And the Universe Shrugged

Posted by Keith Tidman

It’s not a question of whether humankind will become extinct, but when.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a devastatingly runaway climate; the predations of human beings on ecosystems; an asteroid slamming into Earth; a super-volcano erupting; a thermonuclear conflagration; a global contagion; rogue artificial intelligence; an eventual red-giant sun engulfing us; the pending collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Nor am I talking about the record of short-lived survival of our forerunners, like the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus, all of whom slid into extinction after unimpressive spans.

Rather, I’m speaking of cosmic death!

Cosmic death will occur according to standard physics, including cosmology. Because of the accelerating expansion of the universe and the irrepressibility of entropy — the headlong plunge toward evermore disorder and chaos — eventually no new stars will form, and existing stars will burn out. The universe will become uninhabitable long before its actual demise. Eventually a near vacuum will result. Particles that remain will be so unimaginably distanced from one another that they’ll seldom, if ever, interact. This is the ultimate end of the universe, when entropy reaches its maximum or so-called thermodynamic equilibrium, more descriptively dubbed ‘heat death’. There’s no place to duck; spacefaring won’t make a difference. Nowhere in the universe is immune.

Assuredly, heat death will take trillions of years to happen. However, might anyone imagine that the timeframe veils the true metaphysical significance of universal extinction, including the extinction of humans and all other conscious, intelligent life? And does it really make a difference if it’s tens of years or tens of trillions of years? Don’t the same ontological questions about being still searingly pertain, irrespective of timescale? Furthermore, does it really make a difference if this would be the so-called ‘sixth extinction’, or the thousandth, or the millionth, or the billionth? Again, don’t the same questions still pertain? There remains, amidst all this, the reality of finality. The consequences — the upshot of why this actuality matters to us existentially — stay the same, immune to time.

So, to ask ‘what is the meaning of life?’ — that old chestnut from inquiring minds through the millennia — likely becomes moot and even unanswerable, in the face of surefire universal extinction. As we contemplate the wafer-thin slice of time that makes up our eighty-or-so-year lifespans, the question seems to make a bit of sense. That select, very manageable timeframe puts us into our comfort zone; we can assure ourselves of meaning, to a degree. But the cosmological context of cosmic heat death contemptuously renders the question about life’s purpose without an answer; all bets are off. And, in face of cosmic thermodynamic death, it’s easy to shift to another chestnut: why, in light of all this, is there something rather than nothing? All this while we may justifiably stay in awe of the universe’s size and majesty, yet know the timing and inevitability of our own extinction rests deterministically in its hands.

A more suitable question might be whether we were given, evolutionarily, consciousness and higher-order intelligence for a reason, making it possible for us to reflect on and try to make sense of the universe. And where that ‘reason’ for our being might originate: an ethereal source, something intrinsic to the cosmos itself, or other. It’s possible that the answer is simply that humankind is incidental, consigning issues like beginnings to unimportance or even nonsense. After all, if the universe dies, and is itself therefore arguably incidental, we may be incidental, too. Again, the fact that the timeframe is huge is immaterial to these inquiries. Also immaterial is whether there might, hypothetically, be another, follow-on Big Bang. Whereby the cosmological process restarts, to include a set of natural physical laws, the possible evolution of intelligent life, and, let’s not overlook it, entropy all over again.

We compartmentalise our lives, to make sense of the bits and pieces that competitively and sometimes contradictorily impact us daily. And in the case of cosmic death and the extinction of life — ours and everyone else’s possibly dotting the universe — that event’s speck-like remoteness in distant time and the vastness of space understandably mollifies. This, despite the event’s unavoidability and hard-to-fathom, hard-to-internalise conclusiveness, existential warts and all. To include, one might suppose, the end of history, the end of physics, and the end of metaphysics! This end of everything might challenge claims to any singular specialness of our and other species, all jointly riding our home planets to this peculiar end. 

Perhaps we have no choice, in the meantime, to conduct ourselves in ways that reflect our belief systems and acknowledge the institutional tools (sociological, political, spiritual) used to referee those beliefs. As an everyday priority, we’ll surely continue to convert those beliefs into norms, to improve society and the quality of life in concrete, actionable ways. Those norms and institutions enable us to live an orderly existence — one that our minds can plumb and make rational sense of. Even though that may largely be a salve, it may be our best (realistically, only) default behaviour in contending with daily realities, ranging from the humdrum to the spectacular. We tend to practice what’s called ‘manic defence’, whereby people distract themselves by focusing on things other than what causes their anxiety and discomfort.

The alternative — to capitulate, falling back upon self-indulgent nihilism — is untenable, insupportable, and unsustainable. We are, after all, quite a resilient species. And we live every day with comparatively attainable horizons. There remains, moreover, a richness to our existence, when our existence is considered outside of extraordinary universal timeframes. Accordingly, we go on with our lives with optimism, not dwelling on the fact that something existential will eventually happen — our collective whistling past the graveyard, one might say. We seldom, if ever, factor this universal expiry date into our thinking — understandably so. There would be little to gain, on any practical level, in doing otherwise. Cosmic thermodynamic death, after all, doesn’t concern considerations of morality. Cosmic death is an amoral event, devoid of concerns about its rightness or wrongness. It will happen matter of factly.

Meanwhile, might the only response to cosmic extinction — and with it, our extinction — be for the universe and humanity to shrug?

PP #48: Philosophic Reflections on a Lunar View of Earth

This view taken  July 20, 1969,  from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising
above the moon's horizon. (Image credit: NASA/JSC)

Posted by Keith Tidman

Half a century after the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the heavily pockmarked moon, a quarter of a million miles away, much of the world has recently been savoring again the grandeur of the achievement. Reaffirmation of the ‘giant leap for mankind’ legendarily beamed back to Earth, and the ambitious revisualisation of our space-based destiny and vistas.

The feat symbolised humankind’s intrepid instincts. To venture into space, as Earth-bound explorers once riskily did across threatening oceans and landmasses. To satisfy a gnawing curiosity, placing footprints, as these resilient astronauts did, onto unknown and little-known shores. And in the doing, be in awe of the oneness and most-fundamental architecture of humanity — the very nature of our being.

From this comparatively short distance, Earth still looks startlingly small and lonely — even humble, given its cloaking by the atmosphere. Yet, humankind might discover it isn’t alone; the cosmos brims with habitable planets. In that endeavour, how might the image of our planet change, then, as cameras peel back even farther: from elsewhere in the Milky Way and well beyond? As distances in space turn into light-years.

As Earth shrinks with distance, does the meaningfulness of our planet and its inhabitants shrink in parallel, in the vast cosmic backdrop, contesting humankind’s immodestly self-styled honorific of ‘exceptional’? Does our reality change? Or do, say, the ‘volume and mass’ of what fundamentally matters about us — our purpose — rebelliously remain unaffected, defining our place in the larger scheme, no matter Earth’s size in the surrounding cold expanse? 

A rebelliousness that, one might submit, emerges from a web of human ‘consciousness’ that stretches around the planet — the neurons and synapses (connectomes) of seven-and-a-half billion people ceaselessly firing: the stuff of dreams, imaginings, creations. Integral, perhaps, to a larger cosmic consciousness: and again, the stuff of dreams, imaginings, creations.

The seeming peacefulness in the image at top is just that: ‘seeming’. The pacific panorama masks the true nature of Earth: roiling with both natural and human activity. The phantom tranquility conceals one of our instinctual human behaviours: successive wars filling millennia of history. One wonders what idiosyncratically in the human genome leads mankind to war to remedy differences and trifling grievances, as well as quench hegemonic cravings. All the while paradoxically juxtaposed with the astounding complexities of humankind’s diverse civilisations and cultures.

As we gaze, from moon’s vantage point, upon the orb of Earth, with its thin coating of air and water, we are reminded of how vulnerably brittle the Earth’s environment is. Especially at the environment’s intersections with not-uncommonly remorseless technology. Existential risks abound. We’re reminded of the responsibility humanity has as active (proactive) guardians, to nurture the planet as the planet symbiotically nurtures us. Critical, we might agree, to the survival and continued evolution of our species.

What happens if we misguidedly, even disinterestedly, poison or exhaust the planet, as it hangs precariously in space? Or might nature, perhaps indifferent to humanity and coolly subjecting us to its whim, itself render the planet uninhabitable — leading to another major extinction event? Are we only renters, not owners? Did the lunar visit introduce a new imperative: to leave Earth behind and inhabit somewhere else?

Is there a solemnity about the rearward-looking scene of a distanced Earth — an awe that prompts reflection? A scene made all the more evocative by our believing that Earth is immersed in a sort of cosmic sea — of dark matter, dark energy, quantum fluctuations, and more. Is there the perception of ‘aloneness’, too, our seemingly distanced from everyone and everything else in that cosmic sea? The silence of the gaping, inky space contrasts with the cacophony of Earth, the latter a hive of devices that magnify our voices and echo our presence. Will that cacophony continue, or ultimately go silent?

In that presence, we marvel that humankind, dwelling on the comparatively tiny planet seen from the lunar perspective, nevertheless has the cognitive wherewithal to ponder and increasingly understand the cosmology of the whole universe: its beginning, its evolution, its current circumstances, its future. A study in the making, propelled by an irresistible impulse to know.

Anyone whose culture might have included the pre-digital-age children’s game of marbles may nostalgically recognise, from this lunar distance, the surface appearance of Earth, with its gauzy, chaotically swirling patterns. We admire its familiarly abstract beauty. All the while suspecting that there’s order interweaving the deception of chaos. Surrounding this marble-like Earth is a bewildering stillness and blackness — a blackness majestically interrupted, however, by galaxies and stunning phenomena like the Pillars of Creation.

Future generations will grasp, better than us, how this one step on another cosmic body, however craggy and nearby the moon is, served to spur far more ambitious tours through space, whether by human beings or sophisticated thinking apparatuses — to face down the harsh environment of space as we inexorably scratch our exploratory itch.

The Octave Illusion

Posted by Thomas Scarborough*

–

440Hz and 880Hz alternating R and L

The Octave Illusion was discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1973. It produced two alternating tones, one octave apart, in each ear. However, when the tone in one ear went ‘high’, the tone in the other ear went ‘low’, and vice versa. (Click the arrow to play.)

The tones used here are A4 (440 Hz) and A5 (880 Hz) - in this case reproduced with the precision of the modern computer. The effect is the same whether this is played through headphones or loudspeakers -- and interestingly, does not change when the headphones or loudspeakers are swapped around.

It is a simple auditory illusion, yet most powerful. Instead of hearing two alternating tones in each ear - as one should - most people hear alternating tones bouncing from ear to ear. It seems that the brain has therefore removed two tones, one from each ear. That is, the tones are replaced with silences.

There is copious literature on what this might mean, and what might cause the effect - yet the general agreement is that there is no simple explanation.

It might not seem at first that an auditory illusion has anything to do with philosophy. However, what we have in this particular case is auditory ‘objects’ -- a range of auditory ‘things’ which include bangs, ringtones, meows, and so on -- which belong to the much larger set of ‘objects’ in general.

To this day, then, we search for ways to decide what is or is not illusory ...

space, time, numbers

identity, free will

things, events, properties

society, language

money

matter, force, energy

causes, physical laws...

... and even God.

Thus, illusions such as that above -- of which we all now are aware -- have a lot to do with the way we perceive our world.  It has not always been so. There once was a time - or so it is thought - where we perceived everything as real. Today, to borrow the words of the British philosophy professor Simon Blackburn, we have left this far behind: ‘Everything you can think of has at some time or another been declared to be a fiction by philosophers.’

It falls under the subject of ontology - and it all started, according to the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, when we separated objects from ideas. The Octave Illusion is just one of many evidences that our experience is not the same as the ideas we have about it. Our brains have already interpreted it for us.

---

* The author once designed a simple electronic unit to produce this effect. This is still obtainable from the publisher at https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazine/elektor-200411/17842

What Truly Exists?

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Magritte’s iconic painting of a man looking in a mirror,
reminds us that the world we perceive is not real,
but rather constructed

A core question of ontology, or theories about the nature of being and existence—and perhaps its most pressing question from a practical point of view—is which individuals or 'things' are really real. What truly exists? It seems that there are three broad possibilities:

• material entities alone (which is materialism),
• mental entities alone (which is idealism),
• or both (which is dualism).

However it is very difficult, as the cognitive scientist Aaron Sloman has put it, to distinguish between ‘real existents’ and ‘useful fictions’—or for that matter, useless ones. As philosophy professor Simon Blackburn notes:

‘Everything you can think of has at some time or another been declared to be a fiction by philosophers bent on keeping a firm check on reality—among them matter, force, energy, causes, physical laws, space, time, possibilities, numbers, infinity, selves, freedom of the will, the will itself, desires, beliefs, identity, things, properties, society, language, and money.’

Intuitively, we feel that what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch—or perceive in any way with our senses—is real. Yet what are we to make of things we do not perceive—either because, momentarily, we find that they lie beyond our senses, or because they are what we call ‘constructs'—compound ideas which may lack empirical evidence?

The problem strikes close to home. Take the one hundred most commonly used nouns in English. The first on the list is ‘time’. You cannot see it or touch it or anything like that. The second is ‘year’. The same applies. The third on the list is ‘people’. Now here is something we can see and touch—at least when those people happen to be around. The fourth term, though, ‘way’, is both real and unreal. And so, depending on how we categorise these nouns, fully half of them may not be ‘real’ at all.

It would be helpful to start with the simplest distinction—namely that which we make between real things we experience directly, and real things we do not.

Imagine that I am cycling down a narrow cycle track under some coconut palms. I see the world in front of me as I go—but do not see the world behind me. I saw it a moment ago—a thicket of breadfruit trees, and children playing. But I know that they are there. I saw them, heard them, smelled them. Besides, I could easily stop my bicycle now and look back to confirm it.

In what sense, then, are those things there, which are now behind me? After all, I do not directly perceive them.

We may conduct a simple thought experiment.

Imagine that, as I ride my bicycle under the coconut trees, we switch off my senses and freeze this moment in time. Without my senses, the perceived and the unperceived look largely the same in my brain—namely, arrangements of synapses in a vast network of neurons.

In my brain, then, there is little difference between the seen and the unseen (or the heard and the unheard, and so on). Both exist in the vast neural network which is or contains the mind. Everything, whether real or imaginary, ends up there. The question now is not so much whether my mind contains things perceived or unperceived. In the first case, my senses are activated; in the second, they are not—but in both cases, they are as real to me as anything possibly can be.

This becomes important now for the more vexing question as to how we are to understand constructs. There is more to riding my bicycle than what I see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. If there were not, I would be wobbling on my bicycle without anything left to orientate me:

Does this outing fit my purpose? Did I steal this bicycle? Do I need a passport here? Should I turn around now? And so on. None of these ‘surplus’ things—purpose, ownership, citizenship, and so on—is immediately real to me, yet all of them are vital. My mind is filled, not only with the things that I see, or saw a moment ago—but with many things which are in a sense unreal. One could say, things which are lacking empirical evidence, although in every case, they can be tested in some way.

Are these constructs real? In fact they are real—at least, as real as the coconut trees before me, and the breadfruit trees and the children behind me, given the fact that I arrange them, too, in my mind—each as a distinct concept with a unique label. As such, they do not fundamentally differ from those things which ‘exist’.

It would be wise for us to pause for a moment. We know well that we are capable, as human beings, of thinking of fictions which are not so. On the one hand, fictitious concepts—say magic spells, or the quintessence—on the other hand, fictitious entities—say the planet Vulcan, or fairies and gnomes. Sometimes, too, we believe that our fictions exist—or that they will exist at some time in the future.

Yet the separation of the real and the fictitious would seem to be fairly straightforward. ‘Real’ things correspond with the reality we perceive, while pure fictions do not. Does time therefore exist—or identity or society or any one of hundreds of thousands of constructs there are? Given that they correspond with the reality we perceive, we can only say yes.

The ultimate question is, does God exist? Given the right conditions, the answer to this, too, could be yes. The ‘right conditions’ for God’s existence would be threefold:

• that he is not purely ideational
• that the concept ‘God’ corresponds with the reality we perceive
• and that this concept is not invoked arbitrarily.

Or put it this way—for God to exist, there needs to be something permanent in our experience which necessitates him.

Fermi's Paradox . . . But What If?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Seven decades ago, the physicist-of-atomic-bomb-fame, Enrico Fermi, pondered with his lunchtime companions at Los Alamos whether other intelligent life forms populate planets around the Milky Way, and if so, why we have no evidence of them? He purportedly asked, “Where are they?”, meaning, of course, the alien beings. Because if other complex, intelligent, technology-clever life forms have even a fraction of humankind’s proclivity toward curiosity and, let’s say, colonization, then why is there no evidence of them having acted on these instincts throughout our galaxy? From that conundrum, Fermi’s Paradox emerged.

The American astrophysicist, Frank Drake, later thought about which factors might be necessary to address Fermi’s question and, in particular, how many technological civilizations, emitting electromagnetic signals, might exist among the stars of just our galaxy alone. These became known as Drake’s Equation, and offer a way to calculate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way based on seven variables.* Although scientists can’t yet insert firm numbers for the variables, I think Drake’s effort remains a worthy first attempt at eventually quantifying an answer to Fermi’s question. Especially given that the physical laws of evolution could well differ among far-flung, unfamiliarly diverse chemical, biological, and physical conditions and constraints, yielding singularly different intelligent species.

Many ‘what if’ hypotheses exist by way of possible answers to Fermi’s deceptively simple question. For example, perhaps technology-based civilizations and species with sophisticated intelligence are too far separated by space and time, measured even in thousands of light-years to reveal any presence. Or perhaps, because of the finely grained conditions necessary for life with high intelligence to evolve (the ‘anthropic principle’), civilizations are so rare and scattered that it’s difficult to find each other. Certainly it seems that our own sending-receiving (and space-faring) technologies are too primitive to matter much yet in the sophisticated game of cosmic outreach. Or just perhaps other civilizations have potted us, but rregard humankind as too biologically and intellectually primitive a species to bother with whom to show their hand. Or perhaps they regard humankind as a prototypically warring species, never-endingly engaged in small-minded, lethal belligerence over territory, resources, and power. Perhaps all intelligent species tend toward self-isolating wariness that outweighs curiosity about ‘the other’. Perhaps Thucydides’ theis that established and rising powers are compelled to go to war applies even on the interplanetary scale.

All that said, should there eventually be confirmation of alien intelligent species that are endowed with far higher levels of consciousness and intelligence than humankind — qualities having evolved over histories hundreds of thousands or millions of years older than ours — then the consequence would be culturally tectonic shifting. As a species, perhaps lulled by so easily triumphing over so many of our Earthly competitors, we’re prone to indulging in flights of ‘exceptionalism’. We’re predisposed to looking at our reflection in life’s mirror and — more often looking down, not up — seeing only reasons to preen over our capacity for rationality, creativity, and imagination. To be unseated, with a thud, by an alien species’ cognitive prowess — and the benefits to its civilization — could prove unsettling for humankind’s indulgences in unchallenged exceptionalism.

At the very least, discovery of our sudden non-uniqueness might compel re-examination of basic principles. It might lead to fundamentally questioning religious texts, customs, tenets, rituals, codes of morality, ‘spirituality’, and dicta. If so, the result may be to rethink and rewrite the underlying explanations and descriptions, widening out the aperture of religious philosophy and theology to take into account the new realities of not being alone in the galaxy and in larger cosmos. At the heart of such teleological investigation and reinvention might be questions, which never go away, about humankind’s purpose: about why we are here.

The stunning space-time topography of this universe isn’t hubristically ours alone. I venture it’s a matter of when, not whether, the ‘code’ to Fermi’s Paradox will be cracked.

---

*Drake’s equation, as in our image, is typically shown as follows:

N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L,

Here N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable; R* is the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life; fp is the fraction of those stars with planetary systems; ne is the number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life (the habitable, ‘Goldilocks’ zones around their suns); fl is the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears; fi is the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges; fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space; and L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

Fermi's Paradox . . . But What If?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Seven decades ago, the physicist-of-atomic-bomb-fame, Enrico Fermi, pondered with his lunchtime companions at Los Alamos whether other intelligent life forms populate planets around the Milky Way, and if so, why we have no evidence of them? He purportedly asked, “Where are they?”, meaning, of course, the alien beings. Because if other complex, intelligent, technology-clever life forms have even a fraction of humankind’s proclivity toward curiosity and, let’s say, colonization, then why is there no evidence of them having acted on these instincts throughout our galaxy? From that conundrum, Fermi’s Paradox emerged.

The American astrophysicist, Frank Drake, later thought about which factors might be necessary to address Fermi’s question and, in particular, how many technological civilizations, emitting electromagnetic signals, might exist among the stars of just our galaxy alone. These became known as Drake’s Equation, and offer a way to calculate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way based on seven variables.* Although scientists can’t yet insert firm numbers for the variables, I think Drake’s effort remains a worthy first attempt at eventually quantifying an answer to Fermi’s question. Especially given that the physical laws of evolution could well differ among far-flung, unfamiliarly diverse chemical, biological, and physical conditions and constraints, yielding singularly different intelligent species.

Many ‘what if’ hypotheses exist by way of possible answers to Fermi’s deceptively simple question. For example, perhaps technology-based civilizations and species with sophisticated intelligence are too far separated by space and time, measured even in thousands of light-years to reveal any presence. Or perhaps, because of the finely grained conditions necessary for life with high intelligence to evolve (the ‘anthropic principle’), civilizations are so rare and scattered that it’s difficult to find each other. Certainly it seems that our own sending-receiving (and space-faring) technologies are too primitive to matter much yet in the sophisticated game of cosmic outreach. Or just perhaps other civilizations have spotted us, but regard humankind as too biologically and intellectually primitive a species to bother with whom to show their hand. Or perhaps they regard humankind as a prototypically warring species, never-endingly engaged in small-minded, lethal belligerence over territory, resources, and power. Perhaps all intelligent species tend toward self-isolating wariness that outweighs curiosity about ‘the other’. Perhaps Thucydides’ thesis that established and rising powers are compelled to go to war applies even on the interplanetary scale.

All that said, should there eventually be confirmation of alien intelligent species that are endowed with far higher levels of consciousness and intelligence than humankind — qualities having evolved over histories hundreds of thousands or millions of years older than ours — then the consequence would be culturally tectonic shifting. As a species, perhaps lulled by so easily triumphing over so many of our Earthly competitors, we’re prone to indulging in flights of ‘exceptionalism’. We’re predisposed to looking at our reflection in life’s mirror and — more often looking down, not up — seeing only reasons to preen over our capacity for rationality, creativity, and imagination. To be unseated, with a thud, by an alien species’ cognitive prowess — and the benefits to its civilization — could prove unsettling for humankind’s indulgences in unchallenged exceptionalism.

At the very least, discovery of our sudden non-uniqueness might compel reexamination of basic principles. It might lead to fundamentally questioning religious texts, customs, tenets, rituals, codes of morality, ‘spirituality’, and dicta. If so, the result may be to rethink and rewrite the underlying explanations and descriptions, widening out the aperture of religious philosophy and theology to take into account the new realities of not being alone in the galaxy and in larger cosmos. At the heart of such teleological investigation and reinvention might be questions, which never go away, about humankind’s purpose: about why we are here.

The stunning space-time topography of this universe isn’t hubristically ours alone. I venture it’s a matter of when, not whether, the ‘code’ to Fermi’s Paradox will be cracked.

---

*Drake’s equation, as in our image, is typically shown as follows:

N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L,

Here N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable; R* is the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life; fp is the fraction of those stars with planetary systems; ne is the number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life (the habitable, ‘Goldilocks’ zones around their suns); fl is the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears; fi is the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges; fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space; and L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

The Land Rover Problem

By Thomas Scarborough

Imagine that I hold in my hand a single part of a 1958 Land Rover – say, a rear stub axle. Being an open-minded sort of person, I try to fit this part to any which motor parts I may find in the whole world. I continue to fit such parts together until I reach the complete termination of my plan. Not surprisingly, I end up with a 1958 Land Rover, complete in itself. Of course, I say to myself – being an enlightened man – that the appearence of a 1958 Land Rover might well have been pure chance. I therefore start all over again – only to end up with a 1958 Land Rover, again.

I shall call it The Land Rover Problem. It is, in my view, the biggest problem that the 21st century philosopher needs to overcome, before we may create a new metaphysic or total philosophy – a philosophy which describes not merely aspects of reality, but the whole of it. No matter where we start, and no matter how far our search reaches into all of reality, the end result is as pre-determined as the 1958 Land Rover. The problem lies in the method of starting with a single part – or in some cases, ending up with it. We might, after all, disassemble a 1958 Land Rover, to see which of its many parts remains in our hands in the end.

The philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard might have been the first to understand this, when he wrote in Either/Or that ‘people of experience maintain that it is very sensible to start from a principle.' Say, boredom. Thus he demonstrated how one (arbitrary) principle will explain the whole world. Just over a century later, the philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen wrote that we are 'thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics'. Even before we set out on a metaphysic, they wrote, we already have one. It is in the nature of the parts to deliver the result. More recently, the philosopher Jacques Derrida famously defined the problem as ‘a process of giving [reality] a centre or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin’.

How then shall we overcome this problem?

Basically, the trouble lies in the way that we attach the parts one to another – in philosophy, our concepts. We are stuck with a Land Rover model of philosophy. This applies both to moderns and to postmoderns, with the difference that postmoderns, while they do not have a way out, are more acutely aware of the problem: ultimately, no matter where we start, and no matter how far our search reaches into all of reality, our thoughts deliver relatively useless constructions – complete in themselves, yet like the 1958 Land Rover, giving us little indication as to their real scope or merit.

Logically, there is only one way of escape, and no other. Instead of constructing philosophies by attaching concept to concept, we may stand back, as it were, to view all the concepts in the world from a distance. Imagine that we scatter every conceivable motor part of every make and model – the 1958 Land Rover, the 1961 Beetle, the 2005 Mustang, the 2008 Roadster, and of many thousands of assemblages more, over a practically infinite expanse. If then we could recognise any patterns or insights here, in this expanse – call them meta-features – we may discover another way of seeing things.

What might we then see?

Of course, we would see that no assemblage is ultimate. The 1958 Land Rover, as an example, would merely be one possible construction among many. We would recognise, too, that if we were to build only a 1958 Land Rover, we would exclude every other assemblage – or to apply this to philosophy, every competing metaphysic. These are core insights of postmodernism. Yet we would see far more than this. Once we have grasped that we are dealing with an innumerable totality of parts – which is concepts – we shall no longer be satisfied with a self-centred or parochial view of the world, but shall think expansively and holistically. Nor shall we interpret our world from a narrow point of view: ethnic, religious, ideological, economic, or scientific, among many more. We shall reject the narrow view.

Further, instead of standing self-importantly beside a 1958 Land Rover, we shall see that our construction, in the context of an innumerable totality of parts – which is concepts – is very limited. A practical infinity of concepts lies beyond our power to explain, and beyond our control. This has obvious consequences. There will always be things without number which lie beyond our own arrangement of concepts, which set a limit to our powers. Therefore any ideas of progress, advancement, development, even utopia, open the door to hubris, and failure. Similarly, we shall recognise that, to overcome our finitude, we shall (impossibly) need infinite control. This drives totalising urges: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, and over-legislation, to give but a few examples – which have led to damaged lives and disasters without number.

Much more may be said, but the point is this: on the basis of the meta-features of the totality of parts, it is possible to reach definite conclusions about the most important things in life. There is a way forward for philosophy, if we will only abandon the Land Rover model, step back, view our world as an infinite expanse of concepts, and see what we may discern through this.

Wittgenstein's Fork

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was convinced, from an early date, that philosophical problems would be solved by paying close attention to the workings of language. In this quest, he reached a great fork in the road. We may never know whether he recognised it as a fork – however the direction which he took profoundly influenced generations of philosophers.

Words, ran the dominant theory of Wittgenstein's day, were the 'basic units' or 'atomic elements' of language – much like the little pieces of coloured glass we use to create a mosaic. While the finished mosaic may represent anything we please – ships on the sea, for instance, or flowers on a table – the little pieces of glass are the most basic constituent parts which do not change. Similarly, says the Oxford Dictionary of Lingusitics, words are 'the union of an invariant form with an invariant meaning'. This view remains dominant today.


On this view, it is natural to arrange these basic units or atomic elements in some kind of semantic structure. Such semantic structures have been variously described – yet the basic idea remains the same: whether we speak of tables of binary features, hierarchies of semantic categories, networks of predicators, or taxonomies of concepts – and so on – we imagine the existence of some such structure. By and large, too, these structures work – although not completely. Here follow two examples of semantic chains – which are snippets of semantic structure sometimes called predicator chains:

     Cheshire cat → cat → animal → living thing
     Mountain bike → bicycle → vehicle → non-living thing

Notice that each term in each chain properly belongs only to a limited range of meanings. For instance, one cannot point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is a vehicle,' although one might well point to a Cheshire cat and say (rather too obviously), 'This is an animal.' Notice, too, that even at the end of such chains, we may not arrive at anything common. There are terms in these chains which in no way resemble one another, or refer to one another. To put this another way, a Cheshire cat and a mountain bike will rarely turn up in the same conversation.

In fact most of our words do not sit well together. More than that, they repulse one another. Whether we speak about chemistry, ecclesiology, sociology, or anything else under the sun, our words will either fit into the subject at hand – or not. The philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen noted that words (they spoke of predicators) 'always stand in such a tightly woven nexus that any one tends to appear with others'. For instance, while we are permitted to say, 'The maid carries the pail,' we cannot say, 'The maid carries the moon,' or anything of that sort.

To put this another way, we seem to find no universal structure, where all of our words will fit. Instead, we find structures (plural). In fact, through semantic structures our language is tightly constrained – so tightly constrained that when we put pen to paper, in whichever direction we cast our thoughts, we tend to be able only to construct semantic networks which are agreeable to our starting point. This was hardly a revolutionary insight at the level of linguistics – until Wittgenstein applied it to metaphysics.

Wittgenstein (the later Wittgenstein, that is) recognised that our language is pervaded by structures (plural), and further that no single semantic structure will accommodate words which go by the description of 'the union of an invariant form with an invariant meaning'. Concept words, he noted, may be used differently within different language-games, and all they have in common then is 'family resemblances'. There are therefore, he said, various 'language-games' within the same language, and these may be said to be incommensurate.

Here is Wittgenstein's fork. Wittgenstein could, at this point, have come to one of two conclusions:

• Each semantic structure represents a self-contained world, to be understood only within its own structure – with its own 'form of life' (its context). And as one moves from structure to structure, so the basic units and atomic elements which are words, though they are still recognisable in a way (the family resemblances), become something else. This is the fork, of course, which Wittgenstein took. 

• Alternatively, given his assumptions, Wittgenstein could have concluded that each word in our language may accommodate free-wheeling worlds of associations within – chamaeleons of sorts – so that a single word may combine variously with other words, yet remain the same inside. This would enable us to keep our words within one world, and transcend a plurality of semantic structures. 

To put it in a picture, Wittgenstein stood before the choice, either of studying 'family resemblances', or of studying the DNA. He chose family resemblances – which he based in turn on the prevalent notion of words as basic units and atomic elements. While Wittgenstein saw that these basic units and atomic elements were not immutable (in contrast to the dominant view of his day), he could not quite shake off the notion of little pieces of coloured glass, even though these pieces could not be used universally.

Wittgenstein's view had vast, obstructive repercussions. Above all, it seemed to close the door to the possibility of a new metaphysic – namely, of finding a new, comprehensive explanation of reality. Without a shared language, there can be no common metaphysic, let alone an all-encompassing one. A generation later, Jean-François Lyotard echoed Wittgenstein's sentiments, describing our situation as 'incredulity toward metanarratives' – which, he noted, is rooted above all in 'the crisis of metaphysical philosophy'.

Further Reading:

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Part I)
Sebastian Löbner, Understanding Semantics (Part II)
Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen, Logical Propaedeutic (Chapter III)
Thomas Scarborough, Revisiting Aristotle's Noun

Wittgenstein's Fork

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was convinced, from an early date, that philosophical problems would be solved by paying close attention to the workings of language. In this quest, he reached a great fork in the road. We may never know whether he recognised it as a fork – however the direction which he took profoundly influenced generations of philosophers.

Words, ran the dominant theory of Wittgenstein's day, were the 'basic units' or 'atomic elements' of language – much like the little pieces of coloured glass we use to create a mosaic. While the finished mosaic may represent anything we please – ships on the sea, for instance, or flowers on a table – the little pieces of glass are the most basic constituent parts which do not change. Similarly, says the Oxford Dictionary of Lingusitics, words are 'the union of an invariant form with an invariant meaning'. This view remains dominant today.

On this view, it is natural to arrange these basic units or atomic elements in some kind of semantic structure. Such semantic structures have been variously described – yet the basic idea remains the same: whether we speak of tables of binary features, hierarchies of semantic categories, networks of predicators, or taxonomies of concepts – and so on – we imagine the existence of some such structure. By and large, too, these structures work – although not completely. Here follow two examples of semantic chains – which are snippets of semantic structure sometimes called predicator chains:

     Cheshire cat → cat → animal → living thing
     Mountain bike → bicycle → vehicle → non-living thing

Notice that each term in each chain properly belongs only to a limited range of meanings. For instance, one cannot point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is a vehicle,' although one might well point to a Cheshire cat and say (rather too obviously), 'This is an animal.' Notice, too, that even at the end of such chains, we may not arrive at anything common. There are terms in these chains which in no way resemble one another, or refer to one another. To put this another way, a Cheshire cat and a mountain bike will rarely turn up in the same conversation.

In fact most of our words do not sit well together. More than that, they repulse one another. Whether we speak about chemistry, ecclesiology, sociology, or anything else under the sun, our words will either fit into the subject at hand – or not. The philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen noted that words (they spoke of predicators) 'always stand in such a tightly woven nexus that any one tends to appear with others'. For instance, while we are permitted to say, 'The maid carries the pail,' we cannot say, 'The maid carries the moon,' or anything of that sort.

To put this another way, we seem to find no universal structure, where all of our words will fit. Instead, we find structures (plural). In fact, through semantic structures our language is tightly constrained – so tightly constrained that when we put pen to paper, in whichever direction we cast our thoughts, we tend to be able only to construct semantic networks which are agreeable to our starting point. This was hardly a revolutionary insight at the level of linguistics – until Wittgenstein applied it to metaphysics.

Wittgenstein (the later Wittgenstein, that is) recognised that our language is pervaded by structures (plural), and further that no single semantic structure will accommodate words which go by the description of 'the union of an invariant form with an invariant meaning'. Concept words, he noted, may be used differently within different language-games, and all they have in common then is 'family resemblances'. There are therefore, he said, various 'language-games' within the same language, and these may be said to be incommensurate.

Here is Wittgenstein's fork. Wittgenstein could, at this point, have come to one of two conclusions:

• Each semantic structure represents a self-contained world, to be understood only within its own structure – with its own 'form of life' (its context). And as one moves from structure to structure, so the basic units and atomic elements which are words, though they are still recognisable in a way (the family resemblances), become something else. This is the fork, of course, which Wittgenstein took. 

• Alternatively, given his assumptions, Wittgenstein could have concluded that each word in our language may accommodate free-wheeling worlds of associations within – chamaeleons of sorts – so that a single word may combine variously with other words, yet remain the same inside. This would enable us to keep our words within one world, and transcend a plurality of semantic structures. 

To put it in a picture, Wittgenstein stood before the choice, either of studying 'family resemblances', or of studying the DNA. He chose family resemblances – which he based in turn on the prevalent notion of words as basic units and atomic elements. While Wittgenstein saw that these basic units and atomic elements were not immutable (in contrast to the dominant view of his day), he could not quite shake off the notion of little pieces of coloured glass, even though these pieces could not be used universally.

Wittgenstein's view had vast, obstructive repercussions. Above all, it seemed to close the door to the possibility of a new metaphysic – namely, of finding a new, comprehensive explanation of reality. Without a shared language, there can be no common metaphysic, let alone an all-encompassing one. A generation later, Jean-François Lyotard echoed Wittgenstein's sentiments, describing our situation as 'incredulity toward metanarratives' – which, he noted, is rooted above all in 'the crisis of metaphysical philosophy'.

Further Reading:

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Part I)
Sebastian Löbner, Understanding Semantics (Part II)
Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen, Logical Propaedeutic (Chapter III)
Thomas Scarborough, Revisiting Aristotle's Noun