Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

The harmony between our minds and the world is due to the fact that the world is responsible for our minds.

the structure of our thought seems to span large gaps: here, the gap between how things appear and how they might be. We hand ourselves the right to cross those gaps.

False dichotomy?

Descartes left us with our own selves and our own minds as special, intimate, objects of immediate knowledge. Or rather, each of us is left with his or her own mind as a special, intimate, object of immediate knowledge.

Mind is not an object, but rather the condition in which objects (and senses, feelings, thoughts, and experiences) appear

This world of experience is composed of mental events or events within subjective consciousness.

We know that someone who has just stubbed their toe is not howling because they have an experience just like the one I have when I hear middle C on a clarinet. We know that they are experiencing something very like what I experience when I stub my toe.

but how do you know this? This looks like an appeal to natural reasoning.

It does not seem to be true that with enough Twinkies inside us we become literally incapable of certain thoughts, so that we could not reasonably be expected to realize that murdering people is a bad idea, for example.

Rebuttal of the Twinkie defense

And if the future is fixed shouldn’t we just resign ourselves to our fates? Doesn’t action become pointless? Is it not better to withdraw, and perhaps sit in an orange shawl saying ‘Om’ all day?

One of the great misconceptions about meditation is that meditating is tantamount to laziness and withdrawal from the world.

Doing nothing—failing to put on a helmet, putting on an orange shawl and saying ‘Om’—represents a choice. To have your choosing modules set by the lazy sophism is to be disposed towards that kind of choice.

Meditating is not like refusing to wear a helmet. This is one of the great misconceptions about meditation: that doing nothing equals laziness or a futile attempt to escape reality. On the contrary, mindfulness puts us in touch with reality directly by letting us observe the contents of consciousness as they appear, leaving us awake, free, and better able to navigate life.

Which events unfold from time’s womb depends on what we decide to do—this is what the inside control of a person or a thermostat means. Our choosing modules are implicated in the process, unlike those of mere spectators.

My biography is like that of other animals, beginning with a natural birth, including natural changes, and ending with a natural death. I am firmly located and bounded in space and time.

Am I? Is consciousness firmly bounded in space and time, or is it unbounded and free?

It is as if there is something—my soul, or self, or essence—that does endure through quite a lot of changes (list 1) and could endure through even more remarkable events (list 2). But what then is this self?

Is it?

This simple, enduring ‘I’ is the thing which Hume complained he could never stumble upon. Reid bangs the table, and announces its existence.

…and yet fails utterly to prove its existence

Locke has got a good hold on what enables us to reidentify the same human being (thought of as a large mammal: what you see when you look in a mirror) or same plant through time. Why should anything change when we come to the self?

This is a misunderstanding. What you see in the mirror is not your true self, but simply another appearance in consciousness.

perhaps to make sense of the thoughts in list 2 we would invoke an ‘immaterial substance’—the mysterious, simple, soul of Me. It might even seem that these thoughts are sound enough to give some kind of argument for Cartesian dualism, it only being within that framework that they make any sense. But then Locke makes an extremely interesting move. We have seen that plants and animals survive change of material substance. So why shouldn’t persons (me, you) survive change of soul substance?

Begs the question. The fact remains that list 2 is nonsense.

We saw Hume pointing out that when you reflect on the contents of your own mind, you find individual memories, thoughts, passions, experiences, but no you. Hume himself thought that if you did not (and could not) encounter something in experience, then you had no right to talk of it. Your mind could not embrace it, or even ‘touch’ it. Hence, consistently, he held that the self was nothing but an aggregate of its ‘perceptions’ or experiences, together with whatever connections there are between them.

Compare the five aggregates of Buddhism

There was content, but no container. This is sometimes called a ‘no ownership’ theory of the self, or the ‘bundle’ theory of the self. For Hume, like Lichtenberg in the first chapter, we have ‘it thinks’, or rather, ‘thoughts go on’. But we do not have an owner or possessor or ‘I’ doing the thinking.

See: Buddhism

The standard problem with this is that it requires that we can make good sense of the idea of an unowned experience. But it is objected that this is incoherent.

It's no problem when you reflect that consciousness, as the condition in which thoughts and experiences arise, cannot be conceptualized.

It treats experiences as ‘objects’ or things in their own right: the kind of thing that might float around, unowned, waiting to be scooped into a bundle with some others, like sticks lying in a forest. But, the objection continues, this is a mistake, for experiences are parasitic, or adjectival on persons who have them.

This is a false objection. If there is no self proper, there is no “I” having experiences, but only experiences, thoughts, feelings, sensations themselves. These things are not parasitic to the self but exist in and of themselves.

So the objection to Hume is that ‘experiences’ are in the same way parasitic on persons. You cannot imagine a pain, for instance, as a ‘thing’ floating around waiting to be caught up in a bundle of other experiences, so that it might be accidental whether it, that very same pain, attaches itself to one bundle or another. In the beginning there is the person, and the onset of a pain is just the event of a bit of the person beginning to hurt, just as the onset of a dent is a bit of a surface becoming dented.

This is wrong. A dent appears in the skin of a car in a similar way that experiences appear in consciousness. Experiences don’t need an interior “I” or ego.

Kant puts this point by talking of the ‘I think’ that accompanies all my representations. In other words, my experiences come billed as ‘mine’. I do not first become acquainted with the experience, then look round for the owner, and then (provided, against Hume, that this last search is successful) announce that the experience is one of mine.

This is only true from a third-person perspective, not from the subjective first-person perspective. From a first person perspective, there is only experience, not a self which does the experiencing.

But how is this possible, if Hume is right that we are never aware of a ‘self’? It is all very well comparing pains to dents, and it is certainly true that when I am aware of a dent this is only because I am aware of a dented surface. But at least we are aware of surfaces, dented or not. Whereas if Hume is right we do not seem to be aware of our soul or self.

We may not be aware of a self, but we are aware. We exist as states of conscious awareness. When you realize this, the entire notion of self becomes illusory.

Perhaps the way forward has to be to deny that the ‘self’ is the kind of thing of which awareness is possible.

Or perhaps we are better off abandoning the idea altogether. Perhaps, as the Zen master said, “The self is composed of non-self elements.”

We should try thinking of self-consciousness some other way. What way?

Blackburn tries to pin down the self, but keeps arguing in circles.

What this suggests is that a minimal self-consciousness is a structural requirement on any kind of interpretation of experience.

This is an unnecessary layer. There is just experience. Any interpretation of it will be just another appearance(s) in consciousness.

is a requirement of the solution that it has an ‘egocentric’ point of view, or in other words presents the space as centred upon ‘itself’.

Not necessarily. You could easily describe the contents of any room from a third-person perspective, say for example, a top-down profile view rotated 45 degrees to display depth.

Given that it can now interpret a scene as containing a table three feet away, it can also say ‘the table is three feet from me’—yet it need have no acquaintance with its bodily shape, or long-term history. And it most certainly needs no acquaintance with an internal ego or immortal soul.

The robot is close to enlightenment. It need only realize that, from a first-person perspective, there is no distance and that, as an appearance in consciousness, the table in the next room is as close as the distant galaxy.

So thinking in terms of an ‘I’ now looks like a formal or structural requirement on interpreting experience in the way we do—as experience of a three-dimensional world of continuing objects, amongst which we move. The ‘I’ is the point of view from which interpretation starts. It is not something else given in experience, because nothing given in experience could solve the formal problem for which an ‘I’ is needed. But a point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.

This begs the question because it only makes sense from an egocentric point of view. What is it that you're calling “I”? Go ahead and look for it. What is it that's doing the looking?

Hume’s spokesman at this point, the character called Cleanthes, goes on to say that for all we know, the material world or universe as a whole itself might be the necessarily existent being, in spite of the way in which parts of it depend upon other parts. For it must be ‘unknown, inconceivable qualities’ that make anything a ‘necessary existent’. And for all we know, such unknown inconceivable qualities may attach to the ordinary physical universe, rather to any immaterial thing or person or deity lying behind it. It is important to remember here that as far as everyday experience goes, minds are just as much in need of explanation, just as much dependent beings, as physical objects. Postulating a mind that is somehow immune from dependency on anything else whatsoever is jumping away from experience just as violently as postulating a physical thing that is so.

there is either a regress, or a simple fiat that something has ‘unknown inconceivable properties’ that make it self-sufficient. This would be something whose ongoing uniformity requires no explanation outside itself. And that might as well be the world as a whole as anything else.

In our experience minds require brains which are fragile, dependent, late, and unusual arrivals in nature. ‘Generation, that is, animal or vegetable growth from previous animal or vegetable life, is by contrast common, and as far as we ever observe, necessary for the existence of intelligence. So, arguing from experience, it is much less likely that there is a self-sustaining mind than some other physical cause responsible for the whole show.

This interaction between the design argument and the interventionist conception of free will has an interesting moral aspect. Arguably, the two images of God as supernatural, and of our ‘selves’ as equally outside nature, feed off each other. And each leads people to deny the sovereignty of nature. It leads people to see the world as something that ‘we’ have dominion over, just as God does. Whereas the truth is that the world is something of which we are a very, very small part.

In a word, Cleanthes, a man who follows your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert or conjecture that the universe sometime arose from something like design: But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: It is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: It is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him ... And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.

The true conclusion is that the original source of all things... has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy.

a nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

Demea’s problem is going to be that having got himself to an utterly mysterious deity, he cannot reap any consequences. You can check into the Mysterious Mist, if you so wish, but you cannot check out carrying any more than you took in with you. Religious belief, reduced to its respectable core, turns out to be completely inert. It has no consequences.

Then atheism is also inert, having no consequences. But one would not say of suicide bombers that their religious beliefs have no consequences. Perhaps the key word here is “respectable”, echoing Saint-Exupery’s prescription, “Respect for humanity.”

Many people think that the difference between being a theist, believing, and an atheist, unbelieving, is incredibly important. But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes. If all we can reasonably believe is that the cause of the universe probably bears some remote inconceivable analogy to the other operations of nature, then we are given no usable comprehension, no real understanding, that we can bring back from these misty regions. We might say, following Wittgenstein’s remark, that Hume here ‘deconstructs’ the apparent difference between theism and atheism.

Hume goes on to argue that no evidence being used to establish a system of religion ever comes at all close to crossing the hurdle.

This would also be Hume’s answer to the protest that so many people cannot be wrong. Whichever way the cake is cut, a huge number of people have to be wrong.

Psychologists now investigate common cognitive malfunctions: failures of perception, of memory, the influences of other people, the infectious qualities of confidence, and the love of the marvellous, as influences that interfere with people’s capacities to tell truth from falsehood. We are mostly quite good instruments for registering truth and dismissing falsehood. But we are not as good as we like to believe, and we are often not very good at all.

After you have ‘stupefied’ yourself, you have become a believer.

There is indeed a very powerful, very benevolent deity. He (or she or they or it) has determined as follows. The good human beings are those who follow the natural light of reason, which is given to them to control their beliefs. These good humans follow the arguments, and hence avoid religious convictions. These ones with the strength of mind not to believe in such things go to Heaven. The rest go to Hell.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

the attitude one takes to the ‘fideism’ that simply lets particular religious beliefs walk free from reason may depend heavily on what has recently been happening when they do so. Hume was born less than twenty years after the last legal religious executions in Britain, and himself suffered from the enthusiastic hostility of believers. If in our time and place all we see are church picnics and charities, we will not be so worried. But enough people come down the mountain carrying their own practical certainties to suggest that we ought to be.

Logic has only one concern. It is concerned whether there is no way that the premises could be true without the conclusion being true.

It seems that we engineer a bridge between past and future, but cannot argue that the bridge is reliable.

Even Newton thought that it was clear that gravitational attraction could not be a case of action at a distance. He thought that any idiot could see that if the Sun exerts an attraction on the Earth this must be because of a chain of some kind between them. Causation had to be a matter of pushes and pulls: That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Surely it ‘stands to reason or is ‘clear and distinct’ or ‘a priori’ that a body cannot act somewhere where it is not! We still reason like this when, for instance, we attempt to show by pure reason that the Universe must be the creation of a god. We are supposing that we know what kind of thing must cause some effect, and what could not cause it. Hume blows this rationalism right out of the water: I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find, that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other. Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that...

The senses are not adapted to tell us what in the world underlies the distribution of powers and forces in space. They simply bring to us the result of that distribution. Anything underlying it would have to be entirely ‘noumenal’—lying behind the range of scientific investigation, and for that matter beyond the range of human experience and thought.

Aren’t we once more left with Wittgenstein’s dire saying,’ [A] nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said’?

Kant sees that when it comes to space and time, size, shape, and the objective order, to have a concept is not to have a mental picture. It is to have an organizing principle or rule; a way of handling the flux of data. Having the same organizing principles or rules could give us the same understanding of the world in spite of differences of subjective experience.

desires are thought of as states of enthusiasm for an end—things that put a gleam in our eye—then we often act because we have particular concerns, when desire is not the right word. Here I am cutting the grass when I would like to be out sailing. Why? Not really because I desired to cut the grass. Perhaps I hate it. But it was time to do it, or it had to be done.

Stoicism: learning to love doing the right thing rather than the pleasant [desirable] thing.