Sea of Faith - Soren Kierkegaard

Among the many theologians and religious philosophers that have become famous throughout history, the most interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking and challenging has got to be the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (whose 200th birthday is being celebrated this week).

Wielding Hegel's dialectic method, Kierkegaard set out both to refute Hegel's conclusions, and to simultaneously defend and to problematize the question of faith and the meaning of life.

Apart from Socrates and Nietzsche (the former who invented the concept, the latter who gave it its most paradoxical twist), no other philosopher has epitomized the concept of irony quite so powerfully and masterfully as Kierkegaard.

His thought is sometimes difficult to pin down, partly due to the fact he wrote under a number of symbolic pseudonyms who expressed differing points of view (Johannes de Silentio, Hilarius Bookbinder, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus: total porn nom de plum, by the way), and partly because the dialectic process he embraced is inherently dynamic and ever-changing. Just to give you a small taste of the incredible kind of balancing act he sought to perform, Kierkegaard argued against an increasingly secular public that faith is an immediacy higher than that afforded by reflection and the intelligibility of universal ethical categories. And arguing against maudlin conceptions of faith (all-too-common today), he contended that faith ought to be experienced in the shudder of existential fear and trembling. To strike this balance of a higher existence to be experienced in anguish, Kierkegaard explores the question of whether Abraham was justified in being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in such a way that, whatever perspective you come from, you can't help both to admire Abraham and to be horrified by him.

But instead of letting me yap endlessly about this master of philosophy, here's a nice introduction to Kierkegaard and his thought, narrated by the influential non-realist (or anti-representationalist) philosopher of religion, Don Cupitt:

Happy birthday, Soren!

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Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

If you believe in reincarnation, you could reasonably believe that Kurt Vonnegut was the reincarnated soul of Mark Twain. With their brief and minimalist styles, as well as their no-holes-barred aphorisms, these two authors managed to drive American literature to a place where substance could take a front seat in our collective consciousness in a way that's rarely accessible through other authors. In the process, they got us to question many of the sacred cows we usually take for granted. In the following reading of an excerpt from Breakfast of Champions, we get to see Vonnegut touch, in his uniquely hilarious way, on the American experience of racism, capitalism, free will, family values, patriotism, religion, parenthood and personhood. Best of all, we get to see that he was so funny he could make himself crack up :)

How awesome was that? :)

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David Eagleman - The Brain and the Law

There is almost universal agreement among philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and other mind researchers that the mind has a physical basis in the brain. Sure, we don't yet understand the particular mechanism through which the brain produces conscious experience, but most serious researchers into the field no longer buy the antiquated notion of an immaterial soul.

But as philosophers have recognized for thousands of years, if the basis of consciousness is physical, then our minds are the result of physical laws of causality, and that creates all sorts of problems for the notion of free will. Whether we have any free will at all is debatable, but there is no doubt that, at the very least, there is a lot less of it than we normally imagine.

This is an interesting intellectual question, but it's also an important practical question everyone should care about because free will is directly tied to the question of moral responsibility: are people responsible for their actions? Suppose we have no free will; what do we do about the 'justice' system? Should we let criminals go free because they're not really culpable for what they've done? That's exactly the kind of question that David Eagleman tries to explore in the following fascinating presentation

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Sam Harris on Free Will

The religious instinct is not merely limited to belief in God and supernatural agents. And to varying degrees, even hard-core atheists tend to be religious in this sense, since they still adopt beliefs that may be religious in origin. It's a little too convenient that when one denies the existence of God, most other beliefs are not similarly rejected, but why should this be the case?

If we reject God, we can't simply assume the reality of the continued identity of the self (or even its very existence), an objective basis for morality, a rational basis for science, the existence of free will, the reality of the external world, the very idea of objective truth, etc. We need to mount arguments and evidence in support of these ideas if we want to be able to have a right to such beliefs.

And Sam Harris thinks we're lying to ourselves if we believe that our wills are free. His arguments are not particularly interesting or new here (and to many not even convincing). Harris may have just written a concise little book on the subject, but he's no Nietzsche, who clinched the case against free will and the self even more concisely, in less than a paragraph:

A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a superstition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’. . . . Even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently —’.

But where Harris is interesting (and I've subscribed to this line of thinking for at least a decade now) is in what he has to say about the implications of the denial of free will: it doesn't de-humanize us. This recognition humanizes us because it helps us to understand that instead of jumping to conclusions and throwing blame around, as we're wont to do, maybe we need to be more compassionate and understand that people are not fully free, and that their actions are at least partly to blame on circumstances and other causal antecedents...

While I agree with a good number of points made by Harris, there is at least one fundamental point on which he seems to be utterly confused: his denial of free will cannot be a scientific conclusion when he argues that there is no possible world in which free will could, even in principle, exist. If this is not a testable claim that could be decided by empirical evidence but simply by conceptual analysis (as I would be perfectly happy to do), then this is a philosophical conclusion... and people say philosophy doesn't make progress :)

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The Secret You

What does it mean to be you? How is it that the physical matter making up the many neurons in your brain somehow produce your subjective, conscious experience? Are your neurons themselves conscious? While we're at it, what exactly is consciousness? Where does your sense of self come from? Do you actually have a self? Can you be made to experience your self from outside your body? Can your consciousness be transferred to an inanimate object, or to someone else's body? If you are your consciousness somehow, do you get to consciously make your own choices, or are these determined by factors over which you have no conscious awareness and control?

Those are just some of the fascinating questions that Marcus du Sautoy explores in the following mind-bending documentary that gets right to the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience:

For more, check out the Brainspotting tag.

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Lecture 7 - Free Will, Determinism, Choice and Moral Responsibility

Ordinarily, we tend to think of our actions as freely chosen: we believe in free will. But if we get philosophical for a second, we have to start asking obvious questions, like what does that mean? What does it mean for something to be a choice? What does it mean for an action to be free? If all of nature is determined by physical law, and we are a part of nature, doesn't it follow that maybe our actions are just as determined, even though we may not always be aware of the causes antecedent to our actions? Hey, if we are indeed determined, how can the concept of moral responsibility make sense? Why praise or condemn someone for actions over which he has no real control? Can we make the choice to believe in free will?

In today's lecture, Professor Millican delves into these and other related questions, starting with the classic demarcation between libertarianism (not the political kind), determinism and compatibilism. As you'll see, the debate is just as alive, interesting and perplexing as ever...

Click here to see the course slides

My own leaning is toward the deterministic side of things (at least compatibilism and libertarianism make no sense to me at all), and even though that seems to rob us of our ability to make free choices, I think the upshot is that it also stops us from jumping to the all-quick conclusion that someone is to blame whenever things don't work out in the fashion we might have anticipated.

I find that as a determinist, I am more forgiving and empathetic than I would be if I just assumed that bad actions are always the result of someone's fault. Before pointing fingers, I think it's usually a good and healthy idea (to wonder at least) to what extent circumstances, and not a person, are to blame...

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Neuroscience and Free Will

As a world-renowned mathematician, Professor Marcus Du Sautoy is well aware of bombshell ideas that have devastating conceptual power such as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or Russell's Paradox. These ideas, of course, are not merely mathematical curiosities: they have powerful philosophical implications about the nature of universals, logic and the limits of thought and cognition.

All his mathematico/philosophical training, however, could not prepare him for the existential confrontation with one of the deepest philosophical questions regarding what it is to be human: free will. Challenging abstract concepts are one thing... lived experience, as one might expect, is a bit more visceral :)

The problem is not simply that free will is most likely an illusion. Today's technological advances in neuroimaging and brain scanning present a modern-day version of LaPlace's demon: other people may know what choice you are going to make before you yourself are aware your own 'choice'...

And here is a bit more from Susan Greenfield on these types of experiments:

Haynes' interpretation didn't quite convince me (I don't assume mind-brain identity, even though I am a physicalist), but you get the point anyway...
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