Tag Archives: philosophy of science

Sidney Morgenbesser’s Sense of Humor

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Humor, Philosophy, Psychology

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Sidney Morgenbesser

Sidney Morgenbesser was a prominent figure at Columbia University throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. As the University’s John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, he taught classes on epistemology and the philosophy of science which were consistently packed with students eager to hear him lecture — but not because of his academic prestige or reputation as a generous grader.

Morgenbesser was widely known as one of the wittiest men of his age. His caustic irreverence and razor-sharp tongue produced an unmistakable — and inimitable — sense of humor. Through freewheeling intellectual banter that could be compared to sportive Socratic dialogues, he influenced generations of students, among them the philosopher Robert Nozick, who once claimed that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.”

Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, struggled to find the words to describe Morgenbesser, resorting to an image from nature: “You don’t ask what the wind does. It’s just power and self-sustaining energy.”

Noam Chomsky called him, “One of the most knowledgeable and in many ways profound thinkers of the modern period… a philosopher in the old sense — not so much what’s on the printed page, but in debate and inspiring discussion.”

The New York Times called him, “Socrates with a Yiddish accent”; I suggest Groucho Marx with a PhD in philosophy.

Here are some of his most famous rejoinders:

  • In the early 1950′s, the esteemed Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the structural analysis of language. He pointed out that, in English, although a double negative implies a positive meaning (i.e. “I’m not unlike my father…”), there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. “Yeah, yeah,” scoffed Morgenbesser from the back of the auditorium.
  • In the 1970′s, a student of Maoist inclination asked him if he disagreed with Chairman Mao’s saying that a proposition can be true and false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, “I do and I don’t.”
  • Morgenbesser became something of a legend at the time of the 1968 student uprising for being beaten up when he joined a human chain protesting the police. When confronted about the incident, Morgenbesser was asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. His response: “It was unjust, but not unfair. It’s unjust to hit me over the head, but it’s not unfair because everyone else was hit over the head, too.”
  • Once during a heady philosophy lecture, Morgenbesser was asked to prove a questioner’s existence. He shot back, “Who’s asking?”
  • A colleague once challenged Morgenbesser’s tenure at Columbia, saying he had not published enough material to deserve a tenured position. Morgenbesser responded: “Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?”
  • Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn’t lit up yet anyway. The cop again said that smoking was not allowed in the subway, and Morgenbesser repeated his comment. The cop said, “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are, Kant?” Due to his accent, the word “Kant” was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser was hauled off to the police station. He won his freedom only after a colleague showed up and explained the Categorical Imperative to the unamused cops.
  • In response to Heidegger’s ontological query “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Morgenbesser answered “If there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”
  • A central subject of Morganbesser’s investigations was the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Once while ordering dessert, Morgenbesser was told by the waitress that he could choose between apple pie and blueberry pie. He ordered the apple pie. Shortly thereafter, the waitress came back and said that cherry pie was also an option; Morgenbesser responded: “In that case I’ll have the blueberry pie.”
  • When asked his opinion of the philosophy of pragmatism, Morgenbesser said, “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

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I found several of these quips and many other gems in Jim Holt’s stunningly clever and often very funny book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.

Sidney Morgenbesser

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Einstein and the God that Doesn’t Play Dice

30 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Science

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Albert Einstein

“In his maturity, Einstein more firmly believed that there was an objective ‘reality’ that existed whether or not we could observe it. The belief in an external world independent of the person observing it, he repeatedly said, was the basis of all science.

In addition, Einstein resisted quantum mechanics because it abandoned strict causality and instead defined reality in terms of indeterminacy, uncertainty, and probability. A true disciple of Hume would not have been troubled by this. There is no real reason—other than either a metaphysical faith or a habit ingrained in the mind—to believe that nature must operate with absolute certainty. It is just as reasonable, though perhaps less satisfying, to believe that some things simply happen by chance. Certainly, there was mounting evidence that on the subatomic level this was the case.

But for Einstein, this simply did not smell true. The ultimate goal of physics, he repeatedly said, was to discover the laws that strictly determine causes and effects. ‘I am very, very reluctant to give up complete causality,’ he told Max Born.

His faith in determinism and causality reflected that of his favorite religious philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. ‘He was utterly convinced,’ Einstein wrote of Spinoza, ‘of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success of efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal relationship of natural phenomena was still quite modest.’ It was a sentence that Einstein could have written about himself, emphasizing the temporariness implied by the word ‘still,’ after the advent of quantum mechanics.

Like Spinoza, Einstein did not believe in a personal God who interacted with man. But they both believed that a divine design was reflected in the elegant laws that governed the way the universe worked.

This was not merely some expression of faith. It was a principle that Einstein elevated (as he had the relativity principle) to the level of a postulate, one that guided him in his work. ‘When I am judging a theory,’ he told his friend Banesh Hoffmann, ‘I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.’

When he posed that question, there was one possibility that he simply could not believe: that the good Lord would have created beautiful and subtle rules that determined most of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance. It felt wrong. ‘If the Lord had wanted to do that, he would have done it thoroughly, and not kept to a pattern . . . He would have gone the whole hog. In that case, we wouldn’t have to look for laws at all.’

This led to one of Einstein’s most famous quotes, written to Max Born, the friend and physicist who would spar with him over three decades on this topic. ‘Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing,’ Einstein said. ‘But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but it does not really bring us any closer to the secrets of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play dice.’

Thus it was that Einstein ended up deciding that quantum mechanics, though it may not be wrong, was at least incomplete. There must be a fuller explanation of how the universe operates, one that would incorporate both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. In doing so, it would not leave things to chance.”

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From Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

For related reading, click below:

Albert Einstein

Einstein’s daily routine

Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza’s view of the universe

The Mystery of Consciousness

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Psychology, Science

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Heidelberg“The universe is filled with physical phenomena that appear devoid of consciousness. From the birth of stars and planets, to the early stages of cell division in a human embryo, the structures and processes we find in Nature seem to lack an inner life. At some point in the development of certain complex organisms, however, consciousness emerges. This miracle does not depend on a change of materials—for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Rather, it must be a matter of organization. Arranging atoms in a certain way appears to bring consciousness into being. And this fact is among the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.

Many readers of my previous essay did not understand why the emergence of consciousness should pose a special problem to science. Every feature of the human mind and body emerges over the course development: Why is consciousness more perplexing than language or digestion? The problem, however, is that the distance between unconsciousness and consciousness must be traversed in a single stride, if traversed at all. Just as the appearance of something out of nothing cannot be explained by our saying that the first something was “very small,” the birth of consciousness is rendered no less mysterious by saying that the simplest minds have only a glimmer of it.

This situation has been characterized as an “explanatory gap” and the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it is surely both. I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have judged the impasse to be total: Perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Consciousness might represent a terminus of this sort. Defying analysis, the mystery of inner life may one day cease to trouble us…

But couldn’t a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness. Nothing about human behavior, or language, or culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We simply know that they are—a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly and in others by analogy.

Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood at the level of the brain. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object—its color, contours, apparent motion, location in space, etc. arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of a ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is perfectly intelligible—and it suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the character of our experience can often be explained in terms of its underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why it should be “like something” to see in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.

For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There seems to be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we fully conscious during sleep and merely failing to form memories? Can human minds be duplicated or merged? Is it possible to love your neighbor as yourself? A precise, functional neuroanatomy of our mental states would help to answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. And yet, whatever insights arise from correlating mental and physical events, it seems unlikely that one side of the world will be fully reduced to the other.

While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is “like something” to be what we are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this universe. How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided…”

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From the essays The Mystery of Consciousness and The Mystery of Consciousness II by Sam Harris.

The picture was taken by the Neckar River in Heidelberg, Germany.