Roger's Re-think: PLOVER - Philosophy

Highlights of 2 books by Stephen Law: The Philosophy Files, Orion 2000 rev 2002, ISBN 0842550533
and The Philosophy Gym , Headline Review 2003, ISBN 0747232717

Introduction

'The Philosophy Files' is simple introduction to philosophy written as a series of dialogues between the author and various young people he knows, where two of the young people in each chapter take opposite views on a topic, and the author reflects on the strength or weakness of their arguments. The background is of modern life in the neighbourhood of Oxford, where Law lives and has worked. It is suitable for fairly young students, and reasonably serious-minded children.

'The Philosphy Gym' is more of an "exercise book" for probably older students. It takes 25 philosophical questions and works its way through many of the different ways one could think about these questions. Some topics are the same as in the more children-oriented 'The Philosophy Files'.

Highlights for 'The Philosophy Files'

Chapter	Page	Highlight
1 -	1-27	Should I eat meat?
		Law shows that logical moral arguments suggest that if we regard cannibalism as wrong, then eating any animal is also wrong, especially if killing the ammal is involved.
		Furthermore, some people argue that using animal products which come from husbandry - where animals may be kept alive but eventually slaughtered - is wrong, otherwise we are guilty of 'speciesism'. So only strict vegans, who don't use leather products, are OK. [RT: no wool or silk either?]
		The Andes plane crash survivors ate human flesh as a last resort. [RT: maybe there's a 'gradient'of justification for meat eating; also, meat might be a more efficient source of protein. The Christian Bible has the quotation "Rise, Peter, kill and eat", and most other religions don't proscribe meat eating.]
2 -	28-54	How do I know the world isn't virtual?
		This addresses the skeptical idea that we could all be just brains in a vat. We probably can't prove by logical argument that the world we experience is real.
		Occam's Razor, i.e. that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one, can't be counted conclusive, and it could be argued that 'brain in a vat' is a simpler idea.
		Appealing to common sense may be insufficient, as common sense can sometimes lead us into fallacies.
		If we are all just brains in vats, that suggests we are like isolated islands, which is clearly not our experience. [RT: we, and most other animals, can communicate and share our experiences. The fact that these are largely consistent suggests the 'world is real' view is more useful as an 'As If'' philosophy.]
		Whatever the logical arguments, we still have to carry on in the environment we find ourselves 'thrown' - with lots of other living and non living things.
3 -	55-77	Where am I?
		Law asks 'what decides what I am as an individual?' Is it 1) my body, 2) my mind (or soul) or 3) the combination?
		Law arguments involve imagining brain swaps, 'beam me up, Scotty' type transportation and duplicating individuals into multiple clones. [RT: if one has to resort to such hypotheses, no wonder there is confusion.]
		The body is continually replacing its cells, so that might support a 'not my body' view. There is some continuity, but a person's memory is probably more continuous.
		[RT: It is probably an error to completely distinguish mind and body. One could not just cut out a mind without completely wrecking the nervous system. And people have 'muscle memory'.]
4 -	78-100	What is real?
		Here Law addresses the story of Plato's cave, and Plato's proposition that the only reality lies beyond the shadows, as 'ideals'. Plato's view was that we can only reach true knowledge through logical argument involving his ideals, and NOT throught observation using our senses which may be delusions.
		CS Lewis also uses this analogy in the last chronicle of Narnia, where the children emerge from the 'Shadowlands'.
		[RT: I think Laws misses out by not considering the sharing of of memes (here used in a very general sense). This would criticise Plato's analogy as looking only at a situation where 'sharing of experiences of the world we find ourselves thrown into' is artificial and very restricted.]
5 -	101-21	Can I jump into the same river twice?
		This is another old conundrum from ancient Greece. The point is that when you jump in the second time, it's a totally different lot of water and conditions may have changed. However Law very soon makes it clear that the problem is that 'same' is a very inexact term.
		Just like in the ''identity'' problem in chapter 3, there is a certain continuity in the states of the river. Laws also mentions the apparent continuity of a movie despite the distinct and separate frames on the film reel.
		Law quotes Wittgenstein as saying that all our confusions are caused by the use of language, though he is not sure that this is really so. [RT: I would say that our languages do not provide a clear relation to the meaning that we want to convey, or what we take from what we receive. That's unlike computer programming languages!]
6 -	122-50	Where do right and wrong come from?
		Law considers three options: 1) from ourselves, 2) from God and 3) they are an external moral imperative.
		The arguments against each are: 1) different people's memes may not match or overlap; 2) it depends on what the self-appointed prophets and priests decide that God says; and 3) there isn't any way of consulting such an external entity.
		[RT: we probably have to accept that it comes from ourselves, but it needs a developing meeting of memes over time; inconsistencies are always liable to occur, and changing situations may require re-thinks.]
		Law points out that equating moral right or wrong with human-made laws is unrelaible, as laws can themselves be wrong, e.g. Apartheid laws in South Africa.
7 -	151-78	What is the mind?
		It may reside physically in our brain (and maybe some body cells), but mind (as we commonly talk about it) is a private picture of our reading of our life in this world, including past, present and future, together with wishes, dreams, desires and regrets. However it is essentially private; other people can't read it, though they may deduce some of it.
		Law discusses the connection by which the mind can communicate with the body (e.g. to move muscles) and vice versa (e.g. to register pain).
		[RT: I regard the mind as a set of structures of private memes, which if we choose, we can share with others.]
		[RT: A question I wrestle with is whether there is some spark within us that kicks off the mental processes and then the physical movement, or whether our thinking and action is simply determined by the external inputs we receive and the state of our brain cells and current meme structures. I feel the process is deterministic from a physical point of view, but that it is better for us and for the rest of the world if we adopt the 'As If ' position that we have to take personal responsibility for our actions and the mems we share.]
8 -	179-	Does God exist?
	208	It might be argued that our life is meaningless, but that many of us would prefer - or need - to know a meaning.
		Law is only referring to an Abrahamic God (i.e. Christian, Moslem or Jewish) - all powerful, all knowing and all good. [RT: not Greek/Roman soap opera of multiple gods, nor Hindu, nor dual good and evil Gods as in Zoroastrianism. Also, no mention of Christ.]
		He considers arguments for existence of God: 1) cause of the Big Bang; 2) divine watchmaker to design the wonderfully complex human (and animal). [RT: He doesn't try Anselm's argument of "you can talk about the greatest so he must exist".]
		But against 1) he says that this means artificially stopping the indefinite chain of causes; against 2) that Darwinian evolution and gradual development of species over geological time has provided a good alternative view about how we have got to where we are now.
		He discusses the problem of suffering: how could a good God allow suffering of people who by no argument can be deemed responsible for their misfortune (e.g. an earthquake).
		[RT: Related to the above is the issue of prayer for personal wishes; God's characteristics may not include being a ''Jim'll fix it'' agent who will intervene in the physical world.]
		Law mentions that excess of religious faith can lead to despising, intolerance and hate of other people with a different (sometimes only slightly) viewpoint.
		[RT: My own view is that God should be a non-compulsory 'As If 'meme to help provide a meaning for life for those who have a need; and if there is enough overlap between people's memes, God can help provide social coherence among a large or small community.]

Highlights for 'The Philosophy Gym'

The exercises are as follows:

1. Where Did the Universe Come From?
2. What's Wrong with Gay Sex?
3. Brain-Snatched
4. Is Time Travel Possible?
5. Into the Lair of the Relativist
6. Could a Machine Think?
7. Does God Exist?
8. The Strange Case of the Rational Dentist
9. But Is It Art?
10. Can We Have Morality without God and Religion?
11. Is Creationism Scientific?
12. Designer Babies
13. The Consciousness Conundrum
14. Why Expect the Sun to Rise Tomorrow?
15. Do We Ever Deserve to Be Punished?
16. The Meaning Mystery
17. Killing Mary to Save Jodie
18. The Strange Realm of Numbers
19. What Is Knowledge?
20. Is Morality Like a Pair of Spectacles?
21. Should You Be Eating That?
22. Brain Transplants, 'Teleportation' and the Puzzle of Personal Identity
23. Miracles and the Supernatural
24. How to Spot Eight Everyday Reasoning Errors
25. Seven Paradoxes

The highlights below do not represent a full review. I have just picked a few comments and quotes that I think are most significant.

Chapter	Page	Highlight
Introduction	xi	"I believe that those who have never taken a step back [RT: i.e. to look at the wider picture] - who have lived totally unexamined lives - are not only rather shallow - they're potentially dangerous. One great lesson of the twentieth century is that human beings, no matter how 'civilised', tend to be moral sheep. We are disastrously prone to follow without question the moral lead provided by those around us. From Nazi Germany to Rwanda, you find people blindly going with the flow."
1 -	1-7	In discussing where the universe comes from, he raises the problem of always looking for a 'cause' of everything, e.g. "what caused the Big Bang?". Religious people say that the 'buck' of causality stops with God, who does not require a cause - but then we can all say that this is just their model or dogma.
16 - Meaning	175-182	Locke had an ideational theory of meaning; we look up words or images presented to us against an internal memory bank. But this is just a model and one that gets us into infinite regress, e.g. how do we create the memory bank? According to Wittgenstein, we just rely on 'conventions' within the groups we are involved in.
20 - Morality	224-7	Law suggests that there are 4 options for how we think of Morality. Numbers 1 to 3 are what he calls "seen through spectacles", i.e. they do not assume an external objective morality. 1) it's subjective (i.e. we ourselves decide what's right or wrong); 2 it's inter-subjective (i.e. we decide by consensus in a group); and 3 it's 'emotivism' (i.e. we say 'boo' to murder and 'hooray' for kindness because that's just how we feel about it). How we see things through spectacles may be in error. 'Being wrong' (i.e. in error) may be objective in some cases, but not universally. He concludes that 'moral value' is an illusion.

Afterthoughts

I think Stephen Law has done a great service with these and other books. He has helped make philosophy more accessible to people outside the groves of academe, including students and children generally.

I look forward to getting hold of a copy of Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (2011) Prometheus Books: New York. ISBN 1-61614-411-4