In that spirit we present Long Island lawyer France E. Dec, "your only hope for a future." He featured in Donna Kossey's book "Kooks" (as well as her online "Kooks Museum") as well as in works by Psychic TV and others. Dec was apparantly a paranoid schizophrenic, but one with a powerfully metaphysical imagination and a Burroughsian gift for words. This rant is typical:
Gangster Computer God worldwide SECRET CONTAINMENT POLICY, made possible SOLY by worldwide Computer God Frankenstein Controls, especially LIFELONG CONSTANT THRESHOLD BRAIN WASH RADIO ( quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it; repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets ). FOUR BILLION worldwide population ALL living have a Computer God CONTAINMENT POLICY BRAIN BANK BRAIN, A REAL BRAIN, in the Brain Bank Cities on the far side of the Moon, we never see. Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein radio controls, especially, your eyesight T.V. (sight, and sound) recorded by your brain. YOUR Moon BRAIN of the Computer God, activates your Frankenstein Threshold Brain Wash Radio LIFELONG, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you-up and the USUAL, "DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT." for your set backs, mistakes even when you receive deadly injuries. THIS IS THE WORLDWIDE COMPUTER GOD SECRET CONTAINMENT POLICYDec is describing Descartes' Demon. It's a thought experiment that asks "if a malevolent entity controlled my every perception - sight, sound, taste, touch, smell - then how could I know what is real?" Of course for Dec, it wasn't a thought-experiment.,it was real life. Hence the poignancy.
So, what if we do live in The Matrix?
Descartes tries to prove that reality is basically trustworthy. First, he finds a limit to doubt: we can doubt everything, except our own existence. This seems solid enough - how can I doubt I exist, when I'm the one that's doing the doubting?
Frankly, I've never been convinced by this; a truly powerful demon should be able to create the illusion of a self-conscious being contemplating its own consciousness. True - I can't imagine how that could work, but saying something is inconceivable just because I can't conceive of it seems like it's setting the bar awfully low.
But let's give Descartes the benefit of the cogito, and assume we ourselves do, in fact, exist. Well, for Descartes, it's then an easy leap to prove God exists, and that he is perfectly good. Descartes argues God must exist because:
a) Everything has a creator - except for the uncreated creator, of course.
b) One can imagine perfection; therefore perfection - God - must exist. Otherwise, where would the idea of perfection come from?
c) God is perfect, therefor he must exist. For if he didn't exist, he wouldn't be perfect, would he?
The problems with Descartes' arguments are mani-fold. For one, a perfect God must be omnipotent; but if God is only benevolent he's not really omnipotent; i.e, true omnipotence includes the power to act against one's nature.
As noted previously, in the 20th century logical "system-building" like Descartes' fell out of favor. Logic, being a symbol-system complex enough to contain number theory, is subject to Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Human consciousness, being a linguistic construct, has the "the map is not the territory" issues linguistics are heir to. In physics, the Copenhagen Interpretation suggests that there is no "underlying" reality behind sub-atomic phenomena, rather quantum physics "deals only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta."
Where does this leave poor Francis E. Dec? Hunter S. Thompson famously observed that "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
I, the Reverend Les Crowley, Certified Hypnotherapist, PhD in 'Pataphysics, suggest an alteration: When the going gets weird, the smart quit.
Not to sound like Nietzsche, but Western thinkers are a pack of liars when it comes to describing their introspections. (I say Western thinkers only because I don't know Eastern ones, but I'd lay down $10 that they're also a bunch of liars on this point.) One of the lies Descartes tells about his introspections tell him are that sensations are thoughts: ". . . [I]t seems to me that I see light, that I hear noise and that I feel heat. . . . [I]t is what is in me called feeling, and used in this precise sense that is no other thing than thinking." Uh, but thoughts come to us through conscious introspection, while feelings (sense perception) are consequences of external stimuli and don't always rise to the level of consciousness. Do you feel your butt in the chair as you read this? Sure, and continuously, too, but the exact sensation wasn't always in your consciousness. The extreme of sensation not being part of consciousness is blindsight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight) where people's vision doesn't enter their consciousness or they experience visual stimuli as something other than visual phenomena. Vice versa, there's Anton–Babinski syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrome) where people have conscious experience of visual phenomena while being blind.
ReplyDeleteConsciousness alone may not be a reliable guide to what is, as Descartes' argument for the existence of God shows, but perhaps sense perception, while not 100% reliable or accurate, may at least prevent us from bumping into the wall even when we don't "see" (have conscious visual experience) of the wall.
Once again, thanks for reading.
DeleteIf I had to make an argument that reality is "real," I'd probably point out its internal consistency. I perceive things wrongly all the time, but there are certain things about the world that never change or go away.
The prejudice Western thinkers have against sense perception is that thinking they're accurate is a Green Lumber fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile#Green_Lumber_Fallacy) But such fallacies only become *Problems* when you try to elaborate them. As the story of the fallacy shows, the mistaken commodities trader's knowledge of "green" lumber was more than good enough for his purposes.
ReplyDelete"Can we trust our senses" is a different question from "do I exist?"
ReplyDeleteFor Deskartes it's the latter question that matters. His senses can be completely delusional - what matters is that there's a "he" who is aware of SOMETHING.
I'm pretty confident I exist. I'm less confident that logic itself is the be and end all. Which makes my confidence in own existence misplaced.
Deskartes=Descartes. Opps.
DeleteThe cogito is right, but even that's not original. Augustine came up with it first (as I'm pretty sure you know). Why it's important to Rene is that he wanted an absolutely certain starting point for his philosophy: if he had such a certain starting point, then how could he go wrong? Yet go wrong he did, "Wrong from the start," as Ezra Pound did say of someone else ...
DeleteAnd as you note, the persistence and intractability of the "external" world (scare quotes for reasons below) is good enough reason to grant it existence: "If external objects did not exist, we would have to invent them." (W.V.O Quine, but I'm not 100% sure of that)
All this is a roundabout way of getting to/justifying my point that the most pernicious doctrine Descartes promulgated (he didn't come up with it fer shere, but his place in the history of modern Western phil. certainty gave it authority) is that the mind is not an "extended thing," i.e., doesn't have spatiotemporal existence: "I am a thing that thinks and not one that is extended." Even people who say that don't believe this look for the mind as if it were a dimensionless point or at best some regions *inside* the brain: "pain center," "fear center," and so on. This is a hard habit to break. The ancients had it right: we're our bodies, and specifically our bodily sensations. Thumos, atê, etc. We are embedded in a world (or worlds?), not somehow distinct from external objects.
None of this detracts from your larger points, which I agree with completely. In terms of foundational philosophy, the going gets weird very quickly (and even more quickly if you're honest about your introspections), so best to quit that game. But if we're radically in/part of a world (worlds?), we're still in the casino. Is Marx's claim that the point of philosophy is to change the world a statement then about what game *might* offer decent odds?
The mind/body problem is a bear, to be sure, although - and I may be misremembering - didn't Descartes locate consciousness physically, in the pineal gland.
ReplyDeleteIn another post I dealt with "simulation hypothesis" and experiments that might confirm that yes, we are software running on a computer. A similar idea surfaces in probably what is the greatest "crank" philosophy/theology book ever written, Frank Tipler's "The Physics of Immortality."
I see Marx as an economic historical/economist more than a philosopher. Taking "change the world" literally, on a philosphic level, leads to the outcome I speculate about here: https://lescrowleysbugreports.blogspot.com/2011/11/beyond-bomb.html