The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name;

Thy kingdom come;

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses;

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

The power and the glory,

For ever and ever.

Amen

Here is a modern paraphrase, which I think is true to the content of the above words.

Big Daddy, up there in heaven (but you knew that),

I hope you are being flattered a lot.

Let’s also hope your monarchical lifestyle gets widely adopted;

And people do what you tell them,

Where we live just like where you live.

Please give us something to eat today (but not only bread).

And don’t blame us for our bad behavior;

Like we shouldn’t blame other people for their bad behavior towards us;

Even when their bad behavior (and ours) is really bad and blameworthy.

And also, please don’t tempt us to commit horrible acts (why would you do that?),

But prevent bad things happening to us (this part is particularly important).

Because you are the boss of everything,

You have all the power and celebrity.

And you always will.

That’s the way it goes.

We were required to intone the Lord’s Prayer (isn’t every prayer a prayer to the Lord?) every day at school from the age of five onwards. I didn’t have much idea what the words really meant but they seemed vaguely serious. I can still remember it, though I haven’t recited the prayer in over fifty years. As an exercise, I decided to make a paraphrase. I don’t think the prayer emerges all that well, either in what it includes or what it leaves out. I don’t know why we were asking God to feed us every day when the school cafeteria was doing a perfectly good job. And what kind of temptations were we talking about (we were too young for sex and alcohol)? Did God do the tempting? How were we to avoid blaming anyone for bad behavior when we were blamed for bad behavior every day in school (I was caned on a number of occasions, as was everyone else)? Did it mean we could skip homework and get away with it? It all seems pretty bizarre stuff. And why all the shameless sucking up to Our Father? And why “hallow” his name (what name?) instead of him? Use-mention confusion? It just doesn’t seem very well thought out.

My Favorite People

A disadvantage of knowing great people is that you miss them when they are gone. This is a list of people I’ve known, living and dead, that stand out in my mind for one reason or another. I could easily write an essay about each of them detailing our friendship. I will insert a short phrase if something pithy occurs to me. Oliver Sacks, always interested. Jonathan Miller, effortlessly himself. Peter Strawson, kindly acerbic. Richard Wollheim, never ordinary. Freddie Ayer, generously egotistical. Robert Silvers, energetically focused. David Pears, sweetly urbane. Jerry Fodor, ruthlessly jolly (and depressed). Christopher Hitchens, ridiculously clever (and nice). Martin Amis, hilariously steely-eyed. Edward St Aubyn, tragically funny and literate. Bernard Williams, attractively venomous (but delightful). George Stephanopoulos, extremely intelligent, moral, and charming. George Soros, amiable but cut off. Noam Chomsky, scary, sharp, principled. Richard Dawkins, passionately clever, somewhat remote. Malcolm Budd, dear friend and colleague. Tom Nagel, genuinely deep, good sense of humor.

Scientific Philosophy

Is philosophy a scientific subject? I don’t mean barroom bromides (“My philosophy is live and let live”); I mean academic philosophy. Here I intend to include the usual subject areas including ethics and aesthetics. The best way to answer this question is to ask what the word “science” is taken to contrast with. And the answer is surely religion: religion is not scientific, nor is it meant to be. What then are marks of religion as it contrasts with science? These are not difficult to enumerate: religion is (or is taken to be) supernatural, superstitious, faith-based, dogmatic, authority-bound, tradition-oriented, and fantastical (miracles etc.); whereas science is naturalistic, unsuperstitious, evidence-based, tolerant of agnosticism, undogmatic, egalitarian, skeptical of tradition, and resolutely nomological (nothing miraculous). Judged by these criteria, philosophy is scientific, since it rejects those features of religion. It is truth-directed not beauty-directed or goodness-directed. Nor is it anecdotal or idiosyncratic; it needs consensus and generally applicable methods. Philosophy is undertaken in a scientific spirit not a religious or artistic or ethical spirit. Notice that this is not say that philosophy is an empirical science, or should be; we have said nothing about methodology. Mathematics is done in a scientific spirit, but it isn’t an empirical science. History may be done in a scientific spirit (not, say, a political spirit), but it isn’t an empirical science in the mold of physics, biology, etc.  A subject can be scientific without being one of the empirical sciences. Sherlock Holmes works in a scientific spirit, but his work isn’t one of the empirical sciences. If philosophy consists of conceptual analysis, it can still be scientific (not religious or aesthetic); and similarly for ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, and process philosophy. Philosophy does not need to be, or to mimic, the recognized empirical sciences in order to qualify as scientific. So, it is wrong to castigate it as non-scientific because it isn’t one of these sciences. Philosophy can be scientific in its own way not assimilable to the way other subjects are scientific (like mathematics and logic). I happen to think (and have argued at length) that philosophy already is a science though not beholden to other sciences[1]; the point I am making now is that philosophy, as currently practiced, is also scientific. It would be possible to pursue a science unscientifically, if one were to lapse into the supernatural, anecdotal, or superstitious; my point here is that philosophy is both a science and pursued scientifically (though not by everyone calling himself a philosopher). Being a science and being pursued scientifically are different questions, though obviously related. Philosophy was pursued scientifically from its earliest days in Plato and (especially) Aristotle, long before science and the word “science” were ever invented. The Socratic critical method is itself a scientific method by the standards outlined above, arguably the prototype of all subsequent scientific inquiry—it is all about clear formulation and rigorous falsification. Socrates had a highly scientific attitude (think of the Euthyphro argument). Back when myth and religion were dominant, he blazed the scientific trail in opposition to anti-scientific attitudes (not unlike Galileo). Philosophy (the Western kind anyway) is the original scientific discipline, contrary to the opinion of many contemporary self-proclaimed scientists. These characters are really scientistic scientists, trying to impose their methods on domains to which they are not suited; but this is not scientific, being a kind of quasi-religious dogma founded on faith and ignorance (“Ultimately physics will explain everything!”). Philosophy is a science, pursued scientifically, but it is not a scientistic science (“excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques”: OED). Not all scientific knowledge properly so called can be revealed by the operation of the human senses. But you knew that, right?[2]

[1] See my “The Science of Philosophy”.

[2] It is really a kind of scandal that I have to enunciate this truism. Just consider first-person introspective knowledge, mathematical knowledge, political knowledge, ethical knowledge, knowledge of literary intention, aesthetic knowledge, knowledge of where you left your keys, etc. Knowledge and science are not coextensive concepts.

Digestion, Learning, and Dreams

The word “digestion” (or “digest”) is apt to suggest to modern ears the process by which food is converted to bodily tissue. But it also has another meaning: the process by which information received by the senses is converted into knowledge—as in “That’s a lot (of information) to digest”. The dictionary duly records both meanings: “break down (food) in the stomach and intestines into substances that can be used by the body”; and “understand or assimilate (information) by reflection” (Concise OED). For the latter we also have: “Settle or arrange methodically in the mind; consider, ponder”, and “comprehend and assimilate mentally; obtain mental nourishment from” (Shorter OED). These linguistic facts prompt a conjecture, namely that the two processes are significantly similar. Information digestion is like food digestion (and vice versa). The stomach digests food and the brain digests information: the brain is the “stomach of the mind” (nice slogan). Lest we suppose that the physical use of the word is primary, we should note that the word “digest” comes from the Latin word digesta meaning “matters methodically arranged”. Thus, the mental use is etymologically primary and very probably precedes the physical use: people knew the mind digests information before they discovered that the body digests food (it was a significant discovery that what goes in at one end comes out at the other). We all know that perceptions become memories, but it isn’t obvious a priori that food produces feces. How should we characterize what is in common between the two processes? Reduction, conversion, and assimilation: the original input is reduced (condensed, concentrated), transformed into something different (a type of metamorphosis), and integrated into the substance of the organism (body or mind). There is a sequence of stages whereby the material taken in is incorporated into the life of the organism, physical or mental. Tissues or memories. It isn’t just a transfer of stuff from one location to another; there is an active process (a procedure) of breaking down, selection, and eventual incorporation. Some of what comes in is discarded as unhelpful, unnecessary, dispensable. Some is nutritious but some isn’t. The input is operated on with a goal “in mind”: to benefit the organism as it makes its way in the world. Junk is eliminated; only the good stuff remains. The organism digests the world in two ways: physically or mentally. The stomach is the brain of the digestive body, while the brain is the stomach of the digestive mind. These are the main organs whose job it is to render usable the various inputs to the organism, whether in the form of food or information. We may thus speak of “somatic digestion” and “cognitive digestion”. Both deserve the label and both fall under the same general conception. Animals are digestive creatures by nature, and have been naturally selected accordingly.[1] Digestion itself is a selective process, sorting the wheat from the chaff—what will help the genes or hinder them (to adopt the genes-eye view of evolution). The typical animal needs both to survive and reproduce—physical nutrition and mental nutrition. Human life, in particular, is digestive life—whether eating or learning, dining or being educated. This principle unifies the functions of the animal in question. To give a salient example: the child needs to digest food in order to grow in size, but she also needs to digest auditory information in order to grow linguistically. The adult body is a result of food digestion; the adult mind is a result of information digestion. Call this biological naturalism if you like, I would not spurn the label.

We should not draw too sharp a line between the two types of digestion (both properly so called). The digestion of information proceeds via physical inputs to the senses and results in tissue rearrangements in the brain (it may even promote size). Energy is taken in and transformed. The digestion of food is a “smart” operation—we may speak of the intelligent stomach. The stomach (and the rest of the gut) has to make “decisions”—what to pass on, what to reject, what kind of secretions to authorize. Not for nothing do gastroenterologists speak of the “second brain” located in the gut.[2] The system is informational not merely “mechanical”. The early stages of food digestion explicitly involve conscious decisions about what to eat (ditto for the output end). The mind is “physical” as the gut is “mental”. Let’s not erect a dualism of digestive apparatus (machines versus soul, etc.). Sense organs and mouths are not that different, abstractly considered. Food may be “raw” as sense data may also be (the “given”). We ingest food and we ingest information—we “internalize” them both. We can find food indigestible, but we can also find that too much information (or the wrong kind) is similarly indigestible (“It’s going to take a while to digest all this”). Reading is a type of grazing (or surfing the Web); eating can be educational. There is junk food but also junk information (sic). There are things we would rather not eat and things we would rather not know. Food may be found disgusting, but so may reported facts. Proust’s madeleine was both gustatory and psychological—food eaten and experience remembered. You are what you eat and also what you learn. Your mind is the result of experiences digested (along with innate mechanisms) and your body is the result of foodstuffs digested (along with innate mechanisms). Memories are the tissues of the self, as tissues are the memories of what has been consumed. We consume the exogenous in order to build the endogenous, thus constructing the whole animal. Ultimately, it’s all energy transfer in the service of life promotion. We have greedy eyes as well as greedy mouths. Absorption is the name of the game. Plants digest light via photosynthesis: this is the prototype of all life, from gut to brain. Food indeed comes from light (via the intermediary of plants), but so does visual information. Animals consume light in two ways. We eat the Sun—with our mouths and eyes. We can imagine creatures that build tissue by absorbing the energy contained in visible light, and also creatures that learn about the world by eating it. There could be light (=photon) eaters and food learners (they derive their science from information conveyed by food). In fact, terrestrial life is already a bit like that. We may be hungry for knowledge, starved of an education, or informationally overstuffed. Then there is the old saw “food for thought”—information received that prompts reflection. If you become a chef, most of the information you digest is about food—that you also digest. Your brain is then full of digested knowledge about what your body has digested. School lessons are school lunches, so they had better be tasty and nutritious. The two concepts run naturally together.

Are you getting the hang of the digestive theory of learning? Have you digested its motivations and point? I hope no dyspepsia has resulted (as opposed to euphoric eupepsia). Because we are now going to go rogue—we are going to the outer limits of advanced digestive science (“digestology”). First, we will consider cooking and teaching; then we will turn to the doozy of dreams. Cooking is a preliminary to mastication—what you do to food before you get your teeth into it. It is really extended digestion: doing with the hands and fire what your mouth does with teeth and saliva and your stomach with bile. Food preparation is extra-bodily digestion. You might as well be spitting into the food before you put it in your mouth (that’s what gravy is all about). Now the point I want to make is that teaching is much the same: it processes information into a form that is easier for the student to digest. Preparing a lecture is like preparing a meal—acting on the material so as to make it more palatable. Lecturing is putting the stuff into the student’s mental mouth and hoping he or she will swallow it, even enjoy it. You cut the material into bite-sized pieces, trying not to give the students more than they can chew on; perhaps you garnish it with humor; you don’t make them consume junk. An assertion is a morsel of food, lovingly prepared: the speech act is a culinary act. You can be a good intellectual cook or a lousy one. A good lesson is like a well-balanced meal (I myself like to cook and teach). Both are facilitations of consumption. I like to eat while watching Jeopardy, as I fortify body and mind (the latter is light eating). Teaching consists of assertions prepared for mental consumption; it takes skill and judgment. You have to know your audience—their culinary and pedagogical preferences. Don’t overegg the pudding; don’t undercook the chicken. Leave them satisfied but wanting more. Be a good intellectual chef. Feed their brains nutritious cognitive food. Introduce them to new tastes. There is no need to let them see your kitchen (that can be a mess), but remember that the lecture hall is a restaurant—of the mind. The teacher is part of the student’s extended digestive process of learning about the world.

I promised you dreams. Then dreams you shall have. It has often been wondered what the function of dreams is, biologically speaking. They seem pointless, unhelpful, yet people suffer when they are disrupted (animals too). Can the digestive theory of learning shed any light on the matter? Dreams often reflect past experience, sometimes with a delay built in; they contain remnants of waking life. They have also been supposed to play some role in information processing—perhaps leading to problem-solving and creativity. Yet they seem to be junk for the most part, just random noise, and not even very pleasant. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That’s right: dreams are the feces of the mind! They are by-products of cognitive (and affective) digestion—what is left over when the digestive mental process has done its work. That process is selective, retaining and discarding; it takes in more than is required, because useful knowledge doesn’t come pre-packaged. It is a complex process, carried out unconsciously, and shrouded in mystery. Surely it will leave some stuff behind—similar to what came in initially and similar to the final end-state (knowledge, memory, emotional equilibrium), but also significantly different. Feces are like that—recognizable yet transformed. They bear the marks of their history (books, in effect). Likewise, cognitive digestion will have its waste products. Well, dreams are like that: they are natural by-products of the selective and reducing process that converts raw information into settled useful knowledge. People sometimes speak of “brain farts”, meaning random products of rational brain activity; dreams are like that—mental flatulence produced by the arduous process of information digestion. You might reply that feces and dreams differ in an important respect, namely that feces are just (as it were) crap while dreams at least have some point or meaning—they aren’t just pure shit. But we must not disrespect the excremental: it too isn’t pure crap. Feces serve to remove not just food waste (like industrial waste); they also convey dead cells and dead bacteria. They aid the health of the body, especially the intestines. They do some good; they aren’t just useless gunge. Shit isn’t just shit, oh no. It may not be manna from heaven, but it isn’t utterly devoid of meaning and purpose. So, it is closer to dreams than a more disrespectful attitude would suggest. Neither dreams nor feces are the animal at its most sublime and practical, but they are not as worthless as might be supposed. How and why dreams get to be as they are is hard to say, but it doesn’t sound wide of the mark to think of them as inevitable by-products of the cognitive digestive process (possibly not only that). The brain dreams of what it discards as it goes about its work of knowledge absorption. Feces consist of pulverized food, infused with this and that; dreams consist of pulverized experience, infused with this and that (sexual desire, according to Freud, primordial myths according to Jung). Dreams are pretty mysterious content-wise, but functionally they seem like bits of mental debris left behind by a more vital function. Given the digestive theory of learning, it is not implausible to see them as at least analogous to feces and farts. They are generally disagreeable like them, though they have their pleasurable aspects (as Freud insisted, exaggerating tremendously).

I cannot resist mentioning another provocative (repellent) application of the digestive theory of the learning mind. It seems that consciousness plays a role in the learning process, obscure though that role may be: some types of learning require it, or at least proceed better with it (e.g., book learning). Is there any analogue in the bodily digestive realm? Consciousness is supplied by the organism not by the external world—it comes from internal physiology not from the environment. What does that remind you of? Saliva, of course. Saliva mixes with food and makes it easier to swallow and digest; it’s hard to eat without it. Consciousness mixes with sensory data (nerve stimulations and whatnot) and makes cognitive digestion easier; it’s hard to learn without it (though not impossible). So, consciousness plays a role like that of saliva. Again, let us not disrespect the salivatory—it plays a vital role in eating, which we normally take for granted (if it dries up you are in big trouble). Nor is saliva simple—its evolution would make a great story. I do not wish to downgrade consciousness by comparing it to saliva; on the contrary, the comparison makes us acknowledge the necessity of consciousness even more. There is nothing epiphenomenal about saliva! Once consciousness has done its early work, the ingested information makes its way unconsciously through the digestive system, eventually becoming an item of settled knowledge. Saliva presents food to the gustatory digestive system, if I may put it so, and consciousness presents sensory stimuli to the cognitive digestive system. These are precursors to the further work of rendering the data suitable for cognitive storage or food suitable for tissue augmentation. Consciousness is the saliva of the mind, so to speak. It makes cognitive digestion possible (or greatly facilitates it). If we think of the mind as (partly) a device for internalizing the external world[3], with consciousness as a component of this device, then it is natural to view it as essentially digestive, in the same sense (but not the same way) in which the stomach and bowels form components of a digestive system. Not a telephone exchange or a computer but a belly (with suitable appendages): that is the image to take away from this leaping discussion.[4]

[1] It would be wonderful if we could argue that cognitive digestion descended from somatic digestion, as a deployment of the basic digestive plan. A mutation of a preexisting gene complex for somatic digestion led to genes for cognitive digestion. But it is hard to see how such an evolutionary story would go. To be sure, the digestive system is an adaptation that has been around for a very long time, so there has been time enough to give rise to a cognitive counterpart: but what kind of modification could lead from the former to the latter? Perhaps the abstract structure of somatic digestion could be repurposed for cognitive digestion by some amazing genetic fluke. Anyway, the idea is worth exploring.

[2] See Michael Gershon, The Second Brain (1998).

[3] See my “What the Mind Does: Internalization and Externalization”.

[4] I am tempted to comment on the content and tone of this discussion—I am well aware of its peculiarity and perlocutionary effect. But on second thoughts I don’t think I will. I leave that to the intelligence of my reader.