My philosophical position and how I reached it
and philosophy's most important unsolved problem
My philosophical outlook derives from three main sources – flashes of insight, weighing up arguments presented in the literature and thinking things out for myself. Needless to say, I have received no formal training in philosophy or logic.
Attaining a strong philosophical position depends on having original ideas and experiences – original, that is, for oneself. It doesn’t matter that someone else has had the same or similar ideas, perhaps centuries before you. What matters is that you create or discover the ideas and experiences for yourself, or at least get the feeling of having done so. You need to have one or more major “Aha!” or “Eureka!” moments in your life – exhilarating flashes of revelation or inspiration in contrast to the stuff you find in books or spend hours constructing. Of course, you still need to scrutinise such insights methodically and guardedly, to avoid being hypnotised by absurdities.
I well remember my most important “Aha!” moment, very many years ago whilst driving a car along one of those winding Devonshire country lanes, when I suddenly realised that not only sensations (like colours and smells) are entirely mental, but so are space, time and force, so far as they are experienced by us. Very soon afterwards I realised that our various senses and the ways we interact with the world actually provide very different impressions of space (etc), and I wondered what holds these impressions together, to form a single coherent idea of space – an underlying, theoretical or “real” space.
The answer was not long coming, when one day it occurred to me that space consists of nothing but mathematical relations. There is no reality “in between” what we experience and this mathematical complex. The same applies to time and force. Essentially the "real" universe is a purely mathematical structure, and since we can comprehend this only through our brains, the human brain must to some extent reflect this structure. Later on I came to believe that reality has finite bounds which depend on mathematics, and, conversely, that the whole of mathematics itself is finite (so infinitudes and various other mathematical devices are fictional – they exist only as meaningless tokens). In this sense, mathematics is “empirical”. Of course my favourite philosopher, Immanuel Kant (in particular various interpretations of his masterpiece "Critique of Pure Reason"), and other idealists had helped me to these conclusions.
The central element of Kant’s treatise is neatly summarised by Ray Monk (writing on Russel) in “The Great Philosophers”, Ed Monk & Raphael, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2000, p. 266. But Monk, in line with general philosophical opinion, then proceeds to cast doubt on Kant’s brainchild with remarks which in my judgment are peripheral to the crucial point - that our working concept of space and time is a purely mental construction, whose form is in fact essentially Euclidean/Newtonian.
A consequence of this position, so far as it goes, is that you should be able to glean something of the structure of the universe by studying pure mathematics, and conversely you should be able to learn something about the limits of mathematics from empirical observations of the universe. I have also suggested that you might be able to modify aspects of the universe by constructing sufficiently complex mathematical models.
Another kind of insight comes from thoughtful reading. It usually takes the form of realising that many of the words one reads have little depth of meaning, or that apparently opposed viewpoints are really similar, just expressed in different words. An example that comes to mind is Locke versus Berkeley. While Locke explains the continuum of experiences in terms of matter, Berkeley explains it in terms of the mind of God. But the difference between matter and the mind of God is never made clear, and neither has much explanatory power. One simply goes for the terminology that has the most relevant connotations and connections. For me, “matter” sounds much more practical and less superfluous than God, but I still don’t really know what it is. Maybe the utility of matter is all that matters, maybe it “really is” more like an idea or maybe, as I’m inclined to think, it’s an aspect of that grand mathematical structure that includes space, time and various forces. But it also seems to be an aspect of "thrust" (see below) and in that respect it is experiential, and unable to explain the existence of unperceived objects.
A third kind of insight comes from stepping outside the circle and observing things from afar. You must try to get outside the local picture, the framework in which your thoughts are confined. A lot of things will then seem trivial, and a lot of things that seemed disconnected will suddenly become connected. Seeing the larger picture brings unity into your life, an extra dimension of understanding, a sense of who you are, an ability to handle (if not dismiss) the “small stuff” and a realisation that nothing is certain or necessary. It was my reading, during my teens, of the popular British philosopher and aviation engineer, J.W. Dunne, that taught me how to step outside the picture, although his aims were questionable.
There are many problems which insight cannot resolve, but whose puzzling nature it throws into perspective. An example is outlined in a footnote to this page.
These revelations might seem to mark me as an idealist. On the contrary, I am convinced that truths are establishable only in terms of clear, objective criteria. The fact that our knowledge of the world as experienced is interpretative doesn't make the world any less objective, independent or real, or provide grounds for talking as if we live in a dream. The world as experienced is dominated by thrust (that from which a conscious person cannot escape). This fact alone really makes me an existentialist, in the Sartrean sense, for I find it difficult not to believe that "existence precedes essence". However, the underlying reality may not be as we imagine. It could be nothing but a mathematical structure. At the same time, I don’t think we should recoil from calling the world as we perceive it “real”. For us, this is reality, this is our entire life and being. On top of this, I do not give credence to any kind of reductionism whereby statements about primarily mental phenomena can be reformulated as statements about primarily physical phenomena, or vice versa.
Thus apart from Kant, the philosophers who have most influenced me (or whose work I find most interesting) include Hume, Peirce, Sartre, Russell, Strawson, Ayer and Feyerabend. On the other hand there are some highly influential philosophers (among them Wittgenstein, Tarski, Popper and Whorf) whose principal ideas seem to me, for various reasons, insignificant or simply mistaken. In particular, I can't see the point of turning elementary observations into grandiose theories.
I did not become much interested in logic until I turned 25 years of age. From the beginning it seemed to me that standard logic had many faults. I have spent (in fact wasted) a lot of time inventing systems of logic, aimed partly at simplifying calculations (systems based on modulo-2 arithmetic), partly at eliminating the ambiguities of interpretation, partly at demonstrating the bare bones of logic and partly at avoiding the paradoxes of both traditional syllogistic and classical predicate logic. In pursuit of the last aim I devised a number of systems that were mostly subsets of ordinary first order predicate calculus (i.e. their truth tables had fewer columns).
The most important outcome of these deliberations was an existentially non-committal system that used normal propositional calculus plus a strict-entailment/deduction qualifier, and with a simplified predicate calculus add-on that could be represented by Euler diagrams. This system contained no individual variables (x, y etc) and no simply negated predicate variables (~f, ~g etc), and it blurred the distinction between relations and operations*, between affirmative and subordinate locutions and between things, stuff and attributes, and I believed this logic could faithfully represent valid arguments and shut out most invalid and paradoxical arguments, within the scope of the system. An informal summary has recently been added to this website. (*A useful way of visualizing elementary logic is to mark the distinction between primary and secondary structures. Much of the work of doing logic arises from the fact that a given primary structure can be represented by any number of secondary structures or formulae, e.g. the relation/operation represented by pVq can also be represented by ~(~p & ~q) and by ~p  q. Some of the paradoxes of logic are due to our tendency to interpret secondary structures with the same primary form differently from one another.)
My “grand system” is based on the organisation of propositions developed mainly in the 1980’s and recorded in an article on this site – Six kinds of proposition and the edges of normality. I still believe it to be essentially correct, though some of my explanations are wanting. The main features of this system are the hierarchy of six distinct kinds of proposition and the arguments that there are no genuinely “necessary” propositions, not even in pure logic. In matters of truth and meaning I am essentially a logical positivist with an extended set of criteria of verification. I don’t subscribe to Popper’s falsificationism, or to the view that the verification theory should (but maybe doesn't) meet its own criteria. This position has been reached by much hard thought, certainly not by any flash of inspiration.
My thoughts about the way we experience (and think and talk about) the world also influenced my logic. I had always questioned the distinction between sense and reference (or between connotation and denotation) and eventually came to the conclusion that it is arbitrary and unnecessary. Language is wholly connotational (or perhaps "associational") but uses words in more “encyclopaedic” or more “domestic” ways. Standard logic thus leads to a mistaken (and philosophically quite barren) way of thinking about facts, individuals and existence, though it does reflect the way we do in fact deal with certain kinds of complexity in our experience.
In the fields of language, logic and maths, there are hierarchies everywhere, but none of much significance. One thing is clear: twist and turn them as you may, language and logic can never draw the distinction between fact and fiction. No wonder so many people cannot draw that distinction either! (But see the footnote below - there's a way of thinking of language as a participant in reality rather than as an aloof description of it.)
I was for long fascinated by “fundamental notions” – a body of related concepts at the heart of our understanding of human existence. Some of these were “more fundamental” than others, and some were subcategories of others. One of my lists includes awareness (duration or time experienced, thrust, discrimination and emergence of actualities, recognition), wellbeing and stress (pleasure/pain – a basic kind of thrust), externality (naïve notions of space and external phenomena, naïve substance/force, the public world), choice and creativity, self-awareness and enterprise. Thinking about these was quite useful in unifying my ideas, and led to some important further principles such as “No perception without conception” (there exists nothing that has percepts and doesn’t have concepts) and “There is no subconscious mind” (the so-called “subconscious” comprises only brain events; mind is conscious by definition).
I have never been a conversationalist, never had the opportunity of conversing or corresponding with philosophically minded people and always thought of normal conversation as philosophically mundane or worthless. Most people's spoken opinions are too relative, too limited or simplistic or just plain ludicrous. Chit-chat allows no space for reflection. (As Douglas Adams puts it: “If human beings don't keep excercising their lips ... their brains start working”.) This is not to say that some of my own opinions don't fall into one or more of these categories. But had I been born deaf and dumb, I suspect it would have made very little difference. Deafness, however, would have seriously affected other aspects of my life (or should I say, my lives: I have almost always led three separate lives - a family life, a working life and a personal life. The sharp disparities between them have never bothered me much!)
My basic position in "practical" philosophy is simple. Philosophy, for me, is mainly about reality and truth, and ethics is mainly about living in tune with reality and communicating truths. A moral person is a person of integrity - one who interacts appropriately with the real world, is not deceived by falsehoods and nonsense and does not deceive others. Appropriate behaviour stems chiefly from the urge to survive, preferably in an amicable physical and social environment. Reality and truth are objective and non-relative, and so are ethical standards. (However, "the needy thief is less culpable than the prosperous thief".) Moral concern has a transcendental (but not necessarily altruistic) aspect; in particular, it extends not only to the plight of people one may never know, but to other species, the environment and the future. Morality is attributable to social and economic entities and institutions as well as to individuals (for a devastating commentary see "The Doubter's Companion" by John Ralston Saul).
My moral outlook has been coloured by an intense, and still increasing, opposition to religion and cultural hang-ups. In my school days I was more or less an atheist, but in my late teens and early twenties I went through a "spiritual" period (believing my prayers were answered etc, and almost persuaded by the writings of converts such as Malcolm Muggeridge). After consorting on and off with various non-conformist Christian organisations, I decided their creeds were not for me and delved into other religions. Nothing struck me as being either credible or desirable, so common sense prevailed and I returned to atheism again, consolidated by reading such books as “The Martyrdom of Man” (Winwood Reade) and “Language, Truth and Logic” (A.J. Ayer), and, on the negative side, certain religious texts. I’m pleased that religious experience has touched my life, but I’m jubilant in the realisation that it was all a pitiful delusion. The final unconditional renunciation of all religion and supernaturalism was one of the most liberating moments of my life. My current view is that religion is primarily a linguistic anomaly - and transparently unethical. However, I remain a strongly "spiritual" person insofar as my intense appreciation of the beauty of nature, and feeling of oneness with it, continues to dominate my life (for example, it means more to me than social relationships do).
Other influences on my ethical views include my schooling in biology, and various philosophers who helped to make me aware of the poverty of metaphysics and the utter meaninglessness of various ethically loaded catch-phrases (such as “inalienable rights” and “innate equality”). Although my outlook could be regarded as naturalistic, I have never been attracted to any particular school of moral philosophy (such as emotivism, prescriptivism or consequentialism), and I lean increasingly to the view that all moral explanation (so far) has little to do with morality as such. However I do identify broadly with the mainstream rationalist/humanist/free-thinkers movement.
Recently my outlook has been tested by certain discoveries in mind and brain science which challenge our concepts of time, consciousness and freedom. It seems that conscious thought, along with the feeling that we are free to make choices, may be only a time-delayed video of brain events, which are causally determined only by other physical events and completely beyond the control of our conscious minds*. In that case there would appear to be no justification for attributing moral responsibility to specific, conscious individuals. There are at least two ways of avoiding this conclusion, however. One is to suppose that time can flow backwards, and the other is to suppose that individuals cannot so easily be absolved from moral responsibility, since the concept of responsibility only applies within the domain of conscious experience and has no relevance in the underlying physical world; while the concept of causality only applies within the physical world, so the supposed causal connection between physical and mental events is "not what it seems". Regardless, there are other good reasons for removing the burden of responsibility from individuals in many circumstances. Too bad. If we want to live without fear in a smoothly running society, someone must be held responsible for every crime and be firmly disciplined by the law. Unfortunately we are still learning where to find fault and how to allocate blame, so "criminals" may not always be dealt fair justice.
*What the experiments collectively appear to show is that certain physical events in the body may precede the associated
conscious events - whether intentions/decisions or responses to external stimuli - by about 0.5 seconds and possibly up to
3 seconds. Yet it only takes 0.1-0.2 seconds for a person to react to a stimulus.
These same discoveries in brain science, together with my contention that the "real" world comprises nothing but mathematical relations, also suggest that the question (typical of the current obsession with "thought experiments") whether we live in a real or a virtual world is irresolvable, because in fact the two concepts are indistiguishable - unless one supposes that a real world is self-constructed while a virtual world has an author!
For many years I was interested in cosmology and developed a ridiculous infatuation with fundamental physical constants, supposing that they could be derived from basic mathematical constants (a surprisingly common belief). I also thought there should be a system of non-arbitrary physical units, and sought to discover it. Instead my technique (a kind of dimensional analysis) led to an endless series of systems, the main problem with the simplest member being the large unit of mass, which seemed not to correspond with anything in nature. While all this was unduly time-wasting, it served to indulge my obsession with one of life's greatest puzzles:
What is the most important, least pondered unsolved problem in the philosophy of science? It is the question "Why does mathematics work in the real world?" On the face of it, there seems to be no reason why maths should have any connection at all with reality; yet not only does it work, it is the foundation of modern science and of much that we take for granted in our lives. It works so well that it can be used to make incredibly accurate predictions about the natural world, and to construct real aeroplanes that really fly and real mobile phones that transmit and receive real messages. As I have already surmised, maths is indeed the foundation of reality. But many people, philosophers in particular, are unwilling to admit the possibility that mere numbers and formulae could have anything to do with the beauty of a loving smile or a leaf blowing in the wind. They don't appreciate the seemingly infinite complexity of mathematics - a complexity that may be unmatched in the real world itself. Mathematics may have the power to describe (explain?) a great deal more of reality than we imagine. However, should the answer to this monumental problem turn out to have no use, the importance of the question will immediately diminish. The world faces a mountain of practical problems, acute and chronic, which are of far greater importance than mere philosophy.
In summary, my outlook is an amalgam of empiricism, idealism and rationalism, along with a non-speciesist, anti-religious, slightly cynical form of humanism. Most of this philosophy, in particular the logical aspects, laboriously and fitfully developed between 1958 and 1990, survives in a series of 19 notebooks spanning those years. A considerably larger volume of decaying rough notes was trashed when I last moved house in January 2009.
Footnote
I realised long ago, when I was interested in parapsychology, that there’s a crucial difference between prediction in the mathematical sense of the probability of an event occurring at some time in the future, and prediction in the prophetic sense of visualizing the future; and later on that the distinction has something to do with at least one of the miscellany of differences that various philosophers draw between truths and facts. The betting odds of a horse winning a race refer to the discrete fact of its winning, and such a fact can be expressed by a simple proposition. If the horse wins, the proposition is true, if it loses, false. On the other hand, a competent seer foretelling the event presumably gets a picture of the “whole scene” and should be able to provide a lot more detail; for example, that the horse won by a nose and a half, that the jockey wore red and white checks, that the track was slippery , etc etc. (in theory, ad infinitum – one might say a super-seer would see the state of the entire universe at that moment – if it were sensible to speak in those terms). A proposition, like a probability statement, represents only a kind of throttled abstraction from experience or reality. Now, some philosophers say that a fact is what makes a true proposition true. But the “what” here is a mysterious entity. Clearly it is nothing like the situation or event that the seer claims to witness or, for that matter, any actual situation experienced by anybody. Indeed the “fact” expressed in a true proposition seems to be nothing more than what is expressed. So a “fact” in this sense is identical with a true proposition, or a truth (given that propositions are the primary or perhaps the only bearers of truth). And in that case one might feel inclined to opt for a coherence theory of truth – the truth of “facts”/propositions/truths can only be established in terms of other “facts”/propositions/truths.
For the persistent philosopher this scenario is clearly unsatisfactory, because one seems to end up with a web of words or ideas that are cut off from reality, from existence. If there’s a question of propositions corresponding to objective facts, however, it is a question of how they relate to the relevant aspects of whole situations. But speaking in these bland terms doesn’t help, whether or not we invent a new name for this kind of fact (such as situation, actuality or reality). Moreover, as already intimated, the “whole situation” is virtually a state of the universe, having an infinite, or at least indefinite, description. We might attempt to narrow this down to all the presuppositions that must be or could be called upon to make sense of the proposition, but these presuppositions in turn would require presuppositions, so we’d be no further forward.
It was largely because of this impasse that I came to think of words and statements as themselves being part of the world of real objects. This viewpoint initially took shape as an elementary theory of signs, somewhat after the manner of C.S. Peirce. Utterances of words were objects that had meaning in virtue of their signifying other objects, and in that respect they did not differ from the many other objects which, in certain contexts, act as signs for other objects again. Thus in appropriate circumstances an utterance of the sentence “There are bees” might indicate the presence of bees in much the same way that a bee-hive might. Thinking along these lines led me to realize that the greater part of one’s experience is something like a web of signs, all kinds of signs ranging from human constructions such as traffic lights and church bells to natural objects and events such as animal footprints, noises, clouds and sunrises. In fact any object or event that we associate with another is acting as a sign, with any of a considerable number of different types of function, and it is this network of signs together with our choices that controls our behaviour and runs our lives. Anyone who has studied biology will appreciate its importance on all levels of the evolutionary scale. Indeed all this was really an extension of an earlier idea which I had called Organic Process (something like a primitive version of Quine’s “Natural Kinds”). Thus it seemed to me that there was little difference – except in complexity – between interpreting a sign and interpreting a situation – and between these and ascertaining the meaning and truth of a proposition.
Now, if propositions have their basis in sign language, and if they are also considered to be the”bearers of truth”, it’s reasonable to suppose that the strength of the concept of truth cannot exceed the strength of the association between a sign and its object. What this means, however, is far from clear. As a rough start, we could say: a sign is false if it deceives or misleads, true if it leads to the expected object. So, for example, the twitching of a divining rod is true if there’s water beneath it, false if there is not. But the “strength” of this association clearly depends on past experience (whether one’s own or that of others, perhaps of generations long since vanished), and also on the reliability of the chain(s) of communication. In this instance, at least, the concept of truth appears to have an inductive basis, elements of subjectivity and an affinity with pragmatic theories of truth. Although seemingly a far cry from the robust “scientific” concept of truth sought by philosophers, one can imagine that, with a bit of work, it could be brought into line with, say, the verification theory. And indeed it was this gathering of ideas that propelled me in the direction of verificationism, or something very like it. (All this from “a rough start!”)
Yet one keeps returning to the undeniable fact that, at the human level, experience, intelligence and self-integrity are essential both for sign giving and for sign reading. One might say: An integrated person is one who tries to interpret signs correctly; an intelligent person one who is good at it; a wise person one who responds appropriately. The notion of "correct" interpretation, however, once again suggests reliance on objective criteria of truth. In the past, the responsibility for interpretation has been borne mainly by the sign-reader, but in this age of information overload it is shifting increasingly to the sign-maker. A worrying trend, suggestive of psychological manipulation, and no rules at all for evaluating truthfulness.
.......Dabs of Grue.......03/09/07 - 02/08/10.....................HOME
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