Philosophy

Candles in the dark

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Certainty is a candle that shines in a darkness of its making.

Normality is an artificial measure of reality calibrated by the fact of what we find ourselves doing.

Ignorance is the fact of what we don’t know created of what we choose to know.

Answers are the prescription narcotics of a thorough education.

AI was invented long before the computer – through our ambitions to define intelligence as IQ.

We are apt to forget that a simulation, which is just like the real thing, is still a simulation.

Just as logic offers no antidote to madness, so science contains no cure for bad philosophy.

If the quantum world is real, it does and doesn’t follow that the real world is quantum.

‘All pathways lead to physics’ so long as we keep on walking backwards – down the chain of being.

We look upon a universe that is more than us only to see everywhere the evidence for what is obviously missing.

There is a world of difference between an objective fact and our knowledge of it.

We see as we believe, believing we see as we see.

Equality is the image of a sameness made from the perception of a difference.

Politics is a balance of powers which pivots upon how much unfairness can be tolerated in the name of necessity.

Contradiction is a fact of life we are happy to accept so long as we can avoid being caught in the act.

Mike Laidler

The advent of Artificial Intelligence

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What are we waiting for? Is it not here already? Or is it not yet powerful enough to match our expectations? But what do we expect – programmes for perception, language, memory, cognition, action and intention – plus a socio-emotive awareness? So what has been achieved to date? Has the technology managed to mimic the full range of abilities of an insect, fish or bird – or will it all follow naturally from the development of a hyper-intellect? Then, if AI can simulate these motivated abilities, and duplicate the purposive dynamic that gives intelligence its thoughtful meaningful aura, will this automatically settle another hypothesis yet to be proved – that life’s ‘vital spark’ may also be replicated as a virtual cog in an algorithmically-driven machine?

Mike Laidler

Subject to oneself

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Is consciousness an illusion generated by the brain?  But how would we know it without the overview that enables our recognition?  So consciousness ‘looks on’.  And there can be no scientific discoveries without a sentient faculty of realisation.  Hence the dawning of awareness heralds a new kind of reality in which facts become identified as perceptual objects.  Likewise, self-awareness marks a new kind of realisation – evocative of ‘a self’ as the object of its own perception.

However, reality is not necessarily limited to that which is framed by perception.  And there is something odd about the nature of self-discovery because it involves the perception of facts that had hitherto escaped recognition – even when the recognisable element of such facts obtains imaginatively of the subjective realisations of insight.  Then what of science’s embrace of an ‘objective reality’ of things natural – is it inclusive enough to show that scientific knowledge represents nature’s insight into itself?

Mike Laidler

As if in fact

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Here we are.  It’s a fact, except our knowledge of the ‘here’ and the ‘we’ is incomplete and compromised by our understandings of the ‘isness’ of it all – as is, indeed, our understanding of the ‘isness’ of understanding.   In fact, we know precious little, but that’s not how we play the game of knowing.  And it is a game insofar as we interpret ‘self and reality’ using theories borrowed from others appointed to do the understanding for us.

So what does knowing that we live in ‘this universe’ tell us about ‘who or what we are’ or even ‘what we are about’?  The first mistake is to believe that knowledge tells us anything – as if there were two sides to it which we can understand as ‘the facts’ conveying a message.  But we only think about it that way because that’s how we convey ‘the facts’ to one another – as messages to be understood.

And the message we receive is that reality must be ‘out there’ in the nature of the universe – as if our nature is reducible to that nature – as if objectivity is more than a way of looking because it is also a fact of existence in which objects are paramount – as if we might understand this ‘for ourselves’ once we defer our understandings to those who say that they are more ‘conversant with the facts’.

Mike Laidler

Sceptic or cynic?

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If a sceptic can be seen as a liberal thinker, a challenging doubter and a seeker after truth, then the cynic is something else: a contemptuously abrasive, dismissive and pessimistic type – a wanton disrupter, even an extremist who poses a threat to civilised life – a troublesome pariah who would shun the very truth for the sake of it.  Not surprisingly, in our ‘enlightened times’, hardly anyone wants to regard themselves as a cynic or be characterised as such.  Even the label ‘mildly cynical’ carries pejorative overtones now that we have alienated the notion, debunked its respectability and popularised forms of post-cynicism through our modern brandings of virtue, truth, justice, authority, civility and tolerance.  However, the lip service paid to ‘the right thing to do’ may conceal a Freudianesque veneer of righteous indignation –‘noble’ prejudices against the incursion of ‘inferiorities’. In sum, scepticism is seen as acceptably productive, progressive and illuminating, whereas cynicism ‘is’ unacceptably morose, dogmatic and subversive; but there is a fallacy behind these stereotypes that is hidden away within the ‘dark horses’ of human nature.

Apparently it’s fitting to confront cynicism with cynicism, whereas being sceptical about scepticism smacks of a counter-productive contradiction.  Perhaps the inverted cynicism – the negative stereotyping and demonisation – serves to burnish our tarnished virtue.  Yet, historically, the cynics were seekers after truth and virtue – ‘God’s’ watchdogs who stood as vanguards against the hubris of human pretentiousness.  But now it’s valid to see ourselves as ‘OK alone’, complete in our self-appointed nature as ‘Homo sapiens’.  So reason, once ‘a slave of the passions’, is now a liberator, enabling us to test the truth with logic, even to bring the unconscious mind into line and raise us to the authority of ‘the Gods’ – because the intellect is supreme and logic is infallible.  But this gives rise to the fallacy that all is subject to the higher truths of logic, which defy contradiction – so rendering any dissent illogical and a futile throwback to more archaic now ‘displaced philosophies’ that are riddled with personal points of view, such as the uncivil cynic might indulge in for the sake of being noticed.

Mike Laidler

The aura of the physical

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As every student of physics learns, ‘solid’ matter is not solid.  So they ‘discover’ a fact that is counter-intuitive; yet they still understand it on the basis of naïve experience – that is, they rely on the concept of solid in order to appreciate its opposite.  In other words, understandings of fact remain rooted in our subjective realisations which build a knowledge of the world and ourselves upon the capacity for recognition.  In short, there is no knowing without its subjective content.  And whilst we can appreciate that reality is bigger than our concepts, we have no notion of the real, the right or the true that is ‘discoverable’ without some reference to those intuitive sensibilities.  How else might we recognise a truth for ourselves?  Unfortunately, a mutual distrust lingers between scientists and proponents of common sense over the identification of ‘objective facts’ which allow for the recognition of things that are ‘meant to be’ independent of what we think.

Actually, the physical sciences don’t replace common sense or vice versa – they are mutually complimentary – and no pragmatic physicist or engineer behaves as though the world at large can’t be solid, or functionally flat.  In fact, ‘behavioural phenomena’ matter at all levels – as constituents of diverse realities from the quantum and beyond.  The fact is, there is more to reality than a single version – the world is and is not solid etc.  Likewise, there is more to the ‘world at large’ than the ‘characteristic’ properties of the physical, especially when they turn uncharacteristically subjective and reflective.  Thus objects ‘do science’ but not like scientists do it.  Then, in order to bridge the gap, scientists look upon the fact of conscious experience retrospectively as an effect that is wholly identifiable with its physical causes – as if physics encounters itself in the ‘psychoplasm’ of the brain – as if to cancel out any duality in the event – as if dualities are unnatural.

Mike Laidler

 

A question of stature

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What does it mean to exist?  What is our place in existence?  What makes nature ‘necessarily so’, perceptible, or an ‘it’?  What makes us think that we can capture it in our concepts any more than we can lay claims upon the world through the possession of bodies?  What if it is all transitory and our temporary presence is but a faint speck in the ‘cosmic panoply’ – an integration of ‘material’ and ‘mental’ dimensions in which notions of ‘our time’ and ‘our experiences’ furnish vain illusions of self-importance?

However, just as time extends space and vice versa, so the various perceptible dimensions – such as energy, matter, life, consciousness and thought – may be seen to co-exist ‘in nature’ as an extended reality that is simultaneously one thing and another.  Hence we cannot specify ‘being’ in terms of the way things are or were, nor ourselves for that matter, any more than we can know the extent of the mind in terms of our contemporary thinking – since there is more to existence than we can find ‘in existence’.

Mike Laidler

Self-consciousness

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Think about it – a cause of consciousness.  What does it mean?  Does it mean that the cause is operative in the identification of itself?  Or does it mean that the cause and effect work in some kind of relationship brought about by a difference occasioning an interaction?

But how are we to identify a difference without a point of comparison that is particular to the nature of consciousness?   And how can the observation of parallel changes in the operations of consciousness and its physical support processes prove sufficient to explain any differences or show that they are one and the same thing?

Mike Laidler

What is reality?

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Scientifically speaking, the lesser reality is the greater – assuming that an underworld of physical processes will provide a ‘theory of everything’.  But that ‘everything’ is not everything – because experience reveals that a universe which subsists beneath the threshold of self-perception is not the whole thing.  However, experience might be confined to a world of its own with no inkling of a ‘bigger picture’ beyond the images that happen to hold our attention.

On the other hand, whatever else reality may or may not be, we can know without further ado that it includes the perception of ourselves thinking.  And if our capacity for reflection is the thing that distinguishes our thinking, albeit in the absence of a definitive knowledge of anything else, then at least we can know that thinking exists as a feature of the way things are, though the wider reality may not be tied to the way we think about it.

Even so, this would be sufficient to tell us that we inhabit a sentient reality, as augmented by a power to be, which we can know but incompletely by its instantiation in the vagaries of our understandings.  And we can know as much because of the reflective experience of the vagaries of our understandings.  Then again, even if we could know everything in terms of ‘something else’ identifiable as the source, we would still need to ask ourselves: have we really identified the whole, or explained the something else?

Mike Laidler

Hidden thresholds: The subtle fact of change

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Change presents the eye with a paradox – because things can be seen to change without changing – because the flow of change reveals nothing of the step to come – because a fact may be seen as one thing and another.  Consequently, change raises more questions than answers.  Some famous examples from antiquity include the paradoxes of Theseus’ ship and the heap: A heap of grains can be reduced to nothing by removing one grain at a time, but there is no definite point of change – unless one grain constitutes a heap.  The paradox of the ship is more challenging: by systematically replacing every piece of the original it ceases to be the same ship, and yet it is.  In sum, these puzzles carry an enduring message because they point to a fundamental problem of explanation that we would rather not think about – that there is more to change than its observable causes.

Shifting to the modern era, we see the same problem redefined.  Science shows us that the universe is constituted of sub-atomic particles – a fact that includes ourselves – but there is no point at which we can see those particles becoming conscious.  Indeed we do not see consciousness as a feature of the physical world until we rely upon the end result as a means of observing a world that is constituted of nothing but physical processes.  So we observe the change as an effect that may be regarded for the sake of explanation as a variation on what is – which means that things do yet do not really change.  Either way, the putative cause, namely the changing configuration of physical processes, doesn’t actually explain the untypical nature of the result – even though, logically, it must if there is no other cause to be found.

Mike Laidler