Philosophy

It is only very recently in my life that I got really interested in philosophy. Sure, I always loved thinking about things – and I loved science and freethought. These two facts virtually ensured that philosophy formed at least a background interest in my head.

It didn’t stay in the background for long…

At first, it was a fascination with the radicalness of philosophy, especially in famous movements such as postmodernism. I read Nietzsche, listened to the Teaching Company’s lecture series on existentialism, bought books like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha …and so on. But my postmodernist phase was soon over, as I found a lot of phony interpretations of science that I didn’t agree with. Moreover, there a lot of people who were PoMos seemed to do what I call philosobating –- from philosophy + masturbation. Philosobating is reading Ayn Rand a lot, learning about this radical view and that without any sense of how it can be applied to real life, professing this value but practicing something completely different.

However, many of the metaphors I stumbled upon in existentialism were striking and some of the ideas I encountered there resonated very deeply within me.  It was strange and wonderful, and such a breath of fresh air when compared to the unquestioning acceptance of dogma found in an average Indian student. Around me I only found minds which are merely receptacles of the most common and most mediocre opinions that are passed down by tradition, an education which does not instill curiosity, and perhaps dogmatic religion. Even the “intellectuals” only elevated trivialities and mediocrity to an art form and were no longer passionate seekers after truth (although none of them could really be blamed because there is no incentive for them to question or to think outside the narrow margins imposed by society) – and philosophy proved a huge respite from that. I’m glad that it was not always the case though.

Fast forward couple of years down the line and I stumbled upon the website called naturalism.org. There was a page on the site talking about success and failure and with a pretty radical notion – that no one deserves ultimate credit for their successes or blame for their failures. According to them, there are a variety of factors that shape people into what they are – and we can hardly be held responsible to those factors. When people win or fail, we only see a culmination of a huge interconnected web of cause and effect, of which the person is just a part. If this is true, why single out the person when he triumphs or falls?

I was very repulsed by this view, and I found it as an affront to the individualism I so strongly espoused. One more factor for my repulsion was that we hardly ever hear such a viewpoint – indeed, successful persons are trumpeted and looked upon as if they have descended from heaven, when failures are hardly if ever encouraged. Also, I somewhat misunderstood the position as saying that we’re all puppets ruled by fate, rather than just how cause and effect relationships almost completely determine the world (determinism). The more I read about it, the more convinced I became.

Anyway which brings me (finally!) to the point of what philosophy is, my experiences with philosophy has left me with a preliminary appreciation of what philosophy really is – or at least what I think philosophy should be. I can state a couple of things that distinguish good philosophy from pseudo-philosophizing:

Philosophy is not just thinking. Any noise is not music, any scribbling is not art and any thinking is not philosophy.  Books by self-help or management gurus titled “My Philosophy” are rarely ever philosophy. Sure, they may be filled with insights or clever witticisms. It’s just that there is something more to it that makes philosophy tick.

It is critical thinking. Reason. Self examination. There are different ways of calling it, but it all boils down to being hard on your opinions. As Tim Minchin says, opinions are like assholes –in that everybody has one; but opinions are also significantly different from assholes in that they should be constantly and thoroughly examined.  There are at least a couple of times in my life in which I let go of cherished beliefs – for example, my belief about about credit and blame I mentioned above, my belief in how demonically evil certain people in my life are, and my unjustified belief in a transcendent rationality that can act as a magic remedy for everything in life.

Philosophy should result in action. Thinking by itself does not provide the raw material for thought.  There is no use if you have read all of Ayn Rand, Jean Paul Sartre, Camus, Advaita Vedanta, Robert M. Pirsig and Khalil Gibran and you still continue the lifestyle of doing what you’re supposed to, rationalizing and providing causal justifications for your inaction and that of others, not stepping out of your line when you sense injustice, and using your intelligence to form an impenetrable cyst around your own beliefs and rendering any possible criticism unlikely to be considered.

There are more I would be coming up with as I think more about what constitutes good philosophy. From now, I am pretty sure these points are quite evident. This is what I consider as philosophy.

–AravindhCee

Thoughts on Free Will and Determinism

Original article.

The most important problem that comes up when talking about free will is the difficulty in defining the concept. How exactly do we define free will? There are many definitions with different levels of rigorousness. One way to define free will is in terms of the absolute laws of physics. We can define free will as “the ability of a conscious entity to make choices that are not affected in any way by the events that happened to the conscious entity in the past.” This is the definition most often used by the group of people who are classified as incompatibilists. Another way to define it is in terms of other living things. We can define free will as “the freedom to chose which action to take in a particular situation without being hindered by other humans or conscious living beings.” My opinion on whether free will exists or not is highly dependent on actual definition being used. I think it is extremely unlikely (and even impossible on principle) to have the kind of free will that is independent of influence from physical law. However if the definition on free will does not mention independence from past events and only concerns itself with restrictions on choices we make by other people, then I am willing to accept the possibility of free will existing.

In the second kind of definition, we are merely stating that when faced with a choice such as “Which profession to go into?” or “Which course do I take in college?” we have the freedom to go against the advice of our parents/teachers and do whatever we feel like at the time (not everyone has this freedom 😉 ). This kind of freedom in principle exists. Although there are parents that force their children to make certain choices when it comes to college courses, the student can in principle choose not to accept that decision by ignoring or being prepared to accept the – sometimes unpleasant – consequences of their choice. That kind of free will exists and that is the picture of free will that comes to most people’s minds when they hear about freedom. In fact, this free will or “social freedom” is the kind of freedom most people expect from modern society. It is what they refer to when they talk about “Freedom of speech” or “Freedom of expression”.

However if your definition of free will that tries to say that human decisions are completely independent of the events that took place in your past, I disagree that such a kind of freedom exists. This kind of freedom is impossible to define without generating a contradiction. The human brain is a huge neural network that stores in the neurons different weights that are a result of our past experiences. These are the same neurons that make “conscious” decisions or “choices.” I think that it is impossible for a human to make a decision or a choice whose sole originator is the human in question.

Recent results in neuroscience suggest that our conscious “mind” is not really the originator of our actions see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15925808?dopt=Abstract and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12191935?dopt=Abstract
The results of these experiments seem to suggest that our “choices” are determined by the brain before our conscious mind becomes aware of the fact that we have made a choice. Results like these reduce the likelihood that the decisions we make are completely independent of past events. It may even be true that the only thing consciousness does is rationalize the involuntary actions of our sub conscious. The very idea that we have “Made a decision” may be an illusion in many situations.

I also disagree with people who simply wave their hands vaguely and say free will exists because Quantum Mechanics. While it is true that quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory,  it doesn’t help to “gift” free will to consciousness. Firstly it is highly dubious whether quantum mechanics is directly involved in human cognition and consciousness. Secondly even if quantum mechanics made our choices probabilistic it still doesn’t mean that the decisions are free decisions. Decisions can only be classified as “free” if a people have the same probability of making a particular decision when faced with a particular choice independent of the experiences these people have had in the past. A coin that lands on heads half the time does not have “free will”.

I think a lot of the confusion surrounding the debate about free will and determinism is because of the wide variety of ways in which people define “Free will”. It’s got so many definitions that it is impossible to say what people mean when they say “I believe in Free will”. If someone ever says that the very first thing I will do is to ask them how they define free will. The debate should be pretty straightforward from that point on.

-Ashwin Narayan