Spiegeloog-columns
It seems I am in a philosophical mood the
last days, so I do some more.
In fact, I wanted to quote a
number of things from the interview with John
Searle I linked to yesterday,
but then I realized that to put this in
proper context - at least so far as I am
concerned - I should first translate the
last of the
columns I wrote and published in
1988-1989 in Spiegeloog, then the
printed monthly of the faculty of
psychology of the university of Amsterdam,
that in 1988 had
removed me briefly before I could take
my M.A. in philosophy. because I protested
what is best called postmodernism, that
was then rampant.
I translated the majority of
these small essays last year, because they
show quite well what I think about quite a
few things, and also why I was removed
from the faculty of philosophy in the
University of Amsterdam, for speaking
my mind rationally and honestly:
The present essay was the
last in the series, that lasted an
academic year, and it extended an
invitation to my readers to come and see
and hear me speak about the mind-body
problem, a problem which John Searle also
has been occupied with for a long time,
with similar ideas and conclusions.
Here is the essay, with a
number of notes,
that follow under it, and are linked in
the text between square brackets:
Body AND mind?
[1]
My me
Is someone I never see
It hides itself
In the dream
I dream
Of me.
Maarten Maartensz [2]
I want to speak about
philosophy[3] -
here by way of introduction, and more
seriously on November 8, at 16.00 hours,
in room 0.46. The subject is "Body
and Mind?". I will try to make
clear to you on this page what, among
other things, is related to this
question.
Look upon it like this:
Here is your head wth brains, there lies
a kilo of mincemeat. Why do you think
that you think with your brains, and not
with the mincemeat? No, this is not
really a joke. It is logically possible
that you are a poor experiment by a
jealous god; the dream of a computer
turned wild; a soul that gets reborn
each generation in another body; a
program that your TV is watching; or an
arbitrary combination from these. It is
also logically possible that what you
are pleased to call yourself, is the
compound effect of the tremendously fast
dancing of trillions of atoms between
your ears, some of which were mincemeat
yesterday, and tomorrow will be your
shit or food for worms. There are
infinitely many mutually contradictory
logically tenable explanatons of what
you and I really are. [3]
On what grounds do you choose
from these? And what motivates such
choices you to do? [4]
Mark well: Ideas about
body and mind have effects - ideas rule
the human world. [5]
For example: Some of our Islamic fellow
human beings are prepared to blow you up
if you ask some ironical questions about
what you are supposed to be and
therefore should and should not do (e.g.
in the fields of buying books and
wearing veils) [6].
And the Catholic Inquisition reasoned
more or less thus: 'It is a fact that
everybody possesses and immortal soul.
Also it is a fact that heathens go to
hell, where they will be tortured
infinitely long ("and therefore Christ
died for our sins on the cross et
credo quia absurdum et gloria in
excelsis Deo"). Ergo, it is a
deed inspired by christian neighbourly
love to torture heathens until they
embrace the truths of the Catholic faith
and die redeemed, with at least a small
chance to get to heaven or into limbo.
For after all, the inquisition can
merely torture for some finite
duration.' [7]
Why did our loving
Christrian brethern think so, and act
accordingly? Because they believed they
knew the answer to a question that
concerns everybody: 'What is a human
being?' and believed that this gave them
the right - the loving Christian duty -
to enforce their beliefs on others,
supposedly in their own interests. [8]
In the end, it is all
about a fundamental problem: What are
the causes of human experience? Is what
we call ourselves, our experiences, our
memories, our ideas and our ideals the
effect of nothing but a tiny chance
event in an enormous completely
unconcerned universe? A conception,
birth and education that happened then
and there, that produced the body, the
mind, the person and the personality
that comprise a tiny fraction of the
history of the universe and that,
comparatively speaking, very rapidly
fall apart into the parts that composed
it? Or is there - so satisfyingly for
our selflove - more to human experience,
or something different, than a
physical/biochemical process? Perhaps an
immortal soul, that will be divinely
rewarded or horribly punished in a
hereafter that can only be accessed by
bundles of experiences without any
material carrier? Or maybe both are true
and you are a mortal soul that has to
survive many bodies before it finally
dissolves into the All that is One? Or
are all experiences, and therefore all
theories, in the end illusions and is
there no real explanation for our
experiences - is the deepest wisdom to
know that you do not know: Das Sein soll
immer Mysterium sein?
Or do you simply get away with
"cogito ergo sum"? (I
think ergo I am, ergo you stink
therefore you are?) [9]
The in many ways most
humble hypothesis [10]
implies
logically that it is not true that
there are a mind AND a body (like a
driver and a car): If the hypothesis
is true, then both are the product of
one natural process that causes them.
This has the advantage of simplicity,
but it introduces several problems,
such as the following one: The body
exists because parts of the body exist
- so much flesh and bones, that can be
analysed into so many organs and parts
thereof, that can be analysed into
atoms and molecules, with such and
such properties and relations; the
mind exists because - and here we see
the first problem with the humble
hypothesis: Where and how does the
mincemeat you ate yesterday, or
whatever your guts made from this,
turn into desire, feeling, idea,
ideal? [11]
What spinning of atoms
is at the foundation of - no: =
identically the same as, if the humble
hypothesis is true [12] - the whirligig of your
feelings and thoughts? How does a
combination of what was mincemeat and
the processes of your brain produce a
poem from dots of ink or a face from a
pattern of stimuli on your corneas?
Where and how are the potatoes,
vegetables and fatty sauce your ate
yesterday transformed into your
dreams, ideas, sexual lusts and
headaches of today? [13]
In a sense, this is a
problem of the psychophysiology of the
future [14] - but only because we
did accept the humble hypothesis. But
then: On what grounds can we attribute
the rights to ourselves to conclude
that any arbitrary hypothesis about
anything whatsoever makes sense? What makes a hypothesis
credible, probable, rational,
acceptable, or the opposites of these?
[15]
Other
hypotheses? OK, but then on what
grounds are these credible, probable,
etcetera? And if we may reason
backward like that without limit ("We
suppose that A is true because we
assume that B is true; we assume that
B is true because... etctera ad
infinitum") does it not follow that
every assumption is reduced to an act
of faith, in the manner of "It is so,
because I think so?" [16]
It are these and
similar backgrounds of the mind-body
problen that I will address on November
8 at 16.00 hours, in a seminar in room
0.46. The initiative for this event came
from dr. Peter Molenaar [17], who seems to believe
that I can speak well and think well.
I can promise you three things: It
will be interesting; it wll be
difficult: To deal with fundamental
philosophical problems, such as the
mind-body problem, one needs logical
and probabilistic methods; and that
what I will say will be mostly
original, namely part of a book
provisionally called "Foundations
of Natural Philosophy",
that solves the problem "How do we
learn from experience?" (among other
things that our self is a part of the
activities of our brain [18]) in a logical way.
[19]
I'll try to my
thoughts in terms that are as clear as
possible, to say sensible things, and
not to bore you. [20]
And you are herewith invited.
Notes
to "Body AND mind?"
of 2011
Most non-bold links -
all underlined - in the notes that
follow are to my
Philosophical Dictionary, that
explains my understandings and usage of
terms, and most bold links to other
material on my site.
[1]
The title was meant to stress that there
are usually taken to be two entities:
the body and the mind,
and that one of these seems redundant.
Also, it should be noted that I wrote
for, and later lectured to, students of
psychology,
not philosophy, and that this and other
philosophical problems that do and
should matter to students of psychology
were not raised nor dealt with in
courses of psychology, in any systematic
and rational fashion.
[2] The poem is also
by me, and dates back to 1970, when I
wrote it after reading Descartes.
(Under the link you find my edition of
his Meditations
plus my comments, most of which date
back to that time.)
The poem has nothing to do
with the disease ME, the existence of
which I did not know before 1988, and
everything with the problems of knowledge
and of self-knowledge,
as in "Learn to know thyself!"
[3] For those who are
somewhat confused by "infinitely many explanations": In
principle, since we may extend any
system of assumptions
by more assumptions. In empirical fact
there are fewer, of course, and most
explanations of the mind-body problem
are either of a materialistic,
an idealistic
or a religious
kind, where the latter usually, if also
obscurely, combines aspects of both
materialism (humans have a body) and
idealism (everything that is, is in the
way of experience).
[4] These are very
fundamental human questions, and humans
are the only animals that murder and
torture their kinds - or kick them from
universities, or lock them in
concentration camps - because they
happen to have different hypotheses
about the ways things are.
As the Voltaire-quote
that opens my
sites since 1996 has it:
"If we
believe absurdities,
we
shall commit atrocities."
Voltaire
[5]
That ideas
rule the human world, in the shapes of fashions,
religions,
political ideologies,
and common cant
in the media,
very much rather than other things, varying
from economy to the interests of some ruling
class, is something few see clearly. One of
the consequences is that a ruling idea may
found a dictatorship
that exists for decades or may destroy
civilization or may create a religion that
exists for millenia.
[6] The fields of buying
books and wearing veils had become prominent
in the 1980ies mostly because of what
happened around Salman Rushdie's "The
Satanic Verses": A fatwah was declared
against him, and he lived for years in
hiding, to avoid being murdered for writing
a book of literature. If you read Dutch, my
own enlightened views on the topic are here:
Een
enigszins verlicht standpunt.
As to
Rushdie and me and postmodern
Holland ... see
-
Meer
juffrouw Ali = More on Ms Ali = The
hollow men (English)
- Vervolg
= reprise: Rushdie, Ali en ik (Dutch)
- me :
Laudatio Neerlandica (English,
relating to current Dutch pomo)
[7] This, of course, is the
general practical form of religions
and ideology:
Persons
and groups
who attribute to themselves the rights to
interfere with your life, your ideas, your
feelings and your interests, because they
claim some God-given
or genius-given
insight into the reality of things - that
often in practice covers their rights to
lock you up or kill you in what they call
"your best real interests".
Apart from malevolent
manipulation, of which there is more
than average
people tend to think, this is
mostly made possible by the lacks of intelligence, of
knowledge,
and of character
that marks most men. For more on these
lines see my
Mencius on human qualities
aka On a fundamental
problem in ethics and morals.
[8] Indeed, in general
human practice the worst deeds tend to
have the most beautiful, most resounding
moral justifications, as witnessed by
the mottos that were to be seen in
Hitler's concentration-camps, that were
either destruction-camps meant to kill
inmates on arrival, or work-camps meant
to kill inmates within a few months by
forced labour, leaving an average profit
of over 1600 Reichsmark per prisoner.
These mottos were namely "Jedem
das Seine" and "Arbeit
macht frei": "Everyone to his
merits" and "Labour sets you free", the
former a German version of the Latin
description of justice: "Suum cuique" =
"To each his own".
[9] All points of view
indicated occur in the literature, and
indeed the problem - What are we,
really?! - is a fundamental human
problem.
[10] One of the
things my paragraph seeks to suggest is
that the common religious
answers, that tend to stress their
humility, is far from that: It
assumes far more than needs to
be assumed, and it attributes to human
beings - primates with the gift of
language - properties, such as existence
for an infinity
of time in a blessed paradisical
hereafter, for those of correct beliefs,
and an infinity of time in hell for the
rest, that are very hard to
swallow for rational minds, or indeed
for moral minds. (Why torture an
opponent infinitely long?)
[11]
This is dealt with in more detail in my
Notes
to Leibniz's Mondadology,
and at greater length in my Notes
to Leibniz's New Essays. The
problem is that molecules and atoms do
not have interests, feelings or beliefs,
but that humans, who are composed from
interacting atoms and molecules (on the
humble hypothesis) do.
A kind of rational
answer-in-principle is that interests,
feelings and beliefs indeed are not
properties of molecules and atoms, but
of systematically interacting and
coordinated sets or systems of them, as
in a human brain, on the analogy of the
properties of water and of chemicals in
general, that do not derive from their
component parts - no molecule of water
is wet: masses of molecules of water are
wet - but from the interactions of their
parts.
This was, I think, first
clearly argued by C.D. Broad, in
his excellent "The Mind and Its Place
in Nature", that anyone interested
in the problem should read, for it is
admirably clear and sensible. The idea
goes ever since by the somewhat
misleading term "emergence",
where e.g. "systematic interaction" or
some such phrase would have been better,
also since a building is related to the
stones and beams that it is composed of
in a similar way as a thought is related
to events in the brain.
[12] Indeed "= identically
the same as" is a correct way
of writing the thesis that is involved:
There is no soul
whatsoever, for all human experience
is the same as processes in the brain.
Incidentally, for those inclined to
think so: This does not decrease
the greatness and creativity of the
human mind
in any way, and to my mind increases it.
(An animal produced by evolution that
has a - gifted - human's gifts, surely
is more awesome, is I suppose the right
word, in this day and age, than a mere
created thing, put together by some
superior species.)
[13] The manner of
putting it as I did in this paragraph
owes something to
McCulloch's "What's in the brain that
may ink my characters?"
[14] At the time what
seems currently mostly functioning under
the name "neuroscience" was termed
"psychophysiology" - but in the
University of Amsterdam this was
effectively mostly destroyed at
the time, and the professor of it, W.
van der Grinten, was also pestered away
from the faculty for reason of not
kowtowing enough to the pseudo-marxists
and bureaucrats
who then had the power
in the faculty and in the university.
[15] These again,
that is "On what
grounds can we attribute the rights to
ourselves to conclude that any
arbitrary hypothesis
about anything whatsoever makes sense?
What makes a hypothesis credible,
probable, rational, acceptable, or the
opposites of these?" are in
fact fundamental questions of logic and philosophy of
science, that is, fundamental questions
of human reasoning.
It was in fact this
that I intended to lecture about and did
lecture about, and most of my background
for that is given here: On
natural philosophy, philosophy of
science, and psychiatry
[16] There are
answers to this, the sources for which
are in the last link in [15],
but it is a difficult question, that
most who do believe themselves to have ideological or religious
answers that they may impose on others,
either do not see at all, or carefully
avoid studying or answering, on the
basis of their
own prejudice that they do not need
more or other knowledge than they have,
because they "know":
"It ain't what a man don't know that
makes him a fool, but what he does
know that ain't so."
(Josh
Billings)
But then such fools
have killed
millions, often of better moral,
intellectual or artistic gifts than
their killers, for
what the killers held to be the most
moral and best of reasons.
[17] Dr. Peter
Molenaar is, I think it is fair to say,
the only member of the staff of the
University of Amsterdam, that I met,
where he thought mathematical statistics
to psychologists, who combined the
qualities of intelligence, honesty and
kindness. He since left the UvA, and is
at an American university.
Nearly all of the
staff of the UvA, and especially in the
faculties of philosophy, psychology,
sociology, political sciences, Dutch,
pedagogy, and andrology (a quasi-science
invented at the UvA, since perished)
were frauds,
whores of reason, parasites of the
Dutch taxpayers, and totally worthless
pseudoscientists. The socalled
scientific staff in the faculty of
psychology for the most part took great
pride in NOT publishing, though
they were paid as scientific
researchers, mostly because (1) this
would have involved work they rather
avoided, and (2) they felt proud to call
scientific publishing "vain" and
themselves "humble" and mostly (3)
having tenure at a Dutch
university they had gained the position
of state bureaucrat
for life, for the staff of Dutch
universities are state bureaucrats, and
it is a virtual impossibility in Holland
to fire a state bureaucrat.
Most of the staff of
the UvA that was there in the 1980ies
still is there, and no doubt they have
taken excellent care that those who
follow them are of the same moral and
intellectual qualities as they are and
were themselves: Liars,
frauds, whores of reason, destroyers
of academia and of the Dutch
university system.
[18] "Foundations of
Natural Philosophy" never got written,
though I have most of the materials to
do so, but I lack the help, and have
asked for over 30 years for some form of
help, e.g. to clean my house.
I do not get it, for I
criticized those with power in
Amsterdam, and in Holland.
See e.g.
ME
+ me : Why my family was in The
Dutch Resistance in WW II
a.k.a.
Dutch Norms And
Values
a.k.a.
If
you ain't Dutch, you ain't much
a.k.a.
A
Real Dutch Treat
and
ME
+ me: Three
documents: My father's story +
my story + my Human Rights
for the reasons why,
and also the explanations
why I did as I did: I have the genes and
the pride and character of my family,
and also a very high intelligence; most
Dutchmen do not, and come from families
that survived WW II by collaborating
with the Nazis.
I fear it really is as
simple as that, because it was not only
thus for me, but because anyone
with a fine mind and moral courage who
dared to speak up against Hitler, Stalin
or Mao got into similar troubles for
having a fine mind and honestly using
it, as I did in Amsterdam since 1977,
and as my parents and grandparents did
between 1940 and 1945.
It also is a good
explanation why I, with my communist
and marxist
background that I had given up in 1970,
was so often called "a fascist" in the
Universtity of Amsterdam by radical
leftist students there, who made a
career by collaborating with the then
leading marxist, communist and socialist
leaderships in the
"democratized" universities of Holland:
In fact they came from families of
Nazi-collaborators, knew themselves to
be hardly any better than that, believed
everybody is equal or equivalent, and
therefore decried me as being a fascist
and a terrorist: Projection of their own
ideals,
mindsets and personalities.
And it is also a good
explanation why I was the only person
since the Nazis were defeated in 1945 to
be removed from a Dutch
university, as a student of philosophy
also, "because of
your publicly outspoken ideas" and "in
spite of your serious illness" (an
addition meant to convey sadistic
intent, in which the Board of Directors
succeeded).
Finally, this is why I
often quote Jung Chang (apart
from the fact that "Wild Swans"
is a very fine book, that explains much
about totalitarianism):
"It was from
this time that I developed my way of
judging the Chinese by dividing them
into two kinds: one humane and one
not. "
- (Jung
Chang)
This is what I believe
about Dutchmen,
and indeed men in general, and the only
solution I know, if mankind lives long
enough, is here:
[19]
I still think this can be done, and even
that I can do it, if only I could get
some of the help anybody in Amsterdam
who is medically an invalid, as I am,
does get: Persons in the street where I
live with half my IQ get free cars and
daily help, because they are said to be
ill, while they evidently are far
healthier than I am, judged by what they
can do and I can't do.
I get no help,
for I criticized the mayors of Amsterdam
for helping the drugsmafia deal in
heroin and cocaine "in the name of the
ideals of the February
Strike", as all these
mayors daily intoned for over 20
years, while protecting the mafia,
knowing full well from my letters and
mails that my father and grandfather
were arrested for co-organizing that
strike, and convicted to
concentration-camps, indeed by
collaborating Dutch judges, who indeed
were not punished after WW II: Hardly
anyone was punished for that in Holland,
because almost everyone did collaborate.
Finally, this also may
be exonerated: Only very brave men and
women dare to resist tyranny. What I
cannot exonerate is lying about it after
it happened - as of May 1945, every
Dutchman had been "a member of the
Resistance" - and what I also cannot
exonerate is the lie that everybody is
and ought to be equal and equivalent,
which every Dutchman but Queen Beatrix
and myself has been daily repeating
since 1970 or so: No, they are not, and
those who repeat this lie do repeat this
lie because they know they themselves
are and have nothing special to be proud
of:
[20]
Here I am also quite serious, since I
have always believed that real science
can be and should be presented far
better than it is, by the majority of
scientists, both pseudo and real: Real
science, if possible, should be written
about as e.g. Henri Poincaré and
D'Arcy Thompson and William
Clifford and William
James could and would and
did.
Sofar for what I wrote
in 1989, with my notes of today. If I can
find the energy, I will continue this in
the next Nederlog with a consideration of
some of the views of John Searle, as
mentioned above and yesterday.
P.S. Corrections, if
any are necessary, have to be made
later.
--
Mar 31, 2011: I did correct a few typos
and added some more links.
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