Life and the World

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid.
Then life would begin.
At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.
So, treasure every moment that you have. And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time. And remember that time waits for no one!
So stop waiting until you finish school, until you go back to school, until you lose ten pounds, until you gain ten pounds, until you have kids, until your kids leave the house, until you start work, until you retire, until you get married, until you are divorced, until Friday night, until Sunday morning, until you get a new car or home, until your car or home is paid off, until spring, until summer, until fall, until winter, until you are off welfare, until the first or fifteenth, until your song comes on, until you've had a drink, until you've sobered up, until you die, until you are born again and decide that there is no better time than right now to be happy!
Happiness is a journey, not a destination."
- Father Alfred D' Souza

Just thought I'd share.

Not so much a philosophical posting this, but peripherally related.

Just a few weeks ago, one of the blogs that I read quite regularly posited the question: what superstitions do you hold? This was in response to his own little foible to do with Arsenal and pants (don't ask). I posted a reasonable and, I thought, average response along the lines that although I paid lip service to a couple of superstitions (e.g. touching wood) I did not believe them to be literal. The touching wood, for example, for me is more of an acknowledgement not to take things for granted. And generally I tend to think of supserstitions as life lessons in easily assimilateable form (although I have never worked out the symbolism of not breaking a mirror). Likewise with much of the contents of holy books (of any variety you care to choose, especially the old ones). The Bible (since that's the one I know most about) contains many a story which most middle of the road Christians would, I think, consider to be allegorical. Although there are some that will take things literally (e.g. creationists), I assumed that this was the arena of extremists only.

I was surprised, nay, chastened to discover how wrong I was. Person after person listed a personal foible which they seemed truly to 'believe' in. This frequently seemed to be a gut, instinct reaction - a function of emotion rather than reason (although, see discussion below on that subject - certainly not done with yet). The phrases 'I have to', 'I can't do anything if' or 'if I don't do this, then' were frequently used; I was frankly astonished by the level of compunction involved. That there were some true believers was not itself so surprising; what really got me was that this was everyone's response. I was absolutely the only person who said what I said.

So what is going on here? I confess to being mystified. I knew that many people say they have to wear their lucky trousers/tie/pants/feather boa (delete as applicable) under certain circumstances but I had thought that most of them did so knowing in some way that this was, in effect, their mind playing tricks on them - their wearing of the feather boa is not going to actually change anything except their state of mind, which might indeed change something, but because of their state of mind rather than the actual feather boa wearing. A stadium full of sporting fans all wearing their lucky undies could lift the atmosphere thus spurring their team on to victory, but that's not the same as really believing that the wearing of lucky pants waves a magic 'winning' wand. The placebo effect writ large, effectively.

Or may be not. These musing brought to mind the bizarre world of 'the hundredth monkey'. The story goes that a particular and now famous set of monkeys were being observed on a number of islands. One monkey learned to do something new and passed that knowledge onto some of the others who passed it on to others etc. By no means all the monkeys learned this trick but the numbers gradually crept up and then - bizzam! - a critical mass was reached. The skill suddenly jumped without apparent communication to (you guessed it) the hundredth monkey on a completely different island. Here is a rather fuller description, should you care to peruse:

http://pure-research.net/healing/light/monkey.html

So far so amazing. This was turned into a book and eventually a movement that spoke about the possibilities of morphogenetic fields and (gulp) a sort of species wide ESP. Looking around the internet there are any number of sites dedicated to the idea that if we all think nice thoughts we can somehow make it happen in some kind of Jungian collective unconscious way. Think about world peace and the people with the big red buttons might be affected by all that positive thinking, goes the argument.

Sounds nice doesn't it? And it brings up all kinds of questions about the nature of our reality and communication, knowledge etc etc. And it sprung to mind when I was thinking about all those lucky pants wearing sports fans spreading out waves of 'go team!' - could this luck thing really be real? Bit of a leap from a hundred monkeys doing one thing to one person's thought contributing to changing the universe, but a leap worth considering. Maybe I was the odd one out, I thought, and everyone else understands this subconsciously.

Unfortunately, it turns out (not to put too fine a point on it) to be bollocks:

http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC09/Myers.htm (for an interesting and well thought out view)

http://skepdic.com/monkey.html (for an altogether more hostile view)

at least as far as collective ESP goes. Although there are some interesting lessons to be drawn about cultural changes and passing of knowledge, there was in fact no evidence of a sudden, miraculous, physical contact-free communication of thought. And really, when you think about it, if it had actually come to pass as the legend says, there would be more attention being paid to it than just a few New Age websites (that also include, as an example, links to allow to purchase the no doubt eseential Crop Circle Year Book).

Which unfortunately takes me round in a rather pointless circle back to the original unanswered question: why do people believe? I have come to the only conclusion I can; that the placebo affect demands that you don't know it is a placebo. Or maybe not. I am stumped. Any thoughts?

Rather than reading my text book, as I should be, I am currently reading a potted commentary on Descartes' Meditations (the set text for Unit 3 of my AS Level) courtesy of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see handy link to the left). This is clearly the wrong way round to do it according to the course material, but I am following where my interest takes me at the moment and there it has lead.

I was puzzled to start with why so much focus is placed on Descartes in the study of philosophy. He has a famous maxim, to be sure, but this alone does not guarantee immortality, especially when, as far as I can tell, a great deal of his conclusions have been dissected, studied and, one way or another, found wanting. It felt, at the beginning at least, as if this was kind of a 'history of philosophy' section. The man clearly had such an enormous brain and tried so hard that no one wanted to write him out of the story of philosophy.

However, I am now starting to see that that is not the case and I find myself in the unexpected position of starting to quite like him. He really clearly made it his mission to work out new and original ideas and that has got to be worth something. He broke it down and started from fundamentals in the most fundamental way he could think of. And the history of philosophy almost is philosophy. In the arena of pure thought (however you want to define that), ideas have no sell-by date, one would think.

Yet there is almost an air of pity wafting around discussions of Descartes. And I know how incredibly modern-day arrogant that sounds, but bear with me. The biggest issue I have with Descartes so far is that he was purporting to start with no assumptions. Cartesian doubt was the name of the game. Assume nothing, start from the ground up and see what, if anything, can be said to be true. What can we really know if we cannot assume any level of knowledge, he is asking. But one of his stated purposes was to prove the existence of God. To have preferences as to your conclusions would be bad enough when one is presenting one's work as doubting everything, but surely one cannot say 'I am doubting everything, except this, which I will assume to be true because I know it be true and thus shall prove it to be true'. It seems to be the ultimate statement of everyone's favourite comeback; 'it just is, okay?'.

ObviouslyI am hardly the first person to say this; pretty much everything I have ever seen written about Descartes or everyone with whom I have talked about him make reference to this one outstanding flaw. It has even spawned a name - the Cartesian circle - roughly speaking, a proposition that can only be proved by assuming the truth of the thing you are trying to prove. And I am not, just for the record, saying that God does or does not exist, or that you can or cannot prove it, just that you cannot prove it by assuming the proof must exist.

Descartes, mind you, was writing at almost exactly the same time as Galileo was getting it in the neck for suggesting that the earth was not the centre of the universe, so one could understand a certain level of nervousness about daring to doubt the existence of God. He would not have been the first person to disguise his 'real' views for the sake of expendiency and a desire to stay under the radar of people with thumb screws. But there does not seem to be any evidence that Descartes was covering his arse with the Church in this way. He is described frequently as a 'devout Catholic' who wanted the Church on his side because he was on theirs.

So I must ask myself how to read Descartes given this background. I cannot wipe this from my mind, but I do not wish my reading of Descartes to be unfairly coloured by this knowledge. Can one be truly objective whilst being aware of such a flaw. How severable will this particular point be from the rest, or is it inextricably entwined? I'll let you know as soon as I do.

I was thinking very hard not so long ago about the perception of touch. Brushing your hand over skin seems like, and is, such a simple thing to do and yet it is the result of any number of complex processes in the brain and the body, leaving aside all the usual other guff about the possibility of life in the first place, evolution, you being conceived out of all the partying sperm, you surviving, growing up, not dying and eventually finding someone whose skin you want to touch and contemplate the act of so touching.

This has come out of my slowly advancing reading on epistomology - the theory of knowledge - the question of how we know what we know and whether in fact we know anything at all. How does the relationship between sensory perception, knowledge and the reality work, and what is this 'reality' thing anyway?

As I said, my reading is advancing slowly. I am not in any rush and I am enjoying reading a little and then letting my mind rather run away with itself. I can't say I have come up with anything particularly profound, but my brain has enjoyed the open spaces and is gambolling joyfully, which was really the point of this exercise in the first place. And my overexcited mind, darting as it was between various pillars and posts, alighted (as it is wont to do) on quantum physics. I don't know why it does that so frequently, since the concept drives me up the wall. Maybe I have just answered my own question.

But getting to the point (such as it is), I was contempating how 'touch' as we understand it doesn't really exist. The point of contact between my skin cells and, say, yours are not solid to solid as we understand it. Right down at the atomic level we are dealing with a dance of electrons, more space than solid, or possibly more waves than particles, with nuclear forces, weak and strong, bashing things around. Our electrons touch. Or rather, our forces touch in a way that we cannot possible truly visualise. What is going on down in the subatomic weeds can only accurately be imagined in mathematics, or perhaps in artistic terms, but it extrapolates out from a level of tiny such as we cannot truly conceive into electrical impulses that lead the brain into a merry dance that finally, extraordinarily and miraculously, resolve themselves into the sensation of soft skin and delicate, feathery hairs that we feel, not in our brain at all, but actually in our fingertips (a trick of consciousness that I've always been impressed by).

And 999,999,999,999,999.99999 times out of 1,000,000,000,000,000 or more we won't notice the nanosecond by nanosecond miracle of touch, because it happens many many times for each of those nanoseconds as do many other nanosecond miracles and because, honestly, who notices normality all that often? But just sometimes the miracle of touch comes alive inside one's head, and a good time is had by all.