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| Who wants to be philosophical in order to find meaning in life, when you can achieve the same effect through interpersonal relationships? You can meditate on Berkelian idealism in order to make the feelings of hollowness in your gut go away, or you can go see a movie with your friends. You'll probably have more fun doing the later. If you feel a vague yearning for something you can't name, you can plumb the mysteries of the universe or go out in search of someone pretty to have sex with. The later will be a better distraction, even if you don't succeede.
I guess my retort to the above paragraph is to say that the above is a false dichotomy: we don't have "meaning-drives" the way we have sexual libidos - we don't all have some set level of meaningfulness we need to experience each day in order to avoid existential angst. Rather, I think meaning has more to do with sustaining our memories and promoting goal-directed behavior.
So this is my theory: those things which are meaningful to us we remember well, and those activities that feel meaningful to us we have a tendency to continue doing because the term "meaningful" as applied to experiences and activities just reflects a particular kind of preference. Human beings are programmed to have these preferences - for preserving certain memories at the expense of others, and sustaining certain activities at the expense of others - because it gives them an evolutionary advantage.
Thus philosophizing might be a symptom of a brain attempting to reset some of its preferences. It might do this in response to stress, or it might just be programmed to go through episodes of preference resetting at various points in life. Most people seem to have a period when they are susceptible to having their preferences reset in adolescence, and men have a susceptibility to another episode halfway through their lives. You can imagine how these times might be ideal for a person to change behaviors - sexual maturity is an excellent time to become restless, as this increases the chances of mating with a non-relative. restlessness in mid-life encourages a male to find a new mate after his first set of children have matured.
Between the periods of preference resetting, a person should be consistent in the kinds of activities and experiences he finds meaningful. The experience of meaning, and its concommitant memory and stamina boosting properties should shape a person's life choices to give him the kind of preference consistency needed to appear to other members of society as someone stable enough to be safe to mate with, do business with, etc.
Organisms that go through periods where they search for new preferences could well have a powerful evolutionary advantage over organisms that don't. The new preferences could lead to entirely different, potentially more fruitful, lives. But the preference sets have to survive in order to be advantageous. The organisms that go through philosophical episodes can't be having them all the time, or they won't be any good for anything.
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| In his 1996 book "Kinds of Minds" philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that there are at least four interestingly different kinds of creatures. The kinds range from "Darwinian creatures" - mindless self-replicating organisms like bacteria and fungi - which come packaged with certain behavioral programing but mostly adapt only at the species level through evolutionary processes, "Skinnerian creatures" which can minimally adapt their behaviors to their enviroment through trial-and-error, "Popperian creatures" which choose from a range of behaviors based on simulations of possible outcomes, and "Gregorian creatures" which can design simulations from information gathered through social-linguistic mediums (ie. they talk to each other) as well as from their first-person experiences.
Dennett believes that somewhere between the Popperian and Gregorian level of sophistication creatures attain consciousness by systematically re-processing some of their internal cognitive activity as if it were external stimuli. According to Dennett, when a creature can evaluate the success or failure of its past behaviors reckoning internal properties among the potential candidates for re-evaluation, then the creature qualifies as "conscious." While I think that Dennett's language - juxtposing pseudo-scientific jargon with anthrocentric terminology glosses over the question of whether thinking, evaluating, and deciding can be analyzed into computational processes. I don't happen to have any more concrete or lucid insights into what consciousness might be myself, so I can't complain too much.
Dennett also delves into bioethics, suggesting that while there is no discrete or supernatural difference between humans and animals, that humans may deserve more moral consideration than animals because the self-reflective nature of our nervous system causes us to experience negative stimuli as effronts to our personal identity, a dubious idea which he flushes out in a brief segway on the relationship between child-abuse and split personality disorder.
I don't care much for ethics, but I find Dennett's position on consciousness intriguing so I recommend this book. My only real complaint is that Dennett doesn't defend his views systematically for a philosopher, and he doesn't develop his ideas with enough detail to make for a cognitive scientist. But Dennett apparently wrote this book with a wider audience in mind, and as a piece of philosophy aimed at dispersing the socially significant aspects of Dennett's philosophy of mind to the general public, it serves it's purpose. This is something you could listen to on your ipod while you drive (which is what I did).
I can only really compare Dennett's theory-of-mind to Sellars. Sellars believed that only social beings can have mental states, because "mind-talk" is an abstraction from talk about behavior. For Sellars, mental words only have meaning because they are accepted as explanations for behavior by other members of the language. Dennett is less interested in the semantic question of what makes mentalistic concepts meaningful and more interested in whether mentalistic concepts correspond to any other kind of phenomena in the universe. His analysis - that distinct kinds of mentalistic phenomena paralell distinct kinds of information processing structures is ultimately more falsifiable and potentially useful than Sellars' theory. This makes Dennett better to read than Sellars for people who look at the mind problem from the standpoint "how do we make intelligent-acting machines?" rather than the solipistic standpoint "how do I know that other people have thoughts and feelings?"
On the other hand, I feel like Douglas Hofstadter beat Denet to his ideas in his book "Godel, Escher, Bach" I hear that Hofstadter wrote a book on philosophy of mind too, and I'm vaguely interested in reading that. | | |
| I really enjoyed Ayn Rand's first novel, "We The Living," which is set in Leninist Russia. I am a fan of Rand's novels because of her romantic and existentialist bent - her characters are heroic figures, whose heroism is derived from their own personal goals and ambitions - her vision of the world is one in which an individual's own aspirations are the highest aspirations there are.
"We The Living" has something unique to offer people interested in Ayn Rand, because the characters are significantly more handicapped and less superhuman than those of "Atlas Shrugged." The story takes place in Russia just after the Bolshevik Revolution. The protagonist, Kira is an aspiring engineer whose career plans are thwarted when the communists confiscate her family's estate, bars her family from finding work, and ejects the children from school. The story revolves around the ever-worsening problems they, their daughter, and her lover face - food shortages, illness, unemployment, and spirit-choking bureacracy.
Rand once said that she wrote this novel in order to tell people what communist Russia was like (she escaped from it as a child), and its interesting in that right - you get a better sense of how dismal Russia's state-controled economy was, some insights into how Lenin's NEP (New Economic Policy) worked and a sense of the all-pervasiveness of the State under Soviet communism.
However, the book is less a novelization of Soviet Russia than it is an autodidactic story. Kira does a lot of things that are dangerous, unpleasant, illegal and socially unconscientable, but she maintains her own code of moral conduct. That code does not include fidelity - Kira doesn't experience much internal turmoil when she starts an ilicit affair with a communist agent in order to obtain favors to keep the man she loves out of the communist's hands. Rand seems to setup the trianglular relationship in order to give an example of a situation where a person with a strong sense of individual purpose might act remarkably differently from someone whose values are derived from the cultural norms around them.
This is one of the biggest problems most people profess to have with Rand - they think the characters in her novels, as embodiements of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, are unrealistic. I agree with the observation but I don't think it is a real good criticism of Rand. She was a self-proclaimed "romantic" - the people in her stories are idealizations. Kira is an example of the kind of person Ayn Rand wants us to be - someone who is unflinching in their pursuit of our goals and holds uncompromising values.
One thing that I think Ayn Rand does well but doesn't get credit for - is that she has compelling insights into the psychology of virtue. Rand draws a link between a person's intellectual capabilities and moral character. In her novels, the morally strong are physically strong, swift, deft, and quick-witted. Everything they do, they do well, and their moral acumen is depicted as if ethical behavior is a skill, of the same kind as archery and piano-playing, but on a higher order. This theme is found in Aristotle's Nicomachian Ethics, but Rand makes it less trivial. It stands to reason, that a person who has a wide-variety of skills, will be more confident, and more likely to stick to their principles in times of crisis. And when people fail to stick to their principles, the consequences are practical - they lose the spiritual vitality needed to endure hardship.
Unfortunately, the book suffers from Ayn Rand's stilted writing style - she uses too many adjectives, and she seems obsessed with imagery involving light and shadow. I wouldn't recommend it as an entertaining read. But, if you're interesting in getting a better idea of Ayn Rand, then its worth taking a look at. | | |
| Here it is:
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?"
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Happy Good Friday! | | |
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According to this site my personal day of death is: Monday, July 24, 2062.
It's a good thing the world is going to end on December 22nd 2012, eh? | | |
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