Thinking About Nothing June 5, 2011

Over at Talking Philosophy Mike LaBossiere wonders if is possible to think nothing. His conclusion:

First, as Hume noted, the mind always seems to have something going on-some perception or another. Hence, a man is never really thinking about nothing-there is always something in the blender. Second, it could be argued that unlike a blender, a mind cannot engage in its function without some content. Thinking might be more like cutting-while one can make a motion with scissors, they are not cutting unless they have something to cut.

In the case of doing nothing, a man could be doing nothing in the sense that a blender could be blending nothing. Of course, the obvious reply is that while the blender is blending nothing, it is not actually doing nothing. After all, by doing it is doing something. Even thinking about nothing would be doing something, namely thinking about nothing. As such, as long as a man is doing, then he would be doing something-at the very least he is doing. What he is doing, of course, might not amount to much-hence we could be forgiven if we exaggerate and say we are doing nothing.

Earlier on he sort of waves away Heidegger and Sartre, but this seems to me one area where continental philosophy has a lot to offer. (Warning: If there’s a way to talk about this stuff without sounding like sort of a pretentious ass, I haven’t found it yet. Excuse the dorm room philosophizing.) If I’m remembering my Sartre correctly, he argued that the self (“essence”) was, at its core, this endless void containing only a self-annhilating, ever-changing miasma. We are nothing but we can’t think nothing, so we’re willfully imprisoned by our own cognition until the day we die.

It’s not the sunniest view of the mind, and contemporary neuroscience would seem to undermine Sartre’s strident dualism*, but I think there’s a kernel of psychological acuity here. Counscious thought may be only a sheer gauze stretched over our vast animal subconscious, but it’s still the only part of my own mind I can directly experience. And unless I’m sleeping, it never really stops chattering away and gumming up the works of my subconscious processes. There are obviously tremendous advantages to conscious thought, but it’s also the source of a sadness which I suspect is unique to persons. We have a lot of ways of trying to run away from it, or at least temporarily dampen its effects, but we can never be rid of it — a conscious mind can’t even understand what it means to be unconscious.

As far as how one deals with that, I think David Foster Wallace has got the right idea. Recently I went back and reread his commencement speech to Kenyon University. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should.

*Sartre took this so far he wound up arguing, ludicrously, that physical processes play no role in sexual desire.

Is there a school of thought that maintains that the mind and brain are dependent on each other? It would be like a half way point between materialism and idealism October 29, 2010

I think most theories of mind, including Cartesian dualism, accept the existence of some sort of mind-independent material world while also saying that this world is experienced by a non-physical mind. Descartes believed that the mind interacted with the brain by way of the pineal gland, while Gottfreid Leibniz believed that the body and the mind didn’t interact at all, but moved in perfect concert because they had been set in motion to do so ahead of time by God.

Then there’s Sartre, who distinguished not between mind and body but between essence and existence, with essence being essentially that which is self-aware and can think and feel, and existence being everything else.

My own view is materialist, but I suppose I cheat a little by suggesting that the fact that we have the phenomenological experience of possessing a non-physical mind is deeply significant. I see the mind as sort of a metaphorical concept used to describe our experiences, and if you take that a step further I think you could call a person “that which experiences itself as having a mind.”

Incidentally, I’m loving answering these philosophy questions. If you guys have got any more you’re curious about, keep ‘em coming.

Flesh and The Look (Or: What is Love? Jean-Paul, Don’t Hurt Me.) May 28, 2010

Image by diametrik via Flickr

Yes, that’s right: I will continue to shamelessly reuse the joke in the title until I’m done trying to answer the question.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre lays out a significantly darker conception of love than Aristophanes. For him, persons are forever torn between the “facticity” of their existence (that is, the factual presence and character of objects and phenomena in the material world) and the infinite freedom and nothingness of consciousness. Because this freedom is profoundly disturbing to us, we run away from it and impose limitations on ourselves, most notably by identifying ourselves with “the look” of others—the look being our own perception of their perception of us.

We can also direct the look towards others, and this is potentially an act of violence because it imposes definition on them and constrains their freedom. It draws them away from their consciousness into “flesh,” the medium by which they experience pure facticity.

So for Sartre, love and sex are just another way of acting out this struggle. Love is a way of diminishing the anguish of our internal struggle by identifying ourselves with the look of another who ostensibly “loves” us, while also directing our own look at that person in an attempt to enslave her and assert dominance.

In sex, one does this by causing such intense pleasure that it draws the other unbearably close to the flesh. And in both sex and love in general, the impulse one feels at any given moment is either inherently sadistic or inherently masochistic; one either wishes to dominate the other or be dominated.

I suspect there’s an inkling of truth in Sartre’s argument for the nothingness of consciousness, but the rest of this argument leaves me cold. For one thing, it admits no room for human empathy; everything is a power struggle. And even if you buy into such a relentlessly dark view of human nature, you have to deal with Sartre’s assertion that sex is purely about this power struggle—that there isn’t even a biological motivation. (No, really. He says that.)

Fortunately, Beauvoir is around to save the existentialist notion of love from Sartre.

Humans versus Persons May 27, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

A couple commenters have made reference to evolutionary biology and “human nature” as the causal force behind existing ethical systems. Now, there’s obviously something to that (look for an upcoming post on something called the Darwinian Dilemma), but it also means that the time has come for us to draw an important distinction: most humans are persons, and as far as we know all persons are humans, but that does not mean that the definition of one exhausts the definition of the other.

“Human” is a label referring to a set of biological characteristics. Personhood is … something else harder to define. But, with the help of some examples, I think it is doable. So: I would argue that an individual who no longer has any brain function beyond basic life support is a human that is no longer a person. On the other hand, to use several geeky examples, Kal-El (pictured), Frodo Baggins, Data from The Next Generation and Dogbert are all non-human persons. Recently, some scientists have argued that the same applies to dolphins.

So what, then, is a person? I think the existentialist definition works best: Heidegger and Sartre refer to man as the “being-for-itself” (in Sartre’s French, the pour sois). What this means is that persons are the only things in the universe that can reflect on themselves and their own actions. The other way to put this is that persons are defined by the fact that they alone are self-aware.

This is an important distinction to make because I think a good ethical system is one which seeks to describe good interactions between persons. So, for example, murdering Frodo in order to get your hands on the one ring is unethical, whereas killing a non-person animal for food or terminating life support for someone in a persistent vegetative state at the wishes of the family is not necessarily wrong in and of itself.