As I posted yesterday’s philosophical insight inspired by the film “Happy Go Lucky” I felt as if the post didn’t quite express my full thought but I didn’t quite know what more to say. As I lay waiting for my son to wake up this morning — those indeterminate minutes as the day goes from black to gray — I realized what it was that I hadn’t said.

Kant recognized and asserted that we only know existence at arm’s length, through our experience of it. Schopenhauer underscored, vaunted, and elaborated on this point through several hundred pages. It’s been refined and narrowed since. Our minds create an impression of existence through the evidence of our senses. We don’t know sunlight, for instance, we know the mind’s recreation of sunlight through the stimulation of our optic nerve.

I left off yesterday with the thought that life is, to some extent, what we make of it. We can choose a negative, pessimistic interpretation or a positive, optimistic interpretation.

Mike Leigh

The operation of the mind connects these two thoughts: The mind not only forms an impression of existence, but applies a set of psychological rules to determine how we feel about that impression.

Someone steals Poppy’s bike. Poppy’s mind applies a rule set that interprets this incident without anger and with a light, bittersweet sense of regret.

In contrast the driving instructor interprets Poppy’s attempts at humor as an attack on him, a game she’s playing to undermine him.

So, Mike Leigh’s film informs us, and is right in doing so, that our senses don’t give us a reliable impression of existence. Our minds apply a complex psychological interpretation to the direct evidence of our senses. And it could be said that only without a psychological rule set, or only with a completely neutral psychological rule set, could we get a somewhat untainted impression of existence.

The constraints of a blog post don’t permit further exploration of this idea. But it promises to be a very rich vein to hack away at. I’ll end with the thought I had just as my son was waking up: Quite apart from our psychological disposition, the rules encoded in the nature of our existence (in our DNA) provide yet another impression of existence that is just as important, if not more important, than the evidence of our senses in yielding an impression of existence.

Well, I’d written a good part of a post about seasons, gas prices, and global warming before I pressed the wrong button combination and lost it.

It started with some reflection on the cost of getting around in the city: I take my son to pre-school on the subway in preference to driving him, because we like the train and because I like the idea that I’m not contributing to global warming and pollution. But this morning as I walked in the Spring sunshine I realized that it costs me $4 for a round trip on the subway, while the cost of driving him to school would only be about 54 cents. That sucks. Shouldn’t we make public transportation more economically attractive than driving to encourage people to use it?

I then lamented the defeat of mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan. I then got into the ineffectiveness of government in dealing with problems like global warming. President Bush is an extreme example. After eight years the best he could do was to make some feel good statements encouraging a voluntary reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. But governments in general seem to be ill-matched to the situation.

Part of the problem seems to be that we’re not really very good at dealing with long term threats. Evolution has wired us to focus on the here and now in a very vivid and immediate way. We can conceptualize and prepare for what may happen today or tomorrow, but the further out the problems get, the less able we are to act in ways that recognize them and respond to them effectively.

I then had started to write about the changing seasons and the way that this affects our conceptual view of the world. I was thinking about referencing lyrics from a record I was just listening to (The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely, on which a track begins with the words “Autumn came around like a drifter to an on ramp…”). It was as I was trying to develop this idea that I pressed the fatal combination of buttons and erased the post.

But now I feel engaged by the idea of ‘the lost blog,’ or, more generally, the lost anything.

The idea of ‘no longer being’ can be juxtaposed with the idea of constant renewal. The changing cycle of the seasons reinforces our concept of the world as a place where things come around again. In the Fall the trees shed their leaves as we enter the long dead winter, but in Spring the natural world appears to be reborn. We integrate this and similar ideas of regeneration into our conceptual view of the world. (The cycle of day and night, of waking and sleeping reinforces this concept.)

It is no surprise then that many cultures and religions have conceptualized life and death as a cycle. Reincarnation, life after death. Renewal of life reflects our regular impression of the world, and it salves the pain of total loss.

But things do get lost. My original post is gone. Even if I were able to recall it word for word and write it out again, it would be something subtly different from the original post.

In reality, existence never repeats itself. The present moment is unique and new. The earth never quite rotates about the same sun, which is ever so slowly burning away and cooling. The child born today is born into a world different from the world his or her parents were born into.

This is not true of the conceptual world, in which concepts remain firm and fast and reproducible over and over, where the concept of a square remains always the concept of a square, where a logical analysis remains always logical.

As we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the world, more aware of our effect on the environment, more cognizant of the way we can improve the long term lot of humankind and a whole host of other species, we face the challenge of shedding our concept of reality and existence as something that forever renews, of life as a short term that will be repeated in the long term.

We have both the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this new conceptual world-view and the capabilities to act on it for the good of the world and for the good of humanity.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the universal criticality of April Fools Day.

The susceptible age of four seemed to me too young for our son to be introduced to the joys and miseries of April Fools Day. My wife thought otherwise. And so it was that this morning he gusted into our dreams bright and early with a panoply of pranks all aimed at making himself happy at our expense.

April Fools Day is clearly the oldest and most significant holiday of any season, predating any other religious or secular holidays, and resonating so deeply with the very fundamental core of our existence, nay the existence of anything, that it hardly bears talking about. That being said, one still doesn’t need to share its rituals with a four year old.

For those who may not have found time to research the long history of April Fools Day, or who have delved back only so far as to the time of Chaucer and his Nun’s Priest Tale (c. 1400) or to the French and Dutch references dating back to the 16th century, I’ll touch on the foundational aspects of the holiday.

The celebration of a prank is a reference to the creation of something out of nothing. The prankster begins with a fiction, something untrue or fabricated, and ends up with an event of significance — the fooling of someone. This ritual sequence evokes the appearance of something out of nothing, which in turn recalls the origin of existence as we know it. What scientists now call the Higgs Boson — the superheavy particle the appearance of which they believe precipitated the big bang — used to be referred to as the Grande Bufon or, roughly translated, the “Large Idiot.” (This was, of course, in pre-scientific times.)

Archimedes, or the Greek’s geek, as he was known, was fascinated by the idea of the biggest prank of all time, and spent much of his middle and later life trying to perfect a trick on humankind that would last well beyond his death. He finally succeeded by calculating more accurately than any before him the irrational number Pi that relates the radius of a circle to its circumference. Archimedes would have been thrilled to know that even today, thousands of years later, schoolboys and schoolgirls the world over still tie their brains in knots trying to recall Pi to a large number of decimal places.

It was Archimedes, too, who jumped out of his bathtub shouting “Eureka!” This was not because he’d had an epiphany about the displacement of water, which is the commonly held myth, but because he’d figured out how to fool the king into thinking that he’d made him a suit out of golden thread. Hence Archimedes subsequent naked romp through the streets to the king’s palace. Archimedes was a true prankster.

Sadly today very few people think about the original significance of April Fools Day. It’s been turned into a circus of silly jokes and goofy tricks. I see this as a reflection of the times we live in. We spend too much time chasing material possessions, success, love, wealth, redeemable coupons, and not enough time focused on the essential void of meaning that underscores existence. If only we could all take this day to prank one another with a heartfelt sense of life’s irony and insignificance the world would be a better place.

 

 

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On the philosophy of existence as it relates to the idea of ownership and property.

I spent the day getting rid of junk, garbage and unwanted stuff from our basement. (We’re selling our house, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts.) Clearing trash makes one reflect on things of moment. We relish the new space, the absence of the piles of crap. We feel a lightness, a sense of freedom. And, conversely, we mourn the time that we spent with those piles of crap when they were, if not cherished possessions, then certainly worth holding onto by putting them in the basement. We’re clearing out old times, in a way.

Are possessions things of the mind? Does a sense of possession require consciousness?

I’ve come across the idea that nomadic people, such as native Americans, don’t have the same sense of property, and certainly not land ownership, as agrarian or industrial societies. This makes some sense, but native Americans surely had a sense of property.

Non-conscious creatures can display a sense of territorial ownership or rights. Animals defend territory and food against interlopers.

Understanding the idea of property seems quite straightforward if we reflect on the idea that survival requires that we ensure that we have food and shelter. If we’ve secured food and shelter, why give it up without a fight, without defending it? Giving up things of importance without a reasonable struggle to keep them would be an act of letting go, of non-living.

This explanation however seems incomplete. It seems that there’s another way in which we feel a sense of ownership, one that’s much more immediate and direct. It’s our sense of our physical being. More than we could say of any other thing, we could be said to own our bodies. We experience the world through the immediate impressions of our physical being. The impulses felt through our body define the us-ness of our being.

This, then, is the root of any idea of property. We own our experiences.

Any other sense of property is derivative and non-essential. We can lose everything except our experience and still live. And so, when we’re ridding ourselves of extraneous possessions, we feel a sense of lightness, of paring down. We feel a calmness and sureness that even if we were to get rid of everything we own, we would still retain ownership of ourselves.

The New York Times Science section today summarizes a debate that’s more than 2,000 years old: Can we say that the universe reflects fundamental laws? As its hook, the article highlights the thoughts of Dr. Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State, who brought the debate to a rolling boil recently by opining that science was, to some extent, a matter of faith.

Despite all of the hoopla and the plethora of theories on the subject, it seems to me that we can satisfy ourselves about the nature of the universe as follows:

First, we can restrict our field of inquiry to the universe that we live in. Sure, it’s interesting to postulate what other universes may exist, but let’s explain the one we live in first.

Second, we can say that the universe operates according to the principles of space and time. (This is a pragmatic statement of fact; what other principles would it operate in accordance with?)

And here’s the most important part: Since principles are concepts, and since concepts don’t exist in the concrete, but only in the abstract, the principles that govern space and time must exist outside space and time. Space and time don’t create them, but must concur with them. (This leaves open the possibility that another universe may concur with other principles.)

I believe that this adequately addresses much of the uncertainty. (Quantum mechanics is simply another principle of space and time, perfectly maleable as an abstract concept, and nothing to get hung up on.)

With these founding ideas, we can make rapid and comprehensive progress in understanding our universe and our existence. (As I explain in my book.)

And when we read stories like the one from Detroit in which a seven year old girl was shot six times as she tried to shield her mother from an attack, or those from Iraq where the dire feuds between factions and attacks by insurgents continue to cause misery and mayhem, we realize that we yet have a lot to understand and address in our own universe without needing to go looking for others.

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My daughter just started high school and has a course called physics. Her grandmother made the comment: “Oh, how wonderful, physics is the best; you’ll learn how everything works.” Which is true. Physics pursues an ever more sophisticated explanation for the way things work. Philosophy seems sometimes to give ground as physics rolls on, but I prefer to think that physics provides a great tool for the philosopher.

Fundamental physics can be a particularly fine-pointed tool. The more we know about the most original and smallest parts of existence, the more we can build up a fully consistent picture of the whole.

Physicists pursue evidence to support their hypotheses, but the best physicists expect to have to refine or throw out their hypotheses. Good physics is a process. A never-ending process.

The title of this blog is misleading for that reason. What’s fundamental today won’t be fundamental tomorrow. Before we knew about atoms, solid matter was considered just that, solid. And the atomic view was replaced by a perspective that included electrons, protons, and neutrons. Which in turn was replaced by a view that allowed for whole families of hadrons and baryons.

Fundamental physics is always in transition. But the philosophy of fundamental physics, the way we use the tool of physics, is a well established conceptual process. Philosophy seeks to know “what can this new insight tell me about our condition.”

Unfortunately, whereas philosophers and physicists were once indivisible (Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and many more were both philosophers and physicists) these days, philosophy and physics have moved ever more deeply into the deep grass at the ends of their respective fields. They no longer speak the same language. They no longer understand one another.

What we end up with is pop philosophy based on some apparently trendy new scientific premise or discovery. (Superstrings, for instance.) Or random conjecture on meaning from the brilliant scientists of the day. To continue to make philosophical progress, the two fields need to be brought back together.

Even some of the now more established scientific findings of recent years can produce quite revealing insight into the philosophy of our existence. One particularly compelling example of this caused me to spend three years analyzing and writing about its implications (the product of which is LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive). It’s this:

What can we discern about the fundamental principles of space and time by observing the evolution of the material universe?

To answer this question we must know enough about the physics of the early universe and the development of particles and star systems over time to be able to discern the pattern. If I hadn’t had a grounding in physics (my original field of study) this pattern probably would have eluded me.

The pattern or principle itself is quite simple. As a thing (particle, particle cluster, dust cloud, etc.) comes into being, it will be more likely to remain in existence if it is stable.

This very humble observation explains why, even though there are dozens of particles that can exist in the material universe, all of the matter in the universe consists of electrons, protons and neutrons clustered together as atoms. The atomic form is the only stable material form and therefore the only one that persisted.

Here is an excerpt from LIFE!

[T]he form of existence we have taken, and the form of existence that predominates in the world we know and interact with (our world: our solar system and the rest of the visible universe, every rock and tree, every cereal box on the supermarket shelf), consists not of lambda or omega nuclei orbited by neutrinos, but of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons. But we need to answer why this is so. It is not, as was once thought, that these are the only possible types of particles. Although they have cornered the market on atomic existence, electrons, protons, and neutrons come from quite large families of particles known as leptons and hadrons. And although leptons seem to be truly fundamental particles, hadrons result from combinations of still smaller particles known as quarks. The electron (which is a lepton) has six brothers and sisters—the muon, the tau, the neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tau neutrino. (Each lepton also has an antimatter twin, known as an antilepton.) Quarks, which come in six types, don’t exist as free particles but combine in pairs or triplets to form mesons and baryons, collectively known as hadrons. (The proton and the neutron each consist of three quarks.) There are dozens of hadrons.We begin to understand why atoms are ubiquitous when we look at the properties of the members of these particle families: the electron and the proton are the lightest and therefore the most stable of the lepton and hadron families. The more massive leptons and quark combinations don’t last very long before breaking up into lighter particles. Of the leptons and quark combinations that do remain stable, only electrons, protons, and neutrons group together into naturally stable structures. In an atom, electromagnetism keeps the negatively charged electrons tightly bound to the positively charged protons. Nuclear forces bind protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.

Although the neutrino (a lepton quite similar to an electron but with no electromagnetic charge) is also a stable particle, and although the universe produces neutrinos in great numbers, their lack of an electromagnetic charge means that neutrinos can’t bind electromagnetically with protons as electrons do, and therefore they don’t form atomlike structures. Instead, neutrons fly through space, unbound and disconnected from the physical structures of stars and planets.

The proton has an effectively infinite life span. It is the only hadron that doesn’t spontaneously degenerate into another hadron plus radiation. By comparison, the neutron, when not bound, has an expected life span of less than eleven minutes. But when bound with a proton in an atom’s nucleus, the neutron can last indefinitely. Therefore, despite the dozens of fundamental particles and the many ways in which they could (statistically) be combined with one another in atomlike structures, atoms consist entirely of electrons, protons, and neutrons because other particles either quickly decompose or can’t combine into stable structures.

From this straightforward analysis of the particles that make up the universe and why these particles and not other particles give rise to material existence, we suddenly have an insight into a principle that guides the development of everything that exists in space and time…

I just went to CNN.com to check out the leading news stories of the day. CNN’s top story focuses on volunteers who collect the dead in Baghdad. Britney Spears‘ MTV awards performance (specifically, its apparent lousiness) tops the popular story list.

Which story tugged at my deepest human feelings? And which story did I read?

The introductory description of volunteers collecting the dead in Baghdad forced me to dwell on the consequences and aftermath of the violence there in a new and painful way. The thought of the unremitting task of cleaning up dead bodies allowed me to imagine, however palely, how it would feel to live in such terrible circumstances. But I then clicked through to the Britney Spears story…

Upon reflection, the two stories may have more in common than it first seems. The violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, whether we think the US presence there is justified or not, derives from people’s inability to see through their apparent differences, it rests on the ego of believing that we have something up on someone else. And our fascination with Britney Spears’ spiraling decline rests on a similar instinct to separate ourselves from others, to enjoy their calamities because it makes us feel better about ourselves at their expense.

Another reported event at the MTV awards — Kid Rock and Tommy Lee (both Pamela Anderson exes) going at it. And a related story: Popular performers insisting on songwriting credit to boost their perception as artists in the public’s eye, and to boost their bank accounts, even when they have little or no input to the songs they sing.

I am not part of the government administration, nor do I commit acts of sectarian violence. And I haven’t fought fist to face with another person since I was a child. But I realized anew today that I am guilty of separating myself from others, of holding myself out as different or in some way better. Whereas rationally I know that I am not separate. That all of us are part of the collective human swell. Rationally, I know that my ego misleads me because the ego has served us well in surviving as a species. Rationally, I know that I should remain aware of this and prevent myself from acting out of prejudice and pride.

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

(Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)

If we reject received ideas and observe and analyze the world around us we gain insight that reflects the only truth we have — our own impressions. This doesn’t mean we should ignore everyone else, our mental and emotional reactions can provide valuable impressions, too. But we should not simply accept without first deciding whether we can reasonably agree.

We can be skeptical about our impressions, too. We can logically conclude that none of our impressions are reliable, that we can’t be sure that the world exists. But, as Schopenhauer concluded (in The World as Will and Representation), what do we gain by such a conclusion? What do we have to gain from saying that we can’t believe in anything? This conclusion leads us to a dead end.

If we accept that our impressions are indeed impressions, that they are, for the most part, not fictions, then we have a place to work from. We can begin to analyze which of our impressions seem more reliable, more complete, more reasonable. We can discuss our impressions with others and find out whether they share the same impressions. We can form hypotheses based on our impressions and see whether we can validate these hypotheses. When we accept an impression as an impression, a whole world of potential understanding opens up.

With his theory of forms or Ideas Plato recognized that in order to hypothesize and analyze we use abstract concepts. Whenever we think about something in general terms (chairs as opposed to “this chair I’m sitting on”) we use abstract concepts. (As I think about this, as I have before, I conclude that consciousness is the ability to manipulate abstract concepts.) So what are the forms or concepts that shape our existence?

This question has nagged at people for thousands of years. But given what we know about the world (through observation and analysis) we can now set out the answer!

It’s important to go back to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s philosophy made great strides in identifying the principles or abstract concepts through which we can understand our existence. He recognized that our impressions of existence come to us through what he called a “fourfold root.” The fourfold root was the three dimensions of space and time (or causality).

All of our impressions concur with the idea that space has three dimensions and that things exist through time governed by the principle of cause and effect.

What Schopenhauer didn’t understand (because not enough was known at the time of the way that the universe evolves over time) was that the earth and heaves weren’t a fixed and static thing, that our existence follows after a whole long stream of prior events. We now know a great deal about that string of events. We can see back in time by looking out into space, and by digging through the layers of earth beneath our feet. We have a great deal of insight into the evolution of the universe.

This insight into the evolution of the universe adds to Schopenhauer’s principles. It tells us that existence isn’t static. That the matter in the universe consists of energy. And that energy changes from one form to another.

So what is the principle by which the evolution of existence has lead to our existence? As I describe in my book, the principle is one of persistence: The more likely a form is to persist, the more likely it is to remain in existence.

This applies to the persistence of fundamental particles, cosmological systems, molecules, and life.