Category: Philosophy

In response to my posting about the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” vote, Mark suggested that I should take a look at a fascinating piece by Paul Graham entitled What You Can’t Say. After a short preamble comes the challenge:
Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
Now this is fascinating, because in a conversation with a friend last week I mentioned that I was thinking of posting a piece challenging people to say whether or not they subscribed to any unorthodox or “fringe” beliefs. Graham’s formulation is much better: it avoids the awkward judgment as to what would count as “unorthodox” by framing it in terms of behaviour.
Graham’s essay is about how we see ourselves, and how we might want to reconsider our confidence in our contemporary beliefs by comparing them with others times and other cultures. It’s really well-written, and I strongly recommend it. I, on the other hand, would like to pause a while with his challenge, and invite people to “come clean” about opinions that they might be reluctant to express in front of their peers. The nice thing about blog comments is that they can be anonymous, so your peers will never know that it’s you….
I’ll kick this off with my own personal “reluctant admission”. I am a firm believer in the Aquatic Ape Theory proposed by Alister Hardy and documented by Elaine Morgan. Today it is often treated as an example of weird fringe science, but I am convinced that, in time, it will become part of the orthodox account of the evolution of homo sapiens.
Your turn.

As I mentioned a few days ago, the BBC is running a poll to find out who we think the greatest philosopher is. The first phase is over, and we can now choose from the final list of 20 nominees. It’s a fairly predictable list (it would be interesting to find out which of the members was “most unexpected”):
Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Epicurus, Heidegger, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Popper, Russell, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein.
And my vote? Well, I’m not quite ready to make up my mind….

The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time is conducting a vote “to find out who you think is the Greatest Philosopher of all time”. You actually get to vote twice: the first time to nominate a candidate, and the second time to pick from the twenty most nominated philosophers. After seeing the large number who are choosing Wittgenstein (some for the strangest of reasons), I felt compelled to submit a nomination for David Hume.

So that’s the end of the Philosophy of Mind course that I’ve been taking. Lectures, check. Term paper, check. Final exam, check. Now I wait to hear how I did.
I came out of the final exam feeling pretty good about it. Yes, I’d blanked on two of the short disambiguation questions (on Block’s psychofunctionalism and Rosenthal’s HOT), but I felt that the essays were OK, if slightly unbalanced (9 pages for one, 6 for the other). Now, of course (a couple of hours later) all I can think of is the defects: what I forgot to include, why I wasted time on McGinn instead of talking more about Churchland, why I didn’t say more about how varieties of functionalism might be compatible with dualism, etcetera. However I guess that’s only to be expected.
And now I’ve got this philosophy-shaped hole in my life! I’m not taking any courses this summer (too many potential distractions), so until the Fall Semester I guess I’m going to be reduced to reading some of the (many) books I acquired during the course. Summer reading, sitting on the deck, with a long cold drink… it could be worse.

I’ve been so busy revising for my Philosophy of Mind final on Wednesday that blogging has had to take a back seat. Yet while I wrestle with questions like Brentano’s view of the intentionality of mental phenomena, I’m concerned that one of the biggest challenges is going to be mechanical: handwriting. The two hour exam will include a short multiple choice section and two essays. I don’t think I’ve handwritten more than half a page at a sitting since the mid-1970s. There’s a real danger that I’ll hand in a bunch of stuff that’s completely illegible….

Just updated my blogroll to include four philosophy-related blogs: Majikthise, David Chalmers (the “philosophical zombies” guy), The Web of Belief (a group blog authored by fellow students from Tufts), and Ignacio’s individual blog. In addition, I came across Chalmers’ useful list of philosophy-related blogs (which needs pruning, but never mind).

“Our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.”

Mill, J. S. 1874, A System of Logic, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers

Douglas Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach and many other books) is in town this week. He gave a lecture to our Phil.of Mind class at Tufts entitled “What is it like to be a strange loop?”, and he’s talking at the Media Lab in MIT tomorrow.

As to the subject of the talk:
(1) Hofstadter remains fascinated (as he was in GEB) with the interaction of two ideas: feedback loops, and systemic (explanatory) levels. In GEB, you may remember, the strange – and unexpectedly stable – patterns generated by pointing a video camera at the screen displaying its output were a powerful example (and metaphor) for the way these ideas come together. Doug’s about to repeat a number of those experiments: how will the fact that the low-level technology has changed from analog to digital affect them?
(2) My interpretation of “strange loops” is that Doug is talking about feedback loops that cross various kinds of boundaries: between the physical and the cognitive, between the outside world and the I-in-the-world (in terms of action and perception), and across minds (from one person to another).

After the lecture, a bunch of us went out for dinner with Dennett and Hofstadter. Among the faculty and students, was an old friend, the novelist and tech writerJohn Sundman. He and I worked together at Sun from 1986 until about 1989; John did most of the writing on the first release of PC-NFS, and managed the writing for the 386i workstation program.

[Apologies for the quality of the pictures – taken on my Treo 650 in very poor light.]

A good week. First, a thoroughly satisafactory result on my mid-term, made even more so by the fact that it was my first bit of classwork in 30+ years. Dennett’s class on Wednesday was about Kripke (“C-fibers and pain”, modal logic, essentialism reborn), and it was one of those lovely “ah-ha!” experiences. The account of the historic 1971 Irvine summer school was priceless. Great fun.
Then my classmate Richard Dub pointed me at the very useful Online Papers in Philosophy site, and from there I found my way to Megan Wallace’s’ delightful website and her provocative ideas about fictionalism and “slingshots” (not to mention the very useful Wussy/BadAss criterion and the priceless Acutetarianism).
And finally this afternoon I took some vacation time (I’ve accumulated a bit too much – use it or lose it) and went to hear Dennett deliver the 2005 Harvard Review of Philosophy Lecture at Emerson Hall. Excellent turn-out – probably around 200. The subject was familar (to those in his class): “Philosophers, Zombies, and Feelings: The Illusions of ‘First-Person’ Approaches to Consciousness.”. The Q&A afterwards showed how uncomfortable some people were with computational models of mind; how strong the need for human exceptionalism – or perhaps essentialism – is.

I just submitted my first written coursework since – oh, I don’t know, 1974? – for my PhilOfMind course at Tufts. The format was a dialogue between three philosophers on a particular topic. The choices were limited: I couldn’t simply pick any philosophers and any topic. I chose Fodor, Millikan and Paul Churchland on mental representations.

I started off routinely – read the lit, capture what each participant had to say on the topic, figure out a sub-topical flow that I could use to organize their ideas. And then I read some exchanges (Fodor & Pylyshyn vs. Smolensky on systematicity in connectionist models) that I thought would be a great way of contrasting Fodor and Churchland. A priori language of thought, symbolic, and pristine on the one hand; distributed representations, activation vectors, fuzzy combinations on the other. There were only two problems: I couldn’t see a role for Millikan in the debate, and at least 80% of the dialogue would be fictitious: there wasn’t a lot of material I could directly quote.

Which to do? Safe but pedestrian, or edgy but speculative and incomplete? In the end, I played it safe – but I think I’ll write up the other one anyway, just for my own satisfaction.