Bad tempered 'In Our Time' discussion on consciousness wherein Roger Penrose expounds his idea that the key to its comprehension may be found in the not-yet-understood boundary between quantum and classical physics while simultaneously demonstrating that he would be a good chap to have a drink with in the pub and where Ted Honderich shows that being a philosopher does not also prevent you from behaving like a bit of an arse.
Subscription only profile of Tom Stoppard focusing on his play about the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness.
Below are just my notes on this book rather than a review (which I might do later). Feel free to read if you are interested!
Chapter 1’ CONSCIOUSNESS, WHY THE MYSTERY
The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness
Consciousness is surprisingly difficult to investigate. Right from the start we are in the paradoxical position of seeming to have to use consciousness itself in order to investigate consciousness.
A historical starting point would be to look at body_dualism and the ‘mind/body’ problem - the mind and the body seem to be two different kinds of thing with no obvious way to bring them together.
On the one hand we have our own experiences - we see the sky, hear music. These ineffable (indescribable) qualities are ‘qualia’, although whether they actually exist or whether the concept is meaningful is in dispute. On the other hand if we believe there really is a physical world that gives rise to the qualia then how do we bridge the gap between them things in the real world whose attributes - weight, elemental make-up - we can measure and our private internal experiences of them? This is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.
Most cultures, including non-western cultures and most religions, are dualists, believing in two different realms of mental and physical things - the world of the spirit and the material world - although their conception may differ between cultures or religions, Children begin to similarly divide the world from 4 or 5 years old. Buddhism and the Hindu Advaita Vedanta school advocate non-dualist philosophical concepts - see ‘non-dualism’.
Dualism, monism (idealism and neutral monism), materialism
Descartes proposed that the mind and brain consisted of different substances and proposed that the two substances meet in the pineal gland (Cartesian Dualism).
The inability to explain how ‘mind’ and ‘body’ interact has led to most scientists and philosophers rejecting this type of dualism in favor of monism - the idea that there is only one kind of reality; note, monism is a broad philosophical concept but here is being applied narrowly to consciousness.
Idealists make the mind fundamental, but are then stuck with the problem of explaining a consistent physical world.
Neutral monists reject dualism but can’t make their mind up about the fundamental nature of the world. Summarised by Bertrand Russell: “...James's view is that the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind, but that it is arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations, and that some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical…". Not so sure how this is different from some of the ideas mentioned towards the end.
Materialism - which is also a form of philosophical monism - takes the position that matter is the fundamental substance in nature and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness, are results of material interactions. In a materialist context the ‘hard problem’ becomes how to account for conscious experiences or ineffable qualia in a purely physical brain made of material substances.
Controversies and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness
David Chalmers coined the term ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (below ‘Hard Problem’) which can be contrasted with the easier problems explaining mental phenomenon such as learning, attention, memory, sleep and similar.
Some claim that the ‘hard problem’ does not really exist; it depends on a false conception of consciousness or an underestimation of the ‘easy’ problems (below ‘Easy Problem(s)’). Is it a false intuition that consciousness is different from the combination of perception, memory, attention and similar?
Defining consciousness
Thomas Nagel used the question of ‘What it is like to be a bat’ to explore what we mean by consciousness. If there is something it is like to be a bat - something for the bat itself - then the bat is conscious. If there nothing like it is to be a bat then it is not conscious. This test can be applied to other items - what is it like to be a mug of tea? An earthworm? An AI program in a computer?
Nagel argued that we can never know what it is like to be a bat; he chose bats because their experiences are so different from those of a human, using sonar, hanging around upside down in caves and so on. He is a ‘mysterian’ believing that the Hard Problem is insoluble and we have no way of understanding it in the same way a dog has no way of understanding the newspaper he carries back from the shops.
Consciousness and subjectivity
Nagel reminds us that we must deal with the subjectivity of conscious thought. Solving the Easy Problems will not explain how subjectivity arises from the material world. If you claim consciousness is an illusion to escape explaining such subjectivity you must explain why consciousness appears so strongly to exist.
Phenomenality or phenomenal consciousness
Philosopher Ned Block coined these terms to refer to subjective experience or ‘What it’s like to be a…’. He divides ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (what it is like to be in a certain state) from ‘access consciousness’ (consciousness available for use in thinking or guiding action or speech). As an aside, his Blockhead thought experiment argues that a non-intelligent system could be used to pass the Turing test.
Consciousness: an ‘extra ingredient’ or not and the philosophical zombie.
A key unresolved divide in consciousness studies is whether consciousness is an ‘extra ingredient’ added on to perception, memory and so on or is it intrinsic to complex biological processes and inseparable from them. Are ‘qualia’ or subjective experiences something in addition to biological processes or intrinsic to them (a materialist or functionalist view).
If consciousness is an ‘extra ingredient’ other questions are raised: why do we have it, what is it for, what does it do, why did it evolve?
If consciousness arises from natural biological processes then perhaps there is no Hard Problem, there just seems to be one. Any creature with intelligence, perception memory, emotions and so on would necessarily be conscious as well.
The idea of the ‘philosophical zombie’ highlights the question of whether or not consciousness is an ‘added ingredient’ to a biological system. Can someone look like, act like and speak exactly like a human but have no inner world of conscious experiences and no ‘qualia’? If philosophical zombies could exist are we just lucky we did evolve a consciousness and didn’t evolve as them? Or perhaps we did? Or perhaps all my friends are philosophical zombies (not sure about my friends, but some of my co-workers certainly are).
What does consciousness actually do?
We visualise our conscious mind as controlling our bodies and influencing things, but does this really make sense?
We may think that we need consciousness is needed to make decisions, but neuroscience shows that this may not be the case. AI systems are also making decisions without being conscious, often better than humans when playing chess or go. Some actions such as playing table tennis, interrupting fast-flowing conversations, seem to be done consciously but in fact they occur too quickly for the conscious mind.
Are there some special mental phenomenon that need consciousness such as aesthetic appreciation or creativity? If so how would you show these are done wholly or partly by consciousness itself rather than the workings of a clever brain?
Epiphenomenalism is the idea that consciousness is a useless by-product of the mind, but if so why are we worrying about it or even capable of talking about it?
Alternatively anyone capable of the various mental processes of the Easy Problem might inevitable end up believing they are conscious even though they are not. They are simply deluded. But if so, how could we be so wrong in thinking it exists? And what does this imply for free will?
The theater of the mind
A natural way of thinking about consciousness is as a private theater inside my head receiving touches, smells, sounds and so on and using the imagination to conjure up sights and sounds as though seen on a mental screen or heard in an inner ear. These thoughts and sense impressions are the ‘contents’ of my consciousness while ‘I’ am the audience.
Daniel Dennett challenges this idea, arguing that while people reject dualist thinking they then let it in again through the back door by imagining a ‘Cartesian theater’ - the notion that there is somewhere in the mind a place or time where everything comes together again and ‘consciousness happens’ or some form of finishing line (a Cartesian finishing line?) which if crossed allows things to become mysteriously ‘conscious’.
Dennett rejects the above ideas through seeing the brain as a parallel, distributed processing system with no central headquarters and not place in which an ‘I’ sits making decisions and watching the show as it passes through consciousness. If so how does this feeling of consciousness arise without an inner theatre, no show and no audience?
Chapter 2: THE HUMAN BRAIN
A big brain
The central nervous system comprises the brain and spinal cord; the brain stem connects to the midbrain; behind this the cerebellum and the largest outer layer of the brain the cerebral cortex, divided into four lobes – occipital at the back, temporal above the ears, parietal at the top and frontal. Specific areas have distinct functions: limbic system (instinctive responses, basic emotions), frontal lobe (planning, decision making, self control), hippocampus in the limbic system (laying down new memories), the temporal lobe (storing and retrieving them).
The brain seems like a parallel, distributed system with no central organization, so why does it seem to be unified?
The unity of consciousness
The unity of consciousness is consistent with it being a theatre or stream of consciousness. We see the unity of “now”: there are some things in my consciousness while many other things are not (on stage or off). Unity over time: there seems to be continuity of consciousness from one moment to the next. Unity of identity: there seems to be a single and continuing experiences. Is this view correct?
The neural correlates of consciousness (the ‘NCC’s)
Much of what happens in the brain seems to be outside or inaccessible to consciousness. What does this really mean though+ What is the difference between brain activity that is conscious versus those parts that are not? Where do we find consciousness? One place to start may be identifying when brain activity correlates with conscious experience – NCCs (defined as “the minimum neural mechanism sufficient for any one specific conscious percept”)..
Pain can help investigate NCC given a clear subject element and objectively observable pain transmission through chemical changes in the nerves.
Note when A and B correlate reliably there are three possible causal explanations: A causes B, B causes A, both A and B are caused by something else or A and B are actually the same phenomena. Do physical changes create consciousness of pain cause NCC? If so we are back to the Hard Problem. Does consciousness of pain cause physical changes – unlikely.
Can we observe NCCs by using brain scans to observe when perceptions change of a Necker cube? Maybe – scans show neural activity in the primary visual cortex stays the same but activity in higher areas changes when reporting of changes to perception of the cube. However when ‘no report’ approaches of testing perception are made (e.g. looking at pupil dilation) many of these differences in neural activity disappear.
Perhaps the NCCs we observe related to specific perceptions or thoughts and there are no NCCs for consciousness itself.
Damaged minds
Certain bran damage can cause patients to lose their sense of on half of the world. They may eat only food on one side of a plate, draw only one side of a picture etc. Italian neurologist Eduardo Bisiach carried out an experiment where he asked such patients to describe entering into the cathedral square in Milan from the north and then from the south. Each time they could only remember one half of the square, but each half was different. In other words, they have retained their memory of the square but were only able to bring it into consciousness under these different circumstances.
In patients with Korsakoff’ syndrome their hippocampus is damaged and they cannot create new long term memories - declarative memory is damaged although procedural memory function may remain. Suffers write of how they seem to sometimes suddenly find themselves waking up, similar to how we may feel if we are suddenly conscious of the beauty of a view or by asking ourselves ‘Am I conscious now?’. Are sufferers fully conscious? Or conscious in a different way?
Another patient could not recognize or line up shapes, but was able to post a letter through a slot without being conscious of trying to do so. This seems to be due to losing the ability to respond to one of multiple streams of visual input – the ‘dorsal stream’ helps fast visuo-motor control while the ‘ventral stream’ is involved in recognizing objects and perceiving the world.
This is consistent with studies of “blindsight’ where patients have damage to the visual centers of the brain and cannot consciously see items but are still able to guess their orientation. Does this prove that qualia exist (due to objective vision without subjective consciousness) or rather that there are multiple routes for visual perception only some of which go through the area that also allows consciousness perception?
‘Jack’ was used in the13th century to designate the average English peasant at the bottom of the social heap, as in “every man Jack”. The French had t‘Jack’ was used in the13th century to designate the average English peasant at the bottom of the social heap, as in “every man Jack”. The French had the same idea with “Jacques” being a common name in medieval France and the “Jacquerie” being the common French peasantry who would occasionally revolt and burn down a few castles before getting massacred by French noblemen with better armor.
“Jack” eventually began to prefix things that were a smaller version of other things – jack-fish, jack-bowl – and in the British navy “jacks” came to refer to smaller versions of flags or sails, known also as sheets. A novice sailor would not know his “jacks” from his “sheets”. And this is how we come to “not knowing jack-shit”.
Well, an increasing number of people in public life – mostly our elected representatives - clearly “know jack-shit” about pretty much everything and I’m quite sick of it. The parade of morons, bullshitters (in the philosophical sense, as discussed in ‘On Bullshit’), cretins and chancers in US and UK politics these days has to be seen to be believed. I would like to really know how people know something so I can begin to understand why they know practically nothing about anything.
This book seemed a good starting place and I was not disappointed. It is a very interesting review of the main issues in epistemology and quite thought provoking. I can now know how our elected representatives know so little in a much deeper and more satisfying manner. This will help fuel my anger towards these know-nothings, bringing me great personal satisfaction.
And if you read the book as a bonus, you'll know whether or not you really know the etymology of "jack-shit" as well. How about that!
There now follows my notes on some chapters of this book as I instantly forget most things I read unless I make the effort to write them down and refer to them occasionally. Below is intended only for masochists who can’t make the effort to stop here and reach for the TV remote:
Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION
The connection between knower and thing known is often overlooked. Unlike water or gold knowledge would cease to exist in the absence of sentient life.
Do not identify “knowledge” with facts; not every fact is an item of knowledge. Toss a coin in a sealed box and write out two claims “the coin shows head” and “the coin shows tails”. Both are facts and one is true, but we do not know the outcome of the coin toss. Knowledge requires access to a fact on the part of a living subject. Unlike water or gold knowledge always belongs to some individual or group.
A group can have knowledge that its individual members do not possess. An orchestra “knows” how to play Beethoven’s Ninth even though each individual member does not.
“To know” is one of very few words that appear in all languages (think, see, want, hear, say, I, you, good, bad, not, maybe, because, if, true, before, after are other examples; eat, drink, happy, sad, animal are examples of words that are not universal).
“To know that” is a factive construction along with “to realize that”, “to see that”, “to remember that”, that is it links a subject to a truth. It is different from, for example, “to think that” where the proposition thought need not be true. This dedicated link to truth is part of the essence of knowledge. Belief can also easily link to a false proposition.
Watch out for non-literal use of “to know” that can link to false propositions, often in a “projected” use into a past frame of mind when it seemed that the subject knew – e.g. “I knew I’d been picked for the team, but it turns out I wasn’t”.
Confidence matters to knowledge – if I am confident that I locked the door this morning I may “know” that I locked the door, otherwise I might just “think” I locked it. However if I am confident of a proposition for the wrong reasons I would fail to know it – but if confidently held true belief is not enough for knowledge, what else is needed? (see chapter 4).
Only true propositions can be known, but what is true? Is truth relative to the subject? Even if we take the view that objective truth exists, is it humanly knowable? Sceptics have raised doubts.
Chapter 2: SCEPTICISM
Can we really trust our senses? Or might we be dreaming? Or might we be a “brain in a vat” (a ‘BIV’ apparently) being fed sense impressions by a mad scientist (or possibly a team of virtual reality developers at Sony - this seems much more credible to me).
Stoic epistemology draws a distinction between impressions and judgments: we receive sense impressions then judge what they are. Knowledge is wise judgment; you know something when a sense impression is so clear and distinct you could not be mistaken as to its nature.
Sceptics agreed with this stoic outline, but argued that you could never be certain that you are not mistaken. Sense impressions are always fallible and hence knowledge is impossible.
But how could sceptics be certain that sense impressions were always fallible (how could they “know” this if no one knows anything?!) - this reasoing leads to Pyrrhonian Scepticism.
A concern of Scepticism is the “criterion of truth” – the rule that figures out what to accept as known compared to accepting things randomly. But how do we know we have selected a correct criterion of truth? If we use the criterion itself to judge it aren’t we just using circular reasoning? Pyrrhonian Sceptics drew attention to this problem without claiming it would never be solved. Instead they suspended all judgment, generating doubt any topic by, for example, thinking bout how things may seem from different viewpoints – animals v human, different cultures etc.
If a Pyrrhonian Sceptic was hungry, would he suspend judgment on whether it eating would satisfy his hunger and starve? Apparently not – behavior can be guided by instinct, habit and custom rather than judgment or knowledge.
G E Moore’s challenge to Scepticism
G E Moore challenged Scepticism in a public lecture in 1939 by holding up his hands and saying “here is one hand, and here is another”. He explained that these were external objects and drew the logical conclusion that external objects actually exist. A great moment in epistemology – I wish I’d been there.
Moore insisted that he knew he had hands but refused to produce as proof that this would be the case. He proposed shifting the burden of proof over to the sceptic.
Moore claims to know without proof that he has hands but he does not claim that a person can never prove that he has hands. For example, a sceptic who thinks Moore’s hands are artificial might examine them and stick a pin in them to see if they bleed and so satisfy his concern. However Moore does not think that there is an all-purpose strategy for proving his hands exist to dispel all future doubts.
Moore is trying to highlight the philosophical nature of the claims of the sceptic – that there is no such thing as knowledge; that there is no all-purpose proof for any claim to have knowledge – so that it can be contrasted with the ordinary claim that he knows he has hands. The parallel is with mathematics. where some basic claims are taken as axioms not themselves in need of proof.
Moore says that we should be alarmed by someone making the controversial philosophical claims of Scepticism without being able to prove them. In contrast we should not feel such resistance to someone who claims to know a simple observable fact about the environment, such as having a pair of hands.
Bertrand Russell’s Inference to the Best Explanation (‘IBE’)
Philosophers have tried to identify more precisely the claim the sceptic is trying to make while constructing a positive defense to common-sense claims to knowledge.
In Russell’s IBE points out that there is a large gap between admitting that something is logically possible and concluding that we cannot rationally rule it out. For example, it is logically possible that, when you think you are stroking your cat, your are not doing so. Perhaps you are just dreaming? Perhaps your cat is not really a cat but a robot cat? How can we rationally rule out these alternatives?
Russell notes that there are rational principles other than the rules of logic narrowly conceived that can be used to rationally rule out the sceptics alternative explanations. In particular, a simpler explanation is rationally preferred to a more complex one: there is a single real cat who is responsible for the sense impressions of meowing and the feel of fur.
Challenges to IBE
IBE is a rational strategy, but is it conclusive grounds for knowledge rather than just rational belief? A detective investigates a murder. The butler hated the victim, the knife was found in the Butler’s room and the victim’s blood on his shoes. IBE suggests the Butler did it, but perhaps he is being framed by the housemaid?
Why is IBE a better explanation of the world than Brain-in-a-Vat (‘BIV’)? If you really were a brain being fed sense impressions by Sony virtual reality developers wouldn’t they try and send us coherent sense impressions consistent with an world of external objects anyway?
The Brain-in-a-Vat debates
Vogel argued that the basic spatial structure of the real world is much simpler than the spatial structure of a BIV virtual reality, making the real-world hypothesis as better way to explain our experience. But is there a better response to the sceptics BIV argument showing that it is not just implausible but wrong?
Semantic Externalism says that the meanings of words do not come from images or descriptions that individual speakers associate with them but from causal chains connection us to things in the world around us. What a modern scientist now knows to be H2O Shakespeare only knew of as water. However both parties have had the same experience seeing and tasting the liquid, and so mean the same thing when they use the word “water”. No one alive still knows Napoleon but if we talk about him we can trace sources with the right type of causal links back to people who know him and to the man himself.
Hilary Putnam tried to refute the sceptic’s BIV hypothesis with Semantic Externalism by arguing that the sentence “I am now a brain in a vat” couldn’t be true for anyone who understands the sentence, as a creature who only ever experienced virtual reality could not mean what we do by the word “vat” because such a creature had only ever interacted with simulated images of vats and his word “vat” cannot refer to something physical in the world beyond the simulation. Our capacity to make sense of the sceptic’s hypothesis is a sign we are in the real world and can understand what a vat is through our causal chains of connection to words describing the world around us.
Criticisms of Putnam include: maybe our sceptical problems are even bigger – maybe words now don’t mean what we thought they did; maybe you are a brand new BIV – some clever Sony developers kidnapped you asleep as after you had made the required causal connections to words (including, crucially, vat), popped your brain in a vat and similated a virtual world so convincing you never thought you’d left the real one. (If anyone could do this, Sony could).
Better off being a Brain-in-a-Vat?
David Chalmers pointed out that although a BIV might be experiencing pixels in virtual reality, was such experience really any less a “true” experience than that of atoms in the real world? From outside the vat we may say the BIV is reading a virtual book but from the BIV’s perspective it is true he is reading a book in his environment. Quantum mechanics showed us the ultimate nature of reality is very different from what our perceptions told us, but so what? Similarly would our experience in a virtual world really be effected if we found out we were a BIV?
Chalmers agrees with the sceptic that the BIV scenarios cannot be ruled out, but fights back against the suggestions that most of our beliefs are false in such a situation.
Staying out of reach of the sceptic
Given the sceptic raises doubts about everything you say in any case, there is not much hope for finding common ground with him as a basis for convincing him he is wrong. Why not try and stay outside his reach?
Timothy Williamson suggests that scepticism looks appealing because it encourages a healthy critical ability to double check individual things by suspending judgment and then seeing if they fit into the rest of what we know. But the process goes to far, as once we have suspended too much and brought into doubt the reality of the whole outside world we have no resources left to support any reasonable belief. (Note to self – this does sound like many conspiracy theories, which require an explicit or implicit suspension of a whole host of common sense beliefs in order to justify themselves).
Chapter 3: RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM
Pre-modern thinkers took the universe to revolve around humanity and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind. By 16th century this idea was endangered by discoveries such as the Copernican system and Galileo’s observation of moons circling Jupiter. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts and expect to gain knowledge through systematic open minded observations of nature rather than the analogies and patterns which appealed to pre modern thinking even though pre-modern ideas – such as the Sun circling the earth – may fit more easily with our sense experience.
Descartes
In Meditations Descartes applied systematic Scepticism to question all his prior opinions. At the end of the first Meditation he establishes the first truth that can be known with utter certainty, the fact of one’s own existence (“I think, therefore I am”). In later meditations he reconstructs a new world view based thereon (with some help from God, useful given the rather narrow foundations).
In the Third Meditation Descartes questions what it was that enabled him to know this first fact of his own existence. He sees nothing more than “…a clear and distinct perception of what I was asserting”. He adopts this as a general rule for establishing this as a basis for knowledge and proceeds to defend it.
Without deciding whether or not they are real, Descartes notices differences between his ideas. Some differ in what they represent (angels, men, the sun, the sky, God) and in their apparent origins. Some seem to be invented – a hippogriff - and some, such as the idea of truth, seem innate. Some come from external things – the idea of a warm fireplace.
Among all his ideas Descartes identified one that stands at the top of the scale – the idea of God as an infinite and perfect being. Descartes reasons that this idea could only have come from God himself. Some commentators think this argument – from the idea of a perfect God to the existence of God is BS. But once God’s existence is established Descartes has his source for the clear and distinct ideas that form a basis for knowledge, as a perfect and benevolent God would not have installed defective innate ideas in us.
Descartes still has some work to do under this scheme, starting with explaining error. We are at risk of error when we make judgments on the basis of what is obscure and confused. If something is confused we should analyze into in clear mathematical or geometric terms- and so Rationalism was born, with abstract concepts at the heart of our pursuit of knowledge,
Human error can still arise, but this is due to human freedom to accept ideas that are less than clear and distinct.
But why did God give us obscure and confused bodily sensations along side our innate brilliant and perfectly accurate mathematical and abstract ideas? God also gave us an imagination, that is not simply reading the clear and distinct ideas of the intellect but is oriented towards the bodily senses. Our sensations and imagination serve the interests of the body and soul taken together. Sensations like hunger, pain, scent and color help ensure bodily survival which a benevolent God would have wanted to protect.
The Empiricism of John Locke
Locke’s ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ sought to ‘search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge’ by using his ‘historical , plain method’ to style the natural operations of the human mind. Humans could not claim certainty nor attack others in matters of opinion or faith.
Locke questioned Descartes and the rationalists claim that we have ideas innate ideas: a baby could recognize its mother long before knowing the rationalist’s logical propositions such as ‘…tis impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be…’. Rather Locke proposed that the mind was a “tabula rasa”, a “blank slate” whose ideas came from two sources, the sensation of outer things and reflection on mental activities. Impressions on the mind from sensation and reflection can be combined to form more complex abstract concepts like justice, property, government or new ideas and inventions.
Locke noted that differences in defining and understanding key terms often frustrated debate around moral or political matters. He defined knowledge as ‘the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas’ and identified three ‘degrees’ of knowledge.
“Intuitive knowledge” is what we have when we immediately grasp agreement or disagreement of some ideas (‘that is a circle, not a triangle’). With “demonstrative knowledge” the mind sees agreement or disagreement between ideas through a chain of connecting ideas. “Sensitive knowledge” is not concerned with general truths or relations between ideas but with the existence of particular objects which we experience.
For Locke knowledge was a tool for the pursuit of happiness. Judgment was also such a tool but one which does not give us certainty but only probability, although in many cases probability high enough that we can treat it as practically certain.
We can contrast Descartes focus on the importance of abstract, innate ideas with Locke’s focus on experience and observation. Descartes has a “first-person” approach where the clearest instance of knowledge do not depend on anything external while Locke pays greater attention to observations including of himself and others. This difference developed into epistemological focus on “internalism” or “externalism” discussed in chapter 5.
All round the planet excitement is mounting as people get ready for the first “World Cup of Ideas” of the 21St Century.
The 20th Century saw this conteAll round the planet excitement is mounting as people get ready for the first “World Cup of Ideas” of the 21St Century.
The 20th Century saw this contest held three times, starting with a hard fought championship in France in 1914. The kickoff for the next round was Poland in 1939 while the surprise venue to start the third and final match of the last century was Fulton, Missouri in 1946, starting only a year after the last match had finished.
As always the Liberal-Democrat-Cosmopolitans are expecting to do well, fielding some top notch players known to us all. We should see the highly talented Frenchman Francois-Marie Arouet (better known to his fans by the nickname ‘Voltaire’) take the forward spot. He will be ably supported by mid-field mood-maker Emmanuel Kant playing alongside the solid Jeremy Bentham. Diderot and Montesquie will be out on the wings with the rest of the team made up from other well known players from the Enlightenment League. This is a team that loves to play with ideas and their supporters are expecting great things.
The problem with the Liberal-Democrat-Cosmopolitans (whose fans call them the “Philosophes”) is, of course, identical to the problem faced by Brazilian football team: they are a great team on paper with individual players guaranteed to give 110 percent but they all have their own style of play, rarely work well together and just don’t seem able to maintain the same team-discipline as their main rivals, the Anti-Modernist-Nativist-Authoritarians (to their fans, the ‘Nationalists’). The Nationalists are well known for sticking together and playing ruthlessly on the field even if their individual skills just aren’t at the same level.
A lot of supporters are blaming the recent poor run of the Philosophes on their merger with the Liberal-Capitalist team around thirty years ago. Its certainly true that we’ve seen a lot of shabby tactics from them since then, with players like Adam Smith or John Locke hogging space in front of the goal mouth and not letting the rest of the team get a look in.
This trend has lost the Philosophes a lot of fans. After all, except for some very rich season ticket holders, who wants to go to a match where Voltaire is left in the dressing room while Milton Friedman plays up front? Some of the fan base are so turned off they’ve even gone back to the Socialist-Communist team (known as the “Reds” after their supporters’ favorite color) even though the Reds placed bottom when the last Cup ended in 1989.
Part of the drama of a good World Cup of Ideas is seeing Voltaire up against his arch rival on the Nationalist team, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Knowing that they are both French, that they played head-to-head for top teams in the Enlightenment League while also knowing that they hate each other with a passion off the field just adds to the spectator’s enjoyment.
Although the ‘Nationalists’ have Rousseau on their team the rest of their players are far less well known. We expect to see them field a mixed team with a bias towards German and Italian players: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giusseppe Mazzini, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, Adam Mickiewicz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Herbert Spencer, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar are all expected to catch the manager’s eye along with a few less well known players.
Just like in previous competitions, this century we expect both the Philosophes and the Nationalists to make a pitch for the controversial but incredibly talented young German player from Saxony in Prussia: Friedrich Nietzsche. Some fans say Nietzsche is good enough to swing the balance in favor of any team he plays for but Nietzsche’s critics complain that its often difficult to tell which side he is actually on. Either way we can be pretty sure he will be taking to the field for this Cup as well.
It’s time to touch on an important subject that comes up in every World Cup of Ideas. That subject is Hooliganism. I am sorry to have to report that, yet again, the offending supporters are all fans of the Nationalist team.
It’s often said that Nationalist fans don’t know and don’t even care who is playing on their side in the World Cup of Ideas because they are just there looking for a fight. It is sad, but true, that if you asked the average Nationalist in the US, the UK, France, India, Turkey or wherever who Giusseppe Mazzini or Johann Gottlieb Fichte is they would struggle to answer you.
Supreme (but often misplaced) confidence in their own team’s abilities doesn’t seem to stop the Nationalist fans playing dirty in the pre-tournament fixtures. In recent years we’ve seen them beating up other fans, taking over the sound system around the pitch and even trying to hack the score board thinking that no one would notice. This behavior has got to stop.
Despite overall poor placing in past matches the Anarchist/Nihilist team (the “Blacks” to their fans) is also expected to be well represented in the up-and-coming Cup.
The Blacks always amuse the crowd with their antics on the field of play given how they love to kick the ball in random directions and are often tackling members of their own team. The Blacks can be dangerous to watch though, as they have been known to attack the spectators much like Eric Cantona with his famous drop kick in the 1995 Manchester United v Crystal Palace game. While they might please the crowd their erratic play means the Blacks often disappoint and I wouldn’t put money on them even getting to the semi-finals.
The Reds are still a weak team after their defeat at the end of the last century. They have been steadily losing fans, mainly to the Nationalists and the Blacks. There is even some talk that their star player from Trier in Prussia, Karl Marx, might be waiting for the transfer market to open up so he can make a move to the Nationalists team or even the Philosophes.
As anyone following the World Cup of Ideas knows the choice of venue is still wide open. Europe has always been a popular location ever since the tournament was first held in France in 1789, but where the next championship will start is anyone’s guess.
The leading contender is a brand new location for the fixture: the South China Sea. The Korean Peninsular nearby is also a possible location, as is Kashmir. That perennial favorite “somewhere in the Middle East” is never out of contention.
A few fans have suggested that the next World Cup of Ideas should be a purely domestic fixture held in the US, with a team of Liberal Democrat Cosmopolitans from the coasts (the ‘Liberals’) playing a team of Nativist, Evangelical Authoritarians drawn from the American South and mid-West (the ‘Rednecks’).
This sounds like a rerun of a much earlier Championship of Ideas that kicked off in 1861 in South Carolina but which only had regional match status rather than being a full World Cup. It looks unlikely that the US would be the venue for the very first Cup in the 21st Century, but you never know. If things continue as they are in the US it could well be a venue for the next fixture after that.
Well, that’s just about it for my round up of prospects for the next World Cup of Ideas.
If you would like a more detailed guide to the forthcoming championship then “The Age of Anger” is a great place to start. It has profiles of many of the players and is a good guide to how they performed in earlier matches. It also has a run down of each team’s strengths and weaknesses and useful commentary on how they might perform when the next round starts.
No point sitting on the sidelines anymore. Pick your team and get out there with your support.
Bertrand Russell was one of the world’s best known public intellectuals in the latter half of the last century. This fact Britain can be proud of, beiBertrand Russell was one of the world’s best known public intellectuals in the latter half of the last century. This fact Britain can be proud of, being a country that has produced few public intellectuals in recent history and which looks unlikely to produce another one ever again.
Despite Russell’s past popularity his star has shone a little less brightly over the past few decades. This is not surprising in our Age of Celebrity, an age when the charms of Kim Kardashian and the brains of Kanye West are what most people aspire to. In this age of glitter and good-looks Russell is especially handicapped; in his later years he had the appearance of a somewhat scrawnier but more human looking version of Gonzo the Muppet.
[image] Left: humanist, philosopher and recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, Bertrand Russell. Right: respected actor and stage performer, Gonzo the Muppet.
Although I am willing to bet Russell would have been a demon on Twitter as well, in the first part of this century his thoughtful, rationale and profound essays expressing deeply held humanistic beliefs would be about as welcome to our current leaders as an expert at a Tory Party conference or a ladder at the Mexican border.
That’s a shame, but my sense is that Bertrand Russell’s star is being to shine once more.
It is people like Bertrand Russell that the world needs right now to calmly, rationally and purposefully take the Twitter account, the “alternative facts”, the press briefings and similar dangerous toys away from the children who have got their grubby little hands on them; children who risk hurting themselves and others if they are allowed to carry on playing their games unsupervised.
This book is as full of Russell’s lucid, beautiful writing as any other book that Russell ever wrote. Many of its essays were written at the peak of the cold war when concerns about nuclear weapons were at their height. Russell’s vision of a world government upholding rational and scientific principles to help contain the deadly threat of nuclear weapons seems quaint and ridiculous these days, but remember these are also days when people can be persuaded that the United Nations is a communist plot to take away our guns.
It is worth pausing to think about whether Russell’s vision was essentially right: that the nations of the world need to establish global institutions to collectively address the most serious problems faced by human civilization. A case can be made that all Russell had wrong was the issue. The clearest and most present danger to human civilization may no longer be nuclear weapons, although they are still a risk. The danger Russell underestimated was environmental degradation and man-made climate change.
Let's quote from passages that Russell wrote when the Nazi legacy was still a recent memory and the dangers of authoritarian populism were fresh in everyone's thoughts. Who could have imagined that these quotes would be as relevant today as they were sixty odd years ago?
This first quote goes to the heart of many of our current problems: the GOPs war on science and denial of climate change; UK politician’s insistence that the ‘will of the people’ (no matter how manipulated or lied to) overrides any objective evidence of the impact of their proposed policies:
...the essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment...""
This quote anticipates the age of the re-tweet, that spark of ignorance that has ignited any number of fake news stories. “…Lead astray by cocksure prophets…ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans…”? Just turn on the TV.
..so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans...""
Was Russell looking into a crystal ball when he wrote this? It's almost uncanny.
"...no one can deny, in face of the evidence [of the Nazis] that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally possible to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments...""
It’s too much to finish on another depressing quote. Bertrand Russell was right about many things. Let’s hope he is right about this as well:
"...it is said that, in a war between Liberals and fanatics, the fanatics are sure to win, owing to their more unshakable belief in the rightness of their cause [but] all history...is against it. Fanatics have failed...because they have attempted the impossible or....because they were too unscientific to adopt the right means; they have failed also because they roused the hostility of those they wished to coerce...
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