Karan Gill is our former USC Philosophy Club vice-president 2010-2012. Karan was Electrophysics and Electrical Engineering graduate student in USC '12. Although he was primarily a science whiz, Karan is deeply intrigued by philosophy especially in relation with Quantum Physics. Karan stood alongside Ben to revive the club in 2010. Karan is contactable at karan.gill@live.com. Visit Karan's blog at: http://www.karangill.com
Thoughts on Philosophy
by Karan Gill, http://karangill.com
Recently I’ve felt my thoughts on epistemology,
reality, consciousness and life in general slowly coalescing. Sort of the way a
dust cloud in space would. It’s time I put down these thoughts and organise
them into a coherent whole. I’m not a student of philosophy, so if my views
appear uninformed and naïve they probably are. While putting this down, I had a
choice between penning a lengthy article exploring each issue in depth, or a
short sketch of my thoughts, trusting the reader’s common sense with filling in
the gaps. I chose the latter.
I think it best to start with the issue of God, if
only because this has dominated Man’s view of the world and reality like no
other idea has. And because the vast majority of humanity subscribes to this
idea. What follows is a quick summary of my thoughts on God. My "The Case for Agnosticism" essay goes into
much greater depth. The common thread that binds the ideas of God different
people hold is that God is something outside human experience and conception.
Thus, by definition, the idea of God is unfalsifiable. If an idea is
unfalsifiable then it is outside the purview of science. Hence science cannot
address the idea of God. God is a belief, and is not predicated on reason. My
view? Agnostic. By definition, the existence of a God or a “Godlike” entity
cannot be proved or disproved. Hence it cannot be known. However such an
existence cannot be discounted either. Allow me to reproduce a line from Donald
Rumsfeld for which initially (if I remember correctly) he was pilloried but
which, I, on further thought felt it was one of the more intelligent things he
had to say.
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always
interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things
we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know
there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns --
the ones we don't know we don't know."
Hence there are four classes into which all things
fall. Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. If
you are a psychology student, you may have studied the Johari window, and you
should be familiar with this concept. God is a unknown unknown. So we can never
prove it or disprove it. Hence I am agnostic. I am also an apathetic agnostic.
That means that given God exists, this “God” does not itself effect the world
or change anything about it.
Why then do people believe in God? This is the
question I posed myself when I realised that I was in a miniscule minority,
being agnostic. Give it some thought yourself and it is plain that the idea of
God can easily be explained by evolutionary social biology and the role it
plays in the human psyche. Think of the time when mankind had just asserted
it’s dominance over other species, maybe a few tens of thousand years ago. Now
groups of humans were beginning to compete with each other for resources. The
groups which won were those which had a greater degree of cohesiveness and an
attachment on the part of the group members to the idea of a group. Now look
around you, what social organisation has the greatest ability to pull members
of a society together into a gestalt? You have it. Religion. I admire religion
for it’s ability to make people conform. Not only that, make people want to
conform and make them really believe that they should, they ought to conform.
In this sense religion is a force for good, because it tends to encourage
people to leave peaceably, to “live and let live”. However I dislike the way
religion can be dogmatic, and drive people to extreme opinions besides inciting
violence and a distrust of those not from one’s religion. My problem with the
idea of God is the deleterious effects it can have, and that it is not a
pursuit of truth. Still, I agree that as long as the issue of consciousness is
not fully resolved there is a rational basis, not a good enough basis for me to
accept, but there is some sort of rational basis to admit the existence of God.
There is certainly no basis for coming up will all stuff people come up with
after the existence of God is admitted, but the basis for that is in the psyche
as I explain below.
So God affects society in the form of religion. God as
the idea affects society at the level of the individual. If you believe in God
you believe that you always have someone watching out for you. It gives you
that most mysterious and perhaps greatest of human feelings – hope. Hope is
what you have left when you have nothing left and if something can give you
hope at all times, then it is very powerful. Also, God provides the feeling of
having a constant companion who will always listen to you. In these ways God
fills what would otherwise have been a gaping hole in the human psyche. The
idea of God is essentially tailor made to improve our quality of life.
I’ll now make the transition from God to instincts.
God is part of the instincts that were instilled in us by the process of
evolution. Instincts are far from perfect, very far indeed, but they provide an
extremely useful way of dealing with situations. They do not require thought or
reason, but come about instantly. They tend to be strong, so an instinct will
almost always be acted upon. As early humans did not possess reason, instinct
was used instead to navigate situations. Think of instinct as a sort of “first
approximation” to the ideal way to respond to a situation. God is, in this
sense an instinct. It is something we developed to help us cope with the
seemingly unfeeling and meaningless world around us. Instincts also give our
lives meaning and purpose, happiness and joy, sadness and pathos and indeed the
entire gamut of emotions are derived from instinct. I am not talking about a
physical basis for emotions but simply reasoning out why we developed them.
A few thousand years ago, mankind began to apply and
understand reason. Unfortunately the results of reason are often in direct
contradiction to what our instincts tell us. This goes back to instincts being
a “first approximation” and often a bad one. In my opinion, the entire field of
ethics arises from this pitting of instinct against reason. We expect human
being to be “reasonable”. I find this concept ridiculous. If everyone was
actually reasonable, no one would ever disagree. Human beings have always been
irrational, and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be irrational. If
you don’t believe me, simply as yourself why you’re reading this article. To
the reason you give, ask yourself why that is so. And continue, do you find an
ultimate answer? The answers you come up with have to do with emotions and instinct,
and have nothing logical or reasonable about them.
The desire to be in a group, “to belong”, is one of
the strongest instincts we have. It is behind so many of our behaviours,
literally, because being in a group confers such a massive advantage. This is
behind gangs, the Nazi party, religion, alumni associations and so on. Another
huge human impulse is to be loved and accepted. You know that a healthy
childhood requires a lot of love, care and attention from the parents and
family, and the lack of such care and attention can, probably will, result in
psychological issues that manifest themselves later. I feel if most sat down
and thought about the real reasons for their feelings, especially the negatives
ones, they would realise that those feelings stem from the desire to be a
group, to have an identity and to belong. That is what people so often define
themselves by a antipathy towards something else, and in doing so form their
identity.
I feel our instincts are only so useful. It is now
time to recognise them, recognise the behaviours they give rise to and discard
those behaviours. Instinct and impulse have served their purpose, we must now
discard them. Do not discard the positives! Then your life would be empty.
Instead discard the negatives such as fear and hate, and everyone’s life would
be much richer, better and happier. Understand yourself first. Know thyself.
Then move on to the world.
Once you have understood psychology and sociology,
understood what is thrown up by your psyche and how your psyche obscures your
view of the world, then you can begin to understand the world around you. I
assume at this point that you have. Now, what can you say about the world.
Technically, strictly, you can only say what Descartes said, “I know, therefore
I am.” That is a fallacious statement, because it means "I am, therefore I
am" but what he's getting at is the best you can do is say you know there
is “something” out there, something that is thinking these thoughts,
essentially your consciousness. But you can’t say these words in front of you
are real for sure. One can always make up some argument to invalidate that. For
example your brain could be hooked up to a computer à la “The Matrix”. But I
think we can pretty agree that for all practical purpose the world is how we
see it and experience it. Science has so far agreed with experiments and so our
view of the world is self-consistent. In epistemology, i.e. the study of
knowledge, there is an idea called “justified true belief”. It means that if
you believe something, and you have a very good reason to believe that
something, then you have justified true belief and that belief is knowledge.
However this is clearly wrong, because you can truly believe something but you
be wrong thanks to something that does not fall in your knowledge. Hence there
is no true knowledge, only belief. You may argue that 2+2=4 is knowledge. That
is wrong. 2+2=4 is not knowledge because you’ve defined it that way, therefore
is has to be. For example, I could define $*!=#. Then suppose I write down
these symbols in that order and say I “know” that dollar asterisk exclamation
mark equals hash. Does that indicate knowledge? No.
However if we, for the sake of staying sane, agree
that what we see and experience, is in fact reality, or an excellent
representation of reality then what can we know? Well science and reason are
the tools you look to, and you know whatever they can tell you.
We now have a basic, rather tenuous, grasp on reality.
What do you do with that? You could, very clichéd, but you could try to figure
out the meaning of life? An expanded account of my views on Meaning and Purpose
is here. What does Meaning even mean? Do you have
a definition? I do. Think of everything that human conception and experience
encompasses. Let all of this be contained in some sort of “sphere”. Everything
that our consciousness can comprehend is within that sphere. Now, if there was
some sort of purpose that would retain its validity outside this sphere, then
that would be a real meaning, a real purpose. Unfortunately, by that
definition, it seems very hard for us to judge what a real purpose is. How do
you check if something is valid outside your conception. Pretty much impossible.
One more thing to bear in mind regarding reality, is that an explanation of
reality might be outside our conception. In fact I’m inclined to feel this is
the case. For example there is no way your neighbourhood cockroach can
understand quantum mechanics. You could try showing it the double slit
experiment but I doubt anything would come of it. The same way, a true
understanding of reality could be outside our grasp. We may not be sufficiently
evolved enough to be able to understand this world. This is a counterargument
against the argument for God. That argument goes, we cannot understand this
world. Thus there is something “beyond”. That something is God. However, just
because we cannot understand and cannot explain our world, does not mean our
world cannot be explained or understood. “Deus ex Machina”. From the meaning
that term has, we can glean something of the purpose the idea of God serves.
Let me say that as far as a purpose of life goes, I’m
a nihilist. I do not believe life has a purpose. We are born, we do some stuff,
and we die. After we die nothing matters. We return to dust. It matters not
what we achieved or did. Thus what we achieved or did had no purpose. Hence
life has no purpose. Now when I tell people this, they turn around and say, so
why are you still alive? Very simple. I believe in nihilism but that does not
mean I follow it.”Aha!”, people say, “you’re irrational!”. “Ofcourse” is my
rejoinder. I am human, hence I am irrational. My instincts and impulses do not
allow me to be rational. Instead they provide and infuse my life with an
overabundance of meaning, more than enough for me to feast upon and live my
life out. All of us are hedonists in daily life. We seek out pleasure. By
reading this, you seek out intellectual fulfilment and pleasure. When you meet
a friend, you seek out the pleasure of company. When you help someone, you do
it because they will help you in turn and you will benefit. When you donate to
an organisation, you do it because that organisation promotes a vision you agree
with, or maybe you’ll save tax and people will have a higher opinion of you.
Whatever it is, we are all essentially hedonists and self centred beings who
look out only for ourselves. There is no arguing with this. If you believe
otherwise your instincts have successfully fooled you, that is all I can say.
I’m not blaming you for it. Instincts are masters at this sort of thing.
I say it is not your fault because I am a determinist.
Someone said, “You study engineering? You must have taken a semesters worth of
Quantum Mechanics. How can you be a determinist” Well are these words popping
in out and of existence? Do people walk through walls? No. Phenomena that
guides this world is essentially Newtonian. The physics of the neurons in your
brains is deterministic. If it wasn’t your behaviour would be random. Is your
behaviour random? Na-ah. It’s directed towards the attainment of pleasure,
which is a proxy for passing your genes down. Hence, the physics of your brain
is deterministic. You do not have free will. By the laws of Physics you can
never have free will. Too bad. It sucks, I know. I don’t like it either. Oh,
and if life were quantum mechanical, it would be random. Your actions are
random? I’d take determinism over randomness any day.
Anyhow, in sum, we all follow the tenets of hedonism.
Returning to the question of God, a strong argument in
favour of it is science’s in-ability to answer the question of the functioning
of the human brain and further consciousness. They are two separate things. The
functioning of the brain is essentially putting neurons together. Consciousness
is thought, feelings, emotions which cannot be found in the firing of neurons.
What is a thought? What is a memory? I am a reductionist. That means I feel
everything has a physical basis. Everything can be explained by science.
However I’ll admit this makes me falter. If there is one thing that cocks a
snook at science, it’s the brain. Pretty interesting that the brain can’t
figure itself out. Admittedly, while science cannot explain consciousness,
there will be some sort of basis, but not in my opinion a very good one, to
believe in something supernatural. This is because science has steadily been
able to explain more and more phenomena. For example, it has been 100 years
since we knew that nuclei existed. Now we fit what, a million?, transistors
into the dot at the end of this sentence. I believe science’s relentless march
will explain consciousness, but this explanation is tens of decades into the
future. However it is a belief, a claim. I admit the possibility that science
mayn’t be able to explain this “secondary subjective consciousness” as some
call it. Remember though, that because something hasn’t been explained, does
not mean it cannot be explained. And just because something cannot be explained
by us, does not mean it does not have an explanation. Sorry about those double
negatives. You should read the "Confusing Multiple Negatives" entry
in Hitchhiker’s Guide if you think this is bad.
Where does all this leave us? How should we live our
daily lives? I like secular humanism. I believe for my life to progress,
everyone else’s life has to progress too. Good education, with a basic
background given to everyone in science, philosophy, psychology and sociology
is a good start. These subjects are things everyone should be aware of.
To sum – nihilism but hedonism, determinism, reason
over instinct, reductionism with a caveat and secular humanism. Above all, pragmatism.
Though really I would like to put it like this “It is unfortunate that as far
as life goes Meaning and Truth are mutually exclusive. You aim for Truth hoping
to find an iota, a wisp of Meaning at the end; that you may latch onto it like a
limpet. Instead, Reason lifts the veil from your eyes and you strive to find
the tiniest pinprick of Meaning in the nothingness beyond. But the abyss
consumes your gaze, encapsulating you, beating down on the pitiful barrier that
is your psyche. You flee into the recesses of your psyche, but deep down inside
you know the abyss awaits.”
I’ve made an effort to express the views in plain
language, and these four pages should be comprehensible to anyone. These views
were arrived at after a fair amount of thought, and I feel they are
self-consistent, and that it is difficult to do much better than them. However
if you do disagree, and I’m sure you will, I’ll be happy to hear you out.
