Philosophy of the Body

What is needed is a philosophy of the body. This is not to say a philosophy of matter, or a materialist philosophy. The body is more than matter - encompassing that which is present through the body, the mental, that 'epiphenomenal' which can breach its own boundaries and, overflowing, exercise power over that which gives it birth.

A philosophy of the body, of human physicality, seeks to determine the humanistic aspects of the body; how the body functions in cultures, how physicality can determine and effect (even, affect) our internal and interpersonal realities.

What happens when we scratch this surface? What comes to pass when we open the body for an examination which is transphysical in nature?

In this case the body becomes not just matter, not a concentration of particles, tissue, blood and bone; neither is it a hollow vessel, second to the spirit which moves it. Instead it is the very presence of the internality which exists through it; the medium by which minds interact, through which expression occurs and as which the human being is real. In this case the body is the manifestation of the spirit in action, bloodied, strained and taut or limp, reduced and languid. The body is both unreal and the most real; it's the closest we get to presence of the incorporeal; it's the opaque presentation of the diaphanous, illogically concealing that very - postulated, always postponed - Real which we can never reach.

There is no mind-body problem

The problem is an illusion created once we start dividing the world up into concept words, and then keep trying to refine our conceptual boxes without realising that the words are abstractions, not indicative of essences. There is no mind-body, there is no i-you, there is only the world and I am the whole of my world; no more, no less.

So, when John Searle poses the question "How can subjectivity be a real part of the world?", the answer is that it is not: The world and subjectivity are the same thing.

It may appear a trivial point, but it makes no alteration to an object whether we measure it in Metres or Feet. This is why disagreeing over what we define as 'self', 'mind', or 'belief' is completely irrelevant. It has no bearing on anything, it is like arguing over which ruler we should use. We can refine the word 'self' so that it equates to the neurological brain structure, or so that it is a type of behaviour...but all this does is gives us a definition of the word. It does not mean that 'I' will continue to exist if I am simulated in a computer. Because, there is no 'self'...this is just a word we use to artificially glue together the sensations, thoughts, behaviours, attitudes, relationships, memories and physical body that seem to fit together under one umbrella.

In this way, we can see the crucial logic-gap in Richard Gregory's reply to Searles. In arguing for Artificial Intelligence, he claims that we should allow enough flexibility in the word 'belief' such that we are not automatically disallowing a mechanical structure, a thermostat, from having such things. It's a fair point. We can broaden the word belief so that it includes thermostat states (eg it being 'too cold in here'). But that does not magically make the thermostat state the same thing as a human belief (or vice versa). It merely means we've stretched the word beyond what we normally mean by it. The same problem is apparent in Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theory: We can reach a level of abstraction where machines and humans are functionally equivalent, and thus analogous. But, there is an obvious level of specificity where they are quite fundamentally different. The mere fact that we can find one way of describing two things so that they are the same, does not mean they are the same in every way. But many, especially in the field of artifical intelligence, seem to miss this.

But I digress. If we accept the postmodern line of thought, promulgated by various thinkers from many different fields, that there is no essential 'object', no separable objectivities correlating to our words which hold their determined natures 'out there' (this thought has been called many different things...the best of which I think is social constructionism). If we accept this, then the way we measure and define is of the utmost importance. For in this way, it is the kind of ruler we use which creates the properties we perceive. Thus, the language we use determines our world. This is not to say that it affects or alters objectivity, for 'the world', my world, is a synonym for subjectivity. The world we live in is formed via language, for it is our thinking-ruler...it is through our language that we measure the world and thereby determine it to be constituted of feet or metres.

For this reason we should be supremely careful about the language we use.

One of the major problems comes when we begin to define self apart from life. For those who identify self with mental processes, they remove the self from the world and place it solely within the brain. No longer is the self constituted by the life it lives - that is, by living, and by making itself in the world - it is now a byproduct. And (in this view) the world exists without selfhood, this is the problem: we have separated self from world by using these definitions.

And, I think, it is language that has done this. By creating the illusion of a shared, non-subjective reality, we slowly have come to think that it is more important than the subjective. Perhaps we could never have done what we do as a species without this subjugation of the inner, of the personal worlds. Civilisation depends on language, and language's imputation of objectivity. Interestingly, it was precisely language that so mystified Plato (and Socrates): it created the illusion that there were abstract, ineffable forms behind the word-concepts we use. Language abstracts from reality, and then we attempt to argue that language defines a 'higher' reality than the material one we experience.

Further, the question of whether the mind is physical or non-physical is demonstrably false: there is no such tidy entity as 'the mind': it is just a category we use (and so, for clarity, are 'mental events', 'thoughts', 'qualia' etc). Like 'love'. The category is useful and it works, but we do not seek either a physical or non-physical entity called 'love'. We recognise it is just a useful word and everyone knows what we mean when we use it. The same with the word 'mind'...but we are tempted, led astray, into thinking that the individual world, subjectivity, equals the mind, in distinction from the body which houses the brain. Nonsense! Utter nonsense. There is just the world. No physical. No mind. Just world, just life.

Truth, Logic and Meaning in the World

Here I'm addressing the status of logic, material reality and the human mind in respect of their distinct natures and relationships.

Karl Popper (in his book Conjectures and Refutations, p266) divides all meaningful statements into three types:

1)Logical or Mathematic

2)Empirical and Scientific

3)Philosophical or Metaphysical

Logical statements are a priori, based solely on abstract reasoning; they rely only on correct thought. Empirical statements are 'facts' about the world, statements about matter, if you will, which are based on sense data. Philosophical statements are speculation/extrapolation, making strictly untestable claims based in the inner world of the human mind.

By means of example, a logical statement would be 'if all x are y then all x are z' (where 'x' and 'y' and 'z' can stand for anything we want: objects, statements, whatever). The rules for determining the truth of this depend on the rules of logic and the categories of maths, ie given the definitions of the terms used either the statement is true or it is not.

An empirical statement would be 'There are two swans on the lake', or 'The earth orbits the sun'. To discover if these are true or false, we would conduct an experiment based on observation (empirical data), to ascertain whether the world correlates with the statement.

The difference between logical and empirical statements may be more clearly understood if we use objects as examples: for instance, 'all rocks are heavy' is an empirical statement, as we must examine the objects which we call 'rocks' and see if they indeed all have the quality we call 'heavy'. 'All rocks are rocks' however, is a logical statement as whatever the objects we call rocks are, it is true that they are rocks.

Therefore we can replace the word rocks with a placeholder such as the term 'x' , as whatever we are referring to, it is true that 'x'='x'. All of the investigations in logic are based on working out equivalence. We can only find if a logical statement is true by working out if the terms used mean the same thing. In the syllogism used above for example, 'if all x are y then all x are z' it is true only if all y are z.

A philosophical statement would be 'All action is predetermined' or 'God exists'. This kind of assertion cannot be subjected to measurement in the scientific sense, and are generally considered irrefutable as they are not subject to testing. Rather, they express a sense of 'soft' meaning which affects primarily the way we approach the world, and our place in it. Newton's theory of gravity is as much a philosophical statement as the two examples given because while its predictions can be tested, the claim of gravity as a force within objects cannot be experienced: only its effects. We do not 'see' the force of gravity, we simply see events such as an apple falling, which happens to correlate with the postulation that there is a force attracting objects to each other.

So it seems clear that we can assign Truth to the categories in the following manner:

1)Logical statements have an Absolute Truth value, as they are either True or False, and only false when incorrectly formulated. There is no inbetween and when true they are absolutely True.

2)Empirical statements have Contingent Truth as valid statements can be made ('today is monday') whose truth value is dependent on the conditions present in the material world.

3)Philosophical statements have no truth value, as they are merely speculation; they have nothing to say about the world outside of the subject - instead, they are a framework by which we understand the world and our place in it. They are subjective, personal and irrefutable as they make no solid claims; what they in fact describe is an individual's approach to the world. They are generated from within, and tackle the interface between the mind and matter. This should be more clear when we consider that the two opposing statements 'God exists' and 'God doesn't exist' make no impact on the facts about the world around us: The chair I'm sitting on is green, whichever one is the case. There are still two swans on the lake, whether or not I believe in God, and even if I have a vision and change my belief while looking at the swans, the empirical data remains precisely the same (although my feelings about it may now differ).

Something interesting comes to light when we examine this: Philosophical statements make no claim on truth. They are metaphor, and their value is purely pragmatic. Empirical statements, while approximating truth, can never be True in a whole sense, as in approaching a precisely accurate representation of any state of affairs, the statement nears an infinite complexity: To say there are two swans on the lake does not come close to the actual material facts, as we have said nothing about their precise position; their size; their motion; the ripples on the lake, the wind that is causing them, the atomic interaction of the water with the feathers of the swans; etc. In order to accurately represent reality, the statement would need to be as complex (and as unbound by human category judgments such as 'swan') as reality itself. The term 'the lake' has no objective meaning: more must be stated about the subject's perspective in order to comprehend the intention behind the statement (for otherwise the statement is both true and false, depending on one's point of view - ie, the particular 'lake' we are looking at). The inclusion of this subjective data makes the statement more specific and therefore more accurate but correspondingly more difficult to formulate and thereby increasingly difficult to assess. Therefore empirical statements can only approximate Truth in the same way that objects can approach lightspeed, but find their mass increasing exponentially as they do so.

Logic however, stands apart from these two. The laws of logic are all tautological: they bear no informaton content. All logically true (that is, necessarily true) statements are reducible to the single guiding principle of logic, the Law of Identity. This is the axiom which no logical system can do without. It states "A=A". For if A is not itself, if A is not A, then no other statement can be understood to be either true or false. From this we can see how all logical truth is a restatement of this single axiom (Other logical systems may include additional 'unquestionable' axioms but these tend to be deviant logics developed with particular practical uses in mind). Wittgenstein claimed that all logical statements say the same thing, towit nothing (Tratatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.43), and we can see clearly now how this is the case.

So now we can see in our tripartite description, that logical statements have absolute truth, Truth with a capital 'T'; but completely lack meaning. Philosophical statements have no truth but are entirely meaningful. Empirical statements stand inbetween these two, their accuracy being in negative correlation with the amount of meaning (or unstated subjective background) they carry.

Although Popper originally postulated these categories as a practical means of testing assertions, it seems to me that reality could also be neatly divided along these lines.

1)Logic, the transcendent ideal which has no place in the world, but can be thought of either as generator or abstraction from reality.

2)Matter, the physical 'stuff' of perception.

3)Mind, the interior mental world of thought, emotion and experience.

Ergo, Truth is not of the world. The stuff of the world we experience is Meaning, which is in direct negative correlation to Truth. The more Meaning, the less Truth and vice versa. Truth stands above and beyond the world, being a single unitary transcendent; in fact even beyond time. Truth is Eternal; Meaning is Ephemeral, based entirely in the 'Now' of subjective experience.

This I think is the point I was trying to make in my earlier blog, 'Matter': Logic is a transcendent principle which can be seen as both generative and an abstract of matter. Matter and Mind are co-generative, standing as two sides of the same coin. As Minds cannot exist without Matter to work upon, to mold, so Matter cannot exist without Minds to imbue perspective into it.

As a footnote, I would ask Kabbalists and those familiar with scriptural exegesis to contemplate the similarity between God's self-revelation to Moses as "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh", I Am That I Am, and the single abstract Truth of A=A. There is a reason that the Kabbalists give Kether (the primary sefirah of the Tree of Life, known as Ehyeh) the alternative title "concealed of the concealed", and claim it as the primordial divine thought which generates all else in existence.

Occam's Razor

is not a law, I don't care how many people say it. It's a theory, and one that is demonstrably false as often as it is true. Rationalists tend to jump on Occam's Razor in every argument in order to underpin a reductionist-materialism, but the simple facts are: 1.The universe does not care how many parts or entities are used in any given system. Needless complexity is often present in reality. 2.The 'mental monism' of Bishop Berkeley et al (the idea that only Mind exists, that the appearance of matter is just a function of the true, incorporeal, reality) passes Occam's Razor better than any kind of materialism could hope to. This does not affect the truth or otherwise of a non-materialist viewpoint, and neither does it challenge the principle of the Razor. It merely establishes the theory's neutrality. Now stop it, I don't want to have to say this again. The discussion went as follows:

		Nasaka: Your last blog was pro-materialism.

	Ayin:	This one isn't anti-materialist; I was simply trying to establish that Occam's Razor does not always tow the rationalist-scientific line. When taken to its logical conclusion the theory would best support a completely non-materialist world view as the existence of mind (or spirit; or "geist"; or God) alone simplifies the universe far more than the multi-parted nature of matter can. But like I say, this doesn't mean that anti-materialism is correct; because Occam's Razor, despite the way many people seem to use it, is only an Idea That Someone Once Thought Up. It has no grander significance than that, and is by no means either part of the structure of reality or a self-evident truth.

	Nasaka:	which do you personally hold to be true?

	Ayin:	What I was trying to express with the previous blog ('Matter') was that neither materialism nor its opposite are wholly satisfactory. They are based on human perception and ideas, and the truth lies beyond the duality - the two are united on a higher plane of understanding, so to speak, where both matter and spirit are exposed as being different ways of understanding the same one thing, which is Being...or, Becoming.

	Nasaka:	nut butters, or jellies?

	Ayin	Jelly is made from gelatine. Nut butter all the way for me. But my personal morality doesn't affect the innate structure of reality, if that's what you're trying to get at.

	Nasaka	oh you british! by jellies I mean wobbly fruit spreads.

	Ayin	OK. I couldn't see the relevance of the original comment but now it's much clearer.

	Khuno	Just a small point: Berkeley's idealism endorsed the existence of minds and ideas. External objects exist (which is why it is an empirical doctrine), but they are maintained within a mind. This mind was explicitly cited as God's mind by Berkeley. Occam's razor is quite useful in determining whether a scientific theory has practical applications by making type/token distinctions in the theory's ontology, i.e., by classing or grouping the entities of the theory. The more sophisticated a theory prohibits general application and testability.

	Ayin	A valid point about Occam's Razor. I would not question its usefulness, my point was merely that it is not something that can be thrown against any statement. Its usefulness is not absolute and is limited to the empirical sciences. My understanding of Berkeley is that he sought to remove all non-empirically verifiable statements from philosophy (such as Newton's force of gravity, an internal property of objects which we have no access to) and replace all these causal mechanisms with the action of God in maintaining an apparently mechanical, 'cause-effect' universe.

Khuno

And what Berkeley meant by "external object" is not "that which can exist unperceived". He meant collections of sense data or a single sense datum--which by definition cannot exist independent from a mind.