From me to Jennifer Hudin:
Bread Philosophy
What do fire, metamorphosis, and bread have on common? Transformation. One thing becomes another thing—a better thing. Potential is unlocked; the hidden is made manifest. Nature performs miracles. Water becomes wine. Bread is made from just water and flour aided by a transformative agent (yeast). Every culture has it, but it was a human invention. Tony Shalhoub’s series on CNN has been exploring bread’s many forms and cultural significance: the world of bread. It is riveting stuff. Abby Phillip has been seen kneading dough and salivating after her regular gig refuting Republicans. Bread is in the limelight, enjoying its culinary centrality. I predict a healthy future for it. Bread is political because it unites people and delights them. It is cheap, plentiful, and vegetarian; everybody loves it. It has no downside, ethical or political. No wars are fought over it. It has an honorable history.
It is also personal. I myself have become a bread maker. Why did it take me so long? Why was I so blind? It was only a quick google away. My first efforts were strictly experimental (I enjoyed the chemistry of the process) and not entirely successful. I made the water too hot and killed the yeast. Still, it was pretty good, if rather flat; I needed to work on my rise. I just made my fourth loaf and now we are talking. Warm water, dry yeast, spoonful of sugar—bubbles, fermentation. Then the flour and some salt. Stir vigorously. But I added caraway seeds and an egg. I keep the dough moist. I don’t rush the rise. Hot oven, 30 minutes, browned crust, and there you have it: an actual loaf of bread. It really is miraculous—something from nothing (like dead wood and fire). You have performed a natural miracle. The taste is excellent, the texture perfect. You share it with your friends. It becomes part of your religion. It is a simple philosophy but an effective one: universal, democratic, creative, life-affirming, pleasurable, harmless. Tony was onto something. Bread is good. Making it is fun.
Existence, Essence, and Time
The traditional view was that essence precedes existence: things have essences before they come to exist. This makes sense if the thing in question is designed: the designer has its essence in mind before he makes it, e.g., a carpenter making a table. It also makes sense if there is no human designer but a divine one: God had all the essences in his mind before he set about bringing the corresponding things into existence. But it is hard to make sense of if there is no designer, since there will be no mind in which the essence is, so to speak, warehoused. Where then is it? If the essence of water is H2O, did H2O precede water? That sounds decidedly peculiar, and H2O is water, so it can’t exist unless water does. Did the origin-essence of Queen Elizabeth II exist before she did: was she born of these particular parents before she was born? Granted the piece of wood that composes the table existed before the table did, but was the table composed of this piece of wood before it existed? Hardly. The whole doctrine looks radically misconceived for objects with essences that are not intelligently designed. Essence does not precede existence—though ideas of objects can precede their actual existence. Is it to be supposed that the essence of numbers preceded numbers? Does the essence of pain precede pain?
So, does existence precede essence, as Sartre famously claimed for human beings? Do things come into existence and only later acquire an essence? That is an even worse doctrine: how can a table exist and not be made of anything and have no nature? How could water acquire a chemical composition sometime after coming to exist? Things can acquire properties (“accidents”) after they come to exist, but not natures. Even human beings according to existentialism have an essence when they come to exist–their essence is unlimited freedom, absolute nothingness, pure potential. Things have to have some essence at the moment of their creation, even if they change over time; if they acquire a new essence, they also acquire a new identity. There is no such thing as having zero nature. If things have essences at all, they have them coevally with their coming to exist.
The indicated doctrine, then, is that existence and essence are simultaneous. A thing comes to have its essence at the precise moment it begins to exist, neither earlier nor later. If the coming into existence is gradual, spread out in time, so is the acquisition of essence. The table comes to exist over a few days, as the carpenter works on it, and so does its essence; it slowly gathers the essence that will define it. When the carpenter finishes making the table, he finishes giving it its essence; only then can we say that the table is essentially made of this piece of wood. If water took a while to come into existence, it also took a while to become H2O. But this sounds distinctly odd: the table comes to exist at a certain time, perhaps gradually, but it doesn’t come to have its essence at a certain time. We can’t sensibly say that things come to have an essence. We can say that they come to exist, slowly or quickly, and provide dates; but we can’t say that they come to have an essence this way. Tables exist in time, but essences don’t. It is a kind of category mistake to locate essences in time, so we can’t say that they precede or postdate or are simultaneous with existence. This is not the “logical grammar” of essence. It is not true that essence precedes existence, nor that existence precedes essence, nor that the two are simultaneous—because these are all nonsensical statements. It is perfectly true that ideas of things can precede the existence of those things, and also true that things can come to exist without yet being fully formed (e.g., human beings); but it is not true (because nonsensical) that existence and essence can precede each other or occur simultaneously. It is a conceptual blunder.[1]
[1] Some might see here a reason to deny essence altogether, since if there were such a thing it ought to make sense. I wish Kripke had written Timing and Necessity.
Thumb Fretting
As dedicated readers know, I am all about the hand. Lately, my left hand has been impressing me mightily: it has been throwing knives with confidence and panache; it has really come into its own on the tennis backhand; and its fingers have been performing nimbly on the guitar. Even my left baby (“little”) finger has been out to prove itself and has won several medals. However, I have not come before you today to celebrate my left hand in its entirety, though that would be perfectly apropos (it is doing a handy job, even if it says so itself). Instead, I want to single out my sinistral thumb, and for a very special reason. Drum roll, please: it has learned how to fret all by itself! I mislead you not, Jeeves (and Gussy Finknottle will back me up on this). I don’t mean that boring business of the thumb peeping over the neck of the guitar to hold down the E and A strings that that annoying fellow Jimi Hendrix made canonical. Oh no: I mean playing whole licks with the thumb. I know, you don’t know what I am talking about, but remember the hand has a mind of its own (it commandeers vast areas of the brain). Today it taught me how to play guitar using only the thumb for fretting! An example might help: just as you can use only one finger to play the lick in Day Tripper, so you can employ the thumb to do the same. You just press the strings down using your thumb with the rest of your hand resting behind the neck, cradling. The great thing is that your thumb is big and strong (the Goliath of digits) and does what you tell it to do. It has been dying to demonstrate its mettle on the strings, as opposed to lurking unseen behind the neck. There is very little learning curve (Jeeves, are you still listening?). You will be amazed: your thumb will veritably dance over the strings, or else I am not Link Wray. It’s even better than your index finger! True, it is only a solitary digit, but what a digit! Within ten minutes I was playing like a thumb demon (new band: The Thumb Demons). You know what I did next: I googled the blighter. To my everlasting surprise, the search brought up nothing (except that feeble Hendrix trick). Evidently, I have invented a new way to play the guitar, or my left hand has. Credit where credit is due. I will keep you posted on future developments… Jeeves, to where have you disappeared, old chap?
Psychology of Philosophy
Probably every field of study has its own distinctive type of psychology. A certain type of mind will be drawn to a particular subject. It is not difficult to see how this pairing proceeds. If you are interested in people, you will naturally be drawn to psychology; not so if you are fascinated by numbers. If words fascinate you, linguistics will attract you. It is safe to say that historians are interested in the past, but not so much in general theories. A fondness for animals may lead you into zoology. A desire to travel may bring you to geography. If the stars grab your attention, astronomy may be your calling. If money excites you, economics may be your chosen area of study. Certain talents and abilities will figure into this: what you were good at in school. Extraversion or introversion may take you in one direction or another (e.g., politics). But what psychology orients people towards philosophy? That is not so obvious, given that philosophy has no well-defined subject-matter. Would anybody say they had a childhood fascination with concepts? Is it a love of paradoxes and puzzles? Is it a desire to argue? None of that sounds very plausible. Is it simply masochism? My best explanation is that it is a liking for certain sorts of language—philosophical language. The words resonate in your head; they feel good on the tongue. They seem impressive, profound. The philosophical personality is linguistically primed, smitten with the jargon, enamored of the sound of the sentences. It isn’t that philosophy is about a certain range of objects; it’s the way it talks that engages the passions. The philosophical personality above all wants to speak like a philosopher—to be master of the vocabulary. He or she may also have a weakness for depth and difficulty, and the language of the subject is thought to help with overcoming this weakness; the philosopher is a deep speaker as well as a deep thinker. A philosophical education is largely acquiring a certain kind of verbal skill—in speech and writing. You learn how to talk the talk.
This connects with a certain characteristic of philosophy: the tendency to be enamored of certain words and phrases. These may come and go; they seldom persist forever. Here is a selective list: form, substance, idea, fact, experience, reason, a priori, a posteriori, analytic, synthetic, necessary, contingent, analysis, logical form, truth condition, criterion, identity, family resemblance, speech act, sense-datum, rigid designation, possible world, noncognitive, normative, what it’s like, reductionist, anti-realist. Where would we be without these words? They roll so deliciously off the tongue. They sound so imposing, grand, profound, scholarly. It is a pleasure just to be around them. And yet they can be slippery, poorly defined, and misleading. The go in and out of fashion, one day greeted with an approving smile, the next with a condescending sneer (“Oh, you still believe in that rubbish”). They are, let’s face it, disturbingly meme-like: buzz words, catch-phrases, verbal tics. They are more substitutes for thought than real thought. You must have heard people (typically graduate students) who half-know how to use them or use them obsessively (“epistemological” in every sentence). They aren’t a way to think clearly but to obfuscate and bamboozle. They tend to go unexamined, trotted out not scrutinized. They lend themselves to obscure verbal altercation. This is their psychology (psychopathology)—the psychology of philosophy.
It is hard to know what to do about this situation. We can’t ban them; they perform a useful service (as memes often do). They are not all bad. The best I can suggest is that they should be handled with care, responsibly, and used in moderation. Don’t litter your speech and writing with them. Don’t rely on them to do your thinking for you. Don’t let them dominate your philosophical consciousness. Keep them at arm’s length. Be suspicious of them. I am as guilty as the next man—I use them all the time. But I feel guilty about it, as if they are shaky crutches rather than sturdy limbs. I would like to do without them, I really would; and one day I will (I tell myself). They have grown up (sprouted) over time, at certain periods, for certain purposes, and they have stuck, for good or ill; they are not the result of strict screening and rigorous peer review. So, don’t use them too easily or heavily, and only when you need to. It is not a virtue to use them but a vice (or ingrained habit). The philosopher needs to clean up his psychology: he went into the subject because of his love of the jargon (to put it unkindly) and now he needs to clean house, tidy the place up. He needs to root out the termites of thought—those insidious little memes that eat away at the foundations of reason. Or rid his mind of verbal junk, however superficially appealing (the fast food of philosophical thought). You can keep it in some form, but don’t live or die by it. Don’t let it call the shots.[1]
[1] It was a virtue of ordinary language philosophy to discourage technical jargon (though it may have gone overboard). Some people are certainly worse than others.
Elvis, Paul, and Mick
Some bands achieve considerable success but without mega-success. Elvis and the Beatles created worldwide mania (and hysteria); the Who and the Troggs did not. True, Elvis and the Beatles were supremely talented and enormously productive, but their success exceeds such attributes. Why? The Stones are an intermediate case: large success but not absolute mania and adoration. You might say they were not as musically gifted as the Beatles and Elvis, but the difference in popularity and impact exceeds this gap. The answer is staring us in the face, literally, and it is undeniable. Elvis and the Beatles were extremely handsome—the girls loved them. You might say that Elvis was more handsome than the Beatles, and that would be true, but Paul McCartney rivaled Elvis for good looks. As the other Beatles recognized, Paul was incredibly good-looking; he had the Elvis touch. I suggest, then, that this was the missing ingredient in the popularity of these two entities—Elvis Presley on the one hand and John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr on the other. They would not have achieved the level of success they enjoyed were it not for the good looks of Elvis and Paul. The girls adored them and the boys envied them. Physical beauty is the key. Once a specimen like that opens his mouth to sing the floodgates simultaneously open—so long as he has a good voice (and both did). It isn’t musical genius but physical appearance that makes the difference. No one in the Who had that degree of male magnetism (and only Paul had it in the Beatles, though the other lads were also pretty handsome). Elvis and Paul were gorgeous. As to Mick, well, he’s not in that league, but I venture to suggest that Mick’s face is what led to the extreme success enjoyed by the Stones in their heyday (Pete Townsend in his autobiography confesses that he fancied Mick). Mick was undoubtedly a very sexy guy. He wasn’t a god, like Elvis and Paul, but he had it going on. The reason the Stones were massive, and still pull big crowds, is Mick’s physical attractiveness. Even if the Beatles and the Stones had made only their first few records, they would still have been bigger than all the other bands in sheer popularity. Elvis, Paul, and Mick: three incredibly attractive bastards. This is what tipped them into mega-success (Queen, say, stood no chance).
The Part Problem
People talk about the mind-brain problem, but that is strictly inaccurate. The problem isn’t about how the brain as a whole produces consciousness; it’s about how some of it does. It isn’t about how the brain differs from other bodily organs; it’s about how certain parts of it do. The various parts of the brain look very similar and function similarly, but only a subset of brain parts have the magic touch. What makes them so special? What ingredient do they possess that other parts don’t possess? This is what I am calling the part problem. It refocuses the so-called mind-body problem: how do you convert a bit of the brain that doesn’t produce consciousness into a bit that does? It can hardly be a change of location, as if transplanting neurons from the brain stem into the frontal cortex will magically transform them into agents of consciousness (or if it does, we would want to know how). Nor are the consciousness neurons bigger or brighter than the non-conscious neurons. Nor do they fire more rapidly. There seems to be no chemical or anatomical difference. And it can hardly be supposed that God arbitrarily chose these neurons to be consciousness-bearing ones (“I anoint thee guardians of the soul”). The part problem looks like a hard problem—as hard as the mind-body problem, or even harder. For it introduces an element of arbitrariness into the picture: all neurons seem the same yet only some have the power to produce consciousness. Then, in virtue of what do they have this power? Is there just no answer to this—is it just a freak of nature, or evidence of a hidden world? But why this portal instead of that one? It’s like supposing that a given chemical can explode or not explode without changing. Is it the environment of the neuron that makes the difference? But why? The puzzle is almost violently difficult. We might call it the infuriating problem.
Take a part of the brain that has no consciousness associated with it. Now consider a neighboring part that does have a conscious correlate. How does one part grade into the other? Is there some intermediate state of semi-consciousness? Can there be consciousness migration or consciousness spread? Could they change places consciousness-wise? Is the difference exceedingly subtle or quite manifest? Could a tiny variation of shape make all the difference? Neurophysiologists have looked at both types of cells under the microscope and detected no physical difference, and yet the difference could not be more marked. What proportion of brain cells are mentally employed? I have never heard an estimate. Is it mainly unconscious? Is this ratio the same for all animals with a brain? If so, why? When the brain dies consciousness disappears from its precincts, the light goes out, but what physiological difference between the two types of cells accompanies this, if any? If you were trying to build a conscious machine, would you install two types of components, corresponding to the two types of neurons? Is one a necessary condition of the other? When brains evolved did the unconscious neurons appear first and the conscious ones build on this foundation, or were there always the two types? How are the two developmentally scheduled in embryogenesis? Is one more active than the other? There is surely some physical difference, but we are damned if we can see what it is. The whole set-up seems contrary to reason, and yet these are the facts. This division of labor within the brain is a complete mystery. Why are some neurons not conscious? They ought to be if others are. This conundrum appears to favor some sort of substance dualism: are we then to take that possibility more seriously than we have? Materialism seems defeated in the face of it. But then we will be confronted by the problem of how and why the mental substance selects certain neurons as its locus of influence and not others. We thought that neurons contained some special mental ingredient that sets them apart from other cells in the body, but it turns out they don’t, since some neurons have nothing to do with consciousness. So, are neurons really beside the point? Some are correlated with consciousness, but this may not be because they produce consciousness, since some don’t. But then, we are completely in the dark about the basis of consciousness. Maybe we are looking in the wrong place altogether. The part problem makes the mind-brain problem even harder, even more maddening.
Here is a comparison to make the point vivid. Suppose you are investigating water and are interested in explaining its liquid state. You arrive at the theory that liquidity is the loose arrangement of the constituent H2O molecules. Well and good, you think, we have that problem under control. But then you discover, to your surprise, that not all H2O molecules loosely bonded are liquid! How can that be? The molecules are exactly the same as in the liquid water but the water is not liquid! Obviously, your theory of liquidity is wrong, but you can discern no difference between the two cases: here liquidity, there no liquidity—but exactly the same chemical make-up. It seems impossible, but it is an observable fact. Nature has gone mad, or you have (are you hallucinating?). In the one case, the micro properties produce liquidity; in the other, they do not. How can this be? Is there some other source of liquidity that you are somehow missing—a sort of immaterial liquidity?
Searle on Mind and Brain
Searle maintained that the mind is a higher-level property of the brain, not a separate substance. There is only the physical world with higher- and lower-level descriptions. This is his solution to the mind-body problem. He liked to compare the mental to the liquid: there is only a world of H2O molecules (lower-level) with liquidity (higher-level) tacked on. The liquidity follows from the molecular composition; it isn’t another thing. Thinking is to neurons what liquidity is to molecules. Problem solved. But is it? It is a good (and familiar) thought that the mind is an aspect of the brain not another separate entity, but is the relation between brain and mind like the relation between H2O molecules and liquid water? Searle would say we can’t find liquidity in individual molecules—they aren’t liquid—but in the aggregate liquidity is the natural outcome (the molecules slide around each other). Liquidity is an aggregate property (“holistic”) not a component property (“individualistic”). Similarly, consciousness is an aggregate holistic property of individual neurons. There is no mystery here, just the logic of wholes and parts, collections and their members. But the problem with this idea is glaring: consciousness isn’t an aggregate property—it is both more and less than that. Neurons aggregate into ganglia and brain regions (e.g., the hypothalamus), but these aggregates are not states of mind, just more complex chunks of brain tissue. The neurons are not elements in a cerebral soup (the brain isn’t liquid) but parts of a relatively solid object. The solidity of the brain is not the mind. But what other relations between neurons could add up to the mind? Nothing we can discern. The neurons are precisely unlike H2O molecules; their composition does not produce mentality according to basic physics and chemistry. Nor does it seem possible for neurons to aggregate into minds. If we liquify the brain, we don’t produce the mind! So, the analogy is exactly wrong: the mind is nothing like liquidity (or solidity or gaseousness or a wrinkled shape or a chestnut). It rather illustrates the nature of the real mind-body problem: we have no account of how the brain produces the mind—no account at all. It isn’t a matter of mere detail; we have no idea how the brain can have a mental aspect. The only aggregative properties we know of don’t produce it. And it looks as if no amount of aggregating and interrelating will ever lead from neurons to thoughts and sensations. The mind is not a feature of collections qua collections. It is not a macro feature of collections of micro entities. Searle’s favorite analogy thus disproves his own theory; it shows up the glaring lacuna at its heart. All the hard work has to be done at the level of relating (collections of) neurons to mental phenomena; that is the problem. And the threat of dualism still looms over us: maybe the brain doesn’t and can’t produce consciousness from its own limited neural resources. Neurons are like molecules that won’t slide over each other. No amount of insistence that consciousness is a biological phenomenon (true as that is) will overcome this problem. Searle’s theory is at best a place-holder for a theory not a theory.
