“That which constitutes the actual being of the human mind is basically nothing else but the idea of an individual actually existing thing”) and P13 (“The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body – i.e., a definite mode of extension actually existing, and nothing else). From these two propositions Spinoza establishes a unity of mind and body. But if a human mind is only the idea of its respective, actually existing human being, why make the distinction between mind and body at all? It seems as though Spinoza makes the mind out to be a transient phenomenon occurring within the human body. However he goes on to state that “it follows that man consists of mind and body, and the human body exists according as we sense it.” How can man consist of both mind and body when mind only exists insofar as it is the idea of an individual actually existing person? Either mind must be re-defined or man is only the respective physical body.

This flaw in Spinoza’s argument has consequences for the rest of his philosophy. If mind does not exist then the whole class of attributes called Thought cannot exist. This is because Thought is dependent upon the existence of a thinking faculty, namely the mind, without which it is non-existent. Additionally, Ideas cannot exist since they too are dependent upon an idea-forming entity like the mind. So if Thought and Ideas are dependent upon the existence of the mind, without which they cannot exist as attributes, then it follows that no mode of substance can possess these attributes. This means that neither God nor humans can possess the attribute of Thought, which Spinoza would find to be absurd.

Existing Inside of God

From Proposition 21 onwards Spinoza reaches one of his most important claims, that God is the cause of both the existence and essence of everything. Everything lives inside of God, he has determined the particular ways in which nature functions; he is the one and only infinite substance from which everything we know of stems from. Does this mean finite things are made out of an infinite substance? How is that possible? Even things that have a designated start and finish still have to, in some way, come from God. It’s within the proof of Proposition 28 that Spinoza addresses my question. His answer: finite things must have been caused by other finite things which had to be caused by other finite things etc etc. I’m not necessarily satisfied with this answer. He goes on to then bring up the concepts of “Natura Naturans” and “Natura Naturata” as a mode of explanation, in which he describes “Natura Naturans” as something conceived through itself, and “Natura Naturata” as things that come out of necessity of God’s nature.

While reading through the appendix of Part I, the adage “Perspective is reality” kept running through my mind. Such is true on an individual level concerning man, but also on a much broader scale. In the quest to figure out final causes, humans constantly have to come to believe that the world was created for their own advantage, and that man is meant to worship God in hopes to stay within his good graces, and receive the benefits of these graces. Spinoza states that this is far from the case. Ultimately, things were not created with human standards in mind; they were not made in attempts to fit into our fabricated ideals of beautiful and ugly, good and bad, but for their sole purposes alone. “Nature has no fixed goal and that all final causes are but figments of the human imagination.” (Pg. 26) Within this one statement he discredits teleology, his discredits the idea that we can explain things through their purposes, for their purpose has nothing to do with us, it is something all in its own. Ultimately, the perfection of things in nature cannot be measured on a human scale, but in terms of themselves, and nothing else. It’s the same as disregarding a genre of music or cuisine because we don’t personally like it, that would just be absurd.

Difference and Unity in God

Difference is possible in two ways “Two or more distinct things are distinguished from one another either by the difference of the attributes of the substances or by the difference of the affections of substance” (1P4). That is, there are two types of difference: formal and modal difference.  I’m just going to address formal difference.  Substances with different attributes are distinct formally, because they possess separate, independent essences. An attribute is what “the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence”(1D4). But really, we are saying substance insofar as it is expressed by this attribute. One might wonder why Spinoza distinguishes between substance and attribute at all, since it will turn out that each attribute must be able to be conceived by itself, which is part of the definition of substance.

The answer is that if he cannot distinguish substance from attributes, then there are an infinite number of attributes, possibly, but we have no explanation for that nor for the possibility of God’s existence. In addition to a concept of difference, Spinoza needs one that explains unity.  Otherwise, there will be no reason to believe that there is any relation between different attributes, and, eventually, the world would be separated into an infinite number of possible worlds, each of which possessing an absolutely unique essence. In other words, in order for Spinoza to think unity in “Nature” whatsoever, he has to posit a distinction between substance and attributes, by which attributes are distinct, but this does not mean that substances are different.

In some ways, Spinoza’s proof for the existence of God amounts to an argument that there is no reason to distinguish substances from one another, since they are distinct only in attribute, they could be the same single substance. 1P5, P6 and P10 speak of the irreducibility of the attributes (or substance conceived by the different attributes). P7, P8 and P9 are all premises towards P11, establishing the necessary existence, infinity and “reality or being”.  P9 is especially important, because only on these grounds are we lead to conceive a reason for a substance containing more than one attribute. But the proofs of P11 seem to depend primarily on the necessary existence of God.  The first is simply the ontological proof, that existence necessarily belongs to, or “is involved in”, his essence. The second claims that the absolutely infinite being is not a contradictory notion, or there is no reason contrary to such a being. The third proof is a posteriori, following the supposition that if anything exists, an omnipotent being exists. But P11 is then supplemented by P12, P13 and P14, which go towards establishing not merely that a single substance is a non-contradictory idea, but also that God must be an eminently simple being.