Just Philosophy

All of you have probably been on pins and needles wondering, where's all the philosophy?

On the 27th at Crepes on Cole at 7pm, I'll be hosting the monthly philosophy meetup. You can check out all the action and info at Meetup.com.

The discussions I've been facilitating focus on not reading philosophy but actually doing philosophy. Particpants are asked to volunteer 1 page of original philosophy.

Sound easy?

It's actually quite challenging, but rewarding, too.

"A woman must have a considerable amount of cynicism, indifference, or pride to regard physical relations as an exchange of pleasure by which each partner benefits equally." (p. 140 of The Second Sex

Do you agree or disagree? And what constitutes a "considerable amount of cynicism"?

"As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity - the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would better be left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercise that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today - philosophical activity, I mean - if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consists, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?"

Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 8-9.

There's an excellent tutorial on how to read papyri at the University of Michigan website.



The site guides you through Seneca's Medea written in a coptic script.
You can check out the latin of Seneca's Medea to see the papyri in a broader context.

Empathy is feeling and entering into another's feelings. Apparently, neuroscientists have located which sort of neurons are responsible for empathy. These neurons are called mirror neurons, and:

"Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."

This is a shameless plug for my contributions to Wikipedia, a free on-line encyclopedia that anybody can edit.

I created three entries so far in Wikipedia:

• Spinoza's Coat, which got voted for deletion and then was deleted 4 votes to 1
  
• Aristotle's Poetics
  
• On species
  

The entry on Aristotle's Rhetoric needs some work. I'm excited about adding to that entry.

Do you have a wikipedia contribution? If so, post a comment below or send me an email to barce A T cyphgen D O T com.

"Pronounce yourself happy only when all your satisfactions are begotten of reason, and when, having surveyed what men struggle for, pray for, watch over, you find nothing to desire let alone prefer. I give you a rule of thumb to assess yourself and ascertain your perfection: You will come into possession when you understand that the 'successful' are least successful. Farewell."

Letter 124, "Reason and the True Good," Seneca.

For you philosophy buffs, here's:
A Florilegium of Seneca's Apothegms

Without an antagonist prowess fades away.

Prosperity unbruised cannot endure a single blow, but a man
who has been at constant feud with misfortune acquires a
skin calloused by suffering; he yields to no evil and even
if he stumbles carries the fight on upon his knee.

A gladiator counts it a disgrace to be matched with an
inferior; he knows that a victory devoid of danger is a
victory devoid of glory.

But the greater the torment, the greater the glory shall be.

Prosperity can come to the vulgar and to ordinary talents,
but to triumph over the disasters and terrors of mortal
life is the privilege of the great man.

No one can discover what he can do except by trying.

Disaster is virtue's opportunity. Those whom an excess
of prosperity has rendered sluggish may justly be called
unfortunate.

All excesses are injurious, but immoderate prosperity is
the most dangerous of all.

By suffering misfortune the mind grows able to belittle suffering.

Your good fortune is not to need good fortune.

The life we receive is not short but we make it so.

Procrastination is the greatest waste of time.

Expectancy is the greatest impediment to living: in
anticipation of tomorrow it loses today.

The present is fleeting. . . it ceases to be before it has become.

The only people really at leisure are those who take
time for philosophy. They alone really live.

All virtues are fragile in the beginning and acquire
toughness and stability in time.

Less labor is needed when your concern is for the present.

For however unadvertised virtue may be, it is never wholly
unknown but gives signs of its presence, and the worthy will
track it down.

Nothing can equal the pleasure of faithful and congenial friendship.

It is important to withdraw into one's self.

What is the happy life? Self-sufficiency and abiding tranquility.

The good lies not in the thing but in the quality of selection.

The third sex. -- "A small man is a paradox but still a man; but small females seem to me to belong to another sex than tall women," said an old dancing master. A small woman is never beautiful -- said old Aristotle.

[The Gay Science, aph. 75]

Barce's interpretation: Nietzsche had the hots for tall chics but had problems saying that outright.

NOTE: I just launched sciurophobia.org where you post all your questions or share your stories and/or concerns about squirrels.
sciurophobia - fear of squirrels

Can be pronounced: ski-ooro-phobia or she-ooro-phobia (more Italianate)
etymology:

squirrel <-- squirel (olde Englishe) <-- esquirel or escurel (old French)
<-- squirelus (Late Latin) <-- sciurus (Latin)
<-- skia [shade] + oura [tale] (classical Greek)

If you've got a phobia that you need treated, the folks at UCSF might be able to help.

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't exist.

I use Serendipity to publish my blog. It's great software, but one of it's features has been causing a bit of an annoyance. Yesterday, I asked, "Whom does information technology serve?" I gave the example of on-line dating and made the comment that although it is supposed to serve our desire for companionship it does it in a physical space where we'd least likely find a companion.

Well, this blog is supposed to allow for a lot of communication, especially with all the trackbacks and commenting it allows. However, as is the case in certain blogs, there are a lot of spammers out there that want to ruin things for non-tangent communication with the masses.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of these trackbacks:


Weblog Name: virtual strip poker

Link to remote-entry: http://insert-lame-spam-url-here/virtual-strip-poker.html



Excerpt:

You may find it interesting to check some relevant pages about virtual strip poker



I get a couple of these pieces of spam a day, so to solve this problem, I created a script that gives me the delete URLs:


#!/usr/bin/env bash



perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /(http.*philo\/delete.*)/' /mail/barce



Still with me? The spammers got a bit more agressive and started sending more spam. So what did I do? I did a little research and now use a .htaccess file to forbid access from the spammers.

My .htaccess file looks something like this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?.*(-|.)poker(-|.).*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?.*(-|.)poker.html$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?.*(-|.)lamedomain(-|.).*$ [NC]

RewriteRule .* - [F]



Thanks to the article at kuro5shin, I had a spam-free day, but now, they found a way to get to me without using a referer. I got spam today, and checked the logs and it said something like this:

65.165.84.11 - - [18/Feb/2005:17:05:32 -0500] "POST /philo/comment.php?type=trackback&entry_id=12 HTTP/1.0" 200 87 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; N_o_k_i_a)"

Okay, now how do I stop them now? And isn't spam, a technology, enslaving me and wasting my time? Yes, and I don't know about the latter question. Any ideas?

The Matrix presents a futuristic dystopia where the machines that used to serve us are now the masters. The idea that our own creations will destroy us looms large in Battle Star Galactica.

Whom does information technology serve?

Whenever I've worked on tech projects what struck me wasn't the technical aspects, regardless of how difficult the problem was or great in scope. Instead, what struck me were the expectations and desires of the people in power. I felt like I was serving them, and that the computers were supposed to serve me and them in such a way that they got their expectations and desires met.

Here's the problem: If no bounds were set on their desires, then only the limitations of technology could re-adjust their expectations. But, their view of technology is altered by the sorts of promises (realistic or not) that their tech people make. Insofar as these promises are not realistic, technology is being made to serve someone else. How are we to understand technology as a function of both desire and expection?

Richard Coyne's Technoromanticism seems to answer this question. There are certain narratives where desire doesn't get met, and these narratives are a great critique of the promise of technology to meet our desires.

"From our point of view here, this pragmatic language narrative deprivileges notions of information and the proposition and counters narratives in which information provides privileged access to the world through an ability to represent things operationally, consistently, and autonomously." (Technoromanticism, p. 113)

This is best illustrated by looking at on-line dating. The computer filters the mass of humanity seeking some sort of companionship, through user-guided clicks and queries. The computer is our helpmate in this search for companionship, yet physically, we are outside the realm which is way more information rich than the Internet, the very realm in which our possible companion will exist. We are served immense possibility by our technology in the form of information, yet something about how we're wired towards possibility can lead us astray. Kate Zernike has talked to lots of people who are now saying 'No' to on-line dating. I've expressed similar sentiments myself in h2so4, a local 'zine.

Below are four sections that summarize issues about dualism in Authur O. Lovejoy's book, The Revolt Against Dualism.

1. How does the existence of memory imply epistemological dualism?
   
2. How can memory be used as a starting point for epistemology?
   
3. What would an outline of a psycho-physical dualist argument look like?
   
4. What are the weaknesses in Lovejoy's argument?
   

I. The argument that the existence of memory implies epistemological dualism is based upon the following assumptions. First, it is held that the memory image, e.g. "a party last Friday," is not the same thing as what it represents, for "merely to remember is to be aware of a contrast between the image presented and the event recalled." (Lovejoy, 381) The memory’s objects of reference, what it "points" to, can be absent or no longer existent, "yet that something which somehow exhibits their character is an item in… experience today." (Lovejoy, 381) Second, "[t]o remember is eo ipso to assign to the object a date in a temporal sequence which is not the date of the act of retrospection nor of the givenness of the image." (Lovejoy, 382) When one remembers, there is "contained" in the memory image the time and place of the object referred to in the memory.


Epistemological dualism is taken to be a "hypothetical proposition" that states: "if you postulate the externality of the entities to be known… i.e., spatial externality to the knower’s body, temporal externality to the date of the event of perceiving or remembering… then in that specific case your knowledge cannot be direct." (Lovejoy, 31) The image recalled is "external" to what it represents, for that which is represented may no longer exist or be elsewhere. The "pastness" of the memory is given to me, but I do not take the image to be the thing represented. If the object were given to me directly through memory, then what was is now, and that leads to the absurdity that there is no time, for it would be like saying, "The party which I remember to be on Friday is happening right now." Since, the objects known through memory are external, knowledge gained through memory cannot be direct. In all important aspects, this hypothetical proposition is the same as the definition set forth for epistemological dualism by Lovejoy.


II. In epistemology, Lovejoy believed that "… the type of cognitive… experience with which epistemological inquiry ought to begin is not perception but retrospection, or, more specifically, remembrance." (Lovejoy, 380) By beginning with memory rather than perception, the difference between sense data and the object of sense data become illuminated, for "at the moment when any man believes himself to be, e.g., remembering, there is before him both a particular concrete datum - usually an image - and the conception of a mode of relatedness in which mutually external existences, including this datum, may stand to one another." (Lovejoy, 390) Memory contrasts the present with the not present, hence with regards to this particular species of knowledge the existential status of data and object are always opposite each other. If I recall anything, the memory is, but the object to which it refers is not. Moreover, this opposition of existential status implies that memory is mediate - if it didn’t, past would be present - and that its dualism is "immediately manifest." (Lovejoy, 381) Since knowledge of causal laws depend upon memory, "science is based upon the experienced." (Lovejoy, 384)


If one wished to demonstrate epistemological dualism by starting with perception, then one is misled right off the bat, for unlike memory "[o]bjects are not sensibly present in duplicate." (Lovejoy, 43) Without reflection one falls into naïve realism, the belief that what you see is what you get, and that what is seen is of one substance, matter. Certain metaphysical discoveries must be made before asserting the duality of content and object known, yet a few confusions, which were - in part - a result of 17th century philosophers fusing the two sorts of dualisms together into the concept of idea, still manage to arise.


When applied to perception, the word "mental" seems to imply "mind-like." Beginning with perception misleads certain philosophers into thinking that mental means mind-like - as was the case with Russell, whose philosophy of mind implied that the coldness of ice water became a quality of the mind. (Lovejoy, 293) Hence the dualist, when giving his/her account of perception, confounds his realist foes, who believe that the dualist account of perception is really just a rosy path to idealism. If you do not perceive the what is known directly, then perhaps there is nothing to perceive indirectly at all given that one cannot imagine anything without placing a perceiver’s in that imagining. By starting off with perception, the dualist bears the onus of countering the idealist’s firm belief that esse est percipi.


"When the dualist describes sensory content as ‘mental,’ he need not be understood to say it has the same properties as are (for some philosophers) connoted by the noun ‘mind." (Lovejoy, 48) Rather, the mental "exists only as a function of the event of sensing." (Lovejoy, 48)


III. The outline of an argument for psycho-physical dualism should be written, "If the argument for epistemological dualism is cogent, and if no place among physical objects can be found for perceptual and other data as epistemological dualism conceives of them, then, on these grounds alone, psychophysical dualism (with respect to content) would be established." (Lovejoy, 40) For Lovejoy five aspects of experience which show that the object of knowing must be different from the content of perception: (a) the duality of memory and its objects (as mentioned in section I above), (b) the time lag between the way an object is, and how it is perceived at the same time, (c) the relativity (conditionality) of perception, (d) the distortion of perception through different medium, and (e) the experience of error and illusion. (Lovejoy, 21ff.) Briefly I will explain how each of the latter four aspects demonstrate the cogency of epistemological dualism.


In (b) two phenomena sufficiently demonstrate that how an object appears to us, is different from how it is at the same moment: the finite velocity of light, and the lapse of time that occurs from the nerve ending to the cerebral cortex. If I look at the sun 8 minutes before it sets, and if it takes light 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth, what I see is an appearance of the sun. The actual sun is already below the horizon. To affirm epistemological monism would require rejecting the finite velocity of light, thus requiring scientists to "reconstruct optics and astronomy so extensively." (Lovejoy, 82)


Whenever two or more perceivers look at the same object, the perceptual content of the idea must differ between them by virtue of their position relative to the object, and by virtue of qualities inherent in themselves (i.e. one might be color-blind). This is what is meant by the relativity (conditionality) of perception. A coin might appear circular to me, but elliptical to you, because of our differing viewpoints, but what can be known about the object "will be untransformed by the accident of your present knowing of it." (Lovejoy 160) The percepts that led you to this immutable knowledge of the object itself demonstrate another aspect of dualism.


The distortion of perception through a medium demonstrates epistemological dualism in a way similar to the finite velocity of light. If the stick that I see in a tank of water is actually bent, then the laws of refraction would have to be rejected.


The experience of error and illusion shows epistemological dualism to be the grounds of their possibility, for "[i]n so far as cognoscendum and content are identified, error is excluded; in so far as the possibility of error is admitted, cognoscendum and content are set apart from one another." (Lovejoy, 28) Illusions are capricious and at times convincingly real, yet "that we are capable of recognizing them as illusions" (Lovejoy, 54) points to a knower’s ability to ascribe to illusions additional properties that do not belong to the physical world, i.e. being private, capricious, and lacking correspondence with a retinal image.


From the above it seems that if a knower is able to recognize the percept to be a distortion of what s/he takes to be the object known, and if a percept can refer to what is not present to the knower, any attempt at monism would conflate a function of knowing (the percept) with the world itself. But experience shows that if I take my memory to be of the present, or launch a rocket at a planet I see in the sky believing that it is there as I see it, then Lovejoy’s conclusion that for theoretical concerns "it is simpler to give up the theory of the identity of perceptual datum and physical object." (Lovejoy, 82)


Given Lovejoy’s notion that physical things "exist without dependence upon a specific kind of relation to a specific kind of events, namely, brain-events accompanied by perception," (Lovejoy, 183) we discover that space, i.e. the ability to place objects in front of us, side by side, are a part of perceptual content. Given the 5 qualities of epistemological dualism above, and philosophers inability to subsume them into the category of physical things, one must conclude that there is a psychophysical dualism, a bifurcation of nature.


IV. The point at which Lovejoy’s argument seemed weak was where he argued from the existence of memory to epistemological dualism. To briefly recapitulate: (1) Epistemological dualism is the creed that if what is known is external, then knowledge is mediate. (2) One is immediately aware that memory is mediate because the memory image refers to what is past. (3) Hence, the content of memory is, whereas what it refers to isn’t. (4) Given (2) and (3) memory implies that it’s content is external and thus mediate, which is what epistemological dualism means.


This seems to me to be an incomplete view of what memory is. I grant that in some cases of remembering one assigns "to the object a date in a temporal sequence which is not the date of the act of retrospection," (Lovejoy 382), but memory isn’t so dutiful, nor can it be. When I remember a proof which I have learnt in geometry years ago, there seem to be two things going on. Perhaps attached to the recollection may be when I learned the proof, but if I focus on recalling the proof alone, to help me solve a problem, there seems to be no past perception mixed in with it. At times, with some proofs, I feel that I am relearning it. This implies that if I cannot find the reference to the past to be united with me idea of the proof, I am remembering two things: (1) my experience of learning the proof, which is mediate, and (2) the proof itself which is immediate! Moreover, if in relearning I should add that which later show to by products of my imagination, remembering is very prone to skeptical arguments of error and illusion, thus requiring our caution.

The 9th Philosopher's Carnival is on at Studi Galileiani