Sage words from Morris Cohen

…in a 1919 edition of The New Republic (thanks to a lead on Leiter’s blog). Cohen was writing, under the pseudonym “Philonous”, in response to someone who had said that those not in ardent support of post-war efforts to rebuild were “slackers”:

My fellow philosophers for the most part are too ready to
assert that theoretic philosophy can justify itself
only by its practical applications. But why the
fundamental human desire to know the world is any
less entitled to satisfaction than the desire for
kodaks, automobiles, india-paper or upholstered
furniture, they do not tell us. Indeed, just exactly
what is practical, and what is the good of being
practical at all, are just the kind of theoretic studies
that they frantically refuse to undertake.

[...]

The great philosophers, like the great artists, scientists and religious
teachers have all, in large measure, ignored their
contemporary social problems. Aristotle, Leonardo
da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton, Buddha, Jesus of
Nazareth and others who have done so much to
heighten the quality of human life, have very little
to say about the actual international, economic and
political readjustments which were as pressing in
their day as in ours. The great service of Socrates
to humanity was surely not in his somewhat superficial
criticism of the Athenian electoral machinery
of his day, but rather in developing certain intellectual
methods, and suggesting to Plato certain
doctrines as to the nature of the soul and ideas,—-
doctrines which in spite of all their impracticality
have served for over two thousand years to raise
men above the grovelling, clawing existence in
which so much of our life is sunk.

What grand writing! I’m proud to admit that I came into possession of one of his spoons, now on display in my office.

Philosophy’s job

Philosophy’s job is to take you from what merely seems puzzling into what really is puzzling.

My own neo-kantianism

To start, let me rehearse Kant’s basic move in explaining our knowledge of the world. Most of us will accept that there are some things we can learn only through experience (like how many donkeys are now in my yard) and some things that are simply true by definition (like anyone with an uncle has a parent with a sibling). Set those aside for now as unproblematic. Kant was interested in a class of statements that are sort of a mix between the two. Take, for example, the fact that any square drawn within a circle will have less area than that of the circle. It has that “true by definition” sort of feel to it, but it isn’t simply true by definition. To see its truth, you need to check it out in your own mind’s eye (“pure intuition,” Kant called it, meaning sense experience unpolluted by anything your physical eye is actually taking in). Call this class of truths “apriori synthetic” facts.

Kant was the first to draw our attention to apriori synthetic truths, and he thought they included many extremely important truths: like the whole of geometry, and the whole of arithmetic, and some super-basic facts about what has to happen in the physical world: that every event has a cause, that when there’s an action, there’s an equal/opposite reaction, and that no event is causally isolated. Indeed, the apriori synthetic truths serve as the foundation for our knowledge of the world.

Now why should it be true that these facts are both known to us through pure intuition, and basic to the fabric of the cosmos? For that is a very nifty coincidence. It could be luck, or God. But Kant’s answer was that the human mind’s own inherent structure makes these truths available to itself through pure intuition, and also puts our experience into a kind of structure so that anything we could possibly experience will fulfill those apriori synthetic truths. They are our operating system, so to speak, regulating both our thinking and all the data that comes our way.

Very cool idea, right? So why did anyone give up on it? It’s hard to give a brief answer to this. I’ll try to write more about this later, but in the end, my view is that Philosophy suffered from a tragic sequence of ideological entanglements. It first had a torrid affair with voluptuous German Idealism; then bounced back from that relationship into a much safer one with Prudish Positivism; then was hit by two buses marked “WWI” and “WWII”, and lost its memory; and finally old Philosophy settled down into a tame relationship with its cousin, Scientific Naturalism. Through all that, the early childhood romance with Kantianism was just sort of forgotten.

There are some solid, worthier reasons not to be satisfied with Kantianism, at least in the form that Kant expressed it. They have to do with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries and (perhaps) with quantum physics (depending on how you interpret both it and what Kant said about the purest laws of science). And there were some philosophers, the neo-kantians, who tried to repair the old man’s theory; but they too were caught up in various ways with the tragic sequence I described.

But it seems to me that a neo-neo-kantianism is both possible and attractive. This lesson was taught to me a little while ago when I sat in on a physics course. The professor started at one end of the whiteboard with some results we already knew. Then he did a whole bunch of math from that end of the board to the other, and ended up with a predicted consequence. And it turned out that the consequence was verified by experiment, with great precision. Now that is frankly amazing. To ask Kant’s question once again: why should it be that nature knows it has to obey the sorts of mathematical principles we find ourselves bound to think are true?

One might try to say that we learned math from nature in the first place. (That’s naturalism.) But this seems to me quite implausible. For, as I have dabbled in math and number theory, nothing about it seems rooted in empirical discovery at all: it is purely conceptual. Moreover, if you come across a real mathematician who tries to think through to the philosophical foundation of what s/he is doing (and such persons are quite rare), you will have found a platonist. It’s just not natural to think of math as natural. And we know that mathematical truths are not simply the derived consequences of some basic rules mathematicians established at some convention: we have Gödel to thank for teaching us that can’t be right. For any set of rules, there are mathematical truths that cannot be proven by that set – and we can prove that.

So we are left with a spooky coherence between how we have to think and how the world has to be. Why not go Kantian? But this time, we will attribute a different structure to the human mind. It’s hard to say just what that structure is, except to say it is whatever it is that makes math true. Call it MATH, a structure existing among concepts, ordering them and determining how they can be distinguished or combined. I think it may well be that MATH both determines our thinking and the thinking of any intellect; and if it does, then it may well also constrain the data structures in which we try to squeeze the booming and buzzing confusion of our sense experience.

Now MATH is not anything whose existence can be confirmed or denied through efforts in cognitive psychology. For, if MATH exists, any attempt at cognitive psychology must necessarily presuppose it. Thus it would be genuinely apriori, but also synthetic, inasmuch as MATH is not simply true by definition.

So there you have it, my friends: my own neo-kantianism. I cannot lay any claims to its originality, since it may well be close to something Carnap was flirting with in his Logical Construction of the World, but that project got tangled up with a host of other ideological moves I’d rather not make.

The discomfort of nothing

Sometimes, in a conspiratorial tone, I reveal to my students that the Great Big Philosophical Question – the baddest of all bad asses – is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” But I think an equivalent question is whether something can ever turn into nothing, even though somehow this question doesn’t sound as profound. When we think through the question, and try to imagine either possibility, I think we enter into a dissonance between what we can imagine and what we can conceive. There isn’t any problem in imagining a green ball in a black space suddenly disappearing or appearing. But something in the mind shifts uneasily and starts asking, “But… but… where did it go? Where did it come from? What caused the change? Whither? Whence?” We can imagine it, but we can’t think it.

Maybe our mental bias against causeless comings and goings is simply an extension of our learning about object permanence, back in our Piaget days. We see the ball roll behind the partition and expect to see it roll on out the other side. That sets our prejudice, and primes us for the Great Big Question.

But wherever we get that bias, it seems nature doesn’t share it. Every empty space is crammed with causeless comings and goings. (Cute video here.) Subatomic particles, and their accompanying fields, spring into existence on a temporary loan of energy from the universe, then fade out once again and thus repay the loan. If I understand correctly, some think the universe itself is just such an episode. But what this really means is that, really, there is no such thing as nothing, at least not that science ever encounters. Anytime you think you’ve set up an empty space, particles and fields start popping up in it and spoiling the batch. Perhaps it is tempting to think, “Ah! But if you ever really could get ahold of some true nothing, nothing would ever come of it!” But such a thought seems to beg the question. If “nihil nihilo fit” is just false, then you can’t ever get ahold of some nothing of which nothing ever comes. Pesky causeless somethings keep popping up.

What about in the world of the mind? I am sure that I had many thoughts yesterday that are now gone for ever. Have they become nothing? (Don’t start thinking about the energy in the brain; we have stopped talking about the physical world for now.) And what about the new ideas I will have today? At times we say that new ideas come from old ideas, mixed and rematched. But I am not sure that means they don’t come from nothing. For an idea is a form; it is a structure that is differentiated from other structures by its structure. And while our experience may suggest that old forms prompt the creation of new forms, I don’t see it as obvious that the new form comes just from the old ones. Where does the new structure come from? It is not identical to the old ones, as they are different forms. Do you have an idea of a donkey? of peacock feathers? Of course. But until now I will bet that you never had an idea of a donkey with peacock feathers for ears. The combination – that is to say, the form – is something new. And it came to me out of nowhere.

“Free, single, disengaged”

The Logan Gramophone Society met recently and uncovered this neglected gem from Mamie Smith and her Jazz Band (Okeh Records):

Value of the liberal arts

(Recently I was invited to speak to our academic advisors on the value of the liberal arts to today’s students. I thought a couple of readers out there might find it interesting … so here it is.)

“WHY DO I NEED THAT, AND WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH IT? GETTING SOMEWHERE THROUGH THE LIBERAL ARTS”
(A PRESENTATION TO ADVISORS AT UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY)

“Better never to have been”

A couple of students and I are reading David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been, alongside our reading of Schopenhauer, which, among all the ways of passing sunny summer days, must count among the most inappropriate. Benatar’s book is an argument for the claim that bringing people into existence causes them harm. He admits that, once you exist, there may be plenty of good reasons to continue to exist; but there are no good reasons to cause anyone to begin to exist, and in fact strong reasons for not doing so.

His whole argument turns on an alleged asymmetry. We DO think it is a good idea not to bring a being into existence when we know that being’s life will be unrelentingly horrible. Indeed, we are apt to censure someone who brings suffering beings into existence. (Set aside the abortion debate; think of couples who are genetically determined to bring about suffering children, or AIDS babies, or whatever; they ought to refrain from doing so.) But – here’s the alleged asymmetry – we DO NOT think it is a bad idea not to bring into existence a being whose life will be pleasant. That is to say, we are not apt to censure couples who decide not to have children when it is clear that the lives of those children would be very pleasant.

So what? Well, Benatar draws from this alleged asymmetry two claims: (1) it is bad to create a being who suffers; and (2) it is not-bad, or just plain neutral, not to create a being who has pleasure. Now think of all the beings who have been brought into existence. All of their pleasures, or high points, count as morally neutral with respect to the act of creating them. But all of their pains count as “bad” with respect to that act. Since every human life includes some suffering, we can say, of every human life, that it was better for that person never to have been brought into existence in the first place.

I keep calling the analogy “alleged” because I think the contrast is between claims of different logical structure. Take claim (1) above – “it is bad to create a being who suffers.” Now it is GRE time: which of the following is its asymmetrical counterpart?

(2) “it is not-good to create a being who has pleasure”
(3) “it is not-good not to create a being who suffers”
(4) “it is good not to create a being who has pleasure”
(5) “it is good to create a being who has no pleasure”

And, as with any good GRE question, after this you should feel like you no longer understand your own language. I have no idea which of (2)-(5) is the asymmetrical counterpart to (1), though Benatar is sure it’s (2). But after trying to think through all of these, it seems to me that a symmetrical counterpart to (1) – namely, “it is good to create a being who experiences pleasure” – seems to me at least sometimes true. I see a happy couple, with wisdom and means and love; they have children, and I think “How wonderful that these kids have such great lives!” Or I see the same couple without kids, and think “That is a loss; the world is a bit worse off for their surplus of loving support never having been spent.” I’ll admit that my complaint in this latter case is not nearly as strong as my censure when couples stupidly bring into existence suffering children; still, my feelings are a bit more colorful than neutral. And this is exactly what Benatar denies.

Now maybe my logic is limp; it wouldn’t be the first time. But I am so far unconvinced that we always do harm in bringing anyone into existence. It seems to me the truth is messier – sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, and usually we don’t know, or there just isn’t a fact to the matter. Once again, flat-footed skepticism prevails. No shortcuts to case-by-case thinking.

But despite my disagreement, I think Benatar’s book is a great model for contemporary philosophy. It pursues a question that gets at our philosophical hearts – to be, or not to be, that is his question – and it does so with clear prose, short sentences, good analogies, elegant insights, and without getting bogged down in citations and narrow in-fights among the experts. It’s a noble and worthy effort. The world is better off for the book’s having been.

What my son and I have learned playing baseball

1. Throw like you mean it. Every time. Point your opposite shoulder where it’s going, focus on the other guy’s glove, and throw hard. Throwing a ball is the glory of man.
2. If the ball is hit near you, go for it, get under it, scramble for it, like your pants are on fire. Don’t just watch it roll by.
3. When you are in the outfield and you get the ball and are unsure what to do, throw it to the nearest infielder who is yelling at you. Let that bigmouth figure it out.
4. Don’t step out of the batter’s box. Yeah, you’ll get hit. You’ll get over it.
5. When at bat, don’t think in terms of “strike” and “ball.” Think in terms of “Can I hit that?”, even if it’s high and outside. If you can hit it, swing away, like you mean to hit it, every time. Watching a hittable pitch whiz by is a misfortune.

Please join my campaign for illiteracy

Begin today. Find a child in your neighborhood, and unlearn them reading.

“[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it; they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” Plato, Phaedrus.

Teaching in the Buzz

Young people live in a cloud of stimulation laced with data. Facebook, Twitter, the web generally, cell phones, iPods – let’s call them collectively “the Buzz”. The Buzz has many virtues, but one unfortunate consequence (noted often) is that many Buzzers do not have the time, and sometimes not even the capacity, to think long or hard about anything that is not connected immediately to the Buzz. I say this with great sympathy for them. They are young, and especially vulnerable to flash and change, and they shouldn’t yet know any better (unlike their older counterparts).

So it should come as no surprise that when these young people come to campus, there is a problem. For college for several centuries has been an island of intellectual repose, a way station between life at home and life on your own, a book-ended retreat into texts, ideas, and reflection. Or that’s been the legend, anyway. But now even that legend is gone. Students never leave the mainland; the Buzz keeps them firmly tethered to the same world they have been in, and the world they will continue to be in. But they enter an institution that has long seen itself as an island. College faculty insist that students take their special subjects seriously, and sometimes for the sake of disinterested inquiry, all while the students are consumed with the effort of maintaining their Buzzing connections and now extending them into new territories.

So, given their perspective, it is natural for the Buzzers to request the faculty to explain to them at some point why they should be interested in what is being taught, and how it will inform their lives. Students are young, and they are fairly tolerant of a wide range of possible explanations, but they want at least some sort of explanation that connects with their lifestyle, immersed as it is in the Buzzing cloud.

But this is precisely where the great disconnect between faculty and students is located. The world as the Buzzer finds it has “ME” squarely in the middle of it, with various links reaching outward in all directions to friends, places, favored media, celebrities, social issues, goals, and fears. But the world as a faculty member finds it has “MY SPECIALTY” in the middle, with various ties of relevance to other ideas, disciplines, theories, and information. The two sets of maps are plainly incommensurable. To repair the difference, students need to adopt a fresh, disinterested approach, or else faculty need to creatively imagine how the stuff they find so fascinating will fit into the buzzing world of their students.

What’s to be done? Well, I’m a faculty member, and a senior one at that, so it is no surprise that I think it is the students who need to give way. When I see my colleagues’ attempts to “buzzify” college material – attempts to integrate social media and apps into the coursework, with the hope that Shakespeare will be more interesting if you can friend him on Facebook – I can’t help but feel that an important battle has been lost, and flash has won out over substance. Any meaningful thing, I say, can be learned only in thoughtful, reflective retreat into one’s self: distraction is the enemy of the deep. And I know it from personal experience, that the Buzz consists entirely in distraction.

Vacation report: Belgium, Greece, and England

I seem to remember some pithy quote along the lines of “Traveling helps you to see the familiar once again as strange.” Anyhow, that was certainly the effect of our trip to Belgium, Greece, and England – by the time we came home, it seemed as exotic as anything else we had seen.

Our main reason to go to Greece was that the kids have a deep fascination for Greek mythology – so we thought it would be a great time to seize their interest and explore as many ruins as we could, which turned out to be about two per day on average. The main reason for England was Jeannine’s love of London, plus a home exchange deal. And the main reason for Belgium was that flying in and out of it yielded the cheapest deals – though once the crafty Belgians have you there, you’ll be leaking money like a nonregulated bank.

We came to Greece armed with an archaeological guidebook, which helped us to know more about what we were seeing, but later in the trip we found an even more useful travel book: Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day tells you just what to do and watch for in 5th century b.c. Athens, and so helps bring to life the ruins of the Agora, the Parthenon, and some further-flung sites we also visited like Delphi and Eleusis. For me, the most interesting ruins were at the Agora – downtown ancient Athens, basically – because it was easiest to imagine what it would have been in Socrates’s day. We stood where he was sentenced to death, and where he would have been lampooned by Aristophanes. Modern-day Athens is narrow, twisted, dynamic, mysterious, and exhausting but fun. And the ruins in Greece are everywhere; imagine the frustration of Greek gardeners as they turn up tiles and cornerstones with every swing of the spade.

We were surprised by the number of stray dogs and cats throughout Greece. That might sound sad, but by all appearances these loose animals are fat and happy. They feast all night on Greek food, and stretch out luxuriously during the day in the middle of walkways.

We stayed in a little town west of London, which meant we spent a lot of time navigating our way through transit systems. We find this to be fun. But apart from the insides of railway stations, we also managed to see some key sights – the Tower, the Globe, Big Ben, Parliament, St. Paul’s, British Library, etc. etc. We also took day trips to some of the smaller towns nearer to where we were staying, like Winchester, Guildford, and Oxford. One critical event along the way was my son’s loss of his iPod, which sent him into a kind of cybernetic detox, but through the magic of technology and exceptional human kindness, we were able to get a message to the person who found it and arrange for its return. Of course we liked some of the big, touristy things (like touring the dark and dungeony “Clink”, the namesake of all prisons to follow), but we mostly enjoyed walking through the neighborhoods and markets, looking at the wonderful old buildings, and taking frequent breaks at pubs. We were very excited to tour the British museum and see the so-called Elgin marbles, which are statues that were taken from the Parthenon and brought to England. There’s an ongoing contest over who gets to keep them, and the issue has grown more complicated the more I think about it. (Our family is currently of mixed opinion on the issue; courts of Europe await our decision.) We spent the last couple of nights in London, and it was nice to have more time to explore and to see the city at night.

Then it was off to the train again, under the channel, through France, through Brussels, and finally to Ghent, where I participated in a Spinoza workshop, and my wife and the kids toured the city by boat and by cobblestone. We left the next day for home, but were delayed overnight in Chicago, which did not disappoint us a bit. We managed to get downtown for a couple of hours and feel the energy of my favorite city.

We were away just long enough (3 weeks), and what we saw was just exotic enough, to make it seem strange to finally come home. Perhaps a zen master can clean his mind just by willing it, but for the rest of us we seem to require a lot of motion, a lot of distraction, and a fair bit of disruption, to cleanse our eyes and see things again freshly.

Who ARE these people?!

It’s no news to anyone that higher education is under pressure to adapt. Some of the pressure comes from within the university, from either a social-sciency direction (like the book Academically Adrift), or from a humanistic direction (like Menand’s Marketplace of Ideas). These are intelligent, well-intentioned, and interesting critiques of the current ideals and methods of education, and they should be taken seriously. The university is what it is because it grew to be that way over the past few centuries, and it is reasonable to ask whether it needs to change – maybe even dramatically – to meet the needs of our changed and changing society. Okay, okay; this I get, and I support.

But then there’s also pressure coming from another direction, and this pressure is big and nasty, and it puzzles me. This other direction is political. Headline after headline suggests that whenever state politicians turn their attention to higher education, they eagerly propose all manner of ill-formed, misguided ideas. Mostly, the proposals end up pointing toward the goal of turning all colleges and universities into vocational schools, or at least schools funded only by measures of vocational success. Get rid of tenure, get rid of graduate programs in the liberal arts, get rid of majors that can’t demonstrate exactly how they are helping young people get jobs.

Most recently, the National Governor’s Association urged states to wean their universities from relying upon “a broad, liberal-arts style education.” But if states really are interested in producing what employers want and need, this is precisely the wrong direction to go. (For further discussion, see Debra Humphreys’s brief post here, and all the research that has gone into AACU’s “Liberal Education and America’s Promise” project.)

So state policy makers are not listening to business communities. My bet is they’re not listening to constituencies either. I don’t know this for sure; I’m basing this only on the case of my own state, where (from what I can gather) legislators had to back down from making truly draconian cuts to higher ed only out of fear of not being re-elected. So, by appearance, state legislators are trying to mold higher ed without consulting either business leaders or the public, or any available data.

Thus my question: who are these people? Did they go to college? If so, what tragedy did they undergo? Did they, as a class, encounter only wretched and boorish liberal arts professors? I’m guessing that the lawmakers must be, on average, around 55 years old. That would mean they were going to college, on average, in the late 70s. What was happening on college campuses then? Was that the era of “stupid and boorish” humanities professors? Or was it that they followed up their undergraduate experience with some of the early, clumsy MBA programs, which may have twisted their thinking? What is it that is hampering their recognition, seemingly enjoyed by everyone else, that there is genuine value in understanding one’s culture, its history, big ideas, literature in other languages, poetry, and the arts? I really am puzzled.

On Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition

This is an interesting and insightful book on Nietzsche’s philosophy and on ancient skepticism generally. I really admire Berry’s ability to adopt and clearly express judicious opinions, and her ability to anticipate readers’ questions and objections and she moves through her story. This is the best book on Nietzsche’s philosophy I’ve seen in quite a while.

First, it’s clear Nietzsche was thoroughly familiar with the ancient skeptics. As a student and early on as a professor, he was studying several topics that would have led him to Sextus Empiricus. Moreover, as Berry documents throughout, Nz often refers to the skeptics, and they seem to be one of the very few groups he does not heap scorn upon. (French novelists and Italian operatic composers are  two others.) In many instances (as Berry documents), Nz frames problems and solutions in ways Sextus himself would appreciate. Plus, Nz is often engaged in the problem of balancing one perspective with another, so that the first ends up less appealing or discredited. When Nz attacks an ideology, he points out the other causal factors which might be leading the ideologues to their conclusions – psychological, societal, dietary, and so on. After we hear Nz’s alternative account, we’re supposed to feel not so sure about the ideologue’s defense of his own position. And as we treat ideas and hypotheses, he wants us to carefully line up considerations for and against, with finely-attuned noses, ears, and tongues for sensing when something is rotten. This “ideology management” technique is very Sexy. (As in “like Sextus,” of course.)

In fact, I think Berry is right to construe Nz as a skeptic on metaphysical and scientific matters. In metaphysics, he does trot out the will-to-power doctrine late in life in all apparent earnestness, but it seems to me he really employs it only as a splendid tool for talking himself and the rest of us out of “thingy” metaphysics. In accounts of humans and nature, he often seems to side with scientific naturalists, but again it’s only to discredit and deflate competing metaphysical views. For on occasion he also deflates naturalistic scientific views, like atomism and belief in universal laws of nature, as beliefs arising from scientists’ own biases. Nz is not so much interested in establishing any metaphysical or scientific truths as he is in establishing an experimental, skeptical attitude that we should take toward ourselves and our experience. We should always be second guessing (or triple guessing) our own psychologies and our own motivations, even when we are doing science, and especially when we are doing psychology or philosophy.

One question Berry must consider (and does) is whether Nz could share the skeptic’s expectation that tranquility will arise from the suspension of belief. The skeptic’s story is that when we successfully purge ourselves of ideologies, we will experience tranquility. Sextus’s own account in that this tranquility simply arises from the suspension of belief – he has no account why it should, and doesn’t laud it as a goal; it’s just a welcome accident. Nz certainly isn’t an advocate of spiritual tranquility – he wants perpetual struggle and strife – but he does think there is a welcome benefit attending to all the hard work. We gain health, and the joy of a free spirit. So one might view this as a Nietzschean variant upon Sextus’s skepticism, and Berry does.

Berry also argues that Nz was a moral skeptic, though here I am unsure. I read Nietzsche as playing back-and-forth with scientific naturalism, with the aim of undermining any confidence we have in any sort of metaphysics. But I don’t see him playing that game at all with morality. He’s straightforward: it’s all wrong, diseased, misguided. Berry’s strategy is to show that the ancient skeptics also committed themselves to the same, profoundly anti-realist conclusion, and maybe that is so; I cannot judge. But here is my thought: if we understand skepticism generally at undermining confidence with the result of not having any beliefs, then Nz wasn’t a skeptic about morality in that sense. He thinks we should end up with some beliefs: namely, that morality is bad, and health is good. Nz seems pretty dogmatic on that score; indeed, I think he can only be a realist about health. If the ancient skeptics were too, in some way or other, well then okay; then the skeptics weren’t skeptical, and were Nietzschean instead.

Getting the 4-1-1

I recently read James Gleick’s book Information: a history, a theory, a flood. It’s a fascinating account of our varying relationships to information. For a long time, we were only set on getting as much of it as we could; then a theory of information developed in the 20th century (principally by Claude Shannon); and now we are drowning in the stuff. But the question that has been bothering me is : what is it?

It’s not that Gleick ignores the question. It’s just that he’s a journalist, and so his aim is to tell a string of interesting stories. Along the way he mentions the physicist John Wheeler’s view that, ultimately, information is the stuff of the universe – in a slogan, “It from Bit.” But what could it possibly mean to say that everything is composed of information? I can understand a hunk of matter or energy or a field somehow having information. Stuff can have a structure which allows us to extract information from it. But what could it possibly mean for the stuff to be information?

So what is information? I’ve gone from reading Gleick’s book to reading Greene’s The Hidden Reality, which also discusses the idea, and supports Gleick’s account that Wheeler thought information may be everything. There’s a lot more studying I need to do, but right now it seems to me that there are two ways of understanding information. The first is purely objective, having to do with being able to quantify and summarize a thing’s structure, regardless of its usefulness for human beings. On this account, the harder it is to exactly summarize an entity’s features, and transmit it exactly to someone else, the less information it contains. So an unending sequence of “01234567890123456789…” doesn’t contain a lot of information, since even though the sequence is infinite, it can be fully summarized as “0123456789, repeat without end.” On the other hand, a random sequence like “73885629199…” is packed with information, since you can’t adequately summarize its exact features without actually giving it. But this view seems counter-intuitive. Consider this message:

“It is a truth that the group identified as the enemy will in the future do something that can be accurately described as attacking at a time that can be described in complete accuracy as dawn.”

That, according to this first view, contains a lot more information than “The enemy will attack at dawn,” since you would have to transmit a longer sequence in order for another person to reproduce it accurately. Wrong.

The second way of looking at information requires humans to enter the picture and sort out what’s useful and relevant or interesting from what isn’t. In this case, the sequence “314159265…” has a lot more information than our earlier “73885629199…”, since it describes pi, while the second sequence isn’t useful for anything. But bringing in subjective human evaluations sort of makes the science of information less sciency.

Also entering into this mess is the notion of entropy, or lack of order, which also seems to me to draw upon both objective and subjective measures. But I’ve read enough now to believe that I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I need to read more, and some other books are on their way to me.

OK, now that I’ve admitted I don’t really know what information is, what could it mean to say that everything is made of it? Here’s the best stab I have at it, courtesy of Greene’s book. Imagine making a computer simulation of the universe. This simulation would have to include a representation of you doing what you are doing now. That virtual you, in the program, and the virtual everything surrounding that virtual you, exists in the computer program. That is to say that the virtual you and the virtual everything are ultimately bits of information – perhaps being processed by some physical, colossal supercomputer, but that isn’t relevant, since information isn’t tied to particular structures, and nothing would be different in the virtual world if it were running on some other kind of system. It’s the data, and the processing of the data that counts. Now if you really are the virtual you, and everything around you is the virtual everything, then indeed everything is composed of information.

Sounds loopy, but apparently that is one of the ideas being bandied about by those crazy physicists. It is impossible for me to think about any of this without going back to Aristotle, and his account of form. He didn’t go so far as to say that everything is form, but he knew it was what we need to focus on when we want to understand things; the underlying stuff or matter doesn’t really matter much, except as a carrier of form. I’m surprised, sort of, that neither Gleick nor Greene make anything of this. But only “sort of” surprised, since they’re anxious to point out how new all of this is.

The party-pooper principle

The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to adopt the following operational principle:

THE PARTY-POOPER PRINCIPLE: Given two, roughly-equal theories, the one that is less attractive is more likely to be true.

Theories can be attractive in a variety of ways. Some theories meet deep-seated wishes, like the wish for immortality, or for free will, or to see human beings as especially noble and special sorts of beings. Some theories are just groovy, like the panpsychist view that our consciousness exists because every material thing in the universe has special flavorings inherent in it, or the view that the pyramids were made by super-intelligent aliens. Some theories give us hope, like the theory that God (or Mother Earth) won’t let global warming take us down as a species.

The problem with being attractive is that attractiveness introduces irrelevant motivations for our belief. We like to believe what puts us in a good light, or makes us feel groovy, or hopeful. That attraction is likely to skew our critical faculties, consciously or unconsciously, and get us to adopt a belief when a more clinical, detached perspective would tell us otherwise. Thus, we need to compensate for attractiveness. Thus, we need to be party-poopers.

Yes, the P-PP is pessimistic, and it is certainly possible that the flattering, groovy, hopeful theory turns out to be true. But, because of our attraction to attractive theories, we need to cultivate some bias against them, and insist that they prove themselves according to more stringent standards. In a way, the insistence levels the argumentative playing field, since the attraction tilts the field in their favor.

So, the Pragmatic Party-Pooper Corollary: If you really want to believe it, don’t.