For Sylvia Jane II

Continuing the consideration of free will, and of Sam Harris’ recent book on the subject, from last week.  

As I indicated there, I’m not persuaded that Libet’s experiments have the broad significance sometimes attributed to them. Accordingly, I find unpersuasive Harris’ reliance on those experiments in his discussin of the factual question.

Beyond that, there is the value question. Harris wants us to abandon the idea of free will because it is part of the further idea of an autonomous self, and he wants us to give up that. The idea of a separate self is (as Buddhism teaches) the cause of all suffering and the abandonment of that illusion is enlightenment.

I recognize this idea as part of a noble philosophical heritage. For myself, though, I’m sticking with … my Self. The idea of the self, as a locus of responsibility and originality, has given us the politics of rights, of social mobility, the struggle for companionate over arranged marriage, and much else. How much “else” quickly becomes a matter of attribution and interpretation, but it seems likely for example that the idea of the lonely creative genius which was so much a part of romanticism was itself a factor in creating some of the works of art with which we associate the period.

Selfhood, whatever else we may say of it, is not only about suffering. And it is my humble prejudice that we should keep selfhood (and such notions of freedom as are intermingled with that) until we have better reasons for abandoning it than anything yet presented.

I'll have a final comment on this line of thought tomorrow.

A Philosophic Crank Immortalized

“Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except one.  Had she been born in the Ionian archipelago some three thousand years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper. The world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely, and the Thin.”   -- William James.

There’s a lot to like about this passage.  There is, to begin, the mild streak of misanthropy. James’ prose often gives you the sense that he did not suffer fools gladly, and someone of his prominence must certainly have heard from a lot of “philosophic cranks” out to sell their own brand of snake oil.

Secondly, though, and somewhat at odds with that: there’s a love of human variety. This woman was a “crank,” but she was a crank whose silly idea sticks in his mind, and might in the right time and place have made her famous.

Third, there is the point of it. For James, the distinction between thick and thin is critical in examining philosophies. Some are thin – they seem to proceed entirely by logic chopping, by the dance of bloodless categories. Such is the vice of intellectualism. Other philosophies are thick – they bring in the empirical world at every turn – and they draw James’ admiration.  He uses this anonymous woman’s distinction to introduce the works of Fechner, and the remainder of that chapter tells of his admiration for Fechner’s mind as a “multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth.”

It is the distinction, in short, between the hedgehog and the fox.      

For Sylvia Jane

On April  10, while I was working my way through a multi-post exegesis of philosopher Robert Kane’s book, The Significance of Free Will, reader Sylvia Jane asked why I hadn’t commented on Sam Harris’ more recent book on the subject.

I had to admit that I hadn’t even known of its existence until three days before receiving her question.  

But I’ll return to the subject now, just to say that I don’t think Harris brings anything new or interesting to the table.

Harris makes two points: (1) free will is an illusion, and (2) that is a good thing, too: we’ll all be better off when we rid ourselves of it.

As to (1), Harris relies upon Libet’s experiments. So let’s talk about them. Benjamin Libet is a physiologist who, in the 1980s, ran experiments in which he instructed his human subjects to make a certain simple movement , like pressing one or another button. He had their brains wired up for his machines while they were deliberating and when they finally did press one or the other button. His conclusion was that there was information available from their brain hemispheres that disclosed which button they were going to push several seconds before they pushed either of them.

This certainly sounds dramatic. I have the introspective awareness that I am deciding now to do something as a result of my conscious thought processes, but my hemispheres had gone into the appropriate mode for that decision seconds before?  Free will wrong! Determinism right!  Right?  So Harris would have us think.  It even inspired him to start putting quotation marks around the word “decision.” “You then become conscious of this ‘decision’ and believe that you are in the process of making it.”

My problem with this is that I don’t believe we can infer that all decisions are alike, or that all intentional acts are inherently conscious.  Consider the last time you were out driving. You likely did a lot of things without ever having the conscious experience of doing or willing to do them. Consider hitting the lever that puts the left signal turn on. This is an action of which you may never have had any conscious awareness at all, yet we might fairly still speak of it as a conscious intention. I doubt it really matters in which second before you hit the level a machine would show the relevant hemispheric activity.

But now consider the sort of life-changing experience Kane is talking about. Suppose you have sworn off cigarettes. Yet you’ve just had a big meal of a sort that has often in the past been a prelude to cigarettes. You reach for a pack for a moment – then remember your vow and, we will say, pull your hand back. Do Libet’s experiments give us any reason to believe that was set before you were struggling over it? No. The rare and critical decisions that count always seem to happen when one is not hooked up to a physiologists’ machine, and there is no obvious non-question-begging case for generalization.   

Harris’ second point is somewhat more interesting. Maybe free will is a bad idea (even if it does accurately describe some events in our lives) and we’re better off without it.  This is related (as Harris tells us) to the Buddhist notion that the self is a bad idea.  

I’ll come back to that next week.

Invention and Discovery

Continuing my thought from last week, a thought instigated by Ciceronianus: 

Do humans actively shape the world?  Do we invent reality? Or do we merely discover it?

Surely we build skyscrapers and bridges, in much the same way that birds make nests. We seek to shape our environment for the sake of our own survival.

Is there some sense that doesn’t immediately involve motor activity in which humans invent the world? Something more constructivist?

A “yes” answer seems to make more sense to me than it does to Ciceronianus. In part this is because of reflection on the history of mathematics A very short statement is this: mathematics is a series of outrageous re-definitions of what it means to be a number. We learn to count when very young, and I suppose it has always been thus. The first conception of number derives from the act of counting.

But through our lives, if we receive any sort of education, we learn about ever more outlandish sorts of number. The strangeness of zero, for example.  Or irrational numbers, those wild things like pi that never repeat and never end.  How uncanny!

We may also wrestle with negative numbers. Then the idea of an "infinitesimal." I remember an old Sesame Street episode with the question whether a circle is “all one side” or whether a circle has “a whole lot of very little sides.” Ernie was raising the question of infinitesimals.  Circles (or other curves) can be thought of as an infinite number of tangent straight lines, each line always receding in size, with the Euclidean point as a limit.

Beyond even that, there is the notion of imaginary numbers. In the real number system, the basic rules of multiplication and division make it impossible that there should be such a thing as the square root of a negative number. But forget about that and invent the square root of -1 anyway! Call it i.

These increasingly absurd seeming steps of human reason are also steps of human imagination.  They seem as sheerly inventive as anything else we as a species can do. The paradox, then, is that the inventions of these outlandish notions by clever humans working at a very high level of abstraction, and often unconcerned with practical consequences, always turns out to have enormous practical consequences.

Interacting with the World, and Ciceronianus

This weekend, Ciceronianus, author of a wonderful neo-Stoic blog, posted on epistemology. He wrote: "I'm bemused from time to time by the view that the world (as in "reality" or the universe) is, in part at least, our creation, or perhaps is created by each of us for himself/herself."

He named first Kant and later Wilfred Sellars as examples of the sort of epistemologist he has in mind. Let us use the broad term "constructivism" for the broad PoV that Kant and Sellars share, and that bemuses our Stoic.

Ciceronianus, if I understand him, then proceeds to the assertion that such constructivism is either pointlessly obvious or wildly wrong. The obvious and uninteresting point is that "we are human beings, and as such interact with the world as human beings do." Yet those who are most serious about urging that "they shape the world" seem to want to go much further than this, and that furtherness is what bothers Ciceronianus.

I contributed a thought of my own to his comment section.
 

There is a tee shirt that bears upon some of the issues you raise. It shows somewhat anthropomorphized versions of the Greek letter pi (Π) and of the expression √-1.

Pi is saying to √-1, “Get real.” And√-1is replying, “Be rational!”

I’ll pause now while you slap your knees.

The joke, of course, is that pi is an example of an “irrational” but real number, while √-1 is the definition of i, the foundation of the imaginary numbers.

Philosophy: Some Terminology Changes

By the late 19th century, philosophers had formulated three theories about the nature of truth.

Before I should say any more, I should add: they were all using the word "truth" in a way that contemporary philosophers would not. They all meant, not "truth" specifically, as a property of belief -- but KNOWLEDGE of truth, as the reason why we know truths, when we do.

The three classical theories were these: correspondence, coherence, pragmatism.

According to the correspondence theory, a belief is true when it accurately copies a fact in the world. As Wittgenstein said, in his usual straightforward style, "In order to tell whether a picture is
true or false we must compare it with reality."

The correspondence theory carried with it some pretty heavy metaphysical baggage. Suppose I'm looking at a painted portrait of John Smith. If I want to decide whether that's a "true" portrait of
John Smith, I can go up to John himself, get a good like at him, then decide whether the likeness is an accurate one.

But even then, we should say that the portrait is either realistic or not. A surrealistic portrait of John Smith, painted say by Salvador Dali, might be as "true" in its own way as anything that can come out
of a camera in the noontime sun, but it would be true in a non-copyist way.

Furthermore, that is a very bad metaphor for my efforts to know the world. After all, both the portrait and the man who sat for it are facts outside of my skull -- I have the same kind of access to the
one as to the other. An analogy to that sort of comparison gets us nowhere if what is in question is the nature of truth/knowledge about people and paintings both.

The coherence and pragmatic theories of knowledge were both efforts to get rid of the metaphysical baggage of correspondence, or the copy theory. They both said that there is something about some of my experiences, my ideas, my beliefs, etc. that makes them true -- and that something isn't a transcendence of the whole body of my experience by the way that it relates to itself, the way the parts of it relate to one another.

In the coherence view, error is inconsistency. If I could only get all my beliefs into a single coherent whole, I would know them as true -- or, strictly, I would know them as the whole single shining
body of Truth itself.

In the pragmatic view, error is failure. Beliefs guide me through experiences well or poorly, they are valuable when they lead me where I want to go, harmful when they get me lost. Truth, then, is success.

The tendency in Anglo-American philosophy since about the 1930s has been to distinguish sharply between the issue of truth and the issue of knowledge, then to render the notion of truth impoverished. To say "it is true that this computer is working" is just to say, with a little extra emphasis perhaps, that "this computer is working" -- the word "true" is the emphasis, but in terms of strict meaning its
redundant.

I've said all this before, but what I'd like to emphasize today is that it isn't only pragmatism that needs restatement in order to become comprehensible within contemporary philosophical jargon. It is each
of the original three positions. They all turn out, in 21st century terms, to have been more about knowledge -- and even more specifically one's WARRANT for a true belief -- than about truth as
such.

The correspondence theory looks backward for warrant, for evidence that the copy derives casually from the thing copied.

The coherence theory looks inward for warrant, and worries whether all parts of a world view cohere.

The pragmatic view would LIKE to look forward -- but since the success or failure of this moment's forward looks is necessarily still unsettled, it adapts by looking backward at earlier instances
of successful forward look, and imitating whatever made them succeed.

The Mereological Fallacy

Philosopher Anderson Brown contends that much of our confusion about the mind-body problem is a "mereological fallacy," a confusion about parts and wholes.

The stomach doesn't "have lunch." The stomach digests, which is part of the process, but we don't accordingly say that the stomach has lunch, and we don't think of the activity of having lunch as internal. It is a fact about our behavior.

Likewise, the brain doesn't think. Brown doesn't give a name to exactly what the brain does -- what is the equivalent of digestion here? "impulse processing"? -- but it isn't "thinking," anyway. A person thinks and, as with lunch, there is nothing internal about it.

I'll reproduce here in italics the comment I made on his site, except that I'll clean it up a bit for this blog.  I was a more-than-usually sloppy typist in the comment section of his.

I'm reminded of one aspect of Julian Jaynes' theories, in his book on the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

I don't have the book with me so I'll work from memory, and more than usually subject to correction. But Jaynes said that the "bicameral mind" was not "conscious" in the way in which we are, NOT just for reasons of neurology, but because certain metaphors hadn't come into use yet. The idea of a sort of theatre "inside" the human body -- chest or head, depending on who is writing -- started as a highly literary metaphor, and gradually became an essential part of how people saw themselves. THAT was the "breakdown" of Jaynes' title, when the metaphor became generally accepted as a literal fact. Thus, "consciousness" pulled itself into existence by imagining itself, if you will.

This seems akin to your point, except for chronology.

Yet implicit in Jaynes' account is the point that we don't really have a choice. Going back to the bicameral mind is not an option. Or, in your terminology, thinking of thought as a fact about behavior, like lunch, isn't really an option either. The notion of an inner space where we deliberate is something more than a useful fiction, it is a constitutive fiction.

Perhaps rather like the fiction that the elite group of white men that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had any business speaking for "We, the people" of the United States.

Line of Best Fit

Some thoughts about philosophy and the special sciences. I put these thoughts together recently in an email to a friend, and liked the result so much I will reproduce it here.

In the task of building an over-all view of the world (which we might call, using the word loosely, the task of philosophy) one is perhaps drawing a line of best fit through points represented by all the fields of special study, including those of the sciences.

The expression "line of best fit" comes from statistics. Think of just two variables, to make things easy to plot on a piece of paper. Say, the relationship between grams of fat and total calories in an item of fast food. You could make fat grams the X axis and total calories the Y axis. Then represent each examined sort of fast food as a point on that graph defined by the two axes. a hamburger, a cheeseburger, a box of french fries, an ice cream cone without sprinkles, an ice cream cone with sprinkles, etc. Each gets just one point, defined by specialists.

Odds are good your graph won't result in any neat line. This is a "scattershot graph." But there will likely be a general common trend, that the points move diagonally upward and ouward -- i.e. fat correlates roughly with calories. So you produce a straight line summing up the data as best you can, keeping the variance between your line and the data points as small as possible.

That is the relation between philosophy and special studies of all sorts I have in mind. Of courtse, the results of the special sciences keep changing, as you may have noticed in terms of the news from CERN for example. So we might think of subatomic physics as it exists circa 2011 as one of the data points in our scattershot graph. If my philosophy is sound, over time the dots that are furthest out from my line of best fit will move toward it, not away. I need not pretend that all known points fit perfectly along my line -- if I make that claim, I'm surely delusional.

This idea of a line of best fit, though, captures well what Jacques Barzun is doing in Darwin, Marx, Wagner, when he argues with Darwin, and with contemporary biology insofar as it continues to reflect those aspects of Darwinism that stray furthest from the line he draws.

His own special science, the field where Barzun first made his initial scholarly reputation, is the history of music in the 19th century.

In the book I've mentioned, that reputation is of course of value. Barzun starts with the observation that three important events, in three distinct fields, took place in 1859. Darwin completed the ms of The Origin if Species, Marx published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (something of an early sketch of the as yet unpublished On Capital) and Wagner completed work on Tristan und Isolde.

I would be loath to argue with Barzun about Wagnerian music and its historic significance. He owns that particular point on the graph. As for the other two -- he is doing the best he can to make a line that fits the points, as we all are in our own ways.

His view, in a few words, is that 1859 was a disaster. Wagner moved music away from the wonderful avenues of exploration Beethoven had opened up and that such romantics as Berlioz had further explored. Marx mis-directed social reform into a materialistic/mechanistic direction, subverting the work of Saint-Simon, Proudhon, etc.

And Charles Darwin? Barzun prefers the insights of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. As it happens, Erasmus even wrote about the evolutionary significance of the opposable thumb, though he chose to do it in verse:

The hand, first gift of heaven! to man belongs;

Untipt with claws the circling fingers close,

With rival points the bending thunbs oppose...."

Shadworth Hodgson

"We shall have to consider in the course of these pages whether any causal relation obtains between these two correlates, necessity and universality. For the present it is enough to explain, that no necessity can be admitted to exist in the objective world; that what we call a necessary sequence is necessary solely in reference to our understanding, because we refer the consequent to a special antecedent, and bring it thus under some law which we think of as fixed, at least so far as the particular case under consideration in concerned; and that the only thing which corresponds to our notion of necessity in nature in the phenomenon of universality."

Bergson and Humor

I enjoyed the recent article in SLATE outlining five theories of humor, and why none explains the field. The point, apparently, is to introduce and justify a sixth theory, one based on evolutionary biology and advocated by Matthew Hurley at al.

But I do think author Nina Shen Rastogi misunderstood one of the five, specifically the "mechanical theory." In her account, this is the view of philosopher Henri Bergson, who "believed that it is inadaptability or rigidity -- the repetitive nature of our personalities -- that is the source of humor."

Rastogi thinks this is wrong, because many examples of rigidity aren't funny at all, and because puns aren't mechanical, but ARE funny. Her example of a non-mechanism witticism comes from Douglas Hofstadter, "Email is the happy medium between male and female."

Aside from the fact that the email pun doesn't quite manage to split my sides, Rastogi is off base here. Bergson's view was that humor arises from the juxtaposition of the vital and the mechanical, the living and the routine.

Consider slapstick physical comedy. A man slips on a banana peel. He starts wheeling his arms around to try to restore his balance. That's funny. Why? Because he began the scene as a human being, a vital purposive creature, and ended it as a system of off-balance levers.

Puns are another example of Bergson's point (not a counter-example)! After all, what is more vital than language? What more mechanical than the classification of words by their mere sound, regardless of their actual meaning?

From Yahoo!Answers

Somebody using the screen name "discovery" recently asked the following in Yahoo!Answers.

Philosophers argue that God is a delusion. How should I structure my essay.

This raises the question: is his essay supposed to be about the contention that "God is a delusion," or about the philosophers who argue that? The former requires that he think about God himself, the latter only that he pass along the thinking of others.

Let's imagine that he is expected to think about God himself. The statement "God is a delusion" covers a lot of ground. There are various ways of being wrong, so it is logically possible for an atheist to deny that God is a delusion -- to maintain that God is some sort of category error.

Nonetheless, let's again make the field-limiting assumption that the claim that God is a delusion simply denies that God exists. However many distinct ideas there are of God, there are that many distinct meanings to a possible denial.

Let us make a further limitation of the field in the spirit of the Passover/Easter season. One common and historically important meaning of God is as a giver of laws for human conduct, a moral legislator. With all that in mind, I proposed on Yahoo! the following structure for a possible essay:

1. Define the idea at stake. We know that government officials tell us what to do and punish us when we fail to do it. We know also that throughout history people have appealed to a higher Authority and its Higher Laws. "Let my people go!" they say to this-worldly legislators.

2. So: Is the idea of God defined in that way a delusion? Consider three influential arguments:
2a. Hobbes, The earthly state, the Leviathan, is the only proper source of guidance so there is no appeal, no excuse for disobeying Pharoah or King Charles.
2b. Kant. Although Kant adhered to religious faith in his own manner, he held explicitly that the argument to God as a moral legislator fails because our human reason by itself explains to us how we ought to act. The law to which we appeal when we defy the authorities is within us, not above us.
2c. Contemporary atheists argue that 'God' as people conceive of Him is a pretty lousy legislator, who tells them to fly airplanes into skyscrapers for example. So we're better off without such a legislator. This is presumably related to 21b, and specifically to what Kant was saying here, but Kant's broader system allowed room for further distinctions in which contemporary atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins etc.) are uninterested.
From each of these points of view, then, we could maintain that God is a delusion.

3. There are counter-arguments to each of those three arguments. Depending on how long your essay is going to be, you can either provide them in full or merely hint at them.

What is Reality? Don't Ask

Some people regard this as the deepest of philosophical questions. Some even regard it as the heart of metaphysics. What is reality? or ... what does it mean to be?

In wrestling with this, philosophers and wanna-bes alike have produced gnomic answers. What is it to be?

To be is to be perceived. That's a good one, George.

Existence is identity. Noted, Ayn. But Prince Hamlet has an "identity" of sorts. He is a very specific fictional character. Identity, then, is not always existence.

Reality is the fulfillment of purpose, complete or incomplete. said Josiah Royce.

Being never was, and never will be, because it is completely whole in the now. Classic -- one of the fragments of Parmenides.

And so forth.

The pragmatic answer to "what is reality," though, is to un-ask the question. For any effort to give a verbal answer to the question will only amount to substituting for the word "reality" or the word "existence" some other word or collection of words. And how will that be an advance, unless there is some confusion in the first word that requires such clarification?

There is no confusion as to what is reality, except the artificial confusion caused by philosophic niggling. Why not? because reality is a primary notion. It is the turtle at the bottom of whatever tower of turtles you want to postulate. It doesn't rest on any other turtle further down so efforts to conjure one up, by "defining" reality, are themselves necessarily unreal.

If you are going to argue over what is reality you may as well argue over what is Nothing, and move thence to the classic dispute over whether it is a verb, whether nothing noths and nihil annihilates.

Beyond the question of "what is reality" there is the far more valuable question, "what is real?" What kinds of things do we acknowledge as the furniture of the world and what are their relations to one another?

The Soul(s) of Plato

Plato seems to have had two different theories of the soul at different stages of his career. The theory advanced in the Phaedo is that the soul is a perfectly simple entity, not compounded of any parts. That is one of the reasons why 'Socrates' argues that it must be eternal -- only that which is a compound can fall apart!

The perfectly simple soul of the Phaedo must also be immaterial, because it knows the Forms, and the Forms are immaterial. A beautiful woman is embodied, but Beauty as such as not. And my soul can know Beauty, thus my soul is not as such embodied, though it seems to have been associated with a body for the last few years!

Anyway, this theory went through some changes by the time Plato wrote The Republic. There he says that the soul is divided into three part: the passions; the spirit; the intellect. Think of these as akin to Dorothy's three friends -- tinman; lion; scarecrow. Or think of them as the class structure of a city -- workers; soldiers; rulers. The point remains, Plato had begun by thinking of the soul as simple, yet here it is clearly a compound. So it presumably can dissolve at death after all?

You can reconcile these views to each other by saying that in The Republic Plato was using the word "soul" in a broader sense than he was using it in the earlier dialogue. What he calls the "intellect" in The Republic corresponds to what he meant by the "soul" in The Phaedo. So he can be taken as saying that only the intellect, the part of us that grasps the Forms, is simple and immortal. The other parts of our soul are, along with the body, dispensable upon death.

Influences Upon Thomas Hobbes

Question for readers.

Who were the major influences upon the development of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes? I'm not interested in broad societal sources of influence (i.e. the civil war and the anxiety about disorder that it naturally caused). I'm curious about names.

To some degree, a philosopher is influenced by those with whom he argues, because he sharpens and develops his arguments in response to theirs. In this sense, one could say that Hobbes was influenced by Descartes. Descartes' insistence on the immateriality of the mind sharpened Hobbes' sense of the corporality of all of human existence.

But what were the more positive influences? Thucydides of course. Hobbes translated Thucydides' history, and since it portrays the downfall of a democracy one can see its possible significance for him.

Anyone else? Machiavelli? Gassendi?

John Searle

John Searle discusses language as a subject of philosophy, in this fascinating YouTube clip from 1978.

He is speaking with Bryan Magee, a fascinating writer in his own right.

Josiah Royce again

Another Josiah Royce quote worth blogging, from the same book that I cited last week. Here, he is talking about different forms of Realism -- by which he means, roughly, epistemological dualism -- the view that the known (especially when it is a material something in the "external world") is utterly independent of, but causes ideas in, the knower.

His broad point is that although Realism sounds like common sense, when pressed and when a persistent mind tries to expound it systematically, it ends up someplace offensive to the very common sense that gave it birth -- it ends up giving us Leibniz' monads, or the Parmenidean One, or something else outrageous.

One of his examples of Realism/duaism comes from the Indian/Hindu philosophic tradition, the Sankhya, who appear to have been philosophic foes of the early Buddhists. But their insistence that the material objects that we sense are utterly independent of our minds led to the view that minds are utterly independent of matter, even unaffected thereby.

This, then, leads to a problem. In Western philosophy, it is a famous post-Cartesian quandry. How do we perceive anything external unless, in the act of perceiving, we are affected by what we perceive? If we are affected, dualism can't be as sharp as Royce says the Sankhya would like to make it. And if we are not affected, what does it mean to perceive or to know at all?

Royce said that the Sankhyas contend that "the soul is not only separated by a chasm from matter; it is even really unaffected by matter," and they expressed this in a favorite simile of "the red Hibiscus flower [that] is reflected in a crystal that all the while remains inwardly unaltered by the presence of the flower. The result is a theory of a sort of psycho-physical parallelism, founded, to be sure, according to the Sankhya, upon an illusion." (p. 103).

All this comes as new to me.

The Subjective Side of Integrity

A friend of mine recently quoted Ayn Rand (From "The Virtue of Selfishness") on her facebook page: "Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one’s subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles."

I would like to take up that thought here, because as is the case with much that Rand wrote, it is resonant, memorable, and misguided.

I will give my own reasons for holding that any sensible conception of integrity does contain a subjective component. It is a matter of loyalty to what one believes, even if one should be so unfortunate as to believe something non-rational, or "whimsical."

Let us make the traditional point involving a cliff. If I am walking along with a precipice to my left, it is of the greatest importance that I recognize that there is a precipice there. Should I by some odd "whim" decide that there is solid ground to my left, I might walk leftward, and so terminate my deluded existence.

But surely we don't need the word "integrity" to describe the virtue of knowing where the edge of the solid ground is and staying on it. There are plenty of other good English-language words for that, including "prudence"!

"Integrity" comes from the Latin for "whole" and its ethical use is closely related to that. If someone acts and speaks as a whole, he does not fragment himself into, say, the at-work character and the at-home character. Nor does he divide himself by the income he admits receiving and the cash payments he takes under the table.

To use integrity as an ethical term at all we must recognize that people often believe wrong things. They never believe that they believe wrong things. [Or do they? we are in the terrain of the paradox of the preface here. I'll send you elsewhere for more.]

But let us flip past the hypothetical preface. For most purposes, it is redundant to speak of "my belief that X is true." My belief that X simply is the belief that X is true, so the period to the sentence could come after the X. Now: why is it good for someone who has a false belief to act and spoeak with loyalty toward that belief?

It is good for that person, because he opens himself up to correction. If someone who thinks that two plus two equals five stays silent about it due, say, to peer group pressure, if he never speaks up, he is less likely to receive corrective explanations of basic arithmetic. He will divide himself into the conformist fellow who claims to believe that 2 + 2 = 4, and the secret rebel hiding a heresy. This is by definition a loss of integrity. The person with integrity who is open to such corrections will benefit by them, will learn that 2 + 2 = 4. Then, once the error is removed and replaced by rational awareness that twice two is four, he can happily display his integrity about that! It will be the same virtue, for the erroneous as for the accurate thinkers, with different manifestations.

But what (you might ask) should we think about people who hold some objectively absurd belief and are closed-minded about it, who will not benefit from correction? Should we praise their integrity, too?

Even here, I would say, integrity has some benefits, and deserves to be called by that name. After all, someone who really believes there is no cliff to his left, and acts with integrity in walking that way, will remove himself from the gene pool. The rest of us will benefit.

Chesterton on the egg (which is an egg).

More on Chesterton. One passage often cited by his admirers comes from his book on Thomas Aquinas:

"Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other
eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God."

As usual, when someone intones a tautology, some form of "A is A," as if it is of tremendous significance, he or she is trying to sneak in a presumption. Here, Chesterton is being less sneaky than are some who use this ploy. For he's been quite open with us, earlier, about the presumption. By "egg" he means a common-sense egg, the egg that an untutored individual who isn't too much concerned about the "particular go of it" will understand to be an egg. When Chesterton says "eggs are eggs" he means that we can't or shouldn't try to get further in than that in our understanding of them. Addling one's brains in an effort to get behind the obviousness of egghood is a bad thing. That's the message here.

IMHO, that message is exactly wrong, and wisdom consists precisely of trying to go further than "an egg is an egg." To consider any more sustained inquiry a matter of "addling one's brains" is to ask that one's brains be perpetually chained by this "authority of the sense." Although we do need the sense to get started, we also need as humans to remember that the reports of the senses are seldom the end.

Personal Identity, Part One

Thirty years ago there was a law student at Western New England College, School of Law, that bore my name. He was a very different person from me, in just about every respect. Every cell of his body was different -- the body as a whole was younger and more energetic -- and subjective characteristics such as his tastes and opinions were very different from my own as well. Yet in some sense I want to be able to say, coherently, that he was me -- that I am simply (or not-so-simply) an older version of that person.

What does this claim of the continuous identity of a person over time mean? This is a venerable philosophical question, to which there are three traditional answers: the core of identity is an unchanging imperishable soul; it is the continuity of memory; it is the continuity of a physical organism.

Professor Anderson Brown, of the University of Puerto Rico, has recently spoken to this issue on his blog. In his mind, the only live alternatives it seems are the second and third. And on that I have to agree. Though I am in my own manner religious, as regular readers will know, I think trying to tie personal identity to an immutable soul is a racket.

So we turn, with Brown, to the choice between the other options. Is identity over time more of a subjective, psychological fact? or more of an organic, physical fact? Brown is exercised by the sort of thought experiments that are often employed to argue in favor of the psychological/subjective answer to that question. "What if a mad scientist transferred your thoughts to somebody else's body...?" He asserts that the questions presume what is to be established. I won't argue with him over those thought experiments.

Rather, I will say that in my view the case for the psychological/subjective answer can be made and has been made in ways independent of the counter-factual arguments that Brown finds deficient. The strongest argument of which I am aware is that put forth by William James in Chapter X of Principles of Psychology. I say so in my comment to Brown's post (the fourth comment there) -- and I will retrace that argument with more particularity here tomorrow.

Leibniz and the Mind-Body Problem

The trickiest questions in modern philosophy, i.e. those with which I have struggled most for decades, are those that involve the body/mind (or body/soul) connection.

Does the thinking-stuff that is "me" really interact with the material-stuff that the rest of the world sees and knows as me? If not, how can the two "Mes" be said to be one? Yet if they do interact, how is that possible? It seems to "me" that the two are so very different that it is hard to get a grasp on this.

I recently encountered the blog of a self-described "contemplative scholar," a Quaker who teaches philosophy at a small college. You can make this discovery for yourself here.

He said he has recently been teaching Leibniz to his students in the Modern Philosophy class. So I free-associated on Leibniz in his comments section. I'll just reproduce most of that comment below:

Leibniz, if I remember my college years at all, had a drastic solution to [mind body issues], -- preestablished harmony. Mind and body only seem to interact, as two trains running on parallel tracks at the same (predetermined) speed might seem to be moving deliberately in concert.

This calls for a rather distinctive conception of God, one at odds with much of the revelation offered to each of the "peoples of the book," and it all seems a very high price to pay for the resolution of the mind/body muddle.

Just my two cents.

To which the Contemplative Scholar replied with a fuller account of what Leibniz said in that line, and with his own thoughts on the matter. I'm sure that any of my readers who follow the above link will appreciate his reaction.