Does imagination separate us from AI?

 I think this is a very good question, but it depends on how one defines ‘imagination’. I remember having a conversation (via email) with Peter Watson, who wrote an excellent book, A Terrible Beauty (about the minds and ideas of the 20^th Century) which covered the arts and sciences with equal erudition, and very little of the politics and conflicts that we tend to associate with that century. In reference to the topic, he argued that imagination was a word past its use-by date, just like introspection and any other term that referred to an inner world. Effectively, he argued that because our inner world is completely dependent on our outer world, it’s misleading to use terms that suggest otherwise.

It’s an interesting perspective, not without merit, when you consider that we all speak and think in a language that is totally dependent on an external environment from our earliest years. 

 

But memory for us is not at all like memory in a computer, which provides a literal record of whatever it stores, including images, words and sounds. On the contrary, our memories of events are ‘reconstructions’, which tend to become less reliable over time. Curiously, the imagination apparently uses the same part of the brain as memory. I’m talking semantic memory, not muscle memory, which is completely different, physiologically. So the imagination, from the brain’s perspective is like a memory of the future. In other words, it’s a projection into the future of something we might desire or fear or just expect to happen. I believe that many animals have this same facility, which they demonstrate when they hunt or, alternatively, evade being hunted.

 

Raymond Tallis, who has a background in neuroscience and writes books as well as a regular column in Philosophy Now, had this to say, when talking about free will:

 

Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another.

 

I find a correspondence here with Richard Feynman’s ‘sum over histories’ interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM). There are, in fact, an infinite number of possible paths in the future, but only one is ‘actualised’ in the past.

 

But the key here is imagination. It is because we can imagine a future that we attempt to bring it about - that's free will. And what we imagine is affected by our past, our emotions and our intellectual considerations, but that doesn't make it predetermined.

 

Now, recent advances in AI would appear to do something similar in the form of making predictions based on recordings of past events. So what’s the difference? Well, if we’re playing a game of chess, there might not be a lot of difference, and AI has reached the stage where it can do it even better than humans. There are even computer programmes available now that try and predict what I’m going to write next, based on what I’ve already written. How do you know this hasn’t been written by a machine?

 

Computers use data – lots of it – and use it mindlessly, which means the computer really doesn’t know what it means in the same way we do. A computer can win a game of chess, but it requires a human watching the game to appreciate what it actually did. In the same way that a computer can distinguish one colour from another, including different shades of a single colour, but without ever ‘seeing’ a colour the way we do.

 

So, when we ‘imagine’, we fabricate a mindscape that affects us emotionally. The most obvious examples are in art, including music and stories. We now have computers also creating works of art, including music and stories. But here’s the thing: the computer cannot respond to these works of art the way we do.

 

Imagination is one of the fundamental attributes that makes us humans. An AI can and will (in the future) generate scenarios and select the one that produces the best outcome, given specific criteria. But, even in these situations, it is a tool that a human will use to analyse enormous amounts of data that would be beyond our capabilities. But I wouldn’t call it imagination any more than I would say an AI could see colour.

Social norms determine morality

 The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 140, Oct/Nov 2020) has Hegel as its theme. I confess that really the only thing I knew about Hegel was his ‘dialectic’ and that he influenced Marx, though, from memory, Marx claimed to have turned Hegel’s dialectic ‘on its head’. Hegel’s dialectic has relevance to politics and history, because, basically, he claimed that if someone proposes a ‘thesis’ someone else will propose its ‘antithesis’ and we end up with a ‘synthesis’ of the two. Some people claim that this is how history has progressed, but I’m not so sure. 

 

However, I do agree that if someone promotes an ideology or a social agenda, you will invariably get opposition to it, and the stronger the promotion, the stronger the opposition. We see this in politics a lot, but a good example is religion. Militant atheism only tends to occur in societies where you have militant fundamentalist religion, which is usually Christian, but could be Muslim. In societies where no one really cares about religion, no one cares too much about atheism either. 

 

I know this, because I live in a culture where no one cares and I’ve visited one where people do, which is America (at the dawn of the 21^st Century). Mind you, I grew up in 1950s Australia when there was a division between Catholic and protestant that even affected the small rural town where I lived and was educated in. That division evaporated in the 1960s pretty much, with a zeitgeist that swept the Western world. It was largely driven by post war liberalism, the introduction of the contraceptive pill and a cultural phenomenon called rock and roll. But what I remember growing up in the 60’s, leaving school, going to university and entering the workforce in a major city, was that we males grew our hair long and everyone, including women, questioned everything. We were rebellious: there were marches against our involvement in the Vietnam war and an Australian academic by the name of Germaine Greer published a book called The Female Eunuch.

 

And all of this is relevant to the theme of my thesis, which is that morality is really about social norms, which is why morality evolves, and whether it evolves for the better or worse is dependent on a lot of factors, not least political forces and individuals’ perceptions of their own worth and sense of security within a social context.

 

But getting back to Hegel, many saw the rebellious attitude in the 1960s as a backlash against conservative forces, especially religious based ones, that had arisen in the 1950s. And this in turn, was a reaction to the forces of fascism that had ignited the most widespread and devastating conflict in the whole of human history. There was almost no one who had not been affected by that in Europe or Asia or North America. Even, in far-flung Australia and New Zealand, it seemed that every family had a member or knew someone who had been directly involved in that war. My family was no exception, as I’ve written about elsewhere.

 

In the same issue of Philosophy Now, there is an article by Terrence Thomson (a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in Kingston University, London) titled, Kant, Conflict & Universal History. I’ve written about Kant elsewhere, but not in this context. He’s more famously known for his epistemology, discussed in some detail in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which was the subject of my essay. But, according to Thomson, 3 years later (1784), he published an article in a ‘prominent intellectual newspaper, titled: Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.’ Without going into too much detail, Kant coined a term, ‘unsociable sociability’, which he contended is ‘a feature of human social interaction’, and which he defined as the human “tendency to enter into society, a tendency that continually threatens to break up this society”. Quoting Thomson (interpreting Kant): ‘...it is a natural human inclination to connect with people and to be part of a larger whole; yet it is also part of our natural inclination to destroy these social bonds through isolationism and divisiveness.’ One has to look no further than the just-held, US presidential election and its immediate aftermath to see this in action. But one could also see this as an example of Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ in action.

 

As I explained in my introduction, Hegel argued that a ‘synthesis’ arises out of an opposition between a ‘thesis’ and its ‘antithesis’, but then the synthesis becomes a new ‘thesis’, which creates a new ‘antithesis’, and so the dialectic never stops. This could also be seen as similar to, if not the same as, the dynamic that Thomson attributes to Kant: the human inclination to ‘belong’ followed by an opposing inclination to ‘break those social bonds’.

 

I take a much simpler view, which is that humans are inherently tribal. And tribalism is a double-edged sword. It creates the division that Kant alludes to in his ‘unsociable sociability’, and it creates the antithesis of Hegel’s dialectic. We see this in the division created by religion throughout history, and not just the petty example I witnessed in my childhood. And now, in the current age, we have a new tribalism in the form of political parties, exemplified by the deep divisions in the US, even before Donald Trump exploited them to the full in his recently eclipsed, 4 year term.

 

And this brings me back, by a very convoluted route, to the subject of this essay: morality and social norms. Trump did his best to change social norms, and, by so doing, change his society’s moral landscape, whether intentionally or not. He made it socially acceptable to be disrespectful to ‘others’, which included women, ‘grab them by the pussy’, immigrants, Muslims, the former President, anyone in the Democratic party, anyone in the GOP who didn’t support him and his own Intelligence community and Defence personnel. He also made white supremacy and fringe conspiracy theorist groups feel legitimised. But, most significantly, beyond everything else, he propagated a social norm whereby you could dismiss any report by any authority whatsoever that didn’t fit in with your worldview – you could simply create your own ‘facts’.

 

In most societies, especially Western democratic societies, we expect social norms to evolve that make people feel more inclusive and that constructively build collaborative relationships, because we know from experience, that that is how we get things done. As a retired naval admiral and self-ascribed conservative (in a TV interview prior to the election) pointed out, Trump did the exact opposite, both at home and abroad: he broke off relations and fomented division wherever and whenever he could. I’ve argued in previous posts that leaders bring out the best in the people they lead, which is how they are ultimately judged; contrarily, Trump brought out the worst in people.

 

In one of my better posts, I discussed at length how a young woman, raped and fatally tortured on a bus in India, exposed the generational divide in social norms in that country at that time, and how it directly affected one’s perception of the morality of that specific incident. 

 

From a Western perspective, especially given the recent ‘me-too’ movement, this is perverse. However, in the late 60s, early 70s, when I was entering adulthood, there was a double-standard when it came to sexual behaviour. It was okay for men to have sex with as many partners as they could find, but it was not alright for women to indulge in the same activity. This led to men behaving more predatory and it was considered normal for women to be ‘seduced’, even if it was against their better-intentions. The double-standard of the day really didn’t encourage much alternative. The introduction of the contraceptive pill, I believe, was the game-changer. Because, theoretically, women could have the same sexual freedom as men without the constant fear of becoming pregnant, which was still a stigma at that time. Now, some of my generation may have a different rear-vision view of this, but I give it as an example of changing social norms occurring concordantly with changing moral perceptions.

 

I write science fiction, as a hobby or pastime, rather than professionally. But what attracted me to sci-fi as a genre, was not so much the futuristic technologies one could conjure up, but the what-if societies that might exist on worlds isolated by astronomical distances. In a recent work, I explored a society that included clones (genetically engineered humans, so not copies per se). In this society, female clones are exploited because they have no family. Instead, they have guardianships that can be sold onto someone else, and this becomes a social norm that’s tacitly accepted. Logically, this leads to sexual exploitation. I admit to being influenced by Blade Runner 2049, though I go in a completely different direction, and my story is more of a psychological thriller than an action thriller. There is sexual exploitation on both sides: I have a man in authority having a sexual relationship with a character by blackmail; and I have a woman sexually exploiting a character so she can manipulate him into committing a crime. Neither of these scenarios were part of my original plot; they evolved in the way that stories do, and became core elements. In fact, it could be argued that the woman is even more evil than the man.

 

Both characters come undone in the end, but, more importantly to me was that the characters should be realistic and not paper cut-outs. I asked someone who’d read it what they thought of the man in power, and they said, ‘Oh, people like him exist, even now.’ 

Does history progress? If so, to what?

This is another Question of the Month from Philosophy Now. The last two I submitted weren’t published, but I really don’t mind as the answers they did publish were generally better than mine. Normally, with a question like this, you know what you want to say before you start. In other words, you know what your conclusion is. But, in this case, I had no idea.

 

At first, I wasn’t going to answer, because I thought the question was a bit obtuse. However, I couldn’t help myself. I started by analysing the question and then just followed the logic.

 

 

I found a dissonance to this question, because ‘history’, by definition, is about the past and ‘progress’ infers projection into the future. In fact, a dictionary definition of history tells us it’s “the study of past events, particularly in human affairs”. And a dictionary definition of progress is “forward or onward movement to a destination”. If one puts the two together, there is an inference that history has a ‘destination’, which is also implicit in the question.

 

I’ve never studied history per se, but if one studies the evolution of ideas in any field, be it science, philosophy, arts, literature or music, one can’t fail to confront the history of human ideas, in all their scope and diversity, and all the richness that has arisen out of that, imbued in culture as well as the material and social consequences of civilisations.

 

There are two questions, one dependent on the other, so we need to address the first one first. If one uses metrics like health, wealth, living conditions, peace, then there appears to be progress over the long term. But if one looks closer, this progress is uneven, even unequal, and one wonders if the future will be even more unequal than the present, as technologies become more available and affordable to some societies than others.

 

Progress infers change, and the 20^th Century saw more change than in the entire previous history of humankind. I expect the 21^st Century will see more change still, which, like the 20^th Century, will be largely unpredictable. This leads to the second question, which I’ll rephrase to make more germane to my discussion: what is the ‘destination’ and do we have control over it?

 

Humans, both as individuals and collectives, like to believe that they control their destiny. I would argue that, collectively, we are currently at a cross roads, which is evidenced by the political polarisation we see everywhere in the Western world.

 

But this cross roads has social and material consequences for the future. It’s epitomised by the debate over climate change, which is a litmus test for whether we control our destiny or not. It not only requires political will, but the consensus of a global community, and not just the scientific community. If we do nothing, it will paradoxically have a bigger impact than taking action. But there is hope: the emerging generation appears more predisposed than the current one.

Road safety starts with the driver, not the vehicle

There was recently (pre-COVID-19) a road-safety ad on some cinemas in Australia (and possibly TV) for motorcyclists. We have video of a motorcyclist on a winding road, which I guess is the other side of Healesville, and there is a voiceover of his thoughts. He sees a branch on the road to avoid, he sees a curve coming up, he consciously thinks through changing gears, including clutch manipulation, he sees a van ahead which he overtakes. The point is that there is this continuous internal dialogue based on what he observes while he’s riding. 

What I find intriguing is that this ad is obviously targeted at motorcyclists, yet I fail to see why it doesn’t equally apply to car drivers. I learned to drive (decades ago) from riding motorcycles, not only on winding roads but in city and suburban traffic. I used to do a daily commute along one of the busiest arterial roads from East Sydney to Western Sydney and back, which I’d still claim to be the most dangerous stretch of driving I ever did in my life. 

I had at least one close call and one accident when a panel van turned left into a side road from the middle lane while I was in the left lane (vehicles travel on the left side, a la Britain, in Australia). I not only went over the top of my bike but the van started to drag the bike over me while I was trapped in the gutter, and then he stopped. I was very young and unhurt and he was older and managed to convince me that it was my fault. My biggest concern was not whether I had sustained injuries (I hadn’t) but that the bike was unrideable.

Watching the ad on the screen, which is clearly aimed at a younger version of myself, I thought that’s how I drive all the time, and I learned that from riding bikes, even though I haven’t ridden a bike in more than 3 decades. It occurred to me that most people probably don’t – they put their cars on cruise-control, now ‘adaptive’, and think about something else entirely, possibly having a conversation with someone who is not even in the vehicle.

In Australia, speed limits get lower and lower every year, so that drivers don’t have to think about what they’re doing. The biggest cause of accidents now, I understand, are distractions to the driver. We are transitioning (for want of a better word) to fully autonomous vehicles. In the interim, it seems that since we don’t have automaton cars, we need automaton drivers. Humans actually don’t make good robots. The road-safety ad aimed at motorcyclists is the exact opposite of this thinking.

I’m anomalous in that I still drive a manual and actually enjoy it. I’ve found others of my generation, including women, who feel that driving a manual forces them to think about what they’re doing in a way that an auto doesn’t. In a manual, you are constantly anticipating what gear you need, whether it be for traffic or for a corner, to slow down or to speed up (just like the rider in the ad). It becomes an integral part of driving. I have a 6 speed which is the same as I had on my first 2 motorbikes, and I use the gears in exactly the same way. We are taught to get into top gear as quickly as possible and stay there. But, riding a bike, you soon learn that this is nonsense. In my car, you ideally need to be doing 100km/hr (60 mph) to change into top gear. 

We have cars that do their best to take the driving out of driving, and I’m not convinced that makes us safer, though most people seem to think it does.

Addendum: I acknowledge I’m a fossil like the car I drive. I do drive autos, and it doesn’t change the way I drive, but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the experience. I accept that, in the future, cars probably won’t be enjoyable to drive at all, because they will have no 'feeling'. The Tesla represents the future of motoring, whether autonomous or not.

Is liberalism under siege?

Like most so-called liberal-minded individuals, I read liberal-minded media, like The New Yorker, but I also acquire The Weekend Australian, religiously, every weekend (a Murdoch broadsheet newspaper). Like most weekend tabloids, it has ‘sections’ and pull-out segments, including a Weekend Australian Magazine and Weekend Australian Review. These pull-out segments often include profiles of people from all walks of life, coverage of arts and culture, as well as commentaries on topical issues.

There is a curious dichotomy in that the main body of the paper has opinion pieces that are predominantly and overtly conservative, whereas the ‘pull-out’ sections (mentioned above) have far more liberal content. Having said that, this weekend, there was virtually a full-page article called Voice, Treaty, Truth: Heart, which was an extract from a book called Treaty by George Williams and Harry Hobbs (who are, respectively, Dean and lecturer in the faculty of law at the University of NSW). It gives a potted history of the treaty process in Australia for indigenous people, with well written arguments on why it’s a necessary process for all Australians. The idea has long been opposed by conservative voices in Australia, so it says a lot that it finds expression in a conservative newspaper.

I only reference the article to give contrast to other feature articles dealing with the current ‘black lives matter’ crisis occurring in the US and spilling over into Australia on the same weekend. In particular, 3 opinion pieces by Paul Kelly (Editor at Large), Greg Sheridan (Foreign Editor) and Chris Kenny (Associate Editor) that provide different yet distinctly conservative views on the divisive issue. None of them are apologists for Trump, yet Sheridan and Kenny, in particular, are critical, to the point of ridicule, of the backlash against Trump, and downplay the racial schism that has become a running sore over the past week.

But I wish to focus on Paul Kelly’s commentary, The Uncivil War Killing Liberalism, because his arguments are more measured and he takes a much wider view. Kelly has been critical of Trump in the past – in particular, his incompetent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic right from the outset.

Kelly effectively argues that liberalism is under attack from both sides, with the political desertion of the ‘centre’ all over the Western world. I’ve made the same point myself, but, even though I’d guess we’re of a similar vintage, we have different perspectives and biases.

Kelly provides a broad definition, which I’ll quote out of context:

...liberalism means equality before the law regardless of race, equal access to health care and education on the principle of universalism.

This is an ideal that is far from fulfilled in virtually every democracy in the modern world, and is manifest in faultlines, particularly in the US, which is the main focus of Kelly’s essay. He more or less says as much in the next paragraph:

Yet the US today is engulfed in a series of social crises, with life expectancy falling for three successive years since 2015.

Kelly sees Trump as a symptom, or a ‘product’ of a ‘decline into cultural decadence’ (quoting conservative New York Times journalist, Ross Douthat, from his book, The Decadent Society). Kelly clearly agrees with Douthat when he quotes him: Trump exploits the decline of liberalism while being an agent of that decline.

But, like many conservative commentators, Kelly lays at least part of the blame with what he and others call ‘the Elites’. He quotes another American author, Christopher Lasch, from his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites:

The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes and complacent, dull and dowdy.

There is a social dynamic occurring here that I have seen before, and so I believe has Kelly. I’m thinking of the 1960s when there was a revolt against postwar conservative values that was arguably augmented by the introduction of oral contraception. It included a rejection of the dominance of the Church in both legislative and family politics, as well as shifts in feminist politics, the effects of which are still being experienced a couple of generations later. Were the ‘radicals’ advocating those ideals the ‘elites’ of their generation?

One of the major differences between American and Australian cultures is obvious to Australians and a surprise to many Americans. In Australia, religious belief is rarely an issue, and certainly not in politics. This wasn’t always the case. When I was growing up there was a divide between protestants and Catholics that even affected the small country town where I lived and was educated. The dissolution of that division was one of the more providential casualties of the 1960s. These days, most Australians are apathetic about religion, which renders it mostly a non-issue.

The reason I raise this is because militant atheism is most aggressive in countries where fundamentalist religion is most political (like the US). In other words, when you get extreme views becoming mainstream, you will get a reaction from the polar opposite extreme. And this is what is happening in politics pretty well worldwide.

So Kelly is right when he contends that Trump is the manifestation of a reaction to left wing ideologies, but he leaves a lot out. If one goes back to the ‘definition’ of liberalism, scribed by Kelly himself, the word ‘equality’ tends to stick in one’s craw. Inequality is arguably the biggest issue in the US which has been exacerbated by recent events. Even in the pandemic, which one assumes is indiscriminate, Black deaths have outnumbered Whites, which suggests that health care is not equitable.

It would seem that people (well, conservative political commentators at least) have already forgotten both the cause and the consequences of the GFC. The GFC hit middle America hard and it is their hardship that Trump exploited. So, the so-called ‘decadence of liberalism’ is a straw man that hides the discontent caused by the sheer greed of the people whom Trump and his ‘Tea Party’ allies really represent.

Kelly argues that ‘aggressive progressivism’ is one, if not ‘the’ cause of the ‘assault on liberalism’, to use his own words. He doesn’t say, but one assumes by ‘aggressive progressivism’, he’s talking about the strong push for renewable energy sources in response to what he calls ‘climate change alarmists’. Curiously, it’s been reported in the last week that industry leaders (you know, the ones who vote for conservative governments) are pushing for more investment in renewable resources. So we have industry groups attempting to lead the (conservative) Australian government, following the paralysis of the last decade by consecutive governments on both sides.

Kelly also argues that ‘individualism’ is one of the factors, along with ‘multiculturalism’, which he denigrates. In Australia, I’ve witnessed at least 3 waves of immigration, all of which have brought out the best and the worst in people. But generally people have got along fine because we tend to live and let live. As long as people from all backgrounds have the same access to health care and education and job opportunities, then there is very little societal dislocation that the xenophobes warn us about. There is inequality, especially among indigenous Australians, and I think that is why the recent protests in America have resonated here. Equality, I believe, starts with education. There is an elitism around education here and it is a political minefield. But the ideals of liberalism, expressed so succinctly by Kelly, surely start with education.

If one takes a broad historical perspective, it’s generally the ideas and ideals of people on the Left of politics that develop into social norms, even for conservatives of later generations. This is arguably how liberalism has evolved and will continue to evolve. Importantly, it’s dynamic, not static.

How do we understand each other?

This is the latest Question of the Month from Philosophy Now (Issue 137 April/May 2020), so answers will appear in Issue 139 (Aug/Sep 2020). It just occurred to me that I may have misread the question and the question I've answered is: How CAN we understand each other? Whatever, it's still worthy of a post, and below is what I wrote: definitely philosophical with psychological underpinnings and political overtones. There’s a thinly veiled reference to my not-so-recent post on Plato, and the conclusion was unexpected.

This is possibly the most difficult question I’ve encountered on Question of the Month, and I’m not sure I have the answer. If there is one characteristic that defines humans, it’s that we are tribal to the extent that it can define us. In almost every facet of our lives we create ingroups and outgroups, and it starts in childhood. If one watches the so-called debates that occur in parliament (at least in Australia) it can remind one of their childhood experiences at school. In current political discourse, if someone proposes an action or a policy, it is reflexively countered by the opposition, irrespective of its merit.

But I’ve also observed this is in the workplace, working on complex engineering projects, where contractual relationships can create similar divisions; where differences of opinion and perspective can escalate to irrational opposition that invariably leads to paralysis.

We’ve observed worldwide (at least in the West) divisions becoming stronger, reinforced by social media that is increasingly being used as a political weapon. We have situations where groups holding extreme yet strongly opposing views will both resist and subvert a compromise position proposed by the middle, which logically results in stalemate.

Staying with Australia (where I’ve lived since birth), we observed this stalemate in energy policy for over a decade. Every time a compromise was about to be reached, either someone from the left side or someone from the right side would scuttle it, because they would not accept a compromise on principle.

But recently, two events occurred in Australia that changed the physical, social and political landscape. In the summer of 2019/2020, we witnessed the worst bushfire season, not only in my lifetime, but in recorded history since European settlement. And although there was some political sniping and blame-calling, all the governments, both Federal and States, deferred to the experts in wildfire and forestry management. What’s more, the whole community came together and helped out irrespective of political and cultural differences. And then, the same thing happened with the COVID-19 crisis. There was broad bipartisan agreement on formulating a response, and the medical experts were not only allowed to do their job but to dictate policy.

Plato was critical of democracies and argued for a ‘philosopher-king’. We don’t have philosopher-kings, but we have non-ideological institutions with diverse scientific and technical expertise. I would contend that ‘understanding each other’ starts with acknowledging one’s own ignorance. 

Is Kant relevant to the modern world?

I recently wrote a comment on Quora that addresses this very question, but I need to backtrack a couple of decades. When I studied philosophy, I wrote an essay on Kant, around the same time I wrote my essay on Christianity and Buddhism. 

Not so long ago (over Christmas) I read AC Grayling’s The History of Philosophy, which, at 580+ pages is pretty extensive and even includes brief discussions on Hindu, Chinese, Islamic and sub-Saharan African philosophy. Any treatise you read on the history of Western philosophy will include Kant as one of the giants of the discipline. Grayling’s book, in particular, provides both historical and contextual perspectives. According to Grayling, Kant brought together the two ‘opposing’ branches of analytical philosophy of his time: empiricism and idealism.

I’ve read Critique of Pure Reason (in English, obviously) and it’s as obscure in places as Kant’s reputation presumes. Someone once claimed that Kant’s lectures were very popular and a lot less intimidating than his texts. If that is true, then one regrets that he didn’t live in the age of YouTube. But his texts, and subsequent commentaries on them, are all we have, including this one you’re about to read. I will include the original bibliography, as I did with my other ‘academic’ essay.

The essay was titled: What is transcendental idealism?

Kant, I believe, made two major contributions to philosophy: that there is a limit to what we can know; and that there is a difference between what we perceive and ‘things-in-themselves’. These two ideas are naturally related but they are not synonymous. Transcendental idealism arose out of Kant’s attempt to incorporate these ideas into an overall philosophy of knowledge or epistemology. Kant is extremely difficult to follow and this is not helped when many of the essays written on Kant are just as obtuse and difficult to understand as Kant himself. However there are parts of Kant’s Critique that are relatively plain and easy to follow. It is my intention to start with these aspects and work towards an exposition on transcendental idealism.

I think it is important to note that our understanding in science and psychology has increased considerably since Kant’s time, and this must influence any modern analysis of his epistemology. For example, in Kant’s time, it was Newton’s physics that provided the paradigm for empirical knowledge and therefore a deterministic universe seemed inevitable. With the discovery of quantum mechanics and Chaos theory, this is no longer the case, and Kant’s third 'antimony' on ‘freedom’ does not have the same relevance as it did in his time. A contemporary analogy to this might be materialism as the current paradigm for consciousness, because current theories are based on our knowledge of genetics, biochemistry and neuroscience, and the limitations of that knowledge. It is quite possible that future developments may overturn materialism as a paradigm because our knowledge of consciousness today is arguably no greater than our knowledge of physics was during Newton’s time.

In view of what we’ve learnt since Kant’s time, it seems to me that he had a remarkable, indeed almost prophetic insight, yet I cannot help but also believe that his philosophy contains a fundamental flaw. The fundamental flaw is his insistence that space and time are purely psychological phenomena, or in Kant’s own terms, that space and time are apriori ‘forms’ of the mind. ‘But this space and this time, and with them all appearances, are not in themselves things; they are nothing but representations and cannot exist outside our minds.’ One of my objectives, therefore, is to provide a resolution of this flaw with aspects of his philosophy that I find sound. Ironically, I believe that time and space give us the best insight into understanding Kant’s transcendental idealism, though not in a manner that he could have foreseen.

A philosophy of knowledge naturally includes knowledge acquisition, and for Kant, this required an analysis of human cognitive abilities. I believe this is a good place to start in understanding Kant. Kant realised that there are two aspects of knowledge acquisition in humans: what we gain directly through our senses or ‘sensibilities’ and what we ‘synthesise’ into concepts through ‘pure understanding’. Kant realised that this synthesis is in effect consciousness. Kant explains how concepts can go beyond experience, which is what he calls pure understanding. This in effect is transcendental idealism, which is speculative as opposed to empirical realism which is based on experience. Another perspective to this is that most animals, we assume, can synthesise knowledge at the sensibility level, otherwise they would not be able to interact with their environment, whereas humans can synthesise knowledge at another level altogether which I believe is Kant’s transcendental level. Note that Kant is not talking about metaphysical knowledge in his reference to the transcendental, but knowledge of the object-in-itself, a concept I will return to later.

Whether Kant realised it or not, this synthesis of concepts is also the way in which we remember things in the long term - that is through association of concepts. I’m talking about knowledge type memory rather than physiological type memory which allows us to remember how to do tasks, like driving a car or playing a musical instrument. These are different types of memory which are dependent on different physiological mechanisms within the brain. The point is that this synthesising of concepts is a memory function as well as a means of understanding. It is virtually impossible to remember new knowledge unless we synthesise it into existing knowledge.

Both in the Study Guide and in Allison’s essay on The Thing in Itself, perception of colour is used as an example of knowledge gained through the senses, and in the Study Guide is contrasted with space and time, which according to Kant are apriori knowledge, and therefore independent of experience. This leads to the problem I have with Kant, because space and time are also sensed by us, despite Kant’s objections that space and time are not entities. It should be pointed out that colour is purely a psychological phenomenon. In other words, colour, unlike space and time, does not exist outside the mind. In fact colour is probably the best example for explaining the difference between what we perceive (our ‘representations’) and ‘things-in-themselves’. Colour as it is-in-itself is a wavelength of light, and so is radar and radio waves and cosmic rays. It is believed that some animals can see in ultraviolet light so that for them ultraviolet light is a colour. Colour best explains Kant’s philosophical point that appearances or representations are not the same as the phenomenon as it exists-in-itself.

So colour only exists in the mind as the result of sensory perception, as Kant himself explained. It is not that appearances or representations of objects as perceived are different entities to what exists in the real world, but that we are only aware or can only sense specific attributes of these objects. This is an important point that is not often delineated.

So in what respects are space and time different? Space and time are different because they are the manifold in which the universe exists - without space and time there would be no universe, no physical universe anyway; no universe that we could perceive in an empirical sense, therefore no empirical realism. According to Kant however, space and time are apriori ‘forms’ that we impose on the universe. There are many aspects to this issue so let’s start with sensory perception. In regard to space, we have a sense in addition to the five known ones called proprioception, discovered by Sherrington in the 1890s. This is a sense that tells us where every part of our body is in space. Oliver Sacks in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describes a case he called ‘The Disembodied Lady’, of a woman who lost this sense completely overnight. She was literally like a rag doll and had to learn to do even the most simple motor tasks, like sitting, anew. But of course we also sense space with our eyes, and all animals that depend on their dynamic abilities, from insects to birds, to mammals, have this ability. Bats and dolphins of course sense space with echo-location.

As for time, we have two means of sensing time. The most obvious is memory. Again Sacks describes the case of a man suffering retrograde amnesia, which in his book he called ‘The Lost Mariner’. Sacks met the man in 1975, but although he displayed above average intelligence, the man could create no new memories. In fact he was permanently stuck in 1945 when he had left the US Navy after the War. This is like being colour blind or deaf beyond a certain frequency. The other sense of time is through our eyes which capture images at a very specific rate. Without this ability we would not be able to detect motion. All photographs, to use an analogy, need time, no matter how small an increment, in order to be realised at all. Again different animals capture these images at different rates so they quite literally live at different speeds. Birds and many insects see the world in slow motion compared to us, whereas other animals like snails and sloths see it much faster. Sometimes in the event of trauma, like a car accident or an explosion, our internal clock changes its rate momentarily and we see things as if we are watching a slow motion film.

We sense space and time the same way we sense colours, sounds and smells. In fact our ability to sense space and time is a matter of life and death - just take a drive in traffic. The idea that we impose space and time on the universe is absurd unless one believes in solipsism which apparently Kant did not. For Kant time and space are apriori knowledge that is ‘given’. Our mind has an inbuilt sense of time and space, yes, but it is a necessary sense no different to our other senses so that we can interact with a world that exists in time and space. This is the distinction I make with Kant. The reason we have a sense of space and time is so the world inside our heads can match the world outside our heads, otherwise we could not do anything - we could not even walk outside our front doors. To argue otherwise, in my opinion, is disingenuous.

This contention on my part has consequences for Kant’s philosophy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution of philosophy’ is: ‘...the assumption not that man’s knowledge must conform to objects but that objects must conform to man’s apparatus of knowing.’  I would turn this argument on its head because it is my belief that the human mind is a mirror of the physical world and not the other way round. Michio Kaku and Jennifer Thompson in their book, Beyond Einstein, describe the hypothetical experience of meeting someone from a higher dimensional universe. They explain that whilst we can perceive things in 2 dimensions of space, if we lived in a 2 dimensional space, 3 dimensions would be incomprehensible to us. If we lived in a higher dimensional universe we would think in those higher dimensions. This is why we can’t create a higher dimensional universe in our imaginations but we can express it mathematically. This I believe also gives us an insight into transcendental idealism, but I will return to this point later.

In terms of our sensibilities, Kant is correct: our ability to perceive is limited by the cognitive powers of the human mind. We cannot see colours outside a certain range of wavelength of light or hear sounds outside a specific range of frequencies. But Kant goes further than this: he realised that our cognitive reasoning ability to understand the things-in-themselves is also limited. Kant quite correctly realised that there is a trap or an illusion, that we often perceive concepts which we synthesise through our reasoning ability as being derived from experience when they are not. We have these ideas in our head which we believe to match reality, but in truth we only think we understand reality and the thing-in-itself escapes us. This is the kernel in the midst of Kant’s philosophy which is worth preserving. Our knowledge acquisition is in fact an interaction between experience (the empirical) and theory (the transcendental). Kant himself showed an insight into this interaction in A95 when he refers to the synthesis of ‘sense, imagination and apperception’. 

‘All these faculties have a transcendental (as well as an empirical) employment which concerns the form alone, and is possible apriori.’  By ‘apriori’ and ‘form’, Kant of course is referring to space and time, but he is also referring to mathematical forms, as he explains on the next page in B128. There is then, this relationship between transcendental idealism and empirical realism; a relationship that is mediated principally through mathematics.

But there is another aspect of our knowledge acquisition that Kant never touched on and relates to the thing-in-itself. We have discovered that nature takes on completely different realities at different levels which means that the thing-in-itself is almost indefinable as a single entity. To describe something we have to conceptually isolate it in our minds. For example the human body is a single entity made up of millions of other entities called cells. It is virtually impossible to conceptualise these two levels of entities simultaneously. But the human mind has a very unique ability. We can create concepts within concepts, like words within sentences, or formulas within mathematical equations, or notes within music, and realise that on different levels all these things take on different meanings. So the human mind is uniquely placed to understand the universe in which we live, because it also takes on different meanings at different levels.

This is even true regarding the number of dimensions of the universe. Michio Kaku, whom I referred to earlier, informs us that according to M theory, the universe may very well exist at one level in 11 dimensions, but at our level of everyday existence, we can only perceive the 3 dimensions of space and the 1 dimension of time. This for me is the irony of Kant’s philosophy. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics suggest that space and time are not how we perceive them to be, which makes Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself quite a prophetic insight. However Kant would never have conceived that space and time could exist as things-in-themselves at all, because for Kant, space and time are not entities. He is right in that they are not entities in the same way that objects are, but they are the absolutely essential components for the universe to exist at all.

Some people would argue that space and time are no more than mathematical entities, because that is the only way we can express space and time, as opposed to how we experience it. From this argument it could be suggested that by using mathematics we are imposing our sense of space and time on the universe, irrespective of all the arguments I have already made concerning how we are able to sense it. But what I find significant is that mathematical laws are not man made and that nature obeys them even if we weren’t here to express them. So I would argue that transcendental idealism is mathematics, even though I’m not at all sure if Kant would concur. I think Pythagoras showed remarkable insight when he claimed that all things are numbers, even though he was talking from a religious perspective. But metaphysics aside, Pythagoras was one of the first philosophers to understand that mathematics gives us a rare and unique insight into the natural world. What would he think today? What’s more I think Pythagoras would be quite agreeable in thinking that Kant’s transcendental idealism was indeed the world of mathematics.

Bibliography

Kaku M., Hyperspace, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Kaku M. & Thompson J., Beyond Einstein, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Kant I., Smith N. (trans.), Critique of Pure Reason, Macmillan, London, 1929.

Philosophy, The History of Western, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.25, Edition 15, 1989, pp.742-69.

Reason And Experience, Theories of Knowledge B, Reader, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, 1989.

Reason And Experience, Theories of Knowledge B, Study Guide, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, 1989.

Ross K., Immanuel Kant, web page http://www.friesian.com/kant.htm

Sacks, O., The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Picador, London, 1986.

Sternberg R., In Search of the Human Mind, Yale University, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995.

Evolution of culture; a uniquely human adaption

I finally got around to reading Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, after someone lent me a copy. I’d already read and reviewed his follow-up book, Homo Deus, so I’m reading them in the reverse order. I have to say he makes bleak reading, yet you feel there’s a lot of truth in his words. Having said that, I still feel I can challenge him on some issues to provide a more optimistic outlook. He is both provocative and thought-provoking, which are not necessarily one and the same thing.

He makes the point, which I’ve long known, that what separates us from all other species is that we have undertaken a cultural evolution that has long overtaken our biological evolution. This was accelerated by the invention of script, which allowed memories to be recorded and maintained over generations, some of which have lasted millennia. Of course, we already had this advantage even before we invented script, but script allowed an accumulation of knowledge that eventually led to the scientific revolution, which we’ve all benefited from since the enlightenment and has accelerated in the last 2 centuries particularly.

One of Harari’s recurring themes is that much of our lives are dependent on fictions and myths, and these have changed as part of our cultural evolution in a way that we don’t appreciate. Jeremy Lent makes similar observations in his excellent book, The Patterning Instinct, though he has a subtly different emphasis to Harari. Harari gives the impression that we are trapped in our social norms and gives examples to make his case. He points out that past societies were very hierarchical and everyone literally knew their place and lived within that paradigm. In fact, the consequences of trying to live outside one’s social constraints could be dire, even fatal. The current paradigm, at least in Western societies, is one of ‘individualism’, which he also explored in his follow-up book, with the warning that it could be eroded, if not eliminated, by the rise of AI, but I won’t discuss that here.

He effectively argues that these ‘fictions’, that we live by, rule out the commonly held belief that we can change our circumstances or that there is an objective morality that we can live by. In other words, he claims our lives are ruled by myths that we accept without question, and the only thing that changes are the myths themselves.

I take his point, but throughout history - at least from around 500BC - there have been iconoclasts who have challenged the reigning paradigm of their time. I will mention four: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius. The curious point is that none of these wrote anything down (we only have their ‘sayings’) yet they are still iconic figures more than 2,000 years after their time. What they have in common is that they all challenged the prevailing ‘myth’ (to use Harari’s term) that there was a ‘natural order’ whereby those who ruled were ordained by gods, compared to those who served.

They all suffered for their subversions: Jesus and Socrates were executed, Confucius was exiled into poverty and the Buddha was threatened but not killed. Jesus challenged the church of his day, and that was the logical cause of his execution, not the blasphemy that he claimed to be ‘the son of god’. A lot of words were put in Jesus’ mouth, especially in the Bible. Jesus stood up for the disenfranchised and was critical of the church and the way it exploited the poor. He wouldn’t have been the only rabble-rouser of his time in Roman occupied Palestine but he was one of the most charismatic.

Buddha challenged the caste system in India as unjust, which made him logically critical of the religious-based norms of his time. He challenged the ‘myth’ that Harari claims everyone would have accepted without question.

Confucius was critical of appointments based on birth rather than merit and argued that good rulers truly served their people, rather than the other way round. Not surprisingly, his views didn’t go down very well with the autocracy of his time. He allegedly proposed the dictum of reciprocity:  ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’. An aphorism also attributed to Jesus, which has more pertinence if one considers that it crosses class boundaries.

As for Socrates, I think he was the original existentialist in that he made a special plea to authenticity: ‘To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.’ Socrates got into trouble for supposedly poisoning the minds of the young, but what he really did was to make people challenge the pervading paradigm of his time, including the dominion of gods. He challenged people to think for themselves through argument, which is the essence of philosophy to this day.

To be fair to Harari, he gives specific attention to the feminist paradigm (my term, not his, as I don’t see it as a fiction or a myth). But I do agree that money, which determines so much in our societies, is based on a very convenient fiction and a great deal of trust. Actually, some level of trust is fundamental to a functioning society. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere that, without trust: truth, justice and freedom all become forfeit.

The feminist paradigm is very recent, yet essential to our future. I recently saw an interview with Melinda Gates (currently in Australia) who made the salient point that it’s contraception that allows women to follow a destiny independent of men. Not surprisingly, it’s the ‘independent of men’ bit that has created, and continues to create, the greatest obstacle to their emancipation.

One of the more interesting discussions, I found, was Harari’s argument that political ideologies are really religions. I guess it depends on how you define religion. This is how Harari defines it, simultaneously giving a rationale to his thesis:

If religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

I’m not convinced that political ideologies are dependent on a belief in a ‘superhuman order’, but they are premised on abstract ideas of uncontested ‘truth’, and, in that sense, they are like religions.

Contrary to what many people think, political thinking of ‘right’ and ‘left’ are largely determined by one’s genes, although environment also plays a role. Basically, personality traits like conscientiousness and goal-oriented leadership over people-based leadership are what are considered right-leaning traits; and agreeableness and openness (to new ideas) are considered left-leaning traits. Neuroticism would probably also be considered a left-leaning trait. Notice that all the left-leaning traits are predominant in artistic or creative people and this is generally reflected in their politics.

Curiously, twin studies have shown that a belief in God is also, at least partly, a genetically inherited trait. But I don’t believe there is any correlation between these two belief systems: God and politics. I know of people on the political right who are atheists and I know people on the political left who are theists.

I know that in America there seems to be a correlation between the political right and Christian fundamentalism, but I think that’s an Americanism. In Australia, it has little impact. We’ve very recently elected a Pentecostal as PM (Prime Minister) but I don’t believe that had any bearing on his election. We’ve had two atheist PMs in my lifetime (one of whom was very popular indeed), which would be unthinkable in America. The truth is that in some cultures religion is bound irretrievably with politics, and it can be hard for anyone who’s lived their entire lives in that culture to imagine there are political regimes where religion is a non-issue.

And this brings me to Harari’s next contentious point:

Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheistic beliefs.

Again, I think this is a particular American perspective. I would argue that liberal humanism has arisen from an existentialist philosophy, even though most people, who advocate and follow it, have probably never studied existential philosophy. There was a cultural revolution in Western societies in the generation following World War 2, and I was a part of it. Basically, we rejected the Christian institutions we were raised in, and embraced the existentialist paradigm that the individual was responsible for their own morality and their own destiny. No where was this more evident than in the rise of feminism, aided ineluctably by on-demand contraception.

So contrary to Harari’s argument, I think the humanist individualism that defines our age (in the West) was inextricably linked to the rejection of the Church. None of us knew what existentialism was, but, when I encountered it academically later in life, I recognised it as the symptomatic paradigm of my generation. We had become existentialists without being ideologically indoctrinated.

I feel Harari is on firmer ground when he discusses the relationship between the scientific revolution and European colonial expansion. I’ve argued previously, when discussing Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct, that Western European philosophy begat the scientific revolution because, under Galileo, Kepler and Newton, they discovered the relationship between mathematics and the movements of stellar objects – the music of the spheres, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks. The Platonic world of mathematics held the key to understanding the heavens. Subsequent centuries progressed this mathematical paradigm even further with the discovery of electromagnetic waves, then quantum mechanics and general relativity, leading to current theories of elementary nuclear particles and QED (quantum electrodynamics).

But Harari makes the case that exploration of foreign lands and peoples went hand-in-hand with scientific exploration of flora, fauna and archaeological digs. He argues that only Europeans acknowledged that we were ignorant of the wider world, which led to a desire for knowledge, rather than an acceptance that what our myths didn’t tell us was not worth knowing or exploring. Science had the same philosophy: that our ignorance would lead us to always search for new theories and new explanations, rather than accept the religious dogma that knowledge outside the Bible was not worthy of consideration.

So I would agree there was a synergy here, that was both destructive and empowering, depending on whether you were the European conqueror or the people being subjugated and ruthlessly exploited for the expansion of empire.

Probably the best part of the book is Harari’s description of capitalism and how it has shaped history in the last 400 years. He explains how and why it works, and why it’s been so successful. He also points out its flaws and its dark side. The book is worth reading for this section alone. He also explains how the free market, if left to its own devices, would lead to slavery. Instead, we have the exploitation of labour in third world countries, which is the next best thing, or the next worse thing, depending on your point of view.

This logically leads to a discussion on the consumerism paradigm that drives almost everything we do in modern society. Economic growth is totally dependent on it, but, ecologically, it’s a catastrophe in progress.

One of his more thought-provoking insights is in regard to how communal care-taking in law enforcement, health, education, even family dynamics, has been taken over by state bureaucracies. If one reads the neo-Confucian text, the I Ching, one finds constant analogies between family relationships and relationships in the Court (which means government officialdom). It should be pointed out that the I Ching predates Confucius, but contemporary texts (Richard Willem’s translation) have a strong Confucian flavour.

I can’t help but wonder if this facilitated China’s adoption of Communism almost as a state religion. Family relationships and loyalties still hold considerable sway in Asian politics and businesses. Nepotism is much more prevalent in Asian countries than in the West, I would suggest.

One of my bones of contention with Harari in Homo Deus was his ideas on happiness and how it’s basically a consequence of biochemistry. As someone who has lived for more than half a century in the modern post-war world, I feel I’m in a position to challenge his simplistic view that people’s ‘happiness setting’ doesn’t change as a consequence of external factors. To quote from Sapiens:

Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can change it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

Well, it works for me. Nothing has given me greater long term happiness than writing a novel and getting it into the public arena – the fact that it’s been a total financial failure is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I really can’t explain that, but it’s probably been the single most important, self-satisfying event of my life. I can die happy. Also I enjoy driving possibly more than any other activity, so owning a car means more to me than just having personal transport. I used to ride motorcycles, so maybe that explains it.

I grew up in a volatile household, which I’ve delineated elsewhere, and when I left home, the first 6 years were very depressing indeed. Over decades I turned all that around, so I think Harari’s ‘happiness setting’ is total bullshit.

But my biggest disagreement with Harari, which I alluded to before, is my advocacy for existentialist philosophy which he replaces with ‘the religion of liberal individualism’. Even though I can see similarities with Buddhism, I wouldn’t call existentialism a religion. Harari pre-empts this objection by claiming all ideologies, be they political or cultural, are no different to any religion. However, I have another objection of my own, which is that when Harari talks about religion, he is really talking about dogma.

In an issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 127, Aug/Sep 2018), Sandy Grant, who is a philosopher at University of Cambridge, defines dogma as an ‘appeal to authority without critical thinking’. I’ve previously defined philosophy as ‘argument augmented by analysis’, which is the antithesis of dogma. In fact, I would go so far as to say that philosophy has been historically an antidote to religion, going all the way back to Socrates.

Existentialism is a humanist philosophy (paraphrasing Sartre) but it requires self-examination and a fundamental honesty to oneself, which is the opposite of the narcissism implied in Harari’s religion of self-obsession, which he euphemistically calls ‘liberal individualism’.

Harari is cynical, if not dismissive, about the need for purpose in life, yet I would argue that it’s fundamental. I would recommend Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a holocaust survivor and psychologist, who argued that we find meaning in relationships, projects and adversity. In fact, I would contend that the whole meaning of life is about dealing with adversity, which is why it is the theme of every work of fiction ever recorded.

If I go back to the title of this post, which I think is what Harari’s book is all about, there is a hierarchy of ‘needs’ (not Maslow’s) that a society must provide to ensure what Harari calls ‘happiness’, which is not so much economical as psychological. Back in July 2015, I wrote one of my 400 word mini-essays in response to a Question of the Month in Philosophy Now. The only relevant part is my conclusion, which effectively says that a functioning society is based on trust.

You can’t have truth without trust; you can’t have justice without truth; you can’t have freedom without justice; and you can’t have happiness without freedom.

I think that succinctly answers Harari’s thesis on happiness. Biochemistry may play a role, but people won’t find happiness if all those prerequisites aren’t met, unless, of course, said people are part of a dictatorship’s oligarchy.

A utopian society would allow everyone to achieve their potential – that’s the ideal. The most important consequence of an existentialist approach is that you don’t forfeit your aspirations for the sake of family or nation or church or some other abstract ideal that Harari calls religion.

While on this subject, I will quote from another contributor to Philosophy Now (Issue 110, Oct/Nov 2015), Simon Clarke, who is talking about John Stuart Mill, but who expresses my point of view better than I can.

An objectively good life, on Mill’s (Aristotelian) view, is one where a person has reached her potential, realizing the powers and abilities she possesses. According to Mill, the chief essential requirement for personal well-being is the development of individuality. By this he meant the development of a person’s unique powers, abilities, and talents, to their fullest potential.

3 rules for humans

A very odd post. I joined a Science Fiction group on Facebook, which has its moments. I sometimes comment, even have conversations, and most of the time manage to avoid conflicts. I’ve been a participator on the internet long enough to know when to shut up, or let something through to the keeper, as we say in Oz. In other words, avoid being baited. Most of the time I succeed, considering how opinionated I can be.

Someone asked the question: what would the equivalent 3 laws for humans be, analogous to Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics?

The 3 laws of robotics (without looking them up) are about avoiding harm to humans within certain constraints and then avoiding harm to robots or itself. It’s hierarchical with humans' safety being at the top, or the first law (from memory).

So I submitted an answer, which I can no longer find, so maybe someone took the post down. But it got me thinking, and I found that what I came up with was more like a manifesto than laws per se; so they're nothing like Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics.

In the end, my so-called laws aren't exactly what I submitted but they are succinct and logically consistent, with enough substance to elaborate upon.

                        1.    Don’t try or pretend to be something you’re not

This is a direct attempt at what existentialists call ‘authenticity’, but it’s as plain as one can make it. I originally thought of something Socrates apparently said:

   To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to seem to be.

And my Rule No1 (preferable to law) is really another way of saying the same thing, only it’s more direct, and it has a cultural origin as well. As a child, growing up, ‘having tickets on yourself’, or ‘being up yourself’, to use some local colloquialisms, was considered the greatest sin. So I grew up with a disdain for pretentiousness that became ingrained. But there is more to it than that. I don’t believe in false modesty either.

There is a particular profession where being someone you’re not is an essential skill. I’m talking about acting. Spying also comes to mind, but the secret there I believe is to become invisible, which is the opposite to what James Bond does. That’s why John Le Carre’s George Smiley seems more like the real thing than 007 does. Going undercover, by the way, is extremely stressful and potentially detrimental to your health – just ask anyone who’s done it.

But actors routinely become someone they’re not. Many years ago, I used to watch a TV programme called The Actor’s Studio, where well known actors were interviewed, and I have to say that many of them struck me with their authenticity, which seems like a contradiction. But an Australian actress, Kerry Armstrong, once pointed out that acting requires leaving your ego behind. It struck me that actors know better than anyone else what the difference is between being yourself and being someone else.

I’m not an actor but I create characters in fiction, and I’ve always believed the process is mentally the same. Someone once said that ‘acting requires you to say something as if you’ve just thought of it, and not everyone can do that.’ So it’s spontaneity that matters. Someone else once said that acting requires you to always be in the moment. Writing fiction, I would contend, requires the same attributes. Writing, at least for me, requires you to inhabit the character, and that’s why the dialogue feels spontaneous, because it is. But paradoxically, it also requires authenticity. The secret is to leave yourself out of it.

The Chinese hold modesty in high regard. The I Ching has a lot to say about modesty, but basically we all like and admire people who are what they appear to be, as Socrates himself said.

We all wear masks, but I think those rare people who seem most comfortable without a mask are those we intrinsically admire the most.

                                   2.    Honesty starts with honesty to yourself

It’s not hard to see that this is directly related to Rule 1. The truth is that we can’t be honest to others if we are not honest to ourselves. It should be no surprise that sociopathic narcissists are also serial liars. Narcissists, from my experience, and from what I’ve read, create a ‘reality distortion field’ that is often at odds with everyone else except for their most loyal followers.

There is an argument that this should be Rule 1. They are obviously interdependent. But Rule 1 seems to be the logical starting point for me. Rule 2 is a consequence of Rule 1 rather than the other way round.

Hugh Mackay made the observation in his book, Right & Wrong: How to Decide for Yourself, that ‘The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves’. From this, neurosis is born and many of the ills that beleaguer us. Self-honesty can be much harder than we think. Obviously, if we are deceiving ourselves, then, by definition, we are unaware of it. But the real objective of self-honesty is so we can have social intercourse with others and all that entails.

So you can see there is a hierarchy in my rules. It goes from how we perceive ourselves to how others perceive us, and logically to how we interact with them.

But before leaving Rule 2, I would like to mention a movie I saw a few years back called Ali’s Wedding, which was an Australian Muslim rom-com. Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron but it was a really good film, partly because it was based on real events experienced by the filmmaker. The music by Nigel Weslake was so good, I bought the soundtrack. It’s relevance to this discussion is that the movie opens with a quote from the Quran about lying. It effectively says that lies have a habit of snowballing; so you dig yourself deeper the further you go. It’s the premise upon which the entire film is based.

                              3.    Assume all humans have the same rights as you

This is so fundamental, it could be Rule 1, but I would argue that you can’t put this into practice without Rules 1 and 2. It’s the opposite to narcissism, which is what Rules 1 and 2 are attempting to counter.

One can see that a direct consequence is Confucius’s dictum: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’; better known in the West as the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’; and attributed to Jesus of course.

It’s also the premise behind the United Nations Bill of Human Rights. All these rules are actually hard to live by, and I include myself in that broad statement.

A couple of years back when I wrote a post in response to the question: Is morality objective? I effectively argued that Rule No3 is the only objective morality.

What makes humans unique

Now everyone pretty well agrees that there is not one single thing that makes humans unique in the animal kingdom, but most people would agree that our cognitive abilities leave the most intelligent and social of species in our wake. I say ‘most’ because there are some, possibly many, who argue that humans are not as special as we like to think and there is really nothing we can do that other species can’t do. They would point out that other species, if not all advanced species, have language, and many produce art to attract a mate and build structures (like ants and beavers) and some even use tools (like apes and crows).

However, I find it hard to imagine that other species can think and conceptualise in a language the way we do or even communicate complex thoughts and intentions using oral utterances alone. To give other examples, I know of no other species that tells stories, keeps track of days by inventing a calendar based on heavenly constellations (like the Mayans) or even thinks about thinking. And as far as I know, we are the only species who literally invents a complex language that we teach our children (it’s not inherited) so that we can extend memories across generations. Even cultures without written scripts can do this using songs and dances and art. As someone said (John Hands in Cosmo Sapiens) we are the only species ‘who know that we know’. Or, as I said above, we are the only species that ‘thinks about thinking’.

Someone once pointed out to me that the only thing that separates us from all other species is the accumulation of knowledge, resulting in what we call civilization. He contended that over hundreds, even thousands of years, this had resulted in a huge gap between us and every other sentient creature on the planet. I pointed out to him that this only happened because we had invented the written word, based on languages, that allowed us to transfer memories across generations. Other species can teach their young certain skills, that may not be genetically inherited, but none can accumulate knowledge over hundreds of generations like we can. His very point demonstrated the difference he was trying to deny.

In a not-so-recent post, I delineated my philosophical ruminations into 23 succinct paragraphs, covering everything from science and mathematics to language, morality and religion.  My 16th point said:



Humans have the unique ability to nest concepts within concepts ad-infinitum, which mirror the physical world.

In another post from 2012, in answer to a Question of the Month in Philosophy  Now: How does language work?; I made the same point. (This is the only submission to Philosophy Now, out of 8 thus far, that didn’t get published.)

I attributed the above ‘philosophical point’ to Douglas Hofstadter, because he says something similar in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Godel Escher Bach, but in reality, I had reached this conclusion before reading it.

It’s my contention that it is this ability that separates us from other species and that has allowed all the intellectual endeavours we associate with humanity, including stories, music, art, architecture, mathematics, science and engineering.

I will illustrate with an example that we are all familiar with, yet many of us struggle to pursue at an advanced level. I’m talking about mathematics, and I choose it because I believe it also explains why many of us fail to achieve the degree of proficiency we might prefer.

With mathematics we learn modules which we then use as a subroutine in a larger calculation. To give a very esoteric example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity requires at least 4 modules: calculus, vectors, matrices and the Lorentz transformation. These all combine in a metric tensor that becomes the basis of his field equations. The thing is, if you don’t know how to deal with any one of these, you obviously can’t derive his field equations. But the point is that the human brain can turn all these ‘modules’ into black boxes and then the black boxes can be manipulated at another level.

It’s not hard to see that we do this with everything, including writing an essay like I’m doing now. I raise a number of ideas and then try to combine them into a coherent thesis. The ‘atoms’ are individual words but no one tries to comprehend it at that level. Instead they think in terms of the ideas that I’ve expressed in words.

We do the same with a story, which becomes like a surrogate life for the time that we are under its spell. I’ve pointed out in other posts that we only learn something new when we integrate it into what we already know. And, with a story, we are continually integrating new information into existing information. Without this unique cognitive skill, stories wouldn’t work.

But more relevant to the current topic, the medium for a story is not words but the reader’s imagination. In a movie, we short-circuit the process, which is why they are so popular.

Because a story works at the level of imagination, it’s like a dream in that it evokes images and emotions that can feel real. One could imagine that a dog or a cat could experience emotions if we gave them a virtual reality experience, but a human story has the same level of complexity that we find in everyday life and which we express in a language. The simple fact that we can use language alone to conjure up a world with characters, along with a plot that can be followed, gives some indication of how powerful language is for the human species.

In a post I wrote on storytelling back in 2012, I referenced a book by Kiwi academic, Brian Boyd, who points out that pretend play, which we all do as children (though I suspect it’s now more likely done using a videogame console) gives us cognitive skills and is the precursor to both telling and experiencing stories. The success of streaming services indicates how stories are an essential part of the human experience.

While it’s self-evident that both mathematics and storytelling are two human endeavours that no other species can do (even at a rudimentary level) it’s hard to see how they are related.

People who are involved in computer programming or writing code, are aware of the value, even necessity, of subroutines. Our own brain does this when we learn to do something without having to think about it, like walking. But we can do the same thing with more complex tasks like driving a car or playing a musical instrument. The key point here is that they are all ‘motor tasks’, and we call the result ‘muscle memory’, as distinct from cognitive tasks. However, I expect it relates to cognitive tasks as well. For example, every time you say something it’s like the sentence has been pre-formed in your brain. We use particular phrases, all the time, which are analogous to ‘subroutines.’

I should point out that this doesn’t mean that computers ‘think’, which is a whole other topic. I’m just relating how the brain delegates tasks so it can ‘think’ about more important things. If we had to concentrate every time we took a step, we would lose the train of thought of whatever it was we were engaged in at the time; a conversation being the most obvious example.

The mathematics example I gave is not dissimilar to the idea of a ‘subroutine’. In fact, one can employ mathematical ‘modules’ into software, so it’s more than an analogy. So with mathematics we’ve effectively achieved cognitively what the brain achieves with motor skills at the subconscious level. And look where it has got us: Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which is the basis of all current theories of the Universe.

We can also think of a story in terms of modules. They are the individual scenes, which join together to form an episode, which form together to create an overarching narrative that we can follow even when it’s interrupted.

What mathematics and storytelling have in common is that they are both examples where the whole appears to be greater than the sum of its parts. Yet we know that in both cases, the whole is made up of the parts, because we ‘process’ the parts to get the whole. My point is that only humans are capable of this.

In both cases, we mentally build a structure that seems to have no limits. The same cognitive skill that allows us to follow a story in serial form also allows us to develop scientific theories. The brain breaks things down into components and then joins them back together to form a complex cognitive structure. Of course, we do this with physical objects as well, like when we manufacture a car or construct a building, or even a spacecraft. It’s called engineering.