Karan Gill: "Thoughts on Philosophy"

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.