The Anti-Philosopher Philosophy

I'll be doing a series of postings about my growing hostility towards the concepts created by many philosophers over the millenia.
I'll take issue with a number of words [including consciousness, rational, immoral, justice, fairness, freedom, subjective, reality, belief] and use my scorn for these words to build a larger case against the practitioners of various philosophical traditions, the Western analytic one being that with which I am most familiar.
The aforementioned words are all exceptionally vague 'suitcase' words, as are their duals; unconscious, irrational, moral, unjust etc. They are supposed to refer to a lot but ultimately lead us in to blind alleys.

Take the word consciousness - we are not 'conscious', there is no single, first-person experience. Consciousness is only mysterious if you fail to realise that it refers to a lot of different things which are simultaneously occurring all of which we have (confusingly, for serious thinkers, but usefully, for laymen) called consciousness. The whole idea of their being a single Experiencer inside our brains which is conscious is a throwback to the idea of a soul, and indeed, the masses aren't able to think beyond simple concepts like the soul or consciousness. If we examine the concept of consciousness it is clear why the concept of soul was simple, irreducible, and shrouded in mystery, eternally so; and yet it seemed like an indispensable concept. However, if we are to be smart about it, we realise that there is no single element which experiences the irreducible sensation of redness, or the irreducible smell of garlic. There is no singular entity which writes a novel, has a child, lives life, though we may name it. There is no Me and no You...except for a conceptual Me, and the concept of there being a single Me or You breaks down under closer examination. Just like there are instruments which can print on a piece of paper that it detects red light incoming, our brain is [note that I'm using a metaphor here, not a simile!!] simply thousands of serial and parallel instruments for detecting light, instruments for talking, instruments for pumping blood, instruments for self-repair. Like all other machines, we're simply a bunch of inputs and outputs with much computation and digestion in between. What you could call "I" is a compound of instruments, parts of machines which can perform a variety of functions from self-reporting errors (it could be emotional issues, or stomach pains) to writing poetry and solving mathematical problems. The 'first-person experience' is a nonsense concept if taken seriously, and a useful communicative tool if understood properly. The dualism here is conscious vs non-conscious, and people who think that creatures are either conscious or nonconscious must of course struggle with the question of whether or not a spider is conscious. Those who then propose that consciousness comes in varying degrees have understood the situation slightly better, but have failed to realise that this demonstrates that consciousness simply refers to the simultaneous operation of many processes, and different machines have different levels of complexity. It is not the case that consciousness is a good, unfairly derided concept, which isn't invalidated by the grey areas at the periphery of its applicability, for instance, to a spider. It is that consciousness is a poor concept, which is better replaced by understanding the components of this concept, and realising that some of the components of what we call consciousness are present in some machines, and not in others. There is no mystery to consciousness, none whatsoever! The only problem here is the inability of a large number of people to think and speak of themselves as machines, to understand how they are constructed, and to have some knowledge of what different parts of their bodies, especially their brains, do. When you learn to, and practise, understanding yourself as a machine, there is absolutely no confusion whatsoever left within the concept of consciousness. Philosophers run in to the same problems that anyone from any discipline does if they take too seriously the concepts that they have created. People somehow stunningly forget a very basic truth about language; we attempt to segment the world in to discrete packages, that is, by naming things. That's all well and good, it is essential for communication and for practical living; however, it introduces an essential inaccuracy - the world is continuous and not composed of categories, nor does nature appear to operate with respect to the categories we have chosen. This presents a myriad of difficulties, but it is amusing that therefore people should be truly troubled about whether or not something belongs within one category or the other and quibble endlessly about it. This inaccuracy isn't so evident provided that we stick to basic categories. Or of course, as scientists do, we can form specialist clubs of people who use and understand technical categories, which can be adapted over time. This necessitates that others will not understand the concept, and they will continue to use other, older words, which are less successful in communicating certain things. There's little confusion over what is a tree, but more about what is a reptile, and more about what is a theory. Nobody is suggesting that we should stop naming things, however, one has to be able to stand back and be able to judge how useful a concept is, and it is scientists' disapproval of words like consciousness which gives rise to their eventual split from philosophy.

I

This post is about why I've become disillusioned with Philosophy generally. I've got major issues with its approach as a discipline. With each of its branches. Philosophy might always be around...and doing it was rewarding for me; it helped me to analyse statements, clarifying my thoughts tremendously. And I do "love knowledge". But now I'm more interested in science, onto whose turf Philosophy illegitimately wanders.
I often wondered why philosophy books appeared in the same section as religious books. I thought it was because both tried to answer similar questions, albeit differently and often with mutual suspicion and intolerance, much like those between competing religions. I no longer see as great a distinction between their methodologies and habits, and I see science as something else entirely to philosophy and religion.
I don't consider it an accident that so many people, infant and adult alike, ask themselves these eternal questions at some point, but many adults find that there are problems with these eternal questions. Rarely do I see philosophers question their various methodologies as often or as seriously as I see them arguing over qualia, ethics, art, empiricism or determinism.

Firstly there was my recognition of the complete failure of philosophers to make sense of the way that the world works. This failure is shared with each and every religion. Over the millennia, only recently-developed scientific methods have added to the store of human knowledge and predictive power. Philosophers, like religious people should take this failure of their discipline/ideology/religion to discover facts about how the world works enormously seriously. Philosophers should be wondering why they're making no more progress on their eternal questions about the universe and the experience of life through their metaphysical arguments than religious people did for countless blood-soaked millenia. Or why they've spectacularly failed to create values out of thin air and alter human behaviour, as religion has failed to ground ethics in the Will or nature of God, and has failed to change human behaviour. Philosophers; now turn your attention to your inability to uniformly validate the scientific-mathematical method as the only successful route towards understanding nature.

What ultimately makes philosophy powerless is that philosophers courageously but futilely attempt to use language techniques alone (mostly populated by scientifically outdated concepts and other archaic words) to wrestle with their eternal questions. They do not experiment or observe nature uniformly - like religious people, they're biased towards using intuitively appealing, often introspective approaches cloaked up within a quasi-logical framework, legitimised by convenient but ancient natural language terms. Conceptual confusion abounds in philosophical discourse. The greatest symptom of the problem of using natural language is evident in Descartes' Error, or dualism, from which Western Philosophy has been suffering for a long time. Abandoning it would merely be acknowledging the superiority of the empirical approach. This tendency of the human brain, infused with language, to think using the word "I", has been one of the major sources of confusion over the years, which have led philosophers astray in so many of their questions. Using such a word with such obvious connections to the false notion of a soul, it is not surprising that philosophers scratch around in conceptual confusion. Witness the philosophical debates about free will, ethics, art the like and you see the problem with "I". Read about memetics and you start to see the general scope and power of evolutionary theory and its analogues first to kill the concept of God and then the idea of the soul, and then the human "mind", leaving only the brain. Always at the cutting edge of science, we see reductionist thinking.
Another good step would be to recognise that just as the physical difference between colours of the rainbow are merely different wavelengths and not completely different things (radically different colours, as we perceive them) (and we use our sensory systems to feel, so philosophy is no better equipped to study our phenomenal experiences than are any other disciplines), there is no real distinction between mind and body. The movement of our bodies affects our thinking!! For example, when rotating an object mentally, we do it worse if we're rotating our hand in the opposite direction to when we do it while rotating our hand in the same direction to which we're mentally rotating the object. The act of thinking about an object rotating, which occurs mostly in the visual thought area, is affected by inputs from the sensor-motor cortex which reports about hand movements. Similarly, self control is object control "The boxer picked himself up from the canvas". Self-control is being in one's normal location: "I'm besides myself with anger". Causing the self to act is the forced movement of an object "You're pushing yourself too hard", and self-control is having the self together as a container "She's falling to pieces". Self is an essence that is a found object'"He's trying to find himself in India". Even the Declaration of Independence in the United States invokes our understanding of the Newtonian independence of free bodies. It is no accident that we talk like this. Right from our births, our thoughts are dependent on the use and perception of our whole body. Those who've had fewer sensory systems eg the blind from birth think quite differently. Yes, our visual systems, like our sense of smell, affect our thoughts in many different ways! So no brain-in-a-vat could ever think like a brain inextricably attached to a body like ours could.There are no disembodied minds, no independent, questioning souls, no "I's", unless you are as much your body as you are your mind. And as for "consciousness", whatever this is supposed to be seems to be the tiny, fleeting recollection of whatever happened in the last 500ms, a fragment of your mind's powers to analyse other people briefly turning to analysing themselves, and entering and cycling around in the short term memory and other parts.

The English language needs to adapt to use as much scientific terminology as best it can or the knowledge generated by English-speaking peoples will slow, and their works will fade in to irrelevancy faster without the aid of new scientific words. Why do we not read Ancient English books anymore? [Well, some people read Bronte, fewer read Milton, and fewer still read 5th-century literature..]. Why do English monolinguals not read Modern French books? Same answer.We don't read things if....insert a million reasons OR If we cannot understand the author. Which is the case for Modern French and Ye Olde English books, as Modern French and Old English are both different languages to English. Sure, modern speakers of English can understand some Old English, but modern speakers of English can also understand some French through their English vocabulary alone...Even if ancient England did more strongly resemble the world that we live in today (which couldn't occur in any real sense without an accompanying change in the vocabulary used by its citizens), the book wouldn't be intelligible to us...because Old English people speak a different language...because the world has changed and language is used to communicate things, many of which are about the world [we also talk about things which aren't part of the world, such as Santa Claus and God]. I find it depressing that the best authors of today will likely be practically unintelligible to readers in the 23rd century, and not so at all to those later. Likewise, words like "kidney" will cease to mean anything concrete after humans have evolved different kidneys thousands of years down the track. So we should reduce knowledge wherever possible and practical to more basic terms. That is, Chemistry books of today will be of more use to doctors of the next century than will Biology books. And physics books will be even more 'timeless' than Chemistry books because of their superior generality.
SO WHAT FILLS THE VACUUM WHEN WE STOP DOING PHILOSOPHY?
- Epistemology could somewhat be replaced by theories and empirical studies of perception, linguistic theory and anthropology (that is, they'd each contribute in the "epistemological vacuum" that would follow)
- Ethics could somewhat be replaced by social and political sciences like psychology as well as by Economics
- Metaphysics simply will collapse on its arse; we have physics, chemistry, biology, history and the like
- Aesthetics; hmm. Art, Music, Dance, Drama, literary theories

******
I don't exist. I'm not conscious! Sometimes, "I" could be hungry, at other times "I think that X", at other times, "I'm absent", or tired, or happy, depressed, or 'conscious', or asleep, or funny. The word "I" has stopped making sense to me and I often actually get confused when I use the word now. Although not here. "I'm hungry" seems to make more sense nowadays compared to "I like X, Y, and Z" or, worse, "I like the idea that X, Y, or Z". "I" is supposed to be the way I remember many things (by relating things back to me), and the way that I make sense of everything that goes on or that went on in my brain. It is all-encompassing and infinitely vague term. It has become unavoidable to use such words, although lately I've done so more successfully when I've wanted to without thinking anything was wrong, and avoided confusion. I won't attempt to do so with this post.

Scientists and Philosophers

Hey, Philosophy can be fascinating.
But one has to ask at some point why it is that it has essentially failed in many respects. Sure, philosophers will disagree with my criteria for failure. One of my reasons is that the same questions keep popping up, unsolved, and sometimes in different guises.

The questions of Philosophy might be eternal because they're relevant to the existential anxieties of humans (but do not have universal significance); I suspect religion shares this feature with philosophy, and naive, first-year-at-school philosophy probably activates the same areas of the brain (logic, ethics and philosophy of language would be less likely to do so!!)

Or Philosophy's questions be eternal because they are poorly phrased questions.
They might be poorly or imprecisely phrased. They might be phrased as well as is possible, but natural language itself is obviously inadequate for understanding natural processes, which, say, are modelled by computer models governed by mathematical equations or any number of other things. Why wouldn't the same be true for the brain, leaving neurobiology as the vital tool to understanding questions of identity, belief and other issues which appear in philosophy?

The questions often seem to basically refer to nothing, just artefacts of the human mind. They often create artificial dichotomies, contradict scientific evidence (which renders the question non-sensical eg Identity Theory), or contradict themselves when taken as a set.

Doing philosophy can give insights but eventually frustrates. Not because it raises more questions; that, I find an advantage. But because it never answers your questions. And science will. That is the lesson of the last few centuries; the scientific method answers questions to the required degree of certainty, metaphysical postulating does not. All that does is create religious warfare or leave humans too preoccupied to manage their own existence.
This is probably essentially the same problem religious people have - introducing a God may help you to "solve" your questions, only if you are complicit in convincing yourself that they're solved. Which usually involves NOT OBSERVING THE PHYSICAL WORLD, instead postulating axioms and drawing the logical conclusions from them.

I think Philosophy is best used as a tool to clarify one's thought processes, although I will think along the lines of its varying branches for the rest of my life.
I am becoming more aware of the fact that I agree with Rudolph Carnap and his Vienna circle of logical positivists. They call themselves the defenders of the scientific method.
Philosophers could claim that "only knowledge acquired through the scientific methods of hypothesis, test" and the techniques of skeptical enquiry, conservatism etc is itself a philosophical statement, an epistemological belief. That would like trying to claim somebody else as their own. Perhaps a Christian saying that a Muslim really is Christian at heart or something else weird like that.

Free Will

One of the oldest problems of philosophy is the "Problem of Free Will". The 'problem' is that we tend to believe that we choose what we say and do. Whereas, scientifically, there is no basis for this assertion. Just as particles flying around in the air have no 'will' of their own and no 'choice' as to how they move (it is evident that they obey laws of physics), so too must the particles in our brain. Therefore we do not 'choose' our thoughts, emotions, opinions, or choices, which are all very much determined by our brain activity.

Some have proposed that we therefore cannot be held responsible for crimes that we commit. After all, if our brain states are entirely dependent on laws of physics, then we could hardly have 'chosen' to do something in violation of a law of physics. Others counter that juries and judges could hardly have 'chosen' something else than to sentence a criminal as they see fit.
The idea that we can't choose what we do doesn't make any intuitive sense - we believe that hearing a prediction of what we're about to do allows us to alter our behaviour to prove this prediction wrong. That, if somebody predicts we will raise our right arm in 10 seconds, we can stop ourselves from doing so (Although brain scans reveal 0.2 seconds before I actually do so AND before I know that I will do so, that I WILL definitely lift my arm). This may prove that hearing a prediction invalidates that prediction within certain time windows, or it may prove that it's impossible to prove what another person will do, under all but the most limited of circumstances or only over very short intervals of time (see Chaos Theory and combine your knowledge of this with knowledge of the Uncertainty Principle). For example, after you finish reading this sentence, over the next 0.1 seconds you are likely to continue reading. When you step on a nail you will hop around afterwards etc.
Or it may just prove that various parts of the brain process information with different delay periods.

Many contradictions around free will exist too. For example, the claim of various religions that you have free will, and yet God Knows All, including everything that you do will do in the future. If God Knows what you're going to do, you could hardly choose to do something yourself!! And if you have free will, you never chose whether or not to have free will!

What I am certain of is that
** Free will is restricted to the domain of our knowledge. If I am unaware that there is a party at 4 Umbrella Road, Blacktown tonight, then I do not have free will to go to this party. After all, the next morning, I’d rightfully claim that I wasn’t “free” to go to this party or any of the others that I was unaware of. One would need to be omniscient to make a decision that is truly free, thus based on a consideration of all available options.
** Language is a problem. What does 'free' mean, when we talk of "free will"? We seem to use it in different senses -- eg 'freedom' (absence of being in jail) meaning an absence of constraint, versus the normal usage. 'Compatabilists' say that our BELIEF that our actions are free are what makes them free, regardless of whether or not this is an illusion
** The illusion that is free will is strengthened by the fact that we change...because we are constantly becoming a different person, our decisions, thoughts and actions often seem novel to us and chosen by us, whereas to an older person our behaviour was more predictable. The reason you thought mum was so smart was that she could predict what you'd do and she had lessons which she knew you'd learn.
** Its obvious, upon analysing what you do all day, that you do not have free will in all senses. You do not decide “Should I do 100 push ups on the roof, and then eat my own shit, jump in the pool and then screech at the bird in the tree at 43Hz?" It is no wonder researchers at scientific institutions often have to publish their papers in E-Prime in order to not be laughed off campus. If I asked you to kill me now, could you really do it? Could you really?

--- Note that the true picture, the world as a probabilistically determined system that works according to Quantum Dynamical properties has been ignored in this post, although similar dilemmas related to free will exist anyway under this system. When you incorporate this, it looks as if our actions are not predictable but also are not free.

**** Reason is a bullied child

My philsopher friend, my friend philosophy

As a tribute to Friedrich Nietzsche, a dude strong enough to crush your arguments with his fists, and cynical enough to kill you, I will post a list of unpleasant facts. In the future, a list of more pleasant truths, just to keep things balanced.

-Morals may change the payoffs in strategic games, but they are not "out there" as is an electron, and they aren't even as real as a chair, and "moral progress" is just intellectual development. You think we stopped burning witches because we gained a conscience? Nonsense.
-You may fall in love with a person, but you love attributes and to love as much as you love the person, and yourself. And your parents probably don't love each child equally. They're just people., anyway
-Freedom can almost always be enhanced by accompanying forms of authoritarian demands...The case of the legislated sound-proof glass. By the way, you have no free will
-People are not as unique as they think they are.
-People expect the fruits of scientific labour without committing themselves to the discipline of scientific rationalism. Science is all that civilised us. Some of us lack scientific thinking. Sometimes its not their fault.
-There is nothing guaranteeing justice, so stop being a coward and thinking things will improve for you in the afterlife. And perhaps stop worrying about being punished in the afterlife. Its not like there is one, anyway
-Paedophiles, necrophiliacs and the like are not evil, they are as human as you.
-Love will always carry a tiny trace of possessiveness and jealousy.
-Terrorism seems to work, at least in the short term. Which is what matters, for those that are alive.
-Most people think less of the poor and don’t care as much about the fat and the ugly.
-The computers are the most impressive objects in the Louvre.
-Everything worthwhile, beauty and brains, and everything less but worthwhile was borne in an ongoing struggle of blood and misery.
-Horrible fates await peacekeepers, thinkers, romantics, the traumatised, the weak, the crippled, the alone
-Humans like to feel superior to others. But then again, there's nothing impossible about being better than some other person in all respects.
-Just because you can name various foods, this doesn't mean that you're cultured.
-Induction is flawed, note the grue and the Black Raven paradoxes
-People behave eugenically. Although nobody should be there to take your right away to do so, few people want to make love to a severely retarded person. It just makes sense
-There is no inherent justification or goodness in the majority getting what it wants, although this is a highly stable arrangement.


Moralising and virtue psychology are never too far from my consciousness. Every day, I'm less narcissistic though. There are always two sides to every story (actually, at least two), and always being constructive is easy when it becomes habit . Ignorance is bliss? Rubbish.

"Haikus are easy to write. But they're sometimes meaningless. Refrigerator."