200% Daily Value of Jacob

Thoughts on Nagel

2008-05-14T01:11:00.003-04:00

During this semester in my freshman Honors College class, we read an article called "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel. If you're not familiar with him, Nagel is an anti-physicalist, or more specifically an anti-reductionist, who believes that there is a subjective experience which cannot be explained by a physical description of the world. His argument is as follows.

He asks, what is it like to be a bat? He doesn't mean what would it be like for us to be a bat; he wants to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Take part of a bat's sensory apparatus: echolocation. Bats send out a pitch that is out of our hearing range, receives it after it bounces back, and interprets it in such a way that it has some sort of visualization of where it is or where prey is. Everything about this notion is strange to us, or at least most of us. Ben Underwood, among others, is an exception, although because of the lower sound range of the noises these people make, they can only discern larger objects than bats, and there's no way of knowing just how sharply they can make out the object. In any case, I at least can't imagine using echolocation, or what it is like for a bat to use echolocation, since they way a bat's brain interprets sound is different from the way my brain interprets sound.

Now, just as we can't imagine what it is like to be a bat, which is vastly different from us, we can't imagine what it's like to be a different person, which is similar, but everyone has different experience. Ask someone what they see when he sees red, and he will be unable to tell you other than by saying what wavelength the light is and how his eyes and brain react to it. But he still has the experience of seeing red, just as I do, but it's impossible to tell if I really am seeing the same thing he is. Language is a barrier that doesn't allow us to share subjective experience. In addition, we don't know enough about our brains to be able to draw a connection between the physical and chemical brain and subjective experience. This all makes perfect sense, and I think Nagel is right in these respects.

But then he makes a leap that I think is a little rash and, in a way, ignorant and insulting of science. He says that because there is subjective experience that can't be described physically, then a purely physical description of the world, i.e. physicalism, is false. There are a few things that he doesn't take into account in this assertion. First, he assumes that science has somehow reached its endpoint. Maybe right now we don't know how or where to find subjective experience in the human physical brain, but we can't rule out the possibility that science has yet to discover a way. Many brilliant scientific conclusions were thought to be impossible but have since been proven true.

Another argument brought up by a friend of mine goes like this: imagine we have a computer. We can examine it all we want, turn it on and off, track the electricity as it flows through it, maybe even imagine what it would look like when a monitor is plugged in, but until we actually plug the monitor in and see what shows up, we can't see the computer's "subjective experience." We could even take it literally and say that we can observe a brain, see all the neurons firing and different areas lighting up when electrodes are placed on it, but until we can somehow invent a way to literally visualize the thoughts on a monitor, or in some other way make the subjective experience available to the experience of others, we can't experience that person's subjective experience. But in both of these cases there is a distinctively material cause for the phenomenon of subjective experience.

Another argument is mood-altering drugs, like anti-depressants. A person's subjective experience is changed by a condition such as depression, and an anti-depressant provides a physical means of changing subjective experience.

So to recap, I agree with Nagel in that other people, and animals, have a subjective experience that I can't experience myself, unless I could "jack into" their experience as if I were jacking into the Matrix, which can't be ruled out as a future possibility. But he makes a mistake in thinking that just because I can't share my subjective experience or someone else's that it's something that has nothing to do with the physical universe. But this doesn't rule out Nagel's view completely, or proof physicalism completely. Remember that my philosophy is that anything is possible. But Nagel's method of proof is poor at best, while there seems to be a much stronger argument against him and for physicalism.

Involuntary Skepticism, Revised

2008-05-08T21:08:00.002-04:00

He fell of the bed. He perceived nothing, then everything as one. His muscles contracted involuntarily, sending his limbs flailing in every direction and nonsense spewing from his mouth at random volumes. His mother downstairs heard the noises, abandoned her breakfast, and rushed upstairs to meet his father, who was already halfway down the hallway towards the door. When they opened it they must have thought their son was having a seizure. The father grabbed a phone and dialed three digits as the mother threw herself upon her son to contain him and keep him from hurting himself in his wild movements.

The ambulance came and subdued him with liquid in a syringe, and then loaded him up and drove him to the hospital. He awoke later that day and uttered some more vocalizations, though with less intensity than before, and struggled weakly in vain against the restraints on the bed that the doctors had worked him into. His mother, eyes red and flowing, sniffled and touched him gingerly on the arm.

“Robert?”

Immediately Robert stopped moving. His mother froze, unsure of whether or not this was a good thing, but was comforted when she noticed that Robert was breathing, and he was slowly moving his head to face her. His eyes were wide open but staring somewhere far behind her.

“Robert?”

Robert grunted, and then again. His mother let out in a quick breath the sob she had been holding in and then held her next breath. Would he speak?

“Uhh… uhhh…. Uhhhhr… Uhr… Urrahh… Urroo… Urob…”

"Robert!” his mother spoke more urgently, encouraging him to repeat, and his father joined in the chanting.

“Rrrobuh..Rober.. Robert.” He had been gripping the sides of the bed and straining himself as if trying to break the iron bars of a jail cell, but now, apparently exhausted by the effort, Robert slumped back onto the bed, awake but still. His parents grew silent. Their son would not recover quickly or easily.

At school, news spread quickly of Robert’s apparent seizure, although some speculated that it was a stroke or even some kind of suicide attempt via drugs. The doctors were forced to run test after test, all with inconclusive diagnoses. But he slowly became more aware of his surroundings, and his parents hired various tutors who specialized in the education of the mentally challenged. His knowledge of English grammar had disappeared completely, and he could only learn concrete words and concepts, things that he could be shown examples of. When he was first given food after it was deemed he no longer needed the feeding tube, he stared at it. “What is it?” he asked in a stilted monotone.

“Food, honey. Please eat it.”

“Eat?”

His father demonstrated, taking a spoonful of the applesauce on the tray and placing it in his mouth. He took care to keep his mouth open so Robert could see how it worked.

“Why eat?”

“Because you need to. It keeps you alive,” said his mother, welling up with tears.

“Alive?”

After a few months, he was released from the hospital (though his parents threatened to sue the doctors for not being able to treat their son), and to all appearances he was okay. He could speak as well as before, and didn’t seem disoriented or confused, only a little depressed. After a trip to school to visit friends and discuss options with the counselors, expressed that he wanted to go back to school. They agreed and he carpooled to school the next day.

The first class of the day was band. Robert sat in the back and listened. At least his friends presumed he was listening, because he just sat there and stared at the rest of the band, holding a pair of drumsticks in his hands that he twiddled with aimlessly. But he tapped his feet in time, and at one point he started to tear up. A percussionist near him noticed and ran over. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“I think I like music,” he replied flatly, with a hint of a smile on his face.

After band, he and his friends made their way outside for brunch. His friends went and got food. He stood against the wall and watched the people walking by, who gave him sympathetic or furtive looks, depending on the version of the story they heard. He had a feeling in his stomach. “I’m hungry.” A student next to him said, “Hold on, they’re coming back with food.” Robert stood and waited. A girl passed by, and Robert felt like he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. When she noticed, she paused and then walked slowly back towards him. “Robert? Is it true what happened? A seizure?”

“Siezure? No. I don’t know what it was.”

“Um… okay. Do you remember me?”

“I… think so.”

“What’s my name?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s July, Robert. Do you remember who I am?”

“July.”

“No, Robert, not my name, who I am.”

“Well, you’re a person. You’re a girl.”

“I was your girlfriend, Robert. A long time ago.”

“Girlfriend?” Robert had another feeling in his stomach. The word “eat” flitted across his mind, but he stopped it from coming out of his mouth. This was a different feeling.

“You liked me, and I liked you. We went places together, did things. We kissed,” she made sure no one was listening, “we had sex.”

Robert squirmed inside at those last words. “Kissed? Sex?” he asked, a little too loud. July rolled her eyes. The bell rang, and all the other students began to leave. July could see Robert’s friends coming back after along line at the cafeteria, and pulled him away through the mass of students. They went behind a nearby building and July pulled down Robert’s head and kissed him longingly.
His head spun and he found himself looking at July again, at school but this time outside of the cafeteria. She is talking to a few other girls and Robert is hanging back against a nearby building trying to look inconspicuous. “Come on, Robert,” he mumbles to himself, “you’ve been doing this for a month now. When are you going to make a move?” Suddenly July’s friends walk away and she is alone, walking towards the parking lot. He follows her, and with each step he takes, the knot in his stomach grows tighter. He has to do this despite himself. He yells out before he can stop himself, “July!” She stops and turns around as Robert catches up to her. “Will you go out with me?”

She smiles and blushes, and says quietly, “Yeah.”

His head spun again and he was in July’s room, with a motif of blue and green and decorated with pandas. They are lying on the bed, doing homework. July brings up college. “It’s only a year and a half away. I can’t believe high school is going by so fast.” Robert says that they would definitely have to keep in touch. What they have now is too good to lose. He loves her and knows it. “I know,” she replies, “I never want this to end, what we have. I love you so much.” She leans over and kisses him. “And I love you, July. So much. I can never say it enough, or ever describe it. I just know.” She smiles and kisses him again.

Another spin and he was outside of July’s two-story suburban house. She’s hugging him and when she pulls away she has tears running down her face. “I’m so sorry,” she says. Robert realizes he is crying too. “I just can’t do it,” July continues. “Maybe if you had decided to go to college here. But three thousand miles away? I should have realized it before. Nothing in high school is meant to last. High school is too short, and then what? Then we’re three thousand miles apart. It won’t work. I’m sorry.” She turns around and after a long look at the doorstep, walks inside and closes the door. Robert is left on the sidewalk hurt and helpless. He drives home pouring tears and collapses on the bed, sobbing.

Then he was back in the present. “I… I’m sorry, Robert. For what I did before. I figured that we weren’t meant to be together. I thought it would be easier to just let go then than have to have college tearing us apart later. But this whole thing that’s happened to you, it scares me. And it makes me realize how much I couldn’t stand being without you. I love you, Robert. I hope you remember how much you love me.” And with that, she leaned her head back and kissed him again, even more passionately.

Robert rolled out of bed and turned the alarm off before it went off. 6:28. He always woke up a little earlier than the alarm, so there wasn’t much use for it for him, but July wanted it there and set just in case. He supposed he would have to deal with it’s incessant screeches if he could be in a relationship with the love of his life.

He stood up and stretched, then made his way downstairs and out the back door. The pool was still as glass despite the cool morning wind, and the sunrise reflected off of it an array of warm pastel colors. The valley filled with suburban homes stretched before him, surrounded by squat, brush-covered hills. At the foot of the farthest hills was the business park that Robert would be making his way to in a few hours to shuffle papers and enter random numbers into a computer. In the other direction, still hidden in the night’s remaining darkness, was the community college that July taught philosophy at.

Even back in high school she had been very smart about all sorts of abstract philosophical concepts, and she tried to teach them to Robert. He already knew the words “love” and “happiness,” “good” and “bad,” “want” and “need.” But in addition to helping him perfect his English, she tried to teach him what the words meant, what the emotions were. He always said after they got back together that nothing quite made sense, that nothing seemed real and everything could be fake, even his emotions. So she tried to teach him, but he could never understand, really. He often asked, how can you possibly classify something as abstract as an emotion? Or anything outside sense experience, either? When he was around July, Robert had a feeling that he called “love.” When someone was mean to him, he had a feeling that he called “angry.” When he was hungry, he “wanted” to eat.

But now, just as he had done every morning after getting married and moving here with July, Robert stood looking out at another bright new day over the earth, and he asked himself, “Am I happy?” And he couldn’t answer it. He knew the words, and he had all the emotions bundled up and snaking around inside of him, but he just couldn’t put the two together, not after waking up that one day with nothing solid to stand on. He gazed through the cold morning air at the valley, looked down on the business park and the houses and trees and people just waking up to start their day, looked up at the indifferent elegant sky, and then thought back all the way through his life, from the good times to the bad times and to the times he didn’t even remember, and about everything that was and wasn’t and all that could ever be. He smiled. “I am happy.”

And so Robert made his way back inside and woke July with a thousand kisses and hugs, and they both went on living through their days until there were none left.

Dietrich Revised

2008-05-08T20:58:00.003-04:00

This is the second version of my story Dietrich, revised as per the assignment of my creative writing class. I like the first version better, and only really changed it based on my teacher's suggestions, but I'd like to see what you think of it and which you like better.

I woke up that morning on the stoop of my run-down apartment with a hangover and a black eye. A small group had gathered and was laughing, calling me “drunken master.” From their other scattered comments I gathered that I had taken a few too many shots of Smirnoff at the local bar and then picked a fight with the most Russian-looking bastard I could find, who turned out to be an ex-weightlifter, and whom I blamed for stealing my second ex-wife. I scattered the onlookers with some grumbled incoherencies and vaguely threatening hand movements, and stumbled through the door and up the three floors of creaky hardwood stairs to my apartment.

The red light on the answering machine blinked at me from the side table by the closet, where the rope noose was hanging, and I hit the button on the third try. The usual prank calls, the taunting, the threatening from people I had been drunk or desperate enough to give my phone number to. I twiddled the knot on the noose, untied it, and retied it while the messages played. Something from my landlord involving rent, something else from the bar demanding its lampshade back. I turned back around to delete the messages, and something caught my eye; the corner of a piece of paper stuck out from underneath the answering machine. The plane ticket. I grabbed it and read the time to make sure I wasn’t late. Two hours until it left. I took a quick shower and threw some clothes and the noose into an old dusty suitcase. A cab picked me up on the curb and drove me to the airport. I spent the twelve-hour plane ride staring out the window at the clouds.

Suddenly I found myself in West Berlin. I wished I had seen it like this fifty years ago. No, all I had seen were the burnt-out skeletons of the now-magnificent stone and brick buildings, the smoldering wreckage of tanks, the bodies strewn in the streets. That was when the Germans weren’t humans, when they didn’t even exist—not alive anyway. They were just shadows hiding behind the muzzles of their guns, spewing fire into the streets of Berlin in the last great defense of the Fatherland. They weren’t men. They were metal death, they were beasts, they were demons, and every comrade knew it.

I walked the streets of the city I had once fought to destroy, entered shops and cafes, saw the Wall. Eventually I came to the Reichstag. Somehow it still made my proud to look at it, to remember that I had once stood upon it and looked out over the whole burning city in triumph. I gazed for a while, and then turned to go. As I glanced back once more, I ran into a short grey-haired man in a wool overcoat and a clean pressed suit. “I’m sorry,” I muttered in Russian, and continued walking while taking a quick look at his face. He looked very familiar. I couldn’t put my finger on why I recognized him but as I walked away, I felt the heat of his stare on the back of my head and suddenly I knew who he was.

February, 1945. I am a private in the Soviet Red Army, defender of the Glorious Motherland. The Fascist invaders have turned tail after Stalingrad in 1943 and Kursk in 1944, and are retreating under the crushing force of our sheer manpower and superior resolve.

Stalingrad is why I joined. I lived there with my mother and younger sister, who both died before we were able to cross the Volga to escape the Germans. The Germans attacked the city on their way to the oil fields towards the southeast. I was sixteen at the time, and before the Germans came, Stalingrad was the wealthiest and most prosperous city in the Soviet Union. I had a wonderful life and reveled in it, even took it for granted. But when the Germans came, I sat hidden on the bank and watched the shelling of the city across the river, heard the ceaseless gunfire, watched the flames rear up and lick the sky every night, the soldiers arrive on the train fresh from training, and leave on the same train in pieces. When the winter came, the firefights continued and the soldiers kept arriving and leaving. I kept out of sight, feeding on rats and stale bread, living under railroad tracks and bomb craters to avoid being handed a gun and five rounds and pointed towards the front.

And then, in the dead of winter, the fighting stopped; the Germans were surrounded, crushed. The Soviet Union had turned the tide of the Great Patriotic War in its favor. A Russian officer caught me stealing food from a boxcar one day and almost shot me for being a deserter and traitor until his superior intervened and instead drafted me on the spot as a punishment. At first I was reluctant, but as soon as I felt the smooth stock of the Mosin-Nagant rifle against my shoulder and the cool iron of the barrel in my hands, I felt powerful and angry enough to fight the Germans. The propaganda posters fluttering throughout the city and what the other soldiers spoke of the Nazis only strengthened my resolve: the Germans were nothing but beasts, rabid animals spawned from hell that needed to be put down in the most painful way possible. Not even the women and children were spared. In the cities that were left ruined in the wake of the advancing forces, Russian and German bodies were everywhere. I waited eagerly for the day I could carry out just retribution against the Nazi scum that plagued the Motherland.

And now it is February 1945, and we are about to advance into Germany. This will be my first action, as my unit is finally on the front lines. All of the other members in my squad have seen action in Stalingrad, so they’re going to let me put down the first fascist dog we come across. I can’t wait. Finally we reach the front, and my squad is sent on patrol. We hear a rustling in the bushes, and my adrenaline fires up. Is this it? I just wait until I see it and then pull the trigger? The squad drops to the ground, rifles at the ready in case it’s a large group or a machine gunner. A pair of hands pops up. The squad relaxes and goads me on with encouraging looks. The hands are followed by a dented rusty helmet atop a grizzled and dirty face that at once conveys utmost misery.

The German stands there for a second, or maybe a minute. My finger is on the trigger, but the trigger seems unusually heavy. Something tugs at my brain but before I can figure out what it is, I fire, and the bullet smashes into his chest, and he falls backward into the bush. I scramble up, excited and nervous at my first kill, and I look into the bush at the body. Suddenly, as my eyes meet the German’s as he lies dying on the ground, as my comrades pat me on the back and mill around impatiently, the tugging grows into a gnawing and finally something terrible, something dreadful, something I hoped I would never feel again after Stalingrad. This is a live German, a human being, and he had surrendered, and I killed him. Squad, form up, my squad leader calls. Berlin waits for no man. The German looks up for a while, giving me an unfathomable expression and then rolls over, limp. I reach down and take the lower half of his perforated dog tag and put it in my pocket. I form up with the squad and move out. Berlin waits for no man.

I glanced at the clock. 4:59. I might as well leave now. I’ll pick up the rest of the paperwork tomorrow. I cleared my oak desk, packed my briefcase, and slipped on my black wool overcoat. The phone rang. It was my wife. I told her I would be home shortly and to start dinner. I took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out under the sign on the building: “Dietrich Ostheim Publishing.” It was a cloudless afternoon, and the sky was just starting to turn violet and red. The colors reflected off of the roof of the Reichstag across the street, between my office and my apartment. As I walked across the square, a newspaper fluttered across my path, and I smiled when I caught my name in bold along the top. I had just donated $100,000 to company that helped spread holocaust awareness to allow them to build a memorial to the millions of victims of the atrocities. I followed the newspaper with my eyes as it flew away and suddenly I felt a bump as a large unshaven man in jeans and a grey t-shirt ran into me. He muttered something in Russian, and I was about to say that it was no problem when I glanced at his face. I froze. The man looked at me for a second and then walked away, faster, it seemed, with every step. I stared until he disappeared from view. It was him.

I was born and raised in Berlin, and I will nearly die in it. I was born during the depression that followed the Great War into poverty, into a broken family that seems to hate me more than it hates the Americans. Now I am five years old, and they abandon me to fend for myself because they can’t afford to feed me anymore. I grow up on the streets, but I keep myself informed from stolen newspapers and the conversations of passers-by. I know what the world outside of Germany is like, and so I know that what I have to do is wrong, the results of depraved necessity. I hate myself for stealing food and supplies, breaking into factories and small shops, sometimes hurting other children who threaten my well-being.

But now I am 17, and there is hope. There is talk of a new leader who will change things, make the economy better. Adolf Hitler takes power, and I don’t hesitate to join the Nazi Party. I do whatever I can to help the cause: I hand out pamphlets, speak at bars and clubs, and register members. Suddenly, things turn radical. Broken windows, burning books, yellow stars. I take part in all of it, and I know it is wrong, but I do it anyway, because it is the easy thing to do, because I have my own safety to think of.

War starts. I join the military and because of my standing in the Party, I am promoted and put in charge of a company. I lead my men in the Blitzkrieg through Poland and into Russia, and they leave a trail of death and destruction; pillage, murder, and rape. Stuff of Viking legend. I don’t stop them, once or twice I even take part, though I hated it. Eventually we make it to Stalingrad, I survive the harsh winter and the Russian encirclement, and I am on one of the last planes out, abandoning my men.
Months later I am in charge of another company and we march east again, past the same ruined cities seemingly filled with the bodies of my company’s victims. I decide that I am done. During the next battle, I sneak away to surrender. Most Germans surrender in the west because the Americans treat us better, but I don’t deserve that. I deserve death, torture if I was lucky.

I hear a squad of Russians passing. I put my hands up, and then stand from my hiding place, a leafy bush. A young Communist is standing, pointing his rifle at me. Give me the bullet. Give me the freedom of death. When the bullet finally comes, I praise God. But then it hits me, and I fall, and lay staring up at the sky. Something casts a shadow across me, and I realize that it’s the Russian. He has an odd expression on his face, and suddenly I don’t want to die. Somehow, in all the years of death I faced, all of the horrible things I had done, I never really thought about death. Death was something for old people and martyrs. I was a villain. But it takes my arrival on the doorstep of death for me to realize that I don’t want to die.
I pass out, and when I wake up I’m in the hands of the Americans. They nurse me back to health and I return to what is now West Germany. I turn my life around. I turn everything around.

Involuntary Skepticism (Short Story)

2008-04-27T01:22:00.004-04:00

This is a short story I wrote for my creative writing class. It's not due yet, I'm still working on it, and I may even write a different story to turn in, but here it is. Enjoy.

He fell of the bed. He perceived nothing, then everything as one. His muscles contracted involuntarily, sending his limbs flailing in every direction and nonsense spewing from his mouth at all volumes. His mother downstairs heard the noises, abandoned her breakfast, and rushed upstairs to meet his father, who was already halfway down the hallway towards the door. When they opened it they must have thought their son was having a seizure. The father grabbed a phone and dialed three digits as the mother threw herself upon her son to contain him and keep him from hurting himself in his wild movements.

The ambulance came and subdued him with liquid in a syringe, and then loaded him up and drove him to the hospital. He awoke later that day and uttered some more vocalizations, though with less intensity than before, and struggled weakly in vain against the restraints on the bed that the doctors had worked him into. His mother, eyes red and flowing, sniffled and touched him gingerly on the arm.

“Robert?”

Immediately Robert stopped moving. His mother froze, unsure of whether or not this was a good thing, but was comforted when she noticed that Robert was breathing, and he was slowly moving his head to face her. His eyes were wide open but staring somewhere far behind her.

“Robert?”

Robert grunted, and then again. His mother let out in a quick breath the sob she had been holding in and then held her next breath. Would he speak?

“Uhh… uhhh…. Uhhhhr… Uhr… Urrahh… Urroo… Urob…”

“Robert!” his mother spoke more urgently, encouraging him to repeat.

“Rrrobuh..Rober.. Robert.” He had been gripping the sides of the bed and straining himself as if trying to break the iron bars of a jail cell, but now, apparently exhausted by the effort, Robert slumped back onto the bed, awake but still. His father, having held back until now, rushed forward in an attempt to rouse him further, force him to regain his senses. He grabbed Robert firmly but gently by his shoulders, and gently shook him. Robert groaned again.

“Robert, it’s your father. Please, Robert.” Robert turned his face towards his father, and continuing to shake Robert, his father said, “Robert. Robert.”

“What are you doing, dear? Are you trying to hurt him?” asked his wife.

“No, just wait. Just wait. Robert. Robert.” Then he stopped shaking him and, making sure Robert was still looking at him, pointed to himself and said, “Dad. Dad.” Then he pointed to his wife and said, “Mom. Mom.” He repeated the entire process over and over again, shaking Robert while calling his name, and pointing to himself and his wife and saying “Dad. Mom.”

After thirty minutes of this, he was about to give up, but suddenly Robert groaned again. “Rrrobert. Dad. Mommm. Robert, Dad, Mom.” Then his finger slowly made its way from down by his side to pointing at his chin. “Robert.” His finger then, more quickly now, swung out into the air until it was pointed at his father as he spoke “Dad,” and then his mother as he spoke “Mom.” He did this a few times, and after his parents were convinced it wasn’t a fluke, they broke into tears of both sadness and joy and hugged each other. But the next time Robert tried to identify his father, his finger only pointed at the space that his father’s head used to occupy. His parents grew silent. Their son would not recover quickly or easily.

At school, news spread quickly of Robert’s apparent seizure, although some speculated that it was a stroke or even some kind of suicide attempt via drugs. The doctors were forced to run test after test, all with inconclusive diagnoses. But he slowly became more aware of his surroundings, and his parents hired various tutors who specialized in the education of the mentally challenged. His knowledge of English grammar had disappeared completely, and he could only learn concrete words and concepts, things that he could be shown examples of. When he was first given food after it was deemed he no longer needed the feeding tube, he stared at it. “What is it?” he asked in a stilted monotone.

“Food, honey. Please eat it.”

“Eat?”

His father demonstrated, taking a spoonful of the applesauce on the tray and placing it in his mouth. He took care to keep his mouth open so Robert could see how it worked.

“Why eat?”

“Because you need to. It keeps you alive,” said his mother, welling up with tears.

"Alive?”

After a few months, he was released from the hospital (though his parents threatened to sue the doctors for not being able to treat their son), and after a visit to school to visit friends, expressed that he wanted to go back to school. He couldn’t actually say what he wanted, but one night after an empty bedroom and a frantic search, he was found at the school trying to open the door to a classroom. So his parents agreed on condition that his friends watch after him and not involve him in any of their “crazy teenager” activities. They agreed and he carpooled to school the next day.

The first class of the day was band. Robert sat in the back and listened. At least his friends presumed he was listening, because he just sat there and stared at the rest of the band, holding a pair of drumsticks in his hands that he twiddled with aimlessly. But he tapped his feet in time, and at one point he started to cry. A percussionist near him noticed and ran over. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“Music,” he replied flatly.

After band, his friends guided him outside, because when he wasn’t physically urged anywhere, he just stood there. It was brunch time, fifteen minutes before the next class. His friends went and got food. He stood against the wall and watched the people walking by, who gave him sympathetic or furtive looks, depending on the version of the story they heard. He had a feeling in his stomach. “Eat.” A student next to him said, “Hold on, they’re coming back with food.” Robert stood and waited. A girl passed by, and Roberts eyes seemed stuck on her. When she noticed, she paused and then walked slowly back towards him. “Robert? Is it true what happened? A seizure?”

“Siezure? No. Nonsense.”

“Nonsense? Um… okay. Do you remember me?”

“Yes.”

“What’s my name?”

“I do not know.”

“It’s July, Robert. Do you remember who I am?”

“July.”

“No, Robert, not my name, who I am?”

“You are a person. You are a girl.”

“I was your girlfriend, Robert. A long time ago.”

“Girlfriend?” Robert had another feeling in his stomach. The word “eat” flitted across his mind, but he stopped it from coming out of his mouth. It was different.

“You liked me, and I liked you. We went places together, did things. We kissed,” she made sure no one was listening, “we had sex.”

Robert squirmed inside at those last words. “Kissed? Sex?” he asked, a little too loud. July rolled her eyes. The bell rang, and all the other students began to leave. July could see Robert’s friends coming back after along line at the cafeteria, and pulled him away through the mass of students. They went behind a nearby building and July pulled down Robert’s head and kissed him longingly. When it was over, she said, “I missed you Robert. I was never really sure why I broke up with you, but I guess it took this whole mess to make me really realize what a mistake I had made. All the old feelings are coming back, but stronger. I think I really do love you.” And with that, she leaned her head back and kissed him again, even more passionately.

Robert rolled out of bed and turned the alarm off before it went off. 6:28. He always woke up a little earlier than the alarm, so there wasn’t much use for it for him, but July wanted it there and set just in case. He supposed he would have to deal with it’s incessant screeches if he could be in a relationship with the love of his life.

He stood up and stretched, then made his way downstairs and out the back door. The pool was still as glass despite the cool morning wind, and the sunrise reflected off of it an array of warm pastel colors. The valley filled with suburban homes stretched before him, surrounded by squad, brush-covered hills. At the foot of the farthest hills was the business park that Robert would be making his way to in a few hours to shuffle papers and enter random numbers into a computer. In the other direction, still hidden in the night’s remaining darkness, was the community college that July taught philosophy at.

Even back in high school she had been very smart about all sorts of abstract philosophical concepts, and she tried to teach them to Robert. She had taught him the words “Love and Happiness,” “Good and Bad,” “Want and Need.” He didn’t really know what they meant, no matter how many times he read Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Sartre. When he was around July, Robert had a feeling that he called “Love.” When someone was mean to him, he had a feeling that he called “Angry.” When he was hungry, he “Wanted” to eat.

But now, just as he had done every morning after getting married and moving here with July, Robert stood looking out at another bright new day over the earth, and he asked himself, “Am I happy?” And he couldn’t answer it. All he could do was take in everything and embrace it. Maybe happiness was everything, all put together into one overpowering emotion that was the world.

And so Robert made his way back inside and woke July with a thousand kisses and hugs, and they both went on living through their days until there were none left.

Ethics

2008-04-27T00:33:00.003-04:00

So halfway through my grand theory of ethics, I realized something and couldn't write any more: it's impossible to impose a universal ethical principle on every human being. Let's look into it.

My starting point is Kant's "Categorical Imperative." It states "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." This means that before you take any action, whatever it may be, you are implying that you give permission for everyone else in the world to take that same action in the same circumstances. For instance, I'm walking down the street and I think someone looks at me funny. I want to make the choice to punch him in the face. First I have to consider if I would be willing to let him punch me in the face if he though I was looking at him funny, regardless of whether or not I was. So I decide not to punch him in the face.

This seems simple enough. It's really just the Golden Rule, but the Golden Rule seems to imply an "eye for an eye" relationship between two individuals, whereas the categorical imperative applies more the everyone. But when I thought about it, I found some ways to get around it. The first is to take an action and then make sure that no one else can be in the same circumstances. This is easy when one is in a position of power, such as the government of the United States. For example, in the 60s the US government staged a successful coup in Guatemala against it's democratically elected president and installed their own US-friendly dictator, all to benefit the United Fruit Company. Given the US's position of power, it's virtually impossible for any other nation to carry out a similar action against the United States, not only because they are weaker militarily than us, but because the US is strong, is protected by the UN and international law, and because other nations don't hold significant, if any, interests in the US.

Another, more individual example of this is murder or any other crime significant enough to warrant life in jail, or any other action that would remove an individual from society, such as suicide. Given the categorical imperative, an individual in jail can justify his actions by saying that even if everyone else takes his murder and its circumstances as universal law, it doesn't matter to him because he will never be in a position to be murdered given those circumstances because he is removed from society. Suicide is similar, because it might not matter to a person who commits suicide whether or not others will consider suicide justifiable by his circumstances since he will be gone from the world anyway.

Given these loopholes alone, it's obvious that the categorical imperative isn't sufficient. After a lecture on Feminism last week and a meditation on happiness a few days ago, I came up with a new theory: do what makes you happy, as long as it doesn't stop others from doing what makes them happy. But this alone doesn't give provisions for punishment if someone does stop someone else from doing what makes them happy. So I can combine it with the categorical imperative to make this: Do what makes you happy, as long as it doesn't stop others from doing what makes them happy, and act according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

This looks good, but there are still some major problems. Some, or perhaps many, people don't know what makes them happy. Maybe they've lost the ability to categorize their feelings, or maybe they've realized there is no categories of feelings (depending on whether or not emotions really are separate or not, but that's in the realm of metaphysics and/or psychology). Another problem is the same problem with the categorical imperative: some people just don't care about other people, and will do what they want or can, regardless of the consequences or because they know they can evade the consequences. There are a thousand and one other reasons why neither of these theories will work, and so I've reached my final theory:

There cannot be a universal ethical law that can be applied equally to everyone and will be obeyed by everyone. It can't come from outside the world, because since we can't experience what's outside the world, and only experience what's in it, we are forced to live in the world and act as if what's outside holds no sway. And it obviously can't come from us, because everyone is different, everyone has different wants, needs, desires, emotions, feelings, and circumstances. So how do we live ethically? The simple answer: we cannot live ethically as a nation, as a society, or as a global community. But we can live ethically on a local and personal level. We can act given my combined theory with the people we know and meet, and try to spread this idea of ethics as best we can, but we also have to accept that there will be "evil" in the world, there will be people who will hurt other people, who will take advantage and put you down. But that is part of the human condition that we cannot escape. But maybe if we get as many people as we can to live by this principle, then maybe the problem of evil won't seem so formidable.

Blast, Foiled Again!

2008-04-15T17:41:00.003-04:00

Once again, it seems some jerk a hundred years ago stole my ideas. A few weeks after my post about language, I read Nietzsche's ideas about language, and he has a very similar hypothesis, which is that language is really just a set of metaphors that refer to objects or ideas. He doesn't mention, at least in anything that I've read, that this means that we can't describe anything outside empirical reality, but rather that there is something there, something tangible and real, but that we can never "know" it because language can't refer literally to things. I do agree that we can't really know reality because of the limitations of language, but the way he claims there is empirical reality blocked by language is a little too similar to Locke's theory of reality, or at least objects, as "something I know not what." This is neither acceptable or rejectable, since in my philosophy any possibility has the probability of being correct and false, but most philosophers reject this anyway because it violates Occam's Razor (the simplest explanation is the best, and having just another mystery makes it more complicated). This is why I think it's preferable to think of language as not blocking our access to "something I know not what," but anything and/or nothing. "Something" presumes there is anything out there.

Anywho, sorry for no updates recently, busy with school and such. But I am going to be posting later today or tomorrow about something I haven't really tried to discuss yet, and that's ethics. I had an idea in class yesterday, but I have yet to refine it.

On Language

2008-03-11T21:04:00.000-04:00

More and more I’m reading or hearing about philosophers who attempt to discount the conclusions of other philosophers because there is something wrong in their definition or description of whatever it is they are attempting to conclude. For a while I’ve had a kind of distaste for whoever pulls this, though I wasn’t exactly sure what my complaint was. But now that I think about it, language can’t really describe ultimate reality, so that even those who discount the conclusions of others are at some fallacy in trying to substitute their own conclusions. Here is what I think:

First of all, all philosophical conclusions are based on assumptions. If it’s possible for ultimate reality not to be based on logic, as I’ve explained in my other posts (like a different operating system on a computer, or a life form based on an element other than carbon), then even the simplest statements like “A is A” has the possibility to be false, because it assumes that ultimate reality is based on logic. It still is possible to draw valid conclusions from any premise, however, but the whole argument has to be an “If this, therefore that” format, instead of “This, therefore that.” Basically, as I’ve said in my last posts, everything in doubtable, so even though valid arguments can be drawn from them, they might not be correct because the premise is unverifiable.

That being said, language itself is sometimes examined to find out something about ultimate reality. St. Anselm’s famous ontological argument for God’s existence is a prime example. It is basically: God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” This means he is perfect, and part of being perfect is existing. Therefore God exists. This argument is based on the definition of God as traditionally accepted. However, the main fallacy is that he assumes that God really is that than which nothing greater can be thought. He could say that “If God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, and do be this he has to exist, then he exists,” then it could be a valid argument.

Unfortunately for Anselm, it’s still invalid because it relies on the definition, which was written or created by humans. Human language is what I’ll call “referential.” This means that it was created specifically by humans in order to function in the empirical view of reality (which, for lack of coming up with a name in previous posts, I’ll call “the world”). It was created out of necessity for survival, the evolutionary result of a larger brain. It’s referential because it refers to things in the world, or at least what we call “things” because many famous philosophers have problems with distinguishing between different and separate objects, and hold that either all is one or any number of other things. So a caveman might say to another “Look out for that lion,” a scientist might say “the wavelength of color X is Y nm (or whatever measurement light waves are measured in),” and I might look at my closet and say “that is a brown wooden closet.” These statements all function pragmatically in the world.

It’s when we get to abstract concepts that we get into trouble. We can say “good is good,” which is a tautology that doesn’t actually tell us what good is. G.E. Moore held that good was indefinable, what Kant would call a simple idea, something that can’t be broken down any further. A mermaid can be broken down into a human and a fish, and then each of those can be broken down further into organs and bones and such, all the way down to atoms and their components. These, in analogy, would be the “good” if the mermaid is something that is or contains good. But when we say “good is being nice to people” or “good is pleasure,” or that “being nice to people is good” and “pleasure is good,” when we relate good to something in the world through language, we are attempting the impossible. We are trying to relate something that language wasn’t built to refer to, to something that it was. Even in the world, language isn’t an exact description of something. I say “my brown closet” because it appears that way to people whose vision of color is “normal.” I don’t say “my closet with the wavelength of X” because it’s impractical, because it doesn’t help us function in the world. Humans don’t function in what isn’t the world, or at least I don’t since I don’t even know if other humans exist. So especially if ultimate reality isn’t based on logic, how is our language ever supposed to describe it?

So far I’ve talked about “good,” which in the realm of ethics. But this whole idea of language as referential only in the closed system that is the world, and not functional in ultimate reality if ultimate reality doesn’t rely on human logic, applies to metaphysics as well. I can define God as anything, because the only “proof” we have of God’s perfection is the Bible, which could be pure fiction for all anyone knows, and people who claim to have known God, who can’t be trusted not because they just sound crazy, but because I don’t know if they exist and I can’t read their mind if they do. I can say God is fallable, stupid, fat and ugly, and he could be for all we know. This is why any possibility for God’s existence is, well, possible. It’s the same for ultimate reality. Unless the world is ultimate reality, we can define ultimate reality as literally anything, even as not making any sense, and we can anyway because as long as there is even the smallest chance that the world isn’t ultimate reality, we can’t make any assumptions.

So it is for these reasons that not only can language not describe ultimate reality, only this world, but that the world exists as a separate entity only in a certain sense. It’s not like a separate reality all it’s own outside ultimate reality or within in like the yolk of an egg within the white. In my last post I talked about the two ways to view the limits of the closed system that is the world, either immediately outside my sense perception, or from atoms up to the universe in terms of scientific and mathematical principles. The limits of language can be seen as a third set of boundaries for the system, and it unites the two others because it can refer to our sense perceptions of things, and the things we can refer to include calculations and instruments that measure the scientific and mathematical principles.

So this is language and how it relates to the world and ultimate reality.

Dietrich (Short Story)

2008-03-10T18:19:00.002-04:00

I woke up that morning on the stoop to my run-down apartment with a hangover and a black eye. A small group had gathered and was laughing, calling me “drunken master.” From their other scattered comments I gathered that I had taken a few too many shots of Smirnoff at the local bar and then picked a fight with the most Russian-looking bastard I could find, who turned out to be an ex-weightlifter, and whom I blamed for stealing my second ex-wife. I scattered the onlookers with some grumbled incoherencies and vaguely threatening hand movements, and stumbled through the door and up the three floors of creaky hardwood stairs to my apartment.

The red light on the answering machine blinked at me from the side table by the closet with the rope noose hanging out of it, and I hit the button on the third try. The usual prank calls, the taunting, the threatening from people I had been drunk or desperate enough to give my phone number to. I twidled the knot on the noose, untied it, and retied it while the messages played. Something from my landlord involving rent, something else from the bar demanding its lampshade back. The last message was my landlord again. I was about to delete it before he could even get another bullshit word out about whatever it was he complained about, but one word stopped me.

“…German…”

I hit the repeat button before it got any further.

“Hey you dirty old Russian. Some foreign assh… er, some German guy called my number because apparently people don’t know how to find a fuckin number in the yellow pages, but he was askin for you and said he was comin over today to talk. He said he’d be here around 10, I guess he’s still on fuckin Europe time, people don’t realize this is America—“

Who the hell do I know who’s German? No one. I don’t know anyone. Not since the war at least. But I never saw a German, except dead ones. Piled in the streets, slumped over the windowsills or sprawled across the burning wreckage of tanks. Maybe there were live ones, but I never really saw them. Just shadows hiding behind the muzzles of their guns, spewing fire into the streets of Berlin in the last great defense of the Fatherland. But they weren’t men. They were metal death, they were beasts, they were demons, and every comrade knew it. What German knows me? No one. It couldn’t be. There wasn’t anyone.

There was a knock at the door and I swung my eyes immediately to the clock on the rotting coffee table. 10:03. Before I knew what was happening, my hand was on the doorknob and then it was open. A quiet but firm voice with a slight German accent issued from the now-familiar face in front of me.

“Hello, my name is Dietrich Ostheim, and I believe you are the one who saved my life.”

*****

It was February 1945, and I was a private in the Soviet Red Army, defender of the Glorious Motherland. The Fascist invaders had turned tail after Stalingrad and Kursk and were retreating under the crushing force of our sheer manpower and superior resolve.

But even that late in the war I was fresh; my unit had been in the rear since Stalingrad in 1943 and had been trying to keep up with the rapid advance of the front line. Stalingrad was why I joined. I lived there with my mother and younger sister, who both died before we were able to cross the Volga to escape the Germans. The Germans had attacked the city on their way to the oil fields to the southeast. I was sixteen at the time, and before the Germans came, Stalingrad was the wealthiest and most prosperous city in the Soviet Union. I had a wonderful life and l. But when the Germans came I sat hidden on the bank and watched the shelling of the city across the river, heard the ceaseless gunfire, watched the flames rear up and lick the sky every night, the soldiers arrive on the train, fresh from training, and leave on the same train in pieces. When the winter came, the firefights continued, and the soldiers kept arriving and leaving, and I kept out of sight, feeding on rats and stale bread, living under railroad tracks and bomb craters, to avoid being handed a gun and five rounds and pointed towards the front.

And then, in the dead of winter, the fighting stopped; the Germans were surrounded, crushed. The Soviet Union had turned the tide of the Great Patriotic War in its favor. A Russian officer caught me stealing food from a boxcar one day, and almost shot me for being a deserter and traitor until his superior intervened and drafted me on the spot as punishment instead. At first I was reluctant, but as soon as I felt the smooth stock of the Mosin-Nagant against my shoulder and the cool iron of the barrel in my hand, I felt powerful and angry enough to fight the Germans. The propaganda posters fluttering throughout the city and the other soldiers only strengthened my resolve: the Germans were nothing, beasts, rabid animals spawned from hell that needed to be put down in the most painful way possible. Not even the women and children were spared. In the cities left ruined in the wake of the advancing forces, the Russian and German dead were everywhere, and I waited eagerly for the day I could carry out just retribution against the Nazi scum that plagued the Motherland.

Finally one day in February 1945 in the outskirts of Germany, my commander informed us that we were moving to the front to replace a forward unit, and that we were to expect slight resistance. All the other members of my squad had seen action in Stalingrad, so they gave me the honor of putting down the first fascist dog we came across. The next day, while we were on patrol, we heard a rustling and clicking in the bushes ahead, and we all dropped to our stomachs with our rifles at the ready. A pair of hands popped up amongst the leaves, followed by a dented rusty helmet atop a grizzled and dirty face that at once conveyed utmost misery. My comrades relaxed and looked at me encouragingly. The German stood there for a second or maybe a minute, and as I looked back something tugged at my brainstem. Then I fired, and the bulled smashed into his chest and he toppled backward into the bush. I scrambled up, excited and nervous at my first kill, and looked over the bush at the body. Immediately the tugging turned into a gnawing and finally, as my eyes met the Germans, as he lay dying on the ground, as my comrades patted me on the back and milled around impatiently, I felt something dreadful, something terrible, something I hoped I would never feel again after Stalingrad. This was a live German. A human being. And he had surrendered. And I had killed him. Aleksandr, my comrades called. Aleksandr Brezhnev, let’s move, Berlin waits for no man. The German looked up at me for a while, giving me an unfathomable expression, and then he rolled over, limp. I reached down and snapped his dog tag in two, and put half in my pocket. Berlin waits for no man.

The same expression looked at me now, from a much older and more wrinkled face. It was framed by the dirty molding doorframe but was clean-shaven and well-presented, his hair combed neatly to one side. He stood straight, though he was at least a foot shorter than me, and he wore a pressed clean suit under a wool overcoat. “You are Brezhnev? Aleksandr Brezhnev? You’re landlord told me this was the room—”

“Yes. Yes, that’s me.” My accent was returning, and I tried to hide it to no effect. I stood staring until I realized my rudeness and shuffled aside to let him in. My head was pounding now, and the hangover wasn’t helping. When I turned around after closing the door, Dietrich stood in the middle of the filthy room, with a sad smile on his face so sincere that tears welled up and I couldn’t bring myself to ask the two hundred thousand questions that were all fighting to escape my collapsing windpipe. I sunk to the couch with my head in my hands. Dietrich understood and sat next to me. “Let me explain. Let me tell you what happened, and then you won’t have to cry.”

****

“I was born and raised in Berlin, and I nearly died in it. I was born during the depression that followed the Great War, into poverty, into a family that hated me more than it hated the Americans. They abandoned me at a young age to fend for myself, and I grew up on the streets. But I was smart. I knew what the world was like outside of Germany because my parents had told me. I got by as best I could by stealing and living like a criminal. I knew it was wrong and I hated myself. But then there was hope. There was talk of a new leader who would change things, make the economy better. When Hitler did take over, I didn’t hesitate to join the Nazi party. I did whatever I could to help the cause; handing out pamphlets, speaking in bars and clubs, registering members.

Then things turned radical. Broken windows, book burnings, yellow stars. I did it all, and I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway, because it was the easy thing to do, because I had my own safety to think of. I hated myself for it. When the war started, I joined the military and because of my standing with the party, I was promoted and put in charge of a company. I fought my way to Stalingrad, I survived the winter, and I was on the last plane out. I had abandoned my company, my men who had fought so valiantly so far, though along the way we had committed unspeakable war crimes. Ravaging cities, raping, pillaging. Stuff of Viking legend. But they were still my brothers, and I had left them.

When I got back, they put me in charge of another company and marched us east again. We had only gone so far when we met the Russian resistance, and we were pushed back across the border, back into Germany. There we held and fought a losing battle, and while my company retreated, I played dead and then hid. I had decided that I was done. Most Germans deserted in the west because they would rather have surrendered to the Americans in a bid for better treatment. I didn’t deserve that. I deserved death, torture if I got lucky. I knew the Russians could deliver. So I surrendered, and that’s when I saw you. I waited for the bullet, and when it finally came, I praised God. But as soon as it hit me, and I fell, and lay staring up at the sky and then your face, I suddenly didn’t want to die. Somehow, in all the years of death that I had faced, all of the horrible things I had done, all the times I could have died and didn’t, I never really thought I would die, not like this anyway. Death was something for old people and martyrs. I was a villain. But it took my arrival on the doorstep of death for me to realize that I didn’t want to die.

“I passed out, and somehow I survived long enough for the Americans to find me, and they nursed me back to health. I was juggled around by their POW system for a while, and then released. I moved to West Berlin, and I changed my life. I helped rebuild the ruined city. I raised funds for social programs. I became active in politics. I worked at bringing freedom to East Germany. I got married and had children. I opened a successful publishing company, and I donated money to spread Holocaust awareness. And the whole time I had remembered hearing your name: Aleksandr Brezhnev. I looked you up in Russian army and American police records and I just wanted to find you to tell you of what a wonderful thing you did. Thank you.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and after a full silence he stood up and made for the door. “Wait,” I said as Dietrich turned the doorknob, “This is yours.” I reached into the side table drawer and pulled out a small velvet bundle, which I unraveled to reveal half of a polished metal dog tag. I absorbed it for a minute and then handed it to him. From the expression on his face as he looked at it and then around my dirty and cluttered room, I suddenly knew what I had done. I had unwittingly both removed his terrible burden and placed it on my own shoulders. Since that day in February 1945, I had beaten myself up, killed myself a thousand times, ruined my name and forced myself into poverty because for fifty years I believed I was a murderer. I didn’t even notice as Dietrich said goodbye and thank you once again before closing the door and walking down the noisy stairs. I made my way to the couch and sat down, empty velvet cloth in hand. And as I sat there, wet-faced and shaking, on the moth-eaten couch in the eight-by-ten apartment in the back-alley down the street from the seedy bar and the whorehouse, five thousand miles from home and three feet from the noose in the closet, I couldn’t help but smile to myself.

Reality as a Lens

2008-03-05T15:18:00.004-05:00

Science, for the most part, works and is understood from a scale as small as bacteria to as large an entire galaxy as far as experimentation is concerned. Anything really outside that range is in the realm of theory, as are some things within it, such as functions of certain parts of the brain. (By the way, if any of my facts are wrong, or I'm missing any information, please let me know. I'm just going by what I think is correct.). Our knowledge of molecular, atomic, and especially sub-atomic physics, for example, is limited at best, and past quarks and such, we don't really know anything at all. It's the same thing on the macro scale--there are many theories as to what the nature of the universe as a whole is like, whether it's infinite or just like plum pudding, or any number of other theories. There are some things that science simply can't explain, like electrons disappearing from one place and instantaneously reappearing somewhere else. So if science on the scale that we're basically certain about stops working on the atomic scale and the universal scale, and even science on those levels leave us unsure of what's past that, how do we expect science, or logic (which functions as a science as with mathematics) for that matter, to help us find ultimate reality or describe it?

If what my senses tell me is reality really is reality, then everything I have said and will say attempting to prove the opposite is irrelevant. But since we don't know if the sense show me reality, I'll examine the opposite, as I have in my last post.

In that case, we, or at least I, can see the reality that my senses show me, the empirical view that I mentioned before, and I can act on it logically and with consistent results. If nothing truly makes sense, if logic truly has no hold in anything, then this might just be coincidence, or a fluke. But if it's not, I can view the empirical view of reality as what scientists call a "closed system," which Wikipedia calls a "system in a state of being isolated from its environment." This basically means, at least for my purposes, that anything inside the system has no effect on anything outside the system or vice versa. The physical world that I see, as well as science, mathematics, and any other logical processes, including our ideas of cause and effect and time, all exist inside the system, while ultimate reality is outside and isn't affected by them.

There are different ways of looking at where the system's boundaries might be. Depending on if you see other people as existing outside yourself, they could be past the electron or quark level in one direction, and the universe in the other. If you think it's possible that other people might not exist, then this level is really limited to your immediate sense experience. I'm not a scientist; I haven't experimented or tested hypotheses with atoms or astrophysics, let alone been in space; nor do I think that other people are necessarily real. So what they say might be true, but it might not. I might even be the subject of a Truman-show-esque project whose sole aim is to fool me into believing this is reality when it isn't. So my view is that the closed system of empirical reality ends immediately outside of my senses.

That means science, history, politics, and world events, may not be true, as well as everything else that I haven't had personal experience with. All I have is logic, from which mathematics ans science flows, but since I'm not a scientist, only science based on logic and not on experimentation is part of the closed system. Even my own memory, and especially any predictions of the future, may not exist or be accurate if they do. Now that I think about it, based on my last entry, even the present may not be real or accurate, unless logic is part of the closed system, as well as time and cause and effect relationships. But the present, and even some time immediately surrounding it, is for the most part clear and relies on logic, and is the clearest thing I have.

Think of reality as a slightly blurry fish-eye lens on reality, not blurry enough so as to make anything obscure but just blurry enough to make the center slightly less than crystal clear. The center is the present, in terms of space, time, and logic. As I look outward from the center, it gets less and less clear, seems further away, and makes it generally harder for me to believe in the concreteness or validity of anything I see. The outside is completely unknown. The present and the areas immediately around it are my immediate sense experience: not completely concrete, but trustworthy nonetheless. After that reality falls away exponentially; it's twice as blurry X distance from the center, four times that X more distance out, eight times that X more distance out, etc. This area, the largest area on the lens, is pretty much the rest of the empirical view of reality, anywhere from right outside my door to quarks and the universe. The infinitely small and infinitely dens and indecipherable edge of the lens is everything outside that, the edge of the closed system as the collective mind of humanity sees it.

That's my view of reality.

Short Story

2008-02-29T21:50:00.001-05:00

A little announcement (especially compared to my last post; get used to it, my philosophical rants can be quite long haha): I'm working on a story for my creative writing class that I'll post here once done. Not quite sure where I'm going with it, but it will be up within the next week and a half, probably.

On Reality and God

2008-02-29T20:31:00.003-05:00

Yeah, it's a pretty generic title for a topic. But we've been reading Descartes in my Honors College "Culture & Expression" class, and I've learned about him before college and last semester in Intro to Philosophy. So today I wrote down some of my thoughts. I don't know how strict you are about the formality of philosophical papers, but I don't have any kind of system of proof or reasoning. This is just me barfing on the paper, pretty much. And, a little background: I'm a philsophical skeptic, which means I basically doubt everything. It's a little more complicated than that, as you're about to see. Enjoy and tell me what you think.

I'm an empiricist in the sense that I think that within what an empiricist [someone who believes that sense experience brings knowledge of reality] would call reality, there are patterns and ideas that are consistent throughout and can be applied to different parts of reality. In other words, social and natural sciences, and mathematics make sense and work, and can't be called into question and descriptors of the empiricist's "reality." What can be called into question as descriptors of "reality," however, is our direct sensory experience of this "reality," or, depending on your epistemological philosophy, your interpretation of it. Descartes was right in questioning sense experience, although his proofs against it weren't exactly foolproof and he accepts it again after his unconvincing "proofs" for God's existence and nature.

Color is an easy example of why sense experience can't be trusted (but keep in mind that it isn't certain that it isn't true as well). First of all, since I can't get into anyone else's head or see the world as they do, let alone know if they even exist, there is no way to know if I see colors the same way as anyone else. But there are always arguments as to whether a color is blue or purple, or black or dark blue, so it's obvious that individuals see color differently from each other. In addition, shown under different lighting or with different atmospheric interference, a wall painted blue will seem lighter or darker, or even like a completely different color. A scientific instrument will tell me that there is a specific wavelength being bounced off that wall and into my eyes, which is a scientific idea that can be applied to other examples of the color blue, just as the Pythagorean Theorem can be applied to any triangle.

But my senses aren't scientific instruments. They are subjective, and so they might not describe ultimate reality. And scientific instruments also only exist as sense experiences, so they may or may not exist as well. That leaves scientific and mathematical theories, ideas, and formulas, which are simply ideas that describe the empirical view of the world but don't exist within it. This isn't to say that the exist as separate entities; they aren't Plato's Forms (or at least they might not be, but they might be also; there's no proof either way). They are simply ideas held in the collective minds of humanity (or if no one else but me exists, then in my mind as I imagine in the collective minds of humanity) and, if it exists and functions similarly to humans in thought and behavior, intelligent life.

Similarly, ethical and logical ideas can be applied, as well as any other non-physical ideas that can describe the empirical view of reality, but those that attempt to describe ultimate reality, unless it turns out that the empirical view is ultimate reality. But there's no proof as to that. So the empirical view of reality does exist, if only as a relation of ideas connected logically.

Descartes would say that it is the self, the "I" which thinks, contains all of this information and processes it, which seems convincing. However, he stops short of pure skepticism by settling for "I." If we assume his evil demon--with which he attempted to get a step ahead of the skeptics--as a thought experiment, that he is all-powerful and infinitely devious, and will not stop at anything to deceive me, then why, as Descartes asserts, is he powerless to deceive me into believing that I don't exist? And what if he is deceiving me into believing I do exist when I don't?

I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of people who might read this would say "But it doesn't make sense for one to believe he doesn't exist, because [as Descartes argues] one has to exist to believe he doesn't exist," i.e. there has to be a doubter to do the doubting. That's exactly the point: it doesn't make sense. This argument brings up and issue. What if ultimate reality, that which exists independent of the possibly non-existent empirical view of reality, independent even of the rationalist view (that knowledge is gained through the use of the mind alone), is not confined to be governed by human logic? What if, in ultimate reality, object "a" can both exist and not exist at the same time?

This can be extended to God as well. What if God can both create a stone that He cannot lift, but then lift it? This defeats Descartes' argument that God exists because for him even God relies on logic, but which also resolves a lot of inconsistency within the bible and traditional definitions of God. It even makes him more powerful that usually accepted (even though it seems contradictory to be better than perfect) because he is even powerful enough to defy logic. This is, of course, unless most of reality doesn't rely on logic, and only we humans do, as a mode of thinking, blinders to ultimate reality--basically, a weakness instead of average.

And, of course, if it's possible that ultimate reality isn't governed by logic, not only is everything I've just said completely unverifiable, but literally anything could be true. It could be only coincidence or facade that the world seems to be a coherent whole, etc. There's really know way to know. That's why I'm a skeptic. Aristotle once said "All I know is I know nothing." My catch phrase is "All I know is I know nothing, not even that I know nothing." If you think that's confusing, try getting into my head.

oh haiii!

2008-02-17T02:19:00.001-05:00

Hello everyone! Well, no one actually, since I'm new and no one knows me yet. But that shall change! Eventually. My name is Jacob and I'm a freshman at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. I'm a philosophy and creative writing double major, so that's mostly what I'm going to be posting about in my blog, my philosophical ideas and random writings. I hope you all/none enjoy what I have to post!

Thank you
Jacob