I’ve been following some interesting stuff by Bill Vallicella about the “thickness” or otherwise of existence. I think the general debate is this: if you can use logical quantifiers to define “Socrates exists” in a sort of Quinean way then you remove at a stroke Heideggerean concerns about the import of “exists”. Thick theorists such as Mr Vallicella believe such reductionism to be misconceived. I think the idea is that the quantifiers import what they aim to omit and if they don’t they leave out other issues that are at leat as important etc….

Anyway there is no point in getting on board with this stuff without going back to primary texts so I opened Graham Priest’s texbook on non-classical logic to find that “A set X, is a collection of objects….”

OK: so how does the reductionism get off the floor then if set theory at its most anodyne uses a concept such as “object” which is, shall we say, metaphysically neutral?

(I realise that there’s an apples and oranges issue there but the point obtains doesn’t it? If you’re attemtpting to avoid ontological promiscuity via logical austerity had’t you be careful what you’re notation commits you to?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M-cmNdiFuI

Enjoy: rebuttals are welcome (but let’s not forget the PAC rules).

(Hat tip: Bill Vallicella).

“I’m going out with my pal Rick for a beer tonight, he’s got himself into a spot of bother with the police again. Fighting.” said Dave.

I think for a minute: “Rick, I don’t think I know him do I?”.

“No” said Dave, “you’ve never met him. I know him from my anger management group.”

Dave is my running partner yet he and I are not alike. He has spent much of his adult life swirling around the British penal system and I, well, haven’t. But an interest in running can forgive a multitude of sins, and he has been gracious enough to forgive many of mine.

Dave’s back story makes for a cautionary tale of how the UK statutory services can infiltrate a life and subvert the identity of the person they purport to help. He has probation officers, social workers, outreach workers and counsellours, all vying for his time and all interfering with his attempt to construct a life, honest or otherwise. But he is fighting back, with the aid of his Penalty Box.

The idea is as follows. Whenever Dave has a meeting with a representative of any of the abovementioned agencies, he takes with him his Penalty Box, into which the relevant factotum must pay a forfeit if she uses any of the following expressions:

acceptable (or unacceptable); appropriate (or inappropriate); empower(ing); person centred (or person oriented); developmental; non-judgemental; rights-based; forward-looking ; in partnership.

If a project or service is ever said to be rolled out then Dave claims a double forfeit. And if any mention of the date is made in such a way as to imply it has a particular moral relevance then that is triple. Hence if a social worker were to say of his opinion that it is  “judgemental and not an appropriate comment to make in this, the 21st Century” then he’d hit paydirt.

But Dave has a Budweiser habit to feed and he wishes to go abroad for his Summer vacation so he is in need of funds. I therefore appeal, on his behalf, for any submissions which you the reader believe could plausibly be added to the above list.

Dave’s strategy has a pleasing consequence, one that is more than merely financial. He has discovered that in being denuded of the above expressions the social worker, probation officer and counsellour suffers a pleasing paralysis of expression and of thought.Meetings that used to take several hours are now over in minutes.  It has become obvious to him that the Wittgensteinians have a point: that there is no pre-linguistic “given”, that thought and experience are mediated by and logically consequent upon language. Strip these statutory representatives of their language game and they become like putty in his hands. He used to spend his time running from these people, now he knows that, with the help of his Penalty Box, he can philosophise them away.

In general outline at least the historical record is not in dispute.  In 1946 Karl Popper addressed the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club on the subject Are There Philosophical Problems?. The subsequent discussion, chaired by Russell, is known to have been lively. At one point Wittgenstein, brandishing a poker, is said to have demanded of Popper that he offer an example of  a moral rule: “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers”, Popper is said to have replied. At which point Wittgenstein, perhaps deciding it was a case of “thereof one must be silent”, stormed out.

It has been suggested that the title and content of Popper’s paper were intended to provoke Wittgenstein who by this time is thought to have become sceptical of the existence of philosophical problems, and to believe that such “problems” were instead reducible to the misuse of language. Whether his scepticism was as well defined as many think is open to question. An alternative reading of Wittgenstein might be that he was developing a metaphilosophical perspective from which standard philosophical problems were drained of their force. Thus in the Blue and Brown Books he remarks that “philosophy really is purely descriptive”. Presumably, also, Popper thought that Wittgenstein, a former pupil of Russell and Moore, and by this time a Cambridge Don, had never come across a philosopher who took seriously the existence of philosophical problems. None of this is important of course. What is most notable about the “Poker incident” is its delicious status as an originator of that most wonderful thing: the philosophical feud.

The incident itself was too fleeting to count as a feud-in-itself (a noumenal feud as it were). But there were many, many spin offs. Defenders of Wittgenstein have claimed that it is unfair to infer from the brandishing of the poker a genuine threat. On this view Wittgenstein was just playing with the poker in a particular way. The Popperians have countered that this defence requires the existence of an inner mental object that exists in addition to the poker-behaviour and that in deploying such a “beetle in a box” the Wittgensteinians are guilty of hypocrisy. The moral philosophers have feuded differently, the deontologists suggesting that Popper’s example needs to be reformulated thus: “Do not threaten visiting lecturers”; the normativists denying that any such reformulation be necessary. Direct realists have accused idealists of denying the existence of the poker in the first place. One Contrarian Literalist has argued for years that Popper has successfully reduced all philosophical problems to the single axiom Do Not Threaten Visiting Lecturers With Pokers – though he, like the People’s Front of Judea, is pretty much on his own. Careers have been tarnished. Fists have flown. Obviously I’m making some of this up.

Most philosophical feuds lack the vibrancy of the Poker Incident (hereafter PI).  I remember as an undergraduate reading Iris Murdoch’s wonderful Sovereignty of Good and coming across the sentence “McTaggart denies that Time exists and Moore replies that he’s just had his breakfast”. This, I thought, sounds like good feud potential! But with the onset of age I’m coing to think that she might have, you know, been making a point about the nature of time. More recent exchanges between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn had potential, but kind of petered out.

What makes for a decent feud? For one thing it seems to me that personal animus is neither necessary nor sufficient. Smith and Jones can like and respect each other and yet feud effectively, and even movingly. And the Honderich/McGinn example shows that intense mutual dislike can sabotage the feud. Whatever animus that exists must not be between the parties but must somehow be internal to the feud itself (this point is crucial, it is tragic when a decent feud founders on the rock of mutual loathing). Need the feud be about anything significant? Again I  would suggest not. Some of the greatest feuds can take as their cause the most trivial, basement, disagreement (see again Honderich/McGinn), although it is often a good idea to disguise this in the cloak of High Principle (McGinn/Honderich ibid).

The logic of feuds is interesting. Consider the relation “A is feuding with B” (AfB). Then clearly it is commutative since AfB implies that BfA. If I’m feuding with you then you must be feuding with me. If not then what we have is not a feud but a sort of extended hissy fit on my part. On the other hand there is no transitivity since AfB and BfC does not imply AfC. I could be feuding with you and you could be feuding with my brother but that does not imply that I am feuding with my brother (as it happens I am but that is not implied by the system). What happens if A is identical to B? Is it possible to feud with yourself? On the face of it perhaps not. It would be like playing chess with yourself. But on the other hand when I was drinking I sort of pulled it off (there are issues of personal identity/continuity that are raised by this, I suspect).

It is interesting that feuding has been brought into focus by the new technologies. As it happens I visit the US quite a bit. Not in person but via various internet (political) discussion boards. On one of these I have been engaged in sustained feuding with several posters over a long period of time. One of these feuds goes back, unbroken, to the Kerry nomination of 2004. Neither of us knows the identity of the other. The feud is rancorous, unrelenting and conducted (I am proud to say) in a tone of high condescension on the part of each of us. On the other hand we exchange perfectly friendly Private Messages. The animus principle as adumbrated above is therefore impeccably observed. On the other hand were we to meet we might hate each other, in which case it would be put under some pressure. This is another example, I submit, of how the internet is reshaping serious philosophical work.

(The sharp-eyed will have noted that following discussion of the Poker Incident I made the parenthetical direction “hereafter PI” and then did not refer to it again. I’m happy to defend that omission in the comments section below but only with posters willing to give up three years of their life at least to give any such potential feud an appropriate momentum)

“Memories……like the corners of my distributed neural architecture…” -Barbara Streisand, Memories (Eliminativist Version).

Issues concerning the nature of memory, much like those concerning the nature of humour and of the paranormal, are underdescribed in the literature. Yes, philosophers have at one time or other recognised that memory carries with it a set of philosophical questions, and much interesting work has been done. But not as much as should have been and it is curious that it has not commanded more attention, nor achieved more centrality in areas such as the philosophy of mind. Continuity theories of the self, for example,  often follow Locke to make memory a necessary condition of Smith being the same person at aged 12 as at age 30 and at age 70. Locke noticed that in order to solve the problem of the persistence of persons over time it seems insufficient to posit the existence of some substance in which experiences inhere since those same experiences could be swapped between many such substances and our intuition would remain that these experiences were of the “same” person. Memory, he argued, provides a psychological criterion of persistence which is less injurious to this intuition. Needless to say there are problems with this, not least that the ascription of memory might presuppose that the question of person-persistence is already settled.  And whilst it might be the case that memory can secure our intuition that I am the same person as I was last week, is that the same claim as that I am identical to that person. Or does this not matter?

What I want to do here is to say a couple of things about the nature of memory and then to raise what might or might not be an interesting question for reductive physicalists i.e. those philsophers of mind who would want to argue that there are no features of memory which are anything more than complex features of brain function or brain chemistry.

“Memory” is not, of course, a unitary phenomenon and we can at the outset distinguish dispositional from (what I will call) the phenomenal character of memory.  By dispositional memory I mean the wealth of acquired practices we display from the time we get up until the time we go to bed: dressing, brushing our teeth, eating, driving, playing chess, riding a bike, telling the time etc. All of these involve learned cognitive competences which do not necessarily disclose themselves to consciousness. When I am playing my friend at chess I am demonstrating a memory of the rules of chess without necessarily rehearsing those rules to myself as I consider my next move (it is interesting that the more competent the player the less such rules impinge -grandmasters tend to see in positions patterns which do not smoothly transpose onto the rules that are constitutive of the game). What can we say about dispositional memory from the point of view of philosophy? Not necessarily that much. Philosophers like to distinguish the hard from the soft problem of consciousness in recognition of the fact that there are certain features of consciousness that might smoothly be integrated into the developing brain and behavioural sciences (the smooth features) and certain other features (the hard features) that will resist such integration, no matter how complete our understanding of brain function, architecture and chemistry turns out to be. Qualia (or sense data or contents presented experientially) might present a hard problem for the cognitive sciences; dispositional memory, on the other hand, might be their bread and butter – we are all of us to some degree a bit Sphexish.

I retain, as it happens, a memory of my first kiss – with a young lady called Suzanne, in a park in Oxford, on a damp Wednesday afternoon just before Christmas 1983. This memory seems not to be an instance of dispositional memory as it presents itself to me as a mental episode, with a certain character, and this character is in no way exhausted by whatever dispositional properties the memory might have. This character is phenomenal in that it feels a certain way (in this case wistful and pleasant and not a little sad). We can notice straight away that there is an interesting relation between phenomenal memory and the beliefs which accompany it, and which are used to describe it. Suppose the kiss took place not on a Wednesday but on a Friday. Would this make the memory a “false” one? Surely not. It seems as if the memory can remain veridical even if some, perhaps the majority, of the attendant beliefs are revealed by my diary to be inaccurate. Could it remain so if all the beliefs are false?  If it turns out that my first kiss was with Jane, in High Wycombe, in May 1984 we would surely want to say that my memory of Suzanne is a false one. Would realising this affect its phenomenal character? I suspect that it would. So we might want to say that there is a connection between an episode of phenomenal memory and our beliefs about that memory but that the connection is not one that can be easily articulated. To put it another way: phenomenal memory seems to be truth functional in a way that beliefs are not and yet the truth functionality of the latter somehow and to some degree feeds back into that of the former.

Reductive physicalists, of course, will want to assimilate phenomenal memory to the cognitive sciences. On this view my memory of Suzanne is no more than some cluster of features of my brain architecture and its content will turn out to be no more than a distributed property of certain neural activities occurring in parallel (or some such story). I wonder if the following feature of phenomenal memory might give them pause. Take two events, A and B. A occurred last year and was a major event in my life. B happened yesterday and was trivial. I remember both of these events and both these memories have what I have called a phenomenal character. As well as remembering A  (MemA) and remembering B (MemB)  I also have a mental episode C in which it is disclosed to me that A preceded B and that B succeeded A. In other words, there is something about the conjunction MemA and MemB which gives a phenomenal disclosure of the temporal ordering of the two episodes. C is a sort of second-order mental episode whose character is an internal relation given by MemA plus MemB. The question then is: (1) is my analysis of the phenomenology of temporal orderings of memory events plausible; and (2) if so does it present a particular problem for the reductive physicalist? My own answers to (1) and therefore to (2) tend to differ with the time of day, I’m happy to admit. So any thoughts welcome….

Suggested Reading

Adrian Cussins: The Connectionist Construction of Concepts (in The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (ed Boden 1990).

Mary Warnock: Memory (1987)

Wittgenstein: Philosophical Grammar (1974) (ed Rhees)

Suggested Listening

The Beautiful South: Song for Whoever.

“I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake up letter” - Steven Wright

I’ve been rereading Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography. It’s been twenty years since I last looked at my copy and the experience is quite discomfiting. I have to record that what I’ve read so far has revealed a man who is shallow, facile and shockingly self-absorbed…serves me right for reading the marginalia. Is there a workable notion of personal identity/continuity that would enable me to escape the charge that it wasn’t really me who wrote them? A loose psychological connectedness view perhaps? If so, then count me in.

I was motivated to look at the book again in part because of a recent conversation with a philosophical friend who remarked that Russell’s attempt to avoid the paradoxes of self-reference, his theory of types, is (and I think I quote her accurately) “shockingly ad hoc“. I must admit that I’ve long thought the same, that the attempt to eliminate the problems of self-reference by reference to the “direct introspection” of logical functions involved the identification of one ambiguity (in ordinary language) and its replacement with another, albeit another of a more respectable logical countenance. What I was hoping to find in the Autobiography was some description of his intellectual development on this specific point. Disappointingly, there is very little there. There is also not much light shed on Ayer’s point that Russell’s post-Principia philosophical techniques and subject matter are oddly discontinuous with the Russell of 1895-1910. Russell’s own claim that the energy invested in writing Principia Mathematica  afterwards left him unable to work at that intellectual altitude does not explain this completely.

Plenty of other things do stand out, however. For one thing the paperbook version is 800 pages long. It is impressive that someone who lived the life that Russell did, for the length of time that he did, could condense it all in so few words. The cast list is also impressive: were a Russell dinner party circa 1905 to have been interrupted by an unwelcome outbreak of botulism then it’s no exaggeration to suggest that the intellectual landscape of the 20th Century would have been vastly different (and not, in all ways, better). Keynes would have passed the port to Sydney Webb who would have passed it to Beatrice (who would have declined and then confiscated the bottle in the best interests of all the other guests).

But the most remarkable feature of the Autobiography to my mind is the revelation of the  sheer volume of correspondence Russell got through, a fraction of which is included in the form of appendices to the main chapters. Disappointingly few of these include those authored by the more famous protagonists in the development of mathematical logic. There is nothing from Peano (whom Russell met in Paris in 1900) and it seems that Whitehead was an indolent correspondent. Someone once remarked that whereas Russell, the grandson of a liberal Prime Minister, was undoubtedly an aristocrat he most certainly was not a gentleman. But I think these appendices show that the remark is unfair. It seems he corresponded with anyone, on almost equal terms, and there are some gems here: from Gilbert Murray’s spoof review of Russell’s The Problems of Philosophyto the lady who wrote to him to express her new found belief in solipsism and her hope that “everyone would become one”. You can’t help but suspect that had he succumbed to the raging contagion of text messaging then the logicist project might have died of natural causes without the intervention of Godel. “Alfred sorry was L8 2 seminar just spotted prob wiv class of classes lol c u l8er. B”.

One shudders to think…..

Zombies have a large part to play in philosophy. I don’t just mean as academics and lecturers -although that is also true (especially when tenure is involved). What I mean is that the concept of a zombie provides a starting point for some pretty interesting philosophical discussion. Let me explain.

If I were to ask you what, fundamentally, you are, how would you reply? You might assert that you are a human being with arms, legs, eyes, ears etc. But you would probably agree that this is hardly the whole story. You would probably also insist that you are a thinking subject, with a mind consisting of beliefs, desires, pains, intentions, hopes etc. And you might concur that it is this complex of mental states that makes you not simply a human being but also a person. If I was to then ask you: where is this mind located? You might reply (having conceded that the question is intelligible) that it is “located” in your brain. And on the face of it the reply seems reasonable. It is my brain that makes it possible for me to feel pain, to anticipate pleasure, to regret the way I voted, to believe that Mo Farah is the best distance runner in Europe.

But what does it mean to say that the mind is “located” in the brain? Is it even a preamble to an explanation to assert that the brain “makes  possible” the sensation of pain? What sort of relation is being, hesitantly, hinted at?  To say that it is your brain that makes your mind possible is not necessarily to assert a relation of identity, for example, since by “makes possible” we might mean “causes”; and when one thing causes another thing there are two distinct things, not one (the possible exception here being God). Some philosophers do indeed wish to assert that the relation is one of identity: that minds are nothing but brains or (more unusually) that brains are “logical constructions” from mental events. Others wish to argue that the mental and physical are ontologically distinct and each as fundamental as the other. Some philosophers wish to deny that minds exist in the first place (yes, honestly).

This, of course, is the mind-body problem which can be summed up in the conjunction of two questions: how to reconcile the dull, grey, synaptic firings in our brains with the richness of phenomenal experience; and how do we bind ourselves as thinking subjects to the world of objects as described by science?

Enter the zombie.

There is an ingenious argument that has been given succinct expression in the writings of David Chalmers. It goes something like this. We are familiar with zombies as they are presented in popular culture, as beings physically like us and yet different from us in that they lack conscious experience. Another way of saying this would be to state that zombies are possible in the sense that to assert that they exist might be false but does not involve a contradiction. In other words, zombies are logically possible (they might exist in some possible universe) even if they are not nomologically possible (ruled out by the physical laws which govern this universe). I am, as it happens, a fan of the actor Dick Van Dyke and consider Diagnosis Murder to be the acme of cheap television shows which appertain to hospital doctors who also happen to be detectives. We can imagine a possible world in which Mr Van Dyke has a zombie-counterpart, a physically like-for-like equivalent to the non-zombie Van Dyke right down to the causal properties of his brain. But we can also intelligibly subtract from zombie-Van Dyke those features of felt consciousness that make “our” Van Dyke the fine actor that he is (the emotional range, the sense of empathy, along with the other felt properties shared with us non-thespians). From this it follows, surely, that those phenomenal features of consciousness (the qualia, or “what it’s like to us to be in pain etc) cannot be identical with the brain since if A is identical with B then necessarily whatever properties A has, B has also: and in the stated case this necessity does not seem to obtain.

The philosopher Michelle Maise, in a nice paper called The Power of Passion on Heartbreak Hill, discusses these issues in connection with running (the title refers to a rocky patch during the Boston marathon). Is it possible, she asks, for a zombie to run a marathon? On the face of it the answer seems straightforward: why not? If we can allow that there might be zombies then we can allow also that they would be able to run. And if they lack sensations such as pain, fatigue, despair and all the other companions of the long distance runner then it seems to follow that they’d make pretty good marathon runners. I’ve spent many a club race night running against club members who show no signs of discomfort and trust me, it’s dispiriting.

But the case of the stoical club runner is misleading for two reasons. For one thing they are normally bluffing: good runners are masters of concealment. She feels the same agony as the rest of us, she just chooses not to (behaviourally) disclose it. Secondly, as Maise points out, this spectrum of sensations is not accidental to the act of running but is on the contrary essential to it. The zombie, in other words, is not running  at  all. Sure it might be moving, but it is not running any more than my PC is flying when I launch it through the air following an email from my publisher. What is required in order to transform the fact of movement into the act of running is agency which, Maise suggests, cannot be legitimately ascribed to a zombie given their cognitive deficiencies.

That said, I wouldn’t want one chasing me. I’ve seen Night of the Living Dead, those zombies can shift.

“The Power of Passion on Heartbreak Hill” is included in Michael W. Austin’s collection “Running and Philosophy: a marathon for the mind”. Other papers in the collection will be the subject of future posts.

I’m on the lam. A fugitive from the State and its capricious application of “justice”. The “one armed man” has nothing on me.

My crimes are manifold, and like all habitual offenders I started small. Ignorance is no excuse but I genuinely was unaware that in 21st Century Britain it was an offence to change a light bulb without the appropriate state-approved certification. What can I say? My baby needed feeding and the main light had blown.

Criminality is a habit like any other, and it was not long before I had changed all the light bulbs in my flat whether they needed changing or not. I consoled myself with the fiction that what I was doing was some form of protest, against the war in Afghanistan perhaps, or the cancellation of the 24 hour drinking laws, or the failure of my local church to recognise the Tridentine Mass. But who was I kidding? I support the war, don’t drink, and have forgotten most of my Latin.

Before long I was irredeemable: mixing the recyclable rubbish with the household waste on collection day; driving my god daughter to school without submitting myself to the requisite criminal records check; cycling on a public road without a helmet. On one occasion I activated a speed camera on an empty dual carriageway at three o’clock in the morning. I even broke my “no dinner party” rule in order to announce my version of climate change scepticism. I had dipped my toe into the murky currents of the underworld and every time I thought I was out….they dragged me back in.

And so I have fled, pausing briefly to throw together a bag of clothes and to grab my well-thumbed copy of Paul Feyerabend’s autobiography Killing Time. Feyerabend understood the mindset of the outsider, but as his anarchism was formed on the Eastern Front rather than in the harsher context of 21st Century Britain, my empathy with him is somewhat abbreviated.

As I write this “they” will be searching the flat. Doubtless by now ”they” will have found my copy of Anarchy, State and Utopia with the indiscreet marginalia decrying the extensive nature of Nozick’s “minimal state”. Will “they” be able to use that against me at the inevitable trial? Fortunately I have hidden my Roger Scruton: A Reader underneath the floor boards. As agents of the State are forbidden to attack floorboards (on health and safety grounds) I am confident that it will remain undiscovered.

I am reconciled to eventual capture and interrogation. I have accepted that some form of “re-education” will be inevitable. Possibly in the form of a “driving awareness” course, or compulsory enrolment in a bicycling proficiency course. Any incipient recidivism will be stamped out, ruthlessly.

The best I can hope for is “urban hero” status, but I suspect my crimes are too common to allow for this.