Quote of the Day – John Dewey on the Role of Philosophy as a General Theory of Education

If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education…Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic – or verbal – or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct.

~John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 338

Quote of the Day – Dewey on Scientific Progress

When we take means for ends we indeed fall into moral materialism. But when we take ends without regard to means we degenerate into sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation and preaching; or else upon a fanaticism that will force the realization of preconceived ends at any cost.

~John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 73

Quote of the Day – Philosophy’s Barren Monopoly

Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Absolute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening the moral forces which move mankind and in contributing to the aspirations of men to attain to a more ordered and intelligent happiness.

~John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 26-27

A Simple Utilitarian Argument for Higher Pleasures

Arch-Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham controversially stated that “quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry”. Thus, if someone found immense intrinsic pleasure in counting blades of grass, we couldn’t hold it against them just because we prefer higher intellectual pleasures like reading or other “pursuits of the mind”. I agree wholeheartedly with J.S. Mill that it is impossible to conclusively establish by reason our “first principles” of valuation. I can no more justify why I seek happiness as an end in itself than  can the person who makes it his ultimate value to count all blades of grass.

What then licenses Mill to claim the higher intellectual pleasures are “more valuable” than mere pleasures of sensation? Isn’t this just elitism? Of course an elite intellectual is going to value reading philosophy and science over watching reality tv, but if someone finds more intrinsic pleasure in salivating in front of a TV over a frozen TV-dinner, who is Mill to judge? By what standard do we judge “ultimate ends”? In the end, we are left promoting values from a purely subjective perspective, for we have no choice except to value what we do in fact value and reason on the basis of those values.

But perhaps Mill was onto something. Take Bentham’s push-pin player. What if everyone in society was a devout push-pin player? From birth all anyone wants to do is play push-pin, much like Bobby Fischer’s famous remark that “All I want to do, ever, is just play chess.” This society would be radically different from ours. After all, if everyone played trivial games all day long and never bothered to learn anything, then no one would go to school to be an engineer or doctor. Without engineers and computer scientists our technological infrastructure would crumble until eventually the push-pin players couldn’t rely on the technological conveniences like supermarkets and computers to feed and entertain themselves with minimal effort. They would eventually be forced to begin hunting and gathering food in between push-pin playing, otherwise they would die of sheer starvation. The push-pin players might eventually realize that perhaps it would be good that at least some of them do things other than play push-pin so that they can have enough technology to keep a minimal segment of the population comfortable enough to devote themselves to playing push-pin all day.

The point of this thought experiment applies to all other “lower” pleasures like reality TV watching. If everyone just watched reality TV all day, no one would be able to maintain the TV-production-broadcast technological infrastructure that provides mindless pleasure to millions. Thus, people who value reality TV watching should actually desire that other people value something besides reality TV watching, otherwise there wouldn’t be technologically minded people producing the technological comforts that allow one to live comfortably watching TV and microwave meals without having to work hard to just stay alive.

Thus, the progressive accumulation of cultural and technological knowledge is predicated on the idea that the higher intellectual virtues are more valuable because the epistemic benefits of these higher intellectual virtues allows us to create a leisurely gulf between the hard facts of biological existence and our culturally acquired desires to engage in trivial but pleasurable pursuits like push-pin or television. Like Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, one could easily imagine that an ideal social utopia would consist in everyone devoted to the continual pursuit of game-playing. But that game-playing utopia would only exist on the basis of a hidden technological infrastructure that was built and maintained by people who valued something besides trivialities and sensation-seeking.

The Extended Mind Theory in Two Sentences

We use objects in the world to help us get things done e.g. Andy Clark’s example of a bartender under stress lining up different kinds of glasses as a visual reminder of their upcoming drink orders. Since it is arguable that getting things done is at the heart of cognition, using objects in the world is an important species of cognition.

Quote of the day 2/20/13 – Seneca on philosophy

One must therefore take refuge in philosophy; this pursuit, not only in the eyes of good men, but also in the eyes of those who are even moderately bad, is a sort of protecting emblem.For speechmaking at the bar, or any other pursuit that claims the people’s attention, wins enemies for a man; but philosophy is peaceful and minds her own business. Men cannot scorn her; she is honoured by every profession, even the vilest among them. Evil can never grow so strong, and nobility of character can never be so plotted against, that the name of philosophy shall cease to be worshipful and sacred.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Nihilism

Value Nihilism holds a curious position in the philosophical landscape. It is simultaneously respected as a position to take seriously yet most contemporary philosophers consider it a “last resort” option at best, a bleak alternative if all other attempts at “saving” morality are unsuccessful (an incentive to never stop hoping moral theories will eventually converge into a consensus). Often it is held up as a philosophical boogey-man to be avoided at all costs. Some would even claim that if your moral theorizing ends up with nihilism you have a good reason to reject that view because it’s too at odds with our common sense ways of thinking.

But it’s an elementary point in other areas of inquiry that evidence of all humans believing in X is not in itself evidence for the existence of X. If almost everyone on the planet believes in fairies, that all by itself does not provide a good reason to the fairy-skeptic that fairies do in fact exist because it’s possible everybody else is mistaken (perhaps the fairy-skeptic could provide an evolutionary or psychological explanation for why fairy belief stabilized in the population thousands of years ago in our ancient superstitious past). Whether or not everyone else thinks the fairy-skeptic is too conceptually “revisionary” in their suggestion to overhaul belief in fairies is irrelevant to the truth of the matter.

Similarly, if it turns out that humans are psychologically incapable of giving up on the idea that some actions are “intrinsically good/evil” because it’s just too psychologically intuitive or too useful to think otherwise, that would provide no reason all by itself to think there really are such things as intrinsic values “out there” independently of contingent preferences. I think it’s strange that so many philosophers want at all costs to hold onto moral discourse including phrases like “Hitler was just downright evil“, “Torturing for fun is just intrinsically bad and you really ought not to do it” and have actually convinced themselves that this makes for a good “explanation” of why evil people do what they do. But this appeal to moral “facts” to explain the situation pales in explanatory power compared to the fully naturalistic explanation that falls out of the scientific worldview. Ontological seriousness is just not compatible with the view that there really are values independently of contingent desires.

And that in essence is my sense of what Value Nihilism is all about. It’s the view that there are no objective values that hold independently of contingent desires. Value Nihilism is fully compatible with Value Subjectivism whereby we can form objective standards relative to the standards of evalulation of contingent, desiring beings like human animals. From an ontological point of view, all modern forms of expressivism, constructivism, or subjectivism are compatible with Value Nihilism. If we say that morality can be constructed out of the basic desires/preferences of Earthly creatures, the Nihilist wants to know: Why is it good to promote basic desires? Is the satisfaction of contingent desires inherently valuable? If so, where do these values come from? What gives it value? Is relative to a stance-independent standard? How does this standard exist independently of us? The scientific worldview has no room in it for wiggles in space-time to be “intrinsically valuable”, “worth pursuing”, or “intrinsically good/evil”, etc. Crudely put, all wiggles in space-time are ontologically on the same “level” as all other wiggles of space-time.

Nowhere in science will it ever make sense to say that there are some specially moral “facts” that provide binding normative reasons for acting or thinking in a certain way. Any binding normative force will only be loosely bound by the hypothetical nature of reason. If you are sincerely committed to playing a legitimate game of chess, then you really ought to follow the rules and do en passant properly and obey touch-rules, etc. But this is only if you have the desire to play a legal game. If you really need the tournament money to pay for your dying child’s medicine and you see that you can cheat and get away with it then you really ought to not follow the rules of chess. The rules of chess don’t “bind you”, because you are always free to say to these rules “Who cares? Nobody is forcing me to follow you.” Of course, it is still objectively true that you made a mistake from the perspective of the chess community.

My sense is that all norms have the same “binding” force as the rules of chess. That is, the binding is only hypothetical relative to contingent preferences. But there is no sense in which any wiggle of space-time is “necessarily obligated” to obey some prescription. Norms do not and cannot bind, authorize, guide, regulate, control, enforce, obligate, or compel any physical entity. They just do not have that power because they don’t exist except as stance-dependent properties. But as John Heil as argued, only substances can bear properties. And the most plausible candidates for substances are things like fundamental particles or space-time fields. Relative properties as such are thus quasi-properties that arise from configurations of more fundamental substances, whose “modes” include complex phenomena such as human societies and biospheres. Norms only have force if there is a preference that has an incentive to follow the norm. No incentive, no authority.

This is just a quicky and dirty rendition of some of the motivations underlying Moral Nihilism or Value Nihilism. My own views are leanings towards the view that if you are going to be a Moral Nihilist then you should also be a Global Normative Nihilist, because it seems to me that the arguments for why moral norms must be merely hypothetical are also good argument for while any other type of norm must also have a merely hypothetical nature. Some philosophers might think this is an unsurprising finding, and it’s exactly what they’d expect. But that’s because they’re philosophers! But I think that the implications of this way of looking at the world stands in stark contrast to the onto-theological worldview that has been prevalent for pretty much the entirety of human history. I don’t think an intellectual understanding of Normative Nihilism changes one’s underlying motivational structure, but I do think it enables a subtle shift in how we understand ourselves relative to the Cosmos at large. Conceptualizing ourselves from the perspectives of the universe at large is humbling when we consider that our values are just that: ours. And we should cherish them and promote them the best we know how. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking these values are imbued with a special intrinsic “goodness” that holds for all rational agents. That’s a philosophical pipedream.

An Ontological Argument for Atheism

This is a totally unoriginal thought, but I can’t remember where I learned about the ontological argument for atheism. It’s been bouncing around my head for awhile, so if anyone could tell me who originated this argument it’d be appreciated. I’ve probably butchered it anyhow, but here goes.

The ontological argument for theism is supposed to prove God exists from the supposition that the concept of God includes not only the properties of being all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good but the property of perfection itself. That is, God, if He is anything at all, is the most perfect being that could possibly exist. Now here’s the workhorse of the ontological argument: does the property of existence itself count amount the properties that a perfectly perfect being necessarily has? Theists answer in the affirmative, since surely a God that exists is more perfect than a God that does not exist. And since God is by definition the most perfect being possible, we can conclude that God exists because the most perfect being would perfectly have the property of existence .

“Not so fast!” says the atheist. Consider this. One of God’s most impressive alleged feats was the creation of the universe, an event universally considered to be a big deal. But wouldn’t it be more impressive if God had managed the trick of creating the universe without existing at all? Now that would be impressive! To make yourself vanish and in your place have a universe. Neat trick. A God who could do that seems more powerful than a God who couldn’t even manage to create a universe without existing. When you think about it, it seems awfully easy to create the universe if you actually exist. But to do so from beyond the grave is very difficult. But if anyone could do it, it’s God alright. Therefore, God does not exist.

On the Existence of Private Sensations

This is a first draft of a paper I’m writing this semester for Gillian Russell’s proseminar on analytic philosophy. Feedback is welcome.

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I think it is uncontroversial that most philosophers believe mental events like sensations are private. In this paper I will investigate the extent to which this claim is true. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, I will show by way of thought experiment that sensations are not private in the sense usually reserved for the term by philosophers. If the thought experiment is conceivable and my interpretation of it is plausible, then the concept of absolute privacy will have to be rejected and replaced with the concept of practical privacy. Moreover, it is not just our folk concept of privacy which will be under scrutiny, but rather, the very existence of absolutely private sensations will come into question. It is my view that the thought experiment establishes, not just that the concept of absolutely private sensations is problematic, but that there actually are no such things as absolutely private sensations. The reason the concept of absolute privacy is problematic is because it doesn’t correspond to anything in reality. This does not mean that laypersons will stop believing in the concept of privacy after hearing these arguments. Many generations will have to pass before our lay concepts of privacy will implicitly and explicitly reflect my debunking of absolute privacy. But by showing that absolutely privacy does not exist, I will argue that it is best if we try to reject the idea of absolute privacy. However, it is undeniable that we will, as a matter of convenience and habit, often slip back into familiar ways of thinking in terms of absolute privacy.

Absolute privacy: what is it?

Although it is ultimately an empirical question whether laypersons really believe this, I take it for granted that something like the concept of absolute privacy concerning sensations is well entrenched in how the folk think about their own mental lives, as well as reinforced by most philosophers. Absolute privacy is the idea that only I have access to my sensations and it is impossible that someone else could share my sensations. When I burn my finger and feel the throbbing sensations of pain, the thesis of absolute privacy states that only I have access to the phenomenal content of painfulness. Although it is possible for other people to infer that I am in pain on the basis of the observation of publically available data (such as taking an aspirin or saying “Ouch!”), I do not have to infer that I am in pain, I simply know it noninferentially. The essential idea behind the concept of absolute privacy is that what-it-is-like for a subject to feel sensations can only be known by the individual subject, and no one else. As Hilary Putnam as argued [reference], there could be a race of Spartans who privately feel the sensation of pain while exercising great willpower in inhibiting all external behavioral indications that they are in pain.

The thought experiment

Now I will demonstrate why there are no absolutely private sensations. Imagine the human race has continued evolving at its current rate of technological acceleration for the next million years. Above all these future humans have developed their techniques of robotic neurosurgery to the point of utter sophistication. One of the most popular recreational pursuits in this far-future society is neurosplicing. The basic idea can be illustrated as follows. Take Subject A and B and place them side-by-side on operating tables. The robotic surgeons then take Subject A’s wrist and open it up such that all the nerves are exposed. The surgeons then take specially designed wires and place splitters on each of A’s nerves such that the nerve signals going from wrist to brain are perfectly copied and sent down the wires. The wires are now attached to B’s nervous system in such a way as to mimic the input pattern of A’s hand nerves into A’s central nervous system. Now that the operation is complete, the robots begin to stroke A’s hand with a feather. Here’s the crux: what does B feel when A’s hand is stroked? Is A’s sensation of being stroked shared by B? If so, what does this show about the nature of absolute privacy?

There are multiple ways to interpret the thought experiment. One way is to continue to insist that what A feels can only be felt by A and that A’s privacy has not been violated despite the neurosplicing. This interpretation is supported by the claim that in order for it to be the exact same sensation there would not just have to be an identical input pattern, but an identical way of processing that input. So it might be said that although B had a very similar input to his central nervous system, B doesn’t know what A actually felt because they don’t have similar central nervous systems. Accordingly, A and B bring all the weight of their differing neural histories to bear on their interpretation of the input of the feather stroke. So the mere fact of being spliced into A’s nerve inputs is not enough for B to know what-it-is-like for A to be tickled.

Another interpretation is to say that the thought experiment shows that sensations cannot be absolutely private. This is the interpretation I prefer. In order to show that A’s sensations are not absolutely private, we only need to tweak the parameters of the thought experiment. The wrist-nerve splicing case is rather simple compared to what the far-future robotic surgeons are really capable of. So whereas it might be thought that simple mental events like tickling sensations could be shared, more complex, global mental states like having a headache must be absolutely private. To show why this is not necessarily true, now consider that the robots are capable of not just mimicking peripheral nervous system patterns, but cortical activity itself. Assuming a weak modularity of the mind, it should be trivial for the robotic surgeons to implant artificial cortical modules that are capable of replicating the precise input-output activity of the real biological cortical modules. Now assume the module is a perceptual module. Stroking A’s hand now generates an identical cortical pattern in B’s head that corresponds to the module-activity in A’s head.

Are we still warranted in claiming that A’s tickling sensation is private? I believe that the similarity is enough to overcome absolute privacy because the question of whether B’s sensation is identical to A’s sensation is irrelevant to the question of whether A’s sensation is absolutely private. It could be the case that precisely what-it-is-like to be A is different from precisely what-it-is-like to be B in virtue of idiosyncrasies in their central nervous system. If A and B’s central nervous system were exactly alike except for the difference of a single neuron, would what-it-is-like to be A be different from what-it-is-like to be B? If what-it-is-likeness supervenes on the physical components, then it seems like there is a difference in what-it-is-likeness despite there being a difference of only one neuron.

But is this difference enough to show that A’s sensation is absolutely private? I don’t think this follows. The concept of privacy is often discussed in terms of informational access. The idea is that if I have a headache, only I have direct access to that headache. Other people might be able to infer that I have a headache on the basis of me taking an aspirin or saying something like “I have a headache”. But if in the nerve-splicing scenario A’s cortex becomes wired into B’s cortex, it seems plausible that B could directly know whether A is having a headache without having to make an explicit inference. So the question of whether B’s experience of A’s headache is identical to the A’s experience of their headache is irrelevant to the question of whether B has to explicitly infer that A is having a headache. I think it is plausible that given enough time to adapt to A’s cortical patterns, B could noninferentially know that A is having a headache simply in virtue of being wired into A’s cortex in the right way.

Wittgenstein’s thought experiment

I propose that this anti-absolute privacy interpretation of the thought experiment is a good way of understanding some of the remarks Wittgenstein made in regards to sensory privacy. In fact, a simpler version of the thought experiment can be found in the Blue Book:

One might in this case argue that the pains are mine because they are felt in my head; but suppose I and someone else had a part of our bodies in common, say a hand. Imagine the nerves and tendons of my arm and A’s connected to this hand by an operation. Now imagine the hand stung by a wasp. Both of us cry, contort our faces, give the same description of the pain, etc. Now are we to say we have the same pain or different ones? If in such a case you say: “We feel pain in the same place, in the same body, our descriptions tally, but still my pain can’t be his”, I suppose as a reason you will be inclined to say: “because my pain is my pain and his pain is his pain”. And here you are making a grammatical statement about the use of such a phrase as “the same pain”. You say that you don’t wish to apply the phrase, “he has got my pain” or “we both have the same pain”, and instead, perhaps, you will apply such a phrase as “his pain is exactly like mine”. (It would be no argument to say that the two couldn’t have the same pain because one might anaesthetize or kill one of them while the other still felt pain.) Of course, if we exclude the phrase “I have his toothache” from our language, we thereby also exclude “I have (or feel) my toothache”. Another form of our metaphysical statement is this: “A man’s sense data are private to himself”. And this way of expressing it is even more misleading because it looks still more like an experiential proposition; the philosopher who says this may well think that he is expressing a kind of scientific truth. (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 54-55)

When Wittgenstein suggests that this thought experiment undermines the metaphysical statement “A man’s sense data are private to himself”, I suggest that Wittgenstein is talking about absolute privacy, not practical privacy. This interpretation also helps to make sense out of some cryptic remarks in the Philosophical Investigations. Consider ¶253:

In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain. (And it would also be imaginable for two people to feel pain in the same – not just the corresponding – place. That might be the case with Siamese twins, for instance.)

It is important that we distinguish two different interpretations of Wittgenstein’s remark about privacy “making sense”. On the stronger reading, we might see Wittgenstein as arguing that there actually isn’t any such phenomena as a private sensation. On the weaker reading, we might see Wittgenstein as arguing that the concept of sensory privacy is somehow problematic or confused. I suggest that Wittgenstein makes the weaker claim about concepts because there is no such thing as absolute privacy, as established by considerations such as the nerve-splicing thought experiment. If the thought experiment shows that there is no such thing as absolute privacy, then it is reasonable to ask us to update our concept of privacy to account for this. The concept of absolute privacy needs to be rejected precisely because it does not latch onto any corresponding fact.

Accordingly, it would be wrong to interpret Wittgenstein as arguing that we don’t actually have a concept of absolute privacy. I believe Wittgenstein thinks we do have such a concept. What I think Wittgenstein is doing in Philosophical Investigations is trying to show that this concept is not based on any kind of corresponding metaphysical fact about the absolute privacy of sensations, but rather, is only a product of a language game based on the realities of practical privacy. The story then goes like this: because of practical privacy, humans developed the language game of absolute privacy. Once the language game got going and sufficiently established in our ways of speaking, philosophers became convinced of the truth of absolute privacy as a metaphysical statement. But once we realize that all we possess is practical privacy, we should no longer affirm the truth of metaphysical statements about absolute privacy.

It is an empirical question as to whether humans will ever be able to implicitly give up belief in the truth of absolute privacy. It might be a contingent fact that humans, in virtue of their cognitive machinery, are unable to stop implicitly believing in the truth of something like absolute privacy. But humans are capable of modifying their explicit, consciously held beliefs about absolute privacy. So although right now I have a conscious belief that if surgical nerve-splicing technology ever advanced my sensations could be shared with others, I also have the conscious belief that since we don’t have such technology, my sensations are in fact private. As a matter of fact, I could walk up to my friends in great pain and they would never know it if I sufficiently suppressed my external pain behaviors. And my implicit beliefs reflect this knowledge of how and to what extent my sensations are private. But on the conscious level I also recognize that absolute privacy is an illusion fostered by the depth of practical privacy.

Thus, when Wittgenstein talks about sensory privacy as a grammatical fiction (¶307), what is fictional is absolute privacy. But the cognitive depth of practical privacy lent itself to the construction of myths of absolute privacy (“It’s impossible that my sensations could ever be experienced by someone else”). This interpretation also suggests a way to make sense of Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about the beetle in the box:

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing [or empty]. (¶293)

I suggest it’s plausible to interpret the “beetle” as a stand-in for an “absolutely private sensation”. The point then is that we could all coherently and intelligibly talk about absolutely private sensations without there actually being any absolutely private sensations (the box could be empty). The key is to realize that just because we have a concept of absolutely private sensations does not mean that absolutely private sensations actually exist.

But it’s also important to realize how our beliefs in absolute privacy are not quite delusions. The reason they aren’t delusional or irrational is that the real existence of practical privacy is enough to underwrite the rationality of believing in absolute privacy. So although the concept of absolute privacy does not track metaphysical truth, it would be strange to say that someone is irrational because they assent to the truth of the statement “My sensations can only be experienced by me”.

The technological relativity of publically observable behavior

Many philosophers are impressed enough with practical privacy that they assent to the truth of absolute privacy. The possibility of Spartans seems enough to conclusively demonstrate that there is more to pain than just pain behavior. In addition to publically observable behavior, the Spartan case seems to suggest that there are also private sensations. What I suggest is that the concept of “publically observable behavior” is relative to the technological sophistication of the society. What’s publically observable for far-future societies is different than what’s publically observable for us today, or for our ancient ancestors. With the invention of better brain imaging and surgical techniques, what becomes publically observable changes. And if it were the case that the precise patterns of our central nervous system were publically available in the sense of anyone else being capable of “splicing” in, then the very data out of which our own brains generate sensations would be available for other brains to digest.

Coming back to the issue of whether B’s experience of A’s headache is identical to A’s headache, we can now see that the question of “direct vs indirect” access is also relative to the way in which B observes A. If B judged that A is having a headache simply by observing A take an aspirin, then we could say that B did not have direct access. If B judged that A is having a headache because scientists correlated headaches with certain kinds of neural activity and B is looking at a brain scanner of A, then we would also say that B’s access is indirect. But if B’s cortex was directly wired into A’s cortex, is the judgment about A’s headache direct or indirect? It seems intuitive to me to say that B’s judgment is direct. But in this case what is the real difference between direct and indirect knowledge? It seems like the directness cannot simply be a matter of direct causal linkage because in the case of looking at A’s brain scan, there is a direct causal link between A’s brain activity, the image displayed on the computer, and B’s looking at the computer display of A’s brain activity. The question of direct or indirect seems then to be a matter of whether the judgment happens explicitly or tacitly. In the case of looking at A’s brain scan, the judgment is indirect because has to be made on the basis of explicit scientific knowledge of various correlations between brain activity and headaches. But surely there is a difference between a novice interpreter of brain scanning images and an expert. Whereas the novice might make a slow explicit judgment, the expert could directly know A is having a headache based on years of experience of looking at headache-brain correlations. It seems then that the nerve-splicing case is more similar to the case of the expert than the novice, because once B’s cortical module has been exposed to A’s cortical activity for long enough, B’s cortical module would start to automatically make judgment’s about A’s activity in the same automatic way B’s cortical module would make judgments about other cortical modules in B’s brain.

Conclusion

In this paper I have argued that when it comes to investigations concerning whether or not sensations are private, it is crucial to distinguish between absolute and practical privacy. Based on the nerve-splicing thought experiment, I have tried to show that absolute privacy does not exist. In normal situations, what we have instead is practical privacy. It’s merely practical rather than absolute because the inability of other people to know what I am feeling is only a matter of those people not having access to the right technology. If we lived in a far-future society where nerve-splicing had become incredibly sophisticated, we would better understand why statements about absolute privacy are false. Because of the depth of practical privacy, we feel justified talking about absolute privacy as if it corresponds to some metaphysical fact. But I have tried to argue that any facts of privacy are merely practical, not absolute. Accordingly, this suggests that we should revise our concepts of privacy to be about practical privacy. Although this conceptual revision can happen on the explicit, conscious level, the extensiveness of practical privacy suggests that it will take a long time before our implicit beliefs can catch up with any explicit denial of absolute privacy. And because we know that practically speaking our sensations will be private until the distant future, absolute privacy will always seems like an attractive thesis. But as the thought experiment suggests, this conviction of absolute privacy is mistaken.

Started reading Deleuze's Difference and Repetition

After taking a graduate seminar on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with John Protevi, I decided I wanted to delve deeper into Deleuzian literature, so I picked up his epic masterpiece Difference and Repetition. The power of thinking displayed in A Thousand Plateaus really blew me away, so I was eager to get into his more classically philosophical works. I’m not sure what I will get out of Difference and Repetition just yet, but I plan on devoting a lot of blog space to thinking through this book. I like Deleuze because of his background in complex systems theory as well as modern mathematics and contemporary scientific theory.  Although he is well-known as a “philosopher’s philosopher”, and is often discussed as being a “continental philosopher”, I think he goes above and beyond the typical work being done under the label continental philosophy. For me, Deleuzian thought is fully compatible with science and should be understood in terms of it. Indeed, Deleuze says in the introduction that “Philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science or art.”

This resonates with something I heard Pat Churchland say about the role of philosophy in  the modern scientific era. Churchland said that philosophy’s role to science is analogous to theoretical physics role to experimental physics. Theoretical physics “jumps ahead” of the known data and essentially participates in a kind of concept creation for the sake of synthetic understanding. Of course, the best theory takes into account all the data collected from the past, but it not simply an analysis of existing data sets, but rather, an attempt to synthesize previous knowledge while at the same time forging new concepts to make new predictions and correct theoretical deficiencies of the old theory. Philosophy should operate in more or less the same way. Philosophy is not restricted to using the vocabulary of established thought, but is charged with the task of creating new vocabularies to make sense of the world in light of previous knowledge, while not restricting itself to the vocabulary of previous knowledge. But the essence of philosophy is the construction of new concepts. I take this to be compatible with Deleuze’s statement that “philosophy creates and expounds its own concepts only in relation to what it can grasp of scientific functions and artistic constructions.”

As you can see, I am tremendously excited to dive into Difference and Repetition. It should offer me a new set of concepts to understand and explain natural phenomena. I even think it will be useful for my own research in the philosophy of mind. I wrote my research paper for Protevi’s seminar on Deleuzian neurophilosophy and I will probably upload it soon, as I think it was a pretty good explication of Deleuze’s relevance to cognitive science. Protevi has already done an invaluable service to the cog sci community by writing his paper “Adding Deleuze to the mix“, which I highly recommend. I hope to someday also contribute to Deleuzian scholarship, and Protevi even expressed interested in coauthoring a paper someday!