A week ago I wrote here about cephalopods -- the octopus and similar creatures. I was then, and am now, motivated by some comments in Peter Godfrey-Smith's book about them, OTHER MINDS. I want to add to those thoughts today. The reason Godfrey-Smith (a professor of philosophy at CUNY) is so interested in them is that they are arguably a case where mind, consciousness, and the use of language have emerged with an evolutionary path very different from our own. Most writing on other, non-human, minds focuses on creatures with whom we share a lot of adaptive history: the other primates, for example, or even the marine mammals. But on the tree of life, the branching off that separates octopuses, squids, etc. from humans and other mammals of land or sea took place a long, long time ago. This, Godfrey-Smith says, presents is with a situation similar to that which would occur were we to encounter a form of life that had evolved on another planet. So: what do we learn by way of com...
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A famous German-language book on philosophy first published in 1929 has finally been translated into English. The work is Helmuth Plessner's LEVELS OF ORGANIC LIFE AND THE HUMAN. For Plessner what is critical to grasp about life, the sine qua non of the living, is that every organism has a self-positioning boundary. There is the organism on the one hand, there is the environment on the other. Further, the organism itself is largely responsible for where that boundary is. Animals move about more than plants of course, but the difference is of degree rather than kind, and all organisms grow. The outer boundary itself may be defined as that which is neither living nor non-living (the outer layer of our skin consists of dead cells), this making it a liminal zone. There is movement both outward and inward. The liminal zone moves outward as an organism grows, there is movement inward in the process of digestion. In Plessner's words, "It is these two moments togethe...
The philosophy of Henri Bergson, summarized. (I may have done this before but I can't find that post now, so we'll try again.) Time is real and important: it cannot without loss be treated in Einsteinian fashion as a particular dimension of space; Because time is real, novelty and free will are also realities: the future contains surprises that could not even in principle have been determined by calculation from the facts existing today; One must make a sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition. Intelligence is very useful — it is a survival mechanism for humans — but it cannot grasp the essence of reality, the movement of time. Intelligence geometricizes, which is why intelligent people often find themselves denying the first two propositions; As a philosophy of biology, Bergsonism asserts too that there is something about life that escapes mechanistic formula: that life and its evolution can never be explained as so much organic chemistry. Bergson populariz...
Both Plato and Aristotle believed in a tripartite human soul Was that just a coincidence, just a symptom of the attraction that the number three has for the human mind? or is the classification in the one case more similar to the other than might first appear? In Plato's view, the soul contains an appetite, a spirit, and an intellect. These correspond to the classes in an idealized city, where the appetite corresponds to the ordinary working stiffs, the spirit corresponds to the warriors (sometimes called "guardians"), and the intellect to the philosopher kings (sometimes also, confusingly, called "guardians"). In the world of fantasy, the three levels correspond to Dorothy's friends: where the appetite might be represented by the sentimental tin man, the guardian spirit by the lion, and the intellect by the scarecrow. What about Aristotle? He wrote of the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the (uniquely) human soul. The vegetative functions o...
In a philosophy group to which I belong, a fellow calling himself Barleycorn posted the following thought: People like to think of the universe as some magical godly force of creation but really it's just the earth that houses life. The universe for the most part is death. Put anything living up in space and the universe instantly kills it. The universe is not your loving friend. This little bubble on earth called an atmosphere is the only thing stopping the universe from instantly murdering you. So why all the memes about the magical mystical universe and all this spirit science crap? And why do so many people feel like the universe will absorb or save your soul at death. No it won't. That's a very romantic idealistic view of the universe. Life struggles AGAINST the universe. My reply was, and is, as follows: First, the "little bubble" of life on earth is only possible because of a continuous stream of energy from the nearest star, and because we are held...
At Yahoo!Answers I tackled this one recently , "How is epistemology and metaphysics related." I did so without even mentioning the issue of noun/verb agreement. What amazing restraint. So let me throw off the shackles of such restraint now and shout, "How ARE THEY, you mean, don't cha????" Here, though, is my full and temperate answer. They are related in somewhat circular fashion. Your view of epistemology, your view of how you know things, will likely depend upon some implicit or explicit metaphysics. If you think of yourself as a biological organism, in the midst of a dangerous world, forced to make the best available guesses in order to increase the chances of seeing tomorrow -- if you think of yourself that way, which is the premise of a lot of epistemological thought, you will already have made a number of metaphysical assumptions. So on one hand we'd have to have a good idea of who and where we are to start thinking sensible thoughts concern...
A recent issue of The New Yorker contains an article by Michael Pollan on the intelligence of plants. I've learnt as a consequence that between 2005 and 2009 there existed a professional entity known as the Society for Plant Neurobiology. The title is intriguing. Plants don't have nervous systems, so in a literal sense there can't be a plant "neurobiology." But the society was created n 2005 by botanists who believe, in Pollan's paraphrase, that the "electrical and chemical signaling systems [that] have been identified in plants ... are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals." The scientists within this Society are wary of association with the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants and the hucksterism they believe it represents. The SPN changed its name to something less intriguing in 2009, possibly (Pollan's article suggests) as a result of government pressure. The federal subsidizers of promising scientific research...
The idea of a "tautology" and especially of its use in philosophical debate, has bugged me for years. Let me express my analytical (or synthetic) reaction here and see if I get an illuminating response. Many of those who dislike the idea of evolution, or Darwinian evolution anyway, make a point about the nature of the alleged mechanism. The notion that evolution works by "the survival of the fittest" can not, they say, be a substantive insight at all because it is a tautology. The fittest are defined by survival, and then survival is attributed to their fitness. An obvious circle. Likewise, those who dislike the notion of market efficiency make the same point, though they may not recognize its similarity. They say that the notion of efficiency is defined by what the market does, and then the market is said to be efficient. An obvious and invalidating circle! Another example: those who argue that a God is necessary, and must be postulated even if His existence ca...