Rational Philosophy

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.

On the value of skepticism in philosophy and life.

Philosophy requires skepticism. Without the urge to doubt or question our immediate experience we cannot understand it. To Socrates, the ultimate knowing was knowing that he knew nothing. This idea, so central to the process of finding firm conceptual ground, has been taken up again and again by philosophers. A good philosopher has to be scrupulously skeptical, particularly of his own ideas. Bad philosophers tend to be bad because they have lousy ideas or because they’re not skeptical enough –

Schopenhauer, in his World As Will And Representation, spectacularly criticizes his contemporary, Hegel, for instance, because he saw Hegel as a self-aggrandizing mystic rather than a real philosopher. Here’s a sample of Schopenhauer’s delightful vitriol: “What was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make use of this privilege; Schelling at best equaled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel.”

In one of those curious NY Times pieces that hovers between information and advice, like a girl enjoying the attentions of two suitors while delicately avoiding a commitment to either, the NY Times reports on the desirability of skepticism as an asset for business leaders. The article points out that executives tend not to be as skeptical as they should be, causing them to fall on their noses more often than they should. The piece checks off a few reasons why this might be so:

1. If an executive doesn’t know the facts, he or she can’t make good decisions.

2. Hearing about the facts means being accessible and open to bad news.

3. Sometimes it’s not enough to be approachable and you need to go looking for bad news.

In everyday life, so long as we’re careful to understand the basis of our skepticism, skepticism can provide us with a helpful perspective on things. Socrates founded his skepticism on the sound philosophical ground that he knew only that he knew nothing. Such a fundamental skepticism would quickly prove impractical as we’re trying to get through the day. “Do I exist?” may be an eminently reasonable question when we first wake up, but it won’t get us into the bathroom to brush our teeth. Instead, there will be some things that it makes sense to be very skeptical about and others that we can pretty much accept at face value.

It makes sense to be skeptical of the e-mail from a complete stranger promising us a share of a vast fortune. And less sense to be skeptical about whether our schools should be teaching intelligent design.

But back to the reasons an executive may not always be as skeptical as he should be: I would add a fourth imperative to the Times’ ad hoc list — an executive may not want to admit that he is wrong. After all, he’s been making the decisions and setting the strategy, a change in direction often demonstrates that some of those prior decisions or plans were flawed. Letting go of the idea of one’s infallibility can be tough for the person in charge.

Clear thinking absolutely requires an acceptance of one’s fallibility. In my own life I’ve learned from my wife that I’m nearly always wrong. This sense of supreme fallibility has helped me immensely in my marriage. As a manager in the business world, I learned over the course of several years that my own ideas could always be improved upon; another valuable lesson.

As we wade on through this election year, I fear that we’re being too hard on the candidates as they make mistakes. The hypercritical election process, during which every statement is parsed and critiqued, only serves to drive the poor hopefuls toward the alluring but false embrace of purported infallibility. Don’t we want a president who, as the most important executive in the country, can feel comfortable with his or her fallibility?

In Iraq, two bomb attacks today killed 19. President Bush, the current national executive, had this to say yesterday about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: “By helping these young democracies grow in freedom and prosperity, we’ll lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”

I’m not happy today. I don’t know why. But perhaps this is a good place to begin in thinking about the philosophy of happiness. I was going to write about the philosophy of depression, but that seemed too, well, depressing.

Arthur Schopenhauer (by all accounts, generally not a happy man) had this to say on the subject: “Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.” Goethe expresses a similar idea, but more gently: “Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.”

Happiness of course is a mental construct or concept that we use to describe a set of complex feelings, and this concept forms part of a spectrum that spans all degrees of happiness and unhappiness. As Carl Yung put it: “The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

John Belushi said more or less the same thing as Jung — “I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time” — but he pushes back toward the pertinent question of happiness as something that may have a purpose.

The study of happiness has received a lot of attention recently. But, as with most matters of psychological interest, those doing the questioning tend to be psychologists. One such study from a few years ago brings focus to the eternally false expectation that things will make us happy; returning to Goethe, we like to chase the ball of happiness, but when we catch up to it, we kick it off again. 

(I had a striking example of this in my personal life just last week. When we were expecting our first child three years ago, my wife and I discovered that we both carry a gene mutation for cystic fibrosis. When we became pregnant again over the summer, we therefore knew that there was a one in four chance that the baby would have cystic fibrosis. The worry about this consumed us. Yet last week when the tests showed that the baby would be fine, the all-pervasive happiness of the relief was quite short-lived. Here I am again, already depressed about something else.)

The problem with the study of happiness from a psychological perspective is that it tends to reveal more about the symptoms of happiness than it does about the purpose of happiness. To understand that purpose, we need to consider the concept from first principles.

Back to Schopenhauer. His definition of happiness as freedom from pain is compelling, because it is neat. “[Pain] is the positive element of life,” he says. A thought we can happily unpack to mean that pain compells us to do things that help us survive.

This is certainly part of the puzzle. We evolved pain receptors to help us refrain from doing things that would damage the living organism. And psychological (emotional) pain is simply an extension of the same phenomenon. To the extent that we can anticipate painful situations we tend to try to avoid them.

But it is surely not the whole answer. What Schopenhauer sought to exises from our analysis by referring all of happiness back to pain, was the potential for a positive purpose for happiness.

Camus evoked the concept of harmony to describe happiness: “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

As life evolved, the more successful organisms would have been those that were able to effectively balance the functions within the living organism itself and between the organism and the outside world. Every evolutionary step or change succeeds or fails according to whether it brings about a more advantageous balance for the organism. This tendency toward balance reveals itself in all kinds of ways — the physical form of the organism (the giraffe’s long neck balanced with the height from the ground of its food), and the internal functioning of the organism (the short life span of the fruit fly, for instance, which allows it to mutate and adapt rapidly).

In human beings, the mental function takes this process of tending toward balance to a new place. Our mental functions, our processing of impulses and conscious decision making, tends to improve our ability to survive if it helps us to achieve balance. Happiness, however fleeting, is the evolutionary reward for achieving harmony and balance — a good meal, a pleasant experience, making love — all of these things produce the chemical reponse that we call happiness so that we will tend to want to do them again. Happiness is evolution’s form of positive feedback.

Why then have so many great minds decided that happiness is merely pain waiting to happen? Bertrand Russell perhaps can shed some light on this: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

 

 

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Today:

In a CNN poll, 65% said that the UAW workers didn’t have the right to strike after a breakdown in talks with GM. In a Best Buy poll 90% of consumers said they didn’t fully understand high definition TVs. And after rallying in the wake of the fed’s cut in the lending rate last week, stocks dropped back as consumers began to worry again about the economic outlook.

Each of these statistics seem to point to a very interesting philosophical problem — sufficient understanding. I first encountered this concept in reading Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer rests the foundation of his philosophy on what he calls “the principle of sufficient reason,” by which he means that we cannot know everything, but we can draw conclusions from a solid ground of knowing (and no more).

In many aspects of life, it seems to me, the critical and the trivial, we just don’t know enough to form a valid opinion, or make a determination. Do the union representatives know enough about the complex repercussions of GM’s business strategy to determine that it will ultimately benefit their members to strike for a better deal? And do the respondent’s to CNN’s poll understand enough to say that it is wrong to strike? Clearly most consumer’s don’t understand enough about high definition technology to make an informed purchase decision (and yet we go out and buy HDTVs anyway). And can anyone claim to know enough about the hugely mysterious workings of the stock market to be able to accurately predict whether, even after a half percent cut in the minimum lending rate, it would be better to buy or sell.

We tend instead to approach these kinds of questions by parsing the broad principles at work, such as: GM’s plans to succeed in the free market must be better overall for workers and consumers than the union’s objective to do well for its members. HDTV is new technology and seems to synonymous with thin panel TVs so it must be worth buying. The lending market is in trouble so a cut in lending rates will be good for the market.

As I think about these kinds of things, I often wonder whether we can ever know enough about the questions at hand to form and draw sufficiently educated conclusions. And perhaps the broad brush stroke approach is the best we can do. Certainly, when we’re buying a new TV it is philosophically acceptable to assume that the newer technology has some merit and, depending on how much we value TV, is worth the money. After all, what’s the downside? Likewise, when we invest in the stock market, we know that we are engaging in an ultimately risky practice, and gauge our investments accordingly. But what about the UAW and its members? What about GM?

After all, the advent of unions was critically important to society in the early decades of the industrial revolution. Without unions, workers were at the mercy of their employers. Today it sometimes seems that the companies are at the mercy of the unions. Certainly, the equation is more balanced.

I’m not trying to draw a conclusion here, but just to point out that each problem requires that we attempt to dig deeply to find the appropriate principles at work. And we can’t arrive at these principles without considerable reflection and research. Too often, perhaps, we hold opinions based on a simplistic and tenuous understanding.

This, I think, is partly because the questions we’re faced with are many and varied, huge and sophisticated; how can we possibly know enough to draw sufficiently reasoned conclusions about the myriad complex questions of the day? And why then do we attempt to do just that? A fair answer would be that if we don’t somebody else will…

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…