Rational Philosophy

While we live in the moment we must accept the uncertainty of the future… and the past.

“Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks,”
– Mark Twain (who may lose his house twice over…)

Back in the dark ages of last November I wrote about a stockbroker who, in anger, jostled the stationary bike of a fellow spin-class member. Frustrated by the man’s grunting and shouting, he grabbed the handlebars of the offender’s bike, lifted it off the ground (while he was still on it) and dropped it. My blog post on the subject sports a photograph of the purportedly injured party, Stuart Sugarman, a partner at an investment firm, wearing a neck brace. Here we are in sunny June and I read that a jury has acquitted the stockbroker of assault, having found Mr. Sugarman to be an unreliable witness, and deciding that the incident didn’t, beyond reasonable doubt, result in Sugarman’s injuries.

When I wrote my original post I was convinced that the stockbroker, Christopher Carter, was guilty of something — perhaps not a crime, but certainly of unreasonably losing his cool. The current news story casts a somewhat heroic glow on Carter’s vigilante act, blaming Sugarman for being a boar in the class, and a liar to boot.

Where does the truth lie?

Some scientists have apparently decided that wherever the truth about dark energy lies they are not going to find it. Current calculations indicate that the universe is 4% regular matter (stars, planets, pencils), 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy (not related to dark matter as far as we know). Despite a lot of attention and investigation, dark energy isn’t yielding its mysteries, and some scientists are worried that it won’t.

Such pessimism seems unwarranted at this point in time. After all, the future could last a long time. Why give up now?

I’m reasonably sure that Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist, would concur. Kurzweil has been making predictions about the future for over thirty years, with impressive results. In the ’80s he predicted that a computer would defeat the world chess champion by 1998 (it happened in 1997). Some of Kurzweil’s current predictions:

• Within 10 years, a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
• Within 20 years, all energy will come from clean sources.
• In 15 years… your life expectancy will rise faster than you age.
• And then, by 2050, the Singularity, when humans and/or machines begin to evolve into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

Still doubtful? “Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.”

From a philosophical perspective, an interesting aspect of all of this is that time, as we perceive it, is all in our minds. The past and the future, as we commonly conceive of them, don’t exist. All of existence rests on the current moment. Reality is transitional. Causality creates our perception of time. The predictable changing of things, the nudge of being from one moment to the next. Without this, time would be meaningless.

(This, as a digression, is the clue to understanding our existence. Once we have accepted that the rules of causality shape the universe we live in, we can begin to understand why we live, think and feel the way we do.)

This morning when I woke up I was the proud owner of an idea for a sure-fire business opportunity. By 9:30am, that sunny feeling of certainty had been toppled as I found out that someone already held the copyright to my idea. All was lost. By 3pm, after a brief nap, I’d regained my optimism after dreaming up a revision to my idea… Time, you faithless lover, revise me again.

In a 1929 interview, Albert Einstein apparently said: “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge.”

In order to have an opinion on Einstein’s statement, we first need to decide what he means by “more important.” Einstein was speaking of his own process. He had been asked whether intuition or inspiration accounted for his theories. Certainly, when devising a new theory, imagination plays a very significant role, and without it a new theory can’t emerge.

Einstein’s contribution to science was creative. For him, then, imagination was more important that knowledge.

As my wife and I visited our newborn son in the ICU today we talked about the role of the nursing staff. So much of what they do is routine — they learn how to care for the newborns and follow the instructions they’ve been given. But the difference between a competent nurse and a nurse who contributes something important is the degree to which she is engaged with the baby and his parents.

The competent nurse follows the correct procedures, attends to her tasks with care and dedication. The engaged nurse does this too, but also sees things, listens, and reacts.

Artist Mark Rothko said this about art: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

Rothko could have been speaking about nursing. One looks at Rothko’s paintings and one could be forgiven for asking what they are about. But does this mean that they aren’t about something?

Rothko’s children are suing to have his remains unearthed and moved to a Jewish cemetery. I don’t know how Rothko would feel about this. Judged as a creative act, one imagines that he would find it rather obvious. Judged as an action in the world, one imagines he would find it somewhat depressing.

Another child of a famous person — Max Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley the notorious British Nazi — has been in trouble for exploring his imaginative world in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes in London. Apparently, shades of Nazism can be detected in the role-play. Mosley is the chief of the Formula One motor racing federation and has been asked to resign.

The thread that I’m trying to mine is the concept of engagement. A nurse engaged with her role as caregiver. A scientist engaged with his role as a pursuer of new ideas. A painter engaged with the direct communication of otherwise uncommunicable ideas. And a man engaged with his legacy and its demons.

But what does any of this have to do with Bacon? Stanley Fish writes about deconstruction and Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon predicted that rational thought would eventually win out; that we would one day have a consistent , complete understanding of the world we live in, but that we would go through tough times to get there. He predicted that language would get in the way. That the terms we use to talk about and define things would become recursively problematic.

Rothko sought to eliminate words. Bacon recognized their challenges. Einstein sought to subjugate knowledge.

There is a reason, I think, for such struggle. Rothko, Bacon and Einstein all felt painfully the distinction between ideas and reality. We experience reality, and we conceive of ideas.

Ideas can be consistent and whole and concrete. Reality must be felt and experienced and can never be pinned down. Einstein eluded language, Rothko avoided it, Mosley seeks to bend it, and Bacon wanted to wrestle with it, but found it stronger than him. Language, I would argue, can be accurate and complete when it expresses ideas, but not when it seeks to represent the world and our experience of it.

The unfolding hostage (just freed) and bomb threat at Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office provides a sobering example of the difference between rhetoric and reality. As an armed man stands off with a bomb strapped to his chest the sparring between campaign candidates doesn’t seem the slightest bit important. Reality trumps rhetoric every time.

Critics of former mayor Rudy Giuliani have stepped up their attacks on his rhetorical device of bandying about mistated, inflated or exaggerated statistics to present his mayoral accomplishments in a brighter light. Here, it seems, rhetoric and reality combine to demonstrate that Giuliani, if elected, would prove to be a deceitful and egotistical leader. Something that by now we’ve surely had enough of.

Then there’s the “outcry” in the Sudan over the thankfully relatively lenient sentence (15 days in jail versus six months and 40 lashes) meted out to Gillian Gibbons for allowing the children in her elementary class to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Sudanese demonstrators have called for Gibbons to be executed. But witnesses indicate that the protesters were supplemented  (or perhaps seeded) by government workers. And the outcry seems to provide convenient rhetoric for the Sudanese government as it tries to block Scandinavian peacekeepers from being sent to Darfur — this in response to last year’s publication in Scandinavia of cartoons that depicted Muhammad and offended muslims.

And for all of the endless rhetoric about Iraq, when one reads some of the details of the violence there (as I’ve been doing in the New Yorker (Inside The Surge)) one realizes just how bloody and brutal and real the war is, and how divorced from those facts is the rhetoric.

The aim of rhetoric, when it has an aim, is to sway the listener or audience. The speaker uses rhetorical devices (such as emphasis, repetition, sarcasm, humor, logic or sophistry, the inducement of fear, omission, bullying, and charisma) to highlight his or her points, and to persuade the listener that his or her perspective has greater merit than any other. Unfortunately, the better the speaker the harder it becomes to differentiate a valid, worthy perspective from an invalid or fatuous perspective. And, given the established methods we employ to select the leaders of our regions, cities, states, and countries, rhetoric must remain for now an indispensible part of the process.

Rhetoric is employed so pervasively around the world that it’s almost impossible to imagine processes of government and leadership without it. But perhaps that’s because we’re not trained to recognize and counter rhetoric. Plato’s Socratic dialogs or their teachings should be required readings in schools. If we could learn to decode rhetoric and diminish its influence the world would be a better place.

Reality on the other hand often gets too little attention. It takes a lot of reality to impinge upon our consciousness. And all too often it’s the sensational stuff that we focus on. In the past few days I’ve been struck by the number of high profile news stories that have focused on tragic disappearances and deaths for no other reason than there was something odd or grizzly or heartbreaking about them (the hoaxed teenager who killed herself, the missing teenager who’d been involved in porn, the couple who allegedly killed their two year old child, the ex-cop who may have killed his wives). I’m not saying that these tragedies aren’t worth our attention, but should they occupy, relatively speaking, so much of our news-space? News serves two purposes — it delivers information of note and it keeps society apprised of things that we should care about and perhaps act upon. Of course, news media don’t make the news, it’s the consumers (us) who dictate our appetite for sensation to the savvy editors and pundits. What would it take to bring about a more enlightened media? A more enlightened public…

One can only hope that the armed hostage taker in New Hampshire is defused. I’d rather have more rhetoric than that kind of reality.

‘They just shoot at anything and everybody,’ says one of the interviewees in a CNN story today on chronic youth violence in parts of Philadelphia.

Responding to Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, Rob Edwards of Woodbridge, Connecticut is reported as saying: “It is a sad world in which we live when bad science (and even a lack of any data at all on many points) leads to so much hype or accolades, especially the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. The IPCC is a farce. View the CBC documentary from 2005, which is backed up by clear and reproducible science, to understand how wrong the IPCC and Al Gore actually are.” (Which prompted me to go look up the CBC documentary.)

And on logic matters today (a philosophy blog,) a post questioning whether there “isn’t something inelegant about stocking up on assignments of objects to variables only not to use infinitely many of them?” I couldn’t understand a word of it. I don’t mean to pick on this post; I wouldn’t understand most of them, I’m sure.

Which brings me to the question of what is reality, and whether philosophy can help us answer it. If we live in a world where kids shoot each other mindlessly, what use is the study of model theory? And if Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize raises a scornful response from many quarters, some of them apparently well meant and well informed, are we to trust our understanding of the world around us, or the understanding of others?

Our perception of reality itself of course is somewhat of an illusion. We see and feel and hear things because we have evolved to see and hear and feel them in that way. Our eyes respond to a thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears to a narrow portion of the frequency spectrum. Things are solid for us because we perceive them at as solid, but at the smallest perspective, subatomic particles are smears of energy spread out relatively huge distances. Smaller particles can just go whizzing through us.

Reality is perception. Consistency in that perception can reassure us of consistency in the world around us. Logic can help us build models that may or may not prove reliable. And progress can only be measured with hindsight.

Where does that leave us?

President Bush today in referring to his desire to meet with the Dalai Lama says that he hopes that China will one day see the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader and someone who wants peace.

I guess that could just about sum up the mind-boggling futility in seeking out logical consistency in the world around us… But then I think about Plato. Plato said: “It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” And this kind of philosophy seems to give us courage and a reason to continue to think.