Len Yabloko's List: Philosophy

• That the act of thinking guarantees the existence of the self is a fact that many philosophers take for granted. As Descartes famously put it “I think, therefore I am”, an assertion that has come to be known as the cogito.
• Knowing that doubt exists we can generalize and assert that conscious acts exist, since doubts are a kind of conscious act (although we haven’t proven that anything besides doubt must exist), yielding “there exist things that present themselves as conscious acts”. From here, if we are to reach Descartes’ conclusion, we must somehow show that the self exists, and not just the conscious acts. There are basically three ways of understanding the “I” in “I think, therefore I exist”, as the real self, as the self that is constituted by the act of thinking, and as the first person perspective.
• Simply because a radical skeptic might insist that there is no real first person perspective, only an appearance of one.* So all we can really say is that the conscious act, the experience, seems as though it has a first person perspective, but given our discussion earlier about the contents of consciousness, this is all that really matters. And, as I alluded above, the existence of a first person viewpoint it itself a kind of minimal constituted self, since the first person perspective implies that there is someone who is having the current experience, even if it doesn’t necessarily give that self any other attributes.

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• The simple meaning of the phrase is that someone wondering whether or not he exists is, in and of itself, proof that he does exist  – at the very least, there must be an "I" who does the thinking.
• A common mistake is that people take the statement as proof that they, as a human person, exist. However, it is a severely limited conclusion that does nothing to prove that one's own body exists, let alone anything else that is perceived in the physical universe. It only proves that one's mind exists (that part of an individual that observes oneself doing the doubting).
• To argue that the cogito is not a syllogism, one may call it self-evident that "Whatever has the property of thinking, exists". In plain English, it seems incoherent to actually doubt that one exists and is doubting. Strict skeptics maintain that only the property of 'thinking' is indubitably a property of the meditator (presumably, they imagine it possible that a thing thinks but does not exist). This counter-criticism is similar to the ideas of Jaakko Hintikka, who offers a non-syllogistic interpretation of Cogito Ergo Sum. He claimed that one simply cannot doubt the proposition "I exist". To be mistaken about the proposition would mean something impossible: I do not exist, but I am still wrong.
• Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the phrase in that it presupposes that there is an "I", that there is such an activity as "thinking", and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks." In other words the "I" in "I think" could be similar to the "It" in "It is raining." David Hume is another philosopher who criticizes Descartes 'Cogito Ergo Sum'. He says that those philosophers who argue that we can work out we have a 'self' using reason are confusing 'similarity' with 'identity'. He is saying that the similarity of our thoughts and the continuity of them in this similarity does not mean that we can identify ourselves as a self but that our thoughts are similar.
• Kierkegaard argues that the value of the cogito is not its logical argument, but its psychological appeal: a thought must have something that exists to think the thought. It is psychologically difficult to think "I do not exist". But as Kierkegaard argues, the proper logical flow of argument is that existence is already assumed or pre-supposed in order for thinking to occur, not that existence is concluded from that thinking.

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• August 18, 2010
• The term cognition is a general category, not well understood. Cognition refers to processes that allow humans to know what is going on out there and how to respond.
• The term, thought, is often used as a synonym for cognition but this is incorrect. A giant leap in understanding cognition is realizing that talking is thinking. We talk to each other and talk to ourselves. Thinking is selftalk, listening to others, speaking with others, reading and writing.

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• Monistic Idealism is a metaphysical theory which states that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being. It is a monistic theory because it holds that there is only one type of thing in the universe, and a form of idealism because it holds that one thing to be consciousness.^[1]

   

  Monistic Idealism is a variety of the theory of Pantheism which asserts that the term god is equivalent to the entirety of existence.

   

  Idealism is opposed philosophy to that of “material realism,” which holds that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Idealism asserts that consciousness is the fundamental entity of the universe.

   

  Both of these are monistic ideals. Monism is opposed to dualism which asserts that consciousness and the physical world are mutually exclusive.

• Gödel may have seen himself as a successor to Leibniz, whose critique of Spinoza's atheism set a precedent for much of Gödel's work. When we try to ascertain the theological intent underlying Gödel's mathematical investigations, though, several difficulties arise.
• If Spinoza tries to capture the ontological proof for atheism, Leibniz sets out to restore it to theism, suitably corrected to answer the objections of Thomas Aquinas. If we suppose that God possesses all positive properties, Leibniz argues, then necessary existence is a positive property and must pertain to God. If we agree that it is logically possible for a perfect being to exist because "all perfections are compatible with each other," then we must conclude that a being possessing all positive properties must exist: "There is, or can be understood, the subject of all perfections, or a most perfect being."
• Gödel's proof is best understood as an exercise within his broader Leibnizian program. If we attempt to speak in purely natural terms of "that than which greater cannot be conceived," we cannot help but refer to the mathematical concept of infinity. That is just how Spinoza thought of his infinite substance, and to embed the infinite, an attribute of God, within natura naturans was a pantheist credo. Leibniz, the coinventor of calculus, knew that an infinite number of infinitely small quantities can have a finite sum, and his infinity of infinitesimals, therefore, does not upset the finite character of created nature. But already, with Leibniz' refutation of Spinoza, mathematics was emerging as the laboratory for ontological investigation. Whether that should be the case is a source of perpetual debate, but it is hard to imagine how it could have happened otherwise in the seventeenth century.
• Leibniz' infinitesimals led to another Godei discovery with deep theological implications. In the nineteenth century, mathematicians learned that the calculus discovered by Leibniz and Newton could not integrate or differentiate some classes of functions. The calculus began with the insight that an infinite series whose terms grew infinitely small might have a positive sum. But some functions resisted the calculus. These include "spiky" functions in which changes in sign, for example, occurred in arbitrarily small intervals. From the study of such functions came the disturbing insight that some infinities are "bigger," that is, more densely packed with numbers, than other infinities. And this inspired one of the nineteenth century's greatest mathematicians to attempt to treat the different orders of infinity as if they were just another kind of number - the "transfinite numbers" - and thus to domesticate infinity.
• That is Cantor's "continuum hypothesis," which attempts to identify a first and second transfinite cardinal number. From there, he believed, all the possible orders of infinity could be counted, the same way the integers count groups of one, two, three, and so forth. He not only recognized, but was driven by, the ontological implications of this assertion: If the continuum hypothesis turned out to be true, Spinoza would be vindicated because God's infinity could be packaged into a neat series of numbers. Cantor spent the last thirty-five years of his life in a vain effort to prove this. He died in 1918 in a mental hospital.
• Gödel noted drily that this represents a problem for philosophy and epistemology rather than for mathematics, which can continue its investigations without ever exhausting the subject. Gödel's result shows that not even in terms of numbers, the simplest objects we can specify, can natura naturans explain the individuality that we observe. The parallel between Gödel's attack on the continuum hypothesis and Leibniz' critique of Spinoza is very strong, and it is remarkable that both hinged on foundational insights into number theory.
• There is yet a third place where Kurt Gödel's mathematical work has theological purchase: in Einstein's failure to reconcile the deterministic world of general relativity with the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics. Einstein famously declared his belief in "Spinoza's God": a god, that is, who is indistinguishable from nature and who reveals himself through natural harmonies. Einstein, we might say, was a "strong Platonist" who actually believed that if one discovers the eternal forms to which natural phenomena correspond, all the world's mystery will yield itself up to science.
• Gödel's personal God is under no obligation to behave in a predictable orderly fashion, and Godei produced what may be the most damaging critique of general relativity. In a Festschrift for Einstein's seventieth birthday in 1949, Godei demonstrated the possibility of a special case in which, as Palle Yourgrau described the result, "the large-scale geometry of the world is so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that they close; that is, they return to their starting point." This means that "a highly accelerated spaceship journey along such a closed path, or world line, could only be described as time travel." In fact, "Godei worked out the length and time for the journey, as well as the exact speed and fuel requirements."
• Godei was at least a weak PIatonist - he considered mathematical objects to be real and his research therefore to be empirical. He thought his theology thus to be an empirical one, founded on man's experience of the infinite fecundity of the creator's mind. That is why Gödel's religious thinking is so rich and also why it is so challenging: One must actually follow the work to make sense of the conclusions, an unusual challenge for theologians, and one they have shirked for too long.

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• I dunno, that to me sounds less like downward causation that an evolving/adaptive system.
  
  Say a persistant loop, or more likely networked reaction composed of many pathways to an arbitrary point, exists in an enviroment where one of the initial components is abundant, but finite and non-replacable - (for consistancy's sake we'll call that element proto-B). Initially the pathway that involves proto-B is favoured over others because pB is readily available - allowing the pathway it catalyses to move faster and scoop up local supplies of whatever other components are required before other pathways arrive at the points in their respective pathways that metabolize them.
  
  The arbitrary point I mentioned is the point at which fullB is produced - at the moment however it is a 'waste product' redundant to the process that results in its making because of the abundant source of pB.
  
  However, as pB is slowly exhausted, the alternate pathway that can use fullB as a catalytic step will begin to outpace its competitiors, moving faster and requisitioning the supplies of later elements - strangling the other pathways in much the same way as the original pB pathway used to.
  
  At a glance it would seem that fullB has somehow bitten its own tail and bootstrapped itself into existence, whereas in reality it is a latent capability of the system (inherrent from its beginning) that has been expressed via the serendipitous creation of a (useful) by-product from earlier cycles.

• I agree. - Len Yabloko on 2011-08-27