Logic is not everything.
The idea of true or false pays homage to our biases
– as if contradiction has the power to destroy a fact.
And logical conclusions serve our pre-logical presumptions
whilst the certainties of logic blind us to our blindness.
For it is logic alone that demands of reality
that it should be logical to be realistic.
But nothing exists alone.
Mike Laidler
Philosophy is the idea that carries the present into the future, and it stays alive by being re-cast in the mind that is the future’s future. But it is the way of language, not philosophy, to further itself in the endless dissection of what has been said. For no analysis of language has uncovered the real world. Also, no record of things said lets us know what to say next. Nor is our recognition of the past masters sufficient to show us what is to come.
Mike Laidler
Will systematic organ replacement do the job? Or even a head transplant? Do we need to remain biological, or could synthetic body parts take over? Setting aside the ‘hardware’ questions, would it be sufficient to transfer the memory into a suitable receptor – real or artificial? Ultimately, could we liberate ourselves from our physical encumbrances? Might this constitute some form of rebirth – or should we accept our lot and patiently await the redemptive intervention of an insuperable supernatural presence? In any case, is it immoral to cheat death? Is it not ethically appropriate to strive for self-improvement, both physical and mental and isn’t modern technology a benign means to a desirable end?
But do these scenarios use up all the options? Are we definable by our embodiments? If not, by what extra-bodily capacity are we able to recognise the difference? And isn’t our brand of intentional action something alien to nature? Also, doesn’t consciousness introduce a real difference that is neither evident in the stark biology nor definable by what we happen to be conscious of? Likewise, what if there is more to us than a life we can call our own? Then what if we are more than a personality forged by circumstance – because personal being transcends our individuality and we retain the flexibility to be more than we can become in any number of biological lives?
Mike Laidler
My left leg and a light bulb don’t equal two of anything even though one plus one surely equals two – except there is always scope for an active imagination to find a connection. Indeed no branch of mathematics is without its imaginative dimension – especially when we take a mathematical equation to stand for an equalisation of differences, so to prove that mathematics not only shows how the universe works, it also shows how it is. However, reality is bigger than our explanations, which is why an active imagination remains an essential requirement for doing science. And it takes an active imagination to say that all things are really one thing because the differences disappear at atomic levels.
Therefore, whilst it is true that an elephant equals a feather because their differences disappear when comparing their behaviour under gravity, nevertheless such convergences in reality have nothing to tell us about the emergent divergences – whereby realities come to differ from one another. Meanwhile, our scientific equations rely on differences that can be equated. Yet even at an elementary level there remains a functional difference between energy and matter, otherwise we would have no basis to start looking for their equivalence. And despite all our proofs there are other phenomenal differences that pertain – because life is an unnecessary divergence within material reality, and consciousness marks a fundamental departure of a different sort, whilst the brain provides only secondary evidence of the existence of a thought.
Mike Laidler
Paradoxically, no one can convince themselves that there is no such thing as free-will without taking a position that involves an act of will. Likewise, no experience can deliver a meaning or truth without an act of recognition.
So we cannot meaningfully say there is no meaning in the world without taking a position in meaning from which to make the observation. Also, there is no denying the existence of truth without appealing to the manifest truth of the denial.
Yet what do we know except that we believe it to be so? Then belief becomes the paradoxical gatekeeper of our reasons – the tacit trickster that can divert our attention and confound all recognition by feeding upon itself – especially when we believe that the facts are speaking for themselves or when we allow ourselves to think that we are entitled to believe what we want.
Mike Laidler
What a wonder of nature is the human kind
What a form of being
How broad in outlook
Though how abject in insight
Yet we deign to take the measure of it all
by the yardstick of our understanding
And explain it – within the limits we bestow
on knowledge set to language.
Mike Laidler
Typically, there is more to a scientific fact than meets the eye and that extra something is the scientific theory. Of course, all theories begin as speculative and sometimes emotive interpretations of observation. But no fact becomes ‘a fact of science’ unless it is wrapped up in a theory. And as it happens, there is nothing more theoretical than our attempts to explain the ‘beginning of the universe’.
Scientists are firstly human beings who relish peer support and it is only natural for them to defend the validity of their ‘pet’ theories by citing the extent of their confirmation. But theories remain theoretical whilst the principle job of the scientist is, in fact, to seek disconfirmation – though it is not uncommon to see ‘dispassionate scientists’ becoming passionately attached to ‘their’ favoured theories.
For instance, a high-level dispute has recently broken out over the validity of the dominant theory of ‘The Big Bang and inflation’ as the explanation of the beginning of the universe. Suffice it to say that scientific theories rise to dominance on the back of the amount of support they receive, especially when they are confirmed by observation. But the observable facts are always open to revision and according to the late Karl Popper, who remains a respected authority on this topic, the weight of evidence is no guarantor of the truth.
In addition, this fracas has all the elements of a classic scientific dispute of the type predicted by the late Thomas Kuhn in his seminal book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The proponents of the dominant theory of inflation are acting as though their take on the facts has the status of a ‘paradigm’ – in short, it overrules any facts to the contrary and in so doing stands for an accord that preserves its version of ‘normal science’ as the official view of reality.
But science depends on its revolutionaries – the problem being that it’s all theory at the end of the day; and the speculation remains fallible, especially when the theory is so broad-based in its ambitions as to claim the status of a ‘theory of everything’.
Mike Laidler
Further Reading: Hannah Osborne’s article on 13.5.17: ‘Hawking Pens Angry Letter about How the Universe Began’ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.techtimes.com/amp/articles/207265/20170515/stephen-hawking-32-other-scientists-pen-furious-letter-about-origin-of-universe-theory.htm
Here we are and here we stay.
But what is this vision of the here?
Our comings and goings are mere episodes in a life we feign to understand.
Our explanations are theories built on a foundation built for us.
We are ever other than everything we identify as the cause of our being.
We cannot look upon ourselves without creating a separation between seer and the seen.
We are ghosts amidst a world that knows nothing of our existence.
And we have lost the feel for that difference
– of the knowledge that remains more than any fact we can make of it
– of a place in being beyond any idea we can lend to ourselves.
Mike Laidler
Myths exist to ‘explain the inexplicable’, and insofar as we believe that existence is potentially explicable we are supporting an epic myth – namely that we can define the greater fact of existence from a lesser perspective that subsists as a part of it.
Ultimately, there is a paradox at the heart of all explanation which leaves us with two strands of logic appertaining to things as they are and are not: observable and unobservable, definitive and indefinite, one thing and another – explicable and inexplicable.
The ancients knew of this as the paradox of change: that it is logically possible to explain why Achilles cannot beat a tortoise in a race, or how an arrow cannot move through the air, or that we cannot step into the same river twice.
As things currently stand, we explain the process of change as a transition from what was to what is, because this is the observable component of the reality. But the flow of change is not something we can capture analytically.
So it is because we know we exist biologically that we say biology is the cause of our existence, but it doesn’t explain the ‘biological changes’ that place us in the elevated state of being able to observe biology – to wrestle with the fact that biology is and is not explaining itself.
Mike Laidler
We are a part of a universe that is ‘everything’ and from which we ‘inherit’ all our characteristics, yet it doesn’t appear to be all that we are because, unlike us, its nature isn’t characterised by thinking sensibilities.
Undeniably, we are a part of something bigger than us, but neither the evidence nor our reasoning is sufficient to resolve the conundrum that ‘nature’ does and does not include those thinking sensibilities – that the resultant ‘everything’ turns out to be more than its beginnings.
Perhaps ‘the nature’ we take to be ‘the starting point’ of existence is, in fact, a plurality of natures, which is why our observations of causality don’t give us all the answers we so willingly ascribe to it – especially when there happens to be so much more to the nature of the effect than we can find in the cause.
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 