Berkeley's Puzzle

Walk up to a table, and you can see and feel that the table is there. Indeed, your concept of what a table is has been shaped by your experience seeing and feeling tables your whole life. But what if you walk out of the room? It seems like your change of location shouldn’t concern the hypothetical table and its state of existence. However, you’ve never experienced a table's existence continuing unperceived for the very reason that you were not, then, perceiving it! A troubling question follows from this line of reasoning; if our experience contributes so directly to our concept of objects, how can we justify the concept of an object existing independent of mind? To push the issue even further: how can we even conceive of the concept of mind-independent objects at all, if every concept is inherently experience driven? This seems highly paradoxical.

See Berkeley philosopher John Campbell's interesting radio-snippet about this. 

God. Oh Dear...

The final prompt for my Metaphysics seminar was basically: "Write a paper." God is an unbelievably controversial topic and a difficult one to talk about even within the framework of philosophical debate. So naturally, God is what I wanted to write about. I knew that this would be a challenge, because I consider myself religious but have trouble justifying my belief in any sort of logically rigorous way. And while I discussed my paper ideas with friends, I realized that I had perhaps bit off more than I could chew; almost everyone seemed at best skeptical and at worst offended by my ideas. Let me know what you think!


"Towards A More Plausible Conception of God" 

High School "Senior Thesis"

Back in high school, there were no such things as Philosophy courses. I knew I liked what I thought was Philosophy, but I never had the opportunity to actually study it in a formal academic setting. All seniors at my school participate in a research project called THE SENIOR THESIS, and the idea is that you can pick anything in the whole world to learn and write about. I decided to try to write about fear of death in a philosophical context. I've always been terrified of dying, and I was hoping that studying the reasons for and against this fear would A) let me try out philosophizing for school and B) cure me. A certainly panned out. B, not so much. But here's a link to the final (disclaimer: high school quality) product:

Epicurean Thanatology: The Irrationality of Fear of Death

Challenge

My metaphysics professor challenged us to draw a rectangular circle. I now extend the challenge to you all. See if you can figure it out.

Philosophy Talk

Today marked my first meeting as a student researcher for the radio show Philosophy Talk. I'm basically super excited to have a summer job where I'll be learning a lot about what I love to learn about. The work I'll be doing will feel real and interesting, UNLIKE the experience of sitting at an office chair literally just waiting for my shift to be over (#summer2k11). Everyone else at the meeting seemed much more knowledgeable and self-assured than me, but I guess that's a good thing.

The radio show is hosted by Kenn Taylor, the director of the Symbolic Systems program at Stanford, and John Perry, a Philosophy professor emeritus. Every episode is about a different philosophical issue, with a giant range of topics from neuroscience and the law to language's effect on conceptions of responsibility.

Check out the site for the neat deets:

philosophytalk.org

Semantics

Last quarter I was given my first taste of Linguistics in my Introduction to Linguistics class. Unsurprisingly, the unit I the most intriguing was Semantics, the study of meaning. I had trouble remembering that I wasn't in a Philosophy course during this unit, which led to some annoyance from my TA and fellow classmates (apologies). I hope that I'll have the opportunity to take a Philosophy of Language class eventually; maybe one day I'll finally then understand Kripke and Wittgenstein instead of being awed by their works.

Chomsky's famous sentence that highlights the distinction between syntax and semantics, and a few thoughts about it:

    Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. 

The words of this sentence are in the right order. Adj Adj N V Adv. Uncontroversial. It is easy to see that the sentence is syntactical correct by replacing some of the words with others of the same type: Fat green snakes sleep peacefully. Tada!

So what about Chomsky's sentence is so nonsensical, or "semantically incorrect," to us? We understand the meaning of each word on its own. An easy observation leads us to suspect that internal contradictions between words renders that renders it semantically incorrect. It is impossible to be colorless and green simultaneously, and the action of sleeping cannot be undertaken by an idea because it is not alive. But oxymoron and paradox are hallmarks of literary writing, and it seems like similarily "incorrect" phrases are at home there and still evoke meaning. If they didn't evoke meaning, why would authors make such use of them! Another thought: maybe the sentence is incorrect because it is an impossible thing to visualize. Then again, so are many semantically correct sentences such as "Justice has been served."

To be honest, this sentence almost makes sense to me, and I'm wondering if anyone else feels similarly. At least, it has SOME meaning. It makes me feel a certain way, although I can't pinpoint exactly what. And I almost can't help imagining something when I read it.

If anything, my opinion might just show that I do not know very much about Semantics at all. 

Vernier Acuity

Here's a really neat thing we learned about in my psych class last quarter (disappointingly, one of the few neat things we learned). It's called vernier acuity. It's the ability to discern an offset in a supposedly continuous line. A related term is visual acuity, how small the smallest discernable visual feature is; it's analogous to the resolution at which we can view the world. This is affected by the size of a each cone on your retina.

You'd think that one is limited by the other. You'd think that our ability to detect an offset in a line is limited by our visual acuity, or how "pixelated" the world is to us as a function of the anatomy of our photoreceptors. Surprise! Vernier acuity has a resolution five to ten times greater than our visual acuity! WHAT?!? Where could all that extra precision come from?

This is an interesting demonstration of the critical role that visual processing systems in the brain play in how we sense our world. Our eyes don't just "tell" our brain how the world is put together. The brain must sort, refine, and compile the bits of data from photoreceptors into a cohesive image that we see. As a result, vernier acuity actually transcends the capable resolution offered by our retinas by somehow harnessing the computing power of the brain.

A further and slightly tangential question: as the brain processes raw sensory input signals from the retina, how can we be sure it is accurately tracking real world phenomena? What keeps the saliency of refinements in check if the only information we receive comes from our photoreceptors in the first place? How "real" is our "real"? Maybe our real is just what is most practical. (In other words, a possible answer to ponder: evolutionary advantage is given to those with certain visual interpretations, so these were the cortical processing systems developed).

A cool, INTERACTIVE (YAY! :D) demonstration can be found at the following link.

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/lum_hyperacuity/index.html

I also used this source to supplement my ailing memory about the subject. Seems legit!

TLDR; We see with our brains (rather than strictly with our eyes) more than we might think. Vernier acuity is a really cool example of this.

An Essential Epistemological Question, and Why it Cannot Be Answered

Science is certainly an amazing thing. Within the past 100 years or so, human society has been able to formulate countless models and theories of explanation where before there was complete mystery or obliviousness. Space feels less far away, the oceans seem less deep, and our own minds are beginning to be treated a lot more like brains.

With all of this rapid progress, it might be useful to think about human knowledge and whether there are limits to this seemingly exponential trend of understanding.

Q : Will we ever know ALL the things? Is it even conceivably possible that there is a point in humankind's future when nothing will remain a mystery, and our understanding of the natural world can be declared to be virtually complete?

A : Eh. Not so fast.

In order to have a answer (at least, one that's justified and supported), we have to fully understand the question at hand. Gut reactions of "yes!" or "no!" won't be very informative. Let's look at the implications of yes and no replies.

The "yes!" people see the current trends and have full confidence that the rate of scientific progress will continue steadily or grow. They also assume that there is a finite amount of information to be gathered about the universe.

The "no!" people assume that there either limitations to what human minds can grasp or be aware of, or that the amount of information to collect and synthesize about the world is so vast that it (might as well be?) infinite.

I think that none of these assumptions have much bearing because none of them can really be shown to be truer than the others. They are assumptions, after all. One of our reasons for feeling like the question is interesting in the first place is that we don't know how much we know in relation to how much there is to know. But without knowing how close we are to knowing everything about the natural world there is no way to answer this question. Some things we know we don't know, and maybe these seem solve-able mysteries to us. But there are plenty of other things we don't know we don't know, and for all we know these could evade our understanding indefinitely.

The answer to our question is therefore one other thing that is perhaps appropriate to add to the list of unknowns.

A Poll: Pre-philosophical Perceptions of Time

The passing of time is a force that is as inevitable and familiar to us as any. Oftentimes we are all too cognizant of the ticking of the seconds, of the passing of birthday after birthday, and of the patter of ever-approaching deadlines that incessantly marches along our calendars. But the concept of time and its unique role in our lives is something we hardly ever stop to think about. What is time, after all? Clearly it is not an object. It is not something that, in an instant, we can touch or see. The non-object-ness of time intuitively seems like a very simple thing. Time does not have width, depth, or height. Time does not have spatial direction at all. In fact, you will probably agree with me when I make the overarching generalization that time has absolutely no accurate spatial analogue.

I, however, have only come to realize this and grasp its implications recently. I was shocked. Throughout my life, I have occasionally paused to consider time. And it is difficult to introspectively consider anything without visualizing it. For whatever reason, my default visualization for time has allows been a horizontal line. As time passed, I’d imagine this line stretching out to the right and further from the origin, the point of my birth, and closer toward a point of unknown location that would be my death. It wasn’t that I was always actively thinking about this image, but even when I wasn’t, it resided in the background of my ability to grasp what time is.

I thought that this conception of time was pretty ubiquitous. After a brief discussion with my dad, however, I wasn’t so sure. He strongly disagreed and insisted that time had no relationship, imagined or otherwise, with spatiality to him at all.

I decided to test my ideas against those of the general population by putting out a short survey and asking friends and family to answer a few simple questions. As you read along, try them for yourself:

1. Say that "Orange," "Purple," and "Green" are all discrete events.

Orange occurs before Purple.

Green occurs after Purple.

Describe in the box below how you would visually represent your perception of these events on a piece of paper.

2. Say that another event, "Red," occurs at the same time as Purple. How does Red fit into your visual representation?

3. When you think of the concept of time, do any spatial connotations come to mind? If so, what are they?

I tried to frame the questions in a way that left the logical structuring of chronology as ambiguous as possible; orange, purple, and green are not usually ordered in this way, and the temporal relationship between these events was not introduced linearly (“Orange occurs before Purple which occurs before Green.)

I received 24 responses. Not as much as I would’ve liked, but respectable given that this was a random survey with really no purpose other than my curiosity. Below is the breakdown of each questions’ results.

The first question: there were four very strange answers which I will list verbatim, mostly for lulz: circles of color, i would imagine fruit, i would draw a rainbow, Chemical rxn involving metal complexes. One result described a complex “black hole type thing” where colored swirls morph into colored circles...very creative stuff. But of the remaining nineteen results, every single one either listed out the colors in order from left to right or described a visual scheme with boxes or circles for events arranged left to right. 6 results explicitly stated their schematic would include arrows.

The second question: twelve responses involved placing some sort of representation of the “red” event either directly above or below the purple one. Because red was described as simultaneously, it’s not a far stretch to extrapolate that timing of events was therefore being associated with horizontal placement for these twelve schematics.

The third question: twelve people made reference to lines, left/right ordering, or axes. Five people said something like “no.” Interestingly enough, of these same five, four answered the first question by ordering the words orange, purple, and green from left to right.

Conclusion: many, many people think about time in a spatial and/or linear way. Even those who deny that time has spatial connotations to them practically ascribe a linearity to the chronology of events.*

Another less dramatic example of the pervasive conflation between the spatial and the temporal is directionality. “Forward” and “future,” “backward” and “past.” These terms just make sense together, even though they really shouldn’t. The same amount of time passes if a man walks from point A to point B than if he stayed absolutely still at A (at least, close enough to the same amount of time so that we may say it is), so why is it that words regarding physical movement and dimensionality seem so comfortable in the arena of the temporal?

These phenomena seem to be a question more of convenience than rationality. Certainly, left/right or forward/backward seems as good as any for a visual representation of time. But, conceivably, anything representing change can also represent the passing over time. You could imagine other analogies that might do the job just as well: warm/cold or light/darker, for example. WOAHZ! But for whatever reason, differences in position is the default analogy we use. I’m not sure where that comes from. Perhaps all of those graphs in math class have mightily conditioned us.

*A slight aside: how might results be affected by a default method of ordering that the structure of our language provides? The survey was taken by only English speakers. I only can wonder how the survey results might have been different if given to Hebrew or Arabic speakers who write (and maybe then also think?) right to left...would the order of events have written out as Green Purple Orange? How about results of Chinese speakers? Would the passing of time be then associated with vertical displacement instead of horizontal?

Hollow

A semi-pretentious, highly disorganized pseudo-"poem" I spontaneously wrote last year:

i am going to try to explain but possibly with limited success:

our reality is defined by perception. perception is channelled through the five senses.

by nature, by literal biological human nature, sensory faculties are geared outwards.

touch, smell, taste, sight, sound: all ways of interpreting the world outside of our skins.

yet it seems like a large part of the universe we live in everyday is missing in this.

our minds, not our brains but the actual stream of our thoughts, we have access to because it is us.

everything around us, we can understand and experience through the above mentioned senses.

but these only operate on the boundary between that outside world and the “us” of our actual bodies.

for all our efforts to be cognizant of what is around us, we are most ignorant of that which is fundamentally tethered to the “us” represented by the mind.

it’s undeniable, that our bodies take up space in the world.

but somehow we don’t stop to realize it.

the body is felt to be hollow. in a normal state devoid of aches and pains, we cannot sense it. therefore we cannot perceive it, and it doesn’t exist.

we are mere three dimensional outlines moving through space-time, unaware that we are dragging along the stuff inside.

Symbolic Systems (?)

About a month ago, after much frantic deliberation and confusion, I declared a major. I'm in love with it as a concept (and so far, in actuality), although there is one small problem: I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life explaining what it actually is.

Symbolic Systems is something that Stanford essentially made up. Some high-ups saw an exciting void between the fields of psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy and decided to stick a program there. In the SymSys program, you end up with a Bachelor of Science and can choose between a number of neat sounding concentrations. The goal is that at the end of your undergraduate career, you will have learned about the mind, consciousness, intelligence, patterns, and meaning (in short, "symbolic systems") from all sorts of academic angles. The plethora of approaches is what gives this understanding strength.

I'm concentrating in what they call Philosophical Foundations, which is basically a philosophy degree focused on philosophy of mind and logic plus classes from the other three fields mentioned above. Woo philosophy!

It's basically super exciting. No clue what I'll do with a degree like that in the real world, but hey, one step at a time.

Goodbye Bio :)

Yellow and Black Bricks

I realized this as I was attempting to take a nap the other day. I think finally taking a psych course is affecting the meanderings of my half-asleep thoughts....

Try a thing! Concentrate as much as possible on the following task:

Close your eyes (after reading these instructions, of course). Imagine a field of totally generic, evenly spaced bricks that extends as far as your mental imagery mechanism can fathom. These bricks are all a generic shade of yellow.

Now that you've established your life-like, colossal brick wall, begin from the lowest row that you can imagine and methodically change each brick's color to black, from left to right in that row. Once you reach the end of the row (however long you have been able to visualize it to be), go up to the next row and do the same thing. Keep snaking along the rows of bricks, changing each brick one at a time from yellow to black, until you reach the very last brick on the top row of your imaginary wall.

Pretty cool, no? You now have a giant black wall of bricks.

At this point, open your eyes.

.

.

(don't read ahead until you've accomplished all of the above)

.

.

Here's the catch. Think back to how you made your wall of black bricks. The brick wall is obviously not real. You made it up, "thought" it up, because I asked you to. But as you were painting your imaginary bricks, I can bet you one hundred dollars that you were moving your eyes along with where the bricks would actually be if they were indeed in front of you. Isn't that weird? You subconsciously tracked the paint action with your eyes, as if you were ACTUALLY seeing the wall. Maybe you were even moving your head along with the rows.

Now that you're aware of this, try another thing. Close your eyes again and try to do the exact same task. Try your hardest to keep your eyeballs still. Even when you know about this strange quirk, you can't HELP but move your eyes as if you were actually seeing the brick wall. And while you work hard to stall your eyeballs, no bricks can change color.

Weird, no? Cool, no!? I wonder why. Perhaps this suggests that our mental imagery mechanism is so inherently tied to a visual sensory processing system beginning on the retina.

My generalized hypothesis: Wherever our mental focus lies in a mental image, our actual physical eyes focus on the point of space where the object would lie if it was real.

Poem

Came upon this poem in downtown San Jose...it's etched into a giant slab of concrete that serves as a random, giant table of sorts in the middle of a plaza. Was intrigued enough to find it a few weeks later on the interwebs. Something about it, I feel is so true.

Could be

I only sang because the lonely road was long;

and now the road and I are gone

but not the song.

I only spoke the verse to pay for borrowed time:

and now the clock and I are broken

but not the rhyme.

Possibly,

the self not being fundamental,

eternity

breathes only on the incidental.

-Ernesto Galarza