New Writing Project

The blog has been quiet while I have been trying my hand at fiction. You can watch the progression over at loveandthezombiecyborgapocalypse.wordpress.com.

Hope you enjoy.

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Top 10 Greatest Philosophical Questions

#10) Does God exist?

I think most people put this question at number one. I don’t for one simple reason: the question of God’s existence actually bears very little on the answers to the questions below.

For example, on the question of why there is something rather than nothing at all, most people say “because God did it”, and from here follows a short list of very old arguments intending to prove God’s logical necessity or to demonstrate that proposing God as the cause of it all makes simpler sense than not.

CT scans show that the same part of the brain is active when people think about God as when they think about ghosts. In other words, our subjective sense of God is a homogeneous, disembodied force. He seems simple, whereas the universe is filled with galaxies and mountains and leaves and kitchen appliances and math tests. It’s all very complicated. But then if God consciously designed and created all that stuff, surely He is more grand, more powerful, more majestic, more extended in space and time, more complicated in ways unimaginable to us. (Otherwise why worship a ghost?)

In fact, that is the basic thrust of the argument from design, which says that if we stumble upon a pocket watch lying on the beach, we don’t assume it randomly came into being. We assume something even more complex designed it.

So adding God not only doesn’t answer the question, it actually makes things more complicated by introducing a regress. In fact, the only reason I included this question on the list at all is for it’s historical significance. Humanity has exhausted itself on this one, an effort I won’t perpetuate here.

#9) What is the meaning of life?

Here is another largely pointless question.

It might be that we are all supposed to cut off all our limbs and babble gibberish in a cave in the desert until we died. Don’t sneer. It’s a possible answer, and your dismissal of it is based on certain assumptions about what the meaning of life must look like, assumptions that you take for granted.

Think of it this way. If I said “I think the meaning of life is beige with a red fringe around two large circles in the center of everything”, you would look at me funny. But that’s because you assume, deep down, that meaning will not only be applicable to a human life, but to YOUR particular human life (along with every other person’s). But we don’t know if that’s true or not. If anything, the objective evidence suggests the exact opposite.

YOUR answer can only be THE ANSWER if we are able to reconcile the subjective and objective points of view – a seemingly impossible task. How can the things that have infinite value to me have any value to the universe? One man’s treasured possession, say the last photograph taken of his dead wife, is just another piece of paper to everyone else. If we passed it lying in a puddle next to an empty fast food bag, we wouldn’t think twice about picking it up and throwing it away.

Human beings are mortal creatures who came into existence at some point in time, and so I don’t see how an anthropocentric answer can be THE ANSWER in some grand cosmological sense. Such an answer wouldn’t make sense for other intelligent creatures on our own planet, those out in some distant galaxy, or for clumps of anti-matter in some other dimension, let alone for the universe as it existed before or will exist after human beings. Such an answer would necessarily be limited in either space or duration, so it couldn’t be THE ANSWER.

Traditionally human beings have used God to bridge the subjective and objective. YOU matter because YOU matter to God. Fine, but then everyone matters to God. What about the rest of it? What about the universe? And if I matter so much, why did that man’s wife get cancer and die?

Not surprisingly the big response is that it’s all one big mystery that only God understands, that He has a plan, and who are you to ask Him to change or even reveal His plan for you?

But then that’s pretty much the same answer as above… Everything’s really not about you, so get over it.

Forget possible answers – I’m not sure the question actually asks anything.

#8) What is the relationship between mind and body?

This is one most people probably don’t think about, which is odd considering it directly addresses their ability to think about anything at all. If the mind lacks physical form, how then how can it interact with the physical world? How does pain translate from unfeeling electrical impulses to “ouch”? How can mere thoughts motivate physical actions?

Lots of folks these days like to think of the mind as the software to the brain’s hardware, and admittedly this appears an easy solution… except that it leaves no room for consciousness. The problem was brilliantly summarized by the philosopher John Searle in his now famous Chinese Room argument.

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the… test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

In other words, the computer analogy seems to leave no room for self awareness. Whatever it is we experience in our minds as conscious beings is coldly absent from the software model. What then is mind exactly, and how can it affect the body?

#7) What happens next?

There are two answers to this question. The first, rather mundane answer has to do with me personally, and what happens when the neurons in my brain stop working. In other words, do we survive death?

Religions vary on the subject. In the East the answer to that question is, yes and you are reborn right back into the world. In the West we tend to answer, yes and you spend the rest of eternity either being tortured or being pampered – no middle option.

Pick whichever you want. We are still left with the question of what happens in, say, a hundred thousand years, or a hundred thousand billion years. More of the same?

The British moral philosopher Bernard Williams argued, whether rebirth, immortality, heaven or hell, at some point it hardly makes a difference. To Williams, the concept of living forever was ludicrous. In an eternity, all possible things are done an infinite number of times, and so eternity inevitably leads to a poverty of experience – a fate worse than boredom. Existence itself becomes relentlessly tedious.

It’s an idea most people will struggle with because the brain simply doesn’t have the tools to comprehend the arithmetic of cosmic numbers. Take a googol for example, or 1 followed by 100 zeros.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Or a googolplex, a 1 followed by a googol zeroes (which is different from the Googleplex, which is the headquarters of Google Inc. in Mountain View, CA). Think how big that number is… 1 followed as many zeroes as above. Now divide googolplex by eternity. What do you get?

A number so close to zero as to make no difference.

In fact, the same is true when you divide ANY finite number infinitely, no matter how mind-bogglingly huge such a number might seem. Eternity, however easy a word it is to pronounce, is not something you can actually understand. Eternity is not a googolplex of googolplexes. It’s not googolplex to the googolplex power. It’s not googolplex factorial! Eternity is the sum of all those plus an infinity of googolplexes more.

Saying we want to live forever is nonsensical. But then whatever life we do have is certainly closer to a deficit than a surplus, and so we all ignore Williams’ warning and instead heed our emotional impulse to live forever, despite the inescapably unhappy result.

Better to focus on making whatever amount of finite life we do have the best possible.

#6) Why is there something rather than nothing?

This is one of my favorites (see link below), but in the grand scheme of things, it has less bearing on a life well-lived than most philosophers care to admit. Even worse, we couldn’t comprehend the answer even if someone told us. We simply do not have the capacity to process it because it is impossible for us to understand the alternative to something.

The reason is simple… Nothing can’t be. By its very definition, it isn’t. Nothing is not a void. A void has space. Nothing is a complete absence of ANYTHING. Zero is something. Nothing is not zero. Nothing is the complete lack of anything, and your brain – which is a particular kind of something and which uses thoughts, which are also something – cannot comprehend nothing.

In other words, I’m not sure it’s possible we could ever comprehend the reason why there is something we can’t comprehend. But it’s still fun to think about.

#5) Why all of this stuff and not some other stuff?

The answer here would settle the ancient battle between free will and determinism, or nature versus nurture, because we would know why things turned out the way they did and not some other way. But that’s not the interesting part.

Most of us appreciate that nothing is 100% nature or 100% nurture, nor is it likely that everything is determined, which would mean nothing is ever random, a statement at least conflicted by the observational evidence from modern physics. The same observations from physics also show that not everything is random either: some things are predictable.

So it’s not all that interesting that there is a little more nature than nurture in one case, about the same in another, and maybe a little more nurture in a third, and so on. That is simply a universal accounting exercise and it’s not why this question is number 5 on our list. No, this question is enlightening for the same reason that philosophy itself is enlightening: not because it gives The Answer, but because it teaches us to appreciate the full range of possible answers.

To start, it teaches us that it’s not always clear what counts as an answer. Did the 8 ball go into the corner pocket because it was struck by the que… or because your TV was broke and you decided to play pool? Did the oil rig explode because a valve failed, or because the oil company cut back on safety? Did thousands die of cholera in the Nineteenth Century because of contaminated water… or because the class structure of European society prevented access to clean water by the poor?

But even where we may be clear on what kind of answer we’re looking for, we still have a track record of mucking it up.

It is a fact that human beings succumb to hindsight bias, or the tendency to assume after the fact that any given outcome was likely or even necessary from the very beginning. Contemporary neuroscience suggests a mechanism: the human brain is a cognitive miser. It does not store any more information than it thinks it is likely to need. Thus we can easily recall the end result of our deliberations – that we decided on a red car, or to vote for a particular politician, or that we didn’t like a certain movie – but have difficulty recreating all of the considerations that took us to that conclusion. Once a decision is made, our hindsightful, miserly brain sees no reason to waste memory retaining all of our foresightful uncertainties and dead ends.

But at any given moment the universe is robust to uncertainty, something Mark Twain acutely observed when he said that History never revealed its alternatives. The power of this question is that it reveals those shrouded alternatives. Those who ask it genuinely – that is, those who approach the uncertainty of the present unencumbered by expectation – are the true revolutionaries, the shapers of History, because they expose alternatives never before contemplated: people like Alexander the Great, or the Buddha, or Einstein, or Beethoven, or Gandhi, as well as innumerable artists, politicians, generals, scientists and saints who contributed in ways large and small to the advancement of human understanding.

The one thing they all have in common is that they reject the easy answer, the time-honored explanation, the usual way, the law.

Let us always be at war with The Answer.

#4) Who am I?

We spend most of our lives in abject certainty of who we are, but are in complete doubt at all of the moments that matter: when confronting our first obstacle as an adult, when contemplating marriage, when facing a terminal illness, and so on. Why the difference? If we are truly certain of who we are, then we should double our resolve in moments of crisis.

Very clearly we don’t do that because it is those moments that shake our expectations. But then that suggests our certainty is an illusion born of repetition. Nothing much changes from day to day, and that gives the appearance on constancy. Constancy gives the appearance of soundness. So there must be no reason to doubt ourselves.

Lying on the ground, any chain appears strong, but every school child knows it’s only as strong as it’s weakest link, and we only know that when it’s stretched. In the very same way, our confidence in our identity is only as strong as how well it holds up to pressure, which is not well.

I say all that to get you to appreciate that our confidence in our identity, in ourselves, isn’t all that strong. It’s just that we don’t usually have any cause to doubt it in daily life. Constancy gives the appearance of soundness.

But who are you really? And how would you even answer that question?

If you are defined by your given name, what about people with the same name? If you’re defined by your relationships, what happens as old friendships wane, people divorce and family members die? If you’re defined by your physical being, what about people who lose a limb (or several)? And consider that you turn over all the cells in your body on a fairly regular basis. The molecules that together defined “you” five years ago have all moved on, probably to other bodies (human or otherwise). What’s left?

When pressed, most people flee to the brain. The molecules of our bodies may slowly but relentlessly turn over, but the neural connections remain. But then new neural connections form as we age and gather experience. What happens as they change? What happens after damage, say from a stroke? Or what about someone who is in a car accident and receives a traumatic brain injury? Are they not the same person? If they were drinking and driving, and in the process killed a pedestrian, would we not hold them accountable in a court of law? Is a person in a persistent vegetative state or someone with Alzheimer’s literally NOT the same person they were before?

Defining ourselves by consciousness fares no better. What then happens when you are sleeping? What about those in a coma? Do they cease to exist? And if you’re defined by the contents of your mind, what happens as you accumulate more memories and others fade completely? Is someone with amnesia not liable for crimes committed before their illness? What about people taking psychoactive medication or illicit drugs?

Through the grind of daily life, we insist on the continuity of the individual. It is a founding principle of society – that it’s members cohere from moment to moment – and is embodied in it’s institutions, such as the law, and in its norms and mores. But there is simply no definition of the individual that persists over time. None. Not a one.

How is it then that YOU persist?

#3) How do I know what is right or wrong?

For most people, the answer to this question seems obvious. The things that are wrong are the things that are obviously wrong, and anyone who tries to make it any more complicated than that is an atheist commie bastard.

But that doesn’t really answer the question. It’s fine to say it’s obviously wrong to lie, cheat, steal, or commit murder – not many would disagree with you – but such an answer is hopelessly academic.  The real question is, what counts as lying, cheating, stealing or murder?

If you think the answer to that question is also obvious, then you are hopelessly conceited, and there is little to say but “I’m not talking to you”.

The fact remains that people – good, honest, hard-working people, both in your country and abroad – have genuine disagreements about what is right and wrong in any particular instance. That one person thinks the right answer is just plain obvious proves nothing if many others disagree. By definition, it must not be so obvious after all. How would we know which is right?

The most common answers appeal to God, but then the same criticism applies. His commandments are so academic as to be practically useless. God says, “thou shalt not kill”, which I assume means “it is wrong to murder another human” rather than “it is wrong to kill any living thing”. Even if we assume it’s just plain obvious He meant the former and not the latter, we still don’t know what counts as murder. What’s worse, He seems to contradict Himself… a lot.

In Deuteronomy for example, God says our punishment for pre-marital sex should be death by stoning:

But if the thing is true, that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father’s house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

So much for thou shalt kill. And while we’re at it, I hardly think Sarah Palin’s daughter deserves to be stoned to death.

In II Kings, an elder of the Hebrew tribes hears that one of the Israelites has married a Midianite woman. But mixing of races is not part of God’s plan – apparently He’s into racial purity – and so the elder walks into the newlywed’s tent and runs them both through with a spear. God looks down and says it was good.

I could go on and on… and on…

Some folks acknowledge the inconsistency and point to the need for heaven and hell to promote social order, which sounds nice… except that doing something out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward is not a moral act. A homicidal killer might choose not to slay one of his victims in plain sight so as not to get caught, but that hardly makes him a good person.

A moral act is one that is done because it is right and for no other reason. Certainly it’s not something done out of fear. If we are actually motivated by hell, if we at all consider what we can get away with or are rewarded for, then we are already not behaving morally, and so God again adds nothing.

So the addition of God get us no closer to an answer. If anything, He just makes things more confusing.

The search for viable alternatives to a divine answer have thus far focused on two kinds of rules: ends-based and means-based. Utilitarian theories have focused on ends, such as that we should strive to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarians however have had problems defining what is good, for if we leave it at merely happiness we seem to end with some nonsensical results, such as that we should kill one mostly useless person if it even marginally increases the happiness of millions.

Means-based theories, like Kant’s categorical imperative, involve some kind of a priori rule which it must always be wrong to violate. Here to we also seem to wind up with nonsensical results, for if it’s wrong to kill, then it’s wrong to kill someone who will kill millions of others (say, Hitler or Pol Pot).

The simple fact is our answers to this question tend to be very muddled, and despite millenia of effort, have so far completely resisted any attempt at formal classification.

#2) How can we know anything?

This is the reply to the skeptic, who has argued persistently (if not always convincingly) from the very beginning that, when you think about it, there really aren’t any solid reasons to think we know anything. And I don’t just mean that 2 + 2 = 4. I mean ANYTHING – that you exist, that the universe is, that you aren’t a brain in a vat somewhere living a complex virtual reality, and so on.

Most philosophers accept that knowledge is true, justified belief. That is, we know something if it’s true and if we believe it because we have justification to believe it (versus believing for bad reasons, or just on accident).

If we accept that definition, then we have real difficulty identifying the benchmark of Truth. What independent source can verify that our true, justified beliefs are in fact true? Even if some advanced alien race came down from the heavens to impart universal wisdom, how would we know that it wasn’t all just as much as sham as any of the rest of it?

We wouldn’t, says the skeptic.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily imply relativism, which argues that there is no universal Truth, but that it’s all relative to our own subjective experiences. The skeptic would argue we have no more evidence for relative truths than for absolute ones. In fact most skeptics want there to be absolute Truth. They’re just trying to be honest about whether we possess any such thing.

Hence almost everyone tends to ignore the question of Truth and instead focuses on justification. Here people tend to fall into one of two camps: empiricists and rationalists. The latter argue that knowledge is either innate (say, provided by God or Nature) or must be deduced from logically necessary first principles.

Hogwash, say the empiricists. Deducing the nature of the deep universe from the comfort of your armchair is about as effective as quarterbacking from the same. Knowledge can only come from engagement with the world, from experience. We know only what we can go out into the world and demonstrate through observation and testing. Anything else is intellectual masturbation.

To understand just how fascinating this debate can be, take the famous ontological argument of St. Anselm (circa 11th Century). Says Anselm, if God is defined as a being than which none greater can be conceived, then He must exist, because if He did not, we would have a paradox – a greater being could yet be conceived (namely, one that did exist). Therefore a being than which none greater can be conceived must logically exist. Therefore God exists.

The logical cleanliness of such a priori reasoning appeals to a rationalist, whereas an empiricist would argue, no mater how clean it seems, nowhere is it demonstrated than any such thing actually is. The empiricist stands on the threshold of the world and asks, Where’s the Beef?

The simple fact is, there are benefits and drawbacks to both points of view, and regardless of where we fall on the question of the divine, no one is purely rationalist or purely empiricist in daily life. We all accept some things as true based on reason and some things as true based on the school of hard knocks. The question is usually one of emphasis.

#1) What am I supposed to do?

Here we mean something more than what is right or wrong. Presumably if we knew what was right, we would do that, but that says nothing of what we are supposed to spend our time doing. After all, there are a great many things that are neither right nor wrong to do. Get married for example, or be an accountant versus a software engineer.

Another way of asking this is “what is good?”, which is subtly but importantly different than “what is right?” For example, what is a good life? Someone might live their life as a shut-in, donating whatever money they have to charity, but eschewing all personal contact. There is nothing immoral about that, but most of us recognize that there is something missing. Living a good life entails something more than simply doing the right thing.

This question is number one on our list for the simple reason that, had we an answer, we wouldn’t care so much about the rest of it. We cling so tightly to, say, the arguments for God’s existence mostly because He seems to provide a ready answer to this question. What am I supposed to do? Whatever God tells me.

Much of the confusion though comes from an implicit assumption we make in asking this question: that there is an answer, that there is a something which we are supposed to do, or at least that some things are objectively or practically better to do than other things. But there is no reason why there must be any such thing.

This simple realization – that there is no sense in asking a question for which there may be no answer – has resurfaced periodically in the history of ideas, from Buddhist philosophy in the East to existentialism in the West. Whereas the Buddha taught that there was no answer, and so we should stop worrying about the question, existentialists like Sartre argued that, since we have no evidence of an answer, we are free to invent our own.

But that requires the Will to Act, something conspicuously absent from a race who doggedly assumes there must yet be a timeless, unchanging answer to the question. Indeed, for Nietzsche, those with such a Will were the exception, and were “super men” who transcended the artificial limitations imposed by the state or religion or societal norms.

The Buddha was more democratic. Such a Will to Act could be achieved by all – it simply required enlightenment, or awakening to the truth that there is no answer to the question. This is the truth of sunyata, or absence. The best you can do is hop of the wheel of reincarnation, and maybe help a few others along the way.

These points of view have been variously criticized as nihilistic, relativistic or just plain bankrupt, which is sad since all of them – even Nietzsche’s - affirm human life against the paucity of an answer. Yes, I said paucity. This takes a little reflection to appreciate, but as much as we yearn for one, any answer to this question, no matter the guise, requires the subjugation of the soul. It is impossible that such an answer could do anything but limit the full scope of human existence for it prescribes a path. And that to me is a tragedy.

But that’s not to say there isn’t something worryingly undemocratic about Nietzsche, or that the Buddha’s answer – stop worrying about the question and become a saint – is easy. And the existentialist approach, in as much as it stresses our unencumbered freedom, does seem vaguely nihilistic. If that’s all there is, why do anything?

Much of the recent work in the humanities and social sciences, or pretty much anything outside analytical philosophy (which, at its heart, like to find rules or make grand theories) has tried to bridge the gap between our desire (need?) for an answer, and the limitations of the various “there is no answer” responses.

Here the big idea is authenticity. You don’t need to give up on the question. Nor do you need to make up an answer. And it isn’t so much that there are “many paths” as much as it is a realization that, regardless of whether you make your own path or follow someone else’s, you’re still you, and the best thing you can be, no matter the hand you have been dealt, is true to yourself and those around you.

Would all of us had the courage to see that.

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For similar readings see It’s been seven months since my last confession, or click on the Topic Cloud.

Got awesome? Follow this blog.

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The Top 10 Greatest Philosophical Questions #1

#1) What am I supposed to do?

Here we mean something more than what is right or wrong. Presumably if we knew what was right, we would do that, but that says nothing of what we are supposed to spend our time doing. After all, there are a great many things that are neither right nor wrong to do. Get married for example, or be an accountant versus a software engineer.

Another way of asking this is “what is good?”, which is subtly but importantly different than “what is right?” For example, what is a good life? Someone might live their life as a shut-in, donating whatever money they have to charity, but eschewing all personal contact. There is nothing immoral about that, but most of us recognize that there is something missing. Living a good life entails something more than simply doing the right thing.

This question is number one on our list for the simple reason that, had we an answer, we wouldn’t care so much about the rest of it. We cling so tightly to, say, the arguments for God’s existence mostly because He seems to provide a ready answer to this question. What am I supposed to do? Whatever God tells me.

Much of the confusion though comes from an implicit assumption we make in asking this question: that there is an answer, that there is a something which we are supposed to do, or at least that some things are objectively or practically better to do than other things. But there is no reason why there must be any such thing.

This simple realization – that there is no sense in asking a question for which there may be no answer – has resurfaced periodically in the history of ideas, from Buddhist philosophy in the East to existentialism in the West. Whereas the Buddha taught that there was no answer, and so we should stop worrying about the question, existentialists like Sartre argued that, since we have no evidence of an answer, we are free to invent our own.

But that requires the Will to Act, something conspicuously absent from a race who doggedly assumes there must yet be a timeless, unchanging answer to the question. Indeed, for Nietzsche, those with such a Will were the exception, and were “super men” who transcended the artificial limitations imposed by the state or religion or societal norms.

The Buddha was more democratic. Such a Will to Act could be achieved by all – it simply required enlightenment, or awakening to the truth that there is no answer to the question. This is the truth of sunyata, or absence. The best you can do is hop of the wheel of reincarnation, and maybe help a few others along the way.

These points of view have been variously criticized as nihilistic, relativistic or just plain bankrupt, which is sad since all of them – even Nietzsche’s - affirm human life against the paucity of an answer. Yes, I said paucity. This takes a little reflection to appreciate, but as much as we yearn for one, any answer to this question, no matter the guise, requires the subjugation of the soul. It is impossible that such an answer could do anything but limit the full scope of human existence for it prescribes a path. And that to me is a tragedy.

But that’s not to say there isn’t something worryingly undemocratic about Nietzsche, or that the Buddha’s answer – stop worrying about the question and become a saint – is easy. And the existentialist approach, in as much as it stresses our unencumbered freedom, does seem vaguely nihilistic. If that’s all there is, why do anything?

Much of the recent work in the humanities and social sciences, or pretty much anything outside analytical philosophy (which, at its heart, like to find rules or make grand theories) has tried to bridge the gap between our desire (need?) for an answer, and the limitations of the various “there is no answer” responses.

Here the big idea is authenticity. You don’t need to give up on the question. Nor do you need to make up an answer. And it isn’t so much that there are “many paths” as much as it is a realization that, regardless of whether you make your own path or follow someone else’s, you’re still you, and the best thing you can be, no matter the hand you have been dealt, is true to yourself and those around you.

Would all of us had the courage to see that.

-

For similar readings see It’s been seven months since my last confession, or click on the Topic Cloud.

Got awesome? Follow this blog.

-

The Top 10 Greatest Philosophical Questions #2

#2) How can we know anything?

This is the reply to the skeptic, who has argued persistently (if not always convincingly) from the very beginning that, when you think about it, there really aren’t any solid reasons to think we know anything. And I don’t just mean that 2 + 2 = 4. I mean ANYTHING – that you exist, that the universe is, that you aren’t a brain in a vat somewhere living a complex virtual reality, and so on.

Most philosophers accept that knowledge is true, justified belief. That is, we know something if it’s true and if we believe it because we have justification to believe it (versus believing for bad reasons, or just on accident).

If we accept that definition, then we have real difficulty identifying the benchmark of Truth. What independent source can verify that our true, justified beliefs are in fact true? Even if some advanced alien race came down from the heavens to impart universal wisdom, how would we know that it wasn’t all just as much as sham as any of the rest of it?

We wouldn’t, says the skeptic.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily imply relativism, which argues that there is no universal Truth, but that it’s all relative to our own subjective experiences. The skeptic would argue we have no more evidence for relative truths than for absolute ones. In fact most skeptics want there to be absolute Truth. They’re just trying to be honest about whether we possess any such thing.

Hence almost everyone tends to ignore the question of Truth and instead focuses on justification. Here people tend to fall into one of two camps: empiricists and rationalists. The latter argue that knowledge is either innate (say, provided by God or Nature) or must be deduced from logically necessary first principles.

Hogwash, say the empiricists. Deducing the nature of the deep universe from the comfort of your armchair is about as effective as quarterbacking from the same. Knowledge can only come from engagement with the world, from experience. We know only what we can go out into the world and demonstrate through observation and testing. Anything else is intellectual masturbation.

To understand just how fascinating this debate can be, take the famous ontological argument of St. Anselm (circa 11th Century). Says Anselm, if God is defined as a being than which none greater can be conceived, then He must exist, because if He did not, we would have a paradox – a greater being could yet be conceived (namely, one that did exist). Therefore a being than which none greater can be conceived must logically exist. Therefore God exists.

The logical cleanliness of such a priori reasoning appeals to a rationalist, whereas an empiricist would argue, no mater how clean it seems, nowhere is it demonstrated than any such thing actually is. The empiricist stands on the threshold of the world and asks, Where’s the Beef?

The simple fact is, there are benefits and drawbacks to both points of view, and regardless of where we fall on the question of the divine, no one is purely rationalist or purely empiricist in daily life. We all accept some things as true based on reason and some things as true based on the school of hard knocks. The question is usually one of emphasis.

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For similar readings see The Incredible Unlikelihood of You, or click on the Topic Cloud.

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The Top 10 Greatest Philosophical Questions #3

#3) How do I know what is right or wrong?

For most people, the answer to this question seems obvious. The things that are wrong are the things that are obviously wrong, and anyone who tries to make it any more complicated than that is an atheist commie bastard.

But that doesn’t really answer the question. It’s fine to say it’s obviously wrong to lie, cheat, steal, or commit murder – not many would disagree with you – but such an answer is hopelessly academic.  The real question is, what counts as lying, cheating, stealing or murder?

If you think the answer to that question is also obvious, then you are hopelessly conceited, and there is little to say but “I’m not talking to you”.

The fact remains that people – good, honest, hard-working people, both in your country and abroad – have genuine disagreements about what is right and wrong in any particular instance. That one person thinks the right answer is just plain obvious proves nothing if many others disagree. By definition, it must not be so obvious after all. How would we know which is right?

The most common answers appeal to God, but then the same criticism applies. His commandments are so academic as to be practically useless. God says, “thou shalt not kill”, which I assume means “it is wrong to murder another human” rather than “it is wrong to kill any living thing”. Even if we assume it’s just plain obvious He meant the former and not the latter, we still don’t know what counts as murder. What’s worse, He seems to contradict Himself… a lot.

In Deutoronomy for example, God says our punishment for pre-marital sex should be death by stoning:

But if the thing is true, that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father’s house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

So much for thou shalt kill. And while we’re at it, I hardly think Sarah Palin’s daughter deserves to be stoned to death.

In II Kings, an elder of the Hebrew tribes hears that one of the Iraelites has married a Midionite woman. But mixing of races is not part of God’s plan – apparently He’s into racial purity – and so the elder walks into the newlywed’s tent and runs them both through with a spear. God looks down and says it was good.

I could go on and on… and on…

Some folks acknowledge the inconsistency and point to the need for heaven and hell to promote social order, which sounds nice… except that doing something out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward is not a moral act. A homicidal killer might choose not to slay one of his victims in plain sight so as not to get caught, but that hardly makes him a good person.

A moral act is one that is done because it is right and for no other reason. Certainly it’s not something done out of fear. If we are actually motivated by hell, if we at all consider what we can get away with or are rewarded for, then we are already not behaving morally, and so God again adds nothing.

So the addition of God get us no closer to an answer. If anything, He just makes things more confusing.

The search for viable alternatives to a divine answer have thus far focused on two kinds of rules: ends-based and means-based. Utilitarian theories have focused on ends, such as that we should strive to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarians however have had problems defining what is good, for if we leave it at merely happiness we seem to end with some nonsensical results, such as that we should kill one mostly useless person if it even marginally increases the happiness of millions.

Means-based theories, like Kant’s categorical imperative, involve some kind of a priori rule which it must always be wrong to violate. Here to we also seem to wind up with nonsensical results, for if it’s wrong to kill, then it’s wrong to kill someone who will kill millions of others (say, Hitler or Pol Pot).

The simple fact is our answers to this question tend to be very muddled, and despite millenia of effort, have so far completely resisted any attempt at formal classification.

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For similar readings see Morality Cheapens Religion, or click on the Topic Cloud.

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