Kings and Queens

The President was in his bathroom fantasizing about torturing his political enemies. They clearly deserved it. It was a habit of his; he meant no harm by it (or not much). He stood up and his ample buttocks were reflected in the gold plate of his Presidential toilet. He gazed at his pudgy polluted face in the mirror and told himself he looked very handsome today—forceful, masculine, yet oddly pretty. Many people said so and they should know, despite the losers and haters that found him repulsive. He flashed his high-price implants and smoothed his carefully arranged hair. He had to look good today. He had a press conference at noon: it was sure to draw a big crowd, it always did. He felt a mixture of dread and jubilance: dread because of all the obvious lies he would have to tell, jubilance because he prided himself on his lying prowess (no one ever in the history of the world was a better liar than the President). Journalists were all dumb anyway, especially the intelligent ones. That young girl reporter from CNN was always trying to trip him up by asking him factual questions, but he knew how to deal with her—just pivot to how bad her network was. He must use that word more often, pivot, because it sounded smart and decisive–he was one of the great pivoters in history. His pivoting was sorely underrated.

The President walked into his large kitchen area and saw his wife sipping tea and reading a women’s magazine. She looked up briefly and then down again. As so often, he reminded himself that she was reckoned one of the world’s top women; not many women could compete with her regarding top woman. She had won several beauty contests in Central Europe and every man wanted to sleep with her (even his own sons, it was sad). He didn’t know what to say so he said, “Have you seen the polls today?” In a heavy accent she replied, “I never look polls, I don’t trust them”. “We are way up in Indiana”, he noted with satisfaction, noticing her eye makeup. He thought she was looking too skinny, as if she wasn’t given enough to eat. “You should eat more,” he advised, but she wasn’t listening to him.

In his Presidential office he was surrounded by his sir-men and yes-women. These were all good people, great people, they love our country. But he was suspicious of all of them: they were all out to get him, rob him, undermine his authority. Some of the men were aggressively taller than him, and not all the women (scandalously) wanted to sleep with him. Still, he could always just get rid of them. He was incredibly good at getting rid of people, famous for it—firing them, deporting them, imprisoning them. They should really be grateful he wasn’t having them shot. Shooting people was one of things he regularly fantasized about. Criminals should be shot, also treasonous generals, and people who don’t love our country. He could shoot anyone and no one would object—he was that popular. But he was a good man, a decent man, and wouldn’t shoot someone for no reason. There had to be a reason, like shoplifting or supporting terrorist organizations. He had been shot at himself, probably by his political opponents, so it was only fair that he should shoot back. It was common sense: they shoot at you so you shoot back—except you don’t miss, because you are a great shot. That was how the world worked. He smiled to himself, if you can call it that. He ordered a coke and wondered who he would call on the Presidential phone. Perhaps he should catch up on cable news, which he dominated like no one in history.

The Presidential press conference was like a rock concert, with him as the star turn. All he had to do was scowl and wave his hands. Occasionally he made sounds with his tight little circle of a mouth. His voice was his main weapon (he actually didn’t know how to shoot): it went from a nasty rasp, to a buttery bleat. And he had the best words: the best insults and put-downs, the classiest vocabulary. Sure, he could cuss like a world-class cusser, but he also knew how to talk civilized. He was from Queens after all, where people are people, not so-called elites and low-ratings losers. With regard to the speaking, he was in a class of his own—sort of a Shakespeare, you could say, but without the long words that nobody knows anyway. He opened the proceedings by congratulating one of his great people, the Secretary of Offence, who had recently succeeded in deporting dozens of people who don’t love our country, several of them minors. The girl from CNN, though, wanted to make trouble, asking her nasty questions. She asked if any of the deported people had broken any laws. The President had a ready answer to this unpatriotic question: “I am the law,” he stated. “The law is my decision, because I was elected by the people, not you and your failing network”. This was a decisive put-down and the President moved on to talk about dress codes in the halls of government. Another reporter asked him about his policy towards Europe, to which he loftily replied, “I’ve never heard of it”, eliciting a loud guffaw of support from his allies and enablers. He also deftly parried questions about breaches of national security caused by top secret information being revealed on the Jeff Regan show, observing that the information hadn’t yet led to any actual deaths of civilians. He felt he had turned in a characteristically stellar performance, marred only by failing to insult the lead reporter from the Times, who he particularly hated.

The President had received a beautiful invitation from the president of England, whose name he couldn’t quite remember, to come and visit the king of England. This idea appealed to him because he felt it was only right for him to hang out with the top royals in the world. He actually despised the king of England: he couldn’t understand a word he said, the king was pro the environment, and his women were not among the top women of the world. Still, he could lord it over this so-called king (wasn’t he once just a prince?) as the most powerful person in the most powerful country of the entire universe. Plus, he had a couple of inches on the king and he drew bigger crowds (the king of England didn’t even have rallies). It was in this frame of mind, if we may call it that, that he turned up at the palace, motorcaded to the hilt. The king was drably dressed but wearing a crown. This immediately put the President on edge—where was his crown! He felt that the king was trying to insult him, diminish him in the eyes of the world. He asked the king how much he would take for the crown, while squeezing his hand, but the king affably replied that the crown wasn’t for sale (it was a hair loom or something). These Americans, with their odd sense of humor, the king mused. Anyway, with that gaffe smoothed over, they went on to a royal banquet in which the President tried to eat food that his gut wasn’t remotely familiar with. He didn’t actually vomit, but his belly let him know it wasn’t happy. He suavely remarked to the king that he was more of a burger and fries man himself, chuckling urbanely. The king nodded, smiled, and carried on talking to the person next to him. The man from Queens was hobnobbing with an actual King—how cool was that? The President felt he had made a great impression, which was no doubt true.

It was only discovered later that the President had arranged with his secret service agents to steal the crown from the king of England. It was surprisingly easy, the king not suspecting that the President might have designs on his crown. It ended up in the Presidential bathroom, where the President could happily gaze at it and revel in his Presidential power. Naturally, the theft caused a diplomatic incident, in which the President was correctly accused of stealing the king of England’s crown. The President tried to brush it off by saying the king should be more careful and anyway he was thinking of annexing Great Britain. He seemed genuinely bemused when this didn’t go down well, at home or abroad. All his bluster about royal losers, sleazeballs, and crooks didn’t turn the tide of public opinion; he was held accountable for the act of Robbery of a Royal Appendage. It didn’t help matters when he loudly asserted that the king of England was the worst king England had ever had, ever. Even his most loyal supporters found this a little hard to stomach and could see in what direction the wind was blowing. He had to make a plea bargain to step down instead of serving hard time. He thereupon sank into oblivion and was never heard from again. He never did understand quite what had happened.

An Audacious Solution to the Mind-Math Problem

The mind-math problem is the problem of explaining how the mind and mathematical reality manage to come together: how do numbers and geometric figures get to be apprehended by the mind? Suppose we adopt a Platonic view of mathematical reality—it consists of abstract objects, existing outside space and time, independent of the physical and mental worlds. Suppose too that we regard the mind as existing in space and time, concretely, embodied in the physical brain. How, then, can the mind make contact with the mathematical realm? There can be no interaction, no contact, no common ground. If the mathematical were mental (or physical), then the mind would have a chance of becoming acquainted with it; and if the mental were mathematical, some sort of communion would be possible. But the two belong to different worlds, almost different universes. We would not be surprised, on metaphysical grounds, to learn that the twain never meet, so ontologically remote are they; and yet they manifestly do meet, intimately so. For we have mathematical knowledge, mathematical perception (apprehension), and mathematical beliefs (and even desires). It seems easy for them to meet. But how is that possible, given that there is no causal connection? Physical objects cause our knowledge of them (we are told), but abstract objects can’t do that—they have no causal powers (we are told). This problem then leads to attempts to close the gap: we can reduce the mathematical objects to something closer to the mind (ideas, notation), or we can equip the mind with special non-causal faculties that permit quasi-mystical communion with the Platonic world (intangible telescopes etc.) Neither approach meets with universal acceptance, and indeed are generally acknowledged to be far-fetched and revisionary. We clearly have such knowledge, but we can’t fit it into our preconceived assumptions—Platonism about mathematical truth, naturalistic causalism about knowledge in general (propositional and objectual).[1]

What notion of causality is in play in these reflections? The kind derived from modern science (allegedly) and the kind derived from common sense (allegedly). We call this “mechanism”—causation by proximal contact, impact, bodies in motion touching each other. That kind of causation is clearly inapplicable to the math-mind relation. But mechanism has long been out of favor and now looks like common sense gone awry, ever since gravitational action at a distance became accepted as real. However, gravity is not the right model for mathematics either, because numbers and geometric forms don’t have mass and don’t exist in space either, according to Platonism. Still, might there not be a broader notion of causality that applies to the relation between math and the mind? In earlier papers[2], I have suggested as much: logical relations, particularly entailment, can be viewed as a species of causal relation. I won’t repeat the arguments here, but their relevance to the present issue is immediate: mathematical reality, construed Platonically, causes mathematical belief, in the extended sense of “cause”. Moreover, it causes the brain to be configured in a certain way—that is, it is (part of) the causal explanation of the brain’s structure.[3] It is because numbers and figures are a certain way that people have the mental and brain states that they have. This is a far cry from mechanistic causation by proximate interaction; it is a sui generis type of causation or causal explanation. We can say that mathematical truth gives rise to mathematical knowledge, has it as a consequence. It is, indeed, hard to see how this could not be so: for it is scarcely conceivable that mathematical truth plays no role in the etiology of mathematical knowledge, as if it had nothing to do with what people believe mathematically. It is because 2 + 2 = 4 that people believe that proposition, to put it crudely. How could they come to know it by some other means, such as sensory perception of material objects? There must be some sort of causal generative connection here. The numbers must be exerting some sort of “force” that produces beliefs about them, though not any physical force with which we are familiar. We might call it the “mathematical force” just to have a name (or “mathemity” to mimic “gravity”). It is defined as whatever it is about numbers that makes them able to command belief—their propensity to invite belief. Once we apprehend them, they induce us to form certain beliefs about them and not others.

It may be said that this is all very mysterious and should not be entertained for that reason. But this is a bad argument: even mechanical causation is mysterious, as we have known since Hume. All causation is mysterious, but it doesn’t follow that it doesn’t exist. Thus, the way is open to accepting mysterious causal Platonism (we already accept mysterious Cartesian causal mechanism). This theory enables us to respond simply to the initial problem: there is no incompatibility between mathematical Platonism and a broadly causal conception of knowledge. We just need to jettison old-fashioned ideas about what causation can be. True, the result is pretty mysterious, but no more so than causation in general; and isn’t it really quite commonsensical, given that we have no trouble with the proposition that we believe what we do mathematically because of how things are mathematically?  It certainly isn’t because of anything else (sensations of color, aches and pains, the sound of number words). I will even venture to suggest that the ability of this view of causation to solve the mind-math problem, which has hitherto proved intractable, puts the underlying metaphysics of causation in a stronger light.[4]

[1] Paul Benacerraf’s well-known paper “Mathematical Truth” is the locus classicus here, but the problem is as old as Plato.

[2] See my “A New Metaphysics”, “Causal and Logical Relations”, and “Because”.

[3] This causal explanation may trace back to genetic selection: the genes make the brain they do because of certain mathematical truths, thus installing innate configurations. That is, we have basic mathematical knowledge innately in virtue of mathematical facts; similarly for basic physical knowledge.

[4] We could take a similar view of ethical knowledge: ethical facts cause ethical belief, though not in the mechanistic sense but the “giving rise to” sense. We have the ethical beliefs we do because of the ethical facts; these are the origin of the causal chains that lead up to ethical belief (at least some of the time). It is the badness of pain that makes me think that pain is bad, not (say) the emotion that pain produces in me or what people tell me. The explanation of ethical belief involves ethical truth (though other factors can come into it)—sometimes, if not always.

Action and Trying

Davidson once memorably said, “We never do more than move our bodies; the rest is up to nature”. This aphorism has the sound of an illuminating truism, but does it stand up to critical examination? Suppose you are suffering from paralysis, total or partial, following an accident. Your physiotherapist asks you to try to move your arm and you find you can’t move it: wouldn’t you think, “I’m trying, but I’m not succeeding; nature won’t let me”? Your body is part of nature and it is not cooperating, so you can’t act; isn’t this just like trying to lift a weight that is too heavy for you? Your act of trying can’t overcome the dictates of nature, whether your own body or the world outside it. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “We never do more than try to do things; the rest is up to nature”? There is our will on the one hand and nature on the other, i.e., the world outside our will. When you lift your arm do you move the bone in your arm but not the clothes on it—is the latter part of nature but not the former? What if your arm is partly prosthetic? What if you always carry a gun in your hand? The distinction between body and nature is artificial, but the distinction between will and nature is not (of course, the will is also part of nature). The correct aphorism is: We never do more than try to do things; the rest is beyond our control. That is, we only have direct control over our will; the rest is a matter of whether the world beyond cooperates. Adopting the terminology of basic actions, we can say that our basic actions are acts of trying (willing); anything else is non-basic, i.e., consequences of acts of trying. The body thus has no privileged position in the philosophy of action. What indeed is the body: does it include the hair on the body, sweat, clothing, tools, machines, other people? Nature and the body merge, with the will attempting to manipulate them. All we really, basically, do is will things; the rest is out of our control—that’s a matter of whether nature chooses to go along with our will. It’s not the body-nature division that matters (not that this is a real distinction); it’s the will-world division. So it would appear.

Is it true that whenever we act we try to move our bodies? And is that really all we try to do? Neither proposition is correct. Surely, we try to do many things beyond moving our bodies—we try to fix things, go places, have careers, find love. The intentionality of trying is wide in scope and not limited to the body’s movements. And do we always try to move our bodies when we try to do these other things? Do we try to contract our muscles, or activate our efferent nerves? We do not—we may not even think about these things. Our mind is not concentrated on our body: you might be trying to score a goal, but you don’t think about your leg at all—you take that for granted. Your brain causes your leg to move thus-and-so, but you don’t give it a second thought—you have your mind set on the goal and goalie. Trying to move your leg in a certain way may hinder what you trying to achieve—there are only so many things you can think about at the same time. Your attention is on the goal not the leg. So, it isn’t that trying to move the body is basic and essential to acting; trying is far more protean and plastic for that to be true. Trying goes with intention and desire, which generally concern ends not means. In principle, you could try without even having a body: you could be a disembodied mind that is suitably causally connected to the external world (isn’t that what God is supposed to be?). What is essential to action is the will (capacity to try) and a causal link to external reality; the body is just one means for getting things done, not a sine qua non. We never do more than will; the rest is up to causality. The basic actions are acts of trying. The body is not at the center of the philosophy of action—it is not even an essential component of the subject. So it would appear.

It might be objected, however, that we are underestimating the role of the brain. Doesn’t the brain (in terrestrial animals) cause and control the body, so it must be occupied about the body, even if the person (or other agent) need not pay the body much attention? This must be conceded: the brain has to have the wherewithal to initiate movements of the body, and this must be detailed and representational. The brain needs a “body image” in order to go about its business. And it must act with that body image “in mind”; it can’t ignore the body as the conscious agent can. Isn’t the brain then part of the philosophy of action of embodied creatures such as ourselves? If so, a philosophy of action that focuses exclusively on what the agent tries to do is incomplete; we need to add what the brain is up to as well. A human action (as well as the actions of other animals) consists of a mental act of trying and a physical act of brain initiation. The combination is the true nature of action as we find it: agent trying plus brain stimulation. In creatures lacking mind (think worms) action is just brain stimulation—efferent nerves and muscles—and such creatures can be said to act equally. Conscious trying is superimposed on this basis, and is presumably a later evolutionary development. Both aspects need to be acknowledged in an adequate philosophy of action—we thus have a double aspect theory of action. Indeed, we have a double ontology theory, since the act of trying is not to be identified with the brain’s action of causing bodily movements. The action of raising your arm consists of two actions—your act of trying to raise your arm and your brain’s action of innervating the relevant muscles. Both need to be described and explained, and integrated. A good philosophy of action has a mental component and a physical component, because two things are involved; an action is both of them together not one separately. The motor part of the brain confines itself to the body, down to the fine details; the conscious agent is more concerned with ends and results and has little time for the physiological machinery. What we call action straddles these two domains and it would be a distortion to limit it to one of them. The agent and the brain are both centrally implicated.[1]

[1] The work of Davidson on action and O’Shaughnessy on the will form the background to this paper. I am adding the brain as an essential component to the story. Both philosophers were too monistic, though in possession of important truths. Human action is Janus-faced. (Let me add that the philosophy of action is a remarkably tricky subject.)

Barbados

I am seriously thinking about moving to Barbados. The political situation in this country has become intolerable and has been for a while (I’m thinking of the political situation in American academic philosophy, but national politics is pretty bad too). Barbados is a British protectorate, not American, so you can get away from that demographic. I was there on vacation twenty years ago, mainly to learn kite surfing, and have good memories of the place and its people. I want to be near the water again. I wonder if any readers have personal experiences of the island which they would care to share.